I'm a little late here, but had to at least attempt to inject some actual information content into this thread. Read on to see if I succeed.
The original quote is nonsensical under normal scrutiny, but we can give the quoter some slack and try "squinting" at his quote to offer meaning.
Meaning 1:
* The quoter thinks that web information, stored in XML datastructures, as opposed to an Oracle DB, is a really great idea.
No! Actually, this is a really BAD idea. The idea behind databases is that one can access large volumes of information from really large volumes of data quickly. Think metaphorically of algorithms good at avoiding unnecessary disk reads in getting large records. That's what DB's do. To scan in all information before accessing what you want is sometimes....a real drag....very slow...wouldn't want to download all books from a library just to pick one, would you? No.
Meaning 2:
* The quoter thinks SQL is a database system. No, actually it's a way to ask a question. It's a language that entirely independent of the database implementation underneath. So the quote shows some really disturbing lack of understanding. I hope whoever said it is not masquerading as someone smart; they could get someone hurt.
Every product is "Green Friendly," if you know how to write the brochure to make it that way.
I know what you mean; the most extreme examples for me are the oil companies and their "We Love the Earth" commercials.
Adbusters had a parody of a Chevron magazine ad, showing a lynx drinking from a pool of crude oil. The caption: "Do animals get rich from oil? No. People Do."
New ways to abuse old laws are growing MUCH faster than new legislation can keep up. It's a libertarian's dream come true. Simple, not too horrifying examples are mini-videotapes being used without consent, e-mail SPAM, and internet information stealing/abuse.
I predict that it will become more obvious in the next year or two that way in which we pass legislation will have to change. Perhaps state legislatures will split up issues or borrow each other's laws more readily. The federal legislature may need to "delegate" to, or at least pay more attention to, state legislatures.
Thanks to the trolls, I'm forced to second-guess every time I see a stupid post. Is it a troll waiting gleefully for a reaction? I sometimes can't believe it's anything but that.
Does the fine print show that it's actually them singing? I've recently had the "pleasure" of watching one of their godawful videos with my two young daughters. The girls barely looked awake, and they didn't lip-sync very well either.
I'm 35. I've only just figured out who these girls are because my daughters (aged 3 & 5) watched an old video of theirs from the 80's.
God, the video is AWFUL. What the hell is so great about two girls (who look vaguely like "Troll dolls") pretending to sing and act? They mostly just sit there and look tired of cameras pointed at them.
It doesn't mean he chose solitude... he was probably like most geeks, a quirky outcast who was difficult to live with.
I don't disagree. The word "chose" as I originally meant it is not expressive enough. If the world had been full of people he understood and who understood him, I'm sure he would have been a happy socialite. I'm projecting my own experiences onto him here, but I believe his quote mentioned at the start of this thread indicates that solitude was a painful adjustment but one that he adapted to.
A notion I find interesting is the idea that our brains have limits. Perhaps if he had enjoyed being more social, we wouldn't have his insights into physics. Einstein, then, is a landmark for those of us who want to know what happens with our lives when we throw ourselves at a challenge. We can make extraordinary progress, still fail at acheiving everything, and like everyone else, eventually die with some stories left behind.
I'll bet that most people don't edit huge docs with Word or OOo. You're on the bleeding edge with that need. So it's good that you spoke up.
When I wrote my thesis, it was with LateX. LateX was good in lots of ways, but having to compile your document to see if you made a good formatting choice was a bit of a pain. I did like the way it allowed you to specify logical structure and worry about nudging things around later. I just didn't have the discipline to ignore formatting until the end.
I'm glad there are more choices available to people now.
Yes. His quote suggests that it was painful realizing in his earlier years that he wasn't a witty socialite and probably didn't excel at friendships. As he aged, he accepted his strengths and weaknesses and learned to use them to good effect.
Personally, I'll bet he had some awesome daydreaming skills. Socializing would have probably interfered with the exercising of this talent.
OpenOffice also gives you the choice of building equations by hand or by text primitives (similar to LateX). Learning the syntax for sums, etc. takes a few minutes, but then it's supremely easy to create the coolest equations with no fuss.
It's surprising that someone so respected would need to chase a carrot like that.
I'm not sure I get your metaphor. This is how I view Einstein: more comfortable around equations than people. A logical mind finds that people are complex AND annoyingly difficult to understand at their core; equations are complex but are at least a fixed target.
Both can be extremely interesting, but I suspect Einstein ultimately chose solitude because he found most people frustratingly difficult to understand.
political opinions were successfully submerged in the popular consciousness by elevating the non-threatening aspects of their life and work.
