He was elected shortly after the worst stock market crash and housing crash since the crash that started the Great Depression, which lasted fifteen years and we almost went there this time. This is not an average recession, our entire economy almost collapsed. Notice it was being called "the great recession" since it started.
And claiming Romney is a clone of Bush is a troll comment
Bullshit, it's the truth. Both are businessmen with MBAs from prestigious schools. Both seemingly believe in trickle-down fairy dust. Both are war hawks. Both are former governors. Both were born into wealth. How are they in any way different?
Troll? The "overrated" was legit but troll? I guess "troll" is the moderation for "it's true but makes me uncomfortable." Some people should never get mod points!
Man, you really fucked that joke up. It's the infinite improbability drive. You got the Heart of Gold's propulsion system confused with the Total Perspective Vortex, which shows one how utterly and completely insignifigant one is compared to the vastness of the universe.
"'By the time we're even 20, we've filled it up,' he said, adding that the only way to add information after that point is to 'repurpose our neocortex to learn something new.'
That really shows how incredibly ignorant Kurtzweil is about the brain. Before age 20 (in most people*) it isn't even fully formed, and neurons reconnect all the time.
If this were even remotely true, then how would he explain people with Eidetic memory?
Your comment brings me back 40 years to undergrad days. A freshman in one class was questioning the professor's knowledge; the prof held a Masters in the field. Dennis replied "Kid, I've forgotten more than you've ever learned."
Actually, before Gutenberg's press, a library was any building with a book in it, and books were always chained down because of the cost of transcribing them.
I shudder to think about a new 4 years of a BHO administration
Sorry, but that's incredibly stupid. The unemployment rate is lower than it's been since before he took office, home foreclosures are lower than before he took office, GM is doing good, is out of bankrupcy, and the US is strting to sell off GM stock, Bin Laden is dead, the stock market is higher than it has been since before he took office, we're out of Iraq and on our way out of Afghanistan.
And you want to replace him with a clone of the guy that caused all those messes in the first place, who wants to do exactly what Bush did? For God's sake, why??? Bush almost got us into a depression worse than the thirties and you want more of that insanity?
Since I don't need to memorize information because I can just look it up via Google Search, I'm learning less
Memorization is NOT learning. Which is a damned good thing for me, because I always sucked at memorization, although I've always been good at learning.
Take history, for example. The public school system will have you memorize dates, places, and names. That's not learning. Learning is understanding what happened at that time and place, and why it happened. "Looking up stuff" is for things you don't understand, or to retrieve data that is best written down than memorized.
Knowing that hydrogen is teh first element in the periodic table is memorization. Understanding why it's first is learning.
GP AC sayeth: Augmenting organic entities with non living parts is a step in the process
I'm partly inorganic (only a tiny little machine implanted), but a lot of folks I know have a lot of their body's parts replaced or augmented with inorganic machines.
You will be assimilated. You will BEG to be assimilated!
I'm sure this is futile, since you sound like either an Obama hater, a Romney lover, or a tea partier, but here we go:
a man who claimed to hate Gitmo yet leaves it open
He tried to close it, Congress wouldn't let him.
claimed to hate war yet doubles down on drone strikes and issues a surge in Afghanistan
The Iraq war (which he opposed) is over, Afghanistan is winding down because the surge worked and we'll be out of there in two years.
claims to hate Wall Street while bailing out (and taking huge donations from) giant Wall Street banks
Rubbish, if he hadn't done that we'd be in a depression so bad it would have made the Great Depression look like boom times.
claims to hate the oil industry while taking huge donations from BP before the oil spill.
Any politician wil take any money offered. If Koch offered Obama money he'd take it, if Michael Moore offered Romney money, he'd take it just as quickly.
On the other hand, during the Republican debates Romney said he wants Roe v Wade overturned, two nights ago said he wouldn't outlaw abortion.
I do agree with you on one thing: The press does not care at all what Democrats will do, and rationalize any action they take. However, the same goes for Republicans. The "liberal media" is a myth; ABC only looks liberal compared to Fox or Rush, who are slightly to the right of Mussolini.
At least when you vote Republican you know the press will do their damnedest to catch them out in something
That's pure laziness; the Republicans make it easy.
So does this go the other way too? Are Romney supporters accidentally "Like"ing Obama's page?
Considering TFA's author's theory, probably. It made sense to me: people "like" Romney (and likely Obama as well) just to hear what he has to say, and maybe catch him in some idiocy they can use against him.
Of course, in TFA it's more like "to see what both candidates have to say."
Your desktop word processing software also didn't have a licensing cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars
It would if you were the only customer and it was only going to run on one computer. Do you have any idea how many programmers MS has and what it costs for salaries and other overhead?
