I'm going to go with Isaac Asimov on this one. He points out, correctly IMO, that to the creationist there really isn't any significant difference between "evolved from a common ape-like ancestor" and "evolved from apes". The creationist is simply horrified at the idea that he isn't a special creation made to look like the creator of the universe. So bite the bullet, and say "well, yes, we did evolve from apes, deal."
The voter doesn't take the paper with him, as you say that would ruin the whole anonymous ballot thing. The voter gets the paper, looks at the human readable output to verify that his vote was correctly recorded, and drops the paper into a ballot box on his way out. If the paper shows that his vote was incorrectly recorded, he can ask an election official to remove his vote from the machine, destroy that paper ballot, and try again.
The election officials keep the paper ballots, machine printed recepts that is, so that in the event of a dispute they can be hand counted. Since, theoretically, every voter looked at their recept and verified that it recorded what they truly intended to vote for, if someone hacks the machines and falsifies the votes recorded there, the paper ballots get the final say in the event of a dispute.
It also gives you a good indication of where the falsification of the electronic votes got started since you can say: hmmm, district 123 shows 4000 votes for candidate X on the computer, but the paper ballots only show 1000 votes for candidate X, who messed with the machines in district 123?
Essentially we're keeping the old paper method of vote recording as a backup in the event that its suspected that someone hacks the machines.
It looks to me that they are planning on using the ramps in place of speed humps. In that case the car would have been slowing down and speeding back up anyway so it isn't going to cost anything extra for the driver.
Naturally this is leaving aside the question of whether speed humps are worthwhile or not.
The interesting thing is that under the so-called USA PATRIOT Act the library is forbidden from confirming that the incident took place. Not only do the police get to review your choice of reading material but the librarians will go to prison if they tell anyone that an investigation actually happened. That way people like you can say "well, there isn't any confirmation so it probably isn't true". Isn't that nice?
Yeah, and when he held up his shopping list and claimed it was a list of "fifty Communists working in the government" he wasn't just being a lying, evil, purely politically motivated, bastard, he was simply halucinating and really did think his shopping list was a list of highly placed Communists. Because no Republican can ever have done anything wrong, yes?
Um, yeah. Except the last time I checked the American Way didn't include the secret police keeping tabs on our reading material, or the President authorizing wiretaps without warrants. You cannot defend liberty by removing liberties. You cannot defend the American Way by undermining the freedoms that make America the place it is.
Sorry, but I've got to agree with the parent poster here. Not only is it next to impossible to keep something that big a secret (heck, Clinton couldn't even keep a little blowjob a secret, and you want me to believe that Bush could keep something that size secret?), but the timeframe is simply too tight. They would have had eight months or so to put the entire thing together after Bush was inaugerated.
Furthermore you're asking me to believe that the same Bush administration which couldn't manage the aftermath of a hurricane, which demonstrates massive incompetence every day in Iraq, which can't even out a CIA agent without screwing it up, is capiable of a) engineering the Attack on New York City, and b) keeping their involvement secret. It isn't that I don't believe they have the will and motivation, I just don't think they have the brains and competence to do it.
They *did* take shameful political advantage over an attack which was focused on their political enemies (quick, how many Republicans died in the Attack on NYC? Also, who would Osama hate more, us liberal pro-gay rights, pro-women's rights types, or the Party of Pat Robertson?). But taking advantage of the actions of Osama for political gain is simply politics at its most repulsive, it isn't evidence they were actually involved. As for the ignored warnings, I tend to agree with the people who think its due to the Bush administration's "if Clinton did x we'll do the opposite". Clinton was worried about Osama, so Bush wasn't. Clinton tried to take out Osama, so Bush didn't. The ignored warnings fit the "Clinton did it so it must be wrong" policy perfectly.
You are correct. In 2005 Smith would have been only moderately wealthy (inheritance from the "death" of his mother in 1982 accounting for most of it). Since Rhysling died around 2004, and Smith was running a whorehouse on Mars when Rhysling died it seems likely that Smith was either living a moderately comfortable life on Mars, or immegrating to Venus in 2005. Not nearly rich enough to make the top 15 fictional characters.
Of course, if we're going to be picky about time, Ebenezer Scrooge should have died a long time ago, so his inclusion is hardly accurate.
