" If you misspell a word or leave out a comma, it's fairly effortless to go back and fix your mistake."
Except many people do not realize they have made mistakes until after they have hit submit button, most people do not always detect mistakes they have made right away do to unconscious errors in perception.
For instance I will constantly make common mistakes because motor signals dropped from my motor cortex when retrieving motor input to type
"They" I will often time "the", what happens is motor inputs are associated with words and how they are stored in the mind and this is why so many common mistakes happen, quite frankly its not too big a deal since for many people trying to re-read what they wrote and fix mistakes is time more effort then it's worth.
Also lets not forget peoples speeds of reading (information uptake) and typing are radically different, and because of these differences people choose how to allot their time if they are slower then others.
"In my lifetime, I've seen "donut" become the de facto spelling rather than "doughnut," and I haven't even lived that long. "
The gh is to signify how to pronounce the o.
Consider the word DO
is it s DO NUT? or is it a dough NUT?
Notice how the spelling marks the pronunciation. In french (at least quebec french) they put little marks above the vowels, in english we come up with special rules that this sequence of letters after this vowel means you pronounce the vowel 'like this'.
... IMHO I believe this may have to do with bloodflow to the brain since obese people would not exercise as much and would have to work harder to get blood flowing to blood poor regions
Human beings are ALWAYS multi tasking, just that the majority of it is unconscious. You can see hear and walk at the same time right?
You can move, shoot, listen and watch while you play a video game, these basic functions we take for granted but we are all doing them simultaneously.
That in itself is proof positive we are multi-tasking ALL the time. When we focus on some task or another, this requires only alocation of PART of our attention that we are aware of. There is tonnes of stuff we are doing and aren't aware of it (unconscious).
Really to say we aren't doing many things at once essentially denies how we function normally, I think one should really talk a bout allocation attention to tasks rather then "multi tasking" since even doing a single task requires many things going on at once even if you are unaware of them.
"DIII was a lot of the same, mindless clicking and lots of killing - for some reason it never loses it's appeal"
It's not the clicking it's the rules, the animations, the art, the music, the mood, etc. The item/loot system in diablo is so well designed is part of what makes it so fun and addictive to begin with. Contrast it with wannabe's like dungeon siege 1 and 2, they tried to copy the diablo system and I always found games that tried to copy Diablo's item system as lame, they never put the spit and polish into their loot systems like blizzard does.
"Which genes ? Well those that guard against cancer..."
Which brings up an interesting point... Since our lives depend critically on the controlled death (apoptosis) of cells. A lot of people don't fully grasp that controlled death of cells is absolutely critical to maintaining limb, bodily form, and organ integrity (eyes, hands, creating fingers)
You can see what happens here when when apoptosis goes wrong:
"Hell, Slashdot is giving me the option of disabling advertising just by clicking a checkbox; I'm not doing it."
The fact they do means I give them respect in my book, since many of us come here for the comments and slashdot editors know that comments and discussion are by and large what most people come for. Those that post a lot and add to the discussion are the ones adding value to the site so why shouldn't they have the option of disabling ads? Since most of the value of slashdot comes from the community itself, not the stories.
lets not forget slashdot attracts those who know how to block ads, so whether they have ad's or not is quite irrelevant since many nerds block ads entirely because they slow down loading pages or becuase many ads have become downright annoyingly rude (i.e. audio on ads that autoplays by itself whenever you load a page). I prefer silent ads then obnoxious TV kind.
"Let's see: Just shy of 72 years ago, my grandfather arrived in this country with $32 and unable to speak the language. He lived in a ghetto style apartment with a brother who had come over to America from Europe 18 months earlier. He spent a week learning enough English to get a job in a machine shop for about $1 an hour. "
The amount of roboticization and automation has drastically changed in 72 years since your grandfather arrived, I always hate these anecdotal tales the spinners of them which don't take into consideration that for every person that reaches a middle class life someone else is losing their lifestyle via war, imperialism or geography, offshorting, automation, etc, etc all reasons well beyond the contol of a significant number of human beings. Many people have gotten rich not by "hard work" but by exploiting the law of large numbers, your grandfather is just such a man, hard work does factor into the wealth equation somewhat but once a society has reached a certain level of tecnological and skills development, an increasing amount of the population is no longer *necessary* economically and povery becomes a matter of many things, some reasons against some poor people are valid, but it certainly can't apply to the bottom 2 billion of humanity, certainly statistically it's impossible to say that hard work alone is enough. I prefer evidence over statistically insignificant anecdotes.
