I'm one of those wacky people who prefers steak well done. Not a hint of pink. Most people object to "ruining" a good steak by "overcooking" it, but after trying the whole spectrum from rare to medium-well steak a number of times and trying to make them an "acquired taste," I've come to the conclusion that I just prefer well done and always will.
I suspect it may be partly genetic, since I've read that the sense of taste is actually quite variable and some people can even taste substances that others cannot (e.g., phenylthiocarbamide, or PTC). To me, a rare or medium steak tastes alright, though aesthetically anything less than medium is displeasingly bloody. But a well-done steak, to me, has a very different and far more pleasing flavor than anything less cooked--even a medium steak with a good char on the outside lacks the sort of high savoriness a well-done steak has for me. Since taste is complex and is both additive and subtractive, it could very well be true that cooking to well-done does destroy some flavors, but that subtracting those other flavors increases my perception of the savoriness (umami) to a level which pleases me far more than the other flavors did. Steak cooked less well just seems to lack the intense savoriness I get from a well-done steak.
For me, the two most pleasing flavors are usually savoriness and saltiness. I not only like my steak very well-done, but with more salt than most people use. I've also found that I like a simple lime juice marinade.
My love for well-done steak does raise eyebrows, but at least I don't commit the sin of ruining great steak with steak sauce...
> Yep, by this logic, it should be illegal for a > woman to have sex with Gary Coleman.
Yup, I'd support that law. If I can't have sex with Gary Coleman, NO ONE CAN, bwahahahahahah!
'Cause it takes-- Diff'rent Strokes, Yes it takes-- Diff'rent Strokes...
But seriously, adult film star Melissa-Ashley has had to testify at least SIX times that she's an adult, thanks to overzealous child porn prosecutions. Don't we have better things to do than police so-called morality? Catch real child molesters, not casual porn fanciers.
I don't see smartphones as our future primary computing platforms...or even as our future mobile computing platforms...in fact, I don't see them in the future at all. My guess is that--considering how texting and mobile browsing seem to be a larger part of the future than voice--we'll see touch tablets too large to be called phones but small enough to be reasonably portable take over eventually, with a tiny bluetooth or successor earclip or earbud headset for voice calls over the tablet's wireless internet connection.
The mobile tablet will be our primary computing device, and our own mobile wireless hotspot. The desktop computer will be largely relegated to the office, as most home users will be happy using their tablets for basic use and wirelessly displaying their contents on their large flatscreen TVs for other uses. Power users will still have home desktop computers, but most people won't need them.
The future is indeed portable--but it ain't a tiny phone. The phone itself is just going to disappear into the mobile internet tablet, with a bluetooth earpiece as its last vestige.
About 5 years ago, I had to give up my health insurance (Kaiser Permanente HMO, really) because we moved to a more rural area where they don't have local infrastructure. I didn't get regular health insurance from another company because my Kaiser coverage had been subsidized through an old employer plan, and everything else was too expensive. I worried that I'd get really sick and not have my HMO coverage, because I was used to going a few times a year for various things.
Fast forward 5 years later, and I haven't been to a doctor or hospital at all in that time. I seem to get sick less often than I did before when I'd go to the HMO 3 or 4 times a year with minor ailments, and when I do get sick it's less serious and goes away faster. I've had no antibiotics in that time, just OTC meds (but I avoid fever-reducers unless my fever goes above 102, because fever is one of the body's natural defense mechanisms against microorganisms).
The net result is that me and my immune system are happier, healthier, and wealthier, now that we're not over-relying on doctors and antibiotics. I also believe my household's complete lack of over-cleansing is part of the recipe for good health--people who clean obsessively and use that antibacterial cleanser are destroying harmless bacteria which usually "crowd out" the harmful strains, or at least leave them a minimal space to grow. But when your household is super-clean and a harmful bacterium arrives, it has room to grow everywhere since there's no existing bacterial ecosystem to compete with. Who knew that my stereotypical geeky tendency towards slight messiness and wearing the same clothes 2 days in a row thanks to all-night gaming/writing sessions might increase my health...
I'm sure I'll have to visit the doctor or hospital eventually when something serious happens. Until then, I see my seemingly better health now than when I was going to the doctor several times a year as an anecdotal vindication of the hypothesis that too much cleanliness and hygiene and antibiotic use can be as bad or worse than none, because our immune systems need to develop and thrive by exposure to lesser bacteria in order to be ready to take on serious ones.
But that would take large capital investment of hundreds of millions if not billions in R&D, production of new facilities, etc., which would decrease short-term profit statements--and executives want to avoid decreases in profit statements at all costs so they can keep stock prices as inflated as possible, and milk their yearly bonuses. The current corporate structure punishes good long-term planning and rewards short-term profitability, so it's not surprising that no one's interested in innovating if it costs too much in the here-and-now to build increased profitability in the distant tomorrow.
Hell, one of the first things "forward-looking" executives do when they get into power is cut short-term costs by any means necessary, even if it means crippling the entire company's future by, for example, spinning-off the expensive R&D operations which have kept the company innovating into new companies so their budget gets off your books. Cf. "Agilent" and "Lucent"--after being spun off, their parent companies stagnated grossly, with the venerated HP a shell of its old self and the "original" AT&T imploding through corporate greed and stupidity with SBC buying up a relatively-empty husk. Oh, and in the process AT&T bought Olivetti Research Laboratory, "Europe's leading communications engineering research laboratory," only to shutter it 3 years later to save money. Corporate asshats at work.
Remember all those financial wizards who melted down the whole economy by discovering new ways to make a quick buck, at the expense of--well, the whole country? How many of them are in the unemployment line now, and how many are still making millions? Yep, thought so. Those car-maker execs who failed to innovate and took the whole American auto industry from best-in-the-world to also-rans--how many of them are collecting unemployment alongside the factory workers they put out of work? Yep, thought so. A few of the top execs lose their jobs whenever big corporations get run into the ground, but they always [golden-] parachute into a new company right quickly.
