I definitely agree with this. I use one lame-ass easy to remember password for all of my low-sensitivity information (forum accounts, random sites that require you to register for no important reason) because the damage done by someone hacking into my slashdot account is much less than the damage done if I accidentally use the same "secure" password for my bank login as I use to read silly tech articles and slashdot doesn't store it properly.
You know, I'd always through Ayn Rand was full of shit when it comes to her opinions on charity, but if getting to see the fleeting impact you made is more important than making twice the impact? I mean, I get the selfish desire for it, but I'd always thought charity wasn't supposed to be about that.
I mean, it's better than no charity, definitely, and if that's what it takes to get people to give something, then I guess it works. It just seems to sort of go against the whole altruistic ideal of most charity groups.
I'm not saying that there aren't charity/volunteer jobs that you couldn't do - mostly I'm saying that they'll require more time commitment. There is some definite benefit as a doctor to spending a month or two someplace, or as an IT person where you can really set up the network and a system and teach someone how to keep it running when you're gone. There are charity jobs where you are doing something skilled that you couldn't easily be paying someone to do for cheap.
Most of these can't really be done in the 2-3 weeks of vacation most Americans have available to them every year. If you want to keep up a website for a charity group year round, awesome. If you want to take a sabbatical or use your time between jobs to live in Madagascar for half a year and teach IT to children, great. If you want to take a week's vacation to do some good, save the air fair and mail a cheque.
Look at it this way - you are an experience professional with a degree, as is your wife. Let's say you make even a starter programmer salary, or about $25/hour. There are no reasonable tech projects that can be done in a week - anything is an ongoing commitment to on the project. So you're stuck doing manual labor.
So if instead of donating money, you volunteer your time as a day laborer, you are now spending thousands of dollars to travel someplace where labor is cheap to do work with your $25/hour self? Work an extra week, send the cash, and go sit in your backyard if you want a tan. You'll do more good - and heck, now the local guys can have $5/hour in their pocket in addition to having a new church/school/hospital/whatever your charity work is building them.
Volunteering time is for people whose time is not worth much. I've heard far too many stories about foreign charity work that probably does some good, but mostly as a side effect of spending money to make middle class volunteers feel better.
This is, in fact, spending a lot of money and time developing a new way to exercise the same power over people without actually killing them. It's a symptom of your new kindler, gentler overlords.
Oh, I completely agree. I think the problem right now is in not identifying what areas do and do not need real journalists and instead paying a full time journalist for every stupid article.
What they need to do is cut out the "journalists" doing that level of stuff and push that all onto web 2.0.
My hometown newspaper had a reporter who would go to all the high school football games, take pictures, and do a writeup on the scores. Really, you're paying someone to do that? Press releases, basic information that doesn't really need fact-checked or heavily investigated, opinions... just push it all out to the web. Make some good software to just publish the press release or the scores and let parents upload their pictures of the game. Fluff pieces about this or that local business can be something the business owner pushes up himself. That frees you to pay a few journalists to do real investigative reporting.
There is still a real value in local information - see the success of craiglist. The problem with the web is that it's great for giving me opinions about worldwide issues and horrible at telling me which is the best pizza shop in town. Create a place for local blogging and local social network type news that *also* does the real investigative reporting (when there actually is something to report) and I think you could still do good journalism on today's budgets.
And even then, you must have been able to switch to offline mode/verify the install initially while you still had an internet connection.
I found this out the hard way when I lost internet for a month right after a reinstall. "Nah, I'll be fine without internet - I still have this whole orange box to play through.":P
It really depends on what kind of business they're running. Most of the best contractors, inspectors, plumbers etc I've met are still working off of an aol address.
Additionally, people here really underestimate the personal overhead and possible confusion of changing emails when you have a large number of business contacts. You will need to keep that old aol address active for years, and you will definitely end up confusing people (even if by accident, once or twice) by replying to them from the new email when they originally spoke with you on the old one, or something similar. I can definitely see why non technical people, who have likely never heard of email forwarding, would keep their fifteen year old email address around.
You are, I believe, still free to run off to the wilderness anytime you please to be "free" as you interpret it. When they find your bones they can talk about how amazing it was.
Chimpanzees also never created and Aristotle, a Shakespeare, or a Bach. Hell, they never even produced a Jesus.
And yes, surviving in the wilderness, period, is a full time job. If you want the time to do anything else you have to work harder at it. Note also that most big cats go through large portions of the year where they are nearly starving to death, and that Chimps can't survive anywhere with a real winter.
