It has to be dumbed down. Only the most passive minds could sit through the endless commercials that are repeated over and over to further hypnotize the audience into buying the junk advertised. Given what they have to work with, the media types go for the number of eyeball on the screen, not the content of the character or intellect behind the eyeballs.
Its all about money. People value money more than they do the planet that they and their offspring depend on for their own survival. The irony is that now the wealthy elites are just now beginning to realize how precarious their position is and they are desperately hoping that a few brilliant minds will bail them out of the predicament humanity has created for itself, yet of course, they still don't want to pay them enough to make it happen. The reality is that unless we move to a world economy based on science, the probability of any kind of sustainable future for humanity is exceedingly low. Nonetheless, just ask anyone what they think the probability is of that happening.
and therein lies the problem, at least for the media: there simply aren't enough educated intelligent people to make up a sufficiently large audience who are willing to sit through the 1 minute and 30 seconds of commercials for each minute of intellectually stimulating programming the rest of the public wouldn't understand.
As Senator Stevenson once quipped while running for president and in response to an admiring fan who yelled out "You are every thinking man's candidate", to which Stevenson replied "Yes I know, but I need a majority".
I suppose it does until you recognize that we are all human and consequently find ourselves in the same predicament and only make our own situation worse by tormenting others.
"There's little market demand for engineers today."
Not so. Its just that the market doesn't want to pay for their services, so they get employed in India, China and elsewhere, where salaries are lower and what they do get constitutes a living wage.
"Next he proclaims that schools are broken, that we need to train more engineers and scientists, fund more researh, etc. No. That's what we've been doing all along and the jobs are disappeared anyway".
No so. If you look at the total cost of entire budget dedicated toward paying scientists and teachers of science, it hardly amounts to a couple of ships, a few planes, and a few trainloads of ammo. The military spends way more in a week, what would fund NSF for a year. Likewise, for the total expenditures of most US corporations. The expenditure toward R&D is a small fraction of what they pay the top 5% of their corporate managers.
"Scaling up innovation" is what has caused the Amazon to disappear, rivers to be polluted, the earth to warm via carbon dioxide, the oceans to acidify, and biodiversity everywhere to disappear. The only thing humans will be scaling up in the next 50-100 years will likely be their extinction.
You can get a 2TB drive at COSTCO for $129 each. Get two and keep them in different locations, periodically backing up one with the other. You won't have to worry about loosing your photos for filling the drives for some time. The newer notebooks should soon have USB 3.0 which will make file transfer much easier, so look for USB 3.0 supported drives (I have seen them for smal, pocket sized 1T drives, although my Sony Vaio won't support them for lack of a USB 3.0 port.
Eskimos tolerate temperatures 100 F below zero, but have oxygen in sufficient quantity. Life on mars would require ability to tolerate temperatures of 178 F below zero and essentially no oxygen. Also, most eskimo tribes are not entirely isolated as would be true for the first colonizers on Mars. Further Mars would provide no food supply, so colonizers would have to bring everything with them. No food plants known on earth would grow under solar illumination on Mars, so growing your own, without abundant alternative sources of visible light would not be possible. The entire idea of spending tens of trillions of dollars to transport just the basics for life for a tiny few on Mars, when there are literally billions on earth already starving, homeless and jobless, is really an exercise in reality avoidance.
And to further emphasize there is no large liquid water pooling on mars, so lots of seamen will hardly be needed. Then again, it is so cold on mars that the women might like to have some seamen along, just to help keep them warm.
The question is are there gravitational cues for any of this? You talk of pooling, but such pooling may not occur in zero-g. You are probably wrong about the race of the little guys as there would be an advantage to the sperm that get there first, since penetration of the ovum causes a change in the egg wall that precludes insemination by late arrivals.
That is why we have to adopt the republican idea that the minimum wage should be set at about $0.15/hr so that we can regain our economic strength and become more competitive with the Chinese.
I'm not so sure. With so many taking up second amendment alternatives these days and the global climate changing to a new equilibrium point that doesn't favor life on the planet, the real world is getting too scary for most people and so they become busy either arming themselves against it or trying to pretend it were not so. Facebook may have staying power because it provides sort of a psychological bomb shelter of the kind provided by excretment to flies, as after all how could 30,000,000,000,000 be wrong, especially since hacking it can help you keep an eye on the personal data of the other 29,999,999,999,999,999 and know what they are really up to.
Not only do we have more guns, but we also have more politicians encouraging people to use them against others when they don't get their way.
We also have a media culture that makes killing people with guns a form of entertainment to be profited from. Those who watch these kinds of programs and buy these kinds of games really need to reflect on the consequences.
before society has a right to take them off the streets as quickly as their rhetoric indicates they may be a potential problem? The shooting at the Washington holocaust museum, the incident in New York, the Tiller murder. This is becoming more of a pattern than "isolated incidents".
