Most atheists, at least on the internet, are insulting towards religious people. They revel in the sense of superiority it gives them.
Dawkin's statement here, that creationists are ignorant of evolution and saying so is simple (albeit harsh) truth, is a narrow case. He's right, but that doesn't excuse all the hardcore internet atheists, who insist that religious people are stupid, or that religion is the cause of all human suffering, etc. Such statements have no grounding in fact. They only serve to stroke the ego of the collective internet atheist circle-jerk, while simultaneously driving away people who might otherwise listen to what you have to say.
And who's going to watch over those kids while they're at home studying? Not the parents; they need to work. Even if they're telecommuting, they can't be focusing their attention on making sure 8-year old Billy is paying attention in geography.
They'll need to hire someone to keep an eye on the kids. But that's expensive, so maybe they can pool their resources with twenty or thirty other families, so one person can watch all the kids in a centralized location. And since they've spread the costs around, why not make sure it's someone who's knowledgeable enough to help the kids learn? Heck, while you're at it, you could even charter a bus to bring all the kids to this central location!
Washed them away?? You're conflating the businesses with the human beings that run them.
If we let the banks go bankrupt, we'd currently be in the Great Depression II, while the bankers would be living like kings off their ill-gotten gains.
We had to bail the banks out for the good of everyone. Where we went wrong was not punishing the scumbags who created the problem, and not breaking up the too-big-to-fail banks. In other words, our problem wasn't too much government intervention, but too little.
Some things need to be kept secret. For example, the identity of undercover cops infiltrating gangs. But of course, secrecy can also be abused to cover up wrong-doing.
The only way to determine whether or not something should be secret, is to look at it. So we need a third party trusted by both sides to do the looking. They need to be trusted by the government not to reveal something that really ought to be secret, and they need to be trusted by the people not to cover-up something that should be exposed. Sadly, I doubt such a party could ever exist. There will always be some fascists in the government trying to corrupt it, and there would always be some tin-foil paranoids insisting it's all a big conspiracy.
1. You're just going to have to trust me on this: it is not possible to find backdoors in microchips by "tearing them down". The CIA or NSA or whoever wouldn't even both to try. Instead, they would bribe some Chinese worker to tell them, or they would drop a flash drive with a virus in the parking lot and gain access to the company's emails, or something like that.
2. If we couldn't get electronics from China, we'd get them from Korea or Japan or Taiwan or Thailand or wherever. Or make them here, thanks to advances in automation. The reduction in supply would raise prices for a while, but we could adjust. Your OPEC analogy doesn't work because oil is a resource that is specific to certain areas. Labor is not.
3. Absolutely agree on why people hate the US, and I agree that our foreign policy shouldn't involve playing world cop (especially since we seem to be a dirty cop). But the fact that people's reasons for anger towards the US are valid does not mean that their predictions of America's fall will come true.
4. "The Chinese are worker ants." Now come on, that's just offensive. They're humans, just like everywhere else. People died building the Great Wall, they also died building the transcontinental railroad in the US. The US developed to the point that people weren't willing to put up with that anymore, and China will too.
5. "Britain's navy was once to be feared,... [now] they're a mere shadow of what they once were". Wait, weren't you complaining about America's imperialism a couple paragraphs ago? What Britain "once was", was a tyrannical empire that killed countless people and destroyed nations all over the world to enrich themselves. Now they're a much calmer nation that provides good quality of life for their people, and doesn't go around hurting others. Why, exactly, would it be bad for America to follow in their footsteps?
I'm quite certain that by now, many intelligence organizations have taken the chips apart and scanned them down [for backdoors] and if they'd found anything there would have been a reaction.
You are grossly underestimating the complexity of modern microchips. What you're describing simply isn't feasible for any chip of even modest complexity. To hunt for backdoors, you would really need to look at the HDL files, and even then, it wouldn't be hard to hide something malicious in one of the hundreds of test modes.
China has us by the balls on rare earth metals, and most of our consumer electronics are made in Asia. If they decide to play economic hardball, we're going to lose.
