Rimadyl kept our last lab mobile for eight years as her arthritis got progressively worse. We understood that it does suddenly kill some dogs so we used the lowest dose that provided relief, but the quality of life it gave her was worth the risk. She was still taking her daily walks up to the day her body gave out at 14 and we put her to sleep. Maybe the Rimadyl finally caught up to her, probably it was just old age, but either way she had a good life thanks to the drug.
Vets absolutely should warn you that it can kill your dog. I've heard it compared to Vioxx -- a miracle pill, if it didn't kill you. And if someone's dog's arthritis is minor enough to be managed on glucosamine, they should be thankful and go that route. But if your dog's in serious pain, Rimadyl works. If it shortens your dog's life, a short, pain-free, mobile life is preferable to an animal than a longer, painful, immobile one.
I find it sad that in all the hoopla over Rimadyl some people are now choosing to give their pets a longer life over a higher quality one, prioritizing their fear of losing their pet over treating their pet's pain. Losing a pet hurts, but I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I knew that I had chosen to let my dog live in unnecessary pain.
If the only reason for you to do good deeds are because of a fear of God/the devil, or a need to please God/the church. Then you are not a good person.
That's not fair. Most of them just have no self control, by whatever combination of genetics/upbringing/lack of willpower. When left alone, they go for immediate gratification and repeatedly make bad choices. When they have some arbitrary external system of control, like a fundamentalist religion, they're able to make positive choices. It allows them to be good. Call them stupid, maybe, but they're no more intrinsically good or bad than anyone else. They're just people.
Where they go wrong obviously is assuming that because liberalism doesn't work for them it can't work for anyone, and that no one can make positive choices unless they follow their religion. Trying to restrict other people's freedoms is bad. But someone recognizing that he's making a mess of his life and that forcing himself to live up to the rules of a religion would help him be a better person? I find that pretty commendable, provided he doesn't force his religious views on the rest of us.
it only applies to the narrow way in which you use the web, and does not apply to the ways in which most other people do. this isn't about monetizing your internet existence, it is about establishing social standards of online discourse. not because of orwell, fascism, overcontrolling busybodies, censorship, etc., but to maintain simple decency and respect
Well, yes. My strategy for navigating online and my opinion of anonymity is obviously tailored to how I use the internet. But given that the article was about Google's new policy and that Google is solely about monetizing everyone's internet existence, I think my type of anonymity is relevant here.
To be honest, I don't care if youtube becomes a private little garden full of real names and politeness. I won't use it, but that's no loss. I was just pointing out that tools to accommodate both anonymity and moderation of trolls already exist on youtube and work well. If your video is meaningful to a number of people, you can open comments and trust them to moderate it. If your video is some fragment dissociated from context/community, you can manually approve comments, disable them, or rework your video so it makes a more lasting connection with its viewer-moderators. No one is entitled to universally positive responses, even the non-frivolous amongst us.
For what it's worth, I'm a pretty respectful person online and off. But I feel dehumanized by advertising, I see anonymity as the only defense against it, and I'd rather half the content on the internet be anonymous flame wars (minimized by moderation tools) than be required to post under my real name.
If you create something worthwhile and provide moderation tools, the anonymous community moderates itself. Works on slashdot, already works on youtube.
When I played in Goonfleet (Something Awful's Eve Online corp), I made a ridiculous little love song of a video and put it up on youtube. The corp is known for being really vile both to our enemies and to idiot members who try too hard, but the comments on the video are almost all positive/amusing. The few trolls who do post get quickly modded down by a handful of goons who like it enough to keep rewatching it and checking in years later.
By your and Google's reasoning, between my hard to please target audience and the anonymous commenting, I should've gotten a shitstorm. The fact that I didn't suggests that anonymity isn't youtube's problem, it's (1) a lack of a communal sense of ownership of most videos, probably due to (2) most videos being quickly produced one-off laughs, not being substantive enough to tap into or contribute to a community, and honestly deserving a lot of the the crap they get. But you put a hundred hours of effort into something and all the wonderful anonymous assholes on the Internet might surprise you.
Personally I will always choose anonymity online because I am a human being, not a consumer. I don't want to be marketed to every second of every day and I certainly don't want to help advertisers market to me better.
I've also been finding Amazon increasingly frustrating. To add one more gripe, why on earth does it default to making recommendations for me based on stuff I've bought off other people's wishlists? And why isn't there at least a universal setting to ignore wishlist purchases for recommendations? I've bought plenty of stuff for myself over the years but indulging my uncle's unfortunate love of Sarah Brightman has made Amazon's music recommendations useless.
Recently I've found myself missing the physicalness of bookstores. The good local ones have all gone under, so I've been keeping a list and visiting a store near my parents' vacation place whenever I'm up there. Getting recommendations from real people is fantastic, browsing semi-curated shelves for new (to me) books is a lot more productive than browsing unending pages online, and supporting a business that runs storytimes and craft projects and gets kids excited about reading is pretty satisfying. It does cost more than Amazon, but it's really worth it.
Also
(Ever gone into a Target to find they don't have ANY men's shoes? Ever gone into a pet store to find they don't have ANY flea collars?)
Given that flea collars either do nothing or kill your pet, stores not carrying them is a great thing. Get a safe and effective flea prevention like Advantage/Advantix or Frontline instead. They cost more but they're worth it, too.
I agree that most people care more about the phone than its service, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. At least in the situation in the US, where all of the service providers seem equally mediocre.
Right now, I actively hate my phone for its horrifically clunky software and inability to sync with my computer's address book. It does have very nice battery life, excellent coverage, and has never dropped a call, but I still loathe the thing. I got it, (my first cell phone ever, a year and a half ago) because I wanted the least hideous phone I could find. But the service was almost irrelevant to my choice of phone; I ended up just getting a slightly less ugly than average model for the provider that most of my family and friends had. (I did listen to the sales rep who cautioned that one particular model was flimsy, but it was so ugly I wouldn't have bought it anyway. And if it had actually looked good, I would have ignored his advice and just been careful with the thing.)
In the past year I've pretty much given up on ever finding a decent-looking phone, but I've become adamant about finding decent software. Right now I'm desperately hoping that the latest iPhone rumors turn out to be true; at this point I'd pay a lot of money for a phone that just worked. I still would prefer a clamshell (I like having the main screen and keys protected) and it absolutely must fit in my pocket, but other than that I'll put up with anything. But it's still all about the phone itself for me; spotty coverage or poor customer service I'm ok with, but this evil abomination of a phone I'm not. The bad coverage and customer service I don't have to deal with everyday, but the phone I do.
I'm probably a little biased here, since I'm one of those people who lives happily under both science and religion, but I think you (and Dawkins) dismiss us "hypocritical moderates" a little too quickly. There's a lot to be said for the ability to handle contradictions and ambiguity. I believe in science (if belief is the right word; science hardly needs my belief to exist) and I believe in religion. I don't personally believe that God created the world in seven days, but I believe that other people have believed that, and that that makes it true on some level. Not a rational, physical, affecting-my-daily-life level, like science, but no less true for all that. It's part of our shared cultural genetics, like the Odyssey and gunpowder and corn.