As for freedom to do as you please... well, it depends on what you please, I guess. I get to eat a nice dinner, fornicate pretty much whenever I please, and then have web conversation with fine fellows such as yourself. About the only thing I am actively restrained from doing on my own is harming someone else... but I don't think that's the kind of freedom you're talking about. What wonderful, mystical freedoms are you looking for that I can't walk out my back door and do? Please give me one that doesn't boil down to "be an asshole to someone or their property" because you'll find those are in short supply in the primitive realm as well, with harsher law enforcement.
Considering that being eaten, stabbed to death, or dying of dysentery significantly decreases one's possible future choices, I would argue that an increased lifespan allows more freedom.
Also, *most* natural habitats include a fair number of natural predators. There are a few (mostly islands) that do not. It is a natural part of the food chain. Does that necessarily mean that there are packs of woods at the gates at all times? No, but primitive man had great respect for large carnivores (you see them in much early art and mythology) for a reason.
As for peace and harmony - we're not doing so terribly for the number of people we have shoved together. Of course, we could always reduce that (we already would have, if we were living as primitives, as we wouldn't have enough food supply) but then there's a pretty small chance *we'd* be the ones still around. In any case, there hasn't been *per capita* violence in the developed world equivalent to tribal warfare since WW2. Nor have studies shown that individual violence (theft, murder, rape) were particularly low in primitive society - they are certainly present in enough early myths to know they were present.
It all depends on the dimensions of your cave. Is working 16 hours a day in the wilderness to scrape a bare minimum of food and water, fearing the bad rains and the bad winters as real threats free? Or is it better to work 8 hours in a box in order to have the rest of your day with time and resources to do as you please, and have no real concern for personal safety? Obviously the world has decided on the latter, or there would be more people wearing skins in the Canadian wilderness.
And the flora and fauna are only hospitable in southern england because your ancestors hunted everything dangerous to extinction.
Also, there is no argument that society is more peaceful with this medical knowledge - when life spans have practically doubled and crime rates have plunged in developed countries. Just because not all societies have achieved that level of success does not mean you should denigrate the accomplishments of those that have.
As someone who grew up without know anyone who knew computers, please be a little more hands on than that:)
Don't force it on them, but if the kid has interest, help guide them onto it. Otherwise if they are interested they'll still end up spending most of their time playing computer games and slowly picking up bits and pieces of programming. I ended up a decent programmer, but I was ages behind where I could have been with a good mentor. There's a reason that so many engineers are the sons and daughters of other engineers.
I highly recommend teaching basic principles in whatever random scripting language you can do something *interesting* in. There are a few different systems online that allow you to script "bugs" or "tanks" or whatever kind of character around a map. They use a simple scripting language that will at least handle loops, control statements, and the concepts of variables and methods. More importantly, they give the new learner *immediate* feedback on what they're doing. Or you could go more into the physical world, and start in Interactive-C and Lego.
The most important thing when you're first learning any skill is getting immediate "fun" reinforcement out of it. No matter what language you learn, it's going to be a lot harder to stick with it if all you can *do* with the language is print out text on a command line. Once they're doing interesting things in their wimpy scripting language, give them a harder problem that is a pain in the butt to do in that simple language, and show them how a more powerful language (and more powerful concepts, like object oriented programming) can help them do it.
IMO, people worry far too much about teaching good design or a specific language early. Get them thinking about problems like a programmer first, then start showing them how good design or a different languge will make those problems easier to solve.
So when does someone start trying this with chimps or monkeys? Are they already doing it? Seems like that could really open some doors, you had chimps who were as easy and (relatively) safe to work with as dogs.
Of course, most of these are the result of poor breeding by people just looking to make a quick buck.
Most breeds exist because they are better at a job than dingos. Most mutts who approximate those jobs do so because they still have most of the genes of their bred ancestors. But there's a reason you don't keep wolves as pets, use a terrier mix to track game, or expect a lab-mix to be a calm inside dog (well, some people do, but that's a whole separate stupidity). The unfortunate health side effects present in some bloodlines come from the same process that allows dogs to be human companions at all.
I say this as someone who has a shelter dog akita that I love who needed major knee surgery because she's so incredibly poorly bred. For a dog that's just a pet, by all means get a shelter pup whose breeding at least vaguely matches the personality you're looking for. But if I wanted a dog to help me hunt, herd, or compete in flyball or obedience (ie, a dog with a job other than "look cute" and "don't poop on the carpet") I'd definitely consider looking for a reputable breeder.
