I think it depends on what your goal is. If your goal is just to make it slightly easier for people in the boonies to surf the web and use the phone, then OK, this is probably a fine solution.
But I think it's kind of a half-assed solution if your goal is to bring next-generation infrastructure to the United States, and if you think that high-speed internet is one of those things, like telephones, mail, water, and electricity, that we ought to make a serious effort to bring to everyone in the United States. Personally, I think we should be trying to do that, for several reasons.
(1) It's just the right thing to do. Like roads and electricity, high speed internet is rapidly becoming a necessity of modern life, not a luxury, and the government has an obligation to help provide it to people, or at least provide incentives for corporations to provide it.
(2) It will be good for the economy in the short term. With an increasing number of transactions taking place online, and services offered online- iTunes, Netflix, Amazon.com, eBay, Craigslist, online banking, WoW, Xbox Live- building this infrastructure will help more people take part in this economy, and result in transactions that otherwise wouldn't be taking place. Particularly when we're facing a recession, investing in high speed would be a good idea.
(3)It will be good for the economy in the long term. Our economy is changing rapidly, and high speed online communications are increasingly going to be a part of that. Whether it's being able to telecommute from rural Idaho, having a videoconference with a businessman in Wyoming, or families downloading movies on demand in backwoods Alabama, high-speed is going to be an important part of the economy 20 years from now. If we want the U.S. to remain competitive for the next 20 years, this would be a good way to help make that happen.
People lining up in front of stores in the hope that maybe there will be something for sale that they are after - sounds like the Soviet Union to me!
I once visited the Apple campus at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino. There was a big open, quadrangular courtyard. Each side of the quadrangle had a huge banner, like 20 feet tall, displaying an Apple product: there was a iBook, a PowerBook, an iMac, and a Power Mac. The huge banners made me think of something the Soviets might have put up to glorify Stalin and Lenin at Red Square to celebrate the revolution. And certainly, Steve Jobs is a bit like Stalin or Kim Jong Il in creating a cult of personality, and you could argue that his product announcements are like the Communist Party rallies held in the USSR, China, or North Korea.
Obviously there are limits to such an analogy. I don't imagine Apple-manufactured tanks, made of polycarbonate and brushed alumninum rolling into Eastern Europe. And I don't imagine Apple getting the bomb, or starving millions of people to death, or locking PC users into re-education camps where they are taught how to use a mouse with a single button. Still, the way Jobs and Apple appeal to people is oddly similar to the way totalitarian regimes do.
Or perhaps he see's himself as more of a Lando... talking with the bad guys and making deals to protect his nation in the clouds.
So the implication is that Obama's willingness to enter into talks with Iran is similar to Lando's pragmatic willingness to negotiate with Vader, who then betrays Lando, making him, Cloud City, and the Galaxy less safe in the end. Of course, this supports the idea that Star Wars has been influential. Here, you're judging a real human being, running for a real position of incredible power, by how his behavior mirrors the behavior of a character in the fictional universe of Star Wars.
But I think this analogy is silly, for two reasons. First, as Obama has noted, strong presidents have used diplomacy as part of their arsenal, whether it's Nixon talking to the Chinese or Reagan talking to Gorbachev. Whatever the lessons of Star Wars, the lesson of the real world is clear: diplomacy is an important tool for making the country safer, even if you don't like the guys across the table from you.
Second, and more important, Lando may have sold out Han in the second movie, but he realizes it was a mistake, he shows real remorse, and makes up for it by saving Han, and then blowing up the second Death Star. So if Obama is really like Lando, then Obama will negotiate with Iran but it will go badly, and then he will turn around and save the day by using the Millenium Falcon to fire a direct shot into Iran's uranium-enrichment facilities, blowing up the entire country, and saving the day. So based on the Lando analogy, you SHOULD vote for Obama this fall!
Actually, the White House official who comes closest to Palpatine is Dick Cheney. He's scheming, he's manipulative, he's secretive and rules from the shadows... and you can totally imagine him sneering with maniacal glee as blue lightning shoots from his fingertips to torture puppies, baby seals, Cub Scouts, whatever. Bush is more like Anakin Skywalker: well meaning, but naive and easily manipulated such that his good intentions end up doing great harm.
Hrm. Scratch that. Bush is more like Jar Jar: easily manipulated, dumb, problems with the English language, huge ears nobody can stand him for long.
"Shaped the course of history"? Gimme a break. It IS just a movie. And yes, it has great cultural significance. But at the end of the day, has it influenced foreign policy? Have real life people been killed because of it? Are people willing to give their life, or alter their concept of what life is about in the most sacred way, because of it? Have nations altered their behavior because of it?