If anything consumes everything, does the anything becomes everything?
You might be amused by the JE I posted yesterday, a rerun from my old site ten years ago.
But past the lightspeed limit, the universe seemed to shrink to a pinpoint, which was angrily chasing me. Which was a very silly thing for it to do, as I wanted to get back inside it. It was kind of like my wife when she's mad at me.
Welcome to Slashdot, where people correct others for inane crap.
The person correcting most likely figured, as I would, that the guy he was correcting probably spoke English as a second language, and that he was doing him a favor (What was the movie where the foreigner was saying "Piece of pie" and "easy as cake"?). Personally, if I make an ignorant goof, I expect to be corrected, and welcome the correction.
Welcome to slashdot, where people who like to learn come to discuss stuff.
Gees, guys, Wordnet and Free online? GOML! How about the dictionary that's been the standard for hundreds of years? From Webster's:
Definition of DATA 1: factual information (as measurements or statistics) used as a basis for reasoning, discussion, or calculation 2: information output by a sensing device or organ that includes both useful and irrelevant or redundant information and must be processed to be meaningful 3: information in numerical form that can be digitally transmitted or processed
As opposed to information (which you, in your unassailable youth, didn't bother defining):
Definition of INFORMATION 1: the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence 2a (1) : knowledge obtained from investigation, study, or instruction (2) : intelligence, news (3) : facts, data b : the attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something (as nucleotides in DNA or binary digits in a computer program) that produce specific effects c (1) : a signal or character (as in a communication system or computer) representing data (2) : something (as a message, experimental data, or a picture) which justifies change in a construct (as a plan or theory) that represents physical or mental experience or another construct d : a quantitative measure of the content of information; specifically : a numerical quantity that measures the uncertainty in the outcome of an experiment to be performed
Looks to me like the GGP was right: data are collections of measurements and observations, information is what you glean from the data, which is exactly what a (now retired) colleague who held a PhD in statistics taught me.
A Brit gave me a coin (I believe it's legal tender but I don't remember) commemorating Charles and Diane's wedding back in the early eighties, is it worth anything?
Indeed, that probably goes for everyone here. Linus sounds like a cool guy. I especially agree with "I really hate big laptops. I can't understand people who lug around 15" (or 17"!) monsters. The right weight for a laptop is 1kg, no more." Mine is about the size of a hard cover book, and weighs about he same.
I wonder what distro Linux uses? If he uses a GUI or a CLI? If GUI (which I doubt), which one?
It already does though. I don't need to memorize *everything* - now I only need to know how to find the answers I need. This allows me to work with a much smaller set of data and fetch that which I need from the cloud as needed.
patent # X05Nz978: "On a computer." It's no different than when I went to school, back when a computer with less power than a pocket calculator took an entire building to house. Slide rule, pocket notebook, encyclopedia, and public libraries. Of course, the cell phone is a much better tool than those things, but you can do it without a phone/computer.
What other types of vitamins are there? I mean, isn't that why people take vitamins, to live longer?
I take them because if I don't, I don't have as much energy, I hurt more, and I get cranky. I'm already 60 and don't really care how long I live (I never expected to last past 40).
Example: GM and having 90% of the car run on the BCM, and Honda running the WHOLE car including engine off of the single ECM. My AC quit working because of a faulty sensor shorting out the IO port on the ECM. only fix is to replace the WHOLE ECM for the car at $2200.00
That kind of design is only done by really really dumb engineers.
At one point I agreed with that sentiment. Hanlon's razor says don't assume malice when stupidity will explain, but mcgrew's razor says don't assume stupidity when greedy self-interest explains.
I once remarked "if the idiots who designed cars had to actuallt work on them, they'd be designed better." It was pointed out to me that the automaker makes more money for their dealerships in repair when they're expensive to repair.
Tell me, why does a car need a $2200 computer for the heater and AC when a couple of potentiometers and switches will do the same job for five bucks?
Don't assume stupidity, the engineers are doing what they're told: Make it expensive to fix.
Presumably, any attempt to surpass the speed of light would required taking actions that will likely kill you.
Both you and the GP sem to be referring to Asimov's 1954 story Escape! In the story, "the brain" (a 3 laws positronic brain) has to overcome the 1st law, because hyperspace kills you... but only for a fraction of a second.
And SOMEONE does not know their Western history! (Not surprising given the utter lack of proper history teaching in the West for the last 30 years. Thanks for that, Baby Boomers!)
