What part of this sentence from the GP post do you not understand?
"If the terms of the contract are considered reasonable, you may be held to them in a court of law."
Your example with the candy and the money would clearly not be considered reasonable. Did you not see this clear statement from the GP or are you deliberately ignoring it?
As much as I like to side with the little guy, I think it's perfectly reasonable for the courts to recognize the impracticality of requiring that EULAs be read or signed before every sale, instead giving the customer full legal rights to reject the product after it has arrived and they've had the opportunity to read the EULA. Obviously the EULA has to be reasonable, and your candy example just demonstrates how obvious unreasonable terms can be.
Did you read the document that was linked to - the summary of the Hill vs. Gateway 2000 decision? The judge makes many good points. At no time while I was reading the summary did I feel that the court had lost its grip on reality.
Why are they running these experiments on mouse cells? Why aren't they starting with human skin cells and developing their techniques there? It would avoid the secondary step of having to transfer the technique from mouse tissue to human tissue.
I always assumed that the reason that experiments are done on mice and other animals is that they are easier to obtain than human subjects and that we can do things to them that would be considered unethical when done to a human (leaving aside some people's feelings that they are unethical when done to animals too).
But with skin cell experiments, I don't see the reason to do the research on animals. Human skin cells ought to be readily available, ethical to obtain, and ethical to experiment on.
Why start with mice on this? Why not start with humans and cut one step out of the process?
You can already cut 2.5 lbs from your rucksack and get everything else you want. Just buy a Panasonic R5. Heck, I'll bet you could cut close to 2.5 lbs out of your rucksack by buying a beast like the Panasonic Y5 (I have the Y2) - 3.3 lbs with a 14.1 inch 1400x1050 display. 6 hr battery life (although be warned, after the first couple of years it drops to 3 hrs, but I think that's pretty standard for lithium ion batteries (a crummy technology if there ever was one)).
Of course, these solutions are grossly more expensive than Palm's offerings. Like, $2,000 more expensive... but - you get what you pay for!
So describe it to us. What was it like, this picture-phone thing? What did you think of it back then? How did the concept fit into the larger context of technology at the time?
As far as my own personal experiences go... back in college in '91 or so I distinctly remember driving my new car (new to me - it was a 1979 Toyota Celica Supra), feeling on top of the world, and having lofty visions of what the future of technology would hold. I distinctly remember thinking that someday, every movie, every episode of every TV show, every piece of video ever made, would be available to a person in their home, they'd just have to select what they wanted to watch and it would be somehow broadcast to them. With video on the internet I think we're getting very close to that vision.
Probably because I don't understand multicast well enough. In fact, I don't really understand it at all - I thought it was kind of like broadcast packets which can cross gateways. I should go read up on it...
My assumption was that this means that everybody's broadband connection would be receiving multicast packets for every channel all the time. With 190+ channels this would be what, 190 Mbits? So if it is possible for it to be multicast as you suggest, then I must not be understanding the concept...
The ATT site is somewhat short on details, but it does mention that it delivers TV programming "using Internet Protocol via a broadband connection".
This raises some questions:
1) Is the bandwidth dedicated to television progamming separate from your other broadband use? Or does watching TV take up most of your bandwidth? Given that they offer a DVR, which means that TV programming will be continuously streamed to the device (think 1/2 hour buffers or whatever), I would expect the only reasonable way for this to work is for AT&T to dedicate bandwidth above and beyond your normal broadband connection to TV programming. But that's just a guess...
2) Is the 4 "tuner" DVR capable of recording 4 programs at once *in real time* over a single "U-verse" connection? Or does each show stream in at 1/4 real time and you just have to wait 4x longer for all shows to complete?
3) Are they using multicast IP or peer-to-peer streaming? I would expect the latter since multicasting 190+ channels would seem infeasable.
4) Given that it's likely peer-to-peer, does AT&T really think they have the server capacity to support tens of thousands of customers all streaming different programming at different times?
5) Are there QOS guarantees in place that would prevent my TV programming from ever "hiccuping" due to traffic congestion?
It looks like a very interesting offering *if* the aspects of the service that AT&T "conveniently" left out in their documentation live up to the hype - i.e., if you really can record 4 channels (or even 2) at once in real time without disturbing your other broadband use.
