Thanks for an interesting post. I'd never considered the impact of US laws on the cheeses you had available over there. But I honestly can't take back what I said about Wisconsin Cheddar. I may have exaggerated very slightly, but when some Americans proudly served me it, I have to say it was quite bland. A good cheddar is a wonderful taste and I'm surprised you can find it so dull. I make you an offer - next time you're in the UK, post me a message on here (or use the email, only that gets hit by a lot of spam), and I will invite you both over to try some really good British Cheddars. There's a smoked, Welsh cheddar, not quite vintage, that's an incredibly satisfying taste.
Red neck refers to being out in the Sun all day in a collarless shirt, not anything to do with inbreeding. And the Royal Family aren't British - they're a bunch of incestuous Germans we can't get rid of. You did good there. Though you unfortunately seem to have lost your taste for revolutions in current generations. Shame, you were at your best when you threw us out and you could probably do with bringing back a bit of that spirit right now.
"While poorer people are more likely to die sooner than their more well-off counterparts, researchers say their finding supports the view that the primary pathway between health and wealth is that poor health leads to a depletion of household wealth, rather than being poor causes one's health to decline. Researchers found that the substantial changes in wealth that occurred in the years 1992 and 2002 in the United States through increases in stock prices and housing prices did not alter the probability of subsequent death."
Yes, that's exactly the part I was eluding to. It doesn't tell us anything about comparative differences between the countries as regards wealth. I.e. are the differences in health care between the two countries constant across different wealth demographics or are they different, e.g. we find the the US is ahead of the UK in heatlh care for the wealthy, but the UK is ahead in health care for the median earners or the poor. That's what would be really interesting to know if we want to start examining the role of health care in more meaningful depth and by the sounds of it, they collected data relevant to this, but it is missing from their conclusions. I find it highly unlikely that the difference in health care is constant across all demographics of society.
For instance the US spends more than twice as much on heath care per citizen as the UK
An alternative way of putting that however, is that the health care costs twice as much per citizen. Factually, the two statements are equivalent, but consider the different implications.
Indeed. In time honoured fashion, I hadn't actually RTFA at the time of posting. I have done so now. I found it rather unenlightening. What would be really interesting to see is the difference in death rates across different wealth demographics. I.e. do we see larger discrepancies in one country than we do in the other. But I've now noticed that this is the RAND corporation, so I wont hold my breath on anything that shows the US system to have conceptual problems.
If you want to talk reality, forget beer comparisons, try cheese. America is home to the worlds most disgusting cheese. This is the country that invented spray on cheese. Everytime I talk about American cheese with Americans, they say, 'ah, but we do have good cheeses, you just have to look for them.' And they try to give me some Wisconsin cheddar which admittedly is not awful, just bad. I don't know what it is. The US has contributed some fantastic music, movies, plays, inventions, economic theories, software and people to the world. Really great, great stuff.
But what you call cheese could kill a rhino at ten paces.
Heh. Our lack of fussy health care in childhood makes us fitter. Their lack of fussy health care in old age, keeps them running.
But seriously, all modern day comparisons should be treated with caution. We're talking about people in their sixties here. If you want to compare the effects of health care in the different countries, you need to give consideration to the last seventy years or more. Or maybe it's just walking versus driving. The British walk more. A slightly more physically demanding life makes them fitter when they can deal with it, and kills us off when we no longer can.;)
And I'm trying to tell you that the "damage" comes from the listeners' reaction, not by the words themselves. There, your examples have been addressed, and so has your premise that words cause harm..
Okay. You're serious. I wasn't sure if you were. Why don't you actually answer the questions I asked in my examples? Without that, you're dodging the problems that I'm pointing out in your argument.
The strange notion that words cannot cause harm is trivially refuted. Take a scenario like the ones I listed, remove the slanders or libels in each case, and check if the harm still occurs. As it does not, we can therefore attribute some of the harm to the slanders or libels.
I will accept your premise on the grounds that I can walk into any courtroom and say, *The devil made me do it.* as my "get out of jail free" card
I don't understand what you're saying. The premise is yours. My argument is to show the implications of your premise. I don't see anything in your post that contradicts those and you avoided addressing any thing in my post. I gave realistic examples. You should either say why those examples don't match what you've been saying, address the examples or concede you hadn't thought your argument through. (In the nicest possible way)
H.
