Hey look, I have no problem with women on Slashdot, but if you're going to hang out here you're going to have to learn to deal with the things that make you different from men.
Beautiful metaphor is not the same as useful scientific proposition. If you find the asteroid & planet metaphor for sperm and egg to be aesthetically pleasing, so be it, but until it has some useful empirical meaning then call that metaphor what it is: religious imagery.
Not too sure about that, Monica Lewinsky's lips moved quite a bit from what I hear, but it certainly wasn't in the course of saying anything. Then again, she's not a real politician, so...
No, that book is an evolution (pardon the pun) of the theory of evolution. It deals with what happened (in RD's view) *after* the avalanche of life had been triggered.
What I was asking was, what was the first snowflake that started that avalanche. Wake me up when people have started caring about that, coz I don't see much discourse on that subject in the scientific media.
Bear in mind that we can now use these to tell if politicians are lying.
Sadaam has WMDs! *BZZZT!*
He is a threat to our safety! *BZZZT!*
He hates our freedom! *BZZZT!*
He is armed with foul language and has a nasty temper... *crickets*
"How we got to elemental material spewed out from a supernova to DNA" Should read: "How we got from elemental material spewed out from a supernova to DNA"
I'd say I didn't preview, but that excuse no longer exists. I guess I'm just a tard:(
The idea that nucleic acids and other organic building blocks were delivered to Earth from a meteor is not new. In fact, I remember reading about that in a space book when I was 5.
Personally, I think that whether or not the "seeds of life" originated here or came here on a meteor is a stupid idea, as it's not where they came from that is even remotely interesting, but how they came to be in the first place. If they originated here, then an asteroid impact may have scattered them elsewhere, and there may be other bewildered life forms on other planets wondering where they came from, or vice versa. What difference does it make?
What I want to know is how complex organic molecules were formed into self-organising, self-replicating structures. Bigfoot is not the missing link. How we got to elemental material spewed out from a supernova to DNA, *that's* the missing link.
I'm not usually a proponent of psychoactive drugs, but when objections to Google Street View turn into a geo political rant and ideological spleen venting about power politics in a war zone, then I think a Valium is definitely called for.
On an entirely separate note, why are we so suspicious of one another that we live in legally constructed imaginary fortresses upon which the mere presence of somebody else causes us to go berserk?
Personally, I'd prefer to live in a place where people I didn't know came to visit me all the time. In fact, I actively try to solicit that.
So lemme get this straight, they blow themselves up and then go to a big lab in the sky, with 72 other engineers? What kind of sick freak considers that a reward?!
Hey, if you as an engineer think you get the short end of the accusatory stick, you don't. I'm a Muslim, and I have to qualify sentences with "IANAT" every time I say something that involves technical gear, government issues or gardening. I was once questioned because a wiretap caught me saying "that damn bush has got to go".
Hell doesn't have a big enough oven for the average American belly. Perhaps they could outsource the actual roasting to China, and just FedEx the finished product back to Hell?
Hey look everyone, its a new, insightful and carefully thought out remark from an obviously well-educated individual. Quick, put him in charge of something!
Yea, it could be like this mechanism that you could click and get to see your post for a bit before it actually gets locked in. They could call it "Preview" or something crazy like that.
Aah great! Yes, I am familiar with the distinction between positive and negative rights, and I'm happy to be able to discuss this with you.
Yes, I did use the word "right" very loosely and I apologise for assuming you'd not pull me over for it. What I was trying to do was make a point about the duality of social action, and trying to illustrate why I take such a disdainful view of people who consider things like apathy and wastefulness to be victimless vices. No man is an island, and everything we do, no matter how trivial, has a follow on effect. If I don't pay attention socially and just vote randomly then I hurt all those who *do* pay attention and vote according to what they think is in the best interests of the society we live in. In that case, a large enough group of people like me would be easily swayed by cheap parlour tricks (known as "election campaigns") and would subvert the course of the vote, giving it who whomever was able to tickle our fancy the most.
A socially apathetic majority, gorged on cheap entertainment and a culture of consumerism, allows the powerful elite to essentially control the "democracy" as they see fit, by ensuring that peoples' right to free speech is monopolised by controlled media and that contrary voices are either drowned out, labelled as crackpot/extremist/fundamentalist or outright censored. It is for this reason that I think freedom of speech's crux lies in people being attentive and critical of everything they hear, no matter where it is coming from and what they may think of it. If the official media is feeding you lies, how will you know if you don't listen and give credence to others exercising their freedom of speech? Thus, the freedom of speech is worthless without the duty to listen.
