What have you done!? Terrorists will notice your post and next time they decide to blow up a building they'll put up a bomb with note that says "This is a sound monitoring device for project XXX. If you have any questions, call John Smith at (617) 555-8944"
It's funny that you mentioned that, I read about Cube a while ago, how U.S. had a deal with them to import sugar before Castro's regime, and I thought to myself, why isn't U.S. growing beets? In my country in Europe we make sugar out of beets and we even export it and make money off of it. If a 3rd world country like mine can do it, U.S. sure can, so why is it fixated on sugar cane when beets are easy to grow?
Unfortunately that is how the human brain works -- big, dramatic crashes/explosions/accidents where a lot of people like us die, registers as 'HOLY CRAP, WE HAVE TO AVOID THIS SHIT AT ALL COST'. It is important for the event to be memorable so media will play a part in this, it is important that people be like us because if say 10000 Somalis would have died from a terrorist act, the media would have dropped the story withing a week! Now that was enough to damage the brains of hundreds of millions of Americans. A rational human being would realize that the their odds of dying in a terrorist act is orders of magnitude lower than being killed by a heart attack, asthma, cancer, car accident, their backyard pool, probably even by lightning. So the only way to stop this obsession with terrorism is to get _smarter_, more _rational_.. and I don't see that happening anytime soon in the 'ol U.S. of A.
Also, let's look at terrorism from the point of view of your Joe Sixpack Homeland Security Officer (JSHSO), or any other dude from the executive branch of the govt., They sit all day on their asses (a lot more positions were created after 9/11), get payed loads of money (more $$$ was budgeted for war on terror) and are waiting for the terrorists to attack. Well, according to the probability mentioned above, the chance of a large terrorist attack is very slim, and JSHSO is getting pretty bored. He was trained to sniff out terrorists, pop their eyes out and skullfuck the empty sockets. So are we really that surprised that they will see terrorists in every Middle Eastern person, a bomb in every blinking light, and will pull the 'OMFG! TERRORISTS ARE COMING!' trigger on every shadow. This gets their blood going, they get a high when they get to close down half a city. Then they realize how stupid they are and arrest someone so they can turn them into a scapegoat. This justifies their job position, they get to go home at the end of the day and tell their kids that 'Daddy stopped Osama today, he disarmed bombs with blinking lights that had nazi jihadists flicking Americans off'
It is pretty obvious that the terrorists already won. They wanted us to be do this and we are doing it. It is about time to smarten up. If we really want to live longer and safe, we should not smoke, drive more carefully, watch what we eat, watch our step when we get in and out of the shower and other stuff like that.
Isn't sugar more expensive than disel? Wouldn't it be better to turn your tank of diesel into a huge bag of Domino sugar and bake some doughnuts?
Or did all the Americans decide all of the sudden to live a healthy life style and stop eating doughnuts, hoho's and stop drinking pop, thus creating a large surplus of corn syrup?
Even better, some cameras have anti-dust sensor coating and can remove dust from the sensor by vibrating it. Nikon's Dust Reference justs masks the symptoms, the dust is still there. And technically if you shoot raw, you can also use Dust Reference with any other camera, as a post processing step.
Call me naive, but I believe that corporations, like individuals, should earn their wealth honorably.
I actually do agree with you and I don't think you are naive. I was just pointing out that the "goodness" of big companies is just a careful marketing facade because intuition or marketing research tells that if a company is viewed as "good" it will be more profitable.
But when Google parades it's "do no evil" policy I would hope that everyone would not be fooled and actually believe that when it comes to the choice between a morally "good" choice and a making a higher profit, Google will choose to pass on the profit and, even at a loss to them choose what is moral and therefore "good". Because, now you can call me naive, in my book that is what a truly "good" company/individual would do -- choose good even when faced with a loss (could be monetary, emotional, or any kind of loss...).
In general it is easy to trumpet and parade slogans like "I do no evil", "I am good", "I would never [insert a morally wrong act here] like so on so...". It is truly evident what my true character is when I am put in a situation to choose between a doing any of those things deemed "bad" in order to avoid a personal loss. For example if someone says, "I will never steal", perhaps they are right if they happen to never need to steal, they have a nice income and a good life. But it doesn't really say much about their moral character. It is when they are faced with poverty and hunger that the statement "I will never steal" (and the person indeed does not resort to theft), starts pointing to a character straight.
