Well, at least theoretically it's conceivable that it would be possible to do a better job with the regulating proteins than nature did. After all, nature itself did an increasingly better job by trial and error, and it would be presumptuous to presume that whatever we got is nothing short of absolute, unsurpassable perfection. So, yes, it's conceivable that one day someone would encode a better protein than that gene does.
I'm not sure if we're at that point, yet, though. We know how to copy genes and we know how to break genes, but I don't think anyone really knows how to make a better one, or really even design one that only causes the effect to differ by a small amount.
We're essentially like a clock maker who knows how to copy a cog or lever from another clock, or how to break one, but even designing a 10% smaller cog is well outside the realm of what he knows how to do. That's really the state of genetic engineering nowadays. Fortunately, we have billions of clocks and trillions of cogs to copy around us, which is why we can still do some useful stuff. But designing a new one is really still right out.
So, yeah, it could happen. Given enough time, it probably _will_ happen. But if it needs to be more complicated than breaking or deleting or replacing that gene with one from a existing organism, I'm not holding my breath that it will happen in my lifetime.
Well, I'd say it remains to be seen if it's an upgrade or a downgrade. Forgetting stuff or needing more than one case to form a rule are there for a reason. If you met someone "upgraded" who upon seeing a yellow cat automatically forms the full connexion that all cats are yellow, and/or is unable to break that connexion afterwards, the thought would probably be less "upgraded" and more like "poor idiot".
The general evolution of the brain has been towards smarter. Something which only needed a gene to break to be an upgrade would have been selected instantly if it were indeed an upgrade, as genes break all the time.
And for that matter, if that gene is a downgrade, how did it get selected in the first place. Survival of the fittest is still the name of the game, and in this case we're not even talking outside colours or anything else blamable on sexual selection. So, really, how did a whole extra gene that causes a downgrade get there, if it's a downgrade?
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they'll test it to heck and back before using it on humans, and all that. They're scientists and all that.
All I'm saying is just don't get your hopes too high yet. It may well turn out to be a literal implementation of the Flowers For Algernon story.
They do it anyway, actually. The point of those lists for example in WoW isn't to make the right number of components for a given number of final products, as most products don't really have any intermediate steps. The point is simply to grind your skill from 1 to whatever value, in the minimum time and with minimum expense.
You seem to assume that most people will actually do that math. In practice most will get some build off a site and run with that. Or get some tool which calculates it for them, rather than just help.
Or for crafting, people actually do stuff like pick some crafting guide from a site and mindlessly follow instructions like "gather 100 bars of X, 60 bars of Y and a stack of Z. Craft product A 20 times, then 25 times product B, go to the trainer and learn recipe C, craft that 15 times." At the end of the day most will just be a few thousand gold short because they just bought those quantities instead, and still have no idea why, say, they skipped products D and E in the middle which needed more bars. The maths involved won't even get a nod, much less some thinking.
Heck, I still see people who don't even learn the basic geography of the place because they were chasing the little cube marker of QuestHelper and never even noticed major landmarks.
Basically, in the immortal words of Dorothy Parker, "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.";)
This includes things like corporate competition. very few of the big companies today got where they are now because they made the logical choices when they were started, presumably by young CEOs.
Actually, on the contrary, I think that if anyone did a serious statistic, they'd find that the only reason they're now big companies instead of also ran, is that at some point down the line they made a decision that made sense. Like, dunno, Sharp realizing that there's a more lucrative market for radios than for pencils, or someone at IBM realizing that there's a business case for smaller and cheaper computers ("smaller" those days meaning "than a room"), or some crazy guy called Edison believing they can make money with those newfangled lightbulbs although they cost more than an oil lamp at first, and so on. While they may have been riskier propositions than just doing the same old thing, they were all actually quite rational business decisions and someone had a very good idea why they expect a R in ROI.
The companies where the decisions were taken with the dick, and just to establish alpha male status... well, you can look at 90% of the dot-coms for an example. That's people who blew all the money on alpha status symbols, be it cars costing more than the company's total income, luxurious headquarters they couldn't even afford, whole sports teams, or even just a bigger herd of programmers than the Joneses' dot-com, or did acquisitions of other dot-coms that also had no income, just for the sake of showing the whole world who's the daddy now.
The companies led by a dick thinking with the dick aren't the Fortune 500 list, but those 80% of startups that fail right away.
But what if I am a sociopath, you sensitive clod?!
