Re:throw out the dictionary, you aren't using it.
on
Super Bacteria Create Gold
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I have seen videos of people using neutron capture with heavy isotopes of mercury to produce gold in fast breeder reactors as a proof of concept. Wikipedia gives a little information, but I really do remember seeing a demonstration with a teeny vial of centrifuged mercury being installed in the high flux compartment of the reactor, then removed several days later with thin inclusions of gold inside the vial.
Its been my experience that the major problem is the right turn on red law.
Yes. It's handy if you are driving a motor vehicle. It isn't so handy when you are a pedestrian or a cyclist trying to cross the street in the pedestrian lane.
People in little 2-door sports cars are the major offender, who whip around right turns when the light os red without pausing to even look for pedestrians or cyclists.
My bike is actually damaged and in need of repair from such an altercation, and I have been literally run over as a pedestrian from this.
And *YES*, the walk light was ON.
The problem is the "Now now now! Gotta get there RIGHT FUCKING NOW OR MY ASS WILL EXPLOOOOOODE!" *VROOOOOOOOM* idiots that should not have licenses. At all.
The problem isn't the right turn on red. Its damned convenient *IF YOU FOLLOW THE LAW AND LOOK*, but there are people who act like stop lights are their own personal torture device, and jump the gun at every red light they get to.
I would love to see strict licensing laws like they have in europe here in the states.
You don't need to tell me... I see the whole thing and just groan.
I'm a moderate, and get shafted by both loud voices regularly.
When the sole motivator behind your political affiliation is to "be against THEM!" (like CA's "anti AZ" immigration law; drafted for all the wrong reasons. This isn't to say I think AZ is right either though. They already dove in. The smart thing to do is watch as the sharks come in with the tide after the fact. Not dive off the other side of the bridge to spite them.), you have abandoned reason, any semblence of perspective or balance, and have clearly dived headfirst into the sea of extremism. Like I said in later posts, when you abandon reason at the door, becoming a raving nutjob is assured.
I am sick to death of the endless propoganda machine here in the US. So much so that I no longer watch TV of any sort, and only listen to music on the radio. (Still doesn't stop people insisting that I am either a flaming liberal pinko, or a limbaugh listener though. I just want people to stop yelling at each other, and open their eyes to what they are doing long enough to see the foxes raiding the henhouse, like I do.) Even still, I get bombarded by it, as koolaid soaked people wring out dirty laundry in earshot, and often in my direction.
The US would do well to put the war machine to rest, and get its house (and senate) in order. The problem, is that we have developed two distinct, schizophrenic, and symbiotic cultures here in the US. One side feels that people are naturally entitled to a soft, comfortable, and enjoyable life, and with that, the promise of easy employment. (Not a bad ideal actually.. but in practice...) and on the other, you have the "manifest destiny" wardrummers, shouting that america is number one, and other scary madness.
The problem? The former, depends on the latter for employment in a HUGE number of areas. Aircraft manufacturing? Financially powered by fighterjet and bomber sales. Neuclear energy research? Conjoined twins with neuclear arsenal research, and dependant on the win for grant funding. You can't disarm the war machine without putting literally millions of americans into the poorhouse. That's why military spending is a huge sacred cow. The USA is no longer a peace loving nation, and hasn't been for a very long time.
Until we open our eyes, see that, and relinquish our iron grips on our schizophrenia, and accept that what we must do to move forward, we will always remain this way-- divided, at each other's throats, and batshit crazy while the rest of the world wishes fervently and earnestly for our destruction, before we destroy them. (Because that is what wars do.)
We have to accept poverty and renouce war, before we can become a peaceful nation again. We have to embrace other industries besides indoctrination, propoganda, military armorments, and officious legislation if we want to survive.
But we won't.
We embraced industrial scale arms dealing and military might to escape the last financial crisis we had, and invested the whole farm into it. Now, military manufacture runs us.
Even the damn space program was an offshoot of military research!
That is the goddamn problem. Neither side will let go.
Au contraire! He very much *IS* a koolaid drinker.
He is of the same stripe as your more typical paranoid conspiracy theorist is. The koolaid being that the government is always, without question, bad-- that regulation leads to sweatheart deal, that government needs to be totally hands off (except where his own money and interests (beck's) are concerned), and that anyone who voices a moderate or liberal opinion are deluded crazy people that need to be violently shouted down.
The reality is that a well managed government is almost always a good thing. The problem is that our government is currently not well managed. The only way our government (in the US) can be well managed is if there is a well educated, and empowered populace to balance it and cry foul. This does not happen, so the government is out of control.
The problem comes when people like Beck enable the out of control government by being the vocal halfwits that they are. The government line is "we are under attack by $BoogeyMan, and need $PowerAllocation to stop it!". When more sensible people ask "how does $PowerAllotment actually assist in detecting $BoogeyMan activity, and how do you account for $RealEncroachmentOnCivilLiberties that $PowerAllotment will invariably cause?", the government paints the sensible question with the broad brush of "batshit crazy conspiracy" that prominent crazies like Beck represent.
