but can you also decline to get a Social Security number?
No.
are you able to conduct a normal life (ie, keep a job, buy a home, etc) without one?
No.
It seems to me your SS number serves the same role as other countries' national IDs, except with none of the safety checks they usually have.
This is 100% correct right now, however, it is a recent development. People these days use SSNs excessively; they were only designed 80 years ago to be used for income/social security tax collection and for receiving social security benefits. Nowadays you're asked for your SSN if you try to order cable TV. *facepalm*
Before this deal if you tried to propose network neutrality rules, all the ISPs were against it with a united front. Now, if Comcast already has to follow the rules, why shouldn't they take the position that their competitors should have to as well? They certainly don't want a situation where AT&T can block or delay NBC content in favor of AT&T's "preferred" partners or whatever, or charge NBC for access to AT&T customers.
(emphasis mine)
I think the problem is that it's very common for a broadband provider to hold a legal local monopoly - an ISP will get right-of-way and monopoly status, provided it doesn't piss off the city council bad enough to give the special deal to another telco/cableco. I remember I once found a map of the continental United States separated into broadband ISP coverage zones. There was *very* little overlap between competing providers; like children selling lemonade on the street, they know it's in their best interest to avoid competition by staying far apart.
When there's no real possibility of competition between hybrid television companies and ISPs, I think two things will inevitably result. One, the ISP will never give up the fight for its ability to filter/block/throttle/take kickbacks/etc, because the ISP knows that if it is in the legal right to do so, there is no financial reason for them *not to*. Two, the ISP will not be concerned either way with the restrictions imposed on their competition - the competition operates in a separate market.
CoD: Modern Warfare 2 is a pretty good example of consolitis, though certainly not as bad as Black Ops.
When MWF2 came out there were a lot of complaints from PC gamers about the lack of a console, the lack of dedicated server support, inability to change field of view from default, etc.
As a PC Call of Duty fan, imagine my surprise and joy when I stumbled upon AlterIW, a community hacking project that fixes all that. To add insult to injury, the hack is designed to slipsteam into a SKiDROW torrent of the game.
Mod parent up; parent is right, I was wrong. I was misremembering a text I read a while ago where actually Collins said his family was (emphasis on first word) "nominally christian".
I think Collins' effectively agnostic upbringing makes his conversion to evangelism even more startling, since that means that Richard-Dawkins-types can't just say, "Well, of course he's a christian, he was brainwashed from the beginning."
(More interestingly, prior to the Civil War, for what heights were known, a man was more likely to be elected if he was not the tallest candidate. Perhaps that was because the electorate was not as superficial in that era. Interesting pattern given the demographic changes to enfranchisement over time, but I am not prepared to draw conclusions without further research.)
(emphasis mine)
Changing voter demographics is certainly one possible cause, but my money is on compulsory public schooling. "Public school" -- the anti-democratic environment where students were and are continuously and publicly ranked based on how well they obey the teacher (usually the tallest person in the room) -- was just getting started in Mass. and NY before the Civil War began. I'm terrible with dates in history, but if memory serves me it was right around the time of the Civil War when public school graduates constituted a majority of the electorate.
Does anyone still actually believe that science coursework below graduate-level material has anything beyond peripheral involvement with the proper growth of scientists? I mean, sure, nearly every scientist goes through it (read on for one notable exception), but let's be honest - high school science classes fail students in the same way that every other high school class fails students:
- There is no experimentation whatsoever. Any "lab" work is done in a rigged environment where students go through the motions laid out by an instructor instead of designing and performing their own experiment from scratch. - There is a one-size-must-fit-all emphasis on abstraction, bookwork, and lecture. This is not how everyone learns best, or even at all. - There is no free association. You see your science teacher (who acts as though he knows everything, when really he just knows everything in the curriculum) and your (clueless) classmates, and that's it. You never interact with people who have conducted / are conducting real research.
