Really? So let's say that Alice enslaves Bob. Alice claims that this makes Bob her property. Bob claims that he has a civil right to not be enslaved. You're saying that you'd agree with Alice?
That argument is crushing on the outside, terrible on the inside (mmmm...).
If you're considering Bob as "Personal Property", which would be required for Alice to enslave him, then who owned Bob before Alice enslaved him? Hopefully, you're smart enough to realize it's Bob, or to argue that every person is first the property of himself. Thus, it's a personal property issue BEFORE it's a civil rights/personal liberties issue. Essentially, the argument would be that Alice is stealing Bob from Bob (or some other owner).
While I don't think the grandparent's system works (deontological systems like that always have holes), your response to it is even worse.
I've looked into a lot of these claims, and most of them are nonsense.
That may be true, but let me share a personal anecdote. Studying in Ohio during 2004, I was glad that my vote might "count" for something, and eagerly anticipated the elections. Being in a (rich and somewhat elitist) college town, you can imagine that liberal sentiment was widespread. Sure, there were a few Bush supporters, but almost everyone I knew of planned on voting Kerry. This is a sizable group of people, several thousand.
The (Republican) voting officials assigned us just TWO voting machines, which coincidentally turned out to be the two oldest in the county. One broke after about an hour in use.
Personally, I ended up standing in line almost 11 hours to vote. Some people stayed in excess of 13 hours (by far the highest in the nation). Needless to say, our votes didn't make it into the county tallies.
Meanwhile, the "townies" (rural and overwhelmingly Bush supporters according to results) had surplus machines, and faced no wait.
I'm not saying that Kerry would have won anyway, but just the brazenness of these people's anti-competitive activities astounded me. I can certainly believe that lesser forms of the same or similar methods were enforced in other areas of the state. IIRC, Ken Blackwell, then Secretary of State (no idea if he still is), said that he would do whatever it took to re-elect Bush. I think that's a quote, but I'm not certain. Certainly, this implies no illegal activity, but given the political climate, I certainly wouldn't rule it out.
That's such crap. There are plenty of linux users who don't mind using proprietary software; I would argue that most people do in fact use proprietary non-f/oss software on free operating environments. You just have to make it worth it for them
Doesn't bother me. Would O'Reilly have written those books if there were a wall around Russia and no Russian could possibly buy them? I bet they would. In that case, they don't need the incentive of the Russian market.
-1, What?!
That's not the issue at all. There are 2 arguments here. One is international, the other is domestic. For the domestic argument, I fail to see how those who attack copyrights can possibly have a leg to stand on with respect to intellectual works. Consider this; if, one day after O'Reilly publishes a book, I can print 100,000 or whatever copies of that book that are EXACTLY identical to the original, while selling them at a fraction of the price, could you please tell me what effect that would have on the authorship market? Regardless of whether you think people "deserve" to earn money for their creating works, how can you possibly deny that it would make fields like professional public authorship disappear faster than SCO once everything hits court? Even if people don't deserve a right to earnings from their productions, if they can't actually make any money with it, it will ruin at the very least the possibility of being a writer that produces works for the public domain at a per-copy fee (technical writers and contracted people who generated content would be ok, though).
That seems distressing enough to my conception of how intellectual growth happens that I reject it out of hand. The international question, on the other hand, is even more convincing. Consider this: if Russia does not have any copyright laws, and therefore there stands to be no profit for published works from America there, what American publishing firm or author would export there? Who would provide services to such a non-paying constituency (for things that don't have intrinsic merit, like open source development)? Sure, Russia can do whatever it wants, and maybe it would eventually realize that it is a poor policy that eliminates imported intellectual materials. Furthermore, such actions degrade the overall price structure; if there are less people worldwide buying, the purchasing people have to pay more per copy. Economically, that's unsound global policy, and amounts to a 'tyranny of the could' -- just because you can is no justification. To extend your simplistic formulation: if every other country in the world built walls around its borders, would O'Reilly still publish? Yes, but it would suck for everyone involved, from O'Reilly on down.
