Well, in my case, I had arthritis when I was a teenager, so I'm used to it. In fact, it was a lot worse when I was young (I credit the yoga lessons an Air Force doctor prescribed). I was alway terribly nearsighted until I got an eye infection, and the treatment caused a cataract. Now I have a CrystaLens implant in that eye and my vision is now better than the average 20 year old. Not only do I not need glasses, I don't even need reading glasses. Since my right eye is still very nearsighted, I can focus down to about three inches. My hair is gray, but I still have all of it. I will need oral surgery for the advanced gum disease, though.
My stomach still seems to be made of cast iron; I won a bet last year by eating a whole ghost pepper! Those things have sent some young people to the hospital before.
As to "no more problems to solve" I don't think that's possible.
I believe that in less that 20 years living will be so easy that most will find it boring because robots will do most if not all of our manual labor.
I find manual labor annoyingly boring.
Computer will do most if not all of our thinking.
Computers can't think, all they can do is enhance our ability to do so. That backhoe isn't digging a ditch, the guy running it is. That Google Car is using the programmers' thinking.
My dad's been retired for over 20 years, and he says he doesn't know how he ever found time to work. Of course, by the time you're in your eighties like him, time must really zip by fast.
I'm sure if Grandma felt like she was 20 she wouldn't have said that. But the thing is, like any other machine, the body wears out. Mine's only starting to show some wear, when I retire in 2014 I plan on going back to school, just for the hell of it. Of course, I've been taking various classes off and on since the seventies. I just like learning.
That's one hell of an assumption. I've knows a lot of people who died (you have that when you're 60) and far too many of them, there wasn't any ill will until the dead person's belongings are up for grabs.
Yes, he was an engineer, pilot, and astronaut, but most of the other astronauts were as well. And you couldn't say he was one of the first of any of them at all. He's my dad's age, the Wright Brothers were the first pilots, and my grandmother was an infant when they took off. Armstrong didn't get to space until the Gemini program (although he got close in the F-15 rocket plane), and there have been engineers since the invention of the steam engine (they were called "tinkers" before the invention of the engine).
All of the astronauts were pilots then, and most were engineers. Actually, almost everyone having anythiong to do with the space program were nerds of one kind or another.
When my grandmother was 95 she told me "I don't know why everybody wants to live to be a hundred. It ain't no fun bein' old."
As to the "how long is best," I think it doesn't matter. A lifetime is a lifetime, whether it's ten years or two hundred. I'm 60, and I don't feel any older thanI did at 20. Thirty year olds seem like children to me, but a 30 year old to me is like a ten year old to a twenty year old.
I really don't feel like more time has passed now than it did when I was young. From birth to now, your life seems like "forever". Perhaps that's because time gets shorter when you get older. Remember how long it was between Christmases when you were five? Christmas to Christmas was 1/5th of a lifetime! Far longer than a year to me, only 1/60th of a lifetime.
The only difference is that I've seen and done a hell of a lot more.
Before Prohibition, there were no bars, taverns, or pubs in the US; there were saloons. No respectable woman would step foot in one. It wasn't just "bad Italian westerns," any western that didn't have a saloon wasn't very accurate (but then again, how many outhouses do you see in old westerns?)
Prohibition closed the saloons, and speakeasies opened. Unlike saloons, women did indeed go there. Before prohibition, the few women who drank did so in secret.
After prohibition, we had bars, pubs, and taverns. This bit of history was imparted to me by my late grandmother, born in 1903 and died 2003. She was a young woman during prohibition.
I really wonder from which parallel universe you came from.
In the old Superman comics when I was a kid, there was a place called "Bizarro World". I think today it's known as "Tea Party World". These people think Barry Goldwater was a communist.
Actually, we Americans do in fact sound like Austrailians when telling you "oh do be silent". Well, without the funny accent... we have our own funny accents.
If you go to a small local bank, you're more likely to get hit with fees when you withdraw cash from an ATM outside the small local bank's market
Realistically, you're going to pay extra fees anyway. You're not going to drive around town looking for wherever the hell Chase is, you're just going to stick your card in and say "yes" to the fees.