We wouldn't be worrying about ideas like Intelligent Design being discussed in school if we had actual science classes. Since science is more of a process than a product, proper science instruction would allow each student to determine for himself that Intelligent Design, healing crystals, etc. are pseudoscience. When you're just telling people that Evolution=FACT; Anthropogenic-Global-Warming=FACT; Creationism=LIE, there's no real intellectual development taking place. A science curriculum whose core is "these are the facts that our expert scientists agree on" is a great way to politicize science by training young minds to rely on entrenched "experts" to tell them the meaning of things.
Fun fact: Francis Collins (THE Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project) is a born-again evangelical christian. He thinks religion is the most important thing in his life. He rejects intelligent design. He was homeschooled by middle-of-the-road christian parents.
Maybe when we talk about science, religion, Intelligent Design, etc. on Slashdot, we could frame our discussion around inspiring people like Collins who manage to find a good balance all on their own. To do otherwise is to basically admit that our schools are brainwashing centers (which they are, but that's another discussion) and that most young minds are powerless to separate fact from fiction on their own (I hope to God they aren't, and if they are, we shouldn't waste money on "science classes" in the first place).
Am I the only one here who hates British humor*? I may be an American, but I'm tired of being told that I'm a brash yank who doesn't understand the subtleties of british humor. I know damn well what it is. It's people doing really weird things nonchalantly, often intentionally. And nothing else.
*Okay, you've got me. I liked Monty Python's Flying Circus. Still, I can't help but see every other example of british humor as an inferior copy of Flying Circus.
Well I think it's just a tragedy how many poor undiscovered species face extinction every year.
Consider logging, a practice which harms the spotted owl. Now consider how many undiscovered species (it's in the thousands, just fyi) face an equal threat from logging. And consider how many of those undiscovered species are actually harmed by logging, not just in the minds of alarmists like me, but *really harmed*, as in dying! We have all fallen from grace, and must return to the Eden where humans and animals alike soaked in the love of Gaia, the Earth Mother. If we all partake in the Eucharist of Sustainability, we will attain Salvation.
Fox News does not have a monopoly on stupidity. On the environment, it enjoys a duopoly with career environmentalists.
So I'll just go ahead and assume the science team will compromise on a flawed model which produces equally flawed results.
Bingo. Whoever designed this is either nuts or just out for research money. The idea of accurately modeling and predicting even the NYSE is madness. An accurate computer model would not only have to completely understand a very complex system, it would have to exist in a world where true inspiration and free will do not exist in the minds of men.
And modeling climate? Please, that's even messier than the stock exchange (an entirely numeric human construct which comes neatly packaged into computer databases already). Earth's climate is affected by countless known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
Note: the unpleasantness comes from doing it wrong. See the references to reindeer urine in TFA
I checked out TFA and Wikipedia, and as I understand it, the amanita consumer must choose between eating somewhat poisonous mushrooms caps OR drinking reindeer urine. Or am I missing something? Because both of those options sound kind of gross.
I can only imagine the teenager replying to the judge: "But your honor here a picture of a Reindeer seeking the hallucinogenic fly agaric mushroom".
Funny you should choose the fly agaric mushroom for your example. Fly agaric is only a controlled substance (illegal to possess) in one U.S. state: Louisiana (source). Elsewhere, you can munch on them as much as you want (note: most people find the effects very unpleasant).
It is perhaps worth noting that although possessing/eating fly agarics is not illegal, it is a violation of FDA regulations to sell them for food or drug purposes.
Ron Paul makes popular statements about the big bad Federal government but gets a free pass on the real legislation he tries to ram through Congress that is designed specifically to give state government the right to infringe on citizens rights.
Ron Paul favors decentralizing the gov't as per the 10th amendment. Everything else he does or believes is secondary, even he happens to touch on one of your hot button issues (abortion, anyone?)
