It's a crappy example. Had Kodos known that there was a supply ship about to land, he would never have killed those people. Roddenberry was pointing out that the difference between being remembered as evil or as good can often come down to a roll of the dice.
I find that offensive! I know math all the way up through differential equations, and I understand it fully. I love having the additional mental tools to work with, with calculus and differential equations, it is a whole new worlds. I find it offensive because although I know how to wear shoes, I absolutely never do, and there is nothing wrong with that.
So what part of my comment do you find offensive? The Heinlein quote, or what I said?
You must be a terrible physicist. As an electrical engineer, I need literary analysis every time I read a technical paper, and I needed composition skills last time I submitted one for publication.
I tend to agree. Having been a software guy for about thirty years, I can tell you this: I've known a lot of engineers (in all fields) who got into it because they were good with technology but lacking in verbal skills, who chose their career believing they were excused from any need to communicate with anyone or anything. That would usually last until they got their first real job, and got told to write a hundred page project proposal all by themselves.
That would often result in a few remedial English classes. Mathematics, spoken and written language... all are just tools. The majority of human beings will never have a need, as long as they live, for higher mathematics... but there are few people who cannot benefit from the ability to communicate.
Understanding it and applying it aren't the same thing. I know lots of people who are much much much better at maths than I am and still can't get their head around the concept of coincidence.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. -- Robert A. Heinlein
I once read that quote to my father, who studied nuclear physics at the University of Rome, and had been an electronics engineer for much of his career, and I remember him saying, "Well, I'm sure he believes that." Personally, speaking as a software engineer, I do wish I had studied more higher math in college, because it would help me do more. More and better mental tools rarely hurt. But, to be honest, that really hasn't affected my earning power in the slightest.
The biggest reason why there are so few jobs for youths today is wealth. Yes, I'm serious. Wealth has made employer time a very pricey resource and something businesses have gone to great lengths to replace with machinery or avoid completely. The primary industries (farming, lumbering, fishing etc.) are now full of machinery instead. Same with all the production industry, there's hardly people moving things around or packing crates, it's conveyor belts and machinery. The service industry isn't quite as badly affected, but they too try to automate.
Those are the usual arguments against automation, the same ones made by the Luddites so many years ago. The reality is that a machine is a machine, and it's the choices we make that determine how beneficial they are. We, as a society, have been making some very bad decisions in recent decades, and yes, the result of those has been a transfer of wealth from the middle class to government and foreign corporations that is unprecedented in U.S. history, but it doesn't have to be this way, nor do we have to throw away advanced technology and the benefits it does offer.
Like most matters involving human beings and whatever passes for civilization at any given point in time, it's a matter of finding the right balance. America actually did a pretty good job of that, for a long time, but like every economic and/or military empire since we first starting building those things, we're collapsing from within, from our own inability to guide our own future to the betterment of all. Do I have all the answers? No. But there has to be one, or we're thoroughly screwed.
Still, some would argue that if a machine can do it, a person is better off doing something else. Others would say that that's ridiculous, 99.99% of humanity isn't capable of doing anything more complex than running a punch press, so we need to limit the spread of technology, hold ourselves back, in order to accommodate the relatively mindless majority.
The answer is somewhere in the middle, as it often is.
And again the rest of the world finds it appalling you only have two parties to choose from.
Most of the rest of the world doesn't even have political parties, or if they do they're strictly for show, so that's a ridiculous comment on your part. Furthermore, what we're talking about here is institutionalized corruption, and if you're claiming that other countries don't have at least as much of that as we do (regardless of the quality or quantity of political parties), then you're full of little red ants.
This consisted of using the old school stain your hand for a week ink for ALL fingers. They would then hold up the card, look at it intently and say something about the US requiring THEIR citizen to do this, then tear up the paper and throw it away.
That would be so awesome if true. It just sounds too good to be.
I see. So America should not be able to penalize the citizens of other countries for the things their governments do, but other countries should be allowed to penalize our citizens for the things our government does.
Yep. Hypocrisy is still very much alive on Slashdot.
Most of us don't have to simplify the world to two choices, to live in it.
Most American's can only rely on their two choices, anymore and they plug there ears and go "lalalalalala", for fear that there brains may explode if they try to understand anything complex.