I think there is no contradiction between saying that eating anything I want to gives me no physical problems, and that I lost 15 pounds living in China for 9 months. I am approximately 10 pounds over ideal weight. This is not obese, or even close to it. I don't think that being 10 pounds over ideal weight is a "physical problem". A "physical problem" is allergic reactions, headaches, loss of energy, sleeplessness, whatever. I didn't mention any of those did I?
And my conclusion is that for me at least, and I expect for most people, the food I eat does not have a great effect on how I feel. Even eating healthier Chinese food for 9 months and subsequently losing weight, did not make me feel any better or worse than I had previously or have since.
Any other obvious aspects to my post that you'd like me to clarify for you?
I drink or eat anything I want to, and none if it ever gives me headaches or causes any other physical problems. I honestly don't know what is up with all of the people who claim sensitivity to this or that or the other thing. I guess it's really true and I feel bad for you. But the insinuation that these chemicals are damaging and cause problems for everyone, is false. In fact I would venture a guess that the people who have bad experiences with these substances are very much in the minority, otherwise these problems would be much more recognized and accepted.
I drank only water (no soft drinks, juices, milk, or any other substance) for about 3 years. It was a new year's resolution one year to stop drinking sugary drinks, and I like it so much that I kept it up for 3 years. While I felt good about it and enjoyed the act of keeping such a strict rule for myself, and got some satisfaction out of the process, it didn't make one difference in how I felt, or in my general health. The only big change was when I lived in China for 9 months and lost 15 pounds without even trying, just because the food was so much healthier (no ice creams or cookies or cakes or pies or any kind of junk food really). I promptly gained it all back when I returned to the USA.
However, even though I lost that weight in China, I felt no better or worse than I did back in the USA once I gained it back.
I have no food allergies of any kind, or lactose intolerance. I can drink soft drinks with aspartame/saccharine/sorbitol/whatever, eat MSG (I love the stuff, it makes food taste so goood!), white flour, processed sugar, anything and everything. And I feel fine and am generally healthy (although 10 lbs over my ideal weight and suffering from lack of exercise).
The Wired piece is very light on details. It doesn't say who the Sturgeon person is supposed to have murdered, or where, or when, or whether or not any of them have any relationship to the Reiser case. Also it doesn't suggest whether or not investigators have correlated Sturgeon's confessions with any known facts about any missing people or unsolved murders. Or maybe this Sturgeon guy had already been charged in a bunch of murders and finally confessed. Who knows, the story is so light on details.
Does anyone know any more about this Sturgeon guy and his confessions?
OK, so clearly I was wrong about there being no races from northern climates with dark skin. Everyone pointed out Inuit, but lots of people also pointed out that they probably have dark skin because they spend so much time around ice and snow and water, all of which reflect UV light (ever get a sunburn on the ski slopes? Even when it was overcast? Yep, there's alot of UV light bouncing around when there is snow on the ground). Also I guess they haven't been there that long (5,000 years as some people suggest)...
I believe that the *most* races that developed away from the equator became lighter than *most* races that developed near the equator. Not all races adapted equally to vitamin D production vs. sunburn pressures, though. Diet and other factors probably played a role, more in some races than others.
Anyway, I am glad that lots of people had intelligent responses to my post. I just found it surprising that the GP post was saying that latitude was agreed by biologists not to have affected skin color, which just seems counterintuitive to me.
Name one race from a northern climate that has brown or black skin. You can't. There aren't any. Now name a race from an equatorial region that has white or light skin. Once again, you can't.
I'd say this is pretty strong evidence for the GP's point. Sure, there will be variations among races at the same latitude, I wouldn't be surprised if some equatorial people were darker than others. But I would also be surprised if there wasn't a STRONG correlation between latitude and skin color. It would seem really, really unlikely that this was "caused by genetic variation of a few settlers." Yeah, the light colored setters just randomly happened to move north, and the darker people stayed south. Sure.
And people weren't in northern europe long enough for evolution to have played a role? OK then how about China? Northern Chinese are very light-skinned, I know this from experience. And surprise, surprise - southern Chinese are alot darker. And don't you think that a 60% greater chance of disease due to vitamin D deficiency would be a strong evolutionary pressure? Strong enough to act over relatively short time periods on the evolutionary scale perhaps?
Anyway, if your evidence for this evolutionary biologists' "dismissal" of skin color's correlation to latitude is one book, that's pretty weak. Of course, it's still more evidence than I can submit.
My friend, that was a truly awesome post. Where are the mod points when you need them?!?! Can we do some kind of global query-replace on this topic and get some of these good comments on the top page in place of the lame "Soviet Union" joke rehashes??! Please?