Which is something I believe old veterans have been doing to movies, songs, and sagas of war since man first stuck a pointy bit of flint on a stick and called it a spear.
Of course, if this device is pulling heat faster than the surrounding air, you will need to burn more calories than before to continue powering it.
If you're in a situation where your body is already dumping heat as fast as it can (ie, you're sweating) it's recapturing waste energy. If you're in a cooler environment, though, the heat will need to be replenished by burning calories to maintain temperature. Users would either lose weight or eat more.
Of course, all of this is a fair amount of bullshit since the effect of any such device is so small as to be completely pointless in environmental terms.
Yeah, it sounds like it'd be great as long as everyone can sign something that they realize this isn't a full examination and there's a limit to what the doctor can do ( and of course, a fair number of the answers from this should be "come in to the office").
I bet there are a ton of standard issues that can be resolved with a quick Q&A and a couple webcam pics of the effected areas. And I know that I've personally had a fair number of minor medical issues that I never get looked at because I don't think they're worth wasting the time (mine or my doctor's) of an office visit.
And of course these drones have been operating for years, and have to withstand conditions well beyond what any off the shelf parts are rated for. Doing good crypto in a small package wasn't quite as easy twenty years ago when these were in development.
You forgot one question, too: should we do anything about it? The medieval warm period lead to massive human population expansion throughout Europe and other areas. Would a longer growing season in northern farming states make up for the loss of beachfront property?
Very few of the studies (at least the ones hitting the news) seem to do a real analysis of pro versus con - which is understandably difficult. But then they all seem very sure when they're talking about anything bad that's going to happen.
Most economists I've read indicate that if carbon output is producing a negative effect that is not captured in pricing, it should be added as a flat per-ton tax. The cap and trade system is just industry and political bullshit to be able to pass out favors and manipulate markets. If producing carbon is bad, fine, make it more expensive to do, and let the market sort out how best to deal with that extra incentive.
Slashdot Mirror
I definitely agree with this. I use one lame-ass easy to remember password for all of my low-sensitivity information (forum accounts, random sites that require you to register for no important reason) because the damage done by someone hacking into my slashdot account is much less than the damage done if I accidentally use the same "secure" password for my bank login as I use to read silly tech articles and slashdot doesn't store it properly.
Especially since when you consider ease of memorization, more characters is a much easier way to increase security than adding asterisks and numbers.
ThisIsMyStupidPasswordForSlashdot is just about as hard to crack than !jd*8Wgd or H3xK@raCtre, but guess which is more likely to be remembered?
You know, I'd always through Ayn Rand was full of shit when it comes to her opinions on charity, but if getting to see the fleeting impact you made is more important than making twice the impact? I mean, I get the selfish desire for it, but I'd always thought charity wasn't supposed to be about that.
I mean, it's better than no charity, definitely, and if that's what it takes to get people to give something, then I guess it works. It just seems to sort of go against the whole altruistic ideal of most charity groups.
I'm not saying that there aren't charity/volunteer jobs that you couldn't do - mostly I'm saying that they'll require more time commitment. There is some definite benefit as a doctor to spending a month or two someplace, or as an IT person where you can really set up the network and a system and teach someone how to keep it running when you're gone. There are charity jobs where you are doing something skilled that you couldn't easily be paying someone to do for cheap.
Most of these can't really be done in the 2-3 weeks of vacation most Americans have available to them every year. If you want to keep up a website for a charity group year round, awesome. If you want to take a sabbatical or use your time between jobs to live in Madagascar for half a year and teach IT to children, great. If you want to take a week's vacation to do some good, save the air fair and mail a cheque.
Look at it this way - you are an experience professional with a degree, as is your wife. Let's say you make even a starter programmer salary, or about $25/hour. There are no reasonable tech projects that can be done in a week - anything is an ongoing commitment to on the project. So you're stuck doing manual labor.
So if instead of donating money, you volunteer your time as a day laborer, you are now spending thousands of dollars to travel someplace where labor is cheap to do work with your $25/hour self? Work an extra week, send the cash, and go sit in your backyard if you want a tan. You'll do more good - and heck, now the local guys can have $5/hour in their pocket in addition to having a new church/school/hospital/whatever your charity work is building them.
Volunteering time is for people whose time is not worth much. I've heard far too many stories about foreign charity work that probably does some good, but mostly as a side effect of spending money to make middle class volunteers feel better.