Almost paradoxically, I am not for an interventionist state. In an ideal world, children would be taught the value of honour and justice, they would be taught the value of putting in effort, they would be shown the benefits of social awareness and all these other aspects of education that have been lost. Today, children are not educated, they are merely schooled. I take a drive last Friday night to the 7-11 at about midnight to pick up some milk for the next morning's breakfast, and I saw a group of about 20 kids, all about 16-18 years old, milling around the car park drinking beer. In a scene like this, all I see is wasted potential. Freedom fought and died for by wise men, degenerated into freedom to get drunk and vomit in a gutter. Worse, this is considered admirable, adults chuckle and refer to it as "youthful formative years". Formative indeed. If the men standing behind George Washington knew this is what would become of their efforts, I doubt they'd have thought it worth dying for. As I said, in an ideal world, children would be taught how to be constructive members of society from an early age, as opposed to being allowed to rot intellectually until they are forced into the labour camps we call "careers". As much as I loathe this about Western society, I don't think an interventionist state is the answer. I think the answer is intellectual, spiritual and emotional enlightenment that must spread at the social level. To put it in the language du jour, a grass roots campaign about not being an apathetic slob.
For the record, I'm neither from the US or EU. I've been living in Australia for most of my life, but my family is from South Africa, with an Indian ethnic background. An awareness of the Apartheid regime (which ended when I was 14) dominated my formative years, so social awareness and action are ingrained in my psyche, and I cannot understand how people consider social apathy to be "cool" or even acceptable.
Please excuse my long, tiresome rant, but it's not often I find people who sound like they're willing to listen to that song and dance;)
Slashdot Mirror
Hey look, I have no problem with women on Slashdot, but if you're going to hang out here you're going to have to learn to deal with the things that make you different from men.
Beautiful metaphor is not the same as useful scientific proposition. If you find the asteroid & planet metaphor for sperm and egg to be aesthetically pleasing, so be it, but until it has some useful empirical meaning then call that metaphor what it is: religious imagery.
Dude, really, read more. And think more too, thinking more is good.
Not too sure about that, Monica Lewinsky's lips moved quite a bit from what I hear, but it certainly wasn't in the course of saying anything. Then again, she's not a real politician, so...
No, that book is an evolution (pardon the pun) of the theory of evolution. It deals with what happened (in RD's view) *after* the avalanche of life had been triggered.
What I was asking was, what was the first snowflake that started that avalanche. Wake me up when people have started caring about that, coz I don't see much discourse on that subject in the scientific media.
Bear in mind that we can now use these to tell if politicians are lying.
Sadaam has WMDs!
*BZZZT!*
He is a threat to our safety!
*BZZZT!*
He hates our freedom!
*BZZZT!*
He is armed with foul language and has a nasty temper...
*crickets*
"How we got to elemental material spewed out from a supernova to DNA"
:(
Should read:
"How we got from elemental material spewed out from a supernova to DNA"
I'd say I didn't preview, but that excuse no longer exists. I guess I'm just a tard
The idea that nucleic acids and other organic building blocks were delivered to Earth from a meteor is not new. In fact, I remember reading about that in a space book when I was 5.
Personally, I think that whether or not the "seeds of life" originated here or came here on a meteor is a stupid idea, as it's not where they came from that is even remotely interesting, but how they came to be in the first place. If they originated here, then an asteroid impact may have scattered them elsewhere, and there may be other bewildered life forms on other planets wondering where they came from, or vice versa. What difference does it make?
What I want to know is how complex organic molecules were formed into self-organising, self-replicating structures. Bigfoot is not the missing link. How we got to elemental material spewed out from a supernova to DNA, *that's* the missing link.
That's ok, we can fix that right up with some gene therapy, then he won't be ruthless enough to suggest gene therap... oh.
I really hate it when idiots invoke Godwin's law upon a perfectly legitimate reference to Nazi Germany. Like this for instance:
http://xkcd.com/261/
I'm not usually a proponent of psychoactive drugs, but when objections to Google Street View turn into a geo political rant and ideological spleen venting about power politics in a war zone, then I think a Valium is definitely called for.
On an entirely separate note, why are we so suspicious of one another that we live in legally constructed imaginary fortresses upon which the mere presence of somebody else causes us to go berserk?
Personally, I'd prefer to live in a place where people I didn't know came to visit me all the time. In fact, I actively try to solicit that.
