Blind faith in the "Singularity" is nothing more or less than an epiphenomena of the psychological condition of technophilia that borders on fetishism.
The people on this panel seem to have ignored the most pressing issue looming up, and that is the monetization of the MMORPG object tokens.
Up till now MMORPGs have been too low on the radar to register for fundies who like to ban this sort of thing, politicians who want a piece of the action, and the mob, sorry, Vegas, who want all of the action.
When you have outfits like Entropia blatantly charging people for their addictions, this is when matters come to a head.
It's already been suggested that's why companies like Mythic are so eager to ban online auctions of their "objects", because this turns them into at least retailers, and probably casino operators.
Now because of the weird alliance between the mob, sorry established casino operators, and the unusual number of puritanically minded prohibitionists in the US, online gambling is effectively banned, or regulated out of the country.
It's existed for a while, but operators generally have to set up servers in dubious countries and share rack space with porn merchants.
If MMORPGs go on developing their virtual economy, then they will soon be subject to at least taxation, probably regulation, and possibly prohibition.
While replying to yourself is probably some form of onanism, I was wondering exactly how the difference in solar constant levels due to distance would affect temperature on earth and venus.
The answer? Not much -- it's really all down to CO2 and albedo. Without atmospheres, Earth would have a mean temperature of Earth (-12C) and Venus (-23C).
Wolf wrote: There's absolutely no way that Earth can turn into Venus. For one thing there isn't enough carbon to make the carbon dioxide to push up the greenhouse effect to that degree. For another Venus is simply closer to the Sun. And further, the amount of carbon dioxide that is produced by man is dwarfed by the amount produced by volcanoes; by more than ten times. Even if we deliberately tried we can't influence the environment that much. Some, but nothing like you are implying.
Whoever wrote this obviously is too young to have been in a classroom where they used... chalk. Ever looked around you? The earth is layered in calcium carbonate and other retentive materials (wood, coal, oil, coral, krill) that extract carbon from the atmosphere and keep it locked up. Yes, volcanoes and other factors churn it out, but our biosphere has evolved processes for packing it away again... processes that we are increasingly interfering with.
The carbon cycle. Look it up. If you're some sort of computer weenie with no chemistry skills think of it as a finely balanced recursive algorithm with hundreds of inputs and outputs that somehow maintains environmental homeostasis. Knock this out of whack and you've got hell to pay. You can easily get Venus, or Mars (SnowballEarth).
Your supposition about Venus is also plain wrong. The incident stellar energy per square metre on the upper atmosphere of Venus is only incrementally higher than Earth's. If the Earth as currently constituted was at.72 AU (ie, Venus), there would be higher temperatures but not runaway greenhouse. -- at least not until the CO2 levels reached critical and the hydroxyls started boiling away into space. Keep CO2 levels low and you're okay.
Alone of all the planets the earth does not exist in physical equilibrium. It's the only planet so far discovered with a strong biosphere that resists change and maintains temperature and humidity levels. Dismissing that unique gift is dangerous and absurd. Have you heard of chicken little?
Sounds a lot like what victims of WTC suffered.
I say drop'em
Ah, collective punishment. The strategy that worked so well for the Gestapo in German-occupied territories during WW2, and the strategy that's working so well for the IDF in Gaza and the West Bank.
Besides, who needs nukes when you have thermobarics? All the terror of mini-nukes, none of the fall-out, and you get a chemical poison-gas weapon as a pleasant, non-Hague Convention side-effect...
The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique--and unpleasant.... What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.. If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents.The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique--and unpleasant.... What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.. If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents. Defense Intelligence Agency, "Fuel-Air and Enhanced-Blast Explosive Technology--Foreign," April 1993. Obtained by Human Rights Watch under the US FOIA
The effect of an FAE explosion within confined spaces is immense. Those near the ignition point are obliterated. Those at the fringe are likely to suffer many internal, and thus invisible injuries, including burst eardrums and crushed inner ear organs, severe concussions, ruptured lungs and internal organs,and possibly blindness. Central Intelligence Agency, "Conventional Weapons Producing Chemical-Warfare-Agent-Like Injuries," February 1990. Unclassified document.
Because the "shock and pressure waves cause minimal damage to brain tissue.it is possible that victims of FAEs are not rendered unconscious by the blast, but instead suffer for several seconds or minutes while they suffocate." Defense Intelligence Agency, "Future Threat to the Soldier System, Volume I; Dismounted Soldier--Middle East Threat," September 1993, p. 73. Obtained by Human Rights Watch under the US FOIA
I think the movie succeeded in doing what the book was meant to do - it sparks the imagination!
