But the ones that buy into the scam, man, those are PLAIN IDIOTS.
They probably figured that it would cost more time and money fighting these patent claims by MS than it would licensing bogus patents. If that's true, then it is clear that our patent system ought to be done away with entirely.
Why does the standard gamut of replies to criticism of any OSS project always include "well, you don't have to use it..."
In this case it holds true. Not everyone will like the default theme no matter what it is. There will still be people that want something else and FOSS gives them the freedom to change their software to their liking. As an example, I don't like Gnome so I use KDE. I find the default theme to be ugly (but still better than gnome) so I changed it to one of my own. I have poor vision so I increased the text size. That is what you are supposed to do, not just wait for the Ubuntu developers to change the wallpaper and default theme every six months.
There's no one forcing you to use Gnome, the default theme or any flavor of Ubuntu; so if you don't like the default Ubuntu which is in your words for "drooling idiots," you are more than free to use one of the 400 Linux distros, one of the ~10 top DEs or the thousands of themes out there.
After Somalia's former government collapsed, it didn't take long for warlords to consolidate power and I predict that at some point Somalia will have a whole new government for better or worse due to either consolidation of the powers of various warlords or a revolution of some sort. Then the cycle starts all over again.
Democracy is no excuse for harassing people needlessly. Your argument can be used to defend any degree of governmental nonsense. Let's put it this way: making a reference to your sig, if a majority decided that unions should be illegal, by your argument they ought to be allowed to ban them. Democracy cuts both ways, it allows you to force some of your ideals on others and at the same time allows them to do the same to you. Time and time again history shows that there need to be limits to what the mob can impose upon others.
Limited powers not no powers. Somalia is a great example of what happens when the state is so far weakened that even property rights/life are not protected. At the opposite end of the scale, you might see something like North Korea which is not much of an improvement over what Somalia has. The idea is not to go to either extreme and maintain a reasonably rational government is large enough to cover the basics but not so big that people start to be strangled by it.
Just replace "don't talk to the police" with "don't provide DNA/etc voluntarily to the police." You don't gain anything by talking to the police nor providing genetic evidence without a proper warrant. Different reasons same good advice.
I believe that his point was that DDT prevented more deaths from Malaria than it took from its toxicity. This is probably the case but the fact remains that it ought to be phased out in favor of a safer alternative that effectively saves even more lives.
DDT is effective for controlling malaria when it is used properly. However, when the chemical is applied to the land like butter on toast, mosquitoes often become resistant to the chemical over time. This is in fact what happened in India and resulted in the use of Malethion for which the mosquitoes were largely not resistant. DDT continues to be used in a small number of countries for the express purpose of controlling malaria, Like antibiotics, DDT must be used intelligently to avoid resistance to the chemical in the target species.
Heck what worried me was whether or not people were killed by the crash. Fortunately no one was hurt but it could have been tragic news. Most of the planet is reasonably uninhabited (ocean, desert, sparsely populated areas like siberia etc.) and so most of the time these objects won't fall into anywhere that you'd consider important like a city. Although wit hthe sheer quantity of garbage up there, I'm sure it is bound to happen at some point.
I estimate that the site of the fall is approximately 47.0 N, 105.2 E. Our final elset, available at the following URL, has the object passing close to the site within a few minutes of 03:32 UTC on Feb 19. The elements are based on observations by Tim Luton on Feb 18 near 23:30 UTC, and Jim Nix and Brad Young one rev later, on Feb 19 near 00:58 UTC.
3:32 was the time that the object was predicted to be in the area of the field in which it crashed. Presumably the object wouldn't take too long to make its final decent (when it actually re-entered the atmosphere instead of remaining in what is essentially a decaying orbit)
Deploying a tether isn't going to be easy because cables in microgravity tend to twist back into the shape they had on the spool.
Actually a shape memory alloy wire would unfurl to a straight position when heated slightly due to a crystal phase transition in the alloy that relieves strain.
If guidance on a dead vehicle is an issue you could build a simple drag brake using a big Mylar balloon
I believe that that would work for relatively minor couse corrections but not so much ditching the debris into the ocean instead of the middle of a continent.