I bank with a small bank, but I don't use cards... had a debit card stolen, the theief had watched me punch the PIN in, there is no limit someone with your PIN can do. But my checks are good everywhere. The only fees I pay my small bank is the five bucks for a box of checks, and a fee if I overdraw my account (and no fee from the other bank, my bank covers the check). Oh, and five bucks for a bank draft. Everything else I need is free.
Who modded that guy down? Jesus H. Christ, "troll" doesn't mean "I disagree."
Actually it's "I'm too stupid to make a rational argument so I'll jsut mod him down."
That comment was insightful, and the two of you who modded it down are idiots. Waste some points on me, dipshits, so you won't make a worthwhile comment like the parent comment invisible.
That's odd, there are a lot of small banks where I live (here's mine). The group of people you refer to obviously were doing something wrong. Perhaps they just thought they had enough resources, but would have gone bottom-up after starting their business?
If a local grocery goes out of business, the customers come out fine. If a bank goes out of business and doesn't have FDIC insurance, its customers are fucked. If the government thinks you're going to fail, no insurance for YOU. As it should be.
People have started and do start small banks, so blaming regulators for your friends' incompetence is just an excuse for their own failure. I doubt seriously they had any business trying to start a bank.
If you're planning on passing things to your heirs, they have to be THINGS. Your best choice is analog, but that's dying. Rather than downloading music, buy CDs (the next best thing to analog). Buy books made of paper. Don't buy any games that require you to connect to the publisher's server, and stay away from anything with DRM. Your Steam account? Forget it, by the time you're dead (barring unfortunate accidents or illnesses) Steam will have been long gone, as will anybody's ability to play any of the Steam games. Meanwhile, Quake and Doom will still work, even online -- you can start your own server, as it should be.
Honestly, I don't why any nerd would put up with DRM. Normal people? Sure, they don't know any better. We do.
That said, you're going to lose a lot of stuff in your life, both digital and physical. As they say, "shit happens".
Wow, such horrible moderations today, why do some days seem to be "give points to morons" day? An AC says "No" to the question, and nothing more; a completely uneducated assumption that flies in the face of what TFA says and gets an "insightful"? WTF? Whoever modded this, please undo your idiotic moderation by commenting. Lacking that, someone with both mod points and a brain mod it "overrated". I have yet to see a single comment here today that was more overrated than that one. It would even be overrated at -1.
Had he given any insight whatever (you know, actually explaining why "no" is his opinion) it would be different.
Sheesh, not only have the noncompos discovered slashdot, now they're getting mod points.
As a physicist, I would like to read a book on why people outside the field consistently refer to large things as quantum
The same reason they refer to cyber-burglars and cyber-vandals as "hackers". The popular press latched on to "quantum leap" without understanding what the phrase meant, and it has been perverted. Just as "Hacker" use to mean "someone who repurposed hardware or writes quick and dirty code" but has changed to "bit burglar".
kind of like making your C++ class learn how to type "Hello World" in Assembly or Fortran halfway through the year
Actually, learning assembly or fortran would do them good.
I've had my system rendered unbootable or at least without working wifi or graphics drivers a few times after updating.
To be fair, I've never had that problem with Mandrake, Mandriva or kubuntu, but a Windows update that replaced my perfectly good network driver with one the was totally nonfucnctional is the last straw that got me to Linux.
The problem is that slashdot has the "funny" mod, and as far as comment visibility, treats it the same as the "insightful" or "interesting" mod.
Going for "funny" used to be dangerous to your karma; "funny" was karma-neutral and any joke risked an "offtopic" or "overrated" or even "troll". Since they changed that I've seen way too many bad jokes and redundant jokes that get modded up anyway.
If I think a joke's not funny, I mod overrated. If it's the same joke that's been told fifteen times in the thread already, well, there's a perfect moderation for that!
Bathroom = In 99.9% of the world a room where you go to shower, wash with water.... in USA room where you go empty your body of fluids etc
Wrong. American bathrooms have bath tubs, showers, sinks, and toilets. When there's no tub or shower (as in a restaraunt) it's not called a bathroom, it's called a rest room. Why it's called that I don't know. In Britain it's called a "loo", silly sounding slang word. I wonder where it came from. Here there are also other slang words for bathroom/rest room: the john, the head (a navy reference), the can (a prison reference), and many more.
