No, but the same questions/comparisons apply to near earth orbit as well (what is actually accomplished by maintaining a human settlement there?). Clearly there are benefits, but are they in proportion to the cost and diversion of so many resources?
Another way to frame this problem might be to ask where is the expansionist/explorative boundary where we should stop? Where further action is counterproductive.
A desire to eat surgary/fatty foods to excess helped for a long time, when these things were rare. The same impulse becomes harmful in an environment of prolonged abundance and relative inactivity.
The impulse to explore, to settle, to conquer, has propelled humanity to planetary dominance. Should it apply only to productive areas on the earth? To Antartica and to the ocean floors? To near earth orbit? To the moon, Mars, and Venus? To Jupiter and Pluto? To the surface of the sun? To the space between galaxies? At what point are we scratching an itch that developed in such a different context that there is simply no rational way to justify it anymore?
It's quite human to view our natural impulses and desires as being imbued with some sort of absolute value and integrity, to view our emotions as guided by an unseen truth beyond questioning. But they are tools, tools constrained by the environment in which they were forged over evolutionary time.
...CA sent ~$286,627,000,000 to the Federal Government, on the other hand they received ~$242,023,000,000 dollars worth of federal funding. I'd just like to note that this represents a 44.6 billion dollar disparity.
Ok let me see if I understand you correctly, you're saying that CA, dollar for dollar, got back 85% of the money it paid in federal taxes. So 15% of that money has gone "missing" and you seem to be implying that the only equitable thing is for CA to get back 100% of the money it sent to DC (or perhaps more than 100% wouldn't cause any frowns either right?).
Are you suggesting that people that live in CA should have no part in paying for the two wars we are involved with? That California shouldn't pay for any of the government structure/personnel in Washington DC? That the IRS should figure out a way to do its job without spending any of the money it collects on infrastructure and employees?
I don't disagree with your assessment of CA state tax/spending issues, but what is the magic number you suggest states should get to for dollar in dollar out for federal taxes? Fifteen percent doesn't seem to be to be outside reasonable bounds given our current situation and commitments on the federal level.
I think your point is spot on, this is why big reputable sites need to take charge of their own advertising instead of farming everything out to 3rd parties that are getting it wrong a lot lately.
You may save some money in the short term by not having to deal with the overhead yourself, but unless all the content that is getting shoveled your way is reputable you just force your readers to block everything to keep their systems safe.
But realistically what this means is using ads that don't rely on delivery mechanisms with a huge attack surface like flash and active scripting.
You make a wonderful point, it boggles me how many posters here seem to be fine with the idea of letting the city burn if you were following the rules like a good little citizen that never questions those in power.
I'm suggesting that a political appointee asking for the passwords to a multi-million population city's highly complex network for no other reason than because he thinks he is entitled to have them (no actual, purposeful reason) is either drunk or stupid, and most likely both, lol.
An even better analogy might be if I get drunk and I start looking like I'm going to drunk-dial my boss and my friend takes my phone away from me until I sober up, should my friend be charged with a crime? Should I be mad at him or grateful?
The 18 months it has taken just to get to this point and the 5 million bail is just ridiculous. It can certainly be argued on both sides which was the better judgment call for Terry to make, but this level of persecution for what he did is just piss and vinegar by people who have the power to do so and isn't justifiable in any rational way.
Especially when you consider that Terry didn't stand to benefit in any way personally from the decision he made, only the network stood to benefit by being shielded from harm.
I move my LCD monitor around a lot and a few months ago the power connector became loose, the solder joints had failed. So I took it apart to resolder it and to add some stress relief straps so it wouldn't happen again. There wasn't a whole lot to the innards, the LCD itself was a self contained metal panel. I could easily see a DIYer being able to construct your own beveless array out of cheap LCD monitors you can pick up at the store. Would probably be an order of magnitude cheaper than buying a ready made array since those are so low volume.
I'd hardly call something free when it requires you to have an MSDN subscription to download and activate, a subscription that ranges from $700 to $11,000 for 12 months.
I don't think the pirates in Asia will have much trouble competing against that. (Or having to download a DVD size installer for that matter.)
Seriously, if the people choose to provide the services themselves, why should they be prohibited from doing so?
I know, it's anathema to free-market idealists, but the end result is... better, cheaper service.
