This, combined with a one-strike-and-you're-out policy makes the most sense to me. There is a small but sizable segment of the population that just shouldn't be behind the wheels of a vehicle period. Smart-phone addicts that are incapable of pulling over to talk/text are part of that group.
Agreed. I think for most people the 'safety' aspect is more of a 'night light in the bedroom' sort of effect. There's no real safety aspect to it; it just feels comforting. Having grown up in a rural area, I was often outside at night with few lights around. You are at a disadvantage against creatures with better night vision (the occasional skunk I ran across, for example) but most humans you could see coming a mile away, because of their flashlights, their cigarettes, or what-not. The danger is in the boundary areas--it's easy to get jumped if you're in the light and your assailant is in the shadows, because they can see and you can't. Either light everything, or nothing. For example, if you need light to see where you're going when you get home, don't turn on the porch light. Light the whole friggin' front of the house to abolish the shadows. Then, turn it all off once you're inside. If you see cigarettes or flashlights in the front yard, turn the lights back on, and take advantage of the 15-20 seconds their temporary blindness gives you to take better aim.
Uh, yes and no. Unix wasn't crap back then, but the Unix vendors were everything Microsoft is today. Outrageous software licensing terms and fees, incredibly expensive hardware, and a big business mentality. I was there too. Microsoft and the IBM PC / PC clones (one did not exist without the other) in the early '80s were like a Linux vendor is today--a breath of freedom for those who wanted to use these incredible new machines without onerous restrictions. I was one of the engineers at my company that made the decision to buy MS/PC, not Sun, at the time. As Luis says, you could do so much more with Microsoft and the PC, because the Microsoft ecosystem wasn't a walled garden in those days like the Unix systems were. Borland, AutoDesk, EA, etc. etc., would never have happened if Sun had 'won' the desktop.
Somewhere along the way, though, a funny thing happened. GNU/Linux opened up the Unix world (which was always the better development environment) while at the same time Microsoft slowly became the 800-lb gorilla that built the very same walls the old Unix vendors had erected in their day. Realistically, there is no compiler but VS for Windows today. No office suite but MS Office. Huge $$$$ MSDN subscription fees. Without competition, easy entry, and love from developers, innovation suffocates and dies. Happened to Unix then, and it's been happening to Microsoft for the past decade.
Personally, both Microsoft and the whole industry would have benefited from a Microsoft breakup a decade ago. It took a breakup of AT&T to get digital communications out of the 300 baud era, and AT&T is hardly the worse for it today. As long as Microsoft remains the large behemoth it is today it will never go anywhere, unless it lucks into the same kind of corporate leadership that IBM found when it totally re-invented itself.
IMO there are two primary reasons for this 1) high-end CAD software is incredibly expensive and has licensing schemes that work better in the Windows ecosystem and 2) the 3-D graphics drivers for Linux, particularly OpenGL, suck big time.
I do wonder if porting to Windows will come back to bite the companies in the future, as Microsoft seems to be intent on destroying Windows via the touchscreen interface--an interface which is anathema to most CAD engineers. Then again, Gnome seems to be following Microsoft down that abyss, and I don't see any sign that the Linux OpenGL drivers will be getting better any time soon.
Life isn't a Disney movie. You're confusing some quasi-religious 'Cycle of Life' mumble-jumble with real life cycles, as described in biology textbooks. The carbon cycle. The Krebs cycle. And so on.
I certainly don't dispute your wish for space exploration/colonization--I'm a NASA fan myself. But I find myself puzzled by the so-called trans-humanists--same as the singularity folks really--who pooh-pooh nature's cycles of life while failing to explain where they will find the energy needed to create this organic or mechanical transformation they seem to long for. It took 4 billion years of your random trial and error for nature to come up with a workable biosphere on a planet with a finite amount of energy falling on it every day, amidst some very immutable laws of physics.
Your body IS replaceable. It replaces itself about 7 times during an average lifetime. Naturally, your brain, that part you consider YOU, doesn't change quite so much. But everything in this universe decays. It's called entropy. Unless you morph into some higher plane of existence like V'ger, you're going to decay. That's not religion. That's science.
