I dunno if the rest of the printer industry is getting the same way lately, but some Lexmark printers I recently bought have far greater disparity between claimed toner capacities and actual toner capacities than I'm used to seeing. (No, I'm not confused about the starter cartridge that comes with new printers, and yes, this is based on real-world data, and no the page coverage on the print jobs were not particularly heavy.)
The computer industry figured out how to make my USB plugs incompatible with my ethernet jack. More importantly, they did this without the government telling them to. They did it while operating on much narrower profit margins, and without a large number of human lives hanging in the balance.
The idiots running the health care industry should have resolved this on their own a long time ago. The government should not have had to get involved at all.
The problem with the "lies, damned lies, and statistics" argument is that it leads people to conclude that all statistics are invalid unless they happen to agree with our political proclivities, which is far more dangerous than bad numbers floating around out there.
You see the nice thing about statistics is that when someone fudges something, it's possible to prove that something was fudged. However if you have been trained to reject all statistical evidence, you no longer have any reasonable tools for separating "probably true" from "probably gibberish", which will ultimately lead to you making bad decisions and holding incorrect conclusions.
There's a reason scientists rely on statistical analysis instead of anecdotal evidence from some mouth-breathing buffoon on talk radio.
That's neat in theory, but...
on
Intel Buys McAfee
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...wouldn't you want antivirus software that doesn't suck big sweaty donkey testes? I mean, if you're going to embed it in your CPU and make it all permanent, shouldn't it be important to choose decent antivirus software?
...and "nannystate". I think they're required for rants of this sort.
Anyway, the political career of Warren Chisum (as well as some of the posts in this very thread) proves that this guy's insane public pronouncement will not have any effect on the number of conservatives/libertarians who will vote for him.
If only all of us were as edumacated and intellectshul as you all's conservatives!
I find it hilarious that conservatives spend so much time demonizing smart people ("Intuhlekshul ELEET!"), then turn around and insist that only dumb people would fall for liberalism (which in turn implies that you must be smart, at least by comparison). Can you make up your minds, please? Is being smart good or bad?
Now you're stretching it. While it is obvious that Rupert Murdoch's media empire is nothing more than a multibillion dollar propaganda business for American conservatives and the Republican party, to claim that they are doing this at the behest of China is just being silly. They would be doing this with or without the influence of China because they mistakenly believe that their actions won't result in America being ground into third world nation status; on the contrary, they think doing these things will make them rich (which technically speaking, it will in the short term).
If the lawyer is struck by lightning, every other Christian would hold that up as proof of God's existence, but if the lawyer isn't struck by lightning, not one single Christian would regard that as disproof of God's existence. I always found that aspect of the religious mind strange.
...those likely to see Halloween as "satanic" are likely to think that "Celtic religion" and "satan worship" are the same thing.
Spend some time talking to one. To them, everything that is not Christian (e.g. Wicca, atheism, the Celtic religion, et. al.) is a form of Satan worship.
It's for our own protection, comrade! If you disagree with this, that means you're with the capitalists and against Mother Russia! We know how to deal with uppity citizens who refuse to cooperate with the KGB!
No offense, but our government has such a track record of claiming "national security" when it is anything but that I am inclined to not believe them when I hear those words. Half the time, it turns out to be our freedoms being curtailed for purely political reasons (either to cover someone's @ss or to harass an enemy). And you know what? Every totalitarian government uses that claim (or something similar) when they run roughshod over the rights of their constituents.
The Soviets were protecting their people from capitalist spies, capitalist saboteurs, and other unsavory "anti-revolutionary" types. The Nazis were protecting their people from Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, union members, etc., etc. For our government, the boogeyman changes from time to time (drug dealers, terrorists, immigrants, etc.), but the purpose is the same. Your problem is that you've obviously fallen from the boogeyman scare tactics and failed to see it for what it is, and your reaction is exactly what those peddling fear could have hoped for.
Anyone who is trying to sell you something using fear is up to no good, or they would not have to resort to such tactics. We have a certain tradition in this country, and letting the government do whatever the hell they want as long as they use the magic words "national security" or "for your own protection" is not part of that tradition.
Out of fear of what happened in the 1970s, our government is spending an awful lot of tax dollars to keep the price of gasoline low. By keeping the price of gas low, many more fuel efficient technologies or even alternative energy sources are not developed or not as fully developed because they are not economically viable.
Obviously, the government of Canada doesn't do as much to suppress gasoline prices and even so this particular technology is not economically viable per se, but with so many billions of dollars in tax breaks and direct subsidies, you can not say this is the free market at work because government policy is driving what is happening.