Then I hope you're the of sociopath kind who, after climbing to the top, will take the business decisions with the head on your neck, not with the one in your pants.
Really, the point I was actually trying to make there was that being either young or insecure and needing to prove penis size, isn't what makes those aggressive young things play other people's emotions on the way to the top. Being a sociopath isn't even necessarily a bad thing in today's culture, where we actually expect corporations to behave like complete sociopaths, and some humans to take those decisions and rationalize them to the rest of the plebs. After all, whatever a company does, the decision was taken by some humans. But it looks to me like it's orthogonal to age or testosterone. That's what I was trying to say.
Well, as a general criterion, I would agree with you, but here we're talking a simple game with clear rules. The offer to get free money was clearly just an offer to get free money. The one offering it didn't get to write some "I own your kids now" clause in the fine print or anything.
Actually, no, if you actually RTFA (I know, I know, it's Slashdot), you'll find out that no, it's also based on a study where they actually asked people to play a sort of game, and they actually measured testosterone levels. Those who had more testosterone, tended to be more competitive even when it resulted in losing the game.
In fact those with high testosterone levels ended up doing things as irrational in any imaginable circumstance as to basically reject an offer of free money, just because they perceived it as being too low. You don't want someone like that making economic decisions.
Just age and experience had nothing to do with it. Those test subjects who were just as young but more deficient in the testosterone department tended to take more rational decisions.
Basically, thinking with your dick is bad. The stereotype of the Real Man with real balls may have been a plus when it came to making him do dumb stuff like going to get stabbed at for his king, but it turns out to be a liability when the job requires more thinking with the head upstairs than with the one below the belt. You want someone taking economic decisions because they make logical and mathematical sense, not because it's his kind of measuring dick size against the partners.
Actually, I guess it depends on what sections he reads, since Slashdot does offer some customizability in what you see on the front page. Someone who isn't interested in idle, games, etc, and reads the IT and/or technology sections, or even only reads one of the Slashdot sub-sites, might see a different set of stories than you do.
Did you mean "smarter-than-thou"? Sorry, couldn't resist.:-)
You did type that right before "thought" so it is a perfectly understandable mistake. Your eyes probably just slid right over the extra "gh". I know I've made that sort of error before and missed it during proofreading. Stuff like that happens more as I get older and I tend to catch it only after I've clicked Submit.
Could be, but on the whole I probably illustrated what I'm talking about. Since I installed the dictionary in the Mozilla, I spend much less time proofreading before hitting Submit. I rely too much on it catching mistakes, and end up submitting with a homophone or near homophone just because it's also a valid word. Give it another 10 or 20 years, and probably I too will have no idea how it's spelled without a spell-checker.
Well, that's insightful and all, but that's not really what I had in mind.
For a start I'm not even talking about people breaking the rules to sound funny or witty or for archaic flavour, but stuff like seeing yet another lemming write "the right to bare arms." What, did someone forbid him from wearing a t-shirt or short sleeves? Where do I join the protest against that injustice?
It's not making it any clearer, and you tend to find it's not even used as a written pun either. I've actually had wannabe grammar nazis "correct" me when I wrote the correct form "bear arms". But the lemming playing smarter-than-though thought "bear" only means, well, the furry kind of animal.
And then you get stuff like "barring" because the spell-checker suggested that, which leaves me wondering it they really meant "barring responsibility" or "bearing responsibility." Sometimes it can be a bit ambiguous.
Second, don't confuse _style_ rules with grammar and lexical rules, although sadly the style is mistakenly lumped under grammar. Rules against double negatives or telling you to use the passive voice or whatever, are really style rules and most are really just debatable recommendations. Breaking those is ok. Not knowing basic spelling or sentence structure, now that's the kind of offense I was talking about.
The supermarkets I visit here in the UK actually tell you the cost per unit of weight or volume anyway.. a simple comparison is all that's needed. I am content with this.
Actually, I'm pretty sure I've seen a heck of a lot of people with calculators in 1990 and even in the 80's. The year 1990 wasn't the 1930's when "calculator" meant a big clunky mechanical machine with a crank. Cheap, four-operation calculators were, well, cheap. A good programmable scientific calculator may have been bigger and more expensive, but 4 operation calculators were already only limited by how small you can make the case and have half-blind still use it. You could get a credit card sized calculator that could slip even into the smallest purse or pocket, or, heck, you could already get one in a wristwatch. (If you were one of those unfashionable nerds, that is. Yeah, welcome to the club.;))
And plenty of people used them. There were already housewives and whatnot who hadn't done any maths by hand or in their head in years, and, yeah, I don't doubt that enough would have already lost the reflex of multiplying 2.50 by 2.