The whole corporate system is FUBAR, and I have to blame it on globalization--which pushes governments to deregulate lest multinationals scale back in-country operations for laxer overseas venues. So no, no one will willingly invest hundreds of millions to billions to get "4x more product from the same ammount of raw material" and "re[duce] production cost per product unit, increase margin and make a step ahead from competitors" if they can make more short-term profit by business as usual.
From what I've read, the phrase in the Koran which is usually translated as "72 virgins" has been studied by scholars who concluded it may actually mean something like "72 kinds of pure juicy raisins." Boy, are those suicide bombers in for a surprise when they get to heaven and find the California Raisins in place of their poon...
But seriously, it's interesting that translations of the Koran and other foundational Islamic texts are often frowned upon in Islamic circles, and (non-clerical) academic studies of and debate about the etymological meaning of the language used and its development are rare in Islamic circles, when there is intense academic study of and debate about the linguistic meaning of ancient Christian and Jewish texts among scholars. The language of the Koran and other foundational documents of Islam is essentially well over a thousand years old--even with the text of the Koran as an anchor to its language, it's insipid to believe that meaning, usage, and nuance haven't changed at all in over a thousand years. Pick any language, and look at literature written in it a thousand years ago; even if only 1% of that level of change and drift in language occurred in the Arabic used in the Koran, there could be major misunderstandings of the text by Islamic adherents.
> Google is not a public service, it is a publicly traded corporation.
And that, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with this country. Publicly traded corporations can and will maximize short to medium-term profit at any and all costs, including costs to the health and well being of the country, its citizens, and their own long-term viability. In corporate persons, moral, ethical, and sometimes legal, obligations are trumped by fiduciary ones in ways which natural persons could never so compromise.
Google's credo of "Don't be evil" remains so because it's profitable for the time being; but we should never believe it makes Google any different from Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, or Enron, in the long run. Until corporations, which have been given by the courts and legislatures the same rights as individual people, are held to the same moral, ethical, and legal responsibilities, we cannot have a well-functioning society which operates to preserve and further the rights and abilities of all.
> Its as if a bunch of different people got together to make a pizza chain with one > guy coming up with the name, logo, mascot, and business plan, and the other guys > deciding to ace that first guy out yet retaining all of that first guy's input.
I don't think so. They're not using Arrington's name, logo, mascot, or business plan. They're using his idea, and you can't copyright or patent a basic idea (badly misapproved patents notwithstanding). Using your pizza chain analogy, it's like a guy got the idea to start a pizza chain, brought a bunch of other people together, and then those other people squeezed him out and started their own pizza chain without him.
At most, Arrington gave some general input on design--"no bigger than X, make the bezel flush, thinner; icons should be here, make one that does that" etc. The fact that he may have been the one who came up with the general idea should make no difference unless he had signed contracts, which he doesn't or else we would've heard about it. It's not even a new idea--it's just a slight but far more usable evolution of Microsoft's Smart Display, which itself is just a crippled version of the touchscreen tablet pc.
Agreed wholeheartedly. Wikipedia really should have been an Encyclopedia Galactica collecting the sum of human knowledge about anything and everything--that's what I thought of when I first heard about Wikipedia. Noteworthiness could have been addressed by flagging topic pages with a noteworthiness rating, and maybe a policy discouraging links between articles with a high noteworthiness rating and a low one, rather than just deleting whole subjects based on someone's opinion of a subject's noteworthiness.
The reliable sources policy is also, while well-intentioned, a cause of much loss of information and articles on Wikipedia--a rule should exist to mitigate it, such as a rule discouraging editors from removing poorly sourced information they nonetheless know or suspect to be correct. While no one wants inaccurate information to stand, the reliable sources policy sometimes goes too far since even first-hand sources are discouraged.
I'm also fairly disgusted at Jimmy Wales' authoritarian control, used to censor articles as he sees fit. If an item is factual, it should be fair game for inclusion and the biases and personal opinions of a project founder should not enter into the picture.
At any rate, while I certainly use Wikipedia a lot, I do so by default and would gladly switch to any viable alternative which took a more inclusive and less tyrannical approach.
> Because it seems nobody really wants tablet (slate) computers.
I have to disagree, because no major company has actually created a decent slate computer. They came close, but then Microsoft came along and ruined the market with their Tablet PC specifications which went in the wrong direction. It really comes down to pen vs. touch issues, and that's where and how Microsoft killed the market.
Slates with pen inputs had of course been around for many years and had become common in many business, industrial, and math/engineering niches. They're ideal for those sorts of uses by the tech saavy or industrial/delivery workers, but the average user wasn't going to like the need to always use a pen even for basic pointing. Computers with touchscreen inputs had of course been around for many years and were becoming common in public kiosk and collaborative/joint learning installations, and even trickling down to your neighborhood Wawas, Verizon stores, record stores, etc. The public liked their touch-and-ye-shall-receive ease of use, but they were common to fixed installations and not portable. The best of both worlds, and the way to make slates appeal to mainstream audiences, is clearly to graft touchscreen input onto the slate form factor. Several companies like Viewsonic had just begun to make touchscreen slates with mainstream appeal and competitive pricing (although underpowered), when Microsoft came out with the Tablet PC spec which demanded pen digitizer input. Granted, touchscreens aren't ideal for handwriting and precision drawing while pen input is, but palm-rejection technologies of the day made them passable for handwriting and they were only going to improve. But specifically because of the Tablet PC specs Microsoft drew up, every major company dropped touchscreen slate PCs for the same old pen computers which had always been available, practically overnight. The only touchscreen slates which ever came to market from mainstream makers were first-gen models with slow CPUs, unacceptable 800x600 displays, or other issues. They were never given a chance. Microsoft wanted to reserve touchscreen input for their expensive, underpowered, and tiny-screened UMPC spec, gadgets which have always been almost prohibitively expensive and therefore never been popular.
Fast forward to the iPod Touch, proof that mainstream customers do like and want touchscreen input. HP and a few other companies have now been releasing--for the first time in nearly 5 years--tablet PCs (albeit convertibles, not slates) priced competitively with mainstream laptops which contain touchscreen input (and some like the HPs have both touchscreen and pen digitizers, making them truly the best of all possible worlds). So, touchscreen tablet pcs are only just now being given a decent chance, after Microsoft fudged up the emerging market years ago with their short-sighted inclusion of pen digitizers but not touchscreens in their tablet PC spec.