To illustrate your argument then, if someone lied about your work and got a promotion over you as a consequence, the blame is entirely attributable to the manager making the decision for not knowing that she was being lied to, rather than any blame falling on the colleague that lied. To illustrate again, if a few people in your neighbourhood spread rumours that you were a convicted rapist or that you'd made a pass at their fourteen year old daughter, and everyone started avoiding you, your resentment is solely directed at the people who are treating you suspiciously and not at all at the people behind the whispering campaign? If someone you know told you that a business you were about to invest in was actually about to be prosecuted for fraud and then you later found out that the person had lied to you so they could make an investment in your place, making themselves a lot of money, you solely blame yourself and not the person who told lies?
Your walling off of responsibility between those who act on the information they have, and those that manipulate such people by distorting the available information, seems arbitrary and obstructive to me. We can only act correctly, to the extent that our knowledge is correct. Those that distort information seem to me to be interfering with people's ability to act correctly, which is a harm. This is qualatively different to people who merely state their beliefs. I.e. someone who says that they hate group X, that doesn't distort information, it just states their beliefs. Someone that falsely says group X did action Y, is distorting information.
I would say it isn't fundamentally different than a slave uprising. It's a case of an upended power dynamic with consequences that look much the same.
I'm sorry, but with that degree of reductionism, I think I could render any science fiction novel you care to name as being basically a non-science fiction story. 2001? It's just an isolationist serial killer story. Martian Timeslip? It's just modern day conspiracy theory.
Your argument is saying if you took Contact by Carl Sagan and swapped the aliens for angels, it would be just a religious parable, and therefore isn't sci-fi.
Besides your argument abstracts away far too much and focuses only on those elements that support your argument. What of people not knowing what they are and worrying that at any moment they may act unknowingly for the enemy? What of not knowing the motivation or origins of an enemy that is not your own species? I.e. why do they keep attacking, but not finishing us. How do we deal with finding ourselves not unique, but an identical clone of many others? How do you deal with losing someone and then being put into sustained and close proximity with someone who shares that someone's memories of you? What does it mean when you know that your death just means you'll be re-born in a newly grown body? And all these things flow naturally from the basic sci-fi premise of the Cylons. I reject the idea that you could just substitute Cylons for Spartacus and say look: it's the same thing.
That's actually addressed in the episode. Half the computer systems are shut down on the ship because they don't even know which are ones are currently infected. It's akin to having a body frozen until you have the medical technology to deal with its illness. What they're doing by plugging everything back together again is akin to thawing it out..
A species creating an artificial life form that attempts to replace it isn't "posing questions about things that are explicitly raised by advanced science concepts"?
Deciding to make the robots in one's production look like humans is a legitimate cost-cutting measure, I suppose, but don't try to justify it on any other terms. It was just cheap, and really added nothing of value.
Half the plots of the series revolved around whether or not someone was a Cylon and even whether or not that individual knew they were a Cylon. That would have worked a great deal less well if one of the people in the room was a seven foot and made of steel.:)
Besides, the original series' Cylons were impressive machines. They were black and silver, very shiny, and had that nifty scanning eye. I wouldn't mind having one, so long as it could be programmed not to try and kill me.
They actually made an appearance in the new series as an earlier model. They still looked pretty good.
Is this something that becomes clear in Caprica, because I didn't pick up on that in the series, or if I did, it's forgotten. How were the final five still living amongst the humans for all that time between the last cycle and the new "discovery" of the Cylons?
I'd challenge anyone to name a soft science fiction series that paid any mind to realistic biology, natural selection or any related topics.
Doctor Who. While there have been abuses a plenty, there are also many parts where these issues have been correctly addressed. One of my favourite lines from the last series was the Doctor remarking on the ancient race of evolved dinosaurs the Silurians as "actually, they should be called Eocenes. Scientist who discovered them had no idea what he was doing". Or the old Quatermass series with their alien manipulation of primitive apes.
Speech can have serious consequences. If someone says they hate muslims/christians/whatever, that's their view. It's a qualitatively different sort of speech than if someone in your office quietly passes around that you are a convicted rapist, or that you followed someone home or that you've been embezzling money or lies about your work in order to get a promotion over you, etc. The former is a statement of belief, the latter is a malicious action.
