I suspect that even China is getting a bit fed up with NK's antics. However, there is also Russia to consider, and given the direction Putin has been taking that country and their general antipathy towards the "West" (including Japan and SK), they would not take lightly any interference with a nation they helped create in their back yard.
I don't know what your definition of a "weak" country is. Iraq wasn't in any honest definition, at least during the first Gulf War. It's just that the US is the strongest country militarily at the present, and the vast majority of other countries are quite a bit weaker. Those with somewhat stable economies and decent standards of living don't tend to piss off the USA much. They even even tend to be allied with America with mutual national interests.
Second, if a country has nuclear weapons, it is nothing but pure conjecture that that would deter a US attack. First the logistical problem is certainly non-trivial for a smaller country such as NK, and second, even the nutters in charge of NK would know that it would be suicide, if it did somehow manage to nuke the US. Third, we have the example of nuclear-armed Pakistan being threatened and bullied into joining G.W.Bush's War on Terror, and the constant drone strikes that continue to this day.
So this being/. and the particular mindset that predominates here, I expect any posts that states a nuclear-armed country is a country immune to attacks from the USA to be modded +5 Insightful, and any posts that question this conventional wisdom to be modded down, if at all.
Here's another theory. Flus and colds are transmitted by contact with either airborne particles (as from an infected person sneezing) or contact with fluids from runny noses. Remove or reduce the potential for exposure to those sources and you don't get sick. There have been several whole years or more that have gone by without a single cold for me, when I did not have children in school and lived in suburban areas. Now I live in a crowded urban area, ride crowded public transportation, and have small children, and guess what: I get sick several times a year now.
I bet you'll more easily find an article on Fox News critical of G. W. Bush than you'll find an article on RT critical of Putin. I watch Channel 1 regularly (well my wife does and I'm there), and can say not a day goes by that they don't show doing something charitable for sick and disabled children, like bringing them to the Kremlin for dinner. Even Fox News doesn't do that sort of thing for Republican leadership. If you've seen the Russian coverage of the Georga War, it was more a Steven Spielberg film than actual news coverage; it put the US media's cheer leading of the Iraq war to shame.
While that's a nice benefit to have, it would really be little more than Band-Aid if applied to American society. Couples really need two incomes just to get by, even without any children. Childhood doesn't end after one year, and the long hours people have to work substantially reduces the amount of time that can be spent on parenting. It seems that having children these days amounts to paying hefty bills for daycare, clothes, food, etc. and maybe getting to spend a little bit of quality time with them on weekends.
Exactly. In Manhattan (I suppose elsewhere as well), you are not supposed to enter an intersection if there is no room on the other side to avoid gridlock. In the aftermath of Sandy when there were no subways running, many people decided to drive into work, and everyone decided to ignore this particular rule with the predictable result of traffic grinding to a halt. So instead of about 10 minutes to get to where you were going in Manhattan, which would have been easily accomplished without gridlock, it took hours.
You can also look up "anti-Semitic" in dictionary.com or any other standard reference and see that in the word specifically denotes hostility or hatred of Jews. A lot of people are genuinely confused by this terminology,...
In particular you and the GGP. The palestinian terrorist and murderer of Israeli civilians Yasser Arafat famous corrected someone who tried to label him an anti-semite, pointing out that Palestinians are also semites.
I would say you're the one confused on this. "Semitic" covers a broader range of peoples
... but you can be pretty sure that when someone argues that "anti-Seimtism" is a meaningless term,...
Straw man. The GP did not do so, all he said was that the wrong adjective was used. That fact remains that palestinians consider themselves semites.
Reading isn't your strong suit, and I know perfectly well what "Semite" and "anti-Semite" mean. Nor have I said GP (now GGP) has said anything different.
... even after having been shown a the dictionary definition and history of the term, it is pretty good evidence that he or she is an anti-Semite.
To which you just provided an example, namely Arafat.
