You must not live in Illinois. Public school was terrible when I was a kid in Cahokia, and still terrible when my kids went in Springfield. I, too, went to all the parent-teacher meetings, and those meetings were a complete waste of time. Voting is a waste of time as well, but I do that, too.
I got a chuckle out of your joke, but you did highlight a very serious problem. When I was in the Air Force in the early '70s, I had to tow some flightline equipment to a C-141 that was missing the co-pilot's windshield. The co-pilot himself was missing his head; a duck had gone through the windshield.
I wonder what will happen when the first drone takes out a commercial airliner?
Not as big a difference as getting women to stop drinking alcohol while they're pregnant. Also to keep them from physical labor; my oldest daughter is learning-disabled because her umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck when she was born. Better doctors, too -- the doctor was going to send Evil-X home despite the fact that she was in labor. A nurse probably saved both their lives by arguing with the doctor.
An awful lot has already been done. They used to use lead in gasoline, and kids who grew up by busy highways were all retarded. They stopped putting lead in paint as well, which also reduced the incidence.
Unfortunately, the schools themselves ofen make this difficult to impossible. When I was in grade school they came up with the "new math". They didn't teach division the same way my parents learned division so could not help at all, and unfortunately my teacher that year was one of the worst I ever had. It took a lomg time to catch up in math (and fortunetaly I was smart enough to learn to use a slide rule, which none of my teachers knew how to use). Had they taught the traditional way (which they went back to after "new math's" abysmal failure) my parents would have been able to help.
By the time my kids got to school, slide rules were obsolete. So I couldn't help them much with their division, either.
Having a good relationship does not result from finding the perfect person.
No, it results from finding the perfect person for you. Relationships aren't about what you love about your mate, it's what you can put up with. Most failed relationships are doomed from the start, one or both parties has the dumb idea that they'll change the other person. They won't.
You're right that many technological advances came from space travel, but not about ICs.
Early developments of the integrated circuit go back to 1949, when the German engineer Werner Jacobi (Siemens AG) [1] filed a patent for an integrated-circuit-like semiconductor amplifying device [3] showing five transistors on a common substrate arranged in a 2-stage amplifier arrangement. Jacobi disclosed small and cheap hearing aids as typical industrial applications of his patent. A commercial use of his patent has not been reported.
The idea of the integrated circuit was conceived by a radar scientist working for the Royal Radar Establishment of the British Ministry of Defence, Geoffrey W.A. Dummer (1909â"2002). Dummer presented the idea to the public at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D.C. on May 7, 1952.[4] He gave many symposia publicly to propagate his ideas, and unsuccessfully attempted to build such a circuit in 1956.
A precursor idea to the IC was to create small ceramic squares (wafers), each one containing a single miniaturized component. Components could then be integrated and wired into a bidimensional or tridimensional compact grid. This idea, which looked very promising in 1957, was proposed to the US Army by Jack Kilby, and led to the short-lived Micromodule Program (similar to 1951's Project Tinkertoy).[5] However, as the project was gaining momentum, Kilby came up with a new, revolutionary design: the IC.
Robert Noyce credited Kurt Lehovec of Sprague Electric for the principle of p-n junction isolation caused by the action of a biased p-n junction (the diode) as a key concept behind the IC.[6]
Jack Kilby's original integrated circuitNewly employed by Texas Instruments, Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning the integrated circuit in July 1958, successfully demonstrating the first working integrated example on September 12, 1958.
Sputnik was launched the same year the first IC was constructed.
Never mind that such factories would be well-protected from such disasters before they happen.
Try protecting ANYTHING from an EF-5 tornado, or a class 3 hurricane, or a magnatude 7 earthquake. There is no place in the US not in danger of natural disaster. Someone said Colorado, do you have any idea how bad it will be when the megavolcano in their back yard blows up? Nobdoy west of the Mississippi river is likely to survive.
The problem was putting all their eggs in one basket. Same with the tsunami in Japan. If you're building 3 US factories, put one on the east coast, one on the west coast, and one in the midwest. If you're shipping worldwide, put one in each continent.
No accident is preventable "after the fact" unless you have a time machine. This accident was preventable before the fact. Just as this "accident" that killed two dozen men that someone should have gone to prison for negligent homicide for.
I don't think anybody at Morton or NASA was criminally negligent (I could be wrong) but in the Virginia "accident," the explosion was the result of repairs costing more than the saftey violations they were repeatedly fined for. Usually if you break a law, any law, and someone dies, you go to prison.
