Maybe, but that has zero to do with OBL, and will not result in the economic collapse he was looking for. OBL didn't attack the WTC in order to cause a debate about the debt ceiling, foreclosures, or creative accounting practices, he wanted a collapse that would destroy the US. That was a total and complete failure. Even the two wars he unintentionally sparked didn't cause us to come close to our State failing due to economic reasons.
No, their goals don't really involve domestic policy in the US. Their upper management would enjoy it a little if we just declared sharia law here in the US, but their priority is getting the US to get out of the middle east, so they can take over and do it themselves throughout the region.
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed," bin Laden said as the U.S. war on terrorism raged in Afghanistan. "The U.S. government will lead the American people in -- and the West in general -- into an unbearable hell and a choking life."
That was just trolling, to demoralize a few more people. Crazy as he was, he didn't embark on his mad quest in order to erode our freedoms. That was all us.
Furthermore, I think it really undermines our side of the security vs freedom debate to go hyperbolic like that. We are not in 1984. Our rights are not totally "doomed." TSA has not turned the nation into a fascist state. Things like patting down babies, and paranoia about fingernail clippers on airplanes are absurd and stupid, yes, and TSA is a big waste of tax dollars and time, but lets keep the criticisms focused and grounded in reality. When we make overstatements like "Osama won," that might make us feel smart, like we're the only ones who know whats going on, but it also makes us look like we're paranoid lunatics to the rest of the people we need to convince to relax about airport security.
We could, but there's a major roadblock: citizens who are terrified that terrorists are out to get them and vote for whoever promises they'll stand between the terrorists and the voters' family. Common sense policy in national security that follows that quote about freedom vs security will always fail because of their paranoia, if they can vote.
What we NEED to do is KILL OFF ALL THE PARANOID PEOPLE!
Subject raises a point: I would use my smartphone before getting out of bed, but my cats start biting me if they see me awake and not putting food in their bowls.
If you bother to learn how, you can judge the existing skies to determine what the weather will be in that timeframe.
1. Depends on where you live
2. Hi, you're on slashdot. If there is a simple way to do something not involving electronics, and a nerdy, more complicated way to do something that does involve electronics, and you choose the simple way to do it, you're in the wrong place.
Many new elements of gameplay they introduced, it really felt like there was a lot more they could have done with them than they did, at least compared to the way the portals were used in the first one. I didn't have much desire to play 3rd party maps on the first portal, since I felt like I had seen every concept that could be done with two portals. Not so with portal 2. I was still thinking of things they could do with, for example the hard light bridges by the time the game was over. There's more in the co-op levels, but it feels like they were trying to make as many new mechanics as they could to encourage the 3rd party maps.
Single player maps without the portal gun, that might be interesting, but there was very little of that in the game, and the parts that were, it was just platforming and exploring, none of those new things like the goo. It wouldn't have worked well with the story. I think it will be interesting to see what people come up with.
I'm not as excited about the inevitable parodies of GLaDOS, or a "the cake is a lie" reference in every map.
Yes, Al Gore IS global climate change. If one website is out there claiming he admits he's wrong that is 100% certainty that climate change can't possibly be happening. Keep telling yourself that.
One problem is that if you give the religious nuts an inch, they'll take a mile, and say that God told them to do so, and if you call them out on it, they'll quibble over the definition of an inch.
Specifically, this gives them license to present evidence in support of the "null hypothesis." In the classroom of a fundie, there will be a -lot- of "evidence" supporting creationism and next to nothing about the "hypothesis of evolution." It will be extremely easy to preach to the kids that creationism is the one that is proved and that evolution is the one which lacks strong evidence. It will be extremely hard to stop too, they'll make sure to follow the letter of the law.
I am now a resident of the certifiably most insane nation in the world
Who exactly is qualified to "certify" nations as sane or insane? I'm going to say that any board of international psychiatry or whoever that would certify the US as the "most insane" rather than North Korea or Iran is certifiably full of shit.
They can. Religious schools are free to do whatever the fuck they want on their own dime.
Taking tax money meant for public education and using it to proselytize? No. Absolutely not. Taxes should not be used for religious purposes. Believe what you want, but pay for it yourself and keep it to yourself.
Teaching Adam and Eve along side of Darwin, implying they're equally credible or even the same subject? No. Absolutely not. That's absurd. Creationism and intelligent design are fundamentally anti-scientific. "The only way to understand any of this is to believe what we tell you" is as far from science as you can get. You may as well teach "intelligent math" in math class and teach kids that 2+2=4, but some people believe that addition is not true, and 2 and 2 will always be 2 and 2, never 4.
