I was actually really impressed with the snow job element. DARPA still probably owns a lot of the data that was gathered while they were the project's only benefactors. Bussard was probably skirting very close to the edge of what he's allowed to say. And sure enough, there isn't enough in the talk for, say, Chinese scientists to get much info on how to do this right. They'd have to duplicate Bussard's 11-year research themselves. Still, I hope somebody gives this a real shot. The $200M is not a lot of money when you consider that every 30 hours of Iraq occupation is costing the taxpayer $200 Million. I can't imagine anyone who thinks the latter is a better investment of government money!
Watch the video. This isn't cold fusion. It's very hot fusion, under high pressure, confined in a very promising magnetic cage. The devil is in the details of the cage design, and the exciting thing about the talk was that Bussard's group figured out how to do it.
You're technically right, I think I would think about the way you do. The fact is, we've seen that many people don't. I have no doubt that the RNC have done extensive research to show that this works.
But this is all beside the point. The point is that this clearly violates the law. The law says that:
(d) All artificial or prerecorded telephone messages delivered by an automatic telephone dialing system shall:
(1) At the beginning of the message, state clearly the identity of the business, individual, or other entity initiating the call
One 50+ solid Democratic female voter has received this very same phone call five times just today. This one allegedly differs from some others that were placed in NY-25, as it has no long "inviting you to hang up" pause after "Dan Maffei".
We've contacted news outlets but it's too late for tonight's news cycle.
Nice troll! One drunk left-winger, who has no connection with the DNC, does something stupid, and that's supposed to be morally equivalent to an organized RNC campaign across 53 districts where millions of illegal phonecalls are placed with the explicit goal of deceiving voters. Hmm, somehow the situations seem different.
I don't think you get it. Republicans don't use the name of their own candidate. They act like the "message" is from the Democrat's campaign. Sure, by the end, you'll figure out it's a smear, but the vast majority of people don't wait until the end. They just hang up when they hear "I'm calling with information about Dan Maffei" and blame their annoyance on the innocent Dan Maffei - for example, but this seems to be going on in all the competitive districts. I know Dan's webmaster and she's received many messages from people who claim they won't vote for Dan after he interrupted their dinner with the robo-call. They really have no idea that it's actually Dan's opponent, Jim Walsh, who is interrupting their dinner with a dirty and illegal smear message.
Dan's campaign answers all the complaints with detailed explanations, and the people often write back furious as the actual perpetrators. But for everyone who blames Dan and tells us, I'm sure there are 100 people who will go on thinking, up until they enter the voting booth, that Dan was responsible for those harassing robo-calls.
I'm good friends with Dan Maffei's webmaster, and she's been receiving complaints about these for about a week. Dan is the sort of candidate that wants to focus on the issues, but maybe if we had screamed louder about this, we could have prevented more of this outrage. The calls begin with "I'm calling with information about Dan Maffei." Then there is a long pause. If you hang up at that point, you will be called back, and the whole time you'll think it's Dan himself who's pestering you with the calls. We've had several people who tell us they meant to vote for Dan, but won't after the harassing robo-calls, which they blame on him.
Does anyone have an idea what we can do about this, one day before the election?
I'd agree with you if, for some strange reason, MySpace were the best way of trading music online. Even as things stand now, it is far from that. Once the fingerprint censors step in, the reaction I expect is: "Oh, fine, we'll just trade music in some other way" - and that will be the end of it. So I think this is a smart move by NewsCorp (parent of MySpace).
As I say to everyone who asks me to fix their computer:
I've never encountered a virus as terrible as Norton Antivirus.
Sure, Microsoft might kill Symantec with shady monopolism, but I think we should me more angry with the free market, which has kept these leeches alive for this long.
So far I haven't seen an article which compares how many watts of power are drawn by this card when idling and under load. This has become a very important feature for me, so much so that for the fist time ever, I bought an nVidia card over ATi. The last generation of ATi cards were terrible power hogs, and nVidia was head and shoulders ahead in that category. I assume the gap has closed, but I'd like to see how much.
Wealth tends to be cyclical. A rough approximation of it being - Rich Parent -> Lazy Child -> Poor Parent -> Desperate Child -> Rich Parent
The other stuff you said doesn't seem right, but this is something I know you pulled from your ass, because it's just false. Nice fantasy!
