short of it going airborne which... is extremely unlikely. And if it were already airborne, we'd all already have it.
To start, let's ignore the first part of your statement and focus on the second part. If the disease is airborne, we're looking at an immediate 60-75% reduction in the world's population within 3-6 months. It'd be very, very bad. This is where all the fearmongering is coming from.
Now, let's look at the first part. As far as we know, the virus has not evolved significantly since its first discovery in the 70's. The virus has also been observed to mutate fairly slowly. This is good news. In addition, there are several major hurdles for the virus to overcome in order to become airborne. This is very good news. These two things put together means that the chances of the second part of your statement happening are very, very low.
But really, we need more data. There are too many unknowns right now. We can't tell if the incubation period is trending upwards, or if the mortality rate is trending downards. We don't know if the infection vectors right now have changed in any meaningful way. We suspect not, and there are very good reasons for this. But quite frankly, if they have, then we're a step closer to getting into trouble.
Quite frankly, sending troops to Africa would be useless. Sending doctors might would be of limited use as well, giving sanitary conditions and the way many people treat doctors trying to stem the outbreak. But researchers and scientists, those may be beneficial in more ways than one. Have them go into every village, town, or other isolated population (e.g. each building in a large city) and get bloodwork from everyone. And if anyone in that population is infected, have the local military quarrantine the whole population. And then send the positive blood work back for analysis.
It's a bit cruel (the researchers would be letting entire villages get infected), but given the state of mistrust between the common people and officials trying to manage this outbreak, that'd probably happen anyway. This way, at least clean villages and population centers would likely remain clean. And we'd get some much-needed information on the virus that could be used either to combat the fearmongering, or prepare for civilization meltdown.
Actually, there are several treatments in various trial stages that seem to be effective. So even if the outbreak spreads significantly to the point where much of the world outside of western Africa becomes afflicted, there's a good chance we'd be ready to fight it. Chances are, we'd be looking at a week or two of lost productivity world wide, rather than a genetic bottleneck event.
Basically, they compiled and disseminated all of this knowledge from all over the civilized world to the rest of the civilized world, and then when they finally had it all, they got cold feet and threw it all away.
Because engineers think in black and white. Right and wrong. Success and failure. There is no middle ground. The engineering discipline itself is about absolutes, and absolute thinking is the precursor to radical thinking.
Uh, for now this is true. In 10 years? 20 years? 50 years? 100 years? There's a huge anti-scientific movement, anti-education, anti-knowledge movement out there. Is it growing? I'm not sure. But it's there, and it's taken over quite a few prominent education systems.
These things happen on generational timescales. individual people don't get (significantly) stupider if the rest of society around them becomes dumber. But their kids might. And their grandkids definitely.
If you want to prevent this eventual outcome, you need to act now. It kinda like global warming. Sure nothing might is happenig right now, but the science says otherwise for 50, 100 years down the line. Now, the science could be wrong, but are you really willing to take that risk and do nothing?
Pretty much it. We want the radicals in power because we want a subjugated people whom we can take advantage of in extracting their natural resources for as cheap as possible, and at the same time, have a leader who we can threaten to remove at any time with the public's full support.
If those Mid East countries had moderate leaders with strong populaces, they might start getting their own ideas. And if they get too smart, they'd end up in control of their own destines. And that's a bad thing for us.
Couple hundred? Think six to ten thousand years. Basic arithmetic has been around for at least that long. Basic science too has been around for that long, albeit it was surrounded by the dogma of the times.
Oh, I completely forgot my other point besides experience. To even begin to get that kind of experience, you need something that only older (20+) people have: money.
Unless your parent's have the equipment already (or the money to buy it), you as a teenager probably won't even know a number called the F-stop exists. Hell, I wonder if most teenagers who're snapping away on their phones know what ISO sensitivity is.
Heh, yeah, photographers can get more experience in digital format, but your average smartphone of your average person is still not going to cut it.
You don't need a DSLR anymore, but you do need some decent lenses (the more the better) and manual controls. And then, you can start accumulating experience. Until I can pop a 8mm fisheye or 300mm telephoto or 25mm F1.2 onto a phone, point and click it still isn't.
