Not this libertarian. The Ryan Plan still results in an annual deficit increase, and doesn't touch the bloated military or defense budgets at all. It may result in a balanced budget...in 30 years. Tea Partiers shouldn't like this guy either, but the Tea Party movement stopped being about taxes and monetary policy shortly after it was born.
And the best thing all of those people could do is to get together and vote for a third-party candidate. It doesn't matter which one; only that the effort is coordinated to pick one. How many disenchanted voters are out there? Getting them all on board is a pipe dream, and I'm not suggesting that a third-party candidate would win. Remember how Perot caused a stir because he got 18% of the vote? Imagine what could happen if we got someone above 20%, especially if the effort was publicized as being a protest vote.
With those kind of numbers and a concerted effort to show people that third parties can be viable if enough people decide to stop voting for the lesser evil, and if other people who are dissatisfied with both big parties take the time to vote, we could foster the growth of a healthier, multi-party system. The presidential election is the worst place to try for a win, but it is the best place to ensure exposure to the idea. Sort of an, "If we can get this far in the presidential election, imagine what we can do at the congressional, state, and local levels."
Publicizing it as a protest vote should also address the concerns of people who don't agree with the example party's platform. Alternatively a new party could be created whose sole platform is to make the system more amenable to third parties--call it the New Blood Party or something. That would take years to set up, however. A protest vote if heard and repeated by the right people could be easily organized by the time of this year's election.
I understand that it would be frustrating to see years of labor on a theory go down the tubes, but at its root the finding means that we now have a slightly better understanding of reality. I would think that for many if not most people in the field, if the implications are as stated in the summary, this is exciting because we have a better idea of what direction to theorize in. Falsification is just as if not more important than making hypotheses.
The Supreme Court of Oregon has explicitly ruled that erotic/sexual displays are a form of protected speech.
Is this accurate? The sibling to the parent comment quotes the law in question which specifically states that public indecency is among other things,
An act of exposing the genitals of the person with the intent of arousing the sexual desire of the person or another person.
So it appears to me that the reason he was not convicted is precisely because his intent was not to be erotic or sexual, only nude. And that makes perfect sense given the context of the protest--he was making explicit* the fact that the scanners essentially nudify everyone, at least from the vantage point of the Viewing Room, and that the TSA is quite invasive in general. Oregon recognizes that not every naked person is necessarily being sexual, and it'd be nice if the rest of the country caught up.
*In this case, the pun happens also to be the most accurate description.
I think images are the way to go, though I'd be more inclined to have some sort of pictograms with text below to show what particular nouns and verbs mean instead of classic works of art.
I also think that storing things in realspace--graven images on metal--is far better than encoding it on a hard disk. Part of me can't help but wonder if ancient civilizations had more technology than we realize; if the things we regard as bits of detritus aren't packed with meaning. After all, if a pre-computing society got hold of a hard drive, what would they make of it? There couldn't possibly be thousands of volumes of information engraved on something you can hold in the palm of your hand, could there?
The rest of me realizes this is likely nonsense, but it is food for thought.
I'll second BitBucket. I'm working on a game with four other people and initially chose that provider because it provided free private git hosting for five users. The bug tracker and the wiki that come along with it have both proven useful.
There is much to be said in favor of a well-constructed piece of writing. I don't know all the technical jargon and I'm sure I have some habitual mistakes or idiosyncrasies, but when I write, especially if it is to be a long piece, I want to construct it with care. I am learning, though, that that is very much a personal preference.
If someone makes all categories of mistakes you mention--spelling, usage, capitalization, and punctuation--yet still manages to get his point across, where is the harm? It grates on me in an aesthetic sense, but neither is every man a painter and musician. Why should I expect a level of mastery in writing that is not a given for other areas of skill? Writing is a creative endeavor; it happens also to be saddled with the task of carrying meaning in ways that art and music are not. Many if not most people don't know the basic rules of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic structure in Western music, and we don't hold that against them. Many if not most people don't know the basic rules of color theory and...the other rules of painting which I am too ignorant about to even name, and we don't hold that against them either.
