The arms inspectors under Hans Blix and Mohammad El Baradai did have unfettered access to Iraq. The Bush Administration had to escalate tensions and pull the inspectors out before they finished the inspections; otherwise, the inspectors would have reported that Iraq did not have Weapons of Mass Destruction, and that their nuclear program was still dismantled. And then Bush's cause for war would have been revealed as the lie that it was.
The intelligence agencies that believed that Saddam had WMDs were stymied by the fact that the inspectors were going where they were told the WMDs were, and finding nothing.
I view myself as an independent. But the Republican War on Science that has been going on for 25 years has kept me from voting for very many Republicans.
Both parties love spending tax dollars. Democrats are honest about it, and more often than not programs pushed by Democrats are well run and provide services to those who are without. Republicans lie when they say that they are the party of small government. Clinton cut the share of the total economy taken by the federal government; G.W. Bush has grown it dramatically.
Republicans frequently say they have passed tax cuts. They're lying again; they have only passed tax deferrments. They increase spending dramatically, cut taxes, and borrow the difference. The government debt held by the public was at $3.3 Trillion and falling at the end of Fiscal Year 2001. After years of Republican rule, the debt held by the public is at $4.6 Trillion and rising. Interest payments on that debt increase have to come from taxes.
In 2001, when I moved, I went from having zero choices for high-speed access to the internet to having two. I chose Time Warner for $45/month, rather than my local independent telephone company for $65/month.
Four years later, I still have those two choices at those two price points. My local independent telephone company is trying to get me with a bundle, but the "long distance" portion of the package is terrible (300 minutes, and then 14 (I think) cents a minute for anything over that. I only pay 4.3 cents a minute for Long Distance.
I'm almost ready to cut off the local land-line telephone service, because I can choose from a variety of competitive cell providers.
Linux advanced computing by showing that a development team could produce a complex, highly-functional software product without a $100 million budget, without an office, without mid-level managers, and without employment contracts.
It doesn't make sense that a President would actively work to thwart something like scientific progress in general, but that is what the President and much of the Republican party have been about for the last 25 years.
I don't care why flat-earthers are flat-earthers. I know enough to know that they are in loonie-land. The same for the consuming-tobacco-doesn't-cause-cancer brigade. And the holocaust-revisionists. And the pi-equals-3-ists. And the creationists and IDists. They are all dedicated to opposing reality.
One gets tired of listening to the endless repetition of the same old lies.
What about creating genetically-modified animals, inserting human genes into them. So we can learn about and understand genetic diseases, and discover treatments for them.
Bush's proposed ban on human-animal hybrids would ban this research.
The net result of applying voltages to skin depends an awful lot on the state of the skin. 110 volts applied across bone-dry skin is likely to tickle and cause muscles to spasm. 110 volts applied across skin that is wet with sweat could conduct enough to burn the limb to uselessness.
Gates made his fortune through criminal activity. He has an uncanny sense of knowing exactly how far over the line of legality his company can go before the punishment will be painful, and he stops just short of that line.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. And there is a long history of abusive behavior investigated by the government, and consent decrees signed by Microsoft that were later ignored by the government. Or the response to Microsoft's violation of the consent decree is yet another investigation.
That he is generous with his ill-gotten goods puts him in the same moral standing as a mob boss who gives generously to support the village he came from back in the old country.
There are many observations that would throw a wrench into the theory of evolution.
Darwin proposed one: identification of a feature in one species that exists solely for the benefit of members of a different species.
I think it was Stepehn Jay Gould who proposed another observation: finding the remains of a modern chicken in precambrian rocks.
But this was all hashed out and decided in the first half of the 20th century. Evolution is science. Evolution is a fact (in the sense of the history of life on earth, i.e. common descent), and a theory (mutation and selection, genetic drift).
The flaw with this system is that all you have to do to steal the election is to manipulate the electronic totals so that a recount won't happen.
The only way to prevent that is to count the paper "audit trail" ballots and see if the total agrees with the electronic total. If they are different, then the paper ballot total should be the official one.
In other words, the electronic totals are worthless.
I just had a thought. Rumors over the years of Disney wanting to buy Apple. It has just happened.
