The other consideration that makes the Netscape comparasin bad is that with web browsers they were dealing with a large mass market filled mostly with end-users who don't particularly care what software they're running. Virtualizing machines is a more complex task not really needed by end-users. So here the market consists of people who know more about computers and don't view them as just another appliance like the toaster or the TV. Thus it's going to be an informed marketplace, and all the normal balancing forces that come into play from that will temper this move. (Netscape lost because the browser market was not populated by informed consumers.)
My favorite bit was (probably a cinematic over-the-top portrayal, but still) when they dumped replicas of the gear in the command module onto a table, and said, "you've got (foo) hours to find a way to make that square filter fit in this round hole, using nothing but that stuff on the table there. Go."
The neat thing about that scene is that it was Cathy Rogers' inspiration for creating Scrapheap Challenge (Junkyard Wars).
The reason for the bullying in school as opposed to out in the "real world" has nothing to do with maturity. The reason bullying stops after people leave high school is that high school is the last place where you are actually forced to spend time with people you don't have anything in common with. After you "get out" you no longer have to spend time with people you don't like just because they are geographically nearby and living in the same school district. And it goes both ways - the bullies are no longer forced to spend time with the people they don't like, and so their anger toward these people fades too.
I suspect that if you took about 1,000 random adults, and forced them into a program where they have to spend 7 hours a day in the same building, doing the same activities with each other, for four years straight, that even among the "mature" adult population you'd see bullying problems resurface. And NO I'm not talking about working in an office or a factory, because that's not a random sampling of adults.
Dying for your beliefs just for the sake of doing it is kind of dumb. You have to be in a situation where furthering your life is less effective to your cause than dying is, and that doesn't happen much in a modern country - so we don't have much exposure to that kind of situation.
The civilians on the plane were not the target. They were, how do we call it, oh, yes, "collateral damage" that occured while attacking the military target - the pentagon. The fact that the hijackers had a backward sense of morals that made them think of the passengers on the plane as rather inconsequential makes them bad, yes, but that doesn't make them terrorists unless the death of the civilians on the plane itself was their end goal. It was not. Killing them in the process was just the simplest way of hitting their target, and they didn't care.
The World Trade Center was different, because there BOTH the weapon being used (the planes) and the target were civilian.
Terrorism is attacking civilian targets for the fear factor. The Pentagon is the fucking head of the military - hardly a civlian target by any stretch of the imagination. Does pointing this out mean I agree with the 9/11 attackers? Of course not. TO assume so one would have to be, what were the words you used - oh yes, "a blithering idiot".
This is just like the flak Bill Maher got over pointing out that "cowardly" is the wrong word to use to describe a group that willingly died to carry out an attack of some sort - EVEN IF that attack is a terrorist one. The hijackers were guilty of a great many evils, but cowardice wasn't one of them. Just the opposite, actually.
People think that any sort of criticism of the press coverage of an event equates to support of the perpetrators of that teven, because people are idiots.
One of these, near the Wisconsin/Illinois border on I-94 was named after Richard Bong, a WW2 ace. The site was abandoned before the construction was complete and now it's a state park used by people who want a wide flat space for outdoor activities like snowmobiling, horse riding, and so on.
Along the Interstate Highway nearby there were signs declaring "Bong Recreational Area, next right", which I'm sure led to a few confused cases here and there. (I think the've since re-phrased the signs so it doesn't look so bad.)
But an old person is only useful to survival of the "breeders" so long as that old person's role is one that cannot be done by a younger person. In societies where culture has been slow moving for a long time, people grow older (because the wisdom of old people is very useful to the offspring.) In societies where things changed rapidly, the wisom of old people isn't as useful to the next generation, and as such evolution doesn't have the incentive to make them last.
The good news, though, is that we've reached a point where biological evolotion is so slow compared to technology and science learning, that it doesn't matter much anymore that evolution doesn't "want" us to grow old. Evolution doesn't have time to react to the changes we impose on our world now.
