As a reader, this "older prophecy" felt sort of cheating because we didn't know about it until after his slaughter. It's like the hero of a space opera having a special protective shield that's only activiated after receiving a fatal shot from the enemy and not learning about it until after the faux death scene.
Yeah, I felt cheated the exact same way when Jesus came back from the dead. Totally ruined the book for me. Plus, it's a Deus Ex Machina!
Anybody else get a little creeped out by the possibility that alot of what CS Lewis was doing with his fantasy writings was really Christian propaganda? I know this sounds terribly like a troll, but it's honestly not meant that way.
I remember reading the end of "Last Battle" and suddenly realizing, "WHAT? I've been reading Christianity???"
I don't share Lewis' faith but I think he tells a damn good story none the less, and his faith is a considered, deep, and subtle one, not the shallow, narrow-minded zealotry of the American Jesus freaks. Likewise, I find "Christian Music" to be just skin-crawlingly awful whereas Johnny Cash's music is really kick ass. I heard "The Man Comes Around" on the radio the other night and it's just fucking awesome- killer beat, The Man in Black's vocals, and lines from the Book of Revelations. It's a religious song you want to party to.
I'm an athiest, but I've learned that what annoys me isn't Christianity itself- I find a lot of Christians to be really good people, and a lot of the teachings of Christianity to be worth living- its those self-righteous, narrow minded Christians who think they know better than anyone else, and want to ram their beliefs down your throat. Of course, plenty of athiests can be just the same.
If it were me, I'd give him a good 'ol fashioned swift kick in the nuts. Then say thanks for the job insecurity, expoitation, long hours, minimal pay raise, and general harrasement.
Then I'd give him another good kick in the ribs to grow on.
There's a fine line to walk. Don't make a habit of being a doormat, or people will get in the habit of walking all over you like one. At the same time, being able to get deal with assholes and deal with unfair treatment is a valuable business skill.
I've found that hitting back at the people who make your life difficult gives you a short-term sense of satisfaction and release of frustration, but in the end being able to walk away and say, "despite this guy being a total asshole, I kept my cool and did the right thing" is far more valuable and satisfying in the long run. If someone tries to bully you, just keep your cool and stand your ground.
No, our highwater mark for the last ten years is a solar-powered toy car which rolled around for a few days on the surface of Mars.
Pathetic.
It's only pathetic if you judge the space program in terms of cool stunts, which for the most part is what the manned program has been.
In terms of collecting data for scientific purposes, we've mapped Mars, photographed the outer planets, and had the Hubble peer at planets outside our solar system. All done with automated "toys" like rovers, probes and orbiters.
So real space exploration doesn't look like "Star Wars". Tough shit. Grow up and get over it.
The threat of a catastophe that is purely natural is also real, even if the probability is low. Asteroid 2004 MN4 seems likely to come very close, if not actually hit, Earth in 2035 and 2036, depending on how it's course is affected by it's close pass in 2029. Though it's not a dinosaur killer, it's big enough to do serious damage. Many of the readers of slashdot will be alive when that happens. There is also a tiny, but real chance that a super-caldera, such as the one in yellowstone might erupt, which would be devistating for the entire planet. It's risky to have all our eggs in one basket.
The asteroid/comet that ended the Cretaceous is pretty unusual in being associated with a mass extinction. Even so, opossums and alligators managed to survive the Cretaceous extinction without the benefit of opposable thumbs or canned food. A major asteroid impact or volcanic event would be a massive disaster and might result in the collapse of most societies, but it would be unlikely to jeopardize the long-term survival of humans as a species.
So uh, why are a good 10% of the comments I've seen on this blaming Bush for a bill the democrats are happily voting into law? Wake up guys, both political parties are in screw-you mode.
This provision is attached to the funding for troops in Iraq. If a Democrat votes against it because of the ID card, they're committing political suicide: Republicans would claim they're "weak on defense", "not supporting our boys" and "playing into the hands of the terrorists", no matter how much they protested that they were voting against the ID card, not war funding. You can blame the politicians, but the voters bear a lot of the blame for being dumb enough to fall for tricks like this.
No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque
WHAT? I just went and got a Letter of Marque from the Governor of Wyoming and now you're telling men its invalid and I can't go and seize foreign shipping on the high seas? Stupid Constitution, telling me I can't be a pirate!
As a heterosexual male currently engaged, I would jump at such an opportunity. I say let's take marriage back to its roots...an economic arrangement.
I predict that, as a heterosexual male currently engaged, you are gonna have your nookie priveleges revoked for a while if your fiancee reads that statement...
