If MA's plan worked in MA, then why not try it out on a bigger scale?
That's the problem with the word "works". It means different thing to different people.
Did more people get insured in MA? Yes -- almost everyone did. Did health insurance big a big windfall because of the fact that everyone had to buy insurance? They did -- and they loved it. So yeah, health insurance companies love it and "everyone" is insured. If you think that "works", great. Roll it out nationwide.
Did it reduce the cost of health care and provide better outcomes? I don't know if we know that yet. It will probably take years to find out. Does it "work" by that measure? I don't know.
I'm sorry you can't get your tooth fixed. So you have a shitty system -- so do we. There's no reason why both of our countries couldn't adopt a system like Frances', Denmarks' ( except for bigotry or jingoism ), etc. and get improved health care for less money.
Where did grandparent say that conservatives "hate" the poor? Nowhere. They simply said that conservatives want the poor to be poor -- i.e. not have anything.
The generations before my parents, my grandparents and up managed to be healthy and afford their doctors on the wages of working men and women. What's changed?
Do you live in an alternate universe? Our grandparents and ancestors further back lived lives with more horror and misery than you can imagine. Calvin Coolidge's son died from an infection in a blister on his hand he got from playing tennis on the White House tennis courts. Even the president's son died from a fucking blister. And people *couldn't* afford doctors. They had to save up and pool money to get treatment -- that's the whole reason why health insurance was started.
Just read any history book about some 100 years ago. If you lived to be fifty you were lucky -- you lived to be an old person. If you got to be that old, you were probably house-ridden from arthritis -- no arthritis drugs back then. People were dropping from the flu, typhoid, whooping cough, scarlet fever. If you really want to see ghastly, read up on Diphtheria. Bacterial growth causes a membrane to form over a persons throat, and they suffocate to death in the course of a few hours. Parents literally cradled their children for hours while they turned blue and died.
Hardly any body was healthy back in the day. 50% of babies died in the first year of infancy. 50% of the survivors died before they were 25. If you made it to 25, you stood a good chance of making it to fifty, or "old age".
Let's require that whatever bill they propose, that all of the US government, especially congress & house, have to operate under that bill for one year before it can be forced on the rest of us.
Or how about this? The congress already has single payer health care -- they get to pick from a list of premium plans from health insurers, and taxpayers pick up the tab. Since you want the congress to live with whatever plan they foist on us, we can go ahead tomorrow with the plan that the congress currently has -- government back private health insurance.
They brought an old guy in to deal with Y2K issues. They agreed to pay him well, but then got chintzy when it turned out that there really wasn't much that he needed to do. They eventually did pay him, but kicked him to the curb again afterwards.
Hey, I'm really on the side of good living wages for workers and all, but what exactly were the employers supposed to do in this case? Give the guy a salary and retirement because he spent 160 hours hacking COBOL in December of 1999? He was charging a decent hourly rate, right?
This would be a situation where someone in retirement might be a consultant, and get paid hourly.
I've heard that when you can't smell you can't taste, which is bullshit. I can't tell the difference between some things but I do very much have a vivid sense of taste still.
You haven't completely lost your sense of smell. You've just lost your ability to detect faint scents on the air. Putting something in your mouth, in the sense of smell, is like the difference between a misting spray-bottle and a super-soaker.
What happens when we 'taste' is that 1. the tongue senses sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and perhaps savory; and 2. chemicals waft up that hole in the back of the mouth to the olfactory tissue. Those two chemoreception processes taken together are what we think of as taste.
In researching this post, I also learned that Stevie Wonder can't smell, either. Or so says wikipedia.
Don't countries have limits on how much gold you can import into them, too? I remember seeing something on a US customs form about "Do you have more than $10,000 in cash, jewelry, gold, or other 'currency instruments'..."
Survival of the fittest was never a formal elucidation of the theory of evolution. I think the basic definition these days is, survival of those who weren't killed by their mutations, or, survival of those not so bad off that they could actually reproduce.
I'm glad you posted your response, it shows how foundational and subconscious the idea of linear progress and the Great Chain of Being are to western thought.