I take your point that many very rich families today were not rich three generations ago. Still, all that you need for differentiation (I think) is that they were significantly richer than average (which I'd bet is true) and that lived in a climate where wealth was significantly correlated with the good appearance of a partner. This is enough, I think, so that every generation of wealthy people gets a progressively higher concentration of prettiness genes. Some will fall out of the upper class (disproportionately, it will be the less pretty - since they are less likely to be rescued from class demotion through finding a rich partner) and some will rise into the upper class (disproportionately the pretty, since they are far more likely to be "promoted" by finding an already-rich partner). Now imagine repeating this over many generations and the end result seems clear.
Of course, some things might prevent this mechanism. For example, if the upper classes just stop having children, then there will not be a population separation. It would mean, though, that we will all get uglier as a society, because our most attractive people would be the least effectively fertile. Maybe this is happening.
Also, if it becomes a widespread fad among the rich and beautiful to adopt children, it could prevent separation. On the other hand, there is now a trend of rich single women shopping around for sperm, and they only seem to consider beautiful donors. This obviously accelerates the importation of prettiness into the upper classes.
Two things you're ignoring: One, if everyone lives no matter what their traits are, then "genetically expensive" features like good vision will just go away. Evolution has been strongly selecting people with good vision, but your eyes cease to affect your chance to reproduce, but mutations still go on, it is incredibly probable that each generation's eyesight will be progressively worse. Ditto for other traits.
Two, there is evolutionary pressure, caused by partner selection. This is the basis of TFA! Good looking people tend to find good looking partners and make good looking children, ditto for the not-good-looking. I would add to this the element of wealth, I think it's quite important: I grew up in a very rich suburb where my schoolmates were uncommonly pretty. I realized that the people rich enough to live in that neighborhood attracted uncommonly pretty partners. No mystery why, and no surprise that the children turned out pretty. Now when you consider how little class-mixing there is in the US, and how little social mobility there is (that's right, look it up!) This means that money, and the extra attractiveness it brings, stays in families. Families with money will typically marry pretty people - most likely from other rich/pretty families, but possibly someone from a lower class who happened to look good. This means the upper classes poach the best lookers from below, making themselves even prettier. Because in each generation, the best looking people marry out of their lower class, this leaves the people of lower class with a increasingly uglier partner pool (on average, of course).
As this trend advances, the increasingly pretty rich will find fewer eligible partners among the increasingly ugly lower classes. Now that you have two non-interbreeding groups, each with different selection pressures, it's not hard to imagine a further divergence. It's not a pleasant thing to picture, but it's not really so crazy!
I imagine (but this isn't my area of research) the causation works this way: Low income causes you to adopt certain dietary and social practices which commonly cause you to be fat. But maybe it works the other way too, because we know that good looking people get paid better, and obese people are less likely to be considered good looking.
In most industrialized countries and especially in the US, obesity is strongly correlated with low income. Since there is also a strong link between low income and low IQ scores, there may be no causal relationship at all between obesity and a lowered IQ.
I wish I had as much faith as you do in the wisdom of our courts. If you can be sued and lose for selling coffee that's hot (and it's not like McDonalds has cheap lawyers), you can get sued and lose big for profiting from work which you have no permission to host. Actually, when I think about it, maybe Google should lose cases like this. I don't mean to defend US copyright law as a whole - it's a complete mess - but if you profit from distributing a complete copyrighted work, and the copyright holder is not consulted, you are doing something wrong (and not just illegal).
Yeah, and I don't remember anyone complaining about those products. I could think of several other things MS made which don't suck, but they made a lot of things over the years, and we shouldn't be straining so hard to compile such a short list!
Once MS locked up the desktop OS market, it seemed like their MO was to suck. They absolutely stopped caring about sucking less and more about pumping us for money and destroying competition (sometimes by deliberately sucking more). They may be a little better now that they have some competition in their crossharis (OSX, OOo, PS3, Google), but competing on a level playing field hasn't been something they needed to do since the 80's and it shows.
If google buys them, they keep the name and start dumping the copy-protected matierial.