Actually it's not anathema at all as you describe it. But what you're describing is closer to a cooperative than a government run service. Where everyone using the service does so voluntarily and the costs are entirely borne by those benefiting from the service.
The only way to maintain a monopoly is through government sanction (or regulations that effectively limit others from entering the market). And the problem with government run services is that it becomes very tempting, once they are up and running, to use that governmental power to shield themselves from competition.
It's essentially a benevolent dictator problem, there's nothing inherently preventing a government from providing high value service at the lowest possible cost, it's just that in the real world it almost never works out that way. Just as a dictator could rule the nation better than any democracy ever could, but in the real world they rarely do (and never for more than one generation).
The more immediate problem here though is that a local government has almost no control over the state and national regulations that tie their hands and keep them from dislodging the controls that set up effective monopolies by the cable and teleco companies. And the only real option they have is to do what they're doing and use their clout and bond status to do what should be possible privately.
Think of it as stochastic resonance. You can take a very low power signal and if you add random noise it will raise the signal above the threshold of detection because even though the signal is below threshold, it's still stronger than the background, so the background also gets lifted but not as much.
So astrology could be totally random, and yet still have a powerful effect. By raising motivations from just below the level where they get acted on. So say you like a girl is interested in a guy down the hall but not quite enough to do anything yet. She reads her horoscope and even though its ambiguity and randomness still raise up motivations that were already there past the point where now she decides to go down and flirt with him.
This is a subtle arugument, but quite powerful in understanding why it's so widespread. It takes a lot of effort to carefully weigh all your choices and decide rationally what the best or optimal course would be to take. If there's some heuristic or rule that you can use to bypass all the consideration and end up making the right choice even just a majority of the time, it can often be worth the mistakes because you can put that time and effort into more beneficial tasks.
Being scared of people you don't know and giving keeping your distance may not always correctly identify people who wish to harm you from those that don't. But you avoid the costs in time and effort (and the risks) of evaluating each stranger on a case by case basis.
Now before you start jumping out with the exceptions and why this is wrong, the point isn't that it's a perfect rule, just that it has the possibility of being good enough to at the end of the day be more beneficial.
We do this with all sorts of things, we cull our experience down into simple rules that allow us to avoid having to waste time and effort.
Now here's the subtle part, we also like to have a good reason for doing what we do, and we're quite capable of inventing a rationale to justify a good rule. The rationale might be total bunkum, but it allows us to feel comfortable in doing what does indeed benefit us.
The only problem comes when we get more attached to the rationale than the rule, which leads people to invent new rules based on a rationale that isn't itself true, then they end up doing stuff that's harmful.
With astrology you can think of it as an ice-breaker to get to know people that might make good mates but you wouldn't normally consider. A rule to seriously consider 1 in every 12 people you meet would work just as well by the way lol. So I would just caution people not to confuse the rationale with the results. We all do it, just in different ways.
You seem to be assuming that diamonds are given to convey wealth from one person to another, in which case you would be correct, diamonds don't have a pragmatic worth anywhere close to what you pay for them.
But it is precisely that quality which makes them useful. In forming trust relationships humans have developed a number of ways to indicate "I'm a person you can trust and spend effort/time/resources on me because I will reciprocate."
One excellent way to do this is for a person to give something that was personally costly, but has little actual value to the receiver (other than the trust value it conveys).
So why not just give something with actual value/utility to the person? It would cost the giver the same right? Well as counterintuitive as it seems, it's to protect the giver. If we gave items that had actual value then there would be a high temptation to seek out trust relationships then just keep it and move on to the next person. Now you may be thinking, you can resell diamonds, but as anyone who has tried to unload an engagement ring knows, the only chance you have to resell it for anywhere near the purchase price is to sell it directly to another suitor.
It's the same thing with flowers I imagine, costly but little utilitarian value.
And given the differences in the sexes it makes sense that men will have evolved to feel good about giving expensive gifts, and women in receiving them, as a means of establishing a cooperative relationship where you can have some confidence that the other person can be trusted not to take advantage of you.