The deeper down the rabbit hole we go, the finer the line between "sensible concern", and "batshit conspiracy" becomes, and the easier it is for government to paint with that brush. As such, people like Beck only *HURT* efforts to curtail government encroachment on civil liberties through legitimate public inquiry, through diluting the channel.
The government, therefore, has every incentive to drum up as much paranoia as possible, to blur the line beyond all sensible recognition, so that plausible rational basis for decrying *all* opposition as sensational.
The increases in government sensationalism (security theater, et al) push the extremity of stupid people like Beck into twilightzone levels of extremity, which is exactly what the desired effect is.
Whether or not this is conspiratorial, or just an organic response from the gestalt structure that is government in response to the percieved threat of voter confidence and potentially empowered voters I can't even begin to address. I just don't know. That there might be a legitimate conspiracy there in the state department for whatever obfuscated reasons only they could hold, is scary-real, but that doesn't justify being a kook. (Personally, I think it is a reactionary gestalt phenomenon, where sociopaths naturally gravitate to positions of power, naturally resort to fabrications to explain their sociopathy, and the growing body of fabrications must be protected due to overapping internal interest. Rather than a "group of secret puppetmasters", (like you get in most conspiracy theories) you have a bunch of incompetent boobs with grandure complexes making shit up(tm), to get what they want(tm), and scratching each other's back to keep that dirt secret because if it got out, they would be held accountable. Note the mass-hysteria on capitol hill and subsequent ass pounding they did when the diplomatic cables leaked.)
They know that the bigger they can spin the hype, the more they can get away with. Rather than extending the leading edge of crackpottery, like Beck does, he should be asking reasonable questions.
The one and only thing incompetent boobs can't handle are straight answers to reasonable questions. That's why they make shit up, and put such extreme spin on boogeymen, like terrorists.
Again, the really telling thing is that we even have enough plausibility in his whacked out schpeel to even CONTEMPLATE his screed as even remotely POSSIBLE.
That he is koolaid man, shouting "terrorists, Oh Yeah!" At airports, online game communities, and neighborhoods around the US is more the result of his being abnormally vulnerable to official government bullshit than the rest of us. This could simply be because he takes it more seriously. (If you are serious about being afraid of terrorists, you will find them everywhere. Hell, to the diehard koolaid drinkers, this post could be construed as being "aiding and abetting terrorists", because it casts 'initiatives" like the farce of the TSA as being silly-stupid reactions to boogeymen, allowing those "so very scary towel-headded terrorists" to "destroy the American(tm) way of life!(pat pend)!" Distribution on the paranoid crank curve has a median, where most people will fall, and extrema, where "nay sayers" like me live on one side of the curve, and where "batshit crazy mother fuckers" like Glenn Beck live.
To reduce the extremeness of people like Beck, we need to stop spraying koolaid. If it helps, just imagine Beck not as koolaid man, but as an empty pitcher that simply catches all the bullshit our media and government PR groups fling. What he gets full of is entirely dependant on what gets sprayed. People like Beck lack a well defined bullshit filter, because they dive headfirst into the rabbithole. You find the same problem with conspiracy nutters. Once you abandon rationality, you can't help but become a raving nutjob, and when SoP is to abandon reason at the door chasing shadows, the endgame is essentially assured.
I'm not trying to defend Beck-- just pointing out that he is a diagnostic sympthom of the problem, and NOT the cause.
The cause is waving around the spooky bedsheet with the word "scary terrorists!" Written on it, as the reason de etre for government doing power grabs.
You can't fix stupid, but you can contain it, by not spraying it with miracle grow.
Natural system software incorporates rules that have builtin support for uncertainty.
Ever wondered why it takes so goddamn much processing power to fold a model of a protein? (They don't call brownian motion a "random walk" for no reason you know.)
The nervous system of that bee is fudementally influenced by biochemical interactions at thousands of locations, each incorporating a degree of randomness into the system. Instead of treating the randomness as noise, the design utilizes the randomness as an asset.
This inherent incorporation of randomness would make artifical nervous systems based on it abhorrently difficult to reliably and consistently program. Rather than programming, it would be training, and the robots would naturally develop naughty habbits, just like their biological counterparts do.
A really sophisticated one would be a health and safety nightmare.
"Paranoia strikes deep, into your lives it will creep. It starts when you're always afraid. Step out of line, the man comes and takes you away."
Really. The fine line between clear batshit-crazy paranoia and justifiable concern grows thinner and thinner the deeper down the "terrorists!" Rabbit hole we go. The cited song refered to the last boogeyman: "Commies!", but it fits very well, if eerily, 50 years later with "Terrorists!"
People like Glen Beck just drink the koolaid. Rather than point and laugh about his over the top paranoia, take an honest look at how batshit we are acting in regard to "Terrorists!", where we are scared of plastic knives, exploding underwear, and flamable mouthwash to the point where we grope and tickle old women and 2 year old children as a daily occurance at our borders.
In times like these, agencies like the CIA get ever expanding license to do stupid, batshit crazy stuff to "catch them terrorists", and "make us feel safe!" As such, things like the silly stupid of this story might not actually be as silly stupid as they seem.
