Is there some computer somewhere telling people to make Beowulf clones?
It's a very common thing in Hollywood to do copycat movies. For instance you had two asteroid movies at once (Deep Impact and Armageddon), and Dreamworks did Antz as a copycat of Bug's Life, and Shark Tale as a copycat of Finding Nemo. Apparently it's pretty vicious- _The Hot Zone_ was being made into a movie but got shelved after that awful disease movie with Cuba Gooding Jr. ended up further along in production.
University of Arizona is building the Large Binocular Telescope [http://medusa.as.arizona.edu/lbtwww/], with with a pair of mirrors each 8.4 meters (25 feet) in diameter. The light gathering power and sharpness are both supposed to put Hubble to shame [ see http://www.nd.edu/~science/core/binocular/lbt_othe rtelescopes.shtml]
using adaptive optics to remove the atmospheric blurring. It's a lot cheaper than Hubble, and while being ground-based has limitations, having it on the ground will make it much easier to repair and upgrade.
No longer can charlatans and quacks fool or manipulate you as easily.
Assuming that people want unbiased and accurate information. Often what people want isn't facts to help them make up their minds; they've already made up their minds and they want to hear the facts that justify their thinking. Look at how much money is made by Fox News or _Fahrenheit 9/11_. What's selling these days is propaganda, not unbiased news.
Okay, I've got the best idea on how to build a tiny robot! I'll use rat muscles to power it, a network of rat neurons to guide it, a rat circulatory system to feed the neurons and muscles, a rat respiratory system to take in oxygen and remove carbon dioxide, and rat optic sensors and olfactory membranes to navigate the environment.
My rat-cell robot will have the size, speed, and agility of a rat- all in a package no bigger and no heavier than a common rat! I can deliver it to you by next Tuesday for only ten million dollars per robot. Powering your rat-cell robot is simple and convenient: lay out a slice of our patented orange, cheeselike Protein Fuel (available for 350$ per pound).
He's also a first-rate manga artist as well: check out the four volumes of _Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind_, the art, characters and story are just astounding. From the introduction to the comic:
"In a few short centuries, industrial civilization had spread from the western fringes of Eurasia to sprawl across the face of the planet. Plundering the soil of its riches, fouling the air, and remolding lifeforms at will, this gargantuan society had already peaked a thousand years after its foundation: ahead lay abrupt and violent decline. The cities burned, welling up as clouds of poison in the war remembered as the Seven Days of Fire. The complex and sophisticated technological superstructure was lost, almost all the surface of the earth was transformed into a sterile wasteland. Industrial civilization was never rebuilt as mankind lived on through the long twilight years..."
The story opens with a tenuous balance of power existing between the kingdom of Torumekia and the Dorok theocracy; which exist precariously on the edge of the Sea of Corruption, a vast forest of poisonous fungus and giant insects. Their technology consists largely of old machines dug up from the ruins of the Ceramic Age and remolded into flying destroyers and giant aircraft. The balance of power is altered when a small independent state digs up a God Warrior, one of the creatures responsible for the Seven Days of Fire, setting off an all-out war. It's got some sugary moments but its probably the darkest, most complex, most violent, and most incredible thing he's ever done.
Re:Ivy League is no plus for tech grads
on
Who Needs Harvard?
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· Score: 1
Ivy Leaguers, on average, surpass their state school colleagues in the area of self congratulation.
Please, we do not merely "on average" surpass state schools in self-congratulation- we are unquestionably superior to them here. My fancy Ivy-League University is currently ranked #1 by U.S. News and World Report in self-congratulation!
RE: the "good ol' boy" thing, that's a show Bush puts on FOR the yokels. His dad's a rich New Englander and Bush went to a fancy prep school in the Northeast and then Yale- does anyone seriously think that he actually would have talked that way in College?
And sure, he has some sort of linguistic problem. But what's clear is that the underlying thought processes just aren't all there. He hasn't always had the mental processes of a retarded chimp, though. The Bush who debated Ann Richards was fairly sharp. Maybe the cocaine and booze finally caught up with him.
Regarding his generally malfunctional way of seeing and dealing with the world, part of this comes from having a rich daddy always there to help him out and fix his screwups. Consequently, Bush has never learned concepts like "Consequences" or "Responsibility". So we have trailer trash like Charles Graner paying for consequences of decisions he made. But as for his whole arrogant disregard for real world experience and reality as a whole, that sounds classic Ivy League to me, Rumsfeld (a Princeton Grad) acts the same way. Makes you wonder though- considering how these guys run the country and the war on Iraq, do you WANT Ivy grads running your company?
