I'd agree with you if you merely stated that the differences between platforms are a concern, but you keep refocusing the argument to try and state that it's the language. They are two entirely different things.
OK, pretend I said platform everywhere. I'm a practical sort of person.
Not everyone has equal opportunity to get "big". If you're naturally small, you have virtually no chance of getting "big" naturally. You can only improve to a naturally limited ceiling. It's been shown that genetics have the largest role in your body type. Extreme ectomorph's cannot train to have big muscles, period. This discovery changes that completely.
This is certainly true, but it gets to what I was saying. No matter who you are, unless you have a severe genetic disorder, several years of appropriate training will create greatly increased muscle mass and strength (relative to your body type). The ectomorph will certainly not have as high a ceiling for mass and strength as a mesomorph, in general, but relative to their baseline, they can make significant gains.
The real problem that I was alluding to is that, if you are an ectomorph with a small frame, you are probably also genetically predisposed to have support systems geared to it. Your vascular system, endocrine system, and your heart.
As you said, if you add on a tremendous amount of muscle and change the effective body type from ectomorph to endomorph, you are placing a huge load on other systems which have not evolved through millenia of genetics to support it. Thus several years of taking that crap will result in all kinds of unpredictable long-term problems probably including organ failure. Stuff will just wear out.
Or just imagine tripling a person's muscle mass, but their lungs are contained in a small rib cage. They might walk around light headed all the time or nearly hyperventilate all the time just to fuel their quadriceps. If they really exerted themselves in a sprint, they might black out. While part of me thinks that is somewhat comical, another part of me thinks it is dead serious.
I did not miss your point. I just do not make pedantic distinctions that are inapplicable to real world context.
For a linguist or a computer scientist looking at a BNF, two languages may be identical, but for an application developer in the real world, two platforms may have identical syntax, but widely varying object support. The grammar is the same, but the sentences created are radically different. Thus you say the same thing in two different ways each time and at a more general level, the "languages" are not the same. As the interpreter for each platform will tell you if you feed it sentences from the other platform.
I saw your point. It was a clever point about semantics, but it missed my point which was broader.
A pudgy ex-Navy guy that says "sir" a lot while he talks down to you will arrive and inform me that I have unauthorized software on my machine which violates security policies. I will receive an email stating the same, and the next time I reboot, the startup scripts will automatically remove all "offending" software.
Nature evolved the muscle inhibitor for a reason and that reason is probably your survivability goes down. For one, you would have to eat much more food. Not necessarily a good trait in the past when food could be scarce, but probably not a good one now because it is still an economic strain to suddenly have to spend 2 or 3 times the normal amount on food.
Since your muscles are the one thing that are going to boost and in a really short period of time, you are going to put tremendous strain on other parts of your body (ligaments, tendons, and most of your organs) since they have to support all that muscle. There may be other things that we can not yet anticipate, but for sure if you put a person in this situation, you will suddenly discover any number of surprise problems that occur after 5 to 10 years of using this stuff.
If a person wants to get bigger and stronger, they just have to train. I've seen some twiggy people totally change there bodies after 5 years of diligent effort, and they remained healthy and strong with no bizarre side effects and very few injuries. Pills are not a substitute for effort.
Sadly, I must say that I can not currently use these tools at work due to company mandate. We are not permitted to use Firefox because it is a "security" risk. Some of my tools-related statements might be more of a Microsoft diatribe (a la "'Bottom:0;' WTF M$?"), but I think there is validity in this pattern of non-converging standards for "Gee, whiz!" and other reasons, and I think it will likely play out similarly for these new standards. EMCAScript is pretty far toward that realm of "been around so long it has nearly converged"; still the tools you mentioned arrived on the scene fairly recently thanks to open-source, and that is part of my point about lackluster tool support across the industry for an industry standard.
I have little trouble blaming M$ for such things, but there is a bigger pattern at work here in the software industry.
Most of the thoroughly tested code that I work with is riddled with these constructs because the implementations of most web standards are mostly the same. I concur that Javascript and JScript are syntactically close, but that is just the surface.
I work with Javascript every day to achieve advanced web application functionality. It is object-oriented now, but I'm not much for alert messages as my preferred method of debugging. It does not have to be that way, true. But I think more than anything that the reason I really do not enjoy using Javascript is that tools support is very limited.
Even now, we are still in the world of dueling standards on the web where what would really be best is a single standard. I write JScript for my Internet Explorer web applications. Javascript for non-Microsoft browsers. I want a single language, and I want a single development environment that can give me "Intellisense" (object delving and code completion), and dynamic help that is linked against Javascript/JScript reference material. I want that environment to target all browser platforms that comply with a standard, and I really do not want people to continue disagreeing on the standard because then tool support will lag and my work is made more difficult.