The problem is endemic to a society that does not value education, and does not place personable responsibility above entitlement. In this case, the knife cuts both ways: stingy and selfish people do not want to fund schools; and apathetic and irresponsible parents do not enforce proper behavior in their children either at school or at home.
I guess that some people believe that other places have the opposite problem of the USA; whereas the USA has too many resources and not enough personal responsibility, there is a belief that other places, especially third world countries, have personal responsibility but not enough resources. So the goal of projects like this is to try to help people who, it is believed, would actually make something out of themselves given the chance, instead of squander whatever resources are spent to attempt to help them better themselves.
My personal opinion is that, the difference between the uneducated in the USA and the uneducated in a third world country is likely to be alot less than what other people may believe. I have been to a decent number of places in the world and the thing which strikes me most is that people everywhere are pretty much the same. The only real difference is the larger circumstances, usually beyond their control, that they find themselves living in. I think that more children in a third world country would benefit from something like OLPC than would children in the USA, but more because of their circumstances than anything else. In both cases, I think the number of actual children who will benefit from being given a free laptop with educational tools on it is not as high as philanthropists would like to believe.
That being said, I am a 100% supporter of OLPC because, first I think it's a cool project from a technical standpoint, and second, I think it *will* provide some benefit to today's generation of third-world children, and that this benefit will be multiplied as these children grow up and can help to educate even more of the next generation of third-world children. Also I like to hope that I am wrong in my assessment of humanity, and that things will go much better than I would have predicted.
I think that likely the reason the GP was so harsh was that they're tired of reading dismissive comments posted without even the most basic research into the problem, which happens all the time whenever OLPC is brought up. I am tired of such comments too.
Gawsh, thanks and all, but I am really no less of a dickhead than anyone else. I do try to be polite but don't always succeed.
For what it's worth, I am not thinking about Star Trek type stuff. I'm just not knowledgeable enough about biochemistry to know how hard and fast the rules of life you are talking about are. And so I wonder if there aren't ways for chemicals to operate in other places that would sustain life, mostly because I don't even know how wide the variance in behavior between chemicals in earth conditions are versus the conditions on other planets. I am sure that real scientists know, though, and if you're one of those, and telling me that other kinds of life just aren't likely, I guess I'll have to believe you. Still, if I had a Ph.D. in biochemistry in front of me, who had the patience to deal with me, I'd definitely pepper them with questions to try to help myself understand *why exactly* other forms of life-chemistry aren't possible (yeah what you said about carbon seems reasonable, but what about other atoms under extreme pressure or temperature conditions?).
It's kind of like if you never knew that there was such a thing as a catalyst. You might say, chemical reaction X is unlikely to ever happen frequently or quickly enough to sustain any reasonable life chemistry. But then you find out about catalysts and you realize that all kind of chemical reactions which previously seemed prohibitively slow or rare are suddenly viable building blocks of life processes.
What if there's some catalyst out there in the form of chemicals, temperatures, pressures, and other conditions not found on Earth, that allow processes that support a form of life that we never could have predicted? What if it's not necessary for there to be stable, complex molecules based on carbon as long as transient, fragile and short-lived molecules of other atoms can still combine with the help of these as-of-yet-undiscovered other-world-chemistry catalysts to support other kinds of life?
Anyway, like I said, it's just my lack of knowledge of biochemistry that makes me wonder this. I guess that since the larger body of science seems to be so concerned with finding water on other planets, I should accept this as proof that people who know much more than I do about this stuff realize that water is where it's at. I just wish the reasons behind that were more widely disseminated.
I think you're making my point for me. Why does life have to based on processes similar to our own, using chemicals similar to our own, at temperatures similar to Earth? Why can't some substance that is gaseous in Earth conditions be liquid in a colder planet's conditions, and combined with other substances which have different properties than they would on Earth under that planet's conditions, be able to support chemical structures and reactions of a different kind of life?
Sure, at Earth's temperatures and atmospheric pressures, along with who knows how many other Earth-specific variables, water works great for what it does. But why can't some other molecule in vastly different conditions serve the same purpose elsewhere?
Note that I have no idea what such a molecule might be or how it might work; but I don't think that Earth conditions are so unique that they'd be the only way for life to work.
