so there was the whole Guy Fawkes thing and the beheading thing and the Boston tea thing and some oath-breakers pushing their luck in the colonies but nothing really changed. The government was still the government and the downtrodden masses were still the downtrodden masses but at least they got Christmas back. What we had was internal strife in the ruling class rather than a major social upheaval. The Peasant's Revolt in the 14th Century might have been more successful if it hadn't been led by peasants.
Britain has no National day. No "Independence Day", no "Revolution Day", and no "Bastille Day" unless you buy the "Caress of Steel" album by Rush. There's plenty of nations with "Hurray, we got independence from Britain" days but for us, sadly, there's nothing similar.
I mean... Come on. What features do people need from Office 2007!?
I'm not sure it's so much a case of what it'll do as much as how it'll do it. It'll probaby have much more XML support and possibly XAML support as MS seem to be heading down that path with Vista and MS Dynamics.
Well, y'know you're more British than the English are.
"Britons" was the name given by the Romans to all the inhabitants of Britannia, Caledonia and Hibernia (Island of Winter) What is now England and Wales became Romano-British. After the legions left in 410AD increasing intrusion by Germanic tribes (Jutes, Angles and Saxons) pushed the Romano-British out to the fringes. The Cornish, Welsh and those in Lowland "Scotland" remained Britons and the rest became the land of the Angles (Angleland=England).
Therefore, by the original definition of who is "British" and who isn't, the Irish and Highland Scots are more British than the Cornish, Welsh and Lowland Scots and the English aren't British at all.
I suppose to be fair to the Magna Carta it goes like this:
public class Parliament{
int year;
For (year=1215, year < 1721, year++){
If King = strong Repeal(MagnaCarta)
Else Invoke(MagnaCarta)
}
}
When the rulers were strong enough to throw off their shackels they did. Not that this would ever happen today....
You may well be right, the early modern period isn't my strong point. I generally regard all of the Protectorate's efforts as wasted with the exception of an end to Divine Right. Apart from banning Christmas, theatres and fun in general I don't know what practical differences the Protectorate made in Government. People were, for the most part, happy to get their king (and entertainment) back.
Odd isn't it how it's called the English Civil War when it was a British civil war encompassing England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The English Civil War was between King Stephen and the Empress Maud in the 12th Century.
Britain never had a social revolution like some other nations had and so never really had a defining moment where a well thought out governing body was created. What we have is merely the *current state* of a body that has been developing for almost 800 years.
In the beginning, sort of, we had kings. Think of kings as CEOs that hold 95% of the nations stock. Now kings can be great, they take speedy decisions and keep everything running nicely, but trouble occurs when you have ones that aren't really up to the job. When King John was forced to accept Magna Carta in 1215 (almost 800 years ago folks) limits were set that underpin most of out current concepts of the limitation of executive power, regulation of inheritance and taxation and separation of Church and executive. Of particular note are articles 1, 14 and 21 namely:
Article 1 - The freedom of the Church from royal interference In the first place we have granted to God, and by this our present charter confirmed for us and our heirs forever that the English Church shall be free, and shall have her rights entire, and her liberties inviolate...
Article 14 - The creation of a common "counsel", the origin of Parliament And for obtaining the common counsel of the kingdom anent the assessing of an aid (except in the three cases aforesaid) or of a scutage, we will cause to be summoned the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons, severally by our letters; and we will moveover cause to be summoned generally, through our sheriffs and bailiffs, and others who hold of us in chief, for a fixed date, namely, after the expiry of at least forty days, and at a fixed place; and in all letters of such summons we will specify the reason of the summons. And when the summons has thus been made, the business shall proceed on the day appointed, according to the counsel of such as are present, although not all who were summoned have come.
Article 21 - The right to a trial by jury of one's peers
Earls and barons shall not be amerced except through their peers, and only in accordance with the degree of the offense.
There's plenty of other stuff in there too. The fact that John repealled Magna Carta a few weeks later gets glossed over by most commentaters. The document is not a current statute and does not "underpin" UK law. The idea of a common counsel persisted and over the next few centuries the two Houses developed slowly. The Lords represented the interests of the land-owning nobility and the Commons represented the merchant classes and villeins. Nobody represented the lowest sections of society. The Commons became the most powerful of the two in the 1700s
Before WWI, Britain had a parliamentary crisis. The elected (Liberal) Commons was unable to pass any laws as they were routinely blocked by a belligerent (Conservative) Lords. The Liberal Party drew up The Parliament Act with the intent of emasculating the House of Lords. The Lords, of course, had no intention of assenting to this and so we had the last major interference in the parliamentary process by the monarch*. King George V told the Lords that if they did not consent to the Bill then he would create as many new Liberal peers as it would take to pass it anyway. The Lords were left with no alternative but to agree and the ability of the Lords to wield any real force in UK politics vanished.
