Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art --
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or ga
Mankind existed for hundred of thousands of years with no language. Written language did not start to appear until some 2500 years ago (or up to 6000 depending on what you feel qualifies.)
Julian Jaynes does a nice job correlating this to the rise of consciousness.
Stay away from that hack Chomsky.
Right back atcha, Barbie.
-MT.
The only grieving will be for the days when
-MT.
I'm a nomadic wanderer now - don't really have a 'home' as such, just travel from place to place, sharing what I find.
-MT.
Although I stopped posting stuff here ages ago, I've had the My Amigos feed in Google Reader, and have occasionally wandered in to have a look.
But now I've decided to cut my ties here permanently. So as soon as I've posted this, I'm unsubscribing My Amigos. I've already updated my User Info with how to contact me.
I don't think that Apple or Google are the companies to follow.
Apple has a bigger market cap than Microsoft and has just released two wildly successful products in the last 5 years: the iPhone and iPad.
They have also created a new, thriving developer ecosystem, substantially change how folks can get applications, music, movies and share those things with others.
Google, likewise, has a portfolio of innovation mostly related to web technologies but branching into computers and mobile devices.
Microsoft has created...the Kinect. Oh, and updated their Windows operating system. If they don't realize the future is in hardware and getting people connected, they better. And they could start by emulating Apple and Google.
Ironically, the best thing for Microsoft would be what could have been the result of its anti-trust problems, a company split. It's doing too much
I agree they're going in too many different directions but what they need to do is not necessarily split, but have a unified vision.
Right now they have Zune, Windows Mobile 7, Symbian and SideKick mobile platforms all in their portfolio. You would think they would try to create a best of breed combined mobile platform. But no, they're not. They missed the boat big time on ARM development.
With Apple developing tetherless setup and updating of iPads, Microsoft's control over the low end computing market (which, like it or not, is their bread and butter) is now in serious jeopardy. And instead of trying to work with hardware manufacturers to build something new and exciting, they're instead focusing their efforts at penalizing hardware manufacturers who work with competing firms.
Whatever innovation edge Microsoft has had is evaporating faster than a snowball in the Sahara. It is nigh on amazing the Kinect actually got created and while it could be a vehicle to more innovative products, I have a feeling that too will be another Microsoft had it first but botched it.
It's a pity that an organization with the resources Microsoft has cannot get the strategy to implementation going but that's what bloated middle management getting hackled by accounting will do to you.
If they can't get OWA to look pretty, how do they think they're going to be meaningful to users in any real way?
The failure of the London experiment may keep entities in the U.S. from trying the same thing.
If the failure of the Soviet, Chinese, North Vietnamese, North Koreans, Cambodians, National Socialists and Fascists didn't teach the US government anything, I fail to see how the British NHS will.
Unfortunately, you're simply failing to grasp the scope of the problem.
You're quite right that poverty is the biggest killer on the planet, but poverty is also the primary reason why people will die (and already are dying) due to global warming.
You see, when a system of oscillators accumulates energy, the amplitude of the oscillations tends to increase. This means that the extremes become more extreme, and you get both extreme droughts and extreme floods. Haven't you noticed that Texas and Arizona are burning while the Mississippi floods? That sort of thing starts happening much more frequently as the temperature increases.
So it's not just a matter of being slowly inundated by the encroaching sea, it's more like being alternately inundated with record flooding and parched with severe drought, repeatedly for many years, and then being slowly inundated by the encroaching sea.
You are fortunate that denial is, as they say, not just a river in Africa, because when the rivers of Africa start to experience alternating severe drought and flooding the way Australia already is, you're probably not going to want to be clinging desperately to any African rivers anyway.
So, what effect do you suppose all of this will have on food commodity prices? And what effect do you suppose that will have on the poor? It's already happening, food prices are way up and many people are dying because of it. And this is only the beginning, Mother Nature is just getting warmed up.
Let's call things what they are for a change, shall we?
When multiple independent well-established lines of evidence all point unequivocally to the same conclusion, I call that science.
When thousands of papers, the official statements of every major scientific organization in the world, and the professional opinion of ~97% of active researchers in the field support the same conclusion, you might just want to consider whether that conclusion might not be science, you think?
When the incoherent antiscientific blatherings of professional corporate shills contradict the vastly overwhelming body of scientific evidence, I call that propaganda.
All power corrupts, but we need electricity.