Who said nature is on our side? Who said nature is thinking at all? The dinosaurs certainly didn't think nature was on their side. Some--those that had the ability to reproduce and change through the cycle of life--still remain. The rest are gone. I suspect immortal humans will find nature to be just as harsh as mortal humans do. Nature holds the reigns of power in this universe, whether you like it or not.
Or you could just enter cryogenic stasis for the trip. You'd consume a lot fewer resources along the way if you were a meat popsicle, and you wouldn't get bored.
I remember reading once that insurance actuaries calculated how long an 'immortal' human would live before dying in a car crash or other accident. I don't remember the actual number, but it was around a few hundred years.
I think my mailman has dyslexia, as he has an uncanny tendency to put the parcel box key in the wrong personal box in our neighborhood cluster box. Nothing is foolproof, particularly when the USPS is involved.
Yes, your thoughtful post does seem out of place. I was wondering the same thing though. Once a population falls to a point where there's no solution but inbreeding, hasn't it already fallen beyond the point of no return? What's the point of having a bunch of sickly, genetically damaged animals, particularly if there's no longer any workable habitat/range available where the species can re-acquire over time a healthy genetic variability?
Exactly. Like the raid in Montana last year where a 12-year-old girl got burned when a SWAT officer threw a flash-bang grenade through a window. Seriously, forget the poor girl, just think about the SWAT team standing nearby. is throwing explosives into a suspected meth lab a good idea?
Last I heard, though, the Podunk forces are starting to dry up as the cost of liability insurance is starting to bite. It seems to me the Feds are now the bigger problem here. That, plus the military mentality that seems to be infecting what is supposed to be a civilian force. There is no good reason to be wearing camouflage if you're a civilian police officer or federal agent. It's not very good at hiding you in the typical urban setting, and it encourages exactly the wrong kind of behavior when you're trying to de-escalate a situation. Same for 'men in black' rushing into a house at 3 in the morning. Police uniforms should be clear and unambiguous, making it easy to tell the supposed good guys from the bad ones.
I totally agree with your suggestions. There is a need for SWAT teams. However, they should be a highly trained, professional force as you describe, with careful oversight, called in only when needed. The rest of the force needs to spend less time practicing SWAT tactics, and more time thinking of non-lethal ways of accomplishing the same goals with less risk to both officers and the occasional innocent bystander.
This, exactly. I don't understand why everyone makes it seem like this is a zero-sum game, where you can have either eBooks or Dead-Tree books, but not both.
Paper books have lots of uses. For example, I'm an aviation enthusiast, and have attended airshows for many years. I have books signed personally, to me, by the likes of 'Buzz' Aldrin the Apollo 11 astronaut, Bob Hoover, Chuck Yeager, and so on. I have yet to see anyone on this thread mentioning having received an eBook signed by the author.
I have my great-grandmothers complete Book of Knowledge encyclopedia set, printed in 1910, and still in beautiful condition. The pages are full of artwork in full color--there's even a few glorious illustrations showing some of these new-fangled flying machines the Wright Brothers and others are flying around in. Not even the highest-resolution eBook today can begin to compare to those pages.
I still have my original copy of 'The C Programming Language', purchased 25 years ago, and still used today. I can find information in it now in just a few seconds--faster than I can open a PDF, much less mouse/touch my way through the pages.
Most of my design books I still buy in dead-tree format, because eBooks still have serious problems with heavy math, illustrations, graphs, and the like. Reading an eBook on Electrodynamics, for example, is just about impossible IMO.
That said, I now prefer eBooks for the light reading. The latest novel, an autobiography, a non-fiction work on some current political topic. Books that I'd otherwise toss after I read them. I also like eBooks now for the more mundane technology stuff, like web design, or a primer on the latest scripting language du jour, things like that. Basically books that are useful for reference, but likely to be tossed in a year or two as new shiny stuff comes out.