Nowadays, the Lords has no control over financial Bills. The Lords may make amendments to non-finance Bills, or reject them outright, after which the Bill is returned to the Commons for further scrutiny. If the Commons agree to the revisions then the Bill goes for Royal Assent, if the changes are rejected then it goes back to the Lords in its original form. After the Lords has rejected a Bill three times the Commons can invoke a clause in the Parliament Act that allows the Commons to bypass the Lords' assent. The Bill is then passed for Royal Assent. No monarch has refu
Which is exactly why IT jobs are moving out of the US. Why pay an inflated wage to an American when you can pay an Indian less than a quarter of that to do the same job?
They're all crazy, it's just a question of the degree of their insanity. Some are saner than others. You seem to have found one at the saner end of the spectrum. I had a girlfriend from the other end of the spectrum who would freak because I wouldn't hit her if we argued. Apparently if I'd really loved her I'd have got more upset. Troubled childhood methinks. My wife, after extensive efforts, is only slightly crazy.
When the alien archaeologists that come to our dead world try to work our what wiped out all life on Earth, what will their judgement be?
Was it
A - A meteorite?
B - Global Warming?
C - Dick Cheney?
D - A plague of genetically and/or cybernetically altered organisms that escaped captivity (as they all do...) and ripped through the world's ecosystems destabilising eveything as they went?
Don't governments EVER learn ANYTHING? You only have to look at the crap created by the other enlightened biological experiments governments have employed such as the wanton introduction of Cane Toads into Australia.
When I was younger and flirted with the idea of a degree in genetics, I thought it would be really cool to mess about with genomes - like a Lego kit of genes to play with. Then I grew up. There was a comment earlier about people taking ideas from Hollywood and I agree. I think that too often scientists and the military see something done in a film and think "Hey! We could do that! That'd be cool!" without thinking through the ramifications. The public at large are then mislead by the standard claim that there MAY be medical advances that may POTENTIALLY lead to the development of cures for diseases and we all say "Well that's alright then, go ahead". Things like saying that we have to embed chips in War Monkeys so that we can help stroke victims in the distant futures.
..playing Enchanter. I'd got past the 3D maze, past the stone dragon, past the mine and the temporal puzzle and I'd worked out that I had to swim out into the bay and dive down to the seaweed but I couldn't do it. I tried SWIM DOWN, DIVE DOWN, GO DOWN, SINK DOWN and so on for h o u r s. My flatmate came in and asked how it was going and I explained. "Oh" he said and typed D.
>Underwater
>you are underwater. There are weeds here
gaaa!stupidassgame!
Nice theory and all, but this actually supports human evolution being driven by intelligence, rather than contradicting it: individuals that would be relatively useless in a system driven by strong backs and thick skulls are kept because their experience/knowledge/intelligence provides a benefit to the tribe which outweighs the bother of their physical problems. In this way it is the advantage provided by intelligence, i.e. the ability to acquire knowledge over time and apply it, that drives what you call 'compassion', rather than the other way about.
I'm sorry but I have to disagree. I cannot imagine a case where the ability to assess whether or not an individual has useful knowledge and is worth keeping alive could come before familial bonding.
Cooperation is a bit different, since situations where pooled resources are advantageous are not limited to applications of intelligence. However, the converse is true, that most endeavours requiring intelligence benefit from a pooling of intelligence, so the motivation for cooperation does stem in part from our heavy focus on intelligence-based activities.
Co-operation comes from strong familial ties - ants co-operate, lions co-operate, mongeese (mongooses?) co-operate.
In the case of your meteor example, I'd actually venture that the population segments well-versed in the academic pursuits of astronomy and engineering would see the event coming and be able to place themselves to survive it, while the quick breeders with good parenting skills would be busy dying horribly in suffocating smoke and flame.
Well I was referring to the survival of the species, not individuals with foreknowledge. It always mystified me that bomb shelters in the cold war era were to be populated by those least likely to re-generate the human race. As to the nonsense in the last bit of your paragraph,...
ooooo!
