I don't really see what this story has to do with news for nerds
I'm going to get modded down for this but it's the honest truth and it's worth saying.
Every culture and subculture has some form of 'machismo'. In the world at large, machismo mostly consists of its literal interpretation, ie. doing those things that you stereotypically associate with being male: ie. being physically fit, healthy and attractive, being able to bed large numbers of women, being able to tolerate large amounts of drink and so on. Nerds, on the other hand, are very poor at these things. But they still need some form of token machismo so they can show off to their peers. This manifests itself in a couple of different ways. The obvious one is showing off your technical ability, eg. by displaying arcane knowledge of poorly documented parts of your OS. And another is to show off your ability to tolerate caffeine. Just observe any group of nerds together and watch the endless stream of little geeky jokes displaying their insecurity about caffeine: "The day hasn't started until my fifth coffee", "I'm a machine to turn caffeine into code", "why would anyone drink decaf?", even clothing to show off ones's capability for caffeine intake. Nerds worry that if they don't make these little comments, their ability to tolerate caffeine will be doubted and they will be perceived as somehow inferior.
And hence it's no surprise that Starbucks is an important part of geek culture.
American culture is largely geared towards mass production and easy duplication of it's art forms. A great thing for the rest of the world, but also meaning there is no reason to go to America to enjoy it.
That's only true of some American culture. And even among mass produced cultural items, many didn't really make it across the Atlantic, such as the stunning variety of classic American cars to be seen here. When I had to serve my 8 hours in comedy traffic school, and so was thrown together with a random sample of Americans from all walks of life, I was amazed by how many cultural references went right over my head because they hadn't been exported.
(1) The modern American form of Thanksgiving with its own uniquely American features bears little relation to anything currently celebrated in the UK, despite there being a historical connection.
(2) British culture from >200 years ago is part of modern American culture. You might equally (or rather, equally stupidly) claim that British culture is only 200 years old because the culture of >200 years ago is that of a different people. Unless you see culture as something inextricably bound to geography, which is a hard position to defend.
Asserting that ~200 years of American culture (using the Wild West and slavery as examples) is equatable to thousands of years of European civilization...
Get over your inferiority complex. A single human can only amass one lifetime's worth of culture and simply disregarding 200 years of culture is nothing but crass. Whether it's the food of San Francisco, or the wine of Napa, or the music of modern composers such as Barber or Cage or Glass (or jazz or hip-hop), or the movies of Hollywood, or the paintings of the countless American painters whose work goes through the museums here, or the quality TV produced in recent years, or the American language itself with a diversity and colour that's completely ignored by most Brits but is there nonetheless, or even simply the traditions of Thanksgiving (which is far more civilised than any celebration that Britain, say, has to offer), there is plenty of culture to be enjoyed here. Culture isn't just something dusty and old and found in museums, it's something still lived and breathed by people today, and dismissing 200 years is your loss.
FWIW I'm a Londoner, now living in California, and I'm no americaphile.
Is it really a good time to go looking for Iris (mag 7) when the nearly full moon is nearby in the sky? And worse, check out the Jan 4 story about observation of Sirius from the supposed island of Zylos in 11,542 BC.
Have you ever read a work of fiction? Or watched TV, or a movie, or a play? Have you ever chosen to eat food because it tastes nice rather than because it's nutritious? Have you ever done anything simply because it's interesting or fun rather than because it's useful? Are you anything other than an automaton whose function is to preserve life at all costs?
That's a $60,000 telescope in its own observatory in New Mexico. I'd love one of those beauties. It'll cost almost twice as much to do the upcoming remodel of the kitchen and bathroom in our house (SF Bay Area contractors...) but somehow it's harder justify that kind of expense on a telescope. Maybe in 20 years when I retire it won't seem so extravagant...
...geared towards the naked eye, binoculars and small telescopes have pictures on the front cover of views that you'll never see with the naked eye, binoculars or a small telescope? Even "The Backyard Astronomer's Guide", the bible of backyard astromomers, has a stunning picture of the Andromeda galaxy on the cover that looks like it was taken by Hubble, or at least something the size of a truck.