If the meaning suffers from an abundance of mistakes, then by all means ask for clarification and get fed up. I do. If the meaning is clear, then the hard-to-accept fact is that the language may be evolving in a way that is ugly to you and me. Someone else mentioned Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales are a struggle to read in the original Middle English, and with spelling particularly offensive to my eyes. Is this contemporary shift meaningfully different? The rules for language are, or at least began as, descriptive rules. They tell us what the language was doing at the time. If people are no longer following the now-prescribed rules, and are doing so in a fairly consistent manner, I think it points not to their stupidity but to a semi-conscious decision that they don't care about the classical English rules and aesthetics, and are going to instead use what is convenient for them to use. I don't like it either, but it's a leap to go from "this person does not write with care like I do" to "this person is an idiot." By that measure, any foreigner who is just learning English, or has only learned enough to get by, is also an idiot, and that should be an obviously false conclusion.
So write with care; some of us appreciate it. If you are lucky enough to create any lasting works, you may be remembered for your skill. I have been impressed by the writings of William James in many ways, and his clarity of thought and writing is a big influence on how I write. Yet, now that I think about it, he used a mix of the formal and the casual that was in his own time regarded as unruly at best. That could prove to be instructive today.
Google searches aren't CLI any more than this comment text box is. A CLI google search would be more like typing out the URL "https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=18&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=command+line+interface" by hand. And browsing through the results pages is very much unlike a CLI.
I think it's more accurate to say that we are getting a better understanding of CLI behaviors that work well, such as the app launch shortcuts and text expanders you mentioned, and incorporating those into everyday use. I certainly believe that the CLI retains its function, and it is without a doubt the best tool for certain jobs. It's not great for browsing, or any operation in which you aren't quite sure when you start out where something is or how it works, but if you know those things from the outset it is very easy to string a number of commands together to get the exact output you desire.
I agree. And for web game developers, Flash is still the best tech out there. HTML5 is okay, but still not terribly mature (and don't get me started on sound) or consistently implemented. Meanwhile on the Flash platform you have at least two mature, useful frameworks--FlashPunk and Flixel--that allow for quick prototyping and rich development.
Not to mention AS3 is prettier and friendlier than Javascript...
What about authors? Books generally take more time to produce than music does, and you won't see nearly as many people buying tickets for reading or speaking engagements...
Should that same argument not then be applied equally to all makers of software? The issue is the same: effort is put into something novel which is nonetheless easily reproduced after the original idea is implemented. When put that way, the same argument should abolish all patents as well--after all, the idea once created is easily transmitted, so anyone who wants to make the effort to reproduce whatever invention the idea was for should be able to do so.
I agree with some of this. To illustrate the point in the realm of art, creativity is not painting an image of a dog with a human's head, even if that were never done before. It is, however, being the first to use light and shadow instead of painting a flat fresco.
If we thought about how hard it is to solve some of the social interactionss from the point of view of instructing computer to perform those tasks, perhaps we would see this in another way.
Is that metric really valuable? It's hard to teach a squirrel to jump through a hoop on command; does that mean it's hard for a human to do the same?
What most people recognize as genius, is often at best labled "creative", since if it were beyond the understanding of others, then it is likely going to go unrecognized.
I disagree. Genius lies not in discovering things that others cannot necessarily understand, it is more a matter of discovering things that others have not understood. Take Einstein's relativity, for instance--the ideas presented by it have entered the popular culture to a degree that is rather surprising. No, not every lay person has an intimate grasp of the details, but certainly every curious person, and increasingly everyone who watches Hollywood movies, knows about time dilation, the fixed speed of light, etc. The concepts themselves, at least a lot of them, are not intuitive but neither are they incomprehensible. To discover them however took a monumental work of intellect, effort, true creativity and curiosity--therein lies the genius.
I would describe it as pleasant. I've had it four or five times, and for me, if there are friends present, it results in a going-away feeling accompanied by uncontrollable laughter. The one time I did it by myself, the going-away feeling was there, and instead of hilarity I felt very still and tranquil. There are a lot of people who don't like the drug, and it is a psychedelic so set and setting play an important role. It's also not a party drug, not something to do to "have a good time."
