I can corroborate the 14:1 kill ratio. I've participated in green flag excercises at Nellis and our pilots (in f-16s) came back fully defeated (pretend killed) after every mission. That is not to say that our pilots are not good- they are, and they have had chances to prove that in several combat zones.
Simply put, the F-22 dominates the sky. Every aspect of the aircraft is superior in terms of performance. One thing that is left out in these discussions is pilot task saturation; in the F-22, the aircraft computers take care of many tasks, and does them better than humanly possible, allowing the pilot to focus more on flying. My conscience tells me to leave it at that, considering the sensitivity of the subject, but you can probably find more information somewhere else.
As someone who has been working on fighters for almost a decade, I am still continually amazed by everything I learn about the F-22. I've personally heard generals and some colonels who have been flying since the f-4 was new say that the F-22 was to them an entirely new paradigm in combat flight. They couldn't say enough good things about it.
I know I probably sound like a shill for lockheed-martin, but I'm trying to counteract the dozens of posts that lament the f-22 as already outdated, as merely an incremental improvement on the f-15, or as an aircraft that could be suitably replaced by its cost in f-16s. None of those things are true.
Yes, I've run tests on my network that confirm what I already thought. I have a small Dell mini with a few network utilities installed that I've used to troubleshoot issues in the past (said dell spends almost zero time connected to the internet).
It was actually during the course of scanning my network that I came across all my neighbors.
I just scanned again for my personal edification, and everything is locked down. The only thing I can't control is my clearwire modem, but I've been trying unsuccessfully to gain access for years now, so I'm not too worried. If the modem was compromised, it should only affect the hop between the modem and the tower.
If you don't me asking, what kind of situation have you found that would lead the network status to not show open ports? Stuff like bonjour and ntp show up in the firewall settings... Are you dealing with keyloggers or something? Just curious for curiosity's sake.
The problem I have with this is that my own ISP has blocked me using the excuse that I might have an infected computer. I tell them that I'm running os x and the problem is immediately fixed.
What concerns me is that what my ISP was doing was not 'bot profiling' (I have almost every port blocked and I'm not running any services that use weird ports, like some p2p software does)- they were simply disconnecting/throttling down their heavy users. I don't use the internet at home more than a few hours a day, and my computer is hibernating all day. I can't tell you how pissed I would be if my isp completely blocked my connection and forced me to jump through hoops to restart it pretending that it had something to do with security.
These ISPs are going to use this opportunity to take care of their heavy user problem. That bugs me.
I can't think of an OS that can tell the difference between skype spraying bit all over the internet versus a spam mailer spraying bits all over the internet. In both cases, the user probably clicked something (skype.exe or boobs.jpg.exe), and clicked "OK" when the OS asked if they were sure. At that point the reins are in the hands of the user.
You can put a HUD, anti-lock brakes, cornering headlights, parking sonar, all-weather tires, and wrap-around cabin airbags in a car, but a stupid user will crash it just the same. It's not the car's fault that the user wanted to drive down an icy mountain road with hairpin turns at 60 mph at 3a.m. in a blizzard. Which- in my experience doing ISP tech support and working with people in various office environments- is EXACTLY what many users want to do.
My ISP (Clearwire, fwiw) has on several occasions throttled me down to about 5 KB/s until I call and ask what's up. I get a level 1 tech who reads me the entire "have you run your antivirus software lately, do you leave your computer on all the time, etc." script before I can tell him that I run os x on a laptop that spends most of its time at work.
The call immediately goes up the chain, I have to explain myself again, I get put on hold for a minute or two, and then the problem is mysteriously solved. All without ever admitting that they had something to do with it.
And I don't use any P2P/torrent/limewire software. I do download lots of legitimate software, streaming video, and music (from amazon or itunes). I don't run any internet-facing servers- in fact, my firewall is locked down as far as it can be without causing problems for myself, and every nonessential service and port is closed. My wireless network uses WPA2 and MAC filtering.
All that, and I was identified several times as a zombie. If I was one of these customers getting cut off in Australia, I'd raise holy hell. Since it has only happened to me a few times (and temporarily) with Clearwire, the hell I raise consists merely of telling everyone at every chance that comes up that Clearwire will screw you over without a second thought. And that I'm on an oversold network segment that gets unusable around dinner time, and that a simple nmap sweep shows me all my network neighbors running unpatched windows boxes.