Sort of. You do however need basically to know what to look for. Einstein would know what book to pull out to get any bit of physics he didn't remember offhand, and had enough knowledge to know if some reasoning you throw at him is valid or you're pulling his leg. (Well, ok, maybe not about Quantum Mechanics, or not at first;))
Joe Sixpack googling for something will land a few million hits, the first couple of pages will be mostly completely unrelated stuff and/or woowoo from some snake oil vendors. And he just never learned the things that would help him distinguish which is which. Having google and no knowledge of his own won't make him Einstein, sorry.
E.g., try googling for, well, just about anything quantum, and see how many bullshit quantum-chi-crystal pendants you find, "ZOMG, uncertainty means we create the universe when we look at it" apologetics for magical thinking, keyword/link spam sites, etc, you find.
On a good day, you might get the Wikipedia link at the top, because, well, google at some point went "fuck it" trying to sort what is relevant and just artificially upranked Wikipedia. Which half the time still need some filtering abilities of your own, because it'll be a page full of [citation needed] and "original research" signs that still won't help _you_ much decide if you should trust it or not or where to go for more authoritative stuff, often enough will directly contradict other Wikipedia pages it links to, etc. And occasionally will contain such vandalisms as that Iron is mined from monkeys, that the bridges in Ancient Rome were made in Japan, or that didgeridoos are cloned in test tubes. (I swear to the FSM, all three are actual things I've learned on Wikipedia.) Without any knowledge of your own, how would you know whether to trust that or not?
And that's actually on a good day. On a bad day you won't even have that Wikipedia link.
More like how having a spell-checker makes people never learn how to spell most words. And even with a spell-checker then you see them writing "should of" or using a wrong near-homophone (homophone, surprisingly enough, doesn't mean "sounds gay";) like "eat, drink and be marry" because if the spell-checker didn't put a wavy line under a word it must be the right one.
Or like already the use of calculator means a lot of people in the western world are effectively innumerate. They can't actually even tally up whether a 5 Euro bill is enough for two packs of X at 1.99 each and one of something else at 0.95. (And I'm only using Euro as an example because here the VAT is already _included_ in the price, you don't have to calculate how much the VAT would be on top of the price. So really, they just need to add.) Or they can't even notice that a special offer of a six-pack of something at only 5.95 Euro isn't actually an improvement over a price of 0.95 Euro per can otherwise, unless you told them to calculate and they pull out their calculator.
No, I'm serious. There actually are such special offers that sound like you could save a lot, but are actually more expensive per unit/gallon/inch/whatever. And they actually work. Because enough people can't do elementary arithmetic any more, or it ranks up there with anal rape for the kind of force or threat of harm you'd need to use to make them do arithmetic.
We had a good century or so of building up literacy and numeracy... and now it's sliding right back.
Actually the idea of some entity trying to buy every single copy of a book to keep it secret, strikes me of more like a PR stunt than something feasible.
If you want to actually bury something, you buy the _rights_ to it. Then you get copyright extended until kingdom come like Disney. Copyright is just as misused for preventing something from being seen as it is used as originally intended.
Trying to just buy the copies off the market is purely pointless if someone else has the copyright, as basically nothing can prevent him from just printing more. I mean, it's not like buying something that costs millions and rare resources to produce. Printing another 10,000 copies or even a million is cheap and trivial. If anything, some entity trying to buy 10,000 copies just added demand worth 10,000 copies, and you'd be stupid not to cash in on it.
On the other hand, the delusion that something is going to be rare because someone else wants to buy all copies, is a pretty much guaranteed way to make idiots think this is a literally once in a lifetime opportunity to grab a copy before the government. It's making it sound like it's more rare than it is, and about to run out.
Actually, it's not _that_ bad for most applications.
I have actually programmed assembly back in ye goode olde days of 16 bit CPUs and segment registers, and the reason it was evil was that you ran into that limit all the time. Even the most trivial operations had to juggle registers. You couldn't even process a 640x480 pixel image in 16 colours without running into segment maths. (Incidentally that aforementioned image would need about twice the memory you could address with 16 bits without segment maths.) Even addressing two pixels on the same row or column could mean needing to change the segment first.