There needs to be a special form of banishment for politicians and talking heads who advocate and encourage the use of violence and routinely employ violent imagery to make their point, that is unless we all want to see this kind of thing escalate to a "bleeding Kansas" type situation.
There need to be laws that require people to pass some form of psychological test before they are allowed to buy a gun. Otherwise, we are just advocating crazies should be allowed to kill at will. It is also time to reverse the trend started by Ronald Reagan, who in his first official act as governor of California, closed many of the states mental hospitals and threw the patients out on to the streets. We need more mental health clinics not less, particularly as social and economic pressures are pushing many past the breaking point.
"A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government." -- George Washington
Obviously, it is you who know little of of Washington's role in quashing the whiskey rebellion, when some thought themselves above paying taxes. Keep up your lame rhetoric in support of this kind of insane behavior and you may soon find that some of your "fellow Americans" may come gunning for you.
The notion that you can use a competitor is laughable, since most "competitors" are now owned by the same few people that own virtually everything else. Don't you know that the wealthiest 1% of the people already own 85% of everything there is to own? Don't you realize that the only national debate going on now is just how much of the remaining 15% they will be allowed to own as well? I guess they've lulled you into a false sense of security.
At least when the government screws you over, you can vote them out of office. Try that with a phone or cable company. Sure you can "switch to a competitor", but with the same few people owning all the "competitors", do you really think you have shown them? If the market had true competition, how do you explain that 9 times out of 10 prices only go up rather than down? How do you explain that just 5 companies control about 85% of all media outlets and the major shareholders are often the very same individuals? Dream on pal and let Fox News sing you back to sleep.
"If not, where did our concern for freedom of expression go?"
It has become subservient to the need for immediate self-gratification, eagerly provided by those who will use the dependency to raid your life in search of plunder.
Not only do they carry more ads, but the ads pop up and block the screen forcing you to cancel them ever time you turn a page. But its all part of the ongoing effort at republicanization of society, where everyone is controlled and manipulated by the dictates of the few wealthy, who own everything and hire programmers to insure that you live your wife the way they expect you to in order to further increase their wealth and power.
Many libraries were created because Andrew Carnegie donated them to many American cities. A few of the mega-wealthy, Carnegie and now Gates, subscribe to the philosophy that money is valuable only if you do something valuable with it. For them there was a logic in seeing that the general population was well educated. Hence, the concept of public libraries made perfect sense. Sadly, for most of the mega-wealthy like Ruppert Murdoch, who worship gold, the fundamental concepts of Christianity seem like quaint anachronisms. For the Gold Worshipers, the public is not to be educated, but rather indoctrinated into the value of the unchristian doctrine that those with wealth are the only people who matter. So we see corporate fortunes being developed to cater those who spend their lives playing games and entertaining themselves, as ecosystems and the civilizations that they make possible crumble around them. In reality, these people have no real focus or purpose other than their immediate self-gratification, so its not surprising that ipad users are not at all bothered by becoming prey to those who would mine their personal information to make a profit off of their lives. Their entire identity is derived from the glow they receive from praying before the Golden Calf and in being just another circuit in the corporate money machine designed to further amass wealth and power in the hands of a few.
This sounds more like an effort to bamboozle politicians into funding supercomputer centers. Anyone remotely familiar with numerical analysis and combinatorics would recognize that this is a fool's errand for two fundamental reasons. 1) the nature of much data lies at the boundary where systems become chaotic and consequently solutions to such datasets will be ill posed and have high condition numbers, where even minute differences in coefficients, that will likely result from just shear volume of computations on of finite computer architecture will render results meaningless. Secondly, there are a great many important problems, such as the elucidation of phylogenies necessary to explain biological diversity that are NP complete and hence computationally intractable no matter what the speed of the supercomputer. The number of potential answers to such problems increases faster than the ability of any processor to compute them. Even for small taxonomic groups the number of possible phylogenies that must be considered dwarfs the number of electrons in the known universe.
Nonetheless, the overall idea could serve as a useful paradigm for organizing scientific infrastructures and its computational components and availability of adequate computational resources for science, so long as the project does not try to shoehorn all scientific investigation into the constraints of some poorly conceived form of universal budgeting. If not, the project could actually do far more harm than good. These guys need to go back to the drawing board and be more specific about exactly what it is they want to compute and why. Lets face it humanity has huge challenges and only finite resources with which to address them, both in material and human resource terms. Unless, there is some potentially successful strategy for dealing with them, we are all up ___creek without a paddle.
Slashdot Mirror
It has to be dumbed down. Only the most passive minds could sit through the endless commercials that are repeated over and over to further hypnotize the audience into buying the junk advertised. Given what they have to work with, the media types go for the number of eyeball on the screen, not the content of the character or intellect behind the eyeballs.