Jobs just took over Disney. I know, the financial press is reporting this the other way around. But Steve's done this before; look at what happened after Apple bought NeXT.
Note the word "fraudulently". If take a gold coin, shave some of the gold off of it (for resale), and pass the coin on at face value, I have committed fraud.
If I melt a pre-1981 penny, and describe the blob of copper as a melted penny (with its weight), then I have not committed fraud.
This leaves 2 doors left, the one you picked and the other. _Both_ have a 2/3rds chance of having a prize.
This cannot be. The probabilities have to add up to one.
With three doors, your initial pick has a 1/3 chance of being correct, and a 2/3 chance of being wrong. With 100 doors, your initial pick has a 1/100 chance of being correct, and 99/100 chance of being wrong. _After_ Monty removes all incorrect choices (one door in the three-door version; 98 doors in the 100-door version), switching means flipping from correct to incorrect or vice versa. So with 3 doors, switching improves your chances from one-in-three to two-in-three. With 100 doors, switching improves your chances from 1 in 100 to 99 in 100.
Just because there are two choices does not mean that both are equally likely to win. This fools a lot of people.
Back on topic, I gave up D20-style games for 3 six-siders (Melee, Wizard, In The Labyrinth, and later GURPS) around 1978.
Does the patent last 20 years from invention (the current standard), or 17 years from approval (the old, abusable standard)? When was the patent approved? Date of inventions was 1977, so do the arithmatic.
Tidal energy comes from the kinetic energy of the spinning earth. The daily rotation of the earth is slowing down (hence the leap second added to 2005) due to "friction" from the tides. Harnessing the tidal energy might increase that drag slightly, or it might not. Jury is still out. In the mean time, the moon recedes by a couple of centimeters every year. This process stops when both the earth and moon have the same face pointing at each other all the time -- a day and a (lunar) month will be the same... at around 40 of today's days, IIRC.
Waves are created by wind, so harnessing wave energy is indirectly harnessing wind energy.
However, Prof Hauser, a physicist at the Applied Sciences University in Salzgitter, Germany, and a former chief of aerodynamics at the European Space Agency, cautioned it was based on a highly controversial theory that would require a significant change in the current understanding of the laws of physics.
"It would be amazing. I have been working on propulsion systems for quite a while and it would be the most amazing thing. The benefits would be almost unlimited," he said.
"But this thing is not around the corner; we first have to prove the basic science is correct and there are quite a few physicists who have a different opinion.
"It's our job to prove we are right and we are working on that."
Significant changes in our understanding of physics do not happen because we want to go fast. Overturning the law of conservation of momentum would be big, and would require big evidence to believe. Catch 22 is that big evidence is usually expensive, so getting the money to build the machine to generate the evidence to support the new theories that would tell us how to build the machines can be tricky.
While 1080i can be deinterlaced, and displayed at 1080p, the artifacts (jumpiness in horizontal and near-horizontal lines) are still there.
And 24 fps would have terrible flicker. I can notice the flicker in a theater (The Empire Strikes back, in the scenes approaching Cloud City, gave me a bit of a headache) and in a theater, the display is 48 fps (each film frame is displayed twice). I can't working in front of a computer monitor set to 60 Hz refresh. It hurts too much.
The first generation of CD players were $1,000 in nominal dollars, back in 1983 (Technics SL-P10). Which makes them closer to $2,000 in today's dollars. The second generation of CD players, a year later, cut the price to $400 (basic model) or $500 (Technics SL-P8; more features, remote control. I bought one of these).
Prices will come down, and volume will go up. Gotta amortize the engineering in the ICs somehow...
Slashdot Mirror
Reduce the number of election machines at urban polling places in Ohio. Long lines. Turn away thousands of voters for Kerry.
SOP for the Corrupt Ohio Republican Party.
The arms inspectors under Hans Blix and Mohammad El Baradai did have unfettered access to Iraq. The Bush Administration had to escalate tensions and pull the inspectors out before they finished the inspections; otherwise, the inspectors would have reported that Iraq did not have Weapons of Mass Destruction, and that their nuclear program was still dismantled. And then Bush's cause for war would have been revealed as the lie that it was.