Already most students will never consider the evidence for and against evolution on their own, so for them, evolution is already more faith than science. There are a variety of reasons for that. I sincerely think that teaching science and religion in the same breath will confuse them even further. We'll take a giant step back from being a scientific culture, and a giant step toward ignorance.
I feel justified in torrenting all their games for free until I get back what they owe me.
You do mean until you've downloaded $250 retail worth, by Valve, correct? Because while I disagree with the notion that two rights make a wrong, and suspect there's another side to that story, that way would at least be somewhat defensible.
If you're saying you'll download as many games as you want, OR from whichever company you feel like, until steam approaches you with a check saying "Hey guy, we're sorry, that was wrong what we did to you," then you're making flimsy excuses for scummy behavior.
Only a little social engineering can defeat NoScript. Whitelisted sites can become compromised as well.
But your whitelisted sites -should- have a decreased chance of being compromised and infected. Thus it is safer than allowing everything, and more functional than blocking everything.
Honestly I can't understand people who act as if NoScript is a huge security risk or the devil when most people, including myself, would choose "allow all javascripts" if their only options were all or nothing.
Why is it that slashdot goes so quickly to the patent side of things, yet so many people are not lawyers?
And since when has even the appearance of expertise in any given field been a criteria for posting? That's half the fun, chattering off about stuff that we know little about.
My issue was people who aren't lawyers, why is their first thought "OMG PATENTS!" instead of "wow, that's really interesting to me as a nerd." Talking outside your area of expertise is fine, I'd have been a hypocrite right there if that was my point.
Those are good reasons why my idea wouldn't work. So thanks for that:-P.
TFA made it sound like the water didn't need to run anywhere, it didn't require steam to be piped in. I was under the impression the samples sat above a pot of water basically, and the steam rose up. Maybe if solid buildup is a problem, one could just wash it with some CLR.
It's fortunate that the the agricultural processes in the developing countries don't produce as much mis-folded proteins as the English one did
What are you talking about? All cells produce misfolded proteins from time to time. Has nothing to do with agriculture methods.
Prions are left over during a normal sterilization of medical instruments in a dentist's office, for example. A solar based heating system could be beneficial in such a sterilization device for steel instruments.
The heat in an autoclave denatures the proteins, killing whatever is in the autoclave. Prions may not be destroyed by autoclaves wiki tells me. However, this IS AN AUTOCLAVE. Just one that works with solar energy rather than plugging into a wall. This will not do anything to prions that other sterilization techniques don't.
Sunlight actually does kill a lot of bacteria, though it's usually because of the UV light. Bacteria generally are less tolerant of UV than we are for a variety of reasons (for one thing, they generally don't have backups of their genes like we do).
They have machinery to repair UV damage to their DNA, but a lot of that is triggered by visible light. I've heard that UV light only, without other wavelengths like visible light, is especially lethal to bacteria. I wonder if a better sterilization method might be a box that let in UV light, but blocked everything else, and mirrors that reflected UV light, concentrating the UV on the box.
Why is it that slashdot goes so quickly to the patent side of things, yet so many people are not lawyers?
Anyway, I'm dubious. Why mess with a bulky, fragile, comparatively costly solar array? Is fire from wood not hot enough? Is it a matter of you'd have to supply a lot of wood?
The fact that civilian aviation experts were able to look at the pictures and say "gee, that's a so-and-so modification to reduce noise" suggests to me that this is hardly top-secret technology
If you had shown a picture of the F-117 Nighthawk (stealth fighter) to an amateur pilot in the 60's, they would have guessed correctly it was designed for stealth... or maybe as some type of elaborate joke, or as a piece of abstract art. That doesn't change the fact that it was secret until the 80's.
I wonder if perhaps the noise reduction and stealth features came at a price of reduced performance.
I've heard the stealth fighter was quite difficult to maneuver compared to other planes at the time, due to it's unique design. One crashed during the test, fortunately the test pilot survived, though with a concussion that ended his flight career.
The U2 spy plane, able to reach altitudes that fighter jets could not, had been so modified that landing it was extremely challenging.
From the wiki page:
The U-2's flight controls are designed around the normal flight envelope and altitude that the aircraft was intended to fly in. The controls provide feather-light control response at operational altitude. However, at lower altitudes, the higher air density and lack of a power-assisted control system makes the aircraft very difficult to fly. Control inputs must be extreme to achieve the desired response in flight attitude, and a great deal of physical strength is needed to operate the controls in this manner.
