The point of space travel is that sooner or later we will kill ourselves off on this planet. Right now unhappy teens can go hack some government server or shoot a couple of classmates. In 30 years they'll be able to make bacteria that make airborne AIDS look like heaven. Some may not even mean to kill anyone but just fuck up. That's assuming we don't nuke ourselves into the stone age or that our society doesn't implode.
The point of any life form is to breed and spread, the more of it there is and the more places its in the less likely it's to die off.
As for life on other planets, well thats a scientific justification. All life on earth, no matter what form or how different, comes from a single source. We can't be close to sure (for quite some time at least) of how it came about or what other possibilities there were. Other life may teach us nothing or it may open up dozens of new paths for biologists.
Am I pushing your buttons? Am I pissing you off? No, not really. I've seen much better written argument for your point, yours is just a weak troll. Hell you actually admit you were trolling.
Just because someone is X doesn't mean that person is right regarding X, just that he's somewhat less likely to be wrong. Also just because they may be right doesn't mean they answered the proper question.
More importantly YOU are saying that the parent is wrong despite him specifically saying that Phil Plait is correct. In other words now YOU'RE claiming to know more than the parent, how do YOU back up your credentials since you find that so vital?
We don't need water HERE, we need it everywhere else. That includes as fuel for spaceships, as drinking water for spaceships, as drinking water for any space stations/habitats and so on.
If it's in some place we have much better odds of setting up a colony there. However if it's harder to get it out of some place then it's of only marginal use save for some scientific colony.
Well, if you'd actually read any history, you would know, that not only illegal wiretaps were authorized by the "war president" Roosevelt, but also a few apparent rub-outs of American citizens by foreign (British) secret agencies. That was also wrong, just because it has been done in the past doesn't mean it is a good thing.
But do tell me, how NSA (or its clients) could've abused the gathered information. You mean how they can use unlimited information on all phone calls made by US citizens, because that is what they have. If you believe that somehow "terrorism": has to be involved then you're a fool, after all the whole point of there being no safety measure sis that no one is there to verify why the information is used.
Some of the more interesting uses are against perfectly legal opponents of the current government and it's policies. For example democrats, peace protectors, socialists, proponents of socialized medicine and so on. There is a history for such abuses of power by presidents in the past. If you don't realize the uses of knowing what your political rivals plan to do then you are an idiot.
Sure -- abortions kill far more, for example. About a million every year in US alone, you know... Mmm, what a flamebait... Sure and exterminators kill billions of mice, rats and insects every year. Doctors kill trillions of cancer cells every year. Nonetheless there is nothing wrong with it, after all murder and killing are very different things. Abortion is not murder in the same way that killing an isect or removing some cancer cells isn't murder.
Oh, BS. If you'd actually read any history you'd know that the point of legal overview is to prevent abuse, and government are run by people who love to abuse their power. Also terrorism is a rather minor threat except that it's a great way for politicians to get more power and votes.
I take it you also find the revolutionary war to be a horrible thing, after all the British were the government and it's utterly evil to not bow down to the government.
And when your bookmarks got deleted what would you do? Well? Remember, no search engines and all you can access is some default web page (likely one you never used before).
Yes, the internet has made a lot of people much stupider (witness your average idiot's abbreviated text message session) People have always been stupid, the internet has done nothing to change that.
Well they may consider the cannot round to be part of the boat thus it hitting another boat being a "collision." On the bright side even if you do get disqualified for such an act the DARPA grant you'll get soon afterwards will probably be worth more than the competition prize.
No, they're sin is wanting to work on games not matter what reality says and being utter idiots about it. In any other industry they'd have been out of candidates a long time ago but the young ones are utter and total idiots. They "want to work in games" and will put up with anything to do so, no matter how little they actually contribute to the game in every sense of the meaning.
Plenty of other jobs, including programming/IT ones, that don't have this problem AND pay better. Of course when you have so many idiots who are willing to sell their souls to work for you it's hard to not take advantage of it.
Build your own damn network. Effectively illegal in a number of places where government sponsored monopolies are the only option. furthermore many of these networks were paid for by taxes to various extents making them effectively partially the property of the government.
Oh for the love of god. Yes, you can use BSD code inside a GPL program, that's the whole bloody point of the BSD license. It let's the code be used anywhere and everywhere.
You seem to confuse language and culture, they are related but not the same. An Indian person would associate something with cow not because he speaks Indian (natively) but because he grew up in a culture which associates those two ideas.
