Atrios may link to interesting things, but "insightful" is one thing I wouldn't call him. He's like a Slashdot troll, trying to stir up a good rage. He rarely even uses complete sentences. Take a look at this post, titled "Stupid Journalists" where his comments on the subject of the margin of error in a political survey. His comment: "Uh, in a word, no". Even his slavish commenters wondered whether he agreed or disagreed with the letter he was linking to.
Most car crashes cause only property damage. There is probably a fair comparison in the waste from computer insecurity to the damage from those crashes. Yet we have decades of car safety laws (which lowered fatalities to today's accepted level), lots of technology and investment to increase quality, and only a veneer of computer security institutions. The apathy probably thrives more because there's not been a publication yet like Nader's _Unsafe At Any Speed_, which was published after almost a half-century of unsafe cars. Since companies like Microsoft are also in the publishing business, their counterpropaganda will probably inhibit the public response.
Auto safety improved a lot before Nader. In fact, the U.S. used to be #1 in auto safety and has fallen to 13th in the world. See this page for details.
The people who actually decide what goes on the air and in print over are overwhelmingly conservative. This has been shown in many studies yet somehow people dredge up that tired old arguement about liberal journalists.
Perhaps we do not read the same economics journals, but perhaps you have heard of Paul Krugman and J. K. Gailbraith?
Just google "Paul Krugman" outsourcing and you'll find that he agrees: see this or this.
I'm not saying "almost all economists" lightly. Surveys show that over 90% of economists favor free trade, and few see any distinction between offshore outsourcing and other international trade.
I don't know what J. K. Galbraith has said about outsourcing.
The only people who will benefit from outsourcing are corporate execs and stockholders.
The rest of us will be left with nothing to do and it won't matter if goods and services are cheaper if you don't have a wage to pay for them.
Oh, so goods and services are cheaper? I guess consumers, as well as CEOs and stockholders benefit.
Meanwhile the Indians etc. will be undercut by the Chinese and they'll be undercut by someone else.
Where does it end?
Where does it end? It ends with all those third world countries having higher wages and better jobs, just like us. It's a race to the top, not for the bottom. Look at all the other countries that have been the source for cheap labor in the past--Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong (now part of China), Singapore, Korea. Those are all high wage countries (or well on their way).
Everybody did not become unemployed after they stopped being poor.
He basically wrote all these economic books and once he was hired by the Bush administration, he contradicts his writings.
Almost all economists agree with what Mankiw said, e.g. leftish econcomist J. Bradford Delong, a Democrat who hates George Bush says "Greg Mankiw is on the right side" of the outsourcing debate. What Mankiw said caused most members of the Bush administration to cringe. Although most know it's true, it's not the kind of thing you're supposed to say out loud.
Um... my only superstition about this is that if you sell your liver when you die, then only rich people with liver disease will get livers. Poor people with liver disease would have to go way into debt to purchase a free market liver... or die.
If the poor person doesn't have insurance, that's how it works now. A liver transplant costs about 300,000 on average. The only people who don't get paid are the families of the donors.
does this mean that the person who is able to finance a media blitz will be first to receive a liver or other major organ?
Hopefully, in the future, we'll be able to just buy the organs directly from the family of the deceased. It would be a lot cheaper and the incentive would ease the shortage of organs and save many lives.
We have this weird superstition that there is something wrong with this. I'm sure that in a few decades people will wonder what we could have been thinking, just as we look back on those times, a couple of hundred years ago, when autopsies were illegal and medical students and researchers had to skulk around illegally buying corpses.
One of the reasons that cities pay so much to help build stadiums is because the stadium brings so many people to the area it creates a somewhat massive economic boom in the area, which over time can be worth more money than the cost to build the stadium.
Not according to the research I have seen... e.g., here and here.
That being said, no pulse....how the hell do I get a BP? I'm guessing my pulseox won't work either. Do they have an LCD control panel mounted on their chest so I can check and adjust their BP with a little screwdriver? I can see this type of thing really compilcating/confusing emergency medicine.
Especially when the patient is unconscious and the medics have no idea that the person has such a heart (at least, after they become fully self-contained). It reminds me of a funny scene in The Return of the Living Dead (1986):
Paramedic #1: You have no pulse, your blood pressure's zero-over-zero, you have no pupillary response, no reflexes and your temperature is 70 degrees. Freddy: Well, what does that mean? Paramedic #1: Well, it's a puzzle because, technically, you're not alive. Except you're conscious, so we don't know what it means. Freddy: Are you saying we're dead? Paramedic #2: Well, let's not jump to conclusions. Freddy: Are you saying we're dead? Paramedic #2: No conclusions. Paramedic #1: Obviously I didn't mean you were really dead. Dead people don't move around and talk.
Seriously, how will this stop terrorists? You can go to walmart.com and get a computer that is quite capable of decent encryption for $200, and maybe an extra $150 or so tops for a monitor. Internet access $20 a month.
You are seriously wrong about this. Encryption can keep people from reading the content of messages, but it doesn't protect the routing information, which is very important. It also doesn't protect the contents if either end point is compromised, which is very likely. Also, we know for a fact that terrorists have used internet cafés and libraries to communicate, so evidently they don't agree with you.