I haven't read The God Delusion yet. I should. But I've kind of been avoiding it because from what I read about Dawkins, he seems to base his arguments purely in the rational, physical, real world while (in my view, being neither an atheist or a fundamentalist) faith isn't about the real world at all. I agree completely that God doesn't exist in the real world, but I also believe completely that God exists nonetheless. Limiting the argument against religion to the physical world misses the point.
I guess since he's an atheist & scientist it's the only world he can argue within, but I'm not particularly interested in being lambasted for my religious beliefs by someone who assumes that disproving that God exists in the real world, as the fundamentalists hold, will prove that God doesn't exist at all. I mean, insult me all you want, but do so for what I believe, not for what you assume I must believe. (And I wonder about the decision to reduce science/God to an either/or choice; the blanket rejection of religion is no less simpleminded than blindly accepting it.) But properly disproving God's existence in my book would be as much a matter of philosophy and history as science.
Outing anyone against their will is a shitty thing to do. But it's extremely frustrating to watch someone you know is gay publicly condemn gays and incite religious right fundamentalists to ban gay marriage while you sit there silently. Hence, for example, Michael Jones outing Ted Haggard. When you're being baselessly attacked by someone doing exactly what you're doing, you want to hit back.
Democrats, for the most part, play nicely and don't go around outing Republicans left and right (the extremely irritating Kerry excepted). But playing nicely is, in the short term, a very bad strategy, and revealing your opponents' hypocrisies is very tempting and potentially rewarding. I can completely understand why Maher said what he did and why CNN, which isn't under attack by the Republican party and has time to edit out things in poor taste spoken on the spur of the moment, chose to edit it.
But to address your statement, no one's ever argued that outing people in itself is a hate crime. Telling a group of religious right homophobes who've had a bit too much to drink that someone is gay and offering them some violent suggestions on how they should respond would be a hate crime. But if you want to spread a groundless rumor that Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi are secret lovers, have fun with that. By and large no one will care, because neither of them vilifies gays. Outing people is poor manners, but in most cases (assuming you're not currently surrounded by drunk homophobes) the only damage being outed will do to you is what your past behavior allows it to do to you. No one likes hypocrites.
I have to agree. I'm so trained on Apple's keyboard shortcuts and Adobe's zooming in/out keys that I always have my left hand on the keyboard anyway. Control-clicking feels perfectly natural. When I got a PC and my first two-button mouse last year, remembering to right-click took conscious thought. I've taught myself to do it quickly & unconsciously, but I still find control-clicking faster. So my Mac still has its single-button mouse.
I guess it's just whatever you're used to. I've grown up associating my mouse-hand with selecting and manipulating objects on screen and my non-mouse-hand with changing tools, changing screen views, and changing applications. Splitting that last group of functions between both hands seems completely nonintuitive to me, but what do I know.
And actually one of the few places in the US where you can get 24 Mbps, Vermont, has a very low population density. It probably helps that VTel is an independent telephone company. 24 Mbps isn't available everywhere in the state yet and does cost $50/mo, probably more than people in the UK are paying, but 24 Mbps DSL does exist in America. And if it hasn't arrived in your corner of Vermont yet, you can still get 8 Mbps for $35/mo while you wait.
And when you sign up for it, you get two t-shirts featuring smug comparisons between VTel's speed and everyone else's. All of the gloating would be annoying if it weren't so justified; I just find it frustrating that all of the nice retired Vermonters down the road from my parents' place can get nearly 10x the speed of what Verizon deigns to give me where I live.
Clearly Hezbollah is fundamentally in the wrong here. I don't think anyone, including the media, is arguing with you on that. The concern, though, is that in bombing civilian neighborhoods and roads that civilians are trying to use to flee their homes, Israel is seen as (inadvertently) stooping to the level of Hezbollah. And Israel is a nation-state, not a terrorist organization, and so the world expects it to behave like a nation-state, not a terrorist organization. No, it's not fair that Israel is being roundly condemned for (accidentally) killing civilians when its enemies (purposefully) do the same thing, but that's part of being a legitimate state: you're held to a higher standard. There's a reason that the world, including Arab states, supported Israel after Hezbollah's incursion, and there's a reason that now, after almost three weeks of Israel bombing civilian areas, that only the US still supports Israel's campaign.
I don't know what Israel should have done in response, but anyone could tell them that reenacting the US invasion of Iraq was not the way to go. Not only will killing civilians lose them the moral high ground and popular opinion, not only will it prove impossible to ever completely root out Hezbollah, but they're going to get stuck bombing Lebanon for far longer than they had anticipated. So please understand that when people criticize Israel's Lebanon campaign, they're doing just that -- criticizing the campaign. They're not saying that they're on Hezbollah's side and they're not saying that Israel is evil, they're saying that the campaign is a futile exercise that will accomplish nothing except the deaths of hundreds of civilians and maybe, if Israel is very lucky, one quarter of the preexisting Hezbollah militants. It just isn't a campaign that's winnable; all it can ultimately result in is a lot of dead civilians and a lot of newly inspired Hezbollah recruits.
There is another cost that employers do pay, but rarely fully account for when planning an offshoring: the loss of expertise... Some of the knowledge lost in transition may never be rediscovered, leading to permanent inefficiencies.
I think this is the most important thing lost to outsourcing. My father's division was outsourced maybe ten years ago (to another American company), the idea being that the other company handled the same tasks for many other, albeit smaller, institutions and could bring economies of scale to jobs that had always been handled in-house. And in theory, it could work, but in practice, the institution suddenly lost its memory. Most of the division had worked there for ten years, and a sizable number for over twenty -- they knew how to handle the politics of the wider institution, they had friends in every other division that allowed multi-division projects to run smoothly, and they knew where to get fast answers. The new company hired on a few of the of the old division, but you can't boil down the knowledge of a hundred people into three. When the new company hadn't managed to acquire the expertise of the old division after several years, the institution's higher-ups gave up and in-sourced it again, but by then most of the old division had moved on to new jobs, and the expertise the institution lost is still hurting it. The idiot who thought outsourcing was the solution to all (nonexistent) problems was fired, but that only goes so far to comfort all of the people who not only had to find new jobs but had to watch others make a mess out of the old jobs they had been proud to do.
Outsourcing is like delegating simple chores to your 8-year-old kid -- in theory, he could clean the bathroom for $5, freeing you up to do your $xx/hr job, but by the time he's called you up and interrupted your work to ask what cleaner to use on the toilet, where the spare sponges are, and whether he needs to vacuum the bath mat, you would have saved time by just doing it yourself. Eventually, assuming he sticks with it, he'll figure it out and even learn how to handle unexpected events like the sink clogging up without referring to you, but you can't look at the cost/benefit of giving him the chore simply in terms of dollars.
Re:Horde IS supposed to be evil ?!?!?!
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Stereotyping the Horde
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think you're misunderstanding. There aren't "evil elf elements" -- all elves (in Celtic legend) are portrayed as amoral. There aren't some "good" ones that can be trusted to help out humans and other "bad" ones -- they're all capricious and spiteful the majority of the time. One half of the original elf stories tells you how to avoid elves, and the other half tells you what happens to you if you fail to avoid them.
