And, as an added bonus (and as the grandparent post points out), it's also beneficial for child/spouse abusers and other people who take advantage of those weaker than them. Huzzah!
Seriously, though, it depends on the laws you have. I agree with you in pricinple, but in practice drawing the line between protecting those who can't protect themselves and staying out of people lives is a tricky one, and I have yet to see anyone provide a good, realistic solution.
The claim (true or not, I don't know), is that the editorial staff of a newspaper and the news staff (including the news editor) are completely different. So, you can get a paper with news reporting that is "un"biased, or biased in direction, and editorials that biased in a different direction.
When people have explained this to me, they always cite a famous newspaper, The Washington Post, perhaps? I can't remember, but has anyone else heard this explanation?
If true, then it would help explain why newspapers are comfortable committing to a candidate. If not, well, personally, I like knowing the bias of a paper - it helps me filter through that bias and figure out what's really going on. In fact, since I think that even papers that appear unbiased at first glance are still biased (being written by human beings, so far as I know), I'd rather read the overtly biased papers, again so that I don't get tricked into accepting opinion as fact.
So if you modify the genes by natural methods its not GM, but if you use artificial means to accomplish the exact same result, it is GM. God! I love the un-inteeligent masses that find this acceptable.
Clarification question: Find GM acceptable or find this supposed confounding acceptable?
Anyway, call me Dr. Stupid, but I think there is a substantive difference between having the means to be really selective about your breeding and splicing genetic code out of one species to put into another.
It seems to me that we are where we are today because clever, patient people "genetically modified" their animals and crops through careful breeding. I don't see how what Brazil is proposing is different. I'm pleased that they'd using this method instead of going in with the high tech equivalent of knives and tweezers to play switcheroo and put genes together in combinations that nature hasn't pre-tested for us.
As I recall, having children reduces the chances of getting a number of different kinds of cancers related to the reproductive system. (Though who knows, the ways these studies get reported, this may not be considered true anymore!)
I'd always assumed that lower cancer incidence rates in these cases had something to do with the idea that using the organs helps keep them fit (an idle womb is the (cancer) devil's workshop?) Or, that the long-term use of hormone-manipulating birth control might take a toll somehow. But, maybe it's actually got something to do with this. Very interesting, indeed!
Fair enough, but most of my hobbies are things I can do sitting down, and all my friends have email. (I live in England, so on those rare days when it's sunny enough to go outside - well, sure, all bets are off and I'm not going to be on the phone anyway.) If it's work-related, then I've plenty to do at my computer. So, in short, I don't care if I'm sitting around with the phone off the hook or sitting around with the phone on the hook. And I don't give my mobile number out except to people I know. (I guess that's over-paranoid, but there it is).
Anyway, I was thinking more about things like calls to the bank to clear up mystery charges, i.e. things that I'd rather get sorted sooner rather than later. Heck, all the tech calls I've ever had to place were because some critical bit of hardware needed replacing before my (work-related) computer/equipment could function, so again, not the sort of thing I want to play phone tag about for ages.
So, I don't use the call back option, but to be fair, I also don't bitch and whine about the wait time. Frankly, I'd rather never call at all - in my experience email (when it's an option) works much better anyway. So, to the question submitter: sure, pick your music carefully, but you've got a good email option for people, too, right?
Agreed! And, as other people have mentioned, don't cut in just to say I'm still on hold. I know I'm on hold, thanks - if I wasn't the music would stop.
Other posters have mentioned the "Thank you for waiting" messages an annoying reminder that they're on hold, but it's more than that - at least for me. Every time I hear the music stop, I have to stop what I'm doing and ask myself: is *this* is my lucky moment? Will I finally get to talk to someone? My hopes rise - I could be at the front of the line at last! I start to re-rehearse how to best phrase my problem. I wait to hear the voice, straining to detect any small cue that it will just be a recording again. And... then I hear "Your call IS important to us". Hopes dashed... back to trying to get some work done. Okay, well, back to reading Slashdot...