Obviously someone who points out that palestinians are also semites must be a nazi. Your logic is breathtaking... as in people are laughing at you so hard that they can not breathe.
Not my logic. When you get a break from laughing out loud and take a breath, go back and re-read your post.
You can also look up "anti-Semitic" in dictionary.com or any other standard reference and see that in the word specifically denotes hostility or hatred of Jews. A lot of people are genuinely confused by this terminology, but you can be pretty sure that when someone argues that "anti-Seimtism" is a meaningless term, even after having been shown a the dictionary definition and history of the term, it is pretty good evidence that he or she is an anti-Semite.
Well, biological evolution and cultural evolution are apples and oranges. Of course they're intertwined, with sexual selection being a cultural phenomenon, but at the same time applying pressure for progeny to be more attractive by that culture's standards. And evolution of such abilities as language will had a huge effect on the societies that could then arise.
I have to disagree about mate selection driving intelligence higher. No one wants to data a complete nerd. Girls always favor the jock and the tough-guy delinquent. Boys would always date prom queen type if they could. Dumb people tend to be the ones accidentally getting pregnant, or intentionally because having a baby is the most important thing in the world to them. Smart people tend to spend more time with intellectual pursuits, while the dumb spend more time in the bar trolling for sex.
That's not strictly true. It seems that in Western Music, the pendulum swings back and forth every couple hundred years. Music of the late Medieval period can be quite dissonant, even by today's standards. The Renaissance, exemplified by Palestrina is very limited in dissonance, but in the Baroque, especially the earlier years, counterpoint often does grind right into minor 2nds and major 7ths, almost gratuitously. During the Classical Era, Mozart is considered one of the mellifluous composers, where even major 2nds and minor 7ths were introduced mostly to jar or shock the audiences. Music continued to grow more dissonant throughout the Romantic Era and into the modernist composers (e.g. Schoenberg), but now very consonant music such as minimalism and composers such as Arvo Part or Gorecki. Of course there are so many streams of musical culture, that such broad brushstrokes break down entirely.
Thanks for bring up the various temperaments. In the Renaissance the Pythagorean Tuning system, ensuring that all the 5ths were tuned to perfect 3:2 ratios. 3rds would be somewhat out of tune, but they didn't care so much, as 3rds were somewhat dissonant to their ears. In the Baroque, the 3rds were far more important, so the meantone tuning system prevailed, keeping them tuned to perfect 5:4 or 6:5 ratios (Major and minor 3rd), while tolerating the 5ths now being somewhat out of tune. Later, in the Romantic up to the present, musicians want to be able to play in any key without having to re-tune their instruments every time they change keys, so equal temperament is used, and the out-of-tune 3rds and 5ths are considered perfectly acceptable.
There are a couple holes in your argument. First you say *most* mental deficiencies are caused by environmental factors rather than heredity. Fine. However, evolution works on a gradient, so if *some* actually are hereditary, selection pressure will push towards higher intelligence, in the same way that most rabbits don't get caught by foxes because they were too slow, but rather they happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. After several generations of a population of many rabbits, there will be a slight advantage to the faster ones, pushing towards faster typical speeds.
Second, it's not the fact a really smart guy comes along and tames fire, etc. A great many people can do all those things now. There's the huge prerequisite of having the mental tools and spare time to figure out those things in the respective societies that those technologies came from. Someone from a hunter-gatherer society is not going to invent calculus, no matter how smart they are. A not insignificant number of high-school age children can learn calculus, and most of whom will not turn out to be the next Newton or Leibniz. However a more intelligent gene pool would imply that a greater proportion would.
Finally, as the above paragraph suggests, Aristotle's likely incomprehension of calculus is not a result of being rather dull by today's standards, but simply a consequence of not having any of the prerequisite concepts, such as analytical geometry or a mathematical definition of continuity, for understanding calculus.
