I've long thought that being able to scan an image with my iPhone that lets me 'pay for parking' or get on a subway would be a really great use for the technology.
So you're saying in order to be worthy of owning a nice TV, you must first live in a nice neighborhood with a nice house and a nice car?
One of the best ways to gather wealth is to cut one of your biggest expenses; your housing. Who is to say that's not what the people in these 'poorer' neighborhoods are doing?
But even if they're not, lets look at all those white-bread suburbs, with people who've leveraged their debt out their eyeballs because they have the expectation in living in a McMansion with Plasma TVs and huge SUVs. But you make no generalized critical statement of them? It's only poor people who deserve to be lambasted for over-consumption?
Face it, you live in America. You're as much a part of that problem as anyone else. You can pretend you're not, that someone else is somehow less deserving of 'stuff', and thus shouldn't have it. But, in the end, you aren't any more deserving of it. Chances are, if you work harder, it's no more than 10% harder. Chances are, you're not doing a significant amount more for the world than they are. The people who are doing more, and are more deserving aren't on/. complaining about the proles.
Unemployment Insurance is rarely involved in cases of people overspending. You're thinking of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which is a different program. If you're complaining that UI is inefficient because of those people, you're barking up the wrong tree.
It's also of note that these programs have already been severely curtailed. The amount of money we spend on them today just isn't the same. While it sucks, on some level, to have to support other people, as a general social quality it's a good thing to have; you would agree if you were ever put in that position. Judging whether something is worthwhile simply on the basis of whether you need it is one of the most abusive ways to develop a system.
If you don't agree with that, there are plenty of countries willing to tell their citizenry what they can or cannot do. What vices they are or are not allowed to have. Maybe move there?
Anecdotal evidence, however, isn't sufficient. Cracking down on the entirety of people pulling unemployment because there are some people who abuse it isn't reasonable. It's not efficient and there is no service to society; those people will still abuse whatever system they come across.
Honestly, it sucks to have to support people in our society that don't pull their weight. But I suspect two things. First, the people we most point to as not pulling their weight are not the ones costing us the most money. Only 37% of jobless workers are covered by unemployment, regardless. Secondly, is that really the big money sink we should be worried about? A mere $33.55B? The Iraq war utilizes $12B a month, by comparison. The Defense Dept as a whole uses $650B a year.
What would be the cost of restricting what you can use that money for? What would you really be getting out of it? In fact, I'd argue that such restrictions would simply create a situation in which lobbyist groups simply have one more pork barrel to bargain over. I don't see how that helps society. If Unemployment Insurance does 80% of what it's supposed to do, then the rest is probably not worth dickering over.
Alright, I've seen this reasoning a half dozen times. It's idiotic, and unimaginative. Israel clearly is not at risk in this endeavor; three of those five people were lost to friendly fire incidents. On the flip side, they've killed over six hundred people now, including over a hundred children. They're murdering.
The lopsided numbers aren't pointed out to be corrected, but as a huge indicator that something is wrong. You see those kind of numbers in a 'war' and you know you're being lied to. It's not a war, it's shooting fish in a barrel. Except it's not fish. It's people.
I am very against US actions in Iraq as well, and think that it's a humanitarian holocaust there perpetrated by my government. I think, in fact, that the 100k number is low for what the deaths in that region has been.
But I would posit that a disproportionate response is precisely what acts of terror are designed to instigate. As long as we persist in thinking of ourselves as needing to not 'appear' weak, we're going to have people attack us to reflexively get support when we then go in and wipe out a bunch of people. In particular, the leaders of those organizations are well practiced at that sort of manipulation - and we're clearly very vulnerable to it because many of our leaders also benefit from it.
All that aside, the invasion of Iraq was not in response to a terror attack. The invasion of Iraq was an aggressive imperialistic move justified on an erroneous basis. It's even less justifiable than Israel's barbarism.
That is very true, and shouldn't be tolerated. But 'not tolerating' it shouldn't necessitate the killing of the human shield. Israel has it's blood up and isn't thinking about this.
In a war between two sovereign states I might agree with you. But Hamas is a group that operates independent of the population over which it's governing. As an institution, or set of institutions, they aren't really providing anything. Courts, medicine, education, infrastructure - they don't have the resources for any of those things.
What they do have is guerrilla structuring and weapons. You would have to not only be lopsided, but literally annihilate them. We couldn't even do that with Germany. The problem in this situation is that continued reckless (see below) destruction only gets more people on Hamas's side.
And it is reckless. The number of civilian and child casualties is way too high for it to be otherwise. It's impossible, to my mind, to imagine how killing children is going to do anything other than galvanize people against you. Their parents will lose the will to live, except for vengeance. And the other children will only grow up seeing the result, not the reasoning, behind the deaths of people just like them. They'll empathize with that and hate the most proximal perpetrators for it. That's basic, uneducated reaction - and it's well established that they have no education to speak of.
I would agree that it were religion if fanatical religious beliefs weren't so strongly correlated to lack of education, which in turn is largely the result of general wealth. The religious reasoning for the fighting is used for entirely emotional reasons. I posit that most of those emotional reasons stem from poverty on the Palestinian side. On the Israeli side, I think that it is continuing emotion from the loss of a large part of their population.
