Uh huh, so what you're saying is that I'm a champion of the Master Helga's Class of You Will Be A Disciplined Exercising Like An Aduly 6 year old. Right, that's really what I meant. I didn't mean anything like teaching kids the value of organized sports by providing them with a safe environment to go out and kick a ball around together, or provide a little guidance on how the game of baseball is played. I meant ramming it down their throats until they love it despite themselves...
The fact that you have a terrible bias toward exercise in school or the idea that organization can be valuable but appropriately relaxed for young children is not my issue and is not my misunderstanding. I've worked with young children 4-10 in martial arts and I can tell you with the right approach the benefits are tremendous and they have a huge amount of fun doing something they wouldn't otherwise know how to begin doing.
So you don't debunk anything because I'm speaking from personal experience of a positive result and your speaking of probably your personal experience and hatred of what happened to you as a kid or saw happen to kids. Well, your negative experience and bias does nothing to change my positive experience and that's all I set out to say. It has a lot of value. If Helga the Authoritarian isn't the one providing the structure.
Right. To both responders, I did obviously read the article. My point, which you deftly gave an entire miss in favor of insulting me is that teaching youth the value of organized sports and exercise at the age of 1, 2, 3, 4.9, or 12 has a very real and lasting value because they will shortly be in the situations which I described. I also made the point that numbers referred to from the study are extremely misleading because body weight is not a function of how much you eat--it is a function of the relative balance between how much you burn vs. how much you take in and the real question is not whether the Law of Conservation of Energy is in play--obviously it is--the question is will participation in sports lead to a lifestyle that is in general less likely to cause obesity. The answer is clearly yes: individuals that go on to a sport or exercise program that is at all serious being the most obvious in that category.
When people just assume I didn't read the article because I made an inferrence and pointed out the logical conclusion of a sports regimine and the fact that the referrant to the article was citing the article in a misleading way--well, I still won't cut on people, but you might want to think again. And I know plenty of families with fat young kids that don't balance out sitting in a chair for hours with bouncing around in the yard after hours. They just build a habit of lethargy. Not all, but a lot of them. So even that part of the article is highly suspicious to me.
Maybe I am insightful. A person wouldn't recognize that if they weren't paying attention or thinking critically. "I don't get what he's saying, he must be dumb. It doesn't seem directly to parrot the article or contradict it in an obvious way. RTFA, dork." Nice.
People who engage in sports and are in all other ways have the same activity of your average couch potato do burn more calories. You can't magically cheat the system. A person that participates in an organized sport for an hour a day will burn more calories than someone that sits on their duff for that hour. The real question is, does being in a sport make you more disciplined about matching your caloric intake to your actual need. For many sports the answer is likely no, so the jock just ups his burger intake and keeps pace with the couch potato, fat-wise.
For sports with weight classes or any highly competitive sport where BMI is relevant (wrestling, bodybuilding, most track events, you bet your fat ass there will be a difference. The successful atheletes will be leaner, burn more calories, and eat more calories. Way more. Anyone that has been through high school or college and seen one of these teams eat and train knows this obvious fact without commissioning an expensive study.
Currently I have a ticket in with Verizon because for the first month of service on my 3Mbps line, I've never exceeded 35K/s. That's a factor of about 10 slower than I was sold on--they're "looking into it".
I've had Verison DSL in the past however and not heard a peep from them for 3 years, so likely it is noticeably nicer than the disgusting cable cartel tactics.
My history was, C64->Apple IIe->Intellivision->Coleco->Mac SE->Nintendo->286->386->home built Pentium I, 2, 3, 4->home built...You know, I'd rather be having sex right now--oh snap, this is a much better way to make things at home!->iMac.
My approach is, my internet connection is much faster than I need for just about anything I do. So people can shut up with their money-driven claims of how we need to do blah, bleh, and blih, until I see real indicators. Real data would be usability data collected from people with service. "What connection rate do you pay for? Do you consider it to be sufficient? Are you happy with the connectivity that you have?", etc.
It's not like we can't easily get that kind of actual data and it's not like we don't have our own personal data to use as a reference point. Instead you get a bunch of proselytizing corporate jackasses. If this was so much of a problem, then digital television people would be positiviely wigging out over HD TV, but are they? No. They're rubbing their hands together with glee at all the revenues from the switch over and the new services they will be able to provide on their fat pipes.
