> This was a major overreaction by the asshats these women worked for.
They weren't fired for mis-using company email; they were fired for making the company look bad to its rivals and potential clients. The "flamewar" looked foolish and unprofessional, and firing the women gives the company the chance to distance itself from such behaviour and limit the damage to its image. It's all about PR.
(And, before someone points out "haha, firing them got the story into the news!!!", that doesn't matter---the story was already well-known inside the industry, and I frankly doubt they give a damn what you or I think. Firing the women makes the company look better inside the industry, and us outsiders are irrelevant.)
> Current projections indicate that Linux's share of the server market
> (total dollar sales of servers preloaded with Linux by the major
> manufactuers) will exceed that of MS by 2012.
Not that I don't trust the word of some random Slashdot poster, but, well, I don't. Any cites for that claim, and any reason to believe such projections are accurate enough to be extended out 7 years, which is rather a long time in computer terms?
Not that it matters---Linux exceeding MS's market share won't amount to the domination MS has now, which was the original poster's point.
And which is probably true.
And which is probably good---too much domination from any OS---even if it's "ours"---risks stifling the industry.
Academia, especially in technical fields, often discriminates quite explicitly against men. I have applied for scholarships that required at least 50% to go to women, regardless of the applicant pool. I have seen job searches outside the normal hiring process that were specifically to hire a woman for the department. I have worked with summer interns who were hired under a women-only program. There are a wide range of programs meant to assist women studying science---even though women are the majority of science students---all of which I am barred from.
> took lesser wages
Neither have you. The "wage gap" represents the difference choices men and women make---such as taking time off work to have children, or taking a job with flexible enough hours to care for children, or being driven by society to succeed financially at all costs or be considered a failure---and does not represent a wage difference between equal workers in the same job with the same seniority/credentials/etc. Look it up if you don't believe me.
> get constanly objectified...
Of course not - I'm a Slashdot guy...
That being said, women certainly do suffer through trials and tribulations that men do not---objectification and fears for physical safety is an excellent example. Men also suffer through difficulties that women do not, though---overt discrimination in child custody or alimony decisions is one obvious example, although others (being used as a money source by women, being considered a failure if not financially successful, being ridiculed rather than helped if a victim of domestic abuse, etc.) are more similar in that they're more an aspect of culture than of law.
I'm not trying to deny that women face difficulties in certain areas that men do not---a friend was expressing her frustration this week about how clients talking about technical information will address the guy on her team, even though she's the programmer, so I know it happens.
What I am trying to do is point out that making this into an "I'm a bigger victim than you are!" pissing contest is stupid (WTF do you want to be labelled a victim?), ignorant (I suspect most women aren't too familiar with the problems men face), and entirely counter-productive---instead of sounding like you're blaming men, most of which are quite nice and quite innocent, it would be much, much more helpful for all involved if you'd simply give a few concrete examples from your own life (to demonstrate the problem) and politely ask for assistance in combatting that kind of behaviour in day-to-day life.
THAT will get results---guys like to fix things, especially if we feel we're doing it for a woman.
Rant that "men are evil, the Patriarchy oppresses Womyn", and you're just shooting yourself in the foot. Seriously---when was the last time insults and brow-beating got you to do someone a favour?
(Aside: guys, when you're talking tech specs, address the damn techie on the team, even if she is 0MFG teh h0ttz0r ggir1!!1!! And don't talk to her tits - she doesn't hear through them. Bloody hell, man, is it that hard to be professional?)
Yup, women pretty much have that, too. The vast majority of the much-misunderstood "wage gap" is due to choices women make---whether to have children and take time off work (losing seniority), whether child-rearing requires job flexibility, which jobs to take on, etc.---rather than any actual sexism.
The "wage gap" is not a difference between wages at the same job. The "wage gap" is not a difference between workers with the same level of seniority. The "wage gap" is not a difference between workers that are at all comparable in any meaningful way.
The "wage gap" is simply a reflection of the choices women and men make in Western society. You may think they make the wrong choices, but you still have to admit that they're their choices to make.
> There's also Howard Gardner's eight types of intelligence.
Why must everything be called "intelligence"?
Why not "ability" or "aptitude" or any of the other, broadly-applicable words that correctly describe such wide-ranging capabilities? Why try to redefine the meaning of the word "intelligence" to be something other than how it's generally been used?