To be truthful, that irony is the saddest facet of all of this.
An interesting note to be made is that the popularity of Hamas has risen since Israel started this attack. A military response will only beget people who are bitter at what Israel is taking away from them - and they don't have a lot to begin with.
The solution is, actually, to give the Palestinians stuff they don't want to lose. Jobs, homes, medical access, education even. You give it to as many people as you can, but you focus on giving something solid to few rather than giving something flimsy to many. Get those people who are in the middle something they won't want to lose in the fighting.
Then, I bet, you'd see a significant shift. That you lay all Palestinian motivations in the same bucket as Hamas clearly demonstrates that you're not very saavy regarding how people are. Do you agree 100% with your president? With all of your presidents? With Congressional edicts? Are you happy with all parts of the US Constitution (I'm assuming US citizenship for sake of illustration), it's Code [of Laws] and so on?
You're very right; talking to Hamas is not useful. They're using the plight of their people to push their own agenda. But I don't think it's the answer. Only once people have something to lose will they stop themselves and those around them from taking destructive actions. That can work two ways, btw; you can give the Palestinian middle and lower class something that will dissuade them from getting involved or electing violent leaders, or you can give their leaders either through action or inaction the weapons that will cause Israel and the rest of the world to think twice before starting a war. One of those routes is reasonable.
I am not in the least arguing such a thick-headed course as that. However, Israel is killing hundreds of people - mostly civilians - in a disproportionate attack on Palestinian camps. If someone hits you in a bar, or on the playground, coming back and blowing their head off with an assault rifle is a similar, disproportionate response.
In the playground situation, chances are you're isolated from other people because you've demonstrated a distinct lack of sense and control. In the 'adult' situation, similarly if there is a law enforcement structure around. If there is not, you run the very high risk of someone deciding to ace you before you hurt them, just like you did the first guy. Regardless, people will not treat you as 'a nice person they want to get along with'.
Israel is digging a very deep hole here. The Palestinians are vastly disadvantaged militarily, economically and educationally. Continuing to pick this fight is not in anyone's best interest - and it's clearly not really a fight. It's Israel killing hundreds of people. They're clearly not at risk.
This is proven by the lopsided casualties. It's proven by the fact that minorly wounded Israeli soldiers are getting the best medical care in the world, and doctors in the Gaza Strip don't have antiseptic to use while stitching the wounds of children caught in the fighting. If Israel cannot recognize it's barbaric behavior in this instance, it remains only for everyone else to say something. Past transgressions are not sufficient reason for this.
Unfortunately, you can't just say 'Down with religion!' because religion has taken up residence in a very vital human activity; culture and community. People will fight to the death to keep their tribes.
In my own experience, this has been demonstrated to me time and again (though I don't know that I understand the reasons - just that they must exist); that nearly every Jew I've met is strongly in favor of the Jewish state. Maybe there is something to that.
All that said, Israel should stop killing recklessly. 550 Palestinian deaths to 5 Israeli deaths is so lopsided that it has to be stopped. The solution to the situation is actually pretty simple; it's money. Once the non-country of Palestine isn't made up of mostly the desperate poor, with a few warlords manipulating them, then you'll see peace. Alas, no one is likely to pony up.
All I can say is that if we do go down that path, I guarantee that it will be a poorer profession for all of us - except the patent attorneys, I guess.
That is, actually, precisely what this ends up being about. A Programmer, or Geneticist, or Bridge Engineer, or what have you comes up with an idea - maybe even implements it. But they're not living in a vaccuum.
There are people out there who will convince you that you can make money off of pure ideas, or if you properly copyright or protect your work you can make money off that. What they're really doing is simply working on the implementation of their own idea; namely, making money off of the interface of whatever you're thinking or doing and their own sphere of expertise - say, patent attorney-ship.
Further, it distracts you from what ought to be the real prize; doing something cool. I'm not saying that you should work for free, to the contrary you should take the value from things as you see the opportunity to do so. But if your focus is on building simple wealth, there are easier and arguably better ways to do it than trying to think up an idea and enter a world of marketing, litigation and all that. Figure out how much wealth you need to do the things you want. Then forget about it, because beyond that point it doesn't help you.
The story is actually misquoted; Ford and Tesla aren't involved, just some Dude with a Problem and an engineer. The engineer says, "Hit here with a hammer to fix your problem" or something like that; the X is simply the marker for where the marker is.
With that setup, you can then move to the punchline; specifically that the value is not intrinsic to the X mark, but rather to knowing where to put the X. The Dude with a Problem can treat it like the X is the thing being paid for, but the engineer is pointing out that in actuality, his accrued knowledge is what is being paid for.
However, in this case, even if they don't get it, it's worth exposing Lovecraft's... well, craft. Only one out of a hundred people will become further enlightened by it, but that's pretty valuable.
Problem as I see it is that MMOs are by their nature social games
I concur that MMOs are social, but they lack a lot of normal 'game' elements. Puzzles are not common. You get infinite retries in most situations. In the most advanced aspects - team raids - it's really a challenge of coordination. Which, while game-like, is not particularly accessible to the casual player. It feels more or less like dancing, without the physicality.
