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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is available online free courtesy of Univ of Virginia:

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/Fitzgerald/jazz/benjamin/benjamin1.htm

How does that figure into the tail?

I said start with BASIC, not dwell on it. If a potential programmer becomes so ingrained with the shortcoming of *any* language, it's a fault in the programmer not the language. The quote is from 1975, wherein he also suggested that Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail. . I think Larry Wall would disagree, and whether you like Perl or not... you're soaking in it here on Slashdot.

gamma-decay The gamma rays are just high-energy photons, of order 100 keV to a few MeV. Emission of gamma rays is similar (but at much higher energies) to emission of photons by excited states of atoms. The nucleus can be excited by having just emitted an alpha or beta, or by colliding with another nucleus, or being bombarded by neutrons, say. All these events can lead to a nucleus in which the charge distribution is oscillating, and electromagnetic radiation ensues.

Same idea for the positron - electron collision - those are clearly not at rest.
If you choose to correct Prof. Fowler on his understanding of nuclear physics I hope you will post the dialog here; /. is not as funny as it once was and I miss those days.

This technology works the same way as Davinci's "aeolian harp", as immortalized in The Æolian Harp by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

The Æolian Harp

My pensive SARA ! thy soft cheek reclined
Thus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it is
To sit beside our Cot, our Cot o'ergrown
With white-flower'd Jasmin, and the broad-leav'd Myrtle,
(Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love !)
And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light,
Slow saddenning round, and mark the star of eve
Serenely brilliant (such should Wisdom be)
Shine opposite ! How exquisite the scents
Snatch'd from yon bean-field ! and the world so hush'd !
The stilly murmur of the distant Sea
Tells us of silence.
        And that simplest Lute,
Plac'd length-ways in the clasping casement, hark !
How by the desultory breeze caress'd,
Like some coy maid half-yielding to her lover,
It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs
Tempt to repeat the wrong ! And now, its strings
Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes
Over delicious surges sink and rise,
Such a soft floating witchery of sound
As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve
Voyage on gentle gales from Faery-Land,
Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,
Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,
Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untam'd wing !
O ! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where--
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so fill'd ;
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is Music slumbering on her instrument.
        And thus, my Love ! as on the midway slope
Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon,
Whilst thro' my half-clos'd eye-lids I behold
The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main,
And tranquil muse upon tranquility ;
Full many a thought uncall'd and undetain'd,
And many idle flitting phantasies,
Traverse my indolent and passive brain,
As wild and various, as the random gales
That swell and flutter on this subject Lute !
        And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversly fram'd,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all ?
        But thy more serious eye a mild reproof
Darts, O belovéd Woman ! nor such thoughts
Dim and unhallow'd dost thou not reject,
And biddest me walk humbly with my God.
Meek Daughter in the Family of Christ !
Well hast thou said and holily disprais'd
These shapings of the unregenerate mind ;
Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break
On vain Philosophy's aye-babbling spring.
For never guiltless may I speak of him,
The Incomprehensible ! save when with awe
I praise him, and with Faith that inly feels ;
Who with his saving mercies healéd me,
A sinful and most miserable man,
Wilder'd and dark, and gave me to possess
Peace, and this Cot, and thee, heart-honour'd Maid !

The findings could put an end to centuries of speculation about the exact resting spot of Copernicus, a priest and astronomer whose theories identified the Sun, not the Earth, as the center of the universe.

The sun is the center of the universe? I though the sun orbited the Milkey Way Galaxy's central black hole?

A question for you math geeks: can an object of infinite size even HAVE a center?

I would posit that I am the center of the universe. No matter where I am, I'm here. As I walk, the world moves beneath my feet.

You could construct an accurately moving model of the solar system, have the earth as the center, and still have it be accurate. The moon doesn't orbit the earth, both bodies orbit a spot somewhere beneath the earth's crust.

It's all a matter of how you look at it.

Copernicus is believed to have come up with his main idea of the Sun at the center of the universe between 1508 and 1514, and during those years wrote a manuscript commonly known as Commentariolus (Little Commentary).

His final thesis was only published, however, in the year of his death. His ideas challenged the Bible, the church and past theories, and they had important consequences for future thinkers, including Galileo, Descartes and Newton.

I'm going to have to reread Genesis. I don't recall seeing anywhere where it says the earth is the center of anything, let alone the universe.

1: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2: And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4: And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5: And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6: And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7: And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8: And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
9: And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
10: And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
11: And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
12: And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
13: And the evening and the morning were the third day.
14: And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16: And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17: And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18: And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19: And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

The part where the earth was created before the stars is a bit hard to believe. Maybe it means that the subatomic particles that it's made of?.

There hasn't been an increase in school violence, just an increase in the number of schools and an increase in the reporting of the violence that has occurred.

http://youthviolence.edschool.virginia.edu/violence-in-schools/national-statistics.html

If spanking is such a violent discipline that breeds violence -- then why is it only in the last 10-20 years that school violence has reached unprecedented levels?

You have to prove that assertion before your question is valid.

http://youthviolence.edschool.virginia.edu/violence-in-schools/national-statistics.html

This site indicates that school violence is going down since the early 90s, drastically.

Was the great depression even "that bad" or are the stories of stock traders jumping out of windows greatly exaggerated ?

Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's by Frederick Lewis Allen was written in (IIRC; I have the paperback edition I was assigned in an undergrad history class at SIU in 1977) 1931 or 2 at the depths of the depression.

All the same, it had been a frightful day. At seven o'clock that night the tickers in a thousand brokers' offices were still, chattering; not till after 7:08 did they finally record the last sale made on the floor at three o'clock. The volume of trading had set a new record -- 12,894,650 shares. ("The time may come when we shall see a five-million-share day," the wise men of the Street had been saying twenty months before!) Incredible rumors had spread wildly during the early afternoon -- that eleven speculators had committed suicide, that the Buffalo and Chicago exchanges had been closed, that troops were guarding the New York Stock Exchange against an angry mob. The country had known the bitter taste of panic. And although the bankers' pool had prevented for the moment an utter collapse, there was no gainsaying the fact that the economic structure had cracked wide open.

Twain was a smart man, smarter than you it seems, as you don't seem to realise that he was NOT SERIOUS in that essay.

Have you ever read Huckleberry Finn? In it, he uses southern dialect in the narrative, as it's written in the first person, told by Huck, a simple country boy. But the characters' words are spelled and grammar used as the speaker speaks them.

Her sister, Miss Watson, a tolerable slim old maid, with goggles on, had just come to live with her, and took a set at me now with a spelling-book. She worked me middling hard for about an hour, and then the widow made her ease up. I couldn't stood it much longer.

That was Finn, but Jim (the story's real hero) speaks in the negro dialect of the time

"Who dah?"