Unless you're rich, of course, and kill someone just to get richer.
That depends: who is "we"? We, the buyer or we, the seller? It seems today's economists completely ignore the buyer.
Do economists do scientific studies? I don't see how they could. Economics is no more scientific than Aristotle, or you wouldn't have such stupidities as "trickle down economics".
Your sense of proportion is just as badly flawed. The risk of something dangerous slipping past the FDA is about as high as your risk of laughing to death.
The most dangerous thing you do is drive a car. 45,000 Americans die on the highway each year. During the Vietnam war, not a single year went by that more Americans died on the highway than on the battlefield.
No, I tale that back -- sitting down and eating that Grand Whopper is even more dangerous; hundreds of thousands per year die from heart attacks.
This could help individuals to be able to afford the overpriced ebooks on the market by allowing them to make up some of the money by selling them later.
No no NO!!! God damn it, they're overpriced! If people simply stopped paying outrageous sums for literally nothing the prices would have to come down.
And not all ebooks are overpriced, Cory Doctorow gives ebooks away for free, using them as advertising to sell real, physical books.
You don't buy a novel, you buy a BOOK. You own that book. You don;t buy music, you buy a CD. You own that CD. You don't buy a movie, you buy a DVD. You own that DVD. If all you're "buying" is bits you've bought nothing and own nothing.
Publishers should encourage piracy, not try to stamp it out.
Unnecessary, you can find plenty on the east side of any city. In Springfield it's about five blocks from my house. Craigslist? LOL, hokers every other block. Easier to find a hooker than it is to find reefer.
BTW, can you get good weed on Craigslist? I'd be as leery of looking for a hooker on Craigslist as I would buying weed from a guy driving a police car. Weed, too. WTF?
Besides, you shouldn't have been doing "fancy UI stuff" with Javascript in 2002.
Depends on what you call "fancy". I used javascript on my old gaming site last century, but only as a last resort. I'd stick little surprised in, like there was an animated GIF of a Strogg, if you moused over it Sonic would run by, the Strogg seemed pissed that he didn't stomp the hedgehog, then Sonic ran from the other direction and SPLATT!!
NASA isn't about travel at all, it's about scientific discovery. And we should all thank $DIETY that you're not in charge of NASA. Only fools take risks unnecessarily.
I think it has less to do with online dating and more to do with a sense of entitlement, period. People date online either because they're desperate or because they have unrealistic expectations to begin with
Where is anyone out of school going to find a decent woman? You might find one in a bar, but most of the women you find in bars are hard core alcoholics. Supermarket? How in the hell do you pick up a woman in a supermarket?
Thanks for saying that. Google has been annoying me greatly lately. They did a tewak a few weeks ago that was supposed to give more relevant results, but the results I've been getting lately have been pretty crappy. Putting a phrase in quotes seems to not work any more; say tou're looking for space aliens and put "little green men" site:wikipedia.org you get results for Little Feat, Green Day, and Men In Black (I didn't actually do that search, it's a hypothetical illustration).
What's mosr frustrating is, as you say, you're looking for FOSS and find nothing but "BUY HERE" even if you go to advanced search and specifically tell it that the page can't have the words "shopping", "cart", or "price."
I'd like someone to create a new search engine that put sites with no advertising first, and sites that sell shit last. If I'm looking for a product I'll put "buy" in the search terms, THEN they can put commercial crap first.
Too bad Bing still sucks even worse than Google's gotten.
You mean they're going for tall, muscular women and don't care how ugly she is? And they want sex but don't need it? Hmmm... I think I see a flaw in your reasoning.
But being more picky is a GOOD thing, as I found out. After getting divorced and not getting as much as a dinner date, my daughter suggested that I was too picky. So I lowered my standards.
I tried online dating maybe a year after the divorce and had no luck whatever. There are a lot more people on the internet these days, maybe I'll try it again.
17 American lives (the Russians have lost a few, too) in fifty years compared to 45,000 lives every single year in auto accidents? Sounds to me like NASA's safety record os pretty damned impressive. As is the ESA, Russia, and everybody else's.
Well, now that's a letdown. If a geek can't dream of getting laid with an alien babe, then what's the point of it all?
Hey, there are lots of alien babes in Mexico... except if you go there then YOU'RE the alien!
On the other hand, if you think about how evolutionary pressures worked on Earth, it's not unreasonable to expect some Earth-style body plan.
