There is a way to break the optimal future into lets say 20 bite size steps or domains. Candy coat each step such that the existing paradigm see's the next step before them as a critical and necessary requirement, a pressing solution to the vital needs of that moment. So, there is no argument, no backlash. Each step becomes an obvious and pressing necessity, opening a door to a new room demanding without obvious coercion, that we cross the room and address the next door. I realize I'm speaking in the broadest of terms and vaguest of ontological models, but I'm curious how you see the future and would twiddle the knobs and dials to illicit what you think is most deeply called for in the human trajectory.
I'm being oblique on purpose. A more direct conversation would take too much time and space here, you're a busy man, but I'm hoping I can pluck a nerve, and on that note thank you for your insights, I find your visions inspiring and compelling.
Hi Ray. Is it your experience that people with nonstandard gender perception/expression seem to have fundamentally more complex brains/minds and for that reason tend to be two or more sigma above in intelligence? As well because of the presence (typically) of an over developed corpus collosum, they tend to have both the linear Problem/Spacial Relation solving skills normally associate with male pattern thinking while at the same time deeply enhanced creative/inventive/intuitive thinking skills? This is less a question than a most polite knock on the door.
Do you envision the whole of human history/society as a spacial manifold? A hyperplane perhaps? Do you see possible/likely trajectories? Is this hyperplane a complex fabric with a recognizable topology and clear attractors? I realize this might occur as many questions, but I'm hoping you'll see it (as I ask it) is in fact just a single question that can simply be answered yes or no.
Is it not time for the enlightened to stand together and invent the future en masse? Where can they play together? Google?
Actually the whole point of cities demanded that human beings address the very things you mention and more, inventing culture, laws, technology, agriculture, common language, modern commerce and architecture. Cities are the birthplaces of social evolution.
The issue is temperature differential, by using very cold materials (refrigerants, etc,) it should be possible to capture waste heat, now the problem is moving that energy to one place, concentrating it and making do useful work. The point is keeping as much of it out of the general environment as possible, and the other is reclaiming the maximum amount to do useful work. That said every application will have its entropic heat loss and as we use greater amounts of energy, we need a way to make that waste heat energy go someplace that doesn't have the planet looking like a sauna. Beaming that energy to the moon solves several problems, but as usual creates several new ones. Again, its vital to define your problem set, related problems, desired goals and environmental constraints.
So first of all you've made a bunch of erroneous presumptions and the first is that I don't know what I'm talking about or bothered to study the subject. Because heat is effectively molecular vibration and in the form of electromagnetic radiation lives in around the infrared area of the spectrum while microwaves are a wee bit further down in frequency (GHz/THz,) it would seem to me that there would be a process (look up heterodyne) or meta-material that would efficiently convert heat to microwaves (which would be able to pass unattenuated through the atmosphere). You can start your reading here for possible ideas related to such a conversion, but its clearly a tractable engineering problem, and if you weren't trying to be so smug, you wouldn't now be in need of an athlete's foot mouth wash..
As for insulation, its irrelevant, thermal superconduction isn't going to behave the way you expect because thermal superconduction occurs at the physical interface of the superconductor where quantum waves move from phonons to photons to protons and travel along the superconductor at the speed of light with less than 0.01% energy loss. Of course you would have had to read what I said more carefully and then bothered to look into the technology involved... tsk, tsk, tsk.
We will not solve today's problems using today's technology. It will take out of the box thinking to envision a future that works for everyone and everything, but these are all tractable problems as long as we bring creativity, inventiveness, native genius and a commitment to serve the greater good. So stop being a knee jerk nay sayer, and use that brain of your to come up with meaningful solutions, and for the love o Jebus, stop crapping all over thoughtful ideas because you need to prove your IQ is a sigma above the norm, because there are folks here who are two and three sigma above average who will just embarrass you.
That's kind of the point, if the jail is of our own making aren't we all responsible for getting out, first for ourselves and then for others. Freedom never comes from the outside.
But what percentage of our industrial process ends up being waste heat, and what is the largest feasible array of transmitter one could reasonable build in, let's say the middle of the desert? Clearly the idea of building arrays of thousands or tens of thousands of high powered emitters would be daunting, however for any society looking to move their planet to accommodate increasing waste heat, it would seem to me should have the where with all to create huge, high efficiency quantum emitters to convert waste heat to a transmissible energy type. Again, its all theoretical or hypothetical. I would just assume projecting the heat would be easier than moving the planet.
