I had the same fight with my dad. After a few years of arguments, he's finally into checking snopes. But it still amazes me that some people don't care if the information that they're passing along is right or not. They don't consider the costs of negative information (time used up, opportunity costs, degraded signal to noise ration, etc.)
There have been many examples of this in the past, and it practically always helps to weaken the leadership of the country.
Which examples? Saddam's Iraq? Castro's Cuba? In both those cases, the country was dramatically weakened militarily by sanctions (is that what you meant?), but the leaders themselves tended to consolidate power during that time, with NGOs losing power and influence.
You know, I'd love to switch over to Linux. I tried installing several different flavors of Linux recently. The newest release of Mandriva didn't even try to load on my system (Pity, it seemed just the OS for high end video editing). Kubuntu loaded but then had problems loading after the updates. Suse 10.1 86_64 loaded (I'm on it now) and updated successfully (it's supposed to be better on newer hardware and my hardware is still pretty up to date) but when I try and install from source I get the errors; Nasm is required Yasm is required GCC 3.4 or greater is required.
Why doesn't the OS already have these programs? Moreover, how am I supposed to compile NASM from source (no option for SUSE Linux 10) when that requires Nasm? Is there some way to use an alternate program like Yast2?
Granted I'm a total noob with linux, but not a total idiot, technically. I'm thrilled with the improved driver support that SUSE offers. (everything but my USB harddrives and firewire digital camera seems supported)
But this difficulty installing from source is a pretty critical problem, or else I'm missing somthing that's pretty terribly obvious. Do I need to install the 32 bit versions instead of the 64 bit? Do the 64 bit versions just not work? Do I have to purchase SUSE to get a version with the proper programs installed?
It's all about how much knowledge it takes to use a certain tool. MS has the 'find/search' feature for instance and people like that just fine. But if you want to specify the max or min file size of the item you're looking for, you do it through designated text boxes and check boxes in a GUI, not by entering memorized flags on the command line. If you broke the command line down that way, into a GUI with check boxes, a 'help' link or description next to each and ID tags, yeah, people would happily use the powerful features it offers. As it is, the design expects users to memorize too much, or else takes too long to use.
Likewise with yahoo. You need to click too much to get it to work, and even with that, you still don't get better results than with google (even assuming you limit your searches to key words separated by spaces)
Perhaps just as programmed cell death is a response to pathogens and cancer, individual death is the same thing. Our environment is much cleaner than it used to be with fewer pathogens to defend against (except STDs, which seem to be increasingly common). Perhaps that favors genes for longer life for a variety of reasons. More chance for them to be relevant. Less need for an overactive immune system and auto-immune diseases, etc. I'd like to see the correlation between lifespan and sexual promiscuity of people and their ancestors. Not that you could get honest results for somthing like that. But the people with longest lifespans seem to be the most isolated which suggests low exposure to diseases over the generations.
The "correct" (in most cases) explanation for altruistic behaviour is kin selection. In kin selection, individuals can voluntarily reduce their own expected fitness for the benefit of others, if these others are close relatives (or have good chances of being close relatives).
But doesn't that apply here? Historically speaking, who would take care of an aging individual if not their relatives? Of course, I think people age for other reasons, but this is one reason why having an enfeebled relative living longer may be worse than having them die, evolutionarily speaking. Having younger, more vigerous relatives with shorter lifespans might maximize reproductive fitness.
Apple DRM is very lenient so far. But the 'rights' that you have are allowed at Apple's sufferance. There's nothing in their EULA that I can see which would prevent them from revoking all these rights once their service became the dominant standard with less competition. I don't object to what Apple, specifically, is doing, so much as the rights that all DRM EULAs claim for content producers.
Recently, copyright was extended on works that had already been created. How does that incent creativity? The works were set to belong to the public domain and were stolen from them and given back to the creators for an additional period. How is that even legal?
Likewise, sampling is legal under copyright. A copyright owner does and should have limits as to how many specifications they can set on the use of their work.
but to me it's also same as getting pissed at GM because a Ford transmission doesn't hook up to it.
To use your metaphore, to me it's like saying that it's illegal to hook a Ford transmission up to a GM car, or to own the tools needed to even open the hood since by opening the hood someone might very well copy the technology inside. Because of course we didn't actually buy a Ford, only the license to drive one, or somthing along those lines. If GM wants to make transmissions for Ford cars, it has every right to do so, even if that means taking apart a Ford to do it. As long as they don't start making Fords, they're in fair territory.