But for whatever reason, people like the idea of a beautiful, stately, powerful, good race, and fused that with the admittedly beautiful, stately, and powerful (although decidedly not good) elves of legend, resulting in the saintly (sanitized) elves in LOTR etc. Warcraft certainly draws inspiration from LOTR -- no one's arguing that -- but concluding that because they both feature an alliance of humans and elves that they both view humans and elves (and orcs) identically is poor logic. Even if Warcraft I was a literal recreation of the LOTR world, which it wasn't, there would be no compulsion for WoW to perpetuate this one view on humans/elves/orcs, especially given the Warcraft III storyline. Warcraft has evolved into a version of elves and orcs somewhat closer to the original Celtic legends, and is arguably more interesting for it, at least for those of us who find perfect goodness and perfect evilness irritatingly boring. It's not that the elves are good and the orcs are evil, or the orcs good and the elves evil -- they're both more nuanced. Kind of like real life.
Re:Horde IS supposed to be evil ?!?!?!
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Stereotyping the Horde
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'm not particularly up on my Norse mythology, but elves are definitely all over Celtic mythology, and range from the sprites you mention to the tall, fairly aristocratic, amoral Sidhe. They're never described as really evil, just highly intelligent, capricious, vicious beings who are so much above humans that they value us no more than animals. So sometimes some of them helped people, but more often they played tricks on us that ended in physically harming us. Even the Sidhe, which as far as I know are the pattern for later ideas of "noble" elves, are best known for making humans dance themselves to death for their own enjoyment. The grandparent's calling elves snobs is a vast understatement.
Again, it's not that they were evil, just that if you wanted to live very long it was best to avoid angering them. Which meant avoiding them entirely, if possible. And wearing iron and carting around wheelbarrows full of religious icons if you had reason to think you'd run into one.
I'm sorry if that came across badly. I wasn't trying to imply that they were "better," just that people who literally compare software architects to architects don't understand the extent of what architects do. Probably the world just hasn't caught up to virtual construction yet; once someone realizes that a poorly constructed piece of software can kill people, I wouldn't be surprised if software architects were required to take on many of the legal responsibilities of physical-building architects. Lucky you.
And you may be giving architects too much credit for their certainty. There are always new technologies to play with, and it's when they play a little too close to the cutting edge that their buildings require expensive renovations a few years after construction. Admittedly structural loads are reasonably straightforward compared to the interdependencies of code, but architects still do a lot of guesswork. All of concrete construction is taken on faith based on experience (and multiple built-in factors of safety) -- you can't test the stuff without destroying it.
A "software architect" can be thought of as the high-paid and lauded building architect.
Not exactly. Software architects design a project, oversee its construction, and then are done with it. Architects design a project, oversee its construction, and then are legally and professionally liable for it for their entire lives. The building contractor has a two year max liability, but the architect is responsible forever -- you sign off on the drawings and it's yours. No software architect is going to be hauled into court and publicly associated with their failed project if it goes wrong, and software architects aren't required to intern for three years and take a professional examination to certify them as capable of doing their job without putting the public in danger. I mean, I'm ok with the world calling software architects "software architects," given that they design stuff, but please don't compare them literally to architects -- their levels of responsibility are in no way similar.
This is besides the fact that extremely few architects are highly paid, and the flashy lauded types were almost all independently wealthy before they became architects. It's another field that people shouldn't go into thinking they'll get rich.
But I agree that there are creative and mechanical sides to both professions, and that the creative jobs give you more control and are much less likely to be outsourced. To continue your analogy, anyone can draw up door details in CAD, but if you want a Gehry building there's only one place to go. (Although at this point it might be debatable if Gehry's stuff truly constitutes creativity anymore...)
I feel like I'm perpetually defending Christianity here, which is a position I hate to be in, honestly, because if I were to be in a room with a self-identified atheist and a self-identified Christian, I would likely have vastly more in common with and would feel more comfortable around the atheist. But mobs of people here seem to think that anyone who believes in a vaguely Christian God is by definition part of the Christian Right, which is simply incorrect. And anti-Christian zealots are just as misguided and irritating as pro-Christian zealots.
I was going to reply to one of the other people who replied to me, but your post was much more informative and polite than anything I could have come up with this morning. It's just that as a liberal Catholic I strongly resent the implication that I'm somehow in cahoots with Jerry Falwell or that I live my life chapter and verse by the Bible. It's ridiculous. But I will freely admit that my church is not a typical Catholic church and that I've been in several midwestern conservative Catholic churches that scared me. There's probably as much variation between individual congregations as there is between denominations.
And I would add the Quakers to your list of accepting Christian denominations. They've got a general consensus core of beliefs but they admit that there are topics they've agreed to disagree on, which is a refreshing comparison to Catholicism, for one.
Why the fuck would a gay person want to be part of christianity?
Why would a straight person want to be part of Christianity? Maybe they grew up in a church, maybe they married into it, maybe they're raising kids and want to give them a certain moral frame of reference, maybe they like the networking opportunities, maybe they like its social missions, maybe they're just in it for a good choir, maybe they're new to an area and want the sense of community, maybe they're sick and want the hope and support that a church can provide. Or they might have experienced the whole born again thing. But Christianity has a pretty wide spectrum, and there's any number of reasons why someone might want to be a member of a church regardless of their orientation.
Not all Christian churches go for the abomination business. But even in those denominations, growing up in a church community is pretty significant -- those people are your friends and neighbors and, to some extent, your second family. Provided you still believe in the church's overall values, that community is not something you're going to throw away lightly, even if they condemn one aspect of your life.
(I was under the impression that posting anonymously didn't affect one's moderations. I guess I was wrong. So much for anonymity.)
Yes, I'm a language nerd. I'm also a girl who is occasionally infatuated with other girls, and, being a nerd, I've consequently read quite a bit about homosexuality, etc. But even if I were straight as an arrow, I'd still be in the habit of consulting my dictionary regularly. And, frankly, I'm amazed that you, on a site billing itself for nerds, couldn't be bothered to crack open your dictionary even this once to double-check your facts before starting an argument about word origins and the relation of word meanings.
It's such a shame, too. For once a Slashdot discussion seemed delightfully gay-positive, and I was all happily thinking that computer geeks are learning and aren't the homophobic idiots they're cracked up to be, until I stumbled on your little rant,* where the homophobic/uninformed/stupidly-impressed-with-long -posts mods apparently had taken up residence. No, the replies to your posts weren't phenomenally persuasive, but that doesn't make your assertions right. Just -- I don't know -- learn to appreciate your dictionary. A good vocabulary is valuable, and can save you from making incorrect and easily verified declarations. And, in this case, from ruining someone's warm & happy thoughts.
* Just to clarify, I'm not trying to imply that you're homophobic, just whoever modded you up.
I ask why he would allow there to be anything bad in the world. Free will doesn't cover it... Why not just create the universe so that there is no bad, no evil, nothing to ever be upsetting?
The most satisfying answer I've ever heard for this question is in Dorothy L. Sayers' play The Devil to Pay. She quotes the following lines in her best book on theology, The Mind of the Maker, which examines the nature of God and creation by comparing him to an author and creation to literary works -- it's a fascinating analogy, and I recommend the book highly. It's not exactly light reading, and I haven't reread it too recently, so I'm not going to vouch for every word, but I remember it as being an unexpectedly and delightfully logical examination of the core of Christianity (the trinity, the nature of evil, etc. -- not specifically the Bible).
