Goals in life are obviously personal, but I've observed they're very much influenced by the culture of the country.
USA is a country where there is tremendous pressure to be successful, purely for the sake of being successful. This is mad for me, and I am strongly against this attitude, but it's factual.
There were interesting comments in a post, a short time ago, comparing the cultures in USA and New Zealand. The latter would fit very much in what you would define as "be satisfied".
It's mostly the typical division of A and B-type personalities.
My personal opinion is that to live in a very fulfilled way a bit of both is required. One needs a bit of "success" to overcome some inevitable obstacles, and a the sime time, "satisfied" to get a true feeling of himself and what's around him.
The excessively laid-down people I've met were afflicted with subtle and not immediately visible problems. As a matter of fact, one needs to carve his space in life, otherwise he's going to be very limited, if not crushed.
The type of problems which affect the opposite type of attitude are more "visible" - mostly, neurotic behavior.
I think there is some deep rooted competitive drive in most folks. Most people are constantly comparing themselves to others as the article explains. It takes a fair amount of self awareness and restraint to stop doing this.. The benefit though is that you feel much more free to be happy with your life. Envy is a terrible disease
Be proud of your race when it solves corruption, poverty and inequalities...
You can do something about it, be proud of it and at the same time watch rockets fly
http://www.watsi.org
I'm not sure if OP was making a racist statement of meant "the human race", but completely independent of that and in response to your statement:
Any technological venture is helping to solve poverty in the long run. Even if the venture does nothing to help inequality, the new technology is almost guaranteed to raise society's collective standard of living.
I'm not too sure Australia would be unaffected, there are quite a few US bases / radar stations etc on Aussie soil...the Chinese/Russians may not like it if it came to a head..Antarctica and Greenland maybe?
Well you have to consider the size of that continent. I am not saying it would be 100% unaffected but remote locations like North-West Australia has literary nothing there to attack. Some small towns and that is it.
People can be wary of new neighbours, i don't see why it wouldn't apply to space neighbours.
On a brighter note, maybe we should welcome with open arms anyone, after all, better be nice than not nice!
As far as I can tell it's now a network of content sites (Tumblr, Flickr, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Weather, a long site of Yahoo {{content_type}} sites, etc), monetized through targeted advertising.
Their demographics are typically older than average, and therefore easily monetizable through display ads. They seem to be doing quite well.
From watching a few of Marissa's interviews, it seems Yahoo is (or trying to become) a network providing services that people use daily, with a focus on mobile moving forward.
Weather, news, sports, stocks, email, social networking (Tumblr/Flickr). They are also appear to be trying to get into video and search.
Thanks guys for clarifying. So am I right to think that they don't have any "identity" that makes them "yahoo" anymore and they just collect rent from a bunch of properties they acquired? In my mind, google is google (identified primarily by search) microsoft is Microsoft( primarily identified by windows and office) yahoo is? ... Is it like if Facebook abandoned social media altogether and became a simple owner of "stuff"?
There's no such thing as a free lunch, and many people believed they could mine one lunch at no (or very little) cost and expect that lunch to last forever. That's very unfortunate, but who wouldn't see that such a utopia would come to an end. It's like thinking that electric cars will replace other cars in 10 years or 20 years (there's too much at stake , the environment being last on the list).
Even if the public was to embrace a such a "currency", governments would step in (and they did) realising they would have no control. The very fact that it became an object of speculation and was making people richer meant it wasn't a currency anyway, it was no better than property, therefore spawned a bubble as a natural phenomenon.
Bitcoin, like Punk certainly isn't dead.
Bitcoin sounded and looked like the sex pistols a year ago, now it sounds and looks like Green Day.
That's an interesting thought. Some terrorist is in the US and planning something, but they don't want to give away their intel. So do a bit of parallel construction and tip off the local cops to some relatively small crime he's committed in the course of everything....
Or substitute "whistleblower" or "inconvenient politician" for "terrorist" if you prefer.
I didn't downvote you, but I expect those who did aren't reading it as "a question" as in "a request for information" - which I would think should rarely be downvoted - but as "a rhetorical question" whose purpose was to serve as a point of argument. Interpreted that way it seems to be attacking a strawman, poorly - such a comment would be deservedly downvoted.
That's how the term "mass driver" was used in Babylon 5, but generally you talk about mass drivers as coilguns propelling loads that combine a magnetic component that the coilgun acts on with the actual payload, usually either for propulsion or transport. In Heinlein's novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress the mass drivers sending products from the Moon to the Earth were re-purposed as weapons, which is probably where a lot of people first ran into the idea of electromagnetic projectile weapons, making it the default term for those some people use. Of course, to quote Niven "A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."
So yes, a railgun is sort of like a mass driver. Except that railguns[1] rely on current flowing through the projectile between two rails and coilguns[2] rely on the current flowing through a loop around the projectile. And mass drivers are a sort of railgun where the projectile isn't a specially designed bullet but a spaceship or hunt of rock or pretty much anything combined with a magnetic sabot, where as this fire specially designed projectiles.
