Perpetuating famine in Zambia by spreading rumors about the dangers of GMOs was a pretty big strike. I'd like to believe that Greenpeace's role in it was exaggerated, that their position isn't really so offensive to famine-stricken countries planting corn that's modified to grow quicker and more dense, so I searched their website for "Zambia." This came up: http://www.greenpeace.org/inte....
Some gems from the article:
Disgracefully, hunger and desperation have become the Genetic Engineering industry's best tools to penetrate the developing world's food supply.
Starving people still deserve the dignity of choice.
I must say I've never understood the need to include women solely for "tits" value. It must be a holdover from the pre-internet days. I don't care what gender you are or how many trucks it looks like you've been hit by; I'm watching Mythbusters for completely non-sexual reasons.
Forgive my ignorance but... To what extend do (or could, with modification?) non-TCP protocols like UDP already address these differences? Also, I wouldn't really have a problem with privileging streaming services; but I have a big problem with privileging certain services of the same type over others. The law would have to be crafted very carefully.
The first is a comma separating cumulative modifiers. E.g. a big, strong, intelligent mammalFive is not a modifier but a determiner, so I would not use a comma there myself. This author just seems to have extended the rule.
The second is just setting off a non-restrictive clause. E.g. the baker, whose cakes I've always enjoyed, came to see me
Because if there's one right that needs to be guaranteed and protected from tyranny... it's the "right" of the armed forces to be armed.
Honestly, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I thought it was a bit sketchy before what exactly the 2nd amendment meant, but specifying it with this addition really underscores the absurdity of the position.
It seems to me that Congress needs to act on this if our children are to have a republic. We've already heard that the Supreme Court, the highest institution of an entire branch of government, "lacks jurisdiction" to review the NSA's secret court decisions, which technically makes their secret court the highest in the land. If the NSA cannot be held accountable to Congress, there goes another branch. This looks like a coup.
It's not entirely obvious. Sure the script is completely different, but there's a chance it could be an alphabetical representation of a Mayan language.
I think it's more likely that a bag handler or TSA agent flat out stole the flutes, and the "agricultural product" excuse is just some run-around style bureaucratic ass-covering. One of our agents stole your things? Oh actually it's because of [MADE-UP REASON], and you need to contact [RANDOM OTHER AGENCY] to deal with it.
Well since the new codon requires the organism to interact with an artificial, human-supplied substance, this seems like a good way to keep manmade organisms in check. Sort of like the dinosaurs in jurassic park. Oh dear.
I've been using Linux since I was in 6th grade: Mandrake 6.something, Suse 7.something, Slackware 10, Redhat 9, a bunch of smaller live-cd and media-centric distros, Ubuntu, and now Fedora 16. I've used KDE, Gnome 2, Blackbox, Fluxbox, Windowmaker, and flirted with FVWM and a couple others. I appreciate minimal aesthetic and functionality as much as any Linux nut, but this is why I like Gnome3.
No, it's not very customizable. But I find its setup intuitive and functional. No, it's not graphically minimal, but computers are far more powerful now than they were even five minutes ago... Graphic simplicity used to be very important, then it was preferable, but now--I feel--it's okay to have a little eye candy. (Take my words with a grain of salt, though. I have become a casual user over the years.)
Still, they should have kept up Gnome2 the way people knew and loved it.
"no one expects ads in a piece of software that they just paid good money for"
Why not? You pay for cable TV and see ads, you see product placement in the shows you watch between the ads, there's product placement in movies, advertisements for other products on the products you buy, ads for books on the backs of books, and the list goes on. The only thing, I think, that really KEEPS ads OUT of a product is the value of its aesthetic. You'll never see an ad on the back of a fancy-looking leather-bound book, because you're paying for an aesthetic that precludes it. You won't find an ad in, say, a free Linux distro, because the aesthetic of the culture precludes it.
So I think we should look at this from the opposite perspective: why are ads showing up in Windows NOW? It may be a sign that Microsoft's business model is changing in some way, but I think it may have more to do with the adoption of the app-market aesthetic. You may not expect to see an ad in an app that you paid for, but you REALLY wouldn't expect to see an ad in a traditional program like Excel or Photoshop.
