I dunno. These numbers seem very low to me for Firefox. I've recently reviewed other statistics sites and I've never seen FF given such a low marketshare. I think this might be a case of everybody's statistics differing. Now, show me the data for Google Analytics on googleanalytics.com (where the tracking script is loaded from) and I'd be willing to call those figures "authoritative."
Here in Erie, PA, recently a cop was filmed off duty in a bar apparently mocking a homicide victim and his family in a rather obnoxious manner. Somebody put it on YouTube, and now the papers are reporting that the police are launching a "probe" to find the naughty poster. Meanwhile the cop is on TV crying. No joke. Cops love it as long as it doesn't cut the other way.
Why do so many posters keep conflating this with religion? Even IF this were submitted by an organization with religious ties, isn't this a common sense / human dignity issue?
We shouldn't be screwing around with the future of our own species. If we want to engineer devices that augment the human body to make it work better, I guess that's fine - but we should be respecting what nature evolved over millions of years. It's a finely tuned machine that we cannot fully understand, certainly not now, probably not ever.
I always think back to ST:TNG; despite the advanced technology, they left the human animal in it's natural state. Geordi had a visor, not artificial eyes. Picard had a mechanical heart, they didn't grow him a new one.
Now, obviously ST:TNG is just a show. However, I've always thought that vision of the future was more dignified than the direction we seem to be going with this biomechanical research.
Gee, thank you for making all these decisions for me. I am too dumb to make them for myself. Thank you, oh wise one.
The fact that children are a lot of work post-pregnancy is no reason to ignore a possible technology that makes the actual gestation/birth process easier.
You sound like you would be more at home in a church than on Slashdot.
That's one of the stupidest and most judgmental things I've ever heard. I am an atheist, but I can appreciate OP's point. Raising a human being is a full-time job for a very long time. The gestational period is one of the most important parts of the parent-child relationship, as the bond really begins at that time.
Making it easier isn't the point, and it certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with being religious. Unless religiousness now has something to do with just being a decent human being.
Epidurals do, in fact, limit the ability of mothers to birth naturally. They do impede the progress of labor, and there are mounds of research supporting this. Epidurals lead to Cesarean Section in statistically significant quantities.
Mod parent up. This is exactly the problem, several generations now of people who were raised in homes where children weren't valued, or where doctors and other "authorities" somehow convinced the parents that children were to be left alone to cry.
What if pigs are better at growing human fetuses than human wombs... an interesting concept. I guess this depends on how you define "better." I guess if you look at a human as nothing more than a collection of cells that are either more or less robustly healthy, than it might be possible to say that a pig can grow a human faster, or larger, more reliably, or with softer hair, or nicer skin tone, etc than a human. But ultimately, we just don't know what might be lost by having a non-human mother.
We have to live in the same world as these hypothetical humans - how could be we ever be sure that these people were not damaged fundamentally by being created in a non-human environment?
We are finding out now that maternal stress levels in pregnancy can change the brains of developing infants, to emphasis strength and physical attributes over intellectual attributes. If something as simple as stress can make a huge difference in the person we become, it seems incredibly risky to grow a human in an non-human environment.
I'm not arguing that the law has merit insofar as the law is supposed to be reactive and not proactive, but surely we can acknowledge that the limited and evolving nature of science is actually a strong argument against this kind of thing. These humans might well live to see the science that created them be discredited.
This is not monstrous. Saying that the child is more important than the mother is just another way that doctors and the medical community make women into second-class citizens at their own births.
Being grown inside a human womb is one of the defining characteristics of being human. Human children grown inside a human womb gives the child exposure to the heartbeat, hormones, pheromones, and an unknown variety of other important human characteristics.
The science surrounding human childbirth is not nearly as good as might otherwise be supposed - research is severely limited by the fact that human lives are at stake, and if anything we are learning that nature's design is the best design. Other in than bona fide emergencies and when dealing with truly abnormal physiology, modern medicine has at every turn made childbirth more dangerous and more complicated than it needs to be. That's why the US leads the world in infant mortality rates, and some of the best places to give birth are in the third world, statistically.
I can't imagine anything worse than creating human children out of non-human wombs - I would regard such a system as being a imminent danger to the survival of our species; or at the very least a mortal threat to our Humanity (capital "H").
