Yeah, when Canada and the other colonies surrender their sovereignity fully to the British crown and parliament, and they ascend back to worldwide military supremacy, including a navy which massively outnumbers and outguns the meager U.S. offering, I guess we'd better really start worrying.
Man, that's a big Navy... better get started soon, eh.
He's easy to make fun of because that's how he purposefully presents himself, which really isn't that bad a tactic when you think about it. He's a smart enough guy, but unfortunately he's the manager type instead of the leader type: not that good on figuring out who is competent enough to trust with descisions he's not qualified to make himself. Other than that, I'm actually rather fond of his general personality type-- he tends to do what he thinks is right because he thinks it's right, and doesn't even generally bother throwing the bone to public opinion like most of our politicians do. The fact that I can respect him for this despite disagreeing with him on what is actually right probably indicates why he was re-elected despite coming off as slightly less than competent in his first four years.
Ok, I've righted the balance of the visible part of this thread: stands at one blind, unsupported insult of a man you don't know and one unsupported compliment of a man I don't know. Cheers.
"This kid is not a "hacker" or "cracker" anymore than I'm a professional wrestler."
That's open to debate. Just because he didn't build this one from the ground up doesn't mean he couldn't, or hasn't on other projects. Coders are lazy: why would he write new code if he already had working code he understood close on-hand?
Not that I support electronic trespassing, but....
People that code malicious programs are called "hackers" (at least according to the movies) People that use other people's tweaked malicious code are called "script-kiddies" People that do the former when they could easily achieve the latter are called "stupid".
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
(Yeah, I know there are legitimate reasons to code your own stuff, but they generally involve interoperability and self-education, neither of which is really at issue in this application)
The reason it's "funny" isn't that it's actually funny, it's that it's presented in a somewhat witty fashion (indirectly rather than flat-out saying "these guys should be jailed or otherwise punished") and it has visceral appeal (vengance is a very gratifying human impulse, it's one of the things that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom-- take that as good or bad as you wish). Of the five or six available tags, "funny" is the closest to this, and so "funny" it's marked. (Note: now that I've had to explain it to you, it's even less funny.)
Secondly, your cynicism on current conditions, while laudible in general, has reached the point where you're no longer actually being cynical about reality, but about things that exist only in your imagination: (1) "threat of homosexual rape", jokes aside, isn't the primary deterrent of prison (that honor belongs to the "being separated from society and deprived of freedom of motion" bit), nor is it really all that common, due to rape still being a crime (penalized by more jail time) if you do it as a prisoner. (2) "Joked about cutting off the feet of slaves and torturing Jews". Probably so. But this really doesn't make them any worse than anyone else. Jokes are generally made about unpleasant situations, because that's what they're designed to help us deal with. (3) The term "barbaric" stems from an old greek word meaning "people that don't speak my language". You might want to find a new bit of rhetoric to use, as that one too quickly exposes your lack of ability to cope with anything outside of your own narrow worldview. (4) And, in conclusion,:-P
"The skeletons of early hominids show evidence of the support of unproductive individuals within communities. Skeletons with broken but healed limbs, crippling arthritis, debilitating head wounds..."
Nice theory and all, but this actually supports human evolution being driven by intelligence, rather than contradicting it: individuals that would be relatively useless in a system driven by strong backs and thick skulls are kept because their experience/knowledge/intelligence provides a benefit to the tribe which outweighs the bother of their physical problems. In this way it is the advantage provided by intelligence, i.e. the ability to acquire knowledge over time and apply it, that drives what you call 'compassion', rather than the other way about.
Cooperation is a bit different, since situations where pooled resources are advantageous are not limited to applications of intelligence. However, the converse is true, that most endeavours requiring intelligence benefit from a pooling of intelligence, so the motivation for cooperation does stem in part from our heavy focus on intelligence-based activities.
