Is this a follow up on the tritiumscare engineered by some?
I summarize it by : OMG there's a tritium leak that make the water undrinkable by regulation, if you are dumb enough to dig a well under that power plant!
There are probably 1000s or enterprise leaking contaminated oil in the ground that are making water far more undrinkable than this, for years after the leak is gone. And those companies would be just as clueless to plug their leak. So why treat this differently?
Now, show me a major leak that has an impact and I'll agree with it. As it is, I am calling this whole campaign a troll.
The Geneva convention was set to clearly divide militaries from civilians. If there is a double-standard in there, is it that States agreed to follow these rules but not the rebels.
You can't be serious. There hasn't been a functioning government in Afghanistan for years. Who exactly did you expect to sign? The literacy rate in Afghanistan is 28%. How many of them do you think have even heard of Geneva?
You should have, therefore you should not double-standard it.
Don't you think it would be oh-so-easy for big-boy US of A to do covert operations all over the planet to kill their opponents? Not that they haven't done it. How would you like it if the Russian or the Chinese blew your neighbor's house for whatever reason of State they might have?
Let me rephrase what I said: the Geneva convention is your State playing with one arm tied behind its back so the other States play nice with your citizens. Now, they decided to be nice and apply this rule to all countries and not just for themselves (not really, but you cannot make a profit off them if another State blasts it all up). There is no double-standard here, it's the same applied everywhere. It may be unfair and evil, but it is a single standard.
BTW, I am not American, and I think the Bush years destroyed whatever potential of a moral victory there was. So go ahead and drink it to the last insane drop, no matter how bitter it is.
The Geneva convention was set to clearly divide militaries from civilians. If there is a double-standard in there, is it that States agreed to follow these rules but not the rebels.
If you are wearing a military uniform, using an aircraft with military marking, and target enemy militaries, you are doing war.
If you disguise yourself as a civilian, you are a spy or a terrorist, and outside of the convention.
Although completely unfair, your Afghani rebel is free to openly charge to Vegas in his non-existent plane, wearing his non-existent uniform to kill the remote pilot. But he cannot cowardly hide behind a disguise to kill. Maybe unfair to non-States, but those are the rules.
Once you come to accept that, you will see that you post was, maybe unwillingly, a troll.
(And yes, I am throwing away mod points because no one had the smarts to make that point.)
You can use the same logic to say that having laws against murder and rape is equally futile, because you can't physically prevent people from doing whatever they want to do without massively encroaching on their basic rights.
No-no-no, no-no-no!
Laws are not there to forbid you, but to protect me. I have the basic right of living, you cannot kill me. The fish does not have that right, so you can kill and eat it. Then it gets more complex as laws become the mirror of society: you cannot hug all the fishes and must share them, so killing is limited. On the other hand, you can share information because it cannot take part in a tragedy of the common.
Well, that's the theory. In practice it's something on which you can go ad absurdum.
Ah, nothing like actually having to know anything about taxes before you post about it.
Glad to know taxes are the same everywhere.
You can't 'work on the way' and deduct a driver. To have a 'company car and driver,' the company must own and employ both and that means either a) it's a privately held company and you're sufficiently high up such that you can direct funds toward such frivolous expenses -- and as someone who owns a privately held company, Hell will freeze over first.
So, you could do it if you wanted. How is that different from what I said?
If the tax rate is flat and you cannot deduct anything, some professions are screwed. If companies can deduct them, work as a consultant for your own company and have it pay for your deductible perks. Flat tax may be better, but it's not the universal panacea some people make it.
Can someone please tell me why we just don't move to a simple flat tax rate? You make minimum wage? You pay X%. You're lower middle class? You pay the same X%. You're upper class? You pay the sam X%. You're the CEO of a fortune 500 company? You pay the same X%.
If you need 20k to make ends meet and you get 30k, you won't be happy if the flat rate is 33%.
If you need 40k to make ends meet and you get 100k, you won't be happy if the flat rate is 33%. But at least you'll be able to put away 25k for retirement.
