Have you heard about the paralegals and trainee lawyers that are being replaced by robots? Five years ago that would have been an absurd worry, but it's started happening. Just about nobody has noticed yet, and they aren't replacing anyone who already has a job. They're just being used instead of hiring entry level people in a few places. So far quite effectively. (They're optimized for searching out prior relevant legal cases.) Here each robot only replaces a couple of people, but they get results faster, and can search more deeply. So it's already cost effective in certain specialized areas of law.
N.B.: These aren't, and don't attempt to be, full service lawyers, they just do a portion of a low level job that was previously delegated to the cheapest lawyer in the partnership. Or to a paralegal. But the current model is already limiting the flow of people into entry level jobs.
Currently programmers have more to worry about outsourcing. Because programming jobs can be outsourced relatively easily. System administrators, however, have more to worry about from H1Bs. Their jobs are harder to outsource. But increasingly the entry level jobs are being removed from one profession after another. And as robots become more capable, they move into those slots. And each generation of robots improves on the skills of the prior generation, enabling it to successfully tackle a new set of jobs.
If you don't see where this leads...there's little to say.
OTOH, robots currently are dependent on scarce materials. Until this is resolved, their penetration will be limited. This will result in a "civilization" most of whose members have no hope of finding a job, but which depends on certain people investing a lot of time and effort first in becoming skilled, and then in working at a job that can't yet be done by robots. (Do note the yet. And remember that this is an ongoing process...so the job that you train for for years may suddenly disappear.)
I don't know what a just society of that nature would look like, but it's pretty clear that the one we're headed words isn't it.
Sorry, but he's only got half a point. It's true that the inflation of costs in college tuition are way out of hand. It's not true that without loans a student could work part time, support himself, and pay tuition. That was only true for a brief period during the late 1950's and early 1960's. Before that, wide college education was made possible by GI benefits, which have since been cut. Since then the pay for unskilled labor has fallen so low that a 60 hour a week job MAY cover room and board. But 60 hours a week is no part time job.
Now I'll grant that the decline in purchasing power of a minimum wage job was a slow matter, so you can't point to one particular time, and say it happened then. And perhaps in different parts of the country it hasn't gotten as bad as it has in urban areas. I live in an urban area in California. That shapes my view of the world. The state supported colleges have drastically cut their admissions and raised their prices. Foreign students, however, who pay much higher fees, can still get in. Well, I say the schools are state supported, and that's true, but the state support has been cut drastically over the last few decades. So it's not entirely the fault of the colleges. But it's *partially* their fault. And the quality of education in high school, and probably in elementary and middle school, has been dropping drastically. This is partially due to acts of the state department of education, but largely due to policies of the federal government. (And there are some judicial decisions that affect things, and even a state constitutional amendment.)
So it's not a simple problem with a simple solution. The simple fact is that the government should support education of the citizenry, and it doesn't. Cutting student loans would remove one of the masks hiding the fact. To that extent it's a good thing. But that's probably the only way that it's a good thing. If you replaced the student loans with an equally funded scholarship program, then I'd consider it a reasonable approach. But I can't imagine Ron Paul proposing such a thing.
Maybe. That's a defensible reading of the term "prospects", but it's not how I read it. And 400 is a rather small number if what you're doing is a cold e-mail. So I don't think it's the correct reading. I, instead, presume a "prior commercial relationship", if only a phone call. (At 400 he didn't just buy a list of prospects. That would be in the thousands, minimum.)
You don't expel the gas, you compress it. That solves that problem. The unsolved problem is that the larger the gas bag, the greater the air friction, lifting body or not. So contrary winds become harder to deal with (and they're already a big problem).
Hydrogen gives a lot more lift per unit volume than helium, and it's cheaper. So it's an obvious better answer. Unfortunately, it also leaks through nearly anything. (Flammable can pretty much be dealt with. The leakage is a bigger problem.) Then there's the bad PR problem, and people just avoid hydrogen airships. (I wonder how a dirigible with "hot air" would work out. You could use pure Nitrogen as the gas. The bad would need to be a fantastic insulator, but outside of that it shows some promise. But it probably couldn't carry much weight...though if the insulation were good enough you could heat the Nitrogen pretty hot, which would make it lots lighter. Yeah...silly thought. Probably. But Nitrogen *is* lighter than air, if just barely.)