If you want a really good comparison of interface versus depth of a game, compare Black Isle's Fallout 2 to Bethesda's Fallout 3. Fallout 3 fails to have any interesting puzzles, and very little character or plot depth. It's pretty enough, and a 3-d (if buggy) environment - and they did a good job with the real-time/turn-based hybrid interface. On the other hand, Fallout 2 is a pearl of humor and interesting character choices - not just a black and white, good versus bad spectrum.
I hope we can get through this dark period of games quickly, to a day where the tools are well developed enough that we can have some interesting writing again. The market these days is comprised of mostly of FPSs, MMOs and flash games, it seems.
- Roads, transit systems allow anonymous movements or some lanes are not considered "public" (hence it is illegal to watch the ID of the cars going there)
Why just roads? Can't I walk down the street without risk of being monitored and tracked? Actually, I personally don't care - but someone might, and that brings up the real issue at hand.
As technology develops, the ability to use that technology to the detriment of the individual increases. We need laws that protect us against unfair government use - that keep the government subjugated to the people, not the people subjugated to the government.
In this case, I think that a subpeona ought to be required to get tracking information on a person: the issue of wearing anonymizing clothing should be unrelated. A private citizen or other legal entity (such as a company) should have
to sue for similar information.
Video archives should not be freely consultable. The issue is that someone will have to maintain them, and companies should be given no additional incentive to do so, because that gives them incentive to observe. The government should not maintain them, because the government is not good about keeping information from itself. Companies and private individuals should be allowed to maintain what archives they deem appropriate, but at their own expense. What they should be required to keep is an archive of creation and deletion - so that it is transparent if there is an irregularity in the pattern.
Finally, I think we all have to get used to the fact that we're going to be watched going to GeekCon99, or the porn store, or to a pub, or to a church. We're going to have to get over that as a social stigma, because guess what? Everyone does it, making it the truth. Rather than trying to suppress technology that records observations, or makes hiding things harder, we should simply try to make sure our rights are well protected. I have the right to go to any of those places.
That brings us around to the clothing issue, and why it's separate: if a law is passed that you cannot wear a mask so that cameras stand a better chance of telling the government whats what - well, that's a breach of my civil rights. I'm being forced to report unfairly on myself to the government. The camera isn't even at question there - it's like presently having to state your name to every cop that you see. The camera simply becomes the mechanism by which you report. The government should only be able to require you to do things that prevent you from infringing on others' freedoms, never anything that simply makes it harder for you to be a anonymous. Because those inevitably are poorly targetted and don't work well.
That, my friend, is a circular argument. Society wouldn't have any need to address the problems of alcoholism without alcohol. Society wouldn't have the need for a support framework for those who would otherwise perish without science to save them -- because they'd be dead.
It would be a circular argument if the solution to the problem presented didn't require crossdisciplinary study. It is not sufficient to study alcohol to solve the problem of alcoholism, nor is it sufficient to study the brain, or even just the two of those. Everything that alcoholism touches must be studied for a successful solution, and even there you have to go a little beyond that. This forced recombination of ideas is extremely good.
So, you're right, without alcohol we don't need to solve the problem of alcoholism; but solving the problem of alcoholism grants us a great deal in addition to that. Note, for instance, how the 12-step idea has propagated to any addiction. Or, how the space program has given us not only rockets, but bed mattresses.
If the relationship between a problem and the tool that solves it is one to one, it is circular argument. If, however, a tool can be applied in many different problems, then it's not.
There are a few examples, but technology use is pretty sparse among the genomes of this planet. I'm talking here about active employment of tools and the like -- the bird building the nest, not the maple seed that's evolved to fly like a helicopter. But then, the bird doesn't experiment with new ways to build a nest (I don't think).
Well, there is actually a great number of examples that are largely ignored for one of two reasons: we aren't looking for them, or we don't consider it 'tool use'. Apes use sticks to dissect ant hills, beavers create dams (construction!) upon which their livelihood is based, dolphins have been seen to use tools to get at food, and so on. Animals in the wild do use objects beyond their immediate body to achieve their ends.
And, they do adapt. One of the central premises of Adaption of Species was the idea that birds built nests differently, and the successful nests became more predominant. This is not unlike our own house building. One thing that humans have that is not often seen is the ability to try more new things quicker - but that's largely seen as our greatest strength and why, in the global niche, we are a runaway success.
Ultimately I largely agree with your assessment that science has improved our lot in life. But I still think it's a little too much to say science has always helped. More like, it's an incredibly great good, but it's not 100% good.
I will grant that science, and indeed any action, has some opposite effect that is either negative or neutral in our eyes. The exact balances can be debated, of course, but it seems to me that because the majority - and I'd posit the vast majority - of the total result is positive within a generation, that science is an objectively good pursuit. You mention the law of Unintended Consequences; one cannot have only intended consequences unless one is aware of how everything works. That law is true because we do not, nor likely will within this eon, know everything. But the more we know (da du da!) has a direct correspondence to how much we can control the consequences. Which leads me to...
Farming is a good technology, right? Is its value greater than one Amazon rainforest? Is that even a judgement we can make?
It is a judgment we can't make until we know more. Which means studying it rationally; science. Right now, we're just choosing farming, but that's not based on any deep understanding of the interplay despite being aware that there is one.