Also, salvia has been prohibited by several US states, with legislation moving through a number of others to do the same.
Why not ban all mind-altering substances except for a whitelist? Say alcohol, caffeine, nicotene are legal. Everthing else illegal. IANAL but that would seem to solve the legal problem.
Don't fall prey to the fallacy of the single cause. There was also Dupont, who wanted nylon to replace hemp. There were also racist motivations: making marihuana illegal was a good way to deport the Mexican laborers who were "stealing our jobs" and the Negro musicians who were "corrupting our youth." I'm sure there are a number of other fringe reasons for making it illegal.
Also, it actually started with the Marihuana Tax Act, in which farmers could only grow hemp if they bought stamps to do so from the government. The government didn't sell any stamps. The scheduling came later.
A lot of the change you are experiencing may be due to selection for THC over other cannabinoids in a lot of breeds. It's not necessarily that it's more potent, it's that the ratio of THC tends to be higher because THC is erroneously thought of as "the active ingredient." There are a lot more incidences of paranoia in people who take THC pills for pain relief than there are for medical marijuana users who smoke or ingest the plant. The "mellow luvving feeling" is a result of a more balanced bouquet.
Health effects are not a red herring at all. There have been cases of GMO food causing allergy problems. For instance, here is an article from the New England Journal of Medicine showing the effects of transgenic soybeans created by Pioneer Hi-Bred which contain a gene from the brazil nut. You don't even need to read the article; just look at the image of the allergic reaction caused by skin-prick testing of extracts from the GMO bean on a person who is allergic to brazil nuts.
And hell, some of Monsanto's corn is registered and patented as a pesticide! There was a recent article here which puts the blame for colony collapse disorder squarely on the use of HFCS from Monsanto corn to feed bees--the trace amounts of pesticide in the corn syrup are enough to make the bees get lost while foraging. This particular pesticide appears harmless to humans; it's been used since the '30s, but it is an illustration of how unintended consequences come into play.
What GMO essentially means is that you have no idea what kinds of genes are in your food, and you will continue to have no idea unless you have an allergic reaction. That's not great, but there could also be long-term effects that will remain unknown for years or decades--a little bit like the radiation craze before we realized it promotes cancer. And there could also be secondary effects: round-up ready crops are meant to be sprayed, and they're going to get hit with a lot more herbicides than non-GMO crops. The use of these crops has been widespread for under a decade. I think it makes sense to remain cautious on the health front as well.
The monoculture is almost certainly the larger issue, and my intention is not to detract from it. I have heard that something like 97% of the varieties of food we grew in the 19th century are now extinct. There are less than 10 kinds of potatoes widely grown, down from 500, and these kinds of numbers are seen across the board. That's not a good idea.
You're probably right about There Will Be Blood. The interesting thing is that the lines from the movie were based on reality:
"I must admit to you where that came from," Anderson says giddily, noting that the eccentric metaphor comes straight from the congressional transcripts of the 1920s "Teapot Dome" scandal, in which New Mexico Republican Senator Albert Fall was convicted of accepting bribes for the oil-drilling rights to public lands in California and Wyoming from several oil-industry fat cats (including Edward Doheny).
I wondered a bit about that myself, but my intent was only to report what was missing from the summary. Is quartz used as a generator? I know it's often used as a timing oscillator, but if my understanding is correct it requires a bit of power to do so.
That question sadly went unanswered in the summary, but is discussed in the article. The viruses are preferable because making existing piezoelectrics is apparently difficult and requires toxic chemicals, while these viruses are self-replicating bacteriophages. They are also under the right conditions self-organizing, making the creation of piezo film easy by comparison. Looks like there's a long way to go to get a decent amount of electricity out of them, though.
In this case it wouldn't be hard, as the plant in question makes XBoxes. But then they couldn't have claimed the news was "sure to ruffle the feathers of Apple fans." Because...I guess...Apple fans are defending Foxcomm's mistreatment of its employees, or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Not this libertarian. The Ryan Plan still results in an annual deficit increase, and doesn't touch the bloated military or defense budgets at all. It may result in a balanced budget...in 30 years. Tea Partiers shouldn't like this guy either, but the Tea Party movement stopped being about taxes and monetary policy shortly after it was born.