      He listened some more; then he come tiptoeing down and stood right between us; we could a touched him, nearly. Well, likely it was minutes and minutes that there warn't a sound, and we all there so close together. There was a place on my ankle that got to itching, but I dasn't scratch it; and then my ear begun to itch; and next my back, right between my shoulders. Seemed like I'd die if I couldn't scratch. Well, I've noticed that thing plenty times since. If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain't sleepy -- if you are anywheres where it won't do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places. Pretty soon Jim says:

      "Say, who is you? Whar is you? Dog my cats ef I didn' hear sumf'n. Well, I know what I's gwyne to do: I's gwyne to set down here and listen tell I hears it agin."

In Noo Yawk they say "Da dwog! Yoo pawked da kaw ahn da dyam dwag!" while in Kentunkee day say "Da dawg! Yall pawrked da kawr own da dayum dawg!"

Read Hoover for President (uncharacteristically SFW, sorry) and the sequel More Hoover (Damn!.

Then read the 1931 book Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s by historian Frederick Lewis Allen (we were assigned to read it in a 1977 undergraduate general studies history class at SIU). Whether or not you read my fear mongering journals, read Allen's book; it's now online, for free (I still have the paperback we had to buy for class).

Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Let's use the excess heat in some parts of the chip and use that as a secondary power source.

It would seem to me that any sort of heat engine driven by heat from the cpu is going to impede the cooling of said CPU.

Maybe not by dissipation, but turning the heat into kinetic energy, effectively cools the CPU. Otherwise we would be breaking the 2nd law by producing energy out of nothing.

Perhaps what you're trying to say is that if the efficiency of the device is pretty low, the heat won't be converted to electrical energy as fast as it accumulates. But think about this: What if the device used to collect the heat goes BETWEEN the CPU and the heat sink? By definition, the sink is ALWAYS cooler than the CPU, therefore making heat transfer possible. Actually that's the opposite of what peltiers do: They use electricity to accelerate the heat transfer from the CPU to the heat sink.

Here's an article about devices using excess heat. Perhaps it's the same device discussed in this article since it's 3 months old, but I'd need to double-check.

Hmmm nope. Here's the original research page about THIS article. What's interesting is that the link doesn't mention anything about brownian rachets. In fact, there are NO articles there!

http://people.virginia.edu/~ag7rq/

follow the link to "Second Law? You must be kidding..."

"FYI -- there is some sensational press out there that makes it sound like we're planning to break/have already broken the 2nd law of thermodynamics. This is, of course, absurd -- but I think it's imperative we set the record straight before everyone starts jumping all over us.

The context.... a colleague and I received funding to study non-equilibrium switching invoking a concept called 'Brownian Ratchets' that has been well studied in nonequilibrium statistical physics over the years. The potential benefactor of this study is the chip industry, in a very broad way, as it is worried about rapidly increasing thermal budgets (chips are becoming very hot). We're simply trying to examine the physics of Brownian ratchets in a device context. A popular model for heat dissipation in binary switching (proposed by Victor Zhirnov and co-workers) looks at a two well one barrier geometry, with a gate controlling the barrier and a drain controlling the overall directionality. Each such raising and lowering of a barrier at the end dissipates energy irreversibly (during the reset step where one erases information), leading to a kTln2 dissipation per operation (kT is the thermal energy). And this analysis is usually done by assuming that you wait after you raise or lower a barrier and then let the electrons move and reach equilibrium with the surroundings. The analysis is thus based on equilibrium Boltzmann statistics -- since the electron was at equilibrium before a computation and reaches equilibrium after. What is not clear is what happens during the non-equilibrium transition phase, or if you switch before the equilibrium is reached. The aim of the study is not to attempt to deviate from cherished physical principles, but on the contrary to see what these cherished principles posit for such a situation. A ratchet is known to be able to rectify non-equilibrium noise to produce directed motion by transducing spatial asymmetries in the system (this is well recognized in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and has been mulled over for years). The physics is well studied, but the context is perhaps new... we are interested in seeing if rectifying such non-equilibrium noise (as a ratchet does) can perhaps shave off some of the power dissipation limit associated with a drain bias in the regular example.

This is, of course, still at a toy model -- we need to worry about how to deal with compatibility of input and output, for example. Simply put, we don't know if this will bear fruit for the big picture of low-power device operation, but it's worth investigating.

That's about it... but then, cooling laptops as hot as the sun through the power of thinking or by breaking the 2nd law sounds fancier ... doesn't it? "

He's talking about studying the transient state of electrons switching in a semiconductor barrier, and how it may be useful in reduce semiconductor heating.

FYI -- there is some sensational press out there that makes it sound like we're planning to break/have already broken the 2nd law of thermodynamics. This is, of course, absurd -- but I think it's imperative we set the record straight before everyone starts jumping all over us.

The context.... a colleague and I received funding to study non-equilibrium switching invoking a concept called 'Brownian Ratchets' that has been well studied in nonequilibrium statistical physics over the years. The potential benefactor of this study is the chip industry, in a very broad way, as it is worried about rapidly increasing thermal budgets (chips are becoming very hot). We're simply trying to examine the physics of Brownian ratchets in a device context. A popular model for heat dissipation in binary switching (proposed by Victor Zhirnov and co-workers) looks at a two well one barrier geometry, with a gate controlling the barrier and a drain controlling the overall directionality. Each such raising and lowering of a barrier at the end dissipates energy irreversibly (during the reset step where one erases information), leading to a kTln2 dissipation per operation (kT is the thermal energy). And this analysis is usually done by assuming that you wait after you raise or lower a barrier and then let the electrons move and reach equilibrium with the surroundings. The analysis is thus based on equilibrium Boltzmann statistics -- since the electron was at equilibrium before a computation and reaches equilibrium after. What is not clear is what happens during the non-equilibrium transition phase, or if you switch before the equilibrium is reached. The aim of the study is not to attempt to deviate from cherished physical principles, but on the contrary to see what these cherished principles posit for such a situation. A ratchet is known to be able to rectify non-equilibrium noise to produce directed motion by transducing spatial asymmetries in the system (this is well recognized in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and has been mulled over for years). The physics is well studied, but the context is perhaps new... we are interested in seeing if rectifying such non-equilibrium noise (as a ratchet does) can perhaps shave off some of the power dissipation limit associated with a drain bias in the regular example.

This is, of course, still at a toy model -- we need to worry about how to deal with compatibility of input and output, for example. Simply put, we don't know if this will bear fruit for the big picture of low-power device operation, but it's worth investigating.

That's about it... but then, cooling laptops as hot as the sun through the power of thinking or by breaking the 2nd law sounds fancier ... doesn't it?

(Emphasis added.)

So this seems like still very early work (just an idea, really)... and it appears that the intention is to build new kinds of switches (e.g. transistors) that exploit the fact that switching is inherently non-equilibrium, and extract some of the energy that is dissipated during these switching events.

FYI -- there is some sensational press out there that makes it sound like we're planning to break/have already broken the 2nd law of thermodynamics. This is, of course, absurd -- but I think it's imperative we set the record straight before everyone starts jumping all over us.

