Stephen Hawkings is an intelligent guy, but isn't this a bit out of his field?
It's called "using your celebrity." The difference, though, is that while he may not be an expert in the logistics of interstellar colonization (um, because nobody is?), he's at least demonstrably smart and a very thoughtful guy. That's the difference, say, between him and... oh, I don't know, Barbara Streisand? When she uses her celebrity to commit horrific typos while whining about something in her blog, she's probably taken more seriously than Hawking ever will be... just in terms of raw numbers of people who consider her to be important for some reason. Hawking, at least, really is an important thinker, as seen in his actual output.
But why should an individual care about whether or not the drama of humanity continues? For instance, if we permit let every person who currently lives to live out a natural and good life, and somehow do so without creating any new people, would that be acceptable?
Because a hardwired, nihilistic, self-destructive (self, including species as self) outlook wouldn't have allowed us to get this far, genetically. The very traits that allow us to nurture offspring that take years to develop simply require us to look at the big picture, and to cherish the future. And to make that more workable, we develop cultures that are built around generational continuity and hope. Anything less than that is a sort of cultural insanity and requires a truly loony willing suspension of disbelief (see 70-virgins-if-I-blow-myself-up-in-a-Zbarro, childish "rapture" fantasies, and related examples).
We're generally wired to get a warm and fuzzy feeling from passing along our culture and protecting our little broods. Remove that, and you're not going to have people, as a whole, living out a "good" life.
Reaching out to or making other livable environments (as in, off-world) is just as rational as clearing the bear out of the cave you need to shelter your tribe. Just as rational as using that bear's hide to keep your little naked ape-like offspring warm through the ice age. It's silly to ask if we "deserve" to survive... survival is deserved by rationally taking advantage of the fact that we exist at all. There is no meaning in anything, otherwise. Since we make the meaning in our lives, we decide if we're worth surving or not. The universe doesn't give a crap one way or the other.
Previous human migrations were driven by less, ahh, altruistic motivations. Survival, distaste for the status quo, better living, things like that.
And what part of wanting your offspring (or theirs, etc) to actually live and carry on your culture is "altruistic?" For most of us, that's exactly the opposite. It's completely, rationally seflish. We want what we build to last and improve. And you don't build large systems without redundancy, that's all. And the thirst for some adventure and a challenge is hardly "altruism." You want altruism? That would be killing yourself to free up some resources for somebody else so they don't have to work as hard. Except, a fat lot of good that does if a giant meteor smacks into your resources.
Indeed. Heck, I'm 26 now, and looking back at 21, it's surprising how much I've grown in just the last five years, despite how "worldly" I thought I was back then.
If you think that's something, wait until you're 40! I've become convinced that most people born at any time after 1965 don't really grow up until they're 30+. Seen it with my own eyes, over and over. BTW, by "grown up," I mean able to truly see the big picture about most things, before dwelling on the little, distracting stuff.
What I find amusing is that a lot of emperors of China, etc, in centuries past were 13 years old.
You don't really think that a 13-year-old was independently making empire-impacting decisions all on his own, do you? That culture as a serious venerate-the-greybeards take on things, and any teenage emperor would have had plenty of "handlers."
I think most can agree on here, age is no determining factor for intelligence
But age has everything to do with experience. Sure, there are some kids that are much more worldly than others, but there aren't many kids that are as across the board worldly as their parents (no matter what the kids would like to think that all of their MTV, MySpace time, and first person shooters have taught them).
That way, when the guy who writes Madden for a living gets uppity and wants a piece of the billions being made off his hard work, he gets replaced
Because... his paychecks have been bouncing, all this time? I have family in this line of work. They get things like juicy raises when business is good, live comfortably, and are sought after because they can not only work hard, but because they're local talent. You simply can't replace the more creative, make-it-really-shine people with a crew halfway across the planet.
If you can do that, then the part of the work you're talking about simply isn't very valuable in the first place. Putting an artificially high value on it is just insisting on entitlements for developers that haven't trained themselves to do something beyond what can be done by an inexperienced person in an Indian cubicle thousands of miles away.
Who do you want in your company? Joe Average or somebody going places?
Except, a lot of the people "going places" (to the extent that their more spectacular youthful indescretions are an indication of their future ways of being) are going... to jail. Or rehab.
Acute exhuberance and risky behavior does not necessarily lead to or imply life-long resourcefulness, or creativity, or diligence, or leadership. Sometimes it's just a form of self-medication by adrenaline for slightly (or very) broken people. The narcisism-fest that is MySpace is as likely to showcase future Enron execs as it is top notch wireframe animators looking to work for Pixar.
But what if the data center has to stay in the U.S.? Corporations are concerned about what's going to happen when we give Texas back to Mexico - provided they want it, of course.
Why would they want it? If they start running it, everyone there will just want to sneak into Arkansas, Omaha, or Arizona to get away from the same BS that keeps Mexico the way it is now. But the real question is, what happens when the Mexicans apoligize on behalf of the Spanish, and then give Mexico back to what's left of the native tribes? That could hardly be worse than what the current (or any recent) government there is doing.
Nah, I'm probably just being a consipiracy nerd. It's clearly just sheer coincidence.
