I see a future with rich parents selecting the best looking, most talented etc embryos (let's call them "Eloy") and the other people (let's call them "Morlocks") having children the "natural" way. This will lead to the Eloys getting better jobs hence more money creating a disparity with the Morlocks who can't get those good jobs due to inferior qualifications.
Eventually there will be need to create fences and walls to secure the Eloys from the Morlocks and thus both races will further diverge, with the Eloy ever increasing their genetic advantage, controlling the planets resources and making sure the Morlocks won't attain potentially dangerous technology. Soon they will find a better way of containing the Morlocks (who sometimes do manage to penetrate the boundaries) by building their cities up into the sky and locking the Morlocks down into the ground.
And thus the Eloy will be able to live in a peaceful, perfect society. - A perfectly fascist one...
Why would you get flamed for things that are perfectly explainable (oh, and observable;)). Any development that doesn't seem to have an obvious evolutionary advantage does not contradict evolution; they could be vestigial like our appendix or even be atavisms whose genes are coupled with a certain genetic mutation that makes it become dominant again.
Btw, you weren't defending ID here, as you only stated why you think evolution produced some strange effect you couldn't explain. "Defending" it would have meant explaining how putting these seemingly useless traits in there by 'the creator' could in any sense be construed as "intelligent design".
The spokesperson of (ex-)Diebold is called Riggall! Maybe they just want to make it clear to their 'customers' that even though they changed their name their complex vote "counting" algorithm is as good as ever..
Well, it's all a matter of interpretation. Fact is that during the time he made his best movies (including the POAs) Heston was pro gun control, a strong supporter of the civil rights movement "long before Hollywood found it fashionable" and was campaigning for democratic politicians.
Then, around 1980 something changed his mind and he became a republican supporter and member of the NRA etc. From that time on I also can't recall any movie at all in which he plays a leading character. It would be interesting to find out what exactly made him change like that.
Maybe in a hundred years "luck" will be an outmoded concept and gambling will been seen properly as "entertainment" but until then, most every idiot who goes to a casino is a mystical moron who thinks he's going to get lucky and win.
I guess the rationale behind it is that the theme designers believe the broad mass wants computers to be fun (ready: flashy, omgpwnies), not remind them of work (read: efficient/useful design). I always wondered myself why Gnome/KDE icons need to be so huge, when recognizing and aiming for 32x32 pixel icons is just as easy.
Fortunately the window managers allow for some tweaking (*heavy* tweaking if you really want to spend some time on it), so why not spend an afternoon or so making it look "cool" and then be happy for the next couple of years;)
On a serious note, it's interesting to see, that during the Cold War with a real threat of thermo-nuclear war the government tried to prevent mass-paranoia by spreading untruthful propaganda, while now they are doing exactly the same, but with th goal of causing mass paranoia.
According to one of Germany's reputable news sources Spiegel Online (in German) early reports suspected counterfeit claims by companies such as Apple, but it has since become clear that the Italian company Sisvel has filed suit over MP3 patent infringements and thereby caused the raid of stands offering mp3/4 players et al.
There have since been further confiscations of GPS/navigation systems too.
Has anyone worked in a company that has pre-installed e.g. Ubuntu? Are there any hurdles or restrictions? Does the company have to pay a royalty to Canonical?
What if the company wanted to modify it so there's a first time boot-up screen that lets the user decide whether to accept the EULA (GPL for Ubuntu, right?) and use it or to decline it and have the harddisk quick-formatted. Are there any limitations? Does this fall under "commercial use" of Ubuntu (even though the OS itself is not actually "sold", only the computer it is on)?
The problem is the increase of nuclear waste material if a resurgence if nuclear power should occur. U-238 has a half life of 4.46 billion years, while the fissile U-235 still has a half life of more than 700 million years.
Have a look at the "Nuclear fuel cycle" and you'll see that it is in effect not a cycle at all, but a process in which at the end we have to dig up more and more holes to put the waste material into and hope it stays there to the end of time. So we got highly concentrated radioactive material dug into the earth. Who is to guarantee that coming generations maybe in 100, maybe in 10000 years will not accidentally be exposed to it and suffer from it?
