This is NOT something I'd be recommending. I worked at a dotcom that folded in late '99, and since there was a big question about our final paychecks, a number of employees decided to walk out with hardware in lieu of cash. Since management didn't seem to care, and since nobody was going to be employed later on anyway, then nobody gets hurt, right? Wrong!
What happened? Well, the liquidation company (employed by the court) realized that there was missing equipment right away. They rewound the security videotape for the building and ID'd the employees who'd walked out with equipment. The next day they called the police and had most of them arrested. IIRC, eleven of them were charged with felony grand theft, and quite a few more were charged with simple theft and burglary (a couple IT guys with keys came back the next day). Without fail, ALL of them offered to return the equipment, but they liquidator refused to drop the charges and everyone eventually plead no contest. Most of the employees were given fines and restitution FAR larger than the value of the equipment they took, a handful of the employees were put on probation, and two of the employees who re-entered the building were actually given brief jail stays (14 days IIRC).
All of the employees learned an unfortunate lesson about property rights and bankruptcy. You see, the moment the judge OK'd the bankruptcy and liquidation, the equipment became the legal property of the COURT with controllership assigned to the liquidator. The employees had an honest grievance with Company X, but they avenged that grievance by stealing from an entity that wasn't involved in it. Legally, it's the equivalent to stealing your neighbors TV because the guy down the street took $500 from your living room. There are legal ways to deal with the guy down the street, but you have no right to steal from someone else in return.
The ironic thing was that we were all paid within two weeks anyway, with a two month severance bonus to boot!
Agreed. The value of my (rare) copy of LOTR has climbed to more than $400 thanks to the movie hype, so I when I decided to reread the trilogy before seeing the movie, I thought it would be wise to buy a new set...and got that one. While the set is paperback, it is very nicely done with quality paper and good artwork (no cheesy movie shots). I now point people to this set when they're looking for a readable, lower budget copy.
Common sense? Sorry, but I this "law" is already becoming a pain in my arse as retailers begin to implement it. I have six credit cards which I am constantly using. When I go to enter my transactions into my account register (MS Money), the number on my receipt is often the ONLY way I can recall which card I charged something to. Some retailers, luckily, are still printing the last four or five digits on the receipt, but with the others I now find myself having to write account info on my receipts just to keep my accounts straight.
Geological processes can be very violent, but they also tend to be regular.
I know a lot of geologists who would be quite suprised to learn that these processes are regular. Certainly some geologic activities, such as the uplifting of the Himalayan range or earthquakes along a strike-slip fault, are regular, but history contains many examples of one-off or short-term geologic phenomena. A section of rock stressed by an earthquake 100,000 years ago could slip tomorrow, even though there are no faults in its region. A section of land can rise or subside based on a short term modification of the magma currents below it. These effects and many more are known to geologists, and can cause all kinds of "non-regular" geologic effects. Most competent geologists will tell you that the concept of "slow but steady" geologic change is a myth. The reality is that "slow but steady" is often punctuated by periods of rapid change and deformation.
That said, you made an assumption that countered my conjecture, when in reality we could both be wrong. For all we know, there might be an extinct volcano or volcanic vent in the area that has caused the land to subside. The magma chambers for either of these can become quite large and cause considerable shifts in land elevation and shoreline positions. Until we search the seafloor region surrounding this "city", we won't know with any certainty what may have caused it to reach its current depth.
Honestly though, for a city to plunge 2000 feet in 6000 years, evidence of the subsidence should be fairly obvious once we start looking for it. Deformation of the surface strata should be quite apparent, as would any tilting or warping of the plateau the city rests upon. Geologists should be able to answer the "How" question pretty quickly.
I see a lot of comments here by people who are skeptical at the veracity of this claim because of the age and depth of the ruins. This skepticism can be easily overcome though, by simply looking at the numbers, the geology of the surrounding area, and geology in general.
For a city to sink 2000 feet in 6000 years only requires an average subsidence rate of 4 inches a year. While 4 inches a year sounds high at first, you must all remember that this IS a geologically active area with a number of faults, uplifts, and volcanoes. As an example, in one sunny June afternoon in the late 1600's, the city of Port Royal Jamaica plunged 40 feet below the surface of the sea, killing thousands. That's forty feet in ONE DAY. There have also been foundations and hints of other structures on the Bimini shelf and elsewhere around the Carribean that indicate that these kinds of shoreline changes have ocurred fairly consistently throughout the regions history. A look at shoreline maps of many of the inhabited islands, even over just the past few centuries, CLEARLY shows that some islands no longer exist, while others have drastically changed size or shape. If these kinds of changes can happen over a few hundred years, who knows what's possible over a few thousand? For all we know, this region could be sitting on top of an emptying magma chamber for a volcanic vent, or a section of crust that was relieved of some upward tension and subsided. These situations could easily provide subsidence rates far in excess of what would be needed to get this city to that depth.
To make a long story short, the region of the Caribbean tectonic plate is known to be highly volatile and active, and it is under immense pressure from its larger surrounding neighbors (the North American plate, South American Plate, etc). To assume that one section of it could not have dropped 4" a year ignores both the regions history and gological evidence.
