Actually, I read it a little differently. To me it sounds like he's already decided to move employees overseas and is now just looking for an excuse that can be used to mitigate the bad PR. If, along the way, he gets some political pull out of grandstanding, then so much the better.
What about treating news like a public service? Have it publicly funded and held accountable with a model similar to how the BBC news operates in the UK?
The problem I see is that most newspapers are just glorified repackaging of newswire services with the odd local story and some opinion pieces that serve the owner's political agenda. That was all fine and well in the past, but the culture and technology has moved on and old business model is as dead as a downtown blacksmith ranting about how cars are damaging his horseshoe repair business.
I joined Facebook last month and was surprised to see how much control was given to the 'apps' by default.
The question you need to ask when signing up for a site is "what's their business model?" Facebook obviously isn't getting its money from its users, so that means the users have to be the product being sold.
Trek was about making ideas exciting, but it fundamentally is about ideas - taking some issue of our time and creating a "strange new world" by exaggerating the idea to an extreme or where it is the basis of an entire civilization. Here, the reboot itself and the interplay of nature-vs-nurture ideas is its own strange new world.
The predictability that almost every story has to end with an ship-to-ship slugfest is the greatest weakness of doing Trek on the big screen.
That's the Star Trek way, kick the opponent, when he already lies on the ground.
As opposed to saying "oh, my enemy is doomed to certain death, let's leave and pat ourselves on the back"? Kirk knows the fundamental difference between dashing heroes and evil overlords: heroes keep shooting, especially when the enemy is down - well except for a token pause to let them surrender:)
Oh no... I've become a Kirkist! *rushes to pull out Next Gen tapes*
Every generation wishes something would force them to change their ways.
Then one day you wake up and gather your books and discover "them" in the mirror as you realize a hundred people even younger than you are going to be staring down at you wishing the same things you once did.
I agree. It feels like this sort of headline is going to get people thinking "spooky quantum particle magic" rather than just using some of the same math that is used in quantum mechanics to model how competing reflexes and instincts add up to a decision.
When weighing our decision we have to take into consideration the chance that we misunderstood the rules of the game or that the explanation was a lie and we're being conned. We have all sorts of social reflexes and instincts that compete to overrule any mathematical solution we think we've found. If I read it correctly, it is the way you can model all these competing reactions adding up to a single decision that they are suggesting is similar to a superposition of probabilities you see in physics models.
Ce n'est pas du protectionnisme, c'est une langue différente.
Make atheism a religion and the problem is solved
on
UN Attacks Free Speech
·
· Score: 3, Funny
So if atheism a religion, then any claim of a god's existence would be criticism and thus disallowed.
VICTORY!!!!
(but seriously, this is why you have to pay attention to diplomacy - as soon as the UN is built, some civilization off the edge of the map can suddenly win the game with a single vote if enough cultures are annoyed with your behavior)
I'm sorry, but even in a world of limitless energy, food, and freedom, with perfect, idealized human beings, there's still going to be individuals/groups/races out there try to eat the good guys' lunch
Because you cannot imagine a better world, no better world can exist? Because humans are flawed, no society can exist that can allow them to coexist in near-harmony? Isn't that like saying that because a channel is noisy, there cannot be a way to communicate near-lossless information?
The peaceful world I live in today would seem like utopia compared to what my ancestors experienced. My city and the neighboring city coexist side by side with neither one of us trying to invade each other. Why not examine why the nation-state concept of civilization still leads to assumptions of tension and conflict when city-state warfare is pretty much unimaginable? Doesn't that just cry out for a imagining a world of tomorrow where nations are as peaceful to each other as cities are towards each other today? I completely reject the notion that humanity cannot create new social structures, just as we build new technological structures, that are better than the ones we have today.
Trek isn't about perfection, it's about reductionism... focusing on each individual issue of today as if it was the only remaining obstacle between us and utopia. To me, the essence of Star Trek is to start with the premise that all today's problems will be solved - that there will be peace and contentment, even if we can't yet imagine how that will happen. We then take some issue or relationship of our world, our history, our society and exaggerate it to an extreme and build a new world, a new civilization around it. Then, as an intellectual exercise, you poke it and prod it and ask "would this work?", "what could go wrong?", "can it be fixed?".