If you need 80k to make ends meet and you get 300k, you won't care if the flat rate is 33%. After all, you still get 120k to invest. After 5 years, you can more than hire a 30k maid just on interests, who still won't be able to make ends meet. {30k spent = 45k income, on 600k = 7.5%}
Pure flat tax would work if income vs need was linear, but it's closer to exponential. Moreover, your driver will be company expenses since you can work on the way, while the bus pass will come from the maid's pocket change. Not that it's unfair, but just to show the solution ain't that easy.
It never ceases to amaze me how some people think that things like files and folders are too confusing for the novice.
It never ceases to amaze me how my father is still to this day unable to organize his files. He was an engineer and owned computers for more than 20 years and it's still a whole mess.
I'm all with you on this, but I have to believe my eyes.
The statement "no random individual will win the lottery today" is false, because a huge number change occurred.
And even if tens of millions play the lottery every week, it still happens once in a while that no one wins.
Think of two probabilities:
1. The probability of a double lottery winner occurring, ie: the probability that someone wins the lottery grand prize twice inside their lifetime.
2. The probability of no one winning the grand prize of any lottery in North America.
I think you will find the probability that in any given week, (1) occurs much more often than (2). Even if you do some work to compensate for massive numbers of lotteries in North America, and assume that everyone plays in the same lottery (which isn't true), and only once (which isn't true), the first probability is still greater than the second, often by many orders of magnitude.
... and?
You are not answering the point. Contrary to what you stated "no random individual will win the lottery today" is true a few times every year. Maybe it's because you tried to use laymen terms that your explanations lack rigor, but they don't make sense to me.
I do agree that some single cases do not follow the norm. I do agree that you must validate every single case before applying the global statistics. It's just that your arguments to come to this conclusion are, well, not conclusive.
How it really works? Imagine that you already identified several suspects. If you take DNA samples of these few people and one of them matches the DNA from the hair from the scene, you can still conclude that given your knowledge, with a very high probability the person in question was present at the crime scene.
While true, this statement is yet another example from the trap of misleading statistics. Individually, your statement is likely true. However, collectively, for all the tests the FBI lab is likely doing, then it is likely false.
What is this nonsense?
Even if I roll a zillion dice I won't have a higher probability of rolling 6s. You are arguing that my cookie will have a salty taste because someone in Ouagadougou mistakenly used salt instead of sugar. I can still safely say that a random cookie has "a very high probability" of tasting fine, even if I may end up with one from Ouagadougou.
Now, if there's a 1/billion chance of being salty and I have a million random cookies, I can say *none* are salty with less confidence. There's about 1:1000 (.9995001671244674 : 1000 using bignums) that at least one cookie will be salty.
The statement "no random individual will win the lottery today" is false, because a huge number change occurred.
And even if tens of millions play the lottery every week, it still happens once in a while that no one wins.
If one was as likely of winning the lottery as being falsely sent to prison because of DNA error, then it'd take quite a few million trials before no one wins. That's what I call "a very high probability".
PS. Polish women are the hottest of all European women.
I am sorry, but I worked with one such woman. She was built like a tractor and had shoulders of a linebacker. A very enjoyable person, but in no way hot.
I don't know, but if I make the effort to learn a foreign language and I end up doing better than a native speaker, I have every right to put their laziness in their faces.
Fun fact: Exercising your rights does not exclude you from being a jerk because you exercised them.
Well, I'd rather be corrected when I make a mistake. Or are you poking fun at my English for using the wrong idiom?
At best, they're still learning and will fix "there lose effect". At worst, they'll pay the price for their stupidity. Repeatedly.
Stupidity: The act of equating poor English with stupidity.
stupid - adjective - lacking intelligence or common sense. intelligence - noun - 1 the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. ergo : lacking the ability to acquire and apply grammar rules
It wouldn't be the Internet if you weren't allowed to be a stupid jerk once in a while.
I don't know, but if I make the effort to learn a foreign language and I end up doing better than a native speaker, I have every right to put their laziness in their faces.