One of George Bush's favorite movies is supposed to be High Noon, a 1952 Western starring Gary Cooper. It's about a town marshal awaiting the arrival of a gang of criminals, coming to take revenge, who are arriving on the noon train. The townspeople are cowardly and don't want to stand up, but Cooper's character stands resolute even when everyone else tries to talk him out of it, and everyone else turns their back on him and abandons him. It's a morality tale about standing your ground and sticking to your principles when you're right, regardless of what other people think. And there's a lot to be said for that... but you could also imagine that someone watching that movie might find inspiration to stick to their ground and stand by their principles, even when they're *dead wrong*. For instance, if you were the President of the United States of America. It's not hard to picture Bush in his office, as the entire nation is telling him to change course in Iraq, imagining that he's the lead character in High Noon, steadfast, doing the right and moral thing even as the cowards around him try to tell him to alter course... who says movies can't alter the course of history?
Oscar Wilde once quipped, "Life imitates art, far more than art imitates life". After "Top Gun" was released, enlistment in the Navy soared. Shows like "CSI" have resulted in huge enrollment in criminology and forensics courses. Goethe's novel "Sorrows of Young Werther" ends with the suicide of its lovelorn protagonist, and was followed by a rash of suicides across Europe. Interrogators in Iraq try methods they've seen on "24" because they haven't received adequate instruction from the army. The novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" helped fuel the tensions that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the American Civil War. Our behavior is to a very large degree shaped by our role models, and we can either imitate real people like our parents, teachers, or celebrities, or fictional characters in novels, TV, and film.
The next President of the United States is likely to be Barack Obama, born 1961. Star Wars was released in 1977- when he was 16. Odds are good he saw it then. Who can know what kind of effect the movie had on him as an impressionable teen? When that 3:00 A.M. phone call comes to tell him that the terrorists/Iranians/aliens have attacked America, how do you know he won't be imagining himself in an Incom X-wing, spoilers locked in attack position, with a trusty R-2 unit as copilot, barreling down a trench as laser bolts fly past?
(2) A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept.
I would argue that (1) is the more traditional usage, but that today definition (2) is the one generally associated with the word. The earliest known usage of the word, apparently, is from Dr. Suess's "if I ran the Zoo."
DORK. n. slang.
A stupid, inept, or foolish person.
GEEK. n. slang.
(1) a peculiar or otherwise dislikable person, esp. one who is perceived to be overly intellectual.
(2) a computer expert or enthusiast (a term of pride as self-reference, but often considered offensive when used by outsiders.)
(3) a carnival performer who performs sensationally morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken.
Definition (3) is the original, (1) is pretty common, and in this forum, (2) is the most common definition.
In summary: nerds have limited social skills, but intellectual or technical skills which partially make up for this. Maybe we can't get a date, but we can do your homework. Geeks have intellectual and technical skills, and may or may not have social skills. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are both geeks, even though Jobs has charisma and some social skills, and Gates has little of either. Dorks have neither social skills, nor any other sort of skills or talents that make up for this. The word "geek" has undergone something of a transformation in the past 15 years to be an a somewhat positive term. I'd say that the change started around 1994-1995, when web browsers started to become widely available and Windows 1995 was released. The reason is not that Americans suddenly came to appreciate technical savvy and intellectual pursuits, it's that Americans started to realize that there was serious money to be made in computers. They started to realize that the guy who helped you out with your homework might also be the guy to start a billion-dollar company; suddenly, being a geek wasn't quite so lame.
Actually, it's already been proposed, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm_mark, and it's even got a name, the "snark", which I assume refers to "snarky" or perhaps is a conglomeration of "sarcasm" and "mark".
Perfectly legitimate measurement, if only you had specified what model and year of Volkswagen Beetle.
It's exactly that kind of problem with units which caused the loss of the Mars Polar Lander. NASA was measuring distances in New Beetles while the contractor was measuring distances in Classic Beetles.
So we have roughly a cylinder of ice a mile thick and a thousand miles across on Mars. With the careful application of energy that's more than enough to produce a breathable atmosphere or at least provide for a considerable human habitat.
How do you turn ice into a breathable atmosphere for a planet? The atmosphere is 78% nitrogen and 20% oxygen. If you could extract oxygen from the ice, you're still missing 4/5 of your atmosphere. Then of course there's the issue of what happens to all that free oxygen. Oxygen is highly reactive and tends to, well, oxidize whatever it comes into contact with; that's going to scrub it out of the atmosphere. That means that you have to produce vastly more than you'd need just to fill an atmosphere, and that's why it took hundreds of millions of years after photosynthesis became common before Earth had anything like a breathable atmosphere.
OK, here's a hypothetical situation for you. One of the major EU countries wants to engage in military action, but the U.S. is against this.
This sounds a bit far-fetched at first... if there's a conflict and it's sufficiently serious that the Europeans want to take up arms, wouldn't the U.S. want a piece of the action? But perhaps it involves a terrorist attack on an EU country, and to retaliate, the EU wants to drop some bombs or a few commando teams inside the territory of one of our close "allies" like Pakistan, where a lot of the terrorists currently hang out. But the U.S. doesn't want to risk upsetting the Pakistanis.