This topic is about as stupid as the 'Tablets are making the desktop PC obsolete' threads.
Yes, I learned that too. But it's the backstory that is the crux of the issue, I believe. Getting a pilot's license isn't easy. It requires a lot of training. Contrary to what many folks believe, that training isn't about the hand-eye coordination part of flying. That is picked up quickly. No, most of the training involves judgment (don't run out of fuel fool), scientific thought (if the dewpoint and temperature are equal, expect the fog bank), situational awareness (how far/fast/where am I, and who else is in my airspace), and systems (those in the plane and those in the airspace). In other words, most of the training involves learning to *pilot* the plane, not *drive* it. This is totally the opposite of most automobile driving instruction, which is more about learning the mechanics of steering/stopping/turning and a few rules of the road. Many drivers are clueless about what makes their car run (gas/air/spark), have limited situational awareness (eg snow==ditch), and can't distinguish an oil pressure warning from a service engine light. To them, it's simply a conveyance, and thus, they have problems at the first sign of trouble or distraction.
There are a few groups that drive on the roads while simultaneously talking into radios, and did so years before cellphones came out. Police. Truckers. HAM radio operators. Rarely does one hear of these folks getting into an accident because they were communicating over the radio while driving. I suspect it is because these folks have a higher level of training and approach the task of driving like a pilot approaches flying. It's not the communications that impairs the cellphone drivers, it's their attitude and priorities.
CA has a Democratic super-majority. I'm positively sure they'll blow the budget like meth addicts. Mind you, I don't think a Republican super-majority would spend it any slower.
True. Furthermore, if I had instant brain-level access to every bit of information on the Internet, I'd know a LOT about the Kardashians and very little about how to build a Saturn V rocket engine.
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
Wow. Wish I had mod points.Yours is one of those rare 'forest, not trees' posts. With decent grammar and spelling to boot.
This issue is closely related to some of the other posters who state that the issue is the lack of 'smart STEM graduates', or those commentators who are writing about the inability to find qualified job applicants. The reality is that the STEM world needs two kinds of workers today: cheap replaceable drones who can code reams of Java from a specification, and really sharp engineers who can design a new smart phone with twice the battery life, four times the screen resolution, and half the BOM cost as the previous version. For everything in between, there is a tool that can probably do the job better and with less cost than the 'average' engineer that would have been hired in years past.
The is the REAL reason why there's both a demand for cheap H1-B labor and a 'STEM shortage' at the same time.
The other side of this argument, however, is that having Linux/Unix running on so many devices is advantageous for Linux users because it forces hardware manufacturers to be more supportive. Yes, I get annoyed occasionally when a router or something with Linux Inside only comes with Windows and Mac GUI tools. However, the fact that it runs Linux invariably means I can find comparable/better Linux utilities, and typically the GUI tools are designed for unsophisticated use/users in any case. Having Apple running BSD, printing with CUPS, and so forth, means that most printers now have Linux support, and has helped push the 'WinPrinter' driver model to extinction. If Google wants to stamp their own brand on a Linux-powered device, that's fine with me, if it leads to more support from Google and peripheral manufacturers for Linux-compatible drivers.
Exactly. And typically the most ardent supporters are psychopaths too, whether left or right. This entire thread simply confirms that. Welcome to politics, and the human condition.
I suspect that if Man does colonize other planets at some point in the future, dogs, cats, chickens and cows at least will probably be coming along as well. You don't need to be the one building the spaceship to be a space-faring species.
Contrast the horse with the zebra. The former was amenable to domestication. The latter was not. Which is more diverse? Which has more freedom to roam? Which is more successfully wide-spread around the world today?
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This, combined with a one-strike-and-you're-out policy makes the most sense to me. There is a small but sizable segment of the population that just shouldn't be behind the wheels of a vehicle period. Smart-phone addicts that are incapable of pulling over to talk/text are part of that group.