When I glanced through the referenced article, I was rolling my eyes, because here again you have two answers to similar problems, each with support from different camps and the result will probably be more browser compatibility work for every developer.
After many years, you get really tired of people coming up with "that one extra feature" or "that totally amazing completely different way to solve the same problem". Each EMCAScript engine on each browser adheres to a slightly different specification. Lovely. CSS is exactly the same. There you have a single set of specifications, but you still have people interpreting things in vastly different ways and Internet Explorer still (a few years) has trouble with something as simple as bottom:0.
Anyway. I think the real opportunities in the future are for much better tools and a much stronger effort to reach standards agreement and compliance. I could care less which of the two standards described in the article actually becomes mainstream. They are all smart people. I'm quite certain either standard will get us great benefits and move us along nicely. Pick one and run with it. That would be nice. But, no. Everyone wants "their approach" to be the one because they are so certain it is "infinitely better" than what the other 30 brilliant guys came up with.
That said, I doubt we are going to see convergence. The things that really converge and become solid standards are the things that have been around so long and are used so ubiquitously, no one finds it possible or worthwhile to make changes because there are lower fruit to pick on the "It's new, New, NEW!" tree. Those two standards in the article will likely not converge for 5 years, minimum.
I use the same username as a base and then alter it depending on the site that I have an account. The password is random gobbledegook that I've used for ages with an additional trailing checksum that is computed from the username specific to the site.
That's pretty obtuse, but no matter how long I am away from a place I can calculate these things rapidly, and it is not particularly easy to crack. The few places where it really matters (banks, for instance), there are other policies in place on their side to mitigate my exposure anyway.
Even so, I think the approach you described above is enough. That's true as long as you are a normal person like 99.999% of everyone else that uses the places where you have accounts. If you were unusual in some respect, it would be safer to create really difficult passwords with a time component and change them on a regular basis.
But come on...for almost everyone that's overkill. People that really want to crack something and make a pile of cash are not going for Joe User. They are embezzling from inside the company or worse.
The European Union is a federation of nations. Many European nations have been reluctant to joining the European Union because of the risk that it might erode their cultural identity. Why do individual states of the United State not have a state.tld? It is because our states do not have a strong enough identity separate from our nation that we demand it. "I am a Rhode Islander" and "I am Spanish" are very different statements.
The real mistake is trying to apply our notion of national identity and governance to other nations. Relegating all European nations to an.eu tld is an attack on sovereignty because it is an attack on the national identity of each nation in the European Union.
New York City would not be the same without Chinatown or Little Italy. Being from the Bronx, Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn, or Staten Island mean different things, too. These identities are important distinctions in certain social contexts and so are.uk,.de,.fr, and the other tlds. Sometimes it is not always good to simplify things down to a single moniker (.eu) for convenience. People and nations have fought to the death over such things.
Semi in front of you starts drifting into the right shoulder of the road. You are following at a smart distance, but there is a guy tight on your bumper behind and another guy immediately on your left. The guy on your left sees what's happening. You put on your left turn single and punch the gas, eating up some of the distance you left between you and the truck, but allowing the guy on the left to see what's going on and let you get over in front of him.
I've had this situation happen with cars. It would be scarier with a truck. Sometimes, the only way to go is forward because you know the person behind is going to plow you otherwise. A lot of people go into the "zone" on highways for instance. Seems every few days I will get in the, "Oh damn, here comes traffic" situation and I brake not too hard, and some guy comes flaming in and nearly faceplants in my trunk.
That sounded bad,:-), but it would be worse if it really happened.
Ok, the accelerator resistor is a dumb idea for several reason, not the least of which is the need to hit the accelerator hard at times to ensure the safety of yourself and others. But that is not why this idea is a bad one. The idea is a bad one because there is absolutely no fun factor whatsoever.
Here's my approach. Just replace all the cars on the road with fricken golf carts. That's right. Let every dumbass punch the accelerator to hearts content. Go all out. In fact, let's put humongous bumpers on the golf carts and load the bottom of them down really heavy so they are virtually impossible to turn upside down.
Then you make a new traffic law called, "Do whatever the fuck you want." Let people go all out. Punch that golf cart accelerator, baby! See an idiot driver? No problem! Go smash your golf cart into him at 10mph! Yeah! Get that anger out! WHEW--oh, shit! There's my exit. Damn, I gotta go to work. I'm like 2 hours late. Stupid golf cart.
If we have to do something stupid, at least it should be fun and stupid.