So whether it's diamonds, pearls, gold, extravagant chocolates, 8 dollar greeting cards, flowers or what have you, there will always be a use for gifts that are both costly to the giver and of little real worth to the receiver as a way to either establish or maintain trust (which is why women get so incensed if you forget to give a nice anniversary gift, to her it has profound implications for the state and future of your relationship). In other words, it's an artifact of the arms race that is sexual reproduction.
Perhaps you don't understand what evolution means, it's simply change. The more change that takes place, the more something has evolved. It doesn't mean better or worse or closer to some ultimate goal.
And what you describe allows lots of evolution to occur. Extremely high selective pressures will punish variability. But when everyone (or almost everyone) can reproduce and selective pressures are low (abundant resources and few dangers) then all those little mutations that would have been selected against get to be passed on to a new generation. Resulting in much faster rates of change over time, as well as much higher variability in the population.
Something few people seem to recognize is there are two separable elements to most of homeopathy. The first is the treatment itself, and the second is the explanation for how it works. For whatever reason people aren't satisfied to know that something works, they also need to know why it works. And unfortunately if there isn't a self-evident explanation one will be invented. And it doesn't end there, the invented rationale is then usually extended to develop other treatments (which don't work of course because what they are based on isn't true).
Take acupuncture. Twirling small needles in the top layer of the skin has a variety of benefits. But why? Traditions tell the story that it balances the energy flows, etc etc. A recent study examined three groups, one with no acupuncture, one with acupuncture in the traditionally prescribed locations, and one with acupuncture in random locations. Both of the latter two groups were better than the first (no treatment), but interestingly they weren't different from each other.
So yes acupuncture has some effect, but the traditional explanation has nothing to do with why it works.
So two of the big problems with homeopathy are first that most people get hung up on the far out explanations for why the treatments supposedly work and miss out on stuff that could actually help them. And second that lots of homeopathic treatments are developed that don't do anything to help because they are logical extensions of faulty premises.
Alternative medicine also suffers from the fact that once a treatment becomes well accepted and is supported by empirical research it magically leaves the realm of alternative medicine. So by definition alternative treatments will always be those that haven't yet been supported by scientific research, even though many of them do in fact work.
I've talked to a number of homeopaths and in my limited experience they seem to take it like an all or nothing religion, where you have to accept it all or none of it, and you have to accept the wacky explanations to the letter. It would be nice if they didn't feel so burned by the modern medical machine that they reject as a matter of principle empirically based testing.
There was a piece on NPR radio a few weeks ago about an inventor who is marketing a device similar to the mosquito one in this article only it is specifically desinged to be annoying to teenagers (he had problems with them congregating in front of his store). Amusingly his daughter then subverted it for her own use by creating ringtones of the noise so that she could turn her phone on during school (since vibra mode can still be audible in a quiet classroom) and none of the teachers can hear it even though everyone else can lol.
They even had the ringtone as a downloadable ringtone there (you can't of course hear it at all if you're over 25 or so, as you age you lose the ability to hear in those outlier frequency ranges).
It's a common misconception to think that evolution moves from simple to complex, from small to large, from reflexive to thinking. But evolution is indeed unidirectional. But I suppose it's putting too technical a spin on things, if you say devolve to people on the street, 99 out of 100 will take it to mean that things are becoming more like they used to be, which still captures the truth of the matter. But technically going from man to slime is just as much evolution as going from slime to man, or anything in between. Darwin just exposed the mechanism that explains why these changes occur.
Evolution is unidirectional in the same way that time is unidirectional, they aren't things in and of themselves, just a convenient label we use to refer to change. What's a minute? It only has meaning when making reference to all the kinds of change we're familar with that occur over the period of what we call a "minute" and the same is true of evolution. It just refers to the changes that occur in response to the environment around an organism.
What about Christian Bale? He might not look like Nemoy, but I think he would be able to do a very credible and entertaining Vulcan. Although he might be too hot now for them to get him.
In order to enforce arbitrary rules you need a cudgel of some sort, whining is the equivalent of a mosquito bite, annoying but easily forgotten.
To say that "than" means only this, and "then" means only that is arbitrary, you can just as easily say that both spellings may connote either meaning and that their interchangability simply reflects the increasing overlap in their everyday pronunciation.
Flexible languages live, prosper and assimilate. Rigid, inflexible languages become musty and decrepit, rarely the victor its adherents always deem it should be in the violent intersection of competing cultures.
