Wow, those Weathermen were incredibly clever with their numerous names. I bet they also called themselves Meteorologists or somesuch, that'd throw off the cops.
But somehow I don't think many competent small businesses and HR departments going to ThePirateBay to find out what pictures you and I might be taking. In fact, I don't imagine them spending more than a couple minutes trying to find possible MySpace or Facebook profiles.
Wow, total failure to read the first line of text on my part.
Not a failure of education, I assure you. I just didn't see the first line when I clicked on the post. It scrolled down partway into the list (the AJAX discussion system can scroll down too far) and I just read down from there.
Though I appreciate your hostile, troll-like response.
You live in Europe, going by the names of those ISPs and the address you used. There's more competition there. The netherlands perhaps? I forget what.nl is.
You clearly have no experience with Canadian or US ISPs. We have no choice.
My choices, in my area, are:
Qwest DSL. Mediacom Cable.
There is no DSL competition, there is no cable competition.
To the first reply above this, ethernet rarely working after a fresh install is out of the norm for me. Esp. if you use a slipstreamed or recent install disc with SP2/3 as part of the installation. Obviously your Windows disc can't include drivers for new software and interfaces that came out after the disc was stamped.
To the second and third replies, you're talking about hugely, enormously stunting the growth of the internet, its accessibility and affordability.
Without IE, there would be no Firefox. Sad to say, but Netscape would probably still be selling their browser.
Unfair competition when two of the three is a free product and the third I've never seen an advertisement for in the OS doesn't really exist. Honestly, how can I begrudge Microsoft for giving me IE for free when, how the fuck else would I download Firefox?
Incorporating a browser into the OS is natural and progressive and frankly, I would bemoan the decisions made if this were an alternate reality in which IE was forcibly removed from Windows by a court decision. We'd be stuck with dialup, telnet and distributing what is currently considered -core- operating system functionality via floppies.
Ah, so instead of actually trying to effect real change, you would suggest that we somehow, as a society, arbitrarily smarten up television programs and break the right to free speech by requiring all entertainment to be equally as smart?
You can't argue for that either, sorry. Free speech is too important.
Nevermind, I'm feeding a troll here who denies in the face of overwhelming evidence the current civilian casualty toll in Iraq, and has been called out on it in the past.
So you agree that the "conflict" isn't actually one our military is best suited for?
Because I'm totally with you on this. We're basically fighting pissed of civilians using whatever homemade bombs they can because they Hate America(TM) or someone influential in their life told them to.
It's not a matter of ground conflict at all, we won that, and we continue to win that without equal by any other military in the world.
Unfortunately, our goal was to go into Iraq, supposedly, to quell a base of terrorist operations and a source of their funding and a source for weapons more dangerous than the airplanes used in 9/11. What we found were civilians who didn't like us, who we pissed off by not knowing their culture at all and completely disrupting the iron grip Saddam had on the place that kept the whole thing from exploding, and we failed to find those supposed weapons they were going to use. The end result was that we made more terrorists.
In which case we're practicing extreme social darwinism. (I know, whoooosh, right?)
I get your joke, haha, but if you can't advocate euthanasia or castration, which is the leading moral perspective of our time (despite what some above have said) then there's only two solutions: get all the smart people together and ask them to create a bigger burden on society by making more babies, or make certain that there are no more "dumb" people, or at least significantly improve standards worldwide.
Just imagine a world in which everyone is able to learn and think at the pace of a child prodigy.
I'm not saying that. In fact, I don't expect people to dump their culture just because it's "stupid." There are intelligent people all over the world practicing different creeds and different cultural mores. The difference, however, is that we can expect positive change in those niche cultural values that are abhorrent, we could see positive change in all of society if the brain trust of the world were vastly increased.
Even if we affected no positive social change whatsoever, how would it be a bad thing -at all- to suddenly have everyone smarter?
No, that complicates the issue and allows future politicians to muddy it with more complex definitions of plain-spoken and the like. Then we have SCOTUS rule on what is and is not plain-spoken, what legal jargon is allowed, what dictionaries are allowed (then it becomes an issue of capitalism, do we support Black's Law Dictionary or some alternative?) Etc.