Great idea, asshole. Just let's eliminate all big science projects in America. They do nothing but the Devil's work and lead people into heresies like evolution and the big bang. BTW, I know personally a number of scientists, engineers, and administrators who worked on the SSC; the slimy innuendos you made in your first post couldn't be farther from the truth.
Patton did, but as recently revealed, FDR was well aware of the Katyn Massacre by 1945 and chose to suppress the information and give Stalin whatever he wanted instead.
They're negative, but in a different way from/.. The overwhelming majority of comments see the results as yet another example of a non-US company being fleeced for doing business in the US at the behest of a large US corporation.
There are a couple of quandaries in the last two terms of the Drake Equation (f sub c and L). First, what is a detectable sign? Surely that would depend on depend on our own technology as much as the alien civilization's. In just a few hundred years we have gone from relying entirely on the naked eye to powerful radio telescope arrays, etc. Who knows what technologies will become available in the future? We might well be able to listen in as if we had ham radios on all the habitable planets in the galaxy in a hundred years or so.
There is no reason to suspect that L is some vanishingly short interval. Even hundreds of millions of years is a relatively short time compared with the age of the universe (and for that matter life on earth). If an alien civilization were capable of generating detectable signs for such a time period, they could very easily have colonized the entire galaxy within the same time frame. Hence, if f sub c (and the other f-variables) were not infinitesimal, the skies should be swarming with alien visitors. We don't see them because either intelligent life really is something extraordinary, not one of these myriad alien races has the slightest interest in interacting with us, or there are some unknown (or unproven hypotheses) laws at work that put limits on how far civilizations advance.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that even China is getting a bit fed up with NK's antics. However, there is also Russia to consider, and given the direction Putin has been taking that country and their general antipathy towards the "West" (including Japan and SK), they would not take lightly any interference with a nation they helped create in their back yard.
I don't know what your definition of a "weak" country is. Iraq wasn't in any honest definition, at least during the first Gulf War. It's just that the US is the strongest country militarily at the present, and the vast majority of other countries are quite a bit weaker. Those with somewhat stable economies and decent standards of living don't tend to piss off the USA much. They even even tend to be allied with America with mutual national interests.
Second, if a country has nuclear weapons, it is nothing but pure conjecture that that would deter a US attack. First the logistical problem is certainly non-trivial for a smaller country such as NK, and second, even the nutters in charge of NK would know that it would be suicide, if it did somehow manage to nuke the US. Third, we have the example of nuclear-armed Pakistan being threatened and bullied into joining G.W.Bush's War on Terror, and the constant drone strikes that continue to this day.
So this being /. and the particular mindset that predominates here, I expect any posts that states a nuclear-armed country is a country immune to attacks from the USA to be modded +5 Insightful, and any posts that question this conventional wisdom to be modded down, if at all.
Here's another theory. Flus and colds are transmitted by contact with either airborne particles (as from an infected person sneezing) or contact with fluids from runny noses. Remove or reduce the potential for exposure to those sources and you don't get sick. There have been several whole years or more that have gone by without a single cold for me, when I did not have children in school and lived in suburban areas. Now I live in a crowded urban area, ride crowded public transportation, and have small children, and guess what: I get sick several times a year now.
I bet you'll more easily find an article on Fox News critical of G. W. Bush than you'll find an article on RT critical of Putin. I watch Channel 1 regularly (well my wife does and I'm there), and can say not a day goes by that they don't show doing something charitable for sick and disabled children, like bringing them to the Kremlin for dinner. Even Fox News doesn't do that sort of thing for Republican leadership. If you've seen the Russian coverage of the Georga War, it was more a Steven Spielberg film than actual news coverage; it put the US media's cheer leading of the Iraq war to shame.
While that's a nice benefit to have, it would really be little more than Band-Aid if applied to American society. Couples really need two incomes just to get by, even without any children. Childhood doesn't end after one year, and the long hours people have to work substantially reduces the amount of time that can be spent on parenting. It seems that having children these days amounts to paying hefty bills for daycare, clothes, food, etc. and maybe getting to spend a little bit of quality time with them on weekends.