I can remember when I was learning Java (around 2000 iirc) that one book proved invaluable in learning the language - and it was (and still is) free! It has been released in the forth edition now so I believe it is quite successful. Thing is the author got his and his book's name out by sharing it with the online community. Not only that, but he got direct feedback from the community on anything from source code bugs to overall structure. It's the perfect way to improve the quality of a book - listen to your readers and see where most people would like an improvement, then simply improve it (given, of course, that most of your readers aren't complete morons;). In fact, this model proved so successful he went on and wrote two other good books "Thinking in C++" and "Thinking in patterns" in much the same way.
It kind of has some similarity with an open source project with the author in control and deservedly so reaping all the monetary profits. The community on the other hand profits from a very useful book, that you can buy in order to take advantage of the "paper-format" as opposed to a PDF displayed on your monitor, or simply to support the author (yes, not everyone is entirely egoistic in this world). And those poor students who can't afford spending to much money get a great product absolutely for free. And perhaps a couple of years down the road a few of them will write a book just like that about the next programming language that comes around or start some kind of other open collaborative project that benefits the community..
It's actually very simple: "Open Source" is the concept that information wants to be free (tm) - much in the same way as you'd obviously agree with me that beer, too, wants to be free. Add to that a hint of free speech (i.e. "I'd like to voice my opinion about free beer anytime and anywhere I want!" and "Nobody should tell you what beer you're supposed to buy or brew, right?") and there you have in essence of what open source stands for.
I once saw an illustration of how a man would look like if he had the sternum and pecs that would be needed to support wings like those of a bird. The diameter of the breast (front to back) was about triple that of a normal human. Which makes me wonder if people like these could pull it off - maybe after losing some of the weight in places where it's not really necessary (and pulling those socks out of the undies to improve aerodynamics;).
Basically Brontosaurus was an Apatosaurus with a Camarasaurus skull wrongly assigned to it. Camarasaurus has a relatively short neck with a round skull; Apatosaurus has a long neck with a flat skull. So whenever you see a picture of a sauropod with a really long neck and round skull it's probably an old reconstruction of a Brontosaurus which never existed. It was a cool name though, it means "thunder lizard".
Btw what's with all these obsessing about sources (at least with topics such as these); I don't have any sources handy right now either, but I'm pretty sure I'd be able to find adequate sources for this within minutes in a public library. Or even google.
Except that in ten years, Bush will be gone and Putin will most likely still be "president". Some people are actually suffering - you just thought you were.
I don't know about the future, but judging by the past - twenty years ago we had Bush, now we have Bush (and not the good kind..) - I don't see how anything would change.
Obviously these self-guided planes need some accurate image recognition coupled with the ability to know the location and trajectory of any other aircraft in the area and adding an AI to process the information and accurately judge the situation. Sharing this information between all those drone via wireless network would be very effective as well. - A network in the sky... OMFG it's gonna be Skynet - it's inevitable! Goddammit Sarah Connor! You've been KILLING machines in three movies now. Stop screwing around and get the frickin job done!
I tend to see it the way you do. But we have to keep in mind, that the premise is that people do take steps to verify the sources etc. - Unfortunately, the way things are now, only a small percentage has this sort of mindset. Many people have no problem trusting a source with perceived or established authority (although not necessarily informed or truthful) even up to the point of believing a lie. We have seen this so often in history (quite recently, too). I believe dishonesty needs to be prosecuted - in meatspace, that is. Dishonesty leads to corruption which is never good for society.
Only considering cyberspace though, rules are quite different. People can be anonymous (to the average user) - this has to be taken into account when reading things on a medium where truthiness is naturally harder to evaluate. This is great, because it creates potential for many people to bind together and communicate unrestricted to pursue a common goal, thereby giving them a much needed tool to fight authoritarianism. The fact that this 'common goal' might not correspond with the plans the governments have gives them the hibby jibbies and thusly they will restrict media access and crack down on free flow of information like this.