Back to Google. I again agree with you that Google started out as a "good" corporation. . But the key in that is that the early Google corporation was indistinguishable from just two individuals. I don't think that Brin and the other co-founder are somehow "bad" people, quite the opposite. But as the company got bigger it became a different entity -- it turned into a money making machine that competes with other money making machines that need to (obviously!) make money for their investors or be faced with death (bankruptcy/liquidation/buyout etc.) At some point in time, the initial, probably sincere policy statement of "do no evil" became just a marketing tool.
In retrospect I wish people would just see through this "goodness" marketing tool and see the companies for what they are, look at the real facts (who is the company sponsoring, is it involved in any way with abuses on freedom, or human rights, is it destroying the environment ? etc.) So looking back Google is not necessarily "better" than Microsoft. It is probably worse because it lied and pronounced a statement that turned out to be false. (I guess the person who just steals is bad but the person who steals after they just said "I will never steal" is worse because they are also a lier).
B.S. Show me an evil nation and a good nation and show me an evil company and a good company. Is U.S. good can you clearly and logically argue that? And then which nation is evil - Iraq? Iran? Pakistan? North Korea? . Are most peasants in North Korea "bad" and the U.S. majority "good" or "better"? You would seem to think so.
And also do you think that the majority of Microsoft (or another Slashdot popular "evil" IT empire) make more immoral decisions than Google employees? What, are they cheating on their wives more than the Google employees, do you really believe that, because that is what you said?
Then what does "soundness" has to do with a company being labeled as "good"? A sound decision made by a company is the decision to make more money. The one and only goal of the for-profit companies is to make money. As soon as the company stops doing it, it will cease to exist. I think that is a pretty clear assumption. Now that "sound" decision to make more money will often dictate making choices that people will _percieve_ as "good" or "bad". It was _sound_ for Google to go for the censorship deal in China but it was considered "evil" by most people. However there is a good link between the customer's perception and the ability to make money. Google knows that because it capitalizes on that "good company" image and it will try to preserve it at all cost. Therefore the recanting pronounced by Brin _but_ note! the deal was not reversed! If Google would truly be a "good" company it would have _not_ taken the deal in the first place even if it meant losing market share to a competitor -- that would have been a "good" moral decision but a bad business decision.
A for-profit company will run this basic pseudo algorithm:
LOOP FOREVER:
Make only the decisions that will maximize the profits.
IF any of those decisions are deemed to be perceived as "evil" and in turn will hurt the chances of maximizing future profits
THEN RUN PR_Magic()
END LOOP
PR_Magic PROCEDURE:
Reduce the perceived "evil" resulting from the any decision made by the company
RETURN
Alright here is how it works. The companies are not human beings they are not "nice" "evil" "good" or "bad". As much as we'd want them to be (and they do go to great lengths to make us think that they have such qualities), because it is just how we humans are, we want those who we do business with to be trustworthy so that is why we anthropomorphize entities that are not human. All a company is, is a money making machine, if it doesn't make money it stop existing.
Now as far as making money, a company that is perceived as being "good" "noble" and "not evil" will make more money. Microsoft probably didn't worry about that because they figured they could make a lot of money anyway...and they did. But now Google comes along and they figure that making themselves into a "good" company will greatly benefit them and will result in even greater profits than otherwise being a just an average IT company.
Google has gone to great lengths to build that image of itself. But that is what that it is, it is a marketing front! It is no more "good" than Microsoft. Or rather it is only as "good" as that perception keeps making them money.
So what Brin was saying in so many words is that "I would still like to keep the image of Google as being good by seemingly recanting the decision to censor in China but we will _not_ break that deal because it makes us money". It is indeed the best he could have said, because we can look at Google and say, "well at least they've sort of apologized for it, so they are still noble", and not too many of us will have the time or the resources to check and see if the actual deal was broken.
Exactly! That is what I thought of. Most of the meaningful research doesn't come out of nowhere like some no-name startup from the Texas desert. It usually comes gradually from years of peer reviewed research. So on one hand we have thousands of officially recognized experts working on the energy storage problem for years on the other hand we have some unknown start-up from Texas that claims a 10x improvement on battery technology...hmm..let's see who do we believe...?