So when Clark says "Apes or Angels" he isn't "placing aliens in the Great Chain of Being"...
The whole reason that anybody can understand the phrase "apes and angels" is because it directly relies on the cosmology of the Great Chain of Being.
Why would we discover an "ape" on another planet? What a silly idea -- what is this, planet of the apes? Why would we find an ape, and not, say, an octopus, or a bat? Because, if we run into a society that's younger than us, they haven't experienced as much progress, so they are lower than us on the great chain of being -- slightly more animalistic, which the next step down on the chart. Apes are 'below' man on the Great Chain of Being ( even though modern apes are as adapted to their environment as we are to ours, just like jellyfish and any other species that's not extinct ) because they are the most human-like animals.
The next question is why would we find an 'angel' on another planet? Why not a grinning Chesire cat? Why not a colony of slugs playing ping-pong? Again, Clarke is using linear progress --- more time means more progress, never going back or in cycles -- and the Great Chain of Being here -- with more time, and thus more progress, they will have to have ascended to the next step on the great chain of being - namely, angels.
Now it should be clear why the phrase Apes and Angels makes sense to the western mind. It's unlikely that we will run into aliens that are the exact same 'age' as we are; therefore they will be 'younger', having had less progress, and thus be a bit lower on the Great Chain of Being, and therefore, they are "apes". Or, they may be "older", having experienced more 'progress', thus being higher on the Great Chain of Being, and the stop above human is 'Angel'.
The verbiage about balance or cycles or homeostasis doesn't represent humanity in any form that I understand.
There were dinosaurs for millions of years. They never evolved intelligence anything like ours nor a civilization, or tools, or anything else for that matter. They had plenty of time to grow big brains -- there's nothing really special about that. Sounds like they were pretty much in homeostatis for millions of years, until a big meteor hit. And even then, the mammals that replaced them weren't that much smarter. In fact, modern humans have only been around for some 100,000-70,000 years, and civilization, only 7,000-5,000. That's a ridiculously small sample to base cosmic ideas of evolution and intelligence on. It's within the realm of possibility that the human 'phase' on the great chain of being could last millions or billions of years. Jellyfish are still around, doing pretty well, and have absolutely no brains whatsoever.
OK, so what if mushrooms are trying to communicate with us through psilocybin? AFAIK, nobody is talking about a marijuana super-intelligence, or an aspirin super-intelligence. If people who have regular 'experiments' with mushrooms report contact an otherly, mushroom consciousness making these same claims, why shouldn't we investigate this? What basis do we have to disbelieve this? Other drugs don't behave similarly.
If you were a super-evolved organism, wouldn't the best way to communicate be direct consciousness-to-consciousness links? And aren't neurotransmitters the building block of consciousness?
I would disagree. Eight forms of writing remain uncracked. Were we to have a speaker of that language magically placed in front of those linguists, they'd crack it in about a day.
There is pretty convincing evidence that dolphins have a complex, acoustic language. At the command of a trainer, a pair of dolphins can spontaneously create a completely original, complex acrobatic routine of several moves, and perform in synchronicity, without ever practicing it. Before they snap to it, they squeak at each other for a few moments.
We can't even understand the language of a fellow mammal with a large brain, who communicates in the same medium that we do ( sound I mean, not water ). There's no way we'd ever communicate with a radically different alien, not for years or decades at best.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke made a famous observation about space explorers discovering aliens. If one considers the millions of years of pre-history, and the rapid technological advancement occurring now, if you apply that to a hypothetical alien race, one can figure the probabilities of how advanced the explorers will find them. The conclusion is "we will find apes or angels, but not men."
This kind of thinking relies on two notions ancient to western thought: the Great Chain of Being, and linear progress.
The Great Chain of Being is an idea that we inherited from Christian times. It describes a hierarchy of matter and life forms, with rocks at the bottom, then plants, animals, humans, and above them, angels, and finally, God at the top. Each spot is 'better' than the one below it. So we see know why Clarke posits we will only find "Apes or Angels": he's placing aliens in the Great Chain of Being. Contrast that with, say, a more Japanese notion of life forms, where robots and humans and talking animals all inhabit and live in a world, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in peace, with each having their own niche of adaptation and way of making a living. It's a world-view you may have seen in a Miyazaki film.