...when computers have been granted rights, machines will be seeking some pretty heavy compensation for this experiment retroactively. I'd hate to be the grandkids of the experimenters who did this.
...gotta start saving for that H-alpha telescope. Believe it or not, for about $500 you can buy a telescope that allows you to view the sun through a filter with a bandwidth of less than.1 nm. This gives you an idea of what you can see with it.
I'm not sure exactly what 'introduce' means here. It could mean 'first find out about' (as in X first hears about Y at a party) or it could mean 'first access' (as in the first thing you see on a web site). There seems to me to be a sharp distinction between these two meanings of 'introduce' and I can't imagine a judge having any kind of difficulty distinguishing them either. Your logic is fine, but the statements you're applying it to are problematic.
(exp(pi*sqrt(163)) is astonishingly close to an integer. It's not a coincidence, ie. there's a reason why, but it's pretty deep.)
Well, one's on a computer and you can click on it using a mouse. The other is a bunch of words spoken by one person to another. I don't think there's a judge on the planet who couldn't distinguish between these things.
I've never understood these "What's the difference...?" posts where someone then proceeds to describe two completely different things.
I'm reminded of Nietzsche who complained often about the way the two meanings of the word 'good' are conflated. There's good as in morally good and there's good as in...well...stuff done well. The HPV vaccine is good both senses, but its newsworthy mainly because of the moral use of the word 'good', it's morally good (IMHO) to allow people to be sexually active with a reduced chance of getting sick as a result. But if this virus didn't make people sick, few people would care about the science in itself. Proving the Poicaré Conjecture, on the other hand, is bloody good science (except that I'm not sure I'm happy calling mathematics science) despite it probably having no moral value whatsoever.
This is information-free. If 95% of Republicans were idiots and 5% of Democrats were idiots it'd still be correct to say "There are idiots on both sides of the aisle", so it doesn't tell you anything useful.
The question isn't whether or not there are idiots on one side or the other. The question is how many idiots there are on one side or the other, to what extent are those idiots informing policy and decision making, and most of all, how many of those idiots happen to be President right now.
own up to the fact that you were never really boycotting Sony
OK, I can't resist your thorough and cogent analysis, and I concede you've outed me. I was just marking them down when weighing up features. But I'm definitely not going to buy a PS3. Or a Vaio. And I'll try really hard not to buy any Celine Dion either, even if she gets really good reviews.
A committee in the UK to decide whether or not robots should get rights: Probably less than $1,000,000
Paying religious organisations in the US to tell people not to have sex: $50,000,000
a business--which sells a good intended to make you better--is not going to sell goods that they know will kill their customer.
You can build a business that kills its customers as long as you recruit new customers faster than you kill them. That is all you need. The public has already demonstrated its willingness to invest large sums of money in 'natural' remedies that have absolutely no effect (or even adverse effects). The public has already demonstrated its willingness to spend even more money on a product that kills it. So it's pretty obvious that the public (especially desperate people) would be perfectly happy to buy products from a company that sells 'medicines' that kill it if it could. The question is not whether or not this would happen, the question is to what degree this is acceptable.
It's just pointless to argue with mother nature when it comes to design.
Nature, screw you for making me susceptible to flu.
There, I just argued with mother nature. OK, it was pointless, but only because she doesn't listen, not because I think she's such an optimal designer.
Slashdot Mirror
Every culture and subculture has some form of 'machismo'. In the world at large, machismo mostly consists of its literal interpretation, ie. doing those things that you stereotypically associate with being male: ie. being physically fit, healthy and attractive, being able to bed large numbers of women, being able to tolerate large amounts of drink and so on. Nerds, on the other hand, are very poor at these things. But they still need some form of token machismo so they can show off to their peers. This manifests itself in a couple of different ways. The obvious one is showing off your technical ability, eg. by displaying arcane knowledge of poorly documented parts of your OS. And another is to show off your ability to tolerate caffeine. Just observe any group of nerds together and watch the endless stream of little geeky jokes displaying their insecurity about caffeine: "The day hasn't started until my fifth coffee", "I'm a machine to turn caffeine into code", "why would anyone drink decaf?", even clothing to show off ones's capability for caffeine intake. Nerds worry that if they don't make these little comments, their ability to tolerate caffeine will be doubted and they will be perceived as somehow inferior.