You need to give a bit of thought to system design.
There are only two candidates with a measurable chance of winning. Both owe tremendous amounts of "dues" to large sources of money. (Often nearly equal amounts to both of them.)
You get to vote for: 1) Bought candidate A. 2) Bought candidate B. 3) Someone else with no measurable chance.
O, and there's no way to enforce that the candidate will keep his pledges after he is elected.
And *you* blame the result on the people being greedy? Yes, they are greedy, but that doesn't have much to do with the outcome.
Everybody here seems to be thinking of hermit crabs as being one species. Or at least having identical preferences. This isn't correct. I don't know if any hermit crab would use the shells printed by a makerbot, but certainly there are lots of hermit crabs that wouldn't. For ANY design. It's worse than designing one pair of shoes for all people, and more like designing one pair for all primates.
It's true, though, that some species of hermit crab seem to be willing to adopt any of a wide variety of homes. Those crabs aren't suffering from a dearth of choices. The ones that are suffering are the ones that are choosier. And some are quite choosey. To the point where it's almost guaranteed that any particular pattern wouldn't work for them unless it was custom designed. (And then they might not like the chemical taint.)
There are definitely places where there are shortages of the kinds of shells needed by some kinds of hermit crabs. Some of them are pretty particular about the exact shape of what they move into. (Others, as mentioned above, are pretty much generalists.)
Whether there's a shortage in any particular locale can depend on lots of factors. S.J.Gould in one of his articles mentioned a kind of hermit crab that would only live in the shells of a now (recently) extinct species of mollusk. They were pretty durable shells, but they were wearing out, even so. People didn't seem to be involved in the affair except for documenting it. So this was just another case of normal "evolution in action".
There are actually decent arguments that we should go back to having the Senators represent the states. I'm not aware of ANY decent arguments that this kind of thing should be mandated.
(The primary argument that the Senators should represent the states is that the Senate has gotten in the habit of mandating that the states do something, but not providing any funding to implement the requirement. If you demand that something be done, you ought, at minimum, to be required to pay for it's being done.)
If it goes a little faster, it will move to a slightly higher orbit, and rotate more slowly. Wait for the place you're aiming for to catch up. Slow down, to move as fast as it does. You'll probably need tethers to do the final orbital adjustment, but by then your speed difference should be in the inches/minute range. (The tether is because it's quite difficult to exactly align in position and velocity in all three dimensions. But you want to get really close before you touch. Think of it as a flexible docking collar, without the air seal.)
This seems like a perfect job for an ion rocket. It's close enough to the sun to use solar power. There's no rush. And things are not only in a stable position already, they'll stay in stable positions along the entire trajectory. You would, however, want to use an advanced model that can operate without special fuels. (Use a laser to evaporate some of the metal from the thing you're moving, and accelerate that as your exhaust. Probably hasn't been built yet, because this is a new situation, but it's a pretty straight-forward adaptation of the current models. Think of it as a nano-scale mass-driver.)
Yes, that's a mathematical model of science. But it doesn't become science until it makes a prediction that is then tested against the physical world. And it's the complete process that's science, not any one piece of it.
Thus, String Theory is mathematics that is endeavoring to become science. Some parts of String Theory have become science. Failed science, as the predictions were not validated, but still science. Other parts of it can't yet be tested.
Science requires BOTH the prediction of a previously unpredicted phenomenon AND the test in the external world to find that phenomenon. It's science whether it is validated or refuted. It's not science until it is tested.
This has run into problems because of many theories predicting things which are "testable in theory, but not currently", which has caused people to fuzz their definitions to not require that theories be tested. But to fuzz that boundary removes the distinction between science and religion. With all the problems that that brings. If you can't test it, it's not science. If you can, but don't test it, it's not science.
Mathematical models are quite important, but they are not science, but only a tool that can be used to produce science. And they aren't sufficient in and of themselves.
PARTS of computer science are science. Parts are math. Where I went to school the science parts were emphasized in the EE department, and the math parts in the math part. I suspect that by now "Computer Science" has become it's own department, but the name is not the thing.
FWIW, mathematical modeling isn't science. It's quite important, but it isn't science until it's tested against a physical environment to determine whether the predictions are correct.
