Learn to discriminate between 1st, 2nd and 3rd world countries before you discriminate.
South Africa is a 3rd world country with a small 1st world portion - but overall the description of a 3rd world would be 100% correct. As for the South African Buro of Standards (SABS), there competency has been highly suspect the past few years.
He does not get a big advantage over other athletes â" he has had huge hurdles to overcome (balance for one). Why not let him compete in the Olympics? The Olympics is supposed to take the best guy â" and not discriminate against him because he is disabled.
Why not make a special event for normal athletes at the para-Olympics (since they are at a disadvantage to non-able bodied athletes)?
Some able bodied (steroid drinking) idiot is going to claim that he is the fastest guy on earth (because he won at the Olympics) â" yet a disabled person best him at that.
Are their any disabled athletic (or other sport) personalities that are popular in the public eye (and huge role models)? I would guess that you would not be able to name one â" this will be the perfect opportunity to bring disabled people into the public arena.
Wouldnâ(TM)t it be cool if a disabled person is the new face of Coke or Adidas or one of those products? Have you ever seen a disabled sport star used in an advertisement?
Researchers in Vienna found that the development level of countries, as a proxy for the efficiency of their governments, is in general lower for countries with more members in the national cabinets.
This is an incredibly complex (and wrong) explanation for a simple phenomena.
In most 3rd World (at least African) countries, the state is used as an instrument to employ the ruling party and its members. For this the cabinet is fairly effective - it is usually appointed by the ruling party's president (as opposed to seats in a parliament that is proportional to the votes).
So it is only rational that the cabinet will be huge - the ruling party effectively pays its top staff with government money.
Interesting story. I see the following in wikipedia: Fearon's applied for, and received, an estimated £5,000 of legal aid to sue Martin for loss of earnings due to the injury he sustained.
This is something that I do not understand. If you try to rob someone, and you come of second best, can you sue them for your unsuccessful robbery?
What do you take as your loss of income? How do you determine a robbers income? From all the successful robberies that he could have done?
I am fortunate enough to live in the country with the highest murders per capita. I think I fully support this guy - if someone is on your property and he attempts a robbery, you can shoot to kill.
you can walk away from a pebble bed reactor and it will just gradually shut down: no active management needed
Although nuclear power is a good idea, I don't think pebble bed reactors are a good idea. There are a few reasons for this: no containment building... Sounds like a good idea when you have people flying into things...
Also, graphite is used in PBMR's. This graphite is heated. Graphite has the tendency to burn when hot (in the presence of air).
The average PBMR reactor is also small (165kW).
There are also no operational PBMR's - their development is off a long way...
The sentence should read: Is still used to make gasoline (petrol, diesel) in SA, and Qatar.
however it's not energy efficient, and i hardly believe that this process is either.
CTL and GTL is energy efficient. It is cheaper to manufacture gasoline from gas or coal than to pump it out of an oil field. SASOL (the company in SA that makes gasoline from coal and gas) has grown considerably during the high oil prices. Their stock price doubled in a year. They made huge profits at $40 dollars/barrel - imagine what they are making now. There were even calls for a special tax on this company (since it makes humongous profits).
Here is a stock chart for SASOL (on the LSE). As you can see, the stock price is 6 times what it was in 2004.
Just a side note, making cellulistic ethanol is a much harder and difficult beast â" it is more difficult (by a few orders of magnitude) than making ethanol from corn.
I think the minister should take a big cup of shut the fuck up. She is the minister of public works - her department is a cesspool of incompetence and corruption. Why should she take on another separate topic if she can not even do the job that she is paid for?
If the government really wants to encourage free software, why not sell their share in Telkom and act against that monopoly? It is impossible for most people to get a basic internet connection in the country. If you do get ADSL, it is capped - this fucks with most internet activities (including outsourcing, call centers and back office work). In all fairness, Telkom is a much worse monopoly than Microsoft can and will ever be.
How the hell will you download a new copy of your favorite Linux distribution? (500MB costs around R189).
To me it looks like the governments "open source" policy is to gather around a bunch of incompetent programmers. They are then paid (with tax money) to write bad open-source software that no-one will use. Yipee kay jay.
