I get your point. What Google is doing is akin to going around town to see what movies are playing in what theaters, to see which are most popular. Sure, they are using other people's choices to their own benefit, but I have a hard time seeing this as anything but an illegitimate rights grab.
It's impossible to know just how difficult it is for any given person to change their behavior: for some people, pretending to be nice might require constant concentration and render them unable to do anything else. Who can say?
There's probably a happy medium: smack the guy down for really over-the-top behavior, and ignore the snide comments etc.
Let's put it this way, then: we've got this guy who's a jerk, but who is also highly skilled in medicine. Can we really afford to not use his brain, to tell him to go home and twiddle his thumbs because he's just not nice enough? It's not like we have a glut of geniuses; sure there are nice brilliant people, but they can only handle so many cases.
This is quintessentially American and nothing new. The phrase "In America, anyone can grow up to be President" has been told to children for decades. Rags-to-riches stories, or American-Joe-outsmarts-European-royalty stories, are part of our cultural heritage. I don't think there's anything wrong with being told you have a potential for greatness, if one is also told what will activate that potential: hard work. The kids described in the article don't just believe they have potential, they believe they are great, just as they are, without having to work for it. That's their mistake.
I think most people have a potential for greatness, just as most people have the potential for good or evil. Potential is not a guarantee. (As an unemployed former valedictorian, I know.)
What you're describing is naivete. So what if they have a misleading picture of the working world? That's a property of youth in general, and will be corrected soon enough. The question is how they deal with the resulting disappointment: do they chalk it up to a learning experience, or do they whine and moan about how unfair it is? Only the latter is arguably narcissism.
* When the breasts get full, you pump them--even at work. If employers don't provide time for that, then this is a societal obstacle that can be fixed if the effort is made (maybe not in all lines of work, but in many of them). * Cost: Cost is for a pump (one-time cost) and possibly storage bags (ongoing cost). We used storage bags for a while, but towards the end we just kept reusing the small bottles which one attached directly to the breastpump, because they were a lot easier to handle. (Bags are good when you want to stockpile in case the mother has to go out of town, but they are unwieldy when you try to pour milk out of them.) In any case, it's cheaper than formula, and cheaper than having a parent not work (particularly if the mother pulls down the larger salary). * Mother-Baby Interaction: Still plenty of mommy time mornings, evenings, overnights, and weekends...but now there's more daddy time too. Surprise, infants enjoy that just as well. * Spoilage risk: Keep it cold at work (need a fridge at work of course) and frozen when you get home, and give it a sniff before feeding it to the baby. Spoiled milk is fairly easy to spot. * Hassle? This is parenting we're talking about! Babies define hassle!
Think what you want, of course-- there's no right way to parent. If a woman wants to be a stay-at-home mom and can afford to do so, more power to her. But if a woman wants to work, she shouldn't be daunted by the difficulties, because there are difficulties in every approach to parenting, and yet most people tend to muddle through. I'm a stay-at-home dad with a working wife and a healthy, growing 18-month-old daughter (now drinking cow's milk), and we've managed just fine.
Actually, most (many?) breast-feeding working moms use breast pumps to express breast milk for use while they're at work. That's how my wife and I did it, anyway.
I'd like to see some analysis about the feasibility of replacing satellites with airships in certain cases. Isn't it a lot cheaper and more fuel-efficient to put a blimp in the air as compared to a satellite? What if we could use them in place of communications satellites-- instead of satellite radio we'd have blimp radio! You'd have to do some extra work to keep the blimp in a geosynchronous position, but a comparison of the energy expenditures would be very interesting.
In this particular case, maybe someone could set up a "Public Domain Fund", a non-profit whose sole job is to hold the copyrights of works meant for the public domain (including anonymous works). Would this work? Can the charter of said organization be written so that there is no chance of them violating the public-domain nature of the works?