Let's not create a blurry definition, instead, let's videotape every senator and representative saying their yea by reciting the text of the bill. If the law is deliberately obfuscated or verbose, then they will pay for it in their time and in explaining why they voted for something needlessly complex. Their upcoming opponents will campaign on the simplicity and elegance to the laws they will write, and may even win on those grounds.
Certainly if we require videotaping of yea votes by requiring each yea to be a repetition of the full text of the bill then we will no longer have to worry about burgeoning, confusing and unnecessary legislation and the strange and unrelated matters that slip into major bills.
No, that's a different sort of pressure. Affluent, wealthy people reproduce less. We can speculate on why: perhaps the wealthy, affluent and intelligent realize fewer children are easier to provide a future for, or other reasons. That's merely speculation.
However we do know that the greater the wealth in a society, the lower the birth rate. We also know the mortality rate is lower. The distraught, the poor, the downtrodden can have many children without fear that any of them will fail to survive. It is quite likely in modern western nations that all of our children will survive to outlive us. Even in America with our limited welfare system, when compared to other western nations, we provide for the needy at a level of subsistence, more or less.
So no, you're wrong. There is pressure on you, but it's cultural. I'm talking about selection pressures, genetic pressures.
I'd like you to convince me that what makes someone more likely to be Mormon as opposed to Christian as opposed to Jewish, etc, is genetic and not cultural.
We can't fight culture, it just never works. You live with it, if you fight it anyone who dies in its name is a martyr. It's silly to fight culture.
Instead, you make people smarter. Better education fights AIDS. Why is that? Being educated doesn't stop the HIV virus from infecting you if you're exposed, it doesn't slow down its growth. Yet there's a negative correlation between AIDS infection rates and intelligence, or more generally, how "western" a culture is. I'm not saying western culture in this case is better, rather I'm making the point that people that are uneducated and alive in Africa do not understand the risks involved with unprotected, frivolous sex. And education provides them with the critical thinking ability to protect themselves and the people around them.
Smart people all around the world make the world around them better in myriad ways. Being "smart" is a gift and I'd like everyone to have it. Is it really that bad to think that if everyone were given what is currently a 180 IQ that the world would be a better place?
That doesn't solve the problem, and in fact, a lot of Congress-critters do just that, they'll have blogs or press releases saying that they support X because of Y.
So what? You also voted for Z which is pretty damn heinous.
What we need is a constitutional amendment requiring a yea vote to be accompanied by an audio-video recording of the bill itself. This has a few effects; first, it drastically reduces the amount of busywork and pork that goes into our law books. Second, the number of tangential items that should be the business of the people or the state is reduced. And third, we can hold our congress-critters personally accountable. Imagine running for reelection when your opponent has a video clip of you saying that you support whatever heinous law?
A second amendment to be passed should require all federal laws to be renewed thirty years after their passing, applied retroactively such that for the next thirty years Congress will have to actually go to work and do something, formalizing a new set of laws that get rid of the cruft we have today.
When every law is plain-spoken and recorded on video so we the people may hold our representatives accountable, we will have succeeded in having a government for the people.
Gay guys likely end up attractive to women because they're the ultimate "hard to get." If a girl can successfully make you straight, that's a huge self-esteem booster.
Also, you're the penultimate nice guy in that they can mess around with you emotionally and never have to worry about you wanting anything physical out of the relationship. They can have their cake and eat it too.
Doesn't matter. If it gets more women, more children are likely to result. Any behavior that results in more children is likely to be selected for because we have such a low mortality rate and competition for survival is low. Competition for resources is not, but it's pretty hard in today's society to well and truly not be able to survive. There are lots of people who "go hungry" but much rarer to have people starve.
This is an unfortunate situation for humanity. On one side, we have to treat everyone as humans, we are all in the same boat together. On the other, we have a variety of incredibly negative selective pressures that could drown our species. We can't advocate social darwinism, we know what that leads to, so I think it's time for science to go up to bat for our future. Not eugenics or darwinism, rather, our goal should be to improve -everyone-. If so-called stupid people reproduce more, and we don't do anything to make everyone smarter, through widely available gene therapy or better schooling or whatnot, then we will eventually have far, far too many of those stupid people.