What IS the world going to be like in 800,000 years? I can't even imagine the changes that will come in the next 50!... Let's put aside our petty concerns for a minute and remember what an important time this is to the evolution of technology.
As regards technological evolution, I note that in Wells' original, it was the Morlock's love of machines and enslavement to the idea of "mechanical progress" that led them at last to cannibalism and moral degeneracy.
The film fails, as the Pal version did in the 1960s, by dropping the key theme of Well's book: the time traveller discovers the end result of class warfare. The proles won by letting the rich think they'd won because they enjoy a life of luxury, but instead they are just cattle being fattened.
Wells was a Fabian Socialist with a huge sense of irony and these influences informed all his work. But socialism and irony is apparently too dangerous for Hollywood. Instead, Pal's film changed it into a metaphor about nuclear warfare and survivalism, and Wells Jr changes it into a metaphor about the perils of leisure development. What a crock.
`I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes -- to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.
`It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.
`So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection -- absolute permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding of the Under-world, however it was effected, had become disjointed. Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began below. The Under-world being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, than the Upper. And when other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden.
Any theory of social stratification should take the above case (which seems almost too black-and-white, but trust me, it was not made up) into account. These guys have the same cultural background, the same social class - but the one had what it takes to make it in this world and come out higher up the economic food chain than he started, the other apparently didn't, and ended up on the bottom.
That's the great thing about theories, there are so many to choose from. Bordieu's theory of habitus comes to mind. People are not born equal, but accrete a physical body, mental disciplines, and social connections based on their immediate neighbours. Basically, rich people are trained to be rich, poor to be poor, and so on. But these are not absolutes, they just tend to steer an individual along a certain lifepath and limit the trajectory of their ascent or descent within society. And so social stratification endures, reproduces, and resists change. Bound by culture, human society is an amazing, adaptive meta-organism that outlives the death of its individual cell bodies.
Source? Specifics? That may be true in some places, but they don't call the US the "Land of Opportunity" for nothing. Obviously there is such a thing as inherited wealth, and such a thing as good luck or bad luck, but honestly - if you have talent, ambition, imagination, and hard work - you really can do anything.
There are any number of sociology studies that demonstrate the social stratification of the US. The common-sense wisdom of a classless society and increased social mobility within the US (compared with European countries) is just pure ideology, useful to those with real power and inherited influence, essential for the preservation of hegemony. Remember Orwell -- if you remove words from the language and ways of talking about things, then it becomes almost impossible to easily think about these things. Or try Foucault, for an example of how people's ideas can be constrained by discursive regimes.
Or think about the Usual Suspects: The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.
because mistakes are much more costly at this [CEO] than down on the shop floor, so companies are willing to pay quite a bit if that's what it takes to get a qualified person in the job.
All these Business 101-derived reasons you state are well and good, but in real life, how often do they apply? Did they apply to Enron? To Global Corssing? Will they apply to Genuity?
I see plenty of people destitute because of idiotic CEO decisions, but I don't think I've ever seen a destitute CEO.
Without personal responsibility for their mistakes, insulated by millions of privileged, dilution-protected options, CEOs in the 90s boom reminded me most strongly of pigs feeding at overflowing troughs.
It seems to me that controlling power consumption requires a user eye-tracking mode. As I look at my dual screen setup, at every moment my focus rests only on a small couple of square cm of the screen. Surely with eye tracking it should be possible to dim/fade the rest of the screen, cutting down power consumption.
This might also have advantages for graphics cards/CPU, because you could concentrate on doing most your rendering and aliasing in only the portion of the screen within eye focus. For that to work you'd need some sort of tile-based rendering system though.
Environments don't have needs. People see a direction to evolution because of an anthropomorphic error, a illogical conflation of local experience with hubris.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. A quote by one of everyone's favourite uber-athiest, Dawkins.
I hope Rogers do something, someday, about the amount of probes and attacks I get from zombies and script kiddies on their network. Somedays I've thought about IP-denying Rogers or all all cable modems,just on principle.
I'm going to disagree with this notion of evolution. Evolution is not undirected. The current environment gives a good deal of direction to the sorts of evolution that occurs. For example: evolution appropriate to tropical beaches is unlikely to occur in the arctic tundra.
Actually, that is wrong. Evolution happens in an undirected sense. In Artic environments, mutations both beneficial and non-beneficial for that environment occur. There's no doubt about Evolution.