It's like someone thought it was good to be "intelligent", and decided that everyone should be "intelligent", so he just redefined it broadly enough that it applied to everyone. As if that's any more useful than handing out degrees or black belts on the street---redefinition is pointless.
There are indeed people with stellar intrapersonal, naturalistic, or body-kinesthetic aptitudes, and those are often spectacularly important and useful abilities that let them easily pick up and use related skills. That does not mean such aptitudes are "intelligence", though---intelligence is an aptitude, but not all aptitudes are intelligence.
> What does an IQ Test measure? Intelligence or is it Knowledge?
People with too much free time on their hands (hey, kinda like us...) have devoted much thought to that very problem. There are "culture-free" or "culture-fair" tests recognized by Mensa, but even those are not truly independent of culture.
At this point, though, most reputable IQ tests strive pretty hard to avoid straight-up knowledge-based questions, since those are pretty non-general.
> Right... and the Bell curve was a title of a pseudo science book
Irrelevant.
A Bell Curve---better known as a normal distribution or Gaussian---is an extremely common pattern for large numbers of data points to fall into when measuring something natural. It's a curve that is key to any kind of statistical psychology.
That some stupid book happened to have the name of the curve in its title says nothing about whether a normal distribution is a sensible result to expect. It's like saying you won't eat dinner off china because you don't like China - it's complete nonsense.
> able to shoot down/burn up mortar and artilery fire as well as RPGs
Mortar and artillery shells, yes, but it's almost certainly false that lasers will provide any protection against RPGs any time soon. RPGs are, as I understand things, essentially big, explosive bullets that are in-flight with a fairly flat trajectory for less than a second before impact in typical usage scenarios. You'd be lucky to even find and isolate them in that time, much less bring a large laser system on-target or get a long enough burn time.
Not that defensive lasers wouldn't be useful---they would---but they're essentially another conventional-war tool. They'd be useless against 90+% of the casualty-causing threats in Iraq, or in most instances of asymmetric warfare that are likely in the near future.
> The amount of energy directed onto one spot is so intense it will burn
> through anything less than a polished mirror.
A fact which I would expect countermeasures to take into account, and perhaps even exploit.
Could the target be protected with a thin, easily-penetrated secondary hull and a layer of opaque-when-vapourized material in between? i.e., laser burns through the outer skin, hits the inner material, vapourizes it, and then wastes all its energy burning through the resulting rapidly-changing vapour/plasma cloud.
(Exactly the same idea as reactive armour, basically - defeat a specific munition by disrupting it with an in-armour triggered-active countermeasure.)
>>> (b) distribute to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright,
>
> I don't understand why paragraph (b) doesn't apply to file-sharing across the internet world-wide
Presumably because it has yet to be shown that such music sharing has a nontrivial negative impact on the copyright holders.
If---as has been suggested---file-sharing actually leads to increased music sales, then there is no pressing reason for the government or courts to find it illegal.
> The U.S. exports a whole lot of food, think millions of tons a year.
> No trade = no food = starvation. Primarily in Canada, Mexico, and China
Ironically, the Wall Street Journal had an article last November about how the US is rapidly becoming a net importer of food.
The US certainly wouldn't starve---its food trade is essentially balanced, and much is used inefficiently for high-fructose corn syrup and the like---but it's not likely anyone else would starve, either.
> It's basically the same thing that has happened in Europe to make our
> fatherlands of old become crippled with left-wing ideology, mostly from
> the Muslims and the Jews.
Face it, dude, "liberal ideology" ain't a foreign influence from "Muslims and Jews"---it's homegrown, through the whole western world. Sorry, but you'll have to find another rationalization for your prejudices.
"Microsoft Research Asia has become a powerhouse of infotech R&D. Far faster than even Microsoft's top brass expected, the Beijing research outpost is influencing the company's global business."
> As soon as ethnicity-blind policies become the law of the land. As soon
> as we recognize that homo sapiens is subject to evolutionary pressures
> and its various subpopulations are variously adapted to their environments.
>
> Any leftist with a lick of political sense is now branding me a racist.
> Odd how anti-evolution the left becomes when you discuss apply the
> principles of evolution to the human race.
See, if you actually were applying the principles of evolution to the human race, you might have a cogent argument.
