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To convince anyone that the page she discusses has something to do with Leonardo's astrological chart, it seems to me she also needs to explain this: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl/oneITEM.asp?pid=2002046&iid=1006202&srchtype=ITEM . It's another page with the same animal in the center, the same word under it (complete with what Sherwood interprets as an inserted "r" above the word), fifteen tub ladies (dressed this time), all holding stars in their outstretched hands instead of on "strings." No babies in sight that I can see.

Is the Voynich Manuscript in its entirety available for public review?

http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/SetsSearchExecXC.asp?srchtype=ITEM

Interesting that a historically rather serious recession can only cause a small decrease.

That's because recessions are not economically efficient ways to lower carbon emissions. They don't address the energy sector specifically, they don't specifically target low-emissions technology development or efficiency measures, etc. They just indiscriminately suppress economic activity, and obviously have effects far beyond the carbon-related sector.

For more on the economics of climate policy, see here and here.

It seems like cutting CO2 back to the levels needed to stop global warming would require or cause a much more serious recession.

That's probably true, which is why nobody is proposing to cut CO2 levels to stop global warming. Or at least, not stop it at current temperatures. Most want to stabilize it at 2 C above pre-industrial. That will still have serious costs (as would unstabilized climate change), but if appropriately designed to specifically promote low-carbon activity, it's not going to create a severe recession; see the above links.

CO2 emissions mitigation policies cost money (as does climate change itself), but they're not going to destroy the economy or "roll back the industrial revolution". Sheesh . That's the skeptic scare version of "global warming alarmism". FUID against climate policy is at least as bad, if not worse, than FUD against climate science. More here on the economics of climate policy, and a good book.

Expanding rounds are forbidden from being used in war by the Hague Convention of 1899. Full metal jacket rounds may be better at penatrating armor, but the real reason they are used is because using expanding ammunition (in war) is a war crime.

[the relevant section of the treaty]

First, the American military uses 3d "game" software for tactical training. Ergo, a good game is a training tool.

Second, real life terrorist organizations have used counter-strike as a training tool. http://lawmeme.research.yale.edu/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=985

There are three on this list that may or may not meet your criteria.

Funny that you mention Somalia. The rise of Somali piracy is said to be a response to the dumping of toxic waste and overfishing in Somali territorial waters by foreigners and multinationals. The problem with any anarchic community is that its property is considered forfeit by sovereign countries. The threat to these and libertarian communities (such as the seasteading movement) will come from those who refuse to recognize their sovereignty.

somebody did come up with a way to do faster database transactions than Oracle and DB2 and they're not not keeping it a secret.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Recent_Sea_Level_Rise.png Right, don't let facts distract you... Although one has to admit that most of this rise is, as far as I remember, due to the thermal extension of water. Or studies by institutes like yale, known for their low level of scientific understanding: http://e360.yale.edu/content/digest.msp?id=2035 Keep the sarcasm

I looked into the effect of persistent current a bit and it turns out that someone has figured out how to use it as a photonic memory. Check out the Wikipedia article on Ahranov-Bohm nano-rings.

The Harris Lab website has a number of papers on the persistent current effect. The Ahranov-Bohm effect is one of the weirdest observed effects in physics so reading about the persistent current effect that arises from it is (arguably) a fun read.

Wait. What? You got fed up with anti-consumer tactics and you bought a Lexmark? A Lexmark??

Lets assume you are correct. Who's to say a warmer earth is bad?

On the whole, a warmer earth may be better for humans than an earth colder by an equivalent amount. However, the problem is that global temperatures have been relatively stable for the last 10,000 years, and human civilization has adapted to that temperature range. Move too far out of it in either direction, too quickly, and there will be costs. People can't just easily shift their agricultural production or settlement patterns into neighboring countries.

It wasn't long ago we were told we were heading in to a new ice age.

Not really.

Climate cycles actually suggest we are (were) heading down that path. Wouldn't we WANT to warm the earth?

Over tens of thousands of years, we might head into another ice age. If you're so concerned about that, you should argue that we should save our fossil fuels for later, when we'll need them, instead of using them all up now, when we don't.

Ice age aside, wouldn't an increased crop growth durations help battle famine?

Depends on where you are. In the mid-latitudes, you tend to get small benefits for 1-2 degrees C warming. The tropics suffer. For more than 3 C of warming, everybody tends to suffer. On top of that, you have to account for the fact that precipitation patterns change, and many agricultural regions may suffer drought.

Lets study the impact

Uh, yeah, people have studied impacts.

rather than demand we do stuff that will destroy not just the developed worlds economy, but potentially starve millions when the industrial world can no longer afford to produce food and medicine on the current scale.