Actually, I was shot by a pro photographer for US News and World Report this week for several hours, and he uses Nikon equipment. He told me that Nikon is now considering sponsoring him, to the tune of not one, but two new $5k cameras, plus full equipment loadout.
Nope. This is not a strictly binary conclusion; there are implications of the phrase. For example -- compare 'I had dinner at the restaurant, and I have to say, it was not unacceptable." vs. "I had dinner at the restaurant, and I have to say, it was acceptable." That is not a phrase without nuance; to say it was simply acceptable is a much more positive attribution, I believe, than to say that it is not unacceptable.
The very action of the negation implies the possibility of that negation being absent. If you want to phrase it logically correctly, the double negation of "it is acceptable" is "it is not the case that 'it is not the case that 'it is acceptable' is true' is true.' Yay baby logic.
I disagree -- it is your right. However, it is a right that our culture sees fit to impinge upon, and rightly so, according to me. I think that you should be able (in general) to spend YOUR money however you want to spend it. However, some freedoms damage overall freedom of the society.
No, actually, it's not sound. It assumes that you are running it on one computer. I could develop a platform solely to run that program over a distributed network.
It goes on to say even though Americans are wealthier than people of other countries, somehow people with more wealth in America have a lower standard of living than people with less wealth in other countries because the distribution of wealth in the US is more uneven. That argument doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, does it?
Umm, of course it does? Consider the basic economics of this:
1) There are a lot more people with wealth in America
2) Our wealth distribution system entails that people continue to maintain or increase that level of wealth, on average.
3) Many products and services in America are provided by Americans, and those that are not are heavily penalized (so that American businesses can compete).
4) Those providing the products and services to Americans must maintain higher prices to maintain the higher level of wealth (see 2).
In fact, this is obvious to anyone who thinks about it. I am by no means waelthy in America (by our wealth distribution system) -- but my wealth compared to, say, an average person from Pakistan, is pretty ridiculous.
And it's not a matter of exchange rates or currency, obviously. Australians make less money (all things equal) than Americans, but their goods and services cost less because of their distribution of wealth, so their economic system generates a higher standard of living (in terms of goods and products acquirable by the average person).
Now why would you think that wouldn't stand up to much scrutiny?
Still, though -- even though that formulation oversimplifies it a bit, it's not that much of an oversimplification. The statistic definitely means higher population density in those areas. The point is that it is highly unfair to compare high-density populations to lower-density populations.
That argument and also the proof to which you link are equally fallacious. They both assume that your systems are discrete, which is certainly not the case. Furthermore, the original proof (while funny) absolutely neglects the possibility of modularized computing, as well as parallel analysis.
Think of it like this: if we were to colonize now, would that mean that we would stop all development of technologies relevant to colonization, or that we would have no communication with a colony? This is certainly preposterous. These are not discrete systems -- if other worlds were colonized, they could be simultaneously enhanced through research on terra firma.
Similarly, the linked argument is fallacious because it assumes that we must 1) run the program only on the fastest computer, one at a time, and 2) that we must re-start the entire process when newer computers become available. Quite to the contrary, a faster computer could certainly "pick up where its predecessor left off" -- or alternatively, for example, a distributed parallel model could be used, and different computational portions of the task could be delegated to modularized computing components. (As an aside, there is also a metaphysical question that lies in that problem -- I would personally argue that his C program, assuming that it will at some point be computable, simply is precisely the detail of a googolplex, just as the gzipped 10gb file simply is the computed number compressed)
To bring this analysis back into focus -- while I agree that there may be prudent practical concerns that could delay space colonization, the argument you are trying to make here simply doesn't work.
Does our bring have a "ping." That is to say, if we had a leg where the nerve receptors has died, but the muscle nerves work (leprosy?), can you tell if it is moving when we want it to, or is the only return signal from the nerves that sense touch?