Indeed, I can't begin to see the value in creating a permanently unemployable, unhousable, unredeemable underclass out of people who could probably be cajoled into becoming decently productive members of society using modern methods. The public sex offender registry and its stigmas make it far more likely for an offender to repeat--after all, if there's no possible good future, why not do whatever you want damn the consequences? However, if you can live a good and unharried life, but know that one false move will instantly ruin it, chances of recidivism would be lessened.
The answer is to replace public sex offender registries with monitoring similar to what's currently done for parolees and others with ankle monitors, only for sex offenders monitoring would be permanent. With a 24/7 trail showing exactly where a monitored offender goes, the offender would know that any recidivism could be instantly proven. Nearing school zones or other verboten areas would result in quick incarceration, with no chance for convicted sex offenders to malinger around potential targets as is common among recidivists. Any former sex offender who stays out of trouble never need have his secret known and he can live a reasonable life. Any recidivism could be quickly proven by locating the offender's GPS trail at the scene of any crime or disappearance. Tracking them seems much better than just putting therm on a public registry. Giving them a reason to stay clean seems better than giving them an excuse to reoffend.
As for "covert" offenders, who insinuate themselves in with families and try to find victims to molest that way, the presence of a big ankle monitor or other tracking apparatus could prevent that. I know I'd sure check for one when letting neighbors near my kids if they were commonplace on convicted sex offenders. Again, it's something that would deter sex offenders from getting close to potential victims and their families, since to keep your distance means living a decent life undetected but getting too close to anyone likely to check could spoil that.
> First the North Pole, then Canada, then Michigan and finally all > of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Can't you see they've come to > take our precious bodily fluids?
Dear Russia,
I formally accept your territorial claims to my precious bodily fluids, and waive all U.N. appeals. Please send three of your most limber female gymnasts to collect them.
Your new subject,
SirWinston
P.S.--If the United States chooses to invade me for strategic control of my bodily fluids, please concentrate conflict near my prostate. Thank you.
> >...or a church based on Harry Potter > > > Your ideas interest me, I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Hail Hermione, full of grace; the Dark Lord is with thee. Thy lips and thy boobs, they comfort me. Thou conjurest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; Thou anointest my wand with oil; my Pumpkin Juice cup runneth over...
> Not to mention Indiana Jones is a much more physically demanding role, > assuming the movie isn't just about Dr. Jones becoming a crotchety, > washed up academic.
Potential titles for another Indy trilogy:
Raiders of the Lost Dentures Indiana Jones and the Hemorrhoid Cream of Doom Indiana Jones and the Last Bran Muffin
Raiders of the Girls Old Enough to be Their Granddaughters Indiana Jones and the Temple of Erectile Dysfunction Indiana Jones and the Little Blue Pill
Raiders of the Shuffleboard Deck Indiana Jones and the Broken Hip of Doom Indiana Jones and the Budget Mobility Scooter
> I honestly hope they DON'T ditch the pulp fiction feel of it.
[Int. ancient temple. Indy's female love-interest-du-jour has a cartoonish Nazi at gunpoint.]
Indy: Bring out the Gimp. Nazi: The Gimp is sleeping, Herr Jones. Love-interest-du-jour: It's fantastic! The chamber must extend 60 meters... Indy: Shit, they ain't got the metric system in ancient Egypt. They wouldn't know what the fuck a meter is. Love-interest-du-jour: Then what would they call it? Indy: A cubit.
[Love-interest-du-jour accidentally shoots Nazi in the head, splattering brains everywhere.]
Love-interest-du-jour: Oh man, I shot that Nazi in the face. Indy: Why the fuck did you do that! Love-interest-du-jour: Well, I didn't mean to do it, it was an accident! Indy: Oh man I've seen some crazy ass shit in my time... Love-interest-du-jour: Chill out, man. I told you it was an accident. You probably set off a booby trap by stepping on that "X" right there. Indy: "X" never, ever marks the spot, bitch! Love-interest-du-jour: Hey, look man, I didn't mean to shoot the son of a bitch. The gun went off. I don't know why. Indy: No, let me ask you a question. When you came in here, did you see a hieroglyphic out in front of this temple that said Dead Nazi Storage? Love-interest-du-jour: Indy, you know I ain't seen no... Indy: Did you see a hieroglyphic out in front of this temple that said Dead Nazi Storage? Love-interest-du-jour: [pause] No. I didn't. Indy: You know WHY you didn't see that hieroglyphic? Love-interest-du-jour: Why? Indy: 'Cause it ain't there, 'cause storing dead Nazis ain't my fucking business, that's why!
> Audio just gives a much better bang for the buck at this point
Not for long. Can we really expect podcast-type audio-only content to stay as popular as it currently is, now that YouTube and other online video options are competing with them for our time? No. Portable video devices are phasing out portable audio-only devices in all but the value segment. Mainstream media companies are now also competing for our Internet A/V time with "webisodes." Audio-only net content (excluding music) will be getting a dwindling portion of the viewership/listenership pie as net video content and devices to access it multiply.
> Anybody attempting, for example the niche Vegan cooking show you > describe, would be better served by making it an Audio, rather > than a Video, production.
Today--maybe. 6 to 12 months from now--no, because video content continues to increase as does the ease of accessing it (iTV will be a quantum leap in this regard, too). Audio-only won't be able to compete for our limited time in the very near future with all the YouTube(esque) phenoms and increasing webisode content.
That's a very tiny excerpt of the relatovely less impassioned floor debate--the real meat of the controversy was in the very lengthy but incredibly contentious hearings, where witnesses including Thomas were vigorously cross-examined by key senators. For what is srguably the most important confirmation hearing C-SPAN ever covered, they ought to offer a DVD set containing full, unabridged confirmation hearing coverage. As far as I can tell, they offer little.
