this program embodies what is most wrong with modern western culture--superficiality, vanity, and an abhorrence of eccentricity or individuality.
I wonder what this program would do with a picture of Angelina Jolie? She has the large eyes and large mouth of the "before" picture in the article, but if those where scaled down to average proportions Angelina would just be kinda average attractive. I think this program might move people towards a median kind of beauty, but that would necessitate making the more exotic beauties of the world rather plain. While there is a rather plain beige conformity thing present in Western culture, there is also a love of the extremes in Western culture, just look the attention we lavish on our best athletes and most attractive movie stars. In a deeply conformist culture they would be ostracized for making other people feel clumsy, weak and ugly. I have to wonder what cultures are more accepting of eccentricity or individuality than modern western culture?
us finding "earth like" planets but outside the bounds of what we understand can substantiate life.
There definitely needs to be some refinement of what qualifies as "earth like". I would consider Mars to be a the extreme outer edge of "earth like". Some of the more extreme bacteria and lichen from earth might be able to survive, maybe. I wonder what the parameters for "earth like" should be. Maybe: 0.4G to 1.4G gravity range, a temperature range between 180K and 335K, atmospheric pressure of 1kPa to 110kPa. What else would need to be included for a meaningful "earth like" definition?
Unions don't want one teacher teaching thousands of students. They want the maximum number of union teachers teaching the minimum number of students.
Could that possibly have to do with a high teacher to student ratio leading to higher quality education for the students? While one teacher could lecture thousands of students, they couldn't teach them, teaching a child requires that you are aware of the child's progress and understanding. A good teacher might be able to have that kind of awareness of two dozen students and might be able to occasionally tailor little bits of a lesson to meet the needs of any students not falling in the center section of the bell curve. But a good teacher with ten students could have a much higher level of awareness of each students progress and abilities and could offer a higher level of lesson optimization for each student. Speaking personally as someone who was quite poorly behaved in elementary school, the fewer the students the less opportunity and desire for mischief. When a teacher has 30 kids in a classroom, the kids at each end of the bell curve (ability wise) frequently find the lesson to be meaningless and quickly find other ways to amuse themselves. So in a way the subject line of this thread is right, it's about money, buthe money question isn't about paying teachers millions of dollars, it's about tax base per teacher. If the default class size is 30 kids, then you have 3 times the budget per teacher compared to a 10 student classroom. Realistically, teaching should pay a median collage grad kind of wage, which it does. If you want to improve quality, then reduce student quantity. Paying the existing teachers in a school system 50% more isn't going to do much in terms of the education quality they are able to produce, but if you hire 50% more teachers so that each class is now 2/3rds the size, educational quality will rise quickly. Especially if you allow the teachers enough flexibility in their curriculum to allow them to customize lesson to the needs of the students, rather than holding hard and fast to some statewide rulebook.
Everyone shares this flaw; humans in general fail logic, for example Christians are often judgmental of other religions or non-believers when their doctrine says they should be tolerant.
That seems to be a weakness/defense mechanism of any religious person or culture when they are insecure/new in their faith. Anyone who is at a fundamental level of understanding in their belief is going to see it as black and white, with-us or against-us situation. This is amusingly true of a belief in tolerance and diversity as well. The believers in the-one-right-way are usually a destructive force in what ever genre their belief is in. For a easy modern cultural view of this phenomenon just look at the many destructive effects of Political Correctness.
Now for an on topic bit: How long until Gecko Glue can be scaled up enough to be cost effective in it's reusablility? Cheap as Velcro per square inch?
The current financial turmoil is causing some amazingly rapid transformations in our culture. It will be interesting to see where it ends.
Hopefully it ends with the public understanding than a people who are all in debt are a people enslaved. A 30 year mortgage is just modern indentured servitude.
You seem to be unfamiliar with Dubya's tendency to say what ever he thinks will sell, with no relation to his true intentions other than to offer a thin justification for the course of action he has decided to take. Why would he bother with that? Because there is so much sensationalism in today's 24 hour News media, that As long as he can draw out any objections to his desired course of action, public furor will die down in about a week. Our entire culture has serious ADD. So any bullshit statement that can allow the pundits to debate back and forth for a few days is pretty much a carte blanc for Bush and his handlers to do whatever the fuck they want to do.
The Amish apparent aversion to technology isn't about technology itself but about staying away from consumerism and maintaining a high degree of self sufficiency. If you never have a tv or car, you never feel the need to get a better tv or car. If you dress in a very regimented traditional manner, you don't feel the need to go buy the latest fashion. and so on..