...I'll just note that 'geek' isn't actually a reference to intelligence, it's a category indicating lack of intelligence, specifically lack of intelligence regarding social interactions. Geeks aren't any smarter, on average, than the rest of the population.
I'd disagree there too. Geeks are smart and you know it. I'm smart and I sit quietly on the sidelines (usually) at Slashdot as the smarter ones discuss things. I am happy to be at the table even if I have nothing to offer the debate.
Or, if you're twisting the definition of 'geek' to actually mean high intelligence, yeah, probably;)
then you're just flat-out wrong about their reproductive habits, as a staggeringly large proportion of NASA engineers are married and parents. So are a large quantity of college professors. Hell, even the grad students in my department are mostly supporting offspring, and they don't even have real jobs!
You can put me in that last category. I have two of the little ankle-biters. It was not me who raised the issue of low reproduction rates amongst the more highly educated but it's still true. The more educated an individual is then the less children that person will be likely to have. More so amongst women than men. That's not to say that the intelligent are childless, just that they have less children. Women with college degrees are more likely to put off having a family until their mid-thirties despite female fertility rates dropping by 50% between the ages of 30 and 35. This is not conducive to the passing on of their genetic legacy. I'm not flame-baiting on this point, it's a lifestyle choice, I'm just referring to the fact that the more intelligent you are then the less likely (ON AVERAGE) you are to pass on your DNA which reduces Intelligence's clout as the prime force behind the evolution of Man.
Genetically, yes. Societally, memetically, and technologically, no.
Societally? "Of or relating to the structure, organization, or functioning of society."
Really? You think so?
Technologically? Perhaps not depending on how much you advance technology. Once you've published your work it's there for everyone to use. Maybe you can console yourself in the afterlife that some new widgety thing was your idea as you observe the single mother's descendents enjoying its fruits.
Memetically? Now that's a good one. If a meme can be defined as "A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another" then I need to ask how you intend to pass on your units of cultural information and how you intend it to be of greater significance to those units passed from parent to child. One of the toughest challenges we face today is the battle against socially divisive memes passed from parent to child where children are taught from birth to despise members of different cultures. I really want to know the secret of your memes' kung-fu.
Perhaps I was unduly harsh towards geeks but this was deliberate, to stress the point that cleverness is not the be-all and end-all of human evolution, it's a bonus. I read slashdot almost every day and go through many, many posts by some very clever people. People cleverer than me certainly. There is a trend though for posters to try to out-clever each other: to competitively display some greater comprehension of the minutiae of linux, windows, bits and bytes and I admit I find it entertaining. But one must not get carried away with cleverness as the sole measure of humankind's advancement. We tend to focus on brain size when assessing the remains of early hominids but there's no guarantee that bigger is better. Neanderthals had large brain capacities, as large, if not larger, than Cro-Magnons. Dolphin brains, to switch mammals, are huge.
What of the invisible evolutionary changes in our bodies. If there was a sudden global pandemic of say Bird Flu for want of a better example, would being clever guarantee you survival? What if it turned out that the natural selection criteria for survival was a better blood supply to the brain and so those who survived had a larger brain cavity than those who died. This might look in the fossil record like a selection for intelligence but would be no such thing. Human evolution might be determined in the future by ANY genetic mutation - a change in kidney mechanics, being taller, being fatter, being browner. The events that push evolution are normally physical. The mental developments follow - we have bigger brains because we learnt to walk on two legs and not the other way around. But back to my main assertion: the primary attributes that have brought us to this point in evolution are Compassion, Communication and Co-operation. Those and the ruthless elimination of competing species.
It is a conceit of the intelligent that intelligence drives human evolution.
The skeletons of early hominids show evidence of the support of unproductive individuals within communities. Skeletons with broken but healed limbs, crippling arthritis, debilitating head wounds show that individuals that had been injured or were elderly were cared for by their peers/relations. The intelligent thing to do would be to ditch the dead weight and ease pressure on resources. Instead the human attributes demonstrated are compassion and co-operation. As for man getting less-healthy, no-one can tell which genes will be be favoured by the whims of nature and the wider the gene pool the better. In Europe sickle cell anaemia is an illness, in malarial zones it's an eveolutionary adaptation that aids survival. Who is to say what's healthy and what isn't.