This is a typical money making scheme designed for the not so technologically proficient investors _but_ who think they are very smart and finally found the next Microsoft , Intel or Google. Basically people with lots of money and not enough brains when it comes to science.
The company waits for the President's speech, the President, as predicted, mentions a 20% reduction in gas consumption. The no-name company from TX announces they they have just the solution for the 20% and more reduction in gas consumption! -- Anyone surprised!?
They rake in investments, then liquidate the company and buy a small island in the Bahamas. Except for the idiots who invested in the company, everyone will forget about this just like they forget about the "free energy breakthroughs" that come in every 3 or 4 years.
I can't possibly see how. Most systems in the body depend on oxidation/reduction reactions,
The body, especially the brain and the nervous system is also a conductor, therefore and antenna. The brain's electrical signal are low enough that it won't take much to disrupt them. I imagine if someone is living close to a radio station, where people with metal fillings can hear "voices" in their head, there might be some interference with the central nervous system. I am not talking about burnt brain matter but rather subtle changes in the nerve signaling patterns. There is definitely no immediate life threatening harm, otherwise as you mentioned we'd all be dead and it would be quite obvious. In other words I would not let my kids play under the station's antenna, but I would also not go around saying that people should wear tin hats.
Say 50Hz might be safe but 120Hz might cause you to hallucinate or something like that.
It was just an example, I thought the word "say" would be enough to indicate that. Yes I know that 120 is beat of 60Hz which is the frequency here in US. And 50Hz is the frequency used in Europe. The point was that one frequency might be safe even at higher power while others might be harmful even at low power.
Because they are paid to do nothing. If their research was meaningful and worthy they should be paid for it while they were doing it. Why not instead reward those who actually research something or produce something useful.
Wouldn't your rather spend your tax money paying somebody who is finding a cure for cancer instead of paying somebody to sit around do nothing because they published stuff 20 years ago? What now they are too stupid to publish or not able to research anymore? -- No, they are just lazy. I don't see any reason whatsoever to reward laziness.
Yes, the "magnetic radiation" is not strong enough to break chemical bonds but it may still affect the nervous system or other systems of the body. It is try that there is a _correlation_ between living under power lines and incidents of leukemia (maybe people who live under power lines are poor and eat crappy foods and therefore get leukemia?).
And is also true that individuals who are exposed to magnetic radiation in their workplace have not been found to be worse off than everyone else. Therefore one cannot claim that low frequency EM radiation is completely safe or definitely harmful. It's still up in the air. I personally think that particular frequencies might be more harmful than others. Say 50Hz might be safe but 120Hz might cause you to hallucinate or something like that.
And what does a professor at your local university gain from having tenure and sitting on his ass all day without doing anything (teaching 2 classes a week doesn't count as "doing something"), getting paid $70k, without the possibility of ever being fired until the day he dies...?
Here is a professor that actually does something and everyone is amazed - "wow, a professor that actually works, something is fishy..."
Well someone has to speak up and stop others from wasting their brain power, slashdot is as good a place as any public forum... yep, just doing humanity a service...
His whole paper is fantasy. It would be more helpful if his brain power could be used for more important tasks such as how to cure cancer, save the environment, efficient energy storage and so on. As soon as I read about his assumptions about an alien civilization (they will travel at 0.1c, or they will build such and such probes) I completely discarded his argument and his conclusion. Just because he slapped some integrals into the paper does not make his paper credible.
They may well have the ability to teleport instantenously(sic) across the Galaxy.
Well where are they then? If they _may_ have such ability they would be teleporting back and forth to earth. The reasons to come to earth are pretty compelling:
1) Help us
2) Exterminate us
3) Mess with us, just for fun
4) See if they could possibly learn anything from us
5) Enslave us (also for fun) -- we could be their bitches and scratch their backs and polish their shoes...ok maybe not this one;)
Reasons not to come to earth and avoid us even if they know about us:
1) Possibility that we could infect them with some virus
2) If they are hippie aliens then perhaps some altruistic reason like "don't mess with other planetary echo-systems" or "save the endangered alien races"
To me it seems that they have a lot more reasons to visit us if they could. But they haven't yet, so this makes me doubt the fact that any civilization has such technology at this particular instant.