Now back to "evil" Microsoft. Microsoft provides all of its software free to any educational institution in South Africa (Academic Alliance). By that I mean everything - Visual Studio.NET, Visio, Office, SQL Server, etc.. Now open source Nazi's are going to rail against this. But remember, there is a market for.NET programmers (for example as outsourcing). If this is what brings in the money, then so be it.
Oh, yeah. The Bill and Melinda charity provides a shitload of money for anti-AIDS programs. This is while the current president makes statements that poverty causes AIDS, and the minister of health promotes beetroot as a cure for AIDS.
Wikipedia definition: a public forum for slander and copyright infringement.
Since anonymity is guaranteed, you can not sue anyone.
Do not tell me that people with slanderous profiles should remove itself. This is not how the world works. The same with copyright infringement - copyright holders should not have to search Wikipedia to see where there copyright was infringed.
I am all for Wiki's where the author's name is known. Three examples - Citizendium, Scholarpedia (excellent articles on some subjects) and Knoll.
One thing I don't understand about Americans (as a non-American).
Jimmy Wales is pretty liberal (seeing as he operated his own p0rn network).
Now this Rachel Marsden is described as a Canadian conservative columnist. How the heck can they be in a relationship? Is conservatism different? How can this work?
This is stupid. Why is the principle of intellectual property attacked but not the idea of property tax?
I mean, the money you buy property with, has already be taxed. Tax is bull-shit - rather remove property tax than try and fit it to intellectual property.
Also, on the topic of intellectual property. Property is the fruit of your labour - either it is a home you built, or the money you earned. Why shouldn't this be extended to intellectual property? What is the difference between a farmer toiling for 8 hours a day, or an author toiling for 8 hours a day? Aren't they each entitled to their compensation? (Don't tell me that an author doesn't see 10% of the profits - if it is their IP, it is his choice how to distribute it).
Interesting comment. It would be interesting to see what the actual performance of the stealth aircraft are. Electronic warfare is probably the future of conventional warfare. There are a few things that you should take into account however:
- Most new radars try to have a low probability of intercept (LPI)
- In network centric warfare, the radar transmitter and receiver are not necessarily the same (for example, the USA using predators for EW). This enables stronger signals to be used.
- Also, the B2 probably has LPI radar that can also be detected.
The USA has not really met an enemy that had good electronic warfare equipment or techniques. The best was probably Serbia in 1999. There are evidence that the Serbs detected and shot down an F117A using a Russian radar. (There are also reports that Nato forces fired ARMs at $80 dollar microwaves, but that is another story).
The F117A and B2 is also not completely invisible, especially when wet.
We would unfortunately not see an equally matched showdown, at least until your guys try to liberate France, Britain or China;)
Getting off the couch to change channels on your TV set
Yeah, we had a manual TV.
I think that is why parents got children - to get some little bugger to change the channels for them.
Last I checked, the United States is doing quite well.
The United States is fairly right (i.e. high economic freedom). Compare your tax rate to most European countries tax rate - there is quite a difference.
I definitely saw just how much money is flowing through the things.
A government does not make money. It merely takes money (tax) and redistributes it - a small portion of the money do end up in the market again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge WP. But this simply reduces the overall efficiency of the market.
When we had a depression
Some people (including Alan Greenspan) believes that the Federal Reserve (thus the government) created the depression.
Economies are just measures of money moving, and there's no better mover of money than the government
Wrong again. Austrian economics showed that the most effective system is a free market. The problem is that central planning simply does not work.
I sincerely hope that people will not copy Wikipedia articles. A lot of WP articles have been copied from websites (or textbooks). In traditional publishing, this would be a serious transgression - but in WP lets it slide.
The advantage that WP has in this regard is that its authors are anonymous - they can not be prosecuted for copyright infringement. People writing on Knol would however need to take copyright laws and libel laws into consideration.
Slashdot Mirror
Learn to discriminate between 1st, 2nd and 3rd world countries before you discriminate.
South Africa is a 3rd world country with a small 1st world portion - but overall the description of a 3rd world would be 100% correct. As for the South African Buro of Standards (SABS), there competency has been highly suspect the past few years.
Isn't Shuttleworth South African?
Depends on what your definition is. He does not live in South Africa (he lives in London), but he does like the image.