No, you are being a conspiracy twit. And it's not like Texas is just some run-down oil and cattle bubba hub. Ever heard of Texas Instruments? Or maybe Dell? Or big hosting operations like Data Return? The tax situation there is favorable, they don't have the incredibly high cost of living that you find in the Seattle, or Boston, or San Fransisco, or Northern Virginia areas... there's plenty of reasons to run a business unit in Texas. And I can think of a lot of reasons why places like WA or OR are overtly hostile to employers and short on places to house employees at anything like a livable rate. The question isn't "why not in WA?" - the question is, "why would they choose to put new operations in an unexpandable, crazy-cost-of-living area like the Pacific NW?"
I say this while living in the DC area - another spot that you'd have to be insane to build a new datacenter in. I've got all of my stuff parked at an Exodus->Cable & Wireless->SAVVIS facility, and there's simply no more room for more of the same.
Yes, while the people who were left to fend for themseles because they were lower-class and/or black knew the real truth.
Let's just get this bit of nonsense out of the way. Are you implying that the people rescued by the Coast Guard were only rich white people? Or that poor black people were the only ones who didn't understand what "mandatory evacuation" meant? And, if they did, but had no way get out, that the mostly-black, liberal government of that city deliberately set out to trap those people in the city? Or did they just screw up the evacuation, and not use the tools at their disposal, and say "we really mean it, people will die if they stay here" to their constituents? What "real truth" are you talking about, that kept the evacuation from actually taking place with all the warning they had, or kept the city from having its act together in advance, or kept a huge number of its law enforcement people from simply walking away from their jobs when they were needed most, or kept actual individual people (who live below sea level in the path of a hurricane that everyone was screaming about for days) from grabbing $4 worth of canned beans and a couple gallons of water to keep themselves from freaking out for two days? Or from helping their elderly neighbors? Real truth? Go for it.
You are implying that you believe that the war in iraq is about terrorism. It isn't.
And you are implying that it's only about one thing (oil) which it sure as hell isn't. It's great that we're able to pull out of Saudi Arabia, and have the prospect of having a democratically run, by-the-people government (other than only Israel) taking shape in that region. The rabid response to that effort by the foreign-backed (mostly Iran, Syria, and some extremists from S.A., Jordan) insurgents in Iraq is the clearest indication that we're doing the right thing. Massive election turnouts (in the face of broadly announced death threats from the "democracy is un-Islamic and we'll behead you if you vote" local A-Q franchise) show it even more. Afghanistan turned into the base camp it became because rich wahabbists weren't shut down when they could have been. Saddam had to go, and his absence couldn't be filled with another Taliban-esque entity.
Ask the people that voted there (in higher numbers than do in the US) if they'd rather have Saddam back, or be able to actually choose a government that doesn't have "annex Kuwait, throw SCUDs we bought from North Korea at Israel" on its to-do list. Of course, don't ask his cousins from Tikrit, but they're still cranky at losing their palace-building tribe-mate's patronage and money laundering operation.
I don't want us to be using foreign oil, or in fact, using petrofuels at all.
On this we certainly agree.
Spending that $400B on altfuel research would have been a dramatically better investment in our future.
You say that like it's a binary situation. We're already making huge headway into the research you're talking about. But it's not going to change anything like flipping some switch, and we have to function in the meantime. If the middle east continues to fester at the hands of the cultural wack jobs, then the huge new consumers of petro-stuff (that would be India and China, whose rapid growth is what's putting all of the demand pressure on the market, and enabling clowns like Mr. Iran and Mr. Chavez to have their little tantrums). Further, not spending what we've spent to remove the Taliban, for example, would have left the same kindly folks that brought you 9-11 (which absolutely cost the US economy way, way more than $500B just in immediate losses and recession-ish behavior). And preventing that from happening again, soon, isn't going to come solely from switching to ethanol or windmills.
You're wrong. Profit-driven sites have an interest in making money, not in providing a good service. Mostly, these two will coincide, but not always.
And when they don't coincide, the companies providing the inferior service lose customers. The moment that Yahoo or MSN really and truly, for the average user, provide a demonstrably better search experience, they'll see a shift. And then right back when Google refines theirs. The incentive for improvement is huge, financially. And the costs of providing such continual improvements is enormous. Now, who would you rather provide that money - customers, or taxpayers? How would you drive such innovation (to say nothing of the colossal daily operating costs) in some government-run or non-profit environment?
And your suggestion for a non-profit search engine would be...? Perhaps you like the EU initiative, that has the government providing it? Nope. How about something like wikipedia? Oh, right, it would have completely died without financial support from companies that make money.
No, you're better served when people compete for your use of their search engine offerings. If you don't like Google, use any of several others. Except we all know that Google actually works better. So, right now, they win most of our eyeballs. I'm very glad that they aren't run by some non-profit coalition or committee that has to bow to political pressure from interest groups or government funding at the mercy of whoever's in office that week.
Profit-driven sites have an interest in being better (for you, their users) than some other site. That's why it works. Non-profits have to depend on patronage, and with that comes baggage that really does have an agenda axe to grind.
Unless you consider successfully running a business to be evil
The irony here is that a large part of the/. audience considers that to, in fact, be exactly evil. I get that you're joshing, but a lot of people will consider that to be meaningful side comment, not a joke.
First, how would someone know that this computer contained all this information?
If you're following the story, every indication is that it was a routine suburban residential burglary. I live in the same county as the home that was robbed, and this is exactly like every other B&E we always see: laptops, game consoles, digital cameras, jewelry, cash. Rinse, repeat.