You've also got to remember that there are Mayan legends about the Olmec that sound distinctly Atlantis-like. The legends said that the Olmec were the former rulers of the Yucatan who were centered on a great island in the Caribbean. That island, again according to legend, plunged below the sea and destroyed their civilisation. There are other similar legends throughout Central and South America about the "educators" (like the Viracocha's of the Andes), a people who came among them and taught them construction, farming, and astronomy, and who spoke of their destroyed homeland. Archaeologists have marveled for years at the consistency of these legends from one region to another, and tin-foil-hatters have attributed them to everything from Atlanteans, to the Irish, to space aliens. It's much more realistic to think that these "Viracochas" may have simply been a Caribbean civilisation destroyed when their home area dove beneath the waves.
I'm printing about 50 copies of this and passing it around at work tomorrow. You see folks, I and my wife heard several of these during the Leonid showers and became a laughingstock when we told the astro-geeks at work. The only meteors that make noise, they claimed, were ferrous stones that penetrated to the lower atmosphere. Since the Leonids contained no meteors of this type, they thought I was just being stupid or lying to impress people.
Those of you who didn't hear this need to understand that it is a very quiet effect. I was watching the show up in the Sierra Nevada mountains south of a little town called Buck Meadows...about 20 minutes from Yosemite National Park. I was like 50 miles from the nearest city (with several mountains in between), 20 miles from the nearest highway, and MILES from ANYTHING louder than a squirrel. Heck, I could hear the hum of the high tension power lines over a mile and a half away and compared "fireball ratings" with a couple other skywatchers more than a thousand feet up the mountain...and didn't even have to raise my voice. It was that quuiieett, and we still barely heard this effect.
Well, since the Nuremberg trials were technically military trials, and since the military executed several of the people found guilty during those trials, your post actually gives credence to the way we're treating the terrorists.
i think you'd at the minimum would have mass UN sanctions, the head of the country or person responsible for launch up for crimes against humanity.
Uh...no. An accident is an accident, and NOBODY is going to prosecute you if a thruster misfires. Now, if you DELIBERATELY dropped that load on a country...
Huge difference here. In the U.S., the television and radio spectrum is owned by the PUBLIC, and the government decided long ago to that it should be run in a manner that is acceptable to the majority of its citizens. What you do or say in private is a totally different story however. You can write anything you want in a book, distribute anything you want in a video, or even transmit anything you want over non public TV stations (flip on Cinemax at 2am in most markets and you'll get an eyeful). In other words, you're free to do and say anything you want, but the PUBLIC doesn't have to support you with THEIR airwaves.
This act, however, steps much further and into an unacceptable realm. Many of Europes "anti-hate" laws ban reading "unacceptable" books, watching "unacceptable" movies, listening to "unacceptable" music, or playing "unacceptable" video games in your own home, where only you are audience to it. Sure, we in the U.S. don't see XXX videos broadcast on ABC primetime, but there's nothing stopping us from taking a trip to the local adult video store and picking up a few copies...or from calling my cable or satellite company and asking them to turn on the Playboy channel. The types of laws Europe is passing restrict not just public, but private behavior. THAT is unnacceptable!
Those are two different kinds of crime. Here's a more apt comparison.
#1 I kill you because I don't like you.
#2 I kill you because I don't like you since you're black.
How exactly is #2 worse than #1? Are hate crime advocates stating that I should get off easier for #1, simply because I didn't take your race into account? Shouldn't both crimes be treated equally harshly in court?
Don't misunderstand us anti-hate crime people. We aren't objecting to the fact that murderers and criminals are being harshly punished for their hate crimes, we simply think that a white man who rapes a white woman should be sentenced just as harshly as a white man who rapes a black woman and calls her a "n*gger" in the process. If we're willing to double the sentence for someone who commits a "hate" crime, why don't we just double the sentences for everyone who commits that crime? A raped woman is a raped woman, regardless of why she was raped. A dead man is a dead man regardless of why he was shot. Don't just stiffen some penalties, stiffen them ALL!
#1 The common foot soldier is still the most devastating part of any army. If you look at all the wars of the twentieth century, you'll notice that the longest and hardest part of the wars were fought by foot soldiers carrying rifles and pistols. In Somalia and Vietnam, all the technological might of the U.S. forces were actually bested by shoeless rebels with nothing more than AK-47's. And what about artillery and tanks? Well, you can build cheap bombs and build tank traps, or shoot the driver when he pops out to take a piss. It doesn't matter because there are ways to shut them down without high powered weaponry. You've also got nuts like me to help out...I've got a Barrett.50 cal target rifle and about 100 DU cored hot loads that'll punch through the side walls of most APC's. Since armed citizens outnumber armed soldiers about one hundred to to one in this country, we could stop them.
#2 But I think that's a rather pointless argument anyway. All branches of the U.S. military are made up of 100% volunteer citizen soldiers. If a dictator somehow came to power in Washington and ordered the military to take control of all major U.S. cities, about 90% of the soldiers would politely tell him where he could shove it. Very, very few volunteer soldiers would follow an order to undermine the U.S. Constitution and fire on their friends and families.
#3 Your comment smacks of defeatism. Even if the military went along with a government overthrow of some type, and even if they had us completely outgunned, there are many of us who would rather fight and die than meekly submit to oppression. I personally don't care what the government has in it's arsenal, I know what I have in mine and I know how to use it. If worst came to worst, we could at least make life a living hell on an oppressive government long enough to incite a full scale rebellion.
Wouldn't fly. Sprint would have legally purchased 1-800-225-5288. The fact that you COULD spell ATT with the numbers would be deemed irrelevant. There HAVE been court cases over this before, and the courts have ruled that the telephone numbers ultimately belong to the issuing phone company, not to the user. Because of that, you can't sue someone for using a phone number you once used, but never legally owned.