That's only part of it I think. For a long time Firefox has enjoyed relative immunity from viruses and trojans that target it as a vector, therefore users enjoyed relative peace and quiet in comparison to IE users.
With its success and increasing popularity we can now see that the respite is coming to an end as malware writers turn their attention to Firefox users. Actual security is a combination of defense capability and degree of threat. Firefox is moving from the small quiet town into the high crime city, so irrespective of its inherent strengths it's now going to start weathering a lot more assaults.
Well there are lots of ways to accomplish the things you mention (pay for dental care, keep up with inflation, improve your standard of living). And lots of those ways are illegal or involve harming other people. I'd say that it's a pretty tough argument to say that you are justified in harming other people in order to get bonuses. The primary responsibility lies with the agents that choose to embellish or report people that didn't do anything wrong. They should simply refuse to do so out of a sense of morality, and try to change the policy through the proper channels (as well as set an example for other agents that you don't have to give in and make stuff up). Unchallenged corruption is corrosive and spreads like wildfire.
Of course that doesn't absolve the bone headed managers that are measuring performance on what are ultimately random occurences. And for little more reason than the ease of counting the number of reports per month and using that as a performance metric. The truely unfortunate thing I suppose is that there's no way this will get changed without abuse occurring (now that the public has reason to fear being unjustly added to their Watch List). We probably just wouldn't care that much if the only thing happening was some dutiful agents missing out on some bonuses or special assignments through no fault of their own.
One of the toughest nuts to crack is what are going to want to do, that is what should our goals be.
If you look at most of the goals we have right now, they're pretty mundane and shortlived. Curing disease, stop killing eachother, end to hunger, creating objects that we find beautiful and pleasing, creating more living beings like ourselves.
Once we reach a singularity we'll have the technology to do away with all these problem oriented goals and I for the life of me can't really think of any obvious goals past that point. While I agree with the premise that we don't have any reliable way of predicting what our goals will become past the singularity, does anyone have any guesses?
WARNING ON LINK OF PARENT
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Your link might be fruity, it's not to the developer's site but rather to a "fan" site, whatever that means. The exe wouldn't load and gave a suspect error message, also it is a different size than the one from the real site.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but the same questions/comparisons apply to near earth orbit as well (what is actually accomplished by maintaining a human settlement there?). Clearly there are benefits, but are they in proportion to the cost and diversion of so many resources?
Another way to frame this problem might be to ask where is the expansionist/explorative boundary where we should stop? Where further action is counterproductive.
A desire to eat surgary/fatty foods to excess helped for a long time, when these things were rare. The same impulse becomes harmful in an environment of prolonged abundance and relative inactivity.
The impulse to explore, to settle, to conquer, has propelled humanity to planetary dominance. Should it apply only to productive areas on the earth? To Antartica and to the ocean floors? To near earth orbit? To the moon, Mars, and Venus? To Jupiter and Pluto? To the surface of the sun? To the space between galaxies? At what point are we scratching an itch that developed in such a different context that there is simply no rational way to justify it anymore?
It's quite human to view our natural impulses and desires as being imbued with some sort of absolute value and integrity, to view our emotions as guided by an unseen truth beyond questioning. But they are tools, tools constrained by the environment in which they were forged over evolutionary time.
Ok let me see if I understand you correctly, you're saying that CA, dollar for dollar, got back 85% of the money it paid in federal taxes. So 15% of that money has gone "missing" and you seem to be implying that the only equitable thing is for CA to get back 100% of the money it sent to DC (or perhaps more than 100% wouldn't cause any frowns either right?).
Are you suggesting that people that live in CA should have no part in paying for the two wars we are involved with? That California shouldn't pay for any of the government structure/personnel in Washington DC? That the IRS should figure out a way to do its job without spending any of the money it collects on infrastructure and employees?
I don't disagree with your assessment of CA state tax/spending issues, but what is the magic number you suggest states should get to for dollar in dollar out for federal taxes? Fifteen percent doesn't seem to be to be outside reasonable bounds given our current situation and commitments on the federal level.
I think your point is spot on, this is why big reputable sites need to take charge of their own advertising instead of farming everything out to 3rd parties that are getting it wrong a lot lately.