Before the automobile, people would carry trunks (large wooden boxes) on their carriages. When the automobile came along, the trunk stayed... but for some inexplicable reason you insist on calling it a "boot". Where the hell did that come from?
"Hood" (American) and "Bonnet" (British) are both silly names for an engine cowling.
so NASA don't loose more rockets due to imperial units
Well, if you don't loose the rockets they can't leave the launch pad, now can they?
America decided to go off and do more of it's own thing
We always go off and do more of "it is" own thing.
As to metric, most packaging has both imperial and metric markings here.
Quite a number of prominent philosophers(e.g. Dennet, Hauser, Nillson) have analyzed Searle's work, and have come to the same conclusion: the Chinese Room argument is sophist nonsense.
Philosophers? Sheesh... when I worked at a drive-in theater when I was a teen, there was another guy who worked there that was a philosphy major. He claimed if he didn't see me, I didn't exist as he turned his back.
I proved him wrong when I threw a box of popcorn at him. Apparently those philosophers and you don't understand the Chinese Room's workings, or indeed, how a computer works.
Whoever moderated that "troll", all I can say is fuck you, you goddamned Microsoft shill. It's entirely accurate -- Windows lacks many features Linux has, Windows has no features I know of that Linux lacks, Linux is faster and more tolerant of hardware faults.
So dry your eyes and fix your poorly engineered piece of shit OS, wimp.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in my case, I had arthritis when I was a teenager, so I'm used to it. In fact, it was a lot worse when I was young (I credit the yoga lessons an Air Force doctor prescribed). I was alway terribly nearsighted until I got an eye infection, and the treatment caused a cataract. Now I have a CrystaLens implant in that eye and my vision is now better than the average 20 year old. Not only do I not need glasses, I don't even need reading glasses. Since my right eye is still very nearsighted, I can focus down to about three inches. My hair is gray, but I still have all of it. I will need oral surgery for the advanced gum disease, though.
My stomach still seems to be made of cast iron; I won a bet last year by eating a whole ghost pepper! Those things have sent some young people to the hospital before.
As to "no more problems to solve" I don't think that's possible.
I believe that in less that 20 years living will be so easy that most will find it boring because robots will do most if not all of our manual labor.
I find manual labor annoyingly boring.
Computer will do most if not all of our thinking.
Computers can't think, all they can do is enhance our ability to do so. That backhoe isn't digging a ditch, the guy running it is. That Google Car is using the programmers' thinking.
My dad's been retired for over 20 years, and he says he doesn't know how he ever found time to work. Of course, by the time you're in your eighties like him, time must really zip by fast.
I'm sure if Grandma felt like she was 20 she wouldn't have said that. But the thing is, like any other machine, the body wears out. Mine's only starting to show some wear, when I retire in 2014 I plan on going back to school, just for the hell of it. Of course, I've been taking various classes off and on since the seventies. I just like learning.
Assuming no ill will within the family
That's one hell of an assumption. I've knows a lot of people who died (you have that when you're 60) and far too many of them, there wasn't any ill will until the dead person's belongings are up for grabs.
Yes, he was an engineer, pilot, and astronaut, but most of the other astronauts were as well. And you couldn't say he was one of the first of any of them at all. He's my dad's age, the Wright Brothers were the first pilots, and my grandmother was an infant when they took off. Armstrong didn't get to space until the Gemini program (although he got close in the F-15 rocket plane), and there have been engineers since the invention of the steam engine (they were called "tinkers" before the invention of the engine).
All of the astronauts were pilots then, and most were engineers. Actually, almost everyone having anythiong to do with the space program were nerds of one kind or another.
When my grandmother was 95 she told me "I don't know why everybody wants to live to be a hundred. It ain't no fun bein' old."
As to the "how long is best," I think it doesn't matter. A lifetime is a lifetime, whether it's ten years or two hundred. I'm 60, and I don't feel any older thanI did at 20. Thirty year olds seem like children to me, but a 30 year old to me is like a ten year old to a twenty year old.