Logistically, if the swarm could not manufacture new units, and or, collect and repair damaged/errant units, the system has serious vulnerabilities.
take for instance, the human greed factor.
If there is a huge swarm of autonomous robots out scouring riverbed sandbars for teensy gold nuggets, or some other discrete but scattered and valuable resource, how long do you think it would be before unscrupulous people tried to trick the bees into dropping the cargo off at a "new" dropoff point?
Where there is profit, there will always be dirty dealing and crime. Look at the internet for instance, with something seemingly as harmless as email. Then along came the spammer.
Autocollecting robot swarms would be a smorgasboard for whitecollar criminals.
(Ignore social networking, and run a local fileserver on a nonstandard port)
Sadly, many ISPs, mine included, simply do not like the basic idea behind the internet, and are very displeased when they discoveer people with consmer accounts hosting servers, even puny ones with essentially no traffic, like mine. Many even actively attempt to frustrate such efforts.
Outside of nefarious uses, the information of a dead person is of no pactical value to facebook or its advertising customers. Dead people don't buy anything.
As such, it is a cost center to retain the information of dead people. They should eliminate all such data, to keep a high relevancy with thir advertising customers, and avoid having stale and inaccurate data to sell.
...I said he ws enacting policies when _resembled_ FDR's new deal, which is what I said tripled unemployment. (The new deal that is.) Obama did not make newdeal part 2. He enacted policies that were similar but not identical. I predicted unemployment would rise sharply. 33% increase is pretty sharp.
As per inflation, you have the issue with america's credit rating being dropped twice during his presidency, as a result of the deficit spending (which he is culpable for, for faling to do his job as the executive. Congress can pass whatever it wants, he can veto. He didn't.) And the money printing stimulous. This has greating devalued american services and products overseas. Domestic inflation hasn't gone up. Interationally it has. (Surely you noticed the devaluation of the dollar?)
Also, I don't watch fox news. I am a moderate centrist. That means I lean liberal in some circumstances and conservative in others. I find both CNN *and* Fox news to be unworthy of airtime. Don't get me started about the talking heads.
I agree though, it is important to look at facts, and not political tag lines. It is also important to have reading comprehension skills.
A directional antenna doesn't need to be expensive to be effective.
I made one for a friend of mine for about 20$ in parts, out of a clamp-on style work lamp, a usb extension cable, and some epoxy putty. Works great. 20dbi increase in gain over a fixed FoV direction.
Couple with netstumbler, kismet, or some other profiling software and a cheap wifi dongle, and you have yourself an aimable wifi probe.
Course, it looks ghetto as fuck, be he doesn't care. It works, and can go through several walls.
I am contemplating the purchase of a makerbot or thing-o-matic, and making parabolic enclosures for wifi dongles as a for fun activity. I designed one that has a "same direction" dual dish design. Wide dish reception, narrow dish broadcast. Would love to make it and try it out.
Maybe sometime next year I will get one (3d printer).
The point being anyway, is that this doesn't need to be extraordinarily expensive. 2 deputies, some ghettodish equipment, and some compases with cheap netbooks, and you can easily calculate intersecting vectors for unsecured wifi.
I am a moderate centrist. I am neither liberal, nor conservative. (I often get attacked by both however. I would be seen as raging conervative by europeans however. No contest.)
I have not voted for a major candidate in any of the past THREE elections.
As such, the false dichotomy you have painted of "if you are down on Obama, you MUST support BUSH!" Is horrible and completely out of touch with reality.
The truth is that we haven't had a sensible government in the USA for the past 50 years.
Simply because I call Obama on his failures, does not mean I give the shrub a free pass. Got it?
That is not what I said at all, and no, I don't watch nor listen to limbaugh, any of the fox news personalities, nor to talk radio of any sort.
What I do see, are stories like this one, which treat the issue with alarming matter-of-factness, along with disturbing numbers of youtube videos parroting the same views as Mr Jackson's.
Seeing that tells me that racism from the african american demographic is a stark reality.
However, conflating that I think this demographic alone (black racists) is sufficient to garner the win of a presidency is a farce. Intead, will attempt to explain it to you.
Much like germans will become enraged at the mere mention of suggesting they are nazis, many white people become equally disturbed at the implication of being called racist, at least here in the US. So much so that saying "you are afraid of the idea of a black president" to them can greatly influence their behavior, and even influence how they will vote.
The black vote is a big red herring. As you pointed out, historically 97% of that demographic consistently votes demorat across the board, regardless of the candidate's race. The issue here was influencing independents and moderates of other demographics. The implied "you are racist if you don't vote for obama" message of the last election cycle had more impact than you care to realize. The DNC initially tried to get the women's vote with hillary, but was unsucessful. (Hillary is just not likeable enough.) They then decided that they could sensationalize a black candidate, which they did. It isn't obama's blackness that I found distasteful at all, nor did I think all black people would vote for him due to his skin color, though it is a foregone conclusion that some did. (See link earlier) what I found distasteful was the sensationalism concerning his race. It is *never* acceptable to engender support of a candidate due to their skin color. End of discussion. The DNC did exactly that, when they started campaigning that McCain supporters were "afraid of the idea of a black president." A huge nonsequitor like that, coupled with rhetoric that undoes work to reduce racial tensions does more harm to racial equality than you can possibly imagine.
