Early in the book, it says very specifically that people shouldn't do human sacrifice any more. Then, in the "sequel" portion, a particular human was created specifically to be sacrificed
You wouldn't accept that degree of illogic from a TV or movie writer; why should you accept it from something that's supposed to be important?
... switch from many gods to just one (who may not have started out as being almighty)
Note that early in the book it says "you shall have no other gods *before* me", and only later on does it emphasize the idea of a single god. And Jews know that nothing in the book is to be taken literally at this point; it's a human transcription of human memory of oral history, and bound to be full of errors and myth and embellishment.
Internet zealots! Everyone must have broadband directly wired to their nervous system! . . . . oh, wait, Samuel R. Delaney did that in 1968, "Nova". Never mind.
No. I work for a division of a Fortune 500, and our division has never upgraded people from Office 2003 because of the "confusion and expenditure for little benefit". And for the most part, they're right. I have Office 2010 at home, and most of the difference I see is that it rearranges things on the menus enough to be confusing. Otherwise I use Thunderbird for email.
Making do with a consistent system that does the job is *exactly* what all of the anti-government-waste people would insist on. Why keep enriching Microsoft for "updates" that are mostly cosmetic and confusing? If they were going to move *forward* to anything *new*, it would be new standards anyway, and the conversion would be decried as an even bigger waste of money.
You cut off the leading part of my sentence: " Humans demonstrate amazing dedication, endurance, and sacrifice to do totally impractical things *purely* to strive for a first-performance, or a record,..." I stand by that.
Ummmm . . . . I think we're in violent agreement here. All I know is, if I were working on a space mission, I would want to be absolutely sure that I had done my absolute best; otherwise I would have trouble living with myself if anything went wrong. But I'm not going.:-)
There is still a risk management decision to make. "People won't come back" is not the same as "People died because of equipment problems". I'm betting most of the Pacific Island settlers didn't go back, either.
At some point, somebody needs to draw a line and say, over there is too much risk to be acceptable,
That task belongs to the persons taking the risks, not you.
If we don't have boundaries and stick by them, things like Challenger or Apollo 1 will happen and we will have needless loss of life because we didn't asses risks properly or take them seriously enough.
There's a big difference between "taking a calculated risk", or even "choosing to commit to a one-way trip", and "not taking the risk seriously". Challenger was a horror not just because people died, but because it was ALREADY KNOWN that the O-rings and joints were a weak spot in the design and were particularly affected by the cold conditions. The astronauts CHOSE to sign on with the implicit understanding that everyone behind them was doing their absolute best, and in this case institutional inertia held back the efforts of people who were already investigating damage at the joints. Of course it didn't help that all of the shuttle parts had to be made the right size, and assemble-able, to fit through railroad tunnels and other barriers from factory to launch pad, rather than one state getting all of the benefit from the space program by building everything in one neighborhood.
The boundary NASA failed to stick to was "We built the best possible rocket that humans can make". It could have been improved, and some of the engineers already knew it. The boundary was not "Astronauts sitting on a big pile of explosive is too dangerous", because it had always been dangerous, has remained so since, and always will be.
Magellan didn't survive Magellan's expedition. Scott died trying to get to the South Pole.
No, Scott died trying to get *back*. On the other hand, the ancestors of the various Pacific Island peoples managed to find their ways to little dots of rock in the middle of a really big ocean, and managed to survive and succeed and have descendents to be ancestors of. There must be a few remnants of that DNA left in some humans, somewhere.
Reporter: I have to ask you the same question people back home are asking about space these days. Is it worth it? Should we just pull back? Forget the whole thing as a bad idea, and take care of our own problems, at home.
Cmdr. Jeffrey Sinclair: No. We have to stay here. And there's a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars.
You clearly have no idea why people strive...to do things that others cannot.
Sorry, I think you're misreading here, and I think we all agree. Humans demonstrate amazing dedication, endurance, and sacrifice to do totally impractical things *purely* to strive for a first-performance, or a record, even if only a handful of other humans really care once the cameras turn off. In the past, humans have gone exploring this planet, even if it meant never coming back to their starting point. Who knows how many died failing to find one of the Pacific islands, or finding one that had insufficient resources?
There are certainly some who will take the adventure. There are certainly others who would go for, say, double an astronaut's salary paid to their families for as long as they are still in contact (with benefits, and a minimum annuity period) (which would be a rounding error in the national budget for a team of 8 or 10). Personally I don't think we have the tech to make it work yet, so I wouldn't be one of them, but I wouldn't stop them any more than I'd try to stop the snowboarders risking their lives to do bigger tricks.
Leviticus 20:13 And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. If, that is, anyone actually believes that particular book enough to kill people because someone said so thousands of years ago.