Agreed. I think for most people the 'safety' aspect is more of a 'night light in the bedroom' sort of effect. There's no real safety aspect to it; it just feels comforting. Having grown up in a rural area, I was often outside at night with few lights around. You are at a disadvantage against creatures with better night vision (the occasional skunk I ran across, for example) but most humans you could see coming a mile away, because of their flashlights, their cigarettes, or what-not. The danger is in the boundary areas--it's easy to get jumped if you're in the light and your assailant is in the shadows, because they can see and you can't. Either light everything, or nothing. For example, if you need light to see where you're going when you get home, don't turn on the porch light. Light the whole friggin' front of the house to abolish the shadows. Then, turn it all off once you're inside. If you see cigarettes or flashlights in the front yard, turn the lights back on, and take advantage of the 15-20 seconds their temporary blindness gives you to take better aim.
Uh, yes and no. Unix wasn't crap back then, but the Unix vendors were everything Microsoft is today. Outrageous software licensing terms and fees, incredibly expensive hardware, and a big business mentality. I was there too. Microsoft and the IBM PC / PC clones (one did not exist without the other) in the early '80s were like a Linux vendor is today--a breath of freedom for those who wanted to use these incredible new machines without onerous restrictions. I was one of the engineers at my company that made the decision to buy MS/PC, not Sun, at the time. As Luis says, you could do so much more with Microsoft and the PC, because the Microsoft ecosystem wasn't a walled garden in those days like the Unix systems were. Borland, AutoDesk, EA, etc. etc., would never have happened if Sun had 'won' the desktop.
Somewhere along the way, though, a funny thing happened. GNU/Linux opened up the Unix world (which was always the better development environment) while at the same time Microsoft slowly became the 800-lb gorilla that built the very same walls the old Unix vendors had erected in their day. Realistically, there is no compiler but VS for Windows today. No office suite but MS Office. Huge $$$$ MSDN subscription fees. Without competition, easy entry, and love from developers, innovation suffocates and dies. Happened to Unix then, and it's been happening to Microsoft for the past decade.
Personally, both Microsoft and the whole industry would have benefited from a Microsoft breakup a decade ago. It took a breakup of AT&T to get digital communications out of the 300 baud era, and AT&T is hardly the worse for it today. As long as Microsoft remains the large behemoth it is today it will never go anywhere, unless it lucks into the same kind of corporate leadership that IBM found when it totally re-invented itself.
IMO there are two primary reasons for this 1) high-end CAD software is incredibly expensive and has licensing schemes that work better in the Windows ecosystem and 2) the 3-D graphics drivers for Linux, particularly OpenGL, suck big time.
I do wonder if porting to Windows will come back to bite the companies in the future, as Microsoft seems to be intent on destroying Windows via the touchscreen interface--an interface which is anathema to most CAD engineers. Then again, Gnome seems to be following Microsoft down that abyss, and I don't see any sign that the Linux OpenGL drivers will be getting better any time soon.
Life isn't a Disney movie. You're confusing some quasi-religious 'Cycle of Life' mumble-jumble with real life cycles, as described in biology textbooks. The carbon cycle. The Krebs cycle. And so on.
I certainly don't dispute your wish for space exploration/colonization--I'm a NASA fan myself. But I find myself puzzled by the so-called trans-humanists--same as the singularity folks really--who pooh-pooh nature's cycles of life while failing to explain where they will find the energy needed to create this organic or mechanical transformation they seem to long for. It took 4 billion years of your random trial and error for nature to come up with a workable biosphere on a planet with a finite amount of energy falling on it every day, amidst some very immutable laws of physics.
Your body IS replaceable. It replaces itself about 7 times during an average lifetime. Naturally, your brain, that part you consider YOU, doesn't change quite so much. But everything in this universe decays. It's called entropy. Unless you morph into some higher plane of existence like V'ger, you're going to decay. That's not religion. That's science.
Who said nature is on our side? Who said nature is thinking at all? The dinosaurs certainly didn't think nature was on their side. Some--those that had the ability to reproduce and change through the cycle of life--still remain. The rest are gone. I suspect immortal humans will find nature to be just as harsh as mortal humans do. Nature holds the reigns of power in this universe, whether you like it or not.
