The question was rhetorical, but I'm happy that you're happy.:-) My point was is that we're motiviated by different things, and see my reply to the other reply that perhaps "happiness" is too ill-defined a term, and that I'm probably searching for another term. "Contentment", maybe? That sounds a bit to passive to me. "Happiness", more or less uniquely defined for each individual, is about as good as it gets describing something so subjective.
Hmmm. You've got a point, and perhaps "happy" is not the best word in the world. But what else motiviates you? A sense of great accomplishment? I had a friend who got hooked on heroin and he explained to me why it was so hard for him to quit. The sensation he got from heroin was exactly that feeling. He got the instant feeling of "I am a god" one gets from succeeding at a difficult task. Given an advanced study and understanding of neurochemistry, the feelings we get from doing the things that motivates us could be simulated with chemistry and/or electrical stimuli.
I doubt everyone would take the happy pill (I wouldn't either), but I'm afraid that many would. Given what a big business drugs are (both the licit and illicit markets), it seems that many try to do so already.
Well, yes, but the real measure of how you are doing is: are you happy? The measure of how well you did is not in the bank balance, or how great a career you have, or in your social status, but in how happy you are with your life. Those things may help improve that happiness value, but it's no guarantee.
I personally am a fairly happy guy, who likes his job making computer systems help people look at cool stuff on Mars, and comes home to a wife and son who are a lot of fun to be with. However, it's possible that my life would be construed as hell on Earth to some other people. I'd think if I were in your shoes, I don't think I'd be that happy. I'm not a guy who copes well with the limelight.
Those other guys may have "did OK" from your perspective, but are they happy now? No way of telling. I agree that seeking knowledge and wisdom has a tendency to lead to happiness because it lets you make more informed decisions, but I think happiness is a somewhat different path for everyone.
Jeez, people, it's satire! This form of satire has been around for a long time. I love how someone can write a "punishments go up, never down" hyperbole and another can write "how can we compare human life to a dollar figure?" (Hint: It's done all the time) and it gets modded insightful. I hope the original posters were extending the joke, but somehow, I get the sense that they were posting in earnest.
If you don't see the humor in this article, I beg of you to abstain from watching Farrelly Brothers and Austin Powers movies and recommend you pick up some books and read some Jonathan Swift or Oscar Wilde, to name a couple. There's more to humor than dick and fart jokes, and if you understand that, I'm sure you'll live longer.
How about E measured in libraries of congress football fields squared per microfortnight squared? That is, the energy required to accelerate the Library of Congress one football field per microfortnight per microfortnight over a distance of one football field.
A truly fitting Slashdot unit of measure, don't you think?
You could make a keyboard with a gadget that had your keyclicks recorded and a decent fidelity speaker in it. When you typed, it would play back random letters and numbers as well. Not fool-proof, but now you're forcing the eavesdropper to collect a corpus of data for your passwords and passphrases for further analysis, instead of just a one-time listen.
However, my keyboard making extra typing sounds would remove one of my own feedback sources that I'm typing what I mean to.
I do know that there is less evidence for alien life than that Jesus walked the earth; but Jesus' existence is less than universally accepted among non-believers, while alien civilization is given serious thought.
Hmmm. I think most non-believers are willing to stipulate that Jesus walked the earth. What they're unwilling to accept is Jesus was the son of God, or the divine made manifest, or that failure to believe that Jesus alone is the path of salvation from an eternal life of torment and agony. For that, I'd say the amount of evidence is approximately equivalent to evidence of the existence of alien civilizations. A few people speculating, and a few eyewitness testimonies, which any investigator will tell you are always suspect.
Really, a lot of the alien mania of the last fourty years or so is just a new form of religion that isn't much more than a pastiche of western and eastern religions run through a "s/God/aliens/g" filter. I have a hard time believing either.
The version of BASIC I learned as a youg'un (TRS-80 Extended Color BASIC) had only FOR as loop constructs. Since there were no while or until loops, I remember simulating them with FOR:
The until:
10 FOR UN = 0 TO 1 STEP 0 20 REM Whatever your program was supposed to do 30 IF condition to terminate here UN = 1 40 NEXT UN
The while:
10 FOR WH = 0 TO 1 STEP 0 20 IF condition to terminate WH = 1: NEXT WH 30 REM Code to run here 40 NEXT WH
Sick, ain't it?
For the pedants: LET was optional in Trash 80 Color BASIC, but I'm sure I'm misremembering something else here.