At best, they're still learning and will fix "there lose effect". At worst, they'll pay the price for their stupidity. Repeatedly.
Well, Congress seems to have considered that, going from the comments in the House Report and Senate Report when they were drafting the law... Specifically, that to not do so would make a loophole where someone could make a single infringing copy and claim that they're only liable for that, while their friend, the publisher, makes a million infringing copies.
So, why not sue the publisher then? Laziness? And am I allowed to double-dip and sue both? Nonsense!
Unless there are aggravating circumstances (drunk, insane, underage, conspiracy), there's no way someone should be held responsible for their friend's action.
I'm not sure you are arguing for fair dealing here.
if we want to reach REAL equality between all races, this also means we mustn't go nuts about an insult to a person from one race while not caring about the same insult to a person from another race (remember the bush/chimpanzee pictures?)
If you believe the same insult has the same result, let me give you a counter-example.
-"This guy sleeps with every girl he lays his eyes on." -"This girl sleeps with every guy she lays her eyes on."
Wouldn't you love being that guy, while thinking that girl is a slut? Being a master key aint the same as being a lousy lock.
Living in society is not a mathematical construct, you need some empathy toward the butt of your jokes or you'll end up crossing the line.
The big joke is that when you see crappy written English, you know it's a native.
"Ce qui se conçoit bien s'énonce clairement et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément" - Boileau
I will add that if you cannot grok your own native language, which you've used to 20+ years, how can you affirm that you understand a programming language. If you cannot make an instantaneous difference between a subject/verb pair, a pronoun and an adverb, why should I trust you'll know the difference between lvalue and rvalue?
Over the summer before 1st grade, my son discovered some Yoko Tsuno lying around. He would beg us to read them to him. Now those are 30ish pages of serious story which take 20 minutes to go through, double that for reading aloud.
After 10 minutes of reading aloud, mom or dad had their quota. That forced him to deal with most of the story by himself. By the end of the summer, he could read it all with ease.
All this to say the image offers a context on which mom and dad's words are memorized. When you return to that image, you use the word shape to jolt your memory and use your memory to read the bubble. And since the image often has very little to do with the text spoken, you really have to read some of it before you can remember the rest.
Invasion and colonisation has been a big no-no for a few centuries. All the colonial empires have been dismantled since then. I don't consider living in the past a sane thing, why should you?
If you knew more about the Middle Ages, maybe you'd understand that the population did not move so much as changed religion over the centuries.
So in a way, this is a war between returning exiles and their old neighbors who stayed behind.
Sometimes I'd wish the whole region was nuked down to a glass surface, that'd take care of the problem. OTOH, look at how the Northern Ireland fester is resorbing itself.
But then you end up with all the people that live in the cities paying for the roads that the suburbanites (just out of reach of the cities taxing hands) use to get to their jobs or bars or friends' houses.
While I totally agree with your point of view, I cannot let this pass.
The friend pays property taxes. The bar pays property taxes. The entreprise pays property taxes. What you are advocating here is the opposite of network neutrality: you want both ends to pay for one end's traffic.
In fact, I know suburbs that are having taxation issues because they have nothing but residential property taxes. Having people living away come spend their money in your burb is a win, it lowers your tax rate.
I've used Numbers '08 and it's hellishly slow. Mind you, half of my cells have conditional formatting of the simplest kind (the only you can do). It is acceptable for a first version, and I'm hoping by '10 they'll have it solved.
But the approach taken in both Pages and Numbers is more natural than what Excel got us used to.
0.9 seconds over 7.3 billion years is... at most a 10^-16 speed difference. IOW, the speed of light is not affected by the wavelength.
Suppose there was a negligible 1 in a million speed variation between those wavelengths, and this speed variation occurred in a magic part of space representing 1 millionth of the total distance. We'd still get 2-3 days of lag between our reception of both wavelengths.
That should tell you why your question is meaningless.
