Sounds like a kind of regressive mindset to get rated so highly on a site full of futurists.
If there's a drug that makes me smarter, stronger, braver, and more attractive, and it doesn't have appreciable side effect, why the fuck SHOULDN'T I take it? Because being old and out of it is part of the Circle of Life? Screw that. Freezing to death in the winter and getting stepped on by mastadons used to be part of the Circle of Life, but we came up with (proto-) science specifically to put an end to that crap.
Is your position that 40-year-olds enjoying life isn't part of God's Plan, but you talking with people around the world through your fancy internet pipes is right there in Leviticus? If you're going to be a neo-Luddite, you better get some consistency going.
And the response to THIS is that while current research would be more than amply supplied by just using already-aborted fetuses, a breakthrough treatment or cure that could be widely applied might require more stem cells than would be available this way.
In worst-case-scenario-land, this could lead to ethical dilemmas for medical practitioners. Just as people who sign up as organ donors supposedly have a lower chance of being resuscitated in hospitals (because doctors know their organs could save a handful of lives and subconsciously or otherwise don't work as hard to save them), doctors might feel an ethical pressure to recommend abortion, knowing that the resultant stem cells would cure a handful of people.
Now, of course, all of this is very far-fetched. But it's not completely irrational, just unlikely.
It sounds like they've already managed A, B and D, judging from the "vast network of red-light cameras" mentioned in TFS. (If you've never experienced this particular joy, red-light cameras take a photo of anyone running a red light, optically scan the license plate, and use their database of addresses to automatically mail out a ticket. They've got them here in California too.)
Or, they've received contrary advice from people whose input they value more than yours. (No offense, but you're probably one of many potential employers they've talked to; maybe five other hiring directors told them that MSFT is the way to go.)
The flipside of this "young narcissists" issue is its inverse: older people tend to inaccurately generalize from their personal, anecdotal experience to the world at large. One of the many tricky issues a burgeoning worker must manage is figuring out whose advice is most worthwhile, and who is playing them or talking out their ass.
I'd like to see a source on those hyphenation rules, if possible. I've taught English before, and although hyphenation rules are often rather vague, I've never heard of this particular distinction, and Wikipedia and the dictionary seem to disagree with you.
The distinction you're making doesn't really seem consistent, either. Aren't I learning "elementary knowledge" in elementary school? And can't "grade school" be distinguished as the type of school in which students are identified by numbered "grades"? (In many schools, students past eighth grade are referred to as freshmen, sophomores, etc.)
This also seems to clash with my general instinct, backed up by Wikipedia, which is to use hyphens for compounds like these only when they are used as adjectives. (So, "I learned grade-school math in grade school.")
Everything you say is accurate, yet none of it applies here.
Voters in Ohio aren't a meaningful "minority" whose interests need to be protected over and above those of, say, Californians.
And your whole argument is pretty damn ironic when the very REASON we have our Senate structured the way it is was to ensure that the (less populated but equally numerous) Southern states would be able to prolong slavery. Good job protecting the "interests of the minority" there, Founding Fathers!
You know what, if you've got $400 to burn on a device that'll let you read glorified txt documents of stuff you could get on paper for half the price on AbeBooks... knock yourself out.
Unless it's been vastly misrepresented in mainstream presentation (like TFS), Fermi's Paradox sounds pretty ridiculously simplistic.
Other bad assumptions it makes, just off the top of my head:
1. Other intelligent civilizations want to engage communications with aliens who, for all they know, might try to blow them up or eat them.
2. Those civilizations are willing to spend resources to beam electromagnetic radiation out into space in the vague hope of someone noticing.
3. Other intelligent civilizations "capable" of "communication" will follow the same technological arc as us and develop electromagnetic communications rather than, say, quantum communications or something we haven't even thought of yet.
4. Those aliens will assume that WE (or some unknown aliens) will be listening carefully for extrasolar broadcasts.
5. Those aliens even have a concept of "communication" and aren't just some hive-mind that never needed to evolve social skills.
6. They didn't cut their Alien-SETI funding to pay for medical research or an Alien-Wall-Street bailout package or something. (I mean, what do you think the chances are that WE will broadcast for a thousand years?)
And so on.
Really, Fermi's Paradox sounds like me saying that if I sit on a lonely beach for a week and don't find a bottle with a message in it in proper English, there are no other intelligent beings in the world.
Well what if I was saying it's not "easy to calculate wavelength," because even though c remains constant I can't actually use it to calculate wavelength since I'm not in a vacuum? What if THAT?