Blah, blah. Corporations should shut up and solve the technical problems. That's how they make their money. If they can't do it, well some other guy will come along and do it and make bank. All this really is, is a pathetically thinly veiled attempt to get more money than they deserve. "If you would just let go of that whole network neutrality thing and let us charge you arbitrary amounts not based on the actual technical cost but rather on how much you want it, we could make so much more money, OMG! Please won't you let us, really...it's too hard the other way despite all the evidence to the contrary, honest, we swear."
Well of course you can rob people blind once costs are arbitrarily fixed by human desire and capacity to spend rather than actual cost of production. Every monopoly ever created is based on that; look at software. *snort*
I think you have quite a streak of violence yourself (murdering people that you think are worthless), but I will only respond that, a child's personality is formed and well established by the age of 12. I do not agree that he was "born bad" and there is not enough evidence from that article to deduce that. I'm not saying he was born good, either, as there isn't evidence for that either, but It is likely that he was fiercely independent right from 2 to 4 years old and he was disciplined repeatedly (I'm sure you've seen the little hyperactive rugrats with the angry parents repeatedly and forcefully telling them all the things they shouldn't do).
And I most definitely did not say that a parent should let their child run wild. Not at all. There are plenty of ways to engage an intelligent and fiercely independent child in meaningful discussion. Instead of berating them and trying to control them, you can offer your knowledge and experience and lead by example. Good parents do this and they do it early when a child is most receptive and interested in what they have to share. They don't expect or demand things of their children, family, and friends. They don't force things upon others. They offer what knowledge and help they can, when asked for it, and they focus on doing what is right so that others around them have an example to look up to. You cannot ever reach understanding and respect with a child if you are busy fighting and judging them ceaselessly. They will just hate you and then they will want to destroy you, everyone like you, and if it goes far enough, everyone.
That was my point. And now...I should apparently return to my bong hits...just as soon as I acquire a bong.
Doing a lot less. Not making his behavior a battle between him and his parents. From my perspective, it could only have gone better than it did go, and ultimately, it likely would have. Generally, with very independent children, they want to prove to the whole world that they can do it themselves. I was very much like that and I remember the feeling very well. If people stop making comments on what you should do or how good or bad the things you did are, they allow you the space to make those judgements on your own, so you do that rather than trying to find ways to fight the people on your back (even if they think they are on your back "for your own good"). If children are under that kind of heavy judgement long enough, the stress inevitably twists them into something pretty awful. Sometimes they become a broken adult. Other times they become and adult that breaks.
Some kids find that a lot more important than others to prove that people can't make them do anything, and if you ride them hard, they won't ever stop fighting and lashing out. Eventually, they reach adulthood, and they encounter the people that can make them do something (e.g. the police that put them behind bars). And that's a terrible waste, but an inevitable consequence of spending a child's entire adolescence teaching them that they are accountable to someone other than themself, when ultimately, goodness comes from within and true goodness only comes out when you hold yourself accountable above all other people (i.e. Do you do right because you want to do what is right or because you are compelled to by real or implied force?)
Reminds me of my childhood, *chuckle*. That kid was fiercely independent and they spent years trying to control him. "Oh, it's for his own good." "We tried, punishment, rewarding, and every other form of manipulation possible." It may sound like I'm siding with the kid, but I'm not. I am saying, that with a child like that, the things this woman describes (trying to fix him) is exactly what would drive him farther and farther over the edge of wrecklessness in a desire to say, "I do what I want."
It surely isn't all roses when the parental figure is describing how this is the only person in the world that they hate and how they fought with a minor for the minor's entire adolescence. What kind of adult will that create? Someone that is trained to fight and fight and hurt people. Nature vs. Nurture indeed. That kid didn't get even close to the same environment as his brother. He got the authoritarian "try everthing under the Sun (grounding for a month, ha!) to manipulate this child" environment, while his brother very likely was out of the spotlight almost all of the time due to their attention being centered on the other one.
She's absolutely right that it has nothing whatsoever to do with playing video games, though.
Worked for 3 years as a business analyst at a health insurance company. I came from 6 years of IT background and we developed IT solutions in the business group. This was a general trend of consolidation where there was more leverage to have a person that understands the business as well as technical side and cut down the overhead between the two groups.