No other Trek has been as dark and gritty as DS9 was, actually showing a real, unsanitized war with it's attendant ugliness, while portraying a federation that was, for a change, flawed and multifaceted.
Strange... you say that like it was a good thing. Some of us actually watched Trek *because* it was a vision of a cleaner, sanitized world, a better humanity where the ideals we strive for are seen in action actually solving problems. The darker, more flawed vision of the Trek universe in DS9, where the ends justify the means and everyone's a broken hypocrite underneath, undermined what seemed to me to be the whole point of the Trek universe.
Also, the Dominion War had a tendency to have ships blowing up all over the place as eye candy, destroying the sense that each ship mattered, that each ship represented a huge investment of resources, a rich and meaningful history and a crew with stories of their own. In attempting to be a bigger, louder Babylon 5 (all while struggling to find a message beyond "life sucks" after it's writers failed to make the initial high-concept post-insurgency-peace theme compelling), DS9 ceased to be recognizable as Trek to me.
Once you go beyond the mechanics physical receptor to what interpretations we are gathering about the world, suddenly we have a great many senses.
We have a great many senses focused around identifying peer groups and mood states of other humans. The cuteness-sense of seeing a baby animal is as much a digestion of brightness and color to give an important data point as pressure senses lead to giving us a perception of balance/acceleration.
One of the things we humans are great at is extending our sense of self on the fly - we learn to see a tool as an extension of our arm, we internalize all the gauges and vibrations of a car into our sense of self, a game avatar becomes an extension of our presence, a facebook profile becomes a proximity sensor for social connectedness.
I see a sense as any metric about the state of the world that gets passed around the brain. I think restricting it to merely the typical input variables of a physics equation creates an unneeded division between amongst the analysis and data-packaging activities of the brain.
um... ok... hard to argue with that rebuttal. I mean, I don't claim any monopoly on the THE ONE TRUE EQUATION... but "no, it's not"? Surely you can open your mind a crack further than that to a new idea? I'm not going to go all technical on slashdot, but here's the wishy-washy version of what I'm saying:
An dollar is to finance what the genetic base pair is to population genetics - it's the thing that gets passed around. An invested dollar is like a gene - it has a purpose and its attempt to reproduce is the elemental unit of success or failure. Financial models are to a dollar what algae is to a gene. A successful dollar means more money using that financial model. A successful gene means a bigger mat of algae.
Correlations are the nutrients upon which financial models feed. Models that feed of some correlation someone else has found are like a critter that lives by eating the algae. Anything that happens in finance can be mapped to something that happens in evolutionary ecology - they are the same concept: a big competitive game of resource allocation. A sufficiently complex economy is essentially an ecosystem of models and business plans.
A single-model "boom" in economics is like a single-species population explosion in biology. This finance model built on the assumption that some newly discovered correlation will last forever is little different than a swarm of locusts assuming the fields of wheat will go on forever.
(now I don't want to oversell my heuristic because then there will be nitpicking over mapping minute concepts of the money supply - evolutionary ecology methods are a better tool for description of the past than engineering the future; but I believe it's a healthy perspective of large complex systems to have in mind... and the central lesson in biology is that things change, no model is perfect and even trilobites can go extinct)
Perhaps its time to come up with a system of government that does not invest so much power and symbolism in a single person? The costs of securing a president are growing larger and larger - it's almost like having to put on a mini-Olympics for any anywhere that just invites him to visit. Eventually you have to reach a point (if it hasn't been reached already) where the cost of having a president outweighs any benefit of a super-powered executive.
(applies to the private sector leadership models too)
In my workplace, after years of cuts, there's speculation that a huge swath of of the company are going to be let go.
I can dig in, make myself look better than everyone else while coworkers with debts and families are out on the street... or, I can sit back, make other people look good and get myself cut.
A nice guy can only handle so much survivor guilt.
If you really want your head to explode, try Ultima Online - more than 10 years of updates, events, rule revisions and tweaks gives it one of the scariest learning curves I've seen. If you've never played it before and tackle it without a tutor or guild, even a year into playing you can find yourself still researching commands, mechanics, subsystems, clever house art tricks, long-lost passwords to secret areas and the origins of obscure items.