Also, don't forget that Nehemiah Scudder is due to be elected President in 2012.
I can't agree with you. I suffered through the whole thing, hoping that at some point it might become funny, or at least cleaver. Unfortunately the writing basically sucked.
It was an impressive effort, the special effects were well done for home computers, the costumes weren't bad, and the acting was vastly better than it is in most fanmade films. But the script. Gads. It was just plain awful, and utterly unfunny.
One thing that I always liked from Alpha Centauri was that I could mix 'n match my tech to produce a unit that was exactly what I wanted. Any chance of something like that?
Not to get snarky, but the link for the "the link between hurricanes and global warming remains contraversial" was the "Free" Republic [1], not exactly an unbiased source.
Personally I'm kinda stunned that Slashdot would like to a political activist site as a source of news. I mean, you don't see links to the Daily Kos in articles about Bush and technology.
[1] Irony quotes because I was banned for asking one question there. Not so free, actually.
I don't see how it can possibly reduce greenhouse gasses. I can see how it could reduce CO, how it could reduce unburned fuel in the exhaust, but CO2 is the biggie and I just don't see how this does anything about that.
Burning petrol frees carbon, that's either going to come out as C (soot), CO (carbon monoxide, bad for you and me), or CO2 (carbon dioxide, the big bad guy of global warming). Introducing hydrogen doesn't do diddily about the carbon.
It might increase fuel economy a bit, but at $7k (even if that's Canadian dollars) it seems like there'd be other tech that does more for the price.
And what about the Wave Motion Gun? Sure, technically it isn't a movie beam, but its got to be the greatest beam ever, or at least the most influential. Virtually every anime since Space Battleship Yamato has featured a Wave Motion Gun knockoff. Besides, you just can't beat that blister effect...
I thought the movie was actually pretty good. What many people keep forgetting is that the book itself falls flat in the last half. Seriously, how long has it been since you read the book? Go back and read it again and you'll discover that once they get to Megrathea it really isn't that funny, amusing yes, but hardly *funny* the way some of the earlier bits are.
As for the movie itself, it really is quite good. The casting is wonderful, especially the man they got to play Zaphod. And the bits where the Guide is used are truly great.
The movie wasn't really all that funny towards the end, but neither was the book so I can't complain on that note.
What's that about the First Ammendment? Giving someone money isn't speech. If it was then I could "speak" to the police office with a couple of bucks to get out of a ticket. Money != Speech.
Similarly, the 14th Ammendment (intended to guarantee the right to vote for blacks (freed slaves) and poor whites) does not say that corporations are citizens. If corps are citizens then they should be allowed a vote (under section 1), and be counted in the census for the purposes of assigning representatives (section 2). They aren't. Corporations are not citizens, and do not have rights.
Or at least that's the way it should be. With Thomas, Scalia, and Rehnquist on the Supreme Court there's a very low chance that reality will come into sync with what should be.
Personally, I'd love to see the ACLU start a suit pushing for corporate voting rights, or counting corporations for representative apportioning as a backhanded way to get the SCotUS to toss the whole corporate citizenship thing out the airlock.
I disagree with your basic assumption that laws are based on what the state has an interest in outlawing. The state exists at our sufferance and for our purposes, not the other way around. It can be argued that the state has a legitimate interest in forcing the citizens to be healthy by mandating diets and exercise. But in the US, and in other free countries, the citizens do not exist to serve the state.
I would argue that murder is illegal becuase it harms a citizen without that citizen's concent. Same thing with theft, battery, etc. But when citizen Foo views pornography it does not harm citizen Bar. It might offend citizen Bar, but being offended is not being harmed.
Now, on the "your right to punch ends where my nose begins" principle, I can see banning public displays of pornography. Citizen Foo has a right to read Playboy, that does not mean that citizen Foo has a right to inflict Playboy on unwilling participants. Similarly your car stereo can be as loud as you want, just as long as you don't force other people to listen to your music.
But if someone claims that the mere existance of things they disapprove of is somehow harmful to them (or anyone else) I will mock them.
What you just described is what Thomas Jefferson, among others, feared: the "tyrany of the majority". Contrary to popular belief the majority cannot simply pass any law it wants to. The Constitution is specifically designed to prevent the majority from passing certain kinds of laws. The Constitution can be changed, but that takes more than a simple majority, it takes a 3/4 majority in 3/4 of the states.
