What I blame is the Military Industrial Complex, the politicians that pander to it, the ex-pentagon/military officers that retire to cushy jobs lobbying for the Industrial Giants that have raped and pillaged our government (and the tax payer in particular), and the self serving representatives who have played at war for no other reason than to justify pumping the vast majority of America's resources into this immoral, objectionable, enterprise.
Soldiers are men and women (most from poor economic situations) who have chosen for the most part to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of defending our nation in war, and healing our nation in times of disaster. For these people I have nothing but the greatest of respect. The sad fact is that in the most recent conflicts we've fought, the largest single cause of death or injury is not from the enemy, but all the problems and mishaps that come from moving large numbers of young people around with weapons, and having them live in constant state of near terror. Our leaders have done a piss poor job of protecting and honoring our soldiers. While publicly honoring our fighting men and women, the last administration cut funding for critical medical care to returning soldiers, and failed to make absolutely certain that those soldiers were being properly taken care of. Every expert on the subject has proclaimed the need for providing our soldiers with psychiatric counseling and care to alleviate PTSD and ease them back into civilian life. To this day, such service is being virtually ignored. The one thing in our military most neglected by our representatives, has consistently been our soldiers. Its an insult to their sacrifice.
Our country spends more on it's weapons of mass destruction, than the next top 27 military countries on the planet combines. Simply said, it's killing us. The sane answer would be to create a small highly mobile team of experts with insanely advanced cutting edge military technology, so at the first hint of trouble, they could make powerful tactical strikes. We live in a time when the greatest threat to America, is not hostile nations, but rogue international organizations (usually religious or politically based.) Our current military is almost useless in the face of that kind of enemy. We could keep a relatively small arsenal of ICBMs, for larger global threats. Dismantle the rest, reduce our army/navy/marines/air force to 10% of it's current size, and then outfit that 10% with space age technology. We build a robotic, fly by wire fighting force, so the number of soldiers in the field are reduced by another 90%. Finally we make certain we have a huge National Guard (in particular, we could cycle huge numbers of non-violent men and women out of prisons) to ensure our safety in case of a catastrophic event either natural or man-made.
In doing this, we still have the strongest militarily on the planet, but it costs us 80% less, its orders of magnitude more mobile, easier to scale and apply to specific situations, and for Americans, less likely to be the source of needless casualties on the field (ours or theirs.)
Of course it would demand that we change our focus from making a buck, to doing the right thing, serving our nation, promoting the common defense, and ensuring domestic tranquility. It saddens me to see that our greed centric society has made suffering, moral degradation, and religious fanaticism the gross national product.
I didn't mention anything about standard deviations. I said IQs over 120, which represent an arbitrary measure of intelligence and as the average continues to drop, the population of those over 120 will simply move into higher and higher increments of deviation from the mean average.
The fact that the "errors" are consistent, suggest this is not an error at all. There was a famous experiment utilizing genetic algorithms to build an optimal circuit with the least possible number of components. It was a simple circuit, and the optimal circuit was well understood. It was an attempt to prove that the genetic methodology would quickly yield this optimal circuit. To everyone's surprise, the process yielded a circuit with fewer parts than the theoretically optimal circuit. What the designers of the experiment hadn't taken into consideration was that the genetic algorithm didn't care about theory, only outcome. It had discovered a heretofore unknown capacitive reactance on the closely spaces lines of the experimental circuit board, and found a way to use that capacitance to reduce the number of parts in it's design. Given the nature of the system, evolution found a clever way to engineer around the believed limitations of the experiment, and utilize any and all real world resources to create a solution transcending of the point of view of the experimenters.
Likewise, there's something interesting going on here with the RNA, well outside of the obvious perspective of the researchers. Bring in biochemists, theoretical physicists, and maybe a couple applied organic chemical engineers. Let them figure out what's happening at the quantum and molecular level to have this outcome be the result. Start doing simulations. Look at topologies and protein folding.