You have yet to grasp that your grandfather is statistically insignificant, almost half of the the world's population is poor by your grandfathers middle class standard and no amount of 'hard work' was ever going to save the bottom 2 billion within their lifetimes, your grandfather happened to move to a country and be born into the right circumstances to have the werewithall and the ability to immigrate.
Offshoring and increasing amount of automation of tasks leaves a surplus population in developed countries without any marketable skills.
If you don't think this is a problem you should check out studies that have professional economists and policy makers worried.
If your grandfather lived among the bottom most of humanity in a future where robots do most of the work, no amount of hard work is going to outcompete technology that is economically more viable then most human beings. This problem is coming down the pike within the next few generations.
Stories about hard work and how the poor deserve their lot will look infantile in front of such technology.
"To make a new MMORPG be massively successful, it's going to take a re-invention of the genre..."
I'd like the see the MMO genre die, single player RPG's have all but been abandoned in an attempt at a cash grab for monthly fee's from MMO's.
The real problem is RPG's can't evolve within an MMO framework since the gameplay is ALWAYS the same in every god damn mmo, it's ALWAYS auto controlled and non-action (twitch/full control ala God of war) based.
That's one of the things I can't stand about MMO's is the focus is on a single character and yet everything is automated out the ying yang and there is barely any skill involved. Not only that, the lag prevents certain kinds of design in terms of action and effects from happening due to latency.
I hope all MMO's start to fade away as players get sick and tired of their monthly fee's. IMHO I've hated the MMO trend since the beginning how gamers can stand to get dinged $15 a month on top of full price for a game is pure insanity.
"That's all we need....a standardized API to allow malware writers access to robots..."
Any system can be hacked, and who's to say malware kinds of people won't have THEIR OWN robots and hardware that doesn't even run legit software in the first place?
"I agree completely. I generally tell people that it's far, far, far better to have a strong password which you write down than a weak one "
The real problem is that there needs to be password software like AI roboform installed NO ONE and I mean NO ONE wants to remember their password what they should have is a LOCAL password {on a local machine, i.e. AI roboform) which then they can press a button that types in a safe big ass randomized password which they can backup.
"What it boils down to, though, is whether God is omnipotent and omniscient. If he is, then he knows that a vast number of people will die and enter the flames of Hades"
Hell of current mainstream christianity is incorrect reading of the bible, for those who are not christian and but are interested in christian history and whatnot it's wonderful that other unknown and small christian denominations have done quite a job debunking modern christianity from within their own ranks and much has been known for a long time.
"Epigenetics is interesting and clearly important, but it does not undermine natural selection; it supports it."
You are totally incorrect, it's obvious you do not have any kind of medical background at all.
Current genetic and epigenetic theories of cancer-specific drug resistance do not adequately explain: the karyotypic changes that coincide with resistance, the high rates at which cancer cells acquire and enhance resistance compared to the rates of conventional mutation, the wide ranges of resistance such as multidrug resistance, the frequent occurrence of intrinsic drug resistance.
All of this is happening independent of mutation mechanisms (i.e. natural selection), this certainly does not complement natural selection because the mechanisms involved are not based on mutation.
"Now that we have CPUs with literally more cores than we know what to do with, it makes sense to use those cores for graphics processing."
This comment is always trotted out by people who have no clue about hardware.
CPU's doing graphics are bandwidth limited by main memory (not to mention general architecture). Graphics requires insane bandwidth. GPU's have had way more main memory bandwidth then modern CPU's have had for a long time. There is simply no way CPU's will ever catch up to GPU's because the GPU has dedicated memory bandwidth that destroys mainboard memory bandwidth on modern motherboards.