By comparison 4 gigabytes is still a lot. There are precious few applications where you need more than 4 GB in a single array, which is when you'd actually need segment maths.
And frankly those are nonexistent in the normal desktop or even vanilla web page world, because they have to be able to run on machines which don't even have that much.
Just having over 4 GB total data is not the old hell. If each individual piece of data is smaller than 4 GB, you can just have the segment be part of the pointer, and only need to load it once. You don't need to do more segment maths just to get the 65537'th byte of that buffer.
Don't get me wrong, it's still more elegant to not have to worry about segments at all. But the alternative is not anywhere near the old hell.
That's exactly what I was wondering too. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to see a company putting its WebSphere application server or Oracle or DB/2 database on a cell phone or netbook any time soon. Nor (I hope to the elder gods) where they'll make their personnel enter the data or program those servers on cell phones instead of some kind of desktop.
Granted, some of those servers may or may not have ARM CPUs, but then that's not what he's implying there. And a lot are running on PowerPC already. The server world is somewhat less fanboyish about either AMD or Intel.
You can call it whatever you like, but "filtering" truth into something mostly false is still a lie by any other name.
And my objection to starting a relationship with lies is basically the same, even changing "lie" to "filtering truth to something more acceptable." We just established we're two people who'll "filter the truth to something more acceptable" when it suits out purposes. Maybe I'll filter the truth just a bit when I say I was in a meeting with mid-level management, when I was actually banging a chick who's a manager at McDonald's. I'm not doing something as ugly as "lying", I'm just filtering truth to make it more acceptable to the wife, see? And maybe she'll just embelish a little when she says she was working out late at the gym with her fitness instructor. Riding him counts as a work out, right?
But as I was saying, even that's not what I find the silliest. It's still subverting the whole idea of actually matching interests.
You can have something which on paper looks like a match made in heaven:
He: likes camping, lifting weights, dancing
She: likes camping, fitness, dancing
And in reality be more like two different sets of something completely different. He loves SF movies and hates chick flicks, she wants to see every soap opera ever made and thinks Star Trek is teh yuck. His idea of a happy weekend is end-to-end raiding Icecrown Citadel, hers is trying to nag him to help move the furniture around. (A surprisingly popular passtime with women, it turns out.) Etc.
They could probably agree that they could kinda tolerate going hiking together once, but let's plan that for next year.
Wouldn't it be more productive to just look for a match for the actual interests in the first place?
The key to understanding is that it only forbids discrimination based on "race, color, religion, or national origin". Which are not the same as, basically, "being a flaming asshole in the name of race, color, religion, or national origin". You can't deny someone service for being a white, but you can deny them service if they start harassing other customers with white supremacist crap. And more in line with TFA, you can't discriminate against someone for _being_ an evangelical Christian, but there's nothing to stop you from kicking them out if they start acting like a bigger asshole than Goatse on the premises in the name of their religion.
Basically just because they can't discriminate against you for (certain categories of) what you _are_, doesn't mean they can't discriminate against you based on what you _do_. There's a difference between "being X" and "being an asshole in the name of X".
In fact, the main rationale behind forbidding discrimination is that people have no influence and can't change their colour or national origin. It's not their fault that they were born in China, for example. Even if they wanted to change to be more acceptable, they can't change that, and it's stupid to expect them to or discriminate based on something that isn't their fault.
But all that doesn't apply to stuff you choose to actively do. If you get discriminated against for shouting "Islam Is Evil!!!" in a restaurant, well, you can choose to freaking stop doing it.
Actually, even for government agencies, they still don't have to provide everyone an outlet for their opinions. You can't demand that the CIA puts someone's anti-globalization rant on their front page, nor that the FBI publishes a rant about how pot should be legal, although both are completely funded and run by the government.
I don't see why an ISP would get to have even less freedom than those, just because it may or may not get some government subsidies.
Plus, I'm not sure if getting some government subsidies automatically trumps someone's rights. Otherwise the government could tell all those corn farmers what they can say and what not.
Plus, I'm really not sure if a web hosting company actually is receiving any government subsidies at all anyway.
Maybe, but really what do you propose? There is not much way to, for example, protect freedom of the press if company don't have rights. Because even back in the day, newspapers tended to be incorporated as a company, rather than being one-man operations.
Plus, see again what I wrote. If Government could tell a company "you have to publish and distribute Mr Hugh G Asshole's Quran-thumping rants", then what's to guarantee that it stops there? Why not then "you have to publish Mr Toadie's daily praise of the government" too?