Here ya go. Basic EM physics. Drag a conductive wire through a magnetic field and the field induces a voltage potential in the conductor. Applying the right hand rule to the system results in the induced potential forming a magnetic field to oppose the one that created it and thus results in a drag force which acts on the conductor and ultimately causes the orbit to decay.
False. Just like Truthers, most of them have a mixture of beliefs that really defy labeling (read the full manifesto of the Dallas plane guy). It's just another generalization you want to apply for convenience
Having attended fairly recent conservative political meeting I'd say you're dead wrong about this unless democrats rail against healthcare "socialism."
Now you claim Libertarians are "right-wingers" (by your use obviously a derogatory term)? They are the ones that got Obama elected. Read comments in Reason articles before the election to see just how confused you really are on that point.
Well libertarians are economically closer to the political right which is what I was getting at here. Although technically libertarians don't really fall on either end of the political scale very well hence why it is often split into the economic and social components of political ideology.
Quite a large conceptual leap there, you made from AGW to "phenomenon" which I am betting you imply as some degree of climate warming. The two are totally separate issues, and the arguments about what to DO even if AGW is true is another still.
I said phenomenon because the major sticking point is what to do about AGW. There are people who agree that we are responsible for AGW but also believe that the proposed solutions suck.
Because obviously people that obstruct FIOA requests are to be trusted in all respects.
Some data used in models is from sources that require a NDA and can not legally be released.
Because obviously people with code that simply makes up data sets are to be trusted.
Except that the anti-AGW crowd wasn't paying any attention here. They made sure to cherry pick a few lines here and there but failed to follow up with actual reading. Turns out that after 1960 the tree ring proxies diverged from temperature readings and virtually every other proxy in use. The tree ring data indicated a decline where otherwise none existed.
You choose to only read what agrees with you then.
Not really. I do keep up with various claims of AGW skeptics and sadly virtually all of them involved some degree of ignorance. Everything from "the Earth isn't warming" to "warming is a good thing" to "even if warming is a bad thing, we can deal with it just fine." No... it would be great if we were wrong about AGW and that it really was not a problem but the evidence largely points to this not being the case.
This is one of the few cases where a space tether isn't the best option for disposal of space debris as this object was much too large to burn up in the atmosphere. With electrodynamic tethers, you can de-orbit debris although I would imagine that it would be fairly difficult to control where it deorbits. This kind of debris is probably best dealt with by using a space tether to raise the orbit before the satellite becomes non-functional. Although in the case of rocket stages like the ones that apparently landed in a field, a few explosive charges to break the object into more manageable pieces before it re-enters dangerously might be in order.
Actually if you had read the article, they explicitly mentioned tainted Methanol being what was "denatured." Hell it's right there in the summary even!:
it decided that the problem was that readily available methyl (industrial) alcohol
methyl alcohol is Methanol which is poisonous and is the chemical that was doctored. It causes blindness primarily due to the breakdown products Formic acid and formaldehyde. So basically drunks were drinking alcohol that had a chemical in it that degrades into what is essentially embalming fluid. I suppose that comes in handy for the eventual funeral; pre-picked corpse.
interestingly enough, a lot of greens don't like cap and trade because they feel that it is a case of capitalism and markets intruding into areas that they do not belong. A lot of people have taken issue with the conecpt of cap and trade because of some of the problems that are apparent in the EU implementation. Such as fraudulent Carbon offsets along with general greenwashing. Then there's opposition to Gore's advocacy of a Carbon tax as it is looked upon as being just another route to tax people.
Why is it not equally lazy to paint all "right wingers" as Birthers,
To group all right wingers as birthers would be lazy however, most of the birthers are right wing.
and people who cannot argue with science even though there are tons of carefully thought out articles from real scientists questioning AGW
Well for one thing, not all right wingers (ie republicans/libertarians) deny AGW. Approximately 25% acknowledge some degree of the phenomenon. For another, the vast majority of attacks on AGW that have been launched (primarily from the right) have been... poorly thought out to put it mildly. The CRU hack frothing as the prime example of this.