This is a bit nit-picky, but too many people seem to be forgetting it, and the distinction is extremely important.
It's closely related. The only difference that I see is that the Catholic Church has a long history of shielding priests from any consequences.
But the current wave of hysteria around "child molesters" is way out of hand and beyond all reason. They do exist, and they should be stopped. But a wide definition of what "child molestation" consists of isn't helpful, and is corrupting society. It's a part of the "think of the children" theme that Congress has been pushing to get coercive laws passed. Some people would like to extend it to just looking at a kid. Where the reasonable boundary is, is a quite difficult question. But having it be too broad is worse than not having any laws at all. And since there isn't an actual sharp edged boundary, you can't come to a reasonable agreement for a legal boundary. Anything you pick will be arbitrary.
But really, forbidding parents to take pictures of their own infants when nude! That's totally bat-shit crazy.
Could I just point out that this is a relatively modern hysteria?
Up through the late 1950's parents routinely took nude pictures of their kids. Very few saw anything wrong with this. Now it's considered a "heinous crime" to do exactly the same thing.
So. I'm much more troubled by the priests reported actions (and in this I would include the taking of pictures of children without their parents consent) AND by the history of the Catholic Church in covering up sexual abuses by the priests than I am by the pictures themselves.
OTOH, I don't know the facts of the case. I have a prejudice to believe them guilty based purely on the historic association between the Catholic Church and coverups in pederasty. That doesn't reasonably prove that they are guilty THIS time.
It depends on how it spreads. If it can spread better by having the infected party up and ambling around infecting others, then it evolves to reduce the symptoms. This is common. But there are other diseases that spread more effectively by rapidly killing the host, and spreading from the corpse.
There's even at least one that spreads by having the infected party behave in a dangerous manner, in hopes of being eaten by the proper predator. (A cat in the example I'm thinking of. Which can only complete it's life cycle inside a feline.)
So. MOST diseases evolve to be less virulent. But by no means all.
Color is mandatory, but volumes are quite low. Most of the time. I.e., except perhaps 3-4 days/year. Those days...well, so far we've often taken the work off-site. (CopyMax or some such.) But print quality is important, especially on the high volume jobs. And they can require double sided printing. Or printing on odd paper sizes.
All of these, except the registration, could be handled adequate on the HP G55 (vintage around 2000) when it was new. The current model, however, is much less flexible, and really dislikes either odd colors of paper or odd sizes. (HP wasn't the only company to have made this wretched decision, though. The OfficeJet 6500+ was the only one that the store could demonstrate would allow itself to be overridden, even if only in draft mode.)
He's kept around half of his campaign promises...if you're generous about what you mean by keeping a promise. And it's largely the wrong half.
You can argue that he was stopped by the Republicans, but if he were serious he could have used his "bully pulpit" to push for what he wanted. He didn't. Largely because what he wanted were things he'd prefer that the public not notice.
You could say that he was guided by public opinion poles...but this is clearly only true when they say what he wants to hear.
The best you can say about him is that Bush was worse, and Palin probably would have been. I don't think that Nixon was worse...and I thought Nixon should have been crucified in a public square for betrayal of the constitution.
It doesn't need a watchdog, it needs deconstruction. It's a centralization of power without accountability, and such almost always leads to corruption. Spam, itself, is one example of this. But to fight corruption with more corruption is the wrong answer. Spamhaus is the wrong answer. I'd sooner use whitelisting. (Greylisting is better. And a combination of whitelisting and greylisting better yet.)
But Spamhaus is the wrong answer. It has become corrupt long since. And it's *because* it's a source of power without accountability.
I think it uses PCL, though I'm not sure. The OfficeJet uses a standard Linux driver. The problem is in some internal firmware that detects the color of the paper and has decided that white is the only proper color. That's why draft mode works...because in draft mode that sensor is turned off.
But space is tight, so I really need a combination printer/scanner. And I haven't heard anything good about the color laser printers. (Huge power consumption, lots of noise, environmental contamination with small particulates, etc.) So I'm avoiding them.