Nobody is interested in "destroying the economy". That's the conservative alarmist version of "the planet will burn up". Just ask economists, e.g. here.

the word itself discounts your theory. Nazi means national socialist party and socialism is almost entirely based on Marx' works which clearly describe many bad things that you must do to become socialist.(the Nazis discriminated/culled by race instead of class which is what labeled them as not true socialists but the soviet union was very very close and maybe the only true Marxist government, and it was evil. the soviets killed more Ukrainians than the Nazis did Jews!)

Uhhh... what.

First of all, I'd love to hear exactly where Marx's works "clearly describe many bad things that you must do to become socialist." I'm pretty sure that killing people is no where in the Communist Manifesto or any of his other works. If that's not the case, then I invite you to provide a citation -- not some other loony's rantings but to actual documents written by Karl Marx.

Though, I seriously doubt you've ever read any of his work -- or even a good summary of his work -- if you think that socialism as he advocated has anything to do with the racial policies of Nazi Germany. No more than Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" had to do with us torturing Arabs in Guantanimo Bay.

Socialism is about a society ruled by the working class, with all capital used in production owned by the workers who used it instead of a separate investor class. It has egalitarian distribution of resources as a goal. That's it. That's socialism in it's entirety. (Communism in contrast had the goal of a classless society through state ownership of property.) Read up on it.

Also, the Nazis were a fascist party which won votes as an alternative to the democratic and communistic parties taking hold in the Weimar Republic. If you knew anything about the Nazis other than their name, you'd know that they accused both laissez-faire capitalism and communism of both being failed ideologies. The Nazis explicitly sought to preserve the middle class instead of to purely side with the poorer working class. It was a nationalist party first, and "socialist" party purely as a matter of propoganda to sell it to the public.

If you really think the Nazis were socialist, you need to read up on the 1934 Charter of Labor. It set up a system in which the entrepreneur made all the decisions for a company, and the workers owed him a duty of faithfulness. (Companies did have advisory boards where workers could advise the owner of a factory, and the state could outright replace them, so it's not a particularly free-market system either.)

As for the Holodomor in Ukraine, well, not much to say there. That was what happens when people put ideology above common sense and human decency. China's Great Leap Forward was another fine example of that. Our own history on slavery, child labor, and murderous strike breaking shows examples where putting capitalism over human decency led to horrors as well, so I'm not sure exactly why we should consider one philosophy more or less dangerous than the other. Anyway, I think I've wasted too much time recapping world history and to a crazy, grossly ignorant AC, but...

Oh, and the heart monitors in many school districts have a USB port and can be uploaded to a program on the teachers desktop to monitor a child's progress. take just one more step and have that data put in the students transcript and this isn't such a far fetched concern.

Except they'd then have to comply with HIPPA and all of its restraints on sharing of medical data. Oh, wait, I forgot -- government regulation is all evil or something. Whatever, let's put aside the legal liabilities involved.

Guess what? When I was a kid, our PE teacher had this radical technology called a clipboard that he used to record all our heart rates. It was just one more step to put that in paper files for each student, and I guess that makes it not a

if you are interested, Yale (who currently owns the manuscript I believe) has high res images, and more information: Here Hey, it is a very poorly laid out website, but it is Yale not Wiki, so there is that :P

You can find the lab site here with several papers freely available in pre-publication form on arxiv from the researchers. I'm trying to find the "basic algorithms" the article alludes to that these rudimentary processors can perform. I thought only a handful were applicable (Shor's algorithm) to quantum computing. Anyone know?

You can find the lab site here with several papers freely available in pre-publication form on arxiv from the researchers. I'm trying to find the "basic algorithms" the article alludes to that these rudimentary processors can perform. I thought only a handful were applicable (Shor's algorithm) to quantum computing. Anyone know?

I don't understand your link between FDR and Jackson.

Jackson basically told the Supreme Court to get lost whereas FDR packed the court with those who would let him do what he wanted. That should be pretty easy to understand.

The treaty was signed and ratified in 1835 during Jackson's term, but the Trail of Tears didn't happen until 1838, after Jackson left office.

The Cherokee was sent on the Trail of Tears in 1838, but the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, and Seminole were sent away before them. The Choctaw was forcibly removed in 1831, the Seminoles in 1832, the Creek in 1834, and the Chickasaw in 1837. Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, so he was president during the removal of all these tribes except the Cherokee. I'm not sure about the others but when the Cherokee was forced the move the US broke a treaty with them. Okay, when the Choctaw was removed treaties were broken, and about 2500 died on their Trail of Tears. The Treaty of Indian Springs in 1825 which allowed the forcible removal of the Creek was never ratified by the Creek. And the Treaty With the Chickasaw, January 10, 1786 was broken with the forces removal of the Chickasaw.

there's little evidence in any case that Jackson's response was as harsh as you reported. What he is recorded to have said was much lighter, and basically that as the Supreme Court found Georgia's action to be unconstitutional, they could not force Georgia to comply; Jackson had no intentions of getting involved.