It's good to be able to have both perspectives, but that's with respect to being a person. With respect to finding a job, without a grasp of even the basics like math, you're going to have a lot of trouble finding (or keeping) employment. The critical thinking skills that go into solving math problems are very similar to the ones that go into solving real world problems.
A lot of people go into "liberal arts" as an out because they're weak in math. To think that they'll come out with a decent chance of getting a job is delusional at best. The real egregious degree is the undergraduate business degree (which falls under liberal arts in most places). It's a total scam. Even the (non-executive) MBA is something of a scam, but at least it can be worthwhile as a networking and resume padding tool. Soft sciences are next up, but its uselessness can be negated with sufficient technical experience (e.g. statistics) as a part of the coursework.
Now, as for very special jobs like social workers and that ilk, even though employers may prefer people with a degree, you don't really need any degree for those, just a heart. Until you want to start moving up the ladder that is, in which case you'll probably need a masters.
Sorry, some of us are not really interested in the menial job that nobody really likes to do and really isn't paid well to do anyway. Besides which, a good chunk of those jobs are going offshore, and the loudest people railing against "offshoring" are those same people.
Skilled labor, on the other hand, cannot be offshored quite so easily, and a lot of companies are very quickly coming to this realization. The ones who aren't are going to be dead soon.
So no, I'm still in disagreement here. If you have a liberal arts degree and no technical background or aptitude (at least math, please, be good at that much at least), then even if you do get a job, you're not going to be very happy at it, or very well paid. If you have a technical degree, or even a liberal arts degree but a strong technical background, you're far more likely to get a well-paid, decent job that you'll enjoy. And if that doesn't happen, you can always apply for the crappy menial job too, because you'll be a ton better at it than all the other candidates.
BTW, engineering is not the only technical discipline out there. There's also science and maintenance. Each one requires a different personality and perspective, despite being technical in nature.
Only a few liberal arts degrees require critical thinking skills and even then, it's up to the individual to cultivate that over the course of study. It's easy to BS through even a graduate liberal arts class. Hell, the whole point of liberal arts study is to make something up, and then defend it afterwards.
You can't BS through STEM (though medical researchers seem to do that quite a bit).
Ergo:
... tech CEOs want employees with liberal arts degrees, because those graduates have superior BS skills.
Actually, when people say googling, they really do mean "look it up using Google." They don't mean "look it up using DuckDuckGo" or "look it up using Yelp" or "look it up using Ask.com" or "look it up using Wolfram Alpha."
When Google no longer dominates generic web search (as opposed to specialized internet search like Yelp) and there are other comparable players, only then would there be a case for genericization. Until then, when you say googling, people think search using Google. That's actually fairly specific (unusually so even) in terms of word meaning.
To be fair, EA did fairly well with their sequels up until the past 2-3 years. Even The Sims 4 isn't horrible, though some say it's a step backwards from The Sims 3.
Funny thing, all this really started to happen these past 2-3 years. Prior to that, the majority of sequels were an improvement.
That's a foolish waste of $2.5B. At least with Nokia, Microsoft weakened them significantly before outright buying them out. With Nokia, the hardware development was what's valuable. That's why they're getting rid of the brand, and why Elop switched to Windows Phone so easily.
With Minecraft, the brand itself is the only real valuable thing. The code itself isn't worth terribly much, considering it wasn't too well-written, and the game itself is not hard to clone (Minecraft itself is a clone of a game). The few Minecraft-only mobs (creeper, enderman, etc.) are really the only bits of the game worth money, and even then, the mobs are much more valuable as brands than as code.
The ecosystem (mods, modpacks, texture packs, etc.) taken as a whole is worth a ton more. But Microsoft doesn't have a very good track record of managing their communities, so I imagine they'll eventually squander that. Hell, I'm pretty certain most mod devs are already thinking of where to move their stuff next.
Throwing devs at the mod API and getting it out the door (after what, 3 years?) might help with the exodus, but that'd be a stopgap measure. People probably won't leave limbo until Minecraft 2 comes out, and at that time, we'll finally know what direction Microsoft's going to take the game. But by then, most mod devs are probably going to be long gone.