I really don't feel like more time has passed now than it did when I was young. From birth to now, your life seems like "forever". Perhaps that's because time gets shorter when you get older. Remember how long it was between Christmases when you were five? Christmas to Christmas was 1/5th of a lifetime! Far longer than a year to me, only 1/60th of a lifetime.
The only difference is that I've seen and done a hell of a lot more.
Before Prohibition, there were no bars, taverns, or pubs in the US; there were saloons. No respectable woman would step foot in one. It wasn't just "bad Italian westerns," any western that didn't have a saloon wasn't very accurate (but then again, how many outhouses do you see in old westerns?)
Prohibition closed the saloons, and speakeasies opened. Unlike saloons, women did indeed go there. Before prohibition, the few women who drank did so in secret.
After prohibition, we had bars, pubs, and taverns. This bit of history was imparted to me by my late grandmother, born in 1903 and died 2003. She was a young woman during prohibition.
And actually, there's a salloon here in Springfield.
I really wonder from which parallel universe you came from.
In the old Superman comics when I was a kid, there was a place called "Bizarro World". I think today it's known as "Tea Party World". These people think Barry Goldwater was a communist.
Well, they came damned close to losing Apollo 13, yet they still only had a few more landidngs afterwards.
STFU (Internet English)
Actually, we Americans do in fact sound like Austrailians when telling you "oh do be silent". Well, without the funny accent... we have our own funny accents.
If you go to a small local bank, you're more likely to get hit with fees when you withdraw cash from an ATM outside the small local bank's market
Realistically, you're going to pay extra fees anyway. You're not going to drive around town looking for wherever the hell Chase is, you're just going to stick your card in and say "yes" to the fees.
I bank with a small bank, but I don't use cards... had a debit card stolen, the theief had watched me punch the PIN in, there is no limit someone with your PIN can do. But my checks are good everywhere. The only fees I pay my small bank is the five bucks for a box of checks, and a fee if I overdraw my account (and no fee from the other bank, my bank covers the check). Oh, and five bucks for a bank draft. Everything else I need is free.
Chase? Fools bank with Chase and Citi.
Nobody knows. I'm hoping that Curiosity will send some data back that has them scratching their heads and saying "what the hell is this???"
I'm not too optimistic though. It seems that Mars is probably not as alien as we thought (well, except for the lack of an atmosphere).
Who modded that guy down? Jesus H. Christ, "troll" doesn't mean "I disagree."
Actually it's "I'm too stupid to make a rational argument so I'll jsut mod him down."
That comment was insightful, and the two of you who modded it down are idiots. Waste some points on me, dipshits, so you won't make a worthwhile comment like the parent comment invisible.
That's odd, there are a lot of small banks where I live (here's mine). The group of people you refer to obviously were doing something wrong. Perhaps they just thought they had enough resources, but would have gone bottom-up after starting their business?
If a local grocery goes out of business, the customers come out fine. If a bank goes out of business and doesn't have FDIC insurance, its customers are fucked. If the government thinks you're going to fail, no insurance for YOU. As it should be.
People have started and do start small banks, so blaming regulators for your friends' incompetence is just an excuse for their own failure. I doubt seriously they had any business trying to start a bank.
If you're planning on passing things to your heirs, they have to be THINGS. Your best choice is analog, but that's dying. Rather than downloading music, buy CDs (the next best thing to analog). Buy books made of paper. Don't buy any games that require you to connect to the publisher's server, and stay away from anything with DRM. Your Steam account? Forget it, by the time you're dead (barring unfortunate accidents or illnesses) Steam will have been long gone, as will anybody's ability to play any of the Steam games. Meanwhile, Quake and Doom will still work, even online -- you can start your own server, as it should be.
Honestly, I don't why any nerd would put up with DRM. Normal people? Sure, they don't know any better. We do.
That said, you're going to lose a lot of stuff in your life, both digital and physical. As they say, "shit happens".