The U-2 is very sensitive to crosswinds which, together with its tendency to float over the runway, makes the U-2 notoriously difficult to land. As the aircraft approaches the runway, the cushion of air provided by the high-lift wings in ground effect is so pronounced that the U-2 will not land unless the wing is fully stalled. To assist the pilot, the landing U-2 is paced by a chase car (usually a "souped-up" performance model including a Ford Mustang SSP, Chevrolet Camaro B4C, Pontiac GTO, and the Pontiac G8) with an assistant (another U-2 pilot) who "talks" the pilot down by calling off the declining height of the aircraft in feet as it decreases in airspeed.
I would bet good money that the stealth reduced performance. After all, there's got to be a reason it's not used on -every- helicopter if it works.
Clearly, those evildoers at Anonymous haxored their way into Sony's Apache servers, removed the patches and the firewall, then stole all the credit card information.
Yes, but there should already be flags raised when an executive of a corporation say anything to congress. Some of those flags should say "Hey stupid elected official: be skeptical" others should say "citation needed," others should say "Caution: possible scapegoating ahead" and many should say "This corporation is not your constituency."
But of course, those flags don't get raised, so it's probably too much to hope that congress realizes he's full of BS when he's saying obviously untrue things about anonymous.
However, the community here being what it is, it should realize how easily documents can be faked, especially in high level government. No, I'm not saying he isn't legit. I'm saying a paper document proves nothing. The fact this nonsense went on for months should be a red flag at the very least. obama handled this very poorly for someone who had an interest in claiming legitimacy.
The red flag it raises is exactly what TFA is talking about, it's red flags about the people asking the questions. Obama handled this "poorly" if the goal was to prove birthers wrong beyond a shadow of a doubt, but why would that be a goal? It's impossible. That's the point. There is always room for what amounts to faith. Even were there no biased sources for these idiots to find support in, the question would not be settled. Had he released the long form right away, that would have been feeding the trolls. We would have had comments about it being a forgery right from the start.
Personally, I think if he can be faulted for answering the birthers now in a way that doesn't involve his middle finger and comments about their parenting. It was an idiotic distraction.
"And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a woosh. It is a woosh deeply rooted in someone not getting a joke online."
-MLK
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, but that has zero to do with OBL, and will not result in the economic collapse he was looking for. OBL didn't attack the WTC in order to cause a debate about the debt ceiling, foreclosures, or creative accounting practices, he wanted a collapse that would destroy the US. That was a total and complete failure. Even the two wars he unintentionally sparked didn't cause us to come close to our State failing due to economic reasons.
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed," bin Laden said as the U.S. war on terrorism raged in Afghanistan. "The U.S. government will lead the American people in -- and the West in general -- into an unbearable hell and a choking life."
That was just trolling, to demoralize a few more people. Crazy as he was, he didn't embark on his mad quest in order to erode our freedoms. That was all us.
Furthermore, I think it really undermines our side of the security vs freedom debate to go hyperbolic like that. We are not in 1984. Our rights are not totally "doomed." TSA has not turned the nation into a fascist state. Things like patting down babies, and paranoia about fingernail clippers on airplanes are absurd and stupid, yes, and TSA is a big waste of tax dollars and time, but lets keep the criticisms focused and grounded in reality. When we make overstatements like "Osama won," that might make us feel smart, like we're the only ones who know whats going on, but it also makes us look like we're paranoid lunatics to the rest of the people we need to convince to relax about airport security.
We really could be better than this.
We could, but there's a major roadblock: citizens who are terrified that terrorists are out to get them and vote for whoever promises they'll stand between the terrorists and the voters' family. Common sense policy in national security that follows that quote about freedom vs security will always fail because of their paranoia, if they can vote.
...but they probably are expecting that...
What we NEED to do is KILL OFF ALL THE PARANOID PEOPLE!
Subject raises a point: I would use my smartphone before getting out of bed, but my cats start biting me if they see me awake and not putting food in their bowls.
If you bother to learn how, you can judge the existing skies to determine what the weather will be in that timeframe.
1. Depends on where you live
2. Hi, you're on slashdot. If there is a simple way to do something not involving electronics, and a nerdy, more complicated way to do something that does involve electronics, and you choose the simple way to do it, you're in the wrong place.
Or internet porn on your phone. Sometimes, it's the only way to get up in the morning.
