having some magic alcohol percent present in your blood is just as stupid an indicator as some arbitrary age.
Yes, that was exactly the point I was trying to make. Drinking has been declared *the* villain in traffic accidents, but is this realistic? Judging from my experience, it seems that rain is a big offender, too. Perhaps we should save more lives if driving in rain was prohibited, like some car races are stopped when it starts raining? Well, driving in the rain cannot be avoided sometimes, but driving in the dark can. Why not have a driving curfew during the night?
And so on, as you mention, there are many factors that influence one's ability to drive, why pick on alcohol exclusively.
Because you can be a less than perfect driver and still be good enough that it's not justified to take away your license.
Try telling that to the judge next time you're caught driving drunk.
I know, drinking is optional, growing old is not. But if there's a danger to people on the street, there should be a limit on how old you can be and drive, just as there's a limit on how drunk you can be and drive.
Because, you know, stuff underwater doesn't ever leak.
Funny thing is, it doesn't. In the last fifty years several nuclear submarines were lost in the seas. None had radioactive leaks strong enough to locate them. To find a lost nuclear submarine, you have to go through the same process it takes to find any sunken ship, find a trail of debris in the bottom of the ocean and track it down to the main disaster area.
In subduction zones part of the material keeps getting pushed around the edge for a long time before being dragged under. In 10000 years a lot of the material would still be sitting there.
But there are some parts of the ocean bottom that have remained stable for at least a billion years. We could enclose the material in glass or ceramic cylinders and bury them in the bottom of the sea. If anyone has the technology and the motive to dig 100 meters in mud that's under 5000 meters of water, one can assume they will have knowledge of the dangers of radioactive material.
Besides, that's a good way to keep it away from terrorists, too. Even if they could locate the exact spots where to dig, they wouldn't want to go to so much effort, there are easier ways to accomplish their ends.
Give the Amazon natives sufficient food and water and safety from other people, and see how long they can comfortably survive in lands where English is spoken.
Then give native English speakers sufficient food and water and safety from other people, and see how long they can comfortably survive in the Amazon region.
Easy. We have seen enough Discovery and NatGeo to have a rough idea of things that can kill you in a jungle. They have no idea at all of the difference between "Walk" and "Don't Walk".
isn't there a shitload of old true-and-tried local technologies
I once saw an interesting example of this. There's a village in the Brazilian northeast where people make cattle bells. The bells themselves are made of steel cut from old oil drums, but what's interesting is the way they braze them.
They cut small pieces of brass from junk and weigh them in a primitive scale, they have a standard pebble that's the right weight of brass for each size of bell. They pile the bells on each other, about ten for a pack, with the brass pieces inside of each. This pile of bells they pack in a mud roll, which is left to dry. Once dry, they put the mud pack in a fire, hot enough to melt the brass inside. When the brass melts, which they know by experience, they remove the pack from the fire an roll it on the ground until it has cooled enough for the brass to solidify. This way, the bells do not stick to each other. When the mud roll is broken they have a stack of bells, each beautifully coated with a golden brass layer.
The problem is that there is a wide range of poorer nations, every of which is "Third World". There are more advanced nations, like Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, there are some in the middle of the road, like India, Egypt, Pakistan, and then there are the desperately poor, like most of Africa.
The technology needed by each group is different. A cheap way of digging a well is not what the people living in a city slum need most. OTOH, a cheap computer will not be much help people who live in mud huts somewhere in Africa.
For a very lightweight text that goes surprisingly deep into the physics theory, I suggest this book: "Astrophysics With a PC - An Introduction to Computational Astrophysics". It's intended for amateur astronomers with an interest in astrophysics, source code in Basic is printed along with the text.
Take a look at the table of contents in the link I gave and see what you think, it costs only $19.95, which is a very low cost for a book these days.
they are ultimately more concerned with getting more users to their distro than promoting software freedom.
How would you promote software freedom if people is unable to use free software?
