I am in my mid-40s and the things that interest me in the world rapidly shrink. I do not want to see most of the Europe as I used in earlier years. I do not want to visit my long-time friends in a neighboring state, because travel is seen as more and more hassle. The only reason for my travel is my son duty of visiting the parents. I do that regularly with a great pain.
I have seen plenty of relatively healthy old people, in whose eyes I read only one desire: to finally end this.
I am still relatively healthy. It's just the grass is not as green anymore as it is used to be, so, naturally, my desire to see new vistas, new man made objects, new people is less.
We are limited in our capacity of learning as we are limited in everything else.
If I could choose I would choose "pick savings" moment of my life (analogous to pick oil) moment, so I can pass to my sons a maximum amount of inheritance.
From what I learned here on/. (and on reddit) during numerous conversations on VPN as a solution against ever increasing presence of hairy bony government arms ("bony arms" - direct copy from a Russian idiom) on your private parts I understand that the major problem with VPN is speed. I already noticed that trivial books (several megs) are loaded extremely slow sometimes on my muTorrent client even without VPN condom, I can imagine how painful torrents might become via VPN.
> I honestly didn't see a lot of substance here. > Instead of saying ants use TCP, I would say ants and TCP both use common sense.
Bingo, my friend. Sadly enough, that's vast majority of modern day scientific articles. Like the subject of the OA - ants - modern scientists are foraging where the bandwidth is wider - grant, fame, circle jirk, etc, etc...
We know almost everything we can possibly scientifically know, adding here that logical result of this gnoseological cul-de-sac is abundance of "scientific" articles about nothing.
At the risk of sounding stupid without reading anything, may I predict that they discovered something trivial or tautological, or otherwise useless like "fractals", "power law", "criticality", etc. etc etc...
> But it gives the false impression that we know pretty much everything, whereas the reality is that there's a whole lot more that we don't know.'
In reality we DO know pretty much everything. But this "everything" is not "everything" that he means. He means simplistic everything that is material, while real "everything" is "everything that could be studied by scientific method".
So, yes we don't know a lot of things, but we know pretty much almost everything we could possibly know.
Most likely, your collection will die much earlier and many times before you die.
Take my history of emails. I never delete emails, yet my earliest email I would be able to recover from back media would be only 14 years old.
My first email was probably dated circa 1988. When I left my position and home in 1996 I backed it up on a tape. Tape was lost.
Same thing happened in 1998 with my next job and home switch. Latest backup is on CD. I do not own a working CD drive anymore.
The problem with digital memorabilia is storage and cost of transfer from one (old) media to another (new) media.
I really hope collection storage on the web will solve this problem. gmail proved to be really reliable source of storage which was able to hold my emails intact since circa 2004, through numerous computer replacements and media shift from CD to DVD to BlueRay.
If your kid is vaccinated does it really matter THAT much if other kids are not?
If presence of non-vaccinated kids increases the chances for your kid to get sick so dramatically, may be vaccination itself is not that effective?
The whole purpose of vaccination of a person is to prevent (diminish the probability of) this person from being infected from a contagious person and if having couple of unvaccinated kids in the class dramatically changes that, then what is really the effectiveness of such vaccination?
There are rules and there are rules. Everybody would agree that the progress of developed countries is moving from less rules to more rules and new rules are made according to the principle of how easy it is to monitor if the rule is broken or not (example, no country has a rule that "bad drivers should be not driving", but they have plenty of rules instead that easy to monitor, like speed, while having very little relevance to the actual rule: "bad driviers should not be driving").
Same here with vaccines. The real rule that has been implemented since Black Death epoch is to isolate sick (actually, contagious) from healthy. Since it's very difficult to determine if the person is contagious or not, the rule is replaced with simple: "no vaccination, no school for you".
>You mean like no one is attacking NATO force in Afganisthan because they are openly carrying weapons?
That is truly non-sequitur analogy. In this case the solution is completely different: get the heck out of Afghanistan and you will have no more NATO deaths. It's very simple really.
>And what is the probability to hit a perfect innocent in these circumstances?
The danger from one person who knows his gun and knows about shooting is much less than a danger from a sociopath shooting indiscriminately in the theater.
>You would be fairly unable to accurately identify your target
Still there is a chance that you would be able to do that under lucky circumstances. And that chance justifies permission to carry weapons.
If gunman knew that many people would be carrying concealed weapons, he probably would not even consider such an attack.
When one country is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, it's a menace to the rest of the world. When more than one country is armed, it's a factor of stabilization.
Slashdot Mirror
How old are you?
>I mean, have you *seen* this world we live in
I am in my mid-40s and the things that interest me in the world rapidly shrink. I do not want to see most of the Europe as I used in earlier years. I do not want to visit my long-time friends in a neighboring state, because travel is seen as more and more hassle. The only reason for my travel is my son duty of visiting the parents. I do that regularly with a great pain.
I have seen plenty of relatively healthy old people, in whose eyes I read only one desire: to finally end this.
I am still relatively healthy. It's just the grass is not as green anymore as it is used to be, so, naturally, my desire to see new vistas, new man made objects, new people is less.
We are limited in our capacity of learning as we are limited in everything else.
Ask Tony S. why he did it.
If I could choose I would choose "pick savings" moment of my life (analogous to pick oil) moment, so I can pass to my sons a maximum amount of inheritance.
It's sad, but that is all that I can give them.