As I said in another post, the legacy admissions stuff is way overblown, and represents a small minority of students at Harvard, and probably similarly so at other top schools. The vast majority of students get in by their own merits, as did I and most of my friends.
Legacies get in at something like three times the rate of nonlegacies. Some of this relates to other factors (odds are if my dad went to Yale then I come from a reasonably well-off family, and odds are he has emphasized my high school education and preparing for college)but that still strikes one as unfair.As for proportions of legacies, in the past few yeas, it's something like 12% at Princeton, 12% at Duke, 10-13% at Harvard, and 14% at Yale. That's a pretty substantial chunk. What if you took that same 10% of the slots and gave it just to atheletes? or entirely to CS majors?Or (speaking as a quasi-marxist) students from the lower 10% of the socioeconomic ladder in the US, or students from the poorest nations in the world? Don't you think that change would have a profound impact on the character of your institution by making one group of people such a large minority? If the Ivy League is really about excellence rather than favoritism, then they need to eliminate legacies entirely. I think this clearly is going to happen eventually; in the 1940s legacy rates were as high as 30% for Yale, for instance, so we're clearly moving in that direction. The question is whether institutions as conservative and backwards-looking as the Ivies will do that within a generation.
Now, I doubt many of us would be above using the legacy advantage to get our kids in a good school, but look at it another way: which school would you want to go to, which will be percieved as better? The school where the kids are there because they are bright and driven, or the one where 1/10 kids are there in large part because their parents and grandparents went there? The problem is that what the alums want is more important, since they are the guys who are likely to plunk down 50 million dollars for a new building with their name on the side. And odds are they enjoy the favoritism and the "we-take-care-of-our-own" thing.
You see, that pesky little organization that actually thinks about issues like global terrorism and the impacts of US policy on such activities, the CIA, has this to say about dumbasses little escapade into Iraq. Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists...
I agree. Sure, we're killing thousands of insurgents, but we're creating them even faster, and the guys over there are getting on-the-job experience at killing civilians, fighting the US Army and destabilizing governments which would just be impossible to get otherwise. Even if we kill 90% of these fuckers, the remaining 10% will disperse around the world, lay low and scheme, and eventually emerge to hit us when and where we least expect it. Anyhow, maybe I'm wrong but that's my prediction. We'll be fighting terrorists for the next decade or two whose resume includes "- Insurgent in Iraq, 2003-2005."
The whole thing reminds me of the oyster farmers and the starfish. Starfish were eating the oysters so they send divers down with knives and they cut the starfish into tiny little pieces! Hooray! It's destructive and decisive behavior. But these guys were idiots, since they didn't realize that when you cut a starfish up, each arm can regrow into a complete starfish, so they had even more than they did before.
It's the same way with the terrorists. Bush wants to fight terrorism without understanding or addressing where it comes from and what feeds it. In the meantime, he's too busy to keep Iran from going nuclear in the next few years. He's a fucking dumbass.
The top schools also exert a lot more effort recruiting from poor neighborhoods and the inner city.
I can remember exactly one "poor inner city kid" from the entire time I was at an Ivy. Maybe one counts as "a lot more" compared to zero 40 or 50 years ago, but it's still a negligible part of the student body.
who are there because of affirmative action
While we're at it, let's talk about "affirmative action" for the rich in the form of legacy students and other advantages. As for who the idiots are, I'd say the smarter people I met were from the bottom of the socioeconomic food chain. The people who made you ask "why is this moron here?" were overwhelmingly rich WASP kids, legacies and the jocks. There may be some big problems with admission these days, but it's not the poor kids.
You can be both a legacy AND work hard. As you can tell from my lame nick, I went to an Ivy League school, and this was the case for me. But I also went to public school, so I didn't have the socioeconomic boost that often comes with being a legacy.
I dont know like what u are all talkeing about. Lots of us legasies are, like, really really smaart and hard workers, and, stuff. I work, like, really, really hard three dayes a week at daddys company.