The speed is the radial velocity, aka how fast it comes closer and goes further. And it's of the order of 1 m/s, which got converted to car speed. Analogy anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
I read bathroom and started to wonder...
Is this a follow up on the tritium scare engineered by some?
I summarize it by : OMG there's a tritium leak that make the water undrinkable by regulation, if you are dumb enough to dig a well under that power plant!
There are probably 1000s or enterprise leaking contaminated oil in the ground that are making water far more undrinkable than this, for years after the leak is gone. And those companies would be just as clueless to plug their leak. So why treat this differently?
Now, show me a major leak that has an impact and I'll agree with it. As it is, I am calling this whole campaign a troll.
You can't be serious. There hasn't been a functioning government in Afghanistan for years. Who exactly did you expect to sign? The literacy rate in Afghanistan is 28%. How many of them do you think have even heard of Geneva?
You should have, therefore you should not double-standard it.
Don't you think it would be oh-so-easy for big-boy US of A to do covert operations all over the planet to kill their opponents? Not that they haven't done it. How would you like it if the Russian or the Chinese blew your neighbor's house for whatever reason of State they might have?
Let me rephrase what I said: the Geneva convention is your State playing with one arm tied behind its back so the other States play nice with your citizens. Now, they decided to be nice and apply this rule to all countries and not just for themselves (not really, but you cannot make a profit off them if another State blasts it all up). There is no double-standard here, it's the same applied everywhere. It may be unfair and evil, but it is a single standard.
BTW, I am not American, and I think the Bush years destroyed whatever potential of a moral victory there was. So go ahead and drink it to the last insane drop, no matter how bitter it is.
My double-standard sense is tingling.
The Geneva convention was set to clearly divide militaries from civilians. If there is a double-standard in there, is it that States agreed to follow these rules but not the rebels.
If you are wearing a military uniform, using an aircraft with military marking, and target enemy militaries, you are doing war.
If you disguise yourself as a civilian, you are a spy or a terrorist, and outside of the convention.
Although completely unfair, your Afghani rebel is free to openly charge to Vegas in his non-existent plane, wearing his non-existent uniform to kill the remote pilot. But he cannot cowardly hide behind a disguise to kill. Maybe unfair to non-States, but those are the rules.
Once you come to accept that, you will see that you post was, maybe unwillingly, a troll.
(And yes, I am throwing away mod points because no one had the smarts to make that point.)
Foundation is mostly people have discussions. What kind of movie can you make out of that?
French movie.
omg! hog, thank you!
You can use the same logic to say that having laws against murder and rape is equally futile, because you can't physically prevent people from doing whatever they want to do without massively encroaching on their basic rights.
No-no-no, no-no-no!
Laws are not there to forbid you, but to protect me. I have the basic right of living, you cannot kill me. The fish does not have that right, so you can kill and eat it. Then it gets more complex as laws become the mirror of society: you cannot hug all the fishes and must share them, so killing is limited. On the other hand, you can share information because it cannot take part in a tragedy of the common.
Well, that's the theory. In practice it's something on which you can go ad absurdum.
Ah, nothing like actually having to know anything about taxes before you post about it.
Glad to know taxes are the same everywhere.
You can't 'work on the way' and deduct a driver. To have a 'company car and driver,' the company must own and employ both and that means either a) it's a privately held company and you're sufficiently high up such that you can direct funds toward such frivolous expenses -- and as someone who owns a privately held company, Hell will freeze over first.
So, you could do it if you wanted. How is that different from what I said?
If the tax rate is flat and you cannot deduct anything, some professions are screwed. If companies can deduct them, work as a consultant for your own company and have it pay for your deductible perks. Flat tax may be better, but it's not the universal panacea some people make it.
Can someone please tell me why we just don't move to a simple flat tax rate? You make minimum wage? You pay X%. You're lower middle class? You pay the same X%. You're upper class? You pay the sam X%. You're the CEO of a fortune 500 company? You pay the same X%.
If you need 20k to make ends meet and you get 30k, you won't be happy if the flat rate is 33%.