God, watch more Star Trek people! It's called a cautionary tale for a reason!
When children have a consistent primary care provider for the first two years of life, research has shown that the children have high-quality lasting attachments and are healthier and happier. Children need to have a parent with them at all times during the first two years... that much we know for sure. We also know that children who are breastfed for two years enjoy lifelong protection from certain diseases and are smarter and have fewer health complications.
So I ask you - do mothers need to stay home? Well, no, but if you are willing to have a child, then perhaps you should consider doing what's best for them as well. Short of full-time live-in wet nurses, I can't think of any other way to give our kids the best possible start.
Tell that to Percy Julian, or the Australian scientist whose discovery of early human specimens was brushed aside in favor of Piltdown Man essentially because nobody in Britain could stomach a human origin that was non-European. Now, those mistakes have been corrected, but it sometimes takes a lifetime or two, and that is significant.
I think the problem of piracy is basically a problem of perception from the Business Community. They have become convinced over the years that there is this huge market for DVDs, or Games, or CDs, or whatever, but the reality is that the market isn't quite a big as they think. For people with lots of money - for whom purchasing a DVD or a CD or a game is inconsequential, piracy is actually harder than just buying the media. For those of us who have only a limited amount of money (certainly I fall into this category), I would never consider buying a $50 game, unless I really felt like my life wouldn't be complete without it. I feel the same way about most media today.
I haven't bought a CD or DVD in years - at least not for entertainment. I actually have bought a few bits of media, but only because I felt so strongly about them that I felt I needed to support the artist or idea behind it. If pirated versions of more "vanilla" media weren't available, I would probably just go without these things - God knows I have more important things to do that sit around playing games or watching idiotic films.
So, in summary, I suppose my feeling is that the "sales figures" that media companies think they've lost to piracy probably wouldn't have been "sales" anyway. Many of us simply drink from the pop-culture waterhole more often than we could really afford to if companies were getting what they really want for this entertainment media.
A serious scholarly research paper would almost certainly require more depth and breadth than what wikipedia would provide. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, people - it provides a summary with links to related ideas. It isn't as if the depth of coverage on wikipedia is so great (for most topics) that one could use it as a sole source.
I can't help but find some of your comments odd. What sort of "intellectual property investment" are you suggesting that Sequoia might have in this machine? It's a machine to count votes electronically. There may be some novelty here and there, but certainly nothing that is going to inflict any damage on the company if an expert is permitted to review it. What I find odd about your post:
1) You seem to think that honoring a business investment "comes first" in this case. It doesn't. The entire success or failure of Sequoia's product depends on the reliability and security of their system, and our most fundamental civil protection from the government depends on it, too. There is no conflict of interest here, unless Sequoia is afraid of something.
2) I'm not sure that the traditional model of capitalism works well in this case. I'm not sure you can say "if company X doesn't want to comply, then company Y will!" because both companies are potentially under enormous pressure to deceive the states and subvert the vote. I'm not sure that voting machines are a great commodity to be outsourcing. One would think that the GAO or the Elections dept. would build these things and then hold public contests at universities to try to crack them, like DARPA sometimes does with emerging military technology.
I'm not flaming here - but I don't think it's that big of a deal if an article on Bill Gates or Jane Fonda is inaccurate. I'll bet the one on Evolution isn't too great, either - but this is what Wikipedia is about. Let me explain:
To hear EB talk about it, you would think that the only good encyclopedia entry on Bill Gates would include factual information about his birth, life, finances, etc. That's fine if you are writing a history book for schoolchildren, but what Wikipedia does is actually captures the cultural moment around an issue - the fact that Bill Gates' article is inaccurate is because there is so much contention surrounding him.
To my eyes, Britannica is enforcing a cultural imperialism that the only right information is Politically Correct whitewashed facts. While that certainly is important, for instance, if you are really looking for the best definition of "evolution" or an impartial recounting of facts about Jane Fonda, that's not what Wikipedia does.
It captures the fullest dimension of the issues - the facts (as they are percieved) and all the culturally significant alternate views as well. Imagine what value future anthropologists might glean from a snapshot of Wikipedia - they wouldn't care who Bill Gates was in any kind of factual way - they would want to see what the world thought of him. Or the WTO, the World Bank, Greenpeace - you get the idea.