I don't mean to make any accusations here or insult anyone, but there are a number of traits that are widely agreed upon to be negative that seem to be correlated with reproductive rates. Humanity has been so dominant for so long that there are no selection pressures for the opposite traits, and we're going to be left with the consequences unless some radically successful genetic modifications take place. We cannot, should not ever punish anyone or infringe on the rights of anyone who we think is dumb, or is mean, or is a narcissist merely because of those reasons. I cannot stress enough that isn't a position I advocate. But we can encourage widespread adoption of genetic advancements. It needs to be fair, it needs to be free, and it needs to be global. We managed to eradicate small pox with something remarkably close to gene therapy, it's time to do it again.
The longer we wait the harder it will be to accomplish.
My ignorance is backed up by people like General Petraeus and other military commanders. And it's clear we are facing a different sort of enemy, in a different sort of conflict.
And while it's completely true that the average soldier today receives superior training and equipment than the same soldier would have a mere twenty years ago, it doesn't weaken my argument. You see, that training appears to be for naught: criminal behavior is constantly occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers are consistently being told with wink and nod to use things like drop weapons and to shoot first, ask questions later. This is from the testimony of soldiers who have been on one or more tours in Iraq. They admit that it's terrifying, that every single time they get into a vehicle they are worried that any single person, any vehicle, any bump on the side of the road or any piece of brush may hide something that will end their lives.
Not only dumb people become soldiers, many people become soldiers. Bravely. I won't dispute that, they put their lives on the line for causes they may or may not agree with because they feel they can serve our country. That's honorable. I know an ex-Marine smarter than anyone else I know. He's not dumb, he didn't join the Marines because he wanted to go kill people, he did it to serve.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, those Weathermen were incredibly clever with their numerous names. I bet they also called themselves Meteorologists or somesuch, that'd throw off the cops.
That's a security flaw, sure.
But somehow I don't think many competent small businesses and HR departments going to ThePirateBay to find out what pictures you and I might be taking. In fact, I don't imagine them spending more than a couple minutes trying to find possible MySpace or Facebook profiles.
Eclipse? Fast?
We could call such a surface "Wet Paint" and use it whenever we need to determine if contact was made between the "Wet Paint" and another object.
Maybe I like the taste of that sugared tap water, you insensitive clod.
Wow, total failure to read the first line of text on my part.
Not a failure of education, I assure you. I just didn't see the first line when I clicked on the post. It scrolled down partway into the list (the AJAX discussion system can scroll down too far) and I just read down from there.
Though I appreciate your hostile, troll-like response.
You live in Europe, going by the names of those ISPs and the address you used. There's more competition there. The netherlands perhaps? I forget what .nl is.
You clearly have no experience with Canadian or US ISPs. We have no choice.
My choices, in my area, are:
Qwest DSL.
Mediacom Cable.
There is no DSL competition, there is no cable competition.
They both suck.
What about excel files? The whole point of an Excel file is to manipulate data, sometimes pull it from a database or a file.
I bring that up because this is how a minority of people use Word documents as well.
To the first reply above this, ethernet rarely working after a fresh install is out of the norm for me. Esp. if you use a slipstreamed or recent install disc with SP2/3 as part of the installation. Obviously your Windows disc can't include drivers for new software and interfaces that came out after the disc was stamped.
To the second and third replies, you're talking about hugely, enormously stunting the growth of the internet, its accessibility and affordability.
Without IE, there would be no Firefox. Sad to say, but Netscape would probably still be selling their browser.
Honestly, I use Firefox, VLC and AVG Free.
Unfair competition when two of the three is a free product and the third I've never seen an advertisement for in the OS doesn't really exist. Honestly, how can I begrudge Microsoft for giving me IE for free when, how the fuck else would I download Firefox?
Incorporating a browser into the OS is natural and progressive and frankly, I would bemoan the decisions made if this were an alternate reality in which IE was forcibly removed from Windows by a court decision. We'd be stuck with dialup, telnet and distributing what is currently considered -core- operating system functionality via floppies.
That's not the black hole, that's the accretion disk around the black hole.
A black hole itself will emit black body radiation in accordance with its mass/temperature.
Ah, so instead of actually trying to effect real change, you would suggest that we somehow, as a society, arbitrarily smarten up television programs and break the right to free speech by requiring all entertainment to be equally as smart?