We have survived and prospered through our abilities to communicate and co-operate. Intelligence has followed on the coattails of our advancement and has not driven it. If a near-extinction meteor impact were to occur, would the species' best hope of survival lie with a select group of the Intelligensia or a select group of fertile people with excellent parenting skills?
Think on this:
You, dear reader, may regard yourself as intelligent and may pride yourself on your ability to read PERL or code in binary but that doesn't make babies. It is true that the "intelligent" breed less. The brutal fact is the geekier you are the less likely you are to reproduce and so when you have finished that algol compiler you've been working on and want to pat yourself on the back for being clever, remind yourself that you are not the pinnacle of human evolution and just an offshoot. The single mother successfully stretching out her budget raising four kids is more likely to leave an indelible imprint on the evolution of Man than you are.
Good Evening
I can think of a simple reason for Microsoft to pull the plug on Blu-Ray - spite.
Microsoft's baby, Windows, has been plagued with security issues both real and manufactured (by which I mean those that it shipped with and those created by bored and malicious script kiddies) since it was born and Microsoft has gone to great lengths to fill all the holes. The last thing Microsoft needs is someone coming along and torpedoing a huge hole in Window's security below the waterline and that's exactly what Sony did. Whether they intended to or not Sony's use of the flawed XCP software allowed the Bad Guys the opportunity to install the virus-of-the-day on a Windows-based machine without anyone being able to stop it. If I were Microsoft I would have been incandescent with fury and Sony would have made an unforgiving corporate enemy.
You can forget consumer choice. If Blu-Ray doesn't get native support in Windows then it'll be highly improbable that it can beat HD DVD.
so...my first post. How'd I do?
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, yeah, yeah
so there was the whole Guy Fawkes thing and the beheading thing and the Boston tea thing and some oath-breakers pushing their luck in the colonies but nothing really changed. The government was still the government and the downtrodden masses were still the downtrodden masses but at least they got Christmas back.
What we had was internal strife in the ruling class rather than a major social upheaval. The Peasant's Revolt in the 14th Century might have been more successful if it hadn't been led by peasants.
Britain has no National day. No "Independence Day", no "Revolution Day", and no "Bastille Day" unless you buy the "Caress of Steel" album by Rush. There's plenty of nations with "Hurray, we got independence from Britain" days but for us, sadly, there's nothing similar.
I mean... Come on. What features do people need from Office 2007!?
I'm not sure it's so much a case of what it'll do as much as how it'll do it. It'll probaby have much more XML support and possibly XAML support as MS seem to be heading down that path with Vista and MS Dynamics.
Probably.
OK, my bad. KB not Kb, MB not Mb
I'm thinking that the Anonymous Coward was thinking that 4096 bytes = 4Mb and so why not just call it a 4Mb sector instead of a 4096 byte sector.
Of course 4096 bytes is 4Kb not 4Mb.
Come on over here, slip that cute, l'il ring on my nanotube and lets oscillate Baby!
I thought it said "Adult Love" Video games but just when I was thinking "ooh! That sounds interesting...
:(
...bubble burst
Well, y'know you're more British than the English are.
"Britons" was the name given by the Romans to all the inhabitants of Britannia, Caledonia and Hibernia (Island of Winter) What is now England and Wales became Romano-British. After the legions left in 410AD increasing intrusion by Germanic tribes (Jutes, Angles and Saxons) pushed the Romano-British out to the fringes. The Cornish, Welsh and those in Lowland "Scotland" remained Britons and the rest became the land of the Angles (Angleland=England).
Therefore, by the original definition of who is "British" and who isn't, the Irish and Highland Scots are more British than the Cornish, Welsh and Lowland Scots and the English aren't British at all.
Germans go home!!
I suppose to be fair to the Magna Carta it goes like this:
public class Parliament{
int year;
For (year=1215, year < 1721, year++){
If King = strong Repeal(MagnaCarta)
Else Invoke(MagnaCarta)
}
} When the rulers were strong enough to throw off their shackels they did. Not that this would ever happen today....
You may well be right, the early modern period isn't my strong point. I generally regard all of the Protectorate's efforts as wasted with the exception of an end to Divine Right. Apart from banning Christmas, theatres and fun in general I don't know what practical differences the Protectorate made in Government. People were, for the most part, happy to get their king (and entertainment) back. Odd isn't it how it's called the English Civil War when it was a British civil war encompassing England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The English Civil War was between King Stephen and the Empress Maud in the 12th Century.