Actually, I never choose this option when it is offered. The thing this - when I call, even if I'm on hold for ages, I'm still calling at my convenience. If I ask them to call me back, then they are calling me back at their convenience.
Here is the problem with this: I know when I call that I might be on hold for awhile, so I sit in the front of the computer, read slashdot, what-have-you, and I don't really notice I'm on hold. Plus, I know that within the next 30 minutes I should be connected. But, if they're going to call me back - well, gee, that could be in a hour, some time today or even tomorrow. Now, I'm trapped at my phone for the indefinite future, instead of just for the next hour (at most).
The best example of this I've seen was at a small academic conference. It's in the question period after a talk, and someone is in the middle of asking a question when a phone rings. The questioner pauses - then exclaims "That's me!", reaches into his pocket, grabs the offending phone and rushes out of the room.
But, to answer your (rhetorical) question - I suspect many people forget their phone is on, or think it is really off. My phone is mostly used to let people know if I'm running late (damn English trains!), and I almost never get calls on it. I often forget I even have it. It hasn't rung inappropriately yet, but there have been a couple times when I've noticed it was on after the fact (i.e. leaving a meeting, etc) and thanked blind luck that it didn't go off. I swear I'm not an asshole (at least not intentionally!) - and I do religiously check it in movie theaters at least - even when I'm certain it's off. But, my own (so far lucky) forgetfulness makes me more tolerant of the occasional, quickly-stopped ring. It's the people who *answer* the damn phone in these contexts that drive me nuts.
At least my questioner at the conference ran outside before taking the call. I can only assume it was important, because this conference was small enough that everyone knew him by name, and he was definitely teased about it.
i) Read thousands of e-books on my couch, while making notes on it
I can do that I my laptop, or with my PDA
ii) Browse in a comfortable position, while watching TV
Again, laptop works great for this
iii) Take Notes in a meeting / classroom.
Laptop or PDA works fine
iv) Pass it around easily to show something
See above
v) Design/Architect solutions while not having to worry about transfering it to PC(the monkey coders at/. wouldn't understand that anyway)
Can't claim the title "monkey coder", but I will admit I know who to use my scanner.
vi) Reduce endless clutter of sticky pads
Again, PDA works great for this - laptop is okay for this under certain circumstances
Sorry, these just don't seem like knock-down arguments in favor of Tablet PC. There's not a thing here that I don't do regularly with either my laptop or PDA. And I've got no complaints..
Well, that's what I get for posting before RTFA. Let's see... here's the text from the post again:
Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas, accounting for one fifth of total warming. Researchers don't know why this is
Maybe I misunderstood, but my interpretation was that researchers don't know why methane accounts for 1/5 of total warming. Particularly the way this is phrased - "accounts for" is often used to mean that the size of an effect (i.e. total warming") can be partially predicted or explained - but crucially without assuming a causal relationship.
But, if they don't know why there is less methane... Well, that's still another problem - and too bad, because if we did know why it's lower, we could (in principle) use that to make sensible recommendations for future treaties and such. Not that they would be followed, mind you...
Right. And until they have a solid, convincing theory to account for this 'why', then we've only got (at best) a correlation between the two events - this does not necessarily mean there is a causal relationship between them.
Trouble is, this is such a politicized issue that I doubt we'll ever see any scientific evidence that everyone will consider convincing (for one side or the other).
Appearantly, the American Way means having two cars per family and getting stuck in a traffic jam at least once a week.
I always thought it was one SUV per person (children included), with two-hour traffic jams on 15-lane freeways both to and from work every day. Oh, wait, that's the Californian Way (tm).
Anyway, I've always suspected that the huge distances involved in travelling in the US have killed a lot of interest in even high-speed trains. I mean, if it takes 6 days to get to point A from point B, even cutting the time in half to 3 days isn't an incentive. People will just take a plane.
Now, maybe if the Ashcroft Way (tm) continues much longer, people will avoid planes because they'll be tired of being strip searched and x-rayed for every leg of their journey. Then it might be worth the investment in high-speed trains. I don't know.