On the other hand . . . "There were one thousand, two hundred and eighty-three religious books in there now, each one—according to itself—the only book any man need ever read. It was sort of nice to see them all together. " - Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"
Somehow I don't think you read the same posting I read. The only "cultural" thing about it was the reaction as if it were willful misbehavior rather than a mental problem. As it happens, I have a colleague with a similar (though not as bad) story. If I remember it right, an elder relative was well known to be isolationist, unable to deal with others or the outside world, and - because institutions existed and because the family could afford a nice one - spent his life as solitary as possible; one of her parents was never able to travel or do certain other activities, and - thanks to mail and phone - was able to finish a career as a solitary knowledge worker with limited contact to the outside world beyond typewritten pages. She herself has the positive attributes of being detail-oriented and thorough, because early therapy helped her be high-functional rather than over the edge into negative attributes of OCD.
Personally I think we've been poisoning ourselves as a society. Humans are developed, like other animals on the planet, to live through the feast and famine of normal years rather than eating sugar all year long, and to be physically active rather than work at fixed positions all year long; we are not developed to have random New! Improved! chemicals (like preservatives) added to our food all the time, nor to breathe air full of particulates and combustion by-products.
I was all ready to say, "What a great idea!", until I re-read the words "boil it up". That means doing something active, which has a cost (aside from the work of getting the stuff out of the jars it's already in). Once again, we come to cold hard cash vs. risk.
... then the news and legal worlds would turn on Costco like a pack of rabid dogs. Yes, this destruction of nutritious food seems like a terrible, horrible waste; but if there's even a chance that one single jar is tainted with salmonella, and someone gets sick, then the tone would change in a heartbeat to "heartless corporation knowingly rids itself of poisoned food". I can't blame them for playing it safe.
Think of cities that have grown (London?) rather than be designed according to some grand master plan (New York?)
(NYC is) almost the exact opposite of what you're saying... Someone designed it to a master plan.... a long time ago. And then it grew
Almost all of Manhattan Island (which is only part of New York City) above 42nd street was planned out as one grid. The Upper West Side (along Central Park from 59th street northward, about 7 miles) has two subway train lines that were largely done by cut-and-cover before the buildings were built; some 10 or 12 miles of Broadway is really a causeway over the #1/2/3 train lines. The East Side, on the other hand, did not get as much service; the work to put it in now, tunneling below, has been disruptive for years!
The BAL Macro language could do things that C++ template functions can't. You could test *all* of the attributes of a parameter, from datatype through number of characters in the name, and vary the generated code accordingly - amazingly powerful levels of abstraction when used properly.
Spending their many hours locked in a cell reading, rather than just staring at the walls, does not sound like a leisure activity; it sounds like "Learn to read better so you can have something to do instead of nothing to do". By all means restrict format - solid hardcovers could be used to hit someone, paperbacks are probably OK. Encouraging reading might raise prisoners' ability to pursue education.
I give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you miss the point in being distracted by the detail. When someone is using Google Glass, another person cannot tell whether video is on or not, or whether some kind of plate recognition is on or not (it's a computer, it could do what the police plate scanners do, right?), so it ALWAYS looks like you could be doing that same kind of suspicious activity. One feature of Glass is to have the computer capabilities available to the user at all times; that feature, and the difficulty of an onlooker to know for sure what is or isn't in use, is *precisely* what makes it look suspicious.
No explicit reason; just the sense that a camera was always on. That's the point - it looks like it's on whether it is or not. If someone had been standing there with a camera to his eye, I would have felt the same - that is, outside of a few touristy spots (I live in NYC so there are lots of places where you have to assume you're going to accidentally be in a photograph) (totally aside from security cameras) (don't ever pick your nose in Times Square). And as I said, if I I'm biking and I see someone else with a camera on his bars or helmet, it does *not* give me a feeling of being watched, probably because I assume that the focus of any later watching will be the scenery and trail rather than the other people who happen to get in the picture.
When I see someone wearing a camera for total recording on a ski slope, or on a bicycle trail, I don't feel bothered. Fat and unphotogenic, perhaps, but not bothered. OTOH the one time I saw someone walking around with a Google Glass on a normal day on a normal street, no special activities, no special event, nothing active to be watching, I felt: Why is this guy watching me?
It's like noticing another person in a crowd looking at you vs. noticing a policeman looking at you.
So what you're saying is that the people running these big banks that are fucking people over and kicking them out of their homes should be drawn, quartered, burned, and then taken outside and really hurt, right? Because those people are doing more harm than virtually anyone actually in prison.
Yes. I agree. The people who instructed their staffs to con people into taking out loans that they couldn't possibly pay back have damaged trust, not just in the financial system, but in society itself. They have hurt thousands. Add up the damage, and punish accordingly.