Look at CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease) or BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) the causative agent is a prion. A vital protein that in its normal state is essential to neurological function, which can fold in more that one way, and folded the wrong way destroys brain tissue and ultimately causes dementia and death. I'll bet dollars to donuts, that there is some funny quantum state, or a protein folding problem, or some simple nonbiological chemical process whose probable result is a code misspelling in protein formation. Its an interesting problem, but not at all surprising. We are complex systems, and trying to force the world processes that make us possible into a box is at once myopic and foolish.
You underestimate the power of retards... exPresident Bush, future President Pallin, why the entire Tea Party hasn't got 5 IQ points to share betwixt'em and look at what they just did to the national legislature (lol.) That and some of the folks that ran for election this year are at least a burger shy of a Happy Meal. By definition, half the populace must fall below the median IQ, and I'm thinking on a purely numerical basis, the folks with IQs over 120 are a fast shrinking part of the population (have you seen Idiocracy?) The wise and brilliant amongst us, need to come up with an Internet Service Provider that is specifically design for those belonging to the left side of the IQ curve, and it should appeal to herd mentality and the deep and special pleasure that comes from chewing cud. It should celebrate and cater to folks whose family trees look like bamboo. It should reach deep into those mystical, magical thinking bible belters and hasten their second coming!!! We need to build the MoroNet!
Nope... it'll be named "yaHOL", and sound much like the yelling Governor Schwarzenegger makes the day after eating Habanero Peppers...
Or perhaps its the sound of the black HOL formed when two infinitely dense, dying corporate stars accrete and collapse under the weight of their own ineptitude. This may well be the perfect opportunity to measure irony waves or maybe even determine the speed of stupid in a corporate vacuum.
I'm sorry but this is silly. If you don't know 99% of something, you have no way of even determining if your ignorance is 90% or 99.999999999999999999999%. We have no direct access to quantum foam, or strings, or any way to evaluate the physics down around the Plank Length. There may be a billion billion things we haven't even got a clue about yet, because we have no way of even perceiving or measuring the profoundly small, or anything outside the limits of our light sphere.
Around the end of the 19th century, scientist made the bold claim that we were very close to knowing all that was knowable. Then we discovered radiation and the weak and strong nuclear forces upset the apple cart. That was quickly followed by relativity, quantum mechanics, the expanding universe, and now dark matter and energy. We have no clue what we don't know, we simply know that we are accelerating our ability to wrest knowledge from the universe as we devise better theories, better tools for testing our theories, and better computers for sifting through the growing mountains of data we generate in searching for ultimate truth.
A person attacks you with a knife... you deflect the blow and receive an injury to your right leg. You happen to be a martial artist, and before you even formulate what next to do, you go into auto-pilot and stitch your assailant with about a dozen well placed punches. He is now seriously injured and falls down unconscious. You have just assaulted someone in self defense, in fact someone who attacked you with a deadly weapon. In addition, you as a registered martial artist, are now required to stick around for the police to determine if you exceeded reasonable force in your self defense. Of course like most folks in this situation, you get the flock out of dodge and hope nobody caught you on a cell phone.
Actually, what we need is a tablet that's a wee bit larger, has full current PC power (or greater) has a touch screen with full multi-touch and gestural support (precluding the need for a mouse), a detachable keyboard, and a full set of interfaces. Then we only need one device.
Are you kidding? Have you seen the load of books kids are dragging to school these days? There is real concern that children are getting injured by carrying more book weight than is physically appropriate for them. Having the ability to carry an entire library in a tablet is a huge advance. Add to that, multimedia educational materials, interactive games and puzzles, team education and tools designed to teach kids how to collaborate in their problem solving... Photography, Videography, Computer Art, Music Composition, imagine the possibilities. There is so much these devices can support that you couldn't do any other way.
Anyone who's read Stevenson's "Diamond Age", see's that we are quick approaching a time when an inexpensive tablet can help a young person become virtually anything they can dream of. We simply need to create interactive tools that rise to the challenge of inspiring and enlightening our progeny.