A geforce 285 has a Memory clock speed is 2584MHz, with memory bandwidth measured at 159GB/sec.
That's more then 10 times what an i920 has and more importantly that kind of bandwidth is absolutely necessary for highspeed graphics.
"Instead of recreating a human brain why don't they figure out how to wire a processor into the human brain to improve it."
It's probably a better idea not to put chips inside the head because of the immune response to foreign objects, also there would have to be a conversion taking place of the data and signals into meaningful information for neurons to understand, I doubt neurons would understand signals directly coming off the chip without some kind of interface based on understanding how to convert signals between systems.
I would think directed stem cells / gene therapy would probably be a better idea of improving intelligence and fixing noisy parts of the brain for more clear thought.
"Was it because of energy efficiency? Adaptation to local predators? etc."
It's quite clear that evolution does not evolve for efficiency because the whole concept of efficiency as good engineers know is a trade off between conflicting design goals.
The fact that genetic error correction mechanisms exist is proof positive that their is goal orientation in evolution, and evolution as is currently taught is much more then natural selection. There's been a lot of controversy over epigenetics and how it undermines the concept that natural selection is the driving force of evolution.
... lets face facts. Almost all of the "news" reported on and linked to is not of great value.
Even if people did pay for news this wouldn't ensure anything but rightwing propaganda, almost all news outlets in canada have a rightwing slant to them whenever theirs talks about strikes or unions for instance almost universally are workers painted in a negative light.
News promotes the agenda of the news clients biggest spenders, which is NOT the public at large sorry to say it.
THIS game if it was made in higher definition would be fantastic, I remember being intrigued while playing this game and thinking what would happen if you got professional game developers making stuff like this.
There's nothing quite like moving around your immune system and zapping bugs that really reenforced remembering stuff.
... would be a great idea. I've often thought the problem isn't "educational games" it's TAKING AN EXISTING GAME adding educational elements and just let the kids play the f'n game and get out of their way.
You can't have a game that isn't fun to play, if you make educational "game" that isn't fun or addictive to play it's pointless because the whole point of education is practice and re-enforcement of the things you want the students to learn.
I think the whole culture of school has done a lot ot kill curiousity in kids and school is just seen as another form of work which kids hate and can't wait to get out of because their curiousity is killed because of the lack of autonomy.
I remember taking ancient history class and remembering a crapload of stuff from civ that was useless because all the games of civ I had played was not meant to reinforce events in hitsory. Now imagine if you took history and made a fun game out of it, you wouldn't even have to make everything exactly like hitsory but use the game to re-enforce your rememberance of key events and whatnot.
I think a game like Empire Total war modified or Civ would be a good start at creating "Educational" games. Since you want to force a education into a "game" and then not have the game be attractive for students to play at all.
"Anyone who believes in free will is implying that his brain doesn't obey causality "
What a bunch of crap, free will is not antagonistic to science. Certain definitions of it are. But lets be frank, when people talk about "Free will" they talk about the ability to control themselves. If I tell you to lift your arm there are two actions: You can lift it or not lift it.
Whether or not you choose to lift it and call it pre-destined by fate is irrelevant, if I asked you to stab someone and you stabbed someone because I told you to, the whole concept of free will is foreknowledge and ability to know the consequences of your actions.
Think of the person who commits murder. That person must first entertain the thought of murder before it can be carried out. In this state, the thought of murder in the person's mind is only a concept or idea, a potential probability. However, once the person makes a conscious choice (or decision) to carry out the murder, he is held responsible for it.
Saying that we all just "can't help it" is nonsense. I'm sure there's an equation cognitive processing ability that determines how able one is to realize and grasp reality and make choices in it.
Committing a murder takes planning and entertaining a high degree of complex thought before the act is even carried out, the murderer has until the last second to stop what he is doing and retract his behaviour.