> Everything that happens on the floor ends up in the Congressional > Record anyway, which is publicly available within a couple days > of it happening. It's text, which means it's searchable, which > makes it a ton better than video when it comes to accessing what > you need.
Garbage. It loses every nuance of the spoken word and human gestures which betray what a representative or witness really feels about a contentious issue. I vividly recall watching the Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings, transfixed by the spectacle of it all, judging the true reactions of senators and witnesses on the committee floor by their body language and intonation. The written record of those proceedings is comparatively worthless. When contentious issues reach the main floor, the written record can be equally misleading about the real tenor of the debate. As Socrates would point out, the written word is dead and misleading compared to seeing a real person.
Interestingly, I went to the C-SPAN store recently hoping they'd offer the Thomas hearings on DVD so I could replace my ancient self-recorded EP VHS tapes. Nope. Perhaps the most important confirmation heaing in a generation, one which transfixed the general public so fully that several Saturday Night Live sketches parodied it, one which is *not at all* accurately reflected by the text record--and it's been gone from public view for well over a decade.
As you pointed out, wizards should be able to conjure goods or magically repair clothes, yet seem unable to. A wizard economy exists, the wizards have money and a bank, and, presumably (maybe this was explained? I forget) magic to prevent counterfeiting. And yet wizards have slaves, even though magic can be (and is) used to automate tasks such as preparing food. The key is that, while you can use magic to e.g. help prepare food, you can't use magic to create it. The subtleties were well explained when it was shown that the food which magically appears on the tables at Hogwarts is actually real food prepared beforehand by house elves in the basements then teleported up--wizards can conjure things from thin air, food included, but anything conjured that way is temporary and will decay to nothingness. So conjured food won't nourish, and conjured gold (like the leprechaun gold that initially fools Ron) can't buy anything (presumably adult or experienced wizards can tell the difference between conjured and real commodities).
So, presumably, Lupin could use magic to seamlessly patch the holes in his clothes--but that would require conjuring new material which would disappear soon, so it's easier just to patch them once with real patches. By the same token, if something can be fixed without conjuring new matter, the fix can be permanent, or if magic can shape existing materials into a new form that can be permanent. But you can't conjure something lasting out of nothing in the Potterverse.
> For the same reason we should be doing our damnedest to colonize other > worlds? So that in the event of the destruction of one of our home worlds > (to the point that life is no longer viable at least), the human race isn't > wiped out?
As for the human race, we're still far too primitive to be colonizing other worlds even within our own star system--not only is our technology still too feeble to do it safely and sustainably, but our primitive economic and social institutions are too feeble as well. Until economic and social disparities are lessened and nationalistic strife wanes, any effort to colonize another planet or moon would be viewed by almost all as an unacceptable and decadent waste of resources--and lead to the toppling of the administration or even the nation which undertakes it. No one would accept spending the trillions of dollars it would require, to the detriment of spending on the general welfare, security, etc. We are a century or two away from our first tentative stab at a semi-permanent offworld colony. Trying now would be irresponsibly premature; those resources need to be spent fixing onworld problems before we even consider offworld colonies.
As for more advanced alien races (and even us if we survive long enough), if sufficiently technologically advanced they'd be able to defend against basic natural threats such as asteroids and to predict catastrophic changes such as planetary or stellar cycles decades, centuries, or even millennia in advance. That would mean there'd be no pressing need to explore or colonize as a protective measure, since there'd be ample warning. They'd only need to send out enough probes to locate one suitable planet, and not prepare to colonize unless/until they foresee an unavoidable catastrophe which would render all planets in their own star system uninhabitable.
Plus, a sufficiently socially and culturally advanced society could likely be less self-centered and more accepting of its own mortality and its own unimportance in the cosmic scale. The desire to outwardly explore and colonize seems to be an aggressive and self-centered impulse; as societies become more advanced and cohesive, aggression is an impulse which becomes counterproductive and antisocial and is increasingly offset by social and legal discouragements. As we move forward, aggression may even be selected against in our natural selection process, as more cognitive traits become increasingly valued and selected for--which may have the consequence of limiting the desire for aggressive expansionist forms of exploration and increasing desire for more introspective and socially, technologically beneficial forms of exploration.
In any event, we are too primitive technologically, socially, and economically to really understand these issues. But I do suspect that any race sufficiently advanced to master interstellar travel will have little inherent desire to undertake it for the purposes of mere exploration. Once you prove life exists elsewhere, it likely becomes a banal fact rather than an impetus to explore, as soon as the novelty wears off.
> Fermi's Paradox (it's not really a paradox) also assumes that intelligent > life wants to expand and explore and have the resources on-planet to get > off-planet and want to contact other life forms. > > It also assumes that a sufficiently advanced alien has figured out some way > of near-lightspeed travel - perhaps it's not possible.
Exactly. Why assume that many (or any) advanced life forms would be "colonialists" and explorers, rather than introverted self-explorers? Humans haven't nearly reached the technological advancement needed for interstellar travel, yet our most advanced societies have already been moving past colonialism and expansion and nearing internal population equilibrium or decline (discounting immigration). Once a planet truly stabilizes socially and culturally, and has eliminated most of its economic ills and national rivalries--would there be any impetus to go out on decades-long interstellar exploration trips in relatively isolated and spartan conditions? There might be a desire to prove that life exists elsewhere--but once that's proven by finding an alien species, that desire would be largely satieted, so why undertake continued explorations for no other reason than the exploration itself?
I think the Fermi Paradox is no paradox at all, just a foolish assumption that intelligent lifeforms would be as interested in exploration and expansion as we were recently--even though we're still too primitive to be an interstellar-capable people. Already our own more advanced societies have slowed/stopped expanding in native population and become more introspective. Perhaps our own tendency to explore is the exception not the rule, or a primitive trait advanced societies outgrow once they get the big picture, or a tendency which gets refocused inward toward exploring ourselves or exploring the limits of technology.