Space is tight, and printing needs are quite light, so those huge monster printers are silly overkill. OTOH, I do want something sturdy. Something like the HP OfficeJet all-in-one G55 of a decade or so ago. I've still got one in operation, but it's paper feed is broken and repair appears impossible. (Mechanic can't get parts.) Also it doesn't have USB ports, but only a Cannon serial connection. And I want it to be networkable. Scanning over the network would be quite desirable.
Cheap? Well, of course I don't want to pay more than I must, but that's NOT the top consideration. It's just that AFAIKT there isn't a decent answer. The current OfficeJet 6500A+ would be a decent answer if it weren't so limited to only using draft.
Well, to be honest I don't need another printer right now. I'm just looking for options for the next time I do. I have not been pleased by what I saw the last time I went looking. So far the answers say I should look at Okidata and Samsung. (Xerox was reported to be too noisy, though otherwise reasonable...but I don't know what model was being referred to.)
Unnh...ICANN is authorized by act of congress. They have a contract with Verisign. So this is a legally authorized monopoly.
You can only "dump it" by refusing to use the *.com and *.org domains. (I *think* org is the second one.) So the question would then be "Who do you want to register your domain with?". Fortunately there are more answers this year than there were a few years ago, and fewer people are even aware what the domain is...but I'm always a bit hesitant when the link is to a domain that I don't expect. Like *.tv or *.ck.
So "dump it" is doable, but it has significant costs.
No it hasn't. You've just become more aware. You can trace deals like this at least as far back as the building of the railroads in the US. I believe that Britain has records of similar hijinks that go back to the middle ages. I'm sure other countries do too. They'd go back further, but corporations were invented during the middle ages. Before then, and even while they were developing, most of the slimy deals were made by individual wealthy people. Corporations didn't really become commonly dominant until after WWI, possibly as late as WWII. Before then the major problem was tycoons. And before them aristocrats.
None of them have ever been worth trusting as classes, though I'll admit that individual people were sometimes trustworthy. But that was unusual. Powerful organizations are not trustworthy. It's not money that corrupts, it's lack of consequences. You see it in corporations, you see it in politicians, you see it in police, you even see it in anonymous e-mail. It's pretty nearly universal. Some individual people avoid corruption. But it isn't what one should expect.
This is why control in civilization should be decentralized. So that people can't create for themselves "spheres of invulnerability". But this goes contrary to what everyone wants, because everyone wants a "safe space", where they can control what happens. This isn't a problem, unless that "safe space" infringes on other people.
P.S.: Anyone know a cell phone that has a white-list option? (I, too, want a safe space. A space where I can decide who is allowed to interrupt me.)
My impression of the Brother linux drives is "lousy!!". The 410jw can't scan over a network, and every system upgrade means TRYING to find out how to reinstall the drivers. It's bad enough that I went out and bought an HP Officejet after buying a new Brother printer. I could get it to scan if attached via USB cable, but not over the network.
OTOH, the HP would only print in draft mode on anything other than bog-standard paper. This is vile as one of my major uses involves printing on colored paper, and another involves printing on card stock. Anybody know of a decent printer/scanner?
That's not the problem with this, though. The problem here is the supernova explosion in Andromeda, where neutrinos and photons arrived here at about the same time. (I forget the exact difference.) If their speeds were any different, then over that distance they shouldn't have arrived at anywhere near the same time. This makes almost all explanations of the time difference detected that don't involve experimental error to be very dubious.
I mean, if neutrinos can cycle into a fourth variety (the "sterile neutrino") that goes faster than light for some reason ("taking a shortcut through the bulk?"), then why did the neutrinos from the supernova arrive at about the same time as the photons? This question can be adapted for any other explanation that I've thought of for neutrinos actually moving faster than light.
OTOH, I don't believe that changing the "fastest particle" to the neutrino instead of the photon would noticably affect relativity. It would just make the tests more difficult. c would then be tied to the speed of the neutrino rather than to that of the photon, and all the other arguments would remain sound. And the speed of the neutrino being so close to that of the photon would probably mean that all the confirming experiments still fell within experimental error. (Of course, there's also the factor that if you accelerate something using electromagnetic forces, you CAN'T get it to move faster than light. And neutrinos would be very poor candidates for something to accelerate something else with.)
There was a version of FireFox recently that had a bad memory leak. I used to need to restart it nearly every other day. That seems to have been fixed, though.
Slashdot Mirror
What you say is true ... today.