You're also overestimating China's position. There are plenty of rare earth metals outside of China. It's actually to China's detriment that they're the chief supplier right now. As the supply of easily accessible minerals goes down, the value will go up -- the countries that wait the longest before ramping production will benefit the most. As for consumer electronics, what are they going to do? Stop making iPhones? If anything, that could be a short term boon to our economy, as we would suddenly have a motive to build a bunch of new factories and hire a bunch of workers. The increased cost of electronics would bug people for a while, but eventually they'd get used to it, and maybe even stop throwing away perfectly good phones every couple years. Meanwhile, what happens to China's economy when they cut out their largest trade partner?
Now, I agree that we spend waaay too much on our military, and but your attitude is way too negative. I get that there's a lot of anti-American propaganda on the internet, and it's easy to be taken in by it, but it's mostly baseless. China will develop for a while longer, their people will demand a fair wage, their quality of life will increase, and things will even back out. The Chinese people aren't a bunch of worker ants, emotionlessly toiling away for the good of the hive. The media likes to present them that way, just as they used to do with Japan, because it's scary, and scared people consume more news.
People often predict end times in their life time. I suspect it's because life can be dull and a part of them wants to live in "interesting times". The truth is much more banal. England's a perfect example of a "fallen" superpower, and they seem to be doing quite alright.
Hahaha, yes, the "classic libertarians" who want the government to outlaw abortion and homosexuality, who want an ever larger military, who want militarized immigration controls to keep "others" out.
The Republican's brand was damaged by the Bush administration. They decided that they needed a new brand name to slap on the old product. They went with "libertarian" and redefined the word in the process. It's still the same corporate raiders leading an army of religious extremists, with a handful of easily fooled true libertarians going along for the ride.
Oh, I'm sure they did. That little masquerade mask lets them sleep at night. They would hate for the GOP to take it off and reveal that they had been voting for Republicans all along.
He's not saying "we must take away personal liberty until everyone is equal", he's saying "it's impossible to have true liberty with so much inequality."
There's a move to make school focus on teaching job schools. College is becoming ever more expensive to bury you in debt. Unions are being destroyed so your employer can play you against your neighbor to pay you both less. Employers want to keep unemployment up so that you're desperate enough to work ever-longer hours for those low wages. And you'll do it, because the alternative is dying in the streets. Data mining allows them to charge you the max amount you're willing to pay. Their contracts require you to waive your right to sue. If you want to retire, you're forced to invest money, where it will be systematically skimmed off by Wall Street firms.
What freedom do you think you have? The freedom to work for someone else's benefit until you die?
The only freedom you'll ever know will come from ganging up with your neighbors, and fighting back. Call it a union, or a government -- either way, it's the people against the powerful. That's how it's been every since the biggest strongest men in the tribes realized they could take the fruits and berries gathered by the other members.
The Tea Party wants whatever the observer wants it to want.
The core group is a bunch of old, white, reasonably well-off people who were told, by Fox News, to be frightened. And frightened they are! They howled when they were told Obama was going to destroy Medicare... hardly "small government" types. They howled more when they were told Obama raised their taxes, never mind that he had actually lowered them. They howled again when told Obama would take their guns, never mind that he never proposed any such thing. They howled about non-existent death panels, and non-existent voter fraud, and on, and on, and on.
There are people like you who latched on because you really want limited government, but you're kidding yourself. The Tea Party is just an extreme wing of the Republicans. A little masquerade mask to let you vote for corporate raiders and their army of Christian extremists while telling yourself that these Republicans are different.
All voting systems, in which more than two choices are present, suffer from spoilers and strategic voting. It is mathematically provable. In approval voting, for example, if candidates A, B, and C are running and are all very close, and I really like A, sorta like B, and hate C, should I vote for B? If I do, I risk B beating A, but if I don't, I risk C beating B with A in third.
That being said, almost anything would be better than our current system, but good luck changing it.
One thing that might actually be attainable would be proportional representation with regard to House elections. Most states are gerrymandered to hell and back. Why not use proportional voting for those elections? It could be done at the state level for a few states that are more open to change, and could probably garner support from the current out-party (to get away from the problem of gerrymandering). Plus state level politicians are easier to affect with grass roots movements. It would let us get some 3rd party candidates into Congress, who could then push for further reform. The Senate would block it for many years, of course, but if we had a few dozen 3rd party representatives in the House, it could open more people up to third parties.