But look at how many completely different shapes there are. Bears, rabbits, homo sapiens, elephants, all completely different and closely related... all are mammals that evolved from the same anscestors 65 million years ago. Then look at octopuses, dolphins, starfish, butterflies, gnats, spiders... I think probably the only advanced life you'll find on another planet that remotely resembles anything on earth might look like a snake or a fish.
Second, I'm only interested in sentients.
If earth is like everywhere else, you'll find a lot more non-sentients than sentients.
Then you have constraints like that probably the simplest complex and mobile shape that can pump that pond through and extract nutrients is some kind of tube. It evolved so many times on Earth that there must be some merit to it.
But did the tube evolve more than once, or is all animal life decended from the same "tube" genome? I'm not sure if there's any data on that, life's been around a long, long time. And oxygen was a deadly poison to the first life here, which evolved to not only survive the deadly poison, but to not be able to live without it.
you'll probably get SOME symmetry
Well, that certainly seems reasonable to me. I can't think of s single advanced earth organism that doesn't have some sort of symmetry.
Then if you think of it, it makes sense to have the sensor organs to the front of that tube.
It also makes sense to have sensory organs in the back to keep from being snuck up on. Bird's eyes are on the sides of their heads rather than the front like mammals. Birds are said to be able to see above and behind them because of the way their eyes are situated. And a bird probably can't smell what's going it its mouth, since the nostrils are on top of the beak.
our eyes even have basic image processing built right into the retina
Citation needed. I've always read (and was taught in college) that sight is a function of the brain, not the eye. If you're right I'd love to read about it.
So that gives you a "brain" or equivalent quite close to the front of that tube, i.e., it gives you a head.
I'm not so sure; that may simply be a quirk of early evolution. You need to get signals to and from all of the muscles (or what paases for muscle in space aliens), whereas sight and sound are one way signals.
Plus, if it were hard-wired, the reflexes that helped avoid predators as a dumb animal, won't help it be able to do maths or operate a spaceship.
That's something I've wondered about -- the development of math. AFAIK no other Earth animal has this capability, it seems that there could be a reality (an abstract reality like math) that we never discovered and nobody ever dreamed up, that maybe a species from some other solar system has.
The most efficient brain layout seems to be basically a lot of processing columns, around a high-speed, massive-bandwidth central hub.
My understanding is that the brain has no CPU. You have one region for sight, one region for hearing, one region for emotion, one region for thought, one for autonomic functions, all working together and all taking part in memory. I don't think the frontal cortex ties the other parts together, I think all parts are interconnected to each other. If you have contrary data I'd love to see it.
And at that point, once you have short reaction times and complex processing for each limb, it seems you need less limbs. In fact, 4 seems to be the all around sweet spot, once you have enough coordination for each.
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You must not live in Illinois. Public school was terrible when I was a kid in Cahokia, and still terrible when my kids went in Springfield. I, too, went to all the parent-teacher meetings, and those meetings were a complete waste of time. Voting is a waste of time as well, but I do that, too.
I got a chuckle out of your joke, but you did highlight a very serious problem. When I was in the Air Force in the early '70s, I had to tow some flightline equipment to a C-141 that was missing the co-pilot's windshield. The co-pilot himself was missing his head; a duck had gone through the windshield.
I wonder what will happen when the first drone takes out a commercial airliner?
Shopping for schools? Where does anyone have that choice, unless they can afford to send their kids to a private school?
Not as big a difference as getting women to stop drinking alcohol while they're pregnant. Also to keep them from physical labor; my oldest daughter is learning-disabled because her umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck when she was born. Better doctors, too -- the doctor was going to send Evil-X home despite the fact that she was in labor. A nurse probably saved both their lives by arguing with the doctor.
An awful lot has already been done. They used to use lead in gasoline, and kids who grew up by busy highways were all retarded. They stopped putting lead in paint as well, which also reduced the incidence.
ah... you think the government has your best interest at heart.
They do, if you matter. Unfortunately, 99% of us don't.
Unfortunately, the schools themselves ofen make this difficult to impossible. When I was in grade school they came up with the "new math". They didn't teach division the same way my parents learned division so could not help at all, and unfortunately my teacher that year was one of the worst I ever had. It took a lomg time to catch up in math (and fortunetaly I was smart enough to learn to use a slide rule, which none of my teachers knew how to use). Had they taught the traditional way (which they went back to after "new math's" abysmal failure) my parents would have been able to help.
By the time my kids got to school, slide rules were obsolete. So I couldn't help them much with their division, either.
As does.
