The standards of proof aren't different for violations of restraining orders, i.e. the accused needs to be guilty beyond reasonable doubt. And accidentally breaking a restraining-order is acceptable. Even if you're not allowed to go near someone, you won't get punished for -accidentally- running into them, nor if you couldn't reasonably know it was them.
I agree it's too early -- if he actually follows up on the path he's started, I'd say he deserves it, but we ain't seen that yet.
That said, he *has* done a lot as to improve relations between the middle east and USA, and seeing as that's among the conflicts in the world today with the greatest damaging potential, defusing them IS worth a peace-prize.
If you watched Obamas speach in Kairo (it's easily googlable), there's a LIGHTYEAR between that and the rhetoric of "axis of evil".
But talk is cheap. I'd want to see -results- before handing out any price, myself.
Perpetum mobile isn't invensted, and won't be anytime soon. First creating, then using antimatter is always going to give you back less than what you started with.
Current production-methods aren't just giving "less" they're giving MANY orders of magnitude less. It's a question of using hundreds of megajoules, and get a few joules back. CERN can produce 10^7 atoms of anti-hydrogen a second, for example, this sounds like a lot, but at that rate it'd take them 2 billion years to produce a single gram.
Offcourse, the longest anyone has managed to store anti-hydrogen is aproximately 20 seconds anyway.
I've never understood what's so cool about grading-systems where a large portion of the clever students score identically, like the "A" to "F" system that is terribly popular, despite in many cases being used such that the best third of the students or somehting all get an A.
How do you use that for selecting the best 10% Or the best 5% of the students ? You can't, which nullifies one of the points of having grades at all.
The grades here are bell-curved, there's also only 6 grades, but the curve is such that the best 3% get top grade, the next 15% the second-best etc. The end-result is that everyone has something to stretch after because NOBODY has a top grade in everything, even having the top grade in half your subjects is exceedingly rare. (as in perhaps 1 student in 1000 manage it)
metacritic already does that; they normalize all reviews to a 0-100 scale, and then average them to get a meta-score. (It's sligthly more complicated than this in practice, because it's a weigthed average, some review-sites count more than others, but that's the gist of it)
Good question, especially one which uses it's weapons in a situation where they -arent- on the edge of total annihilation. Remind me again, how close to the capital where the enemies soldiers when those nukes where used ?
And was the war almost-lost when the bombs where set off ? Or was there a reasonable chance of winning, even without using them ?
True, but on the other hand, advantages in networking and storage-mediums mean that keeping around a few copies of old data becomes more and more trivial.
I have a lot of data that once was stored on CD-roms, around 100 of them, 3 copies each, it was a major hassle to redo one of the copies after 3 years.
After 6 years, DVDs where around, so stopped using 3*100 CD-roms, but instead used 3*10 DVDs, a major improvement.
After 9 years, 50GB was small enough that it fit easily on a small fraction of a HD, so I switched to having one copy online on my desktop-machine, and one copy on an external-HD that I stored offsite.
Now ? 50GB is a trivial amount of data, it takes up 3% of a single HD, and the network has evolved to the point where I can do the offsite-copy to a online file-storage-service available at nominal cost.
What used to be a major hassle maintaining, because the data was so large it needed several hundred physical discs, is now a trivial amount of data, if I still wanted to archive it on optical discs, it would fit on a single one (Isn't blueray 50GB ? Something of that order anyway)
It is solved, it's just that USA is held back by a braindead telecom-structure, this is political barrier not a technological one.
Here in Norway, I've got 4-5 different technologies to choose from, that all trump what you've got. First there's ADSL and ADSL2, the former ain't much better than what you've got, stopping at around 2M/512kbit, but ADSL2 is available up to something like 10M/1M, which is already a significant improvement.
With similar speed, there's mobile broadband, 2-3Mbps download and 500kbps upload, it's got worse latency though so no good for gaming. (but nice in working also when you're traveling)
Then there's internet-over-coax, i.e. alongside cable-tv, this offers speeds up to 50Mbps, though the most popular offering is 3.5 or 7Mbps.
And if none of that will satisfy you, get fibre-to-the-basement with physical capacity for several Gbit/s, but actually offering internet-speeds of up to 100M/100M (i.e. symetrical) to private homes at the moment, the lack of higher speeds offerings if from lack of demand though, not because of any technological restrictions on the last mile.
Most people settle for something in the 3M to 10M range, though, I've got fibre, and that's the most popular solution, but even a 2-nerd household like mine don't really have a reason for more than 25M/25M, so that's what we have.