Bottom right of a standard UK keyboard layout, adjacent to the space bar, has a key normally labelled "Alt Gr". Different OS's interpret it differently, but it's generally used in conjunction with another key to get characters that are related but different to what you would get without it. For example on Windows 7, you can depress Alt Gr and the e key and you get é (accented e). On default KDE, you can press Alt Gr + the ; key and that primes the OS to give you an alternative version to whatever you type next, so pressing e after that combination gets you the same accented character as on Windows. The advantage with the KDE version is power - you can for example press Alt Gr + the ' key and followed by the e key, you'd get ê (e with circumflex). The combinations are fairly consistent and you quickly get used to it. Not sure what it's like on US keyboards. I'd thought it was similar but if you're in the US, then maybe I'm misremembering.
If IE9 doesn't suck you will see a lot of people stick with it instead of Firefox.
If you're doing web-development, you use Firefox for the lovely Firebug and Web Developer plugins. If you want the best browsing experience you use either Chrome or IE9 (imo). A lot of people who "defected" to Firefox wont return to IE if they find Firefox has become bloated and heavy, they'll move to Chrome, and those who are on IE and want to move, similarly will start to drift to Chrome rather than Firefox. And let's not forget that Google provides the lion's share of Mozilla's funding. Firefox has been a useful stalking horse for Google in stopping MS from resculpting web-standards to their whim. But that job is done now. Will Google really fund a competitor to themself? We'll have to wait and see,
Imo, the future battle is going to be between Chrome, IE9 and whatever Steve Jobs decrees Mac users will use. Firefox has enough market share that they ain't going anywhere soon, and if the next Firefox is awesome, then everything I've said could be wrong, but this is how I think it's going to play out. All that said, I'm typing this in Konqueror, but I don't kid myself that there are as many of us as there are IE, Firefox or Safari users.;)
The frenzy around IE9 may have subsided already and [...]
The one the Slashdot editors try to pretend there was in order to stir up some more juicy-post-count boosting flamewars. IE9 beta came out. Surprisingly seemed quite good and certainly zippy. Some people made comments. Apparently that's a "frenzy" to Slashdot editors.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for an interesting post. I'd never considered the impact of US laws on the cheeses you had available over there. But I honestly can't take back what I said about Wisconsin Cheddar. I may have exaggerated very slightly, but when some Americans proudly served me it, I have to say it was quite bland. A good cheddar is a wonderful taste and I'm surprised you can find it so dull. I make you an offer - next time you're in the UK, post me a message on here (or use the email, only that gets hit by a lot of spam), and I will invite you both over to try some really good British Cheddars. There's a smoked, Welsh cheddar, not quite vintage, that's an incredibly satisfying taste.
Yes, but so much quantity!
Red neck refers to being out in the Sun all day in a collarless shirt, not anything to do with inbreeding. And the Royal Family aren't British - they're a bunch of incestuous Germans we can't get rid of. You did good there. Though you unfortunately seem to have lost your taste for revolutions in current generations. Shame, you were at your best when you threw us out and you could probably do with bringing back a bit of that spirit right now.
"While poorer people are more likely to die sooner than their more well-off counterparts, researchers say their finding supports the view that the primary pathway between health and wealth is that poor health leads to a depletion of household wealth, rather than being poor causes one's health to decline. Researchers found that the substantial changes in wealth that occurred in the years 1992 and 2002 in the United States through increases in stock prices and housing prices did not alter the probability of subsequent death."
Yes, that's exactly the part I was eluding to. It doesn't tell us anything about comparative differences between the countries as regards wealth. I.e. are the differences in health care between the two countries constant across different wealth demographics or are they different, e.g. we find the the US is ahead of the UK in heatlh care for the wealthy, but the UK is ahead in health care for the median earners or the poor. That's what would be really interesting to know if we want to start examining the role of health care in more meaningful depth and by the sounds of it, they collected data relevant to this, but it is missing from their conclusions. I find it highly unlikely that the difference in health care is constant across all demographics of society.
For instance the US spends more than twice as much on heath care per citizen as the UK
An alternative way of putting that however, is that the health care costs twice as much per citizen. Factually, the two statements are equivalent, but consider the different implications.
Indeed. In time honoured fashion, I hadn't actually RTFA at the time of posting. I have done so now. I found it rather unenlightening. What would be really interesting to see is the difference in death rates across different wealth demographics. I.e. do we see larger discrepancies in one country than we do in the other. But I've now noticed that this is the RAND corporation, so I wont hold my breath on anything that shows the US system to have conceptual problems.