There's a real sense of accomplishment for "learning stuff", but it's not for the feint of heart.
The canonicity of the Fox movie may not be clear, but it did include the following line in the prologue: "In all my travels through space and time, and nearing the end of my seventh life, I was finally beginning to realise that you could never be too careful."
In the end though, it all runs on comic book logic: there will always be another episode, whatever the excuse needed.
Alas, something I discovered to my sorrow over the years is that sufficiently specialized math is indistinguishable from gobbledygook (and vice versa).
As for other lifeforms, most of them are a lot tougher than we are.
We humans seem to have a massive inferiority complex sometimes. We are an extremely tough organism with viable colonies in almost every region of the planet except Antarctica and undersea. We're the only organism that will understand the consequences of a magnetic field issue and be able to take preemptive steps to adapt to it. We can design satillites that can survive the harsh stresses of space, so in the worst case, we can redesign critical electronics to survive here on earth or just burrow underground for shielding. Yes, we might have to shock to our comfortable western lifespans/standards of living, but I don't fear for the survival of our species.
The words "life" and "intelligence" are a like the word "planet". What seems obvious gets messy and debate-ridden once you have enough data to actually have to formalize the definition of where to draw the line.
Looking for unusual patterns in the entropy will tell you where to look for new things to explain, but it isn't going to magically cancel out all possible explanations short of civilization.
(by the way, could slashdot please, please cut back on the apparent quota of ID references - sure it's driving in debate traffic, but it's making this place feel like the Jerry Springer Show of blogging)
On the Ultima Online boards a few years ago, there was a discussion about player memorials (once a game has been around ten years, when a notable player passes away, it can have a real impact on the community - especially in a game where player houses can become landmarks). One of the arguments against player memorials was that there was no guarantee that the game would always be there, so it didn't seem the right place a true memorial.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I read it a little differently. To me it sounds like he's already decided to move employees overseas and is now just looking for an excuse that can be used to mitigate the bad PR. If, along the way, he gets some political pull out of grandstanding, then so much the better.
What about treating news like a public service? Have it publicly funded and held accountable with a model similar to how the BBC news operates in the UK?
The problem I see is that most newspapers are just glorified repackaging of newswire services with the odd local story and some opinion pieces that serve the owner's political agenda. That was all fine and well in the past, but the culture and technology has moved on and old business model is as dead as a downtown blacksmith ranting about how cars are damaging his horseshoe repair business.
Also, if you have this "red matter" that can create a black hole, why bother to drill to the center of the planet?
Because you have to.
First rule of science fantasy: the engineers in the story know more about the tech than you do.
I joined Facebook last month and was surprised to see how much control was given to the 'apps' by default.
The question you need to ask when signing up for a site is "what's their business model?" Facebook obviously isn't getting its money from its users, so that means the users have to be the product being sold.
I want to see epic, multi-ship space battles.
Star Wars is over there. *points*
Trek was about making ideas exciting, but it fundamentally is about ideas - taking some issue of our time and creating a "strange new world" by exaggerating the idea to an extreme or where it is the basis of an entire civilization. Here, the reboot itself and the interplay of nature-vs-nurture ideas is its own strange new world.
The predictability that almost every story has to end with an ship-to-ship slugfest is the greatest weakness of doing Trek on the big screen.
That's the Star Trek way, kick the opponent, when he already lies on the ground.
As opposed to saying "oh, my enemy is doomed to certain death, let's leave and pat ourselves on the back"? Kirk knows the fundamental difference between dashing heroes and evil overlords: heroes keep shooting, especially when the enemy is down - well except for a token pause to let them surrender :)
Oh no ... I've become a Kirkist! *rushes to pull out Next Gen tapes*
Every generation wishes something would force them to change their ways.
Then one day you wake up and gather your books and discover "them" in the mirror as you realize a hundred people even younger than you are going to be staring down at you wishing the same things you once did.
I agree. It feels like this sort of headline is going to get people thinking "spooky quantum particle magic" rather than just using some of the same math that is used in quantum mechanics to model how competing reflexes and instincts add up to a decision.