Oh, and I realize that it's bad form to reply to your own posts, but I thought I'd mention that my own six month old IBM 75GXP 45GB died yesterday. No SMART warning, lost clusters, or other indicators of impending doom, just an odd clicking sound followed by total failure. I'll definitely be hitting IBM up for a replacement, though I'm not sure if I'll join in this class action or not.
Not neccesarily. I was involved with a class action over an old 6X HP CDR drive that was a lemon (as they all were). I was pleasantly suprised when, after the case was completely settled, I recieved a brand new 12x32 CDRW in the mail as compensation. Of course, having to wait five years for any compensation was a little irritating:\
I guess that quite a few of the hijackers were here on expired work or tourist visas. By linking INS information to the national ID card program they could have caught this. Wouldn't you have been a little suspicious if four or five people who were in the country illegally all tried to board the same plane together? The FBI/CIA/NSA/Homeland Defense could also have the ability to flag people with known associations to hijackers. Several of the S11 hijackers WERE previously known to be associated with al Quaeda, and the intelligence community had been keeping loose tabs on them while they were here. Although being "associated" with a hijacker isn't illegal and isn't grounds for detainment, a computer might catch a few of them trying to board a plane together and notify airport security to perform an extra-close security check when they try to board.
It's been my experience that "facial scans" is corporate doubletalk for photograph. In otherwords, they want your picture and thumbprint, a practice already started by most DMV's in the U.S.
IBM could conceivably argue that FP97 is a programming utility and therefore exempt. A better example would be MS Publisher 97. I hammered out a few simple brochure sites with Publisher back then and it clearly violates this patent. I could pick a generic template from a list, input nothing more than my content or body text, and have the software output a web site (they were pretty awful sites, but that's beside the point).
There's your prior art, and it's from Microsoft no less.
Must be something with wineries. The same thing happened to the fairly famous Gallo family a number of years back. The modern winery was founded by two brothers, Ernest and Julio Gallo, while the third brother Joseph became a dairy farmer.
The Gallo winery, as most wine drinkers know, expanded rapidly and is now the largest winery in the U.S., and one of the largest in the world. Well, in the early 80's the third brother, Joseph Gallo, began selling his dairy products directly to consumers in grocery stores. There was cheeses, milk, butter, and cremes (but no wine), and all were marketed under the name "Gallo Farms". When the Gallo Winery heard of this, they quickly demanded the name be changed. Cheese, they reasoned, is commonly consumed with wine...therefore creating the possibility of confusion.
Joseph Gallo tried to comply at first, changing the company name to "Joseph Gallo Farms" to add some differentiation, but that wasn't good enough. The winery wanted him to desist from using his last name altogether. Joseph Gallo refused and his brothers dragged him to court for trademark infringement (Gallo Winery is still a privately held corporation entirely controlled by the Gallo family). Joseph Gallo had a serious problem with this, and claimed that the law shouldn't be able to prevent him from using his last name. After all, Gallo in Italian was like MacDonald in Scotland...a very common name.
Joseph Gallo ended up losing his shirt. Not only did the judge order him not to use his own name, but he was also slapped with a large compensatory and punitive fine because of his belligerance. Of course, the judgement could have had something to do with the fact that the Gallo winery helped to finance the elections of nearly every local official before the early 90's, and the fact that the Gallo's power over the local economy was greatly feared by most of Stanislaus Counties government workers. NOBODY was going to risk pissing the Gallo's off, so poor Joseph really didn't stand a chance.
Ah, they have an answer for THAT too. Adults are permitted to view pretty much any non-pornographic site on the Internet. If you want to view IHateFags.Com, then you are permitted to. What they have done is set up two computers at the end of the librarians counter that aren't visible to regular users. They ask that people who are viewing "objectionable" material use these (you must get librarian permission to use them), but make it clear that screen content is still visible to the staff. If you view something objectionable on one of the regular machines and someone complains, they may ask you to change to one of the private machines. And what about innocuous links and popups? That's why they review the request logs. It's pretty easy to tell a porn surfer from someone who may have accidentally brought up a single page (and promptly closed it)
See, all it takes is a little forethought and common sense.
I agree completely, and this is exactly the route my local library took. Three years ago when they first installed Internet access, the problem arose that children were accessing porn via the libraries computers. Did they filter? Did they restrict access? Did they prohibit the Internet altogether?
No. First they instituted the Internet Card. It's like a library card, but for Internet access. You have to agree to several rules to get the card (including no porn), and then it must be inserted into the machine during each use. The beauty of the card is that the parents of minor children must sign for their access INSIDE the library, and must also agree to a few things...including acceptance of the fact that they know about the objectionable materials on the internet and are allowing them on anyway. This eliminates the libraries liability and reduces pressure on them to filter. The second step was to RELOCATE the computers to the middle of the library. The public computers are in two large circles in the center of the main room, where you can be assured ZERO privacy (the keyboard trays were recessed to prevent people from peeking your passwords as you typed them in.) The third and final step to eliminate porn from the library was to scrap the paltry 14" monitors originally supplied by Compaq and replace them with shiny new 21" screens...which are BIG and EASILY VIEWABLE from behind.
