"People have no "soul" anymore, they want fluff with no real substance, typical disposable society."
It's not that people dont have souls its that new ones are constantly born without an entertainment history, if you want to know why industries pump out the same stuff time and time again its because people dying and new people being born wipes the slate clean. They could be a game company that pumps out the same shit for decades and as long as newblood or blood that doesn't care or gets bored exists money will be made.
"Why should we not examine the important ethical questions? There is absolutely no doubt that significant scientific benefit could come from cloning or farming of humans in more developed forms. So should we push forward with things such as that, full force? Or should we take pause ask important questions that define our very humanity?"
The thing most people miss is that nature naturally destroys unfertalized eggs every month, how many eggs inside a women's body that will never see the light of day and die with her body upon her death? You can't in one sentence say embryo's are objectionable while nature/the human natural body itself kills millions and billions of embryo's naturally by itself.
Embryonic stem cell research is no more objectionable then a woman having her period. End of story. People just refuse to think with a very wide scope, how many eggs are there within a woman's body or "potential people" right now dying every day with peoples entire bodies due to sickness, illness, accident, etc? We going to have a "save the sperm too" or do sperm not count somehow? Whenever I jack off am I killing hundreds of millions of potential people? It's ridiculous argument.
Yes of course but the manufacturing process for eyes and lenses are in no way logically comparable. Not to mention the goal and objective when designing lenses is ends up being completely different then having to design a biologically non-toxic/corrosive/maintainable for decades by food biological eyes you got there.
Not to mention your eyes have to fight all sorts of organisms wanting to have it for lunch. Making an lense or lense components that you do not have to grow with one where you control the manufacturing process/environment and no life or persons eyesight is at risk just aren't comparable. Apples and oranges.
We can not get grow lenses and hook them up to brains yet like cells with nanotechnology ala cellular technology found in life.
... until they realize biological intelligence is the place where AI really needs to start. It seems pretty ass backward to model biological behaviour on a machine when you don't understand the mechanics of Biological or human consciousness.
My guesss is 'real' true AI, that see's the world like us and senses it like us wont be understood for a long time. Because lets face it, what AI really gives us is precise tools, to do all the jobs we cannot more precisely, but the fact is these greater functions were made by us, and are still reliant on our wetware brains for their superior formation and organization, and are only as good as we build them to be.
AI is supposed to do more and be more then just an automaton running algorithms, what I mean is, it has to self-aware environment like we are, when we are very young when we are first born we run algorithms that build some the foundation of the mind, none of us remember learning to walk or our first words within our first year or two, our self-awareness, 'we' as we experience ourselves don't wake up until between 2 and 4 year of age, this can vary somewhat depending on how fast the brain develops but the biology does most of the 'plumbing work' for us to build a foundation / mature the brain structures, to the point where enabling self-awareness makes sense.
Babies may seem alive and self-aware when they are very young but they are not, they do not experience the world at all like 6 year old, they are effectively asleep until the brain has matured to the point where self-awareness is achievable, we do not understand this process and until this is understood AI will be a wet dream if we truly want to create intelligences like human beings that are not merely machines not aware of their own existence responding in like a live human being in every respect, but not really alive. You can only really be said to be alive if you awake.
People in their sleep speak and move and do all sorts of 'living' things but they are not aware that they are doing so, it's all automatic, this is basically what most if not all AI will be like until we understand the threshold of what causes human self-awareness.
"This is not as implausible as it may seem. There are many cases in which authors have released print versions of their text alongside or after having released electronic versions. In the majority of cases, the freely available electronic text bolsters sales of the print version."
I wholeheartedly agree with this statement, because you don't have the time in a bookstore to peruse the contents of a book, thank god amazon now allows you to browse at least some portions of the book, because no one wants to spend that kind of money on a book that is not what they needed or had so little information of value.
"So far, your actions have been that of a cockroach."
So nike making shoes that cost them $1 and selling them for $120-200 I suppose is not highway robbery? Or how about most businesses paying 'minimum wage' that a single person only makes enough to pay rent and food, if that, many actually go in the reverse direction just simply living -> going into debt instead of profiting.
IMO there is another kind of theft: It's called resource dominance, price gouging and selective availability (i.e. all shoe stores in such and such an area only carry shoes of this price or higher) or those who have the power/resources make the rules, and those who dont get to follow them.
This can happen especially in smaller towns where there are not many stores, they can get away with determining what the customers will pay because there is nowhere else to go, and most people want to save time because they have other things in their lives they have to do besides getting a pair of shoes.
I suppose "that's decent way to treat human beings" right? Please, capitalism has inherent defects we need to control or there would be social overthrow if not outright revolution, I'd love to see what would happen if minimum wage laws were repealed all forms of social assistance disappeared, and let the free marketers see the consequences of unchecked irresponsible/bottom lineism of human exploitation. It's all a bloody animalistic race to the bottom if you let capitalism go unchecked, and we certainly have ample evidence of inhumanity of many businesses and their 'business practices'.