"Most Americans".
Do you know "Most Americans", or are you just making a generalization on a Biblical scale because it makes you feel better? We're a nation of some three hundred million people. I'm gathering that you've made no effort to understand that (or perhaps you have, and your brain has already exploded.)
Unfortunately with climate change and some other areas there is a bias in selecting who enters the field in favor of those naturally inclined to agree with dire conclusions, particularly when dire conclusions can dramatically increase funding of the field.
Science is just as politicized and generally corrupt as most human endeavors eventually become. That doesn't mean that much good cannot come of it, it just means that you have to watch out for human nature. Much of the scientific method is about trying to eliminate the tendency to fabricate, rationalize and dissemble that humans bring to everything they do, but the method is only as perfect as the individual scientists who are applying it.
One of my best friends left the field of climatology because he was sick of the politics, and also the institutionalized inertia that limits the advancement of science as much, if not more, as limits on funding do.
Then you come along with some volcano analogy, despite the fact the entire study is based on the *high altitude* generation of soot particles and I haven't seen any flying volcanos recently.
The GP is absolutely correct though. The article was talking about stratospheric effects. As it happens, vulcanism is perfectly capable of ejecting all sorts of substances that can have profound effects on weather into the stratosphere. How do you think eruptions like Krakatoa and Pinatubo had globe-spanning effects?
Nothing. But they may be able to get whatever the parents have. And, of course, the endless satisfaction many adults receive from destroying the lives of small children.
Even if these kids did do this maliciously, they're kids. They aren't expected to have an adult's sense of, well, anything, including empathy and right or wrong. Not at age 4, for fuck's sake.
What I find interesting is that they're claiming that injecting soot into the stratosphere would cause global warming (at least according to the summary, didn't RTFA.) When blasts of particulate matter from other sources have reached those heights (for example, when Krakatoa went postal) it resulted in global cooling instead. I'm assuming there's a different mechanism involved.
What I think is fascinating is that you couldn't combine the above and this into one post. It's almost as though you wanted twice the karma...
A. I don't need the karma and...
B. the second thought occurred to me after I clicked Submit.
If you have nothing to contribute to this discussion (because, frankly, you've contributed nothing so far) just lurk, don't post.
What I find interesting is that they're claiming that injecting soot into the stratosphere would cause global warming (at least according to the summary, didn't RTFA.) When blasts of particulate matter from other sources have reached those heights (for example, when Krakatoa went postal) it resulted in global cooling instead. I'm assuming there's a different mechanism involved.
Assuming they can get a job in the first place. When I was that age there were paper routes available and other jobs. These days it's getting quite challenging for kids to get work, as a lot of those jobs are being taken over by adults or eliminated due to concerns about child welfare.
There are other reasons. I was watching a prime-time news program last year which was decrying the lack of such "transition jobs" available for our youth, and how that was seriously impacting their ability to enter the workforce as adults. Now, this particular program placed the blame for this entirely at the feet of the elderly. I was listening to the voiceover solemnly declare that our senior citizens were not gracefully accepting their retirement (as if some 80-year-old is working retail because he or she wants to be) and were injuring the nation's young people with their greediness, and thinking "what kind of a crock is this?"
The final scene showed a white-haired old woman working the register at a Macdonald's, the voice carrying on about how in the past an up-and-coming young American would have filled this job, on his way to fame and glory. I almost fell out of my chair when I noticed the half-dozen Mexicans slaving busily away in the background.
If the producers did that on purpose, it was brilliant. If not, they were just being assholes. Some of the "adults" you speak of who are taking menial jobs from children are doing so because for the past half century or more, our leaders have looted our treasury, pillaged our economy, broken every promise they, and left millions of elderly in the unenviable position of having to work until they die. Others are working people who spent much of their lives doing real work, but (for the reasons outlined above) have found themselves having to take any job they can find just to feed themselves and their families.
Yes, Mr. President(s), and members of that august committee known as "Congress", you did this. I hope there is a God, because that means there's probably a Satan around here somewhere, and I think most you know where you'll be going.
Yep, a very good summary, but I am too lazy to type it all out.
Why your post was modded Troll, anyway?
If I had to guess, I'd say I've angered someone from the "Ronald ruined the evil empire single handed" crowd.