When weighing our decision we have to take into consideration the chance that we misunderstood the rules of the game or that the explanation was a lie and we're being conned. We have all sorts of social reflexes and instincts that compete to overrule any mathematical solution we think we've found. If I read it correctly, it is the way you can model all these competing reactions adding up to a single decision that they are suggesting is similar to a superposition of probabilities you see in physics models.
Then again, I might be wrong. *waffles*
Ce n'est pas du protectionnisme, c'est une langue différente.
So if atheism a religion, then any claim of a god's existence would be criticism and thus disallowed.
VICTORY!!!!
(but seriously, this is why you have to pay attention to diplomacy - as soon as the UN is built, some civilization off the edge of the map can suddenly win the game with a single vote if enough cultures are annoyed with your behavior)
Wouldn't this scheme be illegal as Negative option billing?
I'm sorry, but even in a world of limitless energy, food, and freedom, with perfect, idealized human beings, there's still going to be individuals/groups/races out there try to eat the good guys' lunch
Because you cannot imagine a better world, no better world can exist? Because humans are flawed, no society can exist that can allow them to coexist in near-harmony? Isn't that like saying that because a channel is noisy, there cannot be a way to communicate near-lossless information?
The peaceful world I live in today would seem like utopia compared to what my ancestors experienced. My city and the neighboring city coexist side by side with neither one of us trying to invade each other. Why not examine why the nation-state concept of civilization still leads to assumptions of tension and conflict when city-state warfare is pretty much unimaginable? Doesn't that just cry out for a imagining a world of tomorrow where nations are as peaceful to each other as cities are towards each other today? I completely reject the notion that humanity cannot create new social structures, just as we build new technological structures, that are better than the ones we have today.
Trek isn't about perfection, it's about reductionism ... focusing on each individual issue of today as if it was the only remaining obstacle between us and utopia. To me, the essence of Star Trek is to start with the premise that all today's problems will be solved - that there will be peace and contentment, even if we can't yet imagine how that will happen. We then take some issue or relationship of our world, our history, our society and exaggerate it to an extreme and build a new world, a new civilization around it. Then, as an intellectual exercise, you poke it and prod it and ask "would this work?", "what could go wrong?", "can it be fixed?".
No other Trek has been as dark and gritty as DS9 was, actually showing a real, unsanitized war with it's attendant ugliness, while portraying a federation that was, for a change, flawed and multifaceted.
Strange ... you say that like it was a good thing. Some of us actually watched Trek *because* it was a vision of a cleaner, sanitized world, a better humanity where the ideals we strive for are seen in action actually solving problems. The darker, more flawed vision of the Trek universe in DS9, where the ends justify the means and everyone's a broken hypocrite underneath, undermined what seemed to me to be the whole point of the Trek universe.
Also, the Dominion War had a tendency to have ships blowing up all over the place as eye candy, destroying the sense that each ship mattered, that each ship represented a huge investment of resources, a rich and meaningful history and a crew with stories of their own. In attempting to be a bigger, louder Babylon 5 (all while struggling to find a message beyond "life sucks" after it's writers failed to make the initial high-concept post-insurgency-peace theme compelling), DS9 ceased to be recognizable as Trek to me.
Oh dear, I've become a person who argues Trek.
Once you go beyond the mechanics physical receptor to what interpretations we are gathering about the world, suddenly we have a great many senses.
We have a great many senses focused around identifying peer groups and mood states of other humans. The cuteness-sense of seeing a baby animal is as much a digestion of brightness and color to give an important data point as pressure senses lead to giving us a perception of balance/acceleration.
One of the things we humans are great at is extending our sense of self on the fly - we learn to see a tool as an extension of our arm, we internalize all the gauges and vibrations of a car into our sense of self, a game avatar becomes an extension of our presence, a facebook profile becomes a proximity sensor for social connectedness.
I see a sense as any metric about the state of the world that gets passed around the brain. I think restricting it to merely the typical input variables of a physics equation creates an unneeded division between amongst the analysis and data-packaging activities of the brain.
um ... ok ... hard to argue with that rebuttal. I mean, I don't claim any monopoly on the THE ONE TRUE EQUATION ... but "no, it's not"? Surely you can open your mind a crack further than that to a new idea? I'm not going to go all technical on slashdot, but here's the wishy-washy version of what I'm saying:
An dollar is to finance what the genetic base pair is to population genetics - it's the thing that gets passed around. An invested dollar is like a gene - it has a purpose and its attempt to reproduce is the elemental unit of success or failure. Financial models are to a dollar what algae is to a gene. A successful dollar means more money using that financial model. A successful gene means a bigger mat of algae.