From what I learned here on /. (and on reddit) during numerous conversations on VPN as a solution against ever increasing presence of hairy bony government arms ("bony arms" - direct copy from a Russian idiom) on your private parts I understand that the major problem with VPN is speed. I already noticed that trivial books (several megs) are loaded extremely slow sometimes on my muTorrent client even without VPN condom, I can imagine how painful torrents might become via VPN.
bq. And, no, we don't know "almost everything". If we did, we wouldn't be building things like LHC.
I do not see a contradiction here. LHC is for what is left when you subtract "almost" from "all".
> I honestly didn't see a lot of substance here.
> Instead of saying ants use TCP, I would say ants and TCP both use common sense.
Bingo, my friend. Sadly enough, that's vast majority of modern day scientific articles. Like the subject of the OA - ants - modern scientists are foraging where the bandwidth is wider - grant, fame, circle jirk, etc, etc...
THAT is what you see as a problem? Not the gaping triviality of their "discovery"? The wider the bandwidth, the more you can send?
That's what I am talking about when commenting on another article at today's ./:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/08/26/2330217/the-sweet-mystery-of-science
We know almost everything we can possibly scientifically know, adding here that logical result of this gnoseological cul-de-sac is abundance of "scientific" articles about nothing.
At the risk of sounding stupid without reading anything, may I predict that they discovered something trivial or tautological, or otherwise useless like "fractals", "power law", "criticality", etc. etc etc...
> But it gives the false impression that we know pretty much everything, whereas the reality is that there's a whole lot more that we don't know.'
In reality we DO know pretty much everything. But this "everything" is not "everything" that he means. He means simplistic everything that is material, while real "everything" is "everything that could be studied by scientific method".
So, yes we don't know a lot of things, but we know pretty much almost everything we could possibly know.
Dangerous to what?
>Further, there are other people who are on immunosuppressants and such who cannot receive the vaccine. These people depend on herd immunity
Here is the problem. They should not depend on herd immunity. They should depend on many other ways to avoid being infected.
>Have you bothered to read the other posts in this discussion?
No. Nor I should had
Most likely, your collection will die much earlier and many times before you die.
Take my history of emails. I never delete emails, yet my earliest email I would be able to recover from back media would be only 14 years old.
My first email was probably dated circa 1988. When I left my position and home in 1996 I backed it up on a tape. Tape was lost.
Same thing happened in 1998 with my next job and home switch. Latest backup is on CD. I do not own a working CD drive anymore.
The problem with digital memorabilia is storage and cost of transfer from one (old) media to another (new) media.
I really hope collection storage on the web will solve this problem. gmail proved to be really reliable source of storage which was able to hold my emails intact since circa 2004, through numerous computer replacements and media shift from CD to DVD to BlueRay.
If your kid is vaccinated does it really matter THAT much if other kids are not?
If presence of non-vaccinated kids increases the chances for your kid to get sick so dramatically, may be vaccination itself is not that effective?
The whole purpose of vaccination of a person is to prevent (diminish the probability of) this person from being infected from a contagious person and if having couple of unvaccinated kids in the class dramatically changes that, then what is really the effectiveness of such vaccination?
There are rules and there are rules. Everybody would agree that the progress of developed countries is moving from less rules to more rules and new rules are made according to the principle of how easy it is to monitor if the rule is broken or not (example, no country has a rule that "bad drivers should be not driving", but they have plenty of rules instead that easy to monitor, like speed, while having very little relevance to the actual rule: "bad driviers should not be driving").
Same here with vaccines. The real rule that has been implemented since Black Death epoch is to isolate sick (actually, contagious) from healthy. Since it's very difficult to determine if the person is contagious or not, the rule is replaced with simple: "no vaccination, no school for you".
>Your freedom to swing your arm ends at my nose
It seems that very often one cannot take a walk on a street without touching someone's overstretched nose.
We should avoid causing anything fast It's ok if a pink flamingo will gradually become extinct, or the planet gradually will become warmer.
It's not ok if sparrows in China suddenly become extinct, or Atlantic Ocean freezes overnight between Staten Island and Manhattan.
>Let's do a simulation:
Let's don't
Why do you presume that gunman in Aurora was crazy?
>I think it says a lot about your culture
Ironically enough, I do not own a gun. I am afraid I might use it out of temper.
>Can you provide examples to support your claim?
Major Hasan
>You mean like no one is attacking NATO force in Afganisthan because they are openly carrying weapons?
That is truly non-sequitur analogy. In this case the solution is completely different: get the heck out of Afghanistan and you will have no more NATO deaths. It's very simple really.
>And what is the probability to hit a perfect innocent in these circumstances?
The danger from one person who knows his gun and knows about shooting is much less than a danger from a sociopath shooting indiscriminately in the theater.
>Once you start shooting
You are presuming that the owner of the gun is an idiot. Though it might be true in some cases, most of the people are responsible.
Could you please give me real life examples of situation you keep describing, people shooting randomly?
>untrained use of lethal force you get George Zimmerman shooting at Trayvon Martin
What the heck are you talking about? Dude was fighting him. Have you seen photos of ZImmerman's head?
>You would be fairly unable to accurately identify your target
Still there is a chance that you would be able to do that under lucky circumstances. And that chance justifies permission to carry weapons.
If gunman knew that many people would be carrying concealed weapons, he probably would not even consider such an attack.
When one country is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, it's a menace to the rest of the world. When more than one country is armed, it's a factor of stabilization.
But I have nothing but admiration for their idealism.