Okay so Jackson's remake may not of been as harsh as I made out, quotes I've read had him saying Marshall needed to get his own army, but it was bad still. And the decision was about the Cherokee removal:

"In 1831 the Supreme Court of the United States, in a decision rendered by Justice, John Marshall, declared the forced removal of the entire Cherokee Nation from their ancestral homes in the South Eastern United States to be illegal, unconstitutional and against treaties made. President Andrew Jackson, having the executive responsibility for enforcement of the laws had this to say:"
"John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can."

Jackson had no intentions of getting involved.

That's right, Andrew Jackson was pretty well known as an Indian Fighter in Tennessee, his home state.

Falcon

Washington was against political parties, and said so in his Farwell Address:

In contemplating the causes which may disturb our Union, it occurs as matter of serious concern that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations, Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western; whence designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views. One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.

. . .

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

But not everyone agreed, even back then. Washington was the first and last President to not belong to a major political party (except, kinda, John Tyler, who was thrown out of the Whig party).

When MS was convicted of violations for tying WMP to Windows, the separation between the application and underlying frameworks within the OS was not even an issue. It's about markets, not technologies.

That was a European finding, not a US one. Further, this opinion shows that things are never cut and dried. Most interestingly, they state:

The reason is, to allow competition. If Windows Media Player code automatically comes on all machines, then content providers know that they have to encode in only one format. Just so long as enough machines are out there without Windows Media Player, then content providers and Web sites will find it worth their while to dual encode. Even a relatively small number of machines that don't come with Windows Media Player will be enough to preserve competition in the market. That's why Microsoft is so concerned. - from http://www.law.yale.edu/news/2128.htm

That's about codecs, not just a player.

I think you're jumping the shark - the anticompetitive part was about compatibilities.

Actually, I would say that that has always been the real definition of democracy. The definition of democracy that most people describe is completely different out of necessity, because it's a piece of propaganda that the masses need to believe. The "bewildered herd" needs to be managed, because they're too dumb to know what's good for them. That's been a central theme of elite political theory for a very long time (see, for example, the writings of Edward Bernays, Walter Lippman, Reinhold Niebuhr). Even when the US was founded, James Madison was quite clear about what the purpose of the senate should be:

The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa, or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge of the wants or feelings of the day laborer. The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. The landed interest, at present, is prevalent; but in process of time, when we approximate to the states and kingdoms of Europe; when the number of landholders shall be comparatively small, through the various means of trade and manufactures, will not the landed interest be overbalanced in future elections, and unless wisely provided against, what will become of your government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be jsut, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05FREAK.html
http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2007/05/monkey_economics.php
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/07/monkeys-practic.html

These links all point to the story, but not to any sort of brief from the research conducted by Keith Chen
http://www.som.yale.edu/faculty/keith.chen/

Anybody know where that is?

Just because you're naive doesn't mean you're right.

I didn't say I was right. But someone's going to have to prove it to me active sonar is NEEDED!

We need sonar because people we don't implicitly trust (Iran, China, Russia, NKorea?) have submarines.

So? That doesn't prove it's needed.

They are not under our control.

Good! I don't want to control anyone and I don't believe we should act like an empire or bullies.

The fact is we have potential enemies.

And we are potential enemies to others. The US supported the invasion and overthrow of a number of other countries resulting on the death of a lot of people. After President Ford and Henry Kissinger supported Soharto's Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor 200,000 East Timerese were massacred. After they supported Gen Pinochet's overthrow of the democratically elected government in Chile tens of thousands disappeared. The US supported military in Guetmala massacred the Mayans. The US invaded Iraq supposedly to get rid of Saddam Hussein but originally the US supported him. Both Reagan and Bush Sr armed Saddam. The Shah of Iran was supported in his overthrow of another democratically elected government.

Don't try to tell me the US is some angel in shining armor.

Falcon

LOL

You think autism is a genetical disease?

AHAHAHAHAH

Why yes I do, and so does the Yale Department of Medicine. And this was just the first authoritative (i.e. non-Wikipedia) link from a simple google search on "autism heritability".

I hope you are not one of those poor souls still grasping at the straws of the vaccine myth? Quite aside from the fact that this has been repeatedly debunked by multiple groups, I have a son with AS and I can assure you that he was acting strangely before he was vaccinated and I have talked to other parents with the same experience.