This whole conversation is so naive. Our government is currently designed to keep those in power, in ever greater power, and those in wealth, in ever greater wealth. It began when when a citizen was first defined as a white male landowner, and it became certain when wealthy captains of industry forced the passing of laws giving the Corporation rights above and beyond those of a citizen without their limitations (if you disagree, you may want to look at the lifespan of corporations, their ability to influence and control with virtually unlimited wealth, issues regarding the personal liability of officers and the corporate veil.) It was enforced when our government adopted the institution of the Prussian Educational System, design not to inform and enlighten an autonomous free citizenry, but to reduce them to sufficiently skilled labor while ensuring they would be subservient, controllable and obedient. In short sheep, a populace that would do precisely as it was told by it's government.
Since then, it's been a steady slide toward Plutocracy. The government being ever more co-opted by those forces already in power. As our government ever growing, gave itself ever greater powers including:
Taxing the income of citizens
Making substances of common consumption legal or illegal
Forcing children into public schools under threat of law to both students and parents
Obliterating the existence of entire cultures including the Native American
Creating Clandestine Federal Investigative Organization answerable to none (read about the histories of the FBI, CIA, and NSA and domestic espionage during the Korean and Viet Nam War
The steady erosion of civil liberties and Human Rights, Constitutional Rights and Protections under the law since 1980
The expansion of the Executive Branch into a complete autonomous side government
The use of war and economic catastrophe to seize greater and greater control while further abridging the rights of citizens... planned economic failure... see 1928 Germany
The placing of our entire economic system in the hands of banks
The co-opting of the Supreme Court for the passing of and interpreting laws in such a way as to expedite this process... see the stuffing all courts during the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush(s) administrations
The waging of wars for political or economic purposes
The "Wallstreet-ification of the Political Process" as a means to manipulate the masses
The giving of full first amendment rights to coporations by a loaded Supreme Court, ensuring that our government would not only be completely controled by corporations, but would now be heavily influenced by money coming from India, Japan, China, and a multitude of other places which have absolutely no interest in our having a democracy whatsoever.
In short, what little Republic we have left is under brutal assault by people who have no interest save sucking every last drop of goodness out of the American People. They've made it their lifes mission, and they have done a more than spendid job of wiring us up to fall on our own ignorance, superstition and magical thinking. It would take an unprecendet act, a large scale uprising, to change the predictable outcome. I'm not certain the American people have either the belly or the brains to take liberty back from the snakes and pigs that plague us. However, there are among us leaders and visionaries, and if they ever get a popular following, god help the wealthy and powerful. It saddens me to think that justice demands revolution, but it sadden me even more that those who wallow in their entitlement, seem perfectly complacent as this nation and the world at large bear the brunt of what arguably amounts to rape.
Face it... 3D is for porn consumption, and modern cartoons. The average porn user is satisfied with 3 minutes of use with glasses, and the so the real impacted population of 3D technologies is going to be children, and who cares what they think?
Go ahead, mock Slashdot!!! Do you have any idea just how much it costs to bring a story from 09/19/2010 through a wormhole to 09/07/2010??? You should be getting down on your knees and thanking your robotic overlords that Slashdot spares no expense (not even space and time) to get you the latest news!
by offering 10 pounds of steaming bat guano... I figure crap for crap is a fair trade, it's an excellent fertilizer, and after all that time with so many lawyers Darl should find guano smells damn near like perfume.
Again, there are a lot of people in the world. Women come in every shape size and appearance. Some transgendered women look rather masculine, the impact of testosterone can be truly difficult to hide. Those are the transgendered women you can clock. You have no idea about the ones you can't because you wouldn't notice the ones you can't. They would never show up on your radar.
As for voice. That's a much harder thing to hide, however, there are speech therapists and even surgical solutions. As I said above, the one's you clock are the one's who have been scarred by testosterone, and don't have the funds or resources to fix the mess.