That's not ethnic cleansing.
If you want to talk reality, forget beer comparisons, try cheese. America is home to the worlds most disgusting cheese. This is the country that invented spray on cheese. Everytime I talk about American cheese with Americans, they say, 'ah, but we do have good cheeses, you just have to look for them.' And they try to give me some Wisconsin cheddar which admittedly is not awful, just bad. I don't know what it is. The US has contributed some fantastic music, movies, plays, inventions, economic theories, software and people to the world. Really great, great stuff.
But what you call cheese could kill a rhino at ten paces.
Heh. Our lack of fussy health care in childhood makes us fitter. Their lack of fussy health care in old age, keeps them running.
;)
But seriously, all modern day comparisons should be treated with caution. We're talking about people in their sixties here. If you want to compare the effects of health care in the different countries, you need to give consideration to the last seventy years or more. Or maybe it's just walking versus driving. The British walk more. A slightly more physically demanding life makes them fitter when they can deal with it, and kills us off when we no longer can.
And I'm trying to tell you that the "damage" comes from the listeners' reaction, not by the words themselves. There, your examples have been addressed, and so has your premise that words cause harm..
Okay. You're serious. I wasn't sure if you were. Why don't you actually answer the questions I asked in my examples? Without that, you're dodging the problems that I'm pointing out in your argument.
The strange notion that words cannot cause harm is trivially refuted. Take a scenario like the ones I listed, remove the slanders or libels in each case, and check if the harm still occurs. As it does not, we can therefore attribute some of the harm to the slanders or libels.
I will accept your premise on the grounds that I can walk into any courtroom and say, *The devil made me do it.* as my "get out of jail free" card
I don't understand what you're saying. The premise is yours. My argument is to show the implications of your premise. I don't see anything in your post that contradicts those and you avoided addressing any thing in my post. I gave realistic examples. You should either say why those examples don't match what you've been saying, address the examples or concede you hadn't thought your argument through. (In the nicest possible way)
H.
To illustrate your argument then, if someone lied about your work and got a promotion over you as a consequence, the blame is entirely attributable to the manager making the decision for not knowing that she was being lied to, rather than any blame falling on the colleague that lied. To illustrate again, if a few people in your neighbourhood spread rumours that you were a convicted rapist or that you'd made a pass at their fourteen year old daughter, and everyone started avoiding you, your resentment is solely directed at the people who are treating you suspiciously and not at all at the people behind the whispering campaign? If someone you know told you that a business you were about to invest in was actually about to be prosecuted for fraud and then you later found out that the person had lied to you so they could make an investment in your place, making themselves a lot of money, you solely blame yourself and not the person who told lies?
Your walling off of responsibility between those who act on the information they have, and those that manipulate such people by distorting the available information, seems arbitrary and obstructive to me. We can only act correctly, to the extent that our knowledge is correct. Those that distort information seem to me to be interfering with people's ability to act correctly, which is a harm. This is qualatively different to people who merely state their beliefs. I.e. someone who says that they hate group X, that doesn't distort information, it just states their beliefs. Someone that falsely says group X did action Y, is distorting information.
I would say it isn't fundamentally different than a slave uprising. It's a case of an upended power dynamic with consequences that look much the same.
I'm sorry, but with that degree of reductionism, I think I could render any science fiction novel you care to name as being basically a non-science fiction story. 2001? It's just an isolationist serial killer story. Martian Timeslip? It's just modern day conspiracy theory.
Your argument is saying if you took Contact by Carl Sagan and swapped the aliens for angels, it would be just a religious parable, and therefore isn't sci-fi.
Besides your argument abstracts away far too much and focuses only on those elements that support your argument. What of people not knowing what they are and worrying that at any moment they may act unknowingly for the enemy? What of not knowing the motivation or origins of an enemy that is not your own species? I.e. why do they keep attacking, but not finishing us. How do we deal with finding ourselves not unique, but an identical clone of many others? How do you deal with losing someone and then being put into sustained and close proximity with someone who shares that someone's memories of you? What does it mean when you know that your death just means you'll be re-born in a newly grown body? And all these things flow naturally from the basic sci-fi premise of the Cylons. I reject the idea that you could just substitute Cylons for Spartacus and say look: it's the same thing.