This is why people enact labor laws and are constantly political about the working poor, these people work hard and are not able to make ends meet something is fundamentally broken and incorrect in how the human economy is designed.
It's not hard to see why when most employees are paid and treated so poorly. When I was younger I worked for Zellers as a stockboy doing night shifts and the managers were basically running a jail, you couldn't go out of the store, you had to buy food from their apporved vending machines.
You were not aloud to bring in bagged food/lunches for the possibility you could hide stolen items in it, you were not allowed to leave the store during your lunch break, etc. One time I forgot my money and I asked if I could pay for the pop/food next shift and my manager was just a complete asshole about it and said tough luck. So you can be damn sure I was mad, this and other stupid management rules went on for a while there and I got fed up and started stealing shit just to blow off steam for being treated so poorly - being forced to buy my lunches there, as if they weren't paying me as little as possible and STILL trying to milk/recoupe in a sneaky fashion the wages of their employees by such ridiculous rules.
I have no regrets about my stupid spur of the moment and hotheaded theivery but I soon left thereafter as I was disgusted by my employer and somewhat by myself at what I had rashly done. You can be damn sure that businesses are as equally as culpable for the theft of their employee's inflict on them since businesses are creating work and economic conditions insofar that they are just asking for it. The false line of reasoning in bourgoise capitalism is that capitalism is amoral, it certainly is not since economic and business practices are controlled, subservient to and driven by people. Economic reality is social manmade construct.
If you want to stop employee theft, stop treating your employee's like shit and give them a reason to trust you and place their confidence in you, so you your employees don't feel like they are being so bloody oppressed. Businesses should expect evil when they dish out evil on people in a working environment. They are just as underhanded as their the thieves, IMO this just shows us what is wrong with many capitalist enterprises where worker supply is so excessive that these businesses have complete exploitive domination over less fortunate people.
Once again comparing stealing objects and replacing objects in return packages with fraudulent objects is irrational. Fraudulent returns hurts these retail businesses, they actually suffer real losses as if someone had actually stolen the physical item. Imagine walking into the stores and replacing 1000's of dollars of HDTV's with much cheaper (but similar) flatscreen TV's, you're actually suffering real losses here as opposed to hypothetical 'lost sales', you're suffering fraud, copyright infringement is certainly not fraud, because the owner still doesn't lose his shirt because some portion of windows XP is removed and he can no longer sell his product. Comparing physical items with software is just wrong through and through. Piracy of copyrighted, unlimited quantity, easy-to-reproduce software is nothing like this.
There is effectively zero cost for bill when someone pirates Windows XP thats some profit he didn't make, note that these companies are still profitable DESPITE piracy. Most people who pirate simply do not use the programs enough to justify the pricetag of much software, really and truly I wish the heart and mind of humanity would change from a cut-throught-economic animal one to one more in line with reason and rationality.
One doesn't have to go far to see irrationality, inequality and injustice in all economies. Economies by their very nature are political entities simply because they involve resource allocation and distribution most people depend on day to day for their livelihoods.
The OP still has a valid point about the pointlessness of life, the fact is just because a certain group of people want people to live certain kinds of lives or do certain kinds of work for their own temporal economic or national benefit is a form of collectivism and almost 'anti-individualism' or 'anti-libertarianism', because they are attempting to influence people's choices as a form of social control.
The fact is physicists have already started speculating if not talking outright about the evidence of natural cosmic disasters and the universes eventual death, if these pan out scientifically then really all of humanities achievements and work is moot if at some point (no matter how far in the future) their are natural circumstances that our descendents and their science/ability, and limits on the laws of nature that simply cannot overcome. S ay like a galactic collision or some other cosmic calamity us (perhaps) finally realizing the laws of physics exist in such a way making travel to other stars and our survival very low probability for our kind of life (even enhanced/genetically engineered life, i.e. immortality, etc).
You can go ahead and accuse me of being fatalist but any student of physics should know that the universe has its own giant program unfolding and that it may (and certianly gives the impression) for all intents and purposes that nature itself in it's ultimate unfolding over time is the absolute destruction of our kind as the universe cycles ands goes through it's motions and processes far beyond our ability to control it.
Religious faith in science and technology is just as bad as faith in religion in my opinion. Scientists often pour scorn on the "miraculous" wishful thinking of religious people, when they themselves are just as guilty as wishful thinking about human ability to transcend natures laws and become masters of those laws existing and surviving forever in this universe cyclic creation and destruction, with cosmological forces much that will most likely be much beyond the control of any human being for the rest of this universes existence.
Everyone wants to believe in hope, no matter how misguided, irrational and baseless it is, you could argue that irrational faith is key to our survival even if it is placed in science and technology rather then religion, because frankly I think hope in science and technology when looked at from a large enough scope of universal time is in fact irrational, there is plenty of evidence suggesting our kinds destruction in this universe.