How tough would it be to make an application that untagged photos for you? Any photos tagged with your name that appear on any pages of anyone on your "my friends" list would have your name untagged.
I considered a "socially repsonsible" investment fund at one point. Then I realized the thing had pathetic returns
Considering that every American taxpayer just got raped to the tune of $850 billion just two days ago, I would have to say that irresponsible investments have pretty pathetic returns as well.
I just don't think big oil is the major recipient.
Perhaps you are un aware of the windfall profits of the major oil companies since the start of the Iraq War.
"By just about any measure, the past three years have produced one of the biggest cash gushers in the oil industry's history. Since January of 2002, the price of crude has tripled, leaving oil producers awash in profits. During that period, the top 10 major public oil companies have sold some $1.5 trillion worth of crude, pocketing profits of more than $125 billion.
"Exxon beat its own one-year-old record for the biggest corporate profits ever by 3 percent. Put together with the announcement by the No. 2 U.S. oil company, Chevron, of an $18.7 billion year, up 9 percent over 2006, plus the earlier results of Shell and ConocoPhillips, and that's more than $100 billion in profits from four companies. It's all thanks to the historic 35 percent climb in worldwide crude oil prices in the second half of 2007, ending the first week of this year when oil briefly touched $100 per barrel...Exxon Mobil's profits are 80 percent higher than those of General Electric, which used to be the largest U.S. company by market capitalization before Exxon left it in the dust in 2005. The new economy? Microsoft earns about a third as much money. And next to Exxon, the world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart, looks like a quaint boutique, with annual profits of about $11 billion."
Just because they aren't getting money straight from Uncle Sam like the military industrial contractors are, don't think that this war hasn't served to make oil far more profitable than ever, and don't think that is any surprise to the oil man in the Whitehouse.
The only things the GGP said beyond "convicted of a crime " are still satisfied by the GPs experiences or anyone else who has been falsely accused. Everyone accused of a crime, whether innocent or guilty, has been out on bail and has an arrest record. Yes, the guy in the featured article had meth in his pocket, so that makes him a much less sympathtic target than the GP who simply ran afoul of a pissy self important cop. But once you start labeling people as "bad guys" and denying them constitutional protections based on that label, you create a form of second class citizen. Consider that one in six Americans has some sort of criminal record, thats 47 million Americans, who would under your standards be stripped of their protections from search and seizure, because "anyone who has been convicted of a crime is liable for a "good faith" warrant based on past "crimes,".
But since Mr. Herring is actually a "bad guy" and Americans love to see bad guys put away, it makes it hard for anyone to sympathize with him.
The very foundation of the "Rule of Law" is that public sympathy or lack there of is irrelevant to the law. When the courts become a popularity contest your have OJ Simpson walking away from a murder as a free man.
When I said "renting" I was alluding to the fact that any DRMed game isn't really your property, you are simply being allowed to use it by the publisher.
So consumers get jerked around when they rent a game from EA? That's been true for a long time, EA pretty much sucks when it comes to respecting the customer. Don't buy EA games, even under the Maxis title. If you do, then expect to be treated like a chump.
I would think that some of your best resources and support for building "approvalvote.com" would come from various third parties in the US. It's something the Greens and the Ron Paul Republicans can agree on. I would be thrilled to see an "Ask Slashdot" in a few days or weeks or months asking for help with format, content and political connections for "approvalvoting.com" I will plaster the NYC subway with stickers pointing to the site and change my sig in every forum I participate in if you can get it up and running. Sorry after some thought that's about the best help I could give.
Yes. Truly amazing. The RIAA lawyer tells the judge that the University will destroy the data if the motion is not granted. Leaving out the fact that the University told him that the data has been preserved. And the Judge "presumes" that that was an "honest mistake"?
So in a situation where a Judge is so obviously and demonstrably "playing dumb" where can the people turn in order to be assured of the judge's fitness to be a judge? I don't find the Judge's presumptions to be amazing, I find them to a cause for concern and investigation as to the Judge's impartiality. I'm not saying that the Judge himself should go on trial, but rather that his "presumptions" need to be noted and evaluated by whatever body is responsible for oversight. A Judge that makes huge and frequent errors like this on a single trial would be rightly called into question, but is there any mechanism with which a Judge's error can be tracked when they are spread over many many cases? How do you stop a Judge that purposefully flavors every trial according to their preconceived opinions?