Vaccines aren't about protecting individuals; you have to think of it at the population level. If more than X% of the population gets vaccinated, the percent of the population that gets the disease goes way down. So the fact that you didn't get the flu last year may may be attributable to other people getting the vaccine (not to downplay the importance of personal hygiene).
Are you guys still pushing the lie that there is a vast international liberal media conspiracy against conservatives while the media is little more than a conveyor belt for Republican propaganda?
The Washington Post had to publish a long bullshit op-ed explaining why they refused to present proof to the American people that Bush lied us into the war (their excuse: everyone already knew... except that 1/3 of the population still doesn't know years later). The New York Times sat on the same information because they asked the Bush administration permission to print the information and the Bushies told them not to (they didn't publish the information until a year later when it came out in other sources).
Obama is no boy scout, but the things Bush did were worse by orders of magnitude, yet the press seems to make it sound like both were just as bad or that Obama is ever so slightly better. There very much is bias at work here, but the bias is the opposite of what you seem to think it is.
...and the older ones are staggeringly computer illiterate. He could have told his boss he was using the computer to monitor security cameras or that he was working on a spreadsheet and his boss likely would not have known the difference.
It was bad enough when Bush tried to pull this "political embarrassment to our administration is the same thing as endangering the nation/troops" codswallop, but I am not going to accept this bullsh*t argument from Obama.
They also want you to pay ISPs to post your resume, and they want to charge JimBob's Ribshack for "access to clients". Without net neutrality, the smaller players won't be able to afford to play, and the Internet will become a place in which only large corporations can afford to have web sites.
If the government cannot have absolute control over what the public does and does not know, then the public itself is being threatened. It's not just the Bush/Obama administrations making these claims. You will find similar claims made by nearly every authoritarian government in existence from China to the old Soviet Union to fascist Germany. It's always "national security" or "protecting the children from obscenity", but in the end, it's all just excuses to make government opaque and less accountable.
One of the primary "scientists" behind the original complaints that led to this manufactured "controversy" is none other than Ross "degrees for radians" McKitrick.
Any of McKitrick's mistakes taken individually would be understandable, but after so many of them one can only conclude that either he is making these "mistakes" on purpose to arrive at a particular conclusion or he is one of the most staggeringly incompetent scientists in the world today. Either way, no one rational should be taking him seriously.
McKitrick by the way is one of the most prominent "scientists" cited by the global warming denial crowd, and is one of the only ones to have actually been published in a serious journal (hence his prominent status among deniers).
This really is no different from the anti-evolution movement. It's all bad information and bad logic to support a religion that can't survive contact with evidence, and they even use similar tactics (e.g. fakey journals publishing materials from fakey labs whose funding is obscured by shell companies and whose content is not really meant to fool anyone but Joe Beercan).
I honestly can't think of any group that would have a motive for deliberately sabotaging the booms. Environmentalists wouldn't want to do it because it would make the ecological damage worse. Teabaggers might relish the idea of doing more damage to the environment, they would never interfere with the activities of one of their corporate masters. Someone out to hurt BP wouldn't get any mileage out of this because the government fines they'll eventually pay are based on the amount of oil coming out of the well, not the amount of oil that hits the beaches, and it would only serve to make BP look like the victims rather than the perpetrators. Who's left? Terrorists? Likely such an action would have a very small impact on what is already a very large ecological disaster anyway.
After Lucas' infamous hissy fit with the DVD standards committee, he refused to release any of his movies on DVD for a very long time. I got pretty angry at him for that, but I found that there were plenty of other movies out there deserving of my attention. So I went years without watching the Star Wars movies. It turns out that watching those movies regularly altered my perception of those movies. By not watching them for years, the spell lifted and when I finally came back, I was able to (finally) give a more fair evaluation of the original trilogy, and I have to say it didn't age well. At all. Now when I look at it, all I can see is the amazingly bad dialog, occasionally atrocious acting (who puts a hack like Mark Hamil in the same scene with the great Alec Guinness?), and of course plot holes you could drive an imperial star destroyer through.
Lucas has always been a talentless hack. There was never a better time when he made better movies.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand, the laser in question really does resemble the light saber. As much as it pains me to side with Lucas, it seems more than within his rights to argue copyright infringement.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno if the rest of the printer industry is getting the same way lately, but some Lexmark printers I recently bought have far greater disparity between claimed toner capacities and actual toner capacities than I'm used to seeing. (No, I'm not confused about the starter cartridge that comes with new printers, and yes, this is based on real-world data, and no the page coverage on the print jobs were not particularly heavy.)