I would make the same argument for time travel. If time travel into the past was possible _ever_ we would see visitors from the future. Sure the first ones to discover it might be careful not to mess with the past but there will be some nut jobs who will.
It's not really a Fortran-esque language. If you would have clicked the link to the project page you would have noticed that...
The language tries to mimic mathematical notation and thus it wants to appeal to scientists more than anyone else. You if you are a regular programmer that does web development or database or anything except scientific computing, there is nothing for you to see here, move along. You can still safely continue using Java or C++.
Having grown in Soviet Union, I'll attest to the fact. No matter how many resources the government will have, no matter how much the technology progresses, it will all get mis-managed, wasted and funneled into militarization. The price of the human life is very low.
But I gotta give them credit, at least they got the right idea about how to properly run a communist country -- fear! Stalin style (yeah, I like the alliteration, just came up with it!) People will obey when they see their neighbors in the evening and by morning the secret police have taken them away because someone made up a lie about them being "enemies of the people." I am not making this up, this happened to families I knew personally, this is how things are in NK.
North Korea is not like China, not even close. It is very much like Soviet Union under Stalin. It is pretty much a time capsule of the 50s. Google for some blogs or photos from westerners who went there, it is a totally surreal experience.
Large empty streets, every foreigner is followed by an assigned guide. If a tourist as much as takes a digital photo of one of their leader's statues that is off center or has the head cut-off they are forced to retake the picture. There are stories of children being used to help harvest poppies for heroin production after they get off school. Everything is a show, they use all of their funds to build their military while hundreds of thousands are starving. Their leader is crazy and he has nukes. Iraq was a kindergarten compared to NK. Until the crazy dictators are ruling the country no amount of giant fluffy (and yummy) bunnies will save the people from starvation...
When everyone is doing something and you are not, you at least have to ask yourself what is going on... You might be justified in doing your own individual thing or you might just be stupid and don't get something really obvious. With the metric stuff I think it is the later...
If it was me, I'd have to look up most of them, which in itself illustrates the point (and I am a scientist too by the way).
I don't agree that somehow "every day world" is completely different from "science/engineering world" because science _is_ the every day world (unless you live in Kansas), because the scientists end up designing most of today's equipment, appliances and vehicles. So they want their screws and nails to be in metric while Joe Sixpack wants to buy 1" nails or 1/2" screws and so on.
But for every day use? It does not matter one tiny bit.
That leads to a schizophrenic situation. Science and engineering _is_ the "every day". If Joe Sixpack goes to Home Depot to buy building materials for his house he expects his nuts and bolts and tools to be in inches but Jane The Engineer of course designed them in a metric system. So Mr. Sixpack gets bolts that are 41/89 of an inch long or something like that. Same goes for cars, are they part of the "every day" or part of the "science and engineering" the list could go on but you get the point.
Sure the kids can learn the imperial system, then learn the metrics system, then spend even more time learning how to convert between the two, during this time children in countries with normal measuring systems can learn something useful , like the Ohm's Law for example and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
You obviously have never dealt with Scientologists....
My the thetans be with you !
You have doomed us!
It's funny that you mentioned that, I read about Cube a while ago, how U.S. had a deal with them to import sugar before Castro's regime, and I thought to myself, why isn't U.S. growing beets? In my country in Europe we make sugar out of beets and we even export it and make money off of it. If a 3rd world country like mine can do it, U.S. sure can, so why is it fixated on sugar cane when beets are easy to grow?
Also, let's look at terrorism from the point of view of your Joe Sixpack Homeland Security Officer (JSHSO), or any other dude from the executive branch of the govt., They sit all day on their asses (a lot more positions were created after 9/11), get payed loads of money (more $$$ was budgeted for war on terror) and are waiting for the terrorists to attack. Well, according to the probability mentioned above, the chance of a large terrorist attack is very slim, and JSHSO is getting pretty bored. He was trained to sniff out terrorists, pop their eyes out and skullfuck the empty sockets. So are we really that surprised that they will see terrorists in every Middle Eastern person, a bomb in every blinking light, and will pull the 'OMFG! TERRORISTS ARE COMING!' trigger on every shadow. This gets their blood going, they get a high when they get to close down half a city. Then they realize how stupid they are and arrest someone so they can turn them into a scapegoat. This justifies their job position, they get to go home at the end of the day and tell their kids that 'Daddy stopped Osama today, he disarmed bombs with blinking lights that had nazi jihadists flicking Americans off'
It is pretty obvious that the terrorists already won. They wanted us to be do this and we are doing it. It is about time to smarten up. If we really want to live longer and safe, we should not smoke, drive more carefully, watch what we eat, watch our step when we get in and out of the shower and other stuff like that.