I look at the price I pay at the store for an item. If I like that price, I get the item. If not, I don't. My time is too important to waste finding the item I want and also then filling out and mailing their stupid card that contains additional information about me on it. Whenever I see a rebate, I think the company is a piece of shit and I avoid them. I can't think of a better way to tell your consumer that you think they are an idiot, then to quote a price you cannot get without extra effort and typically divulging personal information that they can then leverage with advertise to further improve their bottom line.
All the crap about accounting and marketing advantage and blah, blah, blah--it's all bullshit, and it's an insult to intelligent consumers, of which there are apparently few. Give me the straight price at the store and I buy it or I don't. That's it.
Most people are don't have what it takes to bypass a system like this (population as a whole), so it will work, particularly if there are legal penalities for bypassing it. But even if they do bypass it, they still have to contend with what they always had to: the repo man.
Since that's no worse than the past, this is an all positive for dealers, unless people get insanely pissed about losing their right to have something for nothing. Hehe.
I think many people do interact with things that they do not perceive. The brain fills in gaps with whatever it thinks is most plausible. This is a well known fact. There is a fuzzy line there between what we perceive as things that are processed as real stimulus and what we perceive by inference which can often be entirely false.
Awareness of objective reality is limited both by the limitations of our senses and by inaccuracy of the inferences that the brain makes in the absense of sufficient stimulus to create a coherent perception.
Not only do I think this is valid, but depending on your definition of science, science itself has not been around for very long at all. European notions of science came along in the past few hundred years for the mostpart. But there are some ancient cultures that had a pretty "scientific" approach to understanding the world. Still, I think it is pretty clear that things did not really get moving until modern times (beginning with the Renaissance).
The oldest science I have direct experience with comes in the form of Qigong which is an ancient medicinal discipline dating back to at least 4000 years ago. Then again, the modern "scientific" medical community has laughed derisively and dismissed 4000 years of such "science" as nonsense. Things have begun to change recently largely do to the preponderance of anecdotal evidence citing dramatically improved health that correlates with Qigong. As a scientist, I am not saying it is causal; I am just saying there is enough of a correlation that people have stopped laughing.
So China has had a scientific tradition for 4000 years, in which case, they may win the prize for longest lasting scientific civilization, or if you are one of the derisive laughers they are just barely stepping into the scientific world and Europe with only a couple hundred years headstart which is nothing to a civilization that has spanned 4000 years. Then again, many different governments have come and gone in China in that time. Has the society survived that? I'd say that as a nation, the Chinese have had a continuous cultural identity that entire time so, yes.
As far as intelligent design goes, these people are not saying that the scientific method is crap. Not as far as I can tell, and if some are, they are the minority idiots that no one needs to worry about because they are so incapable of rational thought they are not likely a threat to anyone other than themselves. The smart people that support intelligent design are just saying that they believe there are gaps too large in the evolutionary path to be accounted for by Darwinian evolution, as in: over time mutation and natural selection lead to species differentiation in harmony with the organisms habitat. They are not saying that science is crap. They are saying that they feel there are gaps in science that need to be accounted for and are not yet.
I think every scientist worth his or her salt would readily acknowledge that there are gaps all over the place in science. That is what drives us to further discovery. Our curiosity about that gaps. And the intelligent design people are right, if they are saying there are gaps in evolutionary theory. Damn right there are. Did Darwin figure out every evolutionary trick up Nature's sleeve in his lifetime? Have we filled in all the gaps in a couple hundred years, keeping in mind that Nature has been playing this game for hundreds of millions of years at least? No way.
If we some day find a periodic genetic record of a protozoan evolving into homo sapiens, then yes, we could certainly make a very conclusive argument. But I think anyone will agree that it is absurdly improbable that we can do that. Which means that scientists have to take a leap of faith just like any religious person. Every theory or law of physics is a leap of faith. "What if this is true," asks a scientist. Then they go devise real world experiments to show conclusively that the supposition is true. Intelligent design people are saying that Darwin's theory is not supported by enough real world experiments to show a protazoan evolving into you.
Can't really argue with them. Any scientist that discounts God because there is no experiment to conclusively demonstrate existance is as dumb as a person discounting science because it does not conclusively show that my Great^10^100 Grandfather was an amoeba.
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem that I was alluding to is that, if you are an ectomorph with a small frame, you are probably also genetically predisposed to have support systems geared to it. Your vascular system, endocrine system, and your heart.
As you said, if you add on a tremendous amount of muscle and change the effective body type from ectomorph to endomorph, you are placing a huge load on other systems which have not evolved through millenia of genetics to support it. Thus several years of taking that crap will result in all kinds of unpredictable long-term problems probably including organ failure. Stuff will just wear out.