Have you heard about the paralegals and trainee lawyers that are being replaced by robots? Five years ago that would have been an absurd worry, but it's started happening. Just about nobody has noticed yet, and they aren't replacing anyone who already has a job. They're just being used instead of hiring entry level people in a few places. So far quite effectively. (They're optimized for searching out prior relevant legal cases.) Here each robot only replaces a couple of people, but they get results faster, and can search more deeply. So it's already cost effective in certain specialized areas of law.
N.B.: These aren't, and don't attempt to be, full service lawyers, they just do a portion of a low level job that was previously delegated to the cheapest lawyer in the partnership. Or to a paralegal. But the current model is already limiting the flow of people into entry level jobs.
Currently programmers have more to worry about outsourcing. Because programming jobs can be outsourced relatively easily. System administrators, however, have more to worry about from H1Bs. Their jobs are harder to outsource. But increasingly the entry level jobs are being removed from one profession after another. And as robots become more capable, they move into those slots. And each generation of robots improves on the skills of the prior generation, enabling it to successfully tackle a new set of jobs.
If you don't see where this leads...there's little to say.
OTOH, robots currently are dependent on scarce materials. Until this is resolved, their penetration will be limited. This will result in a "civilization" most of whose members have no hope of finding a job, but which depends on certain people investing a lot of time and effort first in becoming skilled, and then in working at a job that can't yet be done by robots. (Do note the yet. And remember that this is an ongoing process...so the job that you train for for years may suddenly disappear.)
I don't know what a just society of that nature would look like, but it's pretty clear that the one we're headed words isn't it.
Sorry, but he's only got half a point. It's true that the inflation of costs in college tuition are way out of hand. It's not true that without loans a student could work part time, support himself, and pay tuition. That was only true for a brief period during the late 1950's and early 1960's. Before that, wide college education was made possible by GI benefits, which have since been cut. Since then the pay for unskilled labor has fallen so low that a 60 hour a week job MAY cover room and board. But 60 hours a week is no part time job.
Now I'll grant that the decline in purchasing power of a minimum wage job was a slow matter, so you can't point to one particular time, and say it happened then. And perhaps in different parts of the country it hasn't gotten as bad as it has in urban areas. I live in an urban area in California. That shapes my view of the world. The state supported colleges have drastically cut their admissions and raised their prices. Foreign students, however, who pay much higher fees, can still get in. Well, I say the schools are state supported, and that's true, but the state support has been cut drastically over the last few decades. So it's not entirely the fault of the colleges. But it's *partially* their fault. And the quality of education in high school, and probably in elementary and middle school, has been dropping drastically. This is partially due to acts of the state department of education, but largely due to policies of the federal government. (And there are some judicial decisions that affect things, and even a state constitutional amendment.)
So it's not a simple problem with a simple solution. The simple fact is that the government should support education of the citizenry, and it doesn't. Cutting student loans would remove one of the masks hiding the fact. To that extent it's a good thing. But that's probably the only way that it's a good thing. If you replaced the student loans with an equally funded scholarship program, then I'd consider it a reasonable approach. But I can't imagine Ron Paul proposing such a thing.
Maybe. That's a defensible reading of the term "prospects", but it's not how I read it. And 400 is a rather small number if what you're doing is a cold e-mail. So I don't think it's the correct reading. I, instead, presume a "prior commercial relationship", if only a phone call. (At 400 he didn't just buy a list of prospects. That would be in the thousands, minimum.)
You don't expel the gas, you compress it. That solves that problem. The unsolved problem is that the larger the gas bag, the greater the air friction, lifting body or not. So contrary winds become harder to deal with (and they're already a big problem).
Hydrogen gives a lot more lift per unit volume than helium, and it's cheaper. So it's an obvious better answer. Unfortunately, it also leaks through nearly anything. (Flammable can pretty much be dealt with. The leakage is a bigger problem.) Then there's the bad PR problem, and people just avoid hydrogen airships. (I wonder how a dirigible with "hot air" would work out. You could use pure Nitrogen as the gas. The bad would need to be a fantastic insulator, but outside of that it shows some promise. But it probably couldn't carry much weight...though if the insulation were good enough you could heat the Nitrogen pretty hot, which would make it lots lighter. Yeah...silly thought. Probably. But Nitrogen *is* lighter than air, if just barely.)