The Theory of Natural Selection, however, adds a directed development, in the sense that beneficial mutations will produce more offspring, and in the long run should predominate. There's the doubt about Natural Selection... in the long run we are all dead.
From the article:
[the] GuideStar controls could be programmed to prevent any airplane from ever going someplace it should not... The coordinates of restricted areas and important buildings could be entered into the new guidance system, which could thwart a pilot's
I've read about this panacea repeatedly since 9/11. The existence of an irrevocable fly-by-wire lockout mode such as this gives hijackers a new physical location (the control room) or software/protocol system to target. I believe the Risks inherent here are great.
Having trained, experienced humans local and ready to override compromised Guidestar-like devices is crucial. The 9/11 hijackers gained easy access to a plane's most valuable assets -- pilots in the cockpit -- due to a lack of Sky Marshals, security doors, and cameras. That was a tragic case of cost cutting by the airlines.
I'd hate to think that similar cost cutting measures could lead to adoption of this automatic flying device with an intention to deskill or replace pilots. The implementation of such a device requires careful human factor analysis. Perhaps a periodic, probabilistically triggered interrogation of pilot credentials (created for one-time-use during a single flight) according to flying patterns and location?
You euros regulate your commercial sector so that you can claim a higher standard of human rights, but you hamstring your businesses and your regulations tolerate (and ecourage) laziness and apathy in the private sector.
So who died and made you an expert in social economics? How can you quantify this "laziness and apathy"?
Slashdot Mirror
Zathrus writes:
Kurzweil repeatedly refers to "The Singularity", which is (as he defines it), "a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence that is going to create something bigger than itself." For reference, this is very similar to something that Vernor Vinge [amazon.com] has espoused in several novels, chiefly Marooned in Realtime [amazon.com]. Basically that technological progress is logarithmic in scale, not linear.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the "Singularity" is just Rapture For Nerds . That's Ken McLeod's phrase, not mine.
Blind faith in the "Singularity" is nothing more or less than an epiphenomena of the psychological condition of technophilia that borders on fetishism.
GodsMadClown writes:
:
The key word here is "economically viable". Think for a moment, what would happen if oil supplies started running low because of a lack of profitable reserves? Demand for oil is pretty inelastic (not dependant on price), so the price would almost assuredly go up, just as when supplies are cut short for other reasons, like an OPEC quota.
while skwang writes:
The problem with the dependence of oil isn't an alternative means. Someone has pointed/will point out that we have many alternative energy sources. Instead oil as a means of energy is dominant because it is cheap. The world's energy infrastructure is based on using crude oil. There are oil power plants, oil refineries, gasoline engines, etc. Oil is simply cheaper to use.
Newsweek summed up the energy market quite well with this litle bon mot
"You want alternatives? That's just so much sweet talk," one former official at the Saudi Petroleum Ministry told NEWSWEEK. "Suppose you target the cost of alternative energy at so many dollars per Btu--and then we lower the cost of oil below that. All your investment goes down the drain."
The people on this panel seem to have ignored the most pressing issue looming up, and that is the monetization of the MMORPG object tokens.
Up till now MMORPGs have been too low on the radar to register for fundies who like to ban this sort of thing, politicians who want a piece of the action, and the mob, sorry, Vegas, who want all of the action.
When you have outfits like Entropia blatantly charging people for their addictions, this is when matters come to a head.
It's already been suggested that's why companies like Mythic are so eager to ban online auctions of their "objects", because this turns them into at least retailers, and probably casino operators.
Now because of the weird alliance between the mob, sorry established casino operators, and the unusual number of puritanically minded prohibitionists in the US, online gambling is effectively banned, or regulated out of the country.
It's existed for a while, but operators generally have to set up servers in dubious countries and share rack space with porn merchants.
If MMORPGs go on developing their virtual economy, then they will soon be subject to at least taxation, probably regulation, and possibly prohibition.
Bare-Faced Messiah
There are those who still believe that Hubbard died years earlier and that his death was covered up by the messengers while they consolidated their control over the church. There are those who still believe that Hubbard will soon be entering another body, or might even have done so already, prior to resuming his position as the head of Scientology. There are those who still believe that, for all his faults, Hubbard made a significant contribution to helping his fellow men. And there are those who now believe, sadly, that they were the unwitting victims of one of the most successful and colourful confidence tricksters of the twentieth century.
While replying to yourself is probably some form of onanism, I was wondering exactly how the difference in solar constant levels due to distance would affect temperature on earth and venus.