And that's even assuming interstellar travel is feasible in practical ways. Even assuming that, would many or any people in a rich technologically and culturally advanced society choose to abandon it to spend decades to reach a neighboring star system, on the off chance that it might have interesting life?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm one of those wacky people who prefers steak well done. Not a hint of pink. Most people object to "ruining" a good steak by "overcooking" it, but after trying the whole spectrum from rare to medium-well steak a number of times and trying to make them an "acquired taste," I've come to the conclusion that I just prefer well done and always will.
I suspect it may be partly genetic, since I've read that the sense of taste is actually quite variable and some people can even taste substances that others cannot (e.g., phenylthiocarbamide, or PTC). To me, a rare or medium steak tastes alright, though aesthetically anything less than medium is displeasingly bloody. But a well-done steak, to me, has a very different and far more pleasing flavor than anything less cooked--even a medium steak with a good char on the outside lacks the sort of high savoriness a well-done steak has for me. Since taste is complex and is both additive and subtractive, it could very well be true that cooking to well-done does destroy some flavors, but that subtracting those other flavors increases my perception of the savoriness (umami) to a level which pleases me far more than the other flavors did. Steak cooked less well just seems to lack the intense savoriness I get from a well-done steak.
For me, the two most pleasing flavors are usually savoriness and saltiness. I not only like my steak very well-done, but with more salt than most people use. I've also found that I like a simple lime juice marinade.
My love for well-done steak does raise eyebrows, but at least I don't commit the sin of ruining great steak with steak sauce...
> Yep, by this logic, it should be illegal for a
> woman to have sex with Gary Coleman.
Yup, I'd support that law. If I can't have sex with Gary Coleman, NO ONE CAN, bwahahahahahah!
'Cause it takes--
Diff'rent Strokes,
Yes it takes--
Diff'rent Strokes...
But seriously, adult film star Melissa-Ashley has had to testify at least SIX times that she's an adult, thanks to overzealous child porn prosecutions. Don't we have better things to do than police so-called morality? Catch real child molesters, not casual porn fanciers.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article527674.ece
"Parish" means "county" in Louisiana. Those Napoleonic bastards just have to be different. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parish_(administrative_division)
I don't see smartphones as our future primary computing platforms...or even as our future mobile computing platforms...in fact, I don't see them in the future at all. My guess is that--considering how texting and mobile browsing seem to be a larger part of the future than voice--we'll see touch tablets too large to be called phones but small enough to be reasonably portable take over eventually, with a tiny bluetooth or successor earclip or earbud headset for voice calls over the tablet's wireless internet connection.
The mobile tablet will be our primary computing device, and our own mobile wireless hotspot. The desktop computer will be largely relegated to the office, as most home users will be happy using their tablets for basic use and wirelessly displaying their contents on their large flatscreen TVs for other uses. Power users will still have home desktop computers, but most people won't need them.
The future is indeed portable--but it ain't a tiny phone. The phone itself is just going to disappear into the mobile internet tablet, with a bluetooth earpiece as its last vestige.
About 5 years ago, I had to give up my health insurance (Kaiser Permanente HMO, really) because we moved to a more rural area where they don't have local infrastructure. I didn't get regular health insurance from another company because my Kaiser coverage had been subsidized through an old employer plan, and everything else was too expensive. I worried that I'd get really sick and not have my HMO coverage, because I was used to going a few times a year for various things.
Fast forward 5 years later, and I haven't been to a doctor or hospital at all in that time. I seem to get sick less often than I did before when I'd go to the HMO 3 or 4 times a year with minor ailments, and when I do get sick it's less serious and goes away faster. I've had no antibiotics in that time, just OTC meds (but I avoid fever-reducers unless my fever goes above 102, because fever is one of the body's natural defense mechanisms against microorganisms).
The net result is that me and my immune system are happier, healthier, and wealthier, now that we're not over-relying on doctors and antibiotics. I also believe my household's complete lack of over-cleansing is part of the recipe for good health--people who clean obsessively and use that antibacterial cleanser are destroying harmless bacteria which usually "crowd out" the harmful strains, or at least leave them a minimal space to grow. But when your household is super-clean and a harmful bacterium arrives, it has room to grow everywhere since there's no existing bacterial ecosystem to compete with. Who knew that my stereotypical geeky tendency towards slight messiness and wearing the same clothes 2 days in a row thanks to all-night gaming/writing sessions might increase my health...
I'm sure I'll have to visit the doctor or hospital eventually when something serious happens. Until then, I see my seemingly better health now than when I was going to the doctor several times a year as an anecdotal vindication of the hypothesis that too much cleanliness and hygiene and antibiotic use can be as bad or worse than none, because our immune systems need to develop and thrive by exposure to lesser bacteria in order to be ready to take on serious ones.
But that would take large capital investment of hundreds of millions if not billions in R&D, production of new facilities, etc., which would decrease short-term profit statements--and executives want to avoid decreases in profit statements at all costs so they can keep stock prices as inflated as possible, and milk their yearly bonuses. The current corporate structure punishes good long-term planning and rewards short-term profitability, so it's not surprising that no one's interested in innovating if it costs too much in the here-and-now to build increased profitability in the distant tomorrow.
Hell, one of the first things "forward-looking" executives do when they get into power is cut short-term costs by any means necessary, even if it means crippling the entire company's future by, for example, spinning-off the expensive R&D operations which have kept the company innovating into new companies so their budget gets off your books. Cf. "Agilent" and "Lucent"--after being spun off, their parent companies stagnated grossly, with the venerated HP a shell of its old self and the "original" AT&T imploding through corporate greed and stupidity with SBC buying up a relatively-empty husk. Oh, and in the process AT&T bought Olivetti Research Laboratory, "Europe's leading communications engineering research laboratory," only to shutter it 3 years later to save money. Corporate asshats at work.
Remember all those financial wizards who melted down the whole economy by discovering new ways to make a quick buck, at the expense of--well, the whole country? How many of them are in the unemployment line now, and how many are still making millions? Yep, thought so. Those car-maker execs who failed to innovate and took the whole American auto industry from best-in-the-world to also-rans--how many of them are collecting unemployment alongside the factory workers they put out of work? Yep, thought so. A few of the top execs lose their jobs whenever big corporations get run into the ground, but they always [golden-] parachute into a new company right quickly.