Also, it's lower-case "c," and how DARE you call me pedantic!;-)
Investigative journalism will certainly still be a "needed skill" and "useful to society" if all the papers die. That's the whole issue. See, right now, those papers and magazines provide most of the infrastructure and career opportunities for journalists. Want to be the next Woodward? Well, you go to journalism school, then get a job at whatever paper will take you and (hopefully) work your way up to the NY Times or whatever prestigious news organization.
You need print media, and not just a few "elite" papers but a whole bunch of options, if you want journalism to remain even a semi-viable choice of profession for smart and motivated individuals. (And "semi-viable" is generous; most of the journalists I know are lucky to stay above the poverty line.)
>>School systems are one of the most budget limited govt run orgs.
This is true, but there are often a lot of state or national funds available specifically for technology that don't come out of the school's (local) budget. So there are actually a lot of public schools that have more money than they really need sloshing around for computers, even if they're scrambling to pay their teachers and replace horrendously outdated textbooks.
Once you get past the misleading science-journalist talk of "scents" and so on, this sounds an awful lot like the "antibody-based therapeutics" that have been around for decades. But I'm no scientist, and I only even know of this stuff because my dad's an immunologist who works on it. Could anyone out there explain if/how this is anything new or different?
Actually, I'd say the term "free" is a deliberate consequence of free-software enthusiasts' marketing attempts. They could call it share-alike software or something else more exact, but they wanted a term associated with wild horses frolicking through the plains and Thomas Jefferson signing the Declaration of Independence. It kinda makes it sound like RMS's codebase crossed the ocean to flee religious persecution.
"Free as in speech" seems like a particularly bad analogy here anyway. "Free speech" typically refers to freedom from government interference or censorship; closed-source software isn't by definition any more or less free from government interference than GNU software, so WTF? Shouldn't we be saying "free-as-in-common-grazing-areas-in-pastoral-societies," since that seems to be the typical analogy for free software?
So even after our loved ones are gone, our minds keep them on as specters. On the one hand, as many have mentioned, this would seem to indicate that a lot of what we see in our moved ones is probably built out of assumptions and memory... we see and hear them around us because we expect to do so.
But it also makes me wonder how much of ourselves we "store" in these relationships. The image of an elderly person having a conversation with a dead spouse is striking, because it makes us wonder: what if those conversations are just the way that person thinks?
Plato wrote long, long after his master Socrates had died, but he kept on Socrates as a protagonist in all his dialogues. What if Socrates wasn't a memory to Plato, or even a character, but rather an essential part of the way he thought about the world?
I've noticed a similar effect learning foreign languages... when I came back from Japan, every conversation I half-heard in the background sounded like Japanese until I got close enough to make out what was being said. When I got back from Argentina, everything sounded Spanish.
Yeah, SF isn't Tokyo, or even Boston, and it probably won't be in the near future. But I don't think you can accuse Californians of ignoring mass transit.
If you're looking for an example of a loving parody that outlasted the original... they're not too hard to find.
"Don Quixote" is a reaction to the trashy novels about knight-errants that everyone was reading in Cervantes' time. Nowadays, most people have never even heard of Orlando Furioso, but a new translation of the Quixote still makes the NY Times bestseller list.
The trick is to make your parody or throwback so good that it's worth reading/playing even after the nostalgic context has faded.
One difference is that Apple has spent a long time now learning how to keep pace with cheap, popular, and free/open alternatives.
I don't think Apple would even be surprised if you told them that the smart-phone competition will heat up with Android. They just think their own design and engineering is good enough to keep them ahead of the curve, just as they manage to STILL make a lot of money selling Macs despite the lower pricetags of Dell, Microsoft, Linux, etc.
Actually, if you're, say, a temp agency, labor IS your "product." As you say, it's only worth what somebody is willing to pay for it, but that's kind of Marx's point.
Your distinction doesn't make much sense here anyway, since Wikipedia and OpenOffice and Linux clearly ARE products that have value to people.
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Sounds like a kind of regressive mindset to get rated so highly on a site full of futurists.
If there's a drug that makes me smarter, stronger, braver, and more attractive, and it doesn't have appreciable side effect, why the fuck SHOULDN'T I take it? Because being old and out of it is part of the Circle of Life? Screw that. Freezing to death in the winter and getting stepped on by mastadons used to be part of the Circle of Life, but we came up with (proto-) science specifically to put an end to that crap.