---J. Witherspoon Throckmorton III, Princeton '99
...seriously, though, I agree, legacies can be hard working and intelligent and get in and a lot of them deserve to be there. And if that's the case, why not eliminate legacy status entirely? If you really deserve to go there, you'll get in anyway, and nobody can make fun of you for being a legacy anymore. Another problem, raised in the article, is the socioeconomic balance. Overwhelmingly, Ivy leaguers come from the upper tier of the socioeconomic ladder. Here, I'll admit I'm part of the problem. My father was blue-collar but as a small businessman my family was better off than most others in town. The Ivy leagues offer you a lot of opportunity. Why are we giving more opportunity to those people who already have all the opportunities in the world?
For the average Ivy Leaguer, motivation and work ethic are exactly what got them admitted, and it's also motivation and work ethic that's required to do well in such a competitive environment. However, I can tell you that at my school, as well as most of the others in the Ivy League, there is a discernible difference between those who had to work hard to get in and those who are of "legacy" status.
Depends. My girlfriend (no, really!) was a legacy but had a genuine desire to learn and intellectual curiosity. But there were plenty of legacies who were just shy of brain-dead. I also knew a smart, nice jock. But he's the only one I can think of.
In general, I think "hardworking" or perhaps "workaholic" is the term which describes Ivy Leaguers better than any other. I met plenty of people who weren't brilliant, but maybe two people you could call "Type B" personalities. Everyone else was a fucking stress fest. One of my best friends gave herself ulcers and had to be hospitalized, just from stressing so much.
Re:-1 Flambait coming up!
on
Who Needs Harvard?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Any idiot can graduate from an Ivy League. There's several reasons for this. One is customer satisfaction. Am I seriously going to pay all that money for Harvard for bad grades? Another is the image of the university. Ivies thrive on the illusion that they are places of unparalleled genius where exceptional academic performance is just the rule. If they start failing people out, they have to admit that some of their students are substandard nongeniuses. Seriously, I've known *plenty* of idiots that went to an Ivy League school, so the fact that Bush went to an Ivy League is anything but impressive. Yet another is that the University is willing to tolerate idiots if they bring something else to the table, such as connections, a name, or shitloads of money. The Ivies have a whorish interest in money and power. Really, can anyone seriously argue that Bush would have got in to Yale, a place he probably can't even spell half the time, on merit?
Re:Compare to people from state schools
on
Who Needs Harvard?
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· Score: 1
I agree with parts of this. Ivy leaguers can be pretty bland; this is because trying to get a 4.0 and 1400 on the SATs in high school limits your opportunities for real-world experience. Also, they lack real-world experience on an emotional level. I found most of them seem to have lived charmed lives, largely untouched by pain or want. Again, I suspect it's easier to be Valedictorian when you don't have the kinds of issues or trauma that build real character. As for drinking, there was tons of it and everyone knew what a keg was. After being so stressed out all week long, people needed to let off steam and abuse alcohol.
On the other hand, a significant number of them are there because they are blazingly bright and genuinely interested in learning. That was the Ivy League component I've always felt most comfortable around.
It's not about where you spent 4 years of your life. It's about what you can do and whether you can provide the employer with any reason to believe that you can do the things you say you can do. If you can, you'll get the job and the Harvard grad will still be looking.
I fully agree with you. That being said, if you have thirty seconds to impress a potential employer, starting with "I went to Harvard" will usually always do more than "I have a correspondence degree from the Saskatoon Community College of Liberal Arts and Small Engine Repair." On the other hand, the arrogance and lack of real-world experience of an Ivy League student can be a potential turn-off.
I've been on both sides of the fence, since I did my undergrad at an Ivy and am working on a graduate degree at a big, not particularly good public university. People are a lot more likely to give you the time of day, or let you get your foot in the door, when you can name-drop Harvard, Yale or Princeton. That alone is worth a few thousand dollars of the tuition price.
I'm sick of sweeping generalizations that at all Ivys, once you get in you are taken care of for life. Although their is excellent academic support in Cornell Engineering, noone holds your hand.
Engineers in the Ivies have it tough. But if you major in the humanities, I'd agree 100% with the "If you go to some of your classes, do some of your homework, and don't spend all of your time stoned you are pretty much guaranteed to graduate" statement. But this does cheat the students, who may find out the hard way that life isn't quite so forgiving once you're on the outside, where things can be pretty Darwinian.
All these facts are courtesy of the worst ranking agent ever, US News and World Reports
I'd agree with that. The idea of a "best" university is stupid. It all depends on what you want. Princeton, for instance, frequently makes the #1 spot. And if you want to hang out with spoiled preppies and later make obscene amounts of money on Wall Street, by all means, go to Princeton. If that's not your idea of the "best" university in the country, maybe look somewhere else. In the defense of a place like Princeton, you can get small classes (like 15 people) with big name writers and scientists, which at least some days makes the preppies tolerable.