Or just imagine tripling a person's muscle mass, but their lungs are contained in a small rib cage. They might walk around light headed all the time or nearly hyperventilate all the time just to fuel their quadriceps. If they really exerted themselves in a sprint, they might black out. While part of me thinks that is somewhat comical, another part of me thinks it is dead serious.
For a linguist or a computer scientist looking at a BNF, two languages may be identical, but for an application developer in the real world, two platforms may have identical syntax, but widely varying object support. The grammar is the same, but the sentences created are radically different. Thus you say the same thing in two different ways each time and at a more general level, the "languages" are not the same. As the interpreter for each platform will tell you if you feed it sentences from the other platform.
I saw your point. It was a clever point about semantics, but it missed my point which was broader.
A pudgy ex-Navy guy that says "sir" a lot while he talks down to you will arrive and inform me that I have unauthorized software on my machine which violates security policies. I will receive an email stating the same, and the next time I reboot, the startup scripts will automatically remove all "offending" software.
Since your muscles are the one thing that are going to boost and in a really short period of time, you are going to put tremendous strain on other parts of your body (ligaments, tendons, and most of your organs) since they have to support all that muscle. There may be other things that we can not yet anticipate, but for sure if you put a person in this situation, you will suddenly discover any number of surprise problems that occur after 5 to 10 years of using this stuff.
If a person wants to get bigger and stronger, they just have to train. I've seen some twiggy people totally change there bodies after 5 years of diligent effort, and they remained healthy and strong with no bizarre side effects and very few injuries. Pills are not a substitute for effort.
I have little trouble blaming M$ for such things, but there is a bigger pattern at work here in the software industry.
Even now, we are still in the world of dueling standards on the web where what would really be best is a single standard. I write JScript for my Internet Explorer web applications. Javascript for non-Microsoft browsers. I want a single language, and I want a single development environment that can give me "Intellisense" (object delving and code completion), and dynamic help that is linked against Javascript/JScript reference material. I want that environment to target all browser platforms that comply with a standard, and I really do not want people to continue disagreeing on the standard because then tool support will lag and my work is made more difficult.
When I glanced through the referenced article, I was rolling my eyes, because here again you have two answers to similar problems, each with support from different camps and the result will probably be more browser compatibility work for every developer.
After many years, you get really tired of people coming up with "that one extra feature" or "that totally amazing completely different way to solve the same problem". Each EMCAScript engine on each browser adheres to a slightly different specification. Lovely. CSS is exactly the same. There you have a single set of specifications, but you still have people interpreting things in vastly different ways and Internet Explorer still (a few years) has trouble with something as simple as bottom:0.
Anyway. I think the real opportunities in the future are for much better tools and a much stronger effort to reach standards agreement and compliance. I could care less which of the two standards described in the article actually becomes mainstream. They are all smart people. I'm quite certain either standard will get us great benefits and move us along nicely. Pick one and run with it. That would be nice. But, no. Everyone wants "their approach" to be the one because they are so certain it is "infinitely better" than what the other 30 brilliant guys came up with.
That said, I doubt we are going to see convergence. The things that really converge and become solid standards are the things that have been around so long and are used so ubiquitously, no one finds it possible or worthwhile to make changes because there are lower fruit to pick on the "It's new, New, NEW!" tree. Those two standards in the article will likely not converge for 5 years, minimum.
That's pretty obtuse, but no matter how long I am away from a place I can calculate these things rapidly, and it is not particularly easy to crack. The few places where it really matters (banks, for instance), there are other policies in place on their side to mitigate my exposure anyway.
Even so, I think the approach you described above is enough. That's true as long as you are a normal person like 99.999% of everyone else that uses the places where you have accounts. If you were unusual in some respect, it would be safer to create really difficult passwords with a time component and change them on a regular basis.
But come on...for almost everyone that's overkill. People that really want to crack something and make a pile of cash are not going for Joe User. They are embezzling from inside the company or worse.
The real mistake is trying to apply our notion of national identity and governance to other nations. Relegating all European nations to an .eu tld is an attack on sovereignty because it is an attack on the national identity of each nation in the European Union.
New York City would not be the same without Chinatown or Little Italy. Being from the Bronx, Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn, or Staten Island mean different things, too. These identities are important distinctions in certain social contexts and so are .uk, .de, .fr, and the other tlds. Sometimes it is not always good to simplify things down to a single moniker (.eu) for convenience. People and nations have fought to the death over such things.
An English woman giving birth to a male child in a Turkish hospital. "Nurse, please remove the penis." "Urk!?"