We have sensory and motor neurons, and they are wholly distinct. You can theoretically lose all sense of feel, but still be able to move your muscle with the motor neuron. As a matter of fact, this is why, for example, chickens will keep moving after decapitation. The sensory neurons are obviously detached from the major processing center, but the motor neurons continue to fire. However, it turns out that motor and sensory neurons tend to travel along the same neural pathways, which means that if one gets screwed up, so does the other, especially in accidental paralysis. Thus, these chips would bridge the gap, allowing the activation of one motor neuron somewhere else in the system (i.e. where the neural pathway was originally severed during an accident) and the paralyzed part. It's like patching a cut cable, essentially, but about a thosand times more complicated, since there are millions of cables, and it's hard to figure out which one to patch =P.
It would be interesting to see if a wireless connection could handle brain bandwidth. I'd imagine that for the simple operatings such as moving an object etc low bandwidth is required. For a fully pluggable experience (how about integrating touch, hearing, and the optic nerve to pilot a mini-plane) I'd imagine that quite a lot of bandwidth is needed, as well as fairly low latency.
Well, you'd imagine fairly wrong, methinks. This research does not even begin to come close to any kind of pluggable experience. There are more possible neural pathways in one brain than there are atoms in the universe, as far as we know. What this research is doing is to allow the functioning of a normal part of the brain (motor neuron 1) to activate an abnormal, paralyzed part of the body (dysfunctional motor neuron 2). The reason they are using a chip is because it turns out that they are going to try to bridge more than one gap, of course. If you could only move one tiny little part of one muscle, it wouldn't be very effective, now would it? But the bandwidth is relatively small, and latency isn't that hard, since the electrical impulses in your body only travel about 200 mph, and since it's not exactly a long way from your head to your toes, differences in latency would be relatively unnoticeable.
Is this the same as a data collision or just lack of reaction speed due to the muscle not being well enough toned
The most probable explanation is that it is a reflex, generally a survival trait. When you kick your leg repeatedly and quickly, your body tries to take over and make the whole process faster, reflexively cutting out the brain from the loop and just kicking your leg for you. This is so that your body can do things faster than your brain can command it to, like in running or swimming, where it might be necessary. This is what happens when you bounce your leg up and down while sitting, and it kind of finds its own rhythm, and if you try to disturb it consciously, it just makes your leg twitch out of rhythm; it's a reflexive twitch.
If it cost some hard drive manufacturer the same amount to make a 250GB disk as it did to make a 125GB disk, they'd just make the 250GB and they'd sell it for only half again what the 125GB costs, and put everyone else out of business.
No, that's simply not true. You are only figuring short-term and material costs. The company has to make up money for R&D, engineering, and a thousand other things too. So they develop a price structure that allows them to make the maximum money. If they sold a 250gb hard drive for less, that would just be less overall money that they could make.
The price of hard drives has nothing to do with the actual "value" of the drive, it is purely driven by what the market can bear. And thanks to competition, what the market can bear is typically sinking, so that the price structures for hard drive companies are slowly falling, and the amount of TOTAL money the companies are pulling in is just enough to keep them afloat, etc. But nobody can raise prices, or they'll go out of business for lack of customers. Similarly, nobody can lower prices, or they won't be taking in enough money to fund their operations. It's like an economic mutually assured destruction.
Wonderful, you use a case of a person who I have never heard of, and who, when googled, returns no results. Here are the facts on autism intelligence, and I can actually support mine, quoted from a course lecture on autism:
75% have below-average IQs, and only about 5-10 percent are significantly above average (i.e. more than 105). Check the facts here. You can find more information on the common symptoms of autism here, here, and here.
Autism is a spectrum disorder, so your case is not out of the question, but would be exceptionally exceptionally rare. Nevermind that an IQ of 170 is approximately the top.05% of the population, so that's rare enough, but as you can see from the statistics quoted above, it is even rarer for someone autistic to be of that intelligence. Anyway, I hope you get a chance to read about the truth of autism, instead of the myths that you hold to be true.