Of course, it is just easier for you to consign me to some prefabricated mental stereotype, and deounce anything I say as lies, but that doesn't reflect poorly on ME.
Stating it is more likely that some of the aftican american demographic would have voted for obama because he is black is no different than saying some of the white demographic voted for mccain because he was white. It does not imply that all african americans are racists. It implies the reality that some are. Just as there *are* racist white people who voted for mccain on racial terms.
I am not one of either of those types of people. I considered obama's campaign in this light: the democratic party needed a candidate that it could galvanize the polls with. At first it tried with Hillary, but she failed to garner the support they were looking for in the polls, and she lost the nomination to Obama. I can't prove that the intentions of the democratic convention was to incite controversy over the first black presidential nominee, but it definately worked out in their favor: the illusion that refusal of the candidate was a vote for another white man, and the disenfranchisement of the black man was a powerful tool used by their campaign. See the linked blogs earlier in the thread. Almost overnight the landscape of the election shifted from platform (Obama was widely criticised for not having a consistent one, other than a nebulous "change" message) toward mudslinging over race and insinuations that people were afraid of the idea of a black president.
As for being called a racist during the 2008 election, in pretty much exactly the situation I lampooned, yes, it did happen. I was there. You were not. Kindly abstain from decyring bullshit when you can't possibly disprove the statement.
That's like asking inner city people about politicians. Your answers will be all over the place, depending on the biases of the person interviewed.
Historically (geological), my area has been a sea, a desert, and now a lowland prairie. It was a desert during the last major rise in global temperatures, and seems well on track to becoming one again, if current weather trends persist. Is it global climate change? Sure would be nice to have more data on that one.. but signs are fairly damning as-is.
Climate is not weather. That's a pretty important thing to say. However, this pattern of weather we have experienced for 2 summers now is not consistent with prior recorded weather patterns. It could be a manifestation of cimate change, but with only 2 points of data, drawing that conclusion would be unreasonable. Just how many years of altered weather do we need to endure before we can definitavely declare it? Statistics says at least 25 for a minimum sample... I think by then, should it be shown to be so, it would be radically too late.
Instead, I think it prudent to contemplate potential, but benign solutions to problems now. If they don't pan out, so be it. If they do... well.
If it's a fiction, then why does a google search return hits from reputable news sources concerning racial mudslinging being used by democrats against percieved republicans?
I dunno. That would require contemplating the idea that the republican party actually had sufficient intelligence to enact such a tactic. Given their track record, and inability to keep things secret, such a faux pas as that would have already exploded in their faces like a loaded cigar.
Occam's razor says to pick the least convoluted explanation.
It is more likely that some percentage of the population actually voted for obama _because_ he was black, while totally ignoring his political platform, and ascribed all resistance to "their" candidate as de-facto racism. To wit: the widely monetized sales of Obama's "historic" inauguration speech, clearly marketed toward african americans.
I don't care what color Obama is. He could have been the first green president for all I care; his policies were abysmal, and his track record is nothing I want to see more of.
I ascribe the "racist!" Posts and rhetoric I see as "racially biased electioneering part II", and find them offensive in every possible sense. That people have forgotten how heavily the word "racist" was slung around 4 years ago deeply saddens me. I don't know how many times I was accused of that disgusting vice 4 years ago for merely questioning obama as a candidate, based on his POLICY statements!
That was the reason for the prior post. Anyone with doubts can just go to waybackmachine.org, type slashdot.org for the site, 2008 for the year, and see for themselves.
...(looks in way-back machine to "election 2008")...
"You're just saying Obama isn't a good candidate because he's black, and you are a racist!"
"No, I think he's a bad candidate because his official policy statements cannot possibly be met, and because his plans to get us out of this recession slump resemble FDR's new deal, which historicallu tripled unemployment!"
"RACIST!"......(steps out of the wayback mchine)....
"And the only reason you hate Obama is because he's black. If Obama was a white man you'd be praising the Democratic party for the work that's been accomplished under this administration. Instead you'll stand by and let the Republican wreck the country further because you're a racist."
"No, the reason I don't like Obama is because he bailed out the people who flushed the economy down the toilet, continues to support printing money as economic stimulous which drives up inflation, enacted policies which tripled deficit spending, FAILED to close GITMO, EXPANDED govt wiretapping programs, and did exactly what I said he would do concerning unemployment."
I don't see how it can support both modes, lacking hands. I can see it shoving around the blind people, but without hands, it can't push bread down their throats.
Regardless, it will still surely protect you from the terrible secret of space.
Slashdot Mirror
I have seen videos of people using neutron capture with heavy isotopes of mercury to produce gold in fast breeder reactors as a proof of concept. Wikipedia gives a little information, but I really do remember seeing a demonstration with a teeny vial of centrifuged mercury being installed in the high flux compartment of the reactor, then removed several days later with thin inclusions of gold inside the vial.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#section_4
Its been my experience that the major problem is the right turn on red law.