*Warning* Some and/or all of this might be crap
Britain never had a social revolution like some other nations had and so never really had a defining moment where a well thought out governing body was created. What we have is merely the *current state* of a body that has been developing for almost 800 years.
In the beginning, sort of, we had kings. Think of kings as CEOs that hold 95% of the nations stock. Now kings can be great, they take speedy decisions and keep everything running nicely, but trouble occurs when you have ones that aren't really up to the job. When King John was forced to accept Magna Carta in 1215 (almost 800 years ago folks) limits were set that underpin most of out current concepts of the limitation of executive power, regulation of inheritance and taxation and separation of Church and executive. Of particular note are articles 1, 14 and 21 namely:
Article 1 - The freedom of the Church from royal interference
In the first place we have granted to God, and by this our present charter confirmed for us and our heirs forever that the English Church shall be free, and shall have her rights entire, and her liberties inviolate...
Article 14 - The creation of a common "counsel", the origin of Parliament
And for obtaining the common counsel of the kingdom anent the assessing of an aid (except in the three cases aforesaid) or of a scutage, we will cause to be summoned the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons, severally by our letters; and we will moveover cause to be summoned generally, through our sheriffs and bailiffs, and others who hold of us in chief, for a fixed date, namely, after the expiry of at least forty days, and at a fixed place; and in all letters of such summons we will specify the reason of the summons. And when the summons has thus been made, the business shall proceed on the day appointed, according to the counsel of such as are present, although not all who were summoned have come.
Article 21 - The right to a trial by jury of one's peers
Earls and barons shall not be amerced except through their peers, and only in accordance with the degree of the offense.
There's plenty of other stuff in there too. The fact that John repealled Magna Carta a few weeks later gets glossed over by most commentaters. The document is not a current statute and does not "underpin" UK law. The idea of a common counsel persisted and over the next few centuries the two Houses developed slowly. The Lords represented the interests of the land-owning nobility and the Commons represented the merchant classes and villeins. Nobody represented the lowest sections of society. The Commons became the most powerful of the two in the 1700s
Before WWI, Britain had a parliamentary crisis. The elected (Liberal) Commons was unable to pass any laws as they were routinely blocked by a belligerent (Conservative) Lords. The Liberal Party drew up The Parliament Act with the intent of emasculating the House of Lords. The Lords, of course, had no intention of assenting to this and so we had the last major interference in the parliamentary process by the monarch*. King George V told the Lords that if they did not consent to the Bill then he would create as many new Liberal peers as it would take to pass it anyway. The Lords were left with no alternative but to agree and the ability of the Lords to wield any real force in UK politics vanished.
Nowadays, the Lords has no control over financial Bills. The Lords may make amendments to non-finance Bills, or reject them outright, after which the Bill is returned to the Commons for further scrutiny. If the Commons agree to the revisions then the Bill goes for Royal Assent, if the changes are rejected then it goes back to the Lords in its original form. After the Lords has rejected a Bill three times the Commons can invoke a clause in the Parliament Act that allows the Commons to bypass the Lords' assent. The Bill is then passed for Royal Assent. No monarch has refu
Which is exactly why IT jobs are moving out of the US. Why pay an inflated wage to an American when you can pay an Indian less than a quarter of that to do the same job?
They're all crazy, it's just a question of the degree of their insanity. Some are saner than others. You seem to have found one at the saner end of the spectrum. I had a girlfriend from the other end of the spectrum who would freak because I wouldn't hit her if we argued. Apparently if I'd really loved her I'd have got more upset. Troubled childhood methinks. My wife, after extensive efforts, is only slightly crazy.
So we can add a dowl of hot chili to that other safe-guard against prostate cancer
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3072021.stm/
All they need to do now is prove the health benefits of beer and my life will be complete.
You don't see them wreaking havoc when they break.
Ho ho! Sounds like someone here has never had to clear up a shattered neon tube. Not fun.
He didn't say the economy was depressed, he said it was depressive.....
When the alien archaeologists that come to our dead world try to work our what wiped out all life on Earth, what will their judgement be?
Was it
A - A meteorite?
B - Global Warming?
C - Dick Cheney?
D - A plague of genetically and/or cybernetically altered organisms that escaped captivity (as they all do...) and ripped through the world's ecosystems destabilising eveything as they went?