You may think this is utter bs, but think about this...we're still alive after those policies have been established.
Well, there's a glowing endorsement of policy: "Hey, we're not dead yet! It couldn't have been too bad!" I've been in bad car wrecks because of poor decision making (once by me, twice by someone else), but that nobody actually got hurt doesn't suddenly make these decisions brilliant. I'd also not like to repeat the experience.
The funny thing is I've been using Linux for almost as long as you have, but I'd only agree with you about poor sound support up until about 3 years ago, and I run Linux extensively on PPC and Intel platforms, with all kinds of weird sound configurations. I've not had a driver problem in YEARS, though I agree that the sound daemons are crap. My theory on sound drivers for Linux? I think Linux users are the product of two alternate universes merging, where half are saying "sound drivers are shit" and the rest are saying "WTF are you talking about?" I suppose where there's smoke there's fire, but I'll be damned if I've seen the flames in the last five years.
I'd like to use OS X, but after a got burned yet again on another shoddily built Mac (a 400 MHz G3 Pismo laptop), I vowed that Apple would never again see another dime from me. It's a vow I've kept for 4 years, and I have no intention of breaking.
John Ashcroft endorses John Kerry for President. I understand pandering to your base, but the opposition is already energized against Bush. Is he trying to energize the centrist undecideds against Bush too?
This goes to show the measures the Bush administration is having to go to to even keep their base constituency voting for them. A base which is getting thinner and thinner. Now the good ol' boys who like guns and porn (myself included!) are probably going to stay home in November.
I wish there was a real conservative to vote for. Just because you disapprove of something doesn't mean it should be illegal.
I agree. However, doing the moral thing can be illegal. A company officer who takes action against the bottom line, or take inaction to improve the bottom line, is civilly and possibly criminally liable, even if the action or inaction is morally right. If a CEO says "I know we're going to take a loss, but we're going to hold on and take care of out people until we get through this," he'll be out on rails for sure, will possibly get sued and maybe even have the SEC investigate him. Note that all those companies' executives are getting raked over the coals not because they did something immoral or unethical (although that is virutally certain), but because the shareholders lost value through their actions.
It would be nice if our modern legal system actually represented some sort of consistent moral and ethical code, but it's a crazy patchwork quilt of rules and regulations held together with duct tape and rubber bands.
What is it with this hard-on about sending "waste to the sun"? Does anybody have any idea what a silly and bad idea this is?
First, let's talk about rocket power and orbital mechanics. When things launch from Earth, they have a problem in that they are already in an orbit around the sun, so you have to come up with enough velocity to drop out of the sun's orbit. This velocity, from Earth, is about 31.8 km/s (The Russians call this the "fourth cosmic velocity" [well, they also say it in Russian.]). That's a lot of delta-v to come up with given current rocket technology. The only way to do this would be to come up with a wacky slingshot course. I haven't sat down to work the orbit, but I imagine to do this you would need an orbit that uses Jupiter to slingshot a couple of times on a 20-40 year journey to finally plunge into the sun. And I thought Mars orbital insertion was a tricky maneuver. I know it's counter-intuitive , but it actually takes a larger velocity to reach the sun from Earth orbit than it does to leave the solar system (That velocity is only 16.6 km/s).
But suppose you have a rocket that can generate 32 km/s delta-v. Now, think what happens if you miss the sun. You've now put that waste in a nifty parabolic orbit with its aphelion right near the orbit of our planet. Congratulations, you've just managed to shoot yourself with an interplanetary gun. I think it's daunting enough to realize there's jack-all we could do right now if a big asteroid was on a collision course with Earth without putting a few intensely radioactive and poisonous chunks out there on our own that we get to try and dodge.
Hey, it's not too late. Think about it. Don't you think that a manned mission to Mars, spending YEARS away from the rest of humankind, will include at LEAST one MD in its crew? If you bust your ass double hard in medical school (probably assumed anyway), and see what sorts of specializations the manned space program would be interested in, You've got a remote shot at it. The competition is always stiff, but if you don't try at all, you already know what the answer is.
So, if we found some big Jupiter sized object orbiting the sun high above the plane of the ecliptic, you would rule it out as aplanet?
What if we found nine or ten objects like that all in their own (not so) little ecliptic? Then maybe we're not on a planet.
I know that the probability of these things is highly unlikely, but I don't think a "within x degrees of the ecliptic" is an especially good definition.