Here in the U.S., the spy Brian Regan used library computers to shop around secrets to Libya and Iraq. Evidently he didn't agree with you, either.
I would find it objectionable if the PATRIOT act created a "Library Awareness Program" that monitored the reading habits of all patrons, but it doesn't do that. Agents still have to get a warrant for specific records. Are libraries really such sacred places that they shouldn't answer to warrants?
Would it be better if librarians said "Sorry, Brian Regan was communicating with Libya in our library and it's a holy place. Get thee hence, sinner!"
Obviously, he must be a drooling moron. just like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. and Ted Turner.
My comment was not meant to denigrate him or his achievement. On the contrary, I have great admiration for him.
I was just pointing out that the original submitter and the comment I was replying to assumed he was a scientist at URI, when he was not. I also thought the NYT article was interesting enough to be submitted as an additional link.
I knew a HAM who was doing this in 1994 for a company he worked with. This scientist sure is a genius when a HAM with nothing but a high school education pulled off the same thing.
There was an article about this "scientist" in the New York Times
yesterday. (No registration link). He is actually just a technician in the university's physics department. He doesn't have even an undergraduate degree.
I think the earth curvature is still there, albeit exaggerated by the fisheye lens...
The distance to the horizon is 549 miles =sqrt(2*r*h+h*h). Or, approximately 546 miles along the surface of the Eath =r*acos(r/(r+h)).
If I do the math correctly, the distance of the airplane from the (geometric) plane containing the cirle of the horizon is 75.4 miles, and the radius of the circle in the plane is 544 miles. So you would get a roughly equivalent view of circle on the ground that has a radius that is 7.2 times the distance of your eyes above the ground (7.2 = 544/75.4). This works out to about 39 feet for me (12 meters). So, yes, I think you could see the curvature.
There's an interesting presentation (8 MB PDF) from George Gollin, who researched (mostly on the Internet) these diploma mills. There are a few players who operate under a lot of different names. It's 123 pages, but basically a slide show, so it goes really fast.
Atlantis was mentioned by more than Plato. It was in Herodotus' writings as well, and he claimed the Egyptians recorded its existence (he studied in Egypt).
As far as I am aware, this is the only thing in Herodotus that supposedly refers to Atlantis:
CLXXXIV. Another ten days' journey from the Garamantes there is again a salt hill and water, where men live called Atarantes. These are the only men whom we know who have no names; for the whole people are called Atarantes, but no man has a name of his own. [2] When the sun is high, they curse and very foully revile him, because his burning heat afflicts their people and their land. [3] After another ten days' journey there is again a hill of salt, and water, and men living there.
Near to this salt is a mountain called Atlas, whose shape is slender and conical; and it is said to be so high that its heights cannot be seen, for clouds are always on them winter and summer. The people of the country call it the pillar of heaven. [4] These men get their name, which is Atlantes, from this mountain. It is said that they eat no living creature, and see no dreams in their sleep.
Who knows if there's any relation to Plato's Atlantis?
You also said:
Among the description given was that it was populated by pygmy elephants. Surprise, surprise, but the remains of pygmy elephants have been discovered on several Cycladean islands.
Plato didn't say they were pygmy elephants, just elephants.
Anyone remember the discovery of polywater. It was massively redidistlled water that developed weird almost homeopathing memory and strange viscosity.
Although it was considered unexplainable, repeated tests showed that the one and only thing inside the glass beaker was infact water. So it had to be a new form of water. A kind of ice-9 but for real.
It was eventually found to be accumulated soluble silica products from the glassware. Which of course was the one chemical that could not be tested for inside a glass beaker. Got people exited like cold fusion for a while, since like cold fusion is was not utterly implausible.
I remember that; I was a grad student in a chemistry lab.
One day I was going to south to visit my gal.
But I had to stay and keep watch over the equipment.
My Sal she is a spunky gal,
But I was on polywater duty all day.
If someone comes into your store and asks for a Pepsi you can say "I don't sell Pepsi, would you like a Coke?" And in fact, what else could you do? Just say no without offering any alternatives? Would it be allowable to offer a beer, but not a Coke?
No Coke! Pepsi? Cheeburger, Cheeburger, Cheeburger, Cheeburger! Cheeps!
Likewise, we were pushed out of textiles, steel, and many many other goods.
In the early 70's all the way up till now we've seen a steady decline of the auto industry, and the ONE THIRD of the country's economy that the auto industry directly or indirectly touches.
We have been "pushed out" of textiles and consumer electronics, but the U.S. has done quite well in steel and the auto industry.
You DO know what the F. in John F. Kerry stands for, right?
Hint, it's not Field&Stream.
And you DO know his wife's maiden name, right? A well known condiment.
Her maiden name was Teresa Simoes-Ferreira. She did inherit millions from her first husband, John Heinz. Kerry's middle name is Forbes, but he's not related to the Forbes magazine publishers.
Secret arrests, supposed "terrorists" being held indefinitely without trial, widespead wiretap priviledges.. the list goes on. Is this what you call a "breeze rustling the trees?"