The reason for all that, naturally, is to protect the minority from the majority. If 51% of the pouplaiton wants to censor porn (or anything else) its simply not enough. I think our founders were quite wise to encode freedom into the Constitution and make it extremely difficult to remove those freedoms from the Constitution.
It is the government's business to do what people tell it to, but within limits.
Typical Creationist behavior: post a huge whine about how nobody will read your huge whine, then chicken out when someone actually responds. Low intelligence, low courage, low ethics, what doesn't Creationism lack?
Ok, I'll bite even though I've sworn before not to get involved in debates with Creationists.
Yes, evolution is a theory. So is gravity. Non-scientists use the word "theory" to mean "an idea I just now came up with and doesn't really have any relation to objective reality". As in "I have a theory about that", or "well, it works *in*theory*". Scientists use the word in a completely different way. What the layman calls a theory a scientist would call a "hypothesis". In order for a hypothesis to become a theory it has to survive attempts to prove that its wrong, offer a good explination for observed facts, etc.
Gravity is a theory, not a fact. And again, we see the difference between lay use of words and scientific use of words. The layman uses "fact" to describe both concrete observations and the explinations for connection between those observations. Scientists use the word only when describing concrete observations, not the connections between those observations. So, on the subject of gravity we see the facts are merely the orbits of planets and stars, and the fact that (some) things fall when they aren't supported. Gravity is a theory invented to connect these facts. F(g) = G * ((m1*m2)/(r^2)). That's "the theory of gravity". We furthur embelish this by theorizing that gravitation is caused by a distortion in space. Evidence seems to back this up, but new evidence could utterly shatter our current theory of gravity. The only things that can't really be disproven are the baren "facts": (some) things fall when they aren't supported, and things orbit other things.
Which brings us to evolution, thories, and the stickers. The stickers were clearly intended to use the term "theory" in the lay sense, meaning "some harebraned idea", not "a rigorusly tested explination for a connection between facts".
The only facts in the whole issue are that a) humans are here today, b) the fossil record contains several species that are no longer living. We theorize that the layers of the fossil record indicate that the lower layers are generally older (baring earthquakes and other things which might rearrange thousands of tonnes of rock). We theorize that since the layers show lower (earlier) periods without trilobites, and later (newer) periods with trilobites, and finally that there are no trilobites today that trilobites must have appeared after a time when they did not previously exist. Evolution is the only theory that connects these facts.
Creationists contend that a) life is so self-evidently complex that it could not arise through any natural process, and b) their book says it all happened 6000 years ago over the course of six days. Neither of those statements are either an alternate theory that explains the observed facts, nor a refutation of the theory of evolution.
If you want to get evolution out of the schools (or even just get equal time for a different theory) there is a very simple way to do so: useing the scientific method establish an alternate theory that explains the observed facts as well as (or better than) evolution does. Creationism (either the so-called "Scientific Creationism", or "Intelligent Design") does not actually do either of those things. In both cases they began with their conclusion and cherrypicked what facts they could to support that conclusion, which is not the way science works. In both cases they ignore rather large bodies of evidence, and they have steadfastly refused to publish their papers in peer reviewed journals.
On that final note, I'll quit: Creationists will often whine that there is a massive conspiricy to keep them out of scientific journals. This is not true (or, as we say in Texas: that is a lie). Creationists have never actually offered their papers to any scientific journal. On a few occasions a journal has actually *requested* a paper from a Creationist only to have the Creationist demand special treatment (usually that no one be permitted to respond to or criticize their paper). Since Creationists so steadfastly refuse to participate in the scientific process I can only presume that they secretly acknowledge that they are not really scientists, which means that their theories (in the lay sense) have no place in a science class.
Cracking hydrogen out of water, then burning it for electricity isn't what you'd call efficient. You loose a *lot* of juice that way. Of course one answer to that is to overproduce and just accept the loss, but I don't know if that'd be economically feasable.
Even more than cheaper power production we need a genuinely efficient (say, less than 10% loss) power storage system.
As for the parking lot, it used solar panels to roof the lot, not as a driving surface. Sorry if that wasn't clear from my description.