Anyway, to your point, Minecraft wasn't really competing with Microsoft. Yes, its ability to run natively on Mac and Linux is a bit of a thorn, but the fact that it runs on Windows as well makes it less so. The lack of a version for Windows Phone (and Metro) was also annoying, but it's really one very, very small drop in the bucket of problems with that whole mess. There's a version for XBox, so it's not like Microsoft was missing out on anything there. Microsoft isn't going to pay $2.5B to make an incidental (at best) competitor go away. They have to have plans for the purchase, bigger plans than just bringing it to Windows 8 and Phone.
What those are, and whether they'll be any good, well, time will tell.
Notch recently paid his employees a ton of money, so I imagine there's not as much cash on hand as you'd think. There might be tangible assets (servers, etc.) and intellectual assets (software, Minecraft brand, licensing deals, etc.), but $2.5B is a bit much for just that. Since they just launched Realms, they might have ~$500M cash set aside to keep it afloat, but that's really a stretch considering how cheap hardware is becoming.
Microsoft has been known to overpay for useless junk (they've had hits too), so there's precedence already. I wouldn't say Minecraft is useless junk, especially if they can do a Minecraft 2 exclusive for XBox and Windows Phone, but to think that they'd recoup the $2.5B easily would be foolish. Microsoft would be smart to treat this as a 10-, 20-year thing like The Sims and just continue building out the brand over that time while using it to promote their other products. But Microsoft's done some dumb (and some really, really dumb) moves over the past 3-5 years, so this might just be wishful thinking on my part.
10 bucks says the devs are going to add a new mob in the next version called Clippy.
D. Making overpriced acquisitions that go nowhere, and then writing the purchase off as a loss. E. Squandering potential opportunities via mismanagement and half-assed commitment. F. Spending a ton of money on marketing to make people think their shit is actually gold.
Unless she was born with clothes on, I'd say she had to have had put on clothes at least once in her life before she had any to take off. Somebody else putting it on her also counts.
I did notice the "powered by Microsoft Surface" hood over the review booth, but that explains why they keep panning to it whenever there's a challenge.
I'm not sure how much that's going to change Surface sales though. I imagine few if any people really notice these things, and the ones who do probably use iPads or some Android tablet already.
NFL "experiences" might be interesting, but as EA has a monopoly on NFL video games (and I'm sure other companies have monopolies in other areas), it's probably not as big of a promotion as you'd think. Unless Microsoft could live stream all games to an NFL app exclusive to the Surface, it'd be pointless. And I'm doubtful about that one since the NFL has tons of other agreements in place.
This is a big problem in terms of legibility. Sometimes, it's easy to tell that you're starting your post in the middle of a sentence, but sometimes, it's impossible. I would say it's worse than posting in ALL CAPS, and around as bad as not having punctuation and paragraph breaks (depending on the length of the text).
If only there was a -1 unintelligibility mod option. Posts that start in the subject and continue in the body, among the other aforementioned transgressions, would slot perfectly in.
You're right that businesses should respond to negative reviews and customer complaints. However, the burden is rather high on small businesses to be constantly doing this. And hiring an outside firm to do it doesn't guarantee satisfactory results all the time either.
Since Google's being forced to delist web pages (DMCA and all), Yelp and other such directory sites probably should be forced to have a delist procedure as well. In fact, I would think that a lot of issues with fake reviews and fake updates and such would be solved if many of these things were opt-in (in the same way that Craig's List or eBay or Amazon Marketplace or Google Shopping is opt-in). At the very least, there should be an ability to opt-out.
I mean, it's one thing to complain when the system you took part in is working against you, but it's something else to be forced into the system that without your active involvement is being gamed against you.
People forget that consumer protection is not just about protecting the consumer directly, but also about preventing unfair business practices to maintain a competitive landscape (this falls in the same vein as price collusion, except it's one bad actor instead of multiple bad actors).
Slashdot Mirror
short of it going airborne which ... is extremely unlikely. And if it were already airborne, we'd all already have it.