At the company, many of the users were technically savvy, and more importantly, the process associated with IT was prohibitively complicated. It would take too long to get an IT project approved, and so people would use readily available tools (Excel and Access were the big ones) to develop solutions that met the need.
I'm sure everyone knows that in the health insurance industry, data privacy is extremely important, so yes, the IT department had some valid concerns about meeting government regulation, but to be fearful of an educated and motivated user that needs something and is willing to invest their time to get it...that's stupid.
This type of alarmism is your typical FUD that arises when a bunch of established people get jittery about where their paycheck will come from when they feel that someone is threatening the usefulness of their job by doing the things that they used to do. I have one response to that.
The model-T Ford.
Yes, all those horse and buggy people were pissed. The smart ones just rolled with it and became mechanics and made fortunes in the automotive industry. And here, too, all that is really required is to say, "OK, what are the new services that we can provide now that we have successfully built tools easy enough that the end-user can use them productively for basic development and analytic tasks?" Guess, what? There will be many more jobs that grow out of millions of educated users all over the world learning to use Excel and Access, etc.
At the health insurance company, what I could clearly see that our VP of IT could not, was that the efforts of our business people were doing an amazing job of forcing the IT process to become more efficient and less complacent. In other words, it demanded that IT actually earn their paycheck, and that IT explore the new responsiblities that they could take on with their considerable technical skills, in order to better serve a new and more educated customer (technically knowledgeable business users).
Fear arises because people are God damn lazy. "But I like doing what I've always done. Doing new things is hard. I have to actually learn to do new things. Oh, I just can't possibly see what we will do now that users can do things with data. Oh, why! Why did we give them a power tool that empowers them to go to Home Depot and then rennovate their house themselves, oh why???" Well carpenters haven't gone out of business and neither will IT people...not the proactive ones at any rate.
The tools will get better and the end user will be able to do more, which means there will be more new business requirements that need specialists to assist the business user, and so on. It's been this same process for generation after generation, and every there are a bunch of alarmists crying doom, and every time new opportunities arise from the changes and the economy experiences a net positive growth.
Not many people will see this now that thread is relatively old, but the Fermi Paradox is completely stupid. It's mired in our own limited knowledge and perceptions and the rules that we think apply. Can we exceed the speed of light? Actually? Probably not. Effectively. Very likely. Space folds. There are ways to travel a shorter path and cross a longer distance. That's a basic thing we know about space right now. There's far more that we don't know than we do know. That's always true.
Would we necessarily have to expand or die? No. Dinosaurs hung out for hundreds of millions of years. We could. And we're more resourceful so we could survive a global extinction event. Do we have the maturity to reign in our intellect and create that kind of sustainability? A million year old civilization that actually has a written history that long? Probably we don't. How hard is that to do? I don't know. Neither does anyone else. It may be that only certain species with specific fundamental brain wiring can evolve along a path of development which is naturally balanced by a desire for sustainable balance with the ecosystem instead of what we currently have which is sort of live by expansion.
Our commercial model is pretty much grow or die in many cases. That's just an echo of the way we operate in this day and age.
And what about space? What about races that evolve into virtual societies because they can simulate more space than is actually available. Or what about races that convert themselves to energy and free themselves from terrestrial existence entirely? Is it possible? I think so. How do we know? We don't. One way or the other. This paradox is based on rules we created with our limited understanding of what is possible.
If religions are based on facts that most of us do not perceive well, there is a spiritual domain where I suppose billions or trillions of entities exist on an energetic level. And energy can occupy the same space without losing individuality (overlapping magnetic waves that pass through each other without interacting). So space constraints are not what they seem.
A responsibly mature alien race would deliberately not colonize and subjugate every inhabitable ecosystem in the galaxy because of biodiversity. They wouldn't expand needlessly. They would know the science and sociology of a necessary and sufficient number of members of a particular species as a function of its genetic code and evolutionary potential. They would know so many things that we do not, but the one thing that they would know is that you don't turn every beautiful thing in the galaxy to slag to fuel your own boundless growth. But we don't seem to know that. In fact, diversity makes us scared. Diversity of race, of ideology, etc.