And the best thing all of those people could do is to get together and vote for a third-party candidate. It doesn't matter which one; only that the effort is coordinated to pick one. How many disenchanted voters are out there? Getting them all on board is a pipe dream, and I'm not suggesting that a third-party candidate would win. Remember how Perot caused a stir because he got 18% of the vote? Imagine what could happen if we got someone above 20%, especially if the effort was publicized as being a protest vote.
With those kind of numbers and a concerted effort to show people that third parties can be viable if enough people decide to stop voting for the lesser evil, and if other people who are dissatisfied with both big parties take the time to vote, we could foster the growth of a healthier, multi-party system. The presidential election is the worst place to try for a win, but it is the best place to ensure exposure to the idea. Sort of an, "If we can get this far in the presidential election, imagine what we can do at the congressional, state, and local levels."
Publicizing it as a protest vote should also address the concerns of people who don't agree with the example party's platform. Alternatively a new party could be created whose sole platform is to make the system more amenable to third parties--call it the New Blood Party or something. That would take years to set up, however. A protest vote if heard and repeated by the right people could be easily organized by the time of this year's election.
I understand that it would be frustrating to see years of labor on a theory go down the tubes, but at its root the finding means that we now have a slightly better understanding of reality. I would think that for many if not most people in the field, if the implications are as stated in the summary, this is exciting because we have a better idea of what direction to theorize in. Falsification is just as if not more important than making hypotheses.
The Supreme Court of Oregon has explicitly ruled that erotic/sexual displays are a form of protected speech.
Is this accurate? The sibling to the parent comment quotes the law in question which specifically states that public indecency is among other things,
An act of exposing the genitals of the person with the intent of arousing the sexual desire of the person or another person.
So it appears to me that the reason he was not convicted is precisely because his intent was not to be erotic or sexual, only nude. And that makes perfect sense given the context of the protest--he was making explicit* the fact that the scanners essentially nudify everyone, at least from the vantage point of the Viewing Room, and that the TSA is quite invasive in general. Oregon recognizes that not every naked person is necessarily being sexual, and it'd be nice if the rest of the country caught up.
*In this case, the pun happens also to be the most accurate description.
I think images are the way to go, though I'd be more inclined to have some sort of pictograms with text below to show what particular nouns and verbs mean instead of classic works of art.
I also think that storing things in realspace--graven images on metal--is far better than encoding it on a hard disk. Part of me can't help but wonder if ancient civilizations had more technology than we realize; if the things we regard as bits of detritus aren't packed with meaning. After all, if a pre-computing society got hold of a hard drive, what would they make of it? There couldn't possibly be thousands of volumes of information engraved on something you can hold in the palm of your hand, could there?
The rest of me realizes this is likely nonsense, but it is food for thought.
I'll second BitBucket. I'm working on a game with four other people and initially chose that provider because it provided free private git hosting for five users. The bug tracker and the wiki that come along with it have both proven useful.
Welcome to Idiocracy.
I was with you until that very last line.
There is much to be said in favor of a well-constructed piece of writing. I don't know all the technical jargon and I'm sure I have some habitual mistakes or idiosyncrasies, but when I write, especially if it is to be a long piece, I want to construct it with care. I am learning, though, that that is very much a personal preference.
If someone makes all categories of mistakes you mention--spelling, usage, capitalization, and punctuation--yet still manages to get his point across, where is the harm? It grates on me in an aesthetic sense, but neither is every man a painter and musician. Why should I expect a level of mastery in writing that is not a given for other areas of skill? Writing is a creative endeavor; it happens also to be saddled with the task of carrying meaning in ways that art and music are not. Many if not most people don't know the basic rules of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic structure in Western music, and we don't hold that against them. Many if not most people don't know the basic rules of color theory and...the other rules of painting which I am too ignorant about to even name, and we don't hold that against them either.