Since the dissociation constant is a ratio of dissociated ion vs associated whole dissolved molecules in solution (at equilibrium between between ionization and recombining) the value is completely independent of quantities or units of measure (the ratio between the two at let's say STP would remain constant, ergo Dissociation Constant.). Also because this process is incredibly sensitive to temperature and mechanical motion (including brownian motion), fine scale measurements are very noisy in nature. Which is why most dissociation constants for different substances dissolved in water are given to only 2 significant decimal places. More places would imply greater precision, where no such accuracy exists. Think of the 2 decimal places as meaningful average values of a changing dynaic chemical equilibrium. Any more significant places would be misleading and inaccurate.
One would think there would be a way to convert the waste heat to let's say microwaves and shoot them at the moon. With a proper array on the moon you could immediately power a lunar civilization and remove earth's waste heat, two birds with one stone. If we created a small device that converted waste heat locally to hydrogen by splitting water, we could reclaim that energy or a reasonable amount of it. Heat concentrators could be used to remove heat from our cities where it would be converted to a frequency that could be radiated into space. Create superconductive heat pipes under superconductive electrical transmission and maglev freeways for robot driven cars? Hey, if your going to think about the future, really think about the future. We now have high quality carbon thread, that has very high conductance (comparable to metal) and in theory could be the material upon which to base a room temperature superconductor (also thermal superconductor), and with the proper infrastructure surrounding cities the problems of power, heat and pollution would be technologically tractable problems.
Of course we need to begin taking carbon our of the air. The good news is we now have a lot of really good ways to do that. The US Navy is funding the largest purchase of biofuel in history, it must not impact food stock so no corn alcohol subsidies, and there are several competing technologies looking to produce fuels that the Navy can use without further processing. If it works, we'll have a way of beginning to move first to carbon neutrality, then negative atmospheric carbon growth. Of course there are probably a slew of things that are bigger immediate threats to humanity than waste heat.
I took chemistry a long time ago. The teacher said if you turn in dissociation constants with more than two decimal places, he'd mark them wrong (for those students who did their calculations on digital devices and copied all 10 digits of result.) He explained that these were chaotic events and everything past the second digit was noise.
I think the point of the very specific number above is simply it being a single data point. In fact heat effects may travel tremendously further than even that. More important, if heat is shifting the jet stream, secondary and tertiary effects may be happening downstream many thousands of miles and include drought, flood, or unseasonable weather. As well, the city heat drives low altitude moisture and chemical particulates (soot and industrial dust) into the higher atmosphere (potentially punching a hole in the common inversion layers) and that moisture/nucleation may have significant down wind impacts as well. I'm looking forward to seeing what the models say. If we're lucky, the effect will be more cloud cover, increasing earth's albido, and be a thermal cooling factor over-all. If not, it may be adding to a climate that is growing ever more unstable and that's bad news for everyone.
My question is, why isn't anyone talking about the air pollution problems happening this month in China? Air that's being called lethal by some, over 40x more polluted that world health limits recommend. Here's a story about a factory that burned for 3 hours because nobody could tell the difference between the smoke and the pall of smog. My greatest concern is that over the last ten years there have been several events of smog from China reaching the western U.S., this being the worst smog event in remembrance, there is a real chance it could make it to America. Thankfully, it winter and most likely will be washed into the sea by storm systems. Had this been summer we would certainly be facing serious environmental threat. So why isn't this a HUGE conversation right now, virtually nobody is even talking about it.
I don't know, could it be I'm against whaling because it involves the wholesale slaughter of the largest brained animal on the planet, an animal with a complex language, an animal with an extended lifespan and race memory and almost certainly sentience? I dunno, I'd say that puts it above a deer, an animal just only slightly more consciousness than a rutabaga. See, I'm good with agriculture, have no problem with utilizing life on the planet to sustain our life. That said, we have a bunch of close primate relatives, whose intelligence demands we consider them as having every bit as much right to be here as we have. In fact there are a significant number of animals, certain parrots and crows, higher primates, cephalopods, cetaceans and a smattering of other critters who've demonstrated by remarkable intelligence, that we should be showing these creatures some respect and perhaps as we evolve ourselves, help them reach their own escape velocity as well. Of course you could just turn them all into dog food. Its not like we have any formal obligation to preserve the miracle of sentience in other species... it just makes us seems like a bunch of self absorbed, misanthropic, unevolved, evil monkeys, but who cares, if we blow the whole damn thing up, or burn it all down, as long as we get ours, screw the universe... right?