There is no Fermi Paradox. There is only a very immature race that doesn't yet see the big enough picture to realize the paradox is really just a reflection of our own limitations.
I think we should put lots of smaller animals on the ark and ship it out with computer systems to maintain and land it. Then wait and see what species evolves into intelligence first this time around:)
Because eventually the mass of the lense would become gravitationally significant. But it might be neat having a second moon which is a bigass eye. Cool!
The only reason that the number of hardcore players is decreasing is because playing that much is becoming mainstream. It's not hardcore anymore. It's normal. Like being a geek is nearly chic now.
7 million Wow accounts and rising. Add the growth in the console markets, etc. Eventually it will be just like watching a TV channel. Totally mundane and ubiquitous.
I personally got a kick out of BoB and the imbalance, because I think it strongly mirrors exactly the type of real world situations that are so interesting. Very often in the real world, someone gains an unfair advantage and exploits it. In fact, this is the foundation of empire--every Empire. Whether economic, technological, or knowledge-based. Someone has an advantage and for a time there is no way to counter it. So they run roughshod over everyone else and subjugate people, and people become more and more oppressed and then revolution. Whether by leveling the playing field (a nation adopts guns to replace the sword when forced to do so or lose sovereignty), or the masses band together in a revolution against those that oppress them and with sufficient numbers that whatever advantage the minority had, it no longer matters.
So in this case, the interesting dynamic I was waiting for was to see an emerging mob of the underpriviledged banding together and saying to the T2 cartel, "Yeah, you've got the good stuff and it's better than our crap, but we have so much crap now and we're dumping so much of it on you, that you are going to suffocate in the stuff and we win anyway."
Alas, it didn't get there, but I was hoping. By far the most fascinating thing about Eve is it's ability to encourage group dynamics. Real corporations comprised of hundreds of people, interacting with each other on the battlefield and in the economy, in a way that more closely parallels the real world than any game I've ever played. I've played more than my share of WoW, and it's got a strong appeal, but the group dynamics are absolutely nothing compared to Eve. There is no other online game with that degree of dynamic. For that, my hats off to CCP, cheating dev and all.
For the most part, only mature adults play Eve, I think. The appeal of the game is too deep, it's not a fast moving game most of the time. Manipulating stock markets, building corporations, obtaining resources, training over the course of a year of real time. It doesn't have the immediate gratification of a WoW, but it is amazing for what it is. I'd be interested to see what the player base would have been capable of on its own as far as restoring balance even in the presence of a monopolizing cartel of T2-lords.
Agreed. This clause refers to running Vista in VMs a la VMWare. The concern is that they want you to buy 3 copies of Vista instead of cloning three VMWare images and running 3 machines on one fat piece of hardware. Bootcamp isn't even virtualization as what it does is make it easier to grab the appropriate Windows drivers (for Mac hardware and load them during the install process. Installing Vista on a Mac is the same as installing on any other supported hardware (Intel Core duo + ATI video doe my iMac); it's the OS run directly on your hardware with appropriate drivers. The guy from Parallels is right about his comment because they _do_ virtualize the hardware and give you a VM, but thats not at all the same as the title claim which is "All Mac users pay a M$ tax to run Vista". No, they won't have to and that would be a stupid move for M$. They will be very happy to make their $199 or whatever it is if you are a Mac user and disable enough of your brain to think you might like to occasionally prefer Vista over MacOS.
Like removing Donald Rumsfeld. There are many replies here that say politicians pander to the public to get elected and once they are in, they do whatever they want. This is just not true, and I wonder what those same people would do with authority. A leader is still culpable. Look at the recent election of a democratic majority. That was a message from the people; granted it was a tepid one and not particularly effectual. Consider the impeachment of Nixon. Consider the fact that Bush had to rethink his policy in Iraq. He was forced to recant his original stance which was, "Our efforts are right beyond question." He was forced by public opinion as communicated through the elections to acknowledge that all was not right with his foreign policy in the Middle East.
The other point to address (not in the parent post but in some of the others at this post level) is this idea that the general population is stupid and that therefore we need someone smarter with real integrity to hold to the Constitution and do right by us even when we are too dumb to know for ourselves. Do you think so little of your friends and neighbors? The earliest example of a democratic government that I have read the history on was Athens. In Athens, public offices were assigned by lot. That's right: a lot was assigned to every citizen and they drew randomly for public offices! What you have to realize is that by investing people with that kind of responsibility, they have the opportunity to rise to that level of expectation. And peer pressure is very powerful, as we all know and have experienced, and works to hold people to those standards.