I think that with respect to your last comment, I think that at a certain level of detail in observation (meaning, once our ability to examine another planet outside our solar system becomes good enough), we'll be able to see even non-intelligent life forms on other planets, just as I would expect that from a far distance, if you could see Earth well enough, you'd be able to see the algae in the oceans (or infer them from other observations), or the forests on the continents.
I guess I assumed that all of the news articles which hype up the fact that another "almost-Earth-like" planet somewhere out there (there was just one on Slashdot today I am pretty sure) are doing so because the presumption is that there could be life there.
The article mentions that when looking for life elsewhere in the universe, "We should make sure we don't lock into ideas that are entirely centered on what we see on Earth", suggesting basically that we don't just look for green plants, but accept that plants on other planets could be any color.
Duh.
I can't understand people who think that to find life on other planets we have to look for conditions similar to Earth. All of the hubbub over liquid water seems so silly to me. We have *no idea* what life on other planets might be like. I think that the only thing to look for is patterns which we don't believe could occur in nature, suggesting that the anti-entropy force of life might be present.
Anyway, I'm kind of a skeptic already, I don't think that looking for life outside our galaxy is particularly interesting or useful anyway, considering that the nearest life would be millions of years away by interstellar travel. Even if it's out there, we'll never meet it or communicate with it.
I think there is debate about whether or not the switch happened on election night or a few days later. The comments I have read here on Slashdot seem to suggest that it's not clear which it was.
If it was on election night, then I think the point is that the site could have manipulated the early result tabulation to the Republicans' benefit. If you believe that people are more likely to go to the poll if their candidate is losing than if their candidate is winning, then they'd just have to show that the early results favored the Democrat (even if the Republican was in fact winning) to give a boost to the Republican vote count.
It's my personal belief that every election since the United States was founded has probably been littered with fraud. It's just that now we have better means of monitoring this stuff and getting the word out than ever before, and also now that the races are so close, the fraud has alot more attention paid to it.
I wish that there weren't people who wanted to cheat to win elections. I can tell you with 100% certainty that if I were involved in politics, I would never allow cheating by my supporters even if it was to my detriment. Some things (like self-respect) are just more important than election results.
I used to think that most people were honest and wouldn't cheat. Then I started playing online games and found that in fact, most people will cheat with every means available to them, even when the prize is something as meaningless as a win in an online game. I am not surprised that in real life, cheaters are everywhere in the electoral process.
Perhaps so, but... in the wikipedia article you reference, the vast majority of the election irregularities reported are republicans using dirty tricks to try to steal votes. Since the Dems won anyway, I guess it didn't really matter so much, so people aren't giving it too much attention.
I am an "independent" (never voted Democrat -or- Republican), and I think both parties suck. But my god, the Republicans suck orders of magnitude more. I don't understand how a party whose basic principles make so much sense, can in reality be the lowest political scum imagineable.
> I'm just saying that you can't claim that the English don't speak English, which is often the case (by US teachers, primarily, in my experience).
Where did that come from? You didn't mention that aspect of your point before.
I completely agree with you if this is the point you are trying to make. Anyone who tries to say that the English don't speak English is obviously and ludicrously incorrect.
I guess I thought this was obvious, but perhaps not... languages tend to be named for the original peoples who spoke it, even after other places start using it. "English" refers to the mutually-intelligible collection of languages spoken in the U.K, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, India, etc. It's pretty simple really. Nobody "wants" English to mean one thing or another. It means what is most useful for the largest collection of speakers.
Perhaps you should be asking instead, why do *you* want to restrict the meaning of the word "English" to something that satisfies your viewpoint? If the meaning of the word English is so commonly understood that it means the same thing to several billion people worldwide, why do you want to insist that it should be something else?
By the way, I'm pretty sure that Australians call their language English too. And so to Kiwis (I know this because I live in New Zealand). And I'll bet that Austrians call what they speak "German". And that Mexicans call what they speak "Spanish", and Brazilians, "Portuguese".
It's a pretty simple and predictable pattern really.
Thanks for your response. It is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for, although I'll forgive you your 700,000+ Slashdot ID:)
Just curious, when did you get your ID? When was Slashdot in the 700,000s? It looks like it must be over 1,000,000 now because I've seen quite a few people with 980,000+ so there must be some 1,000,000s out there...
Also I think your comment about Slashdot needing more posts to stimulate the mind and fewer to stimulate the post counts, is spot on.
Slashdot Mirror
What part of this sentence from the GP post do you not understand?