The context.... a colleague and I received funding to study non-equilibrium switching invoking a concept called 'Brownian Ratchets' that has been well studied in nonequilibrium statistical physics over the years. The potential benefactor of this study is the chip industry, in a very broad way, as it is worried about rapidly increasing thermal budgets (chips are becoming very hot). We're simply trying to examine the physics of Brownian ratchets in a device context. A popular model for heat dissipation in binary switching (proposed by Victor Zhirnov and co-workers) looks at a two well one barrier geometry, with a gate controlling the barrier and a drain controlling the overall directionality. Each such raising and lowering of a barrier at the end dissipates energy irreversibly (during the reset step where one erases information), leading to a kTln2 dissipation per operation (kT is the thermal energy). And this analysis is usually done by assuming that you wait after you raise or lower a barrier and then let the electrons move and reach equilibrium with the surroundings. The analysis is thus based on equilibrium Boltzmann statistics -- since the electron was at equilibrium before a computation and reaches equilibrium after. What is not clear is what happens during the non-equilibrium transition phase, or if you switch before the equilibrium is reached. The aim of the study is not to attempt to deviate from cherished physical principles, but on the contrary to see what these cherished principles posit for such a situation. A ratchet is known to be able to rectify non-equilibrium noise to produce directed motion by transducing spatial asymmetries in the system (this is well recognized in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and has been mulled over for years). The physics is well studied, but the context is perhaps new... we are interested in seeing if rectifying such non-equilibrium noise (as a ratchet does) can perhaps shave off some of the power dissipation limit associated with a drain bias in the regular example.

This is, of course, still at a toy model -- we need to worry about how to deal with compatibility of input and output, for example. Simply put, we don't know if this will bear fruit for the big picture of low-power device operation, but it's worth investigating.

That's about it... but then, cooling laptops as hot as the sun through the power of thinking or by breaking the 2nd law sounds fancier ... doesn't it?

(Emphasis added.)

So this seems like still very early work (just an idea, really)... and it appears that the intention is to build new kinds of switches (e.g. transistors) that exploit the fact that switching is inherently non-equilibrium, and extract some of the energy that is dissipated during these switching events.

FYI -- there is some sensational press out there that makes it sound like we're planning to break/have already broken the 2nd law of thermodynamics. This is, of course, absurd -- but I think it's imperative we set the record straight before everyone starts jumping all over us.

The context.... a colleague and I received funding to study non-equilibrium switching invoking a concept called 'Brownian Ratchets' that has been well studied in nonequilibrium statistical physics over the years. The potential benefactor of this study is the chip industry, in a very broad way, as it is worried about rapidly increasing thermal budgets (chips are becoming very hot). We're simply trying to examine the physics of Brownian ratchets in a device context. A popular model for heat dissipation in binary switching (proposed by Victor Zhirnov and co-workers) looks at a two well one barrier geometry, with a gate controlling the barrier and a drain controlling the overall directionality. Each such raising and lowering of a barrier at the end dissipates energy irreversibly (during the reset step where one erases information), leading to a kTln2 dissipation per operation (kT is the thermal energy). And this analysis is usually done by assuming that you wait after you raise or lower a barrier and then let the electrons move and reach equilibrium with the surroundings. The analysis is thus based on equilibrium Boltzmann statistics -- since the electron was at equilibrium before a computation and reaches equilibrium after. What is not clear is what happens during the non-equilibrium transition phase, or if you switch before the equilibrium is reached. The aim of the study is not to attempt to deviate from cherished physical principles, but on the contrary to see what these cherished principles posit for such a situation. A ratchet is known to be able to rectify non-equilibrium noise to produce directed motion by transducing spatial asymmetries in the system (this is well recognized in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and has been mulled over for years). The physics is well studied, but the context is perhaps new... we are interested in seeing if rectifying such non-equilibrium noise (as a ratchet does) can perhaps shave off some of the power dissipation limit associated with a drain bias in the regular example.

This is, of course, still at a toy model -- we need to worry about how to deal with compatibility of input and output, for example. Simply put, we don't know if this will bear fruit for the big picture of low-power device operation, but it's worth investigating.

That's about it... but then, cooling laptops as hot as the sun through the power of thinking or by breaking the 2nd law sounds fancier ... doesn't it?

(Emphasis added.)

So this seems like still very early work (just an idea, really)... and it appears that the intention is to build new kinds of switches (e.g. transistors) that exploit the fact that switching is inherently non-equilibrium, and extract some of the energy that is dissipated during these switching events.

FYI -- there is some sensational press out there that makes it sound like we're planning to break/have already broken the 2nd law of thermodynamics. This is, of course, absurd -- but I think it's imperative we set the record straight before everyone starts jumping all over us.

The context.... a colleague and I received funding to study non-equilibrium switching invoking a concept called 'Brownian Ratchets' that has been well studied in nonequilibrium statistical physics over the years. The potential benefactor of this study is the chip industry, in a very broad way, as it is worried about rapidly increasing thermal budgets (chips are becoming very hot). We're simply trying to examine the physics of Brownian ratchets in a device context. A popular model for heat dissipation in binary switching (proposed by Victor Zhirnov and co-workers) looks at a two well one barrier geometry, with a gate controlling the barrier and a drain controlling the overall directionality. Each such raising and lowering of a barrier at the end dissipates energy irreversibly (during the reset step where one erases information), leading to a kTln2 dissipation per operation (kT is the thermal energy). And this analysis is usually done by assuming that you wait after you raise or lower a barrier and then let the electrons move and reach equilibrium with the surroundings. The analysis is thus based on equilibrium Boltzmann statistics -- since the electron was at equilibrium before a computation and reaches equilibrium after. What is not clear is what happens during the non-equilibrium transition phase, or if you switch before the equilibrium is reached. The aim of the study is not to attempt to deviate from cherished physical principles, but on the contrary to see what these cherished principles posit for such a situation. A ratchet is known to be able to rectify non-equilibrium noise to produce directed motion by transducing spatial asymmetries in the system (this is well recognized in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and has been mulled over for years). The physics is well studied, but the context is perhaps new... we are interested in seeing if rectifying such non-equilibrium noise (as a ratchet does) can perhaps shave off some of the power dissipation limit associated with a drain bias in the regular example.

This is, of course, still at a toy model -- we need to worry about how to deal with compatibility of input and output, for example. Simply put, we don't know if this will bear fruit for the big picture of low-power device operation, but it's worth investigating.

That's about it... but then, cooling laptops as hot as the sun through the power of thinking or by breaking the 2nd law sounds fancier ... doesn't it?

(Emphasis added.)

So this seems like still very early work (just an idea, really)... and it appears that the intention is to build new kinds of switches (e.g. transistors) that exploit the fact that switching is inherently non-equilibrium, and extract some of the energy that is dissipated during these switching events.

it's a correction. When a certain section of the economy is artifically inflated - such as real estate, particularly in CA and FL - it has to come back down to an honest market. Everything will shake out as it ALWAYS has - even right after the Great Depression

So the Great Depression was a "correction"? Okaaaay.... you might want to read Only yesterday by historian Frederick Lewis Allen, written in 1932.