Don't blame us, our education was even worse than yours. Most early 20th centuy history I learned from my grandparents, who lived it. They didn't teach us any more than they did my kids, who are in their twenties, and they're probably doing a better job than then..
I once got an A+ on a science paper in high school because it was over the teacher's head. That's how bad the education system was in the '60s. Almost everything they tried to teach me after I learned to read I'd already read.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't California in debt?
Woosh! They're in as bad a shape as Illinois. In short, terrible debt.
Umm, he was elected during a recession
He was elected shortly after the worst stock market crash and housing crash since the crash that started the Great Depression, which lasted fifteen years and we almost went there this time. This is not an average recession, our entire economy almost collapsed. Notice it was being called "the great recession" since it started.
And claiming Romney is a clone of Bush is a troll comment
Bullshit, it's the truth. Both are businessmen with MBAs from prestigious schools. Both seemingly believe in trickle-down fairy dust. Both are war hawks. Both are former governors. Both were born into wealth. How are they in any way different?
Troll? The "overrated" was legit but troll? I guess "troll" is the moderation for "it's true but makes me uncomfortable." Some people should never get mod points!
Man, you really fucked that joke up. It's the infinite improbability drive. You got the Heart of Gold's propulsion system confused with the Total Perspective Vortex, which shows one how utterly and completely insignifigant one is compared to the vastness of the universe.
"'By the time we're even 20, we've filled it up,' he said, adding that the only way to add information after that point is to 'repurpose our neocortex to learn something new.'
That really shows how incredibly ignorant Kurtzweil is about the brain. Before age 20 (in most people*) it isn't even fully formed, and neurons reconnect all the time.
If this were even remotely true, then how would he explain people with Eidetic memory?
Your comment brings me back 40 years to undergrad days. A freshman in one class was questioning the professor's knowledge; the prof held a Masters in the field. Dennis replied "Kid, I've forgotten more than you've ever learned."
Actually, before Gutenberg's press, a library was any building with a book in it, and books were always chained down because of the cost of transcribing them.
I shudder to think about a new 4 years of a BHO administration
Sorry, but that's incredibly stupid. The unemployment rate is lower than it's been since before he took office, home foreclosures are lower than before he took office, GM is doing good, is out of bankrupcy, and the US is strting to sell off GM stock, Bin Laden is dead, the stock market is higher than it has been since before he took office, we're out of Iraq and on our way out of Afghanistan.
And you want to replace him with a clone of the guy that caused all those messes in the first place, who wants to do exactly what Bush did? For God's sake, why??? Bush almost got us into a depression worse than the thirties and you want more of that insanity?
As Bugsy says, "what a maroon."
Since I don't need to memorize information because I can just look it up via Google Search, I'm learning less
Memorization is NOT learning. Which is a damned good thing for me, because I always sucked at memorization, although I've always been good at learning.
Take history, for example. The public school system will have you memorize dates, places, and names. That's not learning. Learning is understanding what happened at that time and place, and why it happened. "Looking up stuff" is for things you don't understand, or to retrieve data that is best written down than memorized.
Knowing that hydrogen is teh first element in the periodic table is memorization. Understanding why it's first is learning.
GP AC sayeth: Augmenting organic entities with non living parts is a step in the process
I'm partly inorganic (only a tiny little machine implanted), but a lot of folks I know have a lot of their body's parts replaced or augmented with inorganic machines.
You will be assimilated. You will BEG to be assimilated!
I'm sure this is futile, since you sound like either an Obama hater, a Romney lover, or a tea partier, but here we go:
a man who claimed to hate Gitmo yet leaves it open
He tried to close it, Congress wouldn't let him.
claimed to hate war yet doubles down on drone strikes and issues a surge in Afghanistan
The Iraq war (which he opposed) is over, Afghanistan is winding down because the surge worked and we'll be out of there in two years.
claims to hate Wall Street while bailing out (and taking huge donations from) giant Wall Street banks
Rubbish, if he hadn't done that we'd be in a depression so bad it would have made the Great Depression look like boom times.
claims to hate the oil industry while taking huge donations from BP before the oil spill.
Any politician wil take any money offered. If Koch offered Obama money he'd take it, if Michael Moore offered Romney money, he'd take it just as quickly.
On the other hand, during the Republican debates Romney said he wants Roe v Wade overturned, two nights ago said he wouldn't outlaw abortion.
I do agree with you on one thing: The press does not care at all what Democrats will do, and rationalize any action they take. However, the same goes for Republicans. The "liberal media" is a myth; ABC only looks liberal compared to Fox or Rush, who are slightly to the right of Mussolini.
At least when you vote Republican you know the press will do their damnedest to catch them out in something
That's pure laziness; the Republicans make it easy.