This is, in fact, spending a lot of money and time developing a new way to exercise the same power over people without actually killing them. It's a symptom of your new kindler, gentler overlords.
Oh, I completely agree. I think the problem right now is in not identifying what areas do and do not need real journalists and instead paying a full time journalist for every stupid article.
What they need to do is cut out the "journalists" doing that level of stuff and push that all onto web 2.0.
My hometown newspaper had a reporter who would go to all the high school football games, take pictures, and do a writeup on the scores. Really, you're paying someone to do that? Press releases, basic information that doesn't really need fact-checked or heavily investigated, opinions... just push it all out to the web. Make some good software to just publish the press release or the scores and let parents upload their pictures of the game. Fluff pieces about this or that local business can be something the business owner pushes up himself. That frees you to pay a few journalists to do real investigative reporting.
There is still a real value in local information - see the success of craiglist. The problem with the web is that it's great for giving me opinions about worldwide issues and horrible at telling me which is the best pizza shop in town. Create a place for local blogging and local social network type news that *also* does the real investigative reporting (when there actually is something to report) and I think you could still do good journalism on today's budgets.
And even then, you must have been able to switch to offline mode/verify the install initially while you still had an internet connection.
I found this out the hard way when I lost internet for a month right after a reinstall. "Nah, I'll be fine without internet - I still have this whole orange box to play through." :P
It really depends on what kind of business they're running. Most of the best contractors, inspectors, plumbers etc I've met are still working off of an aol address.
Additionally, people here really underestimate the personal overhead and possible confusion of changing emails when you have a large number of business contacts. You will need to keep that old aol address active for years, and you will definitely end up confusing people (even if by accident, once or twice) by replying to them from the new email when they originally spoke with you on the old one, or something similar. I can definitely see why non technical people, who have likely never heard of email forwarding, would keep their fifteen year old email address around.
You are, I believe, still free to run off to the wilderness anytime you please to be "free" as you interpret it. When they find your bones they can talk about how amazing it was.
Chimpanzees also never created and Aristotle, a Shakespeare, or a Bach. Hell, they never even produced a Jesus.
And yes, surviving in the wilderness, period, is a full time job. If you want the time to do anything else you have to work harder at it. Note also that most big cats go through large portions of the year where they are nearly starving to death, and that Chimps can't survive anywhere with a real winter.
As for freedom to do as you please... well, it depends on what you please, I guess. I get to eat a nice dinner, fornicate pretty much whenever I please, and then have web conversation with fine fellows such as yourself. About the only thing I am actively restrained from doing on my own is harming someone else... but I don't think that's the kind of freedom you're talking about. What wonderful, mystical freedoms are you looking for that I can't walk out my back door and do? Please give me one that doesn't boil down to "be an asshole to someone or their property" because you'll find those are in short supply in the primitive realm as well, with harsher law enforcement.
Considering that being eaten, stabbed to death, or dying of dysentery significantly decreases one's possible future choices, I would argue that an increased lifespan allows more freedom.
Also, *most* natural habitats include a fair number of natural predators. There are a few (mostly islands) that do not. It is a natural part of the food chain. Does that necessarily mean that there are packs of woods at the gates at all times? No, but primitive man had great respect for large carnivores (you see them in much early art and mythology) for a reason.
As for peace and harmony - we're not doing so terribly for the number of people we have shoved together. Of course, we could always reduce that (we already would have, if we were living as primitives, as we wouldn't have enough food supply) but then there's a pretty small chance *we'd* be the ones still around. In any case, there hasn't been *per capita* violence in the developed world equivalent to tribal warfare since WW2. Nor have studies shown that individual violence (theft, murder, rape) were particularly low in primitive society - they are certainly present in enough early myths to know they were present.
It all depends on the dimensions of your cave. Is working 16 hours a day in the wilderness to scrape a bare minimum of food and water, fearing the bad rains and the bad winters as real threats free? Or is it better to work 8 hours in a box in order to have the rest of your day with time and resources to do as you please, and have no real concern for personal safety? Obviously the world has decided on the latter, or there would be more people wearing skins in the Canadian wilderness.
And the flora and fauna are only hospitable in southern england because your ancestors hunted everything dangerous to extinction.
Also, there is no argument that society is more peaceful with this medical knowledge - when life spans have practically doubled and crime rates have plunged in developed countries. Just because not all societies have achieved that level of success does not mean you should denigrate the accomplishments of those that have.