There's a lot of colorful (no pun intended) speech from a time before the civil rights movement. My Mother used to own a nut and candy store, and old folks would come in and ask for N***** Toes, a euphemism for Brazil Nuts. There was no dark intent, no racial slur, its just what people from a certain part of the country called Brazil Nuts. This is valid speech, yet it has the burden of all these unintended consequences. I was watching a Ralphie May video, I don't know if his idea for destroying words that reflect hate is the right way to go, but I have to applaud the attempt... Gays have reclaimed "Queer", though a number of bigots still use it as an epithet, but the word most folks looking to hurt use now is "Fag" or its longer variant, because queer has lost its sting..
I was listening to Shawn Mullins' song "Shimmer" and the first verse talks about a child being born perfect and we'll teach it how to hate. But, we're born to shimmer, born to shine, born radiate, born to live and born love, and born to try not to hate. I think George Carlin had it right. There are no bad words. Those are just arbitrary noises coming out of our mouths. There are bad intentions, bad deeds, bad actions predicated on hate and ignorance. Its time to wash the words clean. Its time to end the hate and embrace our differences, celebrate our diversity.
Poor choice of phrase, even though it accurately connotes the situation, its so inflammatory that nobody can hear your comment, which is too bad, its a good comment. I'm a little torn by this issue, I understand the pain and anguish this language has inflicted, and that the black culture still experiences some PTSD from it and related language. That said, there is important, vital work, by people like Twain in his stories about life in slave era Missouri, that people need to understand and appreciate, and that truth plied with honest compassion and dignity invariably trumps well meaning dishonesty even when that dishonesty is easier or socially less expensive. Rewriting the works of Twain and for that matter sanitizing history, science and art for our children, so we don't have to address real problems or philosophically complex truths does no service to them or the future of our society. So I would honestly say that the parent post doesn't deserve a Flamebait rating, however, I would also say, in this era of social awareness, it behooves us all to choose our words with at least a modicum of consideration for their unintended impact.
As for the patent trolls. I want to flame them, and I don't mean over the internet. Thank you NewEgg, I've done business with you before and now I will do all my PC related business with you. You fight to keep the parasites and leaches from bleeding my world dry. This makes you heroic in my eyes, and I support your work to make this form of commerce safe from the greedy and conniving. We all suffer at the soulless ministrations of these sycophants and their legal minions. Its time to take back what it rightfully and justly ours, to stop this runaway train from sailing into the abyss, and put IP protection back to a place that serves the future rather than cannibalizing it.
No, that's just letting the likes of Rupert and his ilk bleed society for their own fun and profit with impunity. Someone has to stand up and yank these big dogs back on their leash. So Jonnie C., hats off, publicly humiliating them (if that's even possible), painting them as ass-hats not by name calling but by framing their actions, stealing their thunder and their profit, doing the good thing and the right thing at the same time and making them the butt of their own ass-holiness... I'm inspired and moved by the class and the cleverness. Don't get mad, get even, and still take the high ground while doing it, bravo, well played sir!
Yeah, it would be wise not to try and boil these men down to far... what is it they say "Anything that can be put in a nut shell probably belongs there..."
Edison was plenty bright, he had real vision, big ideas. He was not however someone who could see how to get from A to C without trying every B on the planet, which is why he had an army of people test all the possible "B"s the world could throw at him. That said, he owns the patents for (notice I didn't say singularly invented) the phonograph, movie projector, voice recorder, light bulb, and on and on. Tesla was a guy who could see clearly from A to Z and how to get there in a single hop, scary mind, and just a wee bit unhinged. Often the price of brilliance is being more than a little screwed up. In the end his biggest dream, free power for humanity would be his undoing and Edison had nothing at all to do with it.
Remember, this was the age of the industrialist, anything goes, your worker strike, you brought in armed thugs and had them shot and clubbed to death. By comparison to most of the captains of industry at the peak of Edison's power he was a pussy cat and a philanthropist. Doesn't mean he couldn't be a belligerent asshole, just small potatoes compared to the world class ass hats of his day, and he had to compete is a world that was by all measures a brutal one.