Those with the resources, you aren't going to notice, because their appearance and sound won't be a clue to anything being out of the ordinary.
Slashdot Mirror
What I blame is the Military Industrial Complex, the politicians that pander to it, the ex-pentagon/military officers that retire to cushy jobs lobbying for the Industrial Giants that have raped and pillaged our government (and the tax payer in particular), and the self serving representatives who have played at war for no other reason than to justify pumping the vast majority of America's resources into this immoral, objectionable, enterprise.
Soldiers are men and women (most from poor economic situations) who have chosen for the most part to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of defending our nation in war, and healing our nation in times of disaster. For these people I have nothing but the greatest of respect. The sad fact is that in the most recent conflicts we've fought, the largest single cause of death or injury is not from the enemy, but all the problems and mishaps that come from moving large numbers of young people around with weapons, and having them live in constant state of near terror. Our leaders have done a piss poor job of protecting and honoring our soldiers. While publicly honoring our fighting men and women, the last administration cut funding for critical medical care to returning soldiers, and failed to make absolutely certain that those soldiers were being properly taken care of. Every expert on the subject has proclaimed the need for providing our soldiers with psychiatric counseling and care to alleviate PTSD and ease them back into civilian life. To this day, such service is being virtually ignored. The one thing in our military most neglected by our representatives, has consistently been our soldiers. Its an insult to their sacrifice.
Our country spends more on it's weapons of mass destruction, than the next top 27 military countries on the planet combines. Simply said, it's killing us. The sane answer would be to create a small highly mobile team of experts with insanely advanced cutting edge military technology, so at the first hint of trouble, they could make powerful tactical strikes. We live in a time when the greatest threat to America, is not hostile nations, but rogue international organizations (usually religious or politically based.) Our current military is almost useless in the face of that kind of enemy. We could keep a relatively small arsenal of ICBMs, for larger global threats. Dismantle the rest, reduce our army/navy/marines/air force to 10% of it's current size, and then outfit that 10% with space age technology. We build a robotic, fly by wire fighting force, so the number of soldiers in the field are reduced by another 90%. Finally we make certain we have a huge National Guard (in particular, we could cycle huge numbers of non-violent men and women out of prisons) to ensure our safety in case of a catastrophic event either natural or man-made.
In doing this, we still have the strongest militarily on the planet, but it costs us 80% less, its orders of magnitude more mobile, easier to scale and apply to specific situations, and for Americans, less likely to be the source of needless casualties on the field (ours or theirs.)
Of course it would demand that we change our focus from making a buck, to doing the right thing, serving our nation, promoting the common defense, and ensuring domestic tranquility. It saddens me to see that our greed centric society has made suffering, moral degradation, and religious fanaticism the gross national product.
I'm thinking it's either Meg Whitman or Carly Fiorina firing their campaign managers... literally!!!
I didn't mention anything about standard deviations. I said IQs over 120, which represent an arbitrary measure of intelligence and as the average continues to drop, the population of those over 120 will simply move into higher and higher increments of deviation from the mean average.
The fact that the "errors" are consistent, suggest this is not an error at all. There was a famous experiment utilizing genetic algorithms to build an optimal circuit with the least possible number of components. It was a simple circuit, and the optimal circuit was well understood. It was an attempt to prove that the genetic methodology would quickly yield this optimal circuit. To everyone's surprise, the process yielded a circuit with fewer parts than the theoretically optimal circuit. What the designers of the experiment hadn't taken into consideration was that the genetic algorithm didn't care about theory, only outcome. It had discovered a heretofore unknown capacitive reactance on the closely spaces lines of the experimental circuit board, and found a way to use that capacitance to reduce the number of parts in it's design. Given the nature of the system, evolution found a clever way to engineer around the believed limitations of the experiment, and utilize any and all real world resources to create a solution transcending of the point of view of the experimenters.