Isn't sugar more expensive than disel? Wouldn't it be better to turn your tank of diesel into a huge bag of Domino sugar and bake some doughnuts? Or did all the Americans decide all of the sudden to live a healthy life style and stop eating doughnuts, hoho's and stop drinking pop, thus creating a large surplus of corn syrup?
Even better, some cameras have anti-dust sensor coating and can remove dust from the sensor by vibrating it. Nikon's Dust Reference justs masks the symptoms, the dust is still there. And technically if you shoot raw, you can also use Dust Reference with any other camera, as a post processing step.
I actually do agree with you and I don't think you are naive. I was just pointing out that the "goodness" of big companies is just a careful marketing facade because intuition or marketing research tells that if a company is viewed as "good" it will be more profitable.
But when Google parades it's "do no evil" policy I would hope that everyone would not be fooled and actually believe that when it comes to the choice between a morally "good" choice and a making a higher profit, Google will choose to pass on the profit and, even at a loss to them choose what is moral and therefore "good". Because, now you can call me naive, in my book that is what a truly "good" company/individual would do -- choose good even when faced with a loss (could be monetary, emotional, or any kind of loss...).
In general it is easy to trumpet and parade slogans like "I do no evil", "I am good", "I would never [insert a morally wrong act here] like so on so...". It is truly evident what my true character is when I am put in a situation to choose between a doing any of those things deemed "bad" in order to avoid a personal loss. For example if someone says, "I will never steal", perhaps they are right if they happen to never need to steal, they have a nice income and a good life. But it doesn't really say much about their moral character. It is when they are faced with poverty and hunger that the statement "I will never steal" (and the person indeed does not resort to theft), starts pointing to a character straight.
Back to Google. I again agree with you that Google started out as a "good" corporation. . But the key in that is that the early Google corporation was indistinguishable from just two individuals. I don't think that Brin and the other co-founder are somehow "bad" people, quite the opposite. But as the company got bigger it became a different entity -- it turned into a money making machine that competes with other money making machines that need to (obviously!) make money for their investors or be faced with death (bankruptcy/liquidation/buyout etc.) At some point in time, the initial, probably sincere policy statement of "do no evil" became just a marketing tool.
In retrospect I wish people would just see through this "goodness" marketing tool and see the companies for what they are, look at the real facts (who is the company sponsoring, is it involved in any way with abuses on freedom, or human rights, is it destroying the environment ? etc.) So looking back Google is not necessarily "better" than Microsoft. It is probably worse because it lied and pronounced a statement that turned out to be false. (I guess the person who just steals is bad but the person who steals after they just said "I will never steal" is worse because they are also a lier).
B.S. Show me an evil nation and a good nation and show me an evil company and a good company. Is U.S. good can you clearly and logically argue that? And then which nation is evil - Iraq? Iran? Pakistan? North Korea? . Are most peasants in North Korea "bad" and the U.S. majority "good" or "better"? You would seem to think so.
And also do you think that the majority of Microsoft (or another Slashdot popular "evil" IT empire) make more immoral decisions than Google employees? What, are they cheating on their wives more than the Google employees, do you really believe that, because that is what you said?
Then what does "soundness" has to do with a company being labeled as "good"? A sound decision made by a company is the decision to make more money. The one and only goal of the for-profit companies is to make money. As soon as the company stops doing it, it will cease to exist. I think that is a pretty clear assumption. Now that "sound" decision to make more money will often dictate making choices that people will _percieve_ as "good" or "bad". It was _sound_ for Google to go for the censorship deal in China but it was considered "evil" by most people. However there is a good link between the customer's perception and the ability to make money. Google knows that because it capitalizes on that "good company" image and it will try to preserve it at all cost. Therefore the recanting pronounced by Brin _but_ note! the deal was not reversed! If Google would truly be a "good" company it would have _not_ taken the deal in the first place even if it meant losing market share to a competitor -- that would have been a "good" moral decision but a bad business decision.