He does not get a big advantage over other athletes â" he has had huge hurdles to overcome (balance for one). Why not let him compete in the Olympics? The Olympics is supposed to take the best guy â" and not discriminate against him because he is disabled.
Why not make a special event for normal athletes at the para-Olympics (since they are at a disadvantage to non-able bodied athletes)?
Some able bodied (steroid drinking) idiot is going to claim that he is the fastest guy on earth (because he won at the Olympics) â" yet a disabled person best him at that.
Are their any disabled athletic (or other sport) personalities that are popular in the public eye (and huge role models)? I would guess that you would not be able to name one â" this will be the perfect opportunity to bring disabled people into the public arena.
Wouldnâ(TM)t it be cool if a disabled person is the new face of Coke or Adidas or one of those products? Have you ever seen a disabled sport star used in an advertisement?
Researchers in Vienna found that the development level of countries, as a proxy for the efficiency of their governments, is in general lower for countries with more members in the national cabinets.
This is an incredibly complex (and wrong) explanation for a simple phenomena.
In most 3rd World (at least African) countries, the state is used as an instrument to employ the ruling party and its members. For this the cabinet is fairly effective - it is usually appointed by the ruling party's president (as opposed to seats in a parliament that is proportional to the votes).
So it is only rational that the cabinet will be huge - the ruling party effectively pays its top staff with government money.
Owning that you have not read the lost material, how are you in any position to judge whether it was "good" or not?
Most of the stuff that got lost was wrestling (ancient WWF). There were also transcripts of a Greek version of Jerry Springer.
Fuckit, I'll do it for free.
Interesting story. I see the following in wikipedia:
Fearon's applied for, and received, an estimated £5,000 of legal aid to sue Martin for loss of earnings due to the injury he sustained.
This is something that I do not understand. If you try to rob someone, and you come of second best, can you sue them for your unsuccessful robbery?
What do you take as your loss of income? How do you determine a robbers income? From all the successful robberies that he could have done?
I am fortunate enough to live in the country with the highest murders per capita. I think I fully support this guy - if someone is on your property and he attempts a robbery, you can shoot to kill.
you can walk away from a pebble bed reactor and it will just gradually shut down: no active management needed
Although nuclear power is a good idea, I don't think pebble bed reactors are a good idea. There are a few reasons for this: no containment building... Sounds like a good idea when you have people flying into things...
Also, graphite is used in PBMR's. This graphite is heated. Graphite has the tendency to burn when hot (in the presence of air).
The average PBMR reactor is also small (165kW).
There are also no operational PBMR's - their development is off a long way...
(and was used to make gasoline in SA),
The sentence should read: Is still used to make gasoline (petrol, diesel) in SA, and Qatar.
however it's not energy efficient, and i hardly believe that this process is either.
CTL and GTL is energy efficient. It is cheaper to manufacture gasoline from gas or coal than to pump it out of an oil field. SASOL (the company in SA that makes gasoline from coal and gas) has grown considerably during the high oil prices. Their stock price doubled in a year. They made huge profits at $40 dollars/barrel - imagine what they are making now. There were even calls for a special tax on this company (since it makes humongous profits).
Here is a stock chart for SASOL (on the LSE). As you can see, the stock price is 6 times what it was in 2004.
Just a side note, making cellulistic ethanol is a much harder and difficult beast â" it is more difficult (by a few orders of magnitude) than making ethanol from corn.
Stupid question time (I'm not from USA).
How does it work that you go to a lab directly after high school? Are you going to study while you work in the lab? Or is it a permanent type of work?
With shiploads of luck I may be studying postgrad in the USA next year... (It seems that the USA has to most amazing university system in the world).
So, how does the Bill and Melinda charity help out exactly? I'm genuinely curious here. :]
Several methods, e.g.:
Raising awareness
Funding AIDS/TB clinics
Funding research
etc... http://www.google.co.za/search?q=bill+and+melinda+gates+AIDS+%22south+africa%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
I think the minister should take a big cup of shut the fuck up. She is the minister of public works - her department is a cesspool of incompetence and corruption. Why should she take on another separate topic if she can not even do the job that she is paid for?
.NET, Visio, Office, SQL Server, etc.. Now open source Nazi's are going to rail against this. But remember, there is a market for .NET programmers (for example as outsourcing). If this is what brings in the money, then so be it.