The whole corporate system is FUBAR, and I have to blame it on globalization--which pushes governments to deregulate lest multinationals scale back in-country operations for laxer overseas venues. So no, no one will willingly invest hundreds of millions to billions to get "4x more product from the same ammount of raw material" and "re[duce] production cost per product unit, increase margin and make a step ahead from competitors" if they can make more short-term profit by business as usual.
From what I've read, the phrase in the Koran which is usually translated as "72 virgins" has been studied by scholars who concluded it may actually mean something like "72 kinds of pure juicy raisins." Boy, are those suicide bombers in for a surprise when they get to heaven and find the California Raisins in place of their poon...
But seriously, it's interesting that translations of the Koran and other foundational Islamic texts are often frowned upon in Islamic circles, and (non-clerical) academic studies of and debate about the etymological meaning of the language used and its development are rare in Islamic circles, when there is intense academic study of and debate about the linguistic meaning of ancient Christian and Jewish texts among scholars. The language of the Koran and other foundational documents of Islam is essentially well over a thousand years old--even with the text of the Koran as an anchor to its language, it's insipid to believe that meaning, usage, and nuance haven't changed at all in over a thousand years. Pick any language, and look at literature written in it a thousand years ago; even if only 1% of that level of change and drift in language occurred in the Arabic used in the Koran, there could be major misunderstandings of the text by Islamic adherents.
> Google is not a public service, it is a publicly traded corporation.
And that, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with this country. Publicly traded corporations can and will maximize short to medium-term profit at any and all costs, including costs to the health and well being of the country, its citizens, and their own long-term viability. In corporate persons, moral, ethical, and sometimes legal, obligations are trumped by fiduciary ones in ways which natural persons could never so compromise.
Google's credo of "Don't be evil" remains so because it's profitable for the time being; but we should never believe it makes Google any different from Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, or Enron, in the long run. Until corporations, which have been given by the courts and legislatures the same rights as individual people, are held to the same moral, ethical, and legal responsibilities, we cannot have a well-functioning society which operates to preserve and further the rights and abilities of all.
> Its as if a bunch of different people got together to make a pizza chain with one
> guy coming up with the name, logo, mascot, and business plan, and the other guys
> deciding to ace that first guy out yet retaining all of that first guy's input.
I don't think so. They're not using Arrington's name, logo, mascot, or business plan. They're using his idea, and you can't copyright or patent a basic idea (badly misapproved patents notwithstanding). Using your pizza chain analogy, it's like a guy got the idea to start a pizza chain, brought a bunch of other people together, and then those other people squeezed him out and started their own pizza chain without him.
At most, Arrington gave some general input on design--"no bigger than X, make the bezel flush, thinner; icons should be here, make one that does that" etc. The fact that he may have been the one who came up with the general idea should make no difference unless he had signed contracts, which he doesn't or else we would've heard about it. It's not even a new idea--it's just a slight but far more usable evolution of Microsoft's Smart Display, which itself is just a crippled version of the touchscreen tablet pc.
Agreed wholeheartedly. Wikipedia really should have been an Encyclopedia Galactica collecting the sum of human knowledge about anything and everything--that's what I thought of when I first heard about Wikipedia. Noteworthiness could have been addressed by flagging topic pages with a noteworthiness rating, and maybe a policy discouraging links between articles with a high noteworthiness rating and a low one, rather than just deleting whole subjects based on someone's opinion of a subject's noteworthiness.
The reliable sources policy is also, while well-intentioned, a cause of much loss of information and articles on Wikipedia--a rule should exist to mitigate it, such as a rule discouraging editors from removing poorly sourced information they nonetheless know or suspect to be correct. While no one wants inaccurate information to stand, the reliable sources policy sometimes goes too far since even first-hand sources are discouraged.
I'm also fairly disgusted at Jimmy Wales' authoritarian control, used to censor articles as he sees fit. If an item is factual, it should be fair game for inclusion and the biases and personal opinions of a project founder should not enter into the picture.
At any rate, while I certainly use Wikipedia a lot, I do so by default and would gladly switch to any viable alternative which took a more inclusive and less tyrannical approach.
> Because it seems nobody really wants tablet (slate) computers.
I have to disagree, because no major company has actually created a decent slate computer. They came close, but then Microsoft came along and ruined the market with their Tablet PC specifications which went in the wrong direction. It really comes down to pen vs. touch issues, and that's where and how Microsoft killed the market.
Slates with pen inputs had of course been around for many years and had become common in many business, industrial, and math/engineering niches. They're ideal for those sorts of uses by the tech saavy or industrial/delivery workers, but the average user wasn't going to like the need to always use a pen even for basic pointing. Computers with touchscreen inputs had of course been around for many years and were becoming common in public kiosk and collaborative/joint learning installations, and even trickling down to your neighborhood Wawas, Verizon stores, record stores, etc. The public liked their touch-and-ye-shall-receive ease of use, but they were common to fixed installations and not portable. The best of both worlds, and the way to make slates appeal to mainstream audiences, is clearly to graft touchscreen input onto the slate form factor. Several companies like Viewsonic had just begun to make touchscreen slates with mainstream appeal and competitive pricing (although underpowered), when Microsoft came out with the Tablet PC spec which demanded pen digitizer input. Granted, touchscreens aren't ideal for handwriting and precision drawing while pen input is, but palm-rejection technologies of the day made them passable for handwriting and they were only going to improve. But specifically because of the Tablet PC specs Microsoft drew up, every major company dropped touchscreen slate PCs for the same old pen computers which had always been available, practically overnight. The only touchscreen slates which ever came to market from mainstream makers were first-gen models with slow CPUs, unacceptable 800x600 displays, or other issues. They were never given a chance. Microsoft wanted to reserve touchscreen input for their expensive, underpowered, and tiny-screened UMPC spec, gadgets which have always been almost prohibitively expensive and therefore never been popular.