Case in point: where I work the email client is Lotus Notes. There's no Linux Notes client that I know of, I use the windows version in wine. So, I have two options, either accept some non-free software in my computer or use MS-Windows.
Almost all the large airships that were built in the past crashed, Google can tell you that (I removed Hindenburg from the list because that was a fire, not a crash). As a matter of fact, I think they ALL crashed, except but one, that is I think I once read about a large airship that was retired due to old age, but I'm not sure.
Being fragile is an intrinsic condition of a structure that must be very large, yet very lightweight. Heavier-than-air craft are much sturdier, just because they are, well, they are heavier.
Although I agree that lack of politeness is a bad thing, that has nothing to do with the KDE4.0 debacle.
The problem was that the KDE team didn't want to miss the Ubuntu Long Term Support edition, so they tried to get a KDE4 formal release for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. The alternative would have been to keep maintaining KDE3.5 until the next Ubuntu LTS, which, considering the facts, would have been a much wiser decision.
Just wait patiently for the KDE developers to sort things out and make sure you have an alternative.
But are they on the right path? From what I have seen in KDE4.0, it seems to me that everything they have done is a step backwards.
Basically, the problem is: if it's working fine, why change? For instance, I'm still using the KDE-classic icon set because I see no reason to get glossier icons, I recognize instantly the old icons and that's what matters.
The big point about KDE has always been its capability for personal configuration. I prefer to use just one desktop, so I don't have a desktop selector applet in my taskbar. I prefer not to put icons on my desktop, since the desktop is always covered by the windows I'm using, so I have my favorite apps icons in my taskbar and use konqueror in the file management mode to open documents. That's the way I prefer, other people think differently, but KDE3.5 lets everyone be happy with their choices.
I've never adapted to Gnome, because the philosophy is different there, it seems to be about making it easier to do things, at the expense of configurability. Well, for me the easiest way to do things is to do them the way I find easier, not the way someone else prefers.
I can hear people telling me, "OK, if you don't like things as they are, just go ahead and change them, the source code is there". Well, I have neither the time nor the inclination to start developing the KDE user interface. I'm not complaining, they were under no obligation to develop KDE for me anyhow, but let's say I'm lamenting the way things are going.
if your argument is valid, then ID's counter-argument is "No, anyone who believes evolution is ignorant and stupid." - "no you're stupid." - "no YOU are."
No, it's more like this:
- "I've tested it in the laboratory, and many other people have verified my claims!"
- "No, you're stupid, it's all written in THE BOOK!"
- "Oh, yeah?"
- "Yes, EVERYTHING that's written in THE BOOK is absolutely true!"
- "Well, can't you see the obvious discrepancy between Matthew 1 and Luke 3, 23~38?"
- "Doh! Well, yes, now that I've read it, I guess you're right. See, I had never really read that book, I just assumed what people told me about it was true."
Teachers are supposed to provide information and play devil's advocate to get students to think, not to tell their students WHAT to think.
In Louisiana, playing the devil's advocate means saying evolution is true. No one needs schools to teach creationism in the Bible belt, there are churches enough to do that.
To get students to think, it's necessary to teach them the scientific method, how it works, how discoveries are published, reviewed, and tested by other scientists. Get the students to do their own criticism of different scientific theories. Students will have plenty of work in science class studying valid scientific alternative theories, no need to teach them extraneous subjects.
OTOH, in Sociology or Philosophy class it would be important to demonstrate how people can be gullible. In that context, it would be important to teach about the different non-scientific and pseudo-scientific theories that have been created. It's perfectly OK to teach different alternatives for this, students should discuss creationism together with the theories of Lysenko, Lamarck, Velikovsky, Erich von Daniken, and UFOs, the FSM, etc.
... to protect teachers who simply ACKNOWLEDGE the fact that not everyone believes ToE is correct.
So, should we also protect teachers who simply ACKNOWLEDGE the fact that not everyone believes the Earth is round?
A teacher's job is not to tell the children what some people believe, his job is to teach what is known to be the most accurate theory in existence.