As I understand things, the U.S. could just say, "Fine. Go ahead. And have fun, guys... but you should remember to bring a map and a good compass, because we're not going to let you guys use our GPS system for navigation, targeting or troop maneuvers." As I understand things, the Europeans would be pretty much fucked. We could call off one of their military actions just by denying them GPS capability or degrading the signal, right?. Even if they were 90% certain they didn't actually want to use a military strike, just taking that card out of their hand would really reduce their power in a negotiation in a conflict.
In the past, I don't think this was so much of an issue. But with the fall of communism, it's less clear that the EU and US will stick together as closely as they have in the past. Furthermore, the U.S.'s foreign policy for the past 8 years, a belligerent "fuck you and get out of my way" attitude towards long-time allies like France and Germany, raises the possibility that U.S. and EU interests could come into direct conflict. Think about it this way. How would it change things if, say, France had control over the GPS system? Would the Iraq war even have been possible? The U.S. would never tolerate that state of affairs. Why should the EU?
Wow, that's deep. It's like a zen riddle or something. "What is the nature of the Buddha? What is the sound of one hand clapping? What is the functionality of Windows with all the crap removed?"
It blows my mind why anyone would want to take a okay movie (the only one I'd call "good" was the first one) and plunge it into irrelevancy with a steaming shit-pile of a sequel. (I'm still referring to the second and third movies there, btw.)
Simple. People get successful and it goes to their heads. When they start out, they have to break their backs, to fight, to compromise, to take criticism... and then they get successful, and they take away the wrong less from that. Instead of crediting hard work, compromise, and criticism, they say, "I'm just brilliant, and everyone who ever criticized me doesn't get that, and if people would let me do whatever I wanted, my work would be even better".
They forget that quality doesn't come from being brilliant so much as hard work, taking criticism, and compromising with people who may know more than you about certain issues, and working with others. Because they are successful and powerful, they have the power to ignore or silence your critics, instead of listening to legitimate criticism. They can take shortcuts, instead of doing hard work, and people will let them get away with it. They can surround yourself with sycophants, yes-men, and hangers-on who just tell them how wonderful you are, instead of telling them the truth. They can get away with half-assed work. It takes discipline and humility to survive being a success and to still produce good work.
Actually, my startup company already has a working beta along those lines. It's a map search, it's life sized, and it's got a three-dimensional, interactive interface. We call it BoxSearch, and it works like this.
You walk into the Immersive Interface Device, which looks like a large cardboard refrigerator box. We close the flaps on the Immersive Interface Device and render the environment: a high-resolution, three-dimensional map of the world, and then when you walk out of the device, you're in the BoxSearch virtual map. The resolution is incredibly high, the colors are bright and crisp, and using our proprietary BoxSearch technology, you can actually touch, hear, and feel objects in the BoxSearch virtual world, just as you would in the real world. The BoxSearch virtual world includes every object you would see in the real world down to individual grains of sand, and it's updated constantly to reflect the current location of people, cars, etc. The only drawback so far is that movement is limited to the speed through which you walk through the BoxSearch virtual map space.
If you have a few million dollars and are interested in investing in the next Google, contact me and I'll put you in touch with the people at BoxSearch and give you a tour. For now, BoxSearch and the Immersive Interface Device are located in the living room of my apartment, but once we get more funding we're hoping to move to more professional accomodations.
I've heard that the problem is a lot more severe than they're actually letting on. Apparently, one of the biggest problems that they're facing is counterfeit Microsoft products. Fortunately, they're pretty easy to recognize, you just have to educate your employees about how everything is supposed to be functioning, and then be vigilant in looking for anything that appears out of the ordinary, any erratic or unusual behavior whatsoever. So if you notice that your computer is running unusually fast, that you're getting a lot of work done, or that the interface is intuitive and easy to use, then you can be sure that you've been sold a counterfeit Microsoft product.
OK, let's say, just for arguments sake, that deciding to engage in business with China is "voting against human rights".
How many times a week do you, personally, engage in business with China, in the form of purchasing or using Chinese goods? If you're reading this on a MacBook, for instance, you're engaging in business with China (made in China). Listening to an iPod? Same deal. Shopped at Wal-Mart any time in the past year? Odds are you bought something made in China. An extraordinary amount of the consumer goods in the world- not just the United States, but even dirt-poor nations in Africa- are manufactured in China. I'm not saying that Google is entirely innocent here, but how many of us could be considered to be "voting against human rights" with our purchases?
Even assuming we could stop buying Chinese goods (I'm skeptical), however, would it do any good? Look at Cuba. We've largely isolated the Castro regime, but Castro was, I believe, the longest reigning leader of the past century, and the country remained virtually unaffected. The embargo failed to destabilize or change the Cuban regime, if anything it secured Castro's lock on power by insulating the country from outside forces, and allowed the regime to persist unaltered by the outside world. Engaging with a corrupt, repressive totalitarian state like China is distasteful, but it may do more to help the people of China than taking the moral high road and refusing to engage.