Yeah, leaving what, exactly? Something worth $1,600,000,000? I hardly think so. There is no way to keep YouTube valuable while filtering the content enough to make sure no one sues you. And with Google's deep pockets, I'm sure the queue to sue would begin on the day of the aquisition. YouTube is a poisoned pill that no company could aquire, much less pay for.
I guess I agree sort of. I mean, I do see TDS in a new light since Colbert, because I had never imagined political comedy in the Colbert style before. TDS seems more simple and conventional in comparison. Sometimes Colbert piles on three levels of irony. Jon Stewart's humor is more direct, sometimes even crass. But both are absolutely brilliant and there's no way I (or anyone else I can think of) could come close to doing what they do.
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I was actually really impressed with the snow job element. DARPA still probably owns a lot of the data that was gathered while they were the project's only benefactors. Bussard was probably skirting very close to the edge of what he's allowed to say. And sure enough, there isn't enough in the talk for, say, Chinese scientists to get much info on how to do this right. They'd have to duplicate Bussard's 11-year research themselves. Still, I hope somebody gives this a real shot. The $200M is not a lot of money when you consider that every 30 hours of Iraq occupation is costing the taxpayer $200 Million. I can't imagine anyone who thinks the latter is a better investment of government money!
Watch the video. This isn't cold fusion. It's very hot fusion, under high pressure, confined in a very promising magnetic cage. The devil is in the details of the cage design, and the exciting thing about the talk was that Bussard's group figured out how to do it.
But this is all beside the point. The point is that this clearly violates the law. The law says that:
(d) All artificial or prerecorded telephone messages delivered by an automatic telephone dialing system shall:
(1) At the beginning of the message, state clearly the identity of the business, individual, or other entity initiating the call
Now listen to one actual phone call, this one placed five times just today to a female Democrat over 50. See?
One 50+ solid Democratic female voter has received this very same phone call five times just today. This one allegedly differs from some others that were placed in NY-25, as it has no long "inviting you to hang up" pause after "Dan Maffei".
We've contacted news outlets but it's too late for tonight's news cycle.
The answering machine lists various employees and their extensions. Unfortunately, the operator is not available.
Nice troll! One drunk left-winger, who has no connection with the DNC, does something stupid, and that's supposed to be morally equivalent to an organized RNC campaign across 53 districts where millions of illegal phonecalls are placed with the explicit goal of deceiving voters. Hmm, somehow the situations seem different.
Dan's campaign answers all the complaints with detailed explanations, and the people often write back furious as the actual perpetrators. But for everyone who blames Dan and tells us, I'm sure there are 100 people who will go on thinking, up until they enter the voting booth, that Dan was responsible for those harassing robo-calls.
Does anyone have an idea what we can do about this, one day before the election?
You did get the irony of what I said, right? Just checking.
I'd agree with you if, for some strange reason, MySpace were the best way of trading music online. Even as things stand now, it is far from that. Once the fingerprint censors step in, the reaction I expect is: "Oh, fine, we'll just trade music in some other way" - and that will be the end of it. So I think this is a smart move by NewsCorp (parent of MySpace).
Sorry, Murdoch's NewsCorp never had a "don't be evil" policy!
That's cool, as long as we Americans don't have to do anything!
I've never encountered a virus as terrible as Norton Antivirus.
Sure, Microsoft might kill Symantec with shady monopolism, but I think we should me more angry with the free market, which has kept these leeches alive for this long.
Their rich kids are pretty hot, thanks to the mothers. Just as I said. Among rich people, ugliness is diluted.
No matter how much you stroke it, it will always be Microsoft.
So far I haven't seen an article which compares how many watts of power are drawn by this card when idling and under load. This has become a very important feature for me, so much so that for the fist time ever, I bought an nVidia card over ATi. The last generation of ATi cards were terrible power hogs, and nVidia was head and shoulders ahead in that category. I assume the gap has closed, but I'd like to see how much.
The other stuff you said doesn't seem right, but this is something I know you pulled from your ass, because it's just false. Nice fantasy!