I just quit smoking so I'm sorry if I come off as angry.
>>The car might as well be sent to the crusher after being hit with this device
Have you ever actually seen what happens to most cars at the end of a high-speed chase? They're not exactly ready for the sales lot.
Why do you all think that this will be used for routine traffic stops?
"Hey, that guy's got expired tags. Zap him and brick his $40k suv. Don't worry about the consequences, because we are teh police and it's totally fair to compare us to the SS and the gov't of the book 1984 which someone read 15 years ago and we never get punished and it's completely appropriate for the country to judge the entire force based on the actions of a few screw-ups even though we're the first people they call when their neighbor won't turn down the music. Also: run-on sentences."
>>The run into somebody and kill them. Just like they do when being chased at high speed.
I'm going to play devil's advocate* here. The difference between this device and other like it versus out-of-control chases is that the police can choose when and where to deploy it. That is, it's doubtful that they will use it on a crowded section of highway- it is much more likely that the first time the car is alone on the street, or better yet walled-in between dividers, the police would use the device. But then again, maybe you're right and all police are mouth-breathing hydrocephalic half-wits.
>>It cannot be accurate at all, but the cops will become convinced that it is laser-like.
Yes, after seeing it cause collateral damage again and again, they will become convinced that it is laser-like. Kind of like how they are always spraying OC upwind. Ho Ho, they'll never learn!:)
>>A bit of filtering and shielding will suffice, and the cop cars will get it. So will the vehicles of some criminals.
And that's why we have the time-tested PIT maneuver ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIT_maneuver ). This is just another tool in a large inventory of strategies for dealing with chases. If it gets out of the lab, approved by all the governing bodies, and then used for routine traffic stops, get back to me.
I would use service even though I have netflix because I have Clearwire and therefore it takes 3 hours to watch a 90-minute movie. With netflix (and the daily show, and others), you can't just pause it and walk away until the video is halfway done loading- the silverlight or whatever halts the download when it gets a few seconds past the playhead.
It's already bad enough that some youtube videos download at the 20-40 KB/s range, while others download at 5 times that speed (it's not my connection- I've gone back and double checked). It's a real pleasure to load up a 3-minute video, pause it, and come back 6 minutes later to watch it.
So youtube/google, if you're reading this: I WANT TO GIVE YOU MY MONEY. I want to buy your service. DON'T FUCK IT UP LIKE EVERYONE ELSE (silverlight). And have a wonderful day:)
Yes. The exceptions would be international travel, since you'll have to report to customs (int'l airports are run by port authority).
Here is the FAQ for Monaco Air, a private operator attached to the airfield my base uses. There's a little bit on customs and it'll give you a feel for what it's like to NOT fly from the main terminals.
And to save you the time of asking, "Isn't that a huge security loophole?"- Yes, it is. But rich people fly private, the rest of us fly commercial; who do you think gets the short end of the stick;)
I don't know if you're being serious or not about the first question, but the answer is no. You'd drive to your hangar or charter company, walk right in, and fly away. These facilities are usually located a good distance away from the commercial terminals. There might be a security gate or something, but that's more to protect the private property than to screen you.
I've been flying in military aircraft for years, and we never deal with that bs. Park and ride, and the only trade-off is hauling your own luggage.
As for the second question: These aircraft never had weapons. They were trainers.
There's nothing stopping you from owning and flying surplus military aircraft- even fighters. There are tons of them out there, especially cold war trainers from both sides (think t-38). There are even a few people out there flying their own p-51's, although each time one crashes the number goes down permanently. There are private businesses that will even fly you around in one.
The primary reason these surplus jets would be unrealistic to own is the maintenance involved. You could do it yourself, if you knew every aircraft-specific system well enough to sign off on your own repairs. You'd spend a few weeks doing maintenance for every flight hour. Finding parts would be a nightmare. The engine alone would keep you on the ground for seemingly minor issues. Or you could hire a crew to do your maintenance, and put your life in their hands. The going rate for a freelance certified NDI tech with his own equipment is about $200-400/hr. Maintenance costs many, many times the original price of any fighter aircraft.
I work in air combat combat command aircraft maintenance, fwiw.
Low standards combined with parents that don't get involved result in very few American students good enough to attend post-secondary education.