My god you are ignorant. I am naming specific, tangible differences. Differences that will decide whether a great many people live or die. And you're just sitting here insisting in broken english that they're all the same. "The truth is that they should likk the white elephant in the room that military expenditure represents with great justice in their hearts"?! What the hell does that even mean? If it's a complaint about military spending, then I repeat: Obama is trying to cut military spending by $100B/yr, and get blasted by Republicans for it. Romney is planning on increasing military spending by $200B/yr and pegging it to 4% of the GDP to ensure that it stays high.
It doesn't matter that you don't support either. One of them will win. If you care at all about your fellow citizens, you should be voting for Obama. He's not great, to say the least, but he's a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
You made the claim that the candidates are the same. I pointed out that they were different.
That's it. I never shoehorned you into either camp. I said I was disgusted by your apathy towards an election that will literally be life or death for many people. There are clear and important differences between the candidates, and to deny that is the height of recklessness.
Those differences include:
Abortion. Romney would outlaw it, Obama would preserve the status quo. From your post, you should prefer Obama.
Medicare. Romney would end it, Obama would make some minor tweaks to keep it solvent. From your post, you would prefer Romney. You're wrong, and don't seem to understand that sending seniors to the for-profit corporations for care would not improve outcomes, but you should at least acknowledge there's a difference.
Military spending. Obama is trying to cut it by $100Byr, Romney wants to increase it by $200B/yr. You gave no indication of which you prefer, but unless you're barely-sentient, you must have some sort of opinion on the matter.
Taxes. Romney would cut them 20% across the board, Obama would raise them by a few percent on people earning $250k+/yr, and by ~10% on capital gains. Again, surely you have some opinion on the matter.
Gay rights. Sounds like you ought to be in the Democrat's camp on this one, if you truly don't condone mistreatment of people based on their sexual orientation.
War. Romney wants to ramp military spending, has said a little while ago in the debate that we should be arming the Syrian rebels, has accused Obama of not sufficiently supporting Israel, etc. If he's elected, there's a better than even chance that we'll be at war in Iran in the next two years. Obama has resisted calls by Israel to support bombing strikes against Iran, pursuing every possible alternative, and wants to cut military spending. I can't guarantee that he wouldn't go to war, but it seems far less likely.
Any reasonable person should come to the conclusion that Obama is the better choice here. An unreasonable one, who perhaps has their view of the world tainted by religion, might think Romney is the better choice. But only an absolute fool would say it doesn't matter either way.
It's not a false dichotomy. It's a real dichotomy. Your next president will be either Obama or Romney. If you live in a swing state, you have a civic duty to vote for the least bad one. If you live in the other 90% of America, then by all means, vote for a third party to send a message. In neither case is it a good idea to refuse to vote at all. That just gives the entrenched leaders even more power.
It absolutely matters who wins. You're just being lazy because it hurts to vote for a guy who loses, or to vote for a guy who then does stuff you don't like.
Let's say that the Democrats grow a spine and don't let Romney get whatever he wants. At the very least, he will be able to appoint new SCOTUS justices. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 79 years old. It is very likely that the winner of his election will name her replacement. If she is replaced by a conservative justice, Roe v Wade will be overturned within a year. Many women will die in back-alley abortions. Many more will have their lives turned upside down.
And that's if we're optimistic and assume that's all Romney gets to do. He also wants to end Medicare, which will bankrupt countless seniors. He wants to slash taxes by 20% across the board and pay for them in a manner that has been proven to be mathematically impossible. He wants to increase military spending by trillions of dollars. His bellicose rhetoric, constantly accusing Obama of being soft and an apologist, makes it far more likely that he'll bow to pressure from Netanyahu and go to war in Iran.
Now, you're probably a fairly well off young straight male, so who cares if women die trying to get abortions? Who cares if some old people are thrown out into the streets? Who cares if some poor people are sent off to die in a foreign land? Who cares if gay people are treated as subhuman?
It's so much easier to pretend it doesn't matter. And cooler too! You get to show off to the internet how wise and jaded you are!
That is plausible. If the router was cheaply designed and didn't include good impedance matching, you could conceivably have a whole lot of the transmitted power being reflected back into the chip. And if that were the case, the router would probably be constantly using its highest amplifier level (to make up for the fact that not much power is getting through), thus causing even more power to get reflected back.