PJ doesn't seem like the sort of director who'd jump through hoops for the sake of preserving a tiny bit of extra consistency with the trilogy.
Um, have you watched any of the special-edition DVD special features? Apparently the man would dig a tunnel to hell if it looked like it would be the perfect location. AND he'd pay gardeners to tend any temporarily-moved flora of hell so they could be replaced a year later. Oh, and he'd retouch every frame to get the color of the flames in the corners *just* right.
I think, if it was best for the film, he'd find a way to make Iam Holm look like a teenager. Not a problem. And, frankly, if you can't get the original actors back, along with Peter Jackson, I don't really see the point of making the movie, anyway.
I'm really surprised to hear that people are leaving broadband to go back to dialup, given not only my experience here in the UK (where the providers act as if they don't even offer dialup unless really pressed), but also talking to friends and family in the US.
There's lots and lots of content that really demands high speed access to be usable that isn't geek-specific at all. Heck - your average webpage these days practically requires high speed just to load in under a minute, what with all the various needless flash and java and such.
I don't think dialup is the wave of the future, especially as people come to see the internet as TV+ - offering lots of content for "free" that means they don't have to wait for snail mail (for say, family photos), or simply go without (how in the world did we function as a society before IMDb?)
In fact, the idea that at least some cities are coming to see the internet as something that should be supported by gov't (for good or evil) in the way that other basic services are or have been supported (roads, telephone, energy, gas, etc), indicates to me that we are on the verge of having the internet be as fundamental to our daily lives as these other services already are.
At least where I live (Brighton, UK) this appears to be exactly what the bus drivers do at peak times, at least up in the hinterlands of the residential areas. I can't tell you how many times I've waited an extra 10 minutes for the bus, only to have it speed past me with bus driver sternly shaking his head. Then the next bus comes a minute later.
Thing is, it doesn't appear to help. Usually afterwards the buses still end up next to each other. Understanding that it's due to being a chaotic system probably won't help being frustrating, but at least it's something, I guess.
Honestly, I don't drive anymore and don't really want to start again, but it's at those moments where I gain a visceral understanding of why cars are so popular. Kind of an anti-Zen moment, I guess.
There's lots of the usual (and appropriate) concerns about the technological security of internet voting systems, but I wonder if there's been much thought about the general effects of making absentee voting easier and thus more common.
My concern is that a lot of votes might be coerced when people fill out a ballot (internet or otherwise) in private, where it is not guarenteed to be secret who you vote for. The more of these votes there are, the more the system is undermined.
You don't have to, although of course you can if you so choose. If you're really interested in this issue - find a journal database that indexes cogsci or philosophy and look up Pat Churchland (based at UC San Diego). There is a whole approach to neuroscience/philosophy/cogsci that is often called radical reductionism - the idea is that all mind states are reduceable to brain states - and not trivially so - crucially mind states ARE brain states, and thus the whole idea of "mind" is really unnecessary, except as a convenient shorthand to discuss mind states until we can pin down the corresponding brain states. The opposite of this view - functionalism - is perhaps best represented in a number of articles by a man named Jerry Fodor.
Of course, this debate spills into AI and is highly relevant there, too
From the county prosecutor: "The government shouldn't have to wait to develop a record of harm," he said. "While the First Amendment is important, the county can't wait for scientists to provide evidence."
Translation: Of course video games cause an increase in violent behavior. We don't need evidence of that, and can ignore any scientific evidence that might cast doubt on our beliefs. We've found one guy in Iowa who'll support our claims, and that's all science is for anyway.
Bleh. It drives me crazy that there are people in our culture who doubt the value of funding research and then don't even use the research results available.
I remember those kinds of debates, and it always seemed to me that people got very hung up on the idea that only human experiences count for anything. There was this assumption that AI's goal is to become human is the sense that it actually experiences mental states identical to those of humans. But - what's wrong with having sophisticated mental states that aren't human mental states?
It will be really interesting once this sort of prostetic brain surgery happens - to be able to interview the patients and see if they really feel as if their mental states are different as a result of the new "tissue".