BS, no one is killing people and in modern times no one is outlawing things. Society likes uniformity to a degree and that is what is happening. I'm sure you yourself take great advantage of all the modern convenience like cheap goods despite the million upon million who lost their livelihood and I would say culture as a result of it.
Do you cry for the candle makers who lost their craft due to electricity? Or the metal or wood craftsman who were replaced by machinery? Do you cry for farmers who became redundant due to modern machinery? Do you cry for the nobles of old who lost their way of life because of democracy? Do you cry for the serfs who can no longer toil on their farms? Do you cry for the peasants who no longer die of now preventable disease?
As for being more employable, there are numerous reasons. Since people are petty the name alone makes them more likely to hire you. Likewise a large number of local companies were started by Stanford graduates (google, yahoo, etc.) which creates ties to the university. When your resume goes through a vice president (as I said, they come and give talks once in a while) it's probably more likely to be taken seriously then if it goes through the normal hr process. Many professors also have ties to various companies which means, if you work with them or take a class with them, they may be able to get you a job. Plain old networking and so on with students is also good for future employability.
As you may notice none of this has anything to do with what they teach you at Stanford but then again the most important thing for getting a job is not what you know but who you know. The second most important one is what you can make them think you know even if you don't really know it. You may not like that but that's life.
Also Stanford has no in-state tuition being a private school and most top schools not provide a lot of financial aid, apparently Princeton started it (trying to make it so no one needs to take out loans to graduate).
Now one of the things that always bugged me about primary and secondary education is that they were lacking the creativity to figure out ways to challenge, or at least keep interested the students that found the material in classes excessively easy. That is mainly a problem of parents not the schools, in that there are ways around it even right now but few parents want to take the effort to do so for their children or actually force their little brats to learn something.
There are magnet schools, distance learning programs, grade skipping, taking classes at local college, taking classes from higher grades, learning on your own, moving to a district with better schools, sending kids to a district with better schools, summer programs, college level summer programs, after school programs, special private programs for gifted students (that will help deal with all these possibilities and provide financial help) and so on.
School administrators are more often than not petty small minded morons but that makes them relatively easy to manipulate. Sure it takes time and effort (for both the student and parents) but no one ever said being a parent is easy. Optimally it'd be nice if the school system helped more with such things but realistically it likely never will.
Stanford (or some stupid expensive private school) Top schools (now) have very nice financial aid programs, essentially if you can't pay then they'll pay for you. After all top universities really don't care about tuition that much, their endowment fund is where the money comes from in the end. Then there are also external scholarships and so on that can help pay off your costs. I finished Stanford with 0 debt and I knew someone who essentially paid no tuition due to financial aid alone.
And yes going to a prestigious school does make you more employable for a variety of reasons.
And your point is? OSS is not the magical fix for every situation and problem which you seem to think it is supposed to be. It is a software product. The BIY response is for when people assume the developers are their personal slaves.
It's like buying furniture, if you want one that exactly fits your needs you need to build it yourself or find someone to do it for you.
Now as I said you can't respond to each individual request. However you aggregate it to the whole community of users, and you can start to get an idea of what you need to focus on, and the rules still hold true: Implementing things people want keeps users and gets new one. What the fuck do you THINK OSS developers do? Hold crack parties throughout the night and use a dart board to think of new features in their cocaine fueled madness?
If you want a feature badly enough you pay for it, one way or another. The DIY response is to those who expect things to be done for them specially.
Part of having a successful product is listening to what people want and working to implement that. Now maybe you think that the devs shouldn't care, that it should just be whatever it is and there shouldn't be any thought given to making it what people want, unless said person is willing to do that. Fair enough, that's a valid stance. However if you take that stance, then do go evangelising Linux as a replacement for Windows or an everyman's OS. Realise that if that is how things are to be done, it is a sysadmin/geek OS and will never be otherwise. So you mean that Microsoft will actually listen to every suggestion someone makes and consider implementing it?
Either way is ok, there's nothing wrong with saying "We are all about DIY, if you aren't willing to do it, don't expect other people to), you just have to recognise that is a viewpoint inconsistent with "We believe this is something everyone could and should use." Why exactly? Every proprietary company pretty much says "we do this for money, if we don't want to implement it go fuck yourself."