"If the terms of the contract are considered reasonable, you may be held to them in a court of law."
Your example with the candy and the money would clearly not be considered reasonable. Did you not see this clear statement from the GP or are you deliberately ignoring it?
As much as I like to side with the little guy, I think it's perfectly reasonable for the courts to recognize the impracticality of requiring that EULAs be read or signed before every sale, instead giving the customer full legal rights to reject the product after it has arrived and they've had the opportunity to read the EULA. Obviously the EULA has to be reasonable, and your candy example just demonstrates how obvious unreasonable terms can be.
Did you read the document that was linked to - the summary of the Hill vs. Gateway 2000 decision? The judge makes many good points. At no time while I was reading the summary did I feel that the court had lost its grip on reality.
Why are they running these experiments on mouse cells? Why aren't they starting with human skin cells and developing their techniques there? It would avoid the secondary step of having to transfer the technique from mouse tissue to human tissue.
I always assumed that the reason that experiments are done on mice and other animals is that they are easier to obtain than human subjects and that we can do things to them that would be considered unethical when done to a human (leaving aside some people's feelings that they are unethical when done to animals too).
But with skin cell experiments, I don't see the reason to do the research on animals. Human skin cells ought to be readily available, ethical to obtain, and ethical to experiment on.
Why start with mice on this? Why not start with humans and cut one step out of the process?
You can already cut 2.5 lbs from your rucksack and get everything else you want. Just buy a Panasonic R5. Heck, I'll bet you could cut close to 2.5 lbs out of your rucksack by buying a beast like the Panasonic Y5 (I have the Y2) - 3.3 lbs with a 14.1 inch 1400x1050 display. 6 hr battery life (although be warned, after the first couple of years it drops to 3 hrs, but I think that's pretty standard for lithium ion batteries (a crummy technology if there ever was one)).
... but - you get what you pay for!
Of course, these solutions are grossly more expensive than Palm's offerings. Like, $2,000 more expensive
So describe it to us. What was it like, this picture-phone thing? What did you think of it back then? How did the concept fit into the larger context of technology at the time?
... back in college in '91 or so I distinctly remember driving my new car (new to me - it was a 1979 Toyota Celica Supra), feeling on top of the world, and having lofty visions of what the future of technology would hold. I distinctly remember thinking that someday, every movie, every episode of every TV show, every piece of video ever made, would be available to a person in their home, they'd just have to select what they wanted to watch and it would be somehow broadcast to them. With video on the internet I think we're getting very close to that vision.
As far as my own personal experiences go
Probably because I don't understand multicast well enough. In fact, I don't really understand it at all - I thought it was kind of like broadcast packets which can cross gateways. I should go read up on it ...
...
My assumption was that this means that everybody's broadband connection would be receiving multicast packets for every channel all the time. With 190+ channels this would be what, 190 Mbits? So if it is possible for it to be multicast as you suggest, then I must not be understanding the concept
The ATT site is somewhat short on details, but it does mention that it delivers TV programming "using Internet Protocol via a broadband connection".
...
This raises some questions:
1) Is the bandwidth dedicated to television progamming separate from your other broadband use? Or does watching TV take up most of your bandwidth? Given that they offer a DVR, which means that TV programming will be continuously streamed to the device (think 1/2 hour buffers or whatever), I would expect the only reasonable way for this to work is for AT&T to dedicate bandwidth above and beyond your normal broadband connection to TV programming. But that's just a guess
2) Is the 4 "tuner" DVR capable of recording 4 programs at once *in real time* over a single "U-verse" connection? Or does each show stream in at 1/4 real time and you just have to wait 4x longer for all shows to complete?
3) Are they using multicast IP or peer-to-peer streaming? I would expect the latter since multicasting 190+ channels would seem infeasable.
4) Given that it's likely peer-to-peer, does AT&T really think they have the server capacity to support tens of thousands of customers all streaming different programming at different times?
5) Are there QOS guarantees in place that would prevent my TV programming from ever "hiccuping" due to traffic congestion?
It looks like a very interesting offering *if* the aspects of the service that AT&T "conveniently" left out in their documentation live up to the hype - i.e., if you really can record 4 channels (or even 2) at once in real time without disturbing your other broadband use.