And hence it's no surprise that Starbucks is an important part of geek culture.
(2) British culture from >200 years ago is part of modern American culture. You might equally (or rather, equally stupidly) claim that British culture is only 200 years old because the culture of >200 years ago is that of a different people. Unless you see culture as something inextricably bound to geography, which is a hard position to defend.
FWIW I'm a Londoner, now living in California, and I'm no americaphile.
Is that like letting gravity take its course?
Is it really a good time to go looking for Iris (mag 7) when the nearly full moon is nearby in the sky? And worse, check out the Jan 4 story about observation of Sirius from the supposed island of Zylos in 11,542 BC.
Have you ever read a work of fiction? Or watched TV, or a movie, or a play? Have you ever chosen to eat food because it tastes nice rather than because it's nutritious? Have you ever done anything simply because it's interesting or fun rather than because it's useful? Are you anything other than an automaton whose function is to preserve life at all costs?
That's a $60,000 telescope in its own observatory in New Mexico. I'd love one of those beauties. It'll cost almost twice as much to do the upcoming remodel of the kitchen and bathroom in our house (SF Bay Area contractors...) but somehow it's harder justify that kind of expense on a telescope. Maybe in 20 years when I retire it won't seem so extravagant...
...geared towards the naked eye, binoculars and small telescopes have pictures on the front cover of views that you'll never see with the naked eye, binoculars or a small telescope? Even "The Backyard Astronomer's Guide", the bible of backyard astromomers, has a stunning picture of the Andromeda galaxy on the cover that looks like it was taken by Hubble, or at least something the size of a truck.
...when computers have been granted rights, machines will be seeking some pretty heavy compensation for this experiment retroactively. I'd hate to be the grandkids of the experimenters who did this.
I'm not kidding!
...gotta start saving for that H-alpha telescope. Believe it or not, for about $500 you can buy a telescope that allows you to view the sun through a filter with a bandwidth of less than .1 nm. This gives you an idea of what you can see with it.
(exp(pi*sqrt(163)) is astonishingly close to an integer. It's not a coincidence, ie. there's a reason why, but it's pretty deep.)
I think you're using the word 'introduce' ambiguously and using one meaning to derive X->W and one to derive X->Y.
Is a computer virus protected speech?
I've never understood these "What's the difference...?" posts where someone then proceeds to describe two completely different things.
I'm reminded of Nietzsche who complained often about the way the two meanings of the word 'good' are conflated. There's good as in morally good and there's good as in...well...stuff done well. The HPV vaccine is good both senses, but its newsworthy mainly because of the moral use of the word 'good', it's morally good (IMHO) to allow people to be sexually active with a reduced chance of getting sick as a result. But if this virus didn't make people sick, few people would care about the science in itself. Proving the Poicaré Conjecture, on the other hand, is bloody good science (except that I'm not sure I'm happy calling mathematics science) despite it probably having no moral value whatsoever.
The question isn't whether or not there are idiots on one side or the other. The question is how many idiots there are on one side or the other, to what extent are those idiots informing policy and decision making, and most of all, how many of those idiots happen to be President right now.
You just caught the tail end of the argument. I explained very carefully what the problem was but nature didn't respond so I lost my temper...
A committee in the UK to decide whether or not robots should get rights: Probably less than $1,000,000
Paying religious organisations in the US to tell people not to have sex: $50,000,000
There, I just argued with mother nature. OK, it was pointless, but only because she doesn't listen, not because I think she's such an optimal designer.