Even as couples from across the globe are flocking in droves
Just how big is a drove, anyway? They would have to be pretty large numbers for this to make much difference in our gene pool. Yes, the price is going to come down, and genetic manipulation is going to become de rigeur in the future just to prevent the worst diseases, but we've got some time yet.
When it does become common and cheap, it's going to have a ton of very interesting side-effects. It could wipe out racism, for instance: when a black couple can have a white child or vice versa, how does a racist know whom to hate? And instead of wiping out genetic diversity, it could add to it greatly. There are plenty of people who give their kids weird names because they hated being one of 5 Jennifers in their class; how much more likely are they to get creative if they had the same *face* as 4 other people in their class?
The previous poster wasn't arguing that the procedure itself would hurt the embryo, but that the results of the procedure could hurt the child in the future. The procedure might be flawed itself, and have unintended side-effects like causing new (or well-known) genetic diseases. Or even if it doesn't, the parents might decide that it would be cool to have a 7' tall daughter with green hair. Um yeah, thanks Mom.:)
A tangent: your mentioning the dowry issue makes me wonder whether anyone has ever proposed public subsidies of dowries for poor families in India? It sounds crazy to a Westerner (who might think that eliminating the dowry system would be more appropriate), but I imagine it might be a reasonable position for a "socialist"-leaning Indian politician to take.
A child should be loved regardless of his/her genetic makeup...but once that child exists the die is cast. Choosing the child's genetic makeup before it exists is a different thing entirely.
e.g. I have a 1-year-old daughter whom I adore. We're going to have one more child, and I'd love for it to be a son, for various reasons. If our next child is a daughter, I will love her completely. If someone offers to arrange for our next child to be male for even only $1000, I would pass. But if I could wave a magic wand*? Yeah sure, I'd consider it. (Of course I'd fix any ailments first.)
There might be some danger of loss of diversity in America, but where this would REALLY be problematic if it became widespread would be present-day China. In twenty years, their male-female ratio would be 20-1 (then again, that would fix their overpopulation problems.:)
*Yeah yeah, double entendre, whatnot.
Re:In some ways it was much better in 1996
on
Jurassic Web
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· Score: 1
I remember writing webpages with images in 1996, so yes. No CSS I don't think: I can tell because all I know about HTML I learned prior to 1997 when I graduated from college.
From what I remember, most people's personal homepages (at least mine) were made up of a number of links to favorite and/or interesting pages: prior to search engines this was how you found new websites to visit. We'd even put links up to major companies' websites; who would bother to do that today?:)
The traditonal way in which audio, video and textual content is distributed is over.
Except it's not; plenty of people are making lots of money by distributing copyrighted material the old way. It may be true that we are seeing the beginning of the end of them, but meanwhile, our horse-and-buggy lobby (unlike the original horse-and-buggy lobby?) is rich and powerful, and in the short term can cause a lot of trouble.
But in a sense, the text is an encoded form of an audiobook, just like an MP3 file but in ASCII form. It's like someone selling a poster where the text of a short story is arranged so that, from a distance, it forms the image of some copyrighted artwork. Surely the postermaker would have to pay the writer AND the artist for using their works, not just the writer, even though the "source code" is the same for both.
I don't think the Authors' Guild SHOULD be right, but I think they might be right (for now).
At first I scoffed at the audacity of the Authors' Guild, but after thinking about it I'm not so sure that they don't have a point. At least, it needs to be settled by a court.
What Amazon is doing is supplying an algorithm which translates the written word into the spoken text. Suppose this was declared legal with no strings attached. Now suppose Amazon writes a very specific decoding algorithm for that text, which converts the original ASCII into a data stream which represents James Earl Jones reading the same text. Both are just algorithms. Now judges aren't bound by ridiculous analogies and so could very easily rule the first to be fine but the second to be illegal, but it doesn't seem so cut and dried.