And here's the thing, the wo/men that go and do study that interplay are giving us something that really does go beyond them; knowledge is tangible and we have a really ea
But to assert that science is always beneficial seems too good to be true. Sure, an invention might reap some reward, but it often ends up creating new problems too.
My objection primarily comes from this statement. Science does not always produce beneficial effects, but the beneficial effects have always outweighed the negative effects, and the obviousness of this is seen 'in the long run'.
To take a basic example; advances in agricultural have definite and observable negative effects. But our society can spend far more time doing other things as a result. Our culture is far more diverse and our ability to create far large because most of our people aren't farmers anymore. There is no need for them to be.
So, to take the example of brain altering chemicals; are they good or bad? The answer is, of course, both, but we are better off with them, and will be even more better off in the future. We have many ADHD kids; it is better that they are functional rather than nonfunctional. Are the brain chemicals all good? Of course not, but it's a good compromise, and pushes our understanding of the brain. In the future, we will mitigate or remove those side effects.
Now, I realize that that requires some faith to believe, but statistics bears it out. Indeed, logic suggests that it is better to have these things and their observable side effects, because those side effects can then be engineered through or around. Whereas if we refuse the advance in understanding, we never learn what the side effects are. Transparency is very, very useful.
I'm hard pressed to think of a single situation wherein science has not helped us - though it is reasonable to say that short-term downsides are problematic. For instance, firearms; they've led to a lot of slaughter and senseless death. At the same time, the scope of wars in terms of percentage of people directly involved has been reduced over time due to the presence of firearms. This is a tangible benefit because a war no longer needs to destroy an entire generation; it is far more decisive.
Medicine is, to my mind, hard to debate. The average life span of humans has significantly gone up. Life is good; I can't really complain about that in any sense. Yes, there are more ways we can die, but much of that is attributable to the fact that we live longer and are more aware of the things that kill. If we have a global pandemic (or nuclear war), one might argue that my above statement is erroneous, but I think that on the whole the argument for apocalypse is rather thin. Obviously we need to be on guard, but it's never happened so it's hard to say what conditions are actually required.
Alcohol is, to my mind, something of a universal constant. I mean, -OH groups are prevalent, and most higher life forms use it as a natural depressant. If you take the 1984 argument, you could say it is the bread of the bread and circus. Alcohol has definitely caused many problems; the egregious number of motor accidents under the influence for starters. But between refined alcohol and unrefined alcohol, I think the former is better - and even between refined and no I think the former is better. Not just because I like me a snakebite every once in a while, either. The downsides to alcohol has spurred significant advances in medicine and sociology. AA is, to my mind, a very important achievement, because it's an excellent example of how to structure a support framework for people with crippling problems.
I'm going to argue a bit with eugenics, because it wasn't really science. It's focus was to prove out a mythology people held; that a certain race was better. It wouldn't accept alternate theories. As a cultural event, we did derive benefit, as steep a price as we paid. Still, I won't attribute that to science, or human reason, but rather human empathy.
And then we come to the crux of it; does science benefit all cultures? Obviously, it's allowed the death of quite a few along the way. But I don't consider that a failure of scie
The question is really; is there any utility to x?
No, the question is: "Is x the best choice?"
But it's not a choice. It was a choice, but with unknown outcomes. In evaluating the utility of the program, you cannot throw out benefits that exist but were not part of the original goal. Nor should you measure it against roads not taken. There is a great deal of use in analyzing past actions, be they disasters or not. But that use does not come from deciding whether it was definitively the best choice; rather from what made it a good or bad choice. Only in the mechanisms is there any future utility, and second-guessing the perspective at the time with knowledge that didn't exist then is not useful.
While a cute quip, 'citation needed' in this situation is juvenile. You can mean one of two things; the first, and proper, usage of 'citation needed' would suggest that the remark in question may not have any foundation, and that some evidence would be useful in judging the veracity of the statement. In this regard, though, one could argue nearly anything requires citation, even the ridiculous ("The sky is blue in cloudless daytime"). I posit that there is such a preponderance of evidence that science has always, in the long run, improved society both culturally and economically, that citing some additional record that this is the case is ridiculous and furthermore distracts from the point at hand. But, if you're curious what led me to believe and thus make such a statement, please examine any account of any of the following eras: the information age, the nuclear age, world war II, the industrial revolution, the renaissance, the classical era. In each there are countless examples of science leading to a marked improvement in life for society and individuals. There are no doubt many others I've overlooked for the sake of brevity. Human history is, after all, long.
The second possibility is that you think the statement in question is wrong. But, despite the fact that 'citation needed' is really not an accurate statement to this end, to bear this out, you have to provide at least a half-way decent counterexample. I suspect, given the three seconds it likely took to write 'citation needed', that you didn't have any further thought forthcoming. Which is a shame, because instead your comment just makes you seem contrary.
I've seen estimates that for the approximate cost of a shuttle service mission to the Hubble, we could have simply launched a new one.
Ah, but therein lies the problem. The shuttle estimates weren't particularly egregious, either. F(known cost, unknown cost) = [True cost], and in the shuttles case we now know both the known and unknown costs. However, in the 'ideal' case we're comparing against, we don't know the unknown costs. Sometimes even hindsight isn't 20/20.
Slashdot Mirror
I've long thought that being able to scan an image with my iPhone that lets me 'pay for parking' or get on a subway would be a really great use for the technology.