The same technologies would work fine in USA too -- if only the political barriers of the entrenched telecom-monopolies where removed.
It's silly to warn against everything, even dangers that aren't out of the ordinary though, because the end-result is just that people learn to ignore warnings, making them useless for the situations where they're actually warranted.
Why do my mobile phone require a "do not microwave" sticker ? Why does the antenna for my wlan have big scary red-yellow DANGER label, complete with triangle and skull saying "risk of DEATH", and when you read more carefully, the actual danger is, the thing consists of conductive metal, if you where to stand on your roof (say when mounting the thing), hold one end and poke the OTHER end at uninsulated mains voltage, you could get an electric shock.
You should warn against things that are more dangerous than they appear, or risks that are elevated. It's not out of the ordinary for a 2-feet piece of metal to be electrically conductive, you don't need to -warn- about that.
The current conflicts -are- less deadly than any of the world-wars. You're right to drag up Congo though, that's the bloodiest war by far from these last decades, and it's been severly underreported, mostly completely ignored.
Nevertheless, there's likely never been a period in human history where your odds of dying from violent conflict was LOWER than it's been these last 50 years.
So we can't just say X is dangerous. Or X is safe, and then generalize to ANY use of X.
In this case, "Standing 50cm from a source of 1000W microwaves is dangerous, therefore garlic grown 100m from a 1W microwave-source will be damaged" is comparing two situations where the power-output is a factor of 1000 smaller, whereas the distance is 200 times larger. And intensity goes with the square of the distance.
So you're comparing X to 40.000.000 X, aproximately, and that's just nonsense.
You know what ? That's a fine argument, far as it goes, but it's not a very good justification for slaving away hundreds of hours in school, mandatory learning of it.
But everything is lethal in the right dosis, so that's an absurd statement.
Drinking water is generally considered safe, despite the fact that a few gallons drunk quickly may very well kill you (and people do die from drinking too much water on occasion)
Oh really ? "A lot of" kids that are "otherwise healthy" are dropping dead in gym classes, from cardiac arrest ?
That claim is pretty far out there, as such it's going to require pretty serious support. What's your source(s) for this piece of astonishing information ?
There's more people capable of reasonable English today than at any point in the past. Because foreign-language education is so much more widespread, there's today a billion people or something whose first language is not english, but who nevertheless knows it to varying degrees. For me personally, English is my third language. (after Norwegian and German)
It's easy in an online setting, such as on Slashdot, to forget that many are non-natives. My english would be considered sub-average if I where a native, true, and I make some elementary mistakes, such as messing up light and ligth. Nevertheless my english is a lot better than the english of the average Norwegian a generation ago. (both my parents also learnt english in school, but different from this generation, they then proceeded to never use it for anything, and 30 years of non-use will deteriorate a language a lot.)
I generally get up around 6am, and start at 8. (the two hours before are spent taking a shower, eating breakfast with my family, dress and prepare my 3 kids and bring them to childcare, then head to work.
By 2pm, I've been busy for 8 hours straight. I generally don't bother taking a nap, since workday is over by 4 in the normal case anyway. But I can tell you I'm definitely less efficient those last couple of hours.
Actually you can't.
Not if the stamp is a digital signature of the message. checking signatures for validity is somewhat heavy work for mailservers though, but cpu isn't getting any more expensive, so I guess that could work.
No, that doesn't follow. Anyone with even a bit of physics knows more than Newton ever did, that doesn't mean that he is today universally considered an idiot.
It's worse than that. They say 4 out of 5 parents have at *some* time been stomped by some science-question of their child. And also that the top questions are those mentioned.
That doesn't imply that 4 out of 5 parents are stomped by any of *those* questions. I've got a 5 year old, and sure I've had -many- questions I don't know the answer to. I generally respond by some variant of "I don't know, but let's find out together".
Why -does- starch work as a lubricant ? What -is- that insect named ? How much can an elephant weigh ? Sure I can eyeball some of it, but I don't -know- the answer precisely.
Then again, that's not really science. That's just facts. Science is a method, not a set of facts.
And it makes the differences even more dramatic than they seem.
When "official" numbers say 15%, the real unemployment is likely much higher, because under those circumstances it's likely that a lot of people become disillusioned and just stop actively searching for a job, which will cause them to drop out of the statistics. Other people decide to stay in education for a year or two longer, even though they'd -really- like a job, those people ALSO don't count as unemployed in the statistics. Neither does housewifes which *would* have started applying for jobs -- if they thought they would get one, but they don't, so they don't.