Someone else mentioned Tux Paint - but I'm not sure that really does much for kids -- I suppose it teaches mouse skills. I have an 18-month old, so this question has been on my mind a lot recently.
A major hurdle for today's young programmers will be the lack of an easy GUI language - they aren't going to settle for the Command Prompt that you get with simple C programs under windows, and they certainly aren't going to learn MFC. Any language that makes it "sort of" easy to make a GUI window, etc, will do well.
Another GUI language option that jumps to mind is LabView's Virtual Instruments. You program by "wiring" modules together in a graphical environment. OpenDX has a similar facility, although it's primarily for Mathmatical calculations. LabView also makes GUIs easy.
HTML/Perl/PHP might not be a bad alternative, as they are simple and yield immediate results. Socially, a girl might see more benefit from HTML or other "communications" related tools rather than mathematical or procedural tools.
Here I achieved it using an emboss filter in Photoshop. You can clearly see two sets of lines, a wide region of pixels that are depressed in the image. This can't be a flying object - it has to be some other kind of effect, only the topmost edge of which we see visually in the picture.
I think I can prove it isn't a bug. If you look at the before-during-after photos in sequence, there is some specular highlighting that goes on in the foreground during the flash. This means that the light of the flash was reflected off the ground. Look closely, and you'll see several pixels light up in the "parking lot" area during the "blast".
So any solution that relies on the flash being very close to the camera has to be wrong, unless you can explain the reflection off the asphault of the parking lot some other way.
I can't believe I read this thread on Slashdot. How can anyone honestly think that Science is some kind of politically biased soapbox?
Look - Science has in the past occasionally been drug into the political limelight - but let's not ignore the truth here - Science is often involved against it's will (read: Evolution even in Darwin's Day, the poplularization of Cold Fusion) because the public or the media catches some scent from the scientific community and now wants to know more.
But what always happens - and this, I think, is the major failing between Journalists/Reporters and Science, is that the reporters don't really want to understand - no, no, nobody ever wants to really get it; they just want to get the jist without needing to understand the finer points.
This is why Quantum Physics is the ultimate sieve by which to filter out "Popular Science" readers - QP is so 'nifty' on the surface, but to understand it requires quite a commitment to the mathmatics, experimental and theoretical explorations, etc. The average consumer doesn't really have the attention span to grasp the concepts, just tell them how much bigger their TV will be and how much cheaper their gasoline will be and their happy with "Science."
That process isn't the fault of the Scientists, who largely are not looking for publicity, except possibly within their own small community of experts, and who are generally mild-mannered people of average means, who happen to enjoy the investigative process.
How can any serious person think that the average scientist is a "leftist commie", unless by that phrase, you mean to indicate a person who has some ethical qualms with being among the richest and most privledged human beings in the entire world, and who feels that the good fortune they have enjoyed deserves to be respected and returned to others. God, what a horrible philosophy. Come to think of it, if that's your definition, most people are leftists and commies. Perhaps scientists (and writers, filmmakers, etc) seem to lean left because they have been educated in the History of the human race, in the art of expressing themselves, and in the principals of Justice, and in the end it's hard for an educated person to "chase the cheese" for decades and never stop to think about the rest of the planet and it's people.
God, get with it. You can't just go on living your little American life while people are murdering one another at your doorstep, living in filth, unable to make ends meet. Pretty soon, all of the enraged and denegrated peoples of the world are going to look up and see America, sitting on it's throne - and I think then we'll see what the rage of an angry world can do to us firsthand.
Oh, Come on. If the retail industry is paying 31 Billion this year in return fraud, and then you close the loophole and save them all that money, does ANYBODY REALLY think that prices will... what? Fall? Give me a break. The market determines the profitability of an item, not the expense incurred in selling it. If people will pay $200 for a jacket, a jacket will cost $200 regardless of the expense of running the store. That $31 billion we save the retailing industry will go directly to the chairmen and the top stockholders.
It's called capitalism, and it's all about making as much money as possible. These fraudsters are making it hard for Express to make more and more money year after year. Wow, I really couldn't care less.
As a kid, I saw the occasional "Beaver Hunter" magazine at Boy Scout Camp, but after that I wasn't exposed to porn really until I started to get online. Back in the day, Newsgroups were the place to go for good pictures without alot of hassle.