So does this go the other way too? Are Romney supporters accidentally "Like"ing Obama's page?
Considering TFA's author's theory, probably. It made sense to me: people "like" Romney (and likely Obama as well) just to hear what he has to say, and maybe catch him in some idiocy they can use against him.
Of course, in TFA it's more like "to see what both candidates have to say."
Your desktop word processing software also didn't have a licensing cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars
It would if you were the only customer and it was only going to run on one computer. Do you have any idea how many programmers MS has and what it costs for salaries and other overhead?
If anything consumes everything, does the anything becomes everything?
You might be amused by the JE I posted yesterday, a rerun from my old site ten years ago.
Welcome to Slashdot, where people correct others for inane crap.
The person correcting most likely figured, as I would, that the guy he was correcting probably spoke English as a second language, and that he was doing him a favor (What was the movie where the foreigner was saying "Piece of pie" and "easy as cake"?). Personally, if I make an ignorant goof, I expect to be corrected, and welcome the correction.
Welcome to slashdot, where people who like to learn come to discuss stuff.
Gees, guys, Wordnet and Free online? GOML! How about the dictionary that's been the standard for hundreds of years? From Webster's:
As opposed to information (which you, in your unassailable youth, didn't bother defining):
Looks to me like the GGP was right: data are collections of measurements and observations, information is what you glean from the data, which is exactly what a (now retired) colleague who held a PhD in statistics taught me.
A Brit gave me a coin (I believe it's legal tender but I don't remember) commemorating Charles and Diane's wedding back in the early eighties, is it worth anything?
Indeed, that probably goes for everyone here. Linus sounds like a cool guy. I especially agree with "I really hate big laptops. I can't understand people who lug around 15" (or 17"!) monsters. The right weight for a laptop is 1kg, no more." Mine is about the size of a hard cover book, and weighs about he same.
I wonder what distro Linux uses? If he uses a GUI or a CLI? If GUI (which I doubt), which one?
It already does though. I don't need to memorize *everything* - now I only need to know how to find the answers I need. This allows me to work with a much smaller set of data and fetch that which I need from the cloud as needed.
patent # X05Nz978: "On a computer." It's no different than when I went to school, back when a computer with less power than a pocket calculator took an entire building to house. Slide rule, pocket notebook, encyclopedia, and public libraries. Of course, the cell phone is a much better tool than those things, but you can do it without a phone/computer.
What other types of vitamins are there? I mean, isn't that why people take vitamins, to live longer?
I take them because if I don't, I don't have as much energy, I hurt more, and I get cranky. I'm already 60 and don't really care how long I live (I never expected to last past 40).
Example: GM and having 90% of the car run on the BCM, and Honda running the WHOLE car including engine off of the single ECM. My AC quit working because of a faulty sensor shorting out the IO port on the ECM. only fix is to replace the WHOLE ECM for the car at $2200.00
That kind of design is only done by really really dumb engineers.
At one point I agreed with that sentiment. Hanlon's razor says don't assume malice when stupidity will explain, but mcgrew's razor says don't assume stupidity when greedy self-interest explains.
I once remarked "if the idiots who designed cars had to actuallt work on them, they'd be designed better." It was pointed out to me that the automaker makes more money for their dealerships in repair when they're expensive to repair.
Tell me, why does a car need a $2200 computer for the heater and AC when a couple of potentiometers and switches will do the same job for five bucks?
Don't assume stupidity, the engineers are doing what they're told: Make it expensive to fix.
Crap I wish I could get payed [sic] 1/10th what this guy gets to spout out garbage like this. What a racket.
Well, invent a few game changers like a music synthesizer, OCR, and speech recognition and you can.
Presumably, any attempt to surpass the speed of light would required taking actions that will likely kill you.
Both you and the GP sem to be referring to Asimov's 1954 story Escape!
In the story, "the brain" (a 3 laws positronic brain) has to overcome the 1st law, because hyperspace kills you... but only for a fraction of a second.
The problem is cell phones. Most are paying by the minute. Phone books only list landlines, which don't bill you for calls recieved.
And SOMEONE does not know their Western history! (Not surprising given the utter lack of proper history teaching in the West for the last 30 years. Thanks for that, Baby Boomers!)
Don't blame us, our education was even worse than yours. Most early 20th centuy history I learned from my grandparents, who lived it. They didn't teach us any more than they did my kids, who are in their twenties, and they're probably doing a better job than then..
I once got an A+ on a science paper in high school because it was over the teacher's head. That's how bad the education system was in the '60s. Almost everything they tried to teach me after I learned to read I'd already read.