As it is, you seem to be misusing the notion of evolution to apply a thin veneer of respectability to your preconceived beliefs.
"Evolution", for something with the long, long reproductive cycle of humans, takes tens of thousands of years to produce significant differences. To get an evolutionary difference in intelligence or learning ability, then, we'd need all of the following to hold:
a) Environmental pressures that select strongly for intelligence/learning on one population. b) Environmental pressures that select weakly or negatively for intelligence/learning on the other population. c) Effective continuance of that selective disparity for tens of thousands of years.
If you were truely applying "the principles of evolution", you'd be able to isolate and explain all of those factors. As it is, though, it's not at all clear what type of environment would select for intelligence/learning significantly better than another environment, and it's not clear that such environments could have been maintained over the last 50,000 years. It's also not clear that the answer wouldn't be "sub-Saharan Africans---similar to having vastly higher genetic diversity than the rest of the world---also have both the lowest and the highest adaptations for intelligence/learning, making societal notions of ethnicity useless in this regard.
In other words, if you truly were applying "the principles of evolution", you would come to the conclusion that this is a question we don't have enough information to answer, and one that almost certainly doesn't fall neatly along "racial" lines.
If you're just using "evolution" as a magic incantation to try to justify your predjudices, though, then, yeah, people will call you racist. And they'd be right.
> It's likely that the hunter-gatherer people of aboriginal Australia
> are more evolved than you, and better suited to survival in any environment,
> not just their own. They are likely more intelligent than you (or I)
> as well.
>...
> You should read the book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond for
> excellent academic research into this very topic.
The book has no research on this particular topic---it has little more than bald assertions that "people in aboriginal cultures aren't stupider than us whities (you bad reader, you); in fact, they're probably smarter!" Diamond gives no credible basis for the conclusion that they might be smarter (and, frankly, is insulting in his tacit assumption that I'd ever thought they might be less so).
There's plenty of other solid research in the book, and I agree that it's worth reading; however, he completely fails to back up his own personal belief that aboriginal people are more intelligent than people in the West. Whining that tv rots your brain ain't "evidence", much less "research".
> If slashdot and places like it are not an indication that
> at least one new subclass of human is emerging than I don't know what is.
Then I humbly submit that you don't know what is.
> Evolution takes time but
But nothing.
Evolution doesn't just "take time"---evolution takes tens of thousands of years (for something with as long a reproductive cycle as humans, and for something as significant as a new subclass of humans).
You're trying to ascribe to evolution things that are pretty clearly social in nature. Aspergers' being more common among tech people may well be no different than hemophilia being more common among European nobility---breeding within a small population allows genetic defects to be expressed more frequently. That doesn't mean they've "evolved" differently---at least, not unless you're using the term in such a broad sense that it loses almost all meaning.
> I think most of us were what we are warts and all before we came here though.
Even if there is a common "what we are"---which is doubtful---isn't the obvious explanation that how we were socialized influences who we socialize with?
> They also say the information on the union's site is somehow damaging to
> Telus and endangers their employees. Also the always loved claim of
> "they're distributing our proprietary information!" without
> elaborating on what that information is SCO-style.
Plenty of articles reporting this---such as this one---give specific information on what Telus objects to on the blocked website:
"the company said the site suggested striking workers jam Telus phone lines, and posted pictures of employees crossing the union picket lines.
Telus spokesman Drew Mcarthur said advocating jamming lines hurt the company, and access to the pictures threatened the privacy and safety of employees."
However, I have to agree with everyone who says this was a deeply stupid idea. Several phone lines supplying communities of hundreds of people have been cut (see same link), which one would expect Telus to use to turn public opinion against the locked-out union members. As it is, they've committed a massive PR blunder---one that has now been picked up by national news services in Canada and widely distributed---that will weigh against them for (literally) years when people decide whether to use their service. According to comments on the union web site (unblocked proxy here), that's already started to happen. It's like they're trying to disprove the idea that no publicity is bad publicity...
It should also be interesting to see whether this is legal. While the Charter doesn't directly prevent censorship by private entities, Telus has a regional monopoly on local telephone service, and so quite possibly may be vulnerable to legal measures.
> I am positive there are 13 year olds who could program circles around you.
You appear to have a misunderstanding of what a CS PhD is trained to do.