Maybe it's because so many of them FUCKED UP the economy when they popped the internet bubble.
The internet bubble came about because a lot of people got greedy and saw dollar signs and did everything but throw money by the shovel-ful at companies which had no product, no market, no business plan, no earnings and no chance in hell of succeeding. You could have the most brilliant CEO in the world running those companies and they still would have failed. The investors bear the brunt of the blame for the bubble. I mean, what the fuck were you expecting? None of these companies actually made any money, which is the primary reason a stock has value.
Netscape for instance had a product, but I don't think it ever turned a profit. They never even had a plan for how to successfully compete against Microsoft. But instead of being prudent and waiting until they had a string of strong earnings, they took the thing public because the CEO wanted enough dough to buy a huge sailboat. That pretty much set the pattern.
As for destroying the economy, economies go through ups and downs, that is just what happens. In reality, I think the bubble may have done a lot of good. Yes, a lot of absolutely idiotic ideas got funded. However, some brilliant ideas also flourished which might have done poorly in a more conservative economic climate, things like eBay and Amazon.
Sorry but you only have two choices. If it wasn't by chance. Then you must accept it was of divine origins.
How in the hell did this thick skulled troglodyte get modded "insightful"? The whole point of _Origin of Species_ is that it isn't all just chance, dumbass. Some genes are better suited to the environment so they are more likely to be passed on to the next generation. The entire point is that survival and reproduction are nonrandom.
c) Two leading "origin -of-life" researchers confirm that Miller used the wrong gas mixture. "Science" magazine said in 1995 that experts now dismiss Miller's experiment because "the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller-Urey simulation."
Who comes up with these revisions, however? Not the creationists. The scientists. Scientists are constantly looking to poke holes in theories, since proving old ideas wrong or proving a new idea is a good way to get a job, fame, funding, and so on. Scientists can be prejudiced to be sure, but ultimately they test their ideas and sooner or later discard them if they're wrong. The old stanley/miller experiments may be wrong so they're looking in a new direction. In contrast, the creationists are stubbornly holding onto a viewpoint that was obsolete 2000 years ago.
The way I see it, if a bunch of retarded homicidal apes can turn into something as fantastical as our modern society, anything is possible. Prokaryots from ooze seems easy to believe by comparison.
And anyone who doubts we're descended from apes, take a look at the current occupant of the Oval Office.
I have not read any of the articles on this, but when I heard the NPR story, I wondered what evidence they had against it simply being a scavenger along the lines of a modern hyena?
Well... um... because that wouldn't be as cool.
Seriously, I'm a paleontologist and that's the best answer I've got. I can't think of any good way you could rule out the idea that it just picked up some already dead dinosaur, but the scientists probably chose to downplay that possibility since it wouldn't generate as much media attention. However it's more than likely that the biggest mammals attacked and killed the smallest dinosaurs. The biggest mammal in the Late Cretaceous was the carnivorous marsupial _Didelphodon_ (about the size of a modern opossum, maybe cat-sized) which was probably large enough to tackle the tiny chicken-sized velociraptors of the time. The jaws on it are pretty darn large and massive, so it might even have been able to kill a hatchling T. rex if it got a good bite or two in. It's all fairly speculative, although once in a while you get lucky.
There's a specimen of _Velociraptor mongoliensis_ locked in combat with a _Protoceratops_- apparently they were working each other over when they were buried alive by a sand dune or a sandstorm or something.
Who wouldn't welcome a slick, well-integrated, back-to-basics, consumer-grade office suite to come out of Apple?
Microsoft? I mean, I never liked Word all that much, but everybody uses it. It's sort of like English- it might not be as pretty as some other ways of communicating, but almost wherever you go you can get your message across. If Apple comes out with an Office-like suite, Microsoft could stop developing Office for them. This might not kill Apple the way it would have five or six years ago, but people probably would still like to know that they can e-mail someone a document and have them open it up and edit it, whether they are on Mac or PC. As for the old Apple software, I liked it a lot, but I find that most of their new software sacrifices user interface in favor of eye candy a little too often. I don't want fucking blue gumdrops all over the screen when I'm typing a text document, its distracting.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a very common thing in Hollywood to do copycat movies. For instance you had two asteroid movies at once (Deep Impact and Armageddon), and Dreamworks did Antz as a copycat of Bug's Life, and Shark Tale as a copycat of Finding Nemo. Apparently it's pretty vicious- _The Hot Zone_ was being made into a movie but got shelved after that awful disease movie with Cuba Gooding Jr. ended up further along in production.