That would depend some on the application, if a 90% charge in your battery bank in a electric car will get you 50 miles, then "50 miles charge in 10 minutes" would sell just fine. But if they also want to be able to boast about the total battery life and charge capacity, they can't be under rating them "This flashlight charges in to full in 15 mins and can be recharged 5000 times". If the charge rate drops significantly for the last 10% of charge, then it would behoove engineers making products that use these batteries to design around a 90% ten minute charge.
I understand the time/speed interaction in my basic knowledge of relativity, but I wasn't aware of a time/mass interaction. I guess the root of my confusion about this is summed up in FTA:"One problem with the void idea, though, is that it negates a principle that has reined in astronomy for more than 450 years: namely, that our place in the universe isn't special. " If we establish that our place in the universe is special, even if it is just with something that is known to be mutable like time, how can we hope to have any accurate understanding beyond the edges of our bubble? As you say the local time frame may look different from outside the bubble than from inside, but then I would assume that the inverse would have to be true and that it would be impossible to know exactly how different it was without having measurement of some kind take from both inside and outside this bubble. Perhaps this would make more sense to me if I understood the mass/time interaction, but this bubble thing seems to conflict deeply with what small amount I do know about physics.
Isn't one of the founding ideas of Physics that "The laws of Physics that hold true here, are also true everywhere else." If we allow for our bubble to have any fundamental exceptions, like the rate at which time flows, then why should any of the other "laws" be expected to hold true outside of our bubble? If that is the case then how can we pretend to be measuring or accurately observing anything outside of that bubble, when all of our observations are based around a physics that may or may not apply to the universe outside the bubble?
The credit and foreclosure crisis caused the housing prices to go down.
I have to disagree with you there, but only slightly. I think it was the superabundance of reckless credit that made housing prices over inflate. The houses aren't losing value, they are shedding false value. The median house price should be about three times the median annual wage, that's the most house that people can realistically afford. But with everyone (banks and consumers) pretending that credit was endless, allowed for a self re-enforcing cycle of over bidding on houses to occur, and the bubble was born. The median house must be affordable by the median wage earner, or else there is no one to buy it and it is worth nothing. Any value the housing market appeared to have that was beyond the means of homeowners to pay for (with their stagnate wages) was always illusory.
Especially if they're stupid enough to try to run the constituent email through the same mailserver (probably a MS Exchange box) that they use for their "business" email
Maybe they could whatever IT resources they utilize to collect my income taxes that get filed electronically every year. If the servers can handle the taxation, they can handle the representation.
Slashdot Mirror
this program embodies what is most wrong with modern western culture--superficiality, vanity, and an abhorrence of eccentricity or individuality.
I wonder what this program would do with a picture of Angelina Jolie? She has the large eyes and large mouth of the "before" picture in the article, but if those where scaled down to average proportions Angelina would just be kinda average attractive. I think this program might move people towards a median kind of beauty, but that would necessitate making the more exotic beauties of the world rather plain. While there is a rather plain beige conformity thing present in Western culture, there is also a love of the extremes in Western culture, just look the attention we lavish on our best athletes and most attractive movie stars. In a deeply conformist culture they would be ostracized for making other people feel clumsy, weak and ugly. I have to wonder what cultures are more accepting of eccentricity or individuality than modern western culture?
us finding "earth like" planets but outside the bounds of what we understand can substantiate life.
There definitely needs to be some refinement of what qualifies as "earth like". I would consider Mars to be a the extreme outer edge of "earth like". Some of the more extreme bacteria and lichen from earth might be able to survive, maybe. I wonder what the parameters for "earth like" should be. Maybe: 0.4G to 1.4G gravity range, a temperature range between 180K and 335K, atmospheric pressure of 1kPa to 110kPa. What else would need to be included for a meaningful "earth like" definition?
Unions don't want one teacher teaching thousands of students. They want the maximum number of union teachers teaching the minimum number of students.