We live at a point in time of the universe in a small oasis while the rest of the universe is completely hostile to life and many if not all our sophisticated artifacts, no matter how well built and shielded from universal processes that seek to rip them apart and cause their decay over time.
"The US took off economically in the postwar period when we also dominated science. I think science dominance has a lot to do with economic success."
Yeah but you have to want to attract people into those industries the problem is there are far bigger problems facing world capitalist national economies, the problem is when one economy is sinking another is gaining due differences in the value of what their money they can actually purchase, think about it this way: When companies can get 8 guys for the price of one north american one, you aren't going to be very apt to go into very difficult fields with very little or mediocre stability (in terms of job secuirty) or mediocre pay (relative to the countries standard and cost of living).
If you want to attract science talent, simply pay them more, but oh wait, the government and businesses don't want to do that, they want top talent for McWage (relatively speaking) prices for the difficulty and sacrifices of time and quality of life these kids make to go into these disciplines. If you want people to sacrifice and dedicate their life to work the majority of the time they are alive, then you are going to have to pony up rewards worth that kind of giving of ones time in life.
I don't think science will ever be "cool", until we start enhancing human intelligence equalizing the skill and mental ability gaps between people. Personally the credentials required for a lot of sciences are difficult if not totally life absorbing if you have average to above average intelligence and are adequately capable of getting into and through university.
I think more people would go into the sciences if they didn't fear their jobs being farmed out to highly educated low wage countries like india and China, whether you want to admit it or not companies want highly educated people for minimum wages in North america and since currency disparity and supply/demand is so skewed in the world companies can just play the people of each country off one another.
No one likes going into a field that they are not going to be able to sustain themselves or have hopes of a reasonably stable existence, there are enough stresses and pressures for people to perform throughout their life.
Some people work to live rather then live to work, most scientists I know are in the latter. This is most likely one of the factors that deters people from going into the sciences, the effort and time sink required for those that are not exceptionally apt in those areas would mean they would end up having little life outside of their work.
Let's just be clear on why the dreamcast failed, sega had a history of burning their customers, witness:
-Sega CD - no 3rd part support, then abandonment altogether
-32X - Same deal
-Saturn - once again 3rd party support support was non-existent
Dreamcast was dead after Sega's constant stream of releasing bad/expensive hardware then abandoning it. When you burn your own customers they wont return, Nintendo so far is doing the exact same thing sega has been doing since the N64 in terms of 3rd party support. Developers are totally abandoning the platform over time because the Playstation 1 basically sucked up all the former SNES players with all those formerly on snes franchies like Castvania, Megaman, Final fantasy and all the other Japanese RPG's that were being made for SNES all went to the Playstation 1 since the CD-ROM storage capacity versus cartridge was so enormous, over 100x the storage of a rom cartridge, you could never do gigantic game like FF7 on the N64 without the storage. FF7 was 3 CD's by the way, there is simply no way a cartridge could ever come close to the amount of graphics and animations PS1 era RPG's were using, not to mention countless other games that could never have been done simply do the storage limitations.
I agree but even on SATA2 you'd still be horribly limited, and I doubt the scores would improve that much from SATA1 to SATA2 because the controller was not designed for and around solid state device. Not to mention a constant 100/Mb sec should be plenty enough for loading stuff off of a small 4GB device. I'm not saying it's a great device but they'd have to wait 5 or so years until SATA 3-4-5 and six come out before they even approach the bandwidth of the ram, and by then we'll have stuff 2-4x as fast as today.
"It's an unfalsifiable claim that, even if it were actually true, would not be a scientific theory."
If it was true it would be scientific, if scientific history is synonymous with science, then real history simply must be synonymous with science, and any claim that it isn't science is simply philosophical bias. Just pointing out your error. Science is based on naturalistic philosophy of cause and effect, if there are other causes and effects out there we have yet to discover or are inaccessable to us at this point in history and they actually exist, it doesn't matter what our basic underpinning philosophy is, if something is actually real and true it is by definition scientific.
You can't have truth that is the at the sametime scientific falsehood or pseudoscience.
"And, that doesn't take into account the dramatic improvement in reliability and speed (both access and interface) that the newer drives exhibit. Do you think CPUs have kept up with this?"
Reliability hasn't improved much. Hard disks still fail with frightening frequency, you'd think that all disks would be able to last at least 5 years with 24/7 operation. The warranties on hard disks were reduced a few years back to 1 year, then when Seagate upped the warranty of their drives to 5 years some companies in the industry swung back the other way towards 3 year warranties. IMHO hard disk companies would love to not have the liability of warranty, but hard disks are worthless without them, no one wants to entrust their data to a device that the manufacturer is confident wont even last much more then year or 2.
In my opinion the money should be going to making hard drives more reliable. Capacity is good, but at some point searching these monster drives is going to be ridiculously time consuming.