What the rest of your post seems to be grasping at is the diversification cycle, a fairly commonly espoused bit of evolutionary lore: in times of abundance, species breed in as much variety of possible, building a buffer of diversity and population so that when hard times hit again, _something_ is bound to survive. In the case of your meteor example, I'd actually venture that the population segments well-versed in the academic pursuits of astronomy and engineering would see the event coming and be able to place themselves to survive it, while the quick breeders with good parenting skills would be busy dying horribly in suffocating smoke and flame. Of course, there's always the luck factor to consider too: maybe there was a james-dean festival in the one city that survived the blast, so the future of your gene lines is dependent on how much you like denim and wether you'd willingly drive a car over a cliff into the ocean.
As to the nonsense in the last bit of your paragraph, I'll just note that 'geek' isn't actually a reference to intelligence, it's a category indicating lack of intelligence, specifically lack of intelligence regarding social interactions. Geeks aren't any smarter, on average, than the rest of the population. Or, if you're twisting the definition of 'geek' to actually mean high intelligence, then you're just flat-out wrong about their reproductive habits, as a staggeringly large proportion of NASA engineers are married and parents. So are a large quantity of college professors. Hell, even the grad students in my department are mostly supporting offspring, and they don't even have real jobs!
If you've ever known someone with an outstanding debt they _really_ don't want to pay, you'll know that this behavior is by no means unusual, from private citizens on up. I've heard the legal juggle involved is even easier in Europe, but I have no way to verify this.
Yeah, circumventing your own laws to go out of your way to harm a company whose business supports a large number of citizens in a country with more clout than you... yeah! Then you can weaken your own legal system, suffer internal liberal backlash, and send a message to one of your biggest allies that you make a habit of dealing in bad faith! Brilliant!
They'll deal with the complaint the way they're supposed to deal with a compliant, investigating it and making a descision based on the law.
I think the objection here is more that the relationships between the consulted companies and the commission were cloak-and-daggered instead of being open to public(including Microsoft)'s scrutiny. Just because their motivation is to protect their company's interests doesn't mean that they don't have a valid point.
A Chemical Engineer, a physicist and a mathematician sleep in separate rooms of the same hotel. During the night, a fire breaks out.
The physicist runs outside, finds a water hose, calculates the appropriate trajectory, and sprays the fire through the window, saving most of his belongings.
The Chem E, immediately relating the problem to an oxygen consumption rate, grabs a fire extinguisher and puts out the flame, saving all of his belongings.
The mathematician rises from his bed and looks at the fire, then looks out the window and sees the hose, then looks by the minibar and sees the extinguisher. He ponders for a moment, then proudly declares "a solution exists!" and goes back to bed.
Firstly, evolution is not entirely encompassed by natural selection. The mechanisms outside of natural selection do not require that things die. Take, for instance, any form of acquired behavior.
Secondly, even in the case of natural selection, death is by no means required. The reproductive rate of the advantaged group just has to be (at least) marginally higher than that of the disadvantaged species.
Thirdly, organisms can't be driven to evolve. Populations, however, can, which is, you know, what people are talking about when they say "humans" in this context. The only reason you have a problem the statement is because you're purposefully misinterpreting the statement (for the express purpose of having something to be pissed about, I might add).
Normally I don't feed the trolls, but I was bored today.
No, it isn't. Conflict being the only driving force of change, and change being the only source of improvement, I'd say that your statements actually qualify as the best news I've heard all day.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one that reacted this way to the article. Remember, though, that it's posted on the internet so that a bunch of people can go "oh, yeah, knowing how cracks propagate really _would_ be handy, i never would have thought of that" and to assure them that smart peoples be working on the problem. So to the intended audience, it probably _is_ new.
Re:My inner Materials scientist just got shot.
on
Tracking the Cracks
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This is only true if your engineers are completely incompetent and mix the concrete incorrectly in places. Otherwise, concrete is much more regular at microscopic level than glass or plastic, which are both amorphous solids. And if your engineers are that incompetent, a good model for cracking is not going to save you. As to larger-scale irregularities, they're generally irrelevant if you know the structures of the component grains or regions.
We already know the strengths of the materials we use to build things, because we test them beforehand. The reason new models are important is that they give us a better understanding of _why_ the strengths turn out the way they do.
P.S. A +5 insightful attached to an assertion that a mostly crystalline solid is less ordered than an amorphous solid makes me cry inside. Everyone makes mistakes, but moderators aren't supposed to encourage it:-P
Oh, great, you've cleared up the meaning of that one objectively defined term by defining it with two subjective ones (sentient, intelligent). Thanks, that helps a lot.