Today, there is no longer a problem with porn in our libraries public computers. Anyone dumb enough to open up xxxsluts.com on one of their computers would be spotted within minutes, and they are usually reported to the librarian immediately. Wthout the user even being aware that he's being investigated, the librarian can then verify what sites that computer has viewed via a special proxy monitoring package and establish exactly what was being looked at. If the librarian determines that the user was in fact trolling for porn, then his card can be instantly suspended for 7, 30, or 90 days, depending on whether he's done it before (subsequent offenses result in a five year access loss).
And there you have it. The perfect way to eliminate porn in libraries without filters! And before anyone tries to argue it's effectiveness, let me point out that it's worked perfectly. A few people were nailed within a few weeks of the new systems implementation, but after those instances the reports of porn viewing dropped SHARPLY. They now average one suspension a month, and those tend to be new users who didn't expect rigid enforcement. Parents love it because their kids are safe from viewing porn and extremist hate sites, students love it because they don't have to deal with annoying filters blocking their access when they try to do their biology homework, and computer geeks love it because they get to stare at those beautiful 21" screens whenever they go to the library. Everyones happy:-)
Don't try to sway the point. I have no problem with making money, and happen to have made quite a bit of it myself. I also don't begrudge other people the right to make and keep their money, as long as they spent THEIR OWN money doing it. If you want to use public funds for your research, then your findings should become public domain. The sick still get helped (and probably at a steeply discounted rate), and the research still gets done. People who want to get RICH in the process should stick to the private sector.
If you really want to debate philosophies though, I can bare my Libertarian streak and make the argument that the government has no business funding scientific research at all. I could point out that nearly every major medical breakthrough of the last two centuries has come out of PRIVATE laboratories, or was funded by private research institutions. I could point out that multiple studies have indicated that researchers on the government dole operate much less efficiently than their privately funded counterparts, and that they tend to be far more interested in maintaining their public funding than they are in actually making discoveries (as an example, nearly two decades of publicly funding AIDS research has yielded little...most of the treatment breakthroughs we have today came out of private labs). Finally, I could point out that publicly funded research is subject to the whims of whoevers in office at the moment, and that researchers using public funds have an unhappy history of tuning their results to appease whoever is currently writing their paycheck...whereas private researchers tend to be simply interested in finding something that works.
I could go into that, but I won't. Our government has decided that it WILL fund this research, so I'll restrict my argument to those parameters. The use of public funds as a form of corporate welfare is completely unacceptable to me and to many Americans. If the government thinks that it's wise to fund this research. then so be it. But it is NOT governments jobs to fund the patent frenzy and allow these people to make a fortune by charging royalties to use discoveries that YOU AND I paid for in the first place.
But it appears that even I'm allowing the topic to wander a bit. Bush DIDN'T place that clause into the funding bill, and private corporations CAN patent the research that the American citizens paid for. The whining you hear in the media has its roots in this subject though. Men like Clark hoped to make bucketloads of money in biotech using your money to do the research. When the First Shrub made his funding plans public, he revealed a shrewd strategy wherein we WOULD provide funding for some research, but where the majority of that research must still be shouldered by private labs. This move infuriated many in the ESCR community because they had planned to parlay public money into private profits, and those plans have been seriously delayed by these restrictions. They are mad because the competition to discover something big will be MUCH more fierce with everyone working on the same sixty lines, and the odds of any one lab succeeding and striking it rich just became much slimmer. Bush did a decent job making sure that our funds actually go to RESEARCH ESCR, and actually increased the likelyhood that we'll see tangible results in a shorter time. You'll have to pardon me if I don't feel any sympathy for the investors and lab heads who were more interested in profits than science. Mr. Clark will just have to put off purchasing that second yacht for a few years.
Having taught electrical engineering at Stanford and benefited there from federal research funds, I can say that with no prospect of federal support, significant scientific inquiry in a field like stem cell research will stop. No research leader can forgo federal money.
Oh puhleez. There have been virtually NO federal funds spent on embryonic SCR, and that doesn't seem to have much hindered researchers so far. The TRUTH here is that these researchers saw easy, string-free government money, and now they're just pissed because it's been limited on them. Let's make the situation clear: scientists who DO NOT have the funds to continue their research have been given open funding by the government to work with the sixty specified lines as they see fit. Scientists who DO have funds can work on any cell lines they want, and do virtually anything with them. These people were thumbing it, we've offered them a free Cadillac, and now they're complaining that it's not a Mercedes...sheesh!
Could funds-free researchers do more with unlimited lines and no control? Sure they could, but when you're on the equivalent of scientific welfare you should be happy to get what you get. It is NOT the duty of the taxpayer to provide unregulated or unlimited funds to every scientist who think he can save the world...if only we'd give him a little money. Those sixty lines are as viable as any other embryonic lines currently available, and should provide a solid foundation for whatever projects those researchers may be pursuing.
Personally, I wish that Bush had added one more restriction to the pile. People like Clark are complaining because his visions of getting even wealthier were set back a bit by GW's decision. Clark, like many financial backers of SCR, were hoping to parlay early investments and later government money into huge financial gains for whatever breakthroughs they attained. MANY people in the field want to use government money to make a big breakthrough, so that they can then patent, control, and royalty-fee it to death. They want to use YOUR money to make THEM rich. Screw that. IMO, any government funding should come with the stipulation that discoveries MUST be passed into the public domain and remain royalty and patent-free. I have no interest in having MY tax dollars spent on projects designed to make people like Jim Clark richer.
