Despite the article's statement, "A Sound of Thunder" really isn't about the politics, it's about a guy who goes back in time to shoot a dinosaur and changes the future. The politics thing is just a convenient way to show the effects of screwing up the timeline.
You know, spammers don't just forge the sender for fun. It's an integral part of their methods of staying a step ahead of being shut down. If you can prevent them from doing it, then you make it that much more difficult to spam. (Of course, we haven't reached that point yet.)
Re:Nuclear energy works!
on
China Goes Nuclear
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· Score: 2, Informative
Energy generation is not the same as electricity generation. The correct stats:
Re:Damned if they do, damned if they don't
on
China Goes Nuclear
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· Score: 1
Why, follow America's lead... by burning fossil fuels (LNG, crude) imported from the Middle East!
You might want to save your antiamerican sentiment for a topic that you know something about. Oil is not used in any significant quantity for electricity generation.
Re:Nuclear energy works!
on
China Goes Nuclear
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· Score: 4, Informative
In the short term, nuclear power is a coal-killer, not a oil-killer -- oil only accounts for something like 2-3% of electricity generation in the US; coal accounts for 50%. In the long term, however. nuclear power can reduce the need for oil. (For instance, it can provide the cheap energy needed to create fuel cells, charge batteries, and other alternative methods of powering vehicles.)
Only the ACLU would try to pretend that posting a bunch of personal information is the same as making a political statement against the government. No wonder they're looked upon as extremist idiots.
But for anyone that cares about their music enough to invest in decent hardware, be it an iPod + SonyNUDES right up to a portable DAT + seperate headphone amp + Sennheiser HD650's, it's certainly *not* an over-estimation.
Yes, I've tried out transcoding music before. I certainly wouldn't do it for music to be played on my home stereo. However, if it takes all that to hear the difference, then it's not bloody awful by any stretch of the imagination. We're talking about a miniature MP3 player here, not a studio setup. Maybe you won't want to transcode it, but under the normal listening conditions for this device, nobody will be able to tell the difference.
If someone without insurance gets into a wreck and is bleeding on the asphalt, they'll take him to the hospital and we do pick up the tab. I'd support getting rid of helmet and seatbelt laws as soon as the policy changes to "if you didn't wear one, no medical help for you."
Those books are still required reading. The list is actually the most challenged books; in other words, if a couple wackos complain about it, it makes the list. It's not like these books are being removed from library shelves in every school. Huckleberry Finn has been challenged over and over for decades.
Try as I might, I can't think of a single example of a G-rated Disney cartoon that has anything more objectionable in it than a live-action PG-13 movie. You want to give an example?
it should be delivered the way music was intended, i.e live.
What an elitist attitude. "The way music was intended?" I think that the thousands of artists who never perform their music live would disagree with your assessment that music is "intended" (whatever that means) to be live. If you put together a song with a synthesizer at home, is it not music?
Those who want to attend concerts should compensate the artist for performing the music for them. Those who would like a CD, or an MP3, or other recorded music should likewise compensate the artist. If somebody decides that their own music is "intended" to be live, that's up to them, but as a blanket statement, that's ridiculous.
Somebody please mod up the parent. I saw a couple articles about this on Google News this morning, and my first thought was "some idiot on Slashdot is going to try to paint this as the Big Mean Republicans stomping on Free Speech." At the very least, people deserve to know that there's more going on than "the first amendment is abolished only for honest people who are not allowed to... protest peacefully on the grass in New York."
You're correct, of course. My issue with the person who posted his "correction" was that his reply was very combative, and yet was asserting something that has just as little evidence as the original statement. Unless somebody can come up with evidence that the distribution is unbalanced -- hard to do, given that quantifying intelligence is very difficult -- the assumption that 50% of people are below average is at least reasonable.
50% of people are NOT dumber than the average person.
Wrong on two counts.
The word "average" does not always refer to the arithmetic mean.
The median may be the same as the mean -- in fact, IQ scores assume a Gaussian distribution of intelligence, which suggests that the median and the mean are the same.
Maybe the statement is not true, but you can't say that for certain.