Those who questioned "glaciers melting before 2035" were laughed at as loons before and told the science was carefully studied, when it turned out it was not.
The problem is that this error was found not by an AGW "skeptic" but by a scientist in full agreement with the scientific consensus on AGW.
Why can YOU not believe there are and can be scientists who do not agree with the current AGW theories?
Few dispute that there are scientists out there that don't agree with the AGW consensus, the same can be said of Evolutionary theory, it's just that as in the case of Evolution, the vast vast vast majority of skeptics are not in relevant fields and have not actually done any relevant research on the topic. It is possible to have legit skepticism about AGW; it just requires actual work and data to back up the assertion made. The same applies to both sides of the issue, it just seems that the vast majority of AGW "skeptics" aren't holding up their end of the bargain.
If the comments on Slashdot earlier today are any indication, it is whoever is loudest that gets the attention, not who is actually representative of the demographics of the group as a whole. In this case, the bashing of Gore was self-selecting. Those who were very against what Gore was advocating spoke up loudly leaving the remainder of the group that was outspoken to either defend or bash Gore. After CRU it wasn't hard to see how general opinion of Gore would go into the toilet for some people.
Do you have any comprehension of how misguided that analogy is? This is Methanol for frak's sake! It's already poison! You wouldn't be whining about tainted brake fluid killing someone that drank the shit because it is poison with and without additives.
The fact remains that these bootleggers were adding a chemical that was already known to be poisonous and extremely dangerous to drink. It's like complaining that the government put strychnine in gasoline and since bootleggers were adding gasoline to their drinks the government was solely responsible for deaths. No. These bootleggers put poison in their products to begin with; they knew it was killing people and they did it anyway.
Early on in the 13-year experiment to outlaw ethyl alcohol, bootleggers turned to its poisonous cousin methyl alcohol, also known as wood alcohol, to quench the nation's thirst. Norris and Gettler saw the results carried into the city morgue. To begin with, methyl alcohol causes the same pleasant feelings of inebriation as ethyl alcohol, but these are quickly followed by blindness, coma and death.
So basically the bootleggers were defrauding the drinkers during prohibition by replacing the cheap (but legal for industrial uses) Methanol which can lead to blindness and ultimately death. The underground market was defrauding and poisoning people wholesale. So in effect, the Methanol was only safe to be used in industrial products as it was and would never have poisoned people if it had not been fraudulently added to alcoholic beverages in the first place. That isn't to say the government wasn't wrong, it most certainly was as is the entire concept of a drug war in of its self, it is that these underground markets were knowingly putting tainted Methanol into their products and killing drinkers as a result.
Sodium Nitrite was of concern because in the acidic environment of your stomach, its acidified form is transient HNO2 which while not every stable, can react with amines to form nitrosamines which are now known to be carcinogenic to some degree. Bisphenol A is also of note as it mimics estrogen and as such has been put under the spotlight.
For use in food the chemical is allowed until it is proven harmful.
eh... not quite.. The regulations for food and herbal remedies are lax by comparison to drug regulations but it isn't quite the wild wild west.
Slashdot Mirror
They probably figured that it would cost more time and money fighting these patent claims by MS than it would licensing bogus patents. If that's true, then it is clear that our patent system ought to be done away with entirely.
It's like an RSS feed for Google. Just like you'd use an RSS feed to keep up with various blogs instead of visiting constantly.
Nuke it from orbit just to be sure.
In this case it holds true. Not everyone will like the default theme no matter what it is. There will still be people that want something else and FOSS gives them the freedom to change their software to their liking. As an example, I don't like Gnome so I use KDE. I find the default theme to be ugly (but still better than gnome) so I changed it to one of my own. I have poor vision so I increased the text size. That is what you are supposed to do, not just wait for the Ubuntu developers to change the wallpaper and default theme every six months.
There's no one forcing you to use Gnome, the default theme or any flavor of Ubuntu; so if you don't like the default Ubuntu which is in your words for "drooling idiots," you are more than free to use one of the 400 Linux distros, one of the ~10 top DEs or the thousands of themes out there.