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, I invite you to consider how differently WW2 might have turned out if Germany hadn't forced all of its Jewish scientists into exile (those who were perceptive enough to see which way the wind was blowing and get out while they still could, I mean.) An awful lot of them ended up working for the US government on a little project in New Mexico.
Or consider the benefits to computer science if the UK hadn't prosecuted Alan Turing for his homosexuality, with the result that he ultimately took his own life.
Yeah, I really hate the endless grinding for experience points in trying to get to the next level in Microsoft. But I hear that once you hit level 60, you can gain the power "Mastery of Monopoly" which makes the spells you cast against startup companies do double damage, and reduces the damage from attacks by the Department of Justice. Combined with the Orb of Marketshare, you're virtually invincible.
But marriage and homosexual union have little in common. Marriage is the bedrock of society in a way that homosexual union can never be. Family - a mother and father creating and raising children - is the basis for the human species. Anything else, isn't.
That view might have been somewhat accurate in the fourteenth century, but in case you haven't noticed, things have changed a lot. Men and women get married for all kinds of reasons besides kids. Companionship, love, sex, money, legal benefits, because they had too much to drink in Vegas, whatever. If a man and a woman can get married for these reasons, why can't a homosexual couple?
Who will be the first slashdotter to suspect evil?
Total global domination means dominating allpeople, not just those of similar race, religion and sexual preference. They're equal opportunity evil.
Plus, if you want to rule the world you've got to be pragmatic about it. I mean, if I'm an evil genius and I've got a scientist who is integral to my plans, I'm not gonna be like "Whoa, Doctor Cyclops, as much as I respect the work you've done in perfecting the Orbital Neutron Death Ray, we here at SPECTOR just feel that your homosexuality sends the wrong message about our values as an evil conspiracy out to destroy the world. Take your mad scientist skills elsewhere." Good help is hard to find.
The real problem here is the effective government monopoly on education.
Um, what? You can send your kids to Catholic school, prep school, or home school them, and there are countless private universities. Sure, there are limits on what the government will pay for, but you can send your kids wherever you want, if you pay for it- which sounds like a healthy consumer's market, not a monopoly.
I don't know, though. Semantics is an issue. The "continuing investigation" makes it sound as though there simply can never be any facts discovered. Whereas the previous "seeking explanations" posits that there are explanations, and that science's job is to find them. It's subtle, but that's an important distinction.
I think its accurate, though. The nature of science is that you can never really prove anything; any hypothesis is potentially capable of being falsified. The hypothesis "the sun always rises in the morning and sets in the evening" could be falsified if one day the sun failed to rise, for instance. Not terribly likely, but we can't rule out the possibility entirely.
We can't really know anything absolutely in science. All we can do is gather lots of corroborating evidence for an hypothesis, have that hypothesis correctly predict the outcome of experiments and studies, and resist testing. Likewise, modern science could in principle be wrong about how the world came to be, we could be wrong about evolution. But so far the theory has stood up remarkably well and a lot of evidence has emerged which fits well with Darwin's ideas, so I find that extremely unlikely.
So, you can't prove it doesn't exist, but you can prove that it is either powerless, helpless, disinterested or an asshole/malovent diety. In any of those cases I have no interest in it, and don't know why anyone else would either.
An interesting point. Who says that the designer in "intelligent design" can't be a malevolent deity... say, Satan?
Look at ichneumon wasps: they lay eggs inside the bodies of their prey and their larvae slowly chew away on them from the inside, leaving the vital organs until last. You can't tell me that random evolution could create something that demented! It's incontestable evidence of a twisted, evil creator. Or how about the ebola virus, bubonic plague, and malaria? Intelligent design, clearly. Just look at goats: horns on their heads and cloven hooves, just like Satan! You can't tell me that's a coincidence.
All this is clear evidence of demonic intelligence. We should demand equal time for the "Satanic Theory of Creation" in our schools.
I swear, its like there is a program which randomly inserts spelling errors into the stories. It's just amazing- all this discussion about high tech software and the people running the site can't even manage to use a simple spell-checker.
Another cool fictional sword: Larry Niven's _Ringworld_ features a device called a "variable sword". It's a piece of molecule-thick wire held in a field, with a little red ball on the end to let you know where the end is. It will cut through pretty much anything on earth, and can be extended from as little as a foot to up to ten feet if I recall.
For those of you unfamiliar with the book, Ringworld is where the original idea for the world in "Halo" comes from.