As someone who grew up without know anyone who knew computers, please be a little more hands on than that :)
Don't force it on them, but if the kid has interest, help guide them onto it. Otherwise if they are interested they'll still end up spending most of their time playing computer games and slowly picking up bits and pieces of programming. I ended up a decent programmer, but I was ages behind where I could have been with a good mentor. There's a reason that so many engineers are the sons and daughters of other engineers.
I highly recommend teaching basic principles in whatever random scripting language you can do something *interesting* in. There are a few different systems online that allow you to script "bugs" or "tanks" or whatever kind of character around a map. They use a simple scripting language that will at least handle loops, control statements, and the concepts of variables and methods. More importantly, they give the new learner *immediate* feedback on what they're doing. Or you could go more into the physical world, and start in Interactive-C and Lego.
The most important thing when you're first learning any skill is getting immediate "fun" reinforcement out of it. No matter what language you learn, it's going to be a lot harder to stick with it if all you can *do* with the language is print out text on a command line. Once they're doing interesting things in their wimpy scripting language, give them a harder problem that is a pain in the butt to do in that simple language, and show them how a more powerful language (and more powerful concepts, like object oriented programming) can help them do it.
IMO, people worry far too much about teaching good design or a specific language early. Get them thinking about problems like a programmer first, then start showing them how good design or a different languge will make those problems easier to solve.
So when does someone start trying this with chimps or monkeys? Are they already doing it? Seems like that could really open some doors, you had chimps who were as easy and (relatively) safe to work with as dogs.
Of course, most of these are the result of poor breeding by people just looking to make a quick buck.
Most breeds exist because they are better at a job than dingos. Most mutts who approximate those jobs do so because they still have most of the genes of their bred ancestors. But there's a reason you don't keep wolves as pets, use a terrier mix to track game, or expect a lab-mix to be a calm inside dog (well, some people do, but that's a whole separate stupidity). The unfortunate health side effects present in some bloodlines come from the same process that allows dogs to be human companions at all.
I say this as someone who has a shelter dog akita that I love who needed major knee surgery because she's so incredibly poorly bred. For a dog that's just a pet, by all means get a shelter pup whose breeding at least vaguely matches the personality you're looking for. But if I wanted a dog to help me hunt, herd, or compete in flyball or obedience (ie, a dog with a job other than "look cute" and "don't poop on the carpet") I'd definitely consider looking for a reputable breeder.
Which is something I believe old veterans have been doing to movies, songs, and sagas of war since man first stuck a pointy bit of flint on a stick and called it a spear.
You can, however, cause it to derail and/or explode as it passes through a highly populated part of town. There's a lot of surface rail in the US.
Regardless, why bother with a plane? Why not just drive a truck full of fertilizer explosives into a football stadium?
Of course, if this device is pulling heat faster than the surrounding air, you will need to burn more calories than before to continue powering it.
If you're in a situation where your body is already dumping heat as fast as it can (ie, you're sweating) it's recapturing waste energy. If you're in a cooler environment, though, the heat will need to be replenished by burning calories to maintain temperature. Users would either lose weight or eat more.
Of course, all of this is a fair amount of bullshit since the effect of any such device is so small as to be completely pointless in environmental terms.
Yeah, it sounds like it'd be great as long as everyone can sign something that they realize this isn't a full examination and there's a limit to what the doctor can do ( and of course, a fair number of the answers from this should be "come in to the office").
I bet there are a ton of standard issues that can be resolved with a quick Q&A and a couple webcam pics of the effected areas. And I know that I've personally had a fair number of minor medical issues that I never get looked at because I don't think they're worth wasting the time (mine or my doctor's) of an office visit.
And of course these drones have been operating for years, and have to withstand conditions well beyond what any off the shelf parts are rated for. Doing good crypto in a small package wasn't quite as easy twenty years ago when these were in development.
You forgot one question, too: should we do anything about it? The medieval warm period lead to massive human population expansion throughout Europe and other areas. Would a longer growing season in northern farming states make up for the loss of beachfront property?
Very few of the studies (at least the ones hitting the news) seem to do a real analysis of pro versus con - which is understandably difficult. But then they all seem very sure when they're talking about anything bad that's going to happen.
Most economists I've read indicate that if carbon output is producing a negative effect that is not captured in pricing, it should be added as a flat per-ton tax. The cap and trade system is just industry and political bullshit to be able to pass out favors and manipulate markets. If producing carbon is bad, fine, make it more expensive to do, and let the market sort out how best to deal with that extra incentive.
I'd say the majority of corporate cases brought are about upholding the law. It's the ones that get dropped that you have to worry about :)