What I'd like to know is why performance enhansing drugs are illegal, but performance enhansing surgery (like LASIK, which can give a person with normal eyesight better than 20/20 vision, albeit with the risk of blindness) is perfectly acceptable?
Let's take it a step further than that. Why is it if a body produces more testosterone naturally it's OK, but if a steroid is used it's wrong? Why should one athlete benefit just because he is younger and has better genetics?
I live in Colorado. Part of what goes on here, and may be going on where you live, attracting quality officers is very competitive between the municipalities. The more 'dangerous' areas, with higher crime rates, have trouble recruiting officers because no one wants to work there. Your neighboring city may either pay better or be safer, so they recruit better officers.
My comment was a broad generalization. In any given department there may be any number of reasons for the cops being goons, corruption, bad management, bad hiring policies, etc...
One reason I mentioned Grocery Stores is because they pay fairly well around here. Most stores are corporate owned, and not union, but in the interest of keeping the unions out, they pay union wages. With the same level of experience, a Grocery Store clerk might make a very comperable wage to a police officer (and better benefits) with a better quality of life.
Wow, you are a little harsh, not that I don't agree to a point.
I think many cops are bad for two reasons.
1. As a society we have allowed to be passed all sorts of ridiculous laws that force cops to make everyone a criminal (drug laws, online piracy, seat belt laws, etc...). If everyone is a criminal, everyone fears and hates law enforcement. Hard to be a good guy when everyone you deal with hates you.
2. As a society, probably because we hate and fear law enforcement, we don't pay cops very well. Why be a cop when you can make more money working at the local grocery store where you don't get shot at? Because you want to be a professional asshole. We end up with three kinds of people as cops. Those who truly want to provide a public service, those who want to be professional assholes and those who can't get a job that pays any better. Stands to reason that two out of three cops are probably 'bad'.
We either need to find ways to attract more quality individuals to be on our police force, or put them on camera so we can give the assholes incentive not to behave badly.
It would be nice, but it's not going to happen. Keep in mind that what they are talking about here is the 'underlying architecture' - the TCP/IP protocol I would assume.
The original design was for maximum reliability. If one node failed the protocol was designed to automatically route around the failure. This is amazingly robust, but does have some performance issues.
SMTP OTOH is not underlying architecture. It could easily be upgraded or replaced. The difficulty there is adoption. There are millions, if not billions, of SMTP servers in the world. Switching to a new protocol would break down communications everywhere.
You have a point, and I don't think you can ever make a blanket statement, but you don't have to be exactly brilliant to be an actor. Some are, but many aren't. Jolie may be intelligent, and she has spent time in Cambodia, but taking people like Pamela Anderson and her PETA work seriously is tough.
OTOH, you pretty much have to be smart to have a PHD and be an astronaut.
Thought the UFO Museum was amusing - once. Did like their gift shop, still have a flying saucer keychain I bought there.
It's been about 6 years since I was there, thought it was a nice farming town. Had a friend that lived there, you are definitely right, not much of a destination. Wouldn't recommend making the jaunt just to see the crazy alien theme. From my house there is no reason to drive "through" Roswell, there is no destination I can think of that would take me through that part of the world.
Stopped in Santa Fe on the same trip, and I thought it was a dirtier town than Roswell. Didn't notice the gang issues then, but we were just tourists.
At least this guy is a doctor and been in space. Tom Cruise and Jim Carey are just actors. I have great respect for their talents, and would consider them an authority on things entertainment related, but I'm constantly amazed that anyone lends much credence to a person just because they are a famous actor or athlete.
I'm going to get Mitchell's back on at least part of this.
Roswell is real. I had lunch there just a few weeks ago on my way to Carlsbad. Don't visit - Nothing to do, nothing to see, just a dirty little town in the New Mexico desert. Don't bother.
What? Did they close the UFO museum? And the Robert Goddard Museum? Those are two things to see.
Been a few years since I was down there, but I didn't really think it was a dirty town at all. Seemed kind of nice. Even had big aliens printed on the Walmart.
Absolutely, plus we have nearby Mars and Venus to experiment on. Why not refine the climate science there. Once they are all terraformed, we won't have to rely on the Earth climate, plus we will be able to fix it.
Spruce is what is generally used for violins, guitar tops, etc. Sitka Spruce from Canada, Red Spruce from the North Eastern US, and Englemann Spruce from Colorado are commonly used varieties on instruments made in the states (and around the world). These trees are big and they are old. I would imagine you could go higher up the mountains where it is colder to get wood with narrower growth rings but some of these trees were around in Stradavari's time.