Faustus: Who made thee?
Mephistopheles: God; as the light makes the shadows.
Faustus: Is God, then, evil?
Mephistopheles: God is only light,
And in the heart of the light no shadow standeth,
Nor can I dwell within the light of heaven
Where God is all.
Faustus: What art thou, Mephistopheles?
Mephistopheles: I am the price that all things pay for being,
The shadow on the world, thrown by the world
Standing in its own light, which light God is.
The idea being that God created matter, and God created light, and when light fell on matter it cast a shadow. God didn't create evil; evil is a side effect of our being real. It's not a perfect idea -- it seems to suggest that all good comes from outside of us but that all evil is directly attributable to us -- but it has a beautiful simplicity...
Mmmh.. I dont think Mac users will migrate. Why would they do that?
It's not about migration. I'm a Mac person, but my graduate program requires a couple of Windows-only programs. At least 75% of my time is spent on programs with Mac versions available (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc), but due that other 25% (for Rhino and AutoCAD), I can't use a Mac. So right now I'm on a Windows-only machine, and have to suffer through Windows 100% of the time. If I could get a Mac running Rhino and AutoCAD at full speed, and could use OS X for all other programs, do you understand how wonderful that would be? It's not about games, and I'm not looking to escape from OS X to Windows, I'm desperately trying to get back to Macs.
This psychoanalysis of popular culture is really grating. If you're shallow enough to define yourself based on pop-culture, you're every bit the female stereotype that you're rebelling against. If you aren't, then why do you care?
I think you're misinterpreting the argument of feminist pop-culture commentators. The point isn't that we're defining ourselves based on pop-culture -- anyone well informed enough to self-identify as a feminist is going to realize that what pop-culture represents women to be and what women actually are are vastly different things. But studying pop-culture, and analyzing its messages about what our culture values, is still important.
The portrayal of people in popular culture is more or less irrelevent.
Well, no. Take your example of the lack of female scientists. Maybe women are as a group less interested in science; I haven't read the latest studies. But while the genetic cause for female disinterest in science is debatable, the cultural one seems pretty obvious to most of us. If young girls are only presented in pop-culture with images of women as singers, dancers, teachers, nurses, homemakers, etc., what do you think they're going to picture themselves as becoming when they grow up? Yes, things have been getting better -- television seems to overflow with female lawyers, doctors, and psychiatrists these days -- but where are the images of female scientists? Numb3rs features male mathematicians and scientists, and the male inspectors on CSI outnumber the female ones, outrank them, and have more screen time devoted to them. Hell, until very recently science textbooks only featured pictures of boys doing experiments, not girls. What sort of a message does that send? No, pop-culture isn't all-powerful, but I imagine that most kids decide that science is cool at a pretty young age and become good at it by spending all of their spare time rebuilding their parents' toasters or whatever. If girls aren't even presented with the idea of going into science when they're young, is it such a surprise that men outnumber women in hard science in higher education?
...engineers or scientists or mathematicians, or even philosophers, or historians, or economists... are the professions in which people are respected for their mind...
Wow. What does that leave out, everything related to literature and the arts? There are different types of intelligence, and hard sciences aren't intrinsically better (or even harder) than poetry or architecture.
And for what it's worth, I've got two sisters, one who wants to be a historian and one who wants to be a scientist. I'm more into creating stuff, but I read as much as I can about science and pop-culture in my spare time, too. I thought this article was a pretty awful pseudo-intellectual rehash of identical articles on the subject that have been written for at least the last ten years, but that doesn't mean the subject itself isn't important.
Send them up half male and half female with orders that they need to rotate partners on a daily basis. Well laid people with multiple partners they aren't previously attached to are less likely to get into jealous rages or similar problems.
How would mandatory daily sex be any better than forbidden sex? What if you're gay -- can you turn down partners of the other sex? Or, despite your qualifications, do you not get to go on the mission at all, since it's unlikely you'd get provided with more than one other gay partner in the article's 6-8 member crew? What if you're straight and just aren't attracted to a particular member of the opposite sex -- do you get to turn them down, too? Are you going to carefully choose four attractive straight men and four attractive straight women for your mission and hope that none of them realizes mid-journey that they're actually interested in someone of the same sex and messes your little rotations up? You really think mandating sex will be less disruptive than forbidding it or just letting it happen on its own?
These people are astronauts and know their lifes depend on working together. If they can't work together even when they hate each other (or worse - love each other) then they shouldn't be sent up.
Exactly. They're highly trained intelligent adults; there shouldn't be any need for either sex bans or your solution. They should be tested for their ability to peacefully coexist with a small group of people for sustained periods of time before they're chosen for the mission, since this is a key requirement for their job, and then trusted to live up to their training. Someone who's prone to jealous rages shouldn't be sent, regardless of their overall brilliance. Other than that, as long as the group regularly voices its concerns and deals with them, I fail to see what the problem of space relationships would be.
On similar lines, I know someone who was recently targeted in a scam. She was looking for a roommate, posted to Craigslist, and got an email from someone claiming to be a model who would be in our area for a month and needed somewhere to stay. My friend was having second thoughts about whether she really wanted a roommate, so she told the model that it would cost $600, the full month's rent for the apartment. When the model agreed, my friend figured that the model was foolish, but at least she'd get a free month's rent out of the girl. Eventually a check arrived for several thousand dollars made out to my friend; when she told the model that rent was only $600, the model told her that this was her full pay for the upcoming modeling job in our area, that my she should deposit the check, take her $600, and send the rest to the model's agent in New York.
At this point my friend's suspicions were raised (finally), and it took very little work to discover that the check was supposedly written by a company no longer in business, to learn that the model's claimed agency had never heard of her, and to decide to go to the police. But she went along with it to this point because the amount involved was (relatively) so low; she's not so greedy as to fall for one of the multimillion payout Nigerian scams, but $600 (in return for a place to stay -- $300 more than it was worth, certainly, but nothing extravagant) was worth considering.
And I only heard about this afterwards; I certainly would have warned her off models contacting one by email at the beginning of the thing, had I known. As it stands, our dear model knows my friend's name and address, which puts her in a trickier situation than the targets of failed standard 419 scams.
Rural areas in the US can have good connections, too -- most of Vermont, for one, pays less and gets more than those of us in urban areas.
VTel offers 1.3 Mbps DSL throughout nearly all of Vermont and is introducing 8 Mbps DSL into the state for $34.95 a month. Whether you get the 1.3 or 8 Mbps for the price depends on whether 8 Mbps is available in your area yet; you get the highest speed available. And they often offer promotional two year contracts at a substantially lower rate. Not as good as your French connection, but (depending on your location in the 1.3 vs 8 Mbps rollout scheme) either better than average or wildly good by US (urban) standards. And connections are available just about everywhere; my parents' summer place at the end of a gravel road on a lake 30 minutes from the nearest town and 50 from anything that could be called a city has access.
And note that Vermont is an extremely rural and extremely mountainous state, to the point where cell phone coverage is pretty spotty at any distance from major highways, and yet they still have excellent internet coverage. I think I heard that VTel got some grants initially to put in all the infrastructure, which explains the good coverage, but for some reason they persist in offering their service at a reasonable rate and in rolling their profits into actively upgrading that infrastructure. It seems almost un-American.