In my company, at least, we only guarantee that high input power doesn't destroy the chip quickly (e.g. a couple weeks). We've never, to my knowledge, studied the long term effects of it. I don't see any obvious way to accelerate a test like that, and it's not exactly practical to run a five year study on something like this.
I don't think so. I'm an RF electronics engineer, and we do all sorts of accelerated stress testing to check out the second half of the bathtub curve, and I've never seen degradation on anything in the RF/IF path inside the chip. The typical "wear out" failure mode is cracks forming in the protective seals around the chip and letting in moisture (from the air), which causes leakage (high current draw) and eventually just shorts out something important and the chip dies. At any rate, that shouldn't be happening in just a couple years, unless the submitter moves his PC back and forth between the freezer and the sauna every week.
One possible explanation would be crystal aging. RF equipment tends to rely on extremely accurate quartz crystals to provide reference frequencies. Those crystals tend to drift as they age. If the design was already near the edge of acceptable frequencies, an extra 10 or 20 ppm from aging could easily result in several dB of degradation.
Another poster pointed out the possibility of the router using a crappy switched-mode power supply, which is also a good explanation. I would hope that they would power the RF chip through a linear regulator with good noise rejection, but who knows? That sort of switching noise can absolutely interfere with the radio's performance.
So have lots of other places. Literally no one reading this summary thought it was about Italy, Texas. In fact, I'd wager that at least 95% of the readers didn't know there was an Italy, Texas. A quick check on Wikipedia shows it to have a population of under 2000, which means the only people who know it exists also know that it's way to small to have a "supreme court".
The GP just had a random bit of trivia that he wanted to milk for karma.
Seems to me that Trayvon is the defendant. The fact that Zimmerman shot him is not in dispute. The case will center entirely around what sort of kid Trayvon was. One side will paint him as a saint, the other as a thug. Either way, there will be at least one Fox News watcher on the jury who will have already made up his mind and vote to acquit, so Zimmerman will walk. (There may be reverse cases, but since the jury needs to be unanimous to lock Zimmerman up, it won't matter.)
The only thing that remains to be determined is how badly the deceased gets smeared first.
This entire case, like so many others, became a farce once the media got involved. If the idiot cops had done their job from day one, there wouldn't be a problem. They could have determined the guilt or innocence of Zimmerman away from the limelight, without letting racial politics get involved.
Excellent point. Minor correction: some parents will complain if their not-so-talented kid doesn't get enough playing time on his school's team, or is stuck playing 3rd seat on his chosen instrument, or only gets cast as an extra in the school play.
The difference is that, for whatever reason, schools will largely ignore those complaints, but will bow to pressure to treat all kids the same academically.
I only bring it up because it suggests that this isn't the fault of complaining parents, since they complain in other cases too.
The varied achievements of such individuals beg the question: what defines a genius?
False. It raises the question. We've been over this.
If we had been over it, the conversation would have been done and one side would have won. I don't recall all the people of the internet coming together to agree to use only the older definition of the phrase. Oh, I'm sorry, did you mean "We've discussed this"? I guess the meaning of that phrase must have changed at some point.
Snark aside, I wonder if people a hundred years ago argued over shifting meanings like this? It's not like "begging the question" is some intergenerational battleground like "ain't" (or whatever teenagers annoy older generations with these days) with teenagers making up their own slang and parents wringing their hands over where this new generation went wrong. I feel like we've reached new heights of grammar naziism caused by people wanting to look smart on the internet.
No, electronic stability control is a great idea that makes cars much safer...for most drivers.
For highly skilled drivers, it probably gets in the way more than it helps. But the vast majority of drivers aren't pros. And there's no denying that accidents have gone down markedly since ESC was introduced. And lest you claim that's a coincidence, studies have also shown strong correlation between vehicles that lack ESC and vehicles that end up in fatal accidents.
Seriously, you shouldn't make claims like that before looking at the evidence. If someone sees your post and decides to avoid getting ESC in their next car, their risk of death goes up by quite a bit. It's akin to telling people vaccines cause autism. Stop it.
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Most atheists, at least on the internet, are insulting towards religious people. They revel in the sense of superiority it gives them.