When the US federal gov't infringes on your rights, there's basically nothing you, a citizen, can do about it. Okay, you can vote for a particular House member, Senator, or President. Whoop-de-doo, your vote is practically meaningless because millions of other people casted votes for the same office. You just have to be happy with whatever turd sandwich / giant douche wins office. If you want to say "fuck it" and vote with your feet, that's about your only other option. Except for that a single world superpower with a strong centralized gov't tends to threaten the sovereignty of everyone else (examples: nation-building in Iraq/Afghanistan; Marijuana being technically illegal EVERYWHERE even if Amsterdam; the Wikileaks smearing).
Now compare this to (T)Ron Paul's option. He wants state governments to have much more autonomy from the Fed than they do now. Now even if we take as a given your claim that Ron Paul wants to infringe on every citizen's rights, his plan limits this infringement of rights to just one state (Ron Paul's state being Texas). Under Ron Paul's plan, Texas is free to become the most back-asswards meanest awfulest place ever. And if you were a Texan who didn't like things, you would be free to vote with your feet and settle down in Cali or Arkasas or wherever suits you best. Or if you wanted to stay in TX, you could protest and canvas neighborhoods and vote (and since your activities would only concern the Texas locality, your efforts might actually make a difference!)
Any biologist will tell you that evolution proceeds fastest when it takes place in small groups. Centralized power is only good for achieving "efficiency" and "stability". Since "efficiency" and "stability" only seem to be providing us with deliberate dollar inflation that makes saving money worthless and constant foreign military adventures, I think decentralization is much better than anything we can do with the current system.
If the federal gov't is going to subsidize the high-technology sector, it should be done directly instead of bothering to make stupid weapons like these.
I'd rather see the military spend their time doing research like this than invading another 3rd world country.
I'd rather see the military ordered to never do anything but perform defensive maneuvers within 200 miles of our borders. Oh, and FFS cut their budget in half.
Fallout 3 is just a TC mod for Oblivion. And Oblivion sucks once you realize it's just a single-player MMO where everything from controls to inventory to dialog options are dumbed-down for the average age of a console gamer (12 years, btw).
Nice post. I'd just like to discuss one paragraph, though.
Europe and the US profited from the industrial revolution and not caring about the environment for ~200 years, what right do we have to demand that everybody else make up for our accidents? We should do what we can, do what makes sense, and do what's practical. What's practical about shutting down factories in Europe and buying imported Chinese goods? This is unfortunately what's happening.
What's interesting about the industrial revolution is that despite putting the EU/USA through a horrible period of pollution so bad that rivers caught on fire (!), it was actually very good at decarbonizing our energy supply. Before the industrial revolution, we were burning wood. Then we started using coal. Then oil. Now we're increasingly using natural gas. There is a trend here - as time passes, the ratio of (useless) carbon atoms to (combustible) hydrogen atoms decreases. We're at 4:1 now with methane. I think the "first world" will be at 1:1 (pure hydrogen) before too long - we can just use fission reactors to separate hydrogen from water. Or we'll replace combustion processes with electrical ones, or both. The result is inevitable: Bye bye, carbon!
In closing, China should learn from our history and avoid fossil fuels, especially in power plants. Not everything is so simple (you mentioned factories), but I'd hate to see China build any more Coal Death Plants when they can just use fission instead.
I've heard (yes, that is my citation) that there is almost a 100% overlap between people who are against stem cell research and people who are against abortion. I've also heard (two sources now!) that anti-abortion groups are largely behind stem-cell hatred, because they claim that if stem cells harvested from aborted fetuses are used in research, the mild "gift to science" of abortion will sway more pregnant women into choosing abortion than keeping the child. Or even that "some women" who did not want children would conceive for the express purpose of having an abortion.
I thought it was crazy at first, too. Then I realized that if one or more single-issue lobbying groups were involved, it's almost stupid enough to be true.
I don't know what kind of academic curriculum a student could choose these days that would permit them to pursue a career in medical research without ever having learned basic calculus at SOME point.
IME, math classes aren't that good for actually learning math unless you love math for math's sake. If you see math as a means to an end (like a med student very well might), it's pretty easy to forget the math you learn in 300-seat classes like "Calc II", only to re-discover it all on your own once you use it within a process you really care about. It looks like that's what this guy did, only he just got a little carried away with the celebration.