As a matter of law, the health care provider typically owns the record, although as with many things it is governed by state law and so may vary.

http://www.med.yale.edu/caim/risk/handbook/rmh_medical_record2.html
http://www.medbd.ca.gov/consumer/complaint_info_questions_records.html

Personally, I think this is a point of law that needs to be changed at the federal level. But then, I also think that there should be a privacy amendment to the US constitution.

Mr. Mark Pesce
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pesce

This man elaborates on how Wikipedia has come to become a problem for Britannica because Wikipedia users are growing and are coming to having a sense of ownership in Wikipedia and start to maintain/update it themselves. Wikipedia has more URL links than Britannica which speaks tremendously about wikipedia's "social currency" as Mr. Pesce coined it. In fact it was clear that every human has a certain "social currency" value.

I suggest you to listen to his Hyperpeople audio book:
http://www.torrentreactor.net/torrents/734605/Hyperpeople:-Information-Knowledge-and-Power-in-the-21st-Century

If you prefer to read:
http://www.webearth.org/hyperpeople/hyperpeople-book.pdf

The combination of Google, Wikipedia and Britannica already do give us a good start to what Mr. Pesce calls the "Encyclopedia Humanica".
Google Translate ROCKS!!!! I look at different web links in different languages and have them translate into English regularly. It's not perfect, but it works adequately in my opinion. A good book for bringing these companies to compliment each other's services would be:
  CO-OPETITION by Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff:
http://mayet.som.yale.edu/coopetition/Foreward-to-paperback.html

Co-opetion emphasizes working "complementors." A complementor is the opposite of a competitor. It's someone who makes your products and services more, rather than less, valuable. Not surprisingly, the complementor concept is especially relevant to the builders of the Information Economy. Hardware needs software, and the internet needs high-speed phone lines. No one, alone, can, build the infrastructure for the new economy. It's a whole new system made up of many complementary parts.

Another example of a complimentary service for these three companies would have been
"Copernicus"
which eliminates the redundant links on the different result pages.
Google, Wikipedia, Britannica and Copernicus are all complimentary services sharing the same "information economy" pie. What they do in terms of co-operating with each other and their users will determine their future existence.

THE BOTTOM LINE
---------------
When I want an answer to some question, I go online. I go to the internet and I "google" the keywords. I don't "wikipediate" the keywords. I don't "Britannicanate" the keywords. I don't go to a book source. It takes too much time to flip the pages. In less than 5-10 seconds I have more information than I can handle about whatever topic I am googling.

USUALLY I'm not stupid enough to just look at the first results page of google urls because I know damn well there are people who pay to be the first hits in terms of relevancy. I have found many gems deeply hidden on the 20th and sometimes 50th page for example.

The funny thing is, just when "I Am Legend" was released, a news release came out from Yale saying that they were going to cure brain cancer using a virus.

The best part? The virus is "distantly related to rabies."

The word, or idiom, DEMOCRACY IS NOT IN: The Declaration of Independence, nor The Bill Of Rights, nor (as recalled) The Articles of Confederation. Patrick Henry boycotted the CONstitutional CONvention because he "smelled a rat". And rightly so. Therein lies the enemy. RR PS. Here are the LINKS that prove the USA is still a colony of Great Britain: 1. NOTE: ARTICLE I IS THE DEBT SCHEDULE FOR $18 MILLION FRENCH LIVRES REPAYMENT BY THE USA TO THE BRITISH CROWN (Prince George III). THAT WAS NEVER HONORED BY THE USA. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/france/fr-1782.htm SEEKING RECOGNITION FOR FREE STATE STATUS via international recognition ... http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fr-1782.asp 2. FOLLOWED BY " Preliminary Articles of Peace : November 30, 1782" THE SECOND US/UK TREATY-ish (convention for the final treaty to come): "Convention" CONFRMING the USA's Free State Status to attend the final formal Treaty table / RECOGNITION by the UK CROWN. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/britain/prel1782.htm http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/prel1782.asp 3. FINAL TREATY OF RECOGNITION RATIFIED GAINING INDEPENDENCE BY CONTRACT. The Paris Peace Treaty of September 3, 1783 http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/britain/paris.htmFULLY RECOGNIZING THE USA AS independent ... contingent upon fulfilling the previous Treaty contract(s) - which never happened. QUOTE "The Definitive Treaty of Peace" http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/paris.asp