If you need 40k to make ends meet and you get 100k, you won't be happy if the flat rate is 33%. But at least you'll be able to put away 25k for retirement.
If you need 80k to make ends meet and you get 300k, you won't care if the flat rate is 33%. After all, you still get 120k to invest. After 5 years, you can more than hire a 30k maid just on interests, who still won't be able to make ends meet. {30k spent = 45k income, on 600k = 7.5%}
Pure flat tax would work if income vs need was linear, but it's closer to exponential. Moreover, your driver will be company expenses since you can work on the way, while the bus pass will come from the maid's pocket change. Not that it's unfair, but just to show the solution ain't that easy.
It never ceases to amaze me how some people think that things like files and folders are too confusing for the novice.
It never ceases to amaze me how my father is still to this day unable to organize his files. He was an engineer and owned computers for more than 20 years and it's still a whole mess.
I'm all with you on this, but I have to believe my eyes.
Think of two probabilities:
1. The probability of a double lottery winner occurring, ie: the probability that someone wins the lottery grand prize twice inside their lifetime.
2. The probability of no one winning the grand prize of any lottery in North America.
I think you will find the probability that in any given week, (1) occurs much more often than (2). Even if you do some work to compensate for massive numbers of lotteries in North America, and assume that everyone plays in the same lottery (which isn't true), and only once (which isn't true), the first probability is still greater than the second, often by many orders of magnitude.
... and?
You are not answering the point. Contrary to what you stated "no random individual will win the lottery today" is true a few times every year. Maybe it's because you tried to use laymen terms that your explanations lack rigor, but they don't make sense to me.
I do agree that some single cases do not follow the norm. I do agree that you must validate every single case before applying the global statistics. It's just that your arguments to come to this conclusion are, well, not conclusive.
While true, this statement is yet another example from the trap of misleading statistics. Individually, your statement is likely true. However, collectively, for all the tests the FBI lab is likely doing, then it is likely false.
What is this nonsense?
Even if I roll a zillion dice I won't have a higher probability of rolling 6s. You are arguing that my cookie will have a salty taste because someone in Ouagadougou mistakenly used salt instead of sugar. I can still safely say that a random cookie has "a very high probability" of tasting fine, even if I may end up with one from Ouagadougou.
Now, if there's a 1/billion chance of being salty and I have a million random cookies, I can say *none* are salty with less confidence. There's about 1:1000 (.9995001671244674 : 1000 using bignums) that at least one cookie will be salty.
The statement "no random individual will win the lottery today" is false, because a huge number change occurred.
And even if tens of millions play the lottery every week, it still happens once in a while that no one wins.
If one was as likely of winning the lottery as being falsely sent to prison because of DNA error, then it'd take quite a few million trials before no one wins. That's what I call "a very high probability".
PS. Polish women are the hottest of all European women.
I am sorry, but I worked with one such woman. She was built like a tractor and had shoulders of a linebacker. A very enjoyable person, but in no way hot.
I don't know, but if I make the effort to learn a foreign language and I end up doing better than a native speaker, I have every right to put their laziness in their faces.
Fun fact: Exercising your rights does not exclude you from being a jerk because you exercised them.
Well, I'd rather be corrected when I make a mistake. Or are you poking fun at my English for using the wrong idiom?
At best, they're still learning and will fix "there lose effect". At worst, they'll pay the price for their stupidity. Repeatedly.
Stupidity: The act of equating poor English with stupidity.
stupid - adjective - lacking intelligence or common sense.
intelligence - noun - 1 the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.
ergo : lacking the ability to acquire and apply grammar rules
It wouldn't be the Internet if you weren't allowed to be a stupid jerk once in a while.
I don't know, but if I make the effort to learn a foreign language and I end up doing better than a native speaker, I have every right to put their laziness in their faces.
At best, they're still learning and will fix "there lose effect". At worst, they'll pay the price for their stupidity. Repeatedly.