Yes, but my question is, why the claim that fluctuating seasons are necessary for life to function? Here on earth we have life that evolved to work within a seasonal cycle, because that's what we have, but I fail to see how it's so essential for all forms of life, as the original poster had implied. (That life couldn't exist without changing seasons.)
Natural selection doesn't optimize for long life. It optimizes for making babies. The long-lived old couple that is no longer breeding is actualy detrimental to evolution, as they are using up resources that could have been used by breeders. Horrible as it may sound, us dying after getting old is not a mistake of evolution, it's an actual goal of it.
If a plant grows a poisonous surface on it's leaves, and traps flies on this surface by snapping closed when they land on it, we call that natural.
If an animal of the mammal kingdom with big buck teeth and a wide flat tail alters his world by chewing down trees and building a dam, we call that natural.
If a moslty hairless ape with an enlarged brain begins reproducing in a new manner, we don't call that natural.
Why do seasons matter? There are places on earth with consistent climate all year that have thriving life. If fluctuating seasons were a requirement for life, then there'd be nobody living in L.A.
while the goal of Microsoft is something roughly like "Sell lots of software and consulting services while insuring stock prices keep going up."
I disagree. Their goal is to make sure stock prices keep going up *A LOT*, not just that they go up at all. And that *is* in conflict with open source. The way to make the most money the fastest is to impose artificial scarcity, and that doesn't work with open source. It's not impossible to make money with open source, but it will not be on the extravagant level Microsoft is used to seeing, because you end up only being able to charge what software is actually worth, and their mechanisms for artificially inflating the price beyond that are gone.
If you are referring to Foundation, actually Asimov hinted at the notion that maybe it was the other way around - That psychohistory was invented by a charlitan specificly to cause humans to believe history would come out that way, and thus it was actually the cause of the history, not a prediction of it. (This doesn't come out until the third or fourth book if I remember correctly.)
The article was pointing out that "what makes them unpopular" is simply being there later, which cannot be "fixed" (Like the fact that no matter what you do you will always be younger than your older brother). Consider for example slashdot, where people with a long history of highly rated posts get an initial score of 2 on their posts, and newcomers get an initial score of 1. That causes newcomers to disapper from the radar screen, and makes them less likely to get the good moderations they need because moderators are less likely to see their posts.
Public schools are straddled with some major baggage that prevents them from doing as well as private schools, and this has NOTHING to do with how much money is spent: 1 - Public schools have to teach everyone. Private schools, being private businesses, can refuse service. Thus public schools are forced to handle more (there's no way to put this politely) stupid students. This alone can cause a major difference in the statistics about acedemic aptitudes. 2 - Public schools have to try to satisfy all the parents' ideologies all the time. 3 - (This is the BIGGEST ONE) Since public schools are the default if the parents take no action, public schools have to take not only the stupid students as mentioned in step #1, but also the students who's families don't give a flying ____ about a good education. (To put it another way, a private school will contain ONLY students from those familes that care about education, while a public school will contain a mix some students from families that care, and some from families that don't.)
Now, don't try to throw the strawman argument at me that I'm claiming all potential good students from familes that care will go to private schools. I'm not. I'm fully aware that for financial reasons or other reasons many caring families with good kids end up putting them through public school. (I went to public school because my parents weren't rich and all the private schools in the area were religious, and run by religions other than the one my parents subscribed to.) But it is true that ALL the ones that don't care will be putting their kids through the public schools alongside the ones that do, and that will bring the averages way, way down.
Don't blame the schools for the difference when the difference can be sufficiently explained by the quality of the students they have to work with (and importanty, their families back home).
This is why the Electoral College exists, to prevent the tyranny of the majority.