So you're saying in order to be worthy of owning a nice TV, you must first live in a nice neighborhood with a nice house and a nice car?
One of the best ways to gather wealth is to cut one of your biggest expenses; your housing. Who is to say that's not what the people in these 'poorer' neighborhoods are doing?
But even if they're not, lets look at all those white-bread suburbs, with people who've leveraged their debt out their eyeballs because they have the expectation in living in a McMansion with Plasma TVs and huge SUVs. But you make no generalized critical statement of them? It's only poor people who deserve to be lambasted for over-consumption?
Face it, you live in America. You're as much a part of that problem as anyone else. You can pretend you're not, that someone else is somehow less deserving of 'stuff', and thus shouldn't have it. But, in the end, you aren't any more deserving of it. Chances are, if you work harder, it's no more than 10% harder. Chances are, you're not doing a significant amount more for the world than they are. The people who are doing more, and are more deserving aren't on /. complaining about the proles.
Unemployment Insurance is rarely involved in cases of people overspending. You're thinking of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which is a different program. If you're complaining that UI is inefficient because of those people, you're barking up the wrong tree.
It's also of note that these programs have already been severely curtailed. The amount of money we spend on them today just isn't the same. While it sucks, on some level, to have to support other people, as a general social quality it's a good thing to have; you would agree if you were ever put in that position. Judging whether something is worthwhile simply on the basis of whether you need it is one of the most abusive ways to develop a system.
If you don't agree with that, there are plenty of countries willing to tell their citizenry what they can or cannot do. What vices they are or are not allowed to have. Maybe move there?
Anecdotal evidence, however, isn't sufficient. Cracking down on the entirety of people pulling unemployment because there are some people who abuse it isn't reasonable. It's not efficient and there is no service to society; those people will still abuse whatever system they come across.
Honestly, it sucks to have to support people in our society that don't pull their weight. But I suspect two things. First, the people we most point to as not pulling their weight are not the ones costing us the most money. Only 37% of jobless workers are covered by unemployment, regardless. Secondly, is that really the big money sink we should be worried about? A mere $33.55B? The Iraq war utilizes $12B a month, by comparison. The Defense Dept as a whole uses $650B a year.
What would be the cost of restricting what you can use that money for? What would you really be getting out of it? In fact, I'd argue that such restrictions would simply create a situation in which lobbyist groups simply have one more pork barrel to bargain over. I don't see how that helps society. If Unemployment Insurance does 80% of what it's supposed to do, then the rest is probably not worth dickering over.
Weapons don't cause conflicts, they just make having them a lot easier.
Fixed that for you... ;)
Alright, I've seen this reasoning a half dozen times. It's idiotic, and unimaginative. Israel clearly is not at risk in this endeavor; three of those five people were lost to friendly fire incidents. On the flip side, they've killed over six hundred people now, including over a hundred children. They're murdering.
The lopsided numbers aren't pointed out to be corrected, but as a huge indicator that something is wrong. You see those kind of numbers in a 'war' and you know you're being lied to. It's not a war, it's shooting fish in a barrel. Except it's not fish. It's people.
I am very against US actions in Iraq as well, and think that it's a humanitarian holocaust there perpetrated by my government. I think, in fact, that the 100k number is low for what the deaths in that region has been.
But I would posit that a disproportionate response is precisely what acts of terror are designed to instigate. As long as we persist in thinking of ourselves as needing to not 'appear' weak, we're going to have people attack us to reflexively get support when we then go in and wipe out a bunch of people. In particular, the leaders of those organizations are well practiced at that sort of manipulation - and we're clearly very vulnerable to it because many of our leaders also benefit from it.
All that aside, the invasion of Iraq was not in response to a terror attack. The invasion of Iraq was an aggressive imperialistic move justified on an erroneous basis. It's even less justifiable than Israel's barbarism.
That is very true, and shouldn't be tolerated. But 'not tolerating' it shouldn't necessitate the killing of the human shield. Israel has it's blood up and isn't thinking about this.
In a war between two sovereign states I might agree with you. But Hamas is a group that operates independent of the population over which it's governing. As an institution, or set of institutions, they aren't really providing anything. Courts, medicine, education, infrastructure - they don't have the resources for any of those things.
What they do have is guerrilla structuring and weapons. You would have to not only be lopsided, but literally annihilate them. We couldn't even do that with Germany. The problem in this situation is that continued reckless (see below) destruction only gets more people on Hamas's side.
And it is reckless. The number of civilian and child casualties is way too high for it to be otherwise. It's impossible, to my mind, to imagine how killing children is going to do anything other than galvanize people against you. Their parents will lose the will to live, except for vengeance. And the other children will only grow up seeing the result, not the reasoning, behind the deaths of people just like them. They'll empathize with that and hate the most proximal perpetrators for it. That's basic, uneducated reaction - and it's well established that they have no education to speak of.
I would agree that it were religion if fanatical religious beliefs weren't so strongly correlated to lack of education, which in turn is largely the result of general wealth. The religious reasoning for the fighting is used for entirely emotional reasons. I posit that most of those emotional reasons stem from poverty on the Palestinian side. On the Israeli side, I think that it is continuing emotion from the loss of a large part of their population.