Steve was a carnival barker, a snake oil salesman who loved and believed in the magic of his snake oil. In the end, who knows, there may have been something of value in the stuff (to soon to say.) Woz had the brain and the know how. Steve was the all singing all dancing neon sign trying to figure new ways to monetize Woz's cool ideas. A huckster hucking. Different as different could be. Still Steve crapped out Next, Pixar and a host of arguably brilliant projects, not the least of which was leave people stupid happy and give them a mind numbingly great experience. Can't say he always succeeded, but I've looked inside a Mac Pro Server, that sucker is engineered to the nines... anyone who's every sliced their knuckles into an ichiban of sashimi working on a poorly designed and constructed server would fall is deep love with a Mac Pro Server... on the flip side... they were over priced and are now discontinued. So sad, too bad. The failures of a capricious vision.
Actually you're very close to hitting something square on the head... owww! No, most dramatically successful people, are folks who are more enamored of their vision than they are in garnering love and appreciation. He was literally playing a different game than most folks. The primary human currency is admiration. Some would argue and instead say its love, but imagine for a second being loved by someone who had no respect or admiration for you... are you completely creeped out? Welcome to the bottom line for the vast majority of human beings. We do anything to be admired (as we see admiration.) Steve was actually more interested in winning the game he was playing than getting your admiration, so if you were between him and his getting what he wanted, he didn't think twice about marching right over your ass rough shod, and if it left you chafed, so sad, too bad.
So all those judgements about Steve are kind of moot, opinions based on people who measured actions and reactions from a context called "Social Behavior" and it would be like expecting a lion to have table manners... silly, right? Steve had his vision, his focus, his raison d'etre. If there was any greatness in the man, it was that he was true to his own vision and that is indeed a kind of greatness. Woz is a more normal life form. Woz is a good man, he too honors his vision, but he's not quite as obsessed with the importance of his own opinion. That is the mark of a wise man. Steve was focused. Woz was, is, will be wise. I prefer wisdom myself, but the world has need of crazy obsessed bastards chasing a vision.
Why do you guys keep applying your economic religion to these problems when time and time again they just make things worse.... The root of the problem in the Amazon is precisely large property owners doing as they please with impunity, and laying claim to huge tracks of land they don't own. They hire mercenaries to enforce their will, bribe the local police and anyone who tries to stop them ends up getting shot, this includes local native populations who have been displaced, environmentalists, rangers and official tasked with protecting the forest and the populace of many small villages. Forest ownership by a few greedy bastards is a full out ecological disaster. The pressure to harvest hardwoods grows greater by the year (with Japan in the lead pushing harvest), and America's endless hunger for cheap beef which has lead to endless slash and burn agriculture which in turn yields poor soil and becomes useless desert in just a few years.
As for elephants, you have not been doing your homework. As of January 2013, the population of African Elephants is in complete free-fall with extinction clearly in sight. In fact the men tasked with protecting the elephants are themselves being slaughtered in record numbers. The price of ivory has soared in China as the growing middle class has caused and explosive growth in the market. Unless the Chinese put an immediate halt to the ivory trade, the African Elephant will disappear from the wild in just a few years. Oh, and by the way, the list of large mammals right behind the elephant tagged for extinction in the wild is broad and long. Before the end of this century expect no big cats, no bears, no primates, few antelopes and ruminants that aren't part of human managed herds, and no large birds of prey. So your ideas surrounding property management are profoundly broken. We need to institute large scale population protection and migration control, and unless your owner has complete rights to the entire Serengeti and is devoted to protecting wildlife up to and including the public execution of poachers, your suggestion is going to pitifully ineffective.
You ideas might work if they were part of a national, international and global program to protect biodiversity, invest in potential biomarkets, gut the trade of illegal animal products and fund local communities to preserve their natural heritage. But simply chopping up the resources will degenerate into a pissing contest between warring land owners until eventually the nastiest takes the prize and burns down the forest.
Face it people... M$ is having a bad day. They need a whole mess-o-apps to make their also-ran tablet a viable choice in the face of more developed competition. Its crunch time. If they have to compromise on license and put a smootch mark on every developers left butt cheek, butt cheeks will bear lipstick. Line up for the M$ logo a pair of red pursed lips...
Oh, and JJ, when your done schmucking around with the Star Trek franchise, don't forget to do some stupid time thing and put Vulcan back for the next generation, and turn out the light when you leave. Damn kids...
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There is a way to break the optimal future into lets say 20 bite size steps or domains. Candy coat each step such that the existing paradigm see's the next step before them as a critical and necessary requirement, a pressing solution to the vital needs of that moment. So, there is no argument, no backlash. Each step becomes an obvious and pressing necessity, opening a door to a new room demanding without obvious coercion, that we cross the room and address the next door. I realize I'm speaking in the broadest of terms and vaguest of ontological models, but I'm curious how you see the future and would twiddle the knobs and dials to illicit what you think is most deeply called for in the human trajectory.