No. The Electoral College exists because in the 1780's we didn't have card machines or computers or telephones or the internet yet, so it was far simpler to send a physical person to the national counting as opposed to sending the result electronicly. (Note, "The Electoral College" is often used erroneously to mean "The system of giving each state N votes where N = 2 + number of reps in the house." I don't use it that way. I use it to refer to the practice of having actual PEOPLE travel to Washington, get together in one room, and give their state's vote in person - a wholly wasteful practice with no purpose anymore when the same mathematical result can be done without creating a class of people with the alleged authority to conduct a coup by ignoring their states' wishes. (Yes, by the US Constitution the electors have the right to do that. The only think keeping them from it is the likelyhood that the public wouldn't acknowlege the authority of such a decision. That's the kind of crap that I can see coming from a slowly evolved system such as Britain has where old laws still exist that can never be used in modern times without a major scandal (like the Monarch having the power to disband Parliament, for example). It shouldn't exist in a country where the laws are supposed to derive from a Constitution of the people.
Throw the electoral college away. Keep the same counting system that gives weighted votes by state if you like, but get rid of the stupid practice of having ceremonial potential coup-makers.
People accuse slashdot of having an anti-MS bias when that's not the case. The site has a pro-geek bias, and geeks tend to be anti-MS. The anti-MS effect is just a consequence of the REAL bias which is simply pro-geek. The population of the site also tends to be anti-luddite, pro-skepticism, emphasiing freedom over safety, and so on because that's the way geeks tend to be.
They were laughing where I saw it too. I was laughing too. I was not laughing at it, though. I was laughing WITH it. It was quite obvious to me that good Smeagol was intended to look comical in contrast to evil Gollum. I think laughing at the difference was the INTENT in that scene, so it's a good thing the audience was laughing.
Academy would have had to have an open mind and I don't think anyone in the Academy does
As evidence of this, When TRON first came out, the Acedemy rejected its nomination for best special effects because they thought using computers to help you make special effects is cheating. Now look at the field of special effects. What idiots.
Serkis did more than just supply the voice. He was also supplying the body movements via a motion-capture suit. when you saw Gollum perched up on a rock, crouched over leering into the mist, that was Serkis wearning a black suit with white dots, perched on a crate leering forward to supply the exact right movements to make the character seem so real. When you saw Gollumn singing his little song while happily whacking the fish against the rock, that was serkis singing the song and slapping a prop against a block. What he did was a lot more than just supply the voice.
Slashdot Mirror
The other consideration that makes the Netscape comparasin bad is that with web browsers they were dealing with a large mass market filled mostly with end-users who don't particularly care what software they're running. Virtualizing machines is a more complex task not really needed by end-users. So here the market consists of people who know more about computers and don't view them as just another appliance like the toaster or the TV. Thus it's going to be an informed marketplace, and all the normal balancing forces that come into play from that will temper this move. (Netscape lost because the browser market was not populated by informed consumers.)
My favorite bit was (probably a cinematic over-the-top portrayal, but still) when they dumped replicas of the gear in the command module onto a table, and said, "you've got (foo) hours to find a way to make that square filter fit in this round hole, using nothing but that stuff on the table there. Go."
The neat thing about that scene is that it was Cathy Rogers' inspiration for creating Scrapheap Challenge (Junkyard Wars).
But with ps -aux, wouldn't the PID be on the left of the process name, not the right of it?
Man, how sloppy can these hollywood types get!
(Just kidding - that was impressively accurate for once.)
The reason for the bullying in school as opposed to out in the "real world" has nothing to do with maturity. The reason bullying stops after people leave high school is that high school is the last place where you are actually forced to spend time with people you don't have anything in common with. After you "get out" you no longer have to spend time with people you don't like just because they are geographically nearby and living in the same school district. And it goes both ways - the bullies are no longer forced to spend time with the people they don't like, and so their anger toward these people fades too.
I suspect that if you took about 1,000 random adults, and forced them into a program where they have to spend 7 hours a day in the same building, doing the same activities with each other, for four years straight, that even among the "mature" adult population you'd see bullying problems resurface. And NO I'm not talking about working in an office or a factory, because that's not a random sampling of adults.
Dying for your beliefs just for the sake of doing it is kind of dumb. You have to be in a situation where furthering your life is less effective to your cause than dying is, and that doesn't happen much in a modern country - so we don't have much exposure to that kind of situation.