If you live in the DC area as an info-worker, the odds of you handling sensitive payroll or similar data, especially related to government/military employees, is certainly higher than anywhere else in the country. But the odds of such a theft happening at all pretty much demand that crap like this is going to happen. The idiot probably would have lost his laptop in the same burglary regardless, but his inappropriate use of that data on his local drive, away from the office, turned something you otherwise would never have heard about into a real pain in the ass. Of course, the person who stole the hardware probably has no idea what's on it, or what to do with it.
Am I being paranoid?
If so, only about the wrong things. This is a workplace culture issue, not some nefarious plot. Too many people have casual access to all sorts of stuff (I know I do) without all of the interested parties really communicating about the risks and trust involved.
Did you drive to work today, eat something that traveled on a truck, or consume any other product that involved, along the way, an internal combustion engine? Think it would be just swell if the rest of OPEC sounded more like Iran's quite loony president, or the most distasteful Hugo Chavez? You want more democracies in those oil-rich areas, not less. More open societies and markets, not less. And if you think you'll persuade people that it's only about a stable oil trading environment, you're being a little disenguous to say the least. Do you think that the guys buying weapons and 3 tons of explosives to attack the Canadian parliment building were all about the oil? Listen to the guys that sign up for such movements and which populate the insurgency in Iraq... they're actually telling you why they do what they do. And oil is on the sidelines. It's only meaningful in the context of their retrograde cultural war because it's a source of cash for crazies.
Or of course, go back a little further into history... remember all those weapons that we sold to third world countries? And now we have a terrorism problem.
Do you really think that 3 tons of fertalizer is a problem derived from historical weapons sales to developing countries? You're aware, aren't you, that much of the explosives and related goodies flowing to the insurgency in Iraq is coming from Iran, right? Or that almost all of the weapons stockpiled in places like Syria or Iran are either built right on the spot, or are purchased from Russia or China? Leftover Soviet weapons are the biggest problem. Not paramilitary supplies sent to anti-communist forces in Central America decades ago, or spare F-16 parts sold to Thailand.
The dirt of the country doesn't have a bank account, and doesn't write you a paycheck.
What the hell are you talking about? The only place that the government gets its spending money is from taxes and fees. Paid for by us, or as part of our commerce with the rest of the world. No economic activity and no income, no taxes. No congress elected by us to control how it's procured and allocated, and no government activity. Period. Of course the top 50% of earners in the country pay over 96% of the income taxes, so the "dirt," as you call them (or, lower-income people) do not, really, write the same check as those of us earn more... but they can still vote and influence how the other 50%'s money is spent.
Anyone who believes that working for the military is serving their country is only fooling themselves.
I'm guessing that some of the thousands of people who (having missed the chance to use their city's bus fleet, which rotted in a parking lot) were nicely airlifted off the rooftops of their swamped New Orleans homes before the Katrina weather had even entirely cleared probably found that they were being well and truly served by the military. We don't even have to get into the role that the military plays in being a counter balance to punks like Kim Jong Il, or the pivotal job they did in preventing Soviet expansion all across Europe, or a thousand other things. Did you think that perhaps Peace Corps workers would have been a better choice for getting Mullah Omar and the al-Queda-sheltering Taliban out their brutal, medievalesque, mysoginistic thugocracy in Afghanistan? That little vacation paradise was home base to the people that planned and executed the killing of thousands of people on US soil, and who vowed (then, and still) to do more and worse. Working to hound such bastards and deprive them of a place to set up shop is not serving the people of this country? The fact that you're so disconnected from the role they play and the need for it is an indication of how well they've been doing it for the last hundred years.
Do you know people in the military? I do. People who are entirely aware of the connection between the jobs they do and our preparedness for a wide variety of threats and disasters. People who re-up, as senior officers, instead of taking a better paying private sector job, because they find it important to have the job done by someone they trust: themselves.
If you're going to persist in making rational points, useful analogies, and reality-based insightful observations, you're at risk of losing your Groupthink Membership Card.
The simple fact that they produce a product should not garuntee their profit.
Does that make you comfortable hopping over the fence to sneak into concerts by your "favorite" artist? Are you willing to stand face to face with a musician you claim to like (who has chosen, despite their being other options, to use a publishing company that happens to be an RIAA member) and tell them that a buck a song is too much, and that they don't deserve to be paid? They can produce a recording without any expectation of your wanting it, but if they're only offering it to you in exchange for money, they do have the expectation that you'll either honor their request, or walk away without their work.
That's him. I was being just a trifle sarcastic, of course. You're right, though, that's he is somewhat Flemming-ish. But of late, it appears that he's more of a brand, than anything else. Other people are writing Cussler-labeled books that are even sillier than some of his earlier stuff (he's running out of ideas, I think). But a recent title of his did deal with giant ocean vortices. Really.
Don't forget to read the whole article.
on
Just Let Me Play!
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· Score: 4, Funny
In a moment of weakness, I nearly caught myself enjoying the author's point right away, in the first couple of paragraphs. But I was raised to put that off and read the whole thing first. It builds character. Delayed gratification, people!
mirror a consensus among America's gadget-happy, cell-phone addicts whose daily chats and text messages are grist for Echelon's computers
Of course this audience will blame it all on other people not being as smart, etc., but by a 2-to-1 ratio, people just aren't worried about it. That would usually qualify as a workable consensus... and makes it hard to gin up that sense of urgency needed to move things, politically.