Dunno about that. Here's what I get after clicking on a picture of an A-10 Warthog: A Tornado, a 767, a 747, A Fokker F-7 turboprop, a Dassault Falcon business jet, a Luftwaffe A310, a Harrier, an F-18 Hornet, another Tornado, a Lockheed P3 Orion sub hunter, a Sikorsky Super Stallion helicopter, a Concorde... and soforth. No other A-10s. Hard to think of a more diverse crop of aircraft.
Most of these aircraft are airborne but a couple are on the ground. If I click on a picture of an A-10 on the tarmac I get one other picture of a Warthog, and a bunch of random planes on the ground. Now, if I just click "search" and type in "warthog" I get 14 pictures... every single one of which contains an ass-kicking A-10 Warthog tankbuster.
The concept seems promising but this particular implementation seems virtually useless.
Ya know I thought I was getting some kinda strange results when I put in a photo of a Supermarine Spitfire with an RAF circle-in-a-circle marking on each wing...
You know what I'm gonna patent? The business practice of patenting absolutely anything and everything under the sun. Then I can sue MS and Amazon for like a bazillion kajillion dollars. Or else sell one of them the patent rights and live like a king.
How much tax revenue does the US get from businesses that wouldn't exist without comm satellites? Historically, exploration has been the number one long-term economic driver. It's not very expensive, and the potential (and hard to anticipate) benefits are big.
The question is how your dollars and engineers can produce the best return. The Shuttle has cost over 100 billion during its lifetime. Would we have gotten more back by spending 100 billion on 100 small unmanned probes during that time? Or doubling the budget of the National Science Foundation (which funds biology, geology, medicine, paleontology, computer science, you name it) for the past 20 years? You can't say these aren't real choices- these choices are already being made: while the NASA budget has been increased for 2005, the National Science Foundation's budget has been cut. Or perhaps 100 billion on development for the world's poorest nations? No one can deny that manned space exploration has its benefits, but no one can deny that it has its costs either. The question is whether the costs are worth the benefits, or whether we can better spend those assets- both in space and on Earth.
The communications satellite example is silly. Arthur C. Clarke outlined the concept in 1945, and the basic rocket technology was already in place by then. It's not as if we wouldn't have communications satellites without the moon shots and the shuttle: Telstar was orbiting just a few months after John Glenn.
This is why I find reality more informative than listening to the people who study it...
What the experts are talking about is reality- history. Historically, insurgencies have been long, bloody, and dirty. The US has been involved in them before, for instance El Salvador and the Philippines. Each of those conflicts lasted a decade. The U.S. at some point will probably hand off the war to Iraqis, but the conflict could easily continue on for another decade, and that's gonna take money, and since the U.S. basically went in on its own, guess who's going to be paying for most of that?
On another note, WTF is up with moderating these days- it just seems like a system for ranking how much you agree with a given statement. It just blows my mind how little people have thought out really basic issues of space travel, like how we're going to pay for it. I like reading science fiction and all, but at the end of the day I still have to do mundane stuff like pay the bills and balance my accounts... and so does NASA and so does Congress. Some people really need to take off the Spock ears.
Lipservice and political grandstanding? I don't think there will be political will to carry out even a "footprint and flagpoles" Mars mission in the near future.
Or the funding. We're in a deep hole with Iraq, and it's just going to get deeper. This year spending will hit 200 billion, and there's no telling where it wil stop. People who study insurgencies say it takes 5-10 years to defeat one. Even if we manage significant decreases in troop strength in the next couple of years, it will still take billions of dollars of aid to the Iraqi government to secure and rebuild that country.
Initial predictions that Iraqi oil revenues could pay for the cost of rebuilding seem to have been too optimistic. At the same time, the income of the government has been reduced by tax cuts, so we've got a massive debt to pay off. I seriously doubt the American people will be willing to pay for a Mars mission: it would demand either large tax increases or significant cuts in government programs, neither of which are popular.
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Yeah, I felt cheated the exact same way when Jesus came back from the dead. Totally ruined the book for me. Plus, it's a Deus Ex Machina!
I remember reading the end of "Last Battle" and suddenly realizing, "WHAT? I've been reading Christianity???"
I don't share Lewis' faith but I think he tells a damn good story none the less, and his faith is a considered, deep, and subtle one, not the shallow, narrow-minded zealotry of the American Jesus freaks. Likewise, I find "Christian Music" to be just skin-crawlingly awful whereas Johnny Cash's music is really kick ass. I heard "The Man Comes Around" on the radio the other night and it's just fucking awesome- killer beat, The Man in Black's vocals, and lines from the Book of Revelations. It's a religious song you want to party to.