I think there is no contradiction between saying that eating anything I want to gives me no physical problems, and that I lost 15 pounds living in China for 9 months. I am approximately 10 pounds over ideal weight. This is not obese, or even close to it. I don't think that being 10 pounds over ideal weight is a "physical problem". A "physical problem" is allergic reactions, headaches, loss of energy, sleeplessness, whatever. I didn't mention any of those did I?
And my conclusion is that for me at least, and I expect for most people, the food I eat does not have a great effect on how I feel. Even eating healthier Chinese food for 9 months and subsequently losing weight, did not make me feel any better or worse than I had previously or have since.
Any other obvious aspects to my post that you'd like me to clarify for you?
I drink or eat anything I want to, and none if it ever gives me headaches or causes any other physical problems. I honestly don't know what is up with all of the people who claim sensitivity to this or that or the other thing. I guess it's really true and I feel bad for you. But the insinuation that these chemicals are damaging and cause problems for everyone, is false. In fact I would venture a guess that the people who have bad experiences with these substances are very much in the minority, otherwise these problems would be much more recognized and accepted.
I drank only water (no soft drinks, juices, milk, or any other substance) for about 3 years. It was a new year's resolution one year to stop drinking sugary drinks, and I like it so much that I kept it up for 3 years. While I felt good about it and enjoyed the act of keeping such a strict rule for myself, and got some satisfaction out of the process, it didn't make one difference in how I felt, or in my general health. The only big change was when I lived in China for 9 months and lost 15 pounds without even trying, just because the food was so much healthier (no ice creams or cookies or cakes or pies or any kind of junk food really). I promptly gained it all back when I returned to the USA.
However, even though I lost that weight in China, I felt no better or worse than I did back in the USA once I gained it back.
I have no food allergies of any kind, or lactose intolerance. I can drink soft drinks with aspartame/saccharine/sorbitol/whatever, eat MSG (I love the stuff, it makes food taste so goood!), white flour, processed sugar, anything and everything. And I feel fine and am generally healthy (although 10 lbs over my ideal weight and suffering from lack of exercise).
The Wired piece is very light on details. It doesn't say who the Sturgeon person is supposed to have murdered, or where, or when, or whether or not any of them have any relationship to the Reiser case. Also it doesn't suggest whether or not investigators have correlated Sturgeon's confessions with any known facts about any missing people or unsolved murders. Or maybe this Sturgeon guy had already been charged in a bunch of murders and finally confessed. Who knows, the story is so light on details.
Does anyone know any more about this Sturgeon guy and his confessions?
OK, so clearly I was wrong about there being no races from northern climates with dark skin. Everyone pointed out Inuit, but lots of people also pointed out that they probably have dark skin because they spend so much time around ice and snow and water, all of which reflect UV light (ever get a sunburn on the ski slopes? Even when it was overcast? Yep, there's alot of UV light bouncing around when there is snow on the ground). Also I guess they haven't been there that long (5,000 years as some people suggest) ...
I believe that the *most* races that developed away from the equator became lighter than *most* races that developed near the equator. Not all races adapted equally to vitamin D production vs. sunburn pressures, though. Diet and other factors probably played a role, more in some races than others.
Anyway, I am glad that lots of people had intelligent responses to my post. I just found it surprising that the GP post was saying that latitude was agreed by biologists not to have affected skin color, which just seems counterintuitive to me.
Name one race from a northern climate that has brown or black skin. You can't. There aren't any. Now name a race from an equatorial region that has white or light skin. Once again, you can't.
I'd say this is pretty strong evidence for the GP's point. Sure, there will be variations among races at the same latitude, I wouldn't be surprised if some equatorial people were darker than others. But I would also be surprised if there wasn't a STRONG correlation between latitude and skin color. It would seem really, really unlikely that this was "caused by genetic variation of a few settlers." Yeah, the light colored setters just randomly happened to move north, and the darker people stayed south. Sure.
And people weren't in northern europe long enough for evolution to have played a role? OK then how about China? Northern Chinese are very light-skinned, I know this from experience. And surprise, surprise - southern Chinese are alot darker. And don't you think that a 60% greater chance of disease due to vitamin D deficiency would be a strong evolutionary pressure? Strong enough to act over relatively short time periods on the evolutionary scale perhaps?
Anyway, if your evidence for this evolutionary biologists' "dismissal" of skin color's correlation to latitude is one book, that's pretty weak. Of course, it's still more evidence than I can submit.
My friend, that was a truly awesome post. Where are the mod points when you need them?!?! Can we do some kind of global query-replace on this topic and get some of these good comments on the top page in place of the lame "Soviet Union" joke rehashes??! Please?