You may save some money in the short term by not having to deal with the overhead yourself, but unless all the content that is getting shoveled your way is reputable you just force your readers to block everything to keep their systems safe.
But realistically what this means is using ads that don't rely on delivery mechanisms with a huge attack surface like flash and active scripting.
Theoretically? Yes. Realistically? Not in our lifetime.
You make a wonderful point, it boggles me how many posters here seem to be fine with the idea of letting the city burn if you were following the rules like a good little citizen that never questions those in power.
I'm suggesting that a political appointee asking for the passwords to a multi-million population city's highly complex network for no other reason than because he thinks he is entitled to have them (no actual, purposeful reason) is either drunk or stupid, and most likely both, lol.
An even better analogy might be if I get drunk and I start looking like I'm going to drunk-dial my boss and my friend takes my phone away from me until I sober up, should my friend be charged with a crime? Should I be mad at him or grateful?
The 18 months it has taken just to get to this point and the 5 million bail is just ridiculous. It can certainly be argued on both sides which was the better judgment call for Terry to make, but this level of persecution for what he did is just piss and vinegar by people who have the power to do so and isn't justifiable in any rational way.
Especially when you consider that Terry didn't stand to benefit in any way personally from the decision he made, only the network stood to benefit by being shielded from harm.
War on drugs and all that. We were eradicating the Mooninite's Moonajuana crop.
I move my LCD monitor around a lot and a few months ago the power connector became loose, the solder joints had failed. So I took it apart to resolder it and to add some stress relief straps so it wouldn't happen again. There wasn't a whole lot to the innards, the LCD itself was a self contained metal panel. I could easily see a DIYer being able to construct your own beveless array out of cheap LCD monitors you can pick up at the store. Would probably be an order of magnitude cheaper than buying a ready made array since those are so low volume.
I'd hardly call something free when it requires you to have an MSDN subscription to download and activate, a subscription that ranges from $700 to $11,000 for 12 months.
I don't think the pirates in Asia will have much trouble competing against that. (Or having to download a DVD size installer for that matter.)
Actually it's not anathema at all as you describe it. But what you're describing is closer to a cooperative than a government run service. Where everyone using the service does so voluntarily and the costs are entirely borne by those benefiting from the service.
The only way to maintain a monopoly is through government sanction (or regulations that effectively limit others from entering the market). And the problem with government run services is that it becomes very tempting, once they are up and running, to use that governmental power to shield themselves from competition.
It's essentially a benevolent dictator problem, there's nothing inherently preventing a government from providing high value service at the lowest possible cost, it's just that in the real world it almost never works out that way. Just as a dictator could rule the nation better than any democracy ever could, but in the real world they rarely do (and never for more than one generation).
The more immediate problem here though is that a local government has almost no control over the state and national regulations that tie their hands and keep them from dislodging the controls that set up effective monopolies by the cable and teleco companies. And the only real option they have is to do what they're doing and use their clout and bond status to do what should be possible privately.
Think of it as stochastic resonance. You can take a very low power signal and if you add random noise it will raise the signal above the threshold of detection because even though the signal is below threshold, it's still stronger than the background, so the background also gets lifted but not as much.
So astrology could be totally random, and yet still have a powerful effect. By raising motivations from just below the level where they get acted on. So say you like a girl is interested in a guy down the hall but not quite enough to do anything yet. She reads her horoscope and even though its ambiguity and randomness still raise up motivations that were already there past the point where now she decides to go down and flirt with him.
This is a subtle arugument, but quite powerful in understanding why it's so widespread. It takes a lot of effort to carefully weigh all your choices and decide rationally what the best or optimal course would be to take. If there's some heuristic or rule that you can use to bypass all the consideration and end up making the right choice even just a majority of the time, it can often be worth the mistakes because you can put that time and effort into more beneficial tasks.
Being scared of people you don't know and giving keeping your distance may not always correctly identify people who wish to harm you from those that don't. But you avoid the costs in time and effort (and the risks) of evaluating each stranger on a case by case basis.
Now before you start jumping out with the exceptions and why this is wrong, the point isn't that it's a perfect rule, just that it has the possibility of being good enough to at the end of the day be more beneficial.
We do this with all sorts of things, we cull our experience down into simple rules that allow us to avoid having to waste time and effort.