The word, or idiom, DEMOCRACY IS NOT IN: The Declaration of Independence, nor The Bill Of Rights, nor (as recalled) The Articles of Confederation. Patrick Henry boycotted the CONstitutional CONvention because he "smelled a rat". And rightly so. Therein lies the enemy. RR PS. Here are the LINKS that prove the USA is still a colony of Great Britain: 1. NOTE: ARTICLE I IS THE DEBT SCHEDULE FOR $18 MILLION FRENCH LIVRES REPAYMENT BY THE USA TO THE BRITISH CROWN (Prince George III). THAT WAS NEVER HONORED BY THE USA. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/france/fr-1782.htm SEEKING RECOGNITION FOR FREE STATE STATUS via international recognition ... http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fr-1782.asp 2. FOLLOWED BY " Preliminary Articles of Peace : November 30, 1782" THE SECOND US/UK TREATY-ish (convention for the final treaty to come): "Convention" CONFRMING the USA's Free State Status to attend the final formal Treaty table / RECOGNITION by the UK CROWN. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/britain/prel1782.htm http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/prel1782.asp 3. FINAL TREATY OF RECOGNITION RATIFIED GAINING INDEPENDENCE BY CONTRACT. The Paris Peace Treaty of September 3, 1783 http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/britain/paris.htmFULLY RECOGNIZING THE USA AS independent ... contingent upon fulfilling the previous Treaty contract(s) - which never happened. QUOTE "The Definitive Treaty of Peace" http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/paris.asp

The word, or idiom, DEMOCRACY IS NOT IN: The Declaration of Independence, nor The Bill Of Rights, nor (as recalled) The Articles of Confederation. Patrick Henry boycotted the CONstitutional CONvention because he "smelled a rat". And rightly so. Therein lies the enemy. RR PS. Here are the LINKS that prove the USA is still a colony of Great Britain: 1. NOTE: ARTICLE I IS THE DEBT SCHEDULE FOR $18 MILLION FRENCH LIVRES REPAYMENT BY THE USA TO THE BRITISH CROWN (Prince George III). THAT WAS NEVER HONORED BY THE USA. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/france/fr-1782.htm SEEKING RECOGNITION FOR FREE STATE STATUS via international recognition ... http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fr-1782.asp 2. FOLLOWED BY " Preliminary Articles of Peace : November 30, 1782" THE SECOND US/UK TREATY-ish (convention for the final treaty to come): "Convention" CONFRMING the USA's Free State Status to attend the final formal Treaty table / RECOGNITION by the UK CROWN. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/britain/prel1782.htm http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/prel1782.asp 3. FINAL TREATY OF RECOGNITION RATIFIED GAINING INDEPENDENCE BY CONTRACT. The Paris Peace Treaty of September 3, 1783 http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/britain/paris.htmFULLY RECOGNIZING THE USA AS independent ... contingent upon fulfilling the previous Treaty contract(s) - which never happened. QUOTE "The Definitive Treaty of Peace" http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/paris.asp

The word, or idiom, DEMOCRACY IS NOT IN: The Declaration of Independence, nor The Bill Of Rights, nor (as recalled) The Articles of Confederation. Patrick Henry boycotted the CONstitutional CONvention because he "smelled a rat". And rightly so. Therein lies the enemy. RR PS. Here are the LINKS that prove the USA is still a colony of Great Britain: 1. NOTE: ARTICLE I IS THE DEBT SCHEDULE FOR $18 MILLION FRENCH LIVRES REPAYMENT BY THE USA TO THE BRITISH CROWN (Prince George III). THAT WAS NEVER HONORED BY THE USA. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/france/fr-1782.htm SEEKING RECOGNITION FOR FREE STATE STATUS via international recognition ... http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fr-1782.asp 2. FOLLOWED BY " Preliminary Articles of Peace : November 30, 1782" THE SECOND US/UK TREATY-ish (convention for the final treaty to come): "Convention" CONFRMING the USA's Free State Status to attend the final formal Treaty table / RECOGNITION by the UK CROWN. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/britain/prel1782.htm http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/prel1782.asp 3. FINAL TREATY OF RECOGNITION RATIFIED GAINING INDEPENDENCE BY CONTRACT. The Paris Peace Treaty of September 3, 1783 http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/britain/paris.htmFULLY RECOGNIZING THE USA AS independent ... contingent upon fulfilling the previous Treaty contract(s) - which never happened. QUOTE "The Definitive Treaty of Peace" http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/paris.asp