So is old bad? Do they need to be young trees that grow slowly? If the trees are used from Colorado, they did come from the mountains. There are no trees to speak of anywhere else. I would think that any Colorado trees would have a slower growth rate due to climate and altitude, than the Sitka Spruce and Red Spruce you mentioned. Trees from Wyoming, Montana or Alberta might be even better.
Exactly. I have two pine trees in my yard. They get more water than average with the lawn. I've lived here almost 7 years and they have MAYBE grown 24 inches. They were probably 5 foot tall when I moved here, so they should be 12 in the 'slow'category. They are probably 7.
It would have to be an indoor tree farm, as things like cool temperatures, sunlight, humidity would all have to be carefully controlled. If a little ice age can slow the growth of the trees down you would have to duplicate that, over a period of 30-50 years to grow the slow growth trees large enough for timber.
Wouldn't it be possible to find a natural climate that caused slower tree growth. I live in Colorado, and trees tend to grow slowly here, probably due to the dryness and possibly altitude. Would an ash or maple from Colorado produce a superior instrument?
This is all too complicated. I'm just going to wait for "Violin Hero" to come out. The delux package comes with a kettle drum, brass and woodwind section, conductor's baton, etc.
The first version of consists entirely of tracks from
Us and Them: Symphonic Pink Floyd by the London Philharmonic Orchestra
Yes, there are huge differences between being a sysadmin and being a programmer but if you are doing anything more than replacing hard drives or installing service packs, sysadmin work can get pretty complex and technically challenging.
I agree, having spent a few years as a sysadmin, I would consider it in many ways more difficult that programming. Many programmers get to sit in front of their ide and work on a single project in a single language. It may be complex, but you can specialize and spend all your time there.
Sysadmin, as you say, can cover anything including, but not limited to DBA, web server management, desktop support, hardware support, desktop application support, copy machine repair, network cabling, etc...
Personally, rather than just having to be proficient in C++ or Java, I've had to learn perl, php, SQL, bash, tcsh and python. I think it would be less technical to just be in straight development - of course, all the developers out there probably disagree...
Fair enough, should have said there were no electronic calculators.
My point stands that math was much more complicated and expensive 60 years ago than it is now - something that's hard to understand for many of us. I remember when my hich school chemistry teacher told us about using slide rules when he went to the Colorado School of Mines. Now there probably aren't even many teachers that remember those days.
What sort of calculations could possibly be worth the expense of building an early computer to do them with? That's one thing I have wondered about : these machines had about as much memory as a sheet of notebook paper, and were glacially slow at calculations. What kind of tasks could be worth the expense of building one?
Not sure for this one, but most of the early computers had to do mathematics. You have to remember that there were no calculators then. To calculate anything from a business perspective you would have to lay it all out and do the math manually - a time consuming and error prone process. With the computer they could input all the raw data and get the right result out the other side.
I think most of us can't imagine living in a world where math had to be done by hand, logarithms had to be looked up in a table, complicated calculations had to be done with a slide rule. Now your phone probably does all that.
Not saying you are wrong, but I think part of the problem with our current lifespan is people just don't have time to churn. Don't have time to re-invent themselves.
In your band example, most in the music industry make it big in their 20s and 30s. Once they grab that brass ring they are afraid to let it go - especially when they know that they aren't going to get a second chance.
Most serious musicians, if they weren't limited by time, would be more likely to tell their labels and producers to shove it and make the music they wanted to.
I myself, being now closer to 40 than 30, make decisions on a daily basis based on the pressures of age. I know that every day the amount of time I have to be successful both on a personal and professional level is dwindling and I can't do everything I would like to do and still accomplish my goals.
Of course, the other side of the coin is we would have professional procrastinators that would never get anything done - for all eternity.
...that anti-aging will just be far too expensive that everyone could have it, and also, that it would be bad in an economical sense if immortality would be cheap.
Maybe, but how good of a loan opportunity would this be. I loan you $10 million to regenerate, you make me monthly payments for the rest of eternity. Immortality gives a whole new meaning to "lifetime earning potential".
Slashdot Mirror
What I'd like to know is why performance enhansing drugs are illegal, but performance enhansing surgery (like LASIK, which can give a person with normal eyesight better than 20/20 vision, albeit with the risk of blindness) is perfectly acceptable?
Let's take it a step further than that. Why is it if a body produces more testosterone naturally it's OK, but if a steroid is used it's wrong? Why should one athlete benefit just because he is younger and has better genetics?