Yes. It's handy if you are driving a motor vehicle. It isn't so handy when you are a pedestrian or a cyclist trying to cross the street in the pedestrian lane.
People in little 2-door sports cars are the major offender, who whip around right turns when the light os red without pausing to even look for pedestrians or cyclists.
My bike is actually damaged and in need of repair from such an altercation, and I have been literally run over as a pedestrian from this.
And *YES*, the walk light was ON.
The problem is the "Now now now! Gotta get there RIGHT FUCKING NOW OR MY ASS WILL EXPLOOOOOODE!" *VROOOOOOOOM* idiots that should not have licenses. At all.
The problem isn't the right turn on red. Its damned convenient *IF YOU FOLLOW THE LAW AND LOOK*, but there are people who act like stop lights are their own personal torture device, and jump the gun at every red light they get to.
I would love to see strict licensing laws like they have in europe here in the states.
You don't need to tell me... I see the whole thing and just groan.
I'm a moderate, and get shafted by both loud voices regularly.
When the sole motivator behind your political affiliation is to "be against THEM!" (like CA's "anti AZ" immigration law; drafted for all the wrong reasons. This isn't to say I think AZ is right either though. They already dove in. The smart thing to do is watch as the sharks come in with the tide after the fact. Not dive off the other side of the bridge to spite them.), you have abandoned reason, any semblence of perspective or balance, and have clearly dived headfirst into the sea of extremism. Like I said in later posts, when you abandon reason at the door, becoming a raving nutjob is assured.
I am sick to death of the endless propoganda machine here in the US. So much so that I no longer watch TV of any sort, and only listen to music on the radio. (Still doesn't stop people insisting that I am either a flaming liberal pinko, or a limbaugh listener though. I just want people to stop yelling at each other, and open their eyes to what they are doing long enough to see the foxes raiding the henhouse, like I do.) Even still, I get bombarded by it, as koolaid soaked people wring out dirty laundry in earshot, and often in my direction.
The US would do well to put the war machine to rest, and get its house (and senate) in order. The problem, is that we have developed two distinct, schizophrenic, and symbiotic cultures here in the US. One side feels that people are naturally entitled to a soft, comfortable, and enjoyable life, and with that, the promise of easy employment. (Not a bad ideal actually.. but in practice...) and on the other, you have the "manifest destiny" wardrummers, shouting that america is number one, and other scary madness.
The problem? The former, depends on the latter for employment in a HUGE number of areas. Aircraft manufacturing? Financially powered by fighterjet and bomber sales. Neuclear energy research? Conjoined twins with neuclear arsenal research, and dependant on the win for grant funding. You can't disarm the war machine without putting literally millions of americans into the poorhouse. That's why military spending is a huge sacred cow. The USA is no longer a peace loving nation, and hasn't been for a very long time.
Until we open our eyes, see that, and relinquish our iron grips on our schizophrenia, and accept that what we must do to move forward, we will always remain this way-- divided, at each other's throats, and batshit crazy while the rest of the world wishes fervently and earnestly for our destruction, before we destroy them. (Because that is what wars do.)
We have to accept poverty and renouce war, before we can become a peaceful nation again. We have to embrace other industries besides indoctrination, propoganda, military armorments, and officious legislation if we want to survive.
But we won't.
We embraced industrial scale arms dealing and military might to escape the last financial crisis we had, and invested the whole farm into it. Now, military manufacture runs us.
Even the damn space program was an offshoot of military research!
That is the goddamn problem. Neither side will let go.
Au contraire! He very much *IS* a koolaid drinker.
He is of the same stripe as your more typical paranoid conspiracy theorist is. The koolaid being that the government is always, without question, bad-- that regulation leads to sweatheart deal, that government needs to be totally hands off (except where his own money and interests (beck's) are concerned), and that anyone who voices a moderate or liberal opinion are deluded crazy people that need to be violently shouted down.
The reality is that a well managed government is almost always a good thing. The problem is that our government is currently not well managed. The only way our government (in the US) can be well managed is if there is a well educated, and empowered populace to balance it and cry foul. This does not happen, so the government is out of control.
The problem comes when people like Beck enable the out of control government by being the vocal halfwits that they are. The government line is "we are under attack by $BoogeyMan, and need $PowerAllocation to stop it!". When more sensible people ask "how does $PowerAllotment actually assist in detecting $BoogeyMan activity, and how do you account for $RealEncroachmentOnCivilLiberties that $PowerAllotment will invariably cause?", the government paints the sensible question with the broad brush of "batshit crazy conspiracy" that prominent crazies like Beck represent.
The deeper down the rabbit hole we go, the finer the line between "sensible concern", and "batshit conspiracy" becomes, and the easier it is for government to paint with that brush. As such, people like Beck only *HURT* efforts to curtail government encroachment on civil liberties through legitimate public inquiry, through diluting the channel.
The government, therefore, has every incentive to drum up as much paranoia as possible, to blur the line beyond all sensible recognition, so that plausible rational basis for decrying *all* opposition as sensational.