Like all other PhDs, they're trained to do research---creating and exploring new ideas. This---sometimes!---involves programming, but for most of 'em, that's nothing more than a means to an end. PhDs are hired to generate ideas, not code.
So, yes, there are no doubt teenagers who could program circles around the grandparent poster. There are also teenagers who could make free throws and hit layups much better than him, too. Neither comparison is useful.
> What kind of a country is this where you can get a knee-jerk reaction
> against anything by calling it "American-style"? (I'll tell you: it's
> the kind of country that, 138 years later, still prints their colonial
> ruler's face on their money.)
Why is this modded as "Insightful" rather than "Flamebait" or "Troll"?
Aside from the fact that the poster appears to be seeing "knee-jerk reaction" in the article that few others are seeing---most everyone else seems to consider it quite coolly and reasonably written---posting a newspaper article for the express purpose of insulting its country of origin is difficult to call anything other than trolling for a flamewar.
As for the secondary point of the poster, well, there are plenty of good reasons why Canada wouldn't be quite so interested in extending DST as the US. The most obvious one is that the US is further south, and hence doesn't have nearly as many worries about icy roads---making everyone drive to work an hour earlier in November mornings is going to put a whole lot more people at risk from black ice on the roads.
High-yield farming does not require extensive use of nitrogen fertilizers, and hence does not require fossil fuels. Even the tractors are prime candidates for electric vehicles (they stay within a small radius of a base station and are used on a very predictable schedule)---although the easy and obvious thing to do would be to run them on ethanol---so it should be entirely possible to conduct high-yield farming efficiently with little or no fossil fuel input.
That's why the Peak Oil Crash won't happen---everything that is now reliant on oil can be changed to use something else, and the change isn't as difficult as the doomsayers insist.
> As far as there having been plenty of nuclear accidents so fucking
> what. We've had plenty of airplane accidents
>...
> Bad guys are going to get WMDs regardless of whether or not nuclear power is used.
Essentially, your argument boils down to "so what if there are possible problems, we're all going to die eventually anyway." This is a bogus argument which can be equally used to justify pretty much anything.
> Oh, and as far as uranium running out, yeah right. Fuel costs
> are a minor cost in the cost of a nuclear plant
No amount of money will buy more uranium if there's none left to be mined. While breeder reactors are a possible solution to this problem, money is not.
> Factored in all of the subsidies renewables receive?
All the comparisons I've seen have either not included any subsidies in the cost of renewables, or have explicitly examined how the available subsidies affect the cost.
There are valid and compelling arguments in favour of nuclear power; trying to handwave away the downsides of nuclear power with nonsense arguments is not at all useful.
> What this study (and it is actually quite old) says is that there is
> more OIL used in the creation of the ethanol than the volume of oil it
> is replacing as a fuel.
From TFA:
"it takes 29 percent more FOSSIL ENERGY to turn corn into ethanol than the amount of fuel the process produces."
There's a reason they said "fossil energy" rather than "oil". That reason is because most of that energy doesn't come from oil---it's mostly either from natural gas (for the fertilizer, as someone else has mentioned) or coal for electricity, or natural gas again for heating during distillation.
Please, if you're going to tell us what the study says, know what it says!
> alcohol is MUCH less dense and has MUCH less energy output per unit volume than the gasoline.
For reference, "much" means 1/3. Ethanol is 21MJ/L, vs. 32MJ/L for gas.
On a flex-fuel vehicle, such as those dominating the market in Brazil, one would expect to travel 2/3 as far on a tankfull of ethanol as on a tankfull of gas. To get equivalent mileage, one would need to store 50% more ethanol than gas. Considering all of the current infrastructure can be used as-is, that's really not such a big deal.
It's certainly less of a big deal than with hydrogen, which not only needs an entirely different infrastructure, but has only one quarter the energy content per litre that gas does, and that doesn't even count the volume, weight, and energy requirements of the cryogenic storage system needed to liquify it.
Biodiesel is a good option; however, the key advantage that ethanol has is that it can be used to replace gasoline in situ---the economy can go from 100% gasoline to 100% ethanol in tiny increments, and---provided new vehicles are flex-fuel (which are no more expensive than the 10%-max engines we use now)---there will be no shock or disruption of any kind. Changing all the vehicles and fuel stations over to diesel, on the other hand, would be a massive and disruptive undertaking.