A couple highly personal observations:
* Einstein's genius was in part the ability to envision abstract relationships, possibly at the expense of understanding human relationships. He had a (perhaps overly) simple vision of a simple and just social order. I admire it and share in his probable wish that people could lead simple, straightforward lives and help the less fortunate along the way.
* Journalism, in its attempt to be sexy, has tried to make Einstein sexy. Humanitarianism is about as un-sexy as it gets, which just kills my own idealism by the way. So of course we don't know about that part of his life. Instead we are left thinking about how he helped bring about the very sexy Atom Bomb.
I see a lot of posts saying Star Trek is out of ideas, but that's because they don't understand story writing.
I don't understand story writing either, but I'm going to pretend that I do and say that the setting is just one small part of the story.
ne can take any hard-hitting current event, SUCH AS THE WAR IN IRAQ, and write a story revealing the deeply complex issues around war. Star Trek may be the right venue because the futuristic setting enables the story to be rated PG-13 instead of NC-17.
and cramming all the casts into one movie screams of a pitiful attempt at fan service
Then again, in one sitting you could watch all the characters die, one by one, in the manner most fitting to their personality. I would pay money for that.
I say Wesley Crusher takes the Enterprise on a huge joyride that ends tragically, despite the crew's valiant attempts to blow away everything in the starship's path.
I'm not sure what the solution to the problem is, but somehow investors need to start holding corporations responsible for long-term success, long-term sacrifices to yield short-term gains need to be severely punished.
As Yogi Berra once said, It's Deja Vu all over again. This thread makes some excellent points, including your own. One direction to push society is toward a higher ethical standard. The problem today is that politicians who promote these standards don't get elected because businesses don't support them. FUD and money win elections.
* We must educate people until we have a FUD-sensitive public who acts rationally.
* We must continue to reform campaign financing. Free TV advertising wouldn't hurt any. The public does own the airwaves, after all, at least in the US.
* More likely, we'll repeat history and have a huge political/economic/social crisis, at which point some reform will occur.
That's funny; I know the area of which you speak. IIRC, they happened millions of years ago. I don't remember reading about any basalt flood plains getting formed any time in recent history. And yes, I believe there were mass extinctions around these events. We don't disagree on our history.
So...were you just trying to refute something in my post? I don't see your post disagreeing with anything I'd previously written.
All while Bush is the only president to ever provide funding for alternative fuel sources.
That's a half-truth at best. I'm assuming you're not talking about nuclear power, first of all, since its funding history is long. Carter did fund it, in a sense, by offering tax credits to homeowners investing in solar energy.
I agree that hydrogen is a dumb way to go. Perhaps Bush is pushing for it because it will keep energy under the thumb of huge corporations.
Wind, solar, and hydro can be small-scale and therefore owned by individual consumers, and the big, corrupt companies might go out of business.
You're not alone, but the size of your camp is dwindling with the growing evidence of the greenhouse effect.
Scientists today:
* know pretty accurately the size of our atmosphere * know pretty accurately what's in it * have run controlled experiments showing how much heat is trapped by CO2 and other gasses * know roughly how much CO2 is being added daily.
Here's what looks like a pretty balanced overview, gleaned through google of course:
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/global_ wa rming/page.cfm?pageID=515#Overview
I can respond to one of your points: it's not necessarily that the earth has never seen the greenhouse effect before, but the rate of its onset may very well be a new phenomenon. There have been massive volcanic eruptions in recent history, such as Krakatoa, but I believe we are producing more CO2 than anything like this.
If the Earth warms up quicker than most species have ever experienced, there is no reason to believe that there wouldn't be massive species upheaval.
Ok, I'll bite. Care to explain this one? Why were they invalid?
From a CNN article:
A six-month investigation into the overseas absentee ballots by the newspaper concluded that the Republican effort to get questionable ballots accepted had a "decided impact on the outcome," the newspaper said. George W. Bush won the presidency by 537 votes.
The newspaper analyzed 2,490 overseas absentee ballots that were counted as legal votes after the general election, November 7, 2000. It found 680 questionable votes: "ballots without postmarks, ballots postmarked after the election, ballots without witness signatures, ballots mailed from towns and cities within the United States and even ballots from voters who voted twice. All would have been disqualified had the state's election laws been strictly enforced," the article said.
The newspaper said it is not known for whom the flawed ballots were cast, but that "four out of five were accepted in counties carried by Mr. Bush."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a little late here, but had to at least attempt to inject some actual information content into this thread. Read on to see if I succeed.
The original quote is nonsensical under normal scrutiny, but we can give the quoter some slack and try "squinting" at his quote to offer meaning.
Meaning 1:
* The quoter thinks that web information, stored in XML datastructures, as opposed to an Oracle DB, is a really great idea.