There'd be nothing stopping them from having their own MS-computers, would there? (that's an honest question)
Also, why not Macs? I agree that getting a bunch of liberal arts majors to happily use Linux might be a bit of a nightmare, but Macs are very friendly, and one *could* argue that they are also used in "real world"... okay, maybe that's going too far..
I agree, though I think that ellipsis does have its place. In some systems of transcription, ellipses are used to mark a pause of a certain length. That's how I generally use them - to indicate when I've just stopped and thought about something.
This kind of use does something that might bother people, though, which is to use email as a surrogate for verbal communication rather than for written. Which raises a question - do people primarily think of email as a replacement for phone calls or a replacement for memos?
For me, it depends on who I'm emailling and why. Sometimes I write memos or letters that happen to be email, other times I try to use written conventions (like ellipsis) to make the email sound more like the way I would speak - giving the recipient (hopefully!) some sense of my train of thought rather than editting heavily and only giving them a clean, finished product. I find this helps when I'm using email to hash out complicated ideas with people in the early stages the process - when an offhand thought may be important but we don't know it yet.
Ummm... how about straight from the horse's mouth (so to speak):
Niven:
What book you give depends on who you're giving it to. To a mundane, give LUCIFER'S HAMMER. To a scientist, give THE INTEGRAL TREES. To someone who already wants to write, or to know about Niven, give N-SPACE or PLAYGROUNDS OF THE MIND or the forthcoming SCATTERBRAIN. Fantasy fans and Angelinos get THE BURNING CITY.
Sorry, this getting really offtopic - but I can't emphasize this enough:
We did not elect him!
He was appointed by a court packed the critical number of judges appointed by his father in a humiliating farce of justice and representative democracy.
But back on topic: The very idea of a space elevator really floors me - I had always dismissed it as an obvious impossibility. That said, I'm not sure whether I'd trust a space elevator or a transporter more - given a glorious universe in which the choice was mine to make!
Slashdot Mirror
And, as an added bonus (and as the grandparent post points out), it's also beneficial for child/spouse abusers and other people who take advantage of those weaker than them. Huzzah!
Seriously, though, it depends on the laws you have. I agree with you in pricinple, but in practice drawing the line between protecting those who can't protect themselves and staying out of people lives is a tricky one, and I have yet to see anyone provide a good, realistic solution.
The claim (true or not, I don't know), is that the editorial staff of a newspaper and the news staff (including the news editor) are completely different. So, you can get a paper with news reporting that is "un"biased, or biased in direction, and editorials that biased in a different direction.
When people have explained this to me, they always cite a famous newspaper, The Washington Post, perhaps? I can't remember, but has anyone else heard this explanation?
If true, then it would help explain why newspapers are comfortable committing to a candidate. If not, well, personally, I like knowing the bias of a paper - it helps me filter through that bias and figure out what's really going on. In fact, since I think that even papers that appear unbiased at first glance are still biased (being written by human beings, so far as I know), I'd rather read the overtly biased papers, again so that I don't get tricked into accepting opinion as fact.
Hey - that's Sir Ben Kingsley to you, Bub.
So if you modify the genes by natural methods its not GM, but if you use artificial means to accomplish the exact same result, it is GM. God! I love the un-inteeligent masses that find this acceptable.
Clarification question: Find GM acceptable or find this supposed confounding acceptable?
Anyway, call me Dr. Stupid, but I think there is a substantive difference between having the means to be really selective about your breeding and splicing genetic code out of one species to put into another.
It seems to me that we are where we are today because clever, patient people "genetically modified" their animals and crops through careful breeding. I don't see how what Brazil is proposing is different. I'm pleased that they'd using this method instead of going in with the high tech equivalent of knives and tweezers to play switcheroo and put genes together in combinations that nature hasn't pre-tested for us.
As I recall, having children reduces the chances of getting a number of different kinds of cancers related to the reproductive system. (Though who knows, the ways these studies get reported, this may not be considered true anymore!)