You know, when they said that Macs were gaining a "bigger role in the Enterprise" I had a picture of a bunch of Macs installed on the bridge of a Federation starship. And this dialogue:
"Fire photon torpedoes!"
"I can't!"
"What's wrong, number one?"
"There's just a single mouse button! I can't right-click on the Klingon ship!"
I'm not entirely sure that I buy the reasoning behind their claims. OK, let's assume that they're right that all modern humans descend from a very small population, of about 2,000 people. It does not follow that the entire global population of H. sapiens was, at some time, 2,000 people. Perhaps there were 200,000 total, but only 1% of the people developed sophisticated technologies and cultures which allowed them to expand, eventually wiping out the remaining 99%. You still have a bottleneck, but your total population never goes below 200,000. For example, if the Neanderthals are considered a subspecies of H. sapiens, then you could have had 198,000 Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, and slowly that 1% of the species which is Homo sapiens sapiens expands and wipes them out. Certain populations of the species may have gone through bottlenecks, but the species as a whole has a stable population. Did that happen? I don't know, but you'd have to address this possibility before you go around waving your arms about the species being on the brink of extinction.
Also, keep in mind that the genetic evidence is just one line of evidence, and that's it's difficult to interpret. If their conclusions are correct, then other lines of evidence should corroborate their story. In particular, if humans nearly went extinct 70,000 years ago, then shouldn't we expect to see that in the archeological evidence, with stone tools becoming less common for a period?
My first thought was "30 Rock"...that's basically a shill for NBC and SNL, but IMHO a very decent sit-com.
I don't think they're trying to sell Saturday Night Live; it's a case of "write what you know". Tina Fey spent a lot of time working at SNL as a writer and performer, so creating a sitcom about a fictional comedy show at a major network made sense for her. The irony is that 30 Rock is currently much better than SNL, the show it is based around. I guess that at some point she must have looked at the sorry state of SNL, and the drama and crazy shit going on behind the scenes, and realized that the real humor was behind the stage, not in front of it. SNL occasionally has moments of genius but its best days are behind it. It's like a dog which has lived a good, long life, but to let it go on any further is just cruelty, and it should be put down.
The French also had a strong economic interest in keeping the region stable as a larger percentage of their oil comes from the middle east.
I think that was part of it. Another part of the French attitude was that by opposing the most powerful country in the world, it made them feel like they are still a player in the international scene. And there's another part of it... an honest belief that maybe, just maybe, this war wasn't the best idea. I had a talk with a French colleague in Paris over a couple of bottles of French wine and we hit on this subject. She was sort of baffled by the anti-French sentiment. Her take on it is that "just because we criticize what you're doing, doesn't mean we're not being your friends".
I mean, think of it this way: if you decide to drop out of school and pursue a career as a professional surfer, and your best friend says, "are you on crack?" that doesn't mean he's not being your friend. A true friend can, and should, tell their friend when they are in the wrong. And it's the same with international relations. China (as well as the U.S. during the leadup to the Iraq war) has this idea that being a good friend means supporting your friend even when he's clearly in the wrong, and saying absolutely nothing bad against them. That's horseshit. That's not being a friend, that's being an opportunist, a suck-up, a sycophant.
I wish the Chinese people well; it's their government that scares me. And in the short term, maybe protests will backfire, but in the long term I think the Chinese want our respect badly enough that they'll try to understand why the rest of the world is so upset with the Chinese government. Just as I think a lot of Americans have come to understand that our government behaved poorly before the Iraq war, and that we have have some bridges to repair. So protest away.
How exactly has that stopped the government from doing whatever the hell it wants for the last decade or so? Just raise the specter of national security and every judge in the country (especially the Supreme Court) will roll over as always. Just say that the tax revenues go to anti-terrorism activities, or that the taxation is a way of regulating and controlling what comes into the state, to make sure it's not contraband.
If we don't pass this law, then terrorists will be able to buy books and other goods tax-free. It is highly probable that terrorist cells operating in New York will need to order books and electronics from online vendors. Taxing these sales means that it will now cost terrorists 8.4% more each time they order terrorism-related materials from Amazon, dealing a serious blow to Al Qaeda's finances. Imagine how furious Bin Laden will be when he sees that his sleeper cells have gone over their budget.
What about the last administration and it's wagging the dog wars in Somalia and Kosovo - where there was NO US interest at all let alone oil interests?
Get your facts straight, dumbass. It was George H. W. Bush who got the United States involved in Somalia, not the Clinton administration. Take two seconds to check your facts on Wikipedia before you post next time, will you?
Holy smokes! Isotopes everywhere!
I'm surprised they needed a detector to find something that, by definition, comprises all of matter.