The increases in government sensationalism (security theater, et al) push the extremity of stupid people like Beck into twilightzone levels of extremity, which is exactly what the desired effect is.
Whether or not this is conspiratorial, or just an organic response from the gestalt structure that is government in response to the percieved threat of voter confidence and potentially empowered voters I can't even begin to address. I just don't know. That there might be a legitimate conspiracy there in the state department for whatever obfuscated reasons only they could hold, is scary-real, but that doesn't justify being a kook. (Personally, I think it is a reactionary gestalt phenomenon, where sociopaths naturally gravitate to positions of power, naturally resort to fabrications to explain their sociopathy, and the growing body of fabrications must be protected due to overapping internal interest. Rather than a "group of secret puppetmasters", (like you get in most conspiracy theories) you have a bunch of incompetent boobs with grandure complexes making shit up(tm), to get what they want(tm), and scratching each other's back to keep that dirt secret because if it got out, they would be held accountable. Note the mass-hysteria on capitol hill and subsequent ass pounding they did when the diplomatic cables leaked.)
They know that the bigger they can spin the hype, the more they can get away with. Rather than extending the leading edge of crackpottery, like Beck does, he should be asking reasonable questions.
The one and only thing incompetent boobs can't handle are straight answers to reasonable questions. That's why they make shit up, and put such extreme spin on boogeymen, like terrorists.
Again, the really telling thing is that we even have enough plausibility in his whacked out schpeel to even CONTEMPLATE his screed as even remotely POSSIBLE.
That he is koolaid man, shouting "terrorists, Oh Yeah!" At airports, online game communities, and neighborhoods around the US is more the result of his being abnormally vulnerable to official government bullshit than the rest of us. This could simply be because he takes it more seriously. (If you are serious about being afraid of terrorists, you will find them everywhere. Hell, to the diehard koolaid drinkers, this post could be construed as being "aiding and abetting terrorists", because it casts 'initiatives" like the farce of the TSA as being silly-stupid reactions to boogeymen, allowing those "so very scary towel-headded terrorists" to "destroy the American(tm) way of life!(pat pend)!" Distribution on the paranoid crank curve has a median, where most people will fall, and extrema, where "nay sayers" like me live on one side of the curve, and where "batshit crazy mother fuckers" like Glenn Beck live.
To reduce the extremeness of people like Beck, we need to stop spraying koolaid. If it helps, just imagine Beck not as koolaid man, but as an empty pitcher that simply catches all the bullshit our media and government PR groups fling. What he gets full of is entirely dependant on what gets sprayed. People like Beck lack a well defined bullshit filter, because they dive headfirst into the rabbithole. You find the same problem with conspiracy nutters. Once you abandon rationality, you can't help but become a raving nutjob, and when SoP is to abandon reason at the door chasing shadows, the endgame is essentially assured.
I'm not trying to defend Beck-- just pointing out that he is a diagnostic sympthom of the problem, and NOT the cause.
The cause is waving around the spooky bedsheet with the word "scary terrorists!" Written on it, as the reason de etre for government doing power grabs.
You can't fix stupid, but you can contain it, by not spraying it with miracle grow.
Natural system software incorporates rules that have builtin support for uncertainty.
Ever wondered why it takes so goddamn much processing power to fold a model of a protein? (They don't call brownian motion a "random walk" for no reason you know.)
The nervous system of that bee is fudementally influenced by biochemical interactions at thousands of locations, each incorporating a degree of randomness into the system. Instead of treating the randomness as noise, the design utilizes the randomness as an asset.
This inherent incorporation of randomness would make artifical nervous systems based on it abhorrently difficult to reliably and consistently program. Rather than programming, it would be training, and the robots would naturally develop naughty habbits, just like their biological counterparts do.
A really sophisticated one would be a health and safety nightmare.
"Paranoia strikes deep, into your lives it will creep. It starts when you're always afraid. Step out of line, the man comes and takes you away."
Really. The fine line between clear batshit-crazy paranoia and justifiable concern grows thinner and thinner the deeper down the "terrorists!" Rabbit hole we go. The cited song refered to the last boogeyman: "Commies!", but it fits very well, if eerily, 50 years later with "Terrorists!"
People like Glen Beck just drink the koolaid. Rather than point and laugh about his over the top paranoia, take an honest look at how batshit we are acting in regard to "Terrorists!", where we are scared of plastic knives, exploding underwear, and flamable mouthwash to the point where we grope and tickle old women and 2 year old children as a daily occurance at our borders.
In times like these, agencies like the CIA get ever expanding license to do stupid, batshit crazy stuff to "catch them terrorists", and "make us feel safe!" As such, things like the silly stupid of this story might not actually be as silly stupid as they seem.
That is what is truly scary.
Burns: Release the robotic Richard Simmons.
Logistically, if the swarm could not manufacture new units, and or, collect and repair damaged/errant units, the system has serious vulnerabilities.
take for instance, the human greed factor.
If there is a huge swarm of autonomous robots out scouring riverbed sandbars for teensy gold nuggets, or some other discrete but scattered and valuable resource, how long do you think it would be before unscrupulous people tried to trick the bees into dropping the cargo off at a "new" dropoff point?