Just like in the case of "pirated" music, we see a place where copyright law needs to be updated to account for new technology. It's inevitable that this issue was going to come up sooner or later. It's to the benefit of the Guilds' opponents that the Author Guilds' claim sounds so ridiculous on the surface, because it would be relatively easy to stir up public sentiment against their claim, and to get a law through Congress reversing any court ruling in the Guild's favor. A more subtle test case would have worked a lot better.
You watch clues in a movie very differently when you know you should be looking for them.
And I think that can limit the benefits of reading a movie review. A professional critic has watched so many movies that he knows the tropes, he's expecting the twist, and so misses the thrill of the unknown. A casual moviegoer (like me) hasn't watched so many movies, and hasn't bothered to study the ones he has watched, and so more movies seem fresh and new and surprising. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, if enjoyment is the goal: the naif gets to enjoy more of the movies he sees, while the critic has a deeper appreciation for the few movies he finds to be good. But they're looking for different things, and one can't necessarily predict what the other will enjoy.
You mean James Gleick. Oddly enough, I have a proof copy of his book, which I found in my desk when I was a physics graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 90s; I have no idea how it got there (Gleick was never at Chicago as far as I know-- someone there must have proofread for him, or maybe it was a former student). I've kept it all these years but I've never gotten around to reading it; with your endorsement I'll have to get around to it.
You are comparing Apples and Oranges (or Apples and PCs). From what I've heard, Apple products for Windows come with some obnoxious upgrade tendencies (e.g. downloading Safari when you upgrade iTunes, etc). Apple doesn't do things like that on OSX: there's a Software Update program which pops up once a week (when there are updates), and you can choose which updates you want to install, when you want to install them.
I wonder if it's just that the Windows team at Apple are nitwits, or if their goal is to make using Windows more cumbersome to convince people to switch (and if that is a team goal or a company goal).
Slashdot Mirror
I get your point. What Google is doing is akin to going around town to see what movies are playing in what theaters, to see which are most popular. Sure, they are using other people's choices to their own benefit, but I have a hard time seeing this as anything but an illegitimate rights grab.
It's impossible to know just how difficult it is for any given person to change their behavior: for some people, pretending to be nice might require constant concentration and render them unable to do anything else. Who can say?
There's probably a happy medium: smack the guy down for really over-the-top behavior, and ignore the snide comments etc.
Let's put it this way, then: we've got this guy who's a jerk, but who is also highly skilled in medicine. Can we really afford to not use his brain, to tell him to go home and twiddle his thumbs because he's just not nice enough? It's not like we have a glut of geniuses; sure there are nice brilliant people, but they can only handle so many cases.
Naah, they'll be fabulous even with kids. :)
This is quintessentially American and nothing new. The phrase "In America, anyone can grow up to be President" has been told to children for decades. Rags-to-riches stories, or American-Joe-outsmarts-European-royalty stories, are part of our cultural heritage. I don't think there's anything wrong with being told you have a potential for greatness, if one is also told what will activate that potential: hard work. The kids described in the article don't just believe they have potential, they believe they are great, just as they are, without having to work for it. That's their mistake.
I think most people have a potential for greatness, just as most people have the potential for good or evil. Potential is not a guarantee. (As an unemployed former valedictorian, I know.)
What you're describing is naivete. So what if they have a misleading picture of the working world? That's a property of youth in general, and will be corrected soon enough. The question is how they deal with the resulting disappointment: do they chalk it up to a learning experience, or do they whine and moan about how unfair it is? Only the latter is arguably narcissism.
* When the breasts get full, you pump them--even at work. If employers don't provide time for that, then this is a societal obstacle that can be fixed if the effort is made (maybe not in all lines of work, but in many of them).
* Cost: Cost is for a pump (one-time cost) and possibly storage bags (ongoing cost). We used storage bags for a while, but towards the end we just kept reusing the small bottles which one attached directly to the breastpump, because they were a lot easier to handle. (Bags are good when you want to stockpile in case the mother has to go out of town, but they are unwieldy when you try to pour milk out of them.) In any case, it's cheaper than formula, and cheaper than having a parent not work (particularly if the mother pulls down the larger salary).