The answer? Not much -- it's really all down to CO2 and albedo. Without atmospheres, Earth would have a mean temperature of Earth (-12C) and Venus (-23C).
More here, and here is the key:
The atmosphere would finally stablilize at a still higher temperature and pressure after all the carbon dioxide had been driven from the rocks. In fact, we believe that if this sequence were to take place on the Earth, the resulting temperature and pressure of the atmosphere left behind would not be very different from that for present-day Venus: the atmospheric termperature would be hundreds of degrees Celsius and the pressure would be maybe 100 times greater than it is today. Thus, we believe that in the case of Venus the initial solar heating kept oceans from forming, or kept them from staying around if they did form, and the subsequent lack of rainfall and failure of plant life to evolve kept the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rather than binding it in the rocks as is the case for the Earth; thus, Venus has an environmental disaster for an atmosphere. The sobering warning for us is obvious: we have to be extremely concerned about processes such as burning of fossil fuels in large volumes that might (we don't know for sure because the scientific questions are complex) have the potential to trigger a runaway greenhouse effect and produce on the Earth atmospheric conditions such as those found on Venus.
Wolf wrote:
.72 AU (ie, Venus), there would be higher temperatures but not runaway greenhouse. -- at least not until the CO2 levels reached critical and the hydroxyls started boiling away into space. Keep CO2 levels low and you're okay.
There's absolutely no way that Earth can turn into Venus. For one thing there isn't enough carbon to make the carbon dioxide to push up the greenhouse effect to that degree. For another Venus is simply closer to the Sun.
And further, the amount of carbon dioxide that is produced by man is dwarfed by the amount produced by volcanoes; by more than ten times. Even if we deliberately tried we can't influence the environment that much. Some, but nothing like you are implying.
Whoever wrote this obviously is too young to have been in a classroom where they used... chalk. Ever looked around you? The earth is layered in calcium carbonate and other retentive materials (wood, coal, oil, coral, krill) that extract carbon from the atmosphere and keep it locked up. Yes, volcanoes and other factors churn it out, but our biosphere has evolved processes for packing it away again... processes that we are increasingly interfering with.
The carbon cycle. Look it up. If you're some sort of computer weenie with no chemistry skills think of it as a finely balanced recursive algorithm with hundreds of inputs and outputs that somehow maintains environmental homeostasis. Knock this out of whack and you've got hell to pay. You can easily get Venus, or Mars (Snowball Earth).
Your supposition about Venus is also plain wrong. The incident stellar energy per square metre on the upper atmosphere of Venus is only incrementally higher than Earth's. If the Earth as currently constituted was at
Alone of all the planets the earth does not exist in physical equilibrium. It's the only planet so far discovered with a strong biosphere that resists change and maintains temperature and humidity levels. Dismissing that unique gift is dangerous and absurd. Have you heard of chicken little?
Try this on for size.
Environmentalism is something more central and vastly more important. Its essence has been defined by science in the following way. Earth, unlike the other solar planets, is not in physical equilibrium. It depends on its living shell to create the special conditions on which life is sustainable. The soil, water, and atmosphere of its surface have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to their present condition by the activity of the biosphere, a stupendously complex layer of living creatures whose activities are locked together in precise but tenuous global cycles of energy and transformed organic matter. The biosphere creates our special world anew every day, every minute, and holds it in a unique, shimmering physical disequilibrium. On that disequilibrium the human species is in total thrall. When we alter the biosphere in any direction, we move the environment away from the delicate dance of biology. When we destroy ecosystems and extinguish species, we degrade the greatest heritage this planet has to offer and thereby threaten our own existence.
The relative indifference to the environment springs, I believe, from deep within human nature. The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future. To look neither far ahead nor far afield is elemental in a Darwinian sense. We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination. It is, people say, just good common sense.
Sounds a lot like what victims of WTC suffered. I say drop'em
Ah, collective punishment. The strategy that worked so well for the Gestapo in German-occupied territories during WW2, and the strategy that's working so well for the IDF in Gaza and the West Bank.
USA.
Besides, who needs nukes when you have thermobarics? All the terror of mini-nukes, none of the fall-out, and you get a chemical poison-gas weapon as a pleasant, non-Hague Convention side-effect...
The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique--and unpleasant.... What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.. If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents.The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique--and unpleasant.... What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.. If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents.