The word, or idiom, DEMOCRACY IS NOT IN: The Declaration of Independence, nor The Bill Of Rights, nor (as recalled) The Articles of Confederation. Patrick Henry boycotted the CONstitutional CONvention because he "smelled a rat". And rightly so. Therein lies the enemy. RR PS. Here are the LINKS that prove the USA is still a colony of Great Britain: 1. NOTE: ARTICLE I IS THE DEBT SCHEDULE FOR $18 MILLION FRENCH LIVRES REPAYMENT BY THE USA TO THE BRITISH CROWN (Prince George III). THAT WAS NEVER HONORED BY THE USA. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/france/fr-1782.htm SEEKING RECOGNITION FOR FREE STATE STATUS via international recognition ... http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fr-1782.asp 2. FOLLOWED BY " Preliminary Articles of Peace : November 30, 1782" THE SECOND US/UK TREATY-ish (convention for the final treaty to come): "Convention" CONFRMING the USA's Free State Status to attend the final formal Treaty table / RECOGNITION by the UK CROWN. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/britain/prel1782.htm http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/prel1782.asp 3. FINAL TREATY OF RECOGNITION RATIFIED GAINING INDEPENDENCE BY CONTRACT. The Paris Peace Treaty of September 3, 1783 http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/britain/paris.htmFULLY RECOGNIZING THE USA AS independent ... contingent upon fulfilling the previous Treaty contract(s) - which never happened. QUOTE "The Definitive Treaty of Peace" http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/paris.asp

The word, or idiom, DEMOCRACY IS NOT IN: The Declaration of Independence, nor The Bill Of Rights, nor (as recalled) The Articles of Confederation. Patrick Henry boycotted the CONstitutional CONvention because he "smelled a rat". And rightly so. Therein lies the enemy. RR PS. Here are the LINKS that prove the USA is still a colony of Great Britain: 1. NOTE: ARTICLE I IS THE DEBT SCHEDULE FOR $18 MILLION FRENCH LIVRES REPAYMENT BY THE USA TO THE BRITISH CROWN (Prince George III). THAT WAS NEVER HONORED BY THE USA. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/france/fr-1782.htm SEEKING RECOGNITION FOR FREE STATE STATUS via international recognition ... http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fr-1782.asp 2. FOLLOWED BY " Preliminary Articles of Peace : November 30, 1782" THE SECOND US/UK TREATY-ish (convention for the final treaty to come): "Convention" CONFRMING the USA's Free State Status to attend the final formal Treaty table / RECOGNITION by the UK CROWN. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/britain/prel1782.htm http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/prel1782.asp 3. FINAL TREATY OF RECOGNITION RATIFIED GAINING INDEPENDENCE BY CONTRACT. The Paris Peace Treaty of September 3, 1783 http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/britain/paris.htmFULLY RECOGNIZING THE USA AS independent ... contingent upon fulfilling the previous Treaty contract(s) - which never happened. QUOTE "The Definitive Treaty of Peace" http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/paris.asp

You are kidding right? Let me introduce you to two new words: regional variability

Check out the following paper where solar forcing is specifically looked at:
http://www.yale.edu/yibs/Solar%20Variability%20Program/2008_Yale_solar_Shindell.pdf

In it they conclude that:
"Proxies suggest solar forcing can induce strong
regional climate change"

Since you can't be bothered to even Google for information however, let me make it nice and easy for you. (Please note, this is my nice simplistic, climate-change-in-a-paragraph explanation. Since I've compressed an entire body of science into a single paragraph, there may be some glossing over of details)

The earth is a ball hanging in space, irradiated by a big glowing ball. This forms our energy input. Some of this energy is radiated back out and some is kept in - trapped. Increasing the amount of CO2 traps more of the energy in. Energy is exactly that - it shakes things around. Heat is just one expression of energy. As a result of having more energy in the system, the climate gets more variable and more "extreme" as well as hotter (averaged globally). So, we either start radiating some of this back out into space (by reducing the "greenhouse" effect i.e. reducing the atmospheric CO2), or we learn to live with increasingly erratic and hotter (globally averaged) climate.

There, better now?

I think we all could take a cue from the French, and start some of our programming classes in one of the ML families, like Caml Light, Standard ML, or my personal favorite Ocaml. These are fairly advanced languages, and support both imperative and functional features, so you can teach for loops AND recursion. Of course, you can do this with Lisp too, but honestly, the syntax of the ML families is a lot better than Lisp. Also you can do object-oriented programming with Ocaml.

In addition, Yale also taught its intro CS class in Standard ML a while back, and I understand it was a big hit.

Of course, it's the course content that matters the most, but why limit yourself? As already stated on Slashdot, FP is increasing in importance due to its ability to handle parallelism, so I think you can really have the best of both worlds with these impure functional languages.

Same thing happened to my son after his HepA just after 2yrs of age - 108 fever for about 12 hours, controlled after a trip to the ER - no seizures, fever resolved within a couple of days, normal activity levels within about 2 weeks, but afterwards he started showing signs of CDD and now he is clearly, severely autistic.