You expect every fucking suggestion to be implemented? If not then what DO you suggest? The developers simply say that they are going to do X, if you want to do Y then you need to do it yourself. You can't implement every bloody possible feature in the damn universe, which is apparently what you want. Instead they implement what they think meets their own goals. They claim that this is enough to work for everyone. It isn't perfect for everyone but NOTHING ever is, if someone wants a feature desperately they either need to implement it themselves or find someone else to do it.
Actually you'll likely die no matter what you know. That's kind of "shit hitting the fan" in modern terms means, massive global death. Also since technology doesn't magically disappear when things go boom it's people who know how to REPAIR technological or mechanical items that will be in highest demand.
Until you suddenly no longer have of the first four and realize that without those "extraneous" things you have little chance of regaining what you lost.
And if you check it you have a new bloody license. People are fighting over it because they don't WANT to have 50 billion incompatible licenses to deal with.
And I enjoy my job, mostly. Seems many people in say Europe are expected to not like their jobs or find them interesting, I feel sad for them. Money is not worth spending dozens of hours a week in essentially misery and I hope to never need to do that.
As for vacations, well I plan to take a many month long vacation in a couple years. See I don't expect to stay in the same job for very long (relatively), at least not for many years to come. I make more than enough to be able to simply not work at all for half a year and visit whatever places I want. If I really wanted to I could line up some nice telecommutable contract work or contract work in other countries and live on that for a while as well.
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The point of any life form is to breed and spread, the more of it there is and the more places its in the less likely it's to die off.
As for life on other planets, well thats a scientific justification. All life on earth, no matter what form or how different, comes from a single source. We can't be close to sure (for quite some time at least) of how it came about or what other possibilities there were. Other life may teach us nothing or it may open up dozens of new paths for biologists. Am I pushing your buttons? Am I pissing you off? No, not really. I've seen much better written argument for your point, yours is just a weak troll. Hell you actually admit you were trolling.
Just because someone is X doesn't mean that person is right regarding X, just that he's somewhat less likely to be wrong. Also just because they may be right doesn't mean they answered the proper question.
More importantly YOU are saying that the parent is wrong despite him specifically saying that Phil Plait is correct. In other words now YOU'RE claiming to know more than the parent, how do YOU back up your credentials since you find that so vital?
We don't need water HERE, we need it everywhere else. That includes as fuel for spaceships, as drinking water for spaceships, as drinking water for any space stations/habitats and so on.
If it's in some place we have much better odds of setting up a colony there. However if it's harder to get it out of some place then it's of only marginal use save for some scientific colony.
Some of the more interesting uses are against perfectly legal opponents of the current government and it's policies. For example democrats, peace protectors, socialists, proponents of socialized medicine and so on. There is a history for such abuses of power by presidents in the past. If you don't realize the uses of knowing what your political rivals plan to do then you are an idiot. Sure -- abortions kill far more, for example. About a million every year in US alone, you know... Mmm, what a flamebait... Sure and exterminators kill billions of mice, rats and insects every year. Doctors kill trillions of cancer cells every year. Nonetheless there is nothing wrong with it, after all murder and killing are very different things. Abortion is not murder in the same way that killing an isect or removing some cancer cells isn't murder.
Oh, BS. If you'd actually read any history you'd know that the point of legal overview is to prevent abuse, and government are run by people who love to abuse their power. Also terrorism is a rather minor threat except that it's a great way for politicians to get more power and votes.
I take it you also find the revolutionary war to be a horrible thing, after all the British were the government and it's utterly evil to not bow down to the government.
And when your bookmarks got deleted what would you do? Well? Remember, no search engines and all you can access is some default web page (likely one you never used before).
I take it you've never been to either the US or a former soviet union nation.
As of 2000 or so:
Murder rate:
-US: 0.042802 per 1,000 people
-Russia: 0.201534 per 1,000 people
And by the time the 50 million flagged emails are read the company is bankrupt from having to hire all those humans to read the emails.
Read what you replied to again, note the word "supporter."
Well they may consider the cannot round to be part of the boat thus it hitting another boat being a "collision." On the bright side even if you do get disqualified for such an act the DARPA grant you'll get soon afterwards will probably be worth more than the competition prize.
No, they're sin is wanting to work on games not matter what reality says and being utter idiots about it. In any other industry they'd have been out of candidates a long time ago but the young ones are utter and total idiots. They "want to work in games" and will put up with anything to do so, no matter how little they actually contribute to the game in every sense of the meaning.
Plenty of other jobs, including programming/IT ones, that don't have this problem AND pay better. Of course when you have so many idiots who are willing to sell their souls to work for you it's hard to not take advantage of it.