Slashdot Mirror
They weren't fired for mis-using company email; they were fired for making the company look bad to its rivals and potential clients. The "flamewar" looked foolish and unprofessional, and firing the women gives the company the chance to distance itself from such behaviour and limit the damage to its image. It's all about PR.
(And, before someone points out "haha, firing them got the story into the news!!!", that doesn't matter---the story was already well-known inside the industry, and I frankly doubt they give a damn what you or I think. Firing the women makes the company look better inside the industry, and us outsiders are irrelevant.)
> (total dollar sales of servers preloaded with Linux by the major
> manufactuers) will exceed that of MS by 2012.
Not that I don't trust the word of some random Slashdot poster, but, well, I don't. Any cites for that claim, and any reason to believe such projections are accurate enough to be extended out 7 years, which is rather a long time in computer terms?
Not that it matters---Linux exceeding MS's market share won't amount to the domination MS has now, which was the original poster's point.
And which is probably true.
And which is probably good---too much domination from any OS---even if it's "ours"---risks stifling the industry.
Okay.
> You haven't been denied the right to vote
Neither have you.
> discriminated at the workplace
Academia, especially in technical fields, often discriminates quite explicitly against men. I have applied for scholarships that required at least 50% to go to women, regardless of the applicant pool. I have seen job searches outside the normal hiring process that were specifically to hire a woman for the department. I have worked with summer interns who were hired under a women-only program. There are a wide range of programs meant to assist women studying science---even though women are the majority of science students---all of which I am barred from.
> took lesser wages
Neither have you. The "wage gap" represents the difference choices men and women make---such as taking time off work to have children, or taking a job with flexible enough hours to care for children, or being driven by society to succeed financially at all costs or be considered a failure---and does not represent a wage difference between equal workers in the same job with the same seniority/credentials/etc. Look it up if you don't believe me.
> get constanly objectified...
Of course not - I'm a Slashdot guy...
That being said, women certainly do suffer through trials and tribulations that men do not---objectification and fears for physical safety is an excellent example. Men also suffer through difficulties that women do not, though---overt discrimination in child custody or alimony decisions is one obvious example, although others (being used as a money source by women, being considered a failure if not financially successful, being ridiculed rather than helped if a victim of domestic abuse, etc.) are more similar in that they're more an aspect of culture than of law.
I'm not trying to deny that women face difficulties in certain areas that men do not---a friend was expressing her frustration this week about how clients talking about technical information will address the guy on her team, even though she's the programmer, so I know it happens.
What I am trying to do is point out that making this into an "I'm a bigger victim than you are!" pissing contest is stupid (WTF do you want to be labelled a victim?), ignorant (I suspect most women aren't too familiar with the problems men face), and entirely counter-productive---instead of sounding like you're blaming men, most of which are quite nice and quite innocent, it would be much, much more helpful for all involved if you'd simply give a few concrete examples from your own life (to demonstrate the problem) and politely ask for assistance in combatting that kind of behaviour in day-to-day life.
THAT will get results---guys like to fix things, especially if we feel we're doing it for a woman.
Rant that "men are evil, the Patriarchy oppresses Womyn", and you're just shooting yourself in the foot. Seriously---when was the last time insults and brow-beating got you to do someone a favour?
(Aside: guys, when you're talking tech specs, address the damn techie on the team, even if she is 0MFG teh h0ttz0r ggir1!!1!! And don't talk to her tits - she doesn't hear through them. Bloody hell, man, is it that hard to be professional?)
Yup, women pretty much have that, too. The vast majority of the much-misunderstood "wage gap" is due to choices women make---whether to have children and take time off work (losing seniority), whether child-rearing requires job flexibility, which jobs to take on, etc.---rather than any actual sexism.
The "wage gap" is not a difference between wages at the same job. The "wage gap" is not a difference between workers with the same level of seniority. The "wage gap" is not a difference between workers that are at all comparable in any meaningful way.
The "wage gap" is simply a reflection of the choices women and men make in Western society. You may think they make the wrong choices, but you still have to admit that they're their choices to make.
Why must everything be called "intelligence"?
Why not "ability" or "aptitude" or any of the other, broadly-applicable words that correctly describe such wide-ranging capabilities? Why try to redefine the meaning of the word "intelligence" to be something other than how it's generally been used?