Defense Intelligence Agency, "Fuel-Air and Enhanced-Blast Explosive Technology--Foreign," April 1993. Obtained by Human Rights Watch under the US FOIA
The effect of an FAE explosion within confined spaces is immense. Those near the ignition point are obliterated. Those at the fringe are likely to suffer many internal, and thus invisible injuries, including burst eardrums and crushed inner ear organs, severe concussions, ruptured lungs and internal organs,and possibly blindness.
Central Intelligence Agency, "Conventional Weapons Producing Chemical-Warfare-Agent-Like Injuries," February 1990. Unclassified document.
Because the "shock and pressure waves cause minimal damage to brain tissue.it is possible that victims of FAEs are not rendered unconscious by the blast, but instead suffer for several seconds or minutes while they suffocate."
Defense Intelligence Agency, "Future Threat to the Soldier System, Volume I; Dismounted Soldier--Middle East Threat," September 1993, p. 73. Obtained by Human Rights Watch under the US FOIA
Source for these quotes.
I think the movie succeeded in doing what the book was meant to do - it sparks the imagination! What IS the world going to be like in 800,000 years? I can't even imagine the changes that will come in the next 50! ... Let's put aside our petty concerns for a minute and remember what an important time this is to the evolution of technology.
As regards technological evolution, I note that in Wells' original, it was the Morlock's love of machines and enslavement to the idea of "mechanical progress" that led them at last to cannibalism and moral degeneracy.
The film fails, as the Pal version did in the 1960s, by dropping the key theme of Well's book: the time traveller discovers the end result of class warfare. The proles won by letting the rich think they'd won because they enjoy a life of luxury, but instead they are just cattle being fattened.
Wells was a Fabian Socialist with a huge sense of irony and these influences informed all his work. But socialism and irony is apparently too dangerous for Hollywood. Instead, Pal's film changed it into a metaphor about nuclear warfare and survivalism, and Wells Jr changes it into a metaphor about the perils of leisure development. What a crock.
The Time Machine is here. The end-of-the-earth chapter, which seems to give Katz the willies, is a perfect little End-Of-Colonialism piece, very typical of the time. Hodgson's House on the Borderland , Night Land , and Stapledon's Last and First Men are more of the same, but with their own charms.
`I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes -- to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.
`It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.
`So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection -- absolute permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding of the Under-world, however it was effected, had become disjointed. Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began below. The Under-world being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, than the Upper. And when other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden.
Any theory of social stratification should take the above case (which seems almost too black-and-white, but trust me, it was not made up) into account. These guys have the same cultural background, the same social class - but the one had what it takes to make it in this world and come out higher up the economic food chain than he started, the other apparently didn't, and ended up on the bottom.
That's the great thing about theories, there are so many to choose from. Bordieu's theory of habitus comes to mind. People are not born equal, but accrete a physical body, mental disciplines, and social connections based on their immediate neighbours. Basically, rich people are trained to be rich, poor to be poor, and so on. But these are not absolutes, they just tend to steer an individual along a certain lifepath and limit the trajectory of their ascent or descent within society. And so social stratification endures, reproduces, and resists change. Bound by culture, human society is an amazing, adaptive meta-organism that outlives the death of its individual cell bodies.
11. Is habitus totally atomistic? That is, does it reduce society to a = large collection of individuals, to be sorted or re-sorted at the whim = of the sociologist? According to Brubaker, Bordieu is not setting up a = theory to tackle a particular problem, but rather a heuristic to help = solve whatever problem concerns one at that particular moment. Further, how similar can two individual "habituses" (Habiti? Habitae? = Aardvarks?) be if they are dependent upon initial conditions - which = Bordieu states are objectively unknowable and only inferred from the = "symptoms" of lifestyle?
Sociologists even have their own versions of organizational emergence theories, or interactionism.
Bordieu came to mind because he died quite recently.
Source? Specifics? That may be true in some places, but they don't call the US the "Land of Opportunity" for nothing. Obviously there is such a thing as inherited wealth, and such a thing as good luck or bad luck, but honestly - if you have talent, ambition, imagination, and hard work - you really can do anything.
There are any number of sociology studies that demonstrate the social stratification of the US. The common-sense wisdom of a classless society and increased social mobility within the US (compared with European countries) is just pure ideology, useful to those with real power and inherited influence, essential for the preservation of hegemony. Remember Orwell -- if you remove words from the language and ways of talking about things, then it becomes almost impossible to easily think about these things. Or try Foucault, for an example of how people's ideas can be constrained by discursive regimes.