No, we took a long time to abolish slavery. The slave trade was banned within two decades of the founding of the country (1807, according to Wikipedia: after that, all slavery transactions were purely domestic). As a country, we tolerated the whole 'import people from other countries to do our work for free' thing for a remarkably short period of time. It just took a bit longer to decide to strike down the whole 'get people to do your work for free in general' thing, for the natural reason that domestic slavery was dying anyhow until the cotton gin made it profitable again (so it wasn't worth bothering about).
My impression was that the african slaves were generally war prisoners as well. The local tribes just realized that it was more profitable to sell the women, children, and battle survivors of the inter-african conflicts to the Portugese and Dutch than to either slaughter them all or keep them themselves and worry about rebellion. It's not like Europeans went out to hunt slaves themselves in the midst of a foreign land, that would be rather cost-innefective. Much better to simply feed off local conflict. (Aside, this is probably most of why slavers are so universally disliked, not because there's a universal hatred of the institution itself, but because they make their living leeching off of the death and sickness of large societies. Of course, that's just conjecture on my part, thus the ellipses.)
There were instances of adoption of african-descended slaves into american (white or otherwise) families as well, at least according to my grade-school american history instructor. What I guess I'm saying here is just a counterpoint to your "don't make the mistake of thinking all forms of an institution are the same". Don't just assume that because things aren't the same, that they're necessarily all that different. Cheers.
The problem with this argument is that it relies on the neighboring town having strong restrictions on firearms. If every place is equally dangerous, you've got an even chance of being robbed again. The criminals aren't going to stop burglary altogether, they'll just be more careful that you're out of the house first if they think you're armed (given the preceding assumption that a less well-guarded target does not exist).
I'd say a better argument for light gun regulation is that people are better at defending themselves, properly equipped, than any police force we could reasonably afford.
It's not a complete transformation, though. The vestiges of historical perspective is there, some rejected explicitly, some modified, some kept. Ignoring the history of the party is to ignore the party identity. I know a lot of Democrat supporters don't like to acknowledge this because of being on the wrong side of the slavery thing a while back, but that doesn't make it any less true. (Aside-- I'm not usre why they're still sensitive about this. The correct response to 'oh, yeah, well you guys supported slavery two centuries ago' is not 'well, we've completely changed since then' but 'that issue is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. Where'd you learn logic, Kansas?')
The republican party actually hasn't changed all that much, or at least it hasn't dropped a lot of significant issues from its platform, just added new ones as the old ones became nonissues.
One final note, the progressives had nothing to do with the Repubs, ever. They were their own party (based around protestant evangelism, amusingly) and then got absorbed into the Democrats. Nor were the Repubs ever particularly humanitarian, at least in the current sense of the word. They've almost always framed their arguments in terms of moral duty and Justice (i was going to say 'social justice', but then i realized that was redundant) rather than helping the poor, suffering baby kittens or whatever. You'll note that once the slaves were freed, the Republican party was greatly concerned about their ability to vote and function as citizens, but really didn't give a rat's ass wether they were starving or not.
So yeah, you're both right and not right, all at the same time. Blows my mind.
Your statement regarding "studies have shown that where politics involve more than 2 sides" is complete bullshit/pulled out of your ass/etc, as demonstrated by the fact that you're ashamed enough of the unreliability of your source not to post it. Also, stating that 'there's no politics in the US' tells us you either failed your community college polysci class miserably or just haven't bothered to learn english well enough to know what the word 'politics' means.
Regarding your comments about the US, at least it's still harder to rig an election here than in Europe. Elect the party, indeed. Pft. I've had worse ideas, but I was drunk and in grade school at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, when Canada and the other colonies surrender their sovereignity fully to the British crown and parliament, and they ascend back to worldwide military supremacy, including a navy which massively outnumbers and outguns the meager U.S. offering, I guess we'd better really start worrying.
Man, that's a big Navy... better get started soon, eh.