Don't governments EVER learn ANYTHING? You only have to look at the crap created by the other enlightened biological experiments governments have employed such as the wanton introduction of Cane Toads into Australia.
When I was younger and flirted with the idea of a degree in genetics, I thought it would be really cool to mess about with genomes - like a Lego kit of genes to play with. Then I grew up.
There was a comment earlier about people taking ideas from Hollywood and I agree. I think that too often scientists and the military see something done in a film and think "Hey! We could do that! That'd be cool!" without thinking through the ramifications. The public at large are then mislead by the standard claim that there MAY be medical advances that may POTENTIALLY lead to the development of cures for diseases and we all say "Well that's alright then, go ahead". Things like saying that we have to embed chips in War Monkeys so that we can help stroke victims in the distant futures.
Bah! Humbug!
..playing Enchanter. I'd got past the 3D maze, past the stone dragon, past the mine and the temporal puzzle and I'd worked out that I had to swim out into the bay and dive down to the seaweed but I couldn't do it. I tried SWIM DOWN, DIVE DOWN, GO DOWN, SINK DOWN and so on for h o u r s. My flatmate came in and asked how it was going and I explained. "Oh" he said and typed D. >Underwater >you are underwater. There are weeds here gaaa!stupidassgame!
The first one to offer Jenna Jameson films
;o)
Nice theory and all, but this actually supports human evolution being driven by intelligence, rather than contradicting it: individuals that would be relatively useless in a system driven by strong backs and thick skulls are kept because their experience/knowledge/intelligence provides a benefit to the tribe which outweighs the bother of their physical problems. In this way it is the advantage provided by intelligence, i.e. the ability to acquire knowledge over time and apply it, that drives what you call 'compassion', rather than the other way about.
...I'll just note that 'geek' isn't actually a reference to intelligence, it's a category indicating lack of intelligence, specifically lack of intelligence regarding social interactions. Geeks aren't any smarter, on average, than the rest of the population.
;)
I'm sorry but I have to disagree. I cannot imagine a case where the ability to assess whether or not an individual has useful knowledge and is worth keeping alive could come before familial bonding.
Cooperation is a bit different, since situations where pooled resources are advantageous are not limited to applications of intelligence. However, the converse is true, that most endeavours requiring intelligence benefit from a pooling of intelligence, so the motivation for cooperation does stem in part from our heavy focus on intelligence-based activities.
Co-operation comes from strong familial ties - ants co-operate, lions co-operate, mongeese (mongooses?) co-operate.
In the case of your meteor example, I'd actually venture that the population segments well-versed in the academic pursuits of astronomy and engineering would see the event coming and be able to place themselves to survive it, while the quick breeders with good parenting skills would be busy dying horribly in suffocating smoke and flame.
Well I was referring to the survival of the species, not individuals with foreknowledge. It always mystified me that bomb shelters in the cold war era were to be populated by those least likely to re-generate the human race.
As to the nonsense in the last bit of your paragraph,...
ooooo!
I'd disagree there too. Geeks are smart and you know it. I'm smart and I sit quietly on the sidelines (usually) at Slashdot as the smarter ones discuss things. I am happy to be at the table even if I have nothing to offer the debate.
Or, if you're twisting the definition of 'geek' to actually mean high intelligence, yeah, probably
then you're just flat-out wrong about their reproductive habits, as a staggeringly large proportion of NASA engineers are married and parents. So are a large quantity of college professors. Hell, even the grad students in my department are mostly supporting offspring, and they don't even have real jobs!
You can put me in that last category. I have two of the little ankle-biters. It was not me who raised the issue of low reproduction rates amongst the more highly educated but it's still true. The more educated an individual is then the less children that person will be likely to have. More so amongst women than men. That's not to say that the intelligent are childless, just that they have less children. Women with college degrees are more likely to put off having a family until their mid-thirties despite female fertility rates dropping by 50% between the ages of 30 and 35. This is not conducive to the passing on of their genetic legacy. I'm not flame-baiting on this point, it's a lifestyle choice, I'm just referring to the fact that the more intelligent you are then the less likely (ON AVERAGE) you are to pass on your DNA which reduces Intelligence's clout as the prime force behind the evolution of Man.
Genetically, yes. Societally, memetically, and technologically, no.
Societally? "Of or relating to the structure, organization, or functioning of society."
Really? You think so?