Nah, it'll get picked up by the meta-moderation system eventually, even if the regular mods don't. I've been mod-bombed more than a few times myself. Part and parcel of the Slashdot experience, I'd say.
Switzerland seems to be doing fine with their flavor of direct democracy.
Sure. And why would you assume that you can extend the success of a tiny country with a monolithic society to the comparatively gigantic United States (or any other nation with a large, fractious population?) Our Founders weren't idiots: they took a lot from the successes (and spectacular failures) of many other nations when laying out the structure of our government.
Simple fact: neither Communism nor Democracy has ever been tried on a significant scale (and no, Switzerland does not count as significant in this context.) The reason for that is very simple: neither of them actually work.
Any chance it was a piece of your gear? Ive never heard of any provider-- T1, DSL, ISDN, cable, etc-- provide upload THAT low. Even bad DSL with a bad modem on a bad line will be at least 128kbit usually....
Is it possible you had some QoS mis-setting, or a bad modem, or a bad ethernet line? Did you test any of it (particularly the modem, since that would have changed after the ISP switch)? Comcast tends to be pretty darn good with respect to uploads...
Nope. Replaced everything more than once, and they admitted it was a provisioning issue. They just weren't willing to do anything about it. I had other problems: for example, I was paying for a second IP, couple bucks a month, but it was handy for testing and other things. At the time, I had AT&T Callvantage VoIP service for my phones, and I used the second IP for that (kept the VoIP traffic off my router.)
Then I decided to "upgrade" my service to the fastest tier. A few days later, my phones stop working: turned out they'd provisioned out my second IP, but were still billing me for it. In the process I reset the modem: now the VoIP box got the one IP and the router was left out, so I had no Internet service.
So I call up and talked to the usual Indian drone for an hour or so, trying to get it through his thick head that it wasn't a problem with the modem, but he insisted that I needed a technician visit. So, okay, whatever.
Now as I said earlier, I never had a problem with Comcast's field service people: generally they were very good. So two of these guys come out to the house. I explained what was happening: they looked at each other and one said, "Why did you request a service call? That's a provisioning problem!" {italics mine}}
So he calls up the provisioning department (not a number that you or I would have access to) and the woman that answers the phone spent fifteen minutes trying to convince the tech that I had no use for a second IP, and that "does the customer know that he can use his existing router for his VoIP service?" The tech looked around my shop, half a dozen computers running, big file server in the corner, cables everywhere and said, very slowly, "Yes, I believe the customer understands that, but WOULD LIKE TO GET WHAT HE IS PAYING FOR!" He'd had just about enough of her, I could tell. She then said, "Okay, sir, it's all fixed" and an hour after the techs left my phones stopped working again.
Really, I wouldn't go back to Comcast if you offered to pay my bill. Yes, I'm glad you have stellar service, and I'm sure that I'm just one of those statistical outliers, but I did not have a good experience with them.
Ultimately? Are you nuts? It has already been shown to have been a huge mistake! We were able to mobilize over a million men for the 1991 Gulf War, but analysts worried about being stretched too thin when deploying 1/10th of that for the 2003 Iraq war. They are still worried about the strain on the units, especially the NG & reserves, due to constant rotation. Given that we have adversaries now that have several million "excess men", the West's nuclear capability is needed more than ever. The fact that the leaders are refusing to modernize these weapons, but are planning on reducing them instead is absolutely, positively, "I don't give a fuck about my nation's survival", batshit insane!!!!!
Well, when Clinton began spouting about the world being safe for Democracy (which it wasn't, and isn't, and in any event we aren't a democracy) I started getting worried. I really wonder if our past couple decades of political "leadership" (using the term very loosely) isn't the result of some Russian or Chinese sleeper program. I mean, the level of malfeasance in office and outright treason is just beyond belief, and the utter lack of consequence for those actions even more so.
Slashdot Mirror
That is just an awesome example!
It's a crappy example. Had Kodos known that there was a supply ship about to land, he would never have killed those people. Roddenberry was pointing out that the difference between being remembered as evil or as good can often come down to a roll of the dice.
I find that offensive! I know math all the way up through differential equations, and I understand it fully. I love having the additional mental tools to work with, with calculus and differential equations, it is a whole new worlds. I find it offensive because although I know how to wear shoes, I absolutely never do, and there is nothing wrong with that.