I am an American but I spent some time living in France a few years back as part of my poor public school education. I lived with a french family that couldn't be more different from my own (strongly catholic, nuclear family with 3 kids, fairly well-to-do, generally pretty open and supportive of each other). What I did not notice was any more or stronger involvement by the parents in education nor any immediately obvious superiority in the quality of French education. They had some bitchy teachers, some nice push-over teachers, cliques and hierarchies, really bad electronic music, etc- basically an echo of american public schools in areas that are economically equivalent. Had I not struggled with how quickly french teenagers spoke, I would have aced any of the classes I attended at the french school.
The disparity lies much more with (imo): -Very poor parts of the US that show no signs of improving, which has ramifications that extend far beyond just grade school -The structure and price of European-style secondary education
Those are things that could only be solved by drastic and sweeping social/economic changes, not simply pouring more money into the public schools. It's a change I would like to see, but it doesn't help to just point fingers at the public schools.
And another thing- I don't like this anti-american self-flagellation that I see around here sometimes. "Oh, children from X know calculus and 4 languages by the time they are 7..." I call BS. Children who have a need for more than one language learn it here in the states just as readily- look at the southwest and california. If I had kids here in the upper midwest, why would I make them learn french and german and spanish? Where or when would they ever have a need or even an opportunity to practice? I spent some time in Iceland: Besides tour guides, no one spoke enough english to have a conversation or communicate anything without some major hand gestures and charades. And in France (where I have visited several subsequent times) even people working in the tourism bureaus couldn't speak anything even close to conversational english. This was in a town that was maybe 60 miles from England.
Heck I'm sorry for ranting... It's -15F outside and I'm stuck drinking instant coffee and I'm not having the best day. But back to my original point: Economics, not our public school structure, is responsible for the sad state of affairs, which is really not that sad when you actually visit other countries and see the french or icelandic or british or qatari or canadian version of rednecks and watch the television shows that make Jerry Springer look like Walter Cronkite. The french have their little problems with minority violence and unemployment and agriculture tariffs that they don't like to talk about, canada is responsible for the cold-ass weather that I'm dealing with right now, Great Britain is just weird with their cameras and knife turn-in campaign, Qatar's weather is too hot to qualify as actual weather anymore, Iceland is a place where people eat fermented shark meat FOR FUN, you can't look at porn in China... Let's just agree that everywhere sucks in some way or another.
You can argue that women have a choice, but in poor provinces, you can bet that it would be akin to prostitution, where young women are basically forced into the lifestyle because they have no other options.
Compared to what women would normally do in poor provinces to get by?
I think that if China is worried about 'demeaning women', it should worry more about:
The lopsided male-female ratio is believed to be the result of female infanticide in a society that values boys and where most couples are allowed only one child.
"China is the only country where suicides among women outnumber men," Yang Fude, vice-president of Beijing Hui Long Guan Hospital, was quoted by the China Daily as saying.
I would like more substantial proof that women are being 'demeaned' by internet porn more than China's own disastrous social policies (which began in their current form long before the internet came about).
A quick search for 'rural chinese porn' (in english and chinese) showed nothing but story after story about China's porn crackdown and nothing even remotely resembling the subjugation of poor rural women.
Skip down to the section on mexico, probably skip the nazi stuff. There are people being dicks to each other everywhere for every reason. It's perfectly reasonable, then, for christians to be someone's whipping boy somewhere.
It doesn't make it right, it doesn't excuse retribution or martyrdom, but that's the way it is.
Things get further complicated if you look at intra-christian fighting such as protestants vs catholics in ireland...
I disagree. I know a couple of guys who play WoW: One of them plays casually, one or two hours per week (and he is in a relationship; before that he played much more). The other guy plays WoW on the order of 80+ hours per week.
After a few years of working with them, I'd estimate that the amount of shit you take as a (male) wow player is proportional to the square of the number of hours/week you spend playing. It really defines the way people think about you, not to mention that you already have little to no social life for others to get to know you better.
On the other hand, the two women who play (one plays WoW, the other one plays some game I don't know) enjoy an insult-free world when they're not playing. Maybe it's just where I live or something, but I can't see any guy giving shit to any girl for any reason outside of relationship issues. Maybe other girls secretly attack them, I don't know- All I know is that if you went so far as to question a woman's outfit or driving- let alone what she does in most of her spare time- you will be ostracized and carry a permanent black mark on your reputation.
God that seems so petty and childlike when I read it back. Welcome to the upper midwest! Minnesota Nice!