When one company has a near monopoly on Operating Systems or any other tool, then of course it has an unfair advantage in the realm of software production or the production of any product which relies on that first tool. The DMCA is the legal mechanism which secures that advantage.
Oh sure. I agree. The DRM is an excellent example of how the property rights of the public domain can be violated. Since the stated purpose of copyright is to encourage innovation, it's illogical (and an ex-post facto law) for the copyright extension to be applied retroactively to works already created.
The DMCA "discourages innovation" by preventing people from referse engineering their software, even for the purpose of interoperability. Why doesn't congress reflect on that for a while.
Whenever someone's face is recognized as being on a terrorist watch list it will show a picture of the twin towers being hit with a big red circle around them and a slash through the center! Much better than those shoe searches.
Since happy people are more likely to buy stuff, I this could be used for sales? Get people to volunteer to watch TV with one of these monitors. The networks want information on viewer reaction for the purpose of ad placement. The trick is to avoid feedback loops by having one audience that reacts and a different one that gets the commercials.
That'd be great for people with diabetes too. Why can't they do somthing as simple as remove glucose from the bloodstream and burn calories. Heck, even if you have to raise someone's temperature a degree, it's better than glaucoma.
Human beings control the mating stock. They choose the bulls that they want, and this keeps things under human control. You can't do that with bacteria. The idea of putting other important genes (resistance, etc) close to the 'on' switch for production is the best solution I've heard so far. It makes it that much harder to get rid of the crucial gene. But not impossible. You might still need a yearly cleaning.
Well, I work 40 miles from my home, in a state with no significant public transportation at all. I DO need a car. And I hate that fact, but it's still a fact.
I'm in the same boat. In the US, I need a car because that's how the US is laid out. Overseas, I can get by without one fine. Having a car is a self fulfiling prophecy.
China is not the country it was 20 years ago. Not by a long shot. I taught there for a semester.
First of all, it's not a dictatorship like Germany was. China is not so rule oriented. It's a little bit of facism, a little bit of capitalism, a little bit of anarchy and a little bit of oligarchy. That's the best way I can describe it. Power is important. With power, you can get away with anything.
They have local elections, and freedom of small businesses. The heavy industry is still state controlled. Freedom of movement is restricted. They just recently legalized private property. Like a few years ago.
Control of information is still a big thing, but in some ways China is less well regulated than the US.
I can't say I've read Marx, here, so this view probably won't be purist) will tell you that Communism means the production is owned by the PEOPLE, not the state.
According to Marx, state ownership of industry was supposed to happen, but the government that oversaw that 'stage' was supposed to wither away and you'd have popular ownership of industry in a sort of lawfully-anarchic society. Instead, the systems set up to create this utopian society consistently are self-preserving and refuse to 'wither away' to allow for an equal distribution of power.
Or to phrase in in the terms of dialectical materialism; if you effectively remove all competition, then there are no more dialectics and the history of progress is dead in the water.
A large number of business people have been seduced into seeing everything in terms of power relations and social movements. They build a world view where one must dominate or be dominated.
Hmm... So the CIA is full of Marxists, then? This is their philosophy to a 'T.'
If you can sell a service for 1/3rd of the cost, you'll find a market that others won't be able to service. I agree, tele-working is less efficient. But it can be done.
Interaction with students is important and someone with a differing cultural base can't understand them.
I agree that verbal interaction is hugely important. But physical interaction? While possibly desirable, it's not crucial for most classes. Why have the Spanish teacher in the room? One of my Spanish teachers was a foreign teacher anyways.
someone with a differing cultural base can't understand them.
How much culture do you need for math class? For chemistry? If we can offshore programmers, why not offshore programming courses? And even if we use teachers native to our country, why do they have to physically be in the classroom? The teachers could live somewhere where the cost of living is a fraction of what it is in the states. If it were in India or the Philippines, they could afford to have a maid cook for them and someone to clean for them and still put more of their cash in the bank at the end of the month.
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I had the same fight with my dad. After a few years of arguments, he's finally into checking snopes. But it still amazes me that some people don't care if the information that they're passing along is right or not. They don't consider the costs of negative information (time used up, opportunity costs, degraded signal to noise ration, etc.)
China has repeatedly shown itself to be a nation without any belief in human rights,
True, but they're still pretty pragmatic, for what that's worth.