The interface simply doesn't matter if you're not using a RAID devices. In my opinion a solid state drive @ SATA1 speeds would be more then enough for 99% of the enthusiast market until the next generation of solid state devices hit. I mean come on you're talking about a gap thats unbridgeable for mechanical devices like hard disks. SATA1 would be plenty for a first generation product for the enthusiast crowd, it wouldn't be enough for people who had special applications and wanted to do complex things on the cheap, but what do you expect for $100?
Sorry Guild wars does not have "excellent" end game content, the only "end game" content is eaten up rather fast, the item and skill system is horribly redundant, do I neeed 4 blocking skills which mostly do the same thing in different tree's when I can only carry around 8 skills at a time?
"PVE advancement supports PVP"
Blah, many PVP'ers hate the fact that they have to go through the single player game to get the best items and skills. I wouldn't exactly call that a feature.
"No monthly fee"
Well gee GW is not an MMO, its more like a super Peer-2-peer hub, whenever you enter the gameworld you can only have a maximum of 8 human controlled characters (depending on town)
"Skill based rather than item/experience based"
What the hell are you talking about? The computer AUTOMATICALLY attacks for you you click icons and you can't really effectively run from certain battles if you're not playing with other human beings. If you want a "real" skill based RPG look at diablo, way more skill is involved because you have way more freedom over your characters movement and even that is stretching it, a true skill based game would take fighting game mechanics and wrap them inside an RPG, think Soulcalibur 2 gameplay mechanics inside a game like diablo.
"All your characters can share money and treasure amongst themselves."
Which doesn't matter because the treasure, skills and magic item system is so damn shallow it makes even the diablo series look like God compared to GW. Guild wars once you get high level becomes insanely boring because you run out of things to do, with low level caps and only being able to take 8 skills with you, on top of having little reason to fight monsters for better gear because most of the gear in GW is so undifferentiated from each other for the sake of pvp "balance" that it totally kills the PvE experience.
GW is only a good game, not a great game, Diablo and Diablo 2 were superior games. GW may be more fun then any MMO out there but as a game, gamers play games for fun. And GW simply isn't even remotely as good as games much older then it.
The fact that we still use languages like C/C++ , python and Java shows us Computer scientists and compiler designers have a lot more work to do to make programming language interfaces more intuitive and easier to understand. C/c++ in my mind is a few steps up from assembler but we should hail it as an achievement. Too much work still goes into writing things as basic as GUI's and buttons, imagine having to write an entire GUI From scratch. The fact is computer languages themselves still have a long way to go.
Visual basic may be a "horrible" programming language but most people dont want to spend their lives having to do all the work that VB and other languages already does for them. As a rapid application development tool VB surely works as it's intended for quick small applications, you dont use assembler to do a job you can do easier in C/c++, and you dont use C/c++ for a job you can do easier in VB. Right tool for the right job.
It takes time to write blogs, many peoples blogs if you look at the amount of crap they post simply must take up a significant portion of their time to write, so it's not exactly wrong for bloggers to attempt to make money through ad revenue when in actual fact if they can sustain it there is no reason they shouldn't attempt the smart thing to do.
Actually Nuclear arms do not make the military redundant, it takes war back to the "old way" of doing things because no one wants to destroy the planet so they have to war the old fashioned way. Or do it through economic means or through sheer population expansion.
It's better to lose to an enemy and survive then to destroy the entire planet and have none of your kin, knowledge, idealogies, etc, survive.
I wish they would make flash drives the new standard, they are relatively cheap and flash SD/MMC / Compact flash cards are cheap enough that it would be easy to drive flash/SD card prices down really fast if everyone adopted them. What I think is the major problem is lack of bios support and standard case layouts for frontside USB ports / using CHEAP USB drives/media to boot to dos, floppy is still econical and portable to computers that lack USB ports, CDROM is write only, the floppy hangs on by a thread simply because it is read/write and you're most assured any older hardware you need to boot to dos from will have floppy support in the bios.
While I'll agree they may be important as in they have something to teach us about how to value human lives and communities over profits and material goods, and give us an important lession in examining how technological innovation displaces people and can ruin peoples lives (both financially and psychologically).
The absence of science and technology will hurt any culture when the sun runs out of fuel. It doesn't matter how sustainable you are, once the sun goes no amount of simple living will save you or your childrens lives.
They also dont teach us much in relation about how human beings love lying to themselves and indoctrinating their children for the sake of the invisible pink unicorn. They are not pro-science, pro-truth kind of people, they are just as disgusting as outsiders, sure they may be all around good people in most respects but their whole life is based on a book of thousands of years old lies.
Slashdot Mirror
"People have no "soul" anymore, they want fluff with no real substance, typical disposable society."