Likewise, there's something interesting going on here with the RNA, well outside of the obvious perspective of the researchers. Bring in biochemists, theoretical physicists, and maybe a couple applied organic chemical engineers. Let them figure out what's happening at the quantum and molecular level to have this outcome be the result. Start doing simulations. Look at topologies and protein folding.
Look at CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease) or BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) the causative agent is a prion. A vital protein that in its normal state is essential to neurological function, which can fold in more that one way, and folded the wrong way destroys brain tissue and ultimately causes dementia and death. I'll bet dollars to donuts, that there is some funny quantum state, or a protein folding problem, or some simple nonbiological chemical process whose probable result is a code misspelling in protein formation. Its an interesting problem, but not at all surprising. We are complex systems, and trying to force the world processes that make us possible into a box is at once myopic and foolish.
You underestimate the power of retards... exPresident Bush, future President Pallin, why the entire Tea Party hasn't got 5 IQ points to share betwixt'em and look at what they just did to the national legislature (lol.) That and some of the folks that ran for election this year are at least a burger shy of a Happy Meal. By definition, half the populace must fall below the median IQ, and I'm thinking on a purely numerical basis, the folks with IQs over 120 are a fast shrinking part of the population (have you seen Idiocracy?) The wise and brilliant amongst us, need to come up with an Internet Service Provider that is specifically design for those belonging to the left side of the IQ curve, and it should appeal to herd mentality and the deep and special pleasure that comes from chewing cud. It should celebrate and cater to folks whose family trees look like bamboo. It should reach deep into those mystical, magical thinking bible belters and hasten their second coming!!! We need to build the MoroNet!
Nope... it'll be named "yaHOL", and sound much like the yelling Governor Schwarzenegger makes the day after eating Habanero Peppers...
Or perhaps its the sound of the black HOL formed when two infinitely dense, dying corporate stars accrete and collapse under the weight of their own ineptitude. This may well be the perfect opportunity to measure irony waves or maybe even determine the speed of stupid in a corporate vacuum.
Why a Machintosh you silly git...
I'm sorry but this is silly. If you don't know 99% of something, you have no way of even determining if your ignorance is 90% or 99.999999999999999999999%. We have no direct access to quantum foam, or strings, or any way to evaluate the physics down around the Plank Length. There may be a billion billion things we haven't even got a clue about yet, because we have no way of even perceiving or measuring the profoundly small, or anything outside the limits of our light sphere.
Around the end of the 19th century, scientist made the bold claim that we were very close to knowing all that was knowable. Then we discovered radiation and the weak and strong nuclear forces upset the apple cart. That was quickly followed by relativity, quantum mechanics, the expanding universe, and now dark matter and energy. We have no clue what we don't know, we simply know that we are accelerating our ability to wrest knowledge from the universe as we devise better theories, better tools for testing our theories, and better computers for sifting through the growing mountains of data we generate in searching for ultimate truth.
A person attacks you with a knife... you deflect the blow and receive an injury to your right leg. You happen to be a martial artist, and before you even formulate what next to do, you go into auto-pilot and stitch your assailant with about a dozen well placed punches. He is now seriously injured and falls down unconscious. You have just assaulted someone in self defense, in fact someone who attacked you with a deadly weapon. In addition, you as a registered martial artist, are now required to stick around for the police to determine if you exceeded reasonable force in your self defense. Of course like most folks in this situation, you get the flock out of dodge and hope nobody caught you on a cell phone.
It was made of silk and had arachnids in it... you need to get your memory checked!
Actually, what we need is a tablet that's a wee bit larger, has full current PC power (or greater) has a touch screen with full multi-touch and gestural support (precluding the need for a mouse), a detachable keyboard, and a full set of interfaces. Then we only need one device.
Are you kidding? Have you seen the load of books kids are dragging to school these days? There is real concern that children are getting injured by carrying more book weight than is physically appropriate for them. Having the ability to carry an entire library in a tablet is a huge advance. Add to that, multimedia educational materials, interactive games and puzzles, team education and tools designed to teach kids how to collaborate in their problem solving... Photography, Videography, Computer Art, Music Composition, imagine the possibilities. There is so much these devices can support that you couldn't do any other way.