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Well, at least theoretically it's conceivable that it would be possible to do a better job with the regulating proteins than nature did. After all, nature itself did an increasingly better job by trial and error, and it would be presumptuous to presume that whatever we got is nothing short of absolute, unsurpassable perfection. So, yes, it's conceivable that one day someone would encode a better protein than that gene does.
I'm not sure if we're at that point, yet, though. We know how to copy genes and we know how to break genes, but I don't think anyone really knows how to make a better one, or really even design one that only causes the effect to differ by a small amount.
We're essentially like a clock maker who knows how to copy a cog or lever from another clock, or how to break one, but even designing a 10% smaller cog is well outside the realm of what he knows how to do. That's really the state of genetic engineering nowadays. Fortunately, we have billions of clocks and trillions of cogs to copy around us, which is why we can still do some useful stuff. But designing a new one is really still right out.
So, yeah, it could happen. Given enough time, it probably _will_ happen. But if it needs to be more complicated than breaking or deleting or replacing that gene with one from a existing organism, I'm not holding my breath that it will happen in my lifetime.
Actually, maybe I'm a pessimist, but I was more like reminded of Flowers For Algernon.
Well, I'd say it remains to be seen if it's an upgrade or a downgrade. Forgetting stuff or needing more than one case to form a rule are there for a reason. If you met someone "upgraded" who upon seeing a yellow cat automatically forms the full connexion that all cats are yellow, and/or is unable to break that connexion afterwards, the thought would probably be less "upgraded" and more like "poor idiot".
The general evolution of the brain has been towards smarter. Something which only needed a gene to break to be an upgrade would have been selected instantly if it were indeed an upgrade, as genes break all the time.
And for that matter, if that gene is a downgrade, how did it get selected in the first place. Survival of the fittest is still the name of the game, and in this case we're not even talking outside colours or anything else blamable on sexual selection. So, really, how did a whole extra gene that causes a downgrade get there, if it's a downgrade?
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they'll test it to heck and back before using it on humans, and all that. They're scientists and all that.
All I'm saying is just don't get your hopes too high yet. It may well turn out to be a literal implementation of the Flowers For Algernon story.
They do it anyway, actually. The point of those lists for example in WoW isn't to make the right number of components for a given number of final products, as most products don't really have any intermediate steps. The point is simply to grind your skill from 1 to whatever value, in the minimum time and with minimum expense.
You seem to assume that most people will actually do that math. In practice most will get some build off a site and run with that. Or get some tool which calculates it for them, rather than just help.
Or for crafting, people actually do stuff like pick some crafting guide from a site and mindlessly follow instructions like "gather 100 bars of X, 60 bars of Y and a stack of Z. Craft product A 20 times, then 25 times product B, go to the trainer and learn recipe C, craft that 15 times." At the end of the day most will just be a few thousand gold short because they just bought those quantities instead, and still have no idea why, say, they skipped products D and E in the middle which needed more bars. The maths involved won't even get a nod, much less some thinking.
Heck, I still see people who don't even learn the basic geography of the place because they were chasing the little cube marker of QuestHelper and never even noticed major landmarks.
Basically, in the immortal words of Dorothy Parker, "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." ;)
Actually, on the contrary, I think that if anyone did a serious statistic, they'd find that the only reason they're now big companies instead of also ran, is that at some point down the line they made a decision that made sense. Like, dunno, Sharp realizing that there's a more lucrative market for radios than for pencils, or someone at IBM realizing that there's a business case for smaller and cheaper computers ("smaller" those days meaning "than a room"), or some crazy guy called Edison believing they can make money with those newfangled lightbulbs although they cost more than an oil lamp at first, and so on. While they may have been riskier propositions than just doing the same old thing, they were all actually quite rational business decisions and someone had a very good idea why they expect a R in ROI.
The companies where the decisions were taken with the dick, and just to establish alpha male status... well, you can look at 90% of the dot-coms for an example. That's people who blew all the money on alpha status symbols, be it cars costing more than the company's total income, luxurious headquarters they couldn't even afford, whole sports teams, or even just a bigger herd of programmers than the Joneses' dot-com, or did acquisitions of other dot-coms that also had no income, just for the sake of showing the whole world who's the daddy now.
The companies led by a dick thinking with the dick aren't the Fortune 500 list, but those 80% of startups that fail right away.