Its all about money. People value money more than they do the planet that they and their offspring depend on for their own survival. The irony is that now the wealthy elites are just now beginning to realize how precarious their position is and they are desperately hoping that a few brilliant minds will bail them out of the predicament humanity has created for itself, yet of course, they still don't want to pay them enough to make it happen. The reality is that unless we move to a world economy based on science, the probability of any kind of sustainable future for humanity is exceedingly low. Nonetheless, just ask anyone what they think the probability is of that happening.
and therein lies the problem, at least for the media: there simply aren't enough educated intelligent people to make up a sufficiently large audience who are willing to sit through the 1 minute and 30 seconds of commercials for each minute of intellectually stimulating programming the rest of the public wouldn't understand.
As Senator Stevenson once quipped while running for president and in response to an admiring fan who yelled out "You are every thinking man's candidate", to which Stevenson replied "Yes I know, but I need a majority".
I suppose it does until you recognize that we are all human and consequently find ourselves in the same predicament and only make our own situation worse by tormenting others.
"There's little market demand for engineers today."
Not so. Its just that the market doesn't want to pay for their services, so they get employed in India, China and elsewhere, where salaries are lower and what they do get constitutes a living wage.
"Next he proclaims that schools are broken, that we need to train more engineers and scientists, fund more researh, etc. No. That's what we've been doing all along and the jobs are disappeared anyway".
No so. If you look at the total cost of entire budget dedicated toward paying scientists and teachers of science, it hardly amounts to a couple of ships, a few planes, and a few trainloads of ammo. The military spends way more in a week, what would fund NSF for a year. Likewise, for the total expenditures of most US corporations. The expenditure toward R&D is a small fraction of what they pay the top 5% of their corporate managers.
"Scaling up innovation" is what has caused the Amazon to disappear, rivers to be polluted, the earth to warm via carbon dioxide, the oceans to acidify, and biodiversity everywhere to disappear. The only thing humans will be scaling up in the next 50-100 years will likely be their extinction.
It only goes to show what Apple customers are really good for, being screwed and feeling good about it for fear of loosing status.
You can get a 2TB drive at COSTCO for $129 each. Get two and keep them in different locations, periodically backing up one with the other. You won't have to worry about loosing your photos for filling the drives for some time. The newer notebooks should soon have USB 3.0 which will make file transfer much easier, so look for USB 3.0 supported drives (I have seen them for smal, pocket sized 1T drives, although my Sony Vaio won't support them for lack of a USB 3.0 port.
Eskimos tolerate temperatures 100 F below zero, but have oxygen in sufficient quantity. Life on mars would require ability to tolerate temperatures of 178 F below zero and essentially no oxygen. Also, most eskimo tribes are not entirely isolated as would be true for the first colonizers on Mars. Further Mars would provide no food supply, so colonizers would have to bring everything with them. No food plants known on earth would grow under solar illumination on Mars, so growing your own, without abundant alternative sources of visible light would not be possible. The entire idea of spending tens of trillions of dollars to transport just the basics for life for a tiny few on Mars, when there are literally billions on earth already starving, homeless and jobless, is really an exercise in reality avoidance.
And to further emphasize there is no large liquid water pooling on mars, so lots of seamen will hardly be needed. Then again, it is so cold on mars that the women might like to have some seamen along, just to help keep them warm.
This may explain NASA's recent request for a heavy lift vehicle. The weight of all the lead in the walls of the honeymoon suite will require it.
The question is are there gravitational cues for any of this? You talk of pooling, but such pooling may not occur in zero-g. You are probably wrong about the race of the little guys as there would be an advantage to the sperm that get there first, since penetration of the ovum causes a change in the egg wall that precludes insemination by late arrivals.
In Zero-G the number of potential positions is much greater than is possible in a One-G environment.
NASA, count me in as a candidate for the trials.
That is why we have to adopt the republican idea that the minimum wage should be set at about $0.15/hr so that we can regain our economic strength and become more competitive with the Chinese.
I'm not sure if I am pissed on or pissed off. Maybe I really should be pissed off about being pissed on.
I'm not so sure. With so many taking up second amendment alternatives these days and the global climate changing to a new equilibrium point that doesn't favor life on the planet, the real world is getting too scary for most people and so they become busy either arming themselves against it or trying to pretend it were not so. Facebook may have staying power because it provides sort of a psychological bomb shelter of the kind provided by excretment to flies, as after all how could 30,000,000,000,000 be wrong, especially since hacking it can help you keep an eye on the personal data of the other 29,999,999,999,999,999 and know what they are really up to.
Perhaps you will feel differently when the victim is you.
Not only do we have more guns, but we also have more politicians encouraging people to use them against others when they don't get their way.