While I am not an opponent of nuclear energy, because of the "cleanliness" compared to fossil fuels I think proponents tend to leave out the tiny detail of nuclear waste. If all the countries were generating their energy with nuclear reactors a couple of generations from now we'd have huge problems with the happily radiating waste material. Even nowadays we can measure the increased radiation everywhere. E.g. to actually find iron that is free from radiation we have to dig deep down or look for pre-WWII shipwrecks on the sea floor.
What (the sane) environmentalists advocated when fighting nuclear power was to put all the research money in renewable energy. The ultimate goal is to be able to generate energy that adversely affects our environment to a minimum. Nuclear power can only be the 'lesser of two evils' to bridge the gap until enough minds in the industry and governments have been swayed to invest into 'clean' power.
I don't think you can blame environmentalists for shedding light on these issues. What you can blame them for may be their hippyesque appearance and their tree-hugging, but at least they are not responsible for leaking radiating waste water, oil spills or an increased cancer risk.
Make no mistake: if we are talking about the "Veterans Day" what is usually meant is the day in which Americans honor their veterans. Most other nations don't honor their veterans on this day (none that I know of) and sure as hell not nations such as Vietnam, Guatemala, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Lebanon, El Salvador, Grenada, Bolivia, Iran, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq or any other country where troops were/are deployed to the dismay of the local population.
I have no problem with people honoring their (violent) ancestors, because obviously without their tribute and sacrifice these certain people might not be here. Yet, not everybody wants to honor those ancestors as a collective on a specific day, some may choose to honor them in their own way, some may choose not to honor them at all and some, as mentioned, don't have any reason whatsoever to honor them to being with.
I guess one way to narrow down the number of pissed off people today would be to confine these 'Veterans Day reminders' to viewers with US IPs (well, and those for the US military abroad, obviously). As far as I can tell they are actually implementing this.
The "terrorists" (if you like to go ahead and put them all into the same category like the government does) care for what is happening on they own turf much more than what is happening in a far away country. It's just that you've been made to believe that their sole reason for blowing up stuff is because "they hate your freedom"(tm) and your way of life, while in the case of most Arab terrorists they are usually much more pissed off at the presence of American (and other foreign) bases, companies and soldiers on land that they deem to be "Arab" land. They couldn't care less about what's happening half way around the globe.
It's actually more or less the same all over the world - most people don't care about what's happening half way around the world (most of the time they don't even know about what's happening in neighboring countries) - at least, it seems, until someone from half way around the globe comes over and makes a big explosion (or more), then apparently people start "to care". With the right media direction this can be converted to a general sentiment of "Well, if the come over and blow stuff up here, we'll go over and blow stuff up there!" - rinse and repeat...
You won't need to pay hundreds of bucks to do that exact same thing half way across the world. You could pop in anywhere and even be present in different locations at the same time (someone mentioned the IRC analogy above), while not worrying how to get there and back home, thus saving time, money etc.
This is the next step up from using the letters/telegraph/telephone or any invention designed to save us time by allowing communication without requiring us to be physically present.
The difference to IRC is that it's more intuitive (read: easier to use for Joe and Jane Schmoe) and in the future might allow for many cool features to be added, e.g. showing your clients (say, in Japan, France and Brazil) a product prototype (that was automatically digitized after you recorded it with a camera) and asking for their opinions.
There you go. For any philosophical or metaphysical question that arises there will be a machine that simply drops the god onto the stage to resolve any issues. Who build the machine you ask? Why, the Greeks of course! And who made the Greeks? More Greeks. Thus by induction we can conclude it was the Greeks.
Jokes aside I always wonder how creationists can defend ID but are usually reluctant to promote the geocentric model of the universe, which has just as much "prove" in the bible (and elsewhere) as ID does. Most of the arguments that work for ID would work (slightly modified) on the geocentric model as well.
Erm, the (Audio-)CD was designed with sequential reading in mind, because, unlike a hard drive or floppy, that is the reading method that would be employed most of the time. Nobody at that time thought that one time people with "PCs" would want to use that medium - I mean check it out: 1982 was the year the C64 was introduced (actually in the same month) with 64KB of RAM and 20KB of ROM, earlier that year IBM launched their double-sided 320 KB floppy disk drive. It took years, with people juggling stacks of floppies around for certain applications, until they would widely adopt the CD-ROM.