Is your position that 40-year-olds enjoying life isn't part of God's Plan, but you talking with people around the world through your fancy internet pipes is right there in Leviticus? If you're going to be a neo-Luddite, you better get some consistency going.
And the response to THIS is that while current research would be more than amply supplied by just using already-aborted fetuses, a breakthrough treatment or cure that could be widely applied might require more stem cells than would be available this way.
In worst-case-scenario-land, this could lead to ethical dilemmas for medical practitioners. Just as people who sign up as organ donors supposedly have a lower chance of being resuscitated in hospitals (because doctors know their organs could save a handful of lives and subconsciously or otherwise don't work as hard to save them), doctors might feel an ethical pressure to recommend abortion, knowing that the resultant stem cells would cure a handful of people.
Now, of course, all of this is very far-fetched. But it's not completely irrational, just unlikely.
It sounds like they've already managed A, B and D, judging from the "vast network of red-light cameras" mentioned in TFS. (If you've never experienced this particular joy, red-light cameras take a photo of anyone running a red light, optically scan the license plate, and use their database of addresses to automatically mail out a ticket. They've got them here in California too.)
Or, they've received contrary advice from people whose input they value more than yours. (No offense, but you're probably one of many potential employers they've talked to; maybe five other hiring directors told them that MSFT is the way to go.)
The flipside of this "young narcissists" issue is its inverse: older people tend to inaccurately generalize from their personal, anecdotal experience to the world at large. One of the many tricky issues a burgeoning worker must manage is figuring out whose advice is most worthwhile, and who is playing them or talking out their ass.
I'd like to see a source on those hyphenation rules, if possible. I've taught English before, and although hyphenation rules are often rather vague, I've never heard of this particular distinction, and Wikipedia and the dictionary seem to disagree with you.
The distinction you're making doesn't really seem consistent, either. Aren't I learning "elementary knowledge" in elementary school? And can't "grade school" be distinguished as the type of school in which students are identified by numbered "grades"? (In many schools, students past eighth grade are referred to as freshmen, sophomores, etc.)
This also seems to clash with my general instinct, backed up by Wikipedia, which is to use hyphens for compounds like these only when they are used as adjectives. (So, "I learned grade-school math in grade school.")
Everything you say is accurate, yet none of it applies here.
Voters in Ohio aren't a meaningful "minority" whose interests need to be protected over and above those of, say, Californians.
And your whole argument is pretty damn ironic when the very REASON we have our Senate structured the way it is was to ensure that the (less populated but equally numerous) Southern states would be able to prolong slavery. Good job protecting the "interests of the minority" there, Founding Fathers!
>Convince me not to.
You know what, if you've got $400 to burn on a device that'll let you read glorified txt documents of stuff you could get on paper for half the price on AbeBooks... knock yourself out.
Unless it's been vastly misrepresented in mainstream presentation (like TFS), Fermi's Paradox sounds pretty ridiculously simplistic.
Other bad assumptions it makes, just off the top of my head:
1. Other intelligent civilizations want to engage communications with aliens who, for all they know, might try to blow them up or eat them.
2. Those civilizations are willing to spend resources to beam electromagnetic radiation out into space in the vague hope of someone noticing.
3. Other intelligent civilizations "capable" of "communication" will follow the same technological arc as us and develop electromagnetic communications rather than, say, quantum communications or something we haven't even thought of yet.
4. Those aliens will assume that WE (or some unknown aliens) will be listening carefully for extrasolar broadcasts.
5. Those aliens even have a concept of "communication" and aren't just some hive-mind that never needed to evolve social skills.
6. They didn't cut their Alien-SETI funding to pay for medical research or an Alien-Wall-Street bailout package or something. (I mean, what do you think the chances are that WE will broadcast for a thousand years?)
And so on.
Really, Fermi's Paradox sounds like me saying that if I sit on a lonely beach for a week and don't find a bottle with a message in it in proper English, there are no other intelligent beings in the world.
Well what if I was saying it's not "easy to calculate wavelength," because even though c remains constant I can't actually use it to calculate wavelength since I'm not in a vacuum? What if THAT?
Also, it's lower-case "c," and how DARE you call me pedantic! ;-)
How DARE Apple quash the creative freedom these developers were exhibiting by ripping off and repackaging an old freeware game!
Not for those of us who don't live in a vacuum, you insensitive clod!
Investigative journalism will certainly still be a "needed skill" and "useful to society" if all the papers die. That's the whole issue. See, right now, those papers and magazines provide most of the infrastructure and career opportunities for journalists. Want to be the next Woodward? Well, you go to journalism school, then get a job at whatever paper will take you and (hopefully) work your way up to the NY Times or whatever prestigious news organization.