Evidence that eating foods with more sweeteners leads to greater obesity, which in turn leads to diabetes? Do I really need to cite studies for something so commonly accepted? Okay, here's a good start:

http://news.healingwell.com/index.php?p=news1&id=521780
http://healthlink.mcw.edu/article/941223597.html
http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/uvahealth/adult_diabetes/obover.cfm

I'm not saying that all type 2 diabetes is caused by obesity---it is well established that this is not the case---but it is well established that a fair percentage of people with type 2 diabetes became diabetic after gaining weight and that these people often cease to be diabetic after surgical intervention to forces weight loss. That's about as clear an establishment of causation as you can get.... The causative mechanism is even somewhat understood at this point.

Or did you mean the proof about the preservatives?

http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Science-Nutrition/FDA-re-opens-probe-into-benzene-contamination-of-soft-drinks

Follow the links from there for loads of info on this subject.

It is fairly well established that sodium benzoate when combined with ascorbic acid (sorry, wrong acid in my previous post... my bad) releases benzene, which is a well known carcinogen.

Word to the wise: if you're buying soft drinks or fruit juices preserved with sodium benzoate, be sure to drink them immediately. Don't let them sit on the shelf of your home. What you don't know can kill you.

Coca Cola invented Fanta so they could continue to sell soft drinks in the European market during the War

Not exactly. The company's german arm, isolated from the american one, invented it to keep the plant in operation during the war, when they could not get the Coca Cola syrup.

* http://xroads.virginia.edu/~class/coke/coke2.html
* http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/fanta.asp

Ah, yes-- the siren song of unionization, born out of the early 20th century labor struggles where socialism was still an idyllic future utopia

(citation needed)

IF THE American people turned a deaf ear to Woodrow Wilson's plea for the League of Nations during the early years of the Post-war Decade, it was not simply because they were too weary of foreign entanglements and noble efforts to heed him. They were listening to something else. They were listening to ugly rumors of a huge radical conspiracy against the government and institutions of the United States. They had their ears cocked for the detonation of bombs and the tramp of Bolshevist armies. They seriously thought-at least millions of them did, millions of otherwise reasonable citizens-that a Red revolution might begin in the United States the next month or next week, and they were less concerned with making the world safe for democracy than with making America safe for themselves.

Those were the days when column after column of the front pages of the newspapers shouted the news of strikes and and-Bolshevist riots; when radicals shot do Armistice Day paraders in the streets of Centralia, Washington, and in revenge the patriotic citizenry took out of the jail a member of the I. W. W.-a white American, be it noted-and lynched him by tying a rope around his neck and throwing him off a bridge; when properly elected members of the Assembly of New York State were expelled (and their constituents thereby disfranchised) simply because they had been elected as members of the venerable Socialist Party; when a jury in Indiana took two minutes to acquit a man for shooting and killing an alien because he had shouted, "To hell with the United States"; and when the Vice-President or the nation cited as a dangerous manifestation of radicalism in the women's colleges the fact that the girl debaters of Radcliffe had upheld the affirmative in an intercollegiate debate on the subject: "Resolved, that the recognition of labor unions by employers is essential to successful collective bargaining." It was an era of lawless and disorderly defense of law and order, of unconstitutional defense of the Constitution, of suspicion and civil conflict-in a very literal sense, a reign of terror.

-Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (emphasis mine)

Allen was a bona-fide historian, the document that debunks your argument is hosted at an American university. So, do you have someone with better credentials than Rush Limbaugh to back your assertion that "socialism was still an idyllic future utopia"?

Where did the railroads go before government subsidies and intervention? Where the money was.

Why do you need them to go elsewhere? What good is a railroad track to nowhere? Amtrak cannot stay in the black precisely because they don't go where the money is. Is it your contention that constantly bailing out a company because it doesn't follow good business practice anymore is good practice? That's what you get when the government over-regulates an industry.

There is little chance you'd be in a position to start a business without the support of the government

Only because the government regulates and controls everything so tightly. Government did not come before business. King is not the world's oldest profession. Governments would like you to believe that they are essential...however there have been plenty of times in history when people have lived productive lives with no government in sight...even if one existed in name. *MY* business will never be started because of governmental intervention. Governments tend to reward large corporations at the expense of small businesses, and I cannot start a large corporation. Remove the disincentives and you would get a larger number of businesses starting up...like we had before the prevailing corporatist/strong central gov't winds began to blow.

Now, governments may have PAVED roads first...but the roads they paved by and large existed before they were paved and were largely broken in by (in the USA) stagecoach traffic, cattle drives, and settlers. Not government. Even with paved roads and highways, private enterprise built a lot of roads. From http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/detoc/transport/how.html:

"Often the responsibility for building a road was passed from the state and federal government to private turnpike companies. Hence, the "turnpike" or toll road: once a company had bid for and built a road, it owned the rights of passage on it."

Hmm, seems like private industry to me...only now, we pay taxes to pay for roads, and then we STILL have to pay tolls to use them. Great improvement. How do people outside municipal or county land have paved roads and/or driveways? Simple. They pay to have them paved. There is NOTHING that our government does that could not be privatized. Not that everything necessarily SHOULD be, but it all COULD be. Then, we might actually have some sort of legal recourse in cases of abuse. It might be tough, but you can fight a company in court and win, at least in theory. You can't even bring suit against the government in many cases, and even if you do, you are asking an employee of the government to be fair in mediating a dispute between you and his/her employer. Yeah, that sounds like it will go well.
Finally, private enterprise is responsible for all the products and services which make up our GDP. What does the government actually produce besides debt?

" The designs are based on the work of Albert Michelson, co-proponent of luminiferous aether theory, from the 1890s."

It's worth reminding people that, whatever his original views of luminiferous aether, Michelson was one of the great experimentalists of the 19th century and his name is most firmly associated with the experiment that's widely credited with experimentaly destroying the credibility of aether theories.

(It's still possible to come up with aether theories even with the Michelson-Morley results (and the results of hundreds of other people who replicated and refined that result), but it's much more difficult, and the resulting theories end up rather hard to credit.) I assume that the original use of the word "proponent" was a typo).

Whoever modded that comment as "troll" should wake up and look around. I was assigned a book in an undergrad history class in the late 1970s, it's a good read and I still have the thing, reread it a couple of months ago.

The link is to the text of the book. Economic similarities between now and the US shortly before the great depression are scary. From "XII.THE BIG BULL MARKET"

The speculative fever had been intensified by the action of the Federal Reserve System in lowering the rediscount rate from 4 per cent to 3'/2 per cent in August, 1927, and purchasing Government securities in the open market. This action had been taken from the most laudable motives: several of the European nations were having difficulty in stabilizing their currencies, European exchanges were weak, and it seemed to the Reserve authorities that the easing of American money rates might prevent the further accumulation of gold in the United States and thus aid in the recovery of Europe and benefit foreign trade. Furthermore, American business was beginning to lose headway; the lowering of money rates might stimulate it. But the lowering of money rates also stimulated the stock market. The bull party in Wall Street had been still further encouraged by the remarkable solicitude of President Coolidge and Secretary Mellon, who whenever confidence showed signs of waning came out with opportunely reassuring statements which at once sent prices upward again. In January 1928, the President had actually taken the altogether unprecedented step of publicly stating that he did not consider brokers' loans too high, thus apparently giving White House sponsorship to the very inflation which was worrying the sober minds of the financial community.