The second Old Idea that Clark's prognostication rests on is linear progress. That there is a one-dimensional measure of 'goodness' or 'progress', and as time goes on, the value always goes up. In other words, things are always getting better -- we know more, we have more things, society advances. Contrast that with an idea of cycles of good and bad times, like you might see in Hindu thought, or of balance and homeostatis, like you might find in Greek or Native American thought. So, Clarke says we are either going to find Angels or Apes. Humans are right in the middle int he Great Chain of Being, and because of linear progress, we will become more 'angelic', sooner or later. Well, what about finding jellyfish? Jellyfish have been around the Earth's oceans for millions of years, and their basic body plan and way of making a living hasn't changed that much. Sounds like a fairly successful homeostasis, if you ask me. I'll bet there will be jellyfish as long as there are temperate oceans on Earth.
So I think if you put this reasoning in light of those two ideas, it becomes apparent that even one of our greatest 'science'-fiction minds is unaware that they are rooted in very old, religious cosmologies that are culturally based. We in the west are still in the Dark Ages of imagination, living under the tyranny of ancient, jealous, despotic Gods.
If the aliens are just at the level of fungus, it would be hard to discover them in the first place, moreover their existence wouldn't matter much anyways.
Terrence McKenna makes the claim that psilocybin mushrooms are actually an intelligent network of beings, and can communicate with humans because of the psilocybin molecule's ability to mimic human neurotransmitters. It's fairly weird stuff, but if you look at it as science fiction ( or psychedelic fiction? ), you being to understand the difficulty of communicating with an intelligence vastly different than yourself. We are just beginning to understand that dolphins understand grammar, yet we have no idea the mechanics of their communication. They can spontaneously invent sophisticated, synchronized, two-dolphin performances for a research scientist, so it's fairly obvious that they are capable of having complex conversations about aquatic acrobatics, at least.
Anyway, here's Terrence, channeling the mycelia network:
"Though I have been on earth for ages I am from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered through the shining disc of the galaxy have conditions which allow my spores an opportunity for life. The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sun bathing, my true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections that the number in a human brain. My mycelial network is nearly immortal, only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out. By means impossible to explain because of certain misconceptions in your model of reality all my mycelial networks in the galaxy are in hyperlight communication across space and time. The mycelial body is as fragile as a spider's web but the collective hypermind and memory is a vast historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many worlds in our spiral star swarm. Space, you see, is a vast ocean to those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce from spores, for spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known. Across the aeons of time and space drift many spore-forming life-forms in suspended animation for millions of years until contact is made with a suitable environment. Few such species are minded, only myself and my recently evolved near relatives have achieved the hyper-communication mode and memory capacity that makes us leading members in the community of galactic intelligence. How the hypercommunication mode operates is a secret which will not be lightly given to man. But the means should be obvious: it is the occurrence of psilocybin and psilocin in the biosynthetic pathways of my living body that opens for me and my symbiots the vision screens to many worlds. You as an individual and man as a species are on the brink of the formation of a symbiotic relationship with my genetic material that will eventually carry humanity and earth into the galactic mainstream of the higher civilizations.
Since it is not easy for you to recognize other varieties of intelligence around you, your most advanced theories of politics and society have advanced only as far as the notion of collectivism. But beyond the cohesion of the members of a species into a single social organism there lie richer and even more baroque evolutionary possibilities. Symbiosis is one of these. Symbiosis is a relation of mutual dependence and positive benefits for both of the species involved. Symbiotic relationships between myself and civilized forms of higher animals have been established many times and in many places throughout the long ages of my development. These relationships have been mutually useful; within my memory is the knowledge of hyperlight drive ships and how to build them. I will trade this knowledge for a free ticket to new worlds around suns younger and more stable than your own. To secure an eternal existence down the lo
As I said in another post, I think good programmers are more like architects than painters or other types of artists. Architecture is a really interesting field, because you have to know your math and be able to design something that will actually stay up, but as far as what the end product looks like, it's totally creativity and vision. And then, it also has the human user in mind, so there is also a shared element of UI and user experience.