Then I hope you're the of sociopath kind who, after climbing to the top, will take the business decisions with the head on your neck, not with the one in your pants.
Really, the point I was actually trying to make there was that being either young or insecure and needing to prove penis size, isn't what makes those aggressive young things play other people's emotions on the way to the top. Being a sociopath isn't even necessarily a bad thing in today's culture, where we actually expect corporations to behave like complete sociopaths, and some humans to take those decisions and rationalize them to the rest of the plebs. After all, whatever a company does, the decision was taken by some humans. But it looks to me like it's orthogonal to age or testosterone. That's what I was trying to say.
Well, as a general criterion, I would agree with you, but here we're talking a simple game with clear rules. The offer to get free money was clearly just an offer to get free money. The one offering it didn't get to write some "I own your kids now" clause in the fine print or anything.
There's a name for people who play people's emotions like a piano. It's not "young and brave". It's "sociopath" :p
Actually, no, if you actually RTFA (I know, I know, it's Slashdot), you'll find out that no, it's also based on a study where they actually asked people to play a sort of game, and they actually measured testosterone levels. Those who had more testosterone, tended to be more competitive even when it resulted in losing the game.
In fact those with high testosterone levels ended up doing things as irrational in any imaginable circumstance as to basically reject an offer of free money, just because they perceived it as being too low. You don't want someone like that making economic decisions.
Just age and experience had nothing to do with it. Those test subjects who were just as young but more deficient in the testosterone department tended to take more rational decisions.
Basically, thinking with your dick is bad. The stereotype of the Real Man with real balls may have been a plus when it came to making him do dumb stuff like going to get stabbed at for his king, but it turns out to be a liability when the job requires more thinking with the head upstairs than with the one below the belt. You want someone taking economic decisions because they make logical and mathematical sense, not because it's his kind of measuring dick size against the partners.
Actually, I guess it depends on what sections he reads, since Slashdot does offer some customizability in what you see on the front page. Someone who isn't interested in idle, games, etc, and reads the IT and/or technology sections, or even only reads one of the Slashdot sub-sites, might see a different set of stories than you do.
Could be, but on the whole I probably illustrated what I'm talking about. Since I installed the dictionary in the Mozilla, I spend much less time proofreading before hitting Submit. I rely too much on it catching mistakes, and end up submitting with a homophone or near homophone just because it's also a valid word. Give it another 10 or 20 years, and probably I too will have no idea how it's spelled without a spell-checker.
Well, that's insightful and all, but that's not really what I had in mind.
For a start I'm not even talking about people breaking the rules to sound funny or witty or for archaic flavour, but stuff like seeing yet another lemming write "the right to bare arms." What, did someone forbid him from wearing a t-shirt or short sleeves? Where do I join the protest against that injustice?
It's not making it any clearer, and you tend to find it's not even used as a written pun either. I've actually had wannabe grammar nazis "correct" me when I wrote the correct form "bear arms". But the lemming playing smarter-than-though thought "bear" only means, well, the furry kind of animal.
And then you get stuff like "barring" because the spell-checker suggested that, which leaves me wondering it they really meant "barring responsibility" or "bearing responsibility." Sometimes it can be a bit ambiguous.
Second, don't confuse _style_ rules with grammar and lexical rules, although sadly the style is mistakenly lumped under grammar. Rules against double negatives or telling you to use the passive voice or whatever, are really style rules and most are really just debatable recommendations. Breaking those is ok. Not knowing basic spelling or sentence structure, now that's the kind of offense I was talking about.
Ah, so that's why Amazon now sells board games by the inch? :P
Actually, I'm pretty sure I've seen a heck of a lot of people with calculators in 1990 and even in the 80's. The year 1990 wasn't the 1930's when "calculator" meant a big clunky mechanical machine with a crank. Cheap, four-operation calculators were, well, cheap. A good programmable scientific calculator may have been bigger and more expensive, but 4 operation calculators were already only limited by how small you can make the case and have half-blind still use it. You could get a credit card sized calculator that could slip even into the smallest purse or pocket, or, heck, you could already get one in a wristwatch. (If you were one of those unfashionable nerds, that is. Yeah, welcome to the club. ;))
And plenty of people used them. There were already housewives and whatnot who hadn't done any maths by hand or in their head in years, and, yeah, I don't doubt that enough would have already lost the reflex of multiplying 2.50 by 2.