After Somalia's former government collapsed, it didn't take long for warlords to consolidate power and I predict that at some point Somalia will have a whole new government for better or worse due to either consolidation of the powers of various warlords or a revolution of some sort. Then the cycle starts all over again.
Democracy is no excuse for harassing people needlessly. Your argument can be used to defend any degree of governmental nonsense. Let's put it this way: making a reference to your sig, if a majority decided that unions should be illegal, by your argument they ought to be allowed to ban them. Democracy cuts both ways, it allows you to force some of your ideals on others and at the same time allows them to do the same to you. Time and time again history shows that there need to be limits to what the mob can impose upon others.
Limited powers not no powers. Somalia is a great example of what happens when the state is so far weakened that even property rights/life are not protected. At the opposite end of the scale, you might see something like North Korea which is not much of an improvement over what Somalia has. The idea is not to go to either extreme and maintain a reasonably rational government is large enough to cover the basics but not so big that people start to be strangled by it.
Just replace "don't talk to the police" with "don't provide DNA/etc voluntarily to the police." You don't gain anything by talking to the police nor providing genetic evidence without a proper warrant. Different reasons same good advice.
I believe that his point was that DDT prevented more deaths from Malaria than it took from its toxicity. This is probably the case but the fact remains that it ought to be phased out in favor of a safer alternative that effectively saves even more lives.
DDT is effective for controlling malaria when it is used properly. However, when the chemical is applied to the land like butter on toast, mosquitoes often become resistant to the chemical over time. This is in fact what happened in India and resulted in the use of Malethion for which the mosquitoes were largely not resistant. DDT continues to be used in a small number of countries for the express purpose of controlling malaria, Like antibiotics, DDT must be used intelligently to avoid resistance to the chemical in the target species.
Heck what worried me was whether or not people were killed by the crash. Fortunately no one was hurt but it could have been tragic news. Most of the planet is reasonably uninhabited (ocean, desert, sparsely populated areas like siberia etc.) and so most of the time these objects won't fall into anywhere that you'd consider important like a city. Although wit hthe sheer quantity of garbage up there, I'm sure it is bound to happen at some point.
3:32 was the time that the object was predicted to be in the area of the field in which it crashed. Presumably the object wouldn't take too long to make its final decent (when it actually re-entered the atmosphere instead of remaining in what is essentially a decaying orbit)
Actually a shape memory alloy wire would unfurl to a straight position when heated slightly due to a crystal phase transition in the alloy that relieves strain.
I believe that that would work for relatively minor couse corrections but not so much ditching the debris into the ocean instead of the middle of a continent.
Here ya go. Basic EM physics. Drag a conductive wire through a magnetic field and the field induces a voltage potential in the conductor. Applying the right hand rule to the system results in the induced potential forming a magnetic field to oppose the one that created it and thus results in a drag force which acts on the conductor and ultimately causes the orbit to decay.
Having attended fairly recent conservative political meeting I'd say you're dead wrong about this unless democrats rail against healthcare "socialism."
Well libertarians are economically closer to the political right which is what I was getting at here. Although technically libertarians don't really fall on either end of the political scale very well hence why it is often split into the economic and social components of political ideology.
Quite a large conceptual leap there, you made from AGW to "phenomenon" which I am betting you imply as some degree of climate warming. The two are totally separate issues, and the arguments about what to DO even if AGW is true is another still.
I said phenomenon because the major sticking point is what to do about AGW. There are people who agree that we are responsible for AGW but also believe that the proposed solutions suck.
Some data used in models is from sources that require a NDA and can not legally be released.
Except that the anti-AGW crowd wasn't paying any attention here. They made sure to cherry pick a few lines here and there but failed to follow up with actual reading. Turns out that after 1960 the tree ring proxies diverged from temperature readings and virtually every other proxy in use. The tree ring data indicated a decline where otherwise none existed.