I'm being oblique on purpose. A more direct conversation would take too much time and space here, you're a busy man, but I'm hoping I can pluck a nerve, and on that note thank you for your insights, I find your visions inspiring and compelling.
Hi Ray. Is it your experience that people with nonstandard gender perception/expression seem to have fundamentally more complex brains/minds and for that reason tend to be two or more sigma above in intelligence? As well because of the presence (typically) of an over developed corpus collosum, they tend to have both the linear Problem/Spacial Relation solving skills normally associate with male pattern thinking while at the same time deeply enhanced creative/inventive/intuitive thinking skills? This is less a question than a most polite knock on the door.
Do you envision the whole of human history/society as a spacial manifold? A hyperplane perhaps? Do you see possible/likely trajectories? Is this hyperplane a complex fabric with a recognizable topology and clear attractors? I realize this might occur as many questions, but I'm hoping you'll see it (as I ask it) is in fact just a single question that can simply be answered yes or no.
Is it not time for the enlightened to stand together and invent the future en masse? Where can they play together? Google?
Actually the whole point of cities demanded that human beings address the very things you mention and more, inventing culture, laws, technology, agriculture, common language, modern commerce and architecture. Cities are the birthplaces of social evolution.
The issue is temperature differential, by using very cold materials (refrigerants, etc,) it should be possible to capture waste heat, now the problem is moving that energy to one place, concentrating it and making do useful work. The point is keeping as much of it out of the general environment as possible, and the other is reclaiming the maximum amount to do useful work. That said every application will have its entropic heat loss and as we use greater amounts of energy, we need a way to make that waste heat energy go someplace that doesn't have the planet looking like a sauna. Beaming that energy to the moon solves several problems, but as usual creates several new ones. Again, its vital to define your problem set, related problems, desired goals and environmental constraints.
So first of all you've made a bunch of erroneous presumptions and the first is that I don't know what I'm talking about or bothered to study the subject. Because heat is effectively molecular vibration and in the form of electromagnetic radiation lives in around the infrared area of the spectrum while microwaves are a wee bit further down in frequency (GHz/THz,) it would seem to me that there would be a process (look up heterodyne) or meta-material that would efficiently convert heat to microwaves (which would be able to pass unattenuated through the atmosphere). You can start your reading here for possible ideas related to such a conversion, but its clearly a tractable engineering problem, and if you weren't trying to be so smug, you wouldn't now be in need of an athlete's foot mouth wash..
As for insulation, its irrelevant, thermal superconduction isn't going to behave the way you expect because thermal superconduction occurs at the physical interface of the superconductor where quantum waves move from phonons to photons to protons and travel along the superconductor at the speed of light with less than 0.01% energy loss. Of course you would have had to read what I said more carefully and then bothered to look into the technology involved... tsk, tsk, tsk.
We will not solve today's problems using today's technology. It will take out of the box thinking to envision a future that works for everyone and everything, but these are all tractable problems as long as we bring creativity, inventiveness, native genius and a commitment to serve the greater good. So stop being a knee jerk nay sayer, and use that brain of your to come up with meaningful solutions, and for the love o Jebus, stop crapping all over thoughtful ideas because you need to prove your IQ is a sigma above the norm, because there are folks here who are two and three sigma above average who will just embarrass you.
That's kind of the point, if the jail is of our own making aren't we all responsible for getting out, first for ourselves and then for others. Freedom never comes from the outside.
But what percentage of our industrial process ends up being waste heat, and what is the largest feasible array of transmitter one could reasonable build in, let's say the middle of the desert? Clearly the idea of building arrays of thousands or tens of thousands of high powered emitters would be daunting, however for any society looking to move their planet to accommodate increasing waste heat, it would seem to me should have the where with all to create huge, high efficiency quantum emitters to convert waste heat to a transmissible energy type. Again, its all theoretical or hypothetical. I would just assume projecting the heat would be easier than moving the planet.