It's not that people dont have souls its that new ones are constantly born without an entertainment history, if you want to know why industries pump out the same stuff time and time again its because people dying and new people being born wipes the slate clean. They could be a game company that pumps out the same shit for decades and as long as newblood or blood that doesn't care or gets bored exists money will be made.
"Why should we not examine the important ethical questions? There is absolutely no doubt that significant scientific benefit could come from cloning or farming of humans in more developed forms. So should we push forward with things such as that, full force? Or should we take pause ask important questions that define our very humanity?"
The thing most people miss is that nature naturally destroys unfertalized eggs every month, how many eggs inside a women's body that will never see the light of day and die with her body upon her death? You can't in one sentence say embryo's are objectionable while nature/the human natural body itself kills millions and billions of embryo's naturally by itself.
Embryonic stem cell research is no more objectionable then a woman having her period. End of story. People just refuse to think with a very wide scope, how many eggs are there within a woman's body or "potential people" right now dying every day with peoples entire bodies due to sickness, illness, accident, etc? We going to have a "save the sperm too" or do sperm not count somehow? Whenever I jack off am I killing hundreds of millions of potential people? It's ridiculous argument.
Yes of course but the manufacturing process for eyes and lenses are in no way logically comparable. Not to mention the goal and objective when designing lenses is ends up being completely different then having to design a biologically non-toxic/corrosive/maintainable for decades by food biological eyes you got there.
Not to mention your eyes have to fight all sorts of organisms wanting to have it for lunch. Making an lense or lense components that you do not have to grow with one where you control the manufacturing process/environment and no life or persons eyesight is at risk just aren't comparable. Apples and oranges.
We can not get grow lenses and hook them up to brains yet like cells with nanotechnology ala cellular technology found in life.
... until they realize biological intelligence is the place where AI really needs to start. It seems pretty ass backward to model biological behaviour on a machine when you don't understand the mechanics of Biological or human consciousness.
My guesss is 'real' true AI, that see's the world like us and senses it like us wont be understood for a long time. Because lets face it, what AI really gives us is precise tools, to do all the jobs we cannot more precisely, but the fact is these greater functions were made by us, and are still reliant on our wetware brains for their superior formation and organization, and are only as good as we build them to be.
AI is supposed to do more and be more then just an automaton running algorithms, what I mean is, it has to self-aware environment like we are, when we are very young when we are first born we run algorithms that build some the foundation of the mind, none of us remember learning to walk or our first words within our first year or two, our self-awareness, 'we' as we experience ourselves don't wake up until between 2 and 4 year of age, this can vary somewhat depending on how fast the brain develops but the biology does most of the 'plumbing work' for us to build a foundation / mature the brain structures, to the point where enabling self-awareness makes sense.
Babies may seem alive and self-aware when they are very young but they are not, they do not experience the world at all like 6 year old, they are effectively asleep until the brain has matured to the point where self-awareness is achievable, we do not understand this process and until this is understood AI will be a wet dream if we truly want to create intelligences like human beings that are not merely machines not aware of their own existence responding in like a live human being in every respect, but not really alive. You can only really be said to be alive if you awake.
People in their sleep speak and move and do all sorts of 'living' things but they are not aware that they are doing so, it's all automatic, this is basically what most if not all AI will be like until we understand the threshold of what causes human self-awareness.
"This is not as implausible as it may seem. There are many cases in which authors have released print versions of their text alongside or after having released electronic versions. In the majority of cases, the freely available electronic text bolsters sales of the print version."
I wholeheartedly agree with this statement, because you don't have the time in a bookstore to peruse the contents of a book, thank god amazon now allows you to browse at least some portions of the book, because no one wants to spend that kind of money on a book that is not what they needed or had so little information of value.
"So far, your actions have been that of a cockroach."
So nike making shoes that cost them $1 and selling them for $120-200 I suppose is not highway robbery? Or how about most businesses paying 'minimum wage' that a single person only makes enough to pay rent and food, if that, many actually go in the reverse direction just simply living -> going into debt instead of profiting.
IMO there is another kind of theft: It's called resource dominance, price gouging and selective availability (i.e. all shoe stores in such and such an area only carry shoes of this price or higher) or those who have the power/resources make the rules, and those who dont get to follow them.
This can happen especially in smaller towns where there are not many stores, they can get away with determining what the customers will pay because there is nowhere else to go, and most people want to save time because they have other things in their lives they have to do besides getting a pair of shoes.
I suppose "that's decent way to treat human beings" right? Please, capitalism has inherent defects we need to control or there would be social overthrow if not outright revolution, I'd love to see what would happen if minimum wage laws were repealed all forms of social assistance disappeared, and let the free marketers see the consequences of unchecked irresponsible/bottom lineism of human exploitation. It's all a bloody animalistic race to the bottom if you let capitalism go unchecked, and we certainly have ample evidence of inhumanity of many businesses and their 'business practices'.