You need to give a bit of thought to system design.
There are only two candidates with a measurable chance of winning. Both owe tremendous amounts of "dues" to large sources of money. (Often nearly equal amounts to both of them.)
You get to vote for:
1) Bought candidate A.
2) Bought candidate B.
3) Someone else with no measurable chance.
O, and there's no way to enforce that the candidate will keep his pledges after he is elected.
And *you* blame the result on the people being greedy? Yes, they are greedy, but that doesn't have much to do with the outcome.
Everybody here seems to be thinking of hermit crabs as being one species. Or at least having identical preferences. This isn't correct. I don't know if any hermit crab would use the shells printed by a makerbot, but certainly there are lots of hermit crabs that wouldn't. For ANY design. It's worse than designing one pair of shoes for all people, and more like designing one pair for all primates.
It's true, though, that some species of hermit crab seem to be willing to adopt any of a wide variety of homes. Those crabs aren't suffering from a dearth of choices. The ones that are suffering are the ones that are choosier. And some are quite choosey. To the point where it's almost guaranteed that any particular pattern wouldn't work for them unless it was custom designed. (And then they might not like the chemical taint.)
There are definitely places where there are shortages of the kinds of shells needed by some kinds of hermit crabs. Some of them are pretty particular about the exact shape of what they move into. (Others, as mentioned above, are pretty much generalists.)
Whether there's a shortage in any particular locale can depend on lots of factors. S.J.Gould in one of his articles mentioned a kind of hermit crab that would only live in the shells of a now (recently) extinct species of mollusk. They were pretty durable shells, but they were wearing out, even so. People didn't seem to be involved in the affair except for documenting it. So this was just another case of normal "evolution in action".
There are actually decent arguments that we should go back to having the Senators represent the states. I'm not aware of ANY decent arguments that this kind of thing should be mandated.
(The primary argument that the Senators should represent the states is that the Senate has gotten in the habit of mandating that the states do something, but not providing any funding to implement the requirement. If you demand that something be done, you ought, at minimum, to be required to pay for it's being done.)
Why would they be in a hurry?
If it goes a little faster, it will move to a slightly higher orbit, and rotate more slowly. Wait for the place you're aiming for to catch up. Slow down, to move as fast as it does. You'll probably need tethers to do the final orbital adjustment, but by then your speed difference should be in the inches/minute range. (The tether is because it's quite difficult to exactly align in position and velocity in all three dimensions. But you want to get really close before you touch. Think of it as a flexible docking collar, without the air seal.)
This seems like a perfect job for an ion rocket. It's close enough to the sun to use solar power. There's no rush. And things are not only in a stable position already, they'll stay in stable positions along the entire trajectory. You would, however, want to use an advanced model that can operate without special fuels. (Use a laser to evaporate some of the metal from the thing you're moving, and accelerate that as your exhaust. Probably hasn't been built yet, because this is a new situation, but it's a pretty straight-forward adaptation of the current models. Think of it as a nano-scale mass-driver.)
Yes, that's a mathematical model of science. But it doesn't become science until it makes a prediction that is then tested against the physical world. And it's the complete process that's science, not any one piece of it.
Thus, String Theory is mathematics that is endeavoring to become science. Some parts of String Theory have become science. Failed science, as the predictions were not validated, but still science. Other parts of it can't yet be tested.
Science requires BOTH the prediction of a previously unpredicted phenomenon AND the test in the external world to find that phenomenon. It's science whether it is validated or refuted. It's not science until it is tested.
This has run into problems because of many theories predicting things which are "testable in theory, but not currently", which has caused people to fuzz their definitions to not require that theories be tested. But to fuzz that boundary removes the distinction between science and religion. With all the problems that that brings. If you can't test it, it's not science. If you can, but don't test it, it's not science.
Mathematical models are quite important, but they are not science, but only a tool that can be used to produce science. And they aren't sufficient in and of themselves.
PARTS of computer science are science. Parts are math. Where I went to school the science parts were emphasized in the EE department, and the math parts in the math part. I suspect that by now "Computer Science" has become it's own department, but the name is not the thing.
FWIW, mathematical modeling isn't science. It's quite important, but it isn't science until it's tested against a physical environment to determine whether the predictions are correct.