Actually, there's a mall in southern California with a solar panel covered parking lot. Keeps the rain off, keeps the customers cool as they go to their cars, and it just about pays for the mall's electric bill.
The twin problems are initial expense (which with traditional solar panels is horrible, typically you can expect economic breakeven (at today's wholesale electric prices) in around fifteen to twenty years), and the fact that we can never base our entire power production on (ground based) solar. Solar can be used a lot more than it is, but we can't do everything solar because we don't have a good way to store electricity.
Slashdot Mirror
Its named after that star system they were visiting in Star Trek.
I'm going to go with Isaac Asimov on this one. He points out, correctly IMO, that to the creationist there really isn't any significant difference between "evolved from a common ape-like ancestor" and "evolved from apes". The creationist is simply horrified at the idea that he isn't a special creation made to look like the creator of the universe. So bite the bullet, and say "well, yes, we did evolve from apes, deal."
The voter doesn't take the paper with him, as you say that would ruin the whole anonymous ballot thing. The voter gets the paper, looks at the human readable output to verify that his vote was correctly recorded, and drops the paper into a ballot box on his way out. If the paper shows that his vote was incorrectly recorded, he can ask an election official to remove his vote from the machine, destroy that paper ballot, and try again.
The election officials keep the paper ballots, machine printed recepts that is, so that in the event of a dispute they can be hand counted. Since, theoretically, every voter looked at their recept and verified that it recorded what they truly intended to vote for, if someone hacks the machines and falsifies the votes recorded there, the paper ballots get the final say in the event of a dispute.
It also gives you a good indication of where the falsification of the electronic votes got started since you can say: hmmm, district 123 shows 4000 votes for candidate X on the computer, but the paper ballots only show 1000 votes for candidate X, who messed with the machines in district 123?
Essentially we're keeping the old paper method of vote recording as a backup in the event that its suspected that someone hacks the machines.
It looks to me that they are planning on using the ramps in place of speed humps. In that case the car would have been slowing down and speeding back up anyway so it isn't going to cost anything extra for the driver.
Naturally this is leaving aside the question of whether speed humps are worthwhile or not.
The interesting thing is that under the so-called USA PATRIOT Act the library is forbidden from confirming that the incident took place. Not only do the police get to review your choice of reading material but the librarians will go to prison if they tell anyone that an investigation actually happened. That way people like you can say "well, there isn't any confirmation so it probably isn't true". Isn't that nice?
Yeah, and when he held up his shopping list and claimed it was a list of "fifty Communists working in the government" he wasn't just being a lying, evil, purely politically motivated, bastard, he was simply halucinating and really did think his shopping list was a list of highly placed Communists. Because no Republican can ever have done anything wrong, yes?
Um, yeah. Except the last time I checked the American Way didn't include the secret police keeping tabs on our reading material, or the President authorizing wiretaps without warrants. You cannot defend liberty by removing liberties. You cannot defend the American Way by undermining the freedoms that make America the place it is.
Sorry, but I've got to agree with the parent poster here. Not only is it next to impossible to keep something that big a secret (heck, Clinton couldn't even keep a little blowjob a secret, and you want me to believe that Bush could keep something that size secret?), but the timeframe is simply too tight. They would have had eight months or so to put the entire thing together after Bush was inaugerated.
Furthermore you're asking me to believe that the same Bush administration which couldn't manage the aftermath of a hurricane, which demonstrates massive incompetence every day in Iraq, which can't even out a CIA agent without screwing it up, is capiable of a) engineering the Attack on New York City, and b) keeping their involvement secret. It isn't that I don't believe they have the will and motivation, I just don't think they have the brains and competence to do it.
They *did* take shameful political advantage over an attack which was focused on their political enemies (quick, how many Republicans died in the Attack on NYC? Also, who would Osama hate more, us liberal pro-gay rights, pro-women's rights types, or the Party of Pat Robertson?). But taking advantage of the actions of Osama for political gain is simply politics at its most repulsive, it isn't evidence they were actually involved. As for the ignored warnings, I tend to agree with the people who think its due to the Bush administration's "if Clinton did x we'll do the opposite". Clinton was worried about Osama, so Bush wasn't. Clinton tried to take out Osama, so Bush didn't. The ignored warnings fit the "Clinton did it so it must be wrong" policy perfectly.