Since the dissociation constant is a ratio of dissociated ion vs associated whole dissolved molecules in solution (at equilibrium between between ionization and recombining) the value is completely independent of quantities or units of measure (the ratio between the two at let's say STP would remain constant, ergo Dissociation Constant.). Also because this process is incredibly sensitive to temperature and mechanical motion (including brownian motion), fine scale measurements are very noisy in nature. Which is why most dissociation constants for different substances dissolved in water are given to only 2 significant decimal places. More places would imply greater precision, where no such accuracy exists. Think of the 2 decimal places as meaningful average values of a changing dynaic chemical equilibrium. Any more significant places would be misleading and inaccurate.
One would think there would be a way to convert the waste heat to let's say microwaves and shoot them at the moon. With a proper array on the moon you could immediately power a lunar civilization and remove earth's waste heat, two birds with one stone. If we created a small device that converted waste heat locally to hydrogen by splitting water, we could reclaim that energy or a reasonable amount of it. Heat concentrators could be used to remove heat from our cities where it would be converted to a frequency that could be radiated into space. Create superconductive heat pipes under superconductive electrical transmission and maglev freeways for robot driven cars? Hey, if your going to think about the future, really think about the future. We now have high quality carbon thread, that has very high conductance (comparable to metal) and in theory could be the material upon which to base a room temperature superconductor (also thermal superconductor), and with the proper infrastructure surrounding cities the problems of power, heat and pollution would be technologically tractable problems.
Of course we need to begin taking carbon our of the air. The good news is we now have a lot of really good ways to do that. The US Navy is funding the largest purchase of biofuel in history, it must not impact food stock so no corn alcohol subsidies, and there are several competing technologies looking to produce fuels that the Navy can use without further processing. If it works, we'll have a way of beginning to move first to carbon neutrality, then negative atmospheric carbon growth. Of course there are probably a slew of things that are bigger immediate threats to humanity than waste heat.
I took chemistry a long time ago. The teacher said if you turn in dissociation constants with more than two decimal places, he'd mark them wrong (for those students who did their calculations on digital devices and copied all 10 digits of result.) He explained that these were chaotic events and everything past the second digit was noise.
I think the point of the very specific number above is simply it being a single data point. In fact heat effects may travel tremendously further than even that. More important, if heat is shifting the jet stream, secondary and tertiary effects may be happening downstream many thousands of miles and include drought, flood, or unseasonable weather. As well, the city heat drives low altitude moisture and chemical particulates (soot and industrial dust) into the higher atmosphere (potentially punching a hole in the common inversion layers) and that moisture/nucleation may have significant down wind impacts as well. I'm looking forward to seeing what the models say. If we're lucky, the effect will be more cloud cover, increasing earth's albido, and be a thermal cooling factor over-all. If not, it may be adding to a climate that is growing ever more unstable and that's bad news for everyone.
My question is, why isn't anyone talking about the air pollution problems happening this month in China? Air that's being called lethal by some, over 40x more polluted that world health limits recommend. Here's a story about a factory that burned for 3 hours because nobody could tell the difference between the smoke and the pall of smog. My greatest concern is that over the last ten years there have been several events of smog from China reaching the western U.S., this being the worst smog event in remembrance, there is a real chance it could make it to America. Thankfully, it winter and most likely will be washed into the sea by storm systems. Had this been summer we would certainly be facing serious environmental threat. So why isn't this a HUGE conversation right now, virtually nobody is even talking about it.
I don't know, could it be I'm against whaling because it involves the wholesale slaughter of the largest brained animal on the planet, an animal with a complex language, an animal with an extended lifespan and race memory and almost certainly sentience? I dunno, I'd say that puts it above a deer, an animal just only slightly more consciousness than a rutabaga. See, I'm good with agriculture, have no problem with utilizing life on the planet to sustain our life. That said, we have a bunch of close primate relatives, whose intelligence demands we consider them as having every bit as much right to be here as we have. In fact there are a significant number of animals, certain parrots and crows, higher primates, cephalopods, cetaceans and a smattering of other critters who've demonstrated by remarkable intelligence, that we should be showing these creatures some respect and perhaps as we evolve ourselves, help them reach their own escape velocity as well. Of course you could just turn them all into dog food. Its not like we have any formal obligation to preserve the miracle of sentience in other species... it just makes us seems like a bunch of self absorbed, misanthropic, unevolved, evil monkeys, but who cares, if we blow the whole damn thing up, or burn it all down, as long as we get ours, screw the universe... right?