Correlations are the nutrients upon which financial models feed. Models that feed of some correlation someone else has found are like a critter that lives by eating the algae. Anything that happens in finance can be mapped to something that happens in evolutionary ecology - they are the same concept: a big competitive game of resource allocation. A sufficiently complex economy is essentially an ecosystem of models and business plans.
A single-model "boom" in economics is like a single-species population explosion in biology. This finance model built on the assumption that some newly discovered correlation will last forever is little different than a swarm of locusts assuming the fields of wheat will go on forever.
(now I don't want to oversell my heuristic because then there will be nitpicking over mapping minute concepts of the money supply - evolutionary ecology methods are a better tool for description of the past than engineering the future; but I believe it's a healthy perspective of large complex systems to have in mind ... and the central lesson in biology is that things change, no model is perfect and even trilobites can go extinct)
Citation?
Darwin. Dawkins. Dollars reproduce dollars, genes reproduce genes. It's the same math at a different time scale.
Perhaps its time to come up with a system of government that does not invest so much power and symbolism in a single person? The costs of securing a president are growing larger and larger - it's almost like having to put on a mini-Olympics for any anywhere that just invites him to visit. Eventually you have to reach a point (if it hasn't been reached already) where the cost of having a president outweighs any benefit of a super-powered executive.
(applies to the private sector leadership models too)
In my workplace, after years of cuts, there's speculation that a huge swath of of the company are going to be let go.
I can dig in, make myself look better than everyone else while coworkers with debts and families are out on the street ... or, I can sit back, make other people look good and get myself cut.
A nice guy can only handle so much survivor guilt.
If you really want your head to explode, try Ultima Online - more than 10 years of updates, events, rule revisions and tweaks gives it one of the scariest learning curves I've seen. If you've never played it before and tackle it without a tutor or guild, even a year into playing you can find yourself still researching commands, mechanics, subsystems, clever house art tricks, long-lost passwords to secret areas and the origins of obscure items.
There's a real sense of accomplishment for "learning stuff", but it's not for the feint of heart.
The canonicity of the Fox movie may not be clear, but it did include the following line in the prologue: "In all my travels through space and time, and nearing the end of my seventh life, I was finally beginning to realise that you could never be too careful."
In the end though, it all runs on comic book logic: there will always be another episode, whatever the excuse needed.
Alas, something I discovered to my sorrow over the years is that sufficiently specialized math is indistinguishable from gobbledygook (and vice versa).
Marketing note to those with brilliant ideas to reverse global warming: don't publish/publicize in winter.
*hunkers down in -25 windchill*
As for other lifeforms, most of them are a lot tougher than we are.
We humans seem to have a massive inferiority complex sometimes. We are an extremely tough organism with viable colonies in almost every region of the planet except Antarctica and undersea. We're the only organism that will understand the consequences of a magnetic field issue and be able to take preemptive steps to adapt to it. We can design satillites that can survive the harsh stresses of space, so in the worst case, we can redesign critical electronics to survive here on earth or just burrow underground for shielding. Yes, we might have to shock to our comfortable western lifespans/standards of living, but I don't fear for the survival of our species.
The words "life" and "intelligence" are a like the word "planet". What seems obvious gets messy and debate-ridden once you have enough data to actually have to formalize the definition of where to draw the line.
Looking for unusual patterns in the entropy will tell you where to look for new things to explain, but it isn't going to magically cancel out all possible explanations short of civilization.
(by the way, could slashdot please, please cut back on the apparent quota of ID references - sure it's driving in debate traffic, but it's making this place feel like the Jerry Springer Show of blogging)
On the Ultima Online boards a few years ago, there was a discussion about player memorials (once a game has been around ten years, when a notable player passes away, it can have a real impact on the community - especially in a game where player houses can become landmarks). One of the arguments against player memorials was that there was no guarantee that the game would always be there, so it didn't seem the right place a true memorial.