Yes, I figure that you are correct insofar as it brings to light the truth about autism in this fashion. And yes, the competency you are referring to is called "islets of competence" -- this is because autism is a "spectrum" disorder. Some autistics are completely devoid of some symptoms, but manifest the others strongly. Thus, someone can be excellent at problem-solving (i.e. deterministic logic), but horrible at almost anything else. I forget exactly what the figure is, but I think about a third of diagnosed autistics are non-verbal.
no one feels under the weather for a time, they have chronic fatigue syndrome
I think you have no clue what this is. Chronic fatigue is not just feeling sleepy frequently, or some weakness like that, but a truly crippling disease. Laura Hillenbrand, Kenyon College graduate and author of "Seabiscuit: An American Legend," which later became the movie after being a best-seller, has been plagued by this disease for years, and has written a truly insightful and moving article about it, which was published in the New Yorker. Here is a link:
Wow -- I find this post both ignorant, and insultingly preachy. Not only is it Asperger's syndrome, which displays a face ignorance of the subject matter, but you move on to disgrace even another illness: Autism.
In Rain Man, it is the autistic savantism that is documented, NOT Asperger's. Here are the basic facts, of which you are obviously unaware:
1) Autism is a neurological disorder that is generally present from birth, and includes debilitating symptoms, such as heightened sensory sensitivity (to the point of pain), lack of verbal behavior, and severely retarded IQ.
2) The phenomenon displayed in Rain Man is called autistic savantism, which occurs in approximately 1 in 6 autistic individuals.
3) Savants do not have high intelligence, but rather exceptional specialized skills. This is one of the weaknesses of the film. Almost all autistic savants are still severely retarded, but they have particular skills that are amazing, but not completely out of the bounds of human sensibility. For example, an autistic savants may be able to take one look at a tree, and tell you exactly how many leaves it has on it, instantly. This is because they don't count, like we do, just see, and understand. Something similar, but normal, is the fact that normal people can remember a complex tune after only one listening, and reproduce it. Somehow, our brains are more able to organize auditory phenomena, so that they can be accurately recalled.
Autism is a crippling disease, and is almost certainly not something that this particular child has, or else he would probably find no place in normal schools.
Just as frequently as I do now -- when I might actually _need_ a car. I don't know if I'm alone in the world here, but I don't think that a car is something you just kind of want, and then buy, even though you don't need it, like a candy bar or something. When my car goes bust, I'll consider buying a new one. If I had a family member that needed a car, I might consider buying a new one. If I were unhappy with my current car, I'd sell it, and buy a new one. It has very little to do with wanting, for me at least.
Thus, I agree that car companies waste a ton of money.
I'm sorry -- I don't know why anyone modded this insightful. Let me point some things out to you:
Consider the following example. I'll never buy a Ferrari. But let me just take it out for a spin. I'll return it in the same condition
Fine! If you can bring my Ferrari back with all of the parts in exactly the same condition, i.e. with no miles added to the car, no extra wear on the engine, seats, or otherwise, and it wouldn't be during a time at which I would be using the car, then go right ahead. This argument is awful -- you are assuming, instead, that you will NOT return it in the same conditions -- i.e. that it will have some extra wear, and chance of an accident. This is not the case for movies/music.
Or how about software? Do you extend that view to software too? Should anyone be paying for ANY software?
You are totally missing the parent's point. If I would have otherwise bought the software, yes. For example, if I didn't use gimp, I would probably buy photoshop. But if I use photoshop for a little while anyway, I don't think it is that big of a deal. Pay for what you would have otherwise bought.
If a company loses money, they won't just cut the high salary personnel! They generally do across the board cuts. Layoff people, make them work harder, lower their wages, etc. Have you looked at other industries? Who loses when a company struggles? Do CEOs lose their jobs, or get their wages cut?