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This is NOT something I'd be recommending. I worked at a dotcom that folded in late '99, and since there was a big question about our final paychecks, a number of employees decided to walk out with hardware in lieu of cash. Since management didn't seem to care, and since nobody was going to be employed later on anyway, then nobody gets hurt, right? Wrong!
What happened? Well, the liquidation company (employed by the court) realized that there was missing equipment right away. They rewound the security videotape for the building and ID'd the employees who'd walked out with equipment. The next day they called the police and had most of them arrested. IIRC, eleven of them were charged with felony grand theft, and quite a few more were charged with simple theft and burglary (a couple IT guys with keys came back the next day). Without fail, ALL of them offered to return the equipment, but they liquidator refused to drop the charges and everyone eventually plead no contest. Most of the employees were given fines and restitution FAR larger than the value of the equipment they took, a handful of the employees were put on probation, and two of the employees who re-entered the building were actually given brief jail stays (14 days IIRC).
All of the employees learned an unfortunate lesson about property rights and bankruptcy. You see, the moment the judge OK'd the bankruptcy and liquidation, the equipment became the legal property of the COURT with controllership assigned to the liquidator. The employees had an honest grievance with Company X, but they avenged that grievance by stealing from an entity that wasn't involved in it. Legally, it's the equivalent to stealing your neighbors TV because the guy down the street took $500 from your living room. There are legal ways to deal with the guy down the street, but you have no right to steal from someone else in return.
The ironic thing was that we were all paid within two weeks anyway, with a two month severance bonus to boot!
Agreed. The value of my (rare) copy of LOTR has climbed to more than $400 thanks to the movie hype, so I when I decided to reread the trilogy before seeing the movie, I thought it would be wise to buy a new set...and got that one. While the set is paperback, it is very nicely done with quality paper and good artwork (no cheesy movie shots). I now point people to this set when they're looking for a readable, lower budget copy.
Common sense? Sorry, but I this "law" is already becoming a pain in my arse as retailers begin to implement it. I have six credit cards which I am constantly using. When I go to enter my transactions into my account register (MS Money), the number on my receipt is often the ONLY way I can recall which card I charged something to. Some retailers, luckily, are still printing the last four or five digits on the receipt, but with the others I now find myself having to write account info on my receipts just to keep my accounts straight.
Geological processes can be very violent, but they also tend to be regular.
I know a lot of geologists who would be quite suprised to learn that these processes are regular. Certainly some geologic activities, such as the uplifting of the Himalayan range or earthquakes along a strike-slip fault, are regular, but history contains many examples of one-off or short-term geologic phenomena. A section of rock stressed by an earthquake 100,000 years ago could slip tomorrow, even though there are no faults in its region. A section of land can rise or subside based on a short term modification of the magma currents below it. These effects and many more are known to geologists, and can cause all kinds of "non-regular" geologic effects. Most competent geologists will tell you that the concept of "slow but steady" geologic change is a myth. The reality is that "slow but steady" is often punctuated by periods of rapid change and deformation.
That said, you made an assumption that countered my conjecture, when in reality we could both be wrong. For all we know, there might be an extinct volcano or volcanic vent in the area that has caused the land to subside. The magma chambers for either of these can become quite large and cause considerable shifts in land elevation and shoreline positions. Until we search the seafloor region surrounding this "city", we won't know with any certainty what may have caused it to reach its current depth.
Honestly though, for a city to plunge 2000 feet in 6000 years, evidence of the subsidence should be fairly obvious once we start looking for it. Deformation of the surface strata should be quite apparent, as would any tilting or warping of the plateau the city rests upon. Geologists should be able to answer the "How" question pretty quickly.
I see a lot of comments here by people who are skeptical at the veracity of this claim because of the age and depth of the ruins. This skepticism can be easily overcome though, by simply looking at the numbers, the geology of the surrounding area, and geology in general.
For a city to sink 2000 feet in 6000 years only requires an average subsidence rate of 4 inches a year. While 4 inches a year sounds high at first, you must all remember that this IS a geologically active area with a number of faults, uplifts, and volcanoes. As an example, in one sunny June afternoon in the late 1600's, the city of Port Royal Jamaica plunged 40 feet below the surface of the sea, killing thousands. That's forty feet in ONE DAY. There have also been foundations and hints of other structures on the Bimini shelf and elsewhere around the Carribean that indicate that these kinds of shoreline changes have ocurred fairly consistently throughout the regions history. A look at shoreline maps of many of the inhabited islands, even over just the past few centuries, CLEARLY shows that some islands no longer exist, while others have drastically changed size or shape. If these kinds of changes can happen over a few hundred years, who knows what's possible over a few thousand? For all we know, this region could be sitting on top of an emptying magma chamber for a volcanic vent, or a section of crust that was relieved of some upward tension and subsided. These situations could easily provide subsidence rates far in excess of what would be needed to get this city to that depth.
To make a long story short, the region of the Caribbean tectonic plate is known to be highly volatile and active, and it is under immense pressure from its larger surrounding neighbors (the North American plate, South American Plate, etc). To assume that one section of it could not have dropped 4" a year ignores both the regions history and gological evidence.
You've also got to remember that there are Mayan legends about the Olmec that sound distinctly Atlantis-like. The legends said that the Olmec were the former rulers of the Yucatan who were centered on a great island in the Caribbean. That island, again according to legend, plunged below the sea and destroyed their civilisation. There are other similar legends throughout Central and South America about the "educators" (like the Viracocha's of the Andes), a people who came among them and taught them construction, farming, and astronomy, and who spoke of their destroyed homeland. Archaeologists have marveled for years at the consistency of these legends from one region to another, and tin-foil-hatters have attributed them to everything from Atlanteans, to the Irish, to space aliens. It's much more realistic to think that these "Viracochas" may have simply been a Caribbean civilisation destroyed when their home area dove beneath the waves.