From "HOME, SWEET FLORIDA"

By 1927, according to Homer B. Vanderblue, most of the elaborate real-estate offices on Flagler Street in Miami were either closed or practically empty; the Davis Islands project, "bankrupt and unfinished," had been taken over by a syndicate organized by Stone & Webster; and many Florida cities, including Miami, were having difficulty collecting their taxes. By 1928 Henry S. Villard, writing in The Nation, thus described the approach to Miami by road: "Dead subdivisions line the highway, their pompous names half-obliterated on crumbling stucco gates. Lonely white-way lights stand guard over miles of cement side- walks, where grass and palmetto take the place of homes that were to be .... Whole sections of outlying subdivisions are composed of unoccupied houses, past which one speeds on broad thoroughfares as if traversing a city in the grip of death." In 1928 there were thirty-one bank failures in Florida; in 1929 there were fifty-seven; in both of these years the liabilities of the failed banks reached greater totals than were recorded for any other state in the Union. The Mediterranean fruitfly added to the gravity of the local economic situation in 1929 by ravaging the citrus crop. Bank clearings for Miami, which had climbed sensation- ally to over a billion dollars in 1925, marched sadly downhill again:

The Big Red Scare sounds a lot like today's "war on terror". Alcohol prohibition reads like today's "war on (some) drugs".

This book was first published in 1931. Read it and be afraid! Who was it that said "those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it?"

Whoever modded that comment as "troll" should wake up and look around. I was assigned a book in an undergrad history class in the late 1970s, it's a good read and I still have the thing, reread it a couple of months ago.

The link is to the text of the book. Economic similarities between now and the US shortly before the great depression are scary. From "XII.THE BIG BULL MARKET"

The speculative fever had been intensified by the action of the Federal Reserve System in lowering the rediscount rate from 4 per cent to 3'/2 per cent in August, 1927, and purchasing Government securities in the open market. This action had been taken from the most laudable motives: several of the European nations were having difficulty in stabilizing their currencies, European exchanges were weak, and it seemed to the Reserve authorities that the easing of American money rates might prevent the further accumulation of gold in the United States and thus aid in the recovery of Europe and benefit foreign trade. Furthermore, American business was beginning to lose headway; the lowering of money rates might stimulate it. But the lowering of money rates also stimulated the stock market. The bull party in Wall Street had been still further encouraged by the remarkable solicitude of President Coolidge and Secretary Mellon, who whenever confidence showed signs of waning came out with opportunely reassuring statements which at once sent prices upward again. In January 1928, the President had actually taken the altogether unprecedented step of publicly stating that he did not consider brokers' loans too high, thus apparently giving White House sponsorship to the very inflation which was worrying the sober minds of the financial community.

From "HOME, SWEET FLORIDA"

By 1927, according to Homer B. Vanderblue, most of the elaborate real-estate offices on Flagler Street in Miami were either closed or practically empty; the Davis Islands project, "bankrupt and unfinished," had been taken over by a syndicate organized by Stone & Webster; and many Florida cities, including Miami, were having difficulty collecting their taxes. By 1928 Henry S. Villard, writing in The Nation, thus described the approach to Miami by road: "Dead subdivisions line the highway, their pompous names half-obliterated on crumbling stucco gates. Lonely white-way lights stand guard over miles of cement side- walks, where grass and palmetto take the place of homes that were to be .... Whole sections of outlying subdivisions are composed of unoccupied houses, past which one speeds on broad thoroughfares as if traversing a city in the grip of death." In 1928 there were thirty-one bank failures in Florida; in 1929 there were fifty-seven; in both of these years the liabilities of the failed banks reached greater totals than were recorded for any other state in the Union. The Mediterranean fruitfly added to the gravity of the local economic situation in 1929 by ravaging the citrus crop. Bank clearings for Miami, which had climbed sensation- ally to over a billion dollars in 1925, marched sadly downhill again:

The Big Red Scare sounds a lot like today's "war on terror". Alcohol prohibition reads like today's "war on (some) drugs".

This book was first published in 1931. Read it and be afraid! Who was it that said "those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it?"

Whoever modded that comment as "troll" should wake up and look around. I was assigned a book in an undergrad history class in the late 1970s, it's a good read and I still have the thing, reread it a couple of months ago.

The link is to the text of the book. Economic similarities between now and the US shortly before the great depression are scary. From "XII.THE BIG BULL MARKET"

The speculative fever had been intensified by the action of the Federal Reserve System in lowering the rediscount rate from 4 per cent to 3'/2 per cent in August, 1927, and purchasing Government securities in the open market. This action had been taken from the most laudable motives: several of the European nations were having difficulty in stabilizing their currencies, European exchanges were weak, and it seemed to the Reserve authorities that the easing of American money rates might prevent the further accumulation of gold in the United States and thus aid in the recovery of Europe and benefit foreign trade. Furthermore, American business was beginning to lose headway; the lowering of money rates might stimulate it. But the lowering of money rates also stimulated the stock market. The bull party in Wall Street had been still further encouraged by the remarkable solicitude of President Coolidge and Secretary Mellon, who whenever confidence showed signs of waning came out with opportunely reassuring statements which at once sent prices upward again. In January 1928, the President had actually taken the altogether unprecedented step of publicly stating that he did not consider brokers' loans too high, thus apparently giving White House sponsorship to the very inflation which was worrying the sober minds of the financial community.

From "HOME, SWEET FLORIDA"

By 1927, according to Homer B. Vanderblue, most of the elaborate real-estate offices on Flagler Street in Miami were either closed or practically empty; the Davis Islands project, "bankrupt and unfinished," had been taken over by a syndicate organized by Stone & Webster; and many Florida cities, including Miami, were having difficulty collecting their taxes. By 1928 Henry S. Villard, writing in The Nation, thus described the approach to Miami by road: "Dead subdivisions line the highway, their pompous names half-obliterated on crumbling stucco gates. Lonely white-way lights stand guard over miles of cement side- walks, where grass and palmetto take the place of homes that were to be .... Whole sections of outlying subdivisions are composed of unoccupied houses, past which one speeds on broad thoroughfares as if traversing a city in the grip of death." In 1928 there were thirty-one bank failures in Florida; in 1929 there were fifty-seven; in both of these years the liabilities of the failed banks reached greater totals than were recorded for any other state in the Union. The Mediterranean fruitfly added to the gravity of the local economic situation in 1929 by ravaging the citrus crop. Bank clearings for Miami, which had climbed sensation- ally to over a billion dollars in 1925, marched sadly downhill again:

The Big Red Scare sounds a lot like today's "war on terror". Alcohol prohibition reads like today's "war on (some) drugs".