Could that be overcome by conventionally breaking up pi into blocks of certain sizes, then conceptualizing those blocks as matrices of conventional height and width?
I am (pleasantly) surprised by how many of my friends have "come out," as it were, as atheists over the last few years. I'm a young person, and I suspect that the amount of closet atheists among younger people (in America at least) is much greater than that among older people. In general, how optimistic are you about humanity getting past religion in the next few decades?
Things I have never seen: 1. a bicyclist obeying a stopsign. 2. a unicorn. 3. a bicyclist stopping at a crosswalk.
Things I have seen rarely: 1. a perfect 10 on the uneven bars. 2. a car passing a cyclist without giving them a berth of at least 2 extra meters.
Things I see all the time: 1. cyclists cutting off pedestrians. 2. cyclists running red lights. 3. cyclists cutting in and out of traffic.
I live by a college campus. I've talked with a campus police officer about all the bike accidents we've had here. He says the overwhelming majority are the fault of the cyclist. Helmets are small potatoes compared to 1. the devil-may-care attitude toward traffic laws that seems to prevail among cyclists and 2. the unsafe piggybacking of considerations for bicycles onto existing roads. Consider the bike lane: it continues straight through an intersection, ACROSS the right turn lane for cars! Furthermore, drivers are not used to this situation because it's both novel and counter-intuitive. Someone please design a better road and let's all tell our cyclist friends to obey the signs.
Contrary to popular belief, the Romans knew about lead poisoning and figured out ways to avoid it. For instance, aqueducts were lined with lead to make them waterproof. New aqueducts were mandated to run for a certain amount of time before water was drawn from them. In that time, the Romans knew, the minerals in the hard water would deposit on the lead and form a protective coating. Nevertheless, lead shavings were used as a seasoning on food. You may say that's horrendously stupid in a society that knows about lead poisoning, but then there's cigarettes today.
The Language abilities of Star Trek computers are extremely advanced compared to today's latest and greatest. Of course most of the things in this article are only inklings, on their way but nowhere near what Star Trek showed. But I find many people are fooled by the usefulness of Siri et al. into thinking that real language processing and synthesis is only N years away. Talking with Siri is like using an old text adventure game: you put in words, it filters those and matches them to a small set of commands, and if that fails it returns an error dressed up as a polite English phrase.
The biggest advancement is speech recognition and speech synthesis, which are indeed very good at this point. But this only deals with the physical forms of words at the level of phonetics. All higher linguistic levels (phonology, morphophonology, morphology, morpho-syntax, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) are woefully closed off to the electronic brains we use today. With our current language technologies, we are only about half a step above text.
If we combine the two statistics, we should arrive at a useful number. I have done the maths, and it seems that 105% of Americans are uninformed about the cloud. But now, being an American, I am forced to look at myself in this new light. I, for one, have looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow it's clouds' illusions I recall. I really don't know clouds at all.
Consider how long children's books have been heavily illustrated. When I was little I won a "reading award" in my first grade classroom because I always had out this science book. Truth is I was just looking at the pictures and reading the captions. Nevertheless I obviously did learn to read, and I can assure you that seeing pictures as a child ruined my imagination in no way. Think of the vast amounts of data we are presented with every day. There are images, written words, music, speech, on advertisements, street signs, in movies, on television, in books, in classrooms, at home... If having one possibility illustrated (in a broader sense) before you actually stifled human creativity, there would be far fewer inventors, artists, and writers. And if you want proof you can search for "fanfic" and see thousands of young adults (perhaps older adults?) and children writing stories based on their favorite movies and television shows and books, simply because they want to apply their own creativity to the fiction. I found one story, obviously written by a young child, which sought to give a back-story for how pokemon evolved out of present-day animals.
In short, I think the least of your worries should be any new media constraining the imagination.
Thinkofthechildren!
Technology improves illustrations --> Entire generation rendered illiterate!
Soon they'll invent an entire GENRE of new media with moving pictures and sound and no need to read at all! And what will happen then!?