Or you could just enter cryogenic stasis for the trip. You'd consume a lot fewer resources along the way if you were a meat popsicle, and you wouldn't get bored.
One of the best movies ever. If you're immortal you might want to watch it, so you'll be prepared for your future.
I remember reading once that insurance actuaries calculated how long an 'immortal' human would live before dying in a car crash or other accident. I don't remember the actual number, but it was around a few hundred years.
I think my mailman has dyslexia, as he has an uncanny tendency to put the parcel box key in the wrong personal box in our neighborhood cluster box. Nothing is foolproof, particularly when the USPS is involved.
Yes, your thoughtful post does seem out of place. I was wondering the same thing though. Once a population falls to a point where there's no solution but inbreeding, hasn't it already fallen beyond the point of no return? What's the point of having a bunch of sickly, genetically damaged animals, particularly if there's no longer any workable habitat/range available where the species can re-acquire over time a healthy genetic variability?
Exactly. Like the raid in Montana last year where a 12-year-old girl got burned when a SWAT officer threw a flash-bang grenade through a window. Seriously, forget the poor girl, just think about the SWAT team standing nearby. is throwing explosives into a suspected meth lab a good idea?
Last I heard, though, the Podunk forces are starting to dry up as the cost of liability insurance is starting to bite. It seems to me the Feds are now the bigger problem here. That, plus the military mentality that seems to be infecting what is supposed to be a civilian force. There is no good reason to be wearing camouflage if you're a civilian police officer or federal agent. It's not very good at hiding you in the typical urban setting, and it encourages exactly the wrong kind of behavior when you're trying to de-escalate a situation. Same for 'men in black' rushing into a house at 3 in the morning. Police uniforms should be clear and unambiguous, making it easy to tell the supposed good guys from the bad ones.
I totally agree with your suggestions. There is a need for SWAT teams. However, they should be a highly trained, professional force as you describe, with careful oversight, called in only when needed. The rest of the force needs to spend less time practicing SWAT tactics, and more time thinking of non-lethal ways of accomplishing the same goals with less risk to both officers and the occasional innocent bystander.
This, exactly. I don't understand why everyone makes it seem like this is a zero-sum game, where you can have either eBooks or Dead-Tree books, but not both.
Paper books have lots of uses. For example, I'm an aviation enthusiast, and have attended airshows for many years. I have books signed personally, to me, by the likes of 'Buzz' Aldrin the Apollo 11 astronaut, Bob Hoover, Chuck Yeager, and so on. I have yet to see anyone on this thread mentioning having received an eBook signed by the author.
I have my great-grandmothers complete Book of Knowledge encyclopedia set, printed in 1910, and still in beautiful condition. The pages are full of artwork in full color--there's even a few glorious illustrations showing some of these new-fangled flying machines the Wright Brothers and others are flying around in. Not even the highest-resolution eBook today can begin to compare to those pages.
I still have my original copy of 'The C Programming Language', purchased 25 years ago, and still used today. I can find information in it now in just a few seconds--faster than I can open a PDF, much less mouse/touch my way through the pages.
Most of my design books I still buy in dead-tree format, because eBooks still have serious problems with heavy math, illustrations, graphs, and the like. Reading an eBook on Electrodynamics, for example, is just about impossible IMO.
That said, I now prefer eBooks for the light reading. The latest novel, an autobiography, a non-fiction work on some current political topic. Books that I'd otherwise toss after I read them. I also like eBooks now for the more mundane technology stuff, like web design, or a primer on the latest scripting language du jour, things like that. Basically books that are useful for reference, but likely to be tossed in a year or two as new shiny stuff comes out.
This topic is about as stupid as the 'Tablets are making the desktop PC obsolete' threads.