Even though the CPI is holding mostly flat, concerns over deflation are a red herring as there is actually inflation in all goods right now save for one. If you look at the basket of goods that make up the CPI, you find that the only thing that has gone down is the price of housing, which in the CPI is based only on rental values. Normally this makes sense, since mortgages are mostly fixed on won't change much over time. However, given the exceptionally easy credit market we are in right now, all kinds of people are qualifying for cheap mortgages that they didn't qualify for previously. So, people are leaving the rental market in droves, driving down the price of those rentals as they try to get people to lease.
Further increasing speculation that we're heading for more inflation is the sharp increases on the prices of raw materials over the last 12 months. Once that starts to affect consumer goods (and I've noticed my groceries are getting more expensive), the credit market will tighten (because that's the almost reflexive action of central banks), and the rental exodus will stop, driving those prices back up. Higher interest rates AND inflation. It will be 1979 all over again. The best counter argument to my concern is that the drive up of raw materials is in large part driven by this same easy credit market. I'm not too convinced of that yet, but time will tell.
I'm not too worried about deflation right now.
Re:Sheesh!
on
TiVo Will Die
·
· Score: 3, Informative
There was no web in 1985, period. A connection capable of more than 2400bps was almost the exclusive province of leased line holders. SLIP was an informal pseudo standard that nobody would even think to write up as an RFC for another 3 years.
I think you may mean 1995, which really at that time was the first big year of things internet. Netscape version 1 was already out. This new C++ like web applet language called Java had just come out. The world you describe is what the net was like more c. 1993 than 1995.
I remember working for a company in 1993 where I was really interested in getting OS/2 rolled out to the user base. The apps we used on the PCs worked great, and the systems were a dream to maintain. The deal killer? The company's main computer was an IBM System/38 and we had IBM 5250 emulator cards in the PCs and the driver software for them didn't work properly on OS/2. Therefore, IBM drivers for IBM computers using an IBM card to connect to an IBM minicomputer were not supported for the IBM PC operating system that they were trying to sell at the time.
If IBM couldn't be bothered to support OS/2, I wonder what made them think anybody else would.
I think it's an efficiency thing. They now post the dupe in the same article to save us all the time of looking for the dupe article in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
The question was rhetorical, but I'm happy that you're happy. :-) My point was is that we're motiviated by different things, and see my reply to the other reply that perhaps "happiness" is too ill-defined a term, and that I'm probably searching for another term. "Contentment", maybe? That sounds a bit to passive to me. "Happiness", more or less uniquely defined for each individual, is about as good as it gets describing something so subjective.
Hmmm. You've got a point, and perhaps "happy" is not the best word in the world. But what else motiviates you? A sense of great accomplishment? I had a friend who got hooked on heroin and he explained to me why it was so hard for him to quit. The sensation he got from heroin was exactly that feeling. He got the instant feeling of "I am a god" one gets from succeeding at a difficult task. Given an advanced study and understanding of neurochemistry, the feelings we get from doing the things that motivates us could be simulated with chemistry and/or electrical stimuli.
I doubt everyone would take the happy pill (I wouldn't either), but I'm afraid that many would. Given what a big business drugs are (both the licit and illicit markets), it seems that many try to do so already.
Well, yes, but the real measure of how you are doing is: are you happy? The measure of how well you did is not in the bank balance, or how great a career you have, or in your social status, but in how happy you are with your life. Those things may help improve that happiness value, but it's no guarantee.
I personally am a fairly happy guy, who likes his job making computer systems help people look at cool stuff on Mars, and comes home to a wife and son who are a lot of fun to be with. However, it's possible that my life would be construed as hell on Earth to some other people. I'd think if I were in your shoes, I don't think I'd be that happy. I'm not a guy who copes well with the limelight.
Those other guys may have "did OK" from your perspective, but are they happy now? No way of telling. I agree that seeking knowledge and wisdom has a tendency to lead to happiness because it lets you make more informed decisions, but I think happiness is a somewhat different path for everyone.
Jeez, people, it's satire! This form of satire has been around for a long time. I love how someone can write a "punishments go up, never down" hyperbole and another can write "how can we compare human life to a dollar figure?" (Hint: It's done all the time) and it gets modded insightful. I hope the original posters were extending the joke, but somehow, I get the sense that they were posting in earnest.
If you don't see the humor in this article, I beg of you to abstain from watching Farrelly Brothers and Austin Powers movies and recommend you pick up some books and read some Jonathan Swift or Oscar Wilde, to name a couple. There's more to humor than dick and fart jokes, and if you understand that, I'm sure you'll live longer.