Fast forward to the iPod Touch, proof that mainstream customers do like and want touchscreen input. HP and a few other companies have now been releasing--for the first time in nearly 5 years--tablet PCs (albeit convertibles, not slates) priced competitively with mainstream laptops which contain touchscreen input (and some like the HPs have both touchscreen and pen digitizers, making them truly the best of all possible worlds). So, touchscreen tablet pcs are only just now being given a decent chance, after Microsoft fudged up the emerging market years ago with their short-sighted inclusion of pen digitizers but not touchscreens in their tablet PC spec.
Indeed, I can't begin to see the value in creating a permanently unemployable, unhousable, unredeemable underclass out of people who could probably be cajoled into becoming decently productive members of society using modern methods. The public sex offender registry and its stigmas make it far more likely for an offender to repeat--after all, if there's no possible good future, why not do whatever you want damn the consequences? However, if you can live a good and unharried life, but know that one false move will instantly ruin it, chances of recidivism would be lessened.
The answer is to replace public sex offender registries with monitoring similar to what's currently done for parolees and others with ankle monitors, only for sex offenders monitoring would be permanent. With a 24/7 trail showing exactly where a monitored offender goes, the offender would know that any recidivism could be instantly proven. Nearing school zones or other verboten areas would result in quick incarceration, with no chance for convicted sex offenders to malinger around potential targets as is common among recidivists. Any former sex offender who stays out of trouble never need have his secret known and he can live a reasonable life. Any recidivism could be quickly proven by locating the offender's GPS trail at the scene of any crime or disappearance. Tracking them seems much better than just putting therm on a public registry. Giving them a reason to stay clean seems better than giving them an excuse to reoffend.
As for "covert" offenders, who insinuate themselves in with families and try to find victims to molest that way, the presence of a big ankle monitor or other tracking apparatus could prevent that. I know I'd sure check for one when letting neighbors near my kids if they were commonplace on convicted sex offenders. Again, it's something that would deter sex offenders from getting close to potential victims and their families, since to keep your distance means living a decent life undetected but getting too close to anyone likely to check could spoil that.
> First the North Pole, then Canada, then Michigan and finally all
> of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Can't you see they've come to
> take our precious bodily fluids?
Dear Russia,
I formally accept your territorial claims to my precious bodily fluids, and waive all U.N. appeals. Please send three of your most limber female gymnasts to collect them.
Your new subject,
SirWinston
P.S.--If the United States chooses to invade me for strategic control of my bodily fluids, please concentrate conflict near my prostate. Thank you.
> > ...or a church based on Harry Potter
> >
> Your ideas interest me, I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Hail Hermione, full of grace; the Dark Lord is with thee.
Thy lips and thy boobs, they comfort me.
Thou conjurest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies;
Thou anointest my wand with oil; my Pumpkin Juice cup runneth over...
> Television is just a passing fad... : p
Dagburnit! My zoetrope gets 40 frames to the rod, and that's the way I likes it!
> Not to mention Indiana Jones is a much more physically demanding role,
> assuming the movie isn't just about Dr. Jones becoming a crotchety,
> washed up academic.
Potential titles for another Indy trilogy:
Raiders of the Lost Dentures
Indiana Jones and the Hemorrhoid Cream of Doom
Indiana Jones and the Last Bran Muffin
Raiders of the Girls Old Enough to be Their Granddaughters
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Erectile Dysfunction
Indiana Jones and the Little Blue Pill
Raiders of the Shuffleboard Deck
Indiana Jones and the Broken Hip of Doom
Indiana Jones and the Budget Mobility Scooter
> I honestly hope they DON'T ditch the pulp fiction feel of it.
[Int. ancient temple. Indy's female love-interest-du-jour has a cartoonish Nazi at gunpoint.]
Indy: Bring out the Gimp.
Nazi: The Gimp is sleeping, Herr Jones.
Love-interest-du-jour: It's fantastic! The chamber must extend 60 meters...
Indy: Shit, they ain't got the metric system in ancient Egypt. They wouldn't know what the fuck a meter is.
Love-interest-du-jour: Then what would they call it?
Indy: A cubit.
[Love-interest-du-jour accidentally shoots Nazi in the head, splattering brains everywhere.]
Love-interest-du-jour: Oh man, I shot that Nazi in the face.
Indy: Why the fuck did you do that!
Love-interest-du-jour: Well, I didn't mean to do it, it was an accident!
Indy: Oh man I've seen some crazy ass shit in my time...
Love-interest-du-jour: Chill out, man. I told you it was an accident. You probably set off a booby trap by stepping on that "X" right there.
Indy: "X" never, ever marks the spot, bitch!
Love-interest-du-jour: Hey, look man, I didn't mean to shoot the son of a bitch. The gun went off. I don't know why.
Indy: No, let me ask you a question. When you came in here, did you see a hieroglyphic out in front of this temple that said Dead Nazi Storage?
Love-interest-du-jour: Indy, you know I ain't seen no...
Indy: Did you see a hieroglyphic out in front of this temple that said Dead Nazi Storage?
Love-interest-du-jour: [pause] No. I didn't.
Indy: You know WHY you didn't see that hieroglyphic?
Love-interest-du-jour: Why?
Indy: 'Cause it ain't there, 'cause storing dead Nazis ain't my fucking business, that's why!
> Audio just gives a much better bang for the buck at this point
Not for long. Can we really expect podcast-type audio-only content to stay as popular as it currently is, now that YouTube and other online video options are competing with them for our time? No. Portable video devices are phasing out portable audio-only devices in all but the value segment. Mainstream media companies are now also competing for our Internet A/V time with "webisodes." Audio-only net content (excluding music) will be getting a dwindling portion of the viewership/listenership pie as net video content and devices to access it multiply.
> Anybody attempting, for example the niche Vegan cooking show you
> describe, would be better served by making it an Audio, rather
> than a Video, production.
Today--maybe. 6 to 12 months from now--no, because video content continues to increase as does the ease of accessing it (iTV will be a quantum leap in this regard, too). Audio-only won't be able to compete for our limited time in the very near future with all the YouTube(esque) phenoms and increasing webisode content.