I'd always assumed that lower cancer incidence rates in these cases had something to do with the idea that using the organs helps keep them fit (an idle womb is the (cancer) devil's workshop?) Or, that the long-term use of hormone-manipulating birth control might take a toll somehow. But, maybe it's actually got something to do with this. Very interesting, indeed!
Fair enough, but most of my hobbies are things I can do sitting down, and all my friends have email. (I live in England, so on those rare days when it's sunny enough to go outside - well, sure, all bets are off and I'm not going to be on the phone anyway.) If it's work-related, then I've plenty to do at my computer. So, in short, I don't care if I'm sitting around with the phone off the hook or sitting around with the phone on the hook. And I don't give my mobile number out except to people I know. (I guess that's over-paranoid, but there it is).
Anyway, I was thinking more about things like calls to the bank to clear up mystery charges, i.e. things that I'd rather get sorted sooner rather than later. Heck, all the tech calls I've ever had to place were because some critical bit of hardware needed replacing before my (work-related) computer/equipment could function, so again, not the sort of thing I want to play phone tag about for ages.
So, I don't use the call back option, but to be fair, I also don't bitch and whine about the wait time. Frankly, I'd rather never call at all - in my experience email (when it's an option) works much better anyway. So, to the question submitter: sure, pick your music carefully, but you've got a good email option for people, too, right?
Other posters have mentioned the "Thank you for waiting" messages an annoying reminder that they're on hold, but it's more than that - at least for me. Every time I hear the music stop, I have to stop what I'm doing and ask myself: is *this* is my lucky moment? Will I finally get to talk to someone? My hopes rise - I could be at the front of the line at last! I start to re-rehearse how to best phrase my problem. I wait to hear the voice, straining to detect any small cue that it will just be a recording again. And... then I hear "Your call IS important to us". Hopes dashed... back to trying to get some work done. Okay, well, back to reading Slashdot...
Actually, I never choose this option when it is offered. The thing this - when I call, even if I'm on hold for ages, I'm still calling at my convenience. If I ask them to call me back, then they are calling me back at their convenience.
Here is the problem with this: I know when I call that I might be on hold for awhile, so I sit in the front of the computer, read slashdot, what-have-you, and I don't really notice I'm on hold. Plus, I know that within the next 30 minutes I should be connected. But, if they're going to call me back - well, gee, that could be in a hour, some time today or even tomorrow. Now, I'm trapped at my phone for the indefinite future, instead of just for the next hour (at most).
The best example of this I've seen was at a small academic conference. It's in the question period after a talk, and someone is in the middle of asking a question when a phone rings. The questioner pauses - then exclaims "That's me!", reaches into his pocket, grabs the offending phone and rushes out of the room.
But, to answer your (rhetorical) question - I suspect many people forget their phone is on, or think it is really off. My phone is mostly used to let people know if I'm running late (damn English trains!), and I almost never get calls on it. I often forget I even have it. It hasn't rung inappropriately yet, but there have been a couple times when I've noticed it was on after the fact (i.e. leaving a meeting, etc) and thanked blind luck that it didn't go off. I swear I'm not an asshole (at least not intentionally!) - and I do religiously check it in movie theaters at least - even when I'm certain it's off. But, my own (so far lucky) forgetfulness makes me more tolerant of the occasional, quickly-stopped ring. It's the people who *answer* the damn phone in these contexts that drive me nuts.
At least my questioner at the conference ran outside before taking the call. I can only assume it was important, because this conference was small enough that everyone knew him by name, and he was definitely teased about it.
Lets see:
/. wouldn't understand that anyway)
i) Read thousands of e-books on my couch, while making notes on it
I can do that I my laptop, or with my PDA
ii) Browse in a comfortable position, while watching TV
Again, laptop works great for this
iii) Take Notes in a meeting / classroom.