As for teaching alternative views, I have nothing against that, as long as they are presented exactly as that: alternative. If a teacher presents the "ID" theory in class, it should be shown why ID is not a reasonable alternative to evolution. Children should be aware that ID exists, because they will find it mentioned outside of class, but they should be aware that a well-informed and intelligent person would have absolutely no doubt that evolution is the correct alternative.
Born in 1971 to parents recently arrived from India, Jindal is a convert to Roman Catholicism and a Rhodes scholar - hardly the profile of a typical Bible-belt politician
There's no need to be a "Bible-belt" politician - a simple politician will do.
It seems that in Louisiana the Bible thumpers have gained some pretty big influence, if the 94-3 and unanimous votes mean anything. A veto would have no chance to stand, so Jindal took the easy way out and signed the law.
However, he might have lost a lot in the process. By not challenging the majority, he just stands in the middle of the mainstream. If he had vetoed the law, he would have stood as a voice for reason. He might have lost the next election, but he's liable to lose it anyhow, since he seems to be indistinguishable from at least 94 other politicians.
When a nation is no longer able to excel in a technology they pioneered, it's very difficult to come back. It started in the 1970s when, instead of continuing on lunar exploration, they decided to cut back on the Apollo program.
Ultimately, what will define how technology will evolve is not the day-to-day improvement but the grand vision. It doesn't matter what the immediate gains from lunar exploration were in 1973, but how long and how much effort it would take to get something practical out of the moon. Once they decided to cut back on the difficult part, the USA couldn't hold its competitiveness in the easy parts.
Today Europe is the leader in commercial space flight, with Japan, Russia, and China trying to gain more significant shares of the market. Without NASA actively developing space technology, the US industry seems to be unable to keep up with external competition.
The space program became too costly. The shuttle was announced as a cost-saving project, a reusable space craft. The problem is that they should have tried to crawl before they tried to walk.
There were projects in the late 1950s, the X-15 and the Dyna-Soar, to develop reusable "space planes", but not much came of them. The logical progression would have been to improve and expand these, but instead they chose to try to adapt existing disposable rockets into a reusable spacecraft.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that was exactly the point I was trying to make. Drinking has been declared *the* villain in traffic accidents, but is this realistic? Judging from my experience, it seems that rain is a big offender, too. Perhaps we should save more lives if driving in rain was prohibited, like some car races are stopped when it starts raining? Well, driving in the rain cannot be avoided sometimes, but driving in the dark can. Why not have a driving curfew during the night?
And so on, as you mention, there are many factors that influence one's ability to drive, why pick on alcohol exclusively.
Try telling that to the judge next time you're caught driving drunk.
I know, drinking is optional, growing old is not. But if there's a danger to people on the street, there should be a limit on how old you can be and drive, just as there's a limit on how drunk you can be and drive.
Funny thing is, it doesn't. In the last fifty years several nuclear submarines were lost in the seas. None had radioactive leaks strong enough to locate them. To find a lost nuclear submarine, you have to go through the same process it takes to find any sunken ship, find a trail of debris in the bottom of the ocean and track it down to the main disaster area.
One can see why your id is nearly a million. You post a six-paragraph comment about price vs worth without ever mentioning free software?
In subduction zones part of the material keeps getting pushed around the edge for a long time before being dragged under. In 10000 years a lot of the material would still be sitting there.
But there are some parts of the ocean bottom that have remained stable for at least a billion years. We could enclose the material in glass or ceramic cylinders and bury them in the bottom of the sea. If anyone has the technology and the motive to dig 100 meters in mud that's under 5000 meters of water, one can assume they will have knowledge of the dangers of radioactive material.
Besides, that's a good way to keep it away from terrorists, too. Even if they could locate the exact spots where to dig, they wouldn't want to go to so much effort, there are easier ways to accomplish their ends.
Well, for sure this :C looks very sad, but I fail to see why JOVIAL should be so happy. If at least it were the J:) language...