The more responsibility you are willing to give a person, the more they are able to rise to that responsibility. If a person knows that others are truly relying upon them to do something, the majority of people that I know rise to that. Even if I think Bush's policies are short-sighted and his elocution is abysmal, I do feel that he is doing his absolute best to do right by his nation. I personally do not think the erosion of our civil rights to combat the fear of victimization by terrorist acts is the right approach, but I can see the desire to do right, even if I think it is misguided.
In summary, people are always accountable to their peers. There is no one that is beyond the law of the majority. We are all subject to it. You can say, "Oh, look at Hitler." Yes, look at Hitler. One of the most vilified human beings in history who met a very abrupt end. Saddam hanging from a rope with a U-bend in his neck. Atrocities happen, but in every historical instance, balance is restored, simply because the majority does rule. It takes time, but it is inevitable. And in this day and age with media as ubiquitous as ours, accountability for good or naught is that much more immediate. So if we had a President that always acted in the best interest of the majority, I would be all right with that, because if it took us to a place "we" do not want to be, then we have only ourselves to blame, and only ourselves to expect a solution from.
Maybe if people spent more time owning up to that responsibility instead of trying to pick the "one guy or girl that's going to be emminently responsible for us all" things would be better.
The real disaster will come when citizens start dying left and right from the concrete bowling balls that come spewing out of the volcano. "Ok, maybe we were wrong on the drilling thing, but concrete bowling balls--that's a no brainer; nothing can possibly go wrong."
Slashdot Mirror
Those are the exit vents for the Martian atmosphere generator.
Yes, you are astute, kind, and literate. Thank you for taking the time to share with me.
Uh huh, so what you're saying is that I'm a champion of the Master Helga's Class of You Will Be A Disciplined Exercising Like An Aduly 6 year old. Right, that's really what I meant. I didn't mean anything like teaching kids the value of organized sports by providing them with a safe environment to go out and kick a ball around together, or provide a little guidance on how the game of baseball is played. I meant ramming it down their throats until they love it despite themselves...
The fact that you have a terrible bias toward exercise in school or the idea that organization can be valuable but appropriately relaxed for young children is not my issue and is not my misunderstanding. I've worked with young children 4-10 in martial arts and I can tell you with the right approach the benefits are tremendous and they have a huge amount of fun doing something they wouldn't otherwise know how to begin doing.
So you don't debunk anything because I'm speaking from personal experience of a positive result and your speaking of probably your personal experience and hatred of what happened to you as a kid or saw happen to kids. Well, your negative experience and bias does nothing to change my positive experience and that's all I set out to say. It has a lot of value. If Helga the Authoritarian isn't the one providing the structure.
Right. To both responders, I did obviously read the article. My point, which you deftly gave an entire miss in favor of insulting me is that teaching youth the value of organized sports and exercise at the age of 1, 2, 3, 4.9, or 12 has a very real and lasting value because they will shortly be in the situations which I described. I also made the point that numbers referred to from the study are extremely misleading because body weight is not a function of how much you eat--it is a function of the relative balance between how much you burn vs. how much you take in and the real question is not whether the Law of Conservation of Energy is in play--obviously it is--the question is will participation in sports lead to a lifestyle that is in general less likely to cause obesity. The answer is clearly yes: individuals that go on to a sport or exercise program that is at all serious being the most obvious in that category.
When people just assume I didn't read the article because I made an inferrence and pointed out the logical conclusion of a sports regimine and the fact that the referrant to the article was citing the article in a misleading way--well, I still won't cut on people, but you might want to think again. And I know plenty of families with fat young kids that don't balance out sitting in a chair for hours with bouncing around in the yard after hours. They just build a habit of lethargy. Not all, but a lot of them. So even that part of the article is highly suspicious to me.