Laptop or PDA works fine
iv) Pass it around easily to show something
See above
v) Design/Architect solutions while not having to worry about transfering it to PC(the monkey coders at
Can't claim the title "monkey coder", but I will admit I know who to use my scanner.
vi) Reduce endless clutter of sticky pads
Again, PDA works great for this - laptop is okay for this under certain circumstances
Sorry, these just don't seem like knock-down arguments in favor of Tablet PC. There's not a thing here that I don't do regularly with either my laptop or PDA. And I've got no complaints..
Well, that's what I get for posting before RTFA. Let's see... here's the text from the post again:
Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas, accounting for one fifth of total warming. Researchers don't know why this is
Maybe I misunderstood, but my interpretation was that researchers don't know why methane accounts for 1/5 of total warming. Particularly the way this is phrased - "accounts for" is often used to mean that the size of an effect (i.e. total warming") can be partially predicted or explained - but crucially without assuming a causal relationship.
But, if they don't know why there is less methane... Well, that's still another problem - and too bad, because if we did know why it's lower, we could (in principle) use that to make sensible recommendations for future treaties and such. Not that they would be followed, mind you...
Researchers don't know why this is.
Right. And until they have a solid, convincing theory to account for this 'why', then we've only got (at best) a correlation between the two events - this does not necessarily mean there is a causal relationship between them.
Trouble is, this is such a politicized issue that I doubt we'll ever see any scientific evidence that everyone will consider convincing (for one side or the other).
Appearantly, the American Way means having two cars per family and getting stuck in a traffic jam at least once a week.
I always thought it was one SUV per person (children included), with two-hour traffic jams on 15-lane freeways both to and from work every day. Oh, wait, that's the Californian Way (tm).
Anyway, I've always suspected that the huge distances involved in travelling in the US have killed a lot of interest in even high-speed trains. I mean, if it takes 6 days to get to point A from point B, even cutting the time in half to 3 days isn't an incentive. People will just take a plane.
Now, maybe if the Ashcroft Way (tm) continues much longer, people will avoid planes because they'll be tired of being strip searched and x-rayed for every leg of their journey. Then it might be worth the investment in high-speed trains. I don't know.
PJ doesn't seem like the sort of director who'd jump through hoops for the sake of preserving a tiny bit of extra consistency with the trilogy.
Um, have you watched any of the special-edition DVD special features? Apparently the man would dig a tunnel to hell if it looked like it would be the perfect location. AND he'd pay gardeners to tend any temporarily-moved flora of hell so they could be replaced a year later. Oh, and he'd retouch every frame to get the color of the flames in the corners *just* right.
I think, if it was best for the film, he'd find a way to make Iam Holm look like a teenager. Not a problem. And, frankly, if you can't get the original actors back, along with Peter Jackson, I don't really see the point of making the movie, anyway.
I'm really surprised to hear that people are leaving broadband to go back to dialup, given not only my experience here in the UK (where the providers act as if they don't even offer dialup unless really pressed), but also talking to friends and family in the US.
There's lots and lots of content that really demands high speed access to be usable that isn't geek-specific at all. Heck - your average webpage these days practically requires high speed just to load in under a minute, what with all the various needless flash and java and such.
I don't think dialup is the wave of the future, especially as people come to see the internet as TV+ - offering lots of content for "free" that means they don't have to wait for snail mail (for say, family photos), or simply go without (how in the world did we function as a society before IMDb?)
In fact, the idea that at least some cities are coming to see the internet as something that should be supported by gov't (for good or evil) in the way that other basic services are or have been supported (roads, telephone, energy, gas, etc), indicates to me that we are on the verge of having the internet be as fundamental to our daily lives as these other services already are.
At least where I live (Brighton, UK) this appears to be exactly what the bus drivers do at peak times, at least up in the hinterlands of the residential areas. I can't tell you how many times I've waited an extra 10 minutes for the bus, only to have it speed past me with bus driver sternly shaking his head. Then the next bus comes a minute later.
Thing is, it doesn't appear to help. Usually afterwards the buses still end up next to each other. Understanding that it's due to being a chaotic system probably won't help being frustrating, but at least it's something, I guess.
Honestly, I don't drive anymore and don't really want to start again, but it's at those moments where I gain a visceral understanding of why cars are so popular. Kind of an anti-Zen moment, I guess.