For years afterward, I was a regular porn collector and watcher. I spent long hours every day browsing and maintaining a porn collection. I can vouch that it IS destructive to an individual who looks at it.
When it comes time to quit porn, like when you get married (as I did), all of the sudden you realize you haven't gone a week without it in 10 years. It's pretty hard to quit - and even when you 'do', you'll probably relapse a couple of times. And it makes regular old sex less interesting to you, because you are aware of a whole lot of possibilities, a whole range of beautiful bodies splayed in arousing positions, etc. What wife can compare with the thousands of women who have already displayed themselves in the lewdest of ways to your eyes?
I don't necessary agree that ALL porn is debasing or unethical, but it certainly does change the observer, and quitting is pretty tough.
2 Years ago I was the kind of guy who pirated copies of Windows and thought that Linux was "too hard" or just "whoa."
The first distro that I tried was RedHat, which I have to admit I was excited to install, but back then I didn't have broadband - so there was very little I could do without an Internet connection. (WinModems - yuck!)
When I finally got broadband, I tried Fedora, and ran that for a while, but I wasn't getting all that far with it and I was so confused by the layout of the distribution, with configuration files all over the place, dependecies that seemed excessive; I felt like I was drowning in all the things I didn't know.
So I switched to Gentoo - I heard good things about it, I liked the idea of a source-code optimized distro. Sure, I guess getting it installed was kind of tough - I started from a stage1 and built everything. But all the conf files are in/etc, where they are supposed to be, you don't have to screw around with dependecies, though you can control them, and did I mention that it's smoking fast?
First, I build a server, which I do hosting from, then I repeated the process with my primary desktop. Gentoo takes a long time to set up, but once it's up, it's up for good. I think my desktop has been up for 40 days continuously, no problems, no incidents, and did I mention I know a WHOLE LOT more about computers and linux now?
Running Linux versus Running Windows is like studying art with a famous artist versus scribbling with crayons. The best part is, that now I can imagine new things to do with my computer that just weren't possible before - like a web interface to my mp3 collection, building my own home media center, hosting 8 different websites off of my modest server, web design without constant FTP uploading, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno. These numbers seem very low to me for Firefox. I've recently reviewed other statistics sites and I've never seen FF given such a low marketshare. I think this might be a case of everybody's statistics differing. Now, show me the data for Google Analytics on googleanalytics.com (where the tracking script is loaded from) and I'd be willing to call those figures "authoritative."
DJB
Here in Erie, PA, recently a cop was filmed off duty in a bar apparently mocking a homicide victim and his family in a rather obnoxious manner. Somebody put it on YouTube, and now the papers are reporting that the police are launching a "probe" to find the naughty poster. Meanwhile the cop is on TV crying. No joke. Cops love it as long as it doesn't cut the other way.
Why do so many posters keep conflating this with religion? Even IF this were submitted by an organization with religious ties, isn't this a common sense / human dignity issue?
We shouldn't be screwing around with the future of our own species. If we want to engineer devices that augment the human body to make it work better, I guess that's fine - but we should be respecting what nature evolved over millions of years. It's a finely tuned machine that we cannot fully understand, certainly not now, probably not ever.
I always think back to ST:TNG; despite the advanced technology, they left the human animal in it's natural state. Geordi had a visor, not artificial eyes. Picard had a mechanical heart, they didn't grow him a new one.
Now, obviously ST:TNG is just a show. However, I've always thought that vision of the future was more dignified than the direction we seem to be going with this biomechanical research.
Gee, thank you for making all these decisions for me.
I am too dumb to make them for myself.
Thank you, oh wise one.
The fact that children are a lot of work post-pregnancy is no reason to ignore a possible technology that makes the actual gestation/birth process easier.
You sound like you would be more at home in a church than on Slashdot.
That's one of the stupidest and most judgmental things I've ever heard. I am an atheist, but I can appreciate OP's point. Raising a human being is a full-time job for a very long time. The gestational period is one of the most important parts of the parent-child relationship, as the bond really begins at that time.
Making it easier isn't the point, and it certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with being religious. Unless religiousness now has something to do with just being a decent human being.
Epidurals do, in fact, limit the ability of mothers to birth naturally. They do impede the progress of labor, and there are mounds of research supporting this. Epidurals lead to Cesarean Section in statistically significant quantities.