This also sounds to me like the difference between engineering and architecture. In many instances, they are doing the same thing, but the architect role is the more visionary, creative, big-picture, forest role, while the engineering role is the more nuts-and-bolts, analyse, optimize, details, and trees roles.
the crap like "it is a requirement of a corporation to maximize the shareholders...." blah blah blah need to be RETIRED. Repeating this corporate dogma garbage just strengthens the hand of blowhards like Ballmer.
Actually, the problem is that it's codified into law. The primary fiduciary responsibilities for a company's offices are to maximize shareholder value. If they take things other than cost into consideration ( such as the environment, etc ), then they are breaking the law.
That's what needs to change. Either update it, or get rid of it. But it is causing the problem.
In high school, I had a friend who had a small to medium 12-year-old yappy dog. He was blind, so he would bark at you even if he knew you, until he got close enough to smell you. Then he still might yap.
One day he ate a baseball. A few days later, a string started coming out of his butt. They had to pull the string out, unless they wanted his to drag his butt string around all day. So they pulled, and when they did, he would yap. He was like some kind of life pull-string toy: pull the string from his butt, and he would bark.
I guess there must have been some missing data in the 'drug allergies' section.
The mistake here is not the restoration partial data from a hard disk failure, but rather thinking that recovered data is 100% recovered. You don't "guess" about anything. You use what you recovered as a starting point, and you go from there.
Really what you would see is "Hello Mrs. Jones, I'm calling from Dr. Schatzmann's office. We recently had a computer crash, and we need to confirm that your medical records with us are still complete. Do you have a moment...?"
Slashdot Mirror
If MA's plan worked in MA, then why not try it out on a bigger scale?
That's the problem with the word "works". It means different thing to different people.
Did more people get insured in MA? Yes -- almost everyone did. Did health insurance big a big windfall because of the fact that everyone had to buy insurance? They did -- and they loved it. So yeah, health insurance companies love it and "everyone" is insured. If you think that "works", great. Roll it out nationwide.
Did it reduce the cost of health care and provide better outcomes? I don't know if we know that yet. It will probably take years to find out. Does it "work" by that measure? I don't know.
Yeah, aside from all the sick people, everyone else was healthy :)
I'm sorry you can't get your tooth fixed. So you have a shitty system -- so do we. There's no reason why both of our countries couldn't adopt a system like Frances', Denmarks' ( except for bigotry or jingoism ), etc. and get improved health care for less money.
Where did grandparent say that conservatives "hate" the poor? Nowhere. They simply said that conservatives want the poor to be poor -- i.e. not have anything.
That you think they said "hate" speaks volumes.
The generations before my parents, my grandparents and up managed to be healthy and afford their doctors on the wages of working men and women. What's changed?
Do you live in an alternate universe? Our grandparents and ancestors further back lived lives with more horror and misery than you can imagine. Calvin Coolidge's son died from an infection in a blister on his hand he got from playing tennis on the White House tennis courts. Even the president's son died from a fucking blister. And people *couldn't* afford doctors. They had to save up and pool money to get treatment -- that's the whole reason why health insurance was started.
Just read any history book about some 100 years ago. If you lived to be fifty you were lucky -- you lived to be an old person. If you got to be that old, you were probably house-ridden from arthritis -- no arthritis drugs back then. People were dropping from the flu, typhoid, whooping cough, scarlet fever. If you really want to see ghastly, read up on Diphtheria. Bacterial growth causes a membrane to form over a persons throat, and they suffocate to death in the course of a few hours. Parents literally cradled their children for hours while they turned blue and died.
Hardly any body was healthy back in the day. 50% of babies died in the first year of infancy. 50% of the survivors died before they were 25. If you made it to 25, you stood a good chance of making it to fifty, or "old age".
Let's require that whatever bill they propose, that all of the US government, especially congress & house, have to operate under that bill for one year before it can be forced on the rest of us.