The civilians on the plane were not the target. They were, how do we call it, oh, yes, "collateral damage" that occured while attacking the military target - the pentagon. The fact that the hijackers had a backward sense of morals that made them think of the passengers on the plane as rather inconsequential makes them bad, yes, but that doesn't make them terrorists unless the death of the civilians on the plane itself was their end goal. It was not. Killing them in the process was just the simplest way of hitting their target, and they didn't care.
The World Trade Center was different, because there BOTH the weapon being used (the planes) and the target were civilian.
Terrorism is attacking civilian targets for the fear factor. The Pentagon is the fucking head of the military - hardly a civlian target by any stretch of the imagination. Does pointing this out mean I agree with the 9/11 attackers? Of course not. TO assume so one would have to be, what were the words you used - oh yes, "a blithering idiot".
This is just like the flak Bill Maher got over pointing out that "cowardly" is the wrong word to use to describe a group that willingly died to carry out an attack of some sort - EVEN IF that attack is a terrorist one. The hijackers were guilty of a great many evils, but cowardice wasn't one of them. Just the opposite, actually.
People think that any sort of criticism of the press coverage of an event equates to support of the perpetrators of that teven, because people are idiots.
One of these, near the Wisconsin/Illinois border on I-94 was named after Richard Bong, a WW2 ace. The site was abandoned before the construction was complete and now it's a state park used by people who want a wide flat space for outdoor activities like snowmobiling, horse riding, and so on.
Along the Interstate Highway nearby there were signs declaring "Bong Recreational Area, next right", which I'm sure led to a few confused cases here and there. (I think the've since re-phrased the signs so it doesn't look so bad.)
But an old person is only useful to survival of the "breeders" so long as that old person's role is one that cannot be done by a younger person. In societies where culture has been slow moving for a long time, people grow older (because the wisdom of old people is very useful to the offspring.) In societies where things changed rapidly, the wisom of old people isn't as useful to the next generation, and as such evolution doesn't have the incentive to make them last.
The good news, though, is that we've reached a point where biological evolotion is so slow compared to technology and science learning, that it doesn't matter much anymore that evolution doesn't "want" us to grow old. Evolution doesn't have time to react to the changes we impose on our world now.
Yes, but my question is, why the claim that fluctuating seasons are necessary for life to function? Here on earth we have life that evolved to work within a seasonal cycle, because that's what we have, but I fail to see how it's so essential for all forms of life, as the original poster had implied. (That life couldn't exist without changing seasons.)
Natural selection doesn't optimize for long life. It optimizes for making babies. The long-lived old couple that is no longer breeding is actualy detrimental to evolution, as they are using up resources that could have been used by breeders. Horrible as it may sound, us dying after getting old is not a mistake of evolution, it's an actual goal of it.
Why the difference? We *are* nature.
Why do seasons matter? There are places on earth with consistent climate all year that have thriving life. If fluctuating seasons were a requirement for life, then there'd be nobody living in L.A.
I disagree. Their goal is to make sure stock prices keep going up *A LOT*, not just that they go up at all. And that *is* in conflict with open source. The way to make the most money the fastest is to impose artificial scarcity, and that doesn't work with open source. It's not impossible to make money with open source, but it will not be on the extravagant level Microsoft is used to seeing, because you end up only being able to charge what software is actually worth, and their mechanisms for artificially inflating the price beyond that are gone.
Apparently we aren't both speaking the same language.
If you are referring to Foundation, actually Asimov hinted at the notion that maybe it was the other way around - That psychohistory was invented by a charlitan specificly to cause humans to believe history would come out that way, and thus it was actually the cause of the history, not a prediction of it. (This doesn't come out until the third or fourth book if I remember correctly.)
The article was pointing out that "what makes them unpopular" is simply being there later, which cannot be "fixed" (Like the fact that no matter what you do you will always be younger than your older brother). Consider for example slashdot, where people with a long history of highly rated posts get an initial score of 2 on their posts, and newcomers get an initial score of 1. That causes newcomers to disapper from the radar screen, and makes them less likely to get the good moderations they need because moderators are less likely to see their posts.