Yes, autism has a large genetic component. No, there is absolutely no PROOF that the fever reaction to the vaccine was the cause of the coincident CDD. However, autism is a spectrum condition and of seven family members in four generations identifiable as "somewhere" on the spectrum, he is radically farther from normal than the rest of us. None of the rest of us exhibited noticeable CDD.

As children, most of "the seven" had many of the diseases that these vaccines prevent, including Mumps, Chicken Pox, etc. and all but one of the adults has gone on to success in the world, with marriage, career, home ownership, children, etc.

The drug companies sell these "legally mandatory" vaccines based on short term economic studies that show cost-benefit of jabs vs. preventing an outbreak. They push the side-effect cost to the margin as "negligible". They are mandated because they won't work if they don't reach herd-immunity compliance levels.

It will be very costly to determine if there are life-long debilitating side effects from new drugs; but it is important not only to those families "in the margins" who have to cope with life-long conditions, but to society as a whole, dealing with lost productivity of the affected people and their family/caregivers, and the increased need for therapy, counseling, and in some cases prisons to handle the affected population.

I submit to our lawmakers that they should require this costly long term side effect studies BEFORE legally mandating new vaccines. But, the payoff for such studies comes long after most lawmakers political careers will sunset, and the short term payoff to drug companies for a new mandatory vaccine is astronomical.

For Vuze, formerly Azureus, there are Ono and P4P, which should do what you're looking for, although for different reasons. Unfortunately, they both rely on people in your region being interested in the same torrents you are, while P4P additionally benefits from an iTracker, an ISP provided tracker that's topology aware (they did some work to prioritize based on ping latency, using that as a distance estimate, but I don't know if it's a fallback mechanism). Due to the iTracker infrastructure and possibly conflicting supporters, there are some privacy concerns.

Where's the freaking reasonable middle when you need it? Sheesh!

Locked out of the process from the start by the shrillness of the political primaries, that's where. It's been drowned out by the inability of anybody to have a nuanced policy debate without resorting to name calling. It's been suffocated by the demand for sound bites & bumper-sticker slogans. It's been allowed to die a slow death because it's easier to just believe what someone tells you rather than do some research and find out of they're selling you a pile of horseshit.

Don't agree with the neo-conservative and/or envagelical republican base? Fuck you, you're a terrorist sympathizing, flip-flopping, unpatriotic, socialist, communist, marxist, god-hating, panty-waisted son of a bitch who doesn't have the balls to kick a little ass and wear a flag pin.

Don't agree with the socialist and/or progressive democrats? Fuck you, you're a corrupt warmonger who doesn't understand how easily we could attain utopia if we just raise taxes and create new entitlements for special interest groups. The world hates you, wring your hands and self-flagellate for being an American. Oh, and you're probably just a rich white man who wants to keep minorities & poor people down.

American "democracy" has turned into a shouting contest where the sedate voice of moderation is drowned out by the shrillness of the debate between the two most extreme elements of the major parties warring over power. Funny thing is, they wind up looking like two sides of the same coin - doctrinaire, dogmatic true believers who are hoping to use the government to ram their ideals down the throats of their fellow citizens. George Washington warned us about it in 1796 in his Farewell Address (emphasis mine):

[ . . . ] The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another. [ . . . ]

That second bold part is exactly why McCain is being implored to "SAVE US", and why there are people making straight-faced irony-not-intended references to Obama as a Messianic figure.

There's no room for polite & reasonable debate anymore. The political process has turned into poisonous mudslinging punctuated by occasional robotic regurgitation of vetted, scrubbed, test-grouped, marketing-driven talking points. And what we ought to do is show our dissatisfaction with the whole rotten lot of fools by refusing to elect a republican or a democrat. But we will, overwhelmingly, re-elect the incumbents who led us down the road to ruin, D

http://www.yale.edu/bass/writing/sources/plagiarism/common.html

and, just for the humor of it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_don't_need_to_cite_that_the_sky_is_blue

I'm part of a similar student-technology group in the US (http://www.yale.edu/its/stc), and our focus is very much on tech support. Our situation is different; we have a hundred members, and we focus on fixing people's software and hardware problems and providing direct education through a combination of helpdesk and house calls, all free of charge. But that's one possibility; you could morph your organization into a free tech support group, either for general computer issues or for specialized tasks like web development.

And far and beyond the thing to do with your hardware is convert it to number-crunching. Either run the machines for other people, and let them submit jobs to you, or just donate the machines to your favorite science department. My college's chemistry department is perpetually hurting for processing power; they don't own any department-wide machines, so if a lab has detailed calculations to perform, it has to buy its own hardware or rent time from a lab that already owns some. Donating all your hardware to a computation-heavy department could be a huge favor.