Yes, I learned that too. But it's the backstory that is the crux of the issue, I believe. Getting a pilot's license isn't easy. It requires a lot of training. Contrary to what many folks believe, that training isn't about the hand-eye coordination part of flying. That is picked up quickly. No, most of the training involves judgment (don't run out of fuel fool), scientific thought (if the dewpoint and temperature are equal, expect the fog bank), situational awareness (how far/fast/where am I, and who else is in my airspace), and systems (those in the plane and those in the airspace). In other words, most of the training involves learning to *pilot* the plane, not *drive* it. This is totally the opposite of most automobile driving instruction, which is more about learning the mechanics of steering/stopping/turning and a few rules of the road. Many drivers are clueless about what makes their car run (gas/air/spark), have limited situational awareness (eg snow==ditch), and can't distinguish an oil pressure warning from a service engine light. To them, it's simply a conveyance, and thus, they have problems at the first sign of trouble or distraction.
There are a few groups that drive on the roads while simultaneously talking into radios, and did so years before cellphones came out. Police. Truckers. HAM radio operators. Rarely does one hear of these folks getting into an accident because they were communicating over the radio while driving. I suspect it is because these folks have a higher level of training and approach the task of driving like a pilot approaches flying. It's not the communications that impairs the cellphone drivers, it's their attitude and priorities.
No, they were already stupid. Cellphones simply allow the stupidity to surface in visible ways.
CA has a Democratic super-majority. I'm positively sure they'll blow the budget like meth addicts. Mind you, I don't think a Republican super-majority would spend it any slower.
BTW, you're totally wrong on Prop 13.
True. Furthermore, if I had instant brain-level access to every bit of information on the Internet, I'd know a LOT about the Kardashians and very little about how to build a Saturn V rocket engine.
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
Not necessarily. Maybe you missed this headline from late last year:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/11/13/191217/study-claims-human-intelligence-peaked-two-to-six-millennia-ago
Based on a rough statistical sample made up primarily of my neighbors, I believe this study has merit.
Wow. Wish I had mod points.Yours is one of those rare 'forest, not trees' posts. With decent grammar and spelling to boot.
This issue is closely related to some of the other posters who state that the issue is the lack of 'smart STEM graduates', or those commentators who are writing about the inability to find qualified job applicants. The reality is that the STEM world needs two kinds of workers today: cheap replaceable drones who can code reams of Java from a specification, and really sharp engineers who can design a new smart phone with twice the battery life, four times the screen resolution, and half the BOM cost as the previous version. For everything in between, there is a tool that can probably do the job better and with less cost than the 'average' engineer that would have been hired in years past.
The is the REAL reason why there's both a demand for cheap H1-B labor and a 'STEM shortage' at the same time.
The other side of this argument, however, is that having Linux/Unix running on so many devices is advantageous for Linux users because it forces hardware manufacturers to be more supportive. Yes, I get annoyed occasionally when a router or something with Linux Inside only comes with Windows and Mac GUI tools. However, the fact that it runs Linux invariably means I can find comparable/better Linux utilities, and typically the GUI tools are designed for unsophisticated use/users in any case. Having Apple running BSD, printing with CUPS, and so forth, means that most printers now have Linux support, and has helped push the 'WinPrinter' driver model to extinction. If Google wants to stamp their own brand on a Linux-powered device, that's fine with me, if it leads to more support from Google and peripheral manufacturers for Linux-compatible drivers.
Exactly. And typically the most ardent supporters are psychopaths too, whether left or right. This entire thread simply confirms that. Welcome to politics, and the human condition.
...than a giant green lizard.
I suspect that if Man does colonize other planets at some point in the future, dogs, cats, chickens and cows at least will probably be coming along as well. You don't need to be the one building the spaceship to be a space-faring species.
Contrast the horse with the zebra. The former was amenable to domestication. The latter was not. Which is more diverse? Which has more freedom to roam? Which is more successfully wide-spread around the world today?
As long as Mozilla and IE continue to be viable, I don't think your concern is valid with regard to the browser.
As for your other points, particularly the abominable choice of H.264 instead of a free codec for HTML5, you're spot on.