The only time when actions are excusable is when one is reacting out of surprise/fear/being attacked, if a bear suddenly attacked you and you couldn't get away your reflex would be to fight it and get away from it or at least hurt it enough to get it to stop, even if that means mortally wounding it.
"Actually, socialism is not the opposite of corporatism/fascism. They are both forms of command economy where the government decides how to distribute resources. They are also both about the group being more important than the individual."
This is nonsense, the fact of the matter is socialism/capitalism/communism are misnomers elements of every one of them is practiced at all times.
John Adams often pondered the issue of civic virtue. Writing Mercy Otis Warren in 1776, he agreed with the Greeks and the Romans, that, "Public Virtue cannot exist without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics." Adams insisted, "There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superior to all private Passions. Men must be ready, they must pride themselves, and be happy to sacrifice their private Pleasures, Passions, and Interests, nay their private Friendships and dearest connections, when they Stand in Competition with the Rights of society."
Quite certainly just because one wants to redistribute some wealth or have some degree of control over certain industries has nothing to do x/y/z ideology their are pragmatic concerns that overtake anything else.
""Although Intel acknowledged that all of its SSDs will suffer from reduced performance because of significant fragmentation, the type of write levels needed to reproduce PC Perspective's results aren't likely for everyday users, whether they're running Windows and Apple's Mac OS X. Even so, it still released the firmware upgrade to slow fragmentation.."
"Although Intel acknowledged that all of its SSDs will suffer from reduced performance because of significant fragmentation, the type of write levels needed to reproduce PC Perspective's results aren't likely for everyday users, whether they're running Windows and Apple's Mac OS X. Even so, it still released the firmware upgrade to slow fragmentation."
Slashdot Mirror
" If you misspell a word or leave out a comma, it's fairly effortless to go back and fix your mistake."
Except many people do not realize they have made mistakes until after they have hit submit button, most people do not always detect mistakes they have made right away do to unconscious errors in perception.
For instance I will constantly make common mistakes because motor signals dropped from my motor cortex when retrieving motor input to type
"They" I will often time "the", what happens is motor inputs are associated with words and how they are stored in the mind and this is why so many common mistakes happen, quite frankly its not too big a deal since for many people trying to re-read what they wrote and fix mistakes is time more effort then it's worth.
Also lets not forget peoples speeds of reading (information uptake) and typing are radically different, and because of these differences people choose how to allot their time if they are slower then others.
"In my lifetime, I've seen "donut" become the de facto spelling rather than "doughnut," and I haven't even lived that long. "
The gh is to signify how to pronounce the o.
Consider the word DO
is it s DO NUT?
or is it a dough NUT?
Notice how the spelling marks the pronunciation. In french (at least quebec french) they put little marks above the vowels, in english we come up with special rules that this sequence of letters after this vowel means you pronounce the vowel 'like this'.
... IMHO I believe this may have to do with bloodflow to the brain since obese people would not exercise as much and would have to work harder to get blood flowing to blood poor regions
... the eyeballs are on the internet advertisers are itching to get at eyes that are no longer on television.
Let's not also forget gaming, tv and porn is on the internet. Also a significant amount of ecommerce happens online (amazon.com, ebay, etc, etc).
Quite frankly this is like crying wolf when there are no wolves around.
Human beings are ALWAYS multi tasking, just that the majority of it is unconscious. You can see hear and walk at the same time right?
You can move, shoot, listen and watch while you play a video game, these basic functions we take for granted but we are all doing them simultaneously.
That in itself is proof positive we are multi-tasking ALL the time. When we focus on some task or another, this requires only alocation of PART of our attention that we are aware of. There is tonnes of stuff we are doing and aren't aware of it (unconscious).
Really to say we aren't doing many things at once essentially denies how we function normally, I think one should really talk a bout allocation attention to tasks rather then "multi tasking" since even doing a single task requires many things going on at once even if you are unaware of them.
"DIII was a lot of the same, mindless clicking and lots of killing - for some reason it never loses it's appeal"
It's not the clicking it's the rules, the animations, the art, the music, the mood, etc. The item/loot system in diablo is so well designed is part of what makes it so fun and addictive to begin with. Contrast it with wannabe's like dungeon siege 1 and 2, they tried to copy the diablo system and I always found games that tried to copy Diablo's item system as lame, they never put the spit and polish into their loot systems like blizzard does.