If the meaning suffers from an abundance of mistakes, then by all means ask for clarification and get fed up. I do. If the meaning is clear, then the hard-to-accept fact is that the language may be evolving in a way that is ugly to you and me. Someone else mentioned Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales are a struggle to read in the original Middle English, and with spelling particularly offensive to my eyes. Is this contemporary shift meaningfully different? The rules for language are, or at least began as, descriptive rules. They tell us what the language was doing at the time. If people are no longer following the now-prescribed rules, and are doing so in a fairly consistent manner, I think it points not to their stupidity but to a semi-conscious decision that they don't care about the classical English rules and aesthetics, and are going to instead use what is convenient for them to use. I don't like it either, but it's a leap to go from "this person does not write with care like I do" to "this person is an idiot." By that measure, any foreigner who is just learning English, or has only learned enough to get by, is also an idiot, and that should be an obviously false conclusion.
So write with care; some of us appreciate it. If you are lucky enough to create any lasting works, you may be remembered for your skill. I have been impressed by the writings of William James in many ways, and his clarity of thought and writing is a big influence on how I write. Yet, now that I think about it, he used a mix of the formal and the casual that was in his own time regarded as unruly at best. That could prove to be instructive today.
Google searches aren't CLI any more than this comment text box is. A CLI google search would be more like typing out the URL "https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=18&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=command+line+interface" by hand. And browsing through the results pages is very much unlike a CLI.
I think it's more accurate to say that we are getting a better understanding of CLI behaviors that work well, such as the app launch shortcuts and text expanders you mentioned, and incorporating those into everyday use. I certainly believe that the CLI retains its function, and it is without a doubt the best tool for certain jobs. It's not great for browsing, or any operation in which you aren't quite sure when you start out where something is or how it works, but if you know those things from the outset it is very easy to string a number of commands together to get the exact output you desire.
Everything was not perfectly back in place and functioning! None of the security council members was speaking his own language!
I agree. And for web game developers, Flash is still the best tech out there. HTML5 is okay, but still not terribly mature (and don't get me started on sound) or consistently implemented. Meanwhile on the Flash platform you have at least two mature, useful frameworks--FlashPunk and Flixel--that allow for quick prototyping and rich development.
Not to mention AS3 is prettier and friendlier than Javascript...
What about authors? Books generally take more time to produce than music does, and you won't see nearly as many people buying tickets for reading or speaking engagements...
Should that same argument not then be applied equally to all makers of software? The issue is the same: effort is put into something novel which is nonetheless easily reproduced after the original idea is implemented. When put that way, the same argument should abolish all patents as well--after all, the idea once created is easily transmitted, so anyone who wants to make the effort to reproduce whatever invention the idea was for should be able to do so.
That doesn't make sense. If it did, mental hospitals would be our greatest source of art and science.
I agree with some of this. To illustrate the point in the realm of art, creativity is not painting an image of a dog with a human's head, even if that were never done before. It is, however, being the first to use light and shadow instead of painting a flat fresco.
If we thought about how hard it is to solve some of the social interactionss from the point of view of instructing computer to perform those tasks, perhaps we would see this in another way.
Is that metric really valuable? It's hard to teach a squirrel to jump through a hoop on command; does that mean it's hard for a human to do the same?
What most people recognize as genius, is often at best labled "creative", since if it were beyond the understanding of others, then it is likely going to go unrecognized.
I disagree. Genius lies not in discovering things that others cannot necessarily understand, it is more a matter of discovering things that others have not understood. Take Einstein's relativity, for instance--the ideas presented by it have entered the popular culture to a degree that is rather surprising. No, not every lay person has an intimate grasp of the details, but certainly every curious person, and increasingly everyone who watches Hollywood movies, knows about time dilation, the fixed speed of light, etc. The concepts themselves, at least a lot of them, are not intuitive but neither are they incomprehensible. To discover them however took a monumental work of intellect, effort, true creativity and curiosity--therein lies the genius.
I would describe it as pleasant. I've had it four or five times, and for me, if there are friends present, it results in a going-away feeling accompanied by uncontrollable laughter. The one time I did it by myself, the going-away feeling was there, and instead of hilarity I felt very still and tranquil. There are a lot of people who don't like the drug, and it is a psychedelic so set and setting play an important role. It's also not a party drug, not something to do to "have a good time."