I'm printing about 50 copies of this and passing it around at work tomorrow. You see folks, I and my wife heard several of these during the Leonid showers and became a laughingstock when we told the astro-geeks at work. The only meteors that make noise, they claimed, were ferrous stones that penetrated to the lower atmosphere. Since the Leonids contained no meteors of this type, they thought I was just being stupid or lying to impress people.
Those of you who didn't hear this need to understand that it is a very quiet effect. I was watching the show up in the Sierra Nevada mountains south of a little town called Buck Meadows...about 20 minutes from Yosemite National Park. I was like 50 miles from the nearest city (with several mountains in between), 20 miles from the nearest highway, and MILES from ANYTHING louder than a squirrel. Heck, I could hear the hum of the high tension power lines over a mile and a half away and compared "fireball ratings" with a couple other skywatchers more than a thousand feet up the mountain...and didn't even have to raise my voice. It was that quuiieett, and we still barely heard this effect.
The last time I looked .edu was open to any accredited school issuing a 4 year degree. There was no requirement that the school be in the U.S.
Well, since the Nuremberg trials were technically military trials, and since the military executed several of the people found guilty during those trials, your post actually gives credence to the way we're treating the terrorists.
i think you'd at the minimum would have mass UN sanctions, the head of the country or person responsible for launch up for crimes against humanity.
Uh...no. An accident is an accident, and NOBODY is going to prosecute you if a thruster misfires. Now, if you DELIBERATELY dropped that load on a country...
Huge difference here. In the U.S., the television and radio spectrum is owned by the PUBLIC, and the government decided long ago to that it should be run in a manner that is acceptable to the majority of its citizens. What you do or say in private is a totally different story however. You can write anything you want in a book, distribute anything you want in a video, or even transmit anything you want over non public TV stations (flip on Cinemax at 2am in most markets and you'll get an eyeful). In other words, you're free to do and say anything you want, but the PUBLIC doesn't have to support you with THEIR airwaves.
This act, however, steps much further and into an unacceptable realm. Many of Europes "anti-hate" laws ban reading "unacceptable" books, watching "unacceptable" movies, listening to "unacceptable" music, or playing "unacceptable" video games in your own home, where only you are audience to it. Sure, we in the U.S. don't see XXX videos broadcast on ABC primetime, but there's nothing stopping us from taking a trip to the local adult video store and picking up a few copies...or from calling my cable or satellite company and asking them to turn on the Playboy channel. The types of laws Europe is passing restrict not just public, but private behavior. THAT is unnacceptable!
Those are two different kinds of crime. Here's a more apt comparison.
#1 I kill you because I don't like you.
#2 I kill you because I don't like you since you're black.
How exactly is #2 worse than #1? Are hate crime advocates stating that I should get off easier for #1, simply because I didn't take your race into account? Shouldn't both crimes be treated equally harshly in court?
Don't misunderstand us anti-hate crime people. We aren't objecting to the fact that murderers and criminals are being harshly punished for their hate crimes, we simply think that a white man who rapes a white woman should be sentenced just as harshly as a white man who rapes a black woman and calls her a "n*gger" in the process. If we're willing to double the sentence for someone who commits a "hate" crime, why don't we just double the sentences for everyone who commits that crime? A raped woman is a raped woman, regardless of why she was raped. A dead man is a dead man regardless of why he was shot. Don't just stiffen some penalties, stiffen them ALL!
Three problems with that line of thinking.
.50 cal target rifle and about 100 DU cored hot loads that'll punch through the side walls of most APC's. Since armed citizens outnumber armed soldiers about one hundred to to one in this country, we could stop them.
#1 The common foot soldier is still the most devastating part of any army. If you look at all the wars of the twentieth century, you'll notice that the longest and hardest part of the wars were fought by foot soldiers carrying rifles and pistols. In Somalia and Vietnam, all the technological might of the U.S. forces were actually bested by shoeless rebels with nothing more than AK-47's. And what about artillery and tanks? Well, you can build cheap bombs and build tank traps, or shoot the driver when he pops out to take a piss. It doesn't matter because there are ways to shut them down without high powered weaponry. You've also got nuts like me to help out...I've got a Barrett
#2 But I think that's a rather pointless argument anyway. All branches of the U.S. military are made up of 100% volunteer citizen soldiers. If a dictator somehow came to power in Washington and ordered the military to take control of all major U.S. cities, about 90% of the soldiers would politely tell him where he could shove it. Very, very few volunteer soldiers would follow an order to undermine the U.S. Constitution and fire on their friends and families.
#3 Your comment smacks of defeatism. Even if the military went along with a government overthrow of some type, and even if they had us completely outgunned, there are many of us who would rather fight and die than meekly submit to oppression. I personally don't care what the government has in it's arsenal, I know what I have in mine and I know how to use it. If worst came to worst, we could at least make life a living hell on an oppressive government long enough to incite a full scale rebellion.
Wouldn't fly. Sprint would have legally purchased 1-800-225-5288. The fact that you COULD spell ATT with the numbers would be deemed irrelevant. There HAVE been court cases over this before, and the courts have ruled that the telephone numbers ultimately belong to the issuing phone company, not to the user. Because of that, you can't sue someone for using a phone number you once used, but never legally owned.