It stinks that GM is losing money on these, but they're putting the effort into it, and I have to applaud them for it. Then again, didn't the PS3 and Xbox 360 cost more to make at launch time than they were selling for? Maybe GM is on to something...
(emphasis mine)
Oh, they're on to something, alright. GM is "too big to fail". This makes it easy for them to start risky, costly ventures, because they'll either succeed and make GM rich, or the gov't will bail GM out with more loans until GM is profitable again.
There must be a better way prevent huge, ugly messes than to support monopolies.
There is! Off the top of my head, here are a few ways for a municipality to remove monopolies without creating a mess:
a. Buy the last-mile infrastructure from the local telco/cableco. Then rent this infrastructure to any ISP who wants to do business in the area.
b. The city gov't builds its own data infrastructure independent of the telcos/cablecos, laying fiber or copper underground. It then rents this to any ISP who wants to do business in the area.
c. The city creates temporary tax breaks to encourage wireless ISP startups. Or the city creates its own wireless internet service.
None of these options are perfect. All of them are somewhat vulnerable to litigation attempts by existing ISPs (especially "b" and "c", since these directly compete with existing ISPs). Still I can't help but think that major metro areas like NYC would reap huge financial benefits by providing a public internet infrastructure to its residents. And they'd certainly have the legal muscle to deal with the ISPs dragging their heels in court.
Thanks for including the text from the Wiki article that I missed.
...it was not meant to be science, but intended as a way to stimulate dialog on these topics.
Here's my problem with the Drake equation: It's not scientific, but it's presented as if it were. It's written out as a mathematical formula despite containing no testable hypothesis. The wikipedia page you quoted says Drake only meant for the equation to be used as a starting point for discussion. Okay, no problem there, but then why did Drake feel the need to present it in the same manner as Newton's second law? Doing so puts the Drake eq on the same level as something the scientific community is rightfully very angry about: "Intelligent Design". The Drake eq and "Intelligent Design" both place unscientific thought within a scientific context. The scientific community reliably pans every variant of "Intelligent Design" as a dangerous idea that threatens to make the scientific process subordinate to religious thought. But for some reason the Drake eq gets a free pass from almost everyone, even though I first heard about it in a high school science class (and isn't that the exact environment scientists try to keep removed from "Intelligent Design"?) The more people we have who are able to distinguish between science and pseudoscience, the better off we are. The Drake equation sets us all back a little bit every time it's introduced without also being ridiculed.
Personally I agree with the criticism of the Drake equation but I think it's an interesting thought experiment, and it's interesting to discuss and speculate on what parameters might be of greatest importance.
(emphasis mine)
I'll agree with that any day; thinking about unknown alien life (or "unknown anything", really) in most any way is fun, and it's great at getting kids interested in physics and astronomy.
From our own solitary data point in Earth we can at least surmise that occasionally, intelligent life can take hundreds of millions of years to arrive even after fairly complex life is common.
The Oxford American Dictionary defines "surmise" as "suppose that something is true without having evidence to confirm it." With words like "surmise", I'm afraid we're back to "Intelligent Design" again. And just like with "Intelligent Design", the problem with the Drake eq is not the idea itself, but rather that the idea has escaped from its proper, useful place in the Philosophy Department and is now running amok through the Science Department.
While I am as excited as you are at the possibility of finding extraterrestrial life, I must point out that the drake equation is and will always be meaningless. I'm going to quote Michael Crichton and T.J. Nelson here because I couldn't say it any better myself:
The Drake equation consists of a large number of probabilities multiplied together. Since each factor is guaranteed to be somewhere between 0 and 1, the result is also guaranteed to be a reasonable-looking number between 0 and 1. Unfortunately, all the probabilities are completely unknown, making the result worse than useless. -T.J. Nelson
The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. [...] As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from "billions and billions" to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless... -Michael Crichton
Slashdot Mirror
Source, please? It seems like the ACLU should be shouting this down the rooftops if it's true.