This is a bit nit-picky, but too many people seem to be forgetting it, and the distinction is extremely important.
It's closely related. The only difference that I see is that the Catholic Church has a long history of shielding priests from any consequences.
But the current wave of hysteria around "child molesters" is way out of hand and beyond all reason. They do exist, and they should be stopped. But a wide definition of what "child molestation" consists of isn't helpful, and is corrupting society. It's a part of the "think of the children" theme that Congress has been pushing to get coercive laws passed. Some people would like to extend it to just looking at a kid. Where the reasonable boundary is, is a quite difficult question. But having it be too broad is worse than not having any laws at all. And since there isn't an actual sharp edged boundary, you can't come to a reasonable agreement for a legal boundary. Anything you pick will be arbitrary.
But really, forbidding parents to take pictures of their own infants when nude! That's totally bat-shit crazy.
Could I just point out that this is a relatively modern hysteria?
Up through the late 1950's parents routinely took nude pictures of their kids. Very few saw anything wrong with this. Now it's considered a "heinous crime" to do exactly the same thing.
So. I'm much more troubled by the priests reported actions (and in this I would include the taking of pictures of children without their parents consent) AND by the history of the Catholic Church in covering up sexual abuses by the priests than I am by the pictures themselves.
OTOH, I don't know the facts of the case. I have a prejudice to believe them guilty based purely on the historic association between the Catholic Church and coverups in pederasty. That doesn't reasonably prove that they are guilty THIS time.
It depends on how it spreads. If it can spread better by having the infected party up and ambling around infecting others, then it evolves to reduce the symptoms. This is common. But there are other diseases that spread more effectively by rapidly killing the host, and spreading from the corpse.
There's even at least one that spreads by having the infected party behave in a dangerous manner, in hopes of being eaten by the proper predator. (A cat in the example I'm thinking of. Which can only complete it's life cycle inside a feline.)
So. MOST diseases evolve to be less virulent. But by no means all.
Color is mandatory, but volumes are quite low. Most of the time. I.e., except perhaps 3-4 days/year. Those days...well, so far we've often taken the work off-site. (CopyMax or some such.) But print quality is important, especially on the high volume jobs. And they can require double sided printing. Or printing on odd paper sizes.
All of these, except the registration, could be handled adequate on the HP G55 (vintage around 2000) when it was new. The current model, however, is much less flexible, and really dislikes either odd colors of paper or odd sizes. (HP wasn't the only company to have made this wretched decision, though. The OfficeJet 6500+ was the only one that the store could demonstrate would allow itself to be overridden, even if only in draft mode.)
He's kept around half of his campaign promises...if you're generous about what you mean by keeping a promise. And it's largely the wrong half.
You can argue that he was stopped by the Republicans, but if he were serious he could have used his "bully pulpit" to push for what he wanted. He didn't. Largely because what he wanted were things he'd prefer that the public not notice.
You could say that he was guided by public opinion poles...but this is clearly only true when they say what he wants to hear.
The best you can say about him is that Bush was worse, and Palin probably would have been. I don't think that Nixon was worse...and I thought Nixon should have been crucified in a public square for betrayal of the constitution.
It doesn't need a watchdog, it needs deconstruction. It's a centralization of power without accountability, and such almost always leads to corruption. Spam, itself, is one example of this. But to fight corruption with more corruption is the wrong answer. Spamhaus is the wrong answer. I'd sooner use whitelisting. (Greylisting is better. And a combination of whitelisting and greylisting better yet.)
But Spamhaus is the wrong answer. It has become corrupt long since. And it's *because* it's a source of power without accountability.
Ah, you say you work for Spamhaus?
I think it uses PCL, though I'm not sure. The OfficeJet uses a standard Linux driver. The problem is in some internal firmware that detects the color of the paper and has decided that white is the only proper color. That's why draft mode works...because in draft mode that sensor is turned off.
But space is tight, so I really need a combination printer/scanner. And I haven't heard anything good about the color laser printers. (Huge power consumption, lots of noise, environmental contamination with small particulates, etc.) So I'm avoiding them.