You can't argue for that either, sorry. Free speech is too important.
Nevermind, I'm feeding a troll here who denies in the face of overwhelming evidence the current civilian casualty toll in Iraq, and has been called out on it in the past.
So you agree that the "conflict" isn't actually one our military is best suited for?
Because I'm totally with you on this. We're basically fighting pissed of civilians using whatever homemade bombs they can because they Hate America(TM) or someone influential in their life told them to.
It's not a matter of ground conflict at all, we won that, and we continue to win that without equal by any other military in the world.
Unfortunately, our goal was to go into Iraq, supposedly, to quell a base of terrorist operations and a source of their funding and a source for weapons more dangerous than the airplanes used in 9/11. What we found were civilians who didn't like us, who we pissed off by not knowing their culture at all and completely disrupting the iron grip Saddam had on the place that kept the whole thing from exploding, and we failed to find those supposed weapons they were going to use. The end result was that we made more terrorists.
Awesome!
In which case we're practicing extreme social darwinism. (I know, whoooosh, right?)
I get your joke, haha, but if you can't advocate euthanasia or castration, which is the leading moral perspective of our time (despite what some above have said) then there's only two solutions: get all the smart people together and ask them to create a bigger burden on society by making more babies, or make certain that there are no more "dumb" people, or at least significantly improve standards worldwide.
Just imagine a world in which everyone is able to learn and think at the pace of a child prodigy.
I'm not saying that. In fact, I don't expect people to dump their culture just because it's "stupid." There are intelligent people all over the world practicing different creeds and different cultural mores. The difference, however, is that we can expect positive change in those niche cultural values that are abhorrent, we could see positive change in all of society if the brain trust of the world were vastly increased.
Even if we affected no positive social change whatsoever, how would it be a bad thing -at all- to suddenly have everyone smarter?
No, that complicates the issue and allows future politicians to muddy it with more complex definitions of plain-spoken and the like. Then we have SCOTUS rule on what is and is not plain-spoken, what legal jargon is allowed, what dictionaries are allowed (then it becomes an issue of capitalism, do we support Black's Law Dictionary or some alternative?) Etc.
Let's not create a blurry definition, instead, let's videotape every senator and representative saying their yea by reciting the text of the bill. If the law is deliberately obfuscated or verbose, then they will pay for it in their time and in explaining why they voted for something needlessly complex. Their upcoming opponents will campaign on the simplicity and elegance to the laws they will write, and may even win on those grounds.
Certainly if we require videotaping of yea votes by requiring each yea to be a repetition of the full text of the bill then we will no longer have to worry about burgeoning, confusing and unnecessary legislation and the strange and unrelated matters that slip into major bills.
No, that's a different sort of pressure. Affluent, wealthy people reproduce less. We can speculate on why: perhaps the wealthy, affluent and intelligent realize fewer children are easier to provide a future for, or other reasons. That's merely speculation.
However we do know that the greater the wealth in a society, the lower the birth rate. We also know the mortality rate is lower. The distraught, the poor, the downtrodden can have many children without fear that any of them will fail to survive. It is quite likely in modern western nations that all of our children will survive to outlive us. Even in America with our limited welfare system, when compared to other western nations, we provide for the needy at a level of subsistence, more or less.
So no, you're wrong. There is pressure on you, but it's cultural. I'm talking about selection pressures, genetic pressures.
I'd like you to convince me that what makes someone more likely to be Mormon as opposed to Christian as opposed to Jewish, etc, is genetic and not cultural.
We can't fight culture, it just never works. You live with it, if you fight it anyone who dies in its name is a martyr. It's silly to fight culture.
Instead, you make people smarter. Better education fights AIDS. Why is that? Being educated doesn't stop the HIV virus from infecting you if you're exposed, it doesn't slow down its growth. Yet there's a negative correlation between AIDS infection rates and intelligence, or more generally, how "western" a culture is. I'm not saying western culture in this case is better, rather I'm making the point that people that are uneducated and alive in Africa do not understand the risks involved with unprotected, frivolous sex. And education provides them with the critical thinking ability to protect themselves and the people around them.