The color? Is "bone".
but can you also decline to get a Social Security number?
No.
are you able to conduct a normal life (ie, keep a job, buy a home, etc) without one?
No.
It seems to me your SS number serves the same role as other countries' national IDs, except with none of the safety checks they usually have.
This is 100% correct right now, however, it is a recent development. People these days use SSNs excessively; they were only designed 80 years ago to be used for income/social security tax collection and for receiving social security benefits. Nowadays you're asked for your SSN if you try to order cable TV. *facepalm*
Before this deal if you tried to propose network neutrality rules, all the ISPs were against it with a united front. Now, if Comcast already has to follow the rules, why shouldn't they take the position that their competitors should have to as well? They certainly don't want a situation where AT&T can block or delay NBC content in favor of AT&T's "preferred" partners or whatever, or charge NBC for access to AT&T customers.
(emphasis mine)
I think the problem is that it's very common for a broadband provider to hold a legal local monopoly - an ISP will get right-of-way and monopoly status, provided it doesn't piss off the city council bad enough to give the special deal to another telco/cableco. I remember I once found a map of the continental United States separated into broadband ISP coverage zones. There was *very* little overlap between competing providers; like children selling lemonade on the street, they know it's in their best interest to avoid competition by staying far apart.
When there's no real possibility of competition between hybrid television companies and ISPs, I think two things will inevitably result. One, the ISP will never give up the fight for its ability to filter/block/throttle/take kickbacks/etc, because the ISP knows that if it is in the legal right to do so, there is no financial reason for them *not to*. Two, the ISP will not be concerned either way with the restrictions imposed on their competition - the competition operates in a separate market.
CoD: Modern Warfare 2 is a pretty good example of consolitis, though certainly not as bad as Black Ops.
When MWF2 came out there were a lot of complaints from PC gamers about the lack of a console, the lack of dedicated server support, inability to change field of view from default, etc.
As a PC Call of Duty fan, imagine my surprise and joy when I stumbled upon AlterIW, a community hacking project that fixes all that. To add insult to injury, the hack is designed to slipsteam into a SKiDROW torrent of the game.
Mod parent up; parent is right, I was wrong. I was misremembering a text I read a while ago where actually Collins said his family was (emphasis on first word) "nominally christian".
I think Collins' effectively agnostic upbringing makes his conversion to evangelism even more startling, since that means that Richard-Dawkins-types can't just say, "Well, of course he's a christian, he was brainwashed from the beginning."
(More interestingly, prior to the Civil War, for what heights were known, a man was more likely to be elected if he was not the tallest candidate. Perhaps that was because the electorate was not as superficial in that era. Interesting pattern given the demographic changes to enfranchisement over time, but I am not prepared to draw conclusions without further research.)
(emphasis mine)
Changing voter demographics is certainly one possible cause, but my money is on compulsory public schooling. "Public school" -- the anti-democratic environment where students were and are continuously and publicly ranked based on how well they obey the teacher (usually the tallest person in the room) -- was just getting started in Mass. and NY before the Civil War began. I'm terrible with dates in history, but if memory serves me it was right around the time of the Civil War when public school graduates constituted a majority of the electorate.
Does anyone still actually believe that science coursework below graduate-level material has anything beyond peripheral involvement with the proper growth of scientists? I mean, sure, nearly every scientist goes through it (read on for one notable exception), but let's be honest - high school science classes fail students in the same way that every other high school class fails students:
- There is no experimentation whatsoever. Any "lab" work is done in a rigged environment where students go through the motions laid out by an instructor instead of designing and performing their own experiment from scratch.
- There is a one-size-must-fit-all emphasis on abstraction, bookwork, and lecture. This is not how everyone learns best, or even at all.
- There is no free association. You see your science teacher (who acts as though he knows everything, when really he just knows everything in the curriculum) and your (clueless) classmates, and that's it. You never interact with people who have conducted / are conducting real research.