I seem to recall that my older Honda had something called a 'radio condenser' or something similar linked in with the electrical system. It was supposed to stop the EMF from the spark plugs/solenoids/etc and if I recall correctly from my old haynes guide, the car wouldn't start without it.
So this is just a question for anyone who works in the field: what effect, if any, does broadcasting and drawing current from a car's electrical system have on these hotspots?
I'm just curious because the wireless things in my house seem to slow down all the time for things like my microwave, furnace, tv, etc being on.
This opens up a really gray area in terms of medical ethics. Here:
There are many documented cases of people being revived after prolonged (over one hour) 'death' caused by exposure to cold with few side-effects. However, and this is a BIG however- those people were "killed" by the cold; that is, they did not fall victim to leukemia and suddenly die, falling into icy water.
So...
The obvious(?) answer is to freeze people who are *near* death. Well, that's kind of murder/euthanasia according to the laws on the books. Without that particular issue, yeah, this would work great. But we'd have to come to accept this as preservation instead of euthanasia. We could work it until the chances of coming out of it alive were the same as surviving open-heart surgery or something comparable, but I think there would still be that mental/emotional block. Not to mention that critically-ill/hospice patients are already fragile. "Gramp is still alive but we're going to freeze him," still has a funeral feel. The person is, in effect, dying until revived when whatever criteria were met. If we don't cure cancer (for example) in our lifetime, then that *is* a funeral for the patient's family and friends.
I can't speak of afghanistan, but in iraq the insurgent attacks were higher and more effective:
-when the ground was dry (moving around in iraq during the rainy season is a nightmare) -lots of blowing dust in the air, drastically reducing visibility -around dusk -toward the end of ramadan
That's just a taste of all the factors that you'd have to account for to get an accurate map of insurgent behavior. Even then, I think it'd be pretty useless, since they are not a regular army and do not usually coordinate among cells. Maybe they want to attack, but the shipment from libya isn't here yet, so they wait for that but now the americans are getting suspicious so they launch all 20 of their libyan mortars at once and high-tail it out of there. Seems like a major, coordinated attack when in reality things are very different.
I think it would be difficult to draw any conclusions about how many insurgents are killed at once. How do you decide when an incident starts and ends? Operations can last days. How close do they have to be to each other when they die? I can almost guarantee that we are taking out insurgents one by one or two by two for the most part. They don't run around in packs of 30, they sneak at night in pairs.
That's just my experience, though. Keep your fun little "23" theory.
I can see why some people would assume that a -ium suffix would be proper.
Aluminum should rightly be called aluminum not for reasons of 'sounding latin' but by way of the standard of using an element's oxide name to determine the pure element's suffix.
From Wikipedia:
The -um suffix is consistent with the universal spelling alumina for the oxide, as lanthana is the oxide of lanthanum, and magnesia, ceria, and thoria are the oxides of magnesium, cerium, and thorium respectively.
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I can corroborate the 14:1 kill ratio. I've participated in green flag excercises at Nellis and our pilots (in f-16s) came back fully defeated (pretend killed) after every mission. That is not to say that our pilots are not good- they are, and they have had chances to prove that in several combat zones.
Simply put, the F-22 dominates the sky. Every aspect of the aircraft is superior in terms of performance. One thing that is left out in these discussions is pilot task saturation; in the F-22, the aircraft computers take care of many tasks, and does them better than humanly possible, allowing the pilot to focus more on flying. My conscience tells me to leave it at that, considering the sensitivity of the subject, but you can probably find more information somewhere else.
As someone who has been working on fighters for almost a decade, I am still continually amazed by everything I learn about the F-22. I've personally heard generals and some colonels who have been flying since the f-4 was new say that the F-22 was to them an entirely new paradigm in combat flight. They couldn't say enough good things about it.
I know I probably sound like a shill for lockheed-martin, but I'm trying to counteract the dozens of posts that lament the f-22 as already outdated, as merely an incremental improvement on the f-15, or as an aircraft that could be suitably replaced by its cost in f-16s. None of those things are true.
-b
Yes, I've run tests on my network that confirm what I already thought. I have a small Dell mini with a few network utilities installed that I've used to troubleshoot issues in the past (said dell spends almost zero time connected to the internet).
It was actually during the course of scanning my network that I came across all my neighbors.