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I bet next people will believe that this guy's mother was somehow a virgin, and not just spouting the same lies that every young, newly sexually active woman says when confronted by her parents.
I seriously doubt that Mary went around saying that she became pregnant despite being a virgin, for two reasons. First, everyone would have read between the lines and assumed Jesus was the product of infidelity, then as now. Saying that Yahweh was the real father makes you look like you're not just loose, you're also batshit insane. The cover story would have been that Joseph was the father.
What's far more likely is that the virgin birth is a later addition to the story of Jesus. In comic book terminology, this is a retroactive alteration of the continuity, or "retcon". "Hm... how do we explain the origin of Jesus' amazing superpowers? How is he able to walk on water, cure leprosy, and feed multitudes using a single loaf of bread, if he's just some average Jew? It's just not plausible, our audience will never buy it. I KNOW! We have a special "Origins of Jesus" issue in the Bible, where we reveal that ACTUALLY, Jesus is the son of God! Now, the fact that he has these amazing superpowers makes sense!"
It's exactly like how Marvel went back and created a backstory to explain the origins of the super-powers of the X-men. In the case of Marvel, alien visitors altered the DNA of ancient humans which resulted in mutants like Wolverine. In the case of the Catholic Church, a super-powerful being impregnates Jesus' mom. It's a really ancient theme. If you recall many of Greek heroes, such as Hercules, had gods for parents, which explained why they were so powerful. Achilles was more like the Incredible Hulk, in that exposure to magic (the waters of the River Styx in the case of Achilles, gamma rays in the case of the Hulk) give them their powers. But Odysseus is like Batman- he doesn't have any superpowers, he's just clever.
Slashdot Mirror
(1) It's just the right thing to do. Like roads and electricity, high speed internet is rapidly becoming a necessity of modern life, not a luxury, and the government has an obligation to help provide it to people, or at least provide incentives for corporations to provide it.
(2) It will be good for the economy in the short term. With an increasing number of transactions taking place online, and services offered online- iTunes, Netflix, Amazon.com, eBay, Craigslist, online banking, WoW, Xbox Live- building this infrastructure will help more people take part in this economy, and result in transactions that otherwise wouldn't be taking place. Particularly when we're facing a recession, investing in high speed would be a good idea.
(3)It will be good for the economy in the long term. Our economy is changing rapidly, and high speed online communications are increasingly going to be a part of that. Whether it's being able to telecommute from rural Idaho, having a videoconference with a businessman in Wyoming, or families downloading movies on demand in backwoods Alabama, high-speed is going to be an important part of the economy 20 years from now. If we want the U.S. to remain competitive for the next 20 years, this would be a good way to help make that happen.
I once visited the Apple campus at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino. There was a big open, quadrangular courtyard. Each side of the quadrangle had a huge banner, like 20 feet tall, displaying an Apple product: there was a iBook, a PowerBook, an iMac, and a Power Mac. The huge banners made me think of something the Soviets might have put up to glorify Stalin and Lenin at Red Square to celebrate the revolution. And certainly, Steve Jobs is a bit like Stalin or Kim Jong Il in creating a cult of personality, and you could argue that his product announcements are like the Communist Party rallies held in the USSR, China, or North Korea.
Obviously there are limits to such an analogy. I don't imagine Apple-manufactured tanks, made of polycarbonate and brushed alumninum rolling into Eastern Europe. And I don't imagine Apple getting the bomb, or starving millions of people to death, or locking PC users into re-education camps where they are taught how to use a mouse with a single button. Still, the way Jobs and Apple appeal to people is oddly similar to the way totalitarian regimes do.
Yeah, but when we Apple fans do mass hysteria, it's in a hip, cool, stylish kinda way.
So the implication is that Obama's willingness to enter into talks with Iran is similar to Lando's pragmatic willingness to negotiate with Vader, who then betrays Lando, making him, Cloud City, and the Galaxy less safe in the end. Of course, this supports the idea that Star Wars has been influential. Here, you're judging a real human being, running for a real position of incredible power, by how his behavior mirrors the behavior of a character in the fictional universe of Star Wars.
But I think this analogy is silly, for two reasons. First, as Obama has noted, strong presidents have used diplomacy as part of their arsenal, whether it's Nixon talking to the Chinese or Reagan talking to Gorbachev. Whatever the lessons of Star Wars, the lesson of the real world is clear: diplomacy is an important tool for making the country safer, even if you don't like the guys across the table from you.
Second, and more important, Lando may have sold out Han in the second movie, but he realizes it was a mistake, he shows real remorse, and makes up for it by saving Han, and then blowing up the second Death Star. So if Obama is really like Lando, then Obama will negotiate with Iran but it will go badly, and then he will turn around and save the day by using the Millenium Falcon to fire a direct shot into Iran's uranium-enrichment facilities, blowing up the entire country, and saving the day. So based on the Lando analogy, you SHOULD vote for Obama this fall!