The Patriot Act is already being abused to prosecute all manner of crimes that have nothing to do with its original intent. If there were any checks and balances in the act itself, this wouldn't be happening.
You shouldn't blame every bad thing the administration has done on the Patriot Act. Although I think Dinh defends some terrible civil rights abuses--especially the treatment of Jose Padilla--those are not done under the auspices of the Patriot Act (nor does the interviewer claim they are, if you read carefully).
If you want to see balanced criticism of the Patriot Act based on what it actually says, read this series in Slate.
About the Patriot Act,
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has said: "I have never had a single abuse of the Patriot Act reported [to] me. My staff e-mailed the ACLU and asked them for instances of actual abuses. They e-mailed back and they had none." Similarly, an investigation this month ((1/27/94)) by the Department of Justice's Inspector General - a Democrat appointed by President Clinton -- found exactly zero civil liberties abuses under the Patriot Act.
How TF did this get modded as insightful? The Patriot Act, specifically the provisions that were found unconstitutional, allow for "secret detentions" where lawyers could not consult for those who were "terrorists" (in this case Mr. Arar). Well, that's great, but if a prisoner can't see the charges against him and neither can he obtain a lawyer, he's screwed... and that's what happened to Mr. Arar.
What are you talking about? The part that was declared unconstitutional had to do with "giving expert advice or assistance to groups designated foreign terrorist organizations." The list of "designated foreign terrorist organizations" is here.
Arar's 10-day detention and deportation to Syria had nothing to do with Patriot Act. The Clinton administration used this same kind of "extraordinary rendition"--as the CIA calls it--after the African embassy bombings, and well before the Patriot Act was dreamed of.
People blame lots of abuses on the Patriot Act that are unrelated--e.g. Maher Arar, Jose Padilla
Slashdot Mirror
Contrast that to Kevin Drum's really informative post on the same topic a few days earlier.
Look at the other posts on that page. "Daryn *Hearts* Rush: Ewww". Insightful?
This guy looks familiar. Insightful?
I'm not saying "almost all economists" lightly. Surveys show that over 90% of economists favor free trade, and few see any distinction between offshore outsourcing and other international trade.
I don't know what J. K. Galbraith has said about outsourcing.
Oh, so goods and services are cheaper? I guess consumers, as well as CEOs and stockholders benefit.
Where does it end? It ends with all those third world countries having higher wages and better jobs, just like us. It's a race to the top, not for the bottom. Look at all the other countries that have been the source for cheap labor in the past--Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong (now part of China), Singapore, Korea. Those are all high wage countries (or well on their way).
Everybody did not become unemployed after they stopped being poor.
For an economically-informed discussion of outsouring, see this article by Daniel Drezner.
We have this weird superstition that there is something wrong with this. I'm sure that in a few decades people will wonder what we could have been thinking, just as we look back on those times, a couple of hundred years ago, when autopsies were illegal and medical students and researchers had to skulk around illegally buying corpses.
It used to support it.
Here in the U.S., the spy Brian Regan used library computers to shop around secrets to Libya and Iraq. Evidently he didn't agree with you, either.
I would find it objectionable if the PATRIOT act created a "Library Awareness Program" that monitored the reading habits of all patrons, but it doesn't do that. Agents still have to get a warrant for specific records. Are libraries really such sacred places that they shouldn't answer to warrants?
Would it be better if librarians said "Sorry, Brian Regan was communicating with Libya in our library and it's a holy place. Get thee hence, sinner!"
His website is here. There are a lot of interesting tidbits on his history page.
I was just pointing out that the original submitter and the comment I was replying to assumed he was a scientist at URI, when he was not. I also thought the NYT article was interesting enough to be submitted as an additional link.
If I do the math correctly, the distance of the airplane from the (geometric) plane containing the cirle of the horizon is 75.4 miles, and the radius of the circle in the plane is 544 miles. So you would get a roughly equivalent view of circle on the ground that has a radius that is 7.2 times the distance of your eyes above the ground (7.2 = 544/75.4). This works out to about 39 feet for me (12 meters). So, yes, I think you could see the curvature.
There's an interesting presentation (8 MB PDF) from George Gollin, who researched (mostly on the Internet) these diploma mills. There are a few players who operate under a lot of different names. It's 123 pages, but basically a slide show, so it goes really fast.
You also said:
Plato didn't say they were pygmy elephants, just elephants.One day I was going to south to visit my gal.
But I had to stay and keep watch over the equipment.
My Sal she is a spunky gal,
But I was on polywater duty all day.
He does come from a wealth family, too
If you want to see balanced criticism of the Patriot Act based on what it actually says, read this series in Slate.
About the Patriot Act,
From a Clifford May columnArar's 10-day detention and deportation to Syria had nothing to do with Patriot Act. The Clinton administration used this same kind of "extraordinary rendition"--as the CIA calls it--after the African embassy bombings, and well before the Patriot Act was dreamed of.
People blame lots of abuses on the Patriot Act that are unrelated--e.g. Maher Arar, Jose Padilla