And, of course, when Canadian intel people used online chat monitoring as part of their bust on those clowns that were busy procuring weapons and explosives to attack the parliment building (and that makes the news for the average viewer), that tends to further lessen the general public's interest in reducing the ability to repeat that success. Let's face it - most people aren't really all that worried if it's clear that they dial everyone they know and send a flurry of text messages at the end of every American Idol episode. Articles and comments by and for the technorati aren't going to ever feel meaningful to most folks (you know, the ones that form the consensus). Just sayin'.
Ah Clive, the modern Jules Verne. The new A.C. Clarke.
The bad guys in one of his forgettable books were using giant EM generators to... let's see... trigger a magnetic pole reversal to crush global corporations. One of the side effects of this testing was giant ocean vortexes, which smelled bad.
I think that about covers it, other than the whole "completely preposterous" part.
There absolutely is a way that more information can be worse than less: if the information is misinformation
Let's not confuse propoganda (by direct utterance or by context-twisting, etc) with "information." I was using the word "information" to mean "actual for-real-facts." I'll maintain my larger point, which is that the Chinese regime can only exist as long as we're busy shipping truckloads (well, boatloads) of cash to it in exchange for what their people produce. The more we buy from them, the higher the stakes (in terms of their control over the people in the country producing all of that output).
But our difference, here (yours and mine) seems to come down to the balance between the benefits (Joe China googling thousands of topics, some of which may provide insights and info that slip past the expected filtering, and all of which train Joe to like having much of the world at his fingertips) and the risks (of outrages like the Chinese government locking people up for what they say about democracy, etc... which they've been doing for decades). My gut take is that they're better off with the benefits, despite the risks. Of course that's easy for me to say, not being in jail for having just said that! I do understand the issue, but suppose that I'm erring on the side of more communication being better - and hoping that the 'net is just too much for their government to completely throttle. And the more that Chinese citizens can see big info/content companies thriving specifically because of communication and content, the more that has to corrode the grip their government wants to preserve.
I assume that a 'bird dog' is a dog used for retrieving hunted birds and that you should take your bird dog hunting regularly to satisfy its natural behaviour and instincts?
Certainly the phrase "bird dog" is a little broad, but yes, it generally covers the wide range of breeds that are used to help in hunting birds. People who favor specifically retrieving dogs (like Labroador Retrievers) tend to most hunt waterfowl (geese, ducks), and usually just refer to such dogs as "retrievers" (which describes the role they play) or by some shorthand name that describes the breed ("labs," "goldens," etc).
So, retrievers being a special case, there's the other group of dogs that more commonly fall into the category "bird dog." Those would be the breeds that are used to actually locate live birds (usually upland ground birds, rather than waterfowl - like pheasants, partridges, quail, grouse, or woodcock). While a retriever sits patiently next to the hunter (usually in a blind) while the team waits for a duck to fall for the decoys that have been put out (and fall from the sky once they're in shotgun range), "bird dogs" (like pointers, setters, and certain spaniels) generally are out running around the field in front of the walking hunter(s), using their noses to locate birds in various cover.
Watching pointers (I'm partial to German Shorthairs) working a strip of cornfield or a hedgerow is a nearly religious experience. The dogs are uncanny, athletic, super-tuned-in animals that can learn to work with the hunting party as a very effective team. Truly wild birds can be hard to come by in some areas, so when a bird dog has spent two hours seeking out three molecules of bird trace in the field, and then comes screeching to a halt, still as a statue... it's electric. That dog is completely controlling its urge to dive into the cover and pounce on that bird, and is instead showing the hunter where to find it. At that point, shotgun in hand, the hunter will walk past the dog, kicking in the brush, and flush that bird up into the air. Some birds, like quail, virtually explode into the air - often several birds at once - in a startling display meant to disorient predators (and it works on humans, that's for sure!).
Under such circumstances - and after that dog has worked his heart out for you - you hate to lift your shotgun and miss the damn bird. Because that dog, still standing steady where he stopped, is waiting for that shotgun to knock a bird down from flight so that he can mark its fall, and race over to fetch it up... ideally, ever so gently, right to the hand of the hunter. They truly live for such moments, and you can see the joy it brings them. But if you miss, the look of reproach that they give you is almost unbearable.
So, the key is to be a good shot with your shotgun. You go to the range (meaning, typically, the trap and skeet range, where you practice your gunning skills on high-speed little ceramic discs called "clay pigeons") and maintain your shooting skills. Because if you can't earn that dog's respect and trust (trust that you'll hit the real birds), he'll stop being a team player, and just go pounce on those birds on his own - not a good habit since it makes the dog unpredictable in life-or-death situations involving real guns.
All that being said, your interpretation still has merit - such dogs require enormous amounts of exercise and stimulation lest their frustration turn them into very ill-mannered companions. So, getting them out for a run on a couple hundred acres is valuable whether or not anyone is carrying a shotgun!
Are the boycotters also boycotting every other corporation that does business in China, or just the ones unlucky enough to have a high-profile demand made of them?
And, did they take off practically every thread of clothing they were wearing, and use only... um... British-made?... non-Chinese-parts computers while swapping the e-mail they used to set up their boycott? The Chinese government's horsepower comes as much from the huge amount of overall economic activity the west in enabling them to enjoy as it does from their willingness to beat up foreign-owned ISP/content businesses running units under the laws of their country. If you want to put pressure on that government, you just stop giving them cash in exchange for goods - rather than moaning about the degree to which hugely liberating technologies are being slowed down on their way to reshaping that society.
Slashdot Mirror
Stephen Hawkings is an intelligent guy, but isn't this a bit out of his field?