Well, Congress seems to have considered that, going from the comments in the House Report and Senate Report when they were drafting the law... Specifically, that to not do so would make a loophole where someone could make a single infringing copy and claim that they're only liable for that, while their friend, the publisher, makes a million infringing copies.
So, why not sue the publisher then? Laziness?
And am I allowed to double-dip and sue both? Nonsense!
Unless there are aggravating circumstances (drunk, insane, underage, conspiracy), there's no way someone should be held responsible for their friend's action.
I'm not sure you are arguing for fair dealing here.
if we want to reach REAL equality between all races, this also means we mustn't go nuts about an insult to a person from one race while not caring about the same insult to a person from another race (remember the bush/chimpanzee pictures?)
If you believe the same insult has the same result, let me give you a counter-example.
-"This guy sleeps with every girl he lays his eyes on."
-"This girl sleeps with every guy she lays her eyes on."
Wouldn't you love being that guy, while thinking that girl is a slut? Being a master key aint the same as being a lousy lock.
Living in society is not a mathematical construct, you need some empathy toward the butt of your jokes or you'll end up crossing the line.
I totally agree with you.
The big joke is that when you see crappy written English, you know it's a native.
"Ce qui se conçoit bien s'énonce clairement et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément" - Boileau
I will add that if you cannot grok your own native language, which you've used to 20+ years, how can you affirm that you understand a programming language. If you cannot make an instantaneous difference between a subject/verb pair, a pronoun and an adverb, why should I trust you'll know the difference between lvalue and rvalue?
Over the summer before 1st grade, my son discovered some Yoko Tsuno lying around. He would beg us to read them to him. Now those are 30ish pages of serious story which take 20 minutes to go through, double that for reading aloud.
After 10 minutes of reading aloud, mom or dad had their quota. That forced him to deal with most of the story by himself. By the end of the summer, he could read it all with ease.
All this to say the image offers a context on which mom and dad's words are memorized. When you return to that image, you use the word shape to jolt your memory and use your memory to read the bubble. And since the image often has very little to do with the text spoken, you really have to read some of it before you can remember the rest.
Invasion and colonisation has been a big no-no for a few centuries. All the colonial empires have been dismantled since then. I don't consider living in the past a sane thing, why should you?
If you knew more about the Middle Ages, maybe you'd understand that the population did not move so much as changed religion over the centuries.
So in a way, this is a war between returning exiles and their old neighbors who stayed behind.
Sometimes I'd wish the whole region was nuked down to a glass surface, that'd take care of the problem. OTOH, look at how the Northern Ireland fester is resorbing itself.
I'm sorry I only dealt with spherical cows. For me, space is a perfectly empty medium with n=1.
But then you end up with all the people that live in the cities paying for the roads that the suburbanites (just out of reach of the cities taxing hands) use to get to their jobs or bars or friends' houses.
While I totally agree with your point of view, I cannot let this pass.
The friend pays property taxes. The bar pays property taxes. The entreprise pays property taxes. What you are advocating here is the opposite of network neutrality: you want both ends to pay for one end's traffic.
In fact, I know suburbs that are having taxation issues because they have nothing but residential property taxes. Having people living away come spend their money in your burb is a win, it lowers your tax rate.
I've used Numbers '08 and it's hellishly slow. Mind you, half of my cells have conditional formatting of the simplest kind (the only you can do). It is acceptable for a first version, and I'm hoping by '10 they'll have it solved.
But the approach taken in both Pages and Numbers is more natural than what Excel got us used to.
0.9 seconds over 7.3 billion years is... at most a 10^-16 speed difference. IOW, the speed of light is not affected by the wavelength.
Suppose there was a negligible 1 in a million speed variation between those wavelengths, and this speed variation occurred in a magic part of space representing 1 millionth of the total distance. We'd still get 2-3 days of lag between our reception of both wavelengths.
That should tell you why your question is meaningless.
http://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/lasilla/instruments/harps/overview.html
The speed is the radial velocity, aka how fast it comes closer and goes further. And it's of the order of 1 m/s, which got converted to car speed. Analogy anyone?