But the connectors should be incompatible regardless of the hours and stress nurses are subjected to.
The computer industry figured out how to make my USB plugs incompatible with my ethernet jack. More importantly, they did this without the government telling them to. They did it while operating on much narrower profit margins, and without a large number of human lives hanging in the balance.
The idiots running the health care industry should have resolved this on their own a long time ago. The government should not have had to get involved at all.
Now we can buy a tablet that locks up frequently and can't find its own a** in a pair of bloomers.
The problem with the "lies, damned lies, and statistics" argument is that it leads people to conclude that all statistics are invalid unless they happen to agree with our political proclivities, which is far more dangerous than bad numbers floating around out there.
You see the nice thing about statistics is that when someone fudges something, it's possible to prove that something was fudged. However if you have been trained to reject all statistical evidence, you no longer have any reasonable tools for separating "probably true" from "probably gibberish", which will ultimately lead to you making bad decisions and holding incorrect conclusions.
There's a reason scientists rely on statistical analysis instead of anecdotal evidence from some mouth-breathing buffoon on talk radio.
...wouldn't you want antivirus software that doesn't suck big sweaty donkey testes? I mean, if you're going to embed it in your CPU and make it all permanent, shouldn't it be important to choose decent antivirus software?
...and "nannystate". I think they're required for rants of this sort.
Anyway, the political career of Warren Chisum (as well as some of the posts in this very thread) proves that this guy's insane public pronouncement will not have any effect on the number of conservatives/libertarians who will vote for him.
It's not as if there aren't millions more just as insane, evil, and stupid as he is.
...but that works too.
If only all of us were as edumacated and intellectshul as you all's conservatives!
I find it hilarious that conservatives spend so much time demonizing smart people ("Intuhlekshul ELEET!"), then turn around and insist that only dumb people would fall for liberalism (which in turn implies that you must be smart, at least by comparison). Can you make up your minds, please? Is being smart good or bad?
Now you're stretching it. While it is obvious that Rupert Murdoch's media empire is nothing more than a multibillion dollar propaganda business for American conservatives and the Republican party, to claim that they are doing this at the behest of China is just being silly. They would be doing this with or without the influence of China because they mistakenly believe that their actions won't result in America being ground into third world nation status; on the contrary, they think doing these things will make them rich (which technically speaking, it will in the short term).
If the lawyer is struck by lightning, every other Christian would hold that up as proof of God's existence, but if the lawyer isn't struck by lightning, not one single Christian would regard that as disproof of God's existence. I always found that aspect of the religious mind strange.
...those likely to see Halloween as "satanic" are likely to think that "Celtic religion" and "satan worship" are the same thing.
Spend some time talking to one. To them, everything that is not Christian (e.g. Wicca, atheism, the Celtic religion, et. al.) is a form of Satan worship.
It's for our own protection, comrade! If you disagree with this, that means you're with the capitalists and against Mother Russia! We know how to deal with uppity citizens who refuse to cooperate with the KGB!
No offense, but our government has such a track record of claiming "national security" when it is anything but that I am inclined to not believe them when I hear those words. Half the time, it turns out to be our freedoms being curtailed for purely political reasons (either to cover someone's @ss or to harass an enemy). And you know what? Every totalitarian government uses that claim (or something similar) when they run roughshod over the rights of their constituents.
The Soviets were protecting their people from capitalist spies, capitalist saboteurs, and other unsavory "anti-revolutionary" types. The Nazis were protecting their people from Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, union members, etc., etc. For our government, the boogeyman changes from time to time (drug dealers, terrorists, immigrants, etc.), but the purpose is the same. Your problem is that you've obviously fallen from the boogeyman scare tactics and failed to see it for what it is, and your reaction is exactly what those peddling fear could have hoped for.
Anyone who is trying to sell you something using fear is up to no good, or they would not have to resort to such tactics. We have a certain tradition in this country, and letting the government do whatever the hell they want as long as they use the magic words "national security" or "for your own protection" is not part of that tradition.
Out of fear of what happened in the 1970s, our government is spending an awful lot of tax dollars to keep the price of gasoline low. By keeping the price of gas low, many more fuel efficient technologies or even alternative energy sources are not developed or not as fully developed because they are not economically viable.