To be truthful, that irony is the saddest facet of all of this.
An interesting note to be made is that the popularity of Hamas has risen since Israel started this attack. A military response will only beget people who are bitter at what Israel is taking away from them - and they don't have a lot to begin with.
The solution is, actually, to give the Palestinians stuff they don't want to lose. Jobs, homes, medical access, education even. You give it to as many people as you can, but you focus on giving something solid to few rather than giving something flimsy to many. Get those people who are in the middle something they won't want to lose in the fighting.
Then, I bet, you'd see a significant shift. That you lay all Palestinian motivations in the same bucket as Hamas clearly demonstrates that you're not very saavy regarding how people are. Do you agree 100% with your president? With all of your presidents? With Congressional edicts? Are you happy with all parts of the US Constitution (I'm assuming US citizenship for sake of illustration), it's Code [of Laws] and so on?
You're very right; talking to Hamas is not useful. They're using the plight of their people to push their own agenda. But I don't think it's the answer. Only once people have something to lose will they stop themselves and those around them from taking destructive actions. That can work two ways, btw; you can give the Palestinian middle and lower class something that will dissuade them from getting involved or electing violent leaders, or you can give their leaders either through action or inaction the weapons that will cause Israel and the rest of the world to think twice before starting a war. One of those routes is reasonable.
I am not in the least arguing such a thick-headed course as that. However, Israel is killing hundreds of people - mostly civilians - in a disproportionate attack on Palestinian camps. If someone hits you in a bar, or on the playground, coming back and blowing their head off with an assault rifle is a similar, disproportionate response.
In the playground situation, chances are you're isolated from other people because you've demonstrated a distinct lack of sense and control. In the 'adult' situation, similarly if there is a law enforcement structure around. If there is not, you run the very high risk of someone deciding to ace you before you hurt them, just like you did the first guy. Regardless, people will not treat you as 'a nice person they want to get along with'.
Israel is digging a very deep hole here. The Palestinians are vastly disadvantaged militarily, economically and educationally. Continuing to pick this fight is not in anyone's best interest - and it's clearly not really a fight. It's Israel killing hundreds of people. They're clearly not at risk.
This is proven by the lopsided casualties. It's proven by the fact that minorly wounded Israeli soldiers are getting the best medical care in the world, and doctors in the Gaza Strip don't have antiseptic to use while stitching the wounds of children caught in the fighting. If Israel cannot recognize it's barbaric behavior in this instance, it remains only for everyone else to say something. Past transgressions are not sufficient reason for this.
Unfortunately, you can't just say 'Down with religion!' because religion has taken up residence in a very vital human activity; culture and community. People will fight to the death to keep their tribes.
In my own experience, this has been demonstrated to me time and again (though I don't know that I understand the reasons - just that they must exist); that nearly every Jew I've met is strongly in favor of the Jewish state. Maybe there is something to that.
All that said, Israel should stop killing recklessly. 550 Palestinian deaths to 5 Israeli deaths is so lopsided that it has to be stopped. The solution to the situation is actually pretty simple; it's money. Once the non-country of Palestine isn't made up of mostly the desperate poor, with a few warlords manipulating them, then you'll see peace. Alas, no one is likely to pony up.
I think it would be an even better epithet, chiseled onto one's headstone.
All I can say is that if we do go down that path, I guarantee that it will be a poorer profession for all of us - except the patent attorneys, I guess.
That is, actually, precisely what this ends up being about. A Programmer, or Geneticist, or Bridge Engineer, or what have you comes up with an idea - maybe even implements it. But they're not living in a vaccuum.
There are people out there who will convince you that you can make money off of pure ideas, or if you properly copyright or protect your work you can make money off that. What they're really doing is simply working on the implementation of their own idea; namely, making money off of the interface of whatever you're thinking or doing and their own sphere of expertise - say, patent attorney-ship.
Further, it distracts you from what ought to be the real prize; doing something cool. I'm not saying that you should work for free, to the contrary you should take the value from things as you see the opportunity to do so. But if your focus is on building simple wealth, there are easier and arguably better ways to do it than trying to think up an idea and enter a world of marketing, litigation and all that. Figure out how much wealth you need to do the things you want. Then forget about it, because beyond that point it doesn't help you.
The story is actually misquoted; Ford and Tesla aren't involved, just some Dude with a Problem and an engineer. The engineer says, "Hit here with a hammer to fix your problem" or something like that; the X is simply the marker for where the marker is.
With that setup, you can then move to the punchline; specifically that the value is not intrinsic to the X mark, but rather to knowing where to put the X. The Dude with a Problem can treat it like the X is the thing being paid for, but the engineer is pointing out that in actuality, his accrued knowledge is what is being paid for.
However, in this case, even if they don't get it, it's worth exposing Lovecraft's... well, craft. Only one out of a hundred people will become further enlightened by it, but that's pretty valuable.
Problem as I see it is that MMOs are by their nature social games
I concur that MMOs are social, but they lack a lot of normal 'game' elements. Puzzles are not common. You get infinite retries in most situations. In the most advanced aspects - team raids - it's really a challenge of coordination. Which, while game-like, is not particularly accessible to the casual player. It feels more or less like dancing, without the physicality.