No! Actually, this is a really BAD idea. The idea behind databases is that one can access large volumes of information from really large volumes of data quickly. Think metaphorically of algorithms good at avoiding unnecessary disk reads in getting large records. That's what DB's do. To scan in all information before accessing what you want is sometimes....a real drag....very slow...wouldn't want to download all books from a library just to pick one, would you? No.
Meaning 2:
* The quoter thinks SQL is a database system. No, actually it's a way to ask a question. It's a language that entirely independent of the database implementation underneath. So the quote shows some really disturbing lack of understanding. I hope whoever said it is not masquerading as someone smart; they could get someone hurt.
Every product is "Green Friendly," if you know how to write the brochure to make it that way.
I know what you mean; the most extreme examples for me are the oil companies and their "We Love the Earth" commercials.
Adbusters had a parody of a Chevron magazine ad, showing a lynx drinking from a pool of crude oil. The caption: "Do animals get rich from oil? No. People Do."
New ways to abuse old laws are growing MUCH faster than new legislation can keep up. It's a libertarian's dream come true. Simple, not too horrifying examples are mini-videotapes being used without consent, e-mail SPAM, and internet information stealing/abuse.
I predict that it will become more obvious in the next year or two that way in which we pass legislation will have to change. Perhaps state legislatures will split up issues or borrow each other's laws more readily. The federal legislature may need to "delegate" to, or at least pay more attention to, state legislatures.
Dinosaurs can't invent and build thousands of nuclear weapons.
Dinosaurs can't invent designer viruses.
Dinosaurs can't invent invisible machines.
Dinosaurs can't commit genocide.
Thanks to the trolls, I'm forced to second-guess every time I see a stupid post. Is it a troll waiting gleefully for a reaction? I sometimes can't believe it's anything but that.
We should make sure that they have their own lane. Then I could see the beauty.
Does the fine print show that it's actually them singing? I've recently had the "pleasure" of watching one of their godawful videos with my two young daughters. The girls barely looked awake, and they didn't lip-sync very well either.
I'm 35. I've only just figured out who these girls are because my daughters (aged 3 & 5) watched an old video of theirs from the 80's.
God, the video is AWFUL. What the hell is so great about two girls (who look vaguely like "Troll dolls") pretending to sing and act? They mostly just sit there and look tired of cameras pointed at them.
It doesn't mean he chose solitude... he was probably like most geeks, a quirky outcast who was difficult to live with.
I don't disagree. The word "chose" as I originally meant it is not expressive enough. If the world had been full of people he understood and who understood him, I'm sure he would have been a happy socialite. I'm projecting my own experiences onto him here, but I believe his quote mentioned at the start of this thread indicates that solitude was a painful adjustment but one that he adapted to.
A notion I find interesting is the idea that our brains have limits. Perhaps if he had enjoyed being more social, we wouldn't have his insights into physics. Einstein, then, is a landmark for those of us who want to know what happens with our lives when we throw ourselves at a challenge. We can make extraordinary progress, still fail at acheiving everything, and like everyone else, eventually die with some stories left behind.
I'll bet that most people don't edit huge docs with Word or OOo. You're on the bleeding edge with that need. So it's good that you spoke up.
When I wrote my thesis, it was with LateX. LateX was good in lots of ways, but having to compile your document to see if you made a good formatting choice was a bit of a pain. I did like the way it allowed you to specify logical structure and worry about nudging things around later. I just didn't have the discipline to ignore formatting until the end.
I'm glad there are more choices available to people now.
Do you really think he chose solitude?
Yes. His quote suggests that it was painful realizing in his earlier years that he wasn't a witty socialite and probably didn't excel at friendships. As he aged, he accepted his strengths and weaknesses and learned to use them to good effect.
Personally, I'll bet he had some awesome daydreaming skills. Socializing would have probably interfered with the exercising of this talent.
OpenOffice also gives you the choice of building equations by hand or by text primitives (similar to LateX). Learning the syntax for sums, etc. takes a few minutes, but then it's supremely easy to create the coolest equations with no fuss.
"ein grosse Nazi"
I doubt he would have butchered the German language, so where did you find this "fact"?
It's surprising that someone so respected would need to chase a carrot like that.
I'm not sure I get your metaphor. This is how I view Einstein: more comfortable around equations than people. A logical mind finds that people are complex AND annoyingly difficult to understand at their core; equations are complex but are at least a fixed target.
Both can be extremely interesting, but I suspect Einstein ultimately chose solitude because he found most people frustratingly difficult to understand.
political opinions were successfully submerged in the popular consciousness by elevating the non-threatening aspects of their life and work.
A couple highly personal observations:
* Einstein's genius was in part the ability to envision abstract relationships, possibly at the expense of understanding human relationships. He had a (perhaps overly) simple vision of a simple and just social order. I admire it and share in his probable wish that people could lead simple, straightforward lives and help the less fortunate along the way.