To start, let's ignore the first part of your statement and focus on the second part. If the disease is airborne, we're looking at an immediate 60-75% reduction in the world's population within 3-6 months. It'd be very, very bad. This is where all the fearmongering is coming from.
Now, let's look at the first part. As far as we know, the virus has not evolved significantly since its first discovery in the 70's. The virus has also been observed to mutate fairly slowly. This is good news. In addition, there are several major hurdles for the virus to overcome in order to become airborne. This is very good news. These two things put together means that the chances of the second part of your statement happening are very, very low.
But really, we need more data. There are too many unknowns right now. We can't tell if the incubation period is trending upwards, or if the mortality rate is trending downards. We don't know if the infection vectors right now have changed in any meaningful way. We suspect not, and there are very good reasons for this. But quite frankly, if they have, then we're a step closer to getting into trouble.
Quite frankly, sending troops to Africa would be useless. Sending doctors might would be of limited use as well, giving sanitary conditions and the way many people treat doctors trying to stem the outbreak. But researchers and scientists, those may be beneficial in more ways than one. Have them go into every village, town, or other isolated population (e.g. each building in a large city) and get bloodwork from everyone. And if anyone in that population is infected, have the local military quarrantine the whole population. And then send the positive blood work back for analysis.
It's a bit cruel (the researchers would be letting entire villages get infected), but given the state of mistrust between the common people and officials trying to manage this outbreak, that'd probably happen anyway. This way, at least clean villages and population centers would likely remain clean. And we'd get some much-needed information on the virus that could be used either to combat the fearmongering, or prepare for civilization meltdown.
Actually, there are several treatments in various trial stages that seem to be effective. So even if the outbreak spreads significantly to the point where much of the world outside of western Africa becomes afflicted, there's a good chance we'd be ready to fight it. Chances are, we'd be looking at a week or two of lost productivity world wide, rather than a genetic bottleneck event.
Basically, they compiled and disseminated all of this knowledge from all over the civilized world to the rest of the civilized world, and then when they finally had it all, they got cold feet and threw it all away.
They violated the copyrights of the Texas curriculum plans and implemented them.
FTFY.
Somehow, it sounds dirtier.
Because engineers think in black and white. Right and wrong. Success and failure. There is no middle ground. The engineering discipline itself is about absolutes, and absolute thinking is the precursor to radical thinking.
Uh, for now this is true. In 10 years? 20 years? 50 years? 100 years? There's a huge anti-scientific movement, anti-education, anti-knowledge movement out there. Is it growing? I'm not sure. But it's there, and it's taken over quite a few prominent education systems.
These things happen on generational timescales. individual people don't get (significantly) stupider if the rest of society around them becomes dumber. But their kids might. And their grandkids definitely.
If you want to prevent this eventual outcome, you need to act now. It kinda like global warming. Sure nothing might is happenig right now, but the science says otherwise for 50, 100 years down the line. Now, the science could be wrong, but are you really willing to take that risk and do nothing?
Pretty much it. We want the radicals in power because we want a subjugated people whom we can take advantage of in extracting their natural resources for as cheap as possible, and at the same time, have a leader who we can threaten to remove at any time with the public's full support.
If those Mid East countries had moderate leaders with strong populaces, they might start getting their own ideas. And if they get too smart, they'd end up in control of their own destines. And that's a bad thing for us.
Couple hundred? Think six to ten thousand years. Basic arithmetic has been around for at least that long. Basic science too has been around for that long, albeit it was surrounded by the dogma of the times.
Oh, I completely forgot my other point besides experience. To even begin to get that kind of experience, you need something that only older (20+) people have: money.
Unless your parent's have the equipment already (or the money to buy it), you as a teenager probably won't even know a number called the F-stop exists. Hell, I wonder if most teenagers who're snapping away on their phones know what ISO sensitivity is.
Heh, yeah, photographers can get more experience in digital format, but your average smartphone of your average person is still not going to cut it.
You don't need a DSLR anymore, but you do need some decent lenses (the more the better) and manual controls. And then, you can start accumulating experience. Until I can pop a 8mm fisheye or 300mm telephoto or 25mm F1.2 onto a phone, point and click it still isn't.