Finally, let's not forget that steroid side effects are overexaggerated and understudied.
Xbox better than the Wii? No way!
I live in Colorado. Part of what goes on here, and may be going on where you live, attracting quality officers is very competitive between the municipalities. The more 'dangerous' areas, with higher crime rates, have trouble recruiting officers because no one wants to work there. Your neighboring city may either pay better or be safer, so they recruit better officers.
My comment was a broad generalization. In any given department there may be any number of reasons for the cops being goons, corruption, bad management, bad hiring policies, etc...
One reason I mentioned Grocery Stores is because they pay fairly well around here. Most stores are corporate owned, and not union, but in the interest of keeping the unions out, they pay union wages. With the same level of experience, a Grocery Store clerk might make a very comperable wage to a police officer (and better benefits) with a better quality of life.
Wow, you are a little harsh, not that I don't agree to a point.
I think many cops are bad for two reasons.
1. As a society we have allowed to be passed all sorts of ridiculous laws that force cops to make everyone a criminal (drug laws, online piracy, seat belt laws, etc...). If everyone is a criminal, everyone fears and hates law enforcement. Hard to be a good guy when everyone you deal with hates you.
2. As a society, probably because we hate and fear law enforcement, we don't pay cops very well. Why be a cop when you can make more money working at the local grocery store where you don't get shot at? Because you want to be a professional asshole. We end up with three kinds of people as cops. Those who truly want to provide a public service, those who want to be professional assholes and those who can't get a job that pays any better. Stands to reason that two out of three cops are probably 'bad'.
We either need to find ways to attract more quality individuals to be on our police force, or put them on camera so we can give the assholes incentive not to behave badly.
It would be nice, but it's not going to happen. Keep in mind that what they are talking about here is the 'underlying architecture' - the TCP/IP protocol I would assume.
The original design was for maximum reliability. If one node failed the protocol was designed to automatically route around the failure. This is amazingly robust, but does have some performance issues.
SMTP OTOH is not underlying architecture. It could easily be upgraded or replaced. The difficulty there is adoption. There are millions, if not billions, of SMTP servers in the world. Switching to a new protocol would break down communications everywhere.
Or "Cell Trenches"? Maybe "Cell Evil Villan Bottomless Pits"? Even "Cell Grottos Where Alien Sea Leviathans Live"?
You have a point, and I don't think you can ever make a blanket statement, but you don't have to be exactly brilliant to be an actor. Some are, but many aren't. Jolie may be intelligent, and she has spent time in Cambodia, but taking people like Pamela Anderson and her PETA work seriously is tough.
OTOH, you pretty much have to be smart to have a PHD and be an astronaut.
Thought the UFO Museum was amusing - once. Did like their gift shop, still have a flying saucer keychain I bought there.
It's been about 6 years since I was there, thought it was a nice farming town. Had a friend that lived there, you are definitely right, not much of a destination. Wouldn't recommend making the jaunt just to see the crazy alien theme. From my house there is no reason to drive "through" Roswell, there is no destination I can think of that would take me through that part of the world.
Stopped in Santa Fe on the same trip, and I thought it was a dirtier town than Roswell. Didn't notice the gang issues then, but we were just tourists.
At least this guy is a doctor and been in space. Tom Cruise and Jim Carey are just actors. I have great respect for their talents, and would consider them an authority on things entertainment related, but I'm constantly amazed that anyone lends much credence to a person just because they are a famous actor or athlete.
Not to mention, I've met many people that believe weird things without being able to blame dementia/alzheimers/any diagnosed mental illness.
I'm going to get Mitchell's back on at least part of this.
Roswell is real. I had lunch there just a few weeks ago on my way to Carlsbad. Don't visit - Nothing to do, nothing to see, just a dirty little town in the New Mexico desert. Don't bother.
What? Did they close the UFO museum? And the Robert Goddard Museum? Those are two things to see.
Been a few years since I was down there, but I didn't really think it was a dirty town at all. Seemed kind of nice. Even had big aliens printed on the Walmart.
Absolutely, plus we have nearby Mars and Venus to experiment on. Why not refine the climate science there. Once they are all terraformed, we won't have to rely on the Earth climate, plus we will be able to fix it.
Where are all of these scared people ? Who are they ?
They are 80 years old, probably will never get on an airplane, and only leave the house to vote. Glad they are dictating policy for us.
Great, now we are going to have Google Parties. Like Candles, Tea and sex toys weren't bad enough.
he's probably the coolest smart guy since they all used to wear togas and live on wine and souvlaki on the beach.