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Rimadyl kept our last lab mobile for eight years as her arthritis got progressively worse. We understood that it does suddenly kill some dogs so we used the lowest dose that provided relief, but the quality of life it gave her was worth the risk. She was still taking her daily walks up to the day her body gave out at 14 and we put her to sleep. Maybe the Rimadyl finally caught up to her, probably it was just old age, but either way she had a good life thanks to the drug.
Vets absolutely should warn you that it can kill your dog. I've heard it compared to Vioxx -- a miracle pill, if it didn't kill you. And if someone's dog's arthritis is minor enough to be managed on glucosamine, they should be thankful and go that route. But if your dog's in serious pain, Rimadyl works. If it shortens your dog's life, a short, pain-free, mobile life is preferable to an animal than a longer, painful, immobile one.
I find it sad that in all the hoopla over Rimadyl some people are now choosing to give their pets a longer life over a higher quality one, prioritizing their fear of losing their pet over treating their pet's pain. Losing a pet hurts, but I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I knew that I had chosen to let my dog live in unnecessary pain.
If the only reason for you to do good deeds are because of a fear of God/the devil, or a need to please God/the church. Then you are not a good person.
That's not fair. Most of them just have no self control, by whatever combination of genetics/upbringing/lack of willpower. When left alone, they go for immediate gratification and repeatedly make bad choices. When they have some arbitrary external system of control, like a fundamentalist religion, they're able to make positive choices. It allows them to be good. Call them stupid, maybe, but they're no more intrinsically good or bad than anyone else. They're just people.
Where they go wrong obviously is assuming that because liberalism doesn't work for them it can't work for anyone, and that no one can make positive choices unless they follow their religion. Trying to restrict other people's freedoms is bad. But someone recognizing that he's making a mess of his life and that forcing himself to live up to the rules of a religion would help him be a better person? I find that pretty commendable, provided he doesn't force his religious views on the rest of us.
it only applies to the narrow way in which you use the web, and does not apply to the ways in which most other people do. this isn't about monetizing your internet existence, it is about establishing social standards of online discourse. not because of orwell, fascism, overcontrolling busybodies, censorship, etc., but to maintain simple decency and respect
Well, yes. My strategy for navigating online and my opinion of anonymity is obviously tailored to how I use the internet. But given that the article was about Google's new policy and that Google is solely about monetizing everyone's internet existence, I think my type of anonymity is relevant here.
To be honest, I don't care if youtube becomes a private little garden full of real names and politeness. I won't use it, but that's no loss. I was just pointing out that tools to accommodate both anonymity and moderation of trolls already exist on youtube and work well. If your video is meaningful to a number of people, you can open comments and trust them to moderate it. If your video is some fragment dissociated from context/community, you can manually approve comments, disable them, or rework your video so it makes a more lasting connection with its viewer-moderators. No one is entitled to universally positive responses, even the non-frivolous amongst us.
For what it's worth, I'm a pretty respectful person online and off. But I feel dehumanized by advertising, I see anonymity as the only defense against it, and I'd rather half the content on the internet be anonymous flame wars (minimized by moderation tools) than be required to post under my real name.
If you create something worthwhile and provide moderation tools, the anonymous community moderates itself. Works on slashdot, already works on youtube.
When I played in Goonfleet (Something Awful's Eve Online corp), I made a ridiculous little love song of a video and put it up on youtube. The corp is known for being really vile both to our enemies and to idiot members who try too hard, but the comments on the video are almost all positive/amusing. The few trolls who do post get quickly modded down by a handful of goons who like it enough to keep rewatching it and checking in years later.
By your and Google's reasoning, between my hard to please target audience and the anonymous commenting, I should've gotten a shitstorm. The fact that I didn't suggests that anonymity isn't youtube's problem, it's (1) a lack of a communal sense of ownership of most videos, probably due to (2) most videos being quickly produced one-off laughs, not being substantive enough to tap into or contribute to a community, and honestly deserving a lot of the the crap they get. But you put a hundred hours of effort into something and all the wonderful anonymous assholes on the Internet might surprise you.
Personally I will always choose anonymity online because I am a human being, not a consumer. I don't want to be marketed to every second of every day and I certainly don't want to help advertisers market to me better.
I've also been finding Amazon increasingly frustrating. To add one more gripe, why on earth does it default to making recommendations for me based on stuff I've bought off other people's wishlists? And why isn't there at least a universal setting to ignore wishlist purchases for recommendations? I've bought plenty of stuff for myself over the years but indulging my uncle's unfortunate love of Sarah Brightman has made Amazon's music recommendations useless.
Recently I've found myself missing the physicalness of bookstores. The good local ones have all gone under, so I've been keeping a list and visiting a store near my parents' vacation place whenever I'm up there. Getting recommendations from real people is fantastic, browsing semi-curated shelves for new (to me) books is a lot more productive than browsing unending pages online, and supporting a business that runs storytimes and craft projects and gets kids excited about reading is pretty satisfying. It does cost more than Amazon, but it's really worth it.
Also
(Ever gone into a Target to find they don't have ANY men's shoes? Ever gone into a pet store to find they don't have ANY flea collars?)
Given that flea collars either do nothing or kill your pet, stores not carrying them is a great thing. Get a safe and effective flea prevention like Advantage/Advantix or Frontline instead. They cost more but they're worth it, too.
I agree that most people care more about the phone than its service, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. At least in the situation in the US, where all of the service providers seem equally mediocre.
Right now, I actively hate my phone for its horrifically clunky software and inability to sync with my computer's address book. It does have very nice battery life, excellent coverage, and has never dropped a call, but I still loathe the thing. I got it, (my first cell phone ever, a year and a half ago) because I wanted the least hideous phone I could find. But the service was almost irrelevant to my choice of phone; I ended up just getting a slightly less ugly than average model for the provider that most of my family and friends had. (I did listen to the sales rep who cautioned that one particular model was flimsy, but it was so ugly I wouldn't have bought it anyway. And if it had actually looked good, I would have ignored his advice and just been careful with the thing.)
In the past year I've pretty much given up on ever finding a decent-looking phone, but I've become adamant about finding decent software. Right now I'm desperately hoping that the latest iPhone rumors turn out to be true; at this point I'd pay a lot of money for a phone that just worked. I still would prefer a clamshell (I like having the main screen and keys protected) and it absolutely must fit in my pocket, but other than that I'll put up with anything. But it's still all about the phone itself for me; spotty coverage or poor customer service I'm ok with, but this evil abomination of a phone I'm not. The bad coverage and customer service I don't have to deal with everyday, but the phone I do.
I'm probably a little biased here, since I'm one of those people who lives happily under both science and religion, but I think you (and Dawkins) dismiss us "hypocritical moderates" a little too quickly. There's a lot to be said for the ability to handle contradictions and ambiguity. I believe in science (if belief is the right word; science hardly needs my belief to exist) and I believe in religion. I don't personally believe that God created the world in seven days, but I believe that other people have believed that, and that that makes it true on some level. Not a rational, physical, affecting-my-daily-life level, like science, but no less true for all that. It's part of our shared cultural genetics, like the Odyssey and gunpowder and corn.