Sometimes, the swearing renders in grayscale.
It's good to be able to have both perspectives, but that's with respect to being a person. With respect to finding a job, without a grasp of even the basics like math, you're going to have a lot of trouble finding (or keeping) employment. The critical thinking skills that go into solving math problems are very similar to the ones that go into solving real world problems.
A lot of people go into "liberal arts" as an out because they're weak in math. To think that they'll come out with a decent chance of getting a job is delusional at best. The real egregious degree is the undergraduate business degree (which falls under liberal arts in most places). It's a total scam. Even the (non-executive) MBA is something of a scam, but at least it can be worthwhile as a networking and resume padding tool. Soft sciences are next up, but its uselessness can be negated with sufficient technical experience (e.g. statistics) as a part of the coursework.
Now, as for very special jobs like social workers and that ilk, even though employers may prefer people with a degree, you don't really need any degree for those, just a heart. Until you want to start moving up the ladder that is, in which case you'll probably need a masters.
Sorry, some of us are not really interested in the menial job that nobody really likes to do and really isn't paid well to do anyway. Besides which, a good chunk of those jobs are going offshore, and the loudest people railing against "offshoring" are those same people.
Skilled labor, on the other hand, cannot be offshored quite so easily, and a lot of companies are very quickly coming to this realization. The ones who aren't are going to be dead soon.
So no, I'm still in disagreement here. If you have a liberal arts degree and no technical background or aptitude (at least math, please, be good at that much at least), then even if you do get a job, you're not going to be very happy at it, or very well paid. If you have a technical degree, or even a liberal arts degree but a strong technical background, you're far more likely to get a well-paid, decent job that you'll enjoy. And if that doesn't happen, you can always apply for the crappy menial job too, because you'll be a ton better at it than all the other candidates.
BTW, engineering is not the only technical discipline out there. There's also science and maintenance. Each one requires a different personality and perspective, despite being technical in nature.
I question the very premise itself.
Only a few liberal arts degrees require critical thinking skills and even then, it's up to the individual to cultivate that over the course of study. It's easy to BS through even a graduate liberal arts class. Hell, the whole point of liberal arts study is to make something up, and then defend it afterwards.
You can't BS through STEM (though medical researchers seem to do that quite a bit).
Ergo:
... tech CEOs want employees with liberal arts degrees, because those graduates have superior BS skills.
FTFY.
I'll post this in a different post
Why? Is the margin of your post too small to fit it?
Actually, when people say googling, they really do mean "look it up using Google." They don't mean "look it up using DuckDuckGo" or "look it up using Yelp" or "look it up using Ask.com" or "look it up using Wolfram Alpha."
When Google no longer dominates generic web search (as opposed to specialized internet search like Yelp) and there are other comparable players, only then would there be a case for genericization. Until then, when you say googling, people think search using Google. That's actually fairly specific (unusually so even) in terms of word meaning.
To be fair, EA did fairly well with their sequels up until the past 2-3 years. Even The Sims 4 isn't horrible, though some say it's a step backwards from The Sims 3.
Funny thing, all this really started to happen these past 2-3 years. Prior to that, the majority of sequels were an improvement.
That's a foolish waste of $2.5B. At least with Nokia, Microsoft weakened them significantly before outright buying them out. With Nokia, the hardware development was what's valuable. That's why they're getting rid of the brand, and why Elop switched to Windows Phone so easily.
With Minecraft, the brand itself is the only real valuable thing. The code itself isn't worth terribly much, considering it wasn't too well-written, and the game itself is not hard to clone (Minecraft itself is a clone of a game). The few Minecraft-only mobs (creeper, enderman, etc.) are really the only bits of the game worth money, and even then, the mobs are much more valuable as brands than as code.
The ecosystem (mods, modpacks, texture packs, etc.) taken as a whole is worth a ton more. But Microsoft doesn't have a very good track record of managing their communities, so I imagine they'll eventually squander that. Hell, I'm pretty certain most mod devs are already thinking of where to move their stuff next.