Slashdot Mirror
Some gems from the article:
Disgracefully, hunger and desperation have become the Genetic Engineering industry's best tools to penetrate the developing world's food supply.
Starving people still deserve the dignity of choice.
I must say I've never understood the need to include women solely for "tits" value. It must be a holdover from the pre-internet days. I don't care what gender you are or how many trucks it looks like you've been hit by; I'm watching Mythbusters for completely non-sexual reasons.
Forgive my ignorance but... To what extend do (or could, with modification?) non-TCP protocols like UDP already address these differences? Also, I wouldn't really have a problem with privileging streaming services; but I have a big problem with privileging certain services of the same type over others. The law would have to be crafted very carefully.
Any place becomes a war zone when you march an army through it.
The Romans were onto something after all...
The first is a comma separating cumulative modifiers. E.g. a big, strong, intelligent mammal Five is not a modifier but a determiner, so I would not use a comma there myself. This author just seems to have extended the rule.
The second is just setting off a non-restrictive clause. E.g. the baker, whose cakes I've always enjoyed, came to see me
Because if there's one right that needs to be guaranteed and protected from tyranny... it's the "right" of the armed forces to be armed.
Honestly, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I thought it was a bit sketchy before what exactly the 2nd amendment meant, but specifying it with this addition really underscores the absurdity of the position.
It seems to me that Congress needs to act on this if our children are to have a republic. We've already heard that the Supreme Court, the highest institution of an entire branch of government, "lacks jurisdiction" to review the NSA's secret court decisions, which technically makes their secret court the highest in the land. If the NSA cannot be held accountable to Congress, there goes another branch. This looks like a coup.
It's not entirely obvious. Sure the script is completely different, but there's a chance it could be an alphabetical representation of a Mayan language.
I think it's more likely that a bag handler or TSA agent flat out stole the flutes, and the "agricultural product" excuse is just some run-around style bureaucratic ass-covering. One of our agents stole your things? Oh actually it's because of [MADE-UP REASON], and you need to contact [RANDOM OTHER AGENCY] to deal with it.
Well since the new codon requires the organism to interact with an artificial, human-supplied substance, this seems like a good way to keep manmade organisms in check. Sort of like the dinosaurs in jurassic park. Oh dear.
Just give it time.....
About, say, twenty years?
I've been using Linux since I was in 6th grade: Mandrake 6.something, Suse 7.something, Slackware 10, Redhat 9, a bunch of smaller live-cd and media-centric distros, Ubuntu, and now Fedora 16. I've used KDE, Gnome 2, Blackbox, Fluxbox, Windowmaker, and flirted with FVWM and a couple others. I appreciate minimal aesthetic and functionality as much as any Linux nut, but this is why I like Gnome3.
No, it's not very customizable. But I find its setup intuitive and functional. No, it's not graphically minimal, but computers are far more powerful now than they were even five minutes ago... Graphic simplicity used to be very important, then it was preferable, but now--I feel--it's okay to have a little eye candy. (Take my words with a grain of salt, though. I have become a casual user over the years.)
Still, they should have kept up Gnome2 the way people knew and loved it.
Racism is: canceling a conference because of the race of the speakers.
"no one expects ads in a piece of software that they just paid good money for"
Why not? You pay for cable TV and see ads, you see product placement in the shows you watch between the ads, there's product placement in movies, advertisements for other products on the products you buy, ads for books on the backs of books, and the list goes on. The only thing, I think, that really KEEPS ads OUT of a product is the value of its aesthetic. You'll never see an ad on the back of a fancy-looking leather-bound book, because you're paying for an aesthetic that precludes it. You won't find an ad in, say, a free Linux distro, because the aesthetic of the culture precludes it.
So I think we should look at this from the opposite perspective: why are ads showing up in Windows NOW? It may be a sign that Microsoft's business model is changing in some way, but I think it may have more to do with the adoption of the app-market aesthetic. You may not expect to see an ad in an app that you paid for, but you REALLY wouldn't expect to see an ad in a traditional program like Excel or Photoshop.