Space is tight, and printing needs are quite light, so those huge monster printers are silly overkill. OTOH, I do want something sturdy. Something like the HP OfficeJet all-in-one G55 of a decade or so ago. I've still got one in operation, but it's paper feed is broken and repair appears impossible. (Mechanic can't get parts.) Also it doesn't have USB ports, but only a Cannon serial connection. And I want it to be networkable. Scanning over the network would be quite desirable.
Cheap? Well, of course I don't want to pay more than I must, but that's NOT the top consideration. It's just that AFAIKT there isn't a decent answer. The current OfficeJet 6500A+ would be a decent answer if it weren't so limited to only using draft.
Well, to be honest I don't need another printer right now. I'm just looking for options for the next time I do. I have not been pleased by what I saw the last time I went looking. So far the answers say I should look at Okidata and Samsung. (Xerox was reported to be too noisy, though otherwise reasonable...but I don't know what model was being referred to.)
Unnh...ICANN is authorized by act of congress. They have a contract with Verisign. So this is a legally authorized monopoly.
You can only "dump it" by refusing to use the *.com and *.org domains. (I *think* org is the second one.) So the question would then be "Who do you want to register your domain with?". Fortunately there are more answers this year than there were a few years ago, and fewer people are even aware what the domain is...but I'm always a bit hesitant when the link is to a domain that I don't expect. Like *.tv or *.ck.
So "dump it" is doable, but it has significant costs.
No it hasn't. You've just become more aware. You can trace deals like this at least as far back as the building of the railroads in the US. I believe that Britain has records of similar hijinks that go back to the middle ages. I'm sure other countries do too. They'd go back further, but corporations were invented during the middle ages. Before then, and even while they were developing, most of the slimy deals were made by individual wealthy people. Corporations didn't really become commonly dominant until after WWI, possibly as late as WWII. Before then the major problem was tycoons. And before them aristocrats.
None of them have ever been worth trusting as classes, though I'll admit that individual people were sometimes trustworthy. But that was unusual. Powerful organizations are not trustworthy. It's not money that corrupts, it's lack of consequences. You see it in corporations, you see it in politicians, you see it in police, you even see it in anonymous e-mail. It's pretty nearly universal. Some individual people avoid corruption. But it isn't what one should expect.
This is why control in civilization should be decentralized. So that people can't create for themselves "spheres of invulnerability". But this goes contrary to what everyone wants, because everyone wants a "safe space", where they can control what happens. This isn't a problem, unless that "safe space" infringes on other people.
P.S.: Anyone know a cell phone that has a white-list option? (I, too, want a safe space. A space where I can decide who is allowed to interrupt me.)
My impression of the Brother linux drives is "lousy!!". The 410jw can't scan over a network, and every system upgrade means TRYING to find out how to reinstall the drivers. It's bad enough that I went out and bought an HP Officejet after buying a new Brother printer. I could get it to scan if attached via USB cable, but not over the network.
OTOH, the HP would only print in draft mode on anything other than bog-standard paper. This is vile as one of my major uses involves printing on colored paper, and another involves printing on card stock. Anybody know of a decent printer/scanner?
That's not the problem with this, though. The problem here is the supernova explosion in Andromeda, where neutrinos and photons arrived here at about the same time. (I forget the exact difference.) If their speeds were any different, then over that distance they shouldn't have arrived at anywhere near the same time. This makes almost all explanations of the time difference detected that don't involve experimental error to be very dubious.
I mean, if neutrinos can cycle into a fourth variety (the "sterile neutrino") that goes faster than light for some reason ("taking a shortcut through the bulk?"), then why did the neutrinos from the supernova arrive at about the same time as the photons? This question can be adapted for any other explanation that I've thought of for neutrinos actually moving faster than light.
OTOH, I don't believe that changing the "fastest particle" to the neutrino instead of the photon would noticably affect relativity. It would just make the tests more difficult. c would then be tied to the speed of the neutrino rather than to that of the photon, and all the other arguments would remain sound. And the speed of the neutrino being so close to that of the photon would probably mean that all the confirming experiments still fell within experimental error. (Of course, there's also the factor that if you accelerate something using electromagnetic forces, you CAN'T get it to move faster than light. And neutrinos would be very poor candidates for something to accelerate something else with.)
There was a version of FireFox recently that had a bad memory leak. I used to need to restart it nearly every other day. That seems to have been fixed, though.