Now here's the subtle part, we also like to have a good reason for doing what we do, and we're quite capable of inventing a rationale to justify a good rule. The rationale might be total bunkum, but it allows us to feel comfortable in doing what does indeed benefit us.
The only problem comes when we get more attached to the rationale than the rule, which leads people to invent new rules based on a rationale that isn't itself true, then they end up doing stuff that's harmful.
With astrology you can think of it as an ice-breaker to get to know people that might make good mates but you wouldn't normally consider. A rule to seriously consider 1 in every 12 people you meet would work just as well by the way lol. So I would just caution people not to confuse the rationale with the results. We all do it, just in different ways.
You seem to be assuming that diamonds are given to convey wealth from one person to another, in which case you would be correct, diamonds don't have a pragmatic worth anywhere close to what you pay for them.
But it is precisely that quality which makes them useful. In forming trust relationships humans have developed a number of ways to indicate "I'm a person you can trust and spend effort/time/resources on me because I will reciprocate."
One excellent way to do this is for a person to give something that was personally costly, but has little actual value to the receiver (other than the trust value it conveys).
So why not just give something with actual value/utility to the person? It would cost the giver the same right? Well as counterintuitive as it seems, it's to protect the giver. If we gave items that had actual value then there would be a high temptation to seek out trust relationships then just keep it and move on to the next person. Now you may be thinking, you can resell diamonds, but as anyone who has tried to unload an engagement ring knows, the only chance you have to resell it for anywhere near the purchase price is to sell it directly to another suitor.
It's the same thing with flowers I imagine, costly but little utilitarian value.
And given the differences in the sexes it makes sense that men will have evolved to feel good about giving expensive gifts, and women in receiving them, as a means of establishing a cooperative relationship where you can have some confidence that the other person can be trusted not to take advantage of you.
So whether it's diamonds, pearls, gold, extravagant chocolates, 8 dollar greeting cards, flowers or what have you, there will always be a use for gifts that are both costly to the giver and of little real worth to the receiver as a way to either establish or maintain trust (which is why women get so incensed if you forget to give a nice anniversary gift, to her it has profound implications for the state and future of your relationship). In other words, it's an artifact of the arms race that is sexual reproduction.
Perhaps you don't understand what evolution means, it's simply change. The more change that takes place, the more something has evolved. It doesn't mean better or worse or closer to some ultimate goal.
And what you describe allows lots of evolution to occur. Extremely high selective pressures will punish variability. But when everyone (or almost everyone) can reproduce and selective pressures are low (abundant resources and few dangers) then all those little mutations that would have been selected against get to be passed on to a new generation. Resulting in much faster rates of change over time, as well as much higher variability in the population.
Something few people seem to recognize is there are two separable elements to most of homeopathy. The first is the treatment itself, and the second is the explanation for how it works. For whatever reason people aren't satisfied to know that something works, they also need to know why it works. And unfortunately if there isn't a self-evident explanation one will be invented. And it doesn't end there, the invented rationale is then usually extended to develop other treatments (which don't work of course because what they are based on isn't true).
Take acupuncture. Twirling small needles in the top layer of the skin has a variety of benefits. But why? Traditions tell the story that it balances the energy flows, etc etc. A recent study examined three groups, one with no acupuncture, one with acupuncture in the traditionally prescribed locations, and one with acupuncture in random locations. Both of the latter two groups were better than the first (no treatment), but interestingly they weren't different from each other.
So yes acupuncture has some effect, but the traditional explanation has nothing to do with why it works.
So two of the big problems with homeopathy are first that most people get hung up on the far out explanations for why the treatments supposedly work and miss out on stuff that could actually help them. And second that lots of homeopathic treatments are developed that don't do anything to help because they are logical extensions of faulty premises.
Alternative medicine also suffers from the fact that once a treatment becomes well accepted and is supported by empirical research it magically leaves the realm of alternative medicine. So by definition alternative treatments will always be those that haven't yet been supported by scientific research, even though many of them do in fact work.
I've talked to a number of homeopaths and in my limited experience they seem to take it like an all or nothing religion, where you have to accept it all or none of it, and you have to accept the wacky explanations to the letter. It would be nice if they didn't feel so burned by the modern medical machine that they reject as a matter of principle empirically based testing.