I just scanned again for my personal edification, and everything is locked down. The only thing I can't control is my clearwire modem, but I've been trying unsuccessfully to gain access for years now, so I'm not too worried. If the modem was compromised, it should only affect the hop between the modem and the tower.
If you don't me asking, what kind of situation have you found that would lead the network status to not show open ports? Stuff like bonjour and ntp show up in the firewall settings... Are you dealing with keyloggers or something? Just curious for curiosity's sake.
-b
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3788
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Germany
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_France#Disabled_people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_United_Kingdom#The_UK_before_the_European_Court_of_Human_Rights
I'm not saying that Europe is broken and the U.S. is perfect, but people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
-b
The problem I have with this is that my own ISP has blocked me using the excuse that I might have an infected computer. I tell them that I'm running os x and the problem is immediately fixed.
What concerns me is that what my ISP was doing was not 'bot profiling' (I have almost every port blocked and I'm not running any services that use weird ports, like some p2p software does)- they were simply disconnecting/throttling down their heavy users. I don't use the internet at home more than a few hours a day, and my computer is hibernating all day. I can't tell you how pissed I would be if my isp completely blocked my connection and forced me to jump through hoops to restart it pretending that it had something to do with security.
These ISPs are going to use this opportunity to take care of their heavy user problem. That bugs me.
-b
I can't think of an OS that can tell the difference between skype spraying bit all over the internet versus a spam mailer spraying bits all over the internet. In both cases, the user probably clicked something (skype.exe or boobs.jpg.exe), and clicked "OK" when the OS asked if they were sure. At that point the reins are in the hands of the user.
You can put a HUD, anti-lock brakes, cornering headlights, parking sonar, all-weather tires, and wrap-around cabin airbags in a car, but a stupid user will crash it just the same. It's not the car's fault that the user wanted to drive down an icy mountain road with hairpin turns at 60 mph at 3a.m. in a blizzard. Which- in my experience doing ISP tech support and working with people in various office environments- is EXACTLY what many users want to do.
-b
My ISP (Clearwire, fwiw) has on several occasions throttled me down to about 5 KB/s until I call and ask what's up. I get a level 1 tech who reads me the entire "have you run your antivirus software lately, do you leave your computer on all the time, etc." script before I can tell him that I run os x on a laptop that spends most of its time at work.
The call immediately goes up the chain, I have to explain myself again, I get put on hold for a minute or two, and then the problem is mysteriously solved. All without ever admitting that they had something to do with it.
And I don't use any P2P/torrent/limewire software. I do download lots of legitimate software, streaming video, and music (from amazon or itunes). I don't run any internet-facing servers- in fact, my firewall is locked down as far as it can be without causing problems for myself, and every nonessential service and port is closed. My wireless network uses WPA2 and MAC filtering.
All that, and I was identified several times as a zombie. If I was one of these customers getting cut off in Australia, I'd raise holy hell. Since it has only happened to me a few times (and temporarily) with Clearwire, the hell I raise consists merely of telling everyone at every chance that comes up that Clearwire will screw you over without a second thought. And that I'm on an oversold network segment that gets unusable around dinner time, and that a simple nmap sweep shows me all my network neighbors running unpatched windows boxes.
I just quit smoking so I'm sorry if I come off as angry.
-b
>>The car might as well be sent to the crusher after being hit with this device
Have you ever actually seen what happens to most cars at the end of a high-speed chase? They're not exactly ready for the sales lot.
Why do you all think that this will be used for routine traffic stops?
"Hey, that guy's got expired tags. Zap him and brick his $40k suv. Don't worry about the consequences, because we are teh police and it's totally fair to compare us to the SS and the gov't of the book 1984 which someone read 15 years ago and we never get punished and it's completely appropriate for the country to judge the entire force based on the actions of a few screw-ups even though we're the first people they call when their neighbor won't turn down the music. Also: run-on sentences."
-b
>>The run into somebody and kill them. Just like they do when being chased at high speed.
I'm going to play devil's advocate* here. The difference between this device and other like it versus out-of-control chases is that the police can choose when and where to deploy it. That is, it's doubtful that they will use it on a crowded section of highway- it is much more likely that the first time the car is alone on the street, or better yet walled-in between dividers, the police would use the device. But then again, maybe you're right and all police are mouth-breathing hydrocephalic half-wits.
>>It cannot be accurate at all, but the cops will become convinced that it is laser-like.