This book was first published in 1931. Read it and be afraid! Who was it that said "those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it?"

Whoever modded that comment as "troll" should wake up and look around. I was assigned a book in an undergrad history class in the late 1970s, it's a good read and I still have the thing, reread it a couple of months ago.

The link is to the text of the book. Economic similarities between now and the US shortly before the great depression are scary. From "XII.THE BIG BULL MARKET"

The speculative fever had been intensified by the action of the Federal Reserve System in lowering the rediscount rate from 4 per cent to 3'/2 per cent in August, 1927, and purchasing Government securities in the open market. This action had been taken from the most laudable motives: several of the European nations were having difficulty in stabilizing their currencies, European exchanges were weak, and it seemed to the Reserve authorities that the easing of American money rates might prevent the further accumulation of gold in the United States and thus aid in the recovery of Europe and benefit foreign trade. Furthermore, American business was beginning to lose headway; the lowering of money rates might stimulate it. But the lowering of money rates also stimulated the stock market. The bull party in Wall Street had been still further encouraged by the remarkable solicitude of President Coolidge and Secretary Mellon, who whenever confidence showed signs of waning came out with opportunely reassuring statements which at once sent prices upward again. In January 1928, the President had actually taken the altogether unprecedented step of publicly stating that he did not consider brokers' loans too high, thus apparently giving White House sponsorship to the very inflation which was worrying the sober minds of the financial community.

From "HOME, SWEET FLORIDA"

By 1927, according to Homer B. Vanderblue, most of the elaborate real-estate offices on Flagler Street in Miami were either closed or practically empty; the Davis Islands project, "bankrupt and unfinished," had been taken over by a syndicate organized by Stone & Webster; and many Florida cities, including Miami, were having difficulty collecting their taxes. By 1928 Henry S. Villard, writing in The Nation, thus described the approach to Miami by road: "Dead subdivisions line the highway, their pompous names half-obliterated on crumbling stucco gates. Lonely white-way lights stand guard over miles of cement side- walks, where grass and palmetto take the place of homes that were to be .... Whole sections of outlying subdivisions are composed of unoccupied houses, past which one speeds on broad thoroughfares as if traversing a city in the grip of death." In 1928 there were thirty-one bank failures in Florida; in 1929 there were fifty-seven; in both of these years the liabilities of the failed banks reached greater totals than were recorded for any other state in the Union. The Mediterranean fruitfly added to the gravity of the local economic situation in 1929 by ravaging the citrus crop. Bank clearings for Miami, which had climbed sensation- ally to over a billion dollars in 1925, marched sadly downhill again:

The Big Red Scare sounds a lot like today's "war on terror". Alcohol prohibition reads like today's "war on (some) drugs".

This book was first published in 1931. Read it and be afraid! Who was it that said "those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it?"

Whoever modded that comment as "troll" should wake up and look around. I was assigned a book in an undergrad history class in the late 1970s, it's a good read and I still have the thing, reread it a couple of months ago.

The link is to the text of the book. Economic similarities between now and the US shortly before the great depression are scary. From "XII.THE BIG BULL MARKET"

The speculative fever had been intensified by the action of the Federal Reserve System in lowering the rediscount rate from 4 per cent to 3'/2 per cent in August, 1927, and purchasing Government securities in the open market. This action had been taken from the most laudable motives: several of the European nations were having difficulty in stabilizing their currencies, European exchanges were weak, and it seemed to the Reserve authorities that the easing of American money rates might prevent the further accumulation of gold in the United States and thus aid in the recovery of Europe and benefit foreign trade. Furthermore, American business was beginning to lose headway; the lowering of money rates might stimulate it. But the lowering of money rates also stimulated the stock market. The bull party in Wall Street had been still further encouraged by the remarkable solicitude of President Coolidge and Secretary Mellon, who whenever confidence showed signs of waning came out with opportunely reassuring statements which at once sent prices upward again. In January 1928, the President had actually taken the altogether unprecedented step of publicly stating that he did not consider brokers' loans too high, thus apparently giving White House sponsorship to the very inflation which was worrying the sober minds of the financial community.

From "HOME, SWEET FLORIDA"

By 1927, according to Homer B. Vanderblue, most of the elaborate real-estate offices on Flagler Street in Miami were either closed or practically empty; the Davis Islands project, "bankrupt and unfinished," had been taken over by a syndicate organized by Stone & Webster; and many Florida cities, including Miami, were having difficulty collecting their taxes. By 1928 Henry S. Villard, writing in The Nation, thus described the approach to Miami by road: "Dead subdivisions line the highway, their pompous names half-obliterated on crumbling stucco gates. Lonely white-way lights stand guard over miles of cement side- walks, where grass and palmetto take the place of homes that were to be .... Whole sections of outlying subdivisions are composed of unoccupied houses, past which one speeds on broad thoroughfares as if traversing a city in the grip of death." In 1928 there were thirty-one bank failures in Florida; in 1929 there were fifty-seven; in both of these years the liabilities of the failed banks reached greater totals than were recorded for any other state in the Union. The Mediterranean fruitfly added to the gravity of the local economic situation in 1929 by ravaging the citrus crop. Bank clearings for Miami, which had climbed sensation- ally to over a billion dollars in 1925, marched sadly downhill again:

The Big Red Scare sounds a lot like today's "war on terror". Alcohol prohibition reads like today's "war on (some) drugs".

This book was first published in 1931. Read it and be afraid! Who was it that said "those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it?"

I'll always admire T.S. Elliot for saying, "I'd have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have time."

This is the first time that I have seen this quote attributed to T. S. Elliot. Usually I see it attributed to Mark Twain, who did in fact use it. However, it comes from before him. It has been attributed to Samuel Johnson as well, but it is not his either. Instead, it comes from Blaise Pascal's "Lettres Provinciales", Letter XVI in 1657:

Mes Reverends Peres, mes lettres n'avaient pas accoutume de se suivre de si pres, ni d'etre si etendues. Le peu de temps que j'ai eu a ete cause de l'un et de l'autre. Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Provinciales_-_Seizi%C3%A8me_lettre_aux_r%C3%A9v%C3%A9rends_p%C3%A8res_j%C3%A9suites

My Reverend Fathers, my letters are not accustomed to follow so closely, nor to be so extensive. The limited time that I had was because of one thing and another. I made it longer because I have not had the opportunity to make it shorter.

Please forgive my poor translation.

http://www.samueljohnson.com/apocryph.html

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/454-why-most-copywriting-on-the-web-sucks

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TimeToMakeItShort

http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v05/0444.html

Obviously he didn't invest that $100k in Enron

This was some time in the early 1980s, Enron didn't exixt. However, if you had bought Enron early and fled before it crumbled you would have made a killing. That's the way of riches; you have to have it to get it. The insiders got rich while California had brownouts and small investors and employees lost everything.