Mod parent up. This is exactly the problem, several generations now of people who were raised in homes where children weren't valued, or where doctors and other "authorities" somehow convinced the parents that children were to be left alone to cry.
What if pigs are better at growing human fetuses than human wombs... an interesting concept. I guess this depends on how you define "better." I guess if you look at a human as nothing more than a collection of cells that are either more or less robustly healthy, than it might be possible to say that a pig can grow a human faster, or larger, more reliably, or with softer hair, or nicer skin tone, etc than a human. But ultimately, we just don't know what might be lost by having a non-human mother.
We have to live in the same world as these hypothetical humans - how could be we ever be sure that these people were not damaged fundamentally by being created in a non-human environment?
We are finding out now that maternal stress levels in pregnancy can change the brains of developing infants, to emphasis strength and physical attributes over intellectual attributes. If something as simple as stress can make a huge difference in the person we become, it seems incredibly risky to grow a human in an non-human environment.
I'm not arguing that the law has merit insofar as the law is supposed to be reactive and not proactive, but surely we can acknowledge that the limited and evolving nature of science is actually a strong argument against this kind of thing. These humans might well live to see the science that created them be discredited.
This is not monstrous. Saying that the child is more important than the mother is just another way that doctors and the medical community make women into second-class citizens at their own births.
I am hoping against hope that you are trolling.
Being grown inside a human womb is one of the defining characteristics of being human. Human children grown inside a human womb gives the child exposure to the heartbeat, hormones, pheromones, and an unknown variety of other important human characteristics.
The science surrounding human childbirth is not nearly as good as might otherwise be supposed - research is severely limited by the fact that human lives are at stake, and if anything we are learning that nature's design is the best design. Other in than bona fide emergencies and when dealing with truly abnormal physiology, modern medicine has at every turn made childbirth more dangerous and more complicated than it needs to be. That's why the US leads the world in infant mortality rates, and some of the best places to give birth are in the third world, statistically.
I can't imagine anything worse than creating human children out of non-human wombs - I would regard such a system as being a imminent danger to the survival of our species; or at the very least a mortal threat to our Humanity (capital "H").
God, watch more Star Trek people! It's called a cautionary tale for a reason!
When children have a consistent primary care provider for the first two years of life, research has shown that the children have high-quality lasting attachments and are healthier and happier. Children need to have a parent with them at all times during the first two years... that much we know for sure. We also know that children who are breastfed for two years enjoy lifelong protection from certain diseases and are smarter and have fewer health complications.
So I ask you - do mothers need to stay home? Well, no, but if you are willing to have a child, then perhaps you should consider doing what's best for them as well. Short of full-time live-in wet nurses, I can't think of any other way to give our kids the best possible start.
Tell that to Percy Julian, or the Australian scientist whose discovery of early human specimens was brushed aside in favor of Piltdown Man essentially because nobody in Britain could stomach a human origin that was non-European. Now, those mistakes have been corrected, but it sometimes takes a lifetime or two, and that is significant.
I think the problem of piracy is basically a problem of perception from the Business Community. They have become convinced over the years that there is this huge market for DVDs, or Games, or CDs, or whatever, but the reality is that the market isn't quite a big as they think. For people with lots of money - for whom purchasing a DVD or a CD or a game is inconsequential, piracy is actually harder than just buying the media. For those of us who have only a limited amount of money (certainly I fall into this category), I would never consider buying a $50 game, unless I really felt like my life wouldn't be complete without it. I feel the same way about most media today.
I haven't bought a CD or DVD in years - at least not for entertainment. I actually have bought a few bits of media, but only because I felt so strongly about them that I felt I needed to support the artist or idea behind it. If pirated versions of more "vanilla" media weren't available, I would probably just go without these things - God knows I have more important things to do that sit around playing games or watching idiotic films.
So, in summary, I suppose my feeling is that the "sales figures" that media companies think they've lost to piracy probably wouldn't have been "sales" anyway. Many of us simply drink from the pop-culture waterhole more often than we could really afford to if companies were getting what they really want for this entertainment media.
A serious scholarly research paper would almost certainly require more depth and breadth than what wikipedia would provide. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, people - it provides a summary with links to related ideas. It isn't as if the depth of coverage on wikipedia is so great (for most topics) that one could use it as a sole source.