Could that possibly have to do with a high teacher to student ratio leading to higher quality education for the students? While one teacher could lecture thousands of students, they couldn't teach them, teaching a child requires that you are aware of the child's progress and understanding. A good teacher might be able to have that kind of awareness of two dozen students and might be able to occasionally tailor little bits of a lesson to meet the needs of any students not falling in the center section of the bell curve. But a good teacher with ten students could have a much higher level of awareness of each students progress and abilities and could offer a higher level of lesson optimization for each student. Speaking personally as someone who was quite poorly behaved in elementary school, the fewer the students the less opportunity and desire for mischief. When a teacher has 30 kids in a classroom, the kids at each end of the bell curve (ability wise) frequently find the lesson to be meaningless and quickly find other ways to amuse themselves. So in a way the subject line of this thread is right, it's about money, buthe money question isn't about paying teachers millions of dollars, it's about tax base per teacher. If the default class size is 30 kids, then you have 3 times the budget per teacher compared to a 10 student classroom. Realistically, teaching should pay a median collage grad kind of wage, which it does. If you want to improve quality, then reduce student quantity. Paying the existing teachers in a school system 50% more isn't going to do much in terms of the education quality they are able to produce, but if you hire 50% more teachers so that each class is now 2/3rds the size, educational quality will rise quickly. Especially if you allow the teachers enough flexibility in their curriculum to allow them to customize lesson to the needs of the students, rather than holding hard and fast to some statewide rulebook.
Everyone shares this flaw; humans in general fail logic, for example Christians are often judgmental of other religions or non-believers when their doctrine says they should be tolerant.
That seems to be a weakness/defense mechanism of any religious person or culture when they are insecure/new in their faith. Anyone who is at a fundamental level of understanding in their belief is going to see it as black and white, with-us or against-us situation. This is amusingly true of a belief in tolerance and diversity as well. The believers in the-one-right-way are usually a destructive force in what ever genre their belief is in. For a easy modern cultural view of this phenomenon just look at the many destructive effects of Political Correctness.
Now for an on topic bit: How long until Gecko Glue can be scaled up enough to be cost effective in it's reusablility? Cheap as Velcro per square inch?
The current financial turmoil is causing some amazingly rapid transformations in our culture. It will be interesting to see where it ends.
Hopefully it ends with the public understanding than a people who are all in debt are a people enslaved. A 30 year mortgage is just modern indentured servitude.
You seem to be unfamiliar with Dubya's tendency to say what ever he thinks will sell, with no relation to his true intentions other than to offer a thin justification for the course of action he has decided to take. Why would he bother with that? Because there is so much sensationalism in today's 24 hour News media, that As long as he can draw out any objections to his desired course of action, public furor will die down in about a week. Our entire culture has serious ADD. So any bullshit statement that can allow the pundits to debate back and forth for a few days is pretty much a carte blanc for Bush and his handlers to do whatever the fuck they want to do.
You could have just said... "Mini-luv"
Sad, but true.
The Amish apparent aversion to technology isn't about technology itself but about staying away from consumerism and maintaining a high degree of self sufficiency. If you never have a tv or car, you never feel the need to get a better tv or car. If you dress in a very regimented traditional manner, you don't feel the need to go buy the latest fashion. and so on..
How tough would it be to make an application that untagged photos for you? Any photos tagged with your name that appear on any pages of anyone on your "my friends" list would have your name untagged.
I considered a "socially repsonsible" investment fund at one point. Then I realized the thing had pathetic returns
Considering that every American taxpayer just got raped to the tune of $850 billion just two days ago, I would have to say that irresponsible investments have pretty pathetic returns as well.
Perhaps you are un aware of the windfall profits of the major oil companies since the start of the Iraq War.
Just because they aren't getting money straight from Uncle Sam like the military industrial contractors are, don't think that this war hasn't served to make oil far more profitable than ever, and don't think that is any surprise to the oil man in the Whitehouse.
The only things the GGP said beyond "convicted of a crime " are still satisfied by the GPs experiences or anyone else who has been falsely accused. Everyone accused of a crime, whether innocent or guilty, has been out on bail and has an arrest record. Yes, the guy in the featured article had meth in his pocket, so that makes him a much less sympathtic target than the GP who simply ran afoul of a pissy self important cop. But once you start labeling people as "bad guys" and denying them constitutional protections based on that label, you create a form of second class citizen. Consider that one in six Americans has some sort of criminal record, thats 47 million Americans, who would under your standards be stripped of their protections from search and seizure, because "anyone who has been convicted of a crime is liable for a "good faith" warrant based on past "crimes,".
But since Mr. Herring is actually a "bad guy" and Americans love to see bad guys put away, it makes it hard for anyone to sympathize with him.
The very foundation of the "Rule of Law" is that public sympathy or lack there of is irrelevant to the law. When the courts become a popularity contest your have OJ Simpson walking away from a murder as a free man.
When I said "renting" I was alluding to the fact that any DRMed game isn't really your property, you are simply being allowed to use it by the publisher.
So consumers get jerked around when they rent a game from EA? That's been true for a long time, EA pretty much sucks when it comes to respecting the customer. Don't buy EA games, even under the Maxis title. If you do, then expect to be treated like a chump.