If you want a really good comparison of interface versus depth of a game, compare Black Isle's Fallout 2 to Bethesda's Fallout 3. Fallout 3 fails to have any interesting puzzles, and very little character or plot depth. It's pretty enough, and a 3-d (if buggy) environment - and they did a good job with the real-time/turn-based hybrid interface. On the other hand, Fallout 2 is a pearl of humor and interesting character choices - not just a black and white, good versus bad spectrum.
I hope we can get through this dark period of games quickly, to a day where the tools are well developed enough that we can have some interesting writing again. The market these days is comprised of mostly of FPSs, MMOs and flash games, it seems.
- Roads, transit systems allow anonymous movements or some lanes are not considered "public" (hence it is illegal to watch the ID of the cars going there)
Why just roads? Can't I walk down the street without risk of being monitored and tracked? Actually, I personally don't care - but someone might, and that brings up the real issue at hand.
As technology develops, the ability to use that technology to the detriment of the individual increases. We need laws that protect us against unfair government use - that keep the government subjugated to the people, not the people subjugated to the government.
In this case, I think that a subpeona ought to be required to get tracking information on a person: the issue of wearing anonymizing clothing should be unrelated. A private citizen or other legal entity (such as a company) should have to sue for similar information.
Video archives should not be freely consultable. The issue is that someone will have to maintain them, and companies should be given no additional incentive to do so, because that gives them incentive to observe. The government should not maintain them, because the government is not good about keeping information from itself. Companies and private individuals should be allowed to maintain what archives they deem appropriate, but at their own expense. What they should be required to keep is an archive of creation and deletion - so that it is transparent if there is an irregularity in the pattern.
Finally, I think we all have to get used to the fact that we're going to be watched going to GeekCon99, or the porn store, or to a pub, or to a church. We're going to have to get over that as a social stigma, because guess what? Everyone does it, making it the truth. Rather than trying to suppress technology that records observations, or makes hiding things harder, we should simply try to make sure our rights are well protected. I have the right to go to any of those places.
That brings us around to the clothing issue, and why it's separate: if a law is passed that you cannot wear a mask so that cameras stand a better chance of telling the government whats what - well, that's a breach of my civil rights. I'm being forced to report unfairly on myself to the government. The camera isn't even at question there - it's like presently having to state your name to every cop that you see. The camera simply becomes the mechanism by which you report. The government should only be able to require you to do things that prevent you from infringing on others' freedoms, never anything that simply makes it harder for you to be a anonymous. Because those inevitably are poorly targetted and don't work well.
That, my friend, is a circular argument. Society wouldn't have any need to address the problems of alcoholism without alcohol. Society wouldn't have the need for a support framework for those who would otherwise perish without science to save them -- because they'd be dead.
It would be a circular argument if the solution to the problem presented didn't require crossdisciplinary study. It is not sufficient to study alcohol to solve the problem of alcoholism, nor is it sufficient to study the brain, or even just the two of those. Everything that alcoholism touches must be studied for a successful solution, and even there you have to go a little beyond that. This forced recombination of ideas is extremely good.
So, you're right, without alcohol we don't need to solve the problem of alcoholism; but solving the problem of alcoholism grants us a great deal in addition to that. Note, for instance, how the 12-step idea has propagated to any addiction. Or, how the space program has given us not only rockets, but bed mattresses.
If the relationship between a problem and the tool that solves it is one to one, it is circular argument. If, however, a tool can be applied in many different problems, then it's not.
There are a few examples, but technology use is pretty sparse among the genomes of this planet. I'm talking here about active employment of tools and the like -- the bird building the nest, not the maple seed that's evolved to fly like a helicopter. But then, the bird doesn't experiment with new ways to build a nest (I don't think).
Well, there is actually a great number of examples that are largely ignored for one of two reasons: we aren't looking for them, or we don't consider it 'tool use'. Apes use sticks to dissect ant hills, beavers create dams (construction!) upon which their livelihood is based, dolphins have been seen to use tools to get at food, and so on. Animals in the wild do use objects beyond their immediate body to achieve their ends.
And, they do adapt. One of the central premises of Adaption of Species was the idea that birds built nests differently, and the successful nests became more predominant. This is not unlike our own house building. One thing that humans have that is not often seen is the ability to try more new things quicker - but that's largely seen as our greatest strength and why, in the global niche, we are a runaway success.
Ultimately I largely agree with your assessment that science has improved our lot in life. But I still think it's a little too much to say science has always helped. More like, it's an incredibly great good, but it's not 100% good.
I will grant that science, and indeed any action, has some opposite effect that is either negative or neutral in our eyes. The exact balances can be debated, of course, but it seems to me that because the majority - and I'd posit the vast majority - of the total result is positive within a generation, that science is an objectively good pursuit. You mention the law of Unintended Consequences; one cannot have only intended consequences unless one is aware of how everything works. That law is true because we do not, nor likely will within this eon, know everything. But the more we know (da du da!) has a direct correspondence to how much we can control the consequences. Which leads me to...
Farming is a good technology, right? Is its value greater than one Amazon rainforest? Is that even a judgement we can make?
It is a judgment we can't make until we know more. Which means studying it rationally; science. Right now, we're just choosing farming, but that's not based on any deep understanding of the interplay despite being aware that there is one.