There have been many examples of this in the past, and it practically always helps to weaken the leadership of the country.
Which examples? Saddam's Iraq? Castro's Cuba? In both those cases, the country was dramatically weakened militarily by sanctions (is that what you meant?), but the leaders themselves tended to consolidate power during that time, with NGOs losing power and influence.
I agree 100% and wish that the press understood what science was as well as you did. Somehow, they manage to remain pathetically stupid.
You know, I'd love to switch over to Linux. I tried installing several different flavors of Linux recently. The newest release of Mandriva didn't even try to load on my system (Pity, it seemed just the OS for high end video editing). Kubuntu loaded but then had problems loading after the updates. Suse 10.1 86_64 loaded (I'm on it now) and updated successfully (it's supposed to be better on newer hardware and my hardware is still pretty up to date) but when I try and install from source I get the errors;
Nasm is required
Yasm is required
GCC 3.4 or greater is required.
Why doesn't the OS already have these programs? Moreover, how am I supposed to compile NASM from source (no option for SUSE Linux 10) when that requires Nasm? Is there some way to use an alternate program like Yast2?
Granted I'm a total noob with linux, but not a total idiot, technically. I'm thrilled with the improved driver support that SUSE offers. (everything but my USB harddrives and firewire digital camera seems supported)
But this difficulty installing from source is a pretty critical problem, or else I'm missing somthing that's pretty terribly obvious. Do I need to install the 32 bit versions instead of the 64 bit? Do the 64 bit versions just not work? Do I have to purchase SUSE to get a version with the proper programs installed?
Can anyone clue me in?
It's all about how much knowledge it takes to use a certain tool. MS has the 'find/search' feature for instance and people like that just fine. But if you want to specify the max or min file size of the item you're looking for, you do it through designated text boxes and check boxes in a GUI, not by entering memorized flags on the command line. If you broke the command line down that way, into a GUI with check boxes, a 'help' link or description next to each and ID tags, yeah, people would happily use the powerful features it offers. As it is, the design expects users to memorize too much, or else takes too long to use.
Likewise with yahoo. You need to click too much to get it to work, and even with that, you still don't get better results than with google (even assuming you limit your searches to key words separated by spaces)
Well then, could you use objects accelerated in this torus to somehow accelerate a person along a half mile or so of linear track?
Perhaps just as programmed cell death is a response to pathogens and cancer, individual death is the same thing. Our environment is much cleaner than it used to be with fewer pathogens to defend against (except STDs, which seem to be increasingly common). Perhaps that favors genes for longer life for a variety of reasons. More chance for them to be relevant. Less need for an overactive immune system and auto-immune diseases, etc. I'd like to see the correlation between lifespan and sexual promiscuity of people and their ancestors. Not that you could get honest results for somthing like that. But the people with longest lifespans seem to be the most isolated which suggests low exposure to diseases over the generations.
The "correct" (in most cases) explanation for altruistic behaviour is kin selection. In kin selection, individuals can voluntarily reduce their own expected fitness for the benefit of others, if these others are close relatives (or have good chances of being close relatives).
But doesn't that apply here? Historically speaking, who would take care of an aging individual if not their relatives? Of course, I think people age for other reasons, but this is one reason why having an enfeebled relative living longer may be worse than having them die, evolutionarily speaking. Having younger, more vigerous relatives with shorter lifespans might maximize reproductive fitness.
Too much work. Just tax health care.
Apple DRM is very lenient so far. But the 'rights' that you have are allowed at Apple's sufferance. There's nothing in their EULA that I can see which would prevent them from revoking all these rights once their service became the dominant standard with less competition. I don't object to what Apple, specifically, is doing, so much as the rights that all DRM EULAs claim for content producers.
Recently, copyright was extended on works that had already been created. How does that incent creativity? The works were set to belong to the public domain and were stolen from them and given back to the creators for an additional period. How is that even legal?
Likewise, sampling is legal under copyright. A copyright owner does and should have limits as to how many specifications they can set on the use of their work.
but to me it's also same as getting pissed at GM because a Ford transmission doesn't hook up to it.
To use your metaphore, to me it's like saying that it's illegal to hook a Ford transmission up to a GM car, or to own the tools needed to even open the hood since by opening the hood someone might very well copy the technology inside. Because of course we didn't actually buy a Ford, only the license to drive one, or somthing along those lines. If GM wants to make transmissions for Ford cars, it has every right to do so, even if that means taking apart a Ford to do it. As long as they don't start making Fords, they're in fair territory.