* Mother-Baby Interaction: Still plenty of mommy time mornings, evenings, overnights, and weekends...but now there's more daddy time too. Surprise, infants enjoy that just as well.
* Spoilage risk: Keep it cold at work (need a fridge at work of course) and frozen when you get home, and give it a sniff before feeding it to the baby. Spoiled milk is fairly easy to spot.
* Hassle? This is parenting we're talking about! Babies define hassle!
Think what you want, of course-- there's no right way to parent. If a woman wants to be a stay-at-home mom and can afford to do so, more power to her. But if a woman wants to work, she shouldn't be daunted by the difficulties, because there are difficulties in every approach to parenting, and yet most people tend to muddle through. I'm a stay-at-home dad with a working wife and a healthy, growing 18-month-old daughter (now drinking cow's milk), and we've managed just fine.
This paints a very limited portrait of the lives of gay people. Many gay couples adopt or otherwise have kids.
Of course, this could explain some of the support for Prop. 8---employers who don't want to lose their "perfect" employees?
Actually, most (many?) breast-feeding working moms use breast pumps to express breast milk for use while they're at work. That's how my wife and I did it, anyway.
I'd like to see some analysis about the feasibility of replacing satellites with airships in certain cases. Isn't it a lot cheaper and more fuel-efficient to put a blimp in the air as compared to a satellite? What if we could use them in place of communications satellites-- instead of satellite radio we'd have blimp radio! You'd have to do some extra work to keep the blimp in a geosynchronous position, but a comparison of the energy expenditures would be very interesting.
Nixon was too liberal for the current GOP, although they appreciate his theories on executive power.
In this particular case, maybe someone could set up a "Public Domain Fund", a non-profit whose sole job is to hold the copyrights of works meant for the public domain (including anonymous works). Would this work? Can the charter of said organization be written so that there is no chance of them violating the public-domain nature of the works?
Even as couples from across the globe are flocking in droves
Just how big is a drove, anyway? They would have to be pretty large numbers for this to make much difference in our gene pool. Yes, the price is going to come down, and genetic manipulation is going to become de rigeur in the future just to prevent the worst diseases, but we've got some time yet.
When it does become common and cheap, it's going to have a ton of very interesting side-effects. It could wipe out racism, for instance: when a black couple can have a white child or vice versa, how does a racist know whom to hate? And instead of wiping out genetic diversity, it could add to it greatly. There are plenty of people who give their kids weird names because they hated being one of 5 Jennifers in their class; how much more likely are they to get creative if they had the same *face* as 4 other people in their class?
The previous poster wasn't arguing that the procedure itself would hurt the embryo, but that the results of the procedure could hurt the child in the future. The procedure might be flawed itself, and have unintended side-effects like causing new (or well-known) genetic diseases. Or even if it doesn't, the parents might decide that it would be cool to have a 7' tall daughter with green hair. Um yeah, thanks Mom. :)
A tangent: your mentioning the dowry issue makes me wonder whether anyone has ever proposed public subsidies of dowries for poor families in India? It sounds crazy to a Westerner (who might think that eliminating the dowry system would be more appropriate), but I imagine it might be a reasonable position for a "socialist"-leaning Indian politician to take.
A child should be loved regardless of his/her genetic makeup...but once that child exists the die is cast. Choosing the child's genetic makeup before it exists is a different thing entirely.
e.g. I have a 1-year-old daughter whom I adore. We're going to have one more child, and I'd love for it to be a son, for various reasons. If our next child is a daughter, I will love her completely. If someone offers to arrange for our next child to be male for even only $1000, I would pass. But if I could wave a magic wand*? Yeah sure, I'd consider it. (Of course I'd fix any ailments first.)