Also, salvia has been prohibited by several US states, with legislation moving through a number of others to do the same.
Why not ban all mind-altering substances except for a whitelist? Say alcohol, caffeine, nicotene are legal. Everthing else illegal. IANAL but that would seem to solve the legal problem.
...prozac, ambien, adderall, ritalin, aspirin, tylenol, zyperxa, effexor, xanax, vicodin...
Don't fall prey to the fallacy of the single cause. There was also Dupont, who wanted nylon to replace hemp. There were also racist motivations: making marihuana illegal was a good way to deport the Mexican laborers who were "stealing our jobs" and the Negro musicians who were "corrupting our youth." I'm sure there are a number of other fringe reasons for making it illegal.
Also, it actually started with the Marihuana Tax Act, in which farmers could only grow hemp if they bought stamps to do so from the government. The government didn't sell any stamps. The scheduling came later.
A lot of the change you are experiencing may be due to selection for THC over other cannabinoids in a lot of breeds. It's not necessarily that it's more potent, it's that the ratio of THC tends to be higher because THC is erroneously thought of as "the active ingredient." There are a lot more incidences of paranoia in people who take THC pills for pain relief than there are for medical marijuana users who smoke or ingest the plant. The "mellow luvving feeling" is a result of a more balanced bouquet.
Ass, Ass. There, I got the other two you missed.
Health effects are not a red herring at all. There have been cases of GMO food causing allergy problems. For instance, here is an article from the New England Journal of Medicine showing the effects of transgenic soybeans created by Pioneer Hi-Bred which contain a gene from the brazil nut. You don't even need to read the article; just look at the image of the allergic reaction caused by skin-prick testing of extracts from the GMO bean on a person who is allergic to brazil nuts.
And hell, some of Monsanto's corn is registered and patented as a pesticide! There was a recent article here which puts the blame for colony collapse disorder squarely on the use of HFCS from Monsanto corn to feed bees--the trace amounts of pesticide in the corn syrup are enough to make the bees get lost while foraging. This particular pesticide appears harmless to humans; it's been used since the '30s, but it is an illustration of how unintended consequences come into play.
What GMO essentially means is that you have no idea what kinds of genes are in your food, and you will continue to have no idea unless you have an allergic reaction. That's not great, but there could also be long-term effects that will remain unknown for years or decades--a little bit like the radiation craze before we realized it promotes cancer. And there could also be secondary effects: round-up ready crops are meant to be sprayed, and they're going to get hit with a lot more herbicides than non-GMO crops. The use of these crops has been widespread for under a decade. I think it makes sense to remain cautious on the health front as well.
The monoculture is almost certainly the larger issue, and my intention is not to detract from it. I have heard that something like 97% of the varieties of food we grew in the 19th century are now extinct. There are less than 10 kinds of potatoes widely grown, down from 500, and these kinds of numbers are seen across the board. That's not a good idea.
You're probably right about There Will Be Blood. The interesting thing is that the lines from the movie were based on reality:
"I must admit to you where that came from," Anderson says giddily, noting that the eccentric metaphor comes straight from the congressional transcripts of the 1920s "Teapot Dome" scandal, in which New Mexico Republican Senator Albert Fall was convicted of accepting bribes for the oil-drilling rights to public lands in California and Wyoming from several oil-industry fat cats (including Edward Doheny).
I wondered a bit about that myself, but my intent was only to report what was missing from the summary. Is quartz used as a generator? I know it's often used as a timing oscillator, but if my understanding is correct it requires a bit of power to do so.
That question sadly went unanswered in the summary, but is discussed in the article. The viruses are preferable because making existing piezoelectrics is apparently difficult and requires toxic chemicals, while these viruses are self-replicating bacteriophages. They are also under the right conditions self-organizing, making the creation of piezo film easy by comparison. Looks like there's a long way to go to get a decent amount of electricity out of them, though.
In this case it wouldn't be hard, as the plant in question makes XBoxes . But then they couldn't have claimed the news was "sure to ruffle the feathers of Apple fans." Because...I guess...Apple fans are defending Foxcomm's mistreatment of its employees, or something.