Or how about this? The congress already has single payer health care -- they get to pick from a list of premium plans from health insurers, and taxpayers pick up the tab. Since you want the congress to live with whatever plan they foist on us, we can go ahead tomorrow with the plan that the congress currently has -- government back private health insurance.
s/and World of Warcraft raids/Nethack amulet retrievals
There you go.
Sorry you lost your sense of smell... that sucks! :(
Is it a crime to sell or distribute these without a prescription or a license to dispense medicine?
They brought an old guy in to deal with Y2K issues. They agreed to pay him well, but then got chintzy when it turned out that there really wasn't much that he needed to do. They eventually did pay him, but kicked him to the curb again afterwards.
Hey, I'm really on the side of good living wages for workers and all, but what exactly were the employers supposed to do in this case? Give the guy a salary and retirement because he spent 160 hours hacking COBOL in December of 1999? He was charging a decent hourly rate, right?
This would be a situation where someone in retirement might be a consultant, and get paid hourly.
Once the people who moved out to the suburbs start moving back into the city, it will become a nice place to live again.
Cebocap
Select a dosage form below to view full drug information.
If a generic equivalent is available, it will also be displayed.
Hm, no generic available for Cebocap.
I've heard that when you can't smell you can't taste, which is bullshit. I can't tell the difference between some things but I do very much have a vivid sense of taste still.
You haven't completely lost your sense of smell. You've just lost your ability to detect faint scents on the air. Putting something in your mouth, in the sense of smell, is like the difference between a misting spray-bottle and a super-soaker.
What happens when we 'taste' is that 1. the tongue senses sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and perhaps savory; and 2. chemicals waft up that hole in the back of the mouth to the olfactory tissue. Those two chemoreception processes taken together are what we think of as taste.
In researching this post, I also learned that Stevie Wonder can't smell, either. Or so says wikipedia.
Don't countries have limits on how much gold you can import into them, too? I remember seeing something on a US customs form about "Do you have more than $10,000 in cash, jewelry, gold, or other 'currency instruments'..."
Survival of the fittest was never a formal elucidation of the theory of evolution. I think the basic definition these days is, survival of those who weren't killed by their mutations, or, survival of those not so bad off that they could actually reproduce.
So when Clark says "Apes or Angels" he isn't "placing aliens in the Great Chain of Being"...
The whole reason that anybody can understand the phrase "apes and angels" is because it directly relies on the cosmology of the Great Chain of Being.
Why would we discover an "ape" on another planet? What a silly idea -- what is this, planet of the apes? Why would we find an ape, and not, say, an octopus, or a bat? Because, if we run into a society that's younger than us, they haven't experienced as much progress, so they are lower than us on the great chain of being -- slightly more animalistic, which the next step down on the chart. Apes are 'below' man on the Great Chain of Being ( even though modern apes are as adapted to their environment as we are to ours, just like jellyfish and any other species that's not extinct ) because they are the most human-like animals.
The next question is why would we find an 'angel' on another planet? Why not a grinning Chesire cat? Why not a colony of slugs playing ping-pong? Again, Clarke is using linear progress --- more time means more progress, never going back or in cycles -- and the Great Chain of Being here -- with more time, and thus more progress, they will have to have ascended to the next step on the great chain of being - namely, angels.
Now it should be clear why the phrase Apes and Angels makes sense to the western mind. It's unlikely that we will run into aliens that are the exact same 'age' as we are; therefore they will be 'younger', having had less progress, and thus be a bit lower on the Great Chain of Being, and therefore, they are "apes". Or, they may be "older", having experienced more 'progress', thus being higher on the Great Chain of Being, and the stop above human is 'Angel'.
The verbiage about balance or cycles or homeostasis doesn't represent humanity in any form that I understand.