University of Arizona is building the Large Binocular Telescope [http://medusa.as.arizona.edu/lbtwww/], with with a pair of mirrors each 8.4 meters (25 feet) in diameter. The light gathering power and sharpness are both supposed to put Hubble to shame [ see http://www.nd.edu/~science/core/binocular/lbt_othe rtelescopes.shtml]
using adaptive optics to remove the atmospheric blurring. It's a lot cheaper than Hubble, and while being ground-based has limitations, having it on the ground will make it much easier to repair and upgrade.
No longer can charlatans and quacks fool or manipulate you as easily.
Assuming that people want unbiased and accurate information. Often what people want isn't facts to help them make up their minds; they've already made up their minds and they want to hear the facts that justify their thinking. Look at how much money is made by Fox News or _Fahrenheit 9/11_. What's selling these days is propaganda, not unbiased news.
My rat-cell robot will have the size, speed, and agility of a rat- all in a package no bigger and no heavier than a common rat! I can deliver it to you by next Tuesday for only ten million dollars per robot. Powering your rat-cell robot is simple and convenient: lay out a slice of our patented orange, cheeselike Protein Fuel (available for 350$ per pound).
"In a few short centuries, industrial civilization had spread from the western fringes of Eurasia to sprawl across the face of the planet. Plundering the soil of its riches, fouling the air, and remolding lifeforms at will, this gargantuan society had already peaked a thousand years after its foundation: ahead lay abrupt and violent decline. The cities burned, welling up as clouds of poison in the war remembered as the Seven Days of Fire. The complex and sophisticated technological superstructure was lost, almost all the surface of the earth was transformed into a sterile wasteland. Industrial civilization was never rebuilt as mankind lived on through the long twilight years..."
The story opens with a tenuous balance of power existing between the kingdom of Torumekia and the Dorok theocracy; which exist precariously on the edge of the Sea of Corruption, a vast forest of poisonous fungus and giant insects. Their technology consists largely of old machines dug up from the ruins of the Ceramic Age and remolded into flying destroyers and giant aircraft. The balance of power is altered when a small independent state digs up a God Warrior, one of the creatures responsible for the Seven Days of Fire, setting off an all-out war. It's got some sugary moments but its probably the darkest, most complex, most violent, and most incredible thing he's ever done.
Please, we do not merely "on average" surpass state schools in self-congratulation- we are unquestionably superior to them here. My fancy Ivy-League University is currently ranked #1 by U.S. News and World Report in self-congratulation!
And sure, he has some sort of linguistic problem. But what's clear is that the underlying thought processes just aren't all there. He hasn't always had the mental processes of a retarded chimp, though. The Bush who debated Ann Richards was fairly sharp. Maybe the cocaine and booze finally caught up with him.
Regarding his generally malfunctional way of seeing and dealing with the world, part of this comes from having a rich daddy always there to help him out and fix his screwups. Consequently, Bush has never learned concepts like "Consequences" or "Responsibility". So we have trailer trash like Charles Graner paying for consequences of decisions he made. But as for his whole arrogant disregard for real world experience and reality as a whole, that sounds classic Ivy League to me, Rumsfeld (a Princeton Grad) acts the same way. Makes you wonder though- considering how these guys run the country and the war on Iraq, do you WANT Ivy grads running your company?
Well, shit look what legacies did to the Presidency. If that's not an argument against legacies, I don't know what is.
Legacies get in at something like three times the rate of nonlegacies. Some of this relates to other factors (odds are if my dad went to Yale then I come from a reasonably well-off family, and odds are he has emphasized my high school education and preparing for college)but that still strikes one as unfair.As for proportions of legacies, in the past few yeas, it's something like 12% at Princeton, 12% at Duke, 10-13% at Harvard, and 14% at Yale. That's a pretty substantial chunk. What if you took that same 10% of the slots and gave it just to atheletes? or entirely to CS majors?Or (speaking as a quasi-marxist) students from the lower 10% of the socioeconomic ladder in the US, or students from the poorest nations in the world? Don't you think that change would have a profound impact on the character of your institution by making one group of people such a large minority? If the Ivy League is really about excellence rather than favoritism, then they need to eliminate legacies entirely. I think this clearly is going to happen eventually; in the 1940s legacy rates were as high as 30% for Yale, for instance, so we're clearly moving in that direction. The question is whether institutions as conservative and backwards-looking as the Ivies will do that within a generation.