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I see a future with rich parents selecting the best looking, most talented etc embryos (let's call them "Eloy") and the other people (let's call them "Morlocks") having children the "natural" way. This will lead to the Eloys getting better jobs hence more money creating a disparity with the Morlocks who can't get those good jobs due to inferior qualifications.
Eventually there will be need to create fences and walls to secure the Eloys from the Morlocks and thus both races will further diverge, with the Eloy ever increasing their genetic advantage, controlling the planets resources and making sure the Morlocks won't attain potentially dangerous technology. Soon they will find a better way of containing the Morlocks (who sometimes do manage to penetrate the boundaries) by building their cities up into the sky and locking the Morlocks down into the ground.
And thus the Eloy will be able to live in a peaceful, perfect society. - A perfectly fascist one...
Why would you get flamed for things that are perfectly explainable (oh, and observable ;)). Any development that doesn't seem to have an obvious evolutionary advantage does not contradict evolution; they could be vestigial like our appendix or even be atavisms whose genes are coupled with a certain genetic mutation that makes it become dominant again.
Btw, you weren't defending ID here, as you only stated why you think evolution produced some strange effect you couldn't explain. "Defending" it would have meant explaining how putting these seemingly useless traits in there by 'the creator' could in any sense be construed as "intelligent design".
The spokesperson of (ex-)Diebold is called Riggall! Maybe they just want to make it clear to their 'customers' that even though they changed their name their complex vote "counting" algorithm is as good as ever..
Well, it's all a matter of interpretation. Fact is that during the time he made his best movies (including the POAs) Heston was pro gun control, a strong supporter of the civil rights movement "long before Hollywood found it fashionable" and was campaigning for democratic politicians.
Then, around 1980 something changed his mind and he became a republican supporter and member of the NRA etc. From that time on I also can't recall any movie at all in which he plays a leading character. It would be interesting to find out what exactly made him change like that.
I guess the rationale behind it is that the theme designers believe the broad mass wants computers to be fun (ready: flashy, omgpwnies), not remind them of work (read: efficient/useful design). I always wondered myself why Gnome/KDE icons need to be so huge, when recognizing and aiming for 32x32 pixel icons is just as easy.
;)
Fortunately the window managers allow for some tweaking (*heavy* tweaking if you really want to spend some time on it), so why not spend an afternoon or so making it look "cool" and then be happy for the next couple of years
On a serious note, it's interesting to see, that during the Cold War with a real threat of thermo-nuclear war the government tried to prevent mass-paranoia by spreading untruthful propaganda, while now they are doing exactly the same, but with th goal of causing mass paranoia.
According to one of Germany's reputable news sources Spiegel Online (in German) early reports suspected counterfeit claims by companies such as Apple, but it has since become clear that the Italian company Sisvel has filed suit over MP3 patent infringements and thereby caused the raid of stands offering mp3/4 players et al.
There have since been further confiscations of GPS/navigation systems too.
Has anyone worked in a company that has pre-installed e.g. Ubuntu? Are there any hurdles or restrictions? Does the company have to pay a royalty to Canonical?
What if the company wanted to modify it so there's a first time boot-up screen that lets the user decide whether to accept the EULA (GPL for Ubuntu, right?) and use it or to decline it and have the harddisk quick-formatted. Are there any limitations? Does this fall under "commercial use" of Ubuntu (even though the OS itself is not actually "sold", only the computer it is on)?
So basically WGA under SP1 causes Vista to act like crippleware.
;).
The irony of course being that Vista was already "crippleware" from the beginning - crippleware by design, if you may
The problem is the increase of nuclear waste material if a resurgence if nuclear power should occur. U-238 has a half life of 4.46 billion years, while the fissile U-235 still has a half life of more than 700 million years.
Have a look at the "Nuclear fuel cycle" and you'll see that it is in effect not a cycle at all, but a process in which at the end we have to dig up more and more holes to put the waste material into and hope it stays there to the end of time. So we got highly concentrated radioactive material dug into the earth. Who is to guarantee that coming generations maybe in 100, maybe in 10000 years will not accidentally be exposed to it and suffer from it?