We wouldn't be worrying about ideas like Intelligent Design being discussed in school if we had actual science classes. Since science is more of a process than a product, proper science instruction would allow each student to determine for himself that Intelligent Design, healing crystals, etc. are pseudoscience. When you're just telling people that Evolution=FACT; Anthropogenic-Global-Warming=FACT; Creationism=LIE, there's no real intellectual development taking place. A science curriculum whose core is "these are the facts that our expert scientists agree on" is a great way to politicize science by training young minds to rely on entrenched "experts" to tell them the meaning of things.
Fun fact: Francis Collins (THE Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project) is a born-again evangelical christian. He thinks religion is the most important thing in his life. He rejects intelligent design. He was homeschooled by middle-of-the-road christian parents.
Maybe when we talk about science, religion, Intelligent Design, etc. on Slashdot, we could frame our discussion around inspiring people like Collins who manage to find a good balance all on their own. To do otherwise is to basically admit that our schools are brainwashing centers (which they are, but that's another discussion) and that most young minds are powerless to separate fact from fiction on their own (I hope to God they aren't, and if they are, we shouldn't waste money on "science classes" in the first place).
Am I the only one here who hates British humor*? I may be an American, but I'm tired of being told that I'm a brash yank who doesn't understand the subtleties of british humor. I know damn well what it is. It's people doing really weird things nonchalantly, often intentionally. And nothing else.
*Okay, you've got me. I liked Monty Python's Flying Circus. Still, I can't help but see every other example of british humor as an inferior copy of Flying Circus.
Well I think it's just a tragedy how many poor undiscovered species face extinction every year.
Consider logging, a practice which harms the spotted owl. Now consider how many undiscovered species (it's in the thousands, just fyi) face an equal threat from logging. And consider how many of those undiscovered species are actually harmed by logging, not just in the minds of alarmists like me, but *really harmed*, as in dying! We have all fallen from grace, and must return to the Eden where humans and animals alike soaked in the love of Gaia, the Earth Mother. If we all partake in the Eucharist of Sustainability, we will attain Salvation.
Fox News does not have a monopoly on stupidity. On the environment, it enjoys a duopoly with career environmentalists.
So I'll just go ahead and assume the science team will compromise on a flawed model which produces equally flawed results.
Bingo. Whoever designed this is either nuts or just out for research money. The idea of accurately modeling and predicting even the NYSE is madness. An accurate computer model would not only have to completely understand a very complex system, it would have to exist in a world where true inspiration and free will do not exist in the minds of men.
And modeling climate? Please, that's even messier than the stock exchange (an entirely numeric human construct which comes neatly packaged into computer databases already). Earth's climate is affected by countless known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
Note: the unpleasantness comes from doing it wrong. See the references to reindeer urine in TFA
I checked out TFA and Wikipedia, and as I understand it, the amanita consumer must choose between eating somewhat poisonous mushrooms caps OR drinking reindeer urine. Or am I missing something? Because both of those options sound kind of gross.
I can only imagine the teenager replying to the judge: "But your honor here a picture of a Reindeer seeking the hallucinogenic fly agaric mushroom".
Funny you should choose the fly agaric mushroom for your example. Fly agaric is only a controlled substance (illegal to possess) in one U.S. state: Louisiana (source). Elsewhere, you can munch on them as much as you want (note: most people find the effects very unpleasant).
It is perhaps worth noting that although possessing/eating fly agarics is not illegal, it is a violation of FDA regulations to sell them for food or drug purposes.
Daft Punk is amazing. The soundtrack fits into a movie of this type so well, I just had to buy it right after watching the movie on IMAX.
If you were impressed by the Tron: Legacy OST, you're going to be blown away by Interstella 5555
Ron Paul makes popular statements about the big bad Federal government but gets a free pass on the real legislation he tries to ram through Congress that is designed specifically to give state government the right to infringe on citizens rights.
Ron Paul favors decentralizing the gov't as per the 10th amendment. Everything else he does or believes is secondary, even he happens to touch on one of your hot button issues (abortion, anyone?)