So what part of my comment do you find offensive? The Heinlein quote, or what I said?
Bullshit. If you have a concept you cannot express in words, you make new words or steal them from other languages.
Grok?
+1 for the Heinlein reference.
You must be a terrible physicist. As an electrical engineer, I need literary analysis every time I read a technical paper, and I needed composition skills last time I submitted one for publication.
I tend to agree. Having been a software guy for about thirty years, I can tell you this: I've known a lot of engineers (in all fields) who got into it because they were good with technology but lacking in verbal skills, who chose their career believing they were excused from any need to communicate with anyone or anything. That would usually last until they got their first real job, and got told to write a hundred page project proposal all by themselves.
... all are just tools. The majority of human beings will never have a need, as long as they live, for higher mathematics ... but there are few people who cannot benefit from the ability to communicate.
That would often result in a few remedial English classes. Mathematics, spoken and written language
"Lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math."
One of my coworkers calls it a "stupid tax".
Understanding it and applying it aren't the same thing. I know lots of people who are much much much better at maths than I am and still can't get their head around the concept of coincidence.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. -- Robert A. Heinlein
I once read that quote to my father, who studied nuclear physics at the University of Rome, and had been an electronics engineer for much of his career, and I remember him saying, "Well, I'm sure he believes that." Personally, speaking as a software engineer, I do wish I had studied more higher math in college, because it would help me do more. More and better mental tools rarely hurt. But, to be honest, that really hasn't affected my earning power in the slightest.
The biggest reason why there are so few jobs for youths today is wealth. Yes, I'm serious. Wealth has made employer time a very pricey resource and something businesses have gone to great lengths to replace with machinery or avoid completely. The primary industries (farming, lumbering, fishing etc.) are now full of machinery instead. Same with all the production industry, there's hardly people moving things around or packing crates, it's conveyor belts and machinery. The service industry isn't quite as badly affected, but they too try to automate.
Those are the usual arguments against automation, the same ones made by the Luddites so many years ago. The reality is that a machine is a machine, and it's the choices we make that determine how beneficial they are. We, as a society, have been making some very bad decisions in recent decades, and yes, the result of those has been a transfer of wealth from the middle class to government and foreign corporations that is unprecedented in U.S. history, but it doesn't have to be this way, nor do we have to throw away advanced technology and the benefits it does offer.
Like most matters involving human beings and whatever passes for civilization at any given point in time, it's a matter of finding the right balance. America actually did a pretty good job of that, for a long time, but like every economic and/or military empire since we first starting building those things, we're collapsing from within, from our own inability to guide our own future to the betterment of all. Do I have all the answers? No. But there has to be one, or we're thoroughly screwed.
Still, some would argue that if a machine can do it, a person is better off doing something else. Others would say that that's ridiculous, 99.99% of humanity isn't capable of doing anything more complex than running a punch press, so we need to limit the spread of technology, hold ourselves back, in order to accommodate the relatively mindless majority.
The answer is somewhere in the middle, as it often is.
And again the rest of the world finds it appalling you only have two parties to choose from.
Most of the rest of the world doesn't even have political parties, or if they do they're strictly for show, so that's a ridiculous comment on your part. Furthermore, what we're talking about here is institutionalized corruption, and if you're claiming that other countries don't have at least as much of that as we do (regardless of the quality or quantity of political parties), then you're full of little red ants.
That would be so awesome if true. It just sounds too good to be.
I see. So America should not be able to penalize the citizens of other countries for the things their governments do, but other countries should be allowed to penalize our citizens for the things our government does.
Yep. Hypocrisy is still very much alive on Slashdot.
Most of us don't have to simplify the world to two choices, to live in it.
Most American's can only rely on their two choices, anymore and they plug there ears and go "lalalalalala", for fear that there brains may explode if they try to understand anything complex.
"Most Americans".
Do you know "Most Americans", or are you just making a generalization on a Biblical scale because it makes you feel better? We're a nation of some three hundred million people. I'm gathering that you've made no effort to understand that (or perhaps you have, and your brain has already exploded.)
Unfortunately with climate change and some other areas there is a bias in selecting who enters the field in favor of those naturally inclined to agree with dire conclusions, particularly when dire conclusions can dramatically increase funding of the field.