Oh, and I realize that it's bad form to reply to your own posts, but I thought I'd mention that my own six month old IBM 75GXP 45GB died yesterday. No SMART warning, lost clusters, or other indicators of impending doom, just an odd clicking sound followed by total failure. I'll definitely be hitting IBM up for a replacement, though I'm not sure if I'll join in this class action or not.
Not neccesarily. I was involved with a class action over an old 6X HP CDR drive that was a lemon (as they all were). I was pleasantly suprised when, after the case was completely settled, I recieved a brand new 12x32 CDRW in the mail as compensation. Of course, having to wait five years for any compensation was a little irritating :\
I guess that quite a few of the hijackers were here on expired work or tourist visas. By linking INS information to the national ID card program they could have caught this. Wouldn't you have been a little suspicious if four or five people who were in the country illegally all tried to board the same plane together? The FBI/CIA/NSA/Homeland Defense could also have the ability to flag people with known associations to hijackers. Several of the S11 hijackers WERE previously known to be associated with al Quaeda, and the intelligence community had been keeping loose tabs on them while they were here. Although being "associated" with a hijacker isn't illegal and isn't grounds for detainment, a computer might catch a few of them trying to board a plane together and notify airport security to perform an extra-close security check when they try to board.
It's been my experience that "facial scans" is corporate doubletalk for photograph. In otherwords, they want your picture and thumbprint, a practice already started by most DMV's in the U.S.
IBM could conceivably argue that FP97 is a programming utility and therefore exempt. A better example would be MS Publisher 97. I hammered out a few simple brochure sites with Publisher back then and it clearly violates this patent. I could pick a generic template from a list, input nothing more than my content or body text, and have the software output a web site (they were pretty awful sites, but that's beside the point).
There's your prior art, and it's from Microsoft no less.
Must be something with wineries. The same thing happened to the fairly famous Gallo family a number of years back. The modern winery was founded by two brothers, Ernest and Julio Gallo, while the third brother Joseph became a dairy farmer.
The Gallo winery, as most wine drinkers know, expanded rapidly and is now the largest winery in the U.S., and one of the largest in the world. Well, in the early 80's the third brother, Joseph Gallo, began selling his dairy products directly to consumers in grocery stores. There was cheeses, milk, butter, and cremes (but no wine), and all were marketed under the name "Gallo Farms". When the Gallo Winery heard of this, they quickly demanded the name be changed. Cheese, they reasoned, is commonly consumed with wine...therefore creating the possibility of confusion.
Joseph Gallo tried to comply at first, changing the company name to "Joseph Gallo Farms" to add some differentiation, but that wasn't good enough. The winery wanted him to desist from using his last name altogether. Joseph Gallo refused and his brothers dragged him to court for trademark infringement (Gallo Winery is still a privately held corporation entirely controlled by the Gallo family). Joseph Gallo had a serious problem with this, and claimed that the law shouldn't be able to prevent him from using his last name. After all, Gallo in Italian was like MacDonald in Scotland...a very common name.
Joseph Gallo ended up losing his shirt. Not only did the judge order him not to use his own name, but he was also slapped with a large compensatory and punitive fine because of his belligerance. Of course, the judgement could have had something to do with the fact that the Gallo winery helped to finance the elections of nearly every local official before the early 90's, and the fact that the Gallo's power over the local economy was greatly feared by most of Stanislaus Counties government workers. NOBODY was going to risk pissing the Gallo's off, so poor Joseph really didn't stand a chance.
Ah, they have an answer for THAT too. Adults are permitted to view pretty much any non-pornographic site on the Internet. If you want to view IHateFags.Com, then you are permitted to. What they have done is set up two computers at the end of the librarians counter that aren't visible to regular users. They ask that people who are viewing "objectionable" material use these (you must get librarian permission to use them), but make it clear that screen content is still visible to the staff. If you view something objectionable on one of the regular machines and someone complains, they may ask you to change to one of the private machines. And what about innocuous links and popups? That's why they review the request logs. It's pretty easy to tell a porn surfer from someone who may have accidentally brought up a single page (and promptly closed it)
See, all it takes is a little forethought and common sense.
I agree completely, and this is exactly the route my local library took. Three years ago when they first installed Internet access, the problem arose that children were accessing porn via the libraries computers. Did they filter? Did they restrict access? Did they prohibit the Internet altogether?
:-)
No. First they instituted the Internet Card. It's like a library card, but for Internet access. You have to agree to several rules to get the card (including no porn), and then it must be inserted into the machine during each use. The beauty of the card is that the parents of minor children must sign for their access INSIDE the library, and must also agree to a few things...including acceptance of the fact that they know about the objectionable materials on the internet and are allowing them on anyway. This eliminates the libraries liability and reduces pressure on them to filter. The second step was to RELOCATE the computers to the middle of the library. The public computers are in two large circles in the center of the main room, where you can be assured ZERO privacy (the keyboard trays were recessed to prevent people from peeking your passwords as you typed them in.) The third and final step to eliminate porn from the library was to scrap the paltry 14" monitors originally supplied by Compaq and replace them with shiny new 21" screens...which are BIG and EASILY VIEWABLE from behind.