Oh no! The dreaded Brown Note! Only on the other end of the frequency range.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note
There was a piece on NPR radio a few weeks ago about an inventor who is marketing a device similar to the mosquito one in this article only it is specifically desinged to be annoying to teenagers (he had problems with them congregating in front of his store). Amusingly his daughter then subverted it for her own use by creating ringtones of the noise so that she could turn her phone on during school (since vibra mode can still be audible in a quiet classroom) and none of the teachers can hear it even though everyone else can lol.
y Id=5434687
They even had the ringtone as a downloadable ringtone there (you can't of course hear it at all if you're over 25 or so, as you age you lose the ability to hear in those outlier frequency ranges).
Here's a link to the story:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
It's a common misconception to think that evolution moves from simple to complex, from small to large, from reflexive to thinking. But evolution is indeed unidirectional. But I suppose it's putting too technical a spin on things, if you say devolve to people on the street, 99 out of 100 will take it to mean that things are becoming more like they used to be, which still captures the truth of the matter. But technically going from man to slime is just as much evolution as going from slime to man, or anything in between. Darwin just exposed the mechanism that explains why these changes occur.
Evolution is unidirectional in the same way that time is unidirectional, they aren't things in and of themselves, just a convenient label we use to refer to change. What's a minute? It only has meaning when making reference to all the kinds of change we're familar with that occur over the period of what we call a "minute" and the same is true of evolution. It just refers to the changes that occur in response to the environment around an organism.
What about Christian Bale? He might not look like Nemoy, but I think he would be able to do a very credible and entertaining Vulcan. Although he might be too hot now for them to get him.
Most people don't care, a few do.
In order to enforce arbitrary rules you need a cudgel of some sort, whining is the equivalent of a mosquito bite, annoying but easily forgotten.
To say that "than" means only this, and "then" means only that is arbitrary, you can just as easily say that both spellings may connote either meaning and that their interchangability simply reflects the increasing overlap in their everyday pronunciation.
Flexible languages live, prosper and assimilate. Rigid, inflexible languages become musty and decrepit, rarely the victor its adherents always deem it should be in the violent intersection of competing cultures.
That's only part of it I think. For a long time Firefox has enjoyed relative immunity from viruses and trojans that target it as a vector, therefore users enjoyed relative peace and quiet in comparison to IE users.
With its success and increasing popularity we can now see that the respite is coming to an end as malware writers turn their attention to Firefox users. Actual security is a combination of defense capability and degree of threat. Firefox is moving from the small quiet town into the high crime city, so irrespective of its inherent strengths it's now going to start weathering a lot more assaults.
Well there are lots of ways to accomplish the things you mention (pay for dental care, keep up with inflation, improve your standard of living). And lots of those ways are illegal or involve harming other people. I'd say that it's a pretty tough argument to say that you are justified in harming other people in order to get bonuses. The primary responsibility lies with the agents that choose to embellish or report people that didn't do anything wrong. They should simply refuse to do so out of a sense of morality, and try to change the policy through the proper channels (as well as set an example for other agents that you don't have to give in and make stuff up). Unchallenged corruption is corrosive and spreads like wildfire.
Of course that doesn't absolve the bone headed managers that are measuring performance on what are ultimately random occurences. And for little more reason than the ease of counting the number of reports per month and using that as a performance metric. The truely unfortunate thing I suppose is that there's no way this will get changed without abuse occurring (now that the public has reason to fear being unjustly added to their Watch List). We probably just wouldn't care that much if the only thing happening was some dutiful agents missing out on some bonuses or special assignments through no fault of their own.
One of the toughest nuts to crack is what are going to want to do, that is what should our goals be.
If you look at most of the goals we have right now, they're pretty mundane and shortlived. Curing disease, stop killing eachother, end to hunger, creating objects that we find beautiful and pleasing, creating more living beings like ourselves.
Once we reach a singularity we'll have the technology to do away with all these problem oriented goals and I for the life of me can't really think of any obvious goals past that point. While I agree with the premise that we don't have any reliable way of predicting what our goals will become past the singularity, does anyone have any guesses?
Your link might be fruity, it's not to the developer's site but rather to a "fan" site, whatever that means. The exe wouldn't load and gave a suspect error message, also it is a different size than the one from the real site.
http://plasticbugs.com/?page_id=294