There's a lot of colorful (no pun intended) speech from a time before the civil rights movement. My Mother used to own a nut and candy store, and old folks would come in and ask for N***** Toes, a euphemism for Brazil Nuts. There was no dark intent, no racial slur, its just what people from a certain part of the country called Brazil Nuts. This is valid speech, yet it has the burden of all these unintended consequences. I was watching a Ralphie May video, I don't know if his idea for destroying words that reflect hate is the right way to go, but I have to applaud the attempt... Gays have reclaimed "Queer", though a number of bigots still use it as an epithet, but the word most folks looking to hurt use now is "Fag" or its longer variant, because queer has lost its sting..
I was listening to Shawn Mullins' song "Shimmer" and the first verse talks about a child being born perfect and we'll teach it how to hate. But, we're born to shimmer, born to shine, born radiate, born to live and born love, and born to try not to hate. I think George Carlin had it right. There are no bad words. Those are just arbitrary noises coming out of our mouths. There are bad intentions, bad deeds, bad actions predicated on hate and ignorance. Its time to wash the words clean. Its time to end the hate and embrace our differences, celebrate our diversity.
Poor choice of phrase, even though it accurately connotes the situation, its so inflammatory that nobody can hear your comment, which is too bad, its a good comment. I'm a little torn by this issue, I understand the pain and anguish this language has inflicted, and that the black culture still experiences some PTSD from it and related language. That said, there is important, vital work, by people like Twain in his stories about life in slave era Missouri, that people need to understand and appreciate, and that truth plied with honest compassion and dignity invariably trumps well meaning dishonesty even when that dishonesty is easier or socially less expensive. Rewriting the works of Twain and for that matter sanitizing history, science and art for our children, so we don't have to address real problems or philosophically complex truths does no service to them or the future of our society. So I would honestly say that the parent post doesn't deserve a Flamebait rating, however, I would also say, in this era of social awareness, it behooves us all to choose our words with at least a modicum of consideration for their unintended impact.
As for the patent trolls. I want to flame them, and I don't mean over the internet. Thank you NewEgg, I've done business with you before and now I will do all my PC related business with you. You fight to keep the parasites and leaches from bleeding my world dry. This makes you heroic in my eyes, and I support your work to make this form of commerce safe from the greedy and conniving. We all suffer at the soulless ministrations of these sycophants and their legal minions. Its time to take back what it rightfully and justly ours, to stop this runaway train from sailing into the abyss, and put IP protection back to a place that serves the future rather than cannibalizing it.
See children, this is what happens when you mix stock car racing, LSD and Red Bull... a warning to the wise!
A robot with breasts is just a publicity stunt.
And I thought it was Nicki Manaj... oh, I guess we're both right!
Ikea builds the terminator??? Ya, dis is a lovely little table and set of bar stoowels... RUN!!!!
No, that's just letting the likes of Rupert and his ilk bleed society for their own fun and profit with impunity. Someone has to stand up and yank these big dogs back on their leash. So Jonnie C., hats off, publicly humiliating them (if that's even possible), painting them as ass-hats not by name calling but by framing their actions, stealing their thunder and their profit, doing the good thing and the right thing at the same time and making them the butt of their own ass-holiness... I'm inspired and moved by the class and the cleverness. Don't get mad, get even, and still take the high ground while doing it, bravo, well played sir!
One is a dung munching, mindless, lower life form, and the other is a beetle?
Between a dung beetle and a Congressman? The Dung Beetle has at least 53 neurons...
Funny thing, is they prolly think the same thing about you... they put what, where?....ewwwww!
Yeah, it would be wise not to try and boil these men down to far... what is it they say "Anything that can be put in a nut shell probably belongs there..."
Edison was plenty bright, he had real vision, big ideas. He was not however someone who could see how to get from A to C without trying every B on the planet, which is why he had an army of people test all the possible "B"s the world could throw at him. That said, he owns the patents for (notice I didn't say singularly invented) the phonograph, movie projector, voice recorder, light bulb, and on and on. Tesla was a guy who could see clearly from A to Z and how to get there in a single hop, scary mind, and just a wee bit unhinged. Often the price of brilliance is being more than a little screwed up. In the end his biggest dream, free power for humanity would be his undoing and Edison had nothing at all to do with it.
Remember, this was the age of the industrialist, anything goes, your worker strike, you brought in armed thugs and had them shot and clubbed to death. By comparison to most of the captains of industry at the peak of Edison's power he was a pussy cat and a philanthropist. Doesn't mean he couldn't be a belligerent asshole, just small potatoes compared to the world class ass hats of his day, and he had to compete is a world that was by all measures a brutal one.