Well, if it helps, some people still seem to think that spelling something the same as everyone else is a sign of an unimaginative mind ;)
Sort of. You do however need basically to know what to look for. Einstein would know what book to pull out to get any bit of physics he didn't remember offhand, and had enough knowledge to know if some reasoning you throw at him is valid or you're pulling his leg. (Well, ok, maybe not about Quantum Mechanics, or not at first;))
Joe Sixpack googling for something will land a few million hits, the first couple of pages will be mostly completely unrelated stuff and/or woowoo from some snake oil vendors. And he just never learned the things that would help him distinguish which is which. Having google and no knowledge of his own won't make him Einstein, sorry.
E.g., try googling for, well, just about anything quantum, and see how many bullshit quantum-chi-crystal pendants you find, "ZOMG, uncertainty means we create the universe when we look at it" apologetics for magical thinking, keyword/link spam sites, etc, you find.
On a good day, you might get the Wikipedia link at the top, because, well, google at some point went "fuck it" trying to sort what is relevant and just artificially upranked Wikipedia. Which half the time still need some filtering abilities of your own, because it'll be a page full of [citation needed] and "original research" signs that still won't help _you_ much decide if you should trust it or not or where to go for more authoritative stuff, often enough will directly contradict other Wikipedia pages it links to, etc. And occasionally will contain such vandalisms as that Iron is mined from monkeys, that the bridges in Ancient Rome were made in Japan, or that didgeridoos are cloned in test tubes. (I swear to the FSM, all three are actual things I've learned on Wikipedia.) Without any knowledge of your own, how would you know whether to trust that or not?
And that's actually on a good day. On a bad day you won't even have that Wikipedia link.
More like how having a spell-checker makes people never learn how to spell most words. And even with a spell-checker then you see them writing "should of" or using a wrong near-homophone (homophone, surprisingly enough, doesn't mean "sounds gay";) like "eat, drink and be marry" because if the spell-checker didn't put a wavy line under a word it must be the right one.
Or like already the use of calculator means a lot of people in the western world are effectively innumerate. They can't actually even tally up whether a 5 Euro bill is enough for two packs of X at 1.99 each and one of something else at 0.95. (And I'm only using Euro as an example because here the VAT is already _included_ in the price, you don't have to calculate how much the VAT would be on top of the price. So really, they just need to add.) Or they can't even notice that a special offer of a six-pack of something at only 5.95 Euro isn't actually an improvement over a price of 0.95 Euro per can otherwise, unless you told them to calculate and they pull out their calculator.
No, I'm serious. There actually are such special offers that sound like you could save a lot, but are actually more expensive per unit/gallon/inch/whatever. And they actually work. Because enough people can't do elementary arithmetic any more, or it ranks up there with anal rape for the kind of force or threat of harm you'd need to use to make them do arithmetic.
We had a good century or so of building up literacy and numeracy... and now it's sliding right back.
Actually the idea of some entity trying to buy every single copy of a book to keep it secret, strikes me of more like a PR stunt than something feasible.
If you want to actually bury something, you buy the _rights_ to it. Then you get copyright extended until kingdom come like Disney. Copyright is just as misused for preventing something from being seen as it is used as originally intended.
Trying to just buy the copies off the market is purely pointless if someone else has the copyright, as basically nothing can prevent him from just printing more. I mean, it's not like buying something that costs millions and rare resources to produce. Printing another 10,000 copies or even a million is cheap and trivial. If anything, some entity trying to buy 10,000 copies just added demand worth 10,000 copies, and you'd be stupid not to cash in on it.
On the other hand, the delusion that something is going to be rare because someone else wants to buy all copies, is a pretty much guaranteed way to make idiots think this is a literally once in a lifetime opportunity to grab a copy before the government. It's making it sound like it's more rare than it is, and about to run out.
Actually, it's not _that_ bad for most applications.
I have actually programmed assembly back in ye goode olde days of 16 bit CPUs and segment registers, and the reason it was evil was that you ran into that limit all the time. Even the most trivial operations had to juggle registers. You couldn't even process a 640x480 pixel image in 16 colours without running into segment maths. (Incidentally that aforementioned image would need about twice the memory you could address with 16 bits without segment maths.) Even addressing two pixels on the same row or column could mean needing to change the segment first.
By comparison 4 gigabytes is still a lot. There are precious few applications where you need more than 4 GB in a single array, which is when you'd actually need segment maths.