Yes, after seeing it cause collateral damage again and again, they will become convinced that it is laser-like. Kind of like how they are always spraying OC upwind. Ho Ho, they'll never learn! :)
>>A bit of filtering and shielding will suffice, and the cop cars will get it. So will the vehicles of some criminals.
And that's why we have the time-tested PIT maneuver ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIT_maneuver ). This is just another tool in a large inventory of strategies for dealing with chases. If it gets out of the lab, approved by all the governing bodies, and then used for routine traffic stops, get back to me.
-b
*In the slashdot sense. You know what I mean.
I would use service even though I have netflix because I have Clearwire and therefore it takes 3 hours to watch a 90-minute movie. With netflix (and the daily show, and others), you can't just pause it and walk away until the video is halfway done loading- the silverlight or whatever halts the download when it gets a few seconds past the playhead.
It's already bad enough that some youtube videos download at the 20-40 KB/s range, while others download at 5 times that speed (it's not my connection- I've gone back and double checked). It's a real pleasure to load up a 3-minute video, pause it, and come back 6 minutes later to watch it.
So youtube/google, if you're reading this: I WANT TO GIVE YOU MY MONEY. I want to buy your service. DON'T FUCK IT UP LIKE EVERYONE ELSE (silverlight). And have a wonderful day :)
-b
Yes. The exceptions would be international travel, since you'll have to report to customs (int'l airports are run by port authority).
Here is the FAQ for Monaco Air, a private operator attached to the airfield my base uses. There's a little bit on customs and it'll give you a feel for what it's like to NOT fly from the main terminals.
http://www.monacoairduluth.com/faq.php
And to save you the time of asking, "Isn't that a huge security loophole?"- Yes, it is. But rich people fly private, the rest of us fly commercial; who do you think gets the short end of the stick ;)
-b
I don't know if you're being serious or not about the first question, but the answer is no. You'd drive to your hangar or charter company, walk right in, and fly away. These facilities are usually located a good distance away from the commercial terminals. There might be a security gate or something, but that's more to protect the private property than to screen you.
I've been flying in military aircraft for years, and we never deal with that bs. Park and ride, and the only trade-off is hauling your own luggage.
As for the second question: These aircraft never had weapons. They were trainers.
-b
There's nothing stopping you from owning and flying surplus military aircraft- even fighters. There are tons of them out there, especially cold war trainers from both sides (think t-38). There are even a few people out there flying their own p-51's, although each time one crashes the number goes down permanently. There are private businesses that will even fly you around in one.
Here's one:
http://millionairesconcierge.com/fighterjets.htm
Here's an extensive list of businesses:
http://www.thirtythousandfeet.com/rentride.htm
---
Yes, you are correct that you would be limited to mach .9 just like our own military. The air force stopped flying supersonic over the mainland shortly after this fiasco:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_sonic_boom_tests
The primary reason these surplus jets would be unrealistic to own is the maintenance involved. You could do it yourself, if you knew every aircraft-specific system well enough to sign off on your own repairs. You'd spend a few weeks doing maintenance for every flight hour. Finding parts would be a nightmare. The engine alone would keep you on the ground for seemingly minor issues. Or you could hire a crew to do your maintenance, and put your life in their hands. The going rate for a freelance certified NDI tech with his own equipment is about $200-400/hr. Maintenance costs many, many times the original price of any fighter aircraft.
I work in air combat combat command aircraft maintenance, fwiw.
-b
The pro version could be the maxIpad.
posted from a macbook, settle down...
Our websense (i think that's what it is) started blocking google cache a year or two ago. Slashdot, of course, is not blocked.
-b
Low standards combined with parents that don't get involved result in very few American students good enough to attend post-secondary education.
I am an American but I spent some time living in France a few years back as part of my poor public school education. I lived with a french family that couldn't be more different from my own (strongly catholic, nuclear family with 3 kids, fairly well-to-do, generally pretty open and supportive of each other). What I did not notice was any more or stronger involvement by the parents in education nor any immediately obvious superiority in the quality of French education. They had some bitchy teachers, some nice push-over teachers, cliques and hierarchies, really bad electronic music, etc- basically an echo of american public schools in areas that are economically equivalent. Had I not struggled with how quickly french teenagers spoke, I would have aced any of the classes I attended at the french school.