I dunno, I still think that it's comforting that at our worst our freedoms regarding political speech become equivalent to those in modern europe.
/me pulls out the marshmallows, prepared to make Karma s'mores.
1. That's because he's actually a Republican
That's the most succinct and coherent summary of the entire democratic party that I've ever read.
He's easy to make fun of because that's how he purposefully presents himself, which really isn't that bad a tactic when you think about it. He's a smart enough guy, but unfortunately he's the manager type instead of the leader type: not that good on figuring out who is competent enough to trust with descisions he's not qualified to make himself. Other than that, I'm actually rather fond of his general personality type-- he tends to do what he thinks is right because he thinks it's right, and doesn't even generally bother throwing the bone to public opinion like most of our politicians do. The fact that I can respect him for this despite disagreeing with him on what is actually right probably indicates why he was re-elected despite coming off as slightly less than competent in his first four years.
Ok, I've righted the balance of the visible part of this thread: stands at one blind, unsupported insult of a man you don't know and one unsupported compliment of a man I don't know. Cheers.
"This kid is not a "hacker" or "cracker" anymore than I'm a professional wrestler."
That's open to debate. Just because he didn't build this one from the ground up doesn't mean he couldn't, or hasn't on other projects. Coders are lazy: why would he write new code if he already had working code he understood close on-hand?
Not that I support electronic trespassing, but....
People that code malicious programs are called "hackers" (at least according to the movies)
People that use other people's tweaked malicious code are called "script-kiddies"
People that do the former when they could easily achieve the latter are called "stupid".
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
(Yeah, I know there are legitimate reasons to code your own stuff, but they generally involve interoperability and self-education, neither of which is really at issue in this application)
The reason it's "funny" isn't that it's actually funny, it's that it's presented in a somewhat witty fashion (indirectly rather than flat-out saying "these guys should be jailed or otherwise punished") and it has visceral appeal (vengance is a very gratifying human impulse, it's one of the things that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom-- take that as good or bad as you wish). Of the five or six available tags, "funny" is the closest to this, and so "funny" it's marked. (Note: now that I've had to explain it to you, it's even less funny.)
:-P
Secondly, your cynicism on current conditions, while laudible in general, has reached the point where you're no longer actually being cynical about reality, but about things that exist only in your imagination:
(1) "threat of homosexual rape", jokes aside, isn't the primary deterrent of prison (that honor belongs to the "being separated from society and deprived of freedom of motion" bit), nor is it really all that common, due to rape still being a crime (penalized by more jail time) if you do it as a prisoner.
(2) "Joked about cutting off the feet of slaves and torturing Jews". Probably so. But this really doesn't make them any worse than anyone else. Jokes are generally made about unpleasant situations, because that's what they're designed to help us deal with.
(3) The term "barbaric" stems from an old greek word meaning "people that don't speak my language". You might want to find a new bit of rhetoric to use, as that one too quickly exposes your lack of ability to cope with anything outside of your own narrow worldview.
(4) And, in conclusion,
"The skeletons of early hominids show evidence of the support of unproductive individuals within communities. Skeletons with broken but healed limbs, crippling arthritis, debilitating head wounds..."
Nice theory and all, but this actually supports human evolution being driven by intelligence, rather than contradicting it: individuals that would be relatively useless in a system driven by strong backs and thick skulls are kept because their experience/knowledge/intelligence provides a benefit to the tribe which outweighs the bother of their physical problems. In this way it is the advantage provided by intelligence, i.e. the ability to acquire knowledge over time and apply it, that drives what you call 'compassion', rather than the other way about.
Cooperation is a bit different, since situations where pooled resources are advantageous are not limited to applications of intelligence. However, the converse is true, that most endeavours requiring intelligence benefit from a pooling of intelligence, so the motivation for cooperation does stem in part from our heavy focus on intelligence-based activities.
What the rest of your post seems to be grasping at is the diversification cycle, a fairly commonly espoused bit of evolutionary lore: in times of abundance, species breed in as much variety of possible, building a buffer of diversity and population so that when hard times hit again, _something_ is bound to survive. In the case of your meteor example, I'd actually venture that the population segments well-versed in the academic pursuits of astronomy and engineering would see the event coming and be able to place themselves to survive it, while the quick breeders with good parenting skills would be busy dying horribly in suffocating smoke and flame. Of course, there's always the luck factor to consider too: maybe there was a james-dean festival in the one city that survived the blast, so the future of your gene lines is dependent on how much you like denim and wether you'd willingly drive a car over a cliff into the ocean.