Actually, the White House official who comes closest to Palpatine is Dick Cheney. He's scheming, he's manipulative, he's secretive and rules from the shadows... and you can totally imagine him sneering with maniacal glee as blue lightning shoots from his fingertips to torture puppies, baby seals, Cub Scouts, whatever. Bush is more like Anakin Skywalker: well meaning, but naive and easily manipulated such that his good intentions end up doing great harm.
Hrm. Scratch that. Bush is more like Jar Jar: easily manipulated, dumb, problems with the English language, huge ears nobody can stand him for long.
One of George Bush's favorite movies is supposed to be High Noon, a 1952 Western starring Gary Cooper. It's about a town marshal awaiting the arrival of a gang of criminals, coming to take revenge, who are arriving on the noon train. The townspeople are cowardly and don't want to stand up, but Cooper's character stands resolute even when everyone else tries to talk him out of it, and everyone else turns their back on him and abandons him. It's a morality tale about standing your ground and sticking to your principles when you're right, regardless of what other people think. And there's a lot to be said for that... but you could also imagine that someone watching that movie might find inspiration to stick to their ground and stand by their principles, even when they're *dead wrong*. For instance, if you were the President of the United States of America. It's not hard to picture Bush in his office, as the entire nation is telling him to change course in Iraq, imagining that he's the lead character in High Noon, steadfast, doing the right and moral thing even as the cowards around him try to tell him to alter course... who says movies can't alter the course of history?
Oscar Wilde once quipped, "Life imitates art, far more than art imitates life". After "Top Gun" was released, enlistment in the Navy soared. Shows like "CSI" have resulted in huge enrollment in criminology and forensics courses. Goethe's novel "Sorrows of Young Werther" ends with the suicide of its lovelorn protagonist, and was followed by a rash of suicides across Europe. Interrogators in Iraq try methods they've seen on "24" because they haven't received adequate instruction from the army. The novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" helped fuel the tensions that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the American Civil War. Our behavior is to a very large degree shaped by our role models, and we can either imitate real people like our parents, teachers, or celebrities, or fictional characters in novels, TV, and film.
The next President of the United States is likely to be Barack Obama, born 1961. Star Wars was released in 1977- when he was 16. Odds are good he saw it then. Who can know what kind of effect the movie had on him as an impressionable teen? When that 3:00 A.M. phone call comes to tell him that the terrorists/Iranians/aliens have attacked America, how do you know he won't be imagining himself in an Incom X-wing, spoilers locked in attack position, with a trusty R-2 unit as copilot, barreling down a trench as laser bolts fly past?
NERD. n. slang.
(1) A foolish, inept, or unattractive person.
(2) A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept.
I would argue that (1) is the more traditional usage, but that today definition (2) is the one generally associated with the word. The earliest known usage of the word, apparently, is from Dr. Suess's "if I ran the Zoo."
DORK. n. slang.
A stupid, inept, or foolish person.
GEEK. n. slang.
(1) a peculiar or otherwise dislikable person, esp. one who is perceived to be overly intellectual.
(2) a computer expert or enthusiast (a term of pride as self-reference, but often considered offensive when used by outsiders.)
(3) a carnival performer who performs sensationally morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken.
Definition (3) is the original, (1) is pretty common, and in this forum, (2) is the most common definition.
In summary: nerds have limited social skills, but intellectual or technical skills which partially make up for this. Maybe we can't get a date, but we can do your homework. Geeks have intellectual and technical skills, and may or may not have social skills. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are both geeks, even though Jobs has charisma and some social skills, and Gates has little of either. Dorks have neither social skills, nor any other sort of skills or talents that make up for this. The word "geek" has undergone something of a transformation in the past 15 years to be an a somewhat positive term. I'd say that the change started around 1994-1995, when web browsers started to become widely available and Windows 1995 was released. The reason is not that Americans suddenly came to appreciate technical savvy and intellectual pursuits, it's that Americans started to realize that there was serious money to be made in computers. They started to realize that the guy who helped you out with your homework might also be the guy to start a billion-dollar company; suddenly, being a geek wasn't quite so lame.
Actually, it's already been proposed, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm_mark, and it's even got a name, the "snark", which I assume refers to "snarky" or perhaps is a conglomeration of "sarcasm" and "mark".
It's exactly that kind of problem with units which caused the loss of the Mars Polar Lander. NASA was measuring distances in New Beetles while the contractor was measuring distances in Classic Beetles.
How do you turn ice into a breathable atmosphere for a planet? The atmosphere is 78% nitrogen and 20% oxygen. If you could extract oxygen from the ice, you're still missing 4/5 of your atmosphere. Then of course there's the issue of what happens to all that free oxygen. Oxygen is highly reactive and tends to, well, oxidize whatever it comes into contact with; that's going to scrub it out of the atmosphere. That means that you have to produce vastly more than you'd need just to fill an atmosphere, and that's why it took hundreds of millions of years after photosynthesis became common before Earth had anything like a breathable atmosphere.