Maybe I am insightful. A person wouldn't recognize that if they weren't paying attention or thinking critically. "I don't get what he's saying, he must be dumb. It doesn't seem directly to parrot the article or contradict it in an obvious way. RTFA, dork." Nice.People who engage in sports and are in all other ways have the same activity of your average couch potato do burn more calories. You can't magically cheat the system. A person that participates in an organized sport for an hour a day will burn more calories than someone that sits on their duff for that hour. The real question is, does being in a sport make you more disciplined about matching your caloric intake to your actual need. For many sports the answer is likely no, so the jock just ups his burger intake and keeps pace with the couch potato, fat-wise.
For sports with weight classes or any highly competitive sport where BMI is relevant (wrestling, bodybuilding, most track events, you bet your fat ass there will be a difference. The successful atheletes will be leaner, burn more calories, and eat more calories. Way more. Anyone that has been through high school or college and seen one of these teams eat and train knows this obvious fact without commissioning an expensive study.
More wasted dollars.
It isn't all roses with DSL.
Currently I have a ticket in with Verizon because for the first month of service on my 3Mbps line, I've never exceeded 35K/s. That's a factor of about 10 slower than I was sold on--they're "looking into it".
I've had Verison DSL in the past however and not heard a peep from them for 3 years, so likely it is noticeably nicer than the disgusting cable cartel tactics.
My history was, C64->Apple IIe->Intellivision->Coleco->Mac SE->Nintendo->286->386->home built Pentium I, 2, 3, 4->home built...You know, I'd rather be having sex right now--oh snap, this is a much better way to make things at home!->iMac.
Only practical way. Either that or self repairing hulls.
Sure, I'll speculate my foot up T-Mobile's monopolistic ass. How's my speculation now?
It's not like we can't easily get that kind of actual data and it's not like we don't have our own personal data to use as a reference point. Instead you get a bunch of proselytizing corporate jackasses. If this was so much of a problem, then digital television people would be positiviely wigging out over HD TV, but are they? No. They're rubbing their hands together with glee at all the revenues from the switch over and the new services they will be able to provide on their fat pipes.
Blah, blah. Corporations should shut up and solve the technical problems. That's how they make their money. If they can't do it, well some other guy will come along and do it and make bank. All this really is, is a pathetically thinly veiled attempt to get more money than they deserve. "If you would just let go of that whole network neutrality thing and let us charge you arbitrary amounts not based on the actual technical cost but rather on how much you want it, we could make so much more money, OMG! Please won't you let us, really...it's too hard the other way despite all the evidence to the contrary, honest, we swear."
Well of course you can rob people blind once costs are arbitrarily fixed by human desire and capacity to spend rather than actual cost of production. Every monopoly ever created is based on that; look at software. *snort*
And I most definitely did not say that a parent should let their child run wild. Not at all. There are plenty of ways to engage an intelligent and fiercely independent child in meaningful discussion. Instead of berating them and trying to control them, you can offer your knowledge and experience and lead by example. Good parents do this and they do it early when a child is most receptive and interested in what they have to share. They don't expect or demand things of their children, family, and friends. They don't force things upon others. They offer what knowledge and help they can, when asked for it, and they focus on doing what is right so that others around them have an example to look up to. You cannot ever reach understanding and respect with a child if you are busy fighting and judging them ceaselessly. They will just hate you and then they will want to destroy you, everyone like you, and if it goes far enough, everyone.
That was my point. And now...I should apparently return to my bong hits...just as soon as I acquire a bong.
Some kids find that a lot more important than others to prove that people can't make them do anything, and if you ride them hard, they won't ever stop fighting and lashing out. Eventually, they reach adulthood, and they encounter the people that can make them do something (e.g. the police that put them behind bars). And that's a terrible waste, but an inevitable consequence of spending a child's entire adolescence teaching them that they are accountable to someone other than themself, when ultimately, goodness comes from within and true goodness only comes out when you hold yourself accountable above all other people (i.e. Do you do right because you want to do what is right or because you are compelled to by real or implied force?)
It surely isn't all roses when the parental figure is describing how this is the only person in the world that they hate and how they fought with a minor for the minor's entire adolescence. What kind of adult will that create? Someone that is trained to fight and fight and hurt people. Nature vs. Nurture indeed. That kid didn't get even close to the same environment as his brother. He got the authoritarian "try everthing under the Sun (grounding for a month, ha!) to manipulate this child" environment, while his brother very likely was out of the spotlight almost all of the time due to their attention being centered on the other one.