Slashdot Mirror
Early in the book, it says very specifically that people shouldn't do human sacrifice any more. Then, in the "sequel" portion, a particular human was created specifically to be sacrificed
You wouldn't accept that degree of illogic from a TV or movie writer; why should you accept it from something that's supposed to be important?
... switch from many gods to just one (who may not have started out as being almighty)
Note that early in the book it says "you shall have no other gods *before* me", and only later on does it emphasize the idea of a single god. And Jews know that nothing in the book is to be taken literally at this point; it's a human transcription of human memory of oral history, and bound to be full of errors and myth and embellishment.
Internet zealots! Everyone must have broadband directly wired to their nervous system! . . . . oh, wait, Samuel R. Delaney did that in 1968, "Nova". Never mind.
I was going to title the same argument, "We aren't".
You mean, return from individual computers to dumb terminals with remote mainframes? Like in the 1960s?
No. I work for a division of a Fortune 500, and our division has never upgraded people from Office 2003 because of the "confusion and expenditure for little benefit". And for the most part, they're right. I have Office 2010 at home, and most of the difference I see is that it rearranges things on the menus enough to be confusing. Otherwise I use Thunderbird for email.
Making do with a consistent system that does the job is *exactly* what all of the anti-government-waste people would insist on. Why keep enriching Microsoft for "updates" that are mostly cosmetic and confusing? If they were going to move *forward* to anything *new*, it would be new standards anyway, and the conversion would be decried as an even bigger waste of money.
You cut off the leading part of my sentence: " Humans demonstrate amazing dedication, endurance, and sacrifice to do totally impractical things *purely* to strive for a first-performance, or a record,..." I stand by that.
Ummmm . . . . I think we're in violent agreement here. All I know is, if I were working on a space mission, I would want to be absolutely sure that I had done my absolute best; otherwise I would have trouble living with myself if anything went wrong. But I'm not going. :-)
Bummer, dude.
There is still a risk management decision to make. "People won't come back" is not the same as "People died because of equipment problems". I'm betting most of the Pacific Island settlers didn't go back, either.
At some point, somebody needs to draw a line and say, over there is too much risk to be acceptable,
That task belongs to the persons taking the risks, not you.
If we don't have boundaries and stick by them, things like Challenger or Apollo 1 will happen and we will have needless loss of life because we didn't asses risks properly or take them seriously enough.
There's a big difference between "taking a calculated risk", or even "choosing to commit to a one-way trip", and "not taking the risk seriously". Challenger was a horror not just because people died, but because it was ALREADY KNOWN that the O-rings and joints were a weak spot in the design and were particularly affected by the cold conditions. The astronauts CHOSE to sign on with the implicit understanding that everyone behind them was doing their absolute best, and in this case institutional inertia held back the efforts of people who were already investigating damage at the joints. Of course it didn't help that all of the shuttle parts had to be made the right size, and assemble-able, to fit through railroad tunnels and other barriers from factory to launch pad, rather than one state getting all of the benefit from the space program by building everything in one neighborhood.
The boundary NASA failed to stick to was "We built the best possible rocket that humans can make". It could have been improved, and some of the engineers already knew it. The boundary was not "Astronauts sitting on a big pile of explosive is too dangerous", because it had always been dangerous, has remained so since, and always will be.
Magellan didn't survive Magellan's expedition. Scott died trying to get to the South Pole.
No, Scott died trying to get *back*. On the other hand, the ancestors of the various Pacific Island peoples managed to find their ways to little dots of rock in the middle of a really big ocean, and managed to survive and succeed and have descendents to be ancestors of. There must be a few remnants of that DNA left in some humans, somewhere.
Obligatory Babylon 5 quote:
Reporter: I have to ask you the same question people back home are asking about space these days. Is it worth it? Should we just pull back? Forget the whole thing as a bad idea, and take care of our own problems, at home.
Cmdr. Jeffrey Sinclair: No. We have to stay here. And there's a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars.
You clearly have no idea why people strive ...to do things that others cannot.
Sorry, I think you're misreading here, and I think we all agree. Humans demonstrate amazing dedication, endurance, and sacrifice to do totally impractical things *purely* to strive for a first-performance, or a record, even if only a handful of other humans really care once the cameras turn off. In the past, humans have gone exploring this planet, even if it meant never coming back to their starting point. Who knows how many died failing to find one of the Pacific islands, or finding one that had insufficient resources?
There are certainly some who will take the adventure. There are certainly others who would go for, say, double an astronaut's salary paid to their families for as long as they are still in contact (with benefits, and a minimum annuity period) (which would be a rounding error in the national budget for a team of 8 or 10). Personally I don't think we have the tech to make it work yet, so I wouldn't be one of them, but I wouldn't stop them any more than I'd try to stop the snowboarders risking their lives to do bigger tricks.
Leviticus 20:13 And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. If, that is, anyone actually believes that particular book enough to kill people because someone said so thousands of years ago.