I'm an athiest, but I've learned that what annoys me isn't Christianity itself- I find a lot of Christians to be really good people, and a lot of the teachings of Christianity to be worth living- its those self-righteous, narrow minded Christians who think they know better than anyone else, and want to ram their beliefs down your throat. Of course, plenty of athiests can be just the same.
There's a fine line to walk. Don't make a habit of being a doormat, or people will get in the habit of walking all over you like one. At the same time, being able to get deal with assholes and deal with unfair treatment is a valuable business skill.
I've found that hitting back at the people who make your life difficult gives you a short-term sense of satisfaction and release of frustration, but in the end being able to walk away and say, "despite this guy being a total asshole, I kept my cool and did the right thing" is far more valuable and satisfying in the long run. If someone tries to bully you, just keep your cool and stand your ground.
It's only pathetic if you judge the space program in terms of cool stunts, which for the most part is what the manned program has been. In terms of collecting data for scientific purposes, we've mapped Mars, photographed the outer planets, and had the Hubble peer at planets outside our solar system. All done with automated "toys" like rovers, probes and orbiters.
So real space exploration doesn't look like "Star Wars". Tough shit. Grow up and get over it.
The asteroid/comet that ended the Cretaceous is pretty unusual in being associated with a mass extinction. Even so, opossums and alligators managed to survive the Cretaceous extinction without the benefit of opposable thumbs or canned food. A major asteroid impact or volcanic event would be a massive disaster and might result in the collapse of most societies, but it would be unlikely to jeopardize the long-term survival of humans as a species.
Whales are carnivores, eating krill and other small animals. Sea lions are carnivores, eating fish. Killer whales eat them both.
This provision is attached to the funding for troops in Iraq. If a Democrat votes against it because of the ID card, they're committing political suicide: Republicans would claim they're "weak on defense", "not supporting our boys" and "playing into the hands of the terrorists", no matter how much they protested that they were voting against the ID card, not war funding. You can blame the politicians, but the voters bear a lot of the blame for being dumb enough to fall for tricks like this.
WHAT? I just went and got a Letter of Marque from the Governor of Wyoming and now you're telling men its invalid and I can't go and seize foreign shipping on the high seas? Stupid Constitution, telling me I can't be a pirate!
I predict that, as a heterosexual male currently engaged, you are gonna have your nookie priveleges revoked for a while if your fiancee reads that statement...
Or consider the benefits to computer science if the UK hadn't prosecuted Alan Turing for his homosexuality, with the result that he ultimately took his own life.
Yeah, I really hate the endless grinding for experience points in trying to get to the next level in Microsoft. But I hear that once you hit level 60, you can gain the power "Mastery of Monopoly" which makes the spells you cast against startup companies do double damage, and reduces the damage from attacks by the Department of Justice. Combined with the Orb of Marketshare, you're virtually invincible.
That view might have been somewhat accurate in the fourteenth century, but in case you haven't noticed, things have changed a lot. Men and women get married for all kinds of reasons besides kids. Companionship, love, sex, money, legal benefits, because they had too much to drink in Vegas, whatever. If a man and a woman can get married for these reasons, why can't a homosexual couple?
Makes me wonder- which would be easier to admit on this forum: loving someone of the same sex, or loving Microsoft?
Total global domination means dominating allpeople, not just those of similar race, religion and sexual preference. They're equal opportunity evil.
Plus, if you want to rule the world you've got to be pragmatic about it. I mean, if I'm an evil genius and I've got a scientist who is integral to my plans, I'm not gonna be like "Whoa, Doctor Cyclops, as much as I respect the work you've done in perfecting the Orbital Neutron Death Ray, we here at SPECTOR just feel that your homosexuality sends the wrong message about our values as an evil conspiracy out to destroy the world. Take your mad scientist skills elsewhere." Good help is hard to find.
Um, what? You can send your kids to Catholic school, prep school, or home school them, and there are countless private universities. Sure, there are limits on what the government will pay for, but you can send your kids wherever you want, if you pay for it- which sounds like a healthy consumer's market, not a monopoly.
I think its accurate, though. The nature of science is that you can never really prove anything; any hypothesis is potentially capable of being falsified. The hypothesis "the sun always rises in the morning and sets in the evening" could be falsified if one day the sun failed to rise, for instance. Not terribly likely, but we can't rule out the possibility entirely.
We can't really know anything absolutely in science. All we can do is gather lots of corroborating evidence for an hypothesis, have that hypothesis correctly predict the outcome of experiments and studies, and resist testing. Likewise, modern science could in principle be wrong about how the world came to be, we could be wrong about evolution. But so far the theory has stood up remarkably well and a lot of evidence has emerged which fits well with Darwin's ideas, so I find that extremely unlikely.