The disparity lies much more with (imo):
-Very poor parts of the US that show no signs of improving, which has ramifications that extend far beyond just grade school
-The structure and price of European-style secondary education
Those are things that could only be solved by drastic and sweeping social/economic changes, not simply pouring more money into the public schools. It's a change I would like to see, but it doesn't help to just point fingers at the public schools.
And another thing- I don't like this anti-american self-flagellation that I see around here sometimes. "Oh, children from X know calculus and 4 languages by the time they are 7..." I call BS. Children who have a need for more than one language learn it here in the states just as readily- look at the southwest and california. If I had kids here in the upper midwest, why would I make them learn french and german and spanish? Where or when would they ever have a need or even an opportunity to practice? I spent some time in Iceland: Besides tour guides, no one spoke enough english to have a conversation or communicate anything without some major hand gestures and charades. And in France (where I have visited several subsequent times) even people working in the tourism bureaus couldn't speak anything even close to conversational english. This was in a town that was maybe 60 miles from England.
Heck I'm sorry for ranting... It's -15F outside and I'm stuck drinking instant coffee and I'm not having the best day. But back to my original point: Economics, not our public school structure, is responsible for the sad state of affairs, which is really not that sad when you actually visit other countries and see the french or icelandic or british or qatari or canadian version of rednecks and watch the television shows that make Jerry Springer look like Walter Cronkite. The french have their little problems with minority violence and unemployment and agriculture tariffs that they don't like to talk about, canada is responsible for the cold-ass weather that I'm dealing with right now, Great Britain is just weird with their cameras and knife turn-in campaign, Qatar's weather is too hot to qualify as actual weather anymore, Iceland is a place where people eat fermented shark meat FOR FUN, you can't look at porn in China... Let's just agree that everywhere sucks in some way or another.
-b
You can argue that women have a choice, but in poor provinces, you can bet that it would be akin to prostitution, where young women are basically forced into the lifestyle because they have no other options.
Compared to what women would normally do in poor provinces to get by?
I think that if China is worried about 'demeaning women', it should worry more about:
The lopsided male-female ratio is believed to be the result of female infanticide in a society that values boys and where most couples are allowed only one child.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/mar/17/china.mainsection
Or
"China is the only country where suicides among women outnumber men," Yang Fude, vice-president of Beijing Hui Long Guan Hospital, was quoted by the China Daily as saying.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST2878220070911
I would like more substantial proof that women are being 'demeaned' by internet porn more than China's own disastrous social policies (which began in their current form long before the internet came about).
A quick search for 'rural chinese porn' (in english and chinese) showed nothing but story after story about China's porn crackdown and nothing even remotely resembling the subjugation of poor rural women.
More proof, please.
-b
Read this:
http://slashdot.org/faq/editorial.shtml#ed900
If you still have questions, read it again. And have a nice day.
-b
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians
Skip down to the section on mexico, probably skip the nazi stuff. There are people being dicks to each other everywhere for every reason. It's perfectly reasonable, then, for christians to be someone's whipping boy somewhere.
It doesn't make it right, it doesn't excuse retribution or martyrdom, but that's the way it is.
Things get further complicated if you look at intra-christian fighting such as protestants vs catholics in ireland...
-b
You must watch this, if you haven't already:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bar3GOzDNzg
Happy holidays! Hehe.
-b
I disagree. I know a couple of guys who play WoW: One of them plays casually, one or two hours per week (and he is in a relationship; before that he played much more). The other guy plays WoW on the order of 80+ hours per week.
After a few years of working with them, I'd estimate that the amount of shit you take as a (male) wow player is proportional to the square of the number of hours/week you spend playing. It really defines the way people think about you, not to mention that you already have little to no social life for others to get to know you better.
On the other hand, the two women who play (one plays WoW, the other one plays some game I don't know) enjoy an insult-free world when they're not playing. Maybe it's just where I live or something, but I can't see any guy giving shit to any girl for any reason outside of relationship issues. Maybe other girls secretly attack them, I don't know- All I know is that if you went so far as to question a woman's outfit or driving- let alone what she does in most of her spare time- you will be ostracized and carry a permanent black mark on your reputation.
God that seems so petty and childlike when I read it back. Welcome to the upper midwest! Minnesota Nice!
-b
I seem to recall that my older Honda had something called a 'radio condenser' or something similar linked in with the electrical system. It was supposed to stop the EMF from the spark plugs/solenoids/etc and if I recall correctly from my old haynes guide, the car wouldn't start without it.