He said: "The Japanese soldier's duty is to die for his emperor. Our duty is to make sure he does his duty"
IIRC this was in the film, so it must be true.
Look at this GDP classification of countries by GDP: Mexico is #58, Brazil is #64, Egypt is #117, India is #131.
Easy. We have seen enough Discovery and NatGeo to have a rough idea of things that can kill you in a jungle. They have no idea at all of the difference between "Walk" and "Don't Walk".
So, are you suggesting that Venus, or Aphrodite, be renamed Fuckfuck?
I once saw an interesting example of this. There's a village in the Brazilian northeast where people make cattle bells. The bells themselves are made of steel cut from old oil drums, but what's interesting is the way they braze them.
They cut small pieces of brass from junk and weigh them in a primitive scale, they have a standard pebble that's the right weight of brass for each size of bell. They pile the bells on each other, about ten for a pack, with the brass pieces inside of each. This pile of bells they pack in a mud roll, which is left to dry. Once dry, they put the mud pack in a fire, hot enough to melt the brass inside. When the brass melts, which they know by experience, they remove the pack from the fire an roll it on the ground until it has cooled enough for the brass to solidify. This way, the bells do not stick to each other. When the mud roll is broken they have a stack of bells, each beautifully coated with a golden brass layer.
The problem is that there is a wide range of poorer nations, every of which is "Third World". There are more advanced nations, like Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, there are some in the middle of the road, like India, Egypt, Pakistan, and then there are the desperately poor, like most of Africa.
The technology needed by each group is different. A cheap way of digging a well is not what the people living in a city slum need most. OTOH, a cheap computer will not be much help people who live in mud huts somewhere in Africa.
For a very lightweight text that goes surprisingly deep into the physics theory, I suggest this book: "Astrophysics With a PC - An Introduction to Computational Astrophysics". It's intended for amateur astronomers with an interest in astrophysics, source code in Basic is printed along with the text.
Take a look at the table of contents in the link I gave and see what you think, it costs only $19.95, which is a very low cost for a book these days.
How would you promote software freedom if people is unable to use free software?
Case in point: where I work the email client is Lotus Notes. There's no Linux Notes client that I know of, I use the windows version in wine. So, I have two options, either accept some non-free software in my computer or use MS-Windows.
Blimps are relatively small craft, made of rubberized fabric, they are in a different class from the larger airships with metal structures.
Almost all the large airships that were built in the past crashed, Google can tell you that (I removed Hindenburg from the list because that was a fire, not a crash). As a matter of fact, I think they ALL crashed, except but one, that is I think I once read about a large airship that was retired due to old age, but I'm not sure.
Being fragile is an intrinsic condition of a structure that must be very large, yet very lightweight. Heavier-than-air craft are much sturdier, just because they are, well, they are heavier.
Although I agree that lack of politeness is a bad thing, that has nothing to do with the KDE4.0 debacle.
The problem was that the KDE team didn't want to miss the Ubuntu Long Term Support edition, so they tried to get a KDE4 formal release for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. The alternative would have been to keep maintaining KDE3.5 until the next Ubuntu LTS, which, considering the facts, would have been a much wiser decision.
But are they on the right path? From what I have seen in KDE4.0, it seems to me that everything they have done is a step backwards.
Basically, the problem is: if it's working fine, why change? For instance, I'm still using the KDE-classic icon set because I see no reason to get glossier icons, I recognize instantly the old icons and that's what matters.
The big point about KDE has always been its capability for personal configuration. I prefer to use just one desktop, so I don't have a desktop selector applet in my taskbar. I prefer not to put icons on my desktop, since the desktop is always covered by the windows I'm using, so I have my favorite apps icons in my taskbar and use konqueror in the file management mode to open documents. That's the way I prefer, other people think differently, but KDE3.5 lets everyone be happy with their choices.
I've never adapted to Gnome, because the philosophy is different there, it seems to be about making it easier to do things, at the expense of configurability. Well, for me the easiest way to do things is to do them the way I find easier, not the way someone else prefers.