I can't help but find some of your comments odd. What sort of "intellectual property investment" are you suggesting that Sequoia might have in this machine? It's a machine to count votes electronically. There may be some novelty here and there, but certainly nothing that is going to inflict any damage on the company if an expert is permitted to review it. What I find odd about your post:
1) You seem to think that honoring a business investment "comes first" in this case. It doesn't. The entire success or failure of Sequoia's product depends on the reliability and security of their system, and our most fundamental civil protection from the government depends on it, too. There is no conflict of interest here, unless Sequoia is afraid of something.
2) I'm not sure that the traditional model of capitalism works well in this case. I'm not sure you can say "if company X doesn't want to comply, then company Y will!" because both companies are potentially under enormous pressure to deceive the states and subvert the vote. I'm not sure that voting machines are a great commodity to be outsourcing. One would think that the GAO or the Elections dept. would build these things and then hold public contests at universities to try to crack them, like DARPA sometimes does with emerging military technology.
I'm not flaming here - but I don't think it's that big of a deal if an article on Bill Gates or Jane Fonda is inaccurate. I'll bet the one on Evolution isn't too great, either - but this is what Wikipedia is about. Let me explain:
To hear EB talk about it, you would think that the only good encyclopedia entry on Bill Gates would include factual information about his birth, life, finances, etc. That's fine if you are writing a history book for schoolchildren, but what Wikipedia does is actually captures the cultural moment around an issue - the fact that Bill Gates' article is inaccurate is because there is so much contention surrounding him.
To my eyes, Britannica is enforcing a cultural imperialism that the only right information is Politically Correct whitewashed facts. While that certainly is important, for instance, if you are really looking for the best definition of "evolution" or an impartial recounting of facts about Jane Fonda, that's not what Wikipedia does.
It captures the fullest dimension of the issues - the facts (as they are percieved) and all the culturally significant alternate views as well. Imagine what value future anthropologists might glean from a snapshot of Wikipedia - they wouldn't care who Bill Gates was in any kind of factual way - they would want to see what the world thought of him. Or the WTO, the World Bank, Greenpeace - you get the idea.
Someone else mentioned Tux Paint - but I'm not sure that really does much for kids -- I suppose it teaches mouse skills. I have an 18-month old, so this question has been on my mind a lot recently.
A major hurdle for today's young programmers will be the lack of an easy GUI language - they aren't going to settle for the Command Prompt that you get with simple C programs under windows, and they certainly aren't going to learn MFC. Any language that makes it "sort of" easy to make a GUI window, etc, will do well.
Another GUI language option that jumps to mind is LabView's Virtual Instruments. You program by "wiring" modules together in a graphical environment. OpenDX has a similar facility, although it's primarily for Mathmatical calculations. LabView also makes GUIs easy.
HTML/Perl/PHP might not be a bad alternative, as they are simple and yield immediate results. Socially, a girl might see more benefit from HTML or other "communications" related tools rather than mathematical or procedural tools.
Oh wait... No. the pictures are shifted by accident.
Take a look at this picture:
Here
I achieved it using an emboss filter in Photoshop. You can clearly see two sets of lines, a wide region of pixels that are depressed in the image. This can't be a flying object - it has to be some other kind of effect, only the topmost edge of which we see visually in the picture.
I think I can prove it isn't a bug. If you look at the before-during-after photos in sequence, there is some specular highlighting that goes on in the foreground during the flash. This means that the light of the flash was reflected off the ground. Look closely, and you'll see several pixels light up in the "parking lot" area during the "blast".
So any solution that relies on the flash being very close to the camera has to be wrong, unless you can explain the reflection off the asphault of the parking lot some other way.
Yes, I did. Sorry.
I can't believe I read this thread on Slashdot. How can anyone honestly think that Science is some kind of politically biased soapbox?
Look - Science has in the past occasionally been drug into the political limelight - but let's not ignore the truth here - Science is often involved against it's will (read: Evolution even in Darwin's Day, the poplularization of Cold Fusion) because the public or the media catches some scent from the scientific community and now wants to know more.
But what always happens - and this, I think, is the major failing between Journalists/Reporters and Science, is that the reporters don't really want to understand - no, no, nobody ever wants to really get it; they just want to get the jist without needing to understand the finer points.