* Journalism, in its attempt to be sexy, has tried to make Einstein sexy. Humanitarianism is about as un-sexy as it gets, which just kills my own idealism by the way. So of course we don't know about that part of his life. Instead we are left thinking about how he helped bring about the very sexy Atom Bomb.
I see a lot of posts saying Star Trek is out of ideas, but that's because they don't understand story writing.
I don't understand story writing either, but I'm going to pretend that I do and say that the setting is just one small part of the story.
ne can take any hard-hitting current event, SUCH AS THE WAR IN IRAQ, and write a story revealing the deeply complex issues around war. Star Trek may be the right venue because the futuristic setting enables the story to be rated PG-13 instead of NC-17.
and cramming all the casts into one movie screams of a pitiful attempt at fan service
Then again, in one sitting you could watch all the characters die, one by one, in the manner most fitting to their personality. I would pay money for that.
I say Wesley Crusher takes the Enterprise on a huge joyride that ends tragically, despite the crew's valiant attempts to blow away everything in the starship's path.
I'm not sure what the solution to the problem is, but somehow investors need to start holding corporations responsible for long-term success, long-term sacrifices to yield short-term gains need to be severely punished.
As Yogi Berra once said, It's Deja Vu all over again. This thread makes some excellent points, including your own. One direction to push society is toward a higher ethical standard. The problem today is that politicians who promote these standards don't get elected because businesses don't support them. FUD and money win elections.
* We must educate people until we have a FUD-sensitive public who acts rationally.
* We must continue to reform campaign financing. Free TV advertising wouldn't hurt any. The public does own the airwaves, after all, at least in the US.
* More likely, we'll repeat history and have a huge political/economic/social crisis, at which point some reform will occur.
That's funny; I know the area of which you speak. IIRC, they happened millions of years ago. I don't remember reading about any basalt flood plains getting formed any time in recent history. And yes, I believe there were mass extinctions around these events. We don't disagree on our history.
So...were you just trying to refute something in my post? I don't see your post disagreeing with anything I'd previously written.
All while Bush is the only president to ever provide funding for alternative fuel sources.
That's a half-truth at best. I'm assuming you're not talking about nuclear power, first of all, since its funding history is long. Carter did fund it, in a sense, by offering tax credits to homeowners investing in solar energy.
I agree that hydrogen is a dumb way to go.
Perhaps Bush is pushing for it because it will keep energy under the thumb of huge corporations.
Wind, solar, and hydro can be small-scale and therefore owned by individual consumers, and the big, corrupt companies might go out of business.
Horrors!!
You're not alone, but the size of your camp is dwindling with the growing evidence of the greenhouse effect.
_ wa rming/page.cfm?pageID=515#Overview
Scientists today:
* know pretty accurately the size of our atmosphere
* know pretty accurately what's in it
* have run controlled experiments showing how much heat is trapped by CO2 and other gasses
* know roughly how much CO2 is being added daily.
Here's what looks like a pretty balanced overview, gleaned through google of course:
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/global
I can respond to one of your points: it's not necessarily that the earth has never seen the greenhouse effect before, but the rate of its onset may very well be a new phenomenon. There have been massive volcanic eruptions in recent history, such as Krakatoa, but I believe we are producing more CO2 than anything like this.
If the Earth warms up quicker than most species have ever experienced, there is no reason to believe that there wouldn't be massive species upheaval.
Yes. There are US companies for hire on the world market, often to the highest bidder. The US Army is one of the biggest consumers.
The Slashdot FAQ is an interesting read.
I recommend it to all those reading this post, especially those who moderated this post as Insightful.
Why is the parent post considered a troll? It is a reasoned response to a half-truth that, at this moment, is marked +5 Insightful.
It may be sad and make Bush supporter defensive, but it's also the truth. Moderators marking posts they don't like as "Troll" are being abusive.
Meta-moderators take note.
Ok, I'll bite. Care to explain this one? Why were they invalid?
From a CNN article:
A six-month investigation into the overseas absentee ballots by the newspaper concluded that the Republican effort to get questionable ballots accepted had a "decided impact on the outcome," the newspaper said. George W. Bush won the presidency by 537 votes.
The newspaper analyzed 2,490 overseas absentee ballots that were counted as legal votes after the general election, November 7, 2000. It found 680 questionable votes: "ballots without postmarks, ballots postmarked after the election, ballots without witness signatures, ballots mailed from towns and cities within the United States and even ballots from voters who voted twice. All would have been disqualified had the state's election laws been strictly enforced," the article said.
The newspaper said it is not known for whom the flawed ballots were cast, but that "four out of five were accepted in counties carried by Mr. Bush."