Or, instead of p1ssing money up the wall on a broken banking system, get the cash and use it to pay, bribe anyone necessary, all around the world, to wage war on the child p0rnographers on this list.
I care about privacy, state control issues and so on, but a lot less than I care about shutting down these monsters.
That's somewhat unfair! In both his books Obama states and restates not only his support for the teaching of evolution but also his deference to the scientific establishment in such matters. Perhaps if he burned an effigy of Jesus at the stake, you'd be satisfied?
It turns out mass is not necessary to interact with matter.
POP! Sorry that was my head exploding. In all seriousness - thanks for a very good answer to a very dumb question! I'm going to go read some books, or something.
So if the graviton is massless, how does it interact with matter? I vaguely recall reading something about quantum gravity a while ago and I got the impression that there was meant to be a a sort of universal sea of gravitons, dashing around an exerting an equal pressure on all massive objects. The observed effect of gravity is only apparent when you are "shielded" by another massive object to one side of you, causing a pressure imbalance which moves you towards that object (and vice versa).
If the graviton were massless, wouldn't it just bounce off with no effect?
Or have I got that horribly, horribly mangled? I hope not, because I really prefer that to the "ball on a sheet" analogy - which is stupid.
For the foreseeable future yes. But there's no fundamental barrier to a suitably protected craft doing a fair chunk of c and getting a dilation factor of 2, making a 20 light year distant system reachable in 10 years.
Disagree. The Star Trek universe still holds a great deal of appeal but the viewpoint of looking at it from the slightly dull position of inside a spaceship got tired. It's like trying to learn about Russia by visiting a Russian submarine. The problem that I have with your argument is that if you took away the spaceships you'd have a potentially exciting new series but still have a lot of star trek left.
It was only ever budget that kept ST ship-bound. DS9 was often more interesting than Voyager or Enerprise because there was a sort of "neighbourhood" of the station, where things were going on all the time in the background. There was also the wider region of the delta quadrant that they could go out into for the occasional outside broadcast.
That's another thing - OBs are great, but how do you do an OB of an alien world? Wildernesses are easy enough but how about cities? TNG would build some fairly dodgy sets then do a few matte paintings, which was ok but a bit cheap looking. Nowadays you could do almost everything with CG - but it would always look crappy next to Coruscant from the star trek prequels, unless you spent $50m per episode.
Also, they really really have to drop the techno-babble. I saw a show about how they made Voyager once and apparently they leave big holes in the script and write in "[INSERT TECHNO-BABBLE]" and gave it to some dude who filled it in with inverse warp-bubble polarities. Just the worst sort of laziness and something they were still doing at the end of Enterprise.
It's the dumb tyranny of the shareholder. If you can get them dividends from one quarter to the next, they will pay you any sum as salary or a bonus. I've sat through meetings where a senior VP outlined, essentially, a plan for running the company into the ground over the next two years. He's retired now. At 40.
Ok for a start I think you're mixing currencies. I'm talking £25,000 so about $36k - I figure that's an 'ok' wage in the US, as it is in the UK. To really be comfortable ( I mean a nice-ish car, good holiday once a year, maybe the cash to pursue a hobby or two ) on a single income, you want to be earning about £40k so about $57k. If the US is anything like here, that mean putting off having kids until you're well into your thirties or even early fourties.
>>as for market regulation, oh brother is a huge giant plateload coming
Good! Recent events show "the system" is horribly vulnerable to powerful, greedy individuals to the detriment of the 99.999% majority.
>>class warfare meanwhile, is a phantom bogey man of yours
False. All of society rests on a complex, implicitly agreed bargain between it's various sections. See the Poll Tax riots. It takes a lot to break it but it can be done and it looks like we're heading there. On a larger scale this time.
>>you hadn't noticed them being grilled in washington lately with the implosion of the financial system?
Sure some questions were asked but these guys get to go home again to their great big houses and tennis courts. I'm talking about people who work hard all their lives and are suddenly thrown out into the street. I'd happily take the grilling Richard Fuld got in return for the money he gets (got) for a day's work. Wouldn't you?
>>did you just step out a time capsule from the late 1800s?
You can get as sarcastic as you like but I know exactly what families are dealing with because I'm one of them. I also know that aside from technological advances, life is tougher for my generation than it was for my parents. When you stop apologising for the status quo you may realise that this is not a recipe for ongoing political stability and economic growth.