Dawkin's statement here, that creationists are ignorant of evolution and saying so is simple (albeit harsh) truth, is a narrow case. He's right, but that doesn't excuse all the hardcore internet atheists, who insist that religious people are stupid, or that religion is the cause of all human suffering, etc. Such statements have no grounding in fact. They only serve to stroke the ego of the collective internet atheist circle-jerk, while simultaneously driving away people who might otherwise listen to what you have to say.
And who's going to watch over those kids while they're at home studying? Not the parents; they need to work. Even if they're telecommuting, they can't be focusing their attention on making sure 8-year old Billy is paying attention in geography.
They'll need to hire someone to keep an eye on the kids. But that's expensive, so maybe they can pool their resources with twenty or thirty other families, so one person can watch all the kids in a centralized location. And since they've spread the costs around, why not make sure it's someone who's knowledgeable enough to help the kids learn? Heck, while you're at it, you could even charter a bus to bring all the kids to this central location!
Now why is this all sounding so familiar...
Washed them away?? You're conflating the businesses with the human beings that run them.
If we let the banks go bankrupt, we'd currently be in the Great Depression II, while the bankers would be living like kings off their ill-gotten gains.
We had to bail the banks out for the good of everyone. Where we went wrong was not punishing the scumbags who created the problem, and not breaking up the too-big-to-fail banks. In other words, our problem wasn't too much government intervention, but too little.
Not if the answer they come to is "a fringe OS pushed by weirdos dressed as wildebeests".
Some things need to be kept secret. For example, the identity of undercover cops infiltrating gangs. But of course, secrecy can also be abused to cover up wrong-doing.
The only way to determine whether or not something should be secret, is to look at it. So we need a third party trusted by both sides to do the looking. They need to be trusted by the government not to reveal something that really ought to be secret, and they need to be trusted by the people not to cover-up something that should be exposed. Sadly, I doubt such a party could ever exist. There will always be some fascists in the government trying to corrupt it, and there would always be some tin-foil paranoids insisting it's all a big conspiracy.
1. You're just going to have to trust me on this: it is not possible to find backdoors in microchips by "tearing them down". The CIA or NSA or whoever wouldn't even both to try. Instead, they would bribe some Chinese worker to tell them, or they would drop a flash drive with a virus in the parking lot and gain access to the company's emails, or something like that.
2. If we couldn't get electronics from China, we'd get them from Korea or Japan or Taiwan or Thailand or wherever. Or make them here, thanks to advances in automation. The reduction in supply would raise prices for a while, but we could adjust. Your OPEC analogy doesn't work because oil is a resource that is specific to certain areas. Labor is not.
3. Absolutely agree on why people hate the US, and I agree that our foreign policy shouldn't involve playing world cop (especially since we seem to be a dirty cop). But the fact that people's reasons for anger towards the US are valid does not mean that their predictions of America's fall will come true.
4. "The Chinese are worker ants." Now come on, that's just offensive. They're humans, just like everywhere else. People died building the Great Wall, they also died building the transcontinental railroad in the US. The US developed to the point that people weren't willing to put up with that anymore, and China will too.
5. "Britain's navy was once to be feared, ... [now] they're a mere shadow of what they once were". Wait, weren't you complaining about America's imperialism a couple paragraphs ago? What Britain "once was", was a tyrannical empire that killed countless people and destroyed nations all over the world to enrich themselves. Now they're a much calmer nation that provides good quality of life for their people, and doesn't go around hurting others. Why, exactly, would it be bad for America to follow in their footsteps?
Which would matter if wars were still fought with muskets. Fortunately, they're not.
Besides, the American and Chinese economies are way too interdependent for the two to ever go to war, at least for the foreseeable future.
A few things...
I'm quite certain that by now, many intelligence organizations have taken the chips apart and scanned them down [for backdoors] and if they'd found anything there would have been a reaction.
You are grossly underestimating the complexity of modern microchips. What you're describing simply isn't feasible for any chip of even modest complexity. To hunt for backdoors, you would really need to look at the HDL files, and even then, it wouldn't be hard to hide something malicious in one of the hundreds of test modes.
China has us by the balls on rare earth metals, and most of our consumer electronics are made in Asia. If they decide to play economic hardball, we're going to lose.