I haven't read The God Delusion yet. I should. But I've kind of been avoiding it because from what I read about Dawkins, he seems to base his arguments purely in the rational, physical, real world while (in my view, being neither an atheist or a fundamentalist) faith isn't about the real world at all. I agree completely that God doesn't exist in the real world, but I also believe completely that God exists nonetheless. Limiting the argument against religion to the physical world misses the point.
I guess since he's an atheist & scientist it's the only world he can argue within, but I'm not particularly interested in being lambasted for my religious beliefs by someone who assumes that disproving that God exists in the real world, as the fundamentalists hold, will prove that God doesn't exist at all. I mean, insult me all you want, but do so for what I believe, not for what you assume I must believe. (And I wonder about the decision to reduce science/God to an either/or choice; the blanket rejection of religion is no less simpleminded than blindly accepting it.) But properly disproving God's existence in my book would be as much a matter of philosophy and history as science.
Outing anyone against their will is a shitty thing to do. But it's extremely frustrating to watch someone you know is gay publicly condemn gays and incite religious right fundamentalists to ban gay marriage while you sit there silently. Hence, for example, Michael Jones outing Ted Haggard. When you're being baselessly attacked by someone doing exactly what you're doing, you want to hit back.
Democrats, for the most part, play nicely and don't go around outing Republicans left and right (the extremely irritating Kerry excepted). But playing nicely is, in the short term, a very bad strategy, and revealing your opponents' hypocrisies is very tempting and potentially rewarding. I can completely understand why Maher said what he did and why CNN, which isn't under attack by the Republican party and has time to edit out things in poor taste spoken on the spur of the moment, chose to edit it.
But to address your statement, no one's ever argued that outing people in itself is a hate crime. Telling a group of religious right homophobes who've had a bit too much to drink that someone is gay and offering them some violent suggestions on how they should respond would be a hate crime. But if you want to spread a groundless rumor that Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi are secret lovers, have fun with that. By and large no one will care, because neither of them vilifies gays. Outing people is poor manners, but in most cases (assuming you're not currently surrounded by drunk homophobes) the only damage being outed will do to you is what your past behavior allows it to do to you. No one likes hypocrites.
I have to agree. I'm so trained on Apple's keyboard shortcuts and Adobe's zooming in/out keys that I always have my left hand on the keyboard anyway. Control-clicking feels perfectly natural. When I got a PC and my first two-button mouse last year, remembering to right-click took conscious thought. I've taught myself to do it quickly & unconsciously, but I still find control-clicking faster. So my Mac still has its single-button mouse.
I guess it's just whatever you're used to. I've grown up associating my mouse-hand with selecting and manipulating objects on screen and my non-mouse-hand with changing tools, changing screen views, and changing applications. Splitting that last group of functions between both hands seems completely nonintuitive to me, but what do I know.
And actually one of the few places in the US where you can get 24 Mbps, Vermont, has a very low population density. It probably helps that VTel is an independent telephone company. 24 Mbps isn't available everywhere in the state yet and does cost $50/mo, probably more than people in the UK are paying, but 24 Mbps DSL does exist in America. And if it hasn't arrived in your corner of Vermont yet, you can still get 8 Mbps for $35/mo while you wait.
And when you sign up for it, you get two t-shirts featuring smug comparisons between VTel's speed and everyone else's. All of the gloating would be annoying if it weren't so justified; I just find it frustrating that all of the nice retired Vermonters down the road from my parents' place can get nearly 10x the speed of what Verizon deigns to give me where I live.
Clearly Hezbollah is fundamentally in the wrong here. I don't think anyone, including the media, is arguing with you on that. The concern, though, is that in bombing civilian neighborhoods and roads that civilians are trying to use to flee their homes, Israel is seen as (inadvertently) stooping to the level of Hezbollah. And Israel is a nation-state, not a terrorist organization, and so the world expects it to behave like a nation-state, not a terrorist organization. No, it's not fair that Israel is being roundly condemned for (accidentally) killing civilians when its enemies (purposefully) do the same thing, but that's part of being a legitimate state: you're held to a higher standard. There's a reason that the world, including Arab states, supported Israel after Hezbollah's incursion, and there's a reason that now, after almost three weeks of Israel bombing civilian areas, that only the US still supports Israel's campaign.
I don't know what Israel should have done in response, but anyone could tell them that reenacting the US invasion of Iraq was not the way to go. Not only will killing civilians lose them the moral high ground and popular opinion, not only will it prove impossible to ever completely root out Hezbollah, but they're going to get stuck bombing Lebanon for far longer than they had anticipated. So please understand that when people criticize Israel's Lebanon campaign, they're doing just that -- criticizing the campaign. They're not saying that they're on Hezbollah's side and they're not saying that Israel is evil, they're saying that the campaign is a futile exercise that will accomplish nothing except the deaths of hundreds of civilians and maybe, if Israel is very lucky, one quarter of the preexisting Hezbollah militants. It just isn't a campaign that's winnable; all it can ultimately result in is a lot of dead civilians and a lot of newly inspired Hezbollah recruits.
There is another cost that employers do pay, but rarely fully account for when planning an offshoring: the loss of expertise... Some of the knowledge lost in transition may never be rediscovered, leading to permanent inefficiencies.
I think this is the most important thing lost to outsourcing. My father's division was outsourced maybe ten years ago (to another American company), the idea being that the other company handled the same tasks for many other, albeit smaller, institutions and could bring economies of scale to jobs that had always been handled in-house. And in theory, it could work, but in practice, the institution suddenly lost its memory. Most of the division had worked there for ten years, and a sizable number for over twenty -- they knew how to handle the politics of the wider institution, they had friends in every other division that allowed multi-division projects to run smoothly, and they knew where to get fast answers. The new company hired on a few of the of the old division, but you can't boil down the knowledge of a hundred people into three. When the new company hadn't managed to acquire the expertise of the old division after several years, the institution's higher-ups gave up and in-sourced it again, but by then most of the old division had moved on to new jobs, and the expertise the institution lost is still hurting it. The idiot who thought outsourcing was the solution to all (nonexistent) problems was fired, but that only goes so far to comfort all of the people who not only had to find new jobs but had to watch others make a mess out of the old jobs they had been proud to do.
Outsourcing is like delegating simple chores to your 8-year-old kid -- in theory, he could clean the bathroom for $5, freeing you up to do your $xx/hr job, but by the time he's called you up and interrupted your work to ask what cleaner to use on the toilet, where the spare sponges are, and whether he needs to vacuum the bath mat, you would have saved time by just doing it yourself. Eventually, assuming he sticks with it, he'll figure it out and even learn how to handle unexpected events like the sink clogging up without referring to you, but you can't look at the cost/benefit of giving him the chore simply in terms of dollars.
I think you're misunderstanding. There aren't "evil elf elements" -- all elves (in Celtic legend) are portrayed as amoral. There aren't some "good" ones that can be trusted to help out humans and other "bad" ones -- they're all capricious and spiteful the majority of the time. One half of the original elf stories tells you how to avoid elves, and the other half tells you what happens to you if you fail to avoid them.