That's funny, because I hear proponents of nuclear power talk about the waste all the time -- generally, trying to explain to people that it's not nearly as dangerous as is commonly believed, and that there's really not very much of it. The reason why we can't find anywhere to store it is because the anti-nuke people have demonized it to the point that the general public is afraid of it, not because there's a shortage of perfectly good places to put it.
Deterrence is "Dont do this illegal thing or we'll sue you." This is "we know you're going to do illegal things, and we'll let you do them if you give us money to leave you alone. If you don't pay us, we'll break your legs."
Surprise, surprise -- if you completely misrepresent what's happening, you can make anything look bad. If, on the other hand, you were honest, and stated it:
"We know that some of your students are going to engage in copyright infringement. If you pay us a small fee, we can provide you with a
legal means for them to get music, which should drastically reduce the amount of copyright infringement, and thus reduce your exposure for lawsuits"
You'd realize that it has absolutely no relationship to a protection racket at all.
It seemes too me as a waste to use the hydrogen here on earth as a powersource
I've got to admit, I've heard a lot of crazy "we're going to run out of X" statements before, but this has got to be the first time that I've ever heard of someone being afraid of running out of hydrogen.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite the article's statement, "A Sound of Thunder" really isn't about the politics, it's about a guy who goes back in time to shoot a dinosaur and changes the future. The politics thing is just a convenient way to show the effects of screwing up the timeline.
You know, spammers don't just forge the sender for fun. It's an integral part of their methods of staying a step ahead of being shut down. If you can prevent them from doing it, then you make it that much more difficult to spam. (Of course, we haven't reached that point yet.)
Coal 52%
Nuclear 20%
Gas 16%
Hydro 7%
Oil 3%
Non-hydro Renewable 2%
(Source)
In the short term, nuclear power is a coal-killer, not a oil-killer -- oil only accounts for something like 2-3% of electricity generation in the US; coal accounts for 50%. In the long term, however. nuclear power can reduce the need for oil. (For instance, it can provide the cheap energy needed to create fuel cells, charge batteries, and other alternative methods of powering vehicles.)
Only the ACLU would try to pretend that posting a bunch of personal information is the same as making a political statement against the government. No wonder they're looked upon as extremist idiots.
Like he said, people tend to really overestimate the quality loss when transcoding a single time.
If someone without insurance gets into a wreck and is bleeding on the asphalt, they'll take him to the hospital and we do pick up the tab. I'd support getting rid of helmet and seatbelt laws as soon as the policy changes to "if you didn't wear one, no medical help for you."
When I started college, my computer was a 486-33MHz. Any potential thieves would have done better to raid the refrigerator.
Those books are still required reading. The list is actually the most challenged books; in other words, if a couple wackos complain about it, it makes the list. It's not like these books are being removed from library shelves in every school. Huckleberry Finn has been challenged over and over for decades.
Link for the gullible...
Try as I might, I can't think of a single example of a G-rated Disney cartoon that has anything more objectionable in it than a live-action PG-13 movie. You want to give an example?
When will slashdotters quit making completely offtopic comments about 1984?
Those who want to attend concerts should compensate the artist for performing the music for them. Those who would like a CD, or an MP3, or other recorded music should likewise compensate the artist. If somebody decides that their own music is "intended" to be live, that's up to them, but as a blanket statement, that's ridiculous.
Somebody please mod up the parent. I saw a couple articles about this on Google News this morning, and my first thought was "some idiot on Slashdot is going to try to paint this as the Big Mean Republicans stomping on Free Speech." At the very least, people deserve to know that there's more going on than "the first amendment is abolished only for honest people who are not allowed to ... protest peacefully on the grass in New York."
You're correct, of course. My issue with the person who posted his "correction" was that his reply was very combative, and yet was asserting something that has just as little evidence as the original statement. Unless somebody can come up with evidence that the distribution is unbalanced -- hard to do, given that quantifying intelligence is very difficult -- the assumption that 50% of people are below average is at least reasonable.
- The word "average" does not always refer to the arithmetic mean.
- The median may be the same as the mean -- in fact, IQ scores assume a Gaussian distribution of intelligence, which suggests that the median and the mean are the same.
Maybe the statement is not true, but you can't say that for certain.I, for one, am glad that the iPod advertisements have been moved out of the headlines and back into the comments where they belong.