The problem is endemic to a society that does not value education, and does not place personable responsibility above entitlement. In this case, the knife cuts both ways: stingy and selfish people do not want to fund schools; and apathetic and irresponsible parents do not enforce proper behavior in their children either at school or at home.
I guess that some people believe that other places have the opposite problem of the USA; whereas the USA has too many resources and not enough personal responsibility, there is a belief that other places, especially third world countries, have personal responsibility but not enough resources. So the goal of projects like this is to try to help people who, it is believed, would actually make something out of themselves given the chance, instead of squander whatever resources are spent to attempt to help them better themselves.
My personal opinion is that, the difference between the uneducated in the USA and the uneducated in a third world country is likely to be alot less than what other people may believe. I have been to a decent number of places in the world and the thing which strikes me most is that people everywhere are pretty much the same. The only real difference is the larger circumstances, usually beyond their control, that they find themselves living in. I think that more children in a third world country would benefit from something like OLPC than would children in the USA, but more because of their circumstances than anything else. In both cases, I think the number of actual children who will benefit from being given a free laptop with educational tools on it is not as high as philanthropists would like to believe.
That being said, I am a 100% supporter of OLPC because, first I think it's a cool project from a technical standpoint, and second, I think it *will* provide some benefit to today's generation of third-world children, and that this benefit will be multiplied as these children grow up and can help to educate even more of the next generation of third-world children. Also I like to hope that I am wrong in my assessment of humanity, and that things will go much better than I would have predicted.
I think that likely the reason the GP was so harsh was that they're tired of reading dismissive comments posted without even the most basic research into the problem, which happens all the time whenever OLPC is brought up. I am tired of such comments too.
Gawsh, thanks and all, but I am really no less of a dickhead than anyone else. I do try to be polite but don't always succeed.
For what it's worth, I am not thinking about Star Trek type stuff. I'm just not knowledgeable enough about biochemistry to know how hard and fast the rules of life you are talking about are. And so I wonder if there aren't ways for chemicals to operate in other places that would sustain life, mostly because I don't even know how wide the variance in behavior between chemicals in earth conditions are versus the conditions on other planets. I am sure that real scientists know, though, and if you're one of those, and telling me that other kinds of life just aren't likely, I guess I'll have to believe you. Still, if I had a Ph.D. in biochemistry in front of me, who had the patience to deal with me, I'd definitely pepper them with questions to try to help myself understand *why exactly* other forms of life-chemistry aren't possible (yeah what you said about carbon seems reasonable, but what about other atoms under extreme pressure or temperature conditions?).
It's kind of like if you never knew that there was such a thing as a catalyst. You might say, chemical reaction X is unlikely to ever happen frequently or quickly enough to sustain any reasonable life chemistry. But then you find out about catalysts and you realize that all kind of chemical reactions which previously seemed prohibitively slow or rare are suddenly viable building blocks of life processes.
What if there's some catalyst out there in the form of chemicals, temperatures, pressures, and other conditions not found on Earth, that allow processes that support a form of life that we never could have predicted? What if it's not necessary for there to be stable, complex molecules based on carbon as long as transient, fragile and short-lived molecules of other atoms can still combine with the help of these as-of-yet-undiscovered other-world-chemistry catalysts to support other kinds of life?
Anyway, like I said, it's just my lack of knowledge of biochemistry that makes me wonder this. I guess that since the larger body of science seems to be so concerned with finding water on other planets, I should accept this as proof that people who know much more than I do about this stuff realize that water is where it's at. I just wish the reasons behind that were more widely disseminated.
I think you're making my point for me. Why does life have to based on processes similar to our own, using chemicals similar to our own, at temperatures similar to Earth? Why can't some substance that is gaseous in Earth conditions be liquid in a colder planet's conditions, and combined with other substances which have different properties than they would on Earth under that planet's conditions, be able to support chemical structures and reactions of a different kind of life?
Sure, at Earth's temperatures and atmospheric pressures, along with who knows how many other Earth-specific variables, water works great for what it does. But why can't some other molecule in vastly different conditions serve the same purpose elsewhere?
Note that I have no idea what such a molecule might be or how it might work; but I don't think that Earth conditions are so unique that they'd be the only way for life to work.
Those are very good points.