It's like someone thought it was good to be "intelligent", and decided that everyone should be "intelligent", so he just redefined it broadly enough that it applied to everyone. As if that's any more useful than handing out degrees or black belts on the street---redefinition is pointless.
There are indeed people with stellar intrapersonal, naturalistic, or body-kinesthetic aptitudes, and those are often spectacularly important and useful abilities that let them easily pick up and use related skills. That does not mean such aptitudes are "intelligence", though---intelligence is an aptitude, but not all aptitudes are intelligence.
People with too much free time on their hands (hey, kinda like us...) have devoted much thought to that very problem. There are "culture-free" or "culture-fair" tests recognized by Mensa, but even those are not truly independent of culture.
At this point, though, most reputable IQ tests strive pretty hard to avoid straight-up knowledge-based questions, since those are pretty non-general.
Irrelevant.
A Bell Curve---better known as a normal distribution or Gaussian---is an extremely common pattern for large numbers of data points to fall into when measuring something natural. It's a curve that is key to any kind of statistical psychology.
That some stupid book happened to have the name of the curve in its title says nothing about whether a normal distribution is a sensible result to expect. It's like saying you won't eat dinner off china because you don't like China - it's complete nonsense.
Mortar and artillery shells, yes, but it's almost certainly false that lasers will provide any protection against RPGs any time soon. RPGs are, as I understand things, essentially big, explosive bullets that are in-flight with a fairly flat trajectory for less than a second before impact in typical usage scenarios. You'd be lucky to even find and isolate them in that time, much less bring a large laser system on-target or get a long enough burn time.
Not that defensive lasers wouldn't be useful---they would---but they're essentially another conventional-war tool. They'd be useless against 90+% of the casualty-causing threats in Iraq, or in most instances of asymmetric warfare that are likely in the near future.
> through anything less than a polished mirror.
A fact which I would expect countermeasures to take into account, and perhaps even exploit.
Could the target be protected with a thin, easily-penetrated secondary hull and a layer of opaque-when-vapourized material in between? i.e., laser burns through the outer skin, hits the inner material, vapourizes it, and then wastes all its energy burning through the resulting rapidly-changing vapour/plasma cloud.
(Exactly the same idea as reactive armour, basically - defeat a specific munition by disrupting it with an in-armour triggered-active countermeasure.)
>
> I don't understand why paragraph (b) doesn't apply to file-sharing across the internet world-wide
Presumably because it has yet to be shown that such music sharing has a nontrivial negative impact on the copyright holders.
If---as has been suggested---file-sharing actually leads to increased music sales, then there is no pressing reason for the government or courts to find it illegal.
Does the penalty of law put in place by the government if you don't pay your rent but don't move out make rent a tax?
Does the penalty of law put in place by the government if you sneak into a movie theatre without paying make movie tickets a tax?
Does the penalty of law put in place by the government if you break a contract make every contract a tax?
You don't like taxes - we get it. That doesn't make every fee you don't like a tax, though.
> No trade = no food = starvation. Primarily in Canada, Mexico, and China
Ironically, the Wall Street Journal had an article last November about how the US is rapidly becoming a net importer of food.
The US certainly wouldn't starve---its food trade is essentially balanced, and much is used inefficiently for high-fructose corn syrup and the like---but it's not likely anyone else would starve, either.
> fatherlands of old become crippled with left-wing ideology, mostly from
> the Muslims and the Jews.
Er - then how do you explain Finland, which is less than 2% immigrants, but is one of the most socialist countries in the world? Even the Finnish government's own Ministry of Finance website says "The Government's main aim is to develop the welfare society". (And, before you ask, its GDP is growing quickly and its debt is much lower than ours.)
Face it, dude, "liberal ideology" ain't a foreign influence from "Muslims and Jews"---it's homegrown, through the whole western world. Sorry, but you'll have to find another rationalization for your prejudices.
> Once they become successful innovators, then we have to worry.
Like, say, if technology magazines start saying the world's hottest computer lab is in China?
"Microsoft Research Asia has become a powerhouse of infotech R&D. Far faster than even Microsoft's top brass expected, the Beijing research outpost is influencing the company's global business."
> about cheapo Japanese copies.
Really? I would have thought you'd have heard all about those darn Normans always threatening to invade, and those pesky Vikings always raiding.