You're also overestimating China's position. There are plenty of rare earth metals outside of China. It's actually to China's detriment that they're the chief supplier right now. As the supply of easily accessible minerals goes down, the value will go up -- the countries that wait the longest before ramping production will benefit the most. As for consumer electronics, what are they going to do? Stop making iPhones? If anything, that could be a short term boon to our economy, as we would suddenly have a motive to build a bunch of new factories and hire a bunch of workers. The increased cost of electronics would bug people for a while, but eventually they'd get used to it, and maybe even stop throwing away perfectly good phones every couple years. Meanwhile, what happens to China's economy when they cut out their largest trade partner?
Now, I agree that we spend waaay too much on our military, and but your attitude is way too negative. I get that there's a lot of anti-American propaganda on the internet, and it's easy to be taken in by it, but it's mostly baseless. China will develop for a while longer, their people will demand a fair wage, their quality of life will increase, and things will even back out. The Chinese people aren't a bunch of worker ants, emotionlessly toiling away for the good of the hive. The media likes to present them that way, just as they used to do with Japan, because it's scary, and scared people consume more news.
People often predict end times in their life time. I suspect it's because life can be dull and a part of them wants to live in "interesting times". The truth is much more banal. England's a perfect example of a "fallen" superpower, and they seem to be doing quite alright.
Hahaha, yes, the "classic libertarians" who want the government to outlaw abortion and homosexuality, who want an ever larger military, who want militarized immigration controls to keep "others" out.
The Republican's brand was damaged by the Bush administration. They decided that they needed a new brand name to slap on the old product. They went with "libertarian" and redefined the word in the process. It's still the same corporate raiders leading an army of religious extremists, with a handful of easily fooled true libertarians going along for the ride.
Oh, I'm sure they did. That little masquerade mask lets them sleep at night. They would hate for the GOP to take it off and reveal that they had been voting for Republicans all along.
You (and the mods) misunderstand.
He's not saying "we must take away personal liberty until everyone is equal", he's saying "it's impossible to have true liberty with so much inequality."
There's a move to make school focus on teaching job schools. College is becoming ever more expensive to bury you in debt. Unions are being destroyed so your employer can play you against your neighbor to pay you both less. Employers want to keep unemployment up so that you're desperate enough to work ever-longer hours for those low wages. And you'll do it, because the alternative is dying in the streets. Data mining allows them to charge you the max amount you're willing to pay. Their contracts require you to waive your right to sue. If you want to retire, you're forced to invest money, where it will be systematically skimmed off by Wall Street firms.
What freedom do you think you have? The freedom to work for someone else's benefit until you die?
The only freedom you'll ever know will come from ganging up with your neighbors, and fighting back. Call it a union, or a government -- either way, it's the people against the powerful. That's how it's been every since the biggest strongest men in the tribes realized they could take the fruits and berries gathered by the other members.
The Tea Party wants whatever the observer wants it to want.
The core group is a bunch of old, white, reasonably well-off people who were told, by Fox News, to be frightened. And frightened they are! They howled when they were told Obama was going to destroy Medicare... hardly "small government" types. They howled more when they were told Obama raised their taxes, never mind that he had actually lowered them. They howled again when told Obama would take their guns, never mind that he never proposed any such thing. They howled about non-existent death panels, and non-existent voter fraud, and on, and on, and on.
There are people like you who latched on because you really want limited government, but you're kidding yourself. The Tea Party is just an extreme wing of the Republicans. A little masquerade mask to let you vote for corporate raiders and their army of Christian extremists while telling yourself that these Republicans are different.
All voting systems, in which more than two choices are present, suffer from spoilers and strategic voting. It is mathematically provable. In approval voting, for example, if candidates A, B, and C are running and are all very close, and I really like A, sorta like B, and hate C, should I vote for B? If I do, I risk B beating A, but if I don't, I risk C beating B with A in third.
That being said, almost anything would be better than our current system, but good luck changing it.
One thing that might actually be attainable would be proportional representation with regard to House elections. Most states are gerrymandered to hell and back. Why not use proportional voting for those elections? It could be done at the state level for a few states that are more open to change, and could probably garner support from the current out-party (to get away from the problem of gerrymandering). Plus state level politicians are easier to affect with grass roots movements. It would let us get some 3rd party candidates into Congress, who could then push for further reform. The Senate would block it for many years, of course, but if we had a few dozen 3rd party representatives in the House, it could open more people up to third parties.