While it's true that businesses cut corners everywhere they can, I can assure you that some of the first to get the axe will be the higher-ups. If your business starts going down, they don't blame the gaffer. They blame the execs. And anyway, most of the lower-level workers have set wages by guilds/unions, so in the most literal sense, it does not directly cut their wages.
This is exactly how my relationship with my parents is -- I was planning on writing something similar in response right before I read this post. This is certainly, in my opinion, the most insightful post I've seen all year, because it demonstrates a parenting principle that you don't see frequently: autonomy.
My recommendation is that all of you parents out there tell your children "hey, you can do whatever you want, but keep in mind it's your life, not mine. If you screw up, you're going to have to rely on yourself, and nobody else." But despite that, I think that you need to help them understand why drugs/drinking/stupidity are bad ideas in the first place. In America today, we say "no no no, don't do/think about/talk about/be interested in that, ignore it as much as you can." But, as my parent poster here and I exemplify, I think, it is deep, meaningful knowledge of the world's temptations that help us autonomously develop, rather than mere stagnation in the standard child-parent roles.
Slashdot Mirror
That argument is crushing on the outside, terrible on the inside (mmmm...).
If you're considering Bob as "Personal Property", which would be required for Alice to enslave him, then who owned Bob before Alice enslaved him? Hopefully, you're smart enough to realize it's Bob, or to argue that every person is first the property of himself. Thus, it's a personal property issue BEFORE it's a civil rights/personal liberties issue. Essentially, the argument would be that Alice is stealing Bob from Bob (or some other owner).
While I don't think the grandparent's system works (deontological systems like that always have holes), your response to it is even worse.
That may be true, but let me share a personal anecdote. Studying in Ohio during 2004, I was glad that my vote might "count" for something, and eagerly anticipated the elections. Being in a (rich and somewhat elitist) college town, you can imagine that liberal sentiment was widespread. Sure, there were a few Bush supporters, but almost everyone I knew of planned on voting Kerry. This is a sizable group of people, several thousand.
The (Republican) voting officials assigned us just TWO voting machines, which coincidentally turned out to be the two oldest in the county. One broke after about an hour in use.
Personally, I ended up standing in line almost 11 hours to vote. Some people stayed in excess of 13 hours (by far the highest in the nation). Needless to say, our votes didn't make it into the county tallies.
Meanwhile, the "townies" (rural and overwhelmingly Bush supporters according to results) had surplus machines, and faced no wait.
I'm not saying that Kerry would have won anyway, but just the brazenness of these people's anti-competitive activities astounded me. I can certainly believe that lesser forms of the same or similar methods were enforced in other areas of the state. IIRC, Ken Blackwell, then Secretary of State (no idea if he still is), said that he would do whatever it took to re-elect Bush. I think that's a quote, but I'm not certain. Certainly, this implies no illegal activity, but given the political climate, I certainly wouldn't rule it out.
Wow -- I had honestly never thought of that. Thank you; I think that was the most insightful comment I have ever read on Slashdot.
Umm -- probably because some idiots without "good intentions" could steal enough information to steal the identity of everyone in the database? Yeah.
I believe the color you are looking for there is a nice shade of ass for that hat.
That's such crap. There are plenty of linux users who don't mind using proprietary software; I would argue that most people do in fact use proprietary non-f/oss software on free operating environments. You just have to make it worth it for them
Man, those professional philosophers are going to be mighty disappointed.
-1, What?!
That's not the issue at all. There are 2 arguments here. One is international, the other is domestic. For the domestic argument, I fail to see how those who attack copyrights can possibly have a leg to stand on with respect to intellectual works. Consider this; if, one day after O'Reilly publishes a book, I can print 100,000 or whatever copies of that book that are EXACTLY identical to the original, while selling them at a fraction of the price, could you please tell me what effect that would have on the authorship market? Regardless of whether you think people "deserve" to earn money for their creating works, how can you possibly deny that it would make fields like professional public authorship disappear faster than SCO once everything hits court? Even if people don't deserve a right to earnings from their productions, if they can't actually make any money with it, it will ruin at the very least the possibility of being a writer that produces works for the public domain at a per-copy fee (technical writers and contracted people who generated content would be ok, though).