Glad to see you didn't fall for the whole "people died young in the middle ages" meme, though. ;)
> as we recognize that homo sapiens is subject to evolutionary pressures
> and its various subpopulations are variously adapted to their environments.
>
> Any leftist with a lick of political sense is now branding me a racist.
> Odd how anti-evolution the left becomes when you discuss apply the
> principles of evolution to the human race.
See, if you actually were applying the principles of evolution to the human race, you might have a cogent argument. As it is, you seem to be misusing the notion of evolution to apply a thin veneer of respectability to your preconceived beliefs.
"Evolution", for something with the long, long reproductive cycle of humans, takes tens of thousands of years to produce significant differences. To get an evolutionary difference in intelligence or learning ability, then, we'd need all of the following to hold:
a) Environmental pressures that select strongly for intelligence/learning on one population.
b) Environmental pressures that select weakly or negatively for intelligence/learning on the other population.
c) Effective continuance of that selective disparity for tens of thousands of years.
If you were truely applying "the principles of evolution", you'd be able to isolate and explain all of those factors. As it is, though, it's not at all clear what type of environment would select for intelligence/learning significantly better than another environment, and it's not clear that such environments could have been maintained over the last 50,000 years. It's also not clear that the answer wouldn't be "sub-Saharan Africans---similar to having vastly higher genetic diversity than the rest of the world---also have both the lowest and the highest adaptations for intelligence/learning, making societal notions of ethnicity useless in this regard.
In other words, if you truly were applying "the principles of evolution", you would come to the conclusion that this is a question we don't have enough information to answer, and one that almost certainly doesn't fall neatly along "racial" lines.
If you're just using "evolution" as a magic incantation to try to justify your predjudices, though, then, yeah, people will call you racist. And they'd be right.
> are more evolved than you, and better suited to survival in any environment,
> not just their own. They are likely more intelligent than you (or I)
> as well.
>
> You should read the book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond for
> excellent academic research into this very topic.
The book has no research on this particular topic---it has little more than bald assertions that "people in aboriginal cultures aren't stupider than us whities (you bad reader, you); in fact, they're probably smarter!" Diamond gives no credible basis for the conclusion that they might be smarter (and, frankly, is insulting in his tacit assumption that I'd ever thought they might be less so).
There's plenty of other solid research in the book, and I agree that it's worth reading; however, he completely fails to back up his own personal belief that aboriginal people are more intelligent than people in the West. Whining that tv rots your brain ain't "evidence", much less "research".
> at least one new subclass of human is emerging than I don't know what is.
Then I humbly submit that you don't know what is.
> Evolution takes time but
But nothing.
Evolution doesn't just "take time"---evolution takes tens of thousands of years (for something with as long a reproductive cycle as humans, and for something as significant as a new subclass of humans).
You're trying to ascribe to evolution things that are pretty clearly social in nature. Aspergers' being more common among tech people may well be no different than hemophilia being more common among European nobility---breeding within a small population allows genetic defects to be expressed more frequently. That doesn't mean they've "evolved" differently---at least, not unless you're using the term in such a broad sense that it loses almost all meaning.
> I think most of us were what we are warts and all before we came here though.
Even if there is a common "what we are"---which is doubtful---isn't the obvious explanation that how we were socialized influences who we socialize with?
> Telus and endangers their employees. Also the always loved claim of
> "they're distributing our proprietary information!" without
> elaborating on what that information is SCO-style.
Plenty of articles reporting this---such as this one---give specific information on what Telus objects to on the blocked website:
"the company said the site suggested striking workers jam Telus phone lines, and posted pictures of employees crossing the union picket lines.
Telus spokesman Drew Mcarthur said advocating jamming lines hurt the company, and access to the pictures threatened the privacy and safety of employees."
However, I have to agree with everyone who says this was a deeply stupid idea. Several phone lines supplying communities of hundreds of people have been cut (see same link), which one would expect Telus to use to turn public opinion against the locked-out union members. As it is, they've committed a massive PR blunder---one that has now been picked up by national news services in Canada and widely distributed---that will weigh against them for (literally) years when people decide whether to use their service. According to comments on the union web site (unblocked proxy here), that's already started to happen. It's like they're trying to disprove the idea that no publicity is bad publicity...