How about E measured in libraries of congress football fields squared per microfortnight squared? That is, the energy required to accelerate the Library of Congress one football field per microfortnight per microfortnight over a distance of one football field.
A truly fitting Slashdot unit of measure, don't you think?
You could make a keyboard with a gadget that had your keyclicks recorded and a decent fidelity speaker in it. When you typed, it would play back random letters and numbers as well. Not fool-proof, but now you're forcing the eavesdropper to collect a corpus of data for your passwords and passphrases for further analysis, instead of just a one-time listen.
However, my keyboard making extra typing sounds would remove one of my own feedback sources that I'm typing what I mean to.
Hmmm. I think most non-believers are willing to stipulate that Jesus walked the earth. What they're unwilling to accept is Jesus was the son of God, or the divine made manifest, or that failure to believe that Jesus alone is the path of salvation from an eternal life of torment and agony. For that, I'd say the amount of evidence is approximately equivalent to evidence of the existence of alien civilizations. A few people speculating, and a few eyewitness testimonies, which any investigator will tell you are always suspect.
Really, a lot of the alien mania of the last fourty years or so is just a new form of religion that isn't much more than a pastiche of western and eastern religions run through a "s/God/aliens/g" filter. I have a hard time believing either.
The version of BASIC I learned as a youg'un (TRS-80 Extended Color BASIC) had only FOR as loop constructs. Since there were no while or until loops, I remember simulating them with FOR:
The until:
The while:
Sick, ain't it?
For the pedants: LET was optional in Trash 80 Color BASIC, but I'm sure I'm misremembering something else here.
Well, there's a glowing endorsement of policy: "Hey, we're not dead yet! It couldn't have been too bad!" I've been in bad car wrecks because of poor decision making (once by me, twice by someone else), but that nobody actually got hurt doesn't suddenly make these decisions brilliant. I'd also not like to repeat the experience.
The funny thing is I've been using Linux for almost as long as you have, but I'd only agree with you about poor sound support up until about 3 years ago, and I run Linux extensively on PPC and Intel platforms, with all kinds of weird sound configurations. I've not had a driver problem in YEARS, though I agree that the sound daemons are crap. My theory on sound drivers for Linux? I think Linux users are the product of two alternate universes merging, where half are saying "sound drivers are shit" and the rest are saying "WTF are you talking about?" I suppose where there's smoke there's fire, but I'll be damned if I've seen the flames in the last five years.
I'd like to use OS X, but after a got burned yet again on another shoddily built Mac (a 400 MHz G3 Pismo laptop), I vowed that Apple would never again see another dime from me. It's a vow I've kept for 4 years, and I have no intention of breaking.
A professor, of MARKETING, who voluntarily lives and works in OHIO (or Northern Kentucky, but it's all the same really), is saying I'M brain damaged!?
Whatever you say there, hoss. *snicker*
in my car parked in a seedy neighborhood once. When I came back, wouldn't you just know that someone broke into my car and put another banjo in there.
John Ashcroft endorses John Kerry for President. I understand pandering to your base, but the opposition is already energized against Bush. Is he trying to energize the centrist undecideds against Bush too?
This goes to show the measures the Bush administration is having to go to to even keep their base constituency voting for them. A base which is getting thinner and thinner. Now the good ol' boys who like guns and porn (myself included!) are probably going to stay home in November.
I wish there was a real conservative to vote for. Just because you disapprove of something doesn't mean it should be illegal.
Just wait until someone metamods it! Then that will be the true test of meta-meta-humor!
I agree. However, doing the moral thing can be illegal. A company officer who takes action against the bottom line, or take inaction to improve the bottom line, is civilly and possibly criminally liable, even if the action or inaction is morally right. If a CEO says "I know we're going to take a loss, but we're going to hold on and take care of out people until we get through this," he'll be out on rails for sure, will possibly get sued and maybe even have the SEC investigate him. Note that all those companies' executives are getting raked over the coals not because they did something immoral or unethical (although that is virutally certain), but because the shareholders lost value through their actions.
It would be nice if our modern legal system actually represented some sort of consistent moral and ethical code, but it's a crazy patchwork quilt of rules and regulations held together with duct tape and rubber bands.
More to the point, what would Jesus garbage-collect (WWJGC)?
What is it with this hard-on about sending "waste to the sun"? Does anybody have any idea what a silly and bad idea this is?