I can remember when I was learning Java (around 2000 iirc) that one book proved invaluable in learning the language - and it was (and still is) free! It has been released in the forth edition now so I believe it is quite successful. Thing is the author got his and his book's name out by sharing it with the online community. Not only that, but he got direct feedback from the community on anything from source code bugs to overall structure. It's the perfect way to improve the quality of a book - listen to your readers and see where most people would like an improvement, then simply improve it (given, of course, that most of your readers aren't complete morons ;). In fact, this model proved so successful he went on and wrote two other good books "Thinking in C++" and "Thinking in patterns" in much the same way.
It kind of has some similarity with an open source project with the author in control and deservedly so reaping all the monetary profits. The community on the other hand profits from a very useful book, that you can buy in order to take advantage of the "paper-format" as opposed to a PDF displayed on your monitor, or simply to support the author (yes, not everyone is entirely egoistic in this world). And those poor students who can't afford spending to much money get a great product absolutely for free. And perhaps a couple of years down the road a few of them will write a book just like that about the next programming language that comes around or start some kind of other open collaborative project that benefits the community..
It's actually very simple: "Open Source" is the concept that information wants to be free (tm) - much in the same way as you'd obviously agree with me that beer, too, wants to be free. Add to that a hint of free speech (i.e. "I'd like to voice my opinion about free beer anytime and anywhere I want!" and "Nobody should tell you what beer you're supposed to buy or brew, right?") and there you have in essence of what open source stands for.
I once saw an illustration of how a man would look like if he had the sternum and pecs that would be needed to support wings like those of a bird. The diameter of the breast (front to back) was about triple that of a normal human. Which makes me wonder if people like these could pull it off - maybe after losing some of the weight in places where it's not really necessary (and pulling those socks out of the undies to improve aerodynamics ;).
Basically Brontosaurus was an Apatosaurus with a Camarasaurus skull wrongly assigned to it. Camarasaurus has a relatively short neck with a round skull; Apatosaurus has a long neck with a flat skull. So whenever you see a picture of a sauropod with a really long neck and round skull it's probably an old reconstruction of a Brontosaurus which never existed. It was a cool name though, it means "thunder lizard".
Btw what's with all these obsessing about sources (at least with topics such as these); I don't have any sources handy right now either, but I'm pretty sure I'd be able to find adequate sources for this within minutes in a public library. Or even google.
Except that in ten years, Bush will be gone and Putin will most likely still be "president". Some people are actually suffering - you just thought you were.
I don't know about the future, but judging by the past - twenty years ago we had Bush, now we have Bush (and not the good kind..) - I don't see how anything would change.
Obviously these self-guided planes need some accurate image recognition coupled with the ability to know the location and trajectory of any other aircraft in the area and adding an AI to process the information and accurately judge the situation. Sharing this information between all those drone via wireless network would be very effective as well. - A network in the sky... OMFG it's gonna be Skynet - it's inevitable! Goddammit Sarah Connor! You've been KILLING machines in three movies now. Stop screwing around and get the frickin job done!
I tend to see it the way you do. But we have to keep in mind, that the premise is that people do take steps to verify the sources etc. - Unfortunately, the way things are now, only a small percentage has this sort of mindset. Many people have no problem trusting a source with perceived or established authority (although not necessarily informed or truthful) even up to the point of believing a lie. We have seen this so often in history (quite recently, too). I believe dishonesty needs to be prosecuted - in meatspace, that is. Dishonesty leads to corruption which is never good for society.
Only considering cyberspace though, rules are quite different. People can be anonymous (to the average user) - this has to be taken into account when reading things on a medium where truthiness is naturally harder to evaluate. This is great, because it creates potential for many people to bind together and communicate unrestricted to pursue a common goal, thereby giving them a much needed tool to fight authoritarianism. The fact that this 'common goal' might not correspond with the plans the governments have gives them the hibby jibbies and thusly they will restrict media access and crack down on free flow of information like this.