It's called "using your celebrity." The difference, though, is that while he may not be an expert in the logistics of interstellar colonization (um, because nobody is?), he's at least demonstrably smart and a very thoughtful guy. That's the difference, say, between him and... oh, I don't know, Barbara Streisand? When she uses her celebrity to commit horrific typos while whining about something in her blog, she's probably taken more seriously than Hawking ever will be... just in terms of raw numbers of people who consider her to be important for some reason. Hawking, at least, really is an important thinker, as seen in his actual output.
But why should an individual care about whether or not the drama of humanity continues? For instance, if we permit let every person who currently lives to live out a natural and good life, and somehow do so without creating any new people, would that be acceptable?
Because a hardwired, nihilistic, self-destructive (self, including species as self) outlook wouldn't have allowed us to get this far, genetically. The very traits that allow us to nurture offspring that take years to develop simply require us to look at the big picture, and to cherish the future. And to make that more workable, we develop cultures that are built around generational continuity and hope. Anything less than that is a sort of cultural insanity and requires a truly loony willing suspension of disbelief (see 70-virgins-if-I-blow-myself-up-in-a-Zbarro, childish "rapture" fantasies, and related examples).
We're generally wired to get a warm and fuzzy feeling from passing along our culture and protecting our little broods. Remove that, and you're not going to have people, as a whole, living out a "good" life.
Reaching out to or making other livable environments (as in, off-world) is just as rational as clearing the bear out of the cave you need to shelter your tribe. Just as rational as using that bear's hide to keep your little naked ape-like offspring warm through the ice age. It's silly to ask if we "deserve" to survive... survival is deserved by rationally taking advantage of the fact that we exist at all. There is no meaning in anything, otherwise. Since we make the meaning in our lives, we decide if we're worth surving or not. The universe doesn't give a crap one way or the other.
Previous human migrations were driven by less, ahh, altruistic motivations. Survival, distaste for the status quo, better living, things like that.
And what part of wanting your offspring (or theirs, etc) to actually live and carry on your culture is "altruistic?" For most of us, that's exactly the opposite. It's completely, rationally seflish. We want what we build to last and improve. And you don't build large systems without redundancy, that's all. And the thirst for some adventure and a challenge is hardly "altruism." You want altruism? That would be killing yourself to free up some resources for somebody else so they don't have to work as hard. Except, a fat lot of good that does if a giant meteor smacks into your resources.
Indeed. Heck, I'm 26 now, and looking back at 21, it's surprising how much I've grown in just the last five years, despite how "worldly" I thought I was back then.
If you think that's something, wait until you're 40! I've become convinced that most people born at any time after 1965 don't really grow up until they're 30+. Seen it with my own eyes, over and over. BTW, by "grown up," I mean able to truly see the big picture about most things, before dwelling on the little, distracting stuff.
What I find amusing is that a lot of emperors of China, etc, in centuries past were 13 years old.
You don't really think that a 13-year-old was independently making empire-impacting decisions all on his own, do you? That culture as a serious venerate-the-greybeards take on things, and any teenage emperor would have had plenty of "handlers."
I think most can agree on here, age is no determining factor for intelligence
But age has everything to do with experience. Sure, there are some kids that are much more worldly than others, but there aren't many kids that are as across the board worldly as their parents (no matter what the kids would like to think that all of their MTV, MySpace time, and first person shooters have taught them).
That way, when the guy who writes Madden for a living gets uppity and wants a piece of the billions being made off his hard work, he gets replaced
Because... his paychecks have been bouncing, all this time? I have family in this line of work. They get things like juicy raises when business is good, live comfortably, and are sought after because they can not only work hard, but because they're local talent. You simply can't replace the more creative, make-it-really-shine people with a crew halfway across the planet.
If you can do that, then the part of the work you're talking about simply isn't very valuable in the first place. Putting an artificially high value on it is just insisting on entitlements for developers that haven't trained themselves to do something beyond what can be done by an inexperienced person in an Indian cubicle thousands of miles away.
Who do you want in your company? Joe Average or somebody going places?
Except, a lot of the people "going places" (to the extent that their more spectacular youthful indescretions are an indication of their future ways of being) are going... to jail. Or rehab.
Acute exhuberance and risky behavior does not necessarily lead to or imply life-long resourcefulness, or creativity, or diligence, or leadership. Sometimes it's just a form of self-medication by adrenaline for slightly (or very) broken people. The narcisism-fest that is MySpace is as likely to showcase future Enron execs as it is top notch wireframe animators looking to work for Pixar.
Right. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of forked Robert Jordan novels. shudder
But what if the data center has to stay in the U.S.? Corporations are concerned about what's going to happen when we give Texas back to Mexico - provided they want it, of course.
Why would they want it? If they start running it, everyone there will just want to sneak into Arkansas, Omaha, or Arizona to get away from the same BS that keeps Mexico the way it is now. But the real question is, what happens when the Mexicans apoligize on behalf of the Spanish, and then give Mexico back to what's left of the native tribes? That could hardly be worse than what the current (or any recent) government there is doing.
Nah, I'm probably just being a consipiracy nerd. It's clearly just sheer coincidence.