There might be some danger of loss of diversity in America, but where this would REALLY be problematic if it became widespread would be present-day China. In twenty years, their male-female ratio would be 20-1 (then again, that would fix their overpopulation problems. :)
*Yeah yeah, double entendre, whatnot.
I remember writing webpages with images in 1996, so yes. No CSS I don't think: I can tell because all I know about HTML I learned prior to 1997 when I graduated from college.
From what I remember, most people's personal homepages (at least mine) were made up of a number of links to favorite and/or interesting pages: prior to search engines this was how you found new websites to visit. We'd even put links up to major companies' websites; who would bother to do that today? :)
The traditonal way in which audio, video and textual content is distributed is over.
Except it's not; plenty of people are making lots of money by distributing copyrighted material the old way. It may be true that we are seeing the beginning of the end of them, but meanwhile, our horse-and-buggy lobby (unlike the original horse-and-buggy lobby?) is rich and powerful, and in the short term can cause a lot of trouble.
I bow to the EFF since they know what the heck they're talking about, unlike me. :) Thanks for the link
But in a sense, the text is an encoded form of an audiobook, just like an MP3 file but in ASCII form. It's like someone selling a poster where the text of a short story is arranged so that, from a distance, it forms the image of some copyrighted artwork. Surely the postermaker would have to pay the writer AND the artist for using their works, not just the writer, even though the "source code" is the same for both.
I don't think the Authors' Guild SHOULD be right, but I think they might be right (for now).
At first I scoffed at the audacity of the Authors' Guild, but after thinking about it I'm not so sure that they don't have a point. At least, it needs to be settled by a court.
What Amazon is doing is supplying an algorithm which translates the written word into the spoken text. Suppose this was declared legal with no strings attached. Now suppose Amazon writes a very specific decoding algorithm for that text, which converts the original ASCII into a data stream which represents James Earl Jones reading the same text. Both are just algorithms. Now judges aren't bound by ridiculous analogies and so could very easily rule the first to be fine but the second to be illegal, but it doesn't seem so cut and dried.
Just like in the case of "pirated" music, we see a place where copyright law needs to be updated to account for new technology. It's inevitable that this issue was going to come up sooner or later. It's to the benefit of the Guilds' opponents that the Author Guilds' claim sounds so ridiculous on the surface, because it would be relatively easy to stir up public sentiment against their claim, and to get a law through Congress reversing any court ruling in the Guild's favor. A more subtle test case would have worked a lot better.
You watch clues in a movie very differently when you know you should be looking for them.
And I think that can limit the benefits of reading a movie review. A professional critic has watched so many movies that he knows the tropes, he's expecting the twist, and so misses the thrill of the unknown. A casual moviegoer (like me) hasn't watched so many movies, and hasn't bothered to study the ones he has watched, and so more movies seem fresh and new and surprising. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, if enjoyment is the goal: the naif gets to enjoy more of the movies he sees, while the critic has a deeper appreciation for the few movies he finds to be good. But they're looking for different things, and one can't necessarily predict what the other will enjoy.
Tells you how much I've looked at the thing; I just found a letter in the pages saying it was an advance copy for Leo Kadanoff. That makes sense.
You mean James Gleick. Oddly enough, I have a proof copy of his book, which I found in my desk when I was a physics graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 90s; I have no idea how it got there (Gleick was never at Chicago as far as I know-- someone there must have proofread for him, or maybe it was a former student). I've kept it all these years but I've never gotten around to reading it; with your endorsement I'll have to get around to it.
You are comparing Apples and Oranges (or Apples and PCs). From what I've heard, Apple products for Windows come with some obnoxious upgrade tendencies (e.g. downloading Safari when you upgrade iTunes, etc). Apple doesn't do things like that on OSX: there's a Software Update program which pops up once a week (when there are updates), and you can choose which updates you want to install, when you want to install them.
I wonder if it's just that the Windows team at Apple are nitwits, or if their goal is to make using Windows more cumbersome to convince people to switch (and if that is a team goal or a company goal).