I think that with respect to your last comment, I think that at a certain level of detail in observation (meaning, once our ability to examine another planet outside our solar system becomes good enough), we'll be able to see even non-intelligent life forms on other planets, just as I would expect that from a far distance, if you could see Earth well enough, you'd be able to see the algae in the oceans (or infer them from other observations), or the forests on the continents.
I guess I assumed that all of the news articles which hype up the fact that another "almost-Earth-like" planet somewhere out there (there was just one on Slashdot today I am pretty sure) are doing so because the presumption is that there could be life there.
Also, SETI.
The article mentions that when looking for life elsewhere in the universe, "We should make sure we don't lock into ideas that are entirely centered on what we see on Earth", suggesting basically that we don't just look for green plants, but accept that plants on other planets could be any color.
Duh.
I can't understand people who think that to find life on other planets we have to look for conditions similar to Earth. All of the hubbub over liquid water seems so silly to me. We have *no idea* what life on other planets might be like. I think that the only thing to look for is patterns which we don't believe could occur in nature, suggesting that the anti-entropy force of life might be present.
Anyway, I'm kind of a skeptic already, I don't think that looking for life outside our galaxy is particularly interesting or useful anyway, considering that the nearest life would be millions of years away by interstellar travel. Even if it's out there, we'll never meet it or communicate with it.
I think there is debate about whether or not the switch happened on election night or a few days later. The comments I have read here on Slashdot seem to suggest that it's not clear which it was.
If it was on election night, then I think the point is that the site could have manipulated the early result tabulation to the Republicans' benefit. If you believe that people are more likely to go to the poll if their candidate is losing than if their candidate is winning, then they'd just have to show that the early results favored the Democrat (even if the Republican was in fact winning) to give a boost to the Republican vote count.
It's my personal belief that every election since the United States was founded has probably been littered with fraud. It's just that now we have better means of monitoring this stuff and getting the word out than ever before, and also now that the races are so close, the fraud has alot more attention paid to it.
I wish that there weren't people who wanted to cheat to win elections. I can tell you with 100% certainty that if I were involved in politics, I would never allow cheating by my supporters even if it was to my detriment. Some things (like self-respect) are just more important than election results.
I used to think that most people were honest and wouldn't cheat. Then I started playing online games and found that in fact, most people will cheat with every means available to them, even when the prize is something as meaningless as a win in an online game. I am not surprised that in real life, cheaters are everywhere in the electoral process.
Perhaps so, but ... in the wikipedia article you reference, the vast majority of the election irregularities reported are republicans using dirty tricks to try to steal votes. Since the Dems won anyway, I guess it didn't really matter so much, so people aren't giving it too much attention.
I am an "independent" (never voted Democrat -or- Republican), and I think both parties suck. But my god, the Republicans suck orders of magnitude more. I don't understand how a party whose basic principles make so much sense, can in reality be the lowest political scum imagineable.
> I'm just saying that you can't claim that the English don't speak English, which is often the case (by US teachers, primarily, in my experience).
Where did that come from? You didn't mention that aspect of your point before.
I completely agree with you if this is the point you are trying to make. Anyone who tries to say that the English don't speak English is obviously and ludicrously incorrect.
I guess I thought this was obvious, but perhaps not ... languages tend to be named for the original peoples who spoke it, even after other places start using it. "English" refers to the mutually-intelligible collection of languages spoken in the U.K, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, India, etc. It's pretty simple really. Nobody "wants" English to mean one thing or another. It means what is most useful for the largest collection of speakers.
Perhaps you should be asking instead, why do *you* want to restrict the meaning of the word "English" to something that satisfies your viewpoint? If the meaning of the word English is so commonly understood that it means the same thing to several billion people worldwide, why do you want to insist that it should be something else?
By the way, I'm pretty sure that Australians call their language English too. And so to Kiwis (I know this because I live in New Zealand). And I'll bet that Austrians call what they speak "German". And that Mexicans call what they speak "Spanish", and Brazilians, "Portuguese".
It's a pretty simple and predictable pattern really.
Thanks for your response. It is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for, although I'll forgive you your 700,000+ Slashdot ID :)
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Just curious, when did you get your ID? When was Slashdot in the 700,000s? It looks like it must be over 1,000,000 now because I've seen quite a few people with 980,000+ so there must be some 1,000,000s out there
Also I think your comment about Slashdot needing more posts to stimulate the mind and fewer to stimulate the post counts, is spot on.
When were 65K IDs being given out? I'm guessing in 1999 sometime?