This is why Quantum Physics is the ultimate sieve by which to filter out "Popular Science" readers - QP is so 'nifty' on the surface, but to understand it requires quite a commitment to the mathmatics, experimental and theoretical explorations, etc. The average consumer doesn't really have the attention span to grasp the concepts, just tell them how much bigger their TV will be and how much cheaper their gasoline will be and their happy with "Science."
That process isn't the fault of the Scientists, who largely are not looking for publicity, except possibly within their own small community of experts, and who are generally mild-mannered people of average means, who happen to enjoy the investigative process.
How can any serious person think that the average scientist is a "leftist commie", unless by that phrase, you mean to indicate a person who has some ethical qualms with being among the richest and most privledged human beings in the entire world, and who feels that the good fortune they have enjoyed deserves to be respected and returned to others. God, what a horrible philosophy. Come to think of it, if that's your definition, most people are leftists and commies. Perhaps scientists (and writers, filmmakers, etc) seem to lean left because they have been educated in the History of the human race, in the art of expressing themselves, and in the principals of Justice, and in the end it's hard for an educated person to "chase the cheese" for decades and never stop to think about the rest of the planet and it's people.
God, get with it. You can't just go on living your little American life while people are murdering one another at your doorstep, living in filth, unable to make ends meet. Pretty soon, all of the enraged and denegrated peoples of the world are going to look up and see America, sitting on it's throne - and I think then we'll see what the rage of an angry world can do to us firsthand.
Oh, Come on. If the retail industry is paying 31 Billion this year in return fraud, and then you close the loophole and save them all that money, does ANYBODY REALLY think that prices will... what? Fall? Give me a break. The market determines the profitability of an item, not the expense incurred in selling it. If people will pay $200 for a jacket, a jacket will cost $200 regardless of the expense of running the store. That $31 billion we save the retailing industry will go directly to the chairmen and the top stockholders.
It's called capitalism, and it's all about making as much money as possible. These fraudsters are making it hard for Express to make more and more money year after year. Wow, I really couldn't care less.
As a kid, I saw the occasional "Beaver Hunter" magazine at Boy Scout Camp, but after that I wasn't exposed to porn really until I started to get online. Back in the day, Newsgroups were the place to go for good pictures without alot of hassle.
For years afterward, I was a regular porn collector and watcher. I spent long hours every day browsing and maintaining a porn collection. I can vouch that it IS destructive to an individual who looks at it.
When it comes time to quit porn, like when you get married (as I did), all of the sudden you realize you haven't gone a week without it in 10 years. It's pretty hard to quit - and even when you 'do', you'll probably relapse a couple of times. And it makes regular old sex less interesting to you, because you are aware of a whole lot of possibilities, a whole range of beautiful bodies splayed in arousing positions, etc. What wife can compare with the thousands of women who have already displayed themselves in the lewdest of ways to your eyes?
I don't necessary agree that ALL porn is debasing or unethical, but it certainly does change the observer, and quitting is pretty tough.
2 Years ago I was the kind of guy who pirated copies of Windows and thought that Linux was "too hard" or just "whoa."
/etc, where they are supposed to be, you don't have to screw around with dependecies, though you can control them, and did I mention that it's smoking fast?
The first distro that I tried was RedHat, which I have to admit I was excited to install, but back then I didn't have broadband - so there was very little I could do without an Internet connection. (WinModems - yuck!)
When I finally got broadband, I tried Fedora, and ran that for a while, but I wasn't getting all that far with it and I was so confused by the layout of the distribution, with configuration files all over the place, dependecies that seemed excessive; I felt like I was drowning in all the things I didn't know.
So I switched to Gentoo - I heard good things about it, I liked the idea of a source-code optimized distro. Sure, I guess getting it installed was kind of tough - I started from a stage1 and built everything. But all the conf files are in
First, I build a server, which I do hosting from, then I repeated the process with my primary desktop. Gentoo takes a long time to set up, but once it's up, it's up for good. I think my desktop has been up for 40 days continuously, no problems, no incidents, and did I mention I know a WHOLE LOT more about computers and linux now?
Running Linux versus Running Windows is like studying art with a famous artist versus scribbling with crayons. The best part is, that now I can imagine new things to do with my computer that just weren't possible before - like a web interface to my mp3 collection, building my own home media center, hosting 8 different websites off of my modest server, web design without constant FTP uploading, etc.
C'mon, Humans have got to rank someplace on that list.
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