If you want to be scared shitless, read Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s by Frederick Lewis Allen. It was required reading in a required undergrad history class I took in the late 1970s, the University of Virginia has placed the entire text online (darn, back in the old days we had to BUY books!)

The 1920s had many eerie similarities to now, especially finance. Their ultra-rich were as sociopathis as today's. We mey be heading for another depression.

The "founding fathers" were not for "small government"

"Jefferson attempted to eliminate the national debt because of his wish for small government. He also decreased the size of the military" ""While smaller governments are better adapted to the ordinary objects of society, larger confederations more effectually secure independence and the preservation of republican government." --Thomas Jefferson to the Rhode Island Assembly, 1801. ME 10:262. "Compare Alexander Hamilton's views of national government with those of Thomas Jefferson.?" "A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government." - Thomas Jefferson. Also on that page a quote from James Madison, "The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse." Now notice I did not say all of the Founding Fathers wanted small government, Alexander Hamilton was one of them that wanted a strong and powerful federal government.

those we traditionally call the founding fathers were almost all Federalists

Both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison repudiated the Federalists positions. Thomas Paine wrote many books and essays in support of small government, his "Common Sense", yes I have and read it along with other writings of his, was a cry for small government.

The idea that the Federalists were for "small government" shows a laughable ignorance of the early history of the Republic

Can you show me where I said the Federalists were for small government, or where I said all of the Founding Fathers were federalists? Perhaps you don't know your history, or are you blowing smoke out of your ass?

Falcon

Oh, and while Thomas Paine wasn't a Founding Father like Hamilton, Jefferson, and Washington he wrote the line "These are the times that try men's souls" in "The Crisis" while serving under General Washington's command. It served to help keep the Continental Army from disintegrating.

Ok, heading for ruin. I hope I'm wrong, but there's a book that was required reading in an undergraduate sociology class I had to take in the late '70s; it's Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen; the link it to the full text of the book (I have it in paperback, it's still on my bookshelf). The similarities to the Bush administration and the Coolige administrations are almost as scary as the similarities between the stock market and housing markets then and now.

I sincerely hope I'm wrong.

About the tyranny of backward compatibility? Think how much further we might be in capability without that albatross slowing innovation.

No "it was necessary" arguments please. I'm not panning reverse compatibility, merely lamenting the unfortunate stagnating side effect it has had.

Actually, yes they do.
Just like people die of smoking - the smoking doesn't kill them, but the effects of smoking do.

We could look at the dangerous effects of jet lag here...
And we can look at a bit of an unconfirmed urban legend here(but also not disproven, I just can't find an original article)...

And we can see the long term effects of jetlag (Thanks to mice... Surprisingly... NOT) here...

Well, if you assume that the Earth moves through such a medium as it orbits the Sun, you can look for that, as you can tell there's a medium when you move relative to it - which was the Michelson-Morley experiment.

This sort of thing has been going on for some time.

Here goes some useful links to electronics resources in the web:

Mag Lab Education - Electricity and Magnetism: A to Z

Make Magazine - all about hobbyst stuff - try searching here for "multimeter", or "soldering", or "PCB"...

Microelectronics Videos - very good videos about microelectronics and fiber optics

UVA Virtual Lab - Amazing multimedia resources covering many aspects of electricity and magnetism

ePanorama - practical projects, texts, tutorials, and many more...

MIT OpenCourseWare - if you want to go really deep in theory...

anyone wants to complete this list???

"now even more computers are controlling these things, like windows desktops, but they are interfacing with the old control system usually"

The problem isn't with the 'old control system' but with the 'computers', the one that was/is designed with Internet security in mind, that is precicly where the problem lies, as the main article so succinctly demonstrates. Where they had full effective control of the system within minutes.

"Maintaining an air gap and keeping the computers off the internet is a nice thought, but its just not going to stay isolated"

The main reason they *still* use the Interent to relay SCADA traffic is, that it is cheap. It is possible to connect to the Internet and have security, an embedded OS running on a private VPN is once way. That way you wouldn't have to worry when some 'virus' comes knocking on some port.

It's mind boggling that they *still* have Windows/SCADA units directly connected to the Internet. Considering the scare in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the blackout I previously mentioned. Has time stood still in the last eight years?

"What if the attackers were able to compromise systems monitoring the water supply for Manhattan?"

And think of all the great literary works that were written on paper, they are still readable today.

Really? Let's see just how readable the english language is a few versions back: Middle English or how about Old English Those texts aren't readable. But we still know what they say because they have been translated into the modern English, just like someone needs to translate some PowerPoint presentations from several versions ago into the modern usage.

Face it, formats and applications evolve over time and expecting every evolution to be backwards compatible for more than one generation is foolish, of course having a new generation of OS every three years might also be a foolish. But if the new generations of OS are in fact justified, then by those very same reasons so are the OS bound evolutions of applications.

...because the crack was already done a few months ago - I think the referred article only just picked it up

I'm in Taiwan at the moment.

Taiwan has just had an election and Chen Shui Bian who was basically in favour of formal independence (which would cause China to attack) has been replaced with Ma Ying Jeou who's policy is "no independence, no unification and no war" and trying to increase economic ties with China and possibly sign some sort of peace treaty. The US strongly supports this since they don't want a war between large but totalitarian China and small but democratic Taiwan which they might get dragged into. Taiwan elects its own leaders, has its own army and so on anyway, and is a rich free country, quite unlike China. Formal independence wouldn't actually do any good, but it might do a lot of bad by triggering a full on war.

No I've no idea what the story behind all this, but I guess the US and/or Taiwan have decided to disclose this rather than risk China finding out about it later. Taiwan having nuclear weapons is one of the things that would cause the China to attack. Since China is in scheming mode rather than bullying mode because of the Taiwanese election result, maybe now is as good a time to make the announcement as any.

Even when the US still had diplomatic relations with Taiwan instead of China, they forced Taiwan to dismantle some nuclear facilities to reduce the risk that they provoke a war with China. Despite the change in diplomatic recognition, which was forced on them by a vote in the UN General Assembly, the US still views Taiwan as a protege and would defend them if China attacked, unless they provoked that attack by declaring formal independence.

Absolutely - the Anglo-Saxons had a lot to say about the dating of Easter. See http://faculty.virginia.edu/OldEnglish/aelfric/detemp.html for an original text on the subject if you're wildly interested. Melvyn Bragg's novel "Credo" dramatises the Synod of Whitby and gives a sense of exactly how serious an issue this was for people. Since Easter is the major Christian feast, it was a matter of orthodoxy to date it correctly. Interesting to think that being bad at math could make you a heretic!

Come off it. The Chinese army certainly raped Tibetan civilians in '59. Just like every other occupying force in the history of warfare. That is what happens when a government dehumanizes the enemy so their soldiers don't realize that they are killing their fellow man and go stark raving mad during combat.

It happened with the U.S. in Viet Nam and in Iraq.

It happened with the British in Dol Dol.