No, you are being a conspiracy twit. And it's not like Texas is just some run-down oil and cattle bubba hub. Ever heard of Texas Instruments? Or maybe Dell? Or big hosting operations like Data Return? The tax situation there is favorable, they don't have the incredibly high cost of living that you find in the Seattle, or Boston, or San Fransisco, or Northern Virginia areas... there's plenty of reasons to run a business unit in Texas. And I can think of a lot of reasons why places like WA or OR are overtly hostile to employers and short on places to house employees at anything like a livable rate. The question isn't "why not in WA?" - the question is, "why would they choose to put new operations in an unexpandable, crazy-cost-of-living area like the Pacific NW?"
I say this while living in the DC area - another spot that you'd have to be insane to build a new datacenter in. I've got all of my stuff parked at an Exodus->Cable & Wireless->SAVVIS facility, and there's simply no more room for more of the same.
Yes, while the people who were left to fend for themseles because they were lower-class and/or black knew the real truth.
Let's just get this bit of nonsense out of the way. Are you implying that the people rescued by the Coast Guard were only rich white people? Or that poor black people were the only ones who didn't understand what "mandatory evacuation" meant? And, if they did, but had no way get out, that the mostly-black, liberal government of that city deliberately set out to trap those people in the city? Or did they just screw up the evacuation, and not use the tools at their disposal, and say "we really mean it, people will die if they stay here" to their constituents? What "real truth" are you talking about, that kept the evacuation from actually taking place with all the warning they had, or kept the city from having its act together in advance, or kept a huge number of its law enforcement people from simply walking away from their jobs when they were needed most, or kept actual individual people (who live below sea level in the path of a hurricane that everyone was screaming about for days) from grabbing $4 worth of canned beans and a couple gallons of water to keep themselves from freaking out for two days? Or from helping their elderly neighbors? Real truth? Go for it.
You are implying that you believe that the war in iraq is about terrorism. It isn't.
And you are implying that it's only about one thing (oil) which it sure as hell isn't. It's great that we're able to pull out of Saudi Arabia, and have the prospect of having a democratically run, by-the-people government (other than only Israel) taking shape in that region. The rabid response to that effort by the foreign-backed (mostly Iran, Syria, and some extremists from S.A., Jordan) insurgents in Iraq is the clearest indication that we're doing the right thing. Massive election turnouts (in the face of broadly announced death threats from the "democracy is un-Islamic and we'll behead you if you vote" local A-Q franchise) show it even more. Afghanistan turned into the base camp it became because rich wahabbists weren't shut down when they could have been. Saddam had to go, and his absence couldn't be filled with another Taliban-esque entity.
Ask the people that voted there (in higher numbers than do in the US) if they'd rather have Saddam back, or be able to actually choose a government that doesn't have "annex Kuwait, throw SCUDs we bought from North Korea at Israel" on its to-do list. Of course, don't ask his cousins from Tikrit, but they're still cranky at losing their palace-building tribe-mate's patronage and money laundering operation.
I don't want us to be using foreign oil, or in fact, using petrofuels at all.
On this we certainly agree.
Spending that $400B on altfuel research would have been a dramatically better investment in our future.
You say that like it's a binary situation. We're already making huge headway into the research you're talking about. But it's not going to change anything like flipping some switch, and we have to function in the meantime. If the middle east continues to fester at the hands of the cultural wack jobs, then the huge new consumers of petro-stuff (that would be India and China, whose rapid growth is what's putting all of the demand pressure on the market, and enabling clowns like Mr. Iran and Mr. Chavez to have their little tantrums). Further, not spending what we've spent to remove the Taliban, for example, would have left the same kindly folks that brought you 9-11 (which absolutely cost the US economy way, way more than $500B just in immediate losses and recession-ish behavior). And preventing that from happening again, soon, isn't going to come solely from switching to ethanol or windmills.
You're wrong. Profit-driven sites have an interest in making money, not in providing a good service. Mostly, these two will coincide, but not always.
And when they don't coincide, the companies providing the inferior service lose customers. The moment that Yahoo or MSN really and truly, for the average user, provide a demonstrably better search experience, they'll see a shift. And then right back when Google refines theirs. The incentive for improvement is huge, financially. And the costs of providing such continual improvements is enormous. Now, who would you rather provide that money - customers, or taxpayers? How would you drive such innovation (to say nothing of the colossal daily operating costs) in some government-run or non-profit environment?
Through profit oriented search engines
And your suggestion for a non-profit search engine would be...? Perhaps you like the EU initiative, that has the government providing it? Nope. How about something like wikipedia? Oh, right, it would have completely died without financial support from companies that make money.
No, you're better served when people compete for your use of their search engine offerings. If you don't like Google, use any of several others. Except we all know that Google actually works better. So, right now, they win most of our eyeballs. I'm very glad that they aren't run by some non-profit coalition or committee that has to bow to political pressure from interest groups or government funding at the mercy of whoever's in office that week.
Profit-driven sites have an interest in being better (for you, their users) than some other site. That's why it works. Non-profits have to depend on patronage, and with that comes baggage that really does have an agenda axe to grind.
Unless you consider successfully running a business to be evil
/. audience considers that to, in fact, be exactly evil. I get that you're joshing, but a lot of people will consider that to be meaningful side comment, not a joke.
The irony here is that a large part of the
First, how would someone know that this computer contained all this information?
If you're following the story, every indication is that it was a routine suburban residential burglary. I live in the same county as the home that was robbed, and this is exactly like every other B&E we always see: laptops, game consoles, digital cameras, jewelry, cash. Rinse, repeat.