So this is just a question for anyone who works in the field: what effect, if any, does broadcasting and drawing current from a car's electrical system have on these hotspots?
I'm just curious because the wireless things in my house seem to slow down all the time for things like my microwave, furnace, tv, etc being on.
-b
This opens up a really gray area in terms of medical ethics. Here:
There are many documented cases of people being revived after prolonged (over one hour) 'death' caused by exposure to cold with few side-effects. However, and this is a BIG however- those people were "killed" by the cold; that is, they did not fall victim to leukemia and suddenly die, falling into icy water.
So...
The obvious(?) answer is to freeze people who are *near* death. Well, that's kind of murder/euthanasia according to the laws on the books. Without that particular issue, yeah, this would work great. But we'd have to come to accept this as preservation instead of euthanasia. We could work it until the chances of coming out of it alive were the same as surviving open-heart surgery or something comparable, but I think there would still be that mental/emotional block. Not to mention that critically-ill/hospice patients are already fragile. "Gramp is still alive but we're going to freeze him," still has a funeral feel. The person is, in effect, dying until revived when whatever criteria were met. If we don't cure cancer (for example) in our lifetime, then that *is* a funeral for the patient's family and friends.
-b
These may be useful to you:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/insurgency/etc/graph.html
http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2007/12/iraq_by_the_numbers.php
I can't speak of afghanistan, but in iraq the insurgent attacks were higher and more effective:
-when the ground was dry (moving around in iraq during the rainy season is a nightmare)
-lots of blowing dust in the air, drastically reducing visibility
-around dusk
-toward the end of ramadan
That's just a taste of all the factors that you'd have to account for to get an accurate map of insurgent behavior. Even then, I think it'd be pretty useless, since they are not a regular army and do not usually coordinate among cells. Maybe they want to attack, but the shipment from libya isn't here yet, so they wait for that but now the americans are getting suspicious so they launch all 20 of their libyan mortars at once and high-tail it out of there. Seems like a major, coordinated attack when in reality things are very different.
Guaranteed to make your brain hurt.
-b
Ehhhh... I don't think so.
A series of searches of "x insurgents killed" yields:
2= 14,700
3= 30,700
4= 164,000
5= 20,000 results
10= 160,000
15= 64,000
20= 306,000
25= 41,000
30= 58,400
31= 10
32= 75,400
33= 4,460
34= 26,400
35= 36,000
40= 57,000
41= 484
42= 28,400
43= 9
44= 1
45= 9,180
I think it would be difficult to draw any conclusions about how many insurgents are killed at once. How do you decide when an incident starts and ends? Operations can last days. How close do they have to be to each other when they die? I can almost guarantee that we are taking out insurgents one by one or two by two for the most part. They don't run around in packs of 30, they sneak at night in pairs.
That's just my experience, though. Keep your fun little "23" theory.
-b
In addition:
Actinium, americium, Barium, berkelium, beryllium, bohrium, cadmium, cesium, calcium, californium, cerium, chromium, curium, darmstadtium, dubnium, dysprosium, einsteinium, erbium, europium, fermium, francium, gadolinium, gallium, germanium, hafnium, hassium, helium, holmium, indium, iridium, lawrencium, lithium, lutetium, magnesium, meitnerium, mendelevium, neodymium, neptunium, niobium, nobelium, osmium, palladium, plutonium, polonium, potassium, praseodymium, promethium, protactinium, radium, rhenium, rhodium, roentgenium, rubidium, ruthenium, rutherfordium, samarium, scandium, seaborgium, selenium, sodium, strontium, technetium, tellurium, terbium, thallium, thorium, thulium, titanium, uranium, vanadium, ytterbium, yttrium, zirconium.
VS:
Aluminum, lanthanum, molybdenum, platinum, tantalum.
I can see why some people would assume that a -ium suffix would be proper.
Aluminum should rightly be called aluminum not for reasons of 'sounding latin' but by way of the standard of using an element's oxide name to determine the pure element's suffix.
From Wikipedia:
The -um suffix is consistent with the universal spelling alumina for the oxide, as lanthana is the oxide of lanthanum, and magnesia, ceria, and thoria are the oxides of magnesium, cerium, and thorium respectively.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Etymology)
List of element name etymologies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_element_name_etymologies
Also of note: The Art of Chemistry: Myths, Medicines, and Materials by Arthur Greenberg
-b