This sounds a bit far-fetched at first... if there's a conflict and it's sufficiently serious that the Europeans want to take up arms, wouldn't the U.S. want a piece of the action? But perhaps it involves a terrorist attack on an EU country, and to retaliate, the EU wants to drop some bombs or a few commando teams inside the territory of one of our close "allies" like Pakistan, where a lot of the terrorists currently hang out. But the U.S. doesn't want to risk upsetting the Pakistanis.
As I understand things, the U.S. could just say, "Fine. Go ahead. And have fun, guys... but you should remember to bring a map and a good compass, because we're not going to let you guys use our GPS system for navigation, targeting or troop maneuvers." As I understand things, the Europeans would be pretty much fucked. We could call off one of their military actions just by denying them GPS capability or degrading the signal, right?. Even if they were 90% certain they didn't actually want to use a military strike, just taking that card out of their hand would really reduce their power in a negotiation in a conflict.
In the past, I don't think this was so much of an issue. But with the fall of communism, it's less clear that the EU and US will stick together as closely as they have in the past. Furthermore, the U.S.'s foreign policy for the past 8 years, a belligerent "fuck you and get out of my way" attitude towards long-time allies like France and Germany, raises the possibility that U.S. and EU interests could come into direct conflict. Think about it this way. How would it change things if, say, France had control over the GPS system? Would the Iraq war even have been possible? The U.S. would never tolerate that state of affairs. Why should the EU?
Wow, that's deep. It's like a zen riddle or something. "What is the nature of the Buddha? What is the sound of one hand clapping? What is the functionality of Windows with all the crap removed?"
Simple. People get successful and it goes to their heads. When they start out, they have to break their backs, to fight, to compromise, to take criticism... and then they get successful, and they take away the wrong less from that. Instead of crediting hard work, compromise, and criticism, they say, "I'm just brilliant, and everyone who ever criticized me doesn't get that, and if people would let me do whatever I wanted, my work would be even better".
They forget that quality doesn't come from being brilliant so much as hard work, taking criticism, and compromising with people who may know more than you about certain issues, and working with others. Because they are successful and powerful, they have the power to ignore or silence your critics, instead of listening to legitimate criticism. They can take shortcuts, instead of doing hard work, and people will let them get away with it. They can surround yourself with sycophants, yes-men, and hangers-on who just tell them how wonderful you are, instead of telling them the truth. They can get away with half-assed work. It takes discipline and humility to survive being a success and to still produce good work.
Just wait until my carsubboatplane hits the market. Then your face will be red.
Actually, my startup company already has a working beta along those lines. It's a map search, it's life sized, and it's got a three-dimensional, interactive interface. We call it BoxSearch, and it works like this.
You walk into the Immersive Interface Device, which looks like a large cardboard refrigerator box. We close the flaps on the Immersive Interface Device and render the environment: a high-resolution, three-dimensional map of the world, and then when you walk out of the device, you're in the BoxSearch virtual map. The resolution is incredibly high, the colors are bright and crisp, and using our proprietary BoxSearch technology, you can actually touch, hear, and feel objects in the BoxSearch virtual world, just as you would in the real world. The BoxSearch virtual world includes every object you would see in the real world down to individual grains of sand, and it's updated constantly to reflect the current location of people, cars, etc. The only drawback so far is that movement is limited to the speed through which you walk through the BoxSearch virtual map space.
If you have a few million dollars and are interested in investing in the next Google, contact me and I'll put you in touch with the people at BoxSearch and give you a tour. For now, BoxSearch and the Immersive Interface Device are located in the living room of my apartment, but once we get more funding we're hoping to move to more professional accomodations.
I've heard that the problem is a lot more severe than they're actually letting on. Apparently, one of the biggest problems that they're facing is counterfeit Microsoft products. Fortunately, they're pretty easy to recognize, you just have to educate your employees about how everything is supposed to be functioning, and then be vigilant in looking for anything that appears out of the ordinary, any erratic or unusual behavior whatsoever. So if you notice that your computer is running unusually fast, that you're getting a lot of work done, or that the interface is intuitive and easy to use, then you can be sure that you've been sold a counterfeit Microsoft product.
How many times a week do you, personally, engage in business with China, in the form of purchasing or using Chinese goods? If you're reading this on a MacBook, for instance, you're engaging in business with China (made in China). Listening to an iPod? Same deal. Shopped at Wal-Mart any time in the past year? Odds are you bought something made in China. An extraordinary amount of the consumer goods in the world- not just the United States, but even dirt-poor nations in Africa- are manufactured in China. I'm not saying that Google is entirely innocent here, but how many of us could be considered to be "voting against human rights" with our purchases?