> Funny, I was able to find them
That's a very tiny excerpt of the relatovely less impassioned floor debate--the real meat of the controversy was in the very lengthy but incredibly contentious hearings, where witnesses including Thomas were vigorously cross-examined by key senators. For what is srguably the most important confirmation hearing C-SPAN ever covered, they ought to offer a DVD set containing full, unabridged confirmation hearing coverage. As far as I can tell, they offer little.
> Everything that happens on the floor ends up in the Congressional
> Record anyway, which is publicly available within a couple days
> of it happening. It's text, which means it's searchable, which
> makes it a ton better than video when it comes to accessing what
> you need.
Garbage. It loses every nuance of the spoken word and human gestures which betray what a representative or witness really feels about a contentious issue. I vividly recall watching the Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings, transfixed by the spectacle of it all, judging the true reactions of senators and witnesses on the committee floor by their body language and intonation. The written record of those proceedings is comparatively worthless. When contentious issues reach the main floor, the written record can be equally misleading about the real tenor of the debate. As Socrates would point out, the written word is dead and misleading compared to seeing a real person.
Interestingly, I went to the C-SPAN store recently hoping they'd offer the Thomas hearings on DVD so I could replace my ancient self-recorded EP VHS tapes. Nope. Perhaps the most important confirmation heaing in a generation, one which transfixed the general public so fully that several Saturday Night Live sketches parodied it, one which is *not at all* accurately reflected by the text record--and it's been gone from public view for well over a decade.
So, presumably, Lupin could use magic to seamlessly patch the holes in his clothes--but that would require conjuring new material which would disappear soon, so it's easier just to patch them once with real patches. By the same token, if something can be fixed without conjuring new matter, the fix can be permanent, or if magic can shape existing materials into a new form that can be permanent. But you can't conjure something lasting out of nothing in the Potterverse.
"If there's nothing wrong with me, maybe there's something wrong with the universe!"--Beverly Crusher
Damn it, Wesley! Stop playing with static warp bubbles.
I was reading Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Discuss Their Favorite Television Show, and one of the writers mentioned he'd had a writing teacher say that there are only 2 basic plots--"a stranger comes to town," and "somebody goes on a journey." A fairly pointless oversimplification, but it does fit...
> For the same reason we should be doing our damnedest to colonize other
> worlds? So that in the event of the destruction of one of our home worlds
> (to the point that life is no longer viable at least), the human race isn't
> wiped out?
As for the human race, we're still far too primitive to be colonizing other worlds even within our own star system--not only is our technology still too feeble to do it safely and sustainably, but our primitive economic and social institutions are too feeble as well. Until economic and social disparities are lessened and nationalistic strife wanes, any effort to colonize another planet or moon would be viewed by almost all as an unacceptable and decadent waste of resources--and lead to the toppling of the administration or even the nation which undertakes it. No one would accept spending the trillions of dollars it would require, to the detriment of spending on the general welfare, security, etc. We are a century or two away from our first tentative stab at a semi-permanent offworld colony. Trying now would be irresponsibly premature; those resources need to be spent fixing onworld problems before we even consider offworld colonies.
As for more advanced alien races (and even us if we survive long enough), if sufficiently technologically advanced they'd be able to defend against basic natural threats such as asteroids and to predict catastrophic changes such as planetary or stellar cycles decades, centuries, or even millennia in advance. That would mean there'd be no pressing need to explore or colonize as a protective measure, since there'd be ample warning. They'd only need to send out enough probes to locate one suitable planet, and not prepare to colonize unless/until they foresee an unavoidable catastrophe which would render all planets in their own star system uninhabitable.
Plus, a sufficiently socially and culturally advanced society could likely be less self-centered and more accepting of its own mortality and its own unimportance in the cosmic scale. The desire to outwardly explore and colonize seems to be an aggressive and self-centered impulse; as societies become more advanced and cohesive, aggression is an impulse which becomes counterproductive and antisocial and is increasingly offset by social and legal discouragements. As we move forward, aggression may even be selected against in our natural selection process, as more cognitive traits become increasingly valued and selected for--which may have the consequence of limiting the desire for aggressive expansionist forms of exploration and increasing desire for more introspective and socially, technologically beneficial forms of exploration.
In any event, we are too primitive technologically, socially, and economically to really understand these issues. But I do suspect that any race sufficiently advanced to master interstellar travel will have little inherent desire to undertake it for the purposes of mere exploration. Once you prove life exists elsewhere, it likely becomes a banal fact rather than an impetus to explore, as soon as the novelty wears off.
> Fermi's Paradox (it's not really a paradox) also assumes that intelligent
> life wants to expand and explore and have the resources on-planet to get
> off-planet and want to contact other life forms.
>
> It also assumes that a sufficiently advanced alien has figured out some way
> of near-lightspeed travel - perhaps it's not possible.
Exactly. Why assume that many (or any) advanced life forms would be "colonialists" and explorers, rather than introverted self-explorers? Humans haven't nearly reached the technological advancement needed for interstellar travel, yet our most advanced societies have already been moving past colonialism and expansion and nearing internal population equilibrium or decline (discounting immigration). Once a planet truly stabilizes socially and culturally, and has eliminated most of its economic ills and national rivalries--would there be any impetus to go out on decades-long interstellar exploration trips in relatively isolated and spartan conditions? There might be a desire to prove that life exists elsewhere--but once that's proven by finding an alien species, that desire would be largely satieted, so why undertake continued explorations for no other reason than the exploration itself?
I think the Fermi Paradox is no paradox at all, just a foolish assumption that intelligent lifeforms would be as interested in exploration and expansion as we were recently--even though we're still too primitive to be an interstellar-capable people. Already our own more advanced societies have slowed/stopped expanding in native population and become more introspective. Perhaps our own tendency to explore is the exception not the rule, or a primitive trait advanced societies outgrow once they get the big picture, or a tendency which gets refocused inward toward exploring ourselves or exploring the limits of technology.
And that's even assuming interstellar travel is feasible in practical ways. Even assuming that, would many or any people in a rich technologically and culturally advanced society choose to abandon it to spend decades to reach a neighboring star system, on the off chance that it might have interesting life?