Having a good relationship does not result from finding the perfect person.
No, it results from finding the perfect person for you. Relationships aren't about what you love about your mate, it's what you can put up with. Most failed relationships are doomed from the start, one or both parties has the dumb idea that they'll change the other person. They won't.
You're right that many technological advances came from space travel, but not about ICs.
Sputnik was launched the same year the first IC was constructed.
Never mind that such factories would be well-protected from such disasters before they happen.
Try protecting ANYTHING from an EF-5 tornado, or a class 3 hurricane, or a magnatude 7 earthquake. There is no place in the US not in danger of natural disaster. Someone said Colorado, do you have any idea how bad it will be when the megavolcano in their back yard blows up? Nobdoy west of the Mississippi river is likely to survive.
The problem was putting all their eggs in one basket. Same with the tsunami in Japan. If you're building 3 US factories, put one on the east coast, one on the west coast, and one in the midwest. If you're shipping worldwide, put one in each continent.
Every accident is preventable... after the fact.
No accident is preventable "after the fact" unless you have a time machine. This accident was preventable before the fact. Just as this "accident" that killed two dozen men that someone should have gone to prison for negligent homicide for.
I don't think anybody at Morton or NASA was criminally negligent (I could be wrong) but in the Virginia "accident," the explosion was the result of repairs costing more than the saftey violations they were repeatedly fined for. Usually if you break a law, any law, and someone dies, you go to prison.
Unless you're rich, of course, and kill someone just to get richer.
That depends: who is "we"? We, the buyer or we, the seller? It seems today's economists completely ignore the buyer.
Do economists do scientific studies? I don't see how they could. Economics is no more scientific than Aristotle, or you wouldn't have such stupidities as "trickle down economics".
Your sense of proportion is just as badly flawed. The risk of something dangerous slipping past the FDA is about as high as your risk of laughing to death.
The most dangerous thing you do is drive a car. 45,000 Americans die on the highway each year. During the Vietnam war, not a single year went by that more Americans died on the highway than on the battlefield.
No, I tale that back -- sitting down and eating that Grand Whopper is even more dangerous; hundreds of thousands per year die from heart attacks.
This could help individuals to be able to afford the overpriced ebooks on the market by allowing them to make up some of the money by selling them later.
No no NO!!! God damn it, they're overpriced! If people simply stopped paying outrageous sums for literally nothing the prices would have to come down.
And not all ebooks are overpriced, Cory Doctorow gives ebooks away for free, using them as advertising to sell real, physical books.
You don't buy a novel, you buy a BOOK. You own that book. You don;t buy music, you buy a CD. You own that CD. You don't buy a movie, you buy a DVD. You own that DVD. If all you're "buying" is bits you've bought nothing and own nothing.
Publishers should encourage piracy, not try to stamp it out.
If you just want a hooker you go craigslist...
Unnecessary, you can find plenty on the east side of any city. In Springfield it's about five blocks from my house. Craigslist? LOL, hokers every other block. Easier to find a hooker than it is to find reefer.
BTW, can you get good weed on Craigslist? I'd be as leery of looking for a hooker on Craigslist as I would buying weed from a guy driving a police car. Weed, too. WTF?
Besides, you shouldn't have been doing "fancy UI stuff" with Javascript in 2002.
Depends on what you call "fancy". I used javascript on my old gaming site last century, but only as a last resort. I'd stick little surprised in, like there was an animated GIF of a Strogg, if you moused over it Sonic would run by, the Strogg seemed pissed that he didn't stomp the hedgehog, then Sonic ran from the other direction and SPLATT!!
NASA isn't about travel at all, it's about scientific discovery. And we should all thank $DIETY that you're not in charge of NASA. Only fools take risks unnecessarily.
God but you youngsters make me laugh! Over 45? I'll be 60 in a couple of months, anything under 40 and I'd feel like a child molester.
Kids... sheesh...
You don't wipe your butthole when you shit???
I think it has less to do with online dating and more to do with a sense of entitlement, period. People date online either because they're desperate or because they have unrealistic expectations to begin with
Where is anyone out of school going to find a decent woman? You might find one in a bar, but most of the women you find in bars are hard core alcoholics. Supermarket? How in the hell do you pick up a woman in a supermarket?
Thanks for saying that. Google has been annoying me greatly lately. They did a tewak a few weeks ago that was supposed to give more relevant results, but the results I've been getting lately have been pretty crappy. Putting a phrase in quotes seems to not work any more; say tou're looking for space aliens and put "little green men" site:wikipedia.org you get results for Little Feat, Green Day, and Men In Black (I didn't actually do that search, it's a hypothetical illustration).