I take your point that many very rich families today were not rich three generations ago. Still, all that you need for differentiation (I think) is that they were significantly richer than average (which I'd bet is true) and that lived in a climate where wealth was significantly correlated with the good appearance of a partner. This is enough, I think, so that every generation of wealthy people gets a progressively higher concentration of prettiness genes. Some will fall out of the upper class (disproportionately, it will be the less pretty - since they are less likely to be rescued from class demotion through finding a rich partner) and some will rise into the upper class (disproportionately the pretty, since they are far more likely to be "promoted" by finding an already-rich partner). Now imagine repeating this over many generations and the end result seems clear.
Of course, some things might prevent this mechanism. For example, if the upper classes just stop having children, then there will not be a population separation. It would mean, though, that we will all get uglier as a society, because our most attractive people would be the least effectively fertile. Maybe this is happening.
Also, if it becomes a widespread fad among the rich and beautiful to adopt children, it could prevent separation. On the other hand, there is now a trend of rich single women shopping around for sperm, and they only seem to consider beautiful donors. This obviously accelerates the importation of prettiness into the upper classes.
Two, there is evolutionary pressure, caused by partner selection. This is the basis of TFA! Good looking people tend to find good looking partners and make good looking children, ditto for the not-good-looking. I would add to this the element of wealth, I think it's quite important: I grew up in a very rich suburb where my schoolmates were uncommonly pretty. I realized that the people rich enough to live in that neighborhood attracted uncommonly pretty partners. No mystery why, and no surprise that the children turned out pretty. Now when you consider how little class-mixing there is in the US, and how little social mobility there is (that's right, look it up!) This means that money, and the extra attractiveness it brings, stays in families. Families with money will typically marry pretty people - most likely from other rich/pretty families, but possibly someone from a lower class who happened to look good. This means the upper classes poach the best lookers from below, making themselves even prettier. Because in each generation, the best looking people marry out of their lower class, this leaves the people of lower class with a increasingly uglier partner pool (on average, of course).
As this trend advances, the increasingly pretty rich will find fewer eligible partners among the increasingly ugly lower classes. Now that you have two non-interbreeding groups, each with different selection pressures, it's not hard to imagine a further divergence. It's not a pleasant thing to picture, but it's not really so crazy!
I imagine (but this isn't my area of research) the causation works this way: Low income causes you to adopt certain dietary and social practices which commonly cause you to be fat. But maybe it works the other way too, because we know that good looking people get paid better, and obese people are less likely to be considered good looking.
In most industrialized countries and especially in the US, obesity is strongly correlated with low income. Since there is also a strong link between low income and low IQ scores, there may be no causal relationship at all between obesity and a lowered IQ.
After this, how could ReiserFS not be the default Linux filesystem? I mean, come on, what's the worst that can happen if Linux dumps Ext3?
I wish I had as much faith as you do in the wisdom of our courts. If you can be sued and lose for selling coffee that's hot (and it's not like McDonalds has cheap lawyers), you can get sued and lose big for profiting from work which you have no permission to host. Actually, when I think about it, maybe Google should lose cases like this. I don't mean to defend US copyright law as a whole - it's a complete mess - but if you profit from distributing a complete copyrighted work, and the copyright holder is not consulted, you are doing something wrong (and not just illegal).
Once MS locked up the desktop OS market, it seemed like their MO was to suck. They absolutely stopped caring about sucking less and more about pumping us for money and destroying competition (sometimes by deliberately sucking more). They may be a little better now that they have some competition in their crossharis (OSX, OOo, PS3, Google), but competing on a level playing field hasn't been something they needed to do since the 80's and it shows.
Yeah, leaving what, exactly? Something worth $1,600,000,000? I hardly think so. There is no way to keep YouTube valuable while filtering the content enough to make sure no one sues you. And with Google's deep pockets, I'm sure the queue to sue would begin on the day of the aquisition. YouTube is a poisoned pill that no company could aquire, much less pay for.
I guess I agree sort of. I mean, I do see TDS in a new light since Colbert, because I had never imagined political comedy in the Colbert style before. TDS seems more simple and conventional in comparison. Sometimes Colbert piles on three levels of irony. Jon Stewart's humor is more direct, sometimes even crass. But both are absolutely brilliant and there's no way I (or anyone else I can think of) could come close to doing what they do.