Exactly. In Manhattan (I suppose elsewhere as well), you are not supposed to enter an intersection if there is no room on the other side to avoid gridlock. In the aftermath of Sandy when there were no subways running, many people decided to drive into work, and everyone decided to ignore this particular rule with the predictable result of traffic grinding to a halt. So instead of about 10 minutes to get to where you were going in Manhattan, which would have been easily accomplished without gridlock, it took hours.
I always refer to it as "The Channel Formerly Known as Sci-Fi."
You can also look up "anti-Semitic" in dictionary.com or any other standard reference and see that in the word specifically denotes hostility or hatred of Jews. A lot of people are genuinely confused by this terminology, ...
In particular you and the GGP. The palestinian terrorist and murderer of Israeli civilians Yasser Arafat famous corrected someone who tried to label him an anti-semite, pointing out that Palestinians are also semites.
I would say you're the one confused on this. "Semitic" covers a broader range of peoples
... but you can be pretty sure that when someone argues that "anti-Seimtism" is a meaningless term, ...
Straw man. The GP did not do so, all he said was that the wrong adjective was used. That fact remains that palestinians consider themselves semites.
Reading isn't your strong suit, and I know perfectly well what "Semite" and "anti-Semite" mean. Nor have I said GP (now GGP) has said anything different.
... even after having been shown a the dictionary definition and history of the term, it is pretty good evidence that he or she is an anti-Semite.
To which you just provided an example, namely Arafat.
Obviously someone who points out that palestinians are also semites must be a nazi. Your logic is breathtaking ... as in people are laughing at you so hard that they can not breathe.
Not my logic. When you get a break from laughing out loud and take a breath, go back and re-read your post.
You can also look up "anti-Semitic" in dictionary.com or any other standard reference and see that in the word specifically denotes hostility or hatred of Jews. A lot of people are genuinely confused by this terminology, but you can be pretty sure that when someone argues that "anti-Seimtism" is a meaningless term, even after having been shown a the dictionary definition and history of the term, it is pretty good evidence that he or she is an anti-Semite.
Would someone with an IQ above 65 please explain how the parent to this post got modded "insightful"? Many thanks!
Well, biological evolution and cultural evolution are apples and oranges. Of course they're intertwined, with sexual selection being a cultural phenomenon, but at the same time applying pressure for progeny to be more attractive by that culture's standards. And evolution of such abilities as language will had a huge effect on the societies that could then arise.
I have to disagree about mate selection driving intelligence higher. No one wants to data a complete nerd. Girls always favor the jock and the tough-guy delinquent. Boys would always date prom queen type if they could. Dumb people tend to be the ones accidentally getting pregnant, or intentionally because having a baby is the most important thing in the world to them. Smart people tend to spend more time with intellectual pursuits, while the dumb spend more time in the bar trolling for sex.
That's not strictly true. It seems that in Western Music, the pendulum swings back and forth every couple hundred years. Music of the late Medieval period can be quite dissonant, even by today's standards. The Renaissance, exemplified by Palestrina is very limited in dissonance, but in the Baroque, especially the earlier years, counterpoint often does grind right into minor 2nds and major 7ths, almost gratuitously. During the Classical Era, Mozart is considered one of the mellifluous composers, where even major 2nds and minor 7ths were introduced mostly to jar or shock the audiences. Music continued to grow more dissonant throughout the Romantic Era and into the modernist composers (e.g. Schoenberg), but now very consonant music such as minimalism and composers such as Arvo Part or Gorecki. Of course there are so many streams of musical culture, that such broad brushstrokes break down entirely.