"Which genes ? Well those that guard against cancer ..."
Which brings up an interesting point... Since our lives depend critically on the controlled death (apoptosis) of cells. A lot of people don't fully grasp that controlled death of cells is absolutely critical to maintaining limb, bodily form, and organ integrity (eyes, hands, creating fingers)
You can see what happens here when when apoptosis goes wrong:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Celldeath.jpg
Thank goodness for controlled cell death.
"Hell, Slashdot is giving me the option of disabling advertising just by clicking a checkbox; I'm not doing it."
The fact they do means I give them respect in my book, since many of us come here for the comments and slashdot editors know that comments and discussion are by and large what most people come for. Those that post a lot and add to the discussion are the ones adding value to the site so why shouldn't they have the option of disabling ads? Since most of the value of slashdot comes from the community itself, not the stories.
lets not forget slashdot attracts those who know how to block ads, so whether they have ad's or not is quite irrelevant since many nerds block ads entirely because they slow down loading pages or becuase many ads have become downright annoyingly rude (i.e. audio on ads that autoplays by itself whenever you load a page). I prefer silent ads then obnoxious TV kind.
"Let's see: Just shy of 72 years ago, my grandfather arrived in this country with $32 and unable to speak the language. He lived in a ghetto style apartment with a brother who had come over to America from Europe 18 months earlier. He spent a week learning enough English to get a job in a machine shop for about $1 an hour. "
The amount of roboticization and automation has drastically changed in 72 years since your grandfather arrived, I always hate these anecdotal tales the spinners of them which don't take into consideration that for every person that reaches a middle class life someone else is losing their lifestyle via war, imperialism or geography, offshorting, automation, etc, etc all reasons well beyond the contol of a significant number of human beings. Many people have gotten rich not by "hard work" but by exploiting the law of large numbers, your grandfather is just such a man, hard work does factor into the wealth equation somewhat but once a society has reached a certain level of tecnological and skills development, an increasing amount of the population is no longer *necessary* economically and povery becomes a matter of many things, some reasons against some poor people are valid, but it certainly can't apply to the bottom 2 billion of humanity, certainly statistically it's impossible to say that hard work alone is enough. I prefer evidence over statistically insignificant anecdotes.
You have yet to grasp that your grandfather is statistically insignificant, almost half of the the world's population is poor by your grandfathers middle class standard and no amount of 'hard work' was ever going to save the bottom 2 billion within their lifetimes, your grandfather happened to move to a country and be born into the right circumstances to have the werewithall and the ability to immigrate.
Offshoring and increasing amount of automation of tasks leaves a surplus population in developed countries without any marketable skills.
If you don't think this is a problem you should check out studies that have professional economists and policy makers worried.
http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/08/robots_and_the_future_of_unemployment.php
If your grandfather lived among the bottom most of humanity in a future where robots do most of the work, no amount of hard work is going to outcompete technology that is economically more viable then most human beings. This problem is coming down the pike within the next few generations.
Stories about hard work and how the poor deserve their lot will look infantile in front of such technology.
"To make a new MMORPG be massively successful, it's going to take a re-invention of the genre..."
I'd like the see the MMO genre die, single player RPG's have all but been abandoned in an attempt at a cash grab for monthly fee's from MMO's.
The real problem is RPG's can't evolve within an MMO framework since the gameplay is ALWAYS the same in every god damn mmo, it's ALWAYS auto controlled and non-action (twitch/full control ala God of war) based.
That's one of the things I can't stand about MMO's is the focus is on a single character and yet everything is automated out the ying yang and there is barely any skill involved. Not only that, the lag prevents certain kinds of design in terms of action and effects from happening due to latency.
I hope all MMO's start to fade away as players get sick and tired of their monthly fee's. IMHO I've hated the MMO trend since the beginning how gamers can stand to get dinged $15 a month on top of full price for a game is pure insanity.