Smart people all around the world make the world around them better in myriad ways. Being "smart" is a gift and I'd like everyone to have it. Is it really that bad to think that if everyone were given what is currently a 180 IQ that the world would be a better place?
I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter because it seems so contrary to the views of most economists, and your ideas intrigue me.
I for some reason feel inclined to believe you despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and without any evidence being presented by you.
That doesn't solve the problem, and in fact, a lot of Congress-critters do just that, they'll have blogs or press releases saying that they support X because of Y.
So what? You also voted for Z which is pretty damn heinous.
What we need is a constitutional amendment requiring a yea vote to be accompanied by an audio-video recording of the bill itself. This has a few effects; first, it drastically reduces the amount of busywork and pork that goes into our law books. Second, the number of tangential items that should be the business of the people or the state is reduced. And third, we can hold our congress-critters personally accountable. Imagine running for reelection when your opponent has a video clip of you saying that you support whatever heinous law?
A second amendment to be passed should require all federal laws to be renewed thirty years after their passing, applied retroactively such that for the next thirty years Congress will have to actually go to work and do something, formalizing a new set of laws that get rid of the cruft we have today.
When every law is plain-spoken and recorded on video so we the people may hold our representatives accountable, we will have succeeded in having a government for the people.
Gay guys likely end up attractive to women because they're the ultimate "hard to get." If a girl can successfully make you straight, that's a huge self-esteem booster.
Also, you're the penultimate nice guy in that they can mess around with you emotionally and never have to worry about you wanting anything physical out of the relationship. They can have their cake and eat it too.
Doesn't matter. If it gets more women, more children are likely to result. Any behavior that results in more children is likely to be selected for because we have such a low mortality rate and competition for survival is low. Competition for resources is not, but it's pretty hard in today's society to well and truly not be able to survive. There are lots of people who "go hungry" but much rarer to have people starve.
This is an unfortunate situation for humanity. On one side, we have to treat everyone as humans, we are all in the same boat together. On the other, we have a variety of incredibly negative selective pressures that could drown our species. We can't advocate social darwinism, we know what that leads to, so I think it's time for science to go up to bat for our future. Not eugenics or darwinism, rather, our goal should be to improve -everyone-. If so-called stupid people reproduce more, and we don't do anything to make everyone smarter, through widely available gene therapy or better schooling or whatnot, then we will eventually have far, far too many of those stupid people.
I don't mean to make any accusations here or insult anyone, but there are a number of traits that are widely agreed upon to be negative that seem to be correlated with reproductive rates. Humanity has been so dominant for so long that there are no selection pressures for the opposite traits, and we're going to be left with the consequences unless some radically successful genetic modifications take place. We cannot, should not ever punish anyone or infringe on the rights of anyone who we think is dumb, or is mean, or is a narcissist merely because of those reasons. I cannot stress enough that isn't a position I advocate. But we can encourage widespread adoption of genetic advancements. It needs to be fair, it needs to be free, and it needs to be global. We managed to eradicate small pox with something remarkably close to gene therapy, it's time to do it again.
The longer we wait the harder it will be to accomplish.
It isn't a matter of not being allowed to win, it's because the idea of winning has changed from "militarily crush the opposition."
My ignorance is backed up by people like General Petraeus and other military commanders. And it's clear we are facing a different sort of enemy, in a different sort of conflict.
And while it's completely true that the average soldier today receives superior training and equipment than the same soldier would have a mere twenty years ago, it doesn't weaken my argument. You see, that training appears to be for naught: criminal behavior is constantly occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers are consistently being told with wink and nod to use things like drop weapons and to shoot first, ask questions later. This is from the testimony of soldiers who have been on one or more tours in Iraq. They admit that it's terrifying, that every single time they get into a vehicle they are worried that any single person, any vehicle, any bump on the side of the road or any piece of brush may hide something that will end their lives.
Not only dumb people become soldiers, many people become soldiers. Bravely. I won't dispute that, they put their lives on the line for causes they may or may not agree with because they feel they can serve our country. That's honorable. I know an ex-Marine smarter than anyone else I know. He's not dumb, he didn't join the Marines because he wanted to go kill people, he did it to serve.
Maybe I'm not speaking from ignorance, c6gunner.