You are correct. In 2005 Smith would have been only moderately wealthy (inheritance from the "death" of his mother in 1982 accounting for most of it). Since Rhysling died around 2004, and Smith was running a whorehouse on Mars when Rhysling died it seems likely that Smith was either living a moderately comfortable life on Mars, or immegrating to Venus in 2005. Not nearly rich enough to make the top 15 fictional characters.
Of course, if we're going to be picky about time, Ebenezer Scrooge should have died a long time ago, so his inclusion is hardly accurate.
Also, don't forget that Nehemiah Scudder is due to be elected President in 2012.
I can't agree with you. I suffered through the whole thing, hoping that at some point it might become funny, or at least cleaver. Unfortunately the writing basically sucked.
It was an impressive effort, the special effects were well done for home computers, the costumes weren't bad, and the acting was vastly better than it is in most fanmade films. But the script. Gads. It was just plain awful, and utterly unfunny.
One thing that I always liked from Alpha Centauri was that I could mix 'n match my tech to produce a unit that was exactly what I wanted. Any chance of something like that?
Not to get snarky, but the link for the "the link between hurricanes and global warming remains contraversial" was the "Free" Republic [1], not exactly an unbiased source.
Personally I'm kinda stunned that Slashdot would like to a political activist site as a source of news. I mean, you don't see links to the Daily Kos in articles about Bush and technology.
[1] Irony quotes because I was banned for asking one question there. Not so free, actually.
I don't see how it can possibly reduce greenhouse gasses. I can see how it could reduce CO, how it could reduce unburned fuel in the exhaust, but CO2 is the biggie and I just don't see how this does anything about that.
Burning petrol frees carbon, that's either going to come out as C (soot), CO (carbon monoxide, bad for you and me), or CO2 (carbon dioxide, the big bad guy of global warming). Introducing hydrogen doesn't do diddily about the carbon.
It might increase fuel economy a bit, but at $7k (even if that's Canadian dollars) it seems like there'd be other tech that does more for the price.
Well, if we believe what the police in Utah say, that's what a rave is... Especially the munching pills part.
And what about the Wave Motion Gun? Sure, technically it isn't a movie beam, but its got to be the greatest beam ever, or at least the most influential. Virtually every anime since Space Battleship Yamato has featured a Wave Motion Gun knockoff. Besides, you just can't beat that blister effect...
Not really, but MS has added the ability to bundle their PP viewer with the presentation. It works OK.
I thought the movie was actually pretty good. What many people keep forgetting is that the book itself falls flat in the last half. Seriously, how long has it been since you read the book? Go back and read it again and you'll discover that once they get to Megrathea it really isn't that funny, amusing yes, but hardly *funny* the way some of the earlier bits are.
As for the movie itself, it really is quite good. The casting is wonderful, especially the man they got to play Zaphod. And the bits where the Guide is used are truly great.
The movie wasn't really all that funny towards the end, but neither was the book so I can't complain on that note.
Similarly, the 14th Ammendment (intended to guarantee the right to vote for blacks (freed slaves) and poor whites) does not say that corporations are citizens. If corps are citizens then they should be allowed a vote (under section 1), and be counted in the census for the purposes of assigning representatives (section 2). They aren't. Corporations are not citizens, and do not have rights.
Or at least that's the way it should be. With Thomas, Scalia, and Rehnquist on the Supreme Court there's a very low chance that reality will come into sync with what should be.
Personally, I'd love to see the ACLU start a suit pushing for corporate voting rights, or counting corporations for representative apportioning as a backhanded way to get the SCotUS to toss the whole corporate citizenship thing out the airlock.
I would argue that murder is illegal becuase it harms a citizen without that citizen's concent. Same thing with theft, battery, etc. But when citizen Foo views pornography it does not harm citizen Bar. It might offend citizen Bar, but being offended is not being harmed.
Now, on the "your right to punch ends where my nose begins" principle, I can see banning public displays of pornography. Citizen Foo has a right to read Playboy, that does not mean that citizen Foo has a right to inflict Playboy on unwilling participants. Similarly your car stereo can be as loud as you want, just as long as you don't force other people to listen to your music.