Anyone who's read Stevenson's "Diamond Age", see's that we are quick approaching a time when an inexpensive tablet can help a young person become virtually anything they can dream of. We simply need to create interactive tools that rise to the challenge of inspiring and enlightening our progeny.
This whole conversation is so naive. Our government is currently designed to keep those in power, in ever greater power, and those in wealth, in ever greater wealth. It began when when a citizen was first defined as a white male landowner, and it became certain when wealthy captains of industry forced the passing of laws giving the Corporation rights above and beyond those of a citizen without their limitations (if you disagree, you may want to look at the lifespan of corporations, their ability to influence and control with virtually unlimited wealth, issues regarding the personal liability of officers and the corporate veil.) It was enforced when our government adopted the institution of the Prussian Educational System, design not to inform and enlighten an autonomous free citizenry, but to reduce them to sufficiently skilled labor while ensuring they would be subservient, controllable and obedient. In short sheep, a populace that would do precisely as it was told by it's government.
Since then, it's been a steady slide toward Plutocracy. The government being ever more co-opted by those forces already in power. As our government ever growing, gave itself ever greater powers including:
In short, what little Republic we have left is under brutal assault by people who have no interest save sucking every last drop of goodness out of the American People. They've made it their lifes mission, and they have done a more than spendid job of wiring us up to fall on our own ignorance, superstition and magical thinking. It would take an unprecendet act, a large scale uprising, to change the predictable outcome. I'm not certain the American people have either the belly or the brains to take liberty back from the snakes and pigs that plague us. However, there are among us leaders and visionaries, and if they ever get a popular following, god help the wealthy and powerful. It saddens me to think that justice demands revolution, but it sadden me even more that those who wallow in their entitlement, seem perfectly complacent as this nation and the world at large bear the brunt of what arguably amounts to rape.
Face it... 3D is for porn consumption, and modern cartoons. The average porn user is satisfied with 3 minutes of use with glasses, and the so the real impacted population of 3D technologies is going to be children, and who cares what they think?
That's wed cabbage, you wasciwy wabbit!!!
Clearly you haven't tried teaching my Aunt Meg how to use email... I'll take the free will any day ;-)
I dunno... which hand do I cross with and which hand do "Heil" with... I guess maybe he is infallible!
...And gravity will kill you, unless you stop falling first...
Exactly, there was a big bang, and the universe was caused by God having a smoke after...
And for your further edutainment...
Only when there's an absolute minimum of neural in the net!
"There is almost certainly and upper limit to human intelligence, sadly it appears, stupidity has no such limit."
Or the "Happy Fun Ball..."
Happy Fun Ball (accept no substitutes.)
E-Toilet paper and E-Toilets... you insensitive clod, now mind your own business!!!
Go ahead, mock Slashdot!!! Do you have any idea just how much it costs to bring a story from 09/19/2010 through a wormhole to 09/07/2010??? You should be getting down on your knees and thanking your robotic overlords that Slashdot spares no expense (not even space and time) to get you the latest news!
But can you toss an alien queen out an airlock with it??? Inquiring minds want to know!
by offering 10 pounds of steaming bat guano... I figure crap for crap is a fair trade, it's an excellent fertilizer, and after all that time with so many lawyers Darl should find guano smells damn near like perfume.
Again, there are a lot of people in the world. Women come in every shape size and appearance. Some transgendered women look rather masculine, the impact of testosterone can be truly difficult to hide. Those are the transgendered women you can clock. You have no idea about the ones you can't because you wouldn't notice the ones you can't. They would never show up on your radar.
As for voice. That's a much harder thing to hide, however, there are speech therapists and even surgical solutions. As I said above, the one's you clock are the one's who have been scarred by testosterone, and don't have the funds or resources to fix the mess.
Those with the resources, you aren't going to notice, because their appearance and sound won't be a clue to anything being out of the ordinary.