You forget about Tesla.
Spruce is what is generally used for violins, guitar tops, etc. Sitka Spruce from Canada, Red Spruce from the North Eastern US, and Englemann Spruce from Colorado are commonly used varieties on instruments made in the states (and around the world). These trees are big and they are old. I would imagine you could go higher up the mountains where it is colder to get wood with narrower growth rings but some of these trees were around in Stradavari's time.
So is old bad? Do they need to be young trees that grow slowly? If the trees are used from Colorado, they did come from the mountains. There are no trees to speak of anywhere else. I would think that any Colorado trees would have a slower growth rate due to climate and altitude, than the Sitka Spruce and Red Spruce you mentioned. Trees from Wyoming, Montana or Alberta might be even better.
Exactly. I have two pine trees in my yard. They get more water than average with the lawn. I've lived here almost 7 years and they have MAYBE grown 24 inches. They were probably 5 foot tall when I moved here, so they should be 12 in the 'slow'category. They are probably 7.
It would have to be an indoor tree farm, as things like cool temperatures, sunlight, humidity would all have to be carefully controlled. If a little ice age can slow the growth of the trees down you would have to duplicate that, over a period of 30-50 years to grow the slow growth trees large enough for timber.
Wouldn't it be possible to find a natural climate that caused slower tree growth. I live in Colorado, and trees tend to grow slowly here, probably due to the dryness and possibly altitude. Would an ash or maple from Colorado produce a superior instrument?
This is all too complicated. I'm just going to wait for "Violin Hero" to come out. The delux package comes with a kettle drum, brass and woodwind section, conductor's baton, etc.
The first version of consists entirely of tracks from
Us and Them: Symphonic Pink Floyd by the London Philharmonic Orchestra
Yes, there are huge differences between being a sysadmin and being a programmer but if you are doing anything more than replacing hard drives or installing service packs, sysadmin work can get pretty complex and technically challenging.
I agree, having spent a few years as a sysadmin, I would consider it in many ways more difficult that programming. Many programmers get to sit in front of their ide and work on a single project in a single language. It may be complex, but you can specialize and spend all your time there.
Sysadmin, as you say, can cover anything including, but not limited to DBA, web server management, desktop support, hardware support, desktop application support, copy machine repair, network cabling, etc...
Personally, rather than just having to be proficient in C++ or Java, I've had to learn perl, php, SQL, bash, tcsh and python. I think it would be less technical to just be in straight development - of course, all the developers out there probably disagree...
Fair enough, should have said there were no electronic calculators.
My point stands that math was much more complicated and expensive 60 years ago than it is now - something that's hard to understand for many of us. I remember when my hich school chemistry teacher told us about using slide rules when he went to the Colorado School of Mines. Now there probably aren't even many teachers that remember those days.
What sort of calculations could possibly be worth the expense of building an early computer to do them with? That's one thing I have wondered about : these machines had about as much memory as a sheet of notebook paper, and were glacially slow at calculations. What kind of tasks could be worth the expense of building one?
Not sure for this one, but most of the early computers had to do mathematics. You have to remember that there were no calculators then. To calculate anything from a business perspective you would have to lay it all out and do the math manually - a time consuming and error prone process. With the computer they could input all the raw data and get the right result out the other side.
I think most of us can't imagine living in a world where math had to be done by hand, logarithms had to be looked up in a table, complicated calculations had to be done with a slide rule. Now your phone probably does all that.
M-F 10-2 with a 2 hour lunch.
Not saying you are wrong, but I think part of the problem with our current lifespan is people just don't have time to churn. Don't have time to re-invent themselves.
In your band example, most in the music industry make it big in their 20s and 30s. Once they grab that brass ring they are afraid to let it go - especially when they know that they aren't going to get a second chance.
Most serious musicians, if they weren't limited by time, would be more likely to tell their labels and producers to shove it and make the music they wanted to.
I myself, being now closer to 40 than 30, make decisions on a daily basis based on the pressures of age. I know that every day the amount of time I have to be successful both on a personal and professional level is dwindling and I can't do everything I would like to do and still accomplish my goals.
Of course, the other side of the coin is we would have professional procrastinators that would never get anything done - for all eternity.
...that anti-aging will just be far too expensive that everyone could have it, and also, that it would be bad in an economical sense if immortality would be cheap.
Maybe, but how good of a loan opportunity would this be. I loan you $10 million to regenerate, you make me monthly payments for the rest of eternity. Immortality gives a whole new meaning to "lifetime earning potential".