What's mosr frustrating is, as you say, you're looking for FOSS and find nothing but "BUY HERE" even if you go to advanced search and specifically tell it that the page can't have the words "shopping", "cart", or "price."
I'd like someone to create a new search engine that put sites with no advertising first, and sites that sell shit last. If I'm looking for a product I'll put "buy" in the search terms, THEN they can put commercial crap first.
Too bad Bing still sucks even worse than Google's gotten.
And the world will turn inside out and we will become Mole People and mocked by a future human and his 2 robot friends.
Um, are you talking about these guys?
You mean they're going for tall, muscular women and don't care how ugly she is? And they want sex but don't need it? Hmmm... I think I see a flaw in your reasoning.
But being more picky is a GOOD thing, as I found out. After getting divorced and not getting as much as a dinner date, my daughter suggested that I was too picky. So I lowered my standards.
God but that was a mistake!
I tried online dating maybe a year after the divorce and had no luck whatever. There are a lot more people on the internet these days, maybe I'll try it again.
17 American lives (the Russians have lost a few, too) in fifty years compared to 45,000 lives every single year in auto accidents? Sounds to me like NASA's safety record os pretty damned impressive. As is the ESA, Russia, and everybody else's.
Well, now that's a letdown. If a geek can't dream of getting laid with an alien babe, then what's the point of it all?
Hey, there are lots of alien babes in Mexico... except if you go there then YOU'RE the alien!
On the other hand, if you think about how evolutionary pressures worked on Earth, it's not unreasonable to expect some Earth-style body plan.
But look at how many completely different shapes there are. Bears, rabbits, homo sapiens, elephants, all completely different and closely related... all are mammals that evolved from the same anscestors 65 million years ago. Then look at octopuses, dolphins, starfish, butterflies, gnats, spiders... I think probably the only advanced life you'll find on another planet that remotely resembles anything on earth might look like a snake or a fish.
Second, I'm only interested in sentients.
If earth is like everywhere else, you'll find a lot more non-sentients than sentients.
Then you have constraints like that probably the simplest complex and mobile shape that can pump that pond through and extract nutrients is some kind of tube. It evolved so many times on Earth that there must be some merit to it.
But did the tube evolve more than once, or is all animal life decended from the same "tube" genome? I'm not sure if there's any data on that, life's been around a long, long time. And oxygen was a deadly poison to the first life here, which evolved to not only survive the deadly poison, but to not be able to live without it.
you'll probably get SOME symmetry
Well, that certainly seems reasonable to me. I can't think of s single advanced earth organism that doesn't have some sort of symmetry.
Then if you think of it, it makes sense to have the sensor organs to the front of that tube.
It also makes sense to have sensory organs in the back to keep from being snuck up on. Bird's eyes are on the sides of their heads rather than the front like mammals. Birds are said to be able to see above and behind them because of the way their eyes are situated. And a bird probably can't smell what's going it its mouth, since the nostrils are on top of the beak.
our eyes even have basic image processing built right into the retina
Citation needed. I've always read (and was taught in college) that sight is a function of the brain, not the eye. If you're right I'd love to read about it.
So that gives you a "brain" or equivalent quite close to the front of that tube, i.e., it gives you a head.
I'm not so sure; that may simply be a quirk of early evolution. You need to get signals to and from all of the muscles (or what paases for muscle in space aliens), whereas sight and sound are one way signals.
Plus, if it were hard-wired, the reflexes that helped avoid predators as a dumb animal, won't help it be able to do maths or operate a spaceship.
That's something I've wondered about -- the development of math. AFAIK no other Earth animal has this capability, it seems that there could be a reality (an abstract reality like math) that we never discovered and nobody ever dreamed up, that maybe a species from some other solar system has.
The most efficient brain layout seems to be basically a lot of processing columns, around a high-speed, massive-bandwidth central hub.
My understanding is that the brain has no CPU. You have one region for sight, one region for hearing, one region for emotion, one region for thought, one for autonomic functions, all working together and all taking part in memory. I don't think the frontal cortex ties the other parts together, I think all parts are interconnected to each other. If you have contrary data I'd love to see it.
And at that point, once you have short reaction times and complex processing for each limb, it seems you need less limbs. In fact, 4 seems to be the all around sweet spot, once you have enough coordination for each.
Octopuses and spiders have eight, ins