We also have a media culture that makes killing people with guns a form of entertainment to be profited from. Those who watch these kinds of programs and buy these kinds of games really need to reflect on the consequences.
before society has a right to take them off the streets as quickly as their rhetoric indicates they may be a potential problem? The shooting at the Washington holocaust museum, the incident in New York, the Tiller murder. This is becoming more of a pattern than "isolated incidents".
There needs to be a special form of banishment for politicians and talking heads who advocate and encourage the use of violence and routinely employ violent imagery to make their point, that is unless we all want to see this kind of thing escalate to a "bleeding Kansas" type situation.
There need to be laws that require people to pass some form of psychological test before they are allowed to buy a gun. Otherwise, we are just advocating crazies should be allowed to kill at will. It is also time to reverse the trend started by Ronald Reagan, who in his first official act as governor of California, closed many of the states mental hospitals and threw the patients out on to the streets. We need more mental health clinics not less, particularly as social and economic pressures are pushing many past the breaking point.
"A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government." -- George Washington
Obviously, it is you who know little of of Washington's role in quashing the whiskey rebellion, when some thought themselves above paying taxes. Keep up your lame rhetoric in support of this kind of insane behavior and you may soon find that some of your "fellow Americans" may come gunning for you.
The notion that you can use a competitor is laughable, since most "competitors" are now owned by the same few people that own virtually everything else. Don't you know that the wealthiest 1% of the people already own 85% of everything there is to own? Don't you realize that the only national debate going on now is just how much of the remaining 15% they will be allowed to own as well? I guess they've lulled you into a false sense of security.
At least when the government screws you over, you can vote them out of office. Try that with a phone or cable company. Sure you can "switch to a competitor", but with the same few people owning all the "competitors", do you really think you have shown them? If the market had true competition, how do you explain that 9 times out of 10 prices only go up rather than down? How do you explain that just 5 companies control about 85% of all media outlets and the major shareholders are often the very same individuals? Dream on pal and let Fox News sing you back to sleep.
Perhaps, but I would rather play the ejaculation video game.
"If not, where did our concern for freedom of expression go?"
It has become subservient to the need for immediate self-gratification, eagerly provided by those who will use the dependency to raid your life in search of plunder.
Not only do they carry more ads, but the ads pop up and block the screen forcing you to cancel them ever time you turn a page. But its all part of the ongoing effort at republicanization of society, where everyone is controlled and manipulated by the dictates of the few wealthy, who own everything and hire programmers to insure that you live your wife the way they expect you to in order to further increase their wealth and power.
Many libraries were created because Andrew Carnegie donated them to many American cities. A few of the mega-wealthy, Carnegie and now Gates, subscribe to the philosophy that money is valuable only if you do something valuable with it. For them there was a logic in seeing that the general population was well educated. Hence, the concept of public libraries made perfect sense. Sadly, for most of the mega-wealthy like Ruppert Murdoch, who worship gold, the fundamental concepts of Christianity seem like quaint anachronisms. For the Gold Worshipers, the public is not to be educated, but rather indoctrinated into the value of the unchristian doctrine that those with wealth are the only people who matter. So we see corporate fortunes being developed to cater those who spend their lives playing games and entertaining themselves, as ecosystems and the civilizations that they make possible crumble around them. In reality, these people have no real focus or purpose other than their immediate self-gratification, so its not surprising that ipad users are not at all bothered by becoming prey to those who would mine their personal information to make a profit off of their lives. Their entire identity is derived from the glow they receive from praying before the Golden Calf and in being just another circuit in the corporate money machine designed to further amass wealth and power in the hands of a few.
This sounds more like an effort to bamboozle politicians into funding supercomputer centers. Anyone remotely familiar with numerical analysis and combinatorics would recognize that this is a fool's errand for two fundamental reasons. 1) the nature of much data lies at the boundary where systems become chaotic and consequently solutions to such datasets will be ill posed and have high condition numbers, where even minute differences in coefficients, that will likely result from just shear volume of computations on of finite computer architecture will render results meaningless. Secondly, there are a great many important problems, such as the elucidation of phylogenies necessary to explain biological diversity that are NP complete and hence computationally intractable no matter what the speed of the supercomputer. The number of potential answers to such problems increases faster than the ability of any processor to compute them. Even for small taxonomic groups the number of possible phylogenies that must be considered dwarfs the number of electrons in the known universe.
Nonetheless, the overall idea could serve as a useful paradigm for organizing scientific infrastructures and its computational components and availability of adequate computational resources for science, so long as the project does not try to shoehorn all scientific investigation into the constraints of some poorly conceived form of universal budgeting. If not, the project could actually do far more harm than good. These guys need to go back to the drawing board and be more specific about exactly what it is they want to compute and why. Lets face it humanity has huge challenges and only finite resources with which to address them, both in material and human resource terms. Unless, there is some potentially successful strategy for dealing with them, we are all up ___creek without a paddle.
What really turned me into a fan was his rendition of Blueberry Hill.