Throwing devs at the mod API and getting it out the door (after what, 3 years?) might help with the exodus, but that'd be a stopgap measure. People probably won't leave limbo until Minecraft 2 comes out, and at that time, we'll finally know what direction Microsoft's going to take the game. But by then, most mod devs are probably going to be long gone.
Anyway, to your point, Minecraft wasn't really competing with Microsoft. Yes, its ability to run natively on Mac and Linux is a bit of a thorn, but the fact that it runs on Windows as well makes it less so. The lack of a version for Windows Phone (and Metro) was also annoying, but it's really one very, very small drop in the bucket of problems with that whole mess. There's a version for XBox, so it's not like Microsoft was missing out on anything there. Microsoft isn't going to pay $2.5B to make an incidental (at best) competitor go away. They have to have plans for the purchase, bigger plans than just bringing it to Windows 8 and Phone.
What those are, and whether they'll be any good, well, time will tell.
Notch recently paid his employees a ton of money, so I imagine there's not as much cash on hand as you'd think. There might be tangible assets (servers, etc.) and intellectual assets (software, Minecraft brand, licensing deals, etc.), but $2.5B is a bit much for just that. Since they just launched Realms, they might have ~$500M cash set aside to keep it afloat, but that's really a stretch considering how cheap hardware is becoming.
Microsoft has been known to overpay for useless junk (they've had hits too), so there's precedence already. I wouldn't say Minecraft is useless junk, especially if they can do a Minecraft 2 exclusive for XBox and Windows Phone, but to think that they'd recoup the $2.5B easily would be foolish. Microsoft would be smart to treat this as a 10-, 20-year thing like The Sims and just continue building out the brand over that time while using it to promote their other products. But Microsoft's done some dumb (and some really, really dumb) moves over the past 3-5 years, so this might just be wishful thinking on my part.
10 bucks says the devs are going to add a new mob in the next version called Clippy.
Because they also make the most noise about it.
I can:
D. Making overpriced acquisitions that go nowhere, and then writing the purchase off as a loss.
E. Squandering potential opportunities via mismanagement and half-assed commitment.
F. Spending a ton of money on marketing to make people think their shit is actually gold.
Unless she was born with clothes on, I'd say she had to have had put on clothes at least once in her life before she had any to take off. Somebody else putting it on her also counts.
In our general direction anyway.
I did notice the "powered by Microsoft Surface" hood over the review booth, but that explains why they keep panning to it whenever there's a challenge.
I'm not sure how much that's going to change Surface sales though. I imagine few if any people really notice these things, and the ones who do probably use iPads or some Android tablet already.
NFL "experiences" might be interesting, but as EA has a monopoly on NFL video games (and I'm sure other companies have monopolies in other areas), it's probably not as big of a promotion as you'd think. Unless Microsoft could live stream all games to an NFL app exclusive to the Surface, it'd be pointless. And I'm doubtful about that one since the NFL has tons of other agreements in place.
This is a big problem in terms of legibility. Sometimes, it's easy to tell that you're starting your post in the middle of a sentence, but sometimes, it's impossible. I would say it's worse than posting in ALL CAPS, and around as bad as not having punctuation and paragraph breaks (depending on the length of the text).
If only there was a -1 unintelligibility mod option. Posts that start in the subject and continue in the body, among the other aforementioned transgressions, would slot perfectly in.
You're right that businesses should respond to negative reviews and customer complaints. However, the burden is rather high on small businesses to be constantly doing this. And hiring an outside firm to do it doesn't guarantee satisfactory results all the time either.
Since Google's being forced to delist web pages (DMCA and all), Yelp and other such directory sites probably should be forced to have a delist procedure as well. In fact, I would think that a lot of issues with fake reviews and fake updates and such would be solved if many of these things were opt-in (in the same way that Craig's List or eBay or Amazon Marketplace or Google Shopping is opt-in). At the very least, there should be an ability to opt-out.
I mean, it's one thing to complain when the system you took part in is working against you, but it's something else to be forced into the system that without your active involvement is being gamed against you.
People forget that consumer protection is not just about protecting the consumer directly, but also about preventing unfair business practices to maintain a competitive landscape (this falls in the same vein as price collusion, except it's one bad actor instead of multiple bad actors).