"That's all we need....a standardized API to allow malware writers access to robots..."
Any system can be hacked, and who's to say malware kinds of people won't have THEIR OWN robots and hardware that doesn't even run legit software in the first place?
"I agree completely. I generally tell people that it's far, far, far better to have a strong password which you write down than a weak one "
The real problem is that there needs to be password software like AI roboform installed NO ONE and I mean NO ONE wants to remember their password what they should have is a LOCAL password {on a local machine, i.e. AI roboform) which then they can press a button that types in a safe big ass randomized password which they can backup.
Let's be frank passwords are a pain in the ass.
http://www.roboform.com/
"What it boils down to, though, is whether God is omnipotent and omniscient. If he is, then he knows that a vast number of people will die and enter the flames of Hades"
Hell of current mainstream christianity is incorrect reading of the bible, for those who are not christian and but are interested in christian history and whatnot it's wonderful that other unknown and small christian denominations have done quite a job debunking modern christianity from within their own ranks and much has been known for a long time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christendom_Astray_from_the_Bible
http://thechristadelphians.org/htm/books/astray/astray_mainframe.htm
"Epigenetics is interesting and clearly important, but it does not undermine natural selection; it supports it."
You are totally incorrect, it's obvious you do not have any kind of medical background at all.
Current genetic and epigenetic theories of cancer-specific drug resistance do not adequately explain: the karyotypic changes that coincide with resistance, the high rates at which cancer cells acquire and enhance resistance compared to the rates of conventional mutation, the wide ranges of resistance such as multidrug resistance, the frequent occurrence of intrinsic drug resistance.
All of this is happening independent of mutation mechanisms (i.e. natural selection), this certainly does not complement natural selection because the mechanisms involved are not based on mutation.
"Now that we have CPUs with literally more cores than we know what to do with, it makes sense to use those cores for graphics processing."
This comment is always trotted out by people who have no clue about hardware.
CPU's doing graphics are bandwidth limited by main memory (not to mention general architecture). Graphics requires insane bandwidth. GPU's have had way more main memory bandwidth then modern CPU's have had for a long time. There is simply no way CPU's will ever catch up to GPU's because the GPU has dedicated memory bandwidth that destroys mainboard memory bandwidth on modern motherboards.
A geforce 285 has a Memory clock speed is 2584MHz, with memory bandwidth measured at 159GB/sec.
That's more then 10 times what an i920 has and more importantly that kind of bandwidth is absolutely necessary for highspeed graphics.
"Instead of recreating a human brain why don't they figure out how to wire a processor into the human brain to improve it."
It's probably a better idea not to put chips inside the head because of the immune response to foreign objects, also there would have to be a conversion taking place of the data and signals into meaningful information for neurons to understand, I doubt neurons would understand signals directly coming off the chip without some kind of interface based on understanding how to convert signals between systems.
I would think directed stem cells / gene therapy would probably be a better idea of improving intelligence and fixing noisy parts of the brain for more clear thought.
"Was it because of energy efficiency? Adaptation to local predators? etc."
It's quite clear that evolution does not evolve for efficiency because the whole concept of efficiency as good engineers know is a trade off between conflicting design goals.
The fact that genetic error correction mechanisms exist is proof positive that their is goal orientation in evolution, and evolution as is currently taught is much more then natural selection. There's been a lot of controversy over epigenetics and how it undermines the concept that natural selection is the driving force of evolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
... lets face facts. Almost all of the "news" reported on and linked to is not of great value.
Even if people did pay for news this wouldn't ensure anything but rightwing propaganda, almost all news outlets in canada have a rightwing slant to them whenever theirs talks about strikes or unions for instance almost universally are workers painted in a negative light.
News promotes the agenda of the news clients biggest spenders, which is NOT the public at large sorry to say it.
... Immune attack
http://fas.org/immuneattack/download
THIS game if it was made in higher definition would be fantastic, I remember being intrigued while playing this game and thinking what would happen if you got professional game developers making stuff like this.