Wow, such horrible moderations today, why do some days seem to be "give points to morons" day? An AC says "No" to the question, and nothing more; a completely uneducated assumption that flies in the face of what TFA says and gets an "insightful"? WTF? Whoever modded this, please undo your idiotic moderation by commenting. Lacking that, someone with both mod points and a brain mod it "overrated". I have yet to see a single comment here today that was more overrated than that one. It would even be overrated at -1.
Had he given any insight whatever (you know, actually explaining why "no" is his opinion) it would be different.
Sheesh, not only have the noncompos discovered slashdot, now they're getting mod points.
As a physicist, I would like to read a book on why people outside the field consistently refer to large things as quantum
The same reason they refer to cyber-burglars and cyber-vandals as "hackers". The popular press latched on to "quantum leap" without understanding what the phrase meant, and it has been perverted. Just as "Hacker" use to mean "someone who repurposed hardware or writes quick and dirty code" but has changed to "bit burglar".
kind of like making your C++ class learn how to type "Hello World" in Assembly or Fortran halfway through the year
Actually, learning assembly or fortran would do them good.
That was sarcasm, Sheldon. Notice that he used both "lose" and "loose" incorrectly? Pretty obvious that it was deliberate.
I've had my system rendered unbootable or at least without working wifi or graphics drivers a few times after updating.
To be fair, I've never had that problem with Mandrake, Mandriva or kubuntu, but a Windows update that replaced my perfectly good network driver with one the was totally nonfucnctional is the last straw that got me to Linux.
I considered him King of the Nerds. Far more than a pilot, he was an engineer, taught engineering and was a self-described nerd.
He was one of us.
I was literally less than 24 hours old when Apollo 11 launched.
I was seventeen and working at a drive-in theater. I wrote about the 40th anniversary of the landing in my journal, if you're interested.
The problem is that slashdot has the "funny" mod, and as far as comment visibility, treats it the same as the "insightful" or "interesting" mod.
Going for "funny" used to be dangerous to your karma; "funny" was karma-neutral and any joke risked an "offtopic" or "overrated" or even "troll". Since they changed that I've seen way too many bad jokes and redundant jokes that get modded up anyway.
If I think a joke's not funny, I mod overrated. If it's the same joke that's been told fifteen times in the thread already, well, there's a perfect moderation for that!
Bathroom = In 99.9% of the world a room where you go to shower, wash with water.... in USA room where you go empty your body of fluids etc
Wrong. American bathrooms have bath tubs, showers, sinks, and toilets. When there's no tub or shower (as in a restaraunt) it's not called a bathroom, it's called a rest room. Why it's called that I don't know. In Britain it's called a "loo", silly sounding slang word. I wonder where it came from. Here there are also other slang words for bathroom/rest room: the john, the head (a navy reference), the can (a prison reference), and many more.
Before the automobile, people would carry trunks (large wooden boxes) on their carriages. When the automobile came along, the trunk stayed... but for some inexplicable reason you insist on calling it a "boot". Where the hell did that come from?
"Hood" (American) and "Bonnet" (British) are both silly names for an engine cowling.
so NASA don't loose more rockets due to imperial units
Well, if you don't loose the rockets they can't leave the launch pad, now can they?
America decided to go off and do more of it's own thing
We always go off and do more of "it is" own thing.
As to metric, most packaging has both imperial and metric markings here.
Perspective distortion was used extensively in the filmimg of LOTR. It's how they made the hobbits look much smaller than the actors actually were.
Quite a number of prominent philosophers(e.g. Dennet, Hauser, Nillson) have analyzed Searle's work, and have come to the same conclusion: the Chinese Room argument is sophist nonsense.
Philosophers? Sheesh... when I worked at a drive-in theater when I was a teen, there was another guy who worked there that was a philosphy major. He claimed if he didn't see me, I didn't exist as he turned his back.
I proved him wrong when I threw a box of popcorn at him. Apparently those philosophers and you don't understand the Chinese Room's workings, or indeed, how a computer works.
Whoever moderated that "troll", all I can say is fuck you, you goddamned Microsoft shill. It's entirely accurate -- Windows lacks many features Linux has, Windows has no features I know of that Linux lacks, Linux is faster and more tolerant of hardware faults.
So dry your eyes and fix your poorly engineered piece of shit OS, wimp.