Many new elements of gameplay they introduced, it really felt like there was a lot more they could have done with them than they did, at least compared to the way the portals were used in the first one. I didn't have much desire to play 3rd party maps on the first portal, since I felt like I had seen every concept that could be done with two portals. Not so with portal 2. I was still thinking of things they could do with, for example the hard light bridges by the time the game was over. There's more in the co-op levels, but it feels like they were trying to make as many new mechanics as they could to encourage the 3rd party maps.
Single player maps without the portal gun, that might be interesting, but there was very little of that in the game, and the parts that were, it was just platforming and exploring, none of those new things like the goo. It wouldn't have worked well with the story. I think it will be interesting to see what people come up with.
I'm not as excited about the inevitable parodies of GLaDOS, or a "the cake is a lie" reference in every map.
Yes, Al Gore IS global climate change. If one website is out there claiming he admits he's wrong that is 100% certainty that climate change can't possibly be happening. Keep telling yourself that.
One problem is that if you give the religious nuts an inch, they'll take a mile, and say that God told them to do so, and if you call them out on it, they'll quibble over the definition of an inch.
Specifically, this gives them license to present evidence in support of the "null hypothesis." In the classroom of a fundie, there will be a -lot- of "evidence" supporting creationism and next to nothing about the "hypothesis of evolution." It will be extremely easy to preach to the kids that creationism is the one that is proved and that evolution is the one which lacks strong evidence. It will be extremely hard to stop too, they'll make sure to follow the letter of the law.
I am now a resident of the certifiably most insane nation in the world
Who exactly is qualified to "certify" nations as sane or insane? I'm going to say that any board of international psychiatry or whoever that would certify the US as the "most insane" rather than North Korea or Iran is certifiably full of shit.
They can. Religious schools are free to do whatever the fuck they want on their own dime.
Taking tax money meant for public education and using it to proselytize? No. Absolutely not. Taxes should not be used for religious purposes. Believe what you want, but pay for it yourself and keep it to yourself.
Teaching Adam and Eve along side of Darwin, implying they're equally credible or even the same subject? No. Absolutely not. That's absurd. Creationism and intelligent design are fundamentally anti-scientific. "The only way to understand any of this is to believe what we tell you" is as far from science as you can get. You may as well teach "intelligent math" in math class and teach kids that 2+2=4, but some people believe that addition is not true, and 2 and 2 will always be 2 and 2, never 4.
Already most students will never consider the evidence for and against evolution on their own, so for them, evolution is already more faith than science. There are a variety of reasons for that. I sincerely think that teaching science and religion in the same breath will confuse them even further. We'll take a giant step back from being a scientific culture, and a giant step toward ignorance.
I feel justified in torrenting all their games for free until I get back what they owe me.
You do mean until you've downloaded $250 retail worth, by Valve, correct? Because while I disagree with the notion that two rights make a wrong, and suspect there's another side to that story, that way would at least be somewhat defensible.
If you're saying you'll download as many games as you want, OR from whichever company you feel like, until steam approaches you with a check saying "Hey guy, we're sorry, that was wrong what we did to you," then you're making flimsy excuses for scummy behavior.
Only a little social engineering can defeat NoScript. Whitelisted sites can become compromised as well.
But your whitelisted sites -should- have a decreased chance of being compromised and infected. Thus it is safer than allowing everything, and more functional than blocking everything.
Honestly I can't understand people who act as if NoScript is a huge security risk or the devil when most people, including myself, would choose "allow all javascripts" if their only options were all or nothing.
Why is it that slashdot goes so quickly to the patent side of things, yet so many people are not lawyers?
And since when has even the appearance of expertise in any given field been a criteria for posting? That's half the fun, chattering off about stuff that we know little about.
My issue was people who aren't lawyers, why is their first thought "OMG PATENTS!" instead of "wow, that's really interesting to me as a nerd." Talking outside your area of expertise is fine, I'd have been a hypocrite right there if that was my point.
Those are good reasons why my idea wouldn't work. So thanks for that :-P.
TFA made it sound like the water didn't need to run anywhere, it didn't require steam to be piped in. I was under the impression the samples sat above a pot of water basically, and the steam rose up. Maybe if solid buildup is a problem, one could just wash it with some CLR.
It's fortunate that the the agricultural processes in the developing countries don't produce as much mis-folded proteins as the English one did
What are you talking about? All cells produce misfolded proteins from time to time. Has nothing to do with agriculture methods.
Prions are left over during a normal sterilization of medical instruments in a dentist's office, for example. A solar based heating system could be beneficial in such a sterilization device for steel instruments.