1 - Public schools have to teach everyone. Private schools, being private businesses, can refuse service. Thus public schools are forced to handle more (there's no way to put this politely) stupid students. This alone can cause a major difference in the statistics about acedemic aptitudes.
2 - Public schools have to try to satisfy all the parents' ideologies all the time.
3 - (This is the BIGGEST ONE) Since public schools are the default if the parents take no action, public schools have to take not only the stupid students as mentioned in step #1, but also the students who's families don't give a flying ____ about a good education. (To put it another way, a private school will contain ONLY students from those familes that care about education, while a public school will contain a mix some students from families that care, and some from families that don't.)
Now, don't try to throw the strawman argument at me that I'm claiming all potential good students from familes that care will go to private schools. I'm not. I'm fully aware that for financial reasons or other reasons many caring families with good kids end up putting them through public school. (I went to public school because my parents weren't rich and all the private schools in the area were religious, and run by religions other than the one my parents subscribed to.) But it is true that ALL the ones that don't care will be putting their kids through the public schools alongside the ones that do, and that will bring the averages way, way down.
Don't blame the schools for the difference when the difference can be sufficiently explained by the quality of the students they have to work with (and importanty, their families back home).
No. The Electoral College exists because in the 1780's we didn't have card machines or computers or telephones or the internet yet, so it was far simpler to send a physical person to the national counting as opposed to sending the result electronicly. (Note, "The Electoral College" is often used erroneously to mean "The system of giving each state N votes where N = 2 + number of reps in the house." I don't use it that way. I use it to refer to the practice of having actual PEOPLE travel to Washington, get together in one room, and give their state's vote in person - a wholly wasteful practice with no purpose anymore when the same mathematical result can be done without creating a class of people with the alleged authority to conduct a coup by ignoring their states' wishes. (Yes, by the US Constitution the electors have the right to do that. The only think keeping them from it is the likelyhood that the public wouldn't acknowlege the authority of such a decision. That's the kind of crap that I can see coming from a slowly evolved system such as Britain has where old laws still exist that can never be used in modern times without a major scandal (like the Monarch having the power to disband Parliament, for example). It shouldn't exist in a country where the laws are supposed to derive from a Constitution of the people.
Throw the electoral college away. Keep the same counting system that gives weighted votes by state if you like, but get rid of the stupid practice of having ceremonial potential coup-makers.
People accuse slashdot of having an anti-MS bias when that's not the case. The site has a pro-geek bias, and geeks tend to be anti-MS. The anti-MS effect is just a consequence of the REAL bias which is simply pro-geek. The population of the site also tends to be anti-luddite, pro-skepticism, emphasiing freedom over safety, and so on because that's the way geeks tend to be.
Baby #1 is born with a defect that leaves him crippled for life.
Baby #2 is born normal.
Still think life is fair?
I think that's just typecasting. I haven't seen Sean Astin in anything else before LOTR, so I just see him as samwise.
They were laughing where I saw it too. I was laughing too. I was not laughing at it, though. I was laughing WITH it. It was quite obvious to me that good Smeagol was intended to look comical in contrast to evil Gollum. I think laughing at the difference was the INTENT in that scene, so it's a good thing the audience was laughing.
As evidence of this, When TRON first came out, the Acedemy rejected its nomination for best special effects because they thought using computers to help you make special effects is cheating. Now look at the field of special effects. What idiots.
Serkis did more than just supply the voice. He was also supplying the body movements via a motion-capture suit. when you saw Gollum perched up on a rock, crouched over leering into the mist, that was Serkis wearning a black suit with white dots, perched on a crate leering forward to supply the exact right movements to make the character seem so real. When you saw Gollumn singing his little song while happily whacking the fish against the rock, that was serkis singing the song and slapping a prop against a block. What he did was a lot more than just supply the voice.