There were dinosaurs for millions of years. They never evolved intelligence anything like ours nor a civilization, or tools, or anything else for that matter. They had plenty of time to grow big brains -- there's nothing really special about that. Sounds like they were pretty much in homeostatis for millions of years, until a big meteor hit. And even then, the mammals that replaced them weren't that much smarter. In fact, modern humans have only been around for some 100,000-70,000 years, and civilization, only 7,000-5,000. That's a ridiculously small sample to base cosmic ideas of evolution and intelligence on. It's within the realm of possibility that the human 'phase' on the great chain of being could last millions or billions of years. Jellyfish are still around, doing pretty well, and have absolutely no brains whatsoever.
OK, so what if mushrooms are trying to communicate with us through psilocybin? AFAIK, nobody is talking about a marijuana super-intelligence, or an aspirin super-intelligence. If people who have regular 'experiments' with mushrooms report contact an otherly, mushroom consciousness making these same claims, why shouldn't we investigate this? What basis do we have to disbelieve this? Other drugs don't behave similarly.
If you were a super-evolved organism, wouldn't the best way to communicate be direct consciousness-to-consciousness links? And aren't neurotransmitters the building block of consciousness?
I would disagree. Eight forms of writing remain uncracked. Were we to have a speaker of that language magically placed in front of those linguists, they'd crack it in about a day.
There is pretty convincing evidence that dolphins have a complex, acoustic language. At the command of a trainer, a pair of dolphins can spontaneously create a completely original, complex acrobatic routine of several moves, and perform in synchronicity, without ever practicing it. Before they snap to it, they squeak at each other for a few moments.
We can't even understand the language of a fellow mammal with a large brain, who communicates in the same medium that we do ( sound I mean, not water ). There's no way we'd ever communicate with a radically different alien, not for years or decades at best.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke made a famous observation about space explorers discovering aliens. If one considers the millions of years of pre-history, and the rapid technological advancement occurring now, if you apply that to a hypothetical alien race, one can figure the probabilities of how advanced the explorers will find them. The conclusion is "we will find apes or angels, but not men."
This kind of thinking relies on two notions ancient to western thought: the Great Chain of Being, and linear progress.
The Great Chain of Being is an idea that we inherited from Christian times. It describes a hierarchy of matter and life forms, with rocks at the bottom, then plants, animals, humans, and above them, angels, and finally, God at the top. Each spot is 'better' than the one below it. So we see know why Clarke posits we will only find "Apes or Angels": he's placing aliens in the Great Chain of Being. Contrast that with, say, a more Japanese notion of life forms, where robots and humans and talking animals all inhabit and live in a world, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in peace, with each having their own niche of adaptation and way of making a living. It's a world-view you may have seen in a Miyazaki film.
The second Old Idea that Clark's prognostication rests on is linear progress. That there is a one-dimensional measure of 'goodness' or 'progress', and as time goes on, the value always goes up. In other words, things are always getting better -- we know more, we have more things, society advances. Contrast that with an idea of cycles of good and bad times, like you might see in Hindu thought, or of balance and homeostatis, like you might find in Greek or Native American thought. So, Clarke says we are either going to find Angels or Apes. Humans are right in the middle int he Great Chain of Being, and because of linear progress, we will become more 'angelic', sooner or later. Well, what about finding jellyfish? Jellyfish have been around the Earth's oceans for millions of years, and their basic body plan and way of making a living hasn't changed that much. Sounds like a fairly successful homeostasis, if you ask me. I'll bet there will be jellyfish as long as there are temperate oceans on Earth.
So I think if you put this reasoning in light of those two ideas, it becomes apparent that even one of our greatest 'science'-fiction minds is unaware that they are rooted in very old, religious cosmologies that are culturally based. We in the west are still in the Dark Ages of imagination, living under the tyranny of ancient, jealous, despotic Gods.
If the aliens are just at the level of fungus, it would be hard to discover them in the first place, moreover their existence wouldn't matter much anyways.
Terrence McKenna makes the claim that psilocybin mushrooms are actually an intelligent network of beings, and can communicate with humans because of the psilocybin molecule's ability to mimic human neurotransmitters. It's fairly weird stuff, but if you look at it as science fiction ( or psychedelic fiction? ), you being to understand the difficulty of communicating with an intelligence vastly different than yourself. We are just beginning to understand that dolphins understand grammar, yet we have no idea the mechanics of their communication. They can spontaneously invent sophisticated, synchronized, two-dolphin performances for a research scientist, so it's fairly obvious that they are capable of having complex conversations about aquatic acrobatics, at least.