While I am not an opponent of nuclear energy, because of the "cleanliness" compared to fossil fuels I think proponents tend to leave out the tiny detail of nuclear waste. If all the countries were generating their energy with nuclear reactors a couple of generations from now we'd have huge problems with the happily radiating waste material. Even nowadays we can measure the increased radiation everywhere. E.g. to actually find iron that is free from radiation we have to dig deep down or look for pre-WWII shipwrecks on the sea floor.
What (the sane) environmentalists advocated when fighting nuclear power was to put all the research money in renewable energy. The ultimate goal is to be able to generate energy that adversely affects our environment to a minimum. Nuclear power can only be the 'lesser of two evils' to bridge the gap until enough minds in the industry and governments have been swayed to invest into 'clean' power.
I don't think you can blame environmentalists for shedding light on these issues. What you can blame them for may be their hippyesque appearance and their tree-hugging, but at least they are not responsible for leaking radiating waste water, oil spills or an increased cancer risk.
Make no mistake: if we are talking about the "Veterans Day" what is usually meant is the day in which Americans honor their veterans. Most other nations don't honor their veterans on this day (none that I know of) and sure as hell not nations such as Vietnam, Guatemala, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Lebanon, El Salvador, Grenada, Bolivia, Iran, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq or any other country where troops were/are deployed to the dismay of the local population.
I have no problem with people honoring their (violent) ancestors, because obviously without their tribute and sacrifice these certain people might not be here. Yet, not everybody wants to honor those ancestors as a collective on a specific day, some may choose to honor them in their own way, some may choose not to honor them at all and some, as mentioned, don't have any reason whatsoever to honor them to being with.
I guess one way to narrow down the number of pissed off people today would be to confine these 'Veterans Day reminders' to viewers with US IPs (well, and those for the US military abroad, obviously). As far as I can tell they are actually implementing this.
The "terrorists" (if you like to go ahead and put them all into the same category like the government does) care for what is happening on they own turf much more than what is happening in a far away country. It's just that you've been made to believe that their sole reason for blowing up stuff is because "they hate your freedom"(tm) and your way of life, while in the case of most Arab terrorists they are usually much more pissed off at the presence of American (and other foreign) bases, companies and soldiers on land that they deem to be "Arab" land. They couldn't care less about what's happening half way around the globe.
It's actually more or less the same all over the world - most people don't care about what's happening half way around the world (most of the time they don't even know about what's happening in neighboring countries) - at least, it seems, until someone from half way around the globe comes over and makes a big explosion (or more), then apparently people start "to care". With the right media direction this can be converted to a general sentiment of "Well, if the come over and blow stuff up here, we'll go over and blow stuff up there!" - rinse and repeat...
You won't need to pay hundreds of bucks to do that exact same thing half way across the world. You could pop in anywhere and even be present in different locations at the same time (someone mentioned the IRC analogy above), while not worrying how to get there and back home, thus saving time, money etc.
This is the next step up from using the letters/telegraph/telephone or any invention designed to save us time by allowing communication without requiring us to be physically present.
The difference to IRC is that it's more intuitive (read: easier to use for Joe and Jane Schmoe) and in the future might allow for many cool features to be added, e.g. showing your clients (say, in Japan, France and Brazil) a product prototype (that was automatically digitized after you recorded it with a camera) and asking for their opinions.
There you go. For any philosophical or metaphysical question that arises there will be a machine that simply drops the god onto the stage to resolve any issues. Who build the machine you ask? Why, the Greeks of course! And who made the Greeks? More Greeks. Thus by induction we can conclude it was the Greeks.
Jokes aside I always wonder how creationists can defend ID but are usually reluctant to promote the geocentric model of the universe, which has just as much "prove" in the bible (and elsewhere) as ID does. Most of the arguments that work for ID would work (slightly modified) on the geocentric model as well.
Erm, the (Audio-)CD was designed with sequential reading in mind, because, unlike a hard drive or floppy, that is the reading method that would be employed most of the time. Nobody at that time thought that one time people with "PCs" would want to use that medium - I mean check it out: 1982 was the year the C64 was introduced (actually in the same month) with 64KB of RAM and 20KB of ROM, earlier that year IBM launched their double-sided 320 KB floppy disk drive. It took years, with people juggling stacks of floppies around for certain applications, until they would widely adopt the CD-ROM.