She's absolutely right that it has nothing whatsoever to do with playing video games, though.
At the company, many of the users were technically savvy, and more importantly, the process associated with IT was prohibitively complicated. It would take too long to get an IT project approved, and so people would use readily available tools (Excel and Access were the big ones) to develop solutions that met the need.
I'm sure everyone knows that in the health insurance industry, data privacy is extremely important, so yes, the IT department had some valid concerns about meeting government regulation, but to be fearful of an educated and motivated user that needs something and is willing to invest their time to get it...that's stupid.
This type of alarmism is your typical FUD that arises when a bunch of established people get jittery about where their paycheck will come from when they feel that someone is threatening the usefulness of their job by doing the things that they used to do. I have one response to that.
The model-T Ford.
Yes, all those horse and buggy people were pissed. The smart ones just rolled with it and became mechanics and made fortunes in the automotive industry. And here, too, all that is really required is to say, "OK, what are the new services that we can provide now that we have successfully built tools easy enough that the end-user can use them productively for basic development and analytic tasks?" Guess, what? There will be many more jobs that grow out of millions of educated users all over the world learning to use Excel and Access, etc.
At the health insurance company, what I could clearly see that our VP of IT could not, was that the efforts of our business people were doing an amazing job of forcing the IT process to become more efficient and less complacent. In other words, it demanded that IT actually earn their paycheck, and that IT explore the new responsiblities that they could take on with their considerable technical skills, in order to better serve a new and more educated customer (technically knowledgeable business users).
Fear arises because people are God damn lazy. "But I like doing what I've always done. Doing new things is hard. I have to actually learn to do new things. Oh, I just can't possibly see what we will do now that users can do things with data. Oh, why! Why did we give them a power tool that empowers them to go to Home Depot and then rennovate their house themselves, oh why???" Well carpenters haven't gone out of business and neither will IT people...not the proactive ones at any rate.
The tools will get better and the end user will be able to do more, which means there will be more new business requirements that need specialists to assist the business user, and so on. It's been this same process for generation after generation, and every there are a bunch of alarmists crying doom, and every time new opportunities arise from the changes and the economy experiences a net positive growth.
Would we necessarily have to expand or die? No. Dinosaurs hung out for hundreds of millions of years. We could. And we're more resourceful so we could survive a global extinction event. Do we have the maturity to reign in our intellect and create that kind of sustainability? A million year old civilization that actually has a written history that long? Probably we don't. How hard is that to do? I don't know. Neither does anyone else. It may be that only certain species with specific fundamental brain wiring can evolve along a path of development which is naturally balanced by a desire for sustainable balance with the ecosystem instead of what we currently have which is sort of live by expansion.
Our commercial model is pretty much grow or die in many cases. That's just an echo of the way we operate in this day and age.
And what about space? What about races that evolve into virtual societies because they can simulate more space than is actually available. Or what about races that convert themselves to energy and free themselves from terrestrial existence entirely? Is it possible? I think so. How do we know? We don't. One way or the other. This paradox is based on rules we created with our limited understanding of what is possible.
If religions are based on facts that most of us do not perceive well, there is a spiritual domain where I suppose billions or trillions of entities exist on an energetic level. And energy can occupy the same space without losing individuality (overlapping magnetic waves that pass through each other without interacting). So space constraints are not what they seem.
A responsibly mature alien race would deliberately not colonize and subjugate every inhabitable ecosystem in the galaxy because of biodiversity. They wouldn't expand needlessly. They would know the science and sociology of a necessary and sufficient number of members of a particular species as a function of its genetic code and evolutionary potential. They would know so many things that we do not, but the one thing that they would know is that you don't turn every beautiful thing in the galaxy to slag to fuel your own boundless growth. But we don't seem to know that. In fact, diversity makes us scared. Diversity of race, of ideology, etc.
There is no Fermi Paradox. There is only a very immature race that doesn't yet see the big enough picture to realize the paradox is really just a reflection of our own limitations.
Etc.
I think we should put lots of smaller animals on the ark and ship it out with computer systems to maintain and land it. Then wait and see what species evolves into intelligence first this time around :)
Because eventually the mass of the lense would become gravitationally significant. But it might be neat having a second moon which is a bigass eye. Cool!
How do you think we evolved...we are the cocktail.