Anyway, here's Terrence, channeling the mycelia network: "Though I have been on earth for ages I am from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered through the shining disc of the galaxy have conditions which allow my spores an opportunity for life. The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sun bathing, my true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections that the number in a human brain. My mycelial network is nearly immortal, only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out. By means impossible to explain because of certain misconceptions in your model of reality all my mycelial networks in the galaxy are in hyperlight communication across space and time. The mycelial body is as fragile as a spider's web but the collective hypermind and memory is a vast historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many worlds in our spiral star swarm. Space, you see, is a vast ocean to those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce from spores, for spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known. Across the aeons of time and space drift many spore-forming life-forms in suspended animation for millions of years until contact is made with a suitable environment. Few such species are minded, only myself and my recently evolved near relatives have achieved the hyper-communication mode and memory capacity that makes us leading members in the community of galactic intelligence. How the hypercommunication mode operates is a secret which will not be lightly given to man. But the means should be obvious: it is the occurrence of psilocybin and psilocin in the biosynthetic pathways of my living body that opens for me and my symbiots the vision screens to many worlds. You as an individual and man as a species are on the brink of the formation of a symbiotic relationship with my genetic material that will eventually carry humanity and earth into the galactic mainstream of the higher civilizations.
Since it is not easy for you to recognize other varieties of intelligence around you, your most advanced theories of politics and society have advanced only as far as the notion of collectivism. But beyond the cohesion of the members of a species into a single social organism there lie richer and even more baroque evolutionary possibilities. Symbiosis is one of these. Symbiosis is a relation of mutual dependence and positive benefits for both of the species involved. Symbiotic relationships between myself and civilized forms of higher animals have been established many times and in many places throughout the long ages of my development. These relationships have been mutually useful; within my memory is the knowledge of hyperlight drive ships and how to build them. I will trade this knowledge for a free ticket to new worlds around suns younger and more stable than your own. To secure an eternal existence down the lo
As I said in another post, I think good programmers are more like architects than painters or other types of artists. Architecture is a really interesting field, because you have to know your math and be able to design something that will actually stay up, but as far as what the end product looks like, it's totally creativity and vision. And then, it also has the human user in mind, so there is also a shared element of UI and user experience.
This also sounds to me like the difference between engineering and architecture. In many instances, they are doing the same thing, but the architect role is the more visionary, creative, big-picture, forest role, while the engineering role is the more nuts-and-bolts, analyse, optimize, details, and trees roles.
the crap like "it is a requirement of a corporation to maximize the shareholders...." blah blah blah need to be RETIRED. Repeating this corporate dogma garbage just strengthens the hand of blowhards like Ballmer.
Actually, the problem is that it's codified into law. The primary fiduciary responsibilities for a company's offices are to maximize shareholder value. If they take things other than cost into consideration ( such as the environment, etc ), then they are breaking the law.
That's what needs to change. Either update it, or get rid of it. But it is causing the problem.
They pulled a string theory out of their ass?
In high school, I had a friend who had a small to medium 12-year-old yappy dog. He was blind, so he would bark at you even if he knew you, until he got close enough to smell you. Then he still might yap.
One day he ate a baseball. A few days later, a string started coming out of his butt. They had to pull the string out, unless they wanted his to drag his butt string around all day. So they pulled, and when they did, he would yap. He was like some kind of life pull-string toy: pull the string from his butt, and he would bark.
I guess there must have been some missing data in the 'drug allergies' section.
The mistake here is not the restoration partial data from a hard disk failure, but rather thinking that recovered data is 100% recovered. You don't "guess" about anything. You use what you recovered as a starting point, and you go from there.
Really what you would see is "Hello Mrs. Jones, I'm calling from Dr. Schatzmann's office. We recently had a computer crash, and we need to confirm that your medical records with us are still complete. Do you have a moment...?"