As to the nonsense in the last bit of your paragraph, I'll just note that 'geek' isn't actually a reference to intelligence, it's a category indicating lack of intelligence, specifically lack of intelligence regarding social interactions. Geeks aren't any smarter, on average, than the rest of the population. Or, if you're twisting the definition of 'geek' to actually mean high intelligence, then you're just flat-out wrong about their reproductive habits, as a staggeringly large proportion of NASA engineers are married and parents. So are a large quantity of college professors. Hell, even the grad students in my department are mostly supporting offspring, and they don't even have real jobs!
Wow, were you going for the record on blind assertion/logical fallacy per sentence? I'm seeing almost 5:1 there.
I nominate parent for most useless post of 2006.
Yeah, "deter" is a better word than "prevent" in this case.
If you've ever known someone with an outstanding debt they _really_ don't want to pay, you'll know that this behavior is by no means unusual, from private citizens on up. I've heard the legal juggle involved is even easier in Europe, but I have no way to verify this.
Yeah, circumventing your own laws to go out of your way to harm a company whose business supports a large number of citizens in a country with more clout than you... yeah! Then you can weaken your own legal system, suffer internal liberal backlash, and send a message to one of your biggest allies that you make a habit of dealing in bad faith! Brilliant!
They'll deal with the complaint the way they're supposed to deal with a compliant, investigating it and making a descision based on the law.
Haha, you got a +5 informaitve. Apparrently the mods broke their joke-o-meter today.
I think the objection here is more that the relationships between the consulted companies and the commission were cloak-and-daggered instead of being open to public(including Microsoft)'s scrutiny. Just because their motivation is to protect their company's interests doesn't mean that they don't have a valid point.
A Chemical Engineer, a physicist and a mathematician sleep in separate rooms of the same hotel. During the night, a fire breaks out.
:-P
The physicist runs outside, finds a water hose, calculates the appropriate trajectory, and sprays the fire through the window, saving most of his belongings.
The Chem E, immediately relating the problem to an oxygen consumption rate, grabs a fire extinguisher and puts out the flame, saving all of his belongings.
The mathematician rises from his bed and looks at the fire, then looks out the window and sees the hose, then looks by the minibar and sees the extinguisher. He ponders for a moment, then proudly declares "a solution exists!" and goes back to bed.
... neener neener.
Firstly, evolution is not entirely encompassed by natural selection. The mechanisms outside of natural selection do not require that things die. Take, for instance, any form of acquired behavior.
Secondly, even in the case of natural selection, death is by no means required. The reproductive rate of the advantaged group just has to be (at least) marginally higher than that of the disadvantaged species.
Thirdly, organisms can't be driven to evolve. Populations, however, can, which is, you know, what people are talking about when they say "humans" in this context. The only reason you have a problem the statement is because you're purposefully misinterpreting the statement (for the express purpose of having something to be pissed about, I might add).
Normally I don't feed the trolls, but I was bored today.
No, it isn't. Conflict being the only driving force of change, and change being the only source of improvement, I'd say that your statements actually qualify as the best news I've heard all day.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one that reacted this way to the article. Remember, though, that it's posted on the internet so that a bunch of people can go "oh, yeah, knowing how cracks propagate really _would_ be handy, i never would have thought of that" and to assure them that smart peoples be working on the problem. So to the intended audience, it probably _is_ new.
This is only true if your engineers are completely incompetent and mix the concrete incorrectly in places. Otherwise, concrete is much more regular at microscopic level than glass or plastic, which are both amorphous solids. And if your engineers are that incompetent, a good model for cracking is not going to save you. As to larger-scale irregularities, they're generally irrelevant if you know the structures of the component grains or regions.
:-P
We already know the strengths of the materials we use to build things, because we test them beforehand. The reason new models are important is that they give us a better understanding of _why_ the strengths turn out the way they do.