When the US federal gov't infringes on your rights, there's basically nothing you, a citizen, can do about it. Okay, you can vote for a particular House member, Senator, or President. Whoop-de-doo, your vote is practically meaningless because millions of other people casted votes for the same office. You just have to be happy with whatever turd sandwich / giant douche wins office. If you want to say "fuck it" and vote with your feet, that's about your only other option. Except for that a single world superpower with a strong centralized gov't tends to threaten the sovereignty of everyone else (examples: nation-building in Iraq/Afghanistan; Marijuana being technically illegal EVERYWHERE even if Amsterdam; the Wikileaks smearing).
Now compare this to (T)Ron Paul's option. He wants state governments to have much more autonomy from the Fed than they do now. Now even if we take as a given your claim that Ron Paul wants to infringe on every citizen's rights, his plan limits this infringement of rights to just one state (Ron Paul's state being Texas). Under Ron Paul's plan, Texas is free to become the most back-asswards meanest awfulest place ever. And if you were a Texan who didn't like things, you would be free to vote with your feet and settle down in Cali or Arkasas or wherever suits you best. Or if you wanted to stay in TX, you could protest and canvas neighborhoods and vote (and since your activities would only concern the Texas locality, your efforts might actually make a difference!)
Any biologist will tell you that evolution proceeds fastest when it takes place in small groups. Centralized power is only good for achieving "efficiency" and "stability". Since "efficiency" and "stability" only seem to be providing us with deliberate dollar inflation that makes saving money worthless and constant foreign military adventures, I think decentralization is much better than anything we can do with the current system.
I'd rather see the military spend their time doing research like this than invading another 3rd world country.
I'd rather see the military ordered to never do anything but perform defensive maneuvers within 200 miles of our borders. Oh, and FFS cut their budget in half.
Fallout 3 is just a TC mod for Oblivion. And Oblivion sucks once you realize it's just a single-player MMO where everything from controls to inventory to dialog options are dumbed-down for the average age of a console gamer (12 years, btw).
I'm glad Blizzard gives us the option to disable that in their games.
My sarcasm detector is out of batteries. Does WoW really require subscribers to donate their upstream bandwidth for patches? Honest question.
Europe and the US profited from the industrial revolution and not caring about the environment for ~200 years, what right do we have to demand that everybody else make up for our accidents? We should do what we can, do what makes sense, and do what's practical. What's practical about shutting down factories in Europe and buying imported Chinese goods? This is unfortunately what's happening.
What's interesting about the industrial revolution is that despite putting the EU/USA through a horrible period of pollution so bad that rivers caught on fire (!), it was actually very good at decarbonizing our energy supply. Before the industrial revolution, we were burning wood. Then we started using coal. Then oil. Now we're increasingly using natural gas. There is a trend here - as time passes, the ratio of (useless) carbon atoms to (combustible) hydrogen atoms decreases. We're at 4:1 now with methane. I think the "first world" will be at 1:1 (pure hydrogen) before too long - we can just use fission reactors to separate hydrogen from water. Or we'll replace combustion processes with electrical ones, or both. The result is inevitable: Bye bye, carbon!
In closing, China should learn from our history and avoid fossil fuels, especially in power plants. Not everything is so simple (you mentioned factories), but I'd hate to see China build any more Coal Death Plants when they can just use fission instead.
I've heard (yes, that is my citation) that there is almost a 100% overlap between people who are against stem cell research and people who are against abortion. I've also heard (two sources now!) that anti-abortion groups are largely behind stem-cell hatred, because they claim that if stem cells harvested from aborted fetuses are used in research, the mild "gift to science" of abortion will sway more pregnant women into choosing abortion than keeping the child. Or even that "some women" who did not want children would conceive for the express purpose of having an abortion.
I thought it was crazy at first, too. Then I realized that if one or more single-issue lobbying groups were involved, it's almost stupid enough to be true.
I don't know what kind of academic curriculum a student could choose these days that would permit them to pursue a career in medical research without ever having learned basic calculus at SOME point.