The heat in an autoclave denatures the proteins, killing whatever is in the autoclave. Prions may not be destroyed by autoclaves wiki tells me. However, this IS AN AUTOCLAVE. Just one that works with solar energy rather than plugging into a wall. This will not do anything to prions that other sterilization techniques don't.
Sunlight actually does kill a lot of bacteria, though it's usually because of the UV light. Bacteria generally are less tolerant of UV than we are for a variety of reasons (for one thing, they generally don't have backups of their genes like we do).
They have machinery to repair UV damage to their DNA, but a lot of that is triggered by visible light. I've heard that UV light only, without other wavelengths like visible light, is especially lethal to bacteria. I wonder if a better sterilization method might be a box that let in UV light, but blocked everything else, and mirrors that reflected UV light, concentrating the UV on the box.
Why is it that slashdot goes so quickly to the patent side of things, yet so many people are not lawyers?
Anyway, I'm dubious. Why mess with a bulky, fragile, comparatively costly solar array? Is fire from wood not hot enough? Is it a matter of you'd have to supply a lot of wood?
The fact that civilian aviation experts were able to look at the pictures and say "gee, that's a so-and-so modification to reduce noise" suggests to me that this is hardly top-secret technology
If you had shown a picture of the F-117 Nighthawk (stealth fighter) to an amateur pilot in the 60's, they would have guessed correctly it was designed for stealth... or maybe as some type of elaborate joke, or as a piece of abstract art. That doesn't change the fact that it was secret until the 80's.
I wonder if perhaps the noise reduction and stealth features came at a price of reduced performance.
I've heard the stealth fighter was quite difficult to maneuver compared to other planes at the time, due to it's unique design. One crashed during the test, fortunately the test pilot survived, though with a concussion that ended his flight career.
The U2 spy plane, able to reach altitudes that fighter jets could not, had been so modified that landing it was extremely challenging. From the wiki page:
The U-2's flight controls are designed around the normal flight envelope and altitude that the aircraft was intended to fly in. The controls provide feather-light control response at operational altitude. However, at lower altitudes, the higher air density and lack of a power-assisted control system makes the aircraft very difficult to fly. Control inputs must be extreme to achieve the desired response in flight attitude, and a great deal of physical strength is needed to operate the controls in this manner. The U-2 is very sensitive to crosswinds which, together with its tendency to float over the runway, makes the U-2 notoriously difficult to land. As the aircraft approaches the runway, the cushion of air provided by the high-lift wings in ground effect is so pronounced that the U-2 will not land unless the wing is fully stalled. To assist the pilot, the landing U-2 is paced by a chase car (usually a "souped-up" performance model including a Ford Mustang SSP, Chevrolet Camaro B4C, Pontiac GTO, and the Pontiac G8) with an assistant (another U-2 pilot) who "talks" the pilot down by calling off the declining height of the aircraft in feet as it decreases in airspeed.
I would bet good money that the stealth reduced performance. After all, there's got to be a reason it's not used on -every- helicopter if it works.
Online voters. Vox populi. That's who.
Well THERE'S your problem.
Ah, but see, Sony said it was Anonymous' fault.
Clearly, those evildoers at Anonymous haxored their way into Sony's Apache servers, removed the patches and the firewall, then stole all the credit card information.
(FYI: this post has been sarcastic)
That alone should raise flags.
Yes, but there should already be flags raised when an executive of a corporation say anything to congress. Some of those flags should say "Hey stupid elected official: be skeptical" others should say "citation needed," others should say "Caution: possible scapegoating ahead" and many should say "This corporation is not your constituency."
But of course, those flags don't get raised, so it's probably too much to hope that congress realizes he's full of BS when he's saying obviously untrue things about anonymous.
However, the community here being what it is, it should realize how easily documents can be faked, especially in high level government. No, I'm not saying he isn't legit. I'm saying a paper document proves nothing. The fact this nonsense went on for months should be a red flag at the very least. obama handled this very poorly for someone who had an interest in claiming legitimacy.
The red flag it raises is exactly what TFA is talking about, it's red flags about the people asking the questions. Obama handled this "poorly" if the goal was to prove birthers wrong beyond a shadow of a doubt, but why would that be a goal? It's impossible. That's the point. There is always room for what amounts to faith. Even were there no biased sources for these idiots to find support in, the question would not be settled. Had he released the long form right away, that would have been feeding the trolls. We would have had comments about it being a forgery right from the start. Personally, I think if he can be faulted for answering the birthers now in a way that doesn't involve his middle finger and comments about their parenting. It was an idiotic distraction.
"And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a woosh. It is a woosh deeply rooted in someone not getting a joke online." -MLK