It doesn't escape me, however it seems I'll have to spell it out for you... Go buy a house. OK this may apply more in the UK but when you've just burned £200,000 on a small 3 bed, that's going to set you back maybe a grand a month, depending on interest rate. Say you earned the median income of £25,000, after tax (overall about 30%), that leaves you with maybe £1450 per month. Take off for student loan if you have one, bills and so on and your disposable income is about £300 per month. Now figure £50 per week for food to feed a couple of kids. I haven't even mentioned a car yet. It hasn't been like this for allt hat long. My sister and her family bought a house maybe 10 years ago for less than half what we paid for ours 5 years ago. They can just about manage with one parent working - we can't.
Can you see the connection now?
Used to be we could do the whole one-working parent family thing. Now it's just a physical impossibility, mainly because of house prices. But, you know, at least I can buy a 42" TV for £400!
The whole class bargain thing has to be looked at again.
You can wind up feeling this way when you're a parent, but no I don't believe governments do this on purpose just so they can collect more taxes. Instead it seems to be a symptom of the ongoing class war in western societies. The government just lets the markets do their thing because it's incompetent to do anything about it. The situation is developing massively to the detriment of working class and lower middle class families though.
Actually a lot of people are starting to think that, while women's rights should of course be equal to men's, having both parents out to work leads to nothing like twice the productivity as the traditional worker/homemaker model still enjoyed in most of the rest of the world. Obama talks about this at some length in his second book and I tend to agree that it's possibly a side-effect of rising prices and greater investment pressure on real-estate. So in effect a growing upper-middle class sh1ts on everyone below them.
Its true that the enlightenment was crucial in putting western science where it is today. OTOH the situation the middle east faces today is very different from Europe in the dark ages, mainly because there is already a more advanced (no offense but the amount of research done and stuff actually invented in the west dwarfs the middle east and asia) culture outside their borders. Iranians would love to recapture the scientific power they held in times gone by but presumably are terrified their culture will be destroyed by western influence, with orthodox religion being their only defence. So It's not just as simple as calling up the Ayatollah and shouting "Hey! Do the enlightenment already!".
I should think any sort of video calling makes monitoring much much more difficult. With voice calls, you can fairly easily hook up some text-to-speech and mine some medium-term recordings for potentially nasty combinations of words. True that'd only catch the careless but I believe it is done.
With video calling you can't do that. If two terrorists were using Skype they could pass messages by writing messages on cards and holding them up to the camera - there'd be no way of transcribing or flagging that automatically.
The technology is growing and diversifying so fast that the whole concept of SIGINT is looking increasingly unrealistic.
What sensible criminal would try to blow up a plane with a mixture of Tang and hair bleach, while carrying a USB stick with an unsecured.xls of potential bomb targets on it?
Sensible criminals like the Russian mafia and the Coumbian drug cartels have gotten western intelligence services beaten all ends up. Being able to spy on loonies who just might cause some serious damage is understandable enough, isn't it?
Well you picked an interesting article to quote. But I think your point about subsidies being inherently bad is non-sequitur. IANAE(conomist) but the German feed-in tariff sounds like a good way of avoiding the perils of public finance - it takes money from bill payers and forces the receiving industry to spend it on it's intended use without touching the government. That would avoid what often happens with "environmental" taxes - the cash is often just lumped into the treasury and spent on whatever the government needs money for at that time. Ring-fencing is another approach but the tariff money is still going through the government.
IMHO this is exactly the sort of thing the Obama administration should be doing in the US, except elaborated to include wind and hell - even nuke.
Nonsense. I'm talking about the overall capability of the human brain for generalisation and technology.
Also, just because you can make an analogy, doesn't mean you should make an analogy! So, I could reply that a squirrel is more like a Casio digital wristwatch. As you can see, the whole thing just becomes absurd.
The UK where they want to rate websites like movies?
Come on, that was mentioned as "an option" by a junior minister - for culture. That counts as it having been "mooted" and is probably just designed to gauge public reaction. I'd imagine the sheer number of websites will make this entirely impossible in any binding way. So what if parents want to have an opt-in filter with "safe" ratings on a few hundred commercial sites. It might even be fairly useful to schools and parents. Go ahead.
Didn't he mean that the character itself is 20 years old? Obviously the in-joke with the Simpsons is that none of the children ever get any older. So it's more like having sex with a midget that looks like a 10-year old but isn't. Isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Or, instead of p1ssing money up the wall on a broken banking system, get the cash and use it to pay, bribe anyone necessary, all around the world, to wage war on the child p0rnographers on this list. I care about privacy, state control issues and so on, but a lot less than I care about shutting down these monsters.