If the government really wants to encourage free software, why not sell their share in Telkom and act against that monopoly? It is impossible for most people to get a basic internet connection in the country. If you do get ADSL, it is capped - this fucks with most internet activities (including outsourcing, call centers and back office work). In all fairness, Telkom is a much worse monopoly than Microsoft can and will ever be.
How the hell will you download a new copy of your favorite Linux distribution? (500MB costs around R189).
To me it looks like the governments "open source" policy is to gather around a bunch of incompetent programmers. They are then paid (with tax money) to write bad open-source software that no-one will use. Yipee kay jay.
Now back to "evil" Microsoft. Microsoft provides all of its software free to any educational institution in South Africa (Academic Alliance). By that I mean everything - Visual Studio
Oh, yeah. The Bill and Melinda charity provides a shitload of money for anti-AIDS programs. This is while the current president makes statements that poverty causes AIDS, and the minister of health promotes beetroot as a cure for AIDS.
Wikipedia definition: a public forum for slander and copyright infringement.
Since anonymity is guaranteed, you can not sue anyone.
Do not tell me that people with slanderous profiles should remove itself. This is not how the world works. The same with copyright infringement - copyright holders should not have to search Wikipedia to see where there copyright was infringed.
I am all for Wiki's where the author's name is known. Three examples - Citizendium, Scholarpedia (excellent articles on some subjects) and Knoll.
One thing I don't understand about Americans (as a non-American).
Jimmy Wales is pretty liberal (seeing as he operated his own p0rn network).
Now this Rachel Marsden is described as a Canadian conservative columnist. How the heck can they be in a relationship? Is conservatism different? How can this work?
This is stupid. Why is the principle of intellectual property attacked but not the idea of property tax?
I mean, the money you buy property with, has already be taxed. Tax is bull-shit - rather remove property tax than try and fit it to intellectual property.
Also, on the topic of intellectual property. Property is the fruit of your labour - either it is a home you built, or the money you earned. Why shouldn't this be extended to intellectual property? What is the difference between a farmer toiling for 8 hours a day, or an author toiling for 8 hours a day? Aren't they each entitled to their compensation? (Don't tell me that an author doesn't see 10% of the profits - if it is their IP, it is his choice how to distribute it).
Interesting comment. It would be interesting to see what the actual performance of the stealth aircraft are. Electronic warfare is probably the future of conventional warfare. There are a few things that you should take into account however:
;)
- Most new radars try to have a low probability of intercept (LPI)
- In network centric warfare, the radar transmitter and receiver are not necessarily the same (for example, the USA using predators for EW). This enables stronger signals to be used.
- Also, the B2 probably has LPI radar that can also be detected.
The USA has not really met an enemy that had good electronic warfare equipment or techniques. The best was probably Serbia in 1999. There are evidence that the Serbs detected and shot down an F117A using a Russian radar. (There are also reports that Nato forces fired ARMs at $80 dollar microwaves, but that is another story).
The F117A and B2 is also not completely invisible, especially when wet.
We would unfortunately not see an equally matched showdown, at least until your guys try to liberate France, Britain or China
The B2 is also useless against insurgencies.
Getting off the couch to change channels on your TV set Yeah, we had a manual TV. I think that is why parents got children - to get some little bugger to change the channels for them.
It must be inconvenient for them.
Last I checked, the United States is doing quite well.
The United States is fairly right (i.e. high economic freedom). Compare your tax rate to most European countries tax rate - there is quite a difference.
I definitely saw just how much money is flowing through the things.
A government does not make money. It merely takes money (tax) and redistributes it - a small portion of the money do end up in the market again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge WP. But this simply reduces the overall efficiency of the market.
When we had a depression
Some people (including Alan Greenspan) believes that the Federal Reserve (thus the government) created the depression.
Economies are just measures of money moving, and there's no better mover of money than the government
Wrong again. Austrian economics showed that the most effective system is a free market. The problem is that central planning simply does not work.
I sincerely hope that people will not copy Wikipedia articles. A lot of WP articles have been copied from websites (or textbooks). In traditional publishing, this would be a serious transgression - but in WP lets it slide. The advantage that WP has in this regard is that its authors are anonymous - they can not be prosecuted for copyright infringement. People writing on Knol would however need to take copyright laws and libel laws into consideration.