I'll definitely take that moral to heart for the next time the 90's come around.
I think the previous poster's point was that if being amoral was profitable, Google would be amoral in a heartbeat.
So lemme get this straight, they blow themselves up and then go to a big lab in the sky, with 72 other engineers? What kind of sick freak considers that a reward?!
Hey, if you as an engineer think you get the short end of the accusatory stick, you don't. I'm a Muslim, and I have to qualify sentences with "IANAT" every time I say something that involves technical gear, government issues or gardening. I was once questioned because a wiretap caught me saying "that damn bush has got to go".
Hell doesn't have a big enough oven for the average American belly. Perhaps they could outsource the actual roasting to China, and just FedEx the finished product back to Hell?
What?! I *knew* there was something odd about Manuel!
Is that a remuneration plan for virgins? Wow, so they _are_ actively trying to recruit engineers...
Here I was thinking that not even big business could afford the salary of Captain Obvious. Either I was wrong or he's doing pro bono work these days.
"Notably, and most unfortunately absent from the report, is the very real question of whether the military should be manipulating domestic media."
What does it matter whether or not the military thinks they *should* be doing this? They are, and have been for a long, long time.
Hey look everyone, its a new, insightful and carefully thought out remark from an obviously well-educated individual. Quick, put him in charge of something!
Yea, it could be like this mechanism that you could click and get to see your post for a bit before it actually gets locked in. They could call it "Preview" or something crazy like that.
What a fantastic business idea! I'm going to open a restaurant with the tagline "Get the taste with none of the inconvenience!"
Aah great! Yes, I am familiar with the distinction between positive and negative rights, and I'm happy to be able to discuss this with you.
;)
Yes, I did use the word "right" very loosely and I apologise for assuming you'd not pull me over for it. What I was trying to do was make a point about the duality of social action, and trying to illustrate why I take such a disdainful view of people who consider things like apathy and wastefulness to be victimless vices. No man is an island, and everything we do, no matter how trivial, has a follow on effect. If I don't pay attention socially and just vote randomly then I hurt all those who *do* pay attention and vote according to what they think is in the best interests of the society we live in. In that case, a large enough group of people like me would be easily swayed by cheap parlour tricks (known as "election campaigns") and would subvert the course of the vote, giving it who whomever was able to tickle our fancy the most.
A socially apathetic majority, gorged on cheap entertainment and a culture of consumerism, allows the powerful elite to essentially control the "democracy" as they see fit, by ensuring that peoples' right to free speech is monopolised by controlled media and that contrary voices are either drowned out, labelled as crackpot/extremist/fundamentalist or outright censored. It is for this reason that I think freedom of speech's crux lies in people being attentive and critical of everything they hear, no matter where it is coming from and what they may think of it. If the official media is feeding you lies, how will you know if you don't listen and give credence to others exercising their freedom of speech? Thus, the freedom of speech is worthless without the duty to listen.
Almost paradoxically, I am not for an interventionist state. In an ideal world, children would be taught the value of honour and justice, they would be taught the value of putting in effort, they would be shown the benefits of social awareness and all these other aspects of education that have been lost. Today, children are not educated, they are merely schooled. I take a drive last Friday night to the 7-11 at about midnight to pick up some milk for the next morning's breakfast, and I saw a group of about 20 kids, all about 16-18 years old, milling around the car park drinking beer. In a scene like this, all I see is wasted potential. Freedom fought and died for by wise men, degenerated into freedom to get drunk and vomit in a gutter. Worse, this is considered admirable, adults chuckle and refer to it as "youthful formative years". Formative indeed. If the men standing behind George Washington knew this is what would become of their efforts, I doubt they'd have thought it worth dying for. As I said, in an ideal world, children would be taught how to be constructive members of society from an early age, as opposed to being allowed to rot intellectually until they are forced into the labour camps we call "careers". As much as I loathe this about Western society, I don't think an interventionist state is the answer. I think the answer is intellectual, spiritual and emotional enlightenment that must spread at the social level. To put it in the language du jour, a grass roots campaign about not being an apathetic slob.
For the record, I'm neither from the US or EU. I've been living in Australia for most of my life, but my family is from South Africa, with an Indian ethnic background. An awareness of the Apartheid regime (which ended when I was 14) dominated my formative years, so social awareness and action are ingrained in my psyche, and I cannot understand how people consider social apathy to be "cool" or even acceptable.
Please excuse my long, tiresome rant, but it's not often I find people who sound like they're willing to listen to that song and dance