There's lots of the usual (and appropriate) concerns about the technological security of internet voting systems, but I wonder if there's been much thought about the general effects of making absentee voting easier and thus more common.
My concern is that a lot of votes might be coerced when people fill out a ballot (internet or otherwise) in private, where it is not guarenteed to be secret who you vote for. The more of these votes there are, the more the system is undermined.
Thoughts?
You don't have to, although of course you can if you so choose. If you're really interested in this issue - find a journal database that indexes cogsci or philosophy and look up Pat Churchland (based at UC San Diego). There is a whole approach to neuroscience/philosophy/cogsci that is often called radical reductionism - the idea is that all mind states are reduceable to brain states - and not trivially so - crucially mind states ARE brain states, and thus the whole idea of "mind" is really unnecessary, except as a convenient shorthand to discuss mind states until we can pin down the corresponding brain states. The opposite of this view - functionalism - is perhaps best represented in a number of articles by a man named Jerry Fodor.
Of course, this debate spills into AI and is highly relevant there, too
From the county prosecutor:
"The government shouldn't have to wait to develop a record of harm," he said. "While the First Amendment is important, the county can't wait for scientists to provide evidence."
Translation: Of course video games cause an increase in violent behavior. We don't need evidence of that, and can ignore any scientific evidence that might cast doubt on our beliefs. We've found one guy in Iowa who'll support our claims, and that's all science is for anyway.
Bleh. It drives me crazy that there are people in our culture who doubt the value of funding research and then don't even use the research results available.
Why not both?
I remember those kinds of debates, and it always seemed to me that people got very hung up on the idea that only human experiences count for anything. There was this assumption that AI's goal is to become human is the sense that it actually experiences mental states identical to those of humans. But - what's wrong with having sophisticated mental states that aren't human mental states?
It will be really interesting once this sort of prostetic brain surgery happens - to be able to interview the patients and see if they really feel as if their mental states are different as a result of the new "tissue".
There'd be nothing stopping them from having their own MS-computers, would there? (that's an honest question)
... okay, maybe that's going too far..
Also, why not Macs? I agree that getting a bunch of liberal arts majors to happily use Linux might be a bit of a nightmare, but Macs are very friendly, and one *could* argue that they are also used in "real world"
Wow, I didn't realize exploding people release CO2 emissions.
At least their overcrowding problems will be solved!
I agree, though I think that ellipsis does have its place. In some systems of transcription, ellipses are used to mark a pause of a certain length. That's how I generally use them - to indicate when I've just stopped and thought about something.
This kind of use does something that might bother people, though, which is to use email as a surrogate for verbal communication rather than for written. Which raises a question - do people primarily think of email as a replacement for phone calls or a replacement for memos?
For me, it depends on who I'm emailling and why. Sometimes I write memos or letters that happen to be email, other times I try to use written conventions (like ellipsis) to make the email sound more like the way I would speak - giving the recipient (hopefully!) some sense of my train of thought rather than editting heavily and only giving them a clean, finished product. I find this helps when I'm using email to hash out complicated ideas with people in the early stages the process - when an offhand thought may be important but we don't know it yet.
Ummm... how about straight from the horse's mouth (so to speak):
Niven:
What book you give depends on who you're giving it to. To a mundane, give LUCIFER'S HAMMER. To a scientist, give THE INTEGRAL TREES. To someone who already wants to write, or to know about Niven, give N-SPACE or PLAYGROUNDS OF THE MIND or the forthcoming SCATTERBRAIN. Fantasy fans and Angelinos get THE BURNING CITY.
Sorry, this getting really offtopic - but I can't emphasize this enough:
We did not elect him!
He was appointed by a court packed the critical number of judges appointed by his father in a humiliating farce of justice and representative democracy.
But back on topic: The very idea of a space elevator really floors me - I had always dismissed it as an obvious impossibility. That said, I'm not sure whether I'd trust a space elevator or a transporter more - given a glorious universe in which the choice was mine to make!