My god you are ignorant. I am naming specific, tangible differences. Differences that will decide whether a great many people live or die. And you're just sitting here insisting in broken english that they're all the same. "The truth is that they should likk the white elephant in the room that military expenditure represents with great justice in their hearts"?! What the hell does that even mean? If it's a complaint about military spending, then I repeat: Obama is trying to cut military spending by $100B/yr, and get blasted by Republicans for it. Romney is planning on increasing military spending by $200B/yr and pegging it to 4% of the GDP to ensure that it stays high.
It doesn't matter that you don't support either. One of them will win. If you care at all about your fellow citizens, you should be voting for Obama. He's not great, to say the least, but he's a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
You made the claim that the candidates are the same. I pointed out that they were different.
That's it. I never shoehorned you into either camp. I said I was disgusted by your apathy towards an election that will literally be life or death for many people. There are clear and important differences between the candidates, and to deny that is the height of recklessness.
Those differences include:
Abortion. Romney would outlaw it, Obama would preserve the status quo. From your post, you should prefer Obama.
Medicare. Romney would end it, Obama would make some minor tweaks to keep it solvent. From your post, you would prefer Romney. You're wrong, and don't seem to understand that sending seniors to the for-profit corporations for care would not improve outcomes, but you should at least acknowledge there's a difference.
Military spending. Obama is trying to cut it by $100Byr, Romney wants to increase it by $200B/yr. You gave no indication of which you prefer, but unless you're barely-sentient, you must have some sort of opinion on the matter.
Taxes. Romney would cut them 20% across the board, Obama would raise them by a few percent on people earning $250k+/yr, and by ~10% on capital gains. Again, surely you have some opinion on the matter.
Gay rights. Sounds like you ought to be in the Democrat's camp on this one, if you truly don't condone mistreatment of people based on their sexual orientation.
War. Romney wants to ramp military spending, has said a little while ago in the debate that we should be arming the Syrian rebels, has accused Obama of not sufficiently supporting Israel, etc. If he's elected, there's a better than even chance that we'll be at war in Iran in the next two years. Obama has resisted calls by Israel to support bombing strikes against Iran, pursuing every possible alternative, and wants to cut military spending. I can't guarantee that he wouldn't go to war, but it seems far less likely.
Any reasonable person should come to the conclusion that Obama is the better choice here. An unreasonable one, who perhaps has their view of the world tainted by religion, might think Romney is the better choice. But only an absolute fool would say it doesn't matter either way.
It's not a false dichotomy. It's a real dichotomy. Your next president will be either Obama or Romney. If you live in a swing state, you have a civic duty to vote for the least bad one. If you live in the other 90% of America, then by all means, vote for a third party to send a message. In neither case is it a good idea to refuse to vote at all. That just gives the entrenched leaders even more power.
It absolutely matters who wins. You're just being lazy because it hurts to vote for a guy who loses, or to vote for a guy who then does stuff you don't like.
Let's say that the Democrats grow a spine and don't let Romney get whatever he wants. At the very least, he will be able to appoint new SCOTUS justices. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 79 years old. It is very likely that the winner of his election will name her replacement. If she is replaced by a conservative justice, Roe v Wade will be overturned within a year. Many women will die in back-alley abortions. Many more will have their lives turned upside down.
And that's if we're optimistic and assume that's all Romney gets to do. He also wants to end Medicare, which will bankrupt countless seniors. He wants to slash taxes by 20% across the board and pay for them in a manner that has been proven to be mathematically impossible. He wants to increase military spending by trillions of dollars. His bellicose rhetoric, constantly accusing Obama of being soft and an apologist, makes it far more likely that he'll bow to pressure from Netanyahu and go to war in Iran.
Now, you're probably a fairly well off young straight male, so who cares if women die trying to get abortions? Who cares if some old people are thrown out into the streets? Who cares if some poor people are sent off to die in a foreign land? Who cares if gay people are treated as subhuman?
It's so much easier to pretend it doesn't matter. And cooler too! You get to show off to the internet how wise and jaded you are!
You disgust me.
That is plausible. If the router was cheaply designed and didn't include good impedance matching, you could conceivably have a whole lot of the transmitted power being reflected back into the chip. And if that were the case, the router would probably be constantly using its highest amplifier level (to make up for the fact that not much power is getting through), thus causing even more power to get reflected back.