IME, math classes aren't that good for actually learning math unless you love math for math's sake. If you see math as a means to an end (like a med student very well might), it's pretty easy to forget the math you learn in 300-seat classes like "Calc II", only to re-discover it all on your own once you use it within a process you really care about. It looks like that's what this guy did, only he just got a little carried away with the celebration.
It stinks that GM is losing money on these, but they're putting the effort into it, and I have to applaud them for it. Then again, didn't the PS3 and Xbox 360 cost more to make at launch time than they were selling for? Maybe GM is on to something...
(emphasis mine)
Oh, they're on to something, alright. GM is "too big to fail". This makes it easy for them to start risky, costly ventures, because they'll either succeed and make GM rich, or the gov't will bail GM out with more loans until GM is profitable again.
There must be a better way prevent huge, ugly messes than to support monopolies.
There is! Off the top of my head, here are a few ways for a municipality to remove monopolies without creating a mess:
a. Buy the last-mile infrastructure from the local telco/cableco. Then rent this infrastructure to any ISP who wants to do business in the area.
b. The city gov't builds its own data infrastructure independent of the telcos/cablecos, laying fiber or copper underground. It then rents this to any ISP who wants to do business in the area.
c. The city creates temporary tax breaks to encourage wireless ISP startups. Or the city creates its own wireless internet service.
None of these options are perfect. All of them are somewhat vulnerable to litigation attempts by existing ISPs (especially "b" and "c", since these directly compete with existing ISPs). Still I can't help but think that major metro areas like NYC would reap huge financial benefits by providing a public internet infrastructure to its residents. And they'd certainly have the legal muscle to deal with the ISPs dragging their heels in court.
Here's my problem with the Drake equation: It's not scientific, but it's presented as if it were. It's written out as a mathematical formula despite containing no testable hypothesis. The wikipedia page you quoted says Drake only meant for the equation to be used as a starting point for discussion. Okay, no problem there, but then why did Drake feel the need to present it in the same manner as Newton's second law? Doing so puts the Drake eq on the same level as something the scientific community is rightfully very angry about: "Intelligent Design". The Drake eq and "Intelligent Design" both place unscientific thought within a scientific context. The scientific community reliably pans every variant of "Intelligent Design" as a dangerous idea that threatens to make the scientific process subordinate to religious thought. But for some reason the Drake eq gets a free pass from almost everyone, even though I first heard about it in a high school science class (and isn't that the exact environment scientists try to keep removed from "Intelligent Design"?) The more people we have who are able to distinguish between science and pseudoscience, the better off we are. The Drake equation sets us all back a little bit every time it's introduced without also being ridiculed.
Personally I agree with the criticism of the Drake equation but I think it's an interesting thought experiment, and it's interesting to discuss and speculate on what parameters might be of greatest importance.
(emphasis mine)
I'll agree with that any day; thinking about unknown alien life (or "unknown anything", really) in most any way is fun, and it's great at getting kids interested in physics and astronomy.
From our own solitary data point in Earth we can at least surmise that occasionally, intelligent life can take hundreds of millions of years to arrive even after fairly complex life is common.
The Oxford American Dictionary defines "surmise" as "suppose that something is true without having evidence to confirm it." With words like "surmise", I'm afraid we're back to "Intelligent Design" again. And just like with "Intelligent Design", the problem with the Drake eq is not the idea itself, but rather that the idea has escaped from its proper, useful place in the Philosophy Department and is now running amok through the Science Department.
Whoa, this simplifies the drake equation.
While I am as excited as you are at the possibility of finding extraterrestrial life, I must point out that the drake equation is and will always be meaningless. I'm going to quote Michael Crichton and T.J. Nelson here because I couldn't say it any better myself:
The Drake equation consists of a large number of probabilities multiplied together. Since each factor is guaranteed to be somewhere between 0 and 1, the result is also guaranteed to be a reasonable-looking number between 0 and 1. Unfortunately, all the probabilities are completely unknown, making the result worse than useless. -T.J. Nelson
The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. [...] As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from "billions and billions" to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless... -Michael Crichton