If you live in the DC area as an info-worker, the odds of you handling sensitive payroll or similar data, especially related to government/military employees, is certainly higher than anywhere else in the country. But the odds of such a theft happening at all pretty much demand that crap like this is going to happen. The idiot probably would have lost his laptop in the same burglary regardless, but his inappropriate use of that data on his local drive, away from the office, turned something you otherwise would never have heard about into a real pain in the ass. Of course, the person who stole the hardware probably has no idea what's on it, or what to do with it.
Am I being paranoid?
If so, only about the wrong things. This is a workplace culture issue, not some nefarious plot. Too many people have casual access to all sorts of stuff (I know I do) without all of the interested parties really communicating about the risks and trust involved.
Over $400B on this bullshit war for oil.
Did you drive to work today, eat something that traveled on a truck, or consume any other product that involved, along the way, an internal combustion engine? Think it would be just swell if the rest of OPEC sounded more like Iran's quite loony president, or the most distasteful Hugo Chavez? You want more democracies in those oil-rich areas, not less. More open societies and markets, not less. And if you think you'll persuade people that it's only about a stable oil trading environment, you're being a little disenguous to say the least. Do you think that the guys buying weapons and 3 tons of explosives to attack the Canadian parliment building were all about the oil? Listen to the guys that sign up for such movements and which populate the insurgency in Iraq... they're actually telling you why they do what they do. And oil is on the sidelines. It's only meaningful in the context of their retrograde cultural war because it's a source of cash for crazies.
Or of course, go back a little further into history... remember all those weapons that we sold to third world countries? And now we have a terrorism problem.
Do you really think that 3 tons of fertalizer is a problem derived from historical weapons sales to developing countries? You're aware, aren't you, that much of the explosives and related goodies flowing to the insurgency in Iraq is coming from Iran, right? Or that almost all of the weapons stockpiled in places like Syria or Iran are either built right on the spot, or are purchased from Russia or China? Leftover Soviet weapons are the biggest problem. Not paramilitary supplies sent to anti-communist forces in Central America decades ago, or spare F-16 parts sold to Thailand.
The dirt of the country doesn't have a bank account, and doesn't write you a paycheck.
What the hell are you talking about? The only place that the government gets its spending money is from taxes and fees. Paid for by us, or as part of our commerce with the rest of the world. No economic activity and no income, no taxes. No congress elected by us to control how it's procured and allocated, and no government activity. Period. Of course the top 50% of earners in the country pay over 96% of the income taxes, so the "dirt," as you call them (or, lower-income people) do not, really, write the same check as those of us earn more... but they can still vote and influence how the other 50%'s money is spent.
Anyone who believes that working for the military is serving their country is only fooling themselves.
I'm guessing that some of the thousands of people who (having missed the chance to use their city's bus fleet, which rotted in a parking lot) were nicely airlifted off the rooftops of their swamped New Orleans homes before the Katrina weather had even entirely cleared probably found that they were being well and truly served by the military. We don't even have to get into the role that the military plays in being a counter balance to punks like Kim Jong Il, or the pivotal job they did in preventing Soviet expansion all across Europe, or a thousand other things. Did you think that perhaps Peace Corps workers would have been a better choice for getting Mullah Omar and the al-Queda-sheltering Taliban out their brutal, medievalesque, mysoginistic thugocracy in Afghanistan? That little vacation paradise was home base to the people that planned and executed the killing of thousands of people on US soil, and who vowed (then, and still) to do more and worse. Working to hound such bastards and deprive them of a place to set up shop is not serving the people of this country? The fact that you're so disconnected from the role they play and the need for it is an indication of how well they've been doing it for the last hundred years.
Do you know people in the military? I do. People who are entirely aware of the connection between the jobs they do and our preparedness for a wide variety of threats and disasters. People who re-up, as senior officers, instead of taking a better paying private sector job, because they find it important to have the job done by someone they trust: themselves.
If you're going to persist in making rational points, useful analogies, and reality-based insightful observations, you're at risk of losing your Groupthink Membership Card.
The simple fact that they produce a product should not garuntee their profit.
Does that make you comfortable hopping over the fence to sneak into concerts by your "favorite" artist? Are you willing to stand face to face with a musician you claim to like (who has chosen, despite their being other options, to use a publishing company that happens to be an RIAA member) and tell them that a buck a song is too much, and that they don't deserve to be paid? They can produce a recording without any expectation of your wanting it, but if they're only offering it to you in exchange for money, they do have the expectation that you'll either honor their request, or walk away without their work.
um.. Clive Cussler? of "rise the titanic" fame?
That's him. I was being just a trifle sarcastic, of course. You're right, though, that's he is somewhat Flemming-ish. But of late, it appears that he's more of a brand, than anything else. Other people are writing Cussler-labeled books that are even sillier than some of his earlier stuff (he's running out of ideas, I think). But a recent title of his did deal with giant ocean vortices. Really.
In a moment of weakness, I nearly caught myself enjoying the author's point right away, in the first couple of paragraphs. But I was raised to put that off and read the whole thing first. It builds character. Delayed gratification, people!
mirror a consensus among America's gadget-happy, cell-phone addicts whose daily chats and text messages are grist for Echelon's computers
Of course this audience will blame it all on other people not being as smart, etc., but by a 2-to-1 ratio, people just aren't worried about it. That would usually qualify as a workable consensus... and makes it hard to gin up that sense of urgency needed to move things, politically.