When "official" numbers say 1%, on the other hand, the oposite effect is in force: when the job market is that good, a lot of people apply for jobs who otherwise wouldn't. For example some people stop studying earlier then planned, because they're offered a well-paying job.
Similarily, some people are really "unemployable" rather than "unemployed", we tried hiring 2 "unemployed" people in that period for example, for a simple job as receptionist. Neither of them where capable of actually regularily showing up at work aproximately at the correct time, such people are more correctly labeled something other than "unemployed", atleast lack of available jobs isn't their main problem.
It's infact very moderate, I think the latest number was 3%, but that's somewhat up from what we had at the time unemployment was lowest, a year ago aproximately, unemployment was at 1% and inflation at 1.5% or something like that.
When the map fails to match the terrain, it's sorta silly to blame the terrain.
If that was it, we'd require bussiness-owners to be responsible for the debts of their bussiness with their entire personal net worth.
But we don't. We invent corporations, and allow people to take *limited* risk, i.e. if you invest in a corporation, you can end up losing every cent you invested -- but not more than that.
We do this because we think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. There's no "natural" right to borrow money, not repay them, and let the lender sit on the loss, while your personal money (except for that portion you invested in the bussiness) is untouched.
I looked, Norway which I was thinking of actually has 3% unemployment now, it's been rising somewhat since last I looked. Still, I said it's more than 2% now, and that's true enough.
Inflation in Norway has been stable and low for as long as I can remember, the last few years it's been in the 1% to 3% range a year, which is perfectly fine.
It's true that 0.8% probably isn't long-time sustainable, that was the minimum rate we had, and it *was* sufficiently low to make it hard to hire qualified people.
2-4% is perfectly normal here though, and I don't see any signs at all of that being unsustainable.
Uhm, did you try comparing that map of yours to the actual terrain ?
Yeah, unemployment is up here, in that part of europe with the highest education (Scandinavia), why we're at above 2% now, which is a lot more than the comfortable 0.8% we used to enjoy prior to the current crisis.
You're right. The sensible thing to do, when you notice the one you're debating with has changed his position is offering him a way out. That assumes you notice it in the first place, offcourse.
Slashdot Mirror
Judges aren't (universally) idiots.
The standards of proof aren't different for violations of restraining orders, i.e. the accused needs to be guilty beyond reasonable doubt. And accidentally breaking a restraining-order is acceptable. Even if you're not allowed to go near someone, you won't get punished for -accidentally- running into them, nor if you couldn't reasonably know it was them.
I agree it's too early -- if he actually follows up on the path he's started, I'd say he deserves it, but we ain't seen that yet.
That said, he *has* done a lot as to improve relations between the middle east and USA, and seeing as that's among the conflicts in the world today with the greatest damaging potential, defusing them IS worth a peace-prize.
If you watched Obamas speach in Kairo (it's easily googlable), there's a LIGHTYEAR between that and the rhetoric of "axis of evil".
But talk is cheap. I'd want to see -results- before handing out any price, myself.
"may" ?
Perpetum mobile isn't invensted, and won't be anytime soon. First creating, then using antimatter is always going to give you back less than what you started with.
Current production-methods aren't just giving "less" they're giving MANY orders of magnitude less. It's a question of using hundreds of megajoules, and get a few joules back. CERN can produce 10^7 atoms of anti-hydrogen a second, for example, this sounds like a lot, but at that rate it'd take them 2 billion years to produce a single gram.
Offcourse, the longest anyone has managed to store anti-hydrogen is aproximately 20 seconds anyway.
Indeed !
I've never understood what's so cool about grading-systems where a large portion of the clever students score identically, like the "A" to "F" system that is terribly popular, despite in many cases being used such that the best third of the students or somehting all get an A.
How do you use that for selecting the best 10% Or the best 5% of the students ? You can't, which nullifies one of the points of having grades at all.
The grades here are bell-curved, there's also only 6 grades, but the curve is such that the best 3% get top grade, the next 15% the second-best etc. The end-result is that everyone has something to stretch after because NOBODY has a top grade in everything, even having the top grade in half your subjects is exceedingly rare. (as in perhaps 1 student in 1000 manage it)
metacritic already does that; they normalize all reviews to a 0-100 scale, and then average them to get a meta-score. (It's sligthly more complicated than this in practice, because it's a weigthed average, some review-sites count more than others, but that's the gist of it)
It's indeed a clever and useful thing to do.
Good question, especially one which uses it's weapons in a situation where they -arent- on the edge of total annihilation. Remind me again, how close to the capital where the enemies soldiers when those nukes where used ?