When one company has a near monopoly on Operating Systems or any other tool, then of course it has an unfair advantage in the realm of software production or the production of any product which relies on that first tool. The DMCA is the legal mechanism which secures that advantage.
Oh sure. I agree. The DRM is an excellent example of how the property rights of the public domain can be violated. Since the stated purpose of copyright is to encourage innovation, it's illogical (and an ex-post facto law) for the copyright extension to be applied retroactively to works already created.
The DMCA "discourages innovation" by preventing people from referse engineering their software, even for the purpose of interoperability. Why doesn't congress reflect on that for a while.
Whenever someone's face is recognized as being on a terrorist watch list it will show a picture of the twin towers being hit with a big red circle around them and a slash through the center! Much better than those shoe searches.
Since happy people are more likely to buy stuff, I this could be used for sales? Get people to volunteer to watch TV with one of these monitors. The networks want information on viewer reaction for the purpose of ad placement. The trick is to avoid feedback loops by having one audience that reacts and a different one that gets the commercials.
... In Soviet Russia, art critiques you!
Try opening your laptop at Mach 2.
:P
Buy me a ticket on the concorde and I will.
The question is, will my soundcard work?
That'd be great for people with diabetes too. Why can't they do somthing as simple as remove glucose from the bloodstream and burn calories. Heck, even if you have to raise someone's temperature a degree, it's better than glaucoma.
Human beings control the mating stock. They choose the bulls that they want, and this keeps things under human control. You can't do that with bacteria. The idea of putting other important genes (resistance, etc) close to the 'on' switch for production is the best solution I've heard so far. It makes it that much harder to get rid of the crucial gene. But not impossible. You might still need a yearly cleaning.
Good catch. I'm going into e-learning(career). One more thing to watch for.
Well, I work 40 miles from my home, in a state with no significant public transportation at all. I DO need a car. And I hate that fact, but it's still a fact.
I'm in the same boat. In the US, I need a car because that's how the US is laid out. Overseas, I can get by without one fine. Having a car is a self fulfiling prophecy.
China is not the country it was 20 years ago. Not by a long shot. I taught there for a semester.
First of all, it's not a dictatorship like Germany was. China is not so rule oriented. It's a little bit of facism, a little bit of capitalism, a little bit of anarchy and a little bit of oligarchy. That's the best way I can describe it. Power is important. With power, you can get away with anything.
They have local elections, and freedom of small businesses. The heavy industry is still state controlled. Freedom of movement is restricted. They just recently legalized private property. Like a few years ago.
Control of information is still a big thing, but in some ways China is less well regulated than the US.
I can't say I've read Marx, here, so this view probably won't be purist) will tell you that Communism means the production is owned by the PEOPLE, not the state.
According to Marx, state ownership of industry was supposed to happen, but the government that oversaw that 'stage' was supposed to wither away and you'd have popular ownership of industry in a sort of lawfully-anarchic society. Instead, the systems set up to create this utopian society consistently are self-preserving and refuse to 'wither away' to allow for an equal distribution of power.
Or to phrase in in the terms of dialectical materialism; if you effectively remove all competition, then there are no more dialectics and the history of progress is dead in the water.
A large number of business people have been seduced into seeing everything in terms of power relations and social movements. They build a world view where one must dominate or be dominated.
Hmm... So the CIA is full of Marxists, then? This is their philosophy to a 'T.'
If you can sell a service for 1/3rd of the cost, you'll find a market that others won't be able to service. I agree, tele-working is less efficient. But it can be done.
Interaction with students is important and someone with a differing cultural base can't understand them.
I agree that verbal interaction is hugely important. But physical interaction? While possibly desirable, it's not crucial for most classes. Why have the Spanish teacher in the room? One of my Spanish teachers was a foreign teacher anyways.
someone with a differing cultural base can't understand them.
How much culture do you need for math class? For chemistry? If we can offshore programmers, why not offshore programming courses? And even if we use teachers native to our country, why do they have to physically be in the classroom? The teachers could live somewhere where the cost of living is a fraction of what it is in the states. If it were in India or the Philippines, they could afford to have a maid cook for them and someone to clean for them and still put more of their cash in the bank at the end of the month.