Science is just as politicized and generally corrupt as most human endeavors eventually become. That doesn't mean that much good cannot come of it, it just means that you have to watch out for human nature. Much of the scientific method is about trying to eliminate the tendency to fabricate, rationalize and dissemble that humans bring to everything they do, but the method is only as perfect as the individual scientists who are applying it.
One of my best friends left the field of climatology because he was sick of the politics, and also the institutionalized inertia that limits the advancement of science as much, if not more, as limits on funding do.
They didn't use people as motorfuel, so they must be alright.
How would you feel about being launched into orbit on a Soylent Green booster?
Then you come along with some volcano analogy, despite the fact the entire study is based on the *high altitude* generation of soot particles and I haven't seen any flying volcanos recently.
The GP is absolutely correct though. The article was talking about stratospheric effects. As it happens, vulcanism is perfectly capable of ejecting all sorts of substances that can have profound effects on weather into the stratosphere. How do you think eruptions like Krakatoa and Pinatubo had globe-spanning effects?
What if I dont want to lurk, but can think of nothing to say.. here home about this..
Hi ScrewMaster, im your friendly lurker
Whatever floats your boat.
What can they get from a 6 year old kid any ways?
Nothing. But they may be able to get whatever the parents have. And, of course, the endless satisfaction many adults receive from destroying the lives of small children.
Even if these kids did do this maliciously, they're kids. They aren't expected to have an adult's sense of, well, anything, including empathy and right or wrong. Not at age 4, for fuck's sake.
What I find interesting is that they're claiming that injecting soot into the stratosphere would cause global warming (at least according to the summary, didn't RTFA.) When blasts of particulate matter from other sources have reached those heights (for example, when Krakatoa went postal) it resulted in global cooling instead. I'm assuming there's a different mechanism involved.
What I think is fascinating is that you couldn't combine the above and this into one post. It's almost as though you wanted twice the karma...
A. I don't need the karma and ...
B. the second thought occurred to me after I clicked Submit.
If you have nothing to contribute to this discussion (because, frankly, you've contributed nothing so far) just lurk, don't post.
What I find interesting is that they're claiming that injecting soot into the stratosphere would cause global warming (at least according to the summary, didn't RTFA.) When blasts of particulate matter from other sources have reached those heights (for example, when Krakatoa went postal) it resulted in global cooling instead. I'm assuming there's a different mechanism involved.
However, the authors are careful about their work being an end-all study and are 'inviting others to take a look.'
A refreshing attitude ... that's how science is supposed to work. There have been far too many bombastic claims made about global warming.
Assuming they can get a job in the first place. When I was that age there were paper routes available and other jobs. These days it's getting quite challenging for kids to get work, as a lot of those jobs are being taken over by adults or eliminated due to concerns about child welfare.
There are other reasons. I was watching a prime-time news program last year which was decrying the lack of such "transition jobs" available for our youth, and how that was seriously impacting their ability to enter the workforce as adults. Now, this particular program placed the blame for this entirely at the feet of the elderly. I was listening to the voiceover solemnly declare that our senior citizens were not gracefully accepting their retirement (as if some 80-year-old is working retail because he or she wants to be) and were injuring the nation's young people with their greediness, and thinking "what kind of a crock is this?"
The final scene showed a white-haired old woman working the register at a Macdonald's, the voice carrying on about how in the past an up-and-coming young American would have filled this job, on his way to fame and glory. I almost fell out of my chair when I noticed the half-dozen Mexicans slaving busily away in the background.
If the producers did that on purpose, it was brilliant. If not, they were just being assholes. Some of the "adults" you speak of who are taking menial jobs from children are doing so because for the past half century or more, our leaders have looted our treasury, pillaged our economy, broken every promise they, and left millions of elderly in the unenviable position of having to work until they die. Others are working people who spent much of their lives doing real work, but (for the reasons outlined above) have found themselves having to take any job they can find just to feed themselves and their families.
Yes, Mr. President(s), and members of that august committee known as "Congress", you did this. I hope there is a God, because that means there's probably a Satan around here somewhere, and I think most you know where you'll be going.
I understand the concept behind this, but how do they keep the sharks pointed at the helicopter?