In my company, at least, we only guarantee that high input power doesn't destroy the chip quickly (e.g. a couple weeks). We've never, to my knowledge, studied the long term effects of it. I don't see any obvious way to accelerate a test like that, and it's not exactly practical to run a five year study on something like this.
I don't think so. I'm an RF electronics engineer, and we do all sorts of accelerated stress testing to check out the second half of the bathtub curve, and I've never seen degradation on anything in the RF/IF path inside the chip. The typical "wear out" failure mode is cracks forming in the protective seals around the chip and letting in moisture (from the air), which causes leakage (high current draw) and eventually just shorts out something important and the chip dies. At any rate, that shouldn't be happening in just a couple years, unless the submitter moves his PC back and forth between the freezer and the sauna every week.
One possible explanation would be crystal aging. RF equipment tends to rely on extremely accurate quartz crystals to provide reference frequencies. Those crystals tend to drift as they age. If the design was already near the edge of acceptable frequencies, an extra 10 or 20 ppm from aging could easily result in several dB of degradation.
Another poster pointed out the possibility of the router using a crappy switched-mode power supply, which is also a good explanation. I would hope that they would power the RF chip through a linear regulator with good noise rejection, but who knows? That sort of switching noise can absolutely interfere with the radio's performance.
So have lots of other places. Literally no one reading this summary thought it was about Italy, Texas. In fact, I'd wager that at least 95% of the readers didn't know there was an Italy, Texas. A quick check on Wikipedia shows it to have a population of under 2000, which means the only people who know it exists also know that it's way to small to have a "supreme court".
The GP just had a random bit of trivia that he wanted to milk for karma.
Seems to me that Trayvon is the defendant. The fact that Zimmerman shot him is not in dispute. The case will center entirely around what sort of kid Trayvon was. One side will paint him as a saint, the other as a thug. Either way, there will be at least one Fox News watcher on the jury who will have already made up his mind and vote to acquit, so Zimmerman will walk. (There may be reverse cases, but since the jury needs to be unanimous to lock Zimmerman up, it won't matter.)
The only thing that remains to be determined is how badly the deceased gets smeared first.
This entire case, like so many others, became a farce once the media got involved. If the idiot cops had done their job from day one, there wouldn't be a problem. They could have determined the guilt or innocence of Zimmerman away from the limelight, without letting racial politics get involved.
Excellent point. Minor correction: some parents will complain if their not-so-talented kid doesn't get enough playing time on his school's team, or is stuck playing 3rd seat on his chosen instrument, or only gets cast as an extra in the school play.
The difference is that, for whatever reason, schools will largely ignore those complaints, but will bow to pressure to treat all kids the same academically.
I only bring it up because it suggests that this isn't the fault of complaining parents, since they complain in other cases too.
Which would still mean that genius and autism are statistically independent, uncorrelated variables.
The varied achievements of such individuals beg the question: what defines a genius?
False. It raises the question. We've been over this.
If we had been over it, the conversation would have been done and one side would have won. I don't recall all the people of the internet coming together to agree to use only the older definition of the phrase. Oh, I'm sorry, did you mean "We've discussed this"? I guess the meaning of that phrase must have changed at some point.
Snark aside, I wonder if people a hundred years ago argued over shifting meanings like this? It's not like "begging the question" is some intergenerational battleground like "ain't" (or whatever teenagers annoy older generations with these days) with teenagers making up their own slang and parents wringing their hands over where this new generation went wrong. I feel like we've reached new heights of grammar naziism caused by people wanting to look smart on the internet.
No, electronic stability control is a great idea that makes cars much safer ...for most drivers.
For highly skilled drivers, it probably gets in the way more than it helps. But the vast majority of drivers aren't pros. And there's no denying that accidents have gone down markedly since ESC was introduced. And lest you claim that's a coincidence, studies have also shown strong correlation between vehicles that lack ESC and vehicles that end up in fatal accidents.
Seriously, you shouldn't make claims like that before looking at the evidence. If someone sees your post and decides to avoid getting ESC in their next car, their risk of death goes up by quite a bit. It's akin to telling people vaccines cause autism. Stop it.