Obviously, the government of Canada doesn't do as much to suppress gasoline prices and even so this particular technology is not economically viable per se, but with so many billions of dollars in tax breaks and direct subsidies, you can not say this is the free market at work because government policy is driving what is happening.
Vaccines aren't about protecting individuals; you have to think of it at the population level. If more than X% of the population gets vaccinated, the percent of the population that gets the disease goes way down. So the fact that you didn't get the flu last year may may be attributable to other people getting the vaccine (not to downplay the importance of personal hygiene).
Are you guys still pushing the lie that there is a vast international liberal media conspiracy against conservatives while the media is little more than a conveyor belt for Republican propaganda?
The Washington Post had to publish a long bullshit op-ed explaining why they refused to present proof to the American people that Bush lied us into the war (their excuse: everyone already knew... except that 1/3 of the population still doesn't know years later). The New York Times sat on the same information because they asked the Bush administration permission to print the information and the Bushies told them not to (they didn't publish the information until a year later when it came out in other sources).
Obama is no boy scout, but the things Bush did were worse by orders of magnitude, yet the press seems to make it sound like both were just as bad or that Obama is ever so slightly better. There very much is bias at work here, but the bias is the opposite of what you seem to think it is.
...and the older ones are staggeringly computer illiterate. He could have told his boss he was using the computer to monitor security cameras or that he was working on a spreadsheet and his boss likely would not have known the difference.
It was bad enough when Bush tried to pull this "political embarrassment to our administration is the same thing as endangering the nation/troops" codswallop, but I am not going to accept this bullsh*t argument from Obama.
They also want you to pay ISPs to post your resume, and they want to charge JimBob's Ribshack for "access to clients". Without net neutrality, the smaller players won't be able to afford to play, and the Internet will become a place in which only large corporations can afford to have web sites.
If the government cannot have absolute control over what the public does and does not know, then the public itself is being threatened. It's not just the Bush/Obama administrations making these claims. You will find similar claims made by nearly every authoritarian government in existence from China to the old Soviet Union to fascist Germany. It's always "national security" or "protecting the children from obscenity", but in the end, it's all just excuses to make government opaque and less accountable.
One of the primary "scientists" behind the original complaints that led to this manufactured "controversy" is none other than Ross "degrees for radians" McKitrick.
Any of McKitrick's mistakes taken individually would be understandable, but after so many of them one can only conclude that either he is making these "mistakes" on purpose to arrive at a particular conclusion or he is one of the most staggeringly incompetent scientists in the world today. Either way, no one rational should be taking him seriously.
McKitrick by the way is one of the most prominent "scientists" cited by the global warming denial crowd, and is one of the only ones to have actually been published in a serious journal (hence his prominent status among deniers).
This really is no different from the anti-evolution movement. It's all bad information and bad logic to support a religion that can't survive contact with evidence, and they even use similar tactics (e.g. fakey journals publishing materials from fakey labs whose funding is obscured by shell companies and whose content is not really meant to fool anyone but Joe Beercan).
I honestly can't think of any group that would have a motive for deliberately sabotaging the booms. Environmentalists wouldn't want to do it because it would make the ecological damage worse. Teabaggers might relish the idea of doing more damage to the environment, they would never interfere with the activities of one of their corporate masters. Someone out to hurt BP wouldn't get any mileage out of this because the government fines they'll eventually pay are based on the amount of oil coming out of the well, not the amount of oil that hits the beaches, and it would only serve to make BP look like the victims rather than the perpetrators. Who's left? Terrorists? Likely such an action would have a very small impact on what is already a very large ecological disaster anyway.
After Lucas' infamous hissy fit with the DVD standards committee, he refused to release any of his movies on DVD for a very long time. I got pretty angry at him for that, but I found that there were plenty of other movies out there deserving of my attention. So I went years without watching the Star Wars movies. It turns out that watching those movies regularly altered my perception of those movies. By not watching them for years, the spell lifted and when I finally came back, I was able to (finally) give a more fair evaluation of the original trilogy, and I have to say it didn't age well. At all. Now when I look at it, all I can see is the amazingly bad dialog, occasionally atrocious acting (who puts a hack like Mark Hamil in the same scene with the great Alec Guinness?), and of course plot holes you could drive an imperial star destroyer through.
Lucas has always been a talentless hack. There was never a better time when he made better movies.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand, the laser in question really does resemble the light saber. As much as it pains me to side with Lucas, it seems more than within his rights to argue copyright infringement.
I could swear there was already a posting on this a while back. Not that my memory is worth anything.