And, of course, when Canadian intel people used online chat monitoring as part of their bust on those clowns that were busy procuring weapons and explosives to attack the parliment building (and that makes the news for the average viewer), that tends to further lessen the general public's interest in reducing the ability to repeat that success. Let's face it - most people aren't really all that worried if it's clear that they dial everyone they know and send a flurry of text messages at the end of every American Idol episode. Articles and comments by and for the technorati aren't going to ever feel meaningful to most folks (you know, the ones that form the consensus). Just sayin'.
Ah Clive, the modern Jules Verne. The new A.C. Clarke.
The bad guys in one of his forgettable books were using giant EM generators to... let's see... trigger a magnetic pole reversal to crush global corporations. One of the side effects of this testing was giant ocean vortexes, which smelled bad.
I think that about covers it, other than the whole "completely preposterous" part.
There absolutely is a way that more information can be worse than less: if the information is misinformation
Let's not confuse propoganda (by direct utterance or by context-twisting, etc) with "information." I was using the word "information" to mean "actual for-real-facts." I'll maintain my larger point, which is that the Chinese regime can only exist as long as we're busy shipping truckloads (well, boatloads) of cash to it in exchange for what their people produce. The more we buy from them, the higher the stakes (in terms of their control over the people in the country producing all of that output).
But our difference, here (yours and mine) seems to come down to the balance between the benefits (Joe China googling thousands of topics, some of which may provide insights and info that slip past the expected filtering, and all of which train Joe to like having much of the world at his fingertips) and the risks (of outrages like the Chinese government locking people up for what they say about democracy, etc... which they've been doing for decades). My gut take is that they're better off with the benefits, despite the risks. Of course that's easy for me to say, not being in jail for having just said that! I do understand the issue, but suppose that I'm erring on the side of more communication being better - and hoping that the 'net is just too much for their government to completely throttle. And the more that Chinese citizens can see big info/content companies thriving specifically because of communication and content, the more that has to corrode the grip their government wants to preserve.
Hundreds of times I have read your sig
Yikes! I think I must post too often.
I assume that a 'bird dog' is a dog used for retrieving hunted birds and that you should take your bird dog hunting regularly to satisfy its natural behaviour and instincts?
Certainly the phrase "bird dog" is a little broad, but yes, it generally covers the wide range of breeds that are used to help in hunting birds. People who favor specifically retrieving dogs (like Labroador Retrievers) tend to most hunt waterfowl (geese, ducks), and usually just refer to such dogs as "retrievers" (which describes the role they play) or by some shorthand name that describes the breed ("labs," "goldens," etc).
So, retrievers being a special case, there's the other group of dogs that more commonly fall into the category "bird dog." Those would be the breeds that are used to actually locate live birds (usually upland ground birds, rather than waterfowl - like pheasants, partridges, quail, grouse, or woodcock). While a retriever sits patiently next to the hunter (usually in a blind) while the team waits for a duck to fall for the decoys that have been put out (and fall from the sky once they're in shotgun range), "bird dogs" (like pointers, setters, and certain spaniels) generally are out running around the field in front of the walking hunter(s), using their noses to locate birds in various cover.
Watching pointers (I'm partial to German Shorthairs) working a strip of cornfield or a hedgerow is a nearly religious experience. The dogs are uncanny, athletic, super-tuned-in animals that can learn to work with the hunting party as a very effective team. Truly wild birds can be hard to come by in some areas, so when a bird dog has spent two hours seeking out three molecules of bird trace in the field, and then comes screeching to a halt, still as a statue... it's electric. That dog is completely controlling its urge to dive into the cover and pounce on that bird, and is instead showing the hunter where to find it. At that point, shotgun in hand, the hunter will walk past the dog, kicking in the brush, and flush that bird up into the air. Some birds, like quail, virtually explode into the air - often several birds at once - in a startling display meant to disorient predators (and it works on humans, that's for sure!).
Under such circumstances - and after that dog has worked his heart out for you - you hate to lift your shotgun and miss the damn bird. Because that dog, still standing steady where he stopped, is waiting for that shotgun to knock a bird down from flight so that he can mark its fall, and race over to fetch it up... ideally, ever so gently, right to the hand of the hunter. They truly live for such moments, and you can see the joy it brings them. But if you miss, the look of reproach that they give you is almost unbearable.
So, the key is to be a good shot with your shotgun. You go to the range (meaning, typically, the trap and skeet range, where you practice your gunning skills on high-speed little ceramic discs called "clay pigeons") and maintain your shooting skills. Because if you can't earn that dog's respect and trust (trust that you'll hit the real birds), he'll stop being a team player, and just go pounce on those birds on his own - not a good habit since it makes the dog unpredictable in life-or-death situations involving real guns.
All that being said, your interpretation still has merit - such dogs require enormous amounts of exercise and stimulation lest their frustration turn them into very ill-mannered companions. So, getting them out for a run on a couple hundred acres is valuable whether or not anyone is carrying a shotgun!
Are the boycotters also boycotting every other corporation that does business in China, or just the ones unlucky enough to have a high-profile demand made of them?
And, did they take off practically every thread of clothing they were wearing, and use only... um... British-made?... non-Chinese-parts computers while swapping the e-mail they used to set up their boycott? The Chinese government's horsepower comes as much from the huge amount of overall economic activity the west in enabling them to enjoy as it does from their willingness to beat up foreign-owned ISP/content businesses running units under the laws of their country. If you want to put pressure on that government, you just stop giving them cash in exchange for goods - rather than moaning about the degree to which hugely liberating technologies are being slowed down on their way to reshaping that society.