Now, I doubt many of us would be above using the legacy advantage to get our kids in a good school, but look at it another way: which school would you want to go to, which will be percieved as better? The school where the kids are there because they are bright and driven, or the one where 1/10 kids are there in large part because their parents and grandparents went there? The problem is that what the alums want is more important, since they are the guys who are likely to plunk down 50 million dollars for a new building with their name on the side. And odds are they enjoy the favoritism and the "we-take-care-of-our-own" thing.
I agree. Sure, we're killing thousands of insurgents, but we're creating them even faster, and the guys over there are getting on-the-job experience at killing civilians, fighting the US Army and destabilizing governments which would just be impossible to get otherwise. Even if we kill 90% of these fuckers, the remaining 10% will disperse around the world, lay low and scheme, and eventually emerge to hit us when and where we least expect it. Anyhow, maybe I'm wrong but that's my prediction. We'll be fighting terrorists for the next decade or two whose resume includes "- Insurgent in Iraq, 2003-2005."
The whole thing reminds me of the oyster farmers and the starfish. Starfish were eating the oysters so they send divers down with knives and they cut the starfish into tiny little pieces! Hooray! It's destructive and decisive behavior. But these guys were idiots, since they didn't realize that when you cut a starfish up, each arm can regrow into a complete starfish, so they had even more than they did before. It's the same way with the terrorists. Bush wants to fight terrorism without understanding or addressing where it comes from and what feeds it. In the meantime, he's too busy to keep Iran from going nuclear in the next few years. He's a fucking dumbass.
I can remember exactly one "poor inner city kid" from the entire time I was at an Ivy. Maybe one counts as "a lot more" compared to zero 40 or 50 years ago, but it's still a negligible part of the student body.
who are there because of affirmative action
While we're at it, let's talk about "affirmative action" for the rich in the form of legacy students and other advantages. As for who the idiots are, I'd say the smarter people I met were from the bottom of the socioeconomic food chain. The people who made you ask "why is this moron here?" were overwhelmingly rich WASP kids, legacies and the jocks. There may be some big problems with admission these days, but it's not the poor kids.
I dont know like what u are all talkeing about. Lots of us legasies are, like, really really smaart and hard workers, and, stuff. I work, like, really, really hard three dayes a week at daddys company.
---J. Witherspoon Throckmorton III, Princeton '99
Depends. My girlfriend (no, really!) was a legacy but had a genuine desire to learn and intellectual curiosity. But there were plenty of legacies who were just shy of brain-dead. I also knew a smart, nice jock. But he's the only one I can think of.
In general, I think "hardworking" or perhaps "workaholic" is the term which describes Ivy Leaguers better than any other. I met plenty of people who weren't brilliant, but maybe two people you could call "Type B" personalities. Everyone else was a fucking stress fest. One of my best friends gave herself ulcers and had to be hospitalized, just from stressing so much.
Any idiot can graduate from an Ivy League. There's several reasons for this. One is customer satisfaction. Am I seriously going to pay all that money for Harvard for bad grades? Another is the image of the university. Ivies thrive on the illusion that they are places of unparalleled genius where exceptional academic performance is just the rule. If they start failing people out, they have to admit that some of their students are substandard nongeniuses. Seriously, I've known *plenty* of idiots that went to an Ivy League school, so the fact that Bush went to an Ivy League is anything but impressive. Yet another is that the University is willing to tolerate idiots if they bring something else to the table, such as connections, a name, or shitloads of money. The Ivies have a whorish interest in money and power. Really, can anyone seriously argue that Bush would have got in to Yale, a place he probably can't even spell half the time, on merit?
On the other hand, a significant number of them are there because they are blazingly bright and genuinely interested in learning. That was the Ivy League component I've always felt most comfortable around.
I fully agree with you. That being said, if you have thirty seconds to impress a potential employer, starting with "I went to Harvard" will usually always do more than "I have a correspondence degree from the Saskatoon Community College of Liberal Arts and Small Engine Repair." On the other hand, the arrogance and lack of real-world experience of an Ivy League student can be a potential turn-off.