The intelligence agencies that believed that Saddam had WMDs were stymied by the fact that the inspectors were going where they were told the WMDs were, and finding nothing.
Being against Bush means being for balanced budgets. Clinton balanced the federal budget.
Being against Bush means being for competent government. Clinton had competent people running FEMA. Bush had a disgraced horse-show judge.
I have a feeling that history will judge the American invasion of Iraq in a similar light to the Japanese Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
I view myself as an independent. But the Republican War on Science that has been going on for 25 years has kept me from voting for very many Republicans.
Both parties love spending tax dollars. Democrats are honest about it, and more often than not programs pushed by Democrats are well run and provide services to those who are without. Republicans lie when they say that they are the party of small government. Clinton cut the share of the total economy taken by the federal government; G.W. Bush has grown it dramatically.
Republicans frequently say they have passed tax cuts. They're lying again; they have only passed tax deferrments. They increase spending dramatically, cut taxes, and borrow the difference. The government debt held by the public was at $3.3 Trillion and falling at the end of Fiscal Year 2001. After years of Republican rule, the debt held by the public is at $4.6 Trillion and rising. Interest payments on that debt increase have to come from taxes.
In 2001, when I moved, I went from having zero choices for high-speed access to the internet to having two. I chose Time Warner for $45/month, rather than my local independent telephone company for $65/month.
Four years later, I still have those two choices at those two price points. My local independent telephone company is trying to get me with a bundle, but the "long distance" portion of the package is terrible (300 minutes, and then 14 (I think) cents a minute for anything over that. I only pay 4.3 cents a minute for Long Distance.
I'm almost ready to cut off the local land-line telephone service, because I can choose from a variety of competitive cell providers.
TOPS-10/DecBasic
Apple DOS 3.2
Apple DOS 3.3
TOPS-20
Apple UCSD Pascal
CP/M
Whatever OS was on Data General Nova
And then (in 1985) MS-DOS.
I didn't really use a Mac until 1986.
I didn't spend any time in front of a Windows box until around 1997-1998.
Linux advanced computing by showing that a development team could produce a complex, highly-functional software product without a $100 million budget, without an office, without mid-level managers, and without employment contracts.
Bush is anti-science.
Anti-abortionists are anti-women.
It doesn't make sense that a President would actively work to thwart something like scientific progress in general, but that is what the President and much of the Republican party have been about for the last 25 years.
I don't care why flat-earthers are flat-earthers. I know enough to know that they are in loonie-land. The same for the consuming-tobacco-doesn't-cause-cancer brigade. And the holocaust-revisionists. And the pi-equals-3-ists. And the creationists and IDists. They are all dedicated to opposing reality.
One gets tired of listening to the endless repetition of the same old lies.
What about creating genetically-modified animals, inserting human genes into them. So we can learn about and understand genetic diseases, and discover treatments for them.
Bush's proposed ban on human-animal hybrids would ban this research.
Girls will be boys and boys will be girls ... the Kinks
It's a mixed up muddled up shook up world except for lola
Lo-lo-lo-lo lola
The net result of applying voltages to skin depends an awful lot on the state of the skin. 110 volts applied across bone-dry skin is likely to tickle and cause muscles to spasm. 110 volts applied across skin that is wet with sweat could conduct enough to burn the limb to uselessness.
Gates made his fortune through criminal activity. He has an uncanny sense of knowing exactly how far over the line of legality his company can go before the punishment will be painful, and he stops just short of that line.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. And there is a long history of abusive behavior investigated by the government, and consent decrees signed by Microsoft that were later ignored by the government. Or the response to Microsoft's violation of the consent decree is yet another investigation.
That he is generous with his ill-gotten goods puts him in the same moral standing as a mob boss who gives generously to support the village he came from back in the old country.
There are many observations that would throw a wrench into the theory of evolution.
Darwin proposed one: identification of a feature in one species that exists solely for the benefit of members of a different species.
I think it was Stepehn Jay Gould who proposed another observation: finding the remains of a modern chicken in precambrian rocks.