There's nothing quite like moving around your immune system and zapping bugs that really reenforced remembering stuff.
... would be a great idea. I've often thought the problem isn't "educational games" it's TAKING AN EXISTING GAME adding educational elements and just let the kids play the f'n game and get out of their way.
You can't have a game that isn't fun to play, if you make educational "game" that isn't fun or addictive to play it's pointless because the whole point of education is practice and re-enforcement of the things you want the students to learn.
I think the whole culture of school has done a lot ot kill curiousity in kids and school is just seen as another form of work which kids hate and can't wait to get out of because their curiousity is killed because of the lack of autonomy.
I remember taking ancient history class and remembering a crapload of stuff from civ that was useless because all the games of civ I had played was not meant to reinforce events in hitsory. Now imagine if you took history and made a fun game out of it, you wouldn't even have to make everything exactly like hitsory but use the game to re-enforce your rememberance of key events and whatnot.
I think a game like Empire Total war modified or Civ would be a good start at creating "Educational" games. Since you want to force a education into a "game" and then not have the game be attractive for students to play at all.
"Anyone who believes in free will is implying that his brain doesn't obey causality "
What a bunch of crap, free will is not antagonistic to science. Certain definitions of it are. But lets be frank, when people talk about "Free will" they talk about the ability to control themselves. If I tell you to lift your arm there are two actions: You can lift it or not lift it.
Whether or not you choose to lift it and call it pre-destined by fate is irrelevant, if I asked you to stab someone and you stabbed someone because I told you to, the whole concept of free will is foreknowledge and ability to know the consequences of your actions.
Think of the person who commits murder. That person must first entertain the thought of murder before it can be carried out. In this state, the thought of murder in the person's mind is only a concept or idea, a potential probability. However, once the person makes a conscious choice (or decision) to carry out the murder, he is held responsible for it.
Saying that we all just "can't help it" is nonsense. I'm sure there's an equation cognitive processing ability that determines how able one is to realize and grasp reality and make choices in it.
Committing a murder takes planning and entertaining a high degree of complex thought before the act is even carried out, the murderer has until the last second to stop what he is doing and retract his behaviour.
The only time when actions are excusable is when one is reacting out of surprise/fear/being attacked, if a bear suddenly attacked you and you couldn't get away your reflex would be to fight it and get away from it or at least hurt it enough to get it to stop, even if that means mortally wounding it.
"How could they miss that?"
Biologies obsession with vestigal organs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermiform_appendix#Vestigiality
Early evolution theorists figured the body would have a lot of "vestigal" organs that did nothing, the same goes for junk dna
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_dna
"Actually, socialism is not the opposite of corporatism/fascism. They are both forms of command economy where the government decides how to distribute resources. They are also both about the group being more important than the individual."
This is nonsense, the fact of the matter is socialism/capitalism/communism are misnomers elements of every one of them is practiced at all times.
John Adams often pondered the issue of civic virtue. Writing Mercy Otis Warren in 1776, he agreed with the Greeks and the Romans, that, "Public Virtue cannot exist without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics." Adams insisted, "There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superior to all private Passions. Men must be ready, they must pride themselves, and be happy to sacrifice their private Pleasures, Passions, and Interests, nay their private Friendships and dearest connections, when they Stand in Competition with the Rights of society."
Quite certainly just because one wants to redistribute some wealth or have some degree of control over certain industries has nothing to do x/y/z ideology their are pragmatic concerns that overtake anything else.
""Although Intel acknowledged that all of its SSDs will suffer from reduced performance because of significant fragmentation, the type of write levels needed to reproduce PC Perspective's results aren't likely for everyday users, whether they're running Windows and Apple's Mac OS X. Even so, it still released the firmware upgrade to slow fragmentation.."
"Although Intel acknowledged that all of its SSDs will suffer from reduced performance because of significant fragmentation, the type of write levels needed to reproduce PC Perspective's results aren't likely for everyday users, whether they're running Windows and Apple's Mac OS X. Even so, it still released the firmware upgrade to slow fragmentation."