I've been on both sides of the fence, since I did my undergrad at an Ivy and am working on a graduate degree at a big, not particularly good public university. People are a lot more likely to give you the time of day, or let you get your foot in the door, when you can name-drop Harvard, Yale or Princeton. That alone is worth a few thousand dollars of the tuition price.
Engineers in the Ivies have it tough. But if you major in the humanities, I'd agree 100% with the "If you go to some of your classes, do some of your homework, and don't spend all of your time stoned you are pretty much guaranteed to graduate" statement. But this does cheat the students, who may find out the hard way that life isn't quite so forgiving once you're on the outside, where things can be pretty Darwinian.
I'd agree with that. The idea of a "best" university is stupid. It all depends on what you want. Princeton, for instance, frequently makes the #1 spot. And if you want to hang out with spoiled preppies and later make obscene amounts of money on Wall Street, by all means, go to Princeton. If that's not your idea of the "best" university in the country, maybe look somewhere else. In the defense of a place like Princeton, you can get small classes (like 15 people) with big name writers and scientists, which at least some days makes the preppies tolerable.
The internet bubble came about because a lot of people got greedy and saw dollar signs and did everything but throw money by the shovel-ful at companies which had no product, no market, no business plan, no earnings and no chance in hell of succeeding. You could have the most brilliant CEO in the world running those companies and they still would have failed. The investors bear the brunt of the blame for the bubble. I mean, what the fuck were you expecting? None of these companies actually made any money, which is the primary reason a stock has value.
Netscape for instance had a product, but I don't think it ever turned a profit. They never even had a plan for how to successfully compete against Microsoft. But instead of being prudent and waiting until they had a string of strong earnings, they took the thing public because the CEO wanted enough dough to buy a huge sailboat. That pretty much set the pattern.
As for destroying the economy, economies go through ups and downs, that is just what happens. In reality, I think the bubble may have done a lot of good. Yes, a lot of absolutely idiotic ideas got funded. However, some brilliant ideas also flourished which might have done poorly in a more conservative economic climate, things like eBay and Amazon.
How in the hell did this thick skulled troglodyte get modded "insightful"? The whole point of _Origin of Species_ is that it isn't all just chance, dumbass. Some genes are better suited to the environment so they are more likely to be passed on to the next generation. The entire point is that survival and reproduction are nonrandom.
Who comes up with these revisions, however? Not the creationists. The scientists. Scientists are constantly looking to poke holes in theories, since proving old ideas wrong or proving a new idea is a good way to get a job, fame, funding, and so on. Scientists can be prejudiced to be sure, but ultimately they test their ideas and sooner or later discard them if they're wrong. The old stanley/miller experiments may be wrong so they're looking in a new direction. In contrast, the creationists are stubbornly holding onto a viewpoint that was obsolete 2000 years ago.
And anyone who doubts we're descended from apes, take a look at the current occupant of the Oval Office.
Well... um... because that wouldn't be as cool.
Seriously, I'm a paleontologist and that's the best answer I've got. I can't think of any good way you could rule out the idea that it just picked up some already dead dinosaur, but the scientists probably chose to downplay that possibility since it wouldn't generate as much media attention. However it's more than likely that the biggest mammals attacked and killed the smallest dinosaurs. The biggest mammal in the Late Cretaceous was the carnivorous marsupial _Didelphodon_ (about the size of a modern opossum, maybe cat-sized) which was probably large enough to tackle the tiny chicken-sized velociraptors of the time. The jaws on it are pretty darn large and massive, so it might even have been able to kill a hatchling T. rex if it got a good bite or two in. It's all fairly speculative, although once in a while you get lucky.
There's a specimen of _Velociraptor mongoliensis_ locked in combat with a _Protoceratops_- apparently they were working each other over when they were buried alive by a sand dune or a sandstorm or something.
Hey, anyone want to go see a pirate movie?
Microsoft? I mean, I never liked Word all that much, but everybody uses it. It's sort of like English- it might not be as pretty as some other ways of communicating, but almost wherever you go you can get your message across. If Apple comes out with an Office-like suite, Microsoft could stop developing Office for them. This might not kill Apple the way it would have five or six years ago, but people probably would still like to know that they can e-mail someone a document and have them open it up and edit it, whether they are on Mac or PC. As for the old Apple software, I liked it a lot, but I find that most of their new software sacrifices user interface in favor of eye candy a little too often. I don't want fucking blue gumdrops all over the screen when I'm typing a text document, its distracting.