This is why people enact labor laws and are constantly political about the working poor, these people work hard and are not able to make ends meet something is fundamentally broken and incorrect in how the human economy is designed.
It's not hard to see why when most employees are paid and treated so poorly. When I was younger I worked for Zellers as a stockboy doing night shifts and the managers were basically running a jail, you couldn't go out of the store, you had to buy food from their apporved vending machines.
You were not aloud to bring in bagged food/lunches for the possibility you could hide stolen items in it, you were not allowed to leave the store during your lunch break, etc. One time I forgot my money and I asked if I could pay for the pop/food next shift and my manager was just a complete asshole about it and said tough luck. So you can be damn sure I was mad, this and other stupid management rules went on for a while there and I got fed up and started stealing shit just to blow off steam for being treated so poorly - being forced to buy my lunches there, as if they weren't paying me as little as possible and STILL trying to milk/recoupe in a sneaky fashion the wages of their employees by such ridiculous rules.
I have no regrets about my stupid spur of the moment and hotheaded theivery but I soon left thereafter as I was disgusted by my employer and somewhat by myself at what I had rashly done. You can be damn sure that businesses are as equally as culpable for the theft of their employee's inflict on them since businesses are creating work and economic conditions insofar that they are just asking for it. The false line of reasoning in bourgoise capitalism is that capitalism is amoral, it certainly is not since economic and business practices are controlled, subservient to and driven by people. Economic reality is social manmade construct.
If you want to stop employee theft, stop treating your employee's like shit and give them a reason to trust you and place their confidence in you, so you your employees don't feel like they are being so bloody oppressed. Businesses should expect evil when they dish out evil on people in a working environment. They are just as underhanded as their the thieves, IMO this just shows us what is wrong with many capitalist enterprises where worker supply is so excessive that these businesses have complete exploitive domination over less fortunate people.
Once again comparing stealing objects and replacing objects in return packages with fraudulent objects is irrational. Fraudulent returns hurts these retail businesses, they actually suffer real losses as if someone had actually stolen the physical item. Imagine walking into the stores and replacing 1000's of dollars of HDTV's with much cheaper (but similar) flatscreen TV's, you're actually suffering real losses here as opposed to hypothetical 'lost sales', you're suffering fraud, copyright infringement is certainly not fraud, because the owner still doesn't lose his shirt because some portion of windows XP is removed and he can no longer sell his product. Comparing physical items with software is just wrong through and through. Piracy of copyrighted, unlimited quantity, easy-to-reproduce software is nothing like this.
There is effectively zero cost for bill when someone pirates Windows XP thats some profit he didn't make, note that these companies are still profitable DESPITE piracy. Most people who pirate simply do not use the programs enough to justify the pricetag of much software, really and truly I wish the heart and mind of humanity would change from a cut-throught-economic animal one to one more in line with reason and rationality.
One doesn't have to go far to see irrationality, inequality and injustice in all economies. Economies by their very nature are political entities simply because they involve resource allocation and distribution most people depend on day to day for their livelihoods.
The OP still has a valid point about the pointlessness of life, the fact is just because a certain group of people want people to live certain kinds of lives or do certain kinds of work for their own temporal economic or national benefit is a form of collectivism and almost 'anti-individualism' or 'anti-libertarianism', because they are attempting to influence people's choices as a form of social control.
The fact is physicists have already started speculating if not talking outright about the evidence of natural cosmic disasters and the universes eventual death, if these pan out scientifically then really all of humanities achievements and work is moot if at some point (no matter how far in the future) their are natural circumstances that our descendents and their science/ability, and limits on the laws of nature that simply cannot overcome. S ay like a galactic collision or some other cosmic calamity us (perhaps) finally realizing the laws of physics exist in such a way making travel to other stars and our survival very low probability for our kind of life (even enhanced/genetically engineered life, i.e. immortality, etc).
You can go ahead and accuse me of being fatalist but any student of physics should know that the universe has its own giant program unfolding and that it may (and certianly gives the impression) for all intents and purposes that nature itself in it's ultimate unfolding over time is the absolute destruction of our kind as the universe cycles ands goes through it's motions and processes far beyond our ability to control it.
Religious faith in science and technology is just as bad as faith in religion in my opinion. Scientists often pour scorn on the "miraculous" wishful thinking of religious people, when they themselves are just as guilty as wishful thinking about human ability to transcend natures laws and become masters of those laws existing and surviving forever in this universe cyclic creation and destruction, with cosmological forces much that will most likely be much beyond the control of any human being for the rest of this universes existence.
Everyone wants to believe in hope, no matter how misguided, irrational and baseless it is, you could argue that irrational faith is key to our survival even if it is placed in science and technology rather then religion, because frankly I think hope in science and technology when looked at from a large enough scope of universal time is in fact irrational, there is plenty of evidence suggesting our kinds destruction in this universe.