Technologically? Perhaps not depending on how much you advance technology. Once you've published your work it's there for everyone to use. Maybe you can console yourself in the afterlife that some new widgety thing was your idea as you observe the single mother's descendents enjoying its fruits.
Memetically? Now that's a good one. If a meme can be defined as "A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another" then I need to ask how you intend to pass on your units of cultural information and how you intend it to be of greater significance to those units passed from parent to child. One of the toughest challenges we face today is the battle against socially divisive memes passed from parent to child where children are taught from birth to despise members of different cultures. I really want to know the secret of your memes' kung-fu.
Perhaps I was unduly harsh towards geeks but this was deliberate, to stress the point that cleverness is not the be-all and end-all of human evolution, it's a bonus. I read slashdot almost every day and go through many, many posts by some very clever people. People cleverer than me certainly. There is a trend though for posters to try to out-clever each other: to competitively display some greater comprehension of the minutiae of linux, windows, bits and bytes and I admit I find it entertaining. But one must not get carried away with cleverness as the sole measure of humankind's advancement. We tend to focus on brain size when assessing the remains of early hominids but there's no guarantee that bigger is better. Neanderthals had large brain capacities, as large, if not larger, than Cro-Magnons. Dolphin brains, to switch mammals, are huge.
What of the invisible evolutionary changes in our bodies. If there was a sudden global pandemic of say Bird Flu for want of a better example, would being clever guarantee you survival? What if it turned out that the natural selection criteria for survival was a better blood supply to the brain and so those who survived had a larger brain cavity than those who died. This might look in the fossil record like a selection for intelligence but would be no such thing. Human evolution might be determined in the future by ANY genetic mutation - a change in kidney mechanics, being taller, being fatter, being browner. The events that push evolution are normally physical. The mental developments follow - we have bigger brains because we learnt to walk on two legs and not the other way around. But back to my main assertion: the primary attributes that have brought us to this point in evolution are Compassion, Communication and Co-operation. Those and the ruthless elimination of competing species.
It is a conceit of the intelligent that intelligence drives human evolution. The skeletons of early hominids show evidence of the support of unproductive individuals within communities. Skeletons with broken but healed limbs, crippling arthritis, debilitating head wounds show that individuals that had been injured or were elderly were cared for by their peers/relations. The intelligent thing to do would be to ditch the dead weight and ease pressure on resources. Instead the human attributes demonstrated are compassion and co-operation. As for man getting less-healthy, no-one can tell which genes will be be favoured by the whims of nature and the wider the gene pool the better. In Europe sickle cell anaemia is an illness, in malarial zones it's an eveolutionary adaptation that aids survival. Who is to say what's healthy and what isn't. We have survived and prospered through our abilities to communicate and co-operate. Intelligence has followed on the coattails of our advancement and has not driven it. If a near-extinction meteor impact were to occur, would the species' best hope of survival lie with a select group of the Intelligensia or a select group of fertile people with excellent parenting skills? Think on this: You, dear reader, may regard yourself as intelligent and may pride yourself on your ability to read PERL or code in binary but that doesn't make babies. It is true that the "intelligent" breed less. The brutal fact is the geekier you are the less likely you are to reproduce and so when you have finished that algol compiler you've been working on and want to pat yourself on the back for being clever, remind yourself that you are not the pinnacle of human evolution and just an offshoot. The single mother successfully stretching out her budget raising four kids is more likely to leave an indelible imprint on the evolution of Man than you are.
Ok then then Ladies, first one to do it wins.....
Good Evening I can think of a simple reason for Microsoft to pull the plug on Blu-Ray - spite. Microsoft's baby, Windows, has been plagued with security issues both real and manufactured (by which I mean those that it shipped with and those created by bored and malicious script kiddies) since it was born and Microsoft has gone to great lengths to fill all the holes. The last thing Microsoft needs is someone coming along and torpedoing a huge hole in Window's security below the waterline and that's exactly what Sony did. Whether they intended to or not Sony's use of the flawed XCP software allowed the Bad Guys the opportunity to install the virus-of-the-day on a Windows-based machine without anyone being able to stop it. If I were Microsoft I would have been incandescent with fury and Sony would have made an unforgiving corporate enemy. You can forget consumer choice. If Blu-Ray doesn't get native support in Windows then it'll be highly improbable that it can beat HD DVD. so...my first post. How'd I do?