First, let's talk about rocket power and orbital mechanics. When things launch from Earth, they have a problem in that they are already in an orbit around the sun, so you have to come up with enough velocity to drop out of the sun's orbit. This velocity, from Earth, is about 31.8 km/s (The Russians call this the "fourth cosmic velocity" [well, they also say it in Russian.]). That's a lot of delta-v to come up with given current rocket technology. The only way to do this would be to come up with a wacky slingshot course. I haven't sat down to work the orbit, but I imagine to do this you would need an orbit that uses Jupiter to slingshot a couple of times on a 20-40 year journey to finally plunge into the sun. And I thought Mars orbital insertion was a tricky maneuver. I know it's counter-intuitive , but it actually takes a larger velocity to reach the sun from Earth orbit than it does to leave the solar system (That velocity is only 16.6 km/s).
But suppose you have a rocket that can generate 32 km/s delta-v. Now, think what happens if you miss the sun. You've now put that waste in a nifty parabolic orbit with its aphelion right near the orbit of our planet. Congratulations, you've just managed to shoot yourself with an interplanetary gun. I think it's daunting enough to realize there's jack-all we could do right now if a big asteroid was on a collision course with Earth without putting a few intensely radioactive and poisonous chunks out there on our own that we get to try and dodge.
I thought "insightful" was the mod you were supposed to use if you thought something was funny, but actually wanted the author to get karma for it.
Hey, it's not too late. Think about it. Don't you think that a manned mission to Mars, spending YEARS away from the rest of humankind, will include at LEAST one MD in its crew? If you bust your ass double hard in medical school (probably assumed anyway), and see what sorts of specializations the manned space program would be interested in, You've got a remote shot at it. The competition is always stiff, but if you don't try at all, you already know what the answer is.
So, if we found some big Jupiter sized object orbiting the sun high above the plane of the ecliptic, you would rule it out as aplanet?
What if we found nine or ten objects like that all in their own (not so) little ecliptic? Then maybe we're not on a planet.
I know that the probability of these things is highly unlikely, but I don't think a "within x degrees of the ecliptic" is an especially good definition.
Even though the CPI is holding mostly flat, concerns over deflation are a red herring as there is actually inflation in all goods right now save for one. If you look at the basket of goods that make up the CPI, you find that the only thing that has gone down is the price of housing, which in the CPI is based only on rental values. Normally this makes sense, since mortgages are mostly fixed on won't change much over time. However, given the exceptionally easy credit market we are in right now, all kinds of people are qualifying for cheap mortgages that they didn't qualify for previously. So, people are leaving the rental market in droves, driving down the price of those rentals as they try to get people to lease.
Further increasing speculation that we're heading for more inflation is the sharp increases on the prices of raw materials over the last 12 months. Once that starts to affect consumer goods (and I've noticed my groceries are getting more expensive), the credit market will tighten (because that's the almost reflexive action of central banks), and the rental exodus will stop, driving those prices back up. Higher interest rates AND inflation. It will be 1979 all over again. The best counter argument to my concern is that the drive up of raw materials is in large part driven by this same easy credit market. I'm not too convinced of that yet, but time will tell.
I'm not too worried about deflation right now.
There was no web in 1985, period. A connection capable of more than 2400bps was almost the exclusive province of leased line holders. SLIP was an informal pseudo standard that nobody would even think to write up as an RFC for another 3 years.
I think you may mean 1995, which really at that time was the first big year of things internet. Netscape version 1 was already out. This new C++ like web applet language called Java had just come out. The world you describe is what the net was like more c. 1993 than 1995.
I remember working for a company in 1993 where I was really interested in getting OS/2 rolled out to the user base. The apps we used on the PCs worked great, and the systems were a dream to maintain. The deal killer? The company's main computer was an IBM System/38 and we had IBM 5250 emulator cards in the PCs and the driver software for them didn't work properly on OS/2. Therefore, IBM drivers for IBM computers using an IBM card to connect to an IBM minicomputer were not supported for the IBM PC operating system that they were trying to sell at the time.
If IBM couldn't be bothered to support OS/2, I wonder what made them think anybody else would.
Ha! I've used regular expressions for years and I still think they look like line noise.
Powerful? Absolutely. Expressive? You bet. Elegant? Maybe. Beautiful? No freaking way.
I think it's an efficiency thing. They now post the dupe in the same article to save us all the time of looking for the dupe article in the first place.
I know I'm more productive now.