I've had this situation happen with cars. It would be scarier with a truck. Sometimes, the only way to go is forward because you know the person behind is going to plow you otherwise. A lot of people go into the "zone" on highways for instance. Seems every few days I will get in the, "Oh damn, here comes traffic" situation and I brake not too hard, and some guy comes flaming in and nearly faceplants in my trunk.
That sounded bad, :-), but it would be worse if it really happened.
Here's my approach. Just replace all the cars on the road with fricken golf carts. That's right. Let every dumbass punch the accelerator to hearts content. Go all out. In fact, let's put humongous bumpers on the golf carts and load the bottom of them down really heavy so they are virtually impossible to turn upside down.
Then you make a new traffic law called, "Do whatever the fuck you want." Let people go all out. Punch that golf cart accelerator, baby! See an idiot driver? No problem! Go smash your golf cart into him at 10mph! Yeah! Get that anger out! WHEW--oh, shit! There's my exit. Damn, I gotta go to work. I'm like 2 hours late. Stupid golf cart.
If we have to do something stupid, at least it should be fun and stupid.
I tried and failed to come up with an "appropriate substantive response" to this. Guess I'm not true AI.
All the crap about accounting and marketing advantage and blah, blah, blah--it's all bullshit, and it's an insult to intelligent consumers, of which there are apparently few. Give me the straight price at the store and I buy it or I don't. That's it.
How low can it go!?
When the ship starts to sink, the ugly side of lesser men is seen.
http://www.beyondcommunion.com/superstorm.html I've read this and many of the initial indicators are coming to pass like clockwork. Sensationalist, maybe. Eerie, definitely.
Since that's no worse than the past, this is an all positive for dealers, unless people get insanely pissed about losing their right to have something for nothing. Hehe.
That's why you build a huge nanofabricated bubble around the planet. Or I guess you could feed Mars asteroids...
when the computer learns how to execute them.
Awareness of objective reality is limited both by the limitations of our senses and by inaccuracy of the inferences that the brain makes in the absense of sufficient stimulus to create a coherent perception.
The oldest science I have direct experience with comes in the form of Qigong which is an ancient medicinal discipline dating back to at least 4000 years ago. Then again, the modern "scientific" medical community has laughed derisively and dismissed 4000 years of such "science" as nonsense. Things have begun to change recently largely do to the preponderance of anecdotal evidence citing dramatically improved health that correlates with Qigong. As a scientist, I am not saying it is causal; I am just saying there is enough of a correlation that people have stopped laughing.
So China has had a scientific tradition for 4000 years, in which case, they may win the prize for longest lasting scientific civilization, or if you are one of the derisive laughers they are just barely stepping into the scientific world and Europe with only a couple hundred years headstart which is nothing to a civilization that has spanned 4000 years. Then again, many different governments have come and gone in China in that time. Has the society survived that? I'd say that as a nation, the Chinese have had a continuous cultural identity that entire time so, yes.
As far as intelligent design goes, these people are not saying that the scientific method is crap. Not as far as I can tell, and if some are, they are the minority idiots that no one needs to worry about because they are so incapable of rational thought they are not likely a threat to anyone other than themselves. The smart people that support intelligent design are just saying that they believe there are gaps too large in the evolutionary path to be accounted for by Darwinian evolution, as in: over time mutation and natural selection lead to species differentiation in harmony with the organisms habitat. They are not saying that science is crap. They are saying that they feel there are gaps in science that need to be accounted for and are not yet.
I think every scientist worth his or her salt would readily acknowledge that there are gaps all over the place in science. That is what drives us to further discovery. Our curiosity about that gaps. And the intelligent design people are right, if they are saying there are gaps in evolutionary theory. Damn right there are. Did Darwin figure out every evolutionary trick up Nature's sleeve in his lifetime? Have we filled in all the gaps in a couple hundred years, keeping in mind that Nature has been playing this game for hundreds of millions of years at least? No way.
If we some day find a periodic genetic record of a protozoan evolving into homo sapiens, then yes, we could certainly make a very conclusive argument. But I think anyone will agree that it is absurdly improbable that we can do that. Which means that scientists have to take a leap of faith just like any religious person. Every theory or law of physics is a leap of faith. "What if this is true," asks a scientist. Then they go devise real world experiments to show conclusively that the supposition is true. Intelligent design people are saying that Darwin's theory is not supported by enough real world experiments to show a protazoan evolving into you.
Can't really argue with them. Any scientist that discounts God because there is no experiment to conclusively demonstrate existance is as dumb as a person discounting science because it does not conclusively show that my Great^10^100 Grandfather was an amoeba.