That seems distressing enough to my conception of how intellectual growth happens that I reject it out of hand. The international question, on the other hand, is even more convincing. Consider this: if Russia does not have any copyright laws, and therefore there stands to be no profit for published works from America there, what American publishing firm or author would export there? Who would provide services to such a non-paying constituency (for things that don't have intrinsic merit, like open source development)? Sure, Russia can do whatever it wants, and maybe it would eventually realize that it is a poor policy that eliminates imported intellectual materials. Furthermore, such actions degrade the overall price structure; if there are less people worldwide buying, the purchasing people have to pay more per copy. Economically, that's unsound global policy, and amounts to a 'tyranny of the could' -- just because you can is no justification. To extend your simplistic formulation: if every other country in the world built walls around its borders, would O'Reilly still publish? Yes, but it would suck for everyone involved, from O'Reilly on down.
Actually, I was shot by a pro photographer for US News and World Report this week for several hours, and he uses Nikon equipment. He told me that Nikon is now considering sponsoring him, to the tune of not one, but two new $5k cameras, plus full equipment loadout.
The very action of the negation implies the possibility of that negation being absent. If you want to phrase it logically correctly, the double negation of "it is acceptable" is "it is not the case that 'it is not the case that 'it is acceptable' is true' is true.' Yay baby logic.
I disagree -- it is your right. However, it is a right that our culture sees fit to impinge upon, and rightly so, according to me. I think that you should be able (in general) to spend YOUR money however you want to spend it. However, some freedoms damage overall freedom of the society.
No, actually, it's not sound. It assumes that you are running it on one computer. I could develop a platform solely to run that program over a distributed network.
It goes on to say even though Americans are wealthier than people of other countries, somehow people with more wealth in America have a lower standard of living than people with less wealth in other countries because the distribution of wealth in the US is more uneven. That argument doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, does it?
Umm, of course it does? Consider the basic economics of this:
1) There are a lot more people with wealth in America
2) Our wealth distribution system entails that people continue to maintain or increase that level of wealth, on average.
3) Many products and services in America are provided by Americans, and those that are not are heavily penalized (so that American businesses can compete).
4) Those providing the products and services to Americans must maintain higher prices to maintain the higher level of wealth (see 2).
In fact, this is obvious to anyone who thinks about it. I am by no means waelthy in America (by our wealth distribution system) -- but my wealth compared to, say, an average person from Pakistan, is pretty ridiculous.
And it's not a matter of exchange rates or currency, obviously. Australians make less money (all things equal) than Americans, but their goods and services cost less because of their distribution of wealth, so their economic system generates a higher standard of living (in terms of goods and products acquirable by the average person).
Now why would you think that wouldn't stand up to much scrutiny?
Still, though -- even though that formulation oversimplifies it a bit, it's not that much of an oversimplification. The statistic definitely means higher population density in those areas. The point is that it is highly unfair to compare high-density populations to lower-density populations.
That argument and also the proof to which you link are equally fallacious. They both assume that your systems are discrete, which is certainly not the case. Furthermore, the original proof (while funny) absolutely neglects the possibility of modularized computing, as well as parallel analysis.
Think of it like this: if we were to colonize now, would that mean that we would stop all development of technologies relevant to colonization, or that we would have no communication with a colony? This is certainly preposterous. These are not discrete systems -- if other worlds were colonized, they could be simultaneously enhanced through research on terra firma.