We live at a point in time of the universe in a small oasis while the rest of the universe is completely hostile to life and many if not all our sophisticated artifacts, no matter how well built and shielded from universal processes that seek to rip them apart and cause their decay over time.
"The US took off economically in the postwar period when we also dominated science. I think science dominance has a lot to do with economic success."
Yeah but you have to want to attract people into those industries the problem is there are far bigger problems facing world capitalist national economies, the problem is when one economy is sinking another is gaining due differences in the value of what their money they can actually purchase, think about it this way: When companies can get 8 guys for the price of one north american one, you aren't going to be very apt to go into very difficult fields with very little or mediocre stability (in terms of job secuirty) or mediocre pay (relative to the countries standard and cost of living).
If you want to attract science talent, simply pay them more, but oh wait, the government and businesses don't want to do that, they want top talent for McWage (relatively speaking) prices for the difficulty and sacrifices of time and quality of life these kids make to go into these disciplines. If you want people to sacrifice and dedicate their life to work the majority of the time they are alive, then you are going to have to pony up rewards worth that kind of giving of ones time in life.
I don't think science will ever be "cool", until we start enhancing human intelligence equalizing the skill and mental ability gaps between people. Personally the credentials required for a lot of sciences are difficult if not totally life absorbing if you have average to above average intelligence and are adequately capable of getting into and through university.
I think more people would go into the sciences if they didn't fear their jobs being farmed out to highly educated low wage countries like india and China, whether you want to admit it or not companies want highly educated people for minimum wages in North america and since currency disparity and supply/demand is so skewed in the world companies can just play the people of each country off one another.
No one likes going into a field that they are not going to be able to sustain themselves or have hopes of a reasonably stable existence, there are enough stresses and pressures for people to perform throughout their life.
Some people work to live rather then live to work, most scientists I know are in the latter. This is most likely one of the factors that deters people from going into the sciences, the effort and time sink required for those that are not exceptionally apt in those areas would mean they would end up having little life outside of their work.
Let's just be clear on why the dreamcast failed, sega had a history of burning their customers, witness:
-Sega CD - no 3rd part support, then abandonment altogether
-32X - Same deal
-Saturn - once again 3rd party support support was non-existent
Dreamcast was dead after Sega's constant stream of releasing bad/expensive hardware then abandoning it. When you burn your own customers they wont return, Nintendo so far is doing the exact same thing sega has been doing since the N64 in terms of 3rd party support. Developers are totally abandoning the platform over time because the Playstation 1 basically sucked up all the former SNES players with all those formerly on snes franchies like Castvania, Megaman, Final fantasy and all the other Japanese RPG's that were being made for SNES all went to the Playstation 1 since the CD-ROM storage capacity versus cartridge was so enormous, over 100x the storage of a rom cartridge, you could never do gigantic game like FF7 on the N64 without the storage. FF7 was 3 CD's by the way, there is simply no way a cartridge could ever come close to the amount of graphics and animations PS1 era RPG's were using, not to mention countless other games that could never have been done simply do the storage limitations.
I agree but even on SATA2 you'd still be horribly limited, and I doubt the scores would improve that much from SATA1 to SATA2 because the controller was not designed for and around solid state device. Not to mention a constant 100/Mb sec should be plenty enough for loading stuff off of a small 4GB device. I'm not saying it's a great device but they'd have to wait 5 or so years until SATA 3-4-5 and six come out before they even approach the bandwidth of the ram, and by then we'll have stuff 2-4x as fast as today.
"It's an unfalsifiable claim that, even if it were actually true, would not be a scientific theory."
If it was true it would be scientific, if scientific history is synonymous with science, then real history simply must be synonymous with science, and any claim that it isn't science is simply philosophical bias. Just pointing out your error. Science is based on naturalistic philosophy of cause and effect, if there are other causes and effects out there we have yet to discover or are inaccessable to us at this point in history and they actually exist, it doesn't matter what our basic underpinning philosophy is, if something is actually real and true it is by definition scientific.
You can't have truth that is the at the sametime scientific falsehood or pseudoscience.
"And, that doesn't take into account the dramatic improvement in reliability and speed (both access and interface) that the newer drives exhibit. Do you think CPUs have kept up with this?"
Reliability hasn't improved much. Hard disks still fail with frightening frequency, you'd think that all disks would be able to last at least 5 years with 24/7 operation. The warranties on hard disks were reduced a few years back to 1 year, then when Seagate upped the warranty of their drives to 5 years some companies in the industry swung back the other way towards 3 year warranties. IMHO hard disk companies would love to not have the liability of warranty, but hard disks are worthless without them, no one wants to entrust their data to a device that the manufacturer is confident wont even last much more then year or 2.
In my opinion the money should be going to making hard drives more reliable. Capacity is good, but at some point searching these monster drives is going to be ridiculously time consuming.