A for-profit company will run this basic pseudo algorithm:
LOOP FOREVER:
Make only the decisions that will maximize the profits.
IF any of those decisions are deemed to be perceived as "evil" and in turn will hurt the chances of maximizing future profits
THEN RUN PR_Magic()
END LOOP
PR_Magic PROCEDURE:
Reduce the perceived "evil" resulting from the any decision made by the company
RETURN
Alright here is how it works. The companies are not human beings they are not "nice" "evil" "good" or "bad". As much as we'd want them to be (and they do go to great lengths to make us think that they have such qualities), because it is just how we humans are, we want those who we do business with to be trustworthy so that is why we anthropomorphize entities that are not human. All a company is, is a money making machine, if it doesn't make money it stop existing.
Now as far as making money, a company that is perceived as being "good" "noble" and "not evil" will make more money. Microsoft probably didn't worry about that because they figured they could make a lot of money anyway...and they did. But now Google comes along and they figure that making themselves into a "good" company will greatly benefit them and will result in even greater profits than otherwise being a just an average IT company.
Google has gone to great lengths to build that image of itself. But that is what that it is, it is a marketing front! It is no more "good" than Microsoft. Or rather it is only as "good" as that perception keeps making them money.
So what Brin was saying in so many words is that "I would still like to keep the image of Google as being good by seemingly recanting the decision to censor in China but we will _not_ break that deal because it makes us money". It is indeed the best he could have said, because we can look at Google and say, "well at least they've sort of apologized for it, so they are still noble", and not too many of us will have the time or the resources to check and see if the actual deal was broken.
Exactly! That is what I thought of. Most of the meaningful research doesn't come out of nowhere like some no-name startup from the Texas desert. It usually comes gradually from years of peer reviewed research. So on one hand we have thousands of officially recognized experts working on the energy storage problem for years on the other hand we have some unknown start-up from Texas that claims a 10x improvement on battery technology...hmm..let's see who do we believe...?
This is a typical money making scheme designed for the not so technologically proficient investors _but_ who think they are very smart and finally found the next Microsoft , Intel or Google. Basically people with lots of money and not enough brains when it comes to science.
The company waits for the President's speech, the President, as predicted, mentions a 20% reduction in gas consumption. The no-name company from TX announces they they have just the solution for the 20% and more reduction in gas consumption! -- Anyone surprised!?
They rake in investments, then liquidate the company and buy a small island in the Bahamas. Except for the idiots who invested in the company, everyone will forget about this just like they forget about the "free energy breakthroughs" that come in every 3 or 4 years.
The body, especially the brain and the nervous system is also a conductor, therefore and antenna. The brain's electrical signal are low enough that it won't take much to disrupt them. I imagine if someone is living close to a radio station, where people with metal fillings can hear "voices" in their head, there might be some interference with the central nervous system. I am not talking about burnt brain matter but rather subtle changes in the nerve signaling patterns. There is definitely no immediate life threatening harm, otherwise as you mentioned we'd all be dead and it would be quite obvious. In other words I would not let my kids play under the station's antenna, but I would also not go around saying that people should wear tin hats. Say 50Hz might be safe but 120Hz might cause you to hallucinate or something like that.
It was just an example, I thought the word "say" would be enough to indicate that. Yes I know that 120 is beat of 60Hz which is the frequency here in US. And 50Hz is the frequency used in Europe. The point was that one frequency might be safe even at higher power while others might be harmful even at low power.
Go to the NIH website
Wouldn't your rather spend your tax money paying somebody who is finding a cure for cancer instead of paying somebody to sit around do nothing because they published stuff 20 years ago? What now they are too stupid to publish or not able to research anymore? -- No, they are just lazy. I don't see any reason whatsoever to reward laziness.
And is also true that individuals who are exposed to magnetic radiation in their workplace have not been found to be worse off than everyone else. Therefore one cannot claim that low frequency EM radiation is completely safe or definitely harmful. It's still up in the air. I personally think that particular frequencies might be more harmful than others. Say 50Hz might be safe but 120Hz might cause you to hallucinate or something like that.