And frankly those are nonexistent in the normal desktop or even vanilla web page world, because they have to be able to run on machines which don't even have that much.
Just having over 4 GB total data is not the old hell. If each individual piece of data is smaller than 4 GB, you can just have the segment be part of the pointer, and only need to load it once. You don't need to do more segment maths just to get the 65537'th byte of that buffer.
Don't get me wrong, it's still more elegant to not have to worry about segments at all. But the alternative is not anywhere near the old hell.
That's exactly what I was wondering too. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to see a company putting its WebSphere application server or Oracle or DB/2 database on a cell phone or netbook any time soon. Nor (I hope to the elder gods) where they'll make their personnel enter the data or program those servers on cell phones instead of some kind of desktop.
Granted, some of those servers may or may not have ARM CPUs, but then that's not what he's implying there. And a lot are running on PowerPC already. The server world is somewhat less fanboyish about either AMD or Intel.
You can call it whatever you like, but "filtering" truth into something mostly false is still a lie by any other name.
And my objection to starting a relationship with lies is basically the same, even changing "lie" to "filtering truth to something more acceptable." We just established we're two people who'll "filter the truth to something more acceptable" when it suits out purposes. Maybe I'll filter the truth just a bit when I say I was in a meeting with mid-level management, when I was actually banging a chick who's a manager at McDonald's. I'm not doing something as ugly as "lying", I'm just filtering truth to make it more acceptable to the wife, see? And maybe she'll just embelish a little when she says she was working out late at the gym with her fitness instructor. Riding him counts as a work out, right?
But as I was saying, even that's not what I find the silliest. It's still subverting the whole idea of actually matching interests.
You can have something which on paper looks like a match made in heaven:
He: likes camping, lifting weights, dancing
She: likes camping, fitness, dancing
And in reality be more like two different sets of something completely different. He loves SF movies and hates chick flicks, she wants to see every soap opera ever made and thinks Star Trek is teh yuck. His idea of a happy weekend is end-to-end raiding Icecrown Citadel, hers is trying to nag him to help move the furniture around. (A surprisingly popular passtime with women, it turns out.) Etc.
They could probably agree that they could kinda tolerate going hiking together once, but let's plan that for next year.
Wouldn't it be more productive to just look for a match for the actual interests in the first place?
I don't think it does, actually. (IANAL, but you can find the text online and see for yourself: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=97&page=transcript)
The key to understanding is that it only forbids discrimination based on "race, color, religion, or national origin". Which are not the same as, basically, "being a flaming asshole in the name of race, color, religion, or national origin". You can't deny someone service for being a white, but you can deny them service if they start harassing other customers with white supremacist crap. And more in line with TFA, you can't discriminate against someone for _being_ an evangelical Christian, but there's nothing to stop you from kicking them out if they start acting like a bigger asshole than Goatse on the premises in the name of their religion.
Basically just because they can't discriminate against you for (certain categories of) what you _are_, doesn't mean they can't discriminate against you based on what you _do_. There's a difference between "being X" and "being an asshole in the name of X".
In fact, the main rationale behind forbidding discrimination is that people have no influence and can't change their colour or national origin. It's not their fault that they were born in China, for example. Even if they wanted to change to be more acceptable, they can't change that, and it's stupid to expect them to or discriminate based on something that isn't their fault.
But all that doesn't apply to stuff you choose to actively do. If you get discriminated against for shouting "Islam Is Evil!!!" in a restaurant, well, you can choose to freaking stop doing it.
Actually, even for government agencies, they still don't have to provide everyone an outlet for their opinions. You can't demand that the CIA puts someone's anti-globalization rant on their front page, nor that the FBI publishes a rant about how pot should be legal, although both are completely funded and run by the government.
I don't see why an ISP would get to have even less freedom than those, just because it may or may not get some government subsidies.
Plus, I'm not sure if getting some government subsidies automatically trumps someone's rights. Otherwise the government could tell all those corn farmers what they can say and what not.
Plus, I'm really not sure if a web hosting company actually is receiving any government subsidies at all anyway.
Maybe, but really what do you propose? There is not much way to, for example, protect freedom of the press if company don't have rights. Because even back in the day, newspapers tended to be incorporated as a company, rather than being one-man operations.
Plus, see again what I wrote. If Government could tell a company "you have to publish and distribute Mr Hugh G Asshole's Quran-thumping rants", then what's to guarantee that it stops there? Why not then "you have to publish Mr Toadie's daily praise of the government" too?