That's somewhat unfair! In both his books Obama states and restates not only his support for the teaching of evolution but also his deference to the scientific establishment in such matters. Perhaps if he burned an effigy of Jesus at the stake, you'd be satisfied?
It turns out mass is not necessary to interact with matter.
POP! Sorry that was my head exploding. In all seriousness - thanks for a very good answer to a very dumb question! I'm going to go read some books, or something.
So if the graviton is massless, how does it interact with matter? I vaguely recall reading something about quantum gravity a while ago and I got the impression that there was meant to be a a sort of universal sea of gravitons, dashing around an exerting an equal pressure on all massive objects. The observed effect of gravity is only apparent when you are "shielded" by another massive object to one side of you, causing a pressure imbalance which moves you towards that object (and vice versa).
If the graviton were massless, wouldn't it just bounce off with no effect?
Or have I got that horribly, horribly mangled? I hope not, because I really prefer that to the "ball on a sheet" analogy - which is stupid.
For the foreseeable future yes. But there's no fundamental barrier to a suitably protected craft doing a fair chunk of c and getting a dilation factor of 2, making a 20 light year distant system reachable in 10 years.
That's not actually true is it? Given time dilation, if there was a definite target then you could get there in a few years, subjective.
I find installing a carpet and some curtains helps with this.
Disagree. The Star Trek universe still holds a great deal of appeal but the viewpoint of looking at it from the slightly dull position of inside a spaceship got tired. It's like trying to learn about Russia by visiting a Russian submarine. The problem that I have with your argument is that if you took away the spaceships you'd have a potentially exciting new series but still have a lot of star trek left.
It was only ever budget that kept ST ship-bound. DS9 was often more interesting than Voyager or Enerprise because there was a sort of "neighbourhood" of the station, where things were going on all the time in the background. There was also the wider region of the delta quadrant that they could go out into for the occasional outside broadcast.
That's another thing - OBs are great, but how do you do an OB of an alien world? Wildernesses are easy enough but how about cities? TNG would build some fairly dodgy sets then do a few matte paintings, which was ok but a bit cheap looking. Nowadays you could do almost everything with CG - but it would always look crappy next to Coruscant from the star trek prequels, unless you spent $50m per episode.
Also, they really really have to drop the techno-babble. I saw a show about how they made Voyager once and apparently they leave big holes in the script and write in "[INSERT TECHNO-BABBLE]" and gave it to some dude who filled it in with inverse warp-bubble polarities. Just the worst sort of laziness and something they were still doing at the end of Enterprise.
It's the dumb tyranny of the shareholder. If you can get them dividends from one quarter to the next, they will pay you any sum as salary or a bonus. I've sat through meetings where a senior VP outlined, essentially, a plan for running the company into the ground over the next two years. He's retired now. At 40.
Ok for a start I think you're mixing currencies. I'm talking £25,000 so about $36k - I figure that's an 'ok' wage in the US, as it is in the UK. To really be comfortable ( I mean a nice-ish car, good holiday once a year, maybe the cash to pursue a hobby or two ) on a single income, you want to be earning about £40k so about $57k. If the US is anything like here, that mean putting off having kids until you're well into your thirties or even early fourties.
They can comfortably sit on technology
Yeah I seen the videos too. Dirty bastards!
>>as for market regulation, oh brother is a huge giant plateload coming
Good! Recent events show "the system" is horribly vulnerable to powerful, greedy individuals to the detriment of the 99.999% majority.
>>class warfare meanwhile, is a phantom bogey man of yours
False. All of society rests on a complex, implicitly agreed bargain between it's various sections. See the Poll Tax riots. It takes a lot to break it but it can be done and it looks like we're heading there. On a larger scale this time.
>>you hadn't noticed them being grilled in washington lately with the implosion of the financial system?
Sure some questions were asked but these guys get to go home again to their great big houses and tennis courts. I'm talking about people who work hard all their lives and are suddenly thrown out into the street. I'd happily take the grilling Richard Fuld got in return for the money he gets (got) for a day's work. Wouldn't you?
>>did you just step out a time capsule from the late 1800s?
You can get as sarcastic as you like but I know exactly what families are dealing with because I'm one of them. I also know that aside from technological advances, life is tougher for my generation than it was for my parents. When you stop apologising for the status quo you may realise that this is not a recipe for ongoing political stability and economic growth.