Here is a professor that actually does something and everyone is amazed - "wow, a professor that actually works, something is fishy..."
You are correct, from a marketing perspective it makes total sense.
Well someone has to speak up and stop others from wasting their brain power, slashdot is as good a place as any public forum... yep, just doing humanity a service...
His whole paper is fantasy. It would be more helpful if his brain power could be used for more important tasks such as how to cure cancer, save the environment, efficient energy storage and so on. As soon as I read about his assumptions about an alien civilization (they will travel at 0.1c, or they will build such and such probes) I completely discarded his argument and his conclusion. Just because he slapped some integrals into the paper does not make his paper credible.
Well where are they then? If they _may_ have such ability they would be teleporting back and forth to earth. The reasons to come to earth are pretty compelling:
1) Help us
2) Exterminate us
3) Mess with us, just for fun
4) See if they could possibly learn anything from us
5) Enslave us (also for fun) -- we could be their bitches and scratch their backs and polish their shoes...ok maybe not this one
Reasons not to come to earth and avoid us even if they know about us:
1) Possibility that we could infect them with some virus
2) If they are hippie aliens then perhaps some altruistic reason like "don't mess with other planetary echo-systems" or "save the endangered alien races"
To me it seems that they have a lot more reasons to visit us if they could. But they haven't yet, so this makes me doubt the fact that any civilization has such technology at this particular instant.
I would make the same argument for time travel. If time travel into the past was possible _ever_ we would see visitors from the future. Sure the first ones to discover it might be careful not to mess with the past but there will be some nut jobs who will.
The language tries to mimic mathematical notation and thus it wants to appeal to scientists more than anyone else. You if you are a regular programmer that does web development or database or anything except scientific computing, there is nothing for you to see here, move along. You can still safely continue using Java or C++.
Having grown in Soviet Union, I'll attest to the fact. No matter how many resources the government will have, no matter how much the technology progresses, it will all get mis-managed, wasted and funneled into militarization. The price of the human life is very low.
But I gotta give them credit, at least they got the right idea about how to properly run a communist country -- fear! Stalin style (yeah, I like the alliteration, just came up with it!) People will obey when they see their neighbors in the evening and by morning the secret police have taken them away because someone made up a lie about them being "enemies of the people." I am not making this up, this happened to families I knew personally, this is how things are in NK.
North Korea is not like China, not even close. It is very much like Soviet Union under Stalin. It is pretty much a time capsule of the 50s. Google for some blogs or photos from westerners who went there, it is a totally surreal experience.
Large empty streets, every foreigner is followed by an assigned guide. If a tourist as much as takes a digital photo of one of their leader's statues that is off center or has the head cut-off they are forced to retake the picture. There are stories of children being used to help harvest poppies for heroin production after they get off school. Everything is a show, they use all of their funds to build their military while hundreds of thousands are starving. Their leader is crazy and he has nukes. Iraq was a kindergarten compared to NK. Until the crazy dictators are ruling the country no amount of giant fluffy (and yummy) bunnies will save the people from starvation...
When everyone is doing something and you are not, you at least have to ask yourself what is going on... You might be justified in doing your own individual thing or you might just be stupid and don't get something really obvious. With the metric stuff I think it is the later...
If it was me, I'd have to look up most of them, which in itself illustrates the point (and I am a scientist too by the way). I don't agree that somehow "every day world" is completely different from "science/engineering world" because science _is_ the every day world (unless you live in Kansas), because the scientists end up designing most of today's equipment, appliances and vehicles. So they want their screws and nails to be in metric while Joe Sixpack wants to buy 1" nails or 1/2" screws and so on.
That leads to a schizophrenic situation. Science and engineering _is_ the "every day". If Joe Sixpack goes to Home Depot to buy building materials for his house he expects his nuts and bolts and tools to be in inches but Jane The Engineer of course designed them in a metric system. So Mr. Sixpack gets bolts that are 41/89 of an inch long or something like that. Same goes for cars, are they part of the "every day" or part of the "science and engineering" the list could go on but you get the point.
Sure the kids can learn the imperial system, then learn the metrics system, then spend even more time learning how to convert between the two, during this time children in countries with normal measuring systems can learn something useful , like the Ohm's Law for example and so on.