Or think about the Usual Suspects:
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.
because mistakes are much more costly at this [CEO] than down on the shop floor, so companies are willing to pay quite a bit if that's what it takes to get a qualified person in the job.
All these Business 101-derived reasons you state are well and good, but in real life, how often do they apply? Did they apply to Enron? To Global Corssing? Will they apply to Genuity?
I see plenty of people destitute because of idiotic CEO decisions, but I don't think I've ever seen a destitute CEO.
Without personal responsibility for their mistakes, insulated by millions of privileged, dilution-protected options, CEOs in the 90s boom reminded me most strongly of pigs feeding at overflowing troughs.
so someone can reinvent it if there is need. It's even easier the second time, because you know it's been done and have some idea as to how.
Cool. Why don't you go off and read some data from Edison's original drum recordings then tell us how easy it was?
Sehert said the CPU only accounted for seven per cent of the typical power consumption of a mobile device (although the chipset accounted for another 13 per cent). With the LCD sucking up a third of the power consumed
It seems to me that controlling power consumption requires a user eye-tracking mode. As I look at my dual screen setup, at every moment my focus rests only on a small couple of square cm of the screen. Surely with eye tracking it should be possible to dim/fade the rest of the screen, cutting down power consumption.
This might also have advantages for graphics cards/CPU, because you could concentrate on doing most your rendering and aliasing in only the portion of the screen within eye focus. For that to work you'd need some sort of tile-based rendering system though.
How can anyone routinely require such complex sentences to say so little?
Strunk and Whyte: Omit Needless Words.
Environments don't have needs. People see a direction to evolution because of an anthropomorphic error, a illogical conflation of local experience with hubris.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.
A quote by one of everyone's favourite uber-athiest, Dawkins.
I hope Rogers do something, someday, about the amount of probes and attacks I get from zombies and script kiddies on their network. Somedays I've thought about IP-denying Rogers or all all cable modems,just on principle.
I'm going to disagree with this notion of evolution. Evolution is not undirected. The current environment gives a good deal of direction to the sorts of evolution that occurs. For example: evolution appropriate to tropical beaches is unlikely to occur in the arctic tundra.
Actually, that is wrong. Evolution happens in an undirected sense. In Artic environments, mutations both beneficial and non-beneficial for that environment occur. There's no doubt about Evolution.
The Theory of Natural Selection, however, adds a directed development, in the sense that beneficial mutations will produce more offspring, and in the long run should predominate. There's the doubt about Natural Selection... in the long run we are all dead.
Useless. Useless. Useless.
Maybe you're right. Maybe the best approach is for all "road warriors" to club hijackers repeatedly with their overweight Armada laptops...
Everyone seems to forget that using a gun in a plane is a very bad idea.
Tasers. Mace. Glubombs.
Canonical site here, lots of rippers, Streambox, URLSniffer, etc.
From the article: ... The coordinates of restricted areas and important buildings could be entered into the new guidance system, which could thwart a pilot's
[the] GuideStar controls could be programmed to prevent any airplane from ever going someplace it should not
I've read about this panacea repeatedly since 9/11. The existence of an irrevocable fly-by-wire lockout mode such as this gives hijackers a new physical location (the control room) or software/protocol system to target. I believe the Risks inherent here are great.
Having trained, experienced humans local and ready to override compromised Guidestar-like devices is crucial. The 9/11 hijackers gained easy access to a plane's most valuable assets -- pilots in the cockpit -- due to a lack of Sky Marshals, security doors, and cameras. That was a tragic case of cost cutting by the airlines.
I'd hate to think that similar cost cutting measures could lead to adoption of this automatic flying device with an intention to deskill or replace pilots. The implementation of such a device requires careful human factor analysis. Perhaps a periodic, probabilistically triggered interrogation of pilot credentials (created for one-time-use during a single flight) according to flying patterns and location?
This was mentioned before, by the way.
Yes, thats why the intro to this article contained a link to the earlier Slashdot story. You mean you don't click on the links?
EllisDees wrote: Yes, the Taliban are shitty people, but our whole reason for attacking them was to 'get Bin Laden'.
Oh I don't know about all Taliban... these guys look kind cute.
And as for not "getting" Bin Laden...
He who lives by fighting with an enemy has an interest in the preservation of the enemys' life - Neitzsche.
You euros regulate your commercial sector so that you can claim a higher standard of human rights, but you hamstring your businesses and your regulations tolerate (and ecourage) laziness and apathy in the private sector.
So who died and made you an expert in social economics? How can you quantify this "laziness and apathy"?