But for whatever reason, people like the idea of a beautiful, stately, powerful, good race, and fused that with the admittedly beautiful, stately, and powerful (although decidedly not good) elves of legend, resulting in the saintly (sanitized) elves in LOTR etc. Warcraft certainly draws inspiration from LOTR -- no one's arguing that -- but concluding that because they both feature an alliance of humans and elves that they both view humans and elves (and orcs) identically is poor logic. Even if Warcraft I was a literal recreation of the LOTR world, which it wasn't, there would be no compulsion for WoW to perpetuate this one view on humans/elves/orcs, especially given the Warcraft III storyline. Warcraft has evolved into a version of elves and orcs somewhat closer to the original Celtic legends, and is arguably more interesting for it, at least for those of us who find perfect goodness and perfect evilness irritatingly boring. It's not that the elves are good and the orcs are evil, or the orcs good and the elves evil -- they're both more nuanced. Kind of like real life.
I'm not particularly up on my Norse mythology, but elves are definitely all over Celtic mythology, and range from the sprites you mention to the tall, fairly aristocratic, amoral Sidhe. They're never described as really evil, just highly intelligent, capricious, vicious beings who are so much above humans that they value us no more than animals. So sometimes some of them helped people, but more often they played tricks on us that ended in physically harming us. Even the Sidhe, which as far as I know are the pattern for later ideas of "noble" elves, are best known for making humans dance themselves to death for their own enjoyment. The grandparent's calling elves snobs is a vast understatement.
Again, it's not that they were evil, just that if you wanted to live very long it was best to avoid angering them. Which meant avoiding them entirely, if possible. And wearing iron and carting around wheelbarrows full of religious icons if you had reason to think you'd run into one.
I'm sorry if that came across badly. I wasn't trying to imply that they were "better," just that people who literally compare software architects to architects don't understand the extent of what architects do. Probably the world just hasn't caught up to virtual construction yet; once someone realizes that a poorly constructed piece of software can kill people, I wouldn't be surprised if software architects were required to take on many of the legal responsibilities of physical-building architects. Lucky you.
And you may be giving architects too much credit for their certainty. There are always new technologies to play with, and it's when they play a little too close to the cutting edge that their buildings require expensive renovations a few years after construction. Admittedly structural loads are reasonably straightforward compared to the interdependencies of code, but architects still do a lot of guesswork. All of concrete construction is taken on faith based on experience (and multiple built-in factors of safety) -- you can't test the stuff without destroying it.
A "software architect" can be thought of as the high-paid and lauded building architect.
Not exactly. Software architects design a project, oversee its construction, and then are done with it. Architects design a project, oversee its construction, and then are legally and professionally liable for it for their entire lives. The building contractor has a two year max liability, but the architect is responsible forever -- you sign off on the drawings and it's yours. No software architect is going to be hauled into court and publicly associated with their failed project if it goes wrong, and software architects aren't required to intern for three years and take a professional examination to certify them as capable of doing their job without putting the public in danger. I mean, I'm ok with the world calling software architects "software architects," given that they design stuff, but please don't compare them literally to architects -- their levels of responsibility are in no way similar.
This is besides the fact that extremely few architects are highly paid, and the flashy lauded types were almost all independently wealthy before they became architects. It's another field that people shouldn't go into thinking they'll get rich.
But I agree that there are creative and mechanical sides to both professions, and that the creative jobs give you more control and are much less likely to be outsourced. To continue your analogy, anyone can draw up door details in CAD, but if you want a Gehry building there's only one place to go. (Although at this point it might be debatable if Gehry's stuff truly constitutes creativity anymore...)
Thank you.
I feel like I'm perpetually defending Christianity here, which is a position I hate to be in, honestly, because if I were to be in a room with a self-identified atheist and a self-identified Christian, I would likely have vastly more in common with and would feel more comfortable around the atheist. But mobs of people here seem to think that anyone who believes in a vaguely Christian God is by definition part of the Christian Right, which is simply incorrect. And anti-Christian zealots are just as misguided and irritating as pro-Christian zealots.
I was going to reply to one of the other people who replied to me, but your post was much more informative and polite than anything I could have come up with this morning. It's just that as a liberal Catholic I strongly resent the implication that I'm somehow in cahoots with Jerry Falwell or that I live my life chapter and verse by the Bible. It's ridiculous. But I will freely admit that my church is not a typical Catholic church and that I've been in several midwestern conservative Catholic churches that scared me. There's probably as much variation between individual congregations as there is between denominations.
And I would add the Quakers to your list of accepting Christian denominations. They've got a general consensus core of beliefs but they admit that there are topics they've agreed to disagree on, which is a refreshing comparison to Catholicism, for one.
Why the fuck would a gay person want to be part of christianity?
Why would a straight person want to be part of Christianity? Maybe they grew up in a church, maybe they married into it, maybe they're raising kids and want to give them a certain moral frame of reference, maybe they like the networking opportunities, maybe they like its social missions, maybe they're just in it for a good choir, maybe they're new to an area and want the sense of community, maybe they're sick and want the hope and support that a church can provide. Or they might have experienced the whole born again thing. But Christianity has a pretty wide spectrum, and there's any number of reasons why someone might want to be a member of a church regardless of their orientation.
Not all Christian churches go for the abomination business. But even in those denominations, growing up in a church community is pretty significant -- those people are your friends and neighbors and, to some extent, your second family. Provided you still believe in the church's overall values, that community is not something you're going to throw away lightly, even if they condemn one aspect of your life.
An addendum:
(I was under the impression that posting anonymously didn't affect one's moderations. I guess I was wrong. So much for anonymity.)
Yes, I'm a language nerd. I'm also a girl who is occasionally infatuated with other girls, and, being a nerd, I've consequently read quite a bit about homosexuality, etc. But even if I were straight as an arrow, I'd still be in the habit of consulting my dictionary regularly. And, frankly, I'm amazed that you, on a site billing itself for nerds, couldn't be bothered to crack open your dictionary even this once to double-check your facts before starting an argument about word origins and the relation of word meanings.
It's such a shame, too. For once a Slashdot discussion seemed delightfully gay-positive, and I was all happily thinking that computer geeks are learning and aren't the homophobic idiots they're cracked up to be, until I stumbled on your little rant,* where the homophobic/uninformed/stupidly-impressed-with-long -posts mods apparently had taken up residence. No, the replies to your posts weren't phenomenally persuasive, but that doesn't make your assertions right. Just -- I don't know -- learn to appreciate your dictionary. A good vocabulary is valuable, and can save you from making incorrect and easily verified declarations. And, in this case, from ruining someone's warm & happy thoughts.
* Just to clarify, I'm not trying to imply that you're homophobic, just whoever modded you up.
I ask why he would allow there to be anything bad in the world. Free will doesn't cover it... Why not just create the universe so that there is no bad, no evil, nothing to ever be upsetting?
The most satisfying answer I've ever heard for this question is in Dorothy L. Sayers' play The Devil to Pay. She quotes the following lines in her best book on theology, The Mind of the Maker, which examines the nature of God and creation by comparing him to an author and creation to literary works -- it's a fascinating analogy, and I recommend the book highly. It's not exactly light reading, and I haven't reread it too recently, so I'm not going to vouch for every word, but I remember it as being an unexpectedly and delightfully logical examination of the core of Christianity (the trinity, the nature of evil, etc. -- not specifically the Bible).