And here's the thing, the wo/men that go and do study that interplay are giving us something that really does go beyond them; knowledge is tangible and we have a really ea
But to assert that science is always beneficial seems too good to be true. Sure, an invention might reap some reward, but it often ends up creating new problems too.
My objection primarily comes from this statement. Science does not always produce beneficial effects, but the beneficial effects have always outweighed the negative effects, and the obviousness of this is seen 'in the long run'.
To take a basic example; advances in agricultural have definite and observable negative effects. But our society can spend far more time doing other things as a result. Our culture is far more diverse and our ability to create far large because most of our people aren't farmers anymore. There is no need for them to be.
So, to take the example of brain altering chemicals; are they good or bad? The answer is, of course, both, but we are better off with them, and will be even more better off in the future. We have many ADHD kids; it is better that they are functional rather than nonfunctional. Are the brain chemicals all good? Of course not, but it's a good compromise, and pushes our understanding of the brain. In the future, we will mitigate or remove those side effects.
Now, I realize that that requires some faith to believe, but statistics bears it out. Indeed, logic suggests that it is better to have these things and their observable side effects, because those side effects can then be engineered through or around. Whereas if we refuse the advance in understanding, we never learn what the side effects are. Transparency is very, very useful.
I'm hard pressed to think of a single situation wherein science has not helped us - though it is reasonable to say that short-term downsides are problematic. For instance, firearms; they've led to a lot of slaughter and senseless death. At the same time, the scope of wars in terms of percentage of people directly involved has been reduced over time due to the presence of firearms. This is a tangible benefit because a war no longer needs to destroy an entire generation; it is far more decisive.
Medicine is, to my mind, hard to debate. The average life span of humans has significantly gone up. Life is good; I can't really complain about that in any sense. Yes, there are more ways we can die, but much of that is attributable to the fact that we live longer and are more aware of the things that kill. If we have a global pandemic (or nuclear war), one might argue that my above statement is erroneous, but I think that on the whole the argument for apocalypse is rather thin. Obviously we need to be on guard, but it's never happened so it's hard to say what conditions are actually required.
Alcohol is, to my mind, something of a universal constant. I mean, -OH groups are prevalent, and most higher life forms use it as a natural depressant. If you take the 1984 argument, you could say it is the bread of the bread and circus. Alcohol has definitely caused many problems; the egregious number of motor accidents under the influence for starters. But between refined alcohol and unrefined alcohol, I think the former is better - and even between refined and no I think the former is better. Not just because I like me a snakebite every once in a while, either. The downsides to alcohol has spurred significant advances in medicine and sociology. AA is, to my mind, a very important achievement, because it's an excellent example of how to structure a support framework for people with crippling problems.
I'm going to argue a bit with eugenics, because it wasn't really science. It's focus was to prove out a mythology people held; that a certain race was better. It wouldn't accept alternate theories. As a cultural event, we did derive benefit, as steep a price as we paid. Still, I won't attribute that to science, or human reason, but rather human empathy.
And then we come to the crux of it; does science benefit all cultures? Obviously, it's allowed the death of quite a few along the way. But I don't consider that a failure of scie
The question is really; is there any utility to x?
No, the question is: "Is x the best choice?"
But it's not a choice. It was a choice, but with unknown outcomes. In evaluating the utility of the program, you cannot throw out benefits that exist but were not part of the original goal. Nor should you measure it against roads not taken. There is a great deal of use in analyzing past actions, be they disasters or not. But that use does not come from deciding whether it was definitively the best choice; rather from what made it a good or bad choice. Only in the mechanisms is there any future utility, and second-guessing the perspective at the time with knowledge that didn't exist then is not useful.
While a cute quip, 'citation needed' in this situation is juvenile. You can mean one of two things; the first, and proper, usage of 'citation needed' would suggest that the remark in question may not have any foundation, and that some evidence would be useful in judging the veracity of the statement. In this regard, though, one could argue nearly anything requires citation, even the ridiculous ("The sky is blue in cloudless daytime"). I posit that there is such a preponderance of evidence that science has always, in the long run, improved society both culturally and economically, that citing some additional record that this is the case is ridiculous and furthermore distracts from the point at hand. But, if you're curious what led me to believe and thus make such a statement, please examine any account of any of the following eras: the information age, the nuclear age, world war II, the industrial revolution, the renaissance, the classical era. In each there are countless examples of science leading to a marked improvement in life for society and individuals. There are no doubt many others I've overlooked for the sake of brevity. Human history is, after all, long.
The second possibility is that you think the statement in question is wrong. But, despite the fact that 'citation needed' is really not an accurate statement to this end, to bear this out, you have to provide at least a half-way decent counterexample. I suspect, given the three seconds it likely took to write 'citation needed', that you didn't have any further thought forthcoming. Which is a shame, because instead your comment just makes you seem contrary.
I've seen estimates that for the approximate cost of a shuttle service mission to the Hubble, we could have simply launched a new one.
Ah, but therein lies the problem. The shuttle estimates weren't particularly egregious, either. F(known cost, unknown cost) = [True cost], and in the shuttles case we now know both the known and unknown costs. However, in the 'ideal' case we're comparing against, we don't know the unknown costs. Sometimes even hindsight isn't 20/20.