You need print media, and not just a few "elite" papers but a whole bunch of options, if you want journalism to remain even a semi-viable choice of profession for smart and motivated individuals. (And "semi-viable" is generous; most of the journalists I know are lucky to stay above the poverty line.)
>>School systems are one of the most budget limited govt run orgs.
This is true, but there are often a lot of state or national funds available specifically for technology that don't come out of the school's (local) budget. So there are actually a lot of public schools that have more money than they really need sloshing around for computers, even if they're scrambling to pay their teachers and replace horrendously outdated textbooks.
Once you get past the misleading science-journalist talk of "scents" and so on, this sounds an awful lot like the "antibody-based therapeutics" that have been around for decades. But I'm no scientist, and I only even know of this stuff because my dad's an immunologist who works on it. Could anyone out there explain if/how this is anything new or different?
Actually, I'd say the term "free" is a deliberate consequence of free-software enthusiasts' marketing attempts. They could call it share-alike software or something else more exact, but they wanted a term associated with wild horses frolicking through the plains and Thomas Jefferson signing the Declaration of Independence. It kinda makes it sound like RMS's codebase crossed the ocean to flee religious persecution.
"Free as in speech" seems like a particularly bad analogy here anyway. "Free speech" typically refers to freedom from government interference or censorship; closed-source software isn't by definition any more or less free from government interference than GNU software, so WTF? Shouldn't we be saying "free-as-in-common-grazing-areas-in-pastoral-societies," since that seems to be the typical analogy for free software?
So even after our loved ones are gone, our minds keep them on as specters. On the one hand, as many have mentioned, this would seem to indicate that a lot of what we see in our moved ones is probably built out of assumptions and memory... we see and hear them around us because we expect to do so.
But it also makes me wonder how much of ourselves we "store" in these relationships. The image of an elderly person having a conversation with a dead spouse is striking, because it makes us wonder: what if those conversations are just the way that person thinks?
Plato wrote long, long after his master Socrates had died, but he kept on Socrates as a protagonist in all his dialogues. What if Socrates wasn't a memory to Plato, or even a character, but rather an essential part of the way he thought about the world?
I've noticed a similar effect learning foreign languages... when I came back from Japan, every conversation I half-heard in the background sounded like Japanese until I got close enough to make out what was being said. When I got back from Argentina, everything sounded Spanish.
That's my point, though - California seems to be pursuing the "holistic" mass-transit solutions right alongside stuff like the electric car grid.
And hey, it looks like even the rest of the US might be catching up a bit too, at least if the new Congress & Obama administration live up to their promises.
...and of course I'm using the British system where "HUNDRED" in all caps means "ten." Carry on...
Did you miss how we just passed Prop 1a to establish a high-speed train system running across the state? For a HUNDRED billion dollars?
How about the BART extension to San Jose?
Yeah, SF isn't Tokyo, or even Boston, and it probably won't be in the near future. But I don't think you can accuse Californians of ignoring mass transit.
If you're looking for an example of a loving parody that outlasted the original... they're not too hard to find.
"Don Quixote" is a reaction to the trashy novels about knight-errants that everyone was reading in Cervantes' time. Nowadays, most people have never even heard of Orlando Furioso, but a new translation of the Quixote still makes the NY Times bestseller list.
The trick is to make your parody or throwback so good that it's worth reading/playing even after the nostalgic context has faded.
One difference is that Apple has spent a long time now learning how to keep pace with cheap, popular, and free/open alternatives.
I don't think Apple would even be surprised if you told them that the smart-phone competition will heat up with Android. They just think their own design and engineering is good enough to keep them ahead of the curve, just as they manage to STILL make a lot of money selling Macs despite the lower pricetags of Dell, Microsoft, Linux, etc.
Actually, if you're, say, a temp agency, labor IS your "product." As you say, it's only worth what somebody is willing to pay for it, but that's kind of Marx's point.
Your distinction doesn't make much sense here anyway, since Wikipedia and OpenOffice and Linux clearly ARE products that have value to people.
>>There are literally thousands of men runnning the code on even more setups regularly
Plus upwards of 7 women!
> only dozens of Christians are involved in clinic bombings (and those haven't happened in many years)
Huh? Here's one from last year: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/26/clinic.bomb/index.html
And it's hardly an isolated incident: http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_viol.htm