On the other hand . . . "There were one thousand, two hundred and eighty-three religious books in there now, each one—according to itself—the only book any man need ever read. It was sort of nice to see them all together. " - Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"
Somehow I don't think you read the same posting I read. The only "cultural" thing about it was the reaction as if it were willful misbehavior rather than a mental problem. As it happens, I have a colleague with a similar (though not as bad) story. If I remember it right, an elder relative was well known to be isolationist, unable to deal with others or the outside world, and - because institutions existed and because the family could afford a nice one - spent his life as solitary as possible; one of her parents was never able to travel or do certain other activities, and - thanks to mail and phone - was able to finish a career as a solitary knowledge worker with limited contact to the outside world beyond typewritten pages. She herself has the positive attributes of being detail-oriented and thorough, because early therapy helped her be high-functional rather than over the edge into negative attributes of OCD.
Personally I think we've been poisoning ourselves as a society. Humans are developed, like other animals on the planet, to live through the feast and famine of normal years rather than eating sugar all year long, and to be physically active rather than work at fixed positions all year long; we are not developed to have random New! Improved! chemicals (like preservatives) added to our food all the time, nor to breathe air full of particulates and combustion by-products.
I was all ready to say, "What a great idea!", until I re-read the words "boil it up". That means doing something active, which has a cost (aside from the work of getting the stuff out of the jars it's already in). Once again, we come to cold hard cash vs. risk.
... then the news and legal worlds would turn on Costco like a pack of rabid dogs. Yes, this destruction of nutritious food seems like a terrible, horrible waste; but if there's even a chance that one single jar is tainted with salmonella, and someone gets sick, then the tone would change in a heartbeat to "heartless corporation knowingly rids itself of poisoned food". I can't blame them for playing it safe.
Think of cities that have grown (London?) rather than be designed according to some grand master plan (New York?)
(NYC is) almost the exact opposite of what you're saying ... Someone designed it to a master plan.... a long time ago. And then it grew
Almost all of Manhattan Island (which is only part of New York City) above 42nd street was planned out as one grid. The Upper West Side (along Central Park from 59th street northward, about 7 miles) has two subway train lines that were largely done by cut-and-cover before the buildings were built; some 10 or 12 miles of Broadway is really a causeway over the #1/2/3 train lines. The East Side, on the other hand, did not get as much service; the work to put it in now, tunneling below, has been disruptive for years!
And you didn't post IBM Assembler macro language?
The BAL Macro language could do things that C++ template functions can't. You could test *all* of the attributes of a parameter, from datatype through number of characters in the name, and vary the generated code accordingly - amazingly powerful levels of abstraction when used properly.
Spending their many hours locked in a cell reading, rather than just staring at the walls, does not sound like a leisure activity; it sounds like "Learn to read better so you can have something to do instead of nothing to do". By all means restrict format - solid hardcovers could be used to hit someone, paperbacks are probably OK. Encouraging reading might raise prisoners' ability to pursue education.
I give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you miss the point in being distracted by the detail. When someone is using Google Glass, another person cannot tell whether video is on or not, or whether some kind of plate recognition is on or not (it's a computer, it could do what the police plate scanners do, right?), so it ALWAYS looks like you could be doing that same kind of suspicious activity. One feature of Glass is to have the computer capabilities available to the user at all times; that feature, and the difficulty of an onlooker to know for sure what is or isn't in use, is *precisely* what makes it look suspicious.
No explicit reason; just the sense that a camera was always on. That's the point - it looks like it's on whether it is or not. If someone had been standing there with a camera to his eye, I would have felt the same - that is, outside of a few touristy spots (I live in NYC so there are lots of places where you have to assume you're going to accidentally be in a photograph) (totally aside from security cameras) (don't ever pick your nose in Times Square). And as I said, if I I'm biking and I see someone else with a camera on his bars or helmet, it does *not* give me a feeling of being watched, probably because I assume that the focus of any later watching will be the scenery and trail rather than the other people who happen to get in the picture.
When I see someone wearing a camera for total recording on a ski slope, or on a bicycle trail, I don't feel bothered. Fat and unphotogenic, perhaps, but not bothered. OTOH the one time I saw someone walking around with a Google Glass on a normal day on a normal street, no special activities, no special event, nothing active to be watching, I felt: Why is this guy watching me?
It's like noticing another person in a crowd looking at you vs. noticing a policeman looking at you.
So what you're saying is that the people running these big banks that are fucking people over and kicking them out of their homes should be drawn, quartered, burned, and then taken outside and really hurt, right? Because those people are doing more harm than virtually anyone actually in prison.
Yes. I agree. The people who instructed their staffs to con people into taking out loans that they couldn't possibly pay back have damaged trust, not just in the financial system, but in society itself. They have hurt thousands. Add up the damage, and punish accordingly.