7 million Wow accounts and rising. Add the growth in the console markets, etc. Eventually it will be just like watching a TV channel. Totally mundane and ubiquitous.
So in this case, the interesting dynamic I was waiting for was to see an emerging mob of the underpriviledged banding together and saying to the T2 cartel, "Yeah, you've got the good stuff and it's better than our crap, but we have so much crap now and we're dumping so much of it on you, that you are going to suffocate in the stuff and we win anyway."
Alas, it didn't get there, but I was hoping. By far the most fascinating thing about Eve is it's ability to encourage group dynamics. Real corporations comprised of hundreds of people, interacting with each other on the battlefield and in the economy, in a way that more closely parallels the real world than any game I've ever played. I've played more than my share of WoW, and it's got a strong appeal, but the group dynamics are absolutely nothing compared to Eve. There is no other online game with that degree of dynamic. For that, my hats off to CCP, cheating dev and all.
For the most part, only mature adults play Eve, I think. The appeal of the game is too deep, it's not a fast moving game most of the time. Manipulating stock markets, building corporations, obtaining resources, training over the course of a year of real time. It doesn't have the immediate gratification of a WoW, but it is amazing for what it is. I'd be interested to see what the player base would have been capable of on its own as far as restoring balance even in the presence of a monopolizing cartel of T2-lords.
By golly, you have a point.
Agreed. This clause refers to running Vista in VMs a la VMWare. The concern is that they want you to buy 3 copies of Vista instead of cloning three VMWare images and running 3 machines on one fat piece of hardware. Bootcamp isn't even virtualization as what it does is make it easier to grab the appropriate Windows drivers (for Mac hardware and load them during the install process. Installing Vista on a Mac is the same as installing on any other supported hardware (Intel Core duo + ATI video doe my iMac); it's the OS run directly on your hardware with appropriate drivers. The guy from Parallels is right about his comment because they _do_ virtualize the hardware and give you a VM, but thats not at all the same as the title claim which is "All Mac users pay a M$ tax to run Vista". No, they won't have to and that would be a stupid move for M$. They will be very happy to make their $199 or whatever it is if you are a Mac user and disable enough of your brain to think you might like to occasionally prefer Vista over MacOS.
The other point to address (not in the parent post but in some of the others at this post level) is this idea that the general population is stupid and that therefore we need someone smarter with real integrity to hold to the Constitution and do right by us even when we are too dumb to know for ourselves. Do you think so little of your friends and neighbors? The earliest example of a democratic government that I have read the history on was Athens. In Athens, public offices were assigned by lot. That's right: a lot was assigned to every citizen and they drew randomly for public offices! What you have to realize is that by investing people with that kind of responsibility, they have the opportunity to rise to that level of expectation. And peer pressure is very powerful, as we all know and have experienced, and works to hold people to those standards.
The more responsibility you are willing to give a person, the more they are able to rise to that responsibility. If a person knows that others are truly relying upon them to do something, the majority of people that I know rise to that. Even if I think Bush's policies are short-sighted and his elocution is abysmal, I do feel that he is doing his absolute best to do right by his nation. I personally do not think the erosion of our civil rights to combat the fear of victimization by terrorist acts is the right approach, but I can see the desire to do right, even if I think it is misguided.
In summary, people are always accountable to their peers. There is no one that is beyond the law of the majority. We are all subject to it. You can say, "Oh, look at Hitler." Yes, look at Hitler. One of the most vilified human beings in history who met a very abrupt end. Saddam hanging from a rope with a U-bend in his neck. Atrocities happen, but in every historical instance, balance is restored, simply because the majority does rule. It takes time, but it is inevitable. And in this day and age with media as ubiquitous as ours, accountability for good or naught is that much more immediate. So if we had a President that always acted in the best interest of the majority, I would be all right with that, because if it took us to a place "we" do not want to be, then we have only ourselves to blame, and only ourselves to expect a solution from.
Maybe if people spent more time owning up to that responsibility instead of trying to pick the "one guy or girl that's going to be emminently responsible for us all" things would be better.
The real disaster will come when citizens start dying left and right from the concrete bowling balls that come spewing out of the volcano. "Ok, maybe we were wrong on the drilling thing, but concrete bowling balls--that's a no brainer; nothing can possibly go wrong."