Steve was a carnival barker, a snake oil salesman who loved and believed in the magic of his snake oil. In the end, who knows, there may have been something of value in the stuff (to soon to say.) Woz had the brain and the know how. Steve was the all singing all dancing neon sign trying to figure new ways to monetize Woz's cool ideas. A huckster hucking. Different as different could be. Still Steve crapped out Next, Pixar and a host of arguably brilliant projects, not the least of which was leave people stupid happy and give them a mind numbingly great experience. Can't say he always succeeded, but I've looked inside a Mac Pro Server, that sucker is engineered to the nines... anyone who's every sliced their knuckles into an ichiban of sashimi working on a poorly designed and constructed server would fall is deep love with a Mac Pro Server... on the flip side... they were over priced and are now discontinued. So sad, too bad. The failures of a capricious vision.
Actually you're very close to hitting something square on the head... owww! No, most dramatically successful people, are folks who are more enamored of their vision than they are in garnering love and appreciation. He was literally playing a different game than most folks. The primary human currency is admiration. Some would argue and instead say its love, but imagine for a second being loved by someone who had no respect or admiration for you... are you completely creeped out? Welcome to the bottom line for the vast majority of human beings. We do anything to be admired (as we see admiration.) Steve was actually more interested in winning the game he was playing than getting your admiration, so if you were between him and his getting what he wanted, he didn't think twice about marching right over your ass rough shod, and if it left you chafed, so sad, too bad.
So all those judgements about Steve are kind of moot, opinions based on people who measured actions and reactions from a context called "Social Behavior" and it would be like expecting a lion to have table manners... silly, right? Steve had his vision, his focus, his raison d'etre. If there was any greatness in the man, it was that he was true to his own vision and that is indeed a kind of greatness. Woz is a more normal life form. Woz is a good man, he too honors his vision, but he's not quite as obsessed with the importance of his own opinion. That is the mark of a wise man. Steve was focused. Woz was, is, will be wise. I prefer wisdom myself, but the world has need of crazy obsessed bastards chasing a vision.
Why do you guys keep applying your economic religion to these problems when time and time again they just make things worse.... The root of the problem in the Amazon is precisely large property owners doing as they please with impunity, and laying claim to huge tracks of land they don't own. They hire mercenaries to enforce their will, bribe the local police and anyone who tries to stop them ends up getting shot, this includes local native populations who have been displaced, environmentalists, rangers and official tasked with protecting the forest and the populace of many small villages. Forest ownership by a few greedy bastards is a full out ecological disaster. The pressure to harvest hardwoods grows greater by the year (with Japan in the lead pushing harvest), and America's endless hunger for cheap beef which has lead to endless slash and burn agriculture which in turn yields poor soil and becomes useless desert in just a few years.
As for elephants, you have not been doing your homework. As of January 2013, the population of African Elephants is in complete free-fall with extinction clearly in sight. In fact the men tasked with protecting the elephants are themselves being slaughtered in record numbers. The price of ivory has soared in China as the growing middle class has caused and explosive growth in the market. Unless the Chinese put an immediate halt to the ivory trade, the African Elephant will disappear from the wild in just a few years. Oh, and by the way, the list of large mammals right behind the elephant tagged for extinction in the wild is broad and long. Before the end of this century expect no big cats, no bears, no primates, few antelopes and ruminants that aren't part of human managed herds, and no large birds of prey. So your ideas surrounding property management are profoundly broken. We need to institute large scale population protection and migration control, and unless your owner has complete rights to the entire Serengeti and is devoted to protecting wildlife up to and including the public execution of poachers, your suggestion is going to pitifully ineffective.
You ideas might work if they were part of a national, international and global program to protect biodiversity, invest in potential biomarkets, gut the trade of illegal animal products and fund local communities to preserve their natural heritage. But simply chopping up the resources will degenerate into a pissing contest between warring land owners until eventually the nastiest takes the prize and burns down the forest.
Face it people... M$ is having a bad day. They need a whole mess-o-apps to make their also-ran tablet a viable choice in the face of more developed competition. Its crunch time. If they have to compromise on license and put a smootch mark on every developers left butt cheek, butt cheeks will bear lipstick. Line up for the M$ logo a pair of red pursed lips...
Oh, and JJ, when your done schmucking around with the Star Trek franchise, don't forget to do some stupid time thing and put Vulcan back for the next generation, and turn out the light when you leave. Damn kids...