Oh for the love of god. Yes, you can use BSD code inside a GPL program, that's the whole bloody point of the BSD license. It let's the code be used anywhere and everywhere.
You seem to confuse language and culture, they are related but not the same. An Indian person would associate something with cow not because he speaks Indian (natively) but because he grew up in a culture which associates those two ideas.
BS, no one is killing people and in modern times no one is outlawing things. Society likes uniformity to a degree and that is what is happening. I'm sure you yourself take great advantage of all the modern convenience like cheap goods despite the million upon million who lost their livelihood and I would say culture as a result of it.
Do you cry for the candle makers who lost their craft due to electricity? Or the metal or wood craftsman who were replaced by machinery? Do you cry for farmers who became redundant due to modern machinery? Do you cry for the nobles of old who lost their way of life because of democracy? Do you cry for the serfs who can no longer toil on their farms? Do you cry for the peasants who no longer die of now preventable disease?
Huh? Well someone sounds bitter.
As for being more employable, there are numerous reasons. Since people are petty the name alone makes them more likely to hire you. Likewise a large number of local companies were started by Stanford graduates (google, yahoo, etc.) which creates ties to the university. When your resume goes through a vice president (as I said, they come and give talks once in a while) it's probably more likely to be taken seriously then if it goes through the normal hr process. Many professors also have ties to various companies which means, if you work with them or take a class with them, they may be able to get you a job. Plain old networking and so on with students is also good for future employability.
As you may notice none of this has anything to do with what they teach you at Stanford but then again the most important thing for getting a job is not what you know but who you know. The second most important one is what you can make them think you know even if you don't really know it. You may not like that but that's life.
Also Stanford has no in-state tuition being a private school and most top schools not provide a lot of financial aid, apparently Princeton started it (trying to make it so no one needs to take out loans to graduate).
There are magnet schools, distance learning programs, grade skipping, taking classes at local college, taking classes from higher grades, learning on your own, moving to a district with better schools, sending kids to a district with better schools, summer programs, college level summer programs, after school programs, special private programs for gifted students (that will help deal with all these possibilities and provide financial help) and so on.
School administrators are more often than not petty small minded morons but that makes them relatively easy to manipulate. Sure it takes time and effort (for both the student and parents) but no one ever said being a parent is easy. Optimally it'd be nice if the school system helped more with such things but realistically it likely never will.
And yes going to a prestigious school does make you more employable for a variety of reasons.
It's like buying furniture, if you want one that exactly fits your needs you need to build it yourself or find someone to do it for you. Now as I said you can't respond to each individual request. However you aggregate it to the whole community of users, and you can start to get an idea of what you need to focus on, and the rules still hold true: Implementing things people want keeps users and gets new one. What the fuck do you THINK OSS developers do? Hold crack parties throughout the night and use a dart board to think of new features in their cocaine fueled madness?
If you want a feature badly enough you pay for it, one way or another. The DIY response is to those who expect things to be done for them specially.
You expect every fucking suggestion to be implemented? If not then what DO you suggest? The developers simply say that they are going to do X, if you want to do Y then you need to do it yourself. You can't implement every bloody possible feature in the damn universe, which is apparently what you want. Instead they implement what they think meets their own goals. They claim that this is enough to work for everyone. It isn't perfect for everyone but NOTHING ever is, if someone wants a feature desperately they either need to implement it themselves or find someone else to do it.
Actually you'll likely die no matter what you know. That's kind of "shit hitting the fan" in modern terms means, massive global death. Also since technology doesn't magically disappear when things go boom it's people who know how to REPAIR technological or mechanical items that will be in highest demand.
Until you suddenly no longer have of the first four and realize that without those "extraneous" things you have little chance of regaining what you lost.
And if you check it you have a new bloody license. People are fighting over it because they don't WANT to have 50 billion incompatible licenses to deal with.
And I enjoy my job, mostly. Seems many people in say Europe are expected to not like their jobs or find them interesting, I feel sad for them. Money is not worth spending dozens of hours a week in essentially misery and I hope to never need to do that.
As for vacations, well I plan to take a many month long vacation in a couple years. See I don't expect to stay in the same job for very long (relatively), at least not for many years to come. I make more than enough to be able to simply not work at all for half a year and visit whatever places I want. If I really wanted to I could line up some nice telecommutable contract work or contract work in other countries and live on that for a while as well.