Could that be overcome by conventionally breaking up pi into blocks of certain sizes, then conceptualizing those blocks as matrices of conventional height and width?
I am (pleasantly) surprised by how many of my friends have "come out," as it were, as atheists over the last few years. I'm a young person, and I suspect that the amount of closet atheists among younger people (in America at least) is much greater than that among older people. In general, how optimistic are you about humanity getting past religion in the next few decades?
Things I have never seen: 1. a bicyclist obeying a stopsign. 2. a unicorn. 3. a bicyclist stopping at a crosswalk.
Things I have seen rarely: 1. a perfect 10 on the uneven bars. 2. a car passing a cyclist without giving them a berth of at least 2 extra meters.
Things I see all the time: 1. cyclists cutting off pedestrians. 2. cyclists running red lights. 3. cyclists cutting in and out of traffic.
I live by a college campus. I've talked with a campus police officer about all the bike accidents we've had here. He says the overwhelming majority are the fault of the cyclist. Helmets are small potatoes compared to 1. the devil-may-care attitude toward traffic laws that seems to prevail among cyclists and 2. the unsafe piggybacking of considerations for bicycles onto existing roads. Consider the bike lane: it continues straight through an intersection, ACROSS the right turn lane for cars! Furthermore, drivers are not used to this situation because it's both novel and counter-intuitive. Someone please design a better road and let's all tell our cyclist friends to obey the signs.
Contrary to popular belief, the Romans knew about lead poisoning and figured out ways to avoid it. For instance, aqueducts were lined with lead to make them waterproof. New aqueducts were mandated to run for a certain amount of time before water was drawn from them. In that time, the Romans knew, the minerals in the hard water would deposit on the lead and form a protective coating. Nevertheless, lead shavings were used as a seasoning on food. You may say that's horrendously stupid in a society that knows about lead poisoning, but then there's cigarettes today.
Handwavium? I like it. I like it more than "unobtanium."
The Language abilities of Star Trek computers are extremely advanced compared to today's latest and greatest. Of course most of the things in this article are only inklings, on their way but nowhere near what Star Trek showed. But I find many people are fooled by the usefulness of Siri et al. into thinking that real language processing and synthesis is only N years away. Talking with Siri is like using an old text adventure game: you put in words, it filters those and matches them to a small set of commands, and if that fails it returns an error dressed up as a polite English phrase. The biggest advancement is speech recognition and speech synthesis, which are indeed very good at this point. But this only deals with the physical forms of words at the level of phonetics. All higher linguistic levels (phonology, morphophonology, morphology, morpho-syntax, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) are woefully closed off to the electronic brains we use today. With our current language technologies, we are only about half a step above text.
If we combine the two statistics, we should arrive at a useful number. I have done the maths, and it seems that 105% of Americans are uninformed about the cloud. But now, being an American, I am forced to look at myself in this new light. I, for one, have looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow it's clouds' illusions I recall. I really don't know clouds at all.
Consider how long children's books have been heavily illustrated. When I was little I won a "reading award" in my first grade classroom because I always had out this science book. Truth is I was just looking at the pictures and reading the captions. Nevertheless I obviously did learn to read, and I can assure you that seeing pictures as a child ruined my imagination in no way. Think of the vast amounts of data we are presented with every day. There are images, written words, music, speech, on advertisements, street signs, in movies, on television, in books, in classrooms, at home... If having one possibility illustrated (in a broader sense) before you actually stifled human creativity, there would be far fewer inventors, artists, and writers. And if you want proof you can search for "fanfic" and see thousands of young adults (perhaps older adults?) and children writing stories based on their favorite movies and television shows and books, simply because they want to apply their own creativity to the fiction. I found one story, obviously written by a young child, which sought to give a back-story for how pokemon evolved out of present-day animals.
In short, I think the least of your worries should be any new media constraining the imagination.
Thinkofthechildren! Technology improves illustrations --> Entire generation rendered illiterate! Soon they'll invent an entire GENRE of new media with moving pictures and sound and no need to read at all! And what will happen then!?
So it's running Linux?