It happened with the Japaneses in China

I could keep going but it's just more of the same. If you still don't believe the Chinese army is capable of blatant human rights violations because these articles are just words, how about a video? WARNING THE PRECEDING LINK IS HARD TO WATCH!

WE went tiptoeing along a path amongst the trees back towards the end of the widow's garden, stooping down so as the branches wouldn't scrape our heads. When we was passing by the kitchen I fell over a root and made a noise. We scrouched down and laid still. Miss Watson's big nigger, named Jim, was setting in the kitchen door; we could see him pretty clear, because there was a light behind him. He got up and stretched his neck out about a minute, listening. Then he says:

      "Who dah?"

      He listened some more; then he come tiptoeing down and stood right between us; we could a touched him, nearly. Well, likely it was minutes and minutes that there warn't a sound, and we all there so close together. There was a place on my ankle that got to itching, but I dasn't scratch it; and then my ear begun to itch; and next my back, right between my shoulders. Seemed like I'd die if I couldn't scratch. Well, I've noticed that thing plenty times since. If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain't sleepy -- if you are anywheres where it won't do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places. Pretty soon Jim says:

      "Say, who is you? Whar is you? Dog my cats ef I didn' hear sumf'n. Well, I know what I's gwyne to do: I's gwyne to set down here and listen tell I hears it agin."

      So he set down on the ground betwixt me and Tom. He leaned his back up against a tree, and stretched his legs out till one of them most touched one of mine. My nose begun to itch. It itched till the tears come into my eyes. But I dasn't scratch. Then it begun to itch on the inside. Next I got to itching underneath. I didn't know how I was going to set still. This miserableness went on as much as six or seven minutes; but it seemed a sight longer than that. I was itching in eleven different places now. I reckoned I couldn't stand it more'n a minute longer, but I set my teeth hard and got ready to try. Just then Jim begun to breathe heavy; next he begun to snore -- and then I was pretty soon comfortable again.

      Tom he made a sign to me -- kind of a little noise with his mouth -- and we went creeping away on our hands and knees. When we was ten foot off Tom whispered to me, and wanted to tie Jim to the tree for fun. But I said no; he might wake and make a disturbance, and then they'd find out I warn't in. Then Tom said he hadn't got candles enough, and he would slip in the kitchen and get some more. I didn't want him to try. I said Jim might wake up and come. But Tom wanted to resk it; so we slid in there and got three candles, and Tom laid five cents on the table for pay. Then we got out, and I was in a sweat to get away; but nothing would do Tom but he must crawl to where Jim was, on his hands and knees, and play something on him. I waited, and it seemed a good while, everything was so still and lonesome.

Thomas Jefferson invented his own gravity powered clock for use in his home. It is build around the front door and uses American Revolution cannonballs for weights. If you tour Monticello you will see it.

The chemicals that the blue mountains emit may be "hydrocarbons", but that does not mean they are greenhouse gases. In fact, environmental scientists are studying these regions to protect and try to REPRODUCE the effect they have.

Forgive me for being light on details about WHY these chemicals are good for the environment, but this is not my area. I simply recall this from a talk by Jose Fuentes at the University of Virginia, who is studying Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, which are similar to Sydney's Blue Mountains.

More details can probably be found here:
http://people.virginia.edu/~jf6s/

Here is a bunch of links about Computer Ethics from when I was researching about it. The google video link (last one on this list) is particularly interesting. Computer ethics is actually a university research topic! http://www.brook.edu/its/cei/cei_hp.htm http://ethics.csc.ncsu.edu/ http://www.southernct.edu/organizations/rccs/resources/teaching/teaching_mono/moor/moor_definition.html http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-computer/ http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/ProfessionalEthics.html http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hackers.html http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=4279094 http://cyberethics.cbi.msstate.edu/ http://www.oekonux.org/texts/copykillsmusic.html http://www.progilibre.com/Open-Source-Alternative-ou-fausse-route-_a350.html http://www.osalt.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License http://creativecommons.org/ http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html http://www.itc.virginia.edu/policy/ethics.html http://www.brook.edu/its/cei/overview/Ten_Commanments_of_Computer_Ethics.htm http://www.acm.org/serving/se/code.htm http://www.ieee.org/portal/site http://video.google.fr/videoplay?docid=-3088012854941915784&q=computer+ethics

is a project at the University of Virginia that tries to do exactly what you describe: take unused storage on a bunch of machines and turn it into a file system. http://vcgr.cs.virginia.edu/storage_at_desk/index.html

Last time I checked, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin didn't spend 12 years doing time in a modern American public school. In fact, the public schools in which you and I did time didn't exist until the late 19th century. They were created in imitation of Prussia's system, which was meant for one purpose: to create a uniform citizenry that would obey the government.

Interesting you mention Thomas Jefferson.

No, you don't, unless you want the family next door to have a say in your life when you do something they deem objectionable.

We're not talking about something that's merely "objectionable." Stupid people invariably end up poor, and a good number of poor people end up as criminals. Also, what Jefferson had to say about public education, specifically that an uneducated person cannot hope to guard their own liberty. Given how stupid many Americans are today and what our government is up to, I have to think he was on to something.

As for paying for other kids' education: I don't think you should have to do that. I don't think I should have to do it either. Your kids are your problem; nobody else should be taxed to subsidize your inability to use contraceptives.

I agree with that; I don't really want as much say, other than you kids should be educated. Beyond that, I don't care. But that's not what we have today.

Yes, I want to get rid of that shit. As long as nobody can prove that you're harming them or damaging their property, nobody should have a say in how you live your life or what you do with your property.

I tend to agree with that, except that stupid people are harming my freedom, because they are stupid. Most reasonable, intelligent people don't support the knee-jerk reactions to 9/11. But look at who does..

You shouldn't even have to pay taxes; the money you earn is yours by right

Mostly agree, but how do you think we should build roads, a communications infrastructor, etc? Those things DO benefit the public good, its been proven already, so I feel for those limited projects taxes are necessary. Also, we do need to be able to raise an army, and we need money to pay judges and court clerks for example.. so unless you have another fair way of funding things like that, I think we have to live with some taxes.

It's hard to understand that I don't want to get modded down for being "Off-topic"?

Well all of the things we are talking about are wrapped in political debate, and Ron Paul talks about going back to the Constitution.. I fail to see how debating public policy (politics) on a political thread would be modded off-topic.

Clearing a 12.5 ft barrier at 33 ft away just didn't feel intuitively possible, so I found a projectile physics toy to test it:

Projectile Motion

In SI, the values are 12 m/s at an angle of 55 degrees with a mass of 160 kg, clearing a 3.8 m barrier at 10 m away.

I had some recollection that 45 degrees was the optimum launch angle, but apparently that maximizes distance, not height. Mass doesn't factor into the calculations unless you include air resistance, which the paper neglects.

The surprisingly sensitive factor is launch velocity. Lose 1 m/s and you smack into the middle of the wall. Gain 1 m/s and clear a 16 ft barrier, landing 52 ft away. It still seems phenomenal to actually get a tiger's horizontal velocity redirected at 55 degrees.