Look, chum.
You forgot about the shark, there has to be a shark involved for this to really work.
There's only a shark involved when it's been jumped.
There will be plenty of sharks about after the first patent infringement suit gets filed.
Well, strictly speaking
Yep, a very good summary, but I am too lazy to type it all out.
Why your post was modded Troll, anyway?
If I had to guess, I'd say I've angered someone from the "Ronald ruined the evil empire single handed" crowd.
Nah, it'll get picked up by the meta-moderation system eventually, even if the regular mods don't. I've been mod-bombed more than a few times myself. Part and parcel of the Slashdot experience, I'd say.
Switzerland seems to be doing fine with their flavor of direct democracy.
Sure. And why would you assume that you can extend the success of a tiny country with a monolithic society to the comparatively gigantic United States (or any other nation with a large, fractious population?) Our Founders weren't idiots: they took a lot from the successes (and spectacular failures) of many other nations when laying out the structure of our government.
Simple fact: neither Communism nor Democracy has ever been tried on a significant scale (and no, Switzerland does not count as significant in this context.) The reason for that is very simple: neither of them actually work.
Any chance it was a piece of your gear? Ive never heard of any provider-- T1, DSL, ISDN, cable, etc-- provide upload THAT low. Even bad DSL with a bad modem on a bad line will be at least 128kbit usually.... Is it possible you had some QoS mis-setting, or a bad modem, or a bad ethernet line? Did you test any of it (particularly the modem, since that would have changed after the ISP switch)? Comcast tends to be pretty darn good with respect to uploads...
Nope. Replaced everything more than once, and they admitted it was a provisioning issue. They just weren't willing to do anything about it. I had other problems: for example, I was paying for a second IP, couple bucks a month, but it was handy for testing and other things. At the time, I had AT&T Callvantage VoIP service for my phones, and I used the second IP for that (kept the VoIP traffic off my router.)
Then I decided to "upgrade" my service to the fastest tier. A few days later, my phones stop working: turned out they'd provisioned out my second IP, but were still billing me for it. In the process I reset the modem: now the VoIP box got the one IP and the router was left out, so I had no Internet service.
So I call up and talked to the usual Indian drone for an hour or so, trying to get it through his thick head that it wasn't a problem with the modem, but he insisted that I needed a technician visit. So, okay, whatever.
Now as I said earlier, I never had a problem with Comcast's field service people: generally they were very good. So two of these guys come out to the house. I explained what was happening: they looked at each other and one said, "Why did you request a service call? That's a provisioning problem!" {italics mine}}
So he calls up the provisioning department (not a number that you or I would have access to) and the woman that answers the phone spent fifteen minutes trying to convince the tech that I had no use for a second IP, and that "does the customer know that he can use his existing router for his VoIP service?" The tech looked around my shop, half a dozen computers running, big file server in the corner, cables everywhere and said, very slowly, "Yes, I believe the customer understands that, but WOULD LIKE TO GET WHAT HE IS PAYING FOR!" He'd had just about enough of her, I could tell. She then said, "Okay, sir, it's all fixed" and an hour after the techs left my phones stopped working again.
Really, I wouldn't go back to Comcast if you offered to pay my bill. Yes, I'm glad you have stellar service, and I'm sure that I'm just one of those statistical outliers, but I did not have a good experience with them.
Ultimately? Are you nuts? It has already been shown to have been a huge mistake! We were able to mobilize over a million men for the 1991 Gulf War, but analysts worried about being stretched too thin when deploying 1/10th of that for the 2003 Iraq war. They are still worried about the strain on the units, especially the NG & reserves, due to constant rotation. Given that we have adversaries now that have several million "excess men", the West's nuclear capability is needed more than ever. The fact that the leaders are refusing to modernize these weapons, but are planning on reducing them instead is absolutely, positively, "I don't give a fuck about my nation's survival", batshit insane!!!!!
Well, when Clinton began spouting about the world being safe for Democracy (which it wasn't, and isn't, and in any event we aren't a democracy) I started getting worried. I really wonder if our past couple decades of political "leadership" (using the term very loosely) isn't the result of some Russian or Chinese sleeper program. I mean, the level of malfeasance in office and outright treason is just beyond belief, and the utter lack of consequence for those actions even more so.