But this was all hashed out and decided in the first half of the 20th century. Evolution is science. Evolution is a fact (in the sense of the history of life on earth, i.e. common descent), and a theory (mutation and selection, genetic drift).
The flaw with this system is that all you have to do to steal the election is to manipulate the electronic totals so that a recount won't happen.
The only way to prevent that is to count the paper "audit trail" ballots and see if the total agrees with the electronic total. If they are different, then the paper ballot total should be the official one.
In other words, the electronic totals are worthless.
Iger (Disney's CEO) will discover soon enough that Jobs bought his company. Jobs will end up with his job.
Okay, so the deal with Mr. Disney was that he would get exclusive rights to Steamboat Willie until 1984, and then it would be free for all to use.
As far as I can tell, the Walt Disney corporation has not compensated the American public for the extension in exclusive rights.
AT&T is not AT&T.
Or rather, AT&T now, is SBC. They bought AT&T, got the debt and the imploding Long Lines business, and that's about it.
AT&T 1984-2005 is the deregulated AT&T. Competing against and losing to MCI, Sprint, and lotsa little guys.
AT&T 1881-1983 is the "telephones are ours. Ours! OURS!" guys.
I just had a thought. Rumors over the years of Disney wanting to buy Apple. It has just happened.
Jobs just took over Disney. I know, the financial press is reporting this the other way around. But Steve's done this before; look at what happened after Apple bought NeXT.
Note the word "fraudulently". If take a gold coin, shave some of the gold off of it (for resale), and pass the coin on at face value, I have committed fraud.
If I melt a pre-1981 penny, and describe the blob of copper as a melted penny (with its weight), then I have not committed fraud.
With three doors, your initial pick has a 1/3 chance of being correct, and a 2/3 chance of being wrong. With 100 doors, your initial pick has a 1/100 chance of being correct, and 99/100 chance of being wrong. _After_ Monty removes all incorrect choices (one door in the three-door version; 98 doors in the 100-door version), switching means flipping from correct to incorrect or vice versa. So with 3 doors, switching improves your chances from one-in-three to two-in-three. With 100 doors, switching improves your chances from 1 in 100 to 99 in 100.
Just because there are two choices does not mean that both are equally likely to win. This fools a lot of people.
Back on topic, I gave up D20-style games for 3 six-siders (Melee, Wizard, In The Labyrinth, and later GURPS) around 1978.
Does the patent last 20 years from invention (the current standard), or 17 years from approval (the old, abusable standard)? When was the patent approved? Date of inventions was 1977, so do the arithmatic.
Tidal energy comes from the kinetic energy of the spinning earth. The daily rotation of the earth is slowing down (hence the leap second added to 2005) due to "friction" from the tides. Harnessing the tidal energy might increase that drag slightly, or it might not. Jury is still out. In the mean time, the moon recedes by a couple of centimeters every year. This process stops when both the earth and moon have the same face pointing at each other all the time -- a day and a (lunar) month will be the same... at around 40 of today's days, IIRC.
Waves are created by wind, so harnessing wave energy is indirectly harnessing wind energy.
Significant changes in our understanding of physics do not happen because we want to go fast. Overturning the law of conservation of momentum would be big, and would require big evidence to believe. Catch 22 is that big evidence is usually expensive, so getting the money to build the machine to generate the evidence to support the new theories that would tell us how to build the machines can be tricky.
While 1080i can be deinterlaced, and displayed at 1080p, the artifacts (jumpiness in horizontal and near-horizontal lines) are still there.
And 24 fps would have terrible flicker. I can notice the flicker in a theater (The Empire Strikes back, in the scenes approaching Cloud City, gave me a bit of a headache) and in a theater, the display is 48 fps (each film frame is displayed twice). I can't working in front of a computer monitor set to 60 Hz refresh. It hurts too much.
The first generation of CD players were $1,000 in nominal dollars, back in 1983 (Technics SL-P10). Which makes them closer to $2,000 in today's dollars. The second generation of CD players, a year later, cut the price to $400 (basic model) or $500 (Technics SL-P8; more features, remote control. I bought one of these).
Prices will come down, and volume will go up. Gotta amortize the engineering in the ICs somehow...