And was the war almost-lost when the bombs where set off ? Or was there a reasonable chance of winning, even without using them ?
True, but on the other hand, advantages in networking and storage-mediums mean that keeping around a few copies of old data becomes more and more trivial.
I have a lot of data that once was stored on CD-roms, around 100 of them, 3 copies each, it was a major hassle to redo one of the copies after 3 years.
After 6 years, DVDs where around, so stopped using 3*100 CD-roms, but instead used 3*10 DVDs, a major improvement.
After 9 years, 50GB was small enough that it fit easily on a small fraction of a HD, so I switched to having one copy online on my desktop-machine, and one copy on an external-HD that I stored offsite.
Now ? 50GB is a trivial amount of data, it takes up 3% of a single HD, and the network has evolved to the point where I can do the offsite-copy to a online file-storage-service available at nominal cost.
What used to be a major hassle maintaining, because the data was so large it needed several hundred physical discs, is now a trivial amount of data, if I still wanted to archive it on optical discs, it would fit on a single one (Isn't blueray 50GB ? Something of that order anyway)
It is solved, it's just that USA is held back by a braindead telecom-structure, this is political barrier not a technological one.
Here in Norway, I've got 4-5 different technologies to choose from, that all trump what you've got. First there's ADSL and ADSL2, the former ain't much better than what you've got, stopping at around 2M/512kbit, but ADSL2 is available up to something like 10M/1M, which is already a significant improvement.
With similar speed, there's mobile broadband, 2-3Mbps download and 500kbps upload, it's got worse latency though so no good for gaming. (but nice in working also when you're traveling)
Then there's internet-over-coax, i.e. alongside cable-tv, this offers speeds up to 50Mbps, though the most popular offering is 3.5 or 7Mbps.
And if none of that will satisfy you, get fibre-to-the-basement with physical capacity for several Gbit/s, but actually offering internet-speeds of up to 100M/100M (i.e. symetrical) to private homes at the moment, the lack of higher speeds offerings if from lack of demand though, not because of any technological restrictions on the last mile.
Most people settle for something in the 3M to 10M range, though, I've got fibre, and that's the most popular solution, but even a 2-nerd household like mine don't really have a reason for more than 25M/25M, so that's what we have.
The same technologies would work fine in USA too -- if only the political barriers of the entrenched telecom-monopolies where removed.
It's silly to warn against everything, even dangers that aren't out of the ordinary though, because the end-result is just that people learn to ignore warnings, making them useless for the situations where they're actually warranted.
Why do my mobile phone require a "do not microwave" sticker ? Why does the antenna for my wlan have big scary red-yellow DANGER label, complete with triangle and skull saying "risk of DEATH", and when you read more carefully, the actual danger is, the thing consists of conductive metal, if you where to stand on your roof (say when mounting the thing), hold one end and poke the OTHER end at uninsulated mains voltage, you could get an electric shock.
You should warn against things that are more dangerous than they appear, or risks that are elevated. It's not out of the ordinary for a 2-feet piece of metal to be electrically conductive, you don't need to -warn- about that.
The current conflicts -are- less deadly than any of the world-wars. You're right to drag up Congo though, that's the bloodiest war by far from these last decades, and it's been severly underreported, mostly completely ignored.
Nevertheless, there's likely never been a period in human history where your odds of dying from violent conflict was LOWER than it's been these last 50 years.
Yes. Exactly !
So we can't just say X is dangerous. Or X is safe, and then generalize to ANY use of X.
In this case, "Standing 50cm from a source of 1000W microwaves is dangerous, therefore garlic grown 100m from a 1W microwave-source will be damaged" is comparing two situations where the power-output is a factor of 1000 smaller, whereas the distance is 200 times larger. And intensity goes with the square of the distance.
So you're comparing X to 40.000.000 X, aproximately, and that's just nonsense.
Yeah sure; It's valuable -because- it's hella impractical.
You know what ? That's a fine argument, far as it goes, but it's not a very good justification for slaving away hundreds of hours in school, mandatory learning of it.
But everything is lethal in the right dosis, so that's an absurd statement.
Drinking water is generally considered safe, despite the fact that a few gallons drunk quickly may very well kill you (and people do die from drinking too much water on occasion)
Oh really ? "A lot of" kids that are "otherwise healthy" are dropping dead in gym classes, from cardiac arrest ?
That claim is pretty far out there, as such it's going to require pretty serious support. What's your source(s) for this piece of astonishing information ?
The opposite is true too.