Where there is profit, there will always be dirty dealing and crime. Look at the internet for instance, with something seemingly as harmless as email. Then along came the spammer.
Autocollecting robot swarms would be a smorgasboard for whitecollar criminals.
Quite right. I do that too.
(Ignore social networking, and run a local fileserver on a nonstandard port)
Sadly, many ISPs, mine included, simply do not like the basic idea behind the internet, and are very displeased when they discoveer people with consmer accounts hosting servers, even puny ones with essentially no traffic, like mine. Many even actively attempt to frustrate such efforts.
Such is the world it seems.
And I mean, comprehensive deletion.
Outside of nefarious uses, the information of a dead person is of no pactical value to facebook or its advertising customers. Dead people don't buy anything.
As such, it is a cost center to retain the information of dead people. They should eliminate all such data, to keep a high relevancy with thir advertising customers, and avoid having stale and inaccurate data to sell.
...I said he ws enacting policies when _resembled_ FDR's new deal, which is what I said tripled unemployment. (The new deal that is.) Obama did not make newdeal part 2. He enacted policies that were similar but not identical. I predicted unemployment would rise sharply. 33% increase is pretty sharp.
As per inflation, you have the issue with america's credit rating being dropped twice during his presidency, as a result of the deficit spending (which he is culpable for, for faling to do his job as the executive. Congress can pass whatever it wants, he can veto. He didn't.) And the money printing stimulous. This has greating devalued american services and products overseas. Domestic inflation hasn't gone up. Interationally it has. (Surely you noticed the devaluation of the dollar?)
Also, I don't watch fox news. I am a moderate centrist. That means I lean liberal in some circumstances and conservative in others. I find both CNN *and* Fox news to be unworthy of airtime. Don't get me started about the talking heads.
I agree though, it is important to look at facts, and not political tag lines. It is also important to have reading comprehension skills.
Pretty good when you gently touch them with a hot air gun to level the plastic, then gently spray with conductive paint.
(Or give the full montey with silver nitrate solution.)
A directional antenna doesn't need to be expensive to be effective.
I made one for a friend of mine for about 20$ in parts, out of a clamp-on style work lamp, a usb extension cable, and some epoxy putty. Works great. 20dbi increase in gain over a fixed FoV direction.
Couple with netstumbler, kismet, or some other profiling software and a cheap wifi dongle, and you have yourself an aimable wifi probe.
Course, it looks ghetto as fuck, be he doesn't care. It works, and can go through several walls.
I am contemplating the purchase of a makerbot or thing-o-matic, and making parabolic enclosures for wifi dongles as a for fun activity. I designed one that has a "same direction" dual dish design. Wide dish reception, narrow dish broadcast. Would love to make it and try it out.
Maybe sometime next year I will get one (3d printer).
The point being anyway, is that this doesn't need to be extraordinarily expensive. 2 deputies, some ghettodish equipment, and some compases with cheap netbooks, and you can easily calculate intersecting vectors for unsecured wifi.
2 deputies with directional antennas.
If you can find warships that way, you can find wifi hotspots.
Hardly. The german tinkerer community alone would gobble that down in no time.
There are way more linux users than you realize Mr AC.
I believe you have mistaken me for a neocon.
I am a moderate centrist. I am neither liberal, nor conservative. (I often get attacked by both however. I would be seen as raging conervative by europeans however. No contest.)
I have not voted for a major candidate in any of the past THREE elections.
As such, the false dichotomy you have painted of "if you are down on Obama, you MUST support BUSH!" Is horrible and completely out of touch with reality.
The truth is that we haven't had a sensible government in the USA for the past 50 years.
Simply because I call Obama on his failures, does not mean I give the shrub a free pass. Got it?
Oh yes. Beat that strawman harder.
That is not what I said at all, and no, I don't watch nor listen to limbaugh, any of the fox news personalities, nor to talk radio of any sort.
What I do see, are stories like this one, which treat the issue with alarming matter-of-factness, along with disturbing numbers of youtube videos parroting the same views as Mr Jackson's.
Seeing that tells me that racism from the african american demographic is a stark reality.
However, conflating that I think this demographic alone (black racists) is sufficient to garner the win of a presidency is a farce. Intead, will attempt to explain it to you.
Much like germans will become enraged at the mere mention of suggesting they are nazis, many white people become equally disturbed at the implication of being called racist, at least here in the US. So much so that saying "you are afraid of the idea of a black president" to them can greatly influence their behavior, and even influence how they will vote.
The black vote is a big red herring. As you pointed out, historically 97% of that demographic consistently votes demorat across the board, regardless of the candidate's race. The issue here was influencing independents and moderates of other demographics. The implied "you are racist if you don't vote for obama" message of the last election cycle had more impact than you care to realize. The DNC initially tried to get the women's vote with hillary, but was unsucessful. (Hillary is just not likeable enough.) They then decided that they could sensationalize a black candidate, which they did. It isn't obama's blackness that I found distasteful at all, nor did I think all black people would vote for him due to his skin color, though it is a foregone conclusion that some did. (See link earlier) what I found distasteful was the sensationalism concerning his race. It is *never* acceptable to engender support of a candidate due to their skin color. End of discussion. The DNC did exactly that, when they started campaigning that McCain supporters were "afraid of the idea of a black president." A huge nonsequitor like that, coupled with rhetoric that undoes work to reduce racial tensions does more harm to racial equality than you can possibly imagine.