The interface simply doesn't matter if you're not using a RAID devices. In my opinion a solid state drive @ SATA1 speeds would be more then enough for 99% of the enthusiast market until the next generation of solid state devices hit. I mean come on you're talking about a gap thats unbridgeable for mechanical devices like hard disks. SATA1 would be plenty for a first generation product for the enthusiast crowd, it wouldn't be enough for people who had special applications and wanted to do complex things on the cheap, but what do you expect for $100?
"Excellent "end game" content"
Sorry Guild wars does not have "excellent" end game content, the only "end game" content is eaten up rather fast, the item and skill system is horribly redundant, do I neeed 4 blocking skills which mostly do the same thing in different tree's when I can only carry around 8 skills at a time?
"PVE advancement supports PVP"
Blah, many PVP'ers hate the fact that they have to go through the single player game to get the best items and skills. I wouldn't exactly call that a feature.
"No monthly fee"
Well gee GW is not an MMO, its more like a super Peer-2-peer hub, whenever you enter the gameworld you can only have a maximum of 8 human controlled characters (depending on town)
"Skill based rather than item/experience based"
What the hell are you talking about? The computer AUTOMATICALLY attacks for you you click icons and you can't really effectively run from certain battles if you're not playing with other human beings. If you want a "real" skill based RPG look at diablo, way more skill is involved because you have way more freedom over your characters movement and even that is stretching it, a true skill based game would take fighting game mechanics and wrap them inside an RPG, think Soulcalibur 2 gameplay mechanics inside a game like diablo.
"All your characters can share money and treasure amongst themselves."
Which doesn't matter because the treasure, skills and magic item system is so damn shallow it makes even the diablo series look like God compared to GW. Guild wars once you get high level becomes insanely boring because you run out of things to do, with low level caps and only being able to take 8 skills with you, on top of having little reason to fight monsters for better gear because most of the gear in GW is so undifferentiated from each other for the sake of pvp "balance" that it totally kills the PvE experience.
GW is only a good game, not a great game, Diablo and Diablo 2 were superior games. GW may be more fun then any MMO out there but as a game, gamers play games for fun. And GW simply isn't even remotely as good as games much older then it.
The fact that we still use languages like C/C++ , python and Java shows us Computer scientists and compiler designers have a lot more work to do to make programming language interfaces more intuitive and easier to understand. C/c++ in my mind is a few steps up from assembler but we should hail it as an achievement. Too much work still goes into writing things as basic as GUI's and buttons, imagine having to write an entire GUI From scratch. The fact is computer languages themselves still have a long way to go.
Visual basic may be a "horrible" programming language but most people dont want to spend their lives having to do all the work that VB and other languages already does for them. As a rapid application development tool VB surely works as it's intended for quick small applications, you dont use assembler to do a job you can do easier in C/c++, and you dont use C/c++ for a job you can do easier in VB. Right tool for the right job.
Gee, this is like the pot calling the kettle black, how many jobs as Mr. Gates company outsourced I wonder?
The guy is just playing the governments of the world off one another to benefit his own company. Not really news.
I had multiple windows open, asshat, so I accidentally replied to the wrong thread. So bloody what?
It takes time to write blogs, many peoples blogs if you look at the amount of crap they post simply must take up a significant portion of their time to write, so it's not exactly wrong for bloggers to attempt to make money through ad revenue when in actual fact if they can sustain it there is no reason they shouldn't attempt the smart thing to do.
But wasn't the computer game inspired by the real world? Where there are real wars and real nuclear weapons?
Actually Nuclear arms do not make the military redundant, it takes war back to the "old way" of doing things because no one wants to destroy the planet so they have to war the old fashioned way. Or do it through economic means or through sheer population expansion.
It's better to lose to an enemy and survive then to destroy the entire planet and have none of your kin, knowledge, idealogies, etc, survive.
I wish they would make flash drives the new standard, they are relatively cheap and flash SD/MMC / Compact flash cards are cheap enough that it would be easy to drive flash/SD card prices down really fast if everyone adopted them. What I think is the major problem is lack of bios support and standard case layouts for frontside USB ports / using CHEAP USB drives/media to boot to dos, floppy is still econical and portable to computers that lack USB ports, CDROM is write only, the floppy hangs on by a thread simply because it is read/write and you're most assured any older hardware you need to boot to dos from will have floppy support in the bios.
While I'll agree they may be important as in they have something to teach us about how to value human lives and communities over profits and material goods, and give us an important lession in examining how technological innovation displaces people and can ruin peoples lives (both financially and psychologically).
The absence of science and technology will hurt any culture when the sun runs out of fuel. It doesn't matter how sustainable you are, once the sun goes no amount of simple living will save you or your childrens lives.
They also dont teach us much in relation about how human beings love lying to themselves and indoctrinating their children for the sake of the invisible pink unicorn. They are not pro-science, pro-truth kind of people, they are just as disgusting as outsiders, sure they may be all around good people in most respects but their whole life is based on a book of thousands of years old lies.