It doesn't escape me, however it seems I'll have to spell it out for you... Go buy a house. OK this may apply more in the UK but when you've just burned £200,000 on a small 3 bed, that's going to set you back maybe a grand a month, depending on interest rate. Say you earned the median income of £25,000, after tax (overall about 30%), that leaves you with maybe £1450 per month. Take off for student loan if you have one, bills and so on and your disposable income is about £300 per month. Now figure £50 per week for food to feed a couple of kids. I haven't even mentioned a car yet. It hasn't been like this for allt hat long. My sister and her family bought a house maybe 10 years ago for less than half what we paid for ours 5 years ago. They can just about manage with one parent working - we can't.
Can you see the connection now?
Used to be we could do the whole one-working parent family thing. Now it's just a physical impossibility, mainly because of house prices. But, you know, at least I can buy a 42" TV for £400!
The whole class bargain thing has to be looked at again.
You can wind up feeling this way when you're a parent, but no I don't believe governments do this on purpose just so they can collect more taxes. Instead it seems to be a symptom of the ongoing class war in western societies. The government just lets the markets do their thing because it's incompetent to do anything about it. The situation is developing massively to the detriment of working class and lower middle class families though.
Actually a lot of people are starting to think that, while women's rights should of course be equal to men's, having both parents out to work leads to nothing like twice the productivity as the traditional worker/homemaker model still enjoyed in most of the rest of the world. Obama talks about this at some length in his second book and I tend to agree that it's possibly a side-effect of rising prices and greater investment pressure on real-estate. So in effect a growing upper-middle class sh1ts on everyone below them.
Its true that the enlightenment was crucial in putting western science where it is today. OTOH the situation the middle east faces today is very different from Europe in the dark ages, mainly because there is already a more advanced (no offense but the amount of research done and stuff actually invented in the west dwarfs the middle east and asia) culture outside their borders. Iranians would love to recapture the scientific power they held in times gone by but presumably are terrified their culture will be destroyed by western influence, with orthodox religion being their only defence. So It's not just as simple as calling up the Ayatollah and shouting "Hey! Do the enlightenment already!".
I should think any sort of video calling makes monitoring much much more difficult. With voice calls, you can fairly easily hook up some text-to-speech and mine some medium-term recordings for potentially nasty combinations of words. True that'd only catch the careless but I believe it is done.
With video calling you can't do that. If two terrorists were using Skype they could pass messages by writing messages on cards and holding them up to the camera - there'd be no way of transcribing or flagging that automatically.
The technology is growing and diversifying so fast that the whole concept of SIGINT is looking increasingly unrealistic.
What sensible criminal would try to blow up a plane with a mixture of Tang and hair bleach, while carrying a USB stick with an unsecured .xls of potential bomb targets on it?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7894755.stm
Sensible criminals like the Russian mafia and the Coumbian drug cartels have gotten western intelligence services beaten all ends up. Being able to spy on loonies who just might cause some serious damage is understandable enough, isn't it?
Well you picked an interesting article to quote. But I think your point about subsidies being inherently bad is non-sequitur. IANAE(conomist) but the German feed-in tariff sounds like a good way of avoiding the perils of public finance - it takes money from bill payers and forces the receiving industry to spend it on it's intended use without touching the government. That would avoid what often happens with "environmental" taxes - the cash is often just lumped into the treasury and spent on whatever the government needs money for at that time. Ring-fencing is another approach but the tariff money is still going through the government.
IMHO this is exactly the sort of thing the Obama administration should be doing in the US, except elaborated to include wind and hell - even nuke.
I'm glad Sun have got enough free time and energy to find out useless nonsense like this.
Tpyo, srrory.
You mean mebbibytes?
Nonsense. I'm talking about the overall capability of the human brain for generalisation and technology.
Also, just because you can make an analogy, doesn't mean you should make an analogy! So, I could reply that a squirrel is more like a Casio digital wristwatch. As you can see, the whole thing just becomes absurd.
The UK where they want to rate websites like movies?
Come on, that was mentioned as "an option" by a junior minister - for culture. That counts as it having been "mooted" and is probably just designed to gauge public reaction. I'd imagine the sheer number of websites will make this entirely impossible in any binding way. So what if parents want to have an opt-in filter with "safe" ratings on a few hundred commercial sites. It might even be fairly useful to schools and parents. Go ahead.
Didn't he mean that the character itself is 20 years old? Obviously the in-joke with the Simpsons is that none of the children ever get any older. So it's more like having sex with a midget that looks like a 10-year old but isn't. Isn't it?