Even assuming we could stop buying Chinese goods (I'm skeptical), however, would it do any good? Look at Cuba. We've largely isolated the Castro regime, but Castro was, I believe, the longest reigning leader of the past century, and the country remained virtually unaffected. The embargo failed to destabilize or change the Cuban regime, if anything it secured Castro's lock on power by insulating the country from outside forces, and allowed the regime to persist unaltered by the outside world. Engaging with a corrupt, repressive totalitarian state like China is distasteful, but it may do more to help the people of China than taking the moral high road and refusing to engage.
"Fire photon torpedoes!"
"I can't!"
"What's wrong, number one?"
"There's just a single mouse button! I can't right-click on the Klingon ship!"
"Dammit! Do a command-click!"
Also, keep in mind that the genetic evidence is just one line of evidence, and that's it's difficult to interpret. If their conclusions are correct, then other lines of evidence should corroborate their story. In particular, if humans nearly went extinct 70,000 years ago, then shouldn't we expect to see that in the archeological evidence, with stone tools becoming less common for a period?
I don't think they're trying to sell Saturday Night Live; it's a case of "write what you know". Tina Fey spent a lot of time working at SNL as a writer and performer, so creating a sitcom about a fictional comedy show at a major network made sense for her. The irony is that 30 Rock is currently much better than SNL, the show it is based around. I guess that at some point she must have looked at the sorry state of SNL, and the drama and crazy shit going on behind the scenes, and realized that the real humor was behind the stage, not in front of it. SNL occasionally has moments of genius but its best days are behind it. It's like a dog which has lived a good, long life, but to let it go on any further is just cruelty, and it should be put down.
I think that was part of it. Another part of the French attitude was that by opposing the most powerful country in the world, it made them feel like they are still a player in the international scene. And there's another part of it... an honest belief that maybe, just maybe, this war wasn't the best idea. I had a talk with a French colleague in Paris over a couple of bottles of French wine and we hit on this subject. She was sort of baffled by the anti-French sentiment. Her take on it is that "just because we criticize what you're doing, doesn't mean we're not being your friends".
I mean, think of it this way: if you decide to drop out of school and pursue a career as a professional surfer, and your best friend says, "are you on crack?" that doesn't mean he's not being your friend. A true friend can, and should, tell their friend when they are in the wrong. And it's the same with international relations. China (as well as the U.S. during the leadup to the Iraq war) has this idea that being a good friend means supporting your friend even when he's clearly in the wrong, and saying absolutely nothing bad against them. That's horseshit. That's not being a friend, that's being an opportunist, a suck-up, a sycophant.
I wish the Chinese people well; it's their government that scares me. And in the short term, maybe protests will backfire, but in the long term I think the Chinese want our respect badly enough that they'll try to understand why the rest of the world is so upset with the Chinese government. Just as I think a lot of Americans have come to understand that our government behaved poorly before the Iraq war, and that we have have some bridges to repair. So protest away.
If we don't pass this law, then terrorists will be able to buy books and other goods tax-free. It is highly probable that terrorist cells operating in New York will need to order books and electronics from online vendors. Taxing these sales means that it will now cost terrorists 8.4% more each time they order terrorism-related materials from Amazon, dealing a serious blow to Al Qaeda's finances. Imagine how furious Bin Laden will be when he sees that his sleeper cells have gone over their budget.
Get your facts straight, dumbass. It was George H. W. Bush who got the United States involved in Somalia, not the Clinton administration. Take two seconds to check your facts on Wikipedia before you post next time, will you?
Maybe they were concerned about cations?
I seriously doubt that Mary went around saying that she became pregnant despite being a virgin, for two reasons. First, everyone would have read between the lines and assumed Jesus was the product of infidelity, then as now. Saying that Yahweh was the real father makes you look like you're not just loose, you're also batshit insane. The cover story would have been that Joseph was the father.
What's far more likely is that the virgin birth is a later addition to the story of Jesus. In comic book terminology, this is a retroactive alteration of the continuity, or "retcon". "Hm... how do we explain the origin of Jesus' amazing superpowers? How is he able to walk on water, cure leprosy, and feed multitudes using a single loaf of bread, if he's just some average Jew? It's just not plausible, our audience will never buy it. I KNOW! We have a special "Origins of Jesus" issue in the Bible, where we reveal that ACTUALLY, Jesus is the son of God! Now, the fact that he has these amazing superpowers makes sense!"
It's exactly like how Marvel went back and created a backstory to explain the origins of the super-powers of the X-men. In the case of Marvel, alien visitors altered the DNA of ancient humans which resulted in mutants like Wolverine. In the case of the Catholic Church, a super-powerful being impregnates Jesus' mom. It's a really ancient theme. If you recall many of Greek heroes, such as Hercules, had gods for parents, which explained why they were so powerful. Achilles was more like the Incredible Hulk, in that exposure to magic (the waters of the River Styx in the case of Achilles, gamma rays in the case of the Hulk) give them their powers. But Odysseus is like Batman- he doesn't have any superpowers, he's just clever.