Thanks for bring up the various temperaments. In the Renaissance the Pythagorean Tuning system, ensuring that all the 5ths were tuned to perfect 3:2 ratios. 3rds would be somewhat out of tune, but they didn't care so much, as 3rds were somewhat dissonant to their ears. In the Baroque, the 3rds were far more important, so the meantone tuning system prevailed, keeping them tuned to perfect 5:4 or 6:5 ratios (Major and minor 3rd), while tolerating the 5ths now being somewhat out of tune. Later, in the Romantic up to the present, musicians want to be able to play in any key without having to re-tune their instruments every time they change keys, so equal temperament is used, and the out-of-tune 3rds and 5ths are considered perfectly acceptable.
There are a couple holes in your argument. First you say *most* mental deficiencies are caused by environmental factors rather than heredity. Fine. However, evolution works on a gradient, so if *some* actually are hereditary, selection pressure will push towards higher intelligence, in the same way that most rabbits don't get caught by foxes because they were too slow, but rather they happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. After several generations of a population of many rabbits, there will be a slight advantage to the faster ones, pushing towards faster typical speeds.
Second, it's not the fact a really smart guy comes along and tames fire, etc. A great many people can do all those things now. There's the huge prerequisite of having the mental tools and spare time to figure out those things in the respective societies that those technologies came from. Someone from a hunter-gatherer society is not going to invent calculus, no matter how smart they are. A not insignificant number of high-school age children can learn calculus, and most of whom will not turn out to be the next Newton or Leibniz. However a more intelligent gene pool would imply that a greater proportion would.
Finally, as the above paragraph suggests, Aristotle's likely incomprehension of calculus is not a result of being rather dull by today's standards, but simply a consequence of not having any of the prerequisite concepts, such as analytical geometry or a mathematical definition of continuity, for understanding calculus.
Great idea, asshole. Just let's eliminate all big science projects in America. They do nothing but the Devil's work and lead people into heresies like evolution and the big bang. BTW, I know personally a number of scientists, engineers, and administrators who worked on the SSC; the slimy innuendos you made in your first post couldn't be farther from the truth.
Absolute fucking bullshit.
Patton did, but as recently revealed, FDR was well aware of the Katyn Massacre by 1945 and chose to suppress the information and give Stalin whatever he wanted instead.
They're negative, but in a different way from /.. The overwhelming majority of comments see the results as yet another example of a non-US company being fleeced for doing business in the US at the behest of a large US corporation.
Not in Russia; for example see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/country_profiles/1102275.stm. Also all these Russian pop stars and ice dancing with celebrity programs shown on Channel 1 make the station hugely popular with Russians.
Looks ugly as hell and you get lots of JavaScript errors, but it appears you are correct.
You should do likewise if you really believe the Georgian offensive was unprovoked, considering that the very Wikipedia article you quote provides facts to the contrary, as does this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2008_South_Ossetia_war
There seems to be a trend to create entire fictional languages for fantasy films, so why not create fictional accents for fantasy realms?
There are a couple of quandaries in the last two terms of the Drake Equation (f sub c and L). First, what is a detectable sign? Surely that would depend on depend on our own technology as much as the alien civilization's. In just a few hundred years we have gone from relying entirely on the naked eye to powerful radio telescope arrays, etc. Who knows what technologies will become available in the future? We might well be able to listen in as if we had ham radios on all the habitable planets in the galaxy in a hundred years or so.
There is no reason to suspect that L is some vanishingly short interval. Even hundreds of millions of years is a relatively short time compared with the age of the universe (and for that matter life on earth). If an alien civilization were capable of generating detectable signs for such a time period, they could very easily have colonized the entire galaxy within the same time frame. Hence, if f sub c (and the other f-variables) were not infinitesimal, the skies should be swarming with alien visitors. We don't see them because either intelligent life really is something extraordinary, not one of these myriad alien races has the slightest interest in interacting with us, or there are some unknown (or unproven hypotheses) laws at work that put limits on how far civilizations advance.
I find it transcendental myself.
The author of the TFA seems unaware that not all musical compositions are "songs"; the Pi Symphony being a case in point.