...in a no-nonsense, http://codex.cs.yale.edu/avi/os-book/os6j/online-dir/Java-primer.pdf kind of way for its modern incarnations? Though arguably its code is more readable than Perl's ;-) in the first place...

Except that "fighting global warming" isn't about cleaner air.

That depends on what you mean by "cleaner air" I suppose, but note that one way to get cleaner air is to burn less fossil fuel, which also reduces CO2. (Of course there are other ways to reduce pollution which leave CO2 emissions the same.)

It is about reducing "greenhouse gases", primarily CO2, which is an essential part of the atmosphere.

No one is talking about sucking all the CO2 out of the atmosphere so all the plants die. They're talking about reducing it back towards pre-industrial levels. (Note I say "towards"; it's not feasible to reduce it all the way down to 280 ppm this century.)

So, it does matter if "global warming" is true, because people like Al Gore are asking us to cripple our economies to reduce CO2 emissions,

Reducing CO2 emissions won't "cripple the economy". That's just the conservative version of "global warming alarmism".

I'd recommend reading William Nordhaus's new book, "A Question of Balance". Nordhaus is an economist at Yale and one of the leading experts on climate economics. A free draft manuscript is here. His recommendations are more conservative than the Stern Report someone else cited. But he still concludes that from a cost-benefit perspective, we should be implementing substantially more CO2 reductions than we currently are. That's also the conclusion of pretty much every other climate economist who works on the problem, although they disagree to various extents about the exact reductions needed and the best way to get there. Note that economists are not generally in favor of crippling the economy.

Which is a question that I rarely seen discussed. If Global Warming is true, is it really a problem?

You can start by reading the Nordhaus book I cited, and also the IPCC Working Group 2 report. (Also the Working Group 3 report for what should be done about it.)

The word "republic" simply means there's no monarch. The word "democracy" means that the government be it monarchy or republic, is subject to (dis)approval of the people.

From the federalist papers: The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.

The US founders meaning of republic was that there would be a government by representatives rather than by direct democracy, by a true federation (where the central government's power is derived from that of the component states), or by a monarchy or dictatorship. The word has evolved somewhat, as countries have found it useful to call themselves republics even if it would not accord with how the US founders used the word.

Your definition is 1a and the other definition is 1b of http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/republic

While your definition does have support, it's not as cut and dry as you make it. It is one definition of several, not the only acceptable definition of the word.

True. And a lot of people here are attacked by ninjas on a regular basis, too.

>the U.S. was never intended to institute a true separation of church and state, at least that's not what the U.S. Constitution says we should be doing.

Article VI, Section 3. Before there was a Bill of Rights, the Founders had made sure that government would be independent of religion.

>But there is nothing wrong with a state *having* a religion which is what our (U.S. that is) Constitution was trying to accomplish.

"..the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion", treaty ratified 1797.

It's kind of ironic that in the US the people who want the government to display their religious symbols and give money to their churches tend to be Christian. It's ironic because if they believed their own religion they'd believe in separation of church and state. Jesus said flat out "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36). When Jesus was asked about paying taxes, he outlined a separation of church and state: "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's." (Matthew 22:21). Caesar's things are separate from God's things. Before Jesus, the faithful were warned about trusting earthly authority: "Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save" (Psalm 146:3).

The problem the US has is with people who have religious followers and want political power. Such people are only too happy to make their flocks believe that anything that interferes with their lust for power is somehow anti-religious.

Hey! I enjoyed my statistical thermodynamics course. I can see though if it isn't taught by somebody good it could a problem. Fortunately the guy I had was good.

Is it?
The Hague conventions were followed even by Hitler during Barbarossa. He refused to authorise http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/lawofwar/dec99-03.htm/ explosive bullets even though Stalin was using then all along.
It was only in 1944 he authorised explosive bullets.
The Hague prevents torture of any kind of any armed combatant. Even http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_war/ unlawful combatants "treated with humanity and, in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial" because they are still covered under GC IV Article 5.
Hmmm.. so that just makes Bush a War Criminal as he is the C-in-C of armed forces.
Or are you claiming Executive Privilege to move him to an alternate timeframe where Bush is president & not president at same time.

Boy, I only hope you know what you are talking about... ;/

Alan Perlis: "A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures." (More wisdom of Alan Perlis)

Reynolds missed the 1959 Antartica Treaty. I thought he was some sorta law professor guy?? Seems to me the perfect model for a remote place that all nations might want to make claims on...