Similarly, the linked argument is fallacious because it assumes that we must 1) run the program only on the fastest computer, one at a time, and 2) that we must re-start the entire process when newer computers become available. Quite to the contrary, a faster computer could certainly "pick up where its predecessor left off" -- or alternatively, for example, a distributed parallel model could be used, and different computational portions of the task could be delegated to modularized computing components. (As an aside, there is also a metaphysical question that lies in that problem -- I would personally argue that his C program, assuming that it will at some point be computable, simply is precisely the detail of a googolplex, just as the gzipped 10gb file simply is the computed number compressed)
To bring this analysis back into focus -- while I agree that there may be prudent practical concerns that could delay space colonization, the argument you are trying to make here simply doesn't work.
We have sensory and motor neurons, and they are wholly distinct. You can theoretically lose all sense of feel, but still be able to move your muscle with the motor neuron. As a matter of fact, this is why, for example, chickens will keep moving after decapitation. The sensory neurons are obviously detached from the major processing center, but the motor neurons continue to fire. However, it turns out that motor and sensory neurons tend to travel along the same neural pathways, which means that if one gets screwed up, so does the other, especially in accidental paralysis. Thus, these chips would bridge the gap, allowing the activation of one motor neuron somewhere else in the system (i.e. where the neural pathway was originally severed during an accident) and the paralyzed part. It's like patching a cut cable, essentially, but about a thosand times more complicated, since there are millions of cables, and it's hard to figure out which one to patch =P.
It would be interesting to see if a wireless connection could handle brain bandwidth. I'd imagine that for the simple operatings such as moving an object etc low bandwidth is required. For a fully pluggable experience (how about integrating touch, hearing, and the optic nerve to pilot a mini-plane) I'd imagine that quite a lot of bandwidth is needed, as well as fairly low latency.
Well, you'd imagine fairly wrong, methinks. This research does not even begin to come close to any kind of pluggable experience. There are more possible neural pathways in one brain than there are atoms in the universe, as far as we know. What this research is doing is to allow the functioning of a normal part of the brain (motor neuron 1) to activate an abnormal, paralyzed part of the body (dysfunctional motor neuron 2). The reason they are using a chip is because it turns out that they are going to try to bridge more than one gap, of course. If you could only move one tiny little part of one muscle, it wouldn't be very effective, now would it? But the bandwidth is relatively small, and latency isn't that hard, since the electrical impulses in your body only travel about 200 mph, and since it's not exactly a long way from your head to your toes, differences in latency would be relatively unnoticeable.
Is this the same as a data collision or just lack of reaction speed due to the muscle not being well enough toned
The most probable explanation is that it is a reflex, generally a survival trait. When you kick your leg repeatedly and quickly, your body tries to take over and make the whole process faster, reflexively cutting out the brain from the loop and just kicking your leg for you. This is so that your body can do things faster than your brain can command it to, like in running or swimming, where it might be necessary. This is what happens when you bounce your leg up and down while sitting, and it kind of finds its own rhythm, and if you try to disturb it consciously, it just makes your leg twitch out of rhythm; it's a reflexive twitch.
No, that's simply not true. You are only figuring short-term and material costs. The company has to make up money for R&D, engineering, and a thousand other things too. So they develop a price structure that allows them to make the maximum money. If they sold a 250gb hard drive for less, that would just be less overall money that they could make.
The price of hard drives has nothing to do with the actual "value" of the drive, it is purely driven by what the market can bear. And thanks to competition, what the market can bear is typically sinking, so that the price structures for hard drive companies are slowly falling, and the amount of TOTAL money the companies are pulling in is just enough to keep them afloat, etc. But nobody can raise prices, or they'll go out of business for lack of customers. Similarly, nobody can lower prices, or they won't be taking in enough money to fund their operations. It's like an economic mutually assured destruction.
75% have below-average IQs, and only about 5-10 percent are significantly above average (i.e. more than 105). Check the facts here. You can find more information on the common symptoms of autism here, here, and here.