There's more people capable of reasonable English today than at any point in the past. Because foreign-language education is so much more widespread, there's today a billion people or something whose first language is not english, but who nevertheless knows it to varying degrees. For me personally, English is my third language. (after Norwegian and German)
It's easy in an online setting, such as on Slashdot, to forget that many are non-natives. My english would be considered sub-average if I where a native, true, and I make some elementary mistakes, such as messing up light and ligth. Nevertheless my english is a lot better than the english of the average Norwegian a generation ago. (both my parents also learnt english in school, but different from this generation, they then proceeded to never use it for anything, and 30 years of non-use will deteriorate a language a lot.)
It depends, doesn't it ?
I generally get up around 6am, and start at 8. (the two hours before are spent taking a shower, eating breakfast with my family, dress and prepare my 3 kids and bring them to childcare, then head to work.
By 2pm, I've been busy for 8 hours straight. I generally don't bother taking a nap, since workday is over by 4 in the normal case anyway. But I can tell you I'm definitely less efficient those last couple of hours.
Actually you can't. Not if the stamp is a digital signature of the message. checking signatures for validity is somewhat heavy work for mailservers though, but cpu isn't getting any more expensive, so I guess that could work.
No, that doesn't follow. Anyone with even a bit of physics knows more than Newton ever did, that doesn't mean that he is today universally considered an idiot.
It's worse than that. They say 4 out of 5 parents have at *some* time been stomped by some science-question of their child. And also that the top questions are those mentioned.
That doesn't imply that 4 out of 5 parents are stomped by any of *those* questions. I've got a 5 year old, and sure I've had -many- questions I don't know the answer to. I generally respond by some variant of "I don't know, but let's find out together".
Why -does- starch work as a lubricant ? What -is- that insect named ? How much can an elephant weigh ? Sure I can eyeball some of it, but I don't -know- the answer precisely.
Then again, that's not really science. That's just facts. Science is a method, not a set of facts.
True !
And it makes the differences even more dramatic than they seem.
When "official" numbers say 15%, the real unemployment is likely much higher, because under those circumstances it's likely that a lot of people become disillusioned and just stop actively searching for a job, which will cause them to drop out of the statistics. Other people decide to stay in education for a year or two longer, even though they'd -really- like a job, those people ALSO don't count as unemployed in the statistics. Neither does housewifes which *would* have started applying for jobs -- if they thought they would get one, but they don't, so they don't.
When "official" numbers say 1%, on the other hand, the oposite effect is in force: when the job market is that good, a lot of people apply for jobs who otherwise wouldn't. For example some people stop studying earlier then planned, because they're offered a well-paying job.
Similarily, some people are really "unemployable" rather than "unemployed", we tried hiring 2 "unemployed" people in that period for example, for a simple job as receptionist. Neither of them where capable of actually regularily showing up at work aproximately at the correct time, such people are more correctly labeled something other than "unemployed", atleast lack of available jobs isn't their main problem.
It's infact very moderate, I think the latest number was 3%, but that's somewhat up from what we had at the time unemployment was lowest, a year ago aproximately, unemployment was at 1% and inflation at 1.5% or something like that.
When the map fails to match the terrain, it's sorta silly to blame the terrain.
If that was it, we'd require bussiness-owners to be responsible for the debts of their bussiness with their entire personal net worth.
But we don't. We invent corporations, and allow people to take *limited* risk, i.e. if you invest in a corporation, you can end up losing every cent you invested -- but not more than that.
We do this because we think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. There's no "natural" right to borrow money, not repay them, and let the lender sit on the loss, while your personal money (except for that portion you invested in the bussiness) is untouched.
I looked, Norway which I was thinking of actually has 3% unemployment now, it's been rising somewhat since last I looked. Still, I said it's more than 2% now, and that's true enough.
Inflation in Norway has been stable and low for as long as I can remember, the last few years it's been in the 1% to 3% range a year, which is perfectly fine.
It's true that 0.8% probably isn't long-time sustainable, that was the minimum rate we had, and it *was* sufficiently low to make it hard to hire qualified people.
2-4% is perfectly normal here though, and I don't see any signs at all of that being unsustainable.
Uhm, did you try comparing that map of yours to the actual terrain ?
Yeah, unemployment is up here, in that part of europe with the highest education (Scandinavia), why we're at above 2% now, which is a lot more than the comfortable 0.8% we used to enjoy prior to the current crisis.
How high is your unemployment again ?
You're right. The sensible thing to do, when you notice the one you're debating with has changed his position is offering him a way out. That assumes you notice it in the first place, offcourse.