Of course, it is just easier for you to consign me to some prefabricated mental stereotype, and deounce anything I say as lies, but that doesn't reflect poorly on ME.
It reflects poorly on YOU.
Really now..
Stating it is more likely that some of the aftican american demographic would have voted for obama because he is black is no different than saying some of the white demographic voted for mccain because he was white. It does not imply that all african americans are racists. It implies the reality that some are. Just as there *are* racist white people who voted for mccain on racial terms.
I am not one of either of those types of people. I considered obama's campaign in this light: the democratic party needed a candidate that it could galvanize the polls with. At first it tried with Hillary, but she failed to garner the support they were looking for in the polls, and she lost the nomination to Obama. I can't prove that the intentions of the democratic convention was to incite controversy over the first black presidential nominee, but it definately worked out in their favor: the illusion that refusal of the candidate was a vote for another white man, and the disenfranchisement of the black man was a powerful tool used by their campaign. See the linked blogs earlier in the thread. Almost overnight the landscape of the election shifted from platform (Obama was widely criticised for not having a consistent one, other than a nebulous "change" message) toward mudslinging over race and insinuations that people were afraid of the idea of a black president.
As for being called a racist during the 2008 election, in pretty much exactly the situation I lampooned, yes, it did happen. I was there. You were not. Kindly abstain from decyring bullshit when you can't possibly disprove the statement.
That's like asking inner city people about politicians. Your answers will be all over the place, depending on the biases of the person interviewed.
Historically (geological), my area has been a sea, a desert, and now a lowland prairie. It was a desert during the last major rise in global temperatures, and seems well on track to becoming one again, if current weather trends persist. Is it global climate change? Sure would be nice to have more data on that one.. but signs are fairly damning as-is.
Climate is not weather. That's a pretty important thing to say. However, this pattern of weather we have experienced for 2 summers now is not consistent with prior recorded weather patterns. It could be a manifestation of cimate change, but with only 2 points of data, drawing that conclusion would be unreasonable. Just how many years of altered weather do we need to endure before we can definitavely declare it? Statistics says at least 25 for a minimum sample... I think by then, should it be shown to be so, it would be radically too late.
Instead, I think it prudent to contemplate potential, but benign solutions to problems now. If they don't pan out, so be it. If they do... well.
For instance, these two:
Abcnews.com
wash.post
Granted, both are blogs, but if it were a fiction, how could both blog entries comment on official political rhetoric?
If it's a fiction, then why does a google search return hits from reputable news sources concerning racial mudslinging being used by democrats against percieved republicans?
I dunno. That would require contemplating the idea that the republican party actually had sufficient intelligence to enact such a tactic. Given their track record, and inability to keep things secret, such a faux pas as that would have already exploded in their faces like a loaded cigar.
Occam's razor says to pick the least convoluted explanation.
It is more likely that some percentage of the population actually voted for obama _because_ he was black, while totally ignoring his political platform, and ascribed all resistance to "their" candidate as de-facto racism. To wit: the widely monetized sales of Obama's "historic" inauguration speech, clearly marketed toward african americans.
I don't care what color Obama is. He could have been the first green president for all I care; his policies were abysmal, and his track record is nothing I want to see more of.
I ascribe the "racist!" Posts and rhetoric I see as "racially biased electioneering part II", and find them offensive in every possible sense. That people have forgotten how heavily the word "racist" was slung around 4 years ago deeply saddens me. I don't know how many times I was accused of that disgusting vice 4 years ago for merely questioning obama as a candidate, based on his POLICY statements!
That was the reason for the prior post. Anyone with doubts can just go to waybackmachine.org, type slashdot.org for the site, 2008 for the year, and see for themselves.
...(looks in way-back machine to "election 2008")...
"You're just saying Obama isn't a good candidate because he's black, and you are a racist!"
"No, I think he's a bad candidate because his official policy statements cannot possibly be met, and because his plans to get us out of this recession slump resemble FDR's new deal, which historicallu tripled unemployment!"
"RACIST!" ......(steps out of the wayback mchine)....
"And the only reason you hate Obama is because he's black. If Obama was a white man you'd be praising the Democratic party for the work that's been accomplished under this administration. Instead you'll stand by and let the Republican wreck the country further because you're a racist."
"No, the reason I don't like Obama is because he bailed out the people who flushed the economy down the toilet, continues to support printing money as economic stimulous which drives up inflation, enacted policies which tripled deficit spending, FAILED to close GITMO, EXPANDED govt wiretapping programs, and did exactly what I said he would do concerning unemployment."
Let me guess. "Racist!" Right?
I don't see how it can support both modes, lacking hands. I can see it shoving around the blind people, but without hands, it can't push bread down their throats.
Regardless, it will still surely protect you from the terrible secret of space.