An interesting point. Who says that the designer in "intelligent design" can't be a malevolent deity... say, Satan?
Look at ichneumon wasps: they lay eggs inside the bodies of their prey and their larvae slowly chew away on them from the inside, leaving the vital organs until last. You can't tell me that random evolution could create something that demented! It's incontestable evidence of a twisted, evil creator. Or how about the ebola virus, bubonic plague, and malaria? Intelligent design, clearly. Just look at goats: horns on their heads and cloven hooves, just like Satan! You can't tell me that's a coincidence.
All this is clear evidence of demonic intelligence. We should demand equal time for the "Satanic Theory of Creation" in our schools.
I swear, its like there is a program which randomly inserts spelling errors into the stories. It's just amazing- all this discussion about high tech software and the people running the site can't even manage to use a simple spell-checker.
For those of you unfamiliar with the book, Ringworld is where the original idea for the world in "Halo" comes from.
Dunno about that. Here's what I get after clicking on a picture of an A-10 Warthog: A Tornado, a 767, a 747, A Fokker F-7 turboprop, a Dassault Falcon business jet, a Luftwaffe A310, a Harrier, an F-18 Hornet, another Tornado, a Lockheed P3 Orion sub hunter, a Sikorsky Super Stallion helicopter, a Concorde... and soforth. No other A-10s. Hard to think of a more diverse crop of aircraft.
Most of these aircraft are airborne but a couple are on the ground. If I click on a picture of an A-10 on the tarmac I get one other picture of a Warthog, and a bunch of random planes on the ground. Now, if I just click "search" and type in "warthog" I get 14 pictures... every single one of which contains an ass-kicking A-10 Warthog tankbuster.
The concept seems promising but this particular implementation seems virtually useless.
Ya know I thought I was getting some kinda strange results when I put in a photo of a Supermarine Spitfire with an RAF circle-in-a-circle marking on each wing...
You know what I'm gonna patent? The business practice of patenting absolutely anything and everything under the sun. Then I can sue MS and Amazon for like a bazillion kajillion dollars. Or else sell one of them the patent rights and live like a king.
The question is how your dollars and engineers can produce the best return. The Shuttle has cost over 100 billion during its lifetime. Would we have gotten more back by spending 100 billion on 100 small unmanned probes during that time? Or doubling the budget of the National Science Foundation (which funds biology, geology, medicine, paleontology, computer science, you name it) for the past 20 years? You can't say these aren't real choices- these choices are already being made: while the NASA budget has been increased for 2005, the National Science Foundation's budget has been cut. Or perhaps 100 billion on development for the world's poorest nations? No one can deny that manned space exploration has its benefits, but no one can deny that it has its costs either. The question is whether the costs are worth the benefits, or whether we can better spend those assets- both in space and on Earth.
The communications satellite example is silly. Arthur C. Clarke outlined the concept in 1945, and the basic rocket technology was already in place by then. It's not as if we wouldn't have communications satellites without the moon shots and the shuttle: Telstar was orbiting just a few months after John Glenn.
What the experts are talking about is reality- history. Historically, insurgencies have been long, bloody, and dirty. The US has been involved in them before, for instance El Salvador and the Philippines. Each of those conflicts lasted a decade. The U.S. at some point will probably hand off the war to Iraqis, but the conflict could easily continue on for another decade, and that's gonna take money, and since the U.S. basically went in on its own, guess who's going to be paying for most of that?
On another note, WTF is up with moderating these days- it just seems like a system for ranking how much you agree with a given statement. It just blows my mind how little people have thought out really basic issues of space travel, like how we're going to pay for it. I like reading science fiction and all, but at the end of the day I still have to do mundane stuff like pay the bills and balance my accounts... and so does NASA and so does Congress. Some people really need to take off the Spock ears.
Or the funding. We're in a deep hole with Iraq, and it's just going to get deeper. This year spending will hit 200 billion, and there's no telling where it wil stop. People who study insurgencies say it takes 5-10 years to defeat one. Even if we manage significant decreases in troop strength in the next couple of years, it will still take billions of dollars of aid to the Iraqi government to secure and rebuild that country.
Initial predictions that Iraqi oil revenues could pay for the cost of rebuilding seem to have been too optimistic. At the same time, the income of the government has been reduced by tax cuts, so we've got a massive debt to pay off. I seriously doubt the American people will be willing to pay for a Mars mission: it would demand either large tax increases or significant cuts in government programs, neither of which are popular.