That's actually addressed in the episode. Half the computer systems are shut down on the ship because they don't even know which are ones are currently infected. It's akin to having a body frozen until you have the medical technology to deal with its illness. What they're doing by plugging everything back together again is akin to thawing it out..
A species creating an artificial life form that attempts to replace it isn't "posing questions about things that are explicitly raised by advanced science concepts"?
Deciding to make the robots in one's production look like humans is a legitimate cost-cutting measure, I suppose, but don't try to justify it on any other terms. It was just cheap, and really added nothing of value.
Half the plots of the series revolved around whether or not someone was a Cylon and even whether or not that individual knew they were a Cylon. That would have worked a great deal less well if one of the people in the room was a seven foot and made of steel. :)
Besides, the original series' Cylons were impressive machines. They were black and silver, very shiny, and had that nifty scanning eye. I wouldn't mind having one, so long as it could be programmed not to try and kill me.
They actually made an appearance in the new series as an earlier model. They still looked pretty good.
Is this something that becomes clear in Caprica, because I didn't pick up on that in the series, or if I did, it's forgotten. How were the final five still living amongst the humans for all that time between the last cycle and the new "discovery" of the Cylons?
I'd challenge anyone to name a soft science fiction series that paid any mind to realistic biology, natural selection or any related topics.
Doctor Who. While there have been abuses a plenty, there are also many parts where these issues have been correctly addressed. One of my favourite lines from the last series was the Doctor remarking on the ancient race of evolved dinosaurs the Silurians as "actually, they should be called Eocenes. Scientist who discovered them had no idea what he was doing". Or the old Quatermass series with their alien manipulation of primitive apes.
Speech can have serious consequences. If someone says they hate muslims/christians/whatever, that's their view. It's a qualitatively different sort of speech than if someone in your office quietly passes around that you are a convicted rapist, or that you followed someone home or that you've been embezzling money or lies about your work in order to get a promotion over you, etc. The former is a statement of belief, the latter is a malicious action.
There is no single example of a commercially successful nuclear program anywhere in the world.
France.
Bottom right of a standard UK keyboard layout, adjacent to the space bar, has a key normally labelled "Alt Gr". Different OS's interpret it differently, but it's generally used in conjunction with another key to get characters that are related but different to what you would get without it. For example on Windows 7, you can depress Alt Gr and the e key and you get é (accented e). On default KDE, you can press Alt Gr + the ; key and that primes the OS to give you an alternative version to whatever you type next, so pressing e after that combination gets you the same accented character as on Windows. The advantage with the KDE version is power - you can for example press Alt Gr + the ' key and followed by the e key, you'd get ê (e with circumflex). The combinations are fairly consistent and you quickly get used to it. Not sure what it's like on US keyboards. I'd thought it was similar but if you're in the US, then maybe I'm misremembering.
Doh! Forgot to cover Opera. Opera is huge, but less so in Western Europe and the US. I should have limited my above comments to these areas.
If IE9 doesn't suck you will see a lot of people stick with it instead of Firefox.
If you're doing web-development, you use Firefox for the lovely Firebug and Web Developer plugins. If you want the best browsing experience you use either Chrome or IE9 (imo). A lot of people who "defected" to Firefox wont return to IE if they find Firefox has become bloated and heavy, they'll move to Chrome, and those who are on IE and want to move, similarly will start to drift to Chrome rather than Firefox. And let's not forget that Google provides the lion's share of Mozilla's funding. Firefox has been a useful stalking horse for Google in stopping MS from resculpting web-standards to their whim. But that job is done now. Will Google really fund a competitor to themself? We'll have to wait and see,
;)
Imo, the future battle is going to be between Chrome, IE9 and whatever Steve Jobs decrees Mac users will use. Firefox has enough market share that they ain't going anywhere soon, and if the next Firefox is awesome, then everything I've said could be wrong, but this is how I think it's going to play out. All that said, I'm typing this in Konqueror, but I don't kid myself that there are as many of us as there are IE, Firefox or Safari users.
And a comment that contained only factual information that happened to compare IE8 favourably against Safari, was modded down Troll almost instantly.
The frenzy around IE9 may have subsided already and [...]
The one the Slashdot editors try to pretend there was in order to stir up some more juicy-post-count boosting flamewars. IE9 beta came out. Surprisingly seemed quite good and certainly zippy. Some people made comments. Apparently that's a "frenzy" to Slashdot editors.