Faustus: Who made thee?
Mephistopheles: God; as the light makes the shadows.
Faustus: Is God, then, evil?
Mephistopheles: God is only light,
And in the heart of the light no shadow standeth,
Nor can I dwell within the light of heaven
Where God is all.
Faustus: What art thou, Mephistopheles?
Mephistopheles: I am the price that all things pay for being,
The shadow on the world, thrown by the world
Standing in its own light, which light God is.
The idea being that God created matter, and God created light, and when light fell on matter it cast a shadow. God didn't create evil; evil is a side effect of our being real. It's not a perfect idea -- it seems to suggest that all good comes from outside of us but that all evil is directly attributable to us -- but it has a beautiful simplicity...
Mmmh.. I dont think Mac users will migrate. Why would they do that?
It's not about migration. I'm a Mac person, but my graduate program requires a couple of Windows-only programs. At least 75% of my time is spent on programs with Mac versions available (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc), but due that other 25% (for Rhino and AutoCAD), I can't use a Mac. So right now I'm on a Windows-only machine, and have to suffer through Windows 100% of the time. If I could get a Mac running Rhino and AutoCAD at full speed, and could use OS X for all other programs, do you understand how wonderful that would be? It's not about games, and I'm not looking to escape from OS X to Windows, I'm desperately trying to get back to Macs.
This psychoanalysis of popular culture is really grating. If you're shallow enough to define yourself based on pop-culture, you're every bit the female stereotype that you're rebelling against. If you aren't, then why do you care?
I think you're misinterpreting the argument of feminist pop-culture commentators. The point isn't that we're defining ourselves based on pop-culture -- anyone well informed enough to self-identify as a feminist is going to realize that what pop-culture represents women to be and what women actually are are vastly different things. But studying pop-culture, and analyzing its messages about what our culture values, is still important.
The portrayal of people in popular culture is more or less irrelevent.
Well, no. Take your example of the lack of female scientists. Maybe women are as a group less interested in science; I haven't read the latest studies. But while the genetic cause for female disinterest in science is debatable, the cultural one seems pretty obvious to most of us. If young girls are only presented in pop-culture with images of women as singers, dancers, teachers, nurses, homemakers, etc., what do you think they're going to picture themselves as becoming when they grow up? Yes, things have been getting better -- television seems to overflow with female lawyers, doctors, and psychiatrists these days -- but where are the images of female scientists? Numb3rs features male mathematicians and scientists, and the male inspectors on CSI outnumber the female ones, outrank them, and have more screen time devoted to them. Hell, until very recently science textbooks only featured pictures of boys doing experiments, not girls. What sort of a message does that send? No, pop-culture isn't all-powerful, but I imagine that most kids decide that science is cool at a pretty young age and become good at it by spending all of their spare time rebuilding their parents' toasters or whatever. If girls aren't even presented with the idea of going into science when they're young, is it such a surprise that men outnumber women in hard science in higher education?
Wow. What does that leave out, everything related to literature and the arts? There are different types of intelligence, and hard sciences aren't intrinsically better (or even harder) than poetry or architecture.
And for what it's worth, I've got two sisters, one who wants to be a historian and one who wants to be a scientist. I'm more into creating stuff, but I read as much as I can about science and pop-culture in my spare time, too. I thought this article was a pretty awful pseudo-intellectual rehash of identical articles on the subject that have been written for at least the last ten years, but that doesn't mean the subject itself isn't important.
Send them up half male and half female with orders that they need to rotate partners on a daily basis. Well laid people with multiple partners they aren't previously attached to are less likely to get into jealous rages or similar problems.
How would mandatory daily sex be any better than forbidden sex? What if you're gay -- can you turn down partners of the other sex? Or, despite your qualifications, do you not get to go on the mission at all, since it's unlikely you'd get provided with more than one other gay partner in the article's 6-8 member crew? What if you're straight and just aren't attracted to a particular member of the opposite sex -- do you get to turn them down, too? Are you going to carefully choose four attractive straight men and four attractive straight women for your mission and hope that none of them realizes mid-journey that they're actually interested in someone of the same sex and messes your little rotations up? You really think mandating sex will be less disruptive than forbidding it or just letting it happen on its own?
These people are astronauts and know their lifes depend on working together. If they can't work together even when they hate each other (or worse - love each other) then they shouldn't be sent up.
Exactly. They're highly trained intelligent adults; there shouldn't be any need for either sex bans or your solution. They should be tested for their ability to peacefully coexist with a small group of people for sustained periods of time before they're chosen for the mission, since this is a key requirement for their job, and then trusted to live up to their training. Someone who's prone to jealous rages shouldn't be sent, regardless of their overall brilliance. Other than that, as long as the group regularly voices its concerns and deals with them, I fail to see what the problem of space relationships would be.
On similar lines, I know someone who was recently targeted in a scam. She was looking for a roommate, posted to Craigslist, and got an email from someone claiming to be a model who would be in our area for a month and needed somewhere to stay. My friend was having second thoughts about whether she really wanted a roommate, so she told the model that it would cost $600, the full month's rent for the apartment. When the model agreed, my friend figured that the model was foolish, but at least she'd get a free month's rent out of the girl. Eventually a check arrived for several thousand dollars made out to my friend; when she told the model that rent was only $600, the model told her that this was her full pay for the upcoming modeling job in our area, that my she should deposit the check, take her $600, and send the rest to the model's agent in New York.
At this point my friend's suspicions were raised (finally), and it took very little work to discover that the check was supposedly written by a company no longer in business, to learn that the model's claimed agency had never heard of her, and to decide to go to the police. But she went along with it to this point because the amount involved was (relatively) so low; she's not so greedy as to fall for one of the multimillion payout Nigerian scams, but $600 (in return for a place to stay -- $300 more than it was worth, certainly, but nothing extravagant) was worth considering.
And I only heard about this afterwards; I certainly would have warned her off models contacting one by email at the beginning of the thing, had I known. As it stands, our dear model knows my friend's name and address, which puts her in a trickier situation than the targets of failed standard 419 scams.
Rural areas in the US can have good connections, too -- most of Vermont, for one, pays less and gets more than those of us in urban areas.
VTel offers 1.3 Mbps DSL throughout nearly all of Vermont and is introducing 8 Mbps DSL into the state for $34.95 a month. Whether you get the 1.3 or 8 Mbps for the price depends on whether 8 Mbps is available in your area yet; you get the highest speed available. And they often offer promotional two year contracts at a substantially lower rate. Not as good as your French connection, but (depending on your location in the 1.3 vs 8 Mbps rollout scheme) either better than average or wildly good by US (urban) standards. And connections are available just about everywhere; my parents' summer place at the end of a gravel road on a lake 30 minutes from the nearest town and 50 from anything that could be called a city has access.
And note that Vermont is an extremely rural and extremely mountainous state, to the point where cell phone coverage is pretty spotty at any distance from major highways, and yet they still have excellent internet coverage. I think I heard that VTel got some grants initially to put in all the infrastructure, which explains the good coverage, but for some reason they persist in offering their service at a reasonable rate and in rolling their profits into actively upgrading that infrastructure. It seems almost un-American.