But if someone claims that the mere existance of things they disapprove of is somehow harmful to them (or anyone else) I will mock them.
The reason for all that, naturally, is to protect the minority from the majority. If 51% of the pouplaiton wants to censor porn (or anything else) its simply not enough. I think our founders were quite wise to encode freedom into the Constitution and make it extremely difficult to remove those freedoms from the Constitution.
It is the government's business to do what people tell it to, but within limits.
Typical Creationist behavior: post a huge whine about how nobody will read your huge whine, then chicken out when someone actually responds. Low intelligence, low courage, low ethics, what doesn't Creationism lack?
Yes, evolution is a theory. So is gravity. Non-scientists use the word "theory" to mean "an idea I just now came up with and doesn't really have any relation to objective reality". As in "I have a theory about that", or "well, it works *in*theory*". Scientists use the word in a completely different way. What the layman calls a theory a scientist would call a "hypothesis". In order for a hypothesis to become a theory it has to survive attempts to prove that its wrong, offer a good explination for observed facts, etc.
Gravity is a theory, not a fact. And again, we see the difference between lay use of words and scientific use of words. The layman uses "fact" to describe both concrete observations and the explinations for connection between those observations. Scientists use the word only when describing concrete observations, not the connections between those observations. So, on the subject of gravity we see the facts are merely the orbits of planets and stars, and the fact that (some) things fall when they aren't supported. Gravity is a theory invented to connect these facts. F(g) = G * ((m1*m2)/(r^2)). That's "the theory of gravity". We furthur embelish this by theorizing that gravitation is caused by a distortion in space. Evidence seems to back this up, but new evidence could utterly shatter our current theory of gravity. The only things that can't really be disproven are the baren "facts": (some) things fall when they aren't supported, and things orbit other things.
Which brings us to evolution, thories, and the stickers. The stickers were clearly intended to use the term "theory" in the lay sense, meaning "some harebraned idea", not "a rigorusly tested explination for a connection between facts".
The only facts in the whole issue are that a) humans are here today, b) the fossil record contains several species that are no longer living. We theorize that the layers of the fossil record indicate that the lower layers are generally older (baring earthquakes and other things which might rearrange thousands of tonnes of rock). We theorize that since the layers show lower (earlier) periods without trilobites, and later (newer) periods with trilobites, and finally that there are no trilobites today that trilobites must have appeared after a time when they did not previously exist. Evolution is the only theory that connects these facts.
Creationists contend that a) life is so self-evidently complex that it could not arise through any natural process, and b) their book says it all happened 6000 years ago over the course of six days. Neither of those statements are either an alternate theory that explains the observed facts, nor a refutation of the theory of evolution.
If you want to get evolution out of the schools (or even just get equal time for a different theory) there is a very simple way to do so: useing the scientific method establish an alternate theory that explains the observed facts as well as (or better than) evolution does. Creationism (either the so-called "Scientific Creationism", or "Intelligent Design") does not actually do either of those things. In both cases they began with their conclusion and cherrypicked what facts they could to support that conclusion, which is not the way science works. In both cases they ignore rather large bodies of evidence, and they have steadfastly refused to publish their papers in peer reviewed journals.
On that final note, I'll quit: Creationists will often whine that there is a massive conspiricy to keep them out of scientific journals. This is not true (or, as we say in Texas: that is a lie). Creationists have never actually offered their papers to any scientific journal. On a few occasions a journal has actually *requested* a paper from a Creationist only to have the Creationist demand special treatment (usually that no one be permitted to respond to or criticize their paper). Since Creationists so steadfastly refuse to participate in the scientific process I can only presume that they secretly acknowledge that they are not really scientists, which means that their theories (in the lay sense) have no place in a science class.
Even more than cheaper power production we need a genuinely efficient (say, less than 10% loss) power storage system.
As for the parking lot, it used solar panels to roof the lot, not as a driving surface. Sorry if that wasn't clear from my description.
I wish I had mod points, becuase you are spot on.
The twin problems are initial expense (which with traditional solar panels is horrible, typically you can expect economic breakeven (at today's wholesale electric prices) in around fifteen to twenty years), and the fact that we can never base our entire power production on (ground based) solar. Solar can be used a lot more than it is, but we can't do everything solar because we don't have a good way to store electricity.