P.S. A +5 insightful attached to an assertion that a mostly crystalline solid is less ordered than an amorphous solid makes me cry inside. Everyone makes mistakes, but moderators aren't supposed to encourage it
"We should error(sic) on the side of protecting life."
Not to rain on your parade or anything, but we've got more than enough life already.
Oh, great, you've cleared up the meaning of that one objectively defined term by defining it with two subjective ones (sentient, intelligent). Thanks, that helps a lot.
No, we took a long time to abolish slavery. The slave trade was banned within two decades of the founding of the country (1807, according to Wikipedia: after that, all slavery transactions were purely domestic). As a country, we tolerated the whole 'import people from other countries to do our work for free' thing for a remarkably short period of time. It just took a bit longer to decide to strike down the whole 'get people to do your work for free in general' thing, for the natural reason that domestic slavery was dying anyhow until the cotton gin made it profitable again (so it wasn't worth bothering about).
My impression was that the african slaves were generally war prisoners as well. The local tribes just realized that it was more profitable to sell the women, children, and battle survivors of the inter-african conflicts to the Portugese and Dutch than to either slaughter them all or keep them themselves and worry about rebellion. It's not like Europeans went out to hunt slaves themselves in the midst of a foreign land, that would be rather cost-innefective. Much better to simply feed off local conflict. (Aside, this is probably most of why slavers are so universally disliked, not because there's a universal hatred of the institution itself, but because they make their living leeching off of the death and sickness of large societies. Of course, that's just conjecture on my part, thus the ellipses.)
There were instances of adoption of african-descended slaves into american (white or otherwise) families as well, at least according to my grade-school american history instructor. What I guess I'm saying here is just a counterpoint to your "don't make the mistake of thinking all forms of an institution are the same". Don't just assume that because things aren't the same, that they're necessarily all that different. Cheers.
The problem with this argument is that it relies on the neighboring town having strong restrictions on firearms. If every place is equally dangerous, you've got an even chance of being robbed again. The criminals aren't going to stop burglary altogether, they'll just be more careful that you're out of the house first if they think you're armed (given the preceding assumption that a less well-guarded target does not exist).
I'd say a better argument for light gun regulation is that people are better at defending themselves, properly equipped, than any police force we could reasonably afford.
It's not a complete transformation, though. The vestiges of historical perspective is there, some rejected explicitly, some modified, some kept. Ignoring the history of the party is to ignore the party identity. I know a lot of Democrat supporters don't like to acknowledge this because of being on the wrong side of the slavery thing a while back, but that doesn't make it any less true. (Aside-- I'm not usre why they're still sensitive about this. The correct response to 'oh, yeah, well you guys supported slavery two centuries ago' is not 'well, we've completely changed since then' but 'that issue is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. Where'd you learn logic, Kansas?')
The republican party actually hasn't changed all that much, or at least it hasn't dropped a lot of significant issues from its platform, just added new ones as the old ones became nonissues.
One final note, the progressives had nothing to do with the Repubs, ever. They were their own party (based around protestant evangelism, amusingly) and then got absorbed into the Democrats. Nor were the Repubs ever particularly humanitarian, at least in the current sense of the word. They've almost always framed their arguments in terms of moral duty and Justice (i was going to say 'social justice', but then i realized that was redundant) rather than helping the poor, suffering baby kittens or whatever. You'll note that once the slaves were freed, the Republican party was greatly concerned about their ability to vote and function as citizens, but really didn't give a rat's ass wether they were starving or not.
So yeah, you're both right and not right, all at the same time. Blows my mind.
Your statement regarding "studies have shown that where politics involve more than 2 sides" is complete bullshit/pulled out of your ass/etc, as demonstrated by the fact that you're ashamed enough of the unreliability of your source not to post it. Also, stating that 'there's no politics in the US' tells us you either failed your community college polysci class miserably or just haven't bothered to learn english well enough to know what the word 'politics' means.
Regarding your comments about the US, at least it's still harder to rig an election here than in Europe. Elect the party, indeed. Pft. I've had worse ideas, but I was drunk and in grade school at the time.