This is one of the few cases where a space tether isn't the best option for disposal of space debris as this object was much too large to burn up in the atmosphere. With electrodynamic tethers, you can de-orbit debris although I would imagine that it would be fairly difficult to control where it deorbits. This kind of debris is probably best dealt with by using a space tether to raise the orbit before the satellite becomes non-functional. Although in the case of rocket stages like the ones that apparently landed in a field, a few explosive charges to break the object into more manageable pieces before it re-enters dangerously might be in order.
Actually if you had read the article, they explicitly mentioned tainted Methanol being what was "denatured." Hell it's right there in the summary even!:
methyl alcohol is Methanol which is poisonous and is the chemical that was doctored. It causes blindness primarily due to the breakdown products Formic acid and formaldehyde. So basically drunks were drinking alcohol that had a chemical in it that degrades into what is essentially embalming fluid. I suppose that comes in handy for the eventual funeral; pre-picked corpse.
interestingly enough, a lot of greens don't like cap and trade because they feel that it is a case of capitalism and markets intruding into areas that they do not belong. A lot of people have taken issue with the conecpt of cap and trade because of some of the problems that are apparent in the EU implementation. Such as fraudulent Carbon offsets along with general greenwashing. Then there's opposition to Gore's advocacy of a Carbon tax as it is looked upon as being just another route to tax people.
To group all right wingers as birthers would be lazy however, most of the birthers are right wing.
Well for one thing, not all right wingers (ie republicans/libertarians) deny AGW. Approximately 25% acknowledge some degree of the phenomenon. For another, the vast majority of attacks on AGW that have been launched (primarily from the right) have been... poorly thought out to put it mildly. The CRU hack frothing as the prime example of this.
The problem is that this error was found not by an AGW "skeptic" but by a scientist in full agreement with the scientific consensus on AGW.
Few dispute that there are scientists out there that don't agree with the AGW consensus, the same can be said of Evolutionary theory, it's just that as in the case of Evolution, the vast vast vast majority of skeptics are not in relevant fields and have not actually done any relevant research on the topic. It is possible to have legit skepticism about AGW; it just requires actual work and data to back up the assertion made. The same applies to both sides of the issue, it just seems that the vast majority of AGW "skeptics" aren't holding up their end of the bargain.
If the comments on Slashdot earlier today are any indication, it is whoever is loudest that gets the attention, not who is actually representative of the demographics of the group as a whole. In this case, the bashing of Gore was self-selecting. Those who were very against what Gore was advocating spoke up loudly leaving the remainder of the group that was outspoken to either defend or bash Gore. After CRU it wasn't hard to see how general opinion of Gore would go into the toilet for some people.
Do you have any comprehension of how misguided that analogy is? This is Methanol for frak's sake! It's already poison! You wouldn't be whining about tainted brake fluid killing someone that drank the shit because it is poison with and without additives.
The fact remains that these bootleggers were adding a chemical that was already known to be poisonous and extremely dangerous to drink. It's like complaining that the government put strychnine in gasoline and since bootleggers were adding gasoline to their drinks the government was solely responsible for deaths. No. These bootleggers put poison in their products to begin with; they knew it was killing people and they did it anyway.
So basically the bootleggers were defrauding the drinkers during prohibition by replacing the cheap (but legal for industrial uses) Methanol which can lead to blindness and ultimately death. The underground market was defrauding and poisoning people wholesale. So in effect, the Methanol was only safe to be used in industrial products as it was and would never have poisoned people if it had not been fraudulently added to alcoholic beverages in the first place. That isn't to say the government wasn't wrong, it most certainly was as is the entire concept of a drug war in of its self, it is that these underground markets were knowingly putting tainted Methanol into their products and killing drinkers as a result.
Sodium Nitrite was of concern because in the acidic environment of your stomach, its acidified form is transient HNO2 which while not every stable, can react with amines to form nitrosamines which are now known to be carcinogenic to some degree. Bisphenol A is also of note as it mimics estrogen and as such has been put under the spotlight.
eh... not quite.. The regulations for food and herbal remedies are lax by comparison to drug regulations but it isn't quite the wild wild west.