It should also be interesting to see whether this is legal. While the Charter doesn't directly prevent censorship by private entities, Telus has a regional monopoly on local telephone service, and so quite possibly may be vulnerable to legal measures.
You appear to have a misunderstanding of what a CS PhD is trained to do.
Like all other PhDs, they're trained to do research---creating and exploring new ideas. This---sometimes!---involves programming, but for most of 'em, that's nothing more than a means to an end. PhDs are hired to generate ideas, not code.
So, yes, there are no doubt teenagers who could program circles around the grandparent poster. There are also teenagers who could make free throws and hit layups much better than him, too. Neither comparison is useful.
> against anything by calling it "American-style"? (I'll tell you: it's
> the kind of country that, 138 years later, still prints their colonial
> ruler's face on their money.)
Why is this modded as "Insightful" rather than "Flamebait" or "Troll"?
Aside from the fact that the poster appears to be seeing "knee-jerk reaction" in the article that few others are seeing---most everyone else seems to consider it quite coolly and reasonably written---posting a newspaper article for the express purpose of insulting its country of origin is difficult to call anything other than trolling for a flamewar.
As for the secondary point of the poster, well, there are plenty of good reasons why Canada wouldn't be quite so interested in extending DST as the US. The most obvious one is that the US is further south, and hence doesn't have nearly as many worries about icy roads---making everyone drive to work an hour earlier in November mornings is going to put a whole lot more people at risk from black ice on the roads.
So don't.
High-yield farming does not require extensive use of nitrogen fertilizers, and hence does not require fossil fuels. Even the tractors are prime candidates for electric vehicles (they stay within a small radius of a base station and are used on a very predictable schedule)---although the easy and obvious thing to do would be to run them on ethanol---so it should be entirely possible to conduct high-yield farming efficiently with little or no fossil fuel input.
That's why the Peak Oil Crash won't happen---everything that is now reliant on oil can be changed to use something else, and the change isn't as difficult as the doomsayers insist.
> what. We've had plenty of airplane accidents
>
> Bad guys are going to get WMDs regardless of whether or not nuclear power is used.
Essentially, your argument boils down to "so what if there are possible problems, we're all going to die eventually anyway." This is a bogus argument which can be equally used to justify pretty much anything.
> Oh, and as far as uranium running out, yeah right. Fuel costs
> are a minor cost in the cost of a nuclear plant
No amount of money will buy more uranium if there's none left to be mined. While breeder reactors are a possible solution to this problem, money is not.
> Factored in all of the subsidies renewables receive?
All the comparisons I've seen have either not included any subsidies in the cost of renewables, or have explicitly examined how the available subsidies affect the cost.
There are valid and compelling arguments in favour of nuclear power; trying to handwave away the downsides of nuclear power with nonsense arguments is not at all useful.
> more OIL used in the creation of the ethanol than the volume of oil it
> is replacing as a fuel.
From TFA:
"it takes 29 percent more FOSSIL ENERGY to turn corn into ethanol than the amount of fuel the process produces."
There's a reason they said "fossil energy" rather than "oil". That reason is because most of that energy doesn't come from oil---it's mostly either from natural gas (for the fertilizer, as someone else has mentioned) or coal for electricity, or natural gas again for heating during distillation.
Please, if you're going to tell us what the study says, know what it says!
For reference, "much" means 1/3. Ethanol is 21MJ/L, vs. 32MJ/L for gas.
On a flex-fuel vehicle, such as those dominating the market in Brazil, one would expect to travel 2/3 as far on a tankfull of ethanol as on a tankfull of gas. To get equivalent mileage, one would need to store 50% more ethanol than gas. Considering all of the current infrastructure can be used as-is, that's really not such a big deal.
It's certainly less of a big deal than with hydrogen, which not only needs an entirely different infrastructure, but has only one quarter the energy content per litre that gas does, and that doesn't even count the volume, weight, and energy requirements of the cryogenic storage system needed to liquify it.
Biodiesel is a good option; however, the key advantage that ethanol has is that it can be used to replace gasoline in situ---the economy can go from 100% gasoline to 100% ethanol in tiny increments, and---provided new vehicles are flex-fuel (which are no more expensive than the 10%-max engines we use now)---there will be no shock or disruption of any kind. Changing all the vehicles and fuel stations over to diesel, on the other hand, would be a massive and disruptive undertaking.