I can hear people telling me, "OK, if you don't like things as they are, just go ahead and change them, the source code is there". Well, I have neither the time nor the inclination to start developing the KDE user interface. I'm not complaining, they were under no obligation to develop KDE for me anyhow, but let's say I'm lamenting the way things are going.
No, it's more like this:
- "I've tested it in the laboratory, and many other people have verified my claims!"
- "No, you're stupid, it's all written in THE BOOK!"
- "Oh, yeah?"
- "Yes, EVERYTHING that's written in THE BOOK is absolutely true!"
- "Well, can't you see the obvious discrepancy between Matthew 1 and Luke 3, 23~38?"
- "Doh! Well, yes, now that I've read it, I guess you're right. See, I had never really read that book, I just assumed what people told me about it was true."
In Louisiana, playing the devil's advocate means saying evolution is true. No one needs schools to teach creationism in the Bible belt, there are churches enough to do that.
To get students to think, it's necessary to teach them the scientific method, how it works, how discoveries are published, reviewed, and tested by other scientists. Get the students to do their own criticism of different scientific theories. Students will have plenty of work in science class studying valid scientific alternative theories, no need to teach them extraneous subjects.
OTOH, in Sociology or Philosophy class it would be important to demonstrate how people can be gullible. In that context, it would be important to teach about the different non-scientific and pseudo-scientific theories that have been created. It's perfectly OK to teach different alternatives for this, students should discuss creationism together with the theories of Lysenko, Lamarck, Velikovsky, Erich von Daniken, and UFOs, the FSM, etc.
I said the BEST theory, not the most complete. Newtonian mechanics is the best theory for any system that isn't too big or too small.
Einstein himself said it: "everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler".
So, should we also protect teachers who simply ACKNOWLEDGE the fact that not everyone believes the Earth is round?
A teacher's job is not to tell the children what some people believe, his job is to teach what is known to be the most accurate theory in existence.
As for teaching alternative views, I have nothing against that, as long as they are presented exactly as that: alternative. If a teacher presents the "ID" theory in class, it should be shown why ID is not a reasonable alternative to evolution. Children should be aware that ID exists, because they will find it mentioned outside of class, but they should be aware that a well-informed and intelligent person would have absolutely no doubt that evolution is the correct alternative.
There's no need to be a "Bible-belt" politician - a simple politician will do.
It seems that in Louisiana the Bible thumpers have gained some pretty big influence, if the 94-3 and unanimous votes mean anything. A veto would have no chance to stand, so Jindal took the easy way out and signed the law.
However, he might have lost a lot in the process. By not challenging the majority, he just stands in the middle of the mainstream. If he had vetoed the law, he would have stood as a voice for reason. He might have lost the next election, but he's liable to lose it anyhow, since he seems to be indistinguishable from at least 94 other politicians.
When a nation is no longer able to excel in a technology they pioneered, it's very difficult to come back. It started in the 1970s when, instead of continuing on lunar exploration, they decided to cut back on the Apollo program.
Ultimately, what will define how technology will evolve is not the day-to-day improvement but the grand vision. It doesn't matter what the immediate gains from lunar exploration were in 1973, but how long and how much effort it would take to get something practical out of the moon. Once they decided to cut back on the difficult part, the USA couldn't hold its competitiveness in the easy parts.
Today Europe is the leader in commercial space flight, with Japan, Russia, and China trying to gain more significant shares of the market. Without NASA actively developing space technology, the US industry seems to be unable to keep up with external competition.
The space program became too costly. The shuttle was announced as a cost-saving project, a reusable space craft. The problem is that they should have tried to crawl before they tried to walk.
There were projects in the late 1950s, the X-15 and the Dyna-Soar, to develop reusable "space planes", but not much came of them. The logical progression would have been to improve and expand these, but instead they chose to try to adapt existing disposable rockets into a reusable spacecraft.
Okay, government tried and ultimately failed, now private enterprise has started from where the X-15 and X-20 stopped. Let's see how it goes.