I would think that some of your best resources and support for building "approvalvote.com" would come from various third parties in the US. It's something the Greens and the Ron Paul Republicans can agree on. I would be thrilled to see an "Ask Slashdot" in a few days or weeks or months asking for help with format, content and political connections for "approvalvoting.com" I will plaster the NYC subway with stickers pointing to the site and change my sig in every forum I participate in if you can get it up and running. Sorry after some thought that's about the best help I could give.
then the people could reasonably hold the politicians accountable come election time.
Why would politicians ever vote that into law? Accountably is a severe hindrance to the maximization of profits.
Thank you. Very interesting with a refreshing lack of snarky ranting. Mod up.
Yes. Truly amazing. The RIAA lawyer tells the judge that the University will destroy the data if the motion is not granted. Leaving out the fact that the University told him that the data has been preserved. And the Judge "presumes" that that was an "honest mistake"?
So in a situation where a Judge is so obviously and demonstrably "playing dumb" where can the people turn in order to be assured of the judge's fitness to be a judge? I don't find the Judge's presumptions to be amazing, I find them to a cause for concern and investigation as to the Judge's impartiality. I'm not saying that the Judge himself should go on trial, but rather that his "presumptions" need to be noted and evaluated by whatever body is responsible for oversight. A Judge that makes huge and frequent errors like this on a single trial would be rightly called into question, but is there any mechanism with which a Judge's error can be tracked when they are spread over many many cases? How do you stop a Judge that purposefully flavors every trial according to their preconceived opinions?
I am having trouble jumping from this thought to the thought of the skin resolving those sensations into an image.
As I understand it, that's more of a matter of the brain rewiring itself to interpret the signals coming from that patch of skin differently than any limitation of the nerves in the skin itself. There is an interesting account of what this is like in an old Wired article around page 5 the author experiences a rather sudden shift as his brain learns to interpret visual signals differently.
That would depend some on the application, if a 90% charge in your battery bank in a electric car will get you 50 miles, then "50 miles charge in 10 minutes" would sell just fine. But if they also want to be able to boast about the total battery life and charge capacity, they can't be under rating them "This flashlight charges in to full in 15 mins and can be recharged 5000 times". If the charge rate drops significantly for the last 10% of charge, then it would behoove engineers making products that use these batteries to design around a 90% ten minute charge.
I understand the time/speed interaction in my basic knowledge of relativity, but I wasn't aware of a time/mass interaction. I guess the root of my confusion about this is summed up in FTA:"One problem with the void idea, though, is that it negates a principle that has reined in astronomy for more than 450 years: namely, that our place in the universe isn't special. " If we establish that our place in the universe is special, even if it is just with something that is known to be mutable like time, how can we hope to have any accurate understanding beyond the edges of our bubble? As you say the local time frame may look different from outside the bubble than from inside, but then I would assume that the inverse would have to be true and that it would be impossible to know exactly how different it was without having measurement of some kind take from both inside and outside this bubble. Perhaps this would make more sense to me if I understood the mass/time interaction, but this bubble thing seems to conflict deeply with what small amount I do know about physics.
Isn't one of the founding ideas of Physics that "The laws of Physics that hold true here, are also true everywhere else." If we allow for our bubble to have any fundamental exceptions, like the rate at which time flows, then why should any of the other "laws" be expected to hold true outside of our bubble? If that is the case then how can we pretend to be measuring or accurately observing anything outside of that bubble, when all of our observations are based around a physics that may or may not apply to the universe outside the bubble?
The credit and foreclosure crisis caused the housing prices to go down.
I have to disagree with you there, but only slightly. I think it was the superabundance of reckless credit that made housing prices over inflate. The houses aren't losing value, they are shedding false value. The median house price should be about three times the median annual wage, that's the most house that people can realistically afford. But with everyone (banks and consumers) pretending that credit was endless, allowed for a self re-enforcing cycle of over bidding on houses to occur, and the bubble was born. The median house must be affordable by the median wage earner, or else there is no one to buy it and it is worth nothing. Any value the housing market appeared to have that was beyond the means of homeowners to pay for (with their stagnate wages) was always illusory.
Especially if they're stupid enough to try to run the constituent email through the same mailserver (probably a MS Exchange box) that they use for their "business" email
Maybe they could whatever IT resources they utilize to collect my income taxes that get filed electronically every year. If the servers can handle the taxation, they can handle the representation.