Autism is a spectrum disorder, so your case is not out of the question, but would be exceptionally exceptionally rare. Nevermind that an IQ of 170 is approximately the top .05% of the population, so that's rare enough, but as you can see from the statistics quoted above, it is even rarer for someone autistic to be of that intelligence. Anyway, I hope you get a chance to read about the truth of autism, instead of the myths that you hold to be true.
One excellent resource is Autism-resources.com
I think you have no clue what this is. Chronic fatigue is not just feeling sleepy frequently, or some weakness like that, but a truly crippling disease. Laura Hillenbrand, Kenyon College graduate and author of "Seabiscuit: An American Legend," which later became the movie after being a best-seller, has been plagued by this disease for years, and has written a truly insightful and moving article about it, which was published in the New Yorker. Here is a link:
http://www.cfids-cab.org/MESA/Hillenbrand.html
In Rain Man, it is the autistic savantism that is documented, NOT Asperger's. Here are the basic facts, of which you are obviously unaware:
1) Autism is a neurological disorder that is generally present from birth, and includes debilitating symptoms, such as heightened sensory sensitivity (to the point of pain), lack of verbal behavior, and severely retarded IQ.
2) The phenomenon displayed in Rain Man is called autistic savantism, which occurs in approximately 1 in 6 autistic individuals.
3) Savants do not have high intelligence, but rather exceptional specialized skills. This is one of the weaknesses of the film. Almost all autistic savants are still severely retarded, but they have particular skills that are amazing, but not completely out of the bounds of human sensibility. For example, an autistic savants may be able to take one look at a tree, and tell you exactly how many leaves it has on it, instantly. This is because they don't count, like we do, just see, and understand. Something similar, but normal, is the fact that normal people can remember a complex tune after only one listening, and reproduce it. Somehow, our brains are more able to organize auditory phenomena, so that they can be accurately recalled.
Autism is a crippling disease, and is almost certainly not something that this particular child has, or else he would probably find no place in normal schools.
Thus, I agree that car companies waste a ton of money.
Cheers,
Consider the following example. I'll never buy a Ferrari. But let me just take it out for a spin. I'll return it in the same condition
Fine! If you can bring my Ferrari back with all of the parts in exactly the same condition, i.e. with no miles added to the car, no extra wear on the engine, seats, or otherwise, and it wouldn't be during a time at which I would be using the car, then go right ahead. This argument is awful -- you are assuming, instead, that you will NOT return it in the same conditions -- i.e. that it will have some extra wear, and chance of an accident. This is not the case for movies/music.
Or how about software? Do you extend that view to software too? Should anyone be paying for ANY software?
You are totally missing the parent's point. If I would have otherwise bought the software, yes. For example, if I didn't use gimp, I would probably buy photoshop. But if I use photoshop for a little while anyway, I don't think it is that big of a deal. Pay for what you would have otherwise bought.
If a company loses money, they won't just cut the high salary personnel! They generally do across the board cuts. Layoff people, make them work harder, lower their wages, etc. Have you looked at other industries? Who loses when a company struggles? Do CEOs lose their jobs, or get their wages cut?
While it's true that businesses cut corners everywhere they can, I can assure you that some of the first to get the axe will be the higher-ups. If your business starts going down, they don't blame the gaffer. They blame the execs. And anyway, most of the lower-level workers have set wages by guilds/unions, so in the most literal sense, it does not directly cut their wages.
My recommendation is that all of you parents out there tell your children "hey, you can do whatever you want, but keep in mind it's your life, not mine. If you screw up, you're going to have to rely on yourself, and nobody else." But despite that, I think that you need to help them understand why drugs/drinking/stupidity are bad ideas in the first place. In America today, we say "no no no, don't do/think about/talk about/be interested in that, ignore it as much as you can." But, as my parent poster here and I exemplify, I think, it is deep, meaningful knowledge of the world's temptations that help us autonomously develop, rather than mere stagnation in the standard child-parent roles.
Have a nice day.