Today, there is no longer a problem with porn in our libraries public computers. Anyone dumb enough to open up xxxsluts.com on one of their computers would be spotted within minutes, and they are usually reported to the librarian immediately. Wthout the user even being aware that he's being investigated, the librarian can then verify what sites that computer has viewed via a special proxy monitoring package and establish exactly what was being looked at. If the librarian determines that the user was in fact trolling for porn, then his card can be instantly suspended for 7, 30, or 90 days, depending on whether he's done it before (subsequent offenses result in a five year access loss).
And there you have it. The perfect way to eliminate porn in libraries without filters! And before anyone tries to argue it's effectiveness, let me point out that it's worked perfectly. A few people were nailed within a few weeks of the new systems implementation, but after those instances the reports of porn viewing dropped SHARPLY. They now average one suspension a month, and those tend to be new users who didn't expect rigid enforcement. Parents love it because their kids are safe from viewing porn and extremist hate sites, students love it because they don't have to deal with annoying filters blocking their access when they try to do their biology homework, and computer geeks love it because they get to stare at those beautiful 21" screens whenever they go to the library. Everyones happy
Don't try to sway the point. I have no problem with making money, and happen to have made quite a bit of it myself. I also don't begrudge other people the right to make and keep their money, as long as they spent THEIR OWN money doing it. If you want to use public funds for your research, then your findings should become public domain. The sick still get helped (and probably at a steeply discounted rate), and the research still gets done. People who want to get RICH in the process should stick to the private sector.
If you really want to debate philosophies though, I can bare my Libertarian streak and make the argument that the government has no business funding scientific research at all. I could point out that nearly every major medical breakthrough of the last two centuries has come out of PRIVATE laboratories, or was funded by private research institutions. I could point out that multiple studies have indicated that researchers on the government dole operate much less efficiently than their privately funded counterparts, and that they tend to be far more interested in maintaining their public funding than they are in actually making discoveries (as an example, nearly two decades of publicly funding AIDS research has yielded little...most of the treatment breakthroughs we have today came out of private labs). Finally, I could point out that publicly funded research is subject to the whims of whoevers in office at the moment, and that researchers using public funds have an unhappy history of tuning their results to appease whoever is currently writing their paycheck...whereas private researchers tend to be simply interested in finding something that works.
I could go into that, but I won't. Our government has decided that it WILL fund this research, so I'll restrict my argument to those parameters. The use of public funds as a form of corporate welfare is completely unacceptable to me and to many Americans. If the government thinks that it's wise to fund this research. then so be it. But it is NOT governments jobs to fund the patent frenzy and allow these people to make a fortune by charging royalties to use discoveries that YOU AND I paid for in the first place.
But it appears that even I'm allowing the topic to wander a bit. Bush DIDN'T place that clause into the funding bill, and private corporations CAN patent the research that the American citizens paid for. The whining you hear in the media has its roots in this subject though. Men like Clark hoped to make bucketloads of money in biotech using your money to do the research. When the First Shrub made his funding plans public, he revealed a shrewd strategy wherein we WOULD provide funding for some research, but where the majority of that research must still be shouldered by private labs. This move infuriated many in the ESCR community because they had planned to parlay public money into private profits, and those plans have been seriously delayed by these restrictions. They are mad because the competition to discover something big will be MUCH more fierce with everyone working on the same sixty lines, and the odds of any one lab succeeding and striking it rich just became much slimmer. Bush did a decent job making sure that our funds actually go to RESEARCH ESCR, and actually increased the likelyhood that we'll see tangible results in a shorter time. You'll have to pardon me if I don't feel any sympathy for the investors and lab heads who were more interested in profits than science. Mr. Clark will just have to put off purchasing that second yacht for a few years.
Having taught electrical engineering at Stanford and benefited there from federal research funds, I can say that with no prospect of federal support, significant scientific inquiry in a field like stem cell research will stop. No research leader can forgo federal money.
Oh puhleez. There have been virtually NO federal funds spent on embryonic SCR, and that doesn't seem to have much hindered researchers so far. The TRUTH here is that these researchers saw easy, string-free government money, and now they're just pissed because it's been limited on them. Let's make the situation clear: scientists who DO NOT have the funds to continue their research have been given open funding by the government to work with the sixty specified lines as they see fit. Scientists who DO have funds can work on any cell lines they want, and do virtually anything with them. These people were thumbing it, we've offered them a free Cadillac, and now they're complaining that it's not a Mercedes...sheesh!
Could funds-free researchers do more with unlimited lines and no control? Sure they could, but when you're on the equivalent of scientific welfare you should be happy to get what you get. It is NOT the duty of the taxpayer to provide unregulated or unlimited funds to every scientist who think he can save the world...if only we'd give him a little money. Those sixty lines are as viable as any other embryonic lines currently available, and should provide a solid foundation for whatever projects those researchers may be pursuing.
Personally, I wish that Bush had added one more restriction to the pile. People like Clark are complaining because his visions of getting even wealthier were set back a bit by GW's decision. Clark, like many financial backers of SCR, were hoping to parlay early investments and later government money into huge financial gains for whatever breakthroughs they attained. MANY people in the field want to use government money to make a big breakthrough, so that they can then patent, control, and royalty-fee it to death. They want to use YOUR money to make THEM rich. Screw that. IMO, any government funding should come with the stipulation that discoveries MUST be passed into the public domain and remain royalty and patent-free. I have no interest in having MY tax dollars spent on projects designed to make people like Jim Clark richer.
No. Read the article. Different company, different technology.
Read the article. It's a different company and a different technology.