The "war on drugs" is fundamentally political. It was started by Nixon as a way to punish what he saw as his chief enemies: the hippies who were constantly protesting against his Vietnam policies. Before Nixon's war on drugs, while drug use was technically illegal, there were far fewer arrests and incarcerations than after it got underway. Even then, the really intense number of incarcerations didn't happen until Reagan - again as a political measure against those he had seen as his enemies since they opposed his governorship in California - redoubled the effort.
Of course the war on drugs has been hardest on blacks. One of the chief political complaints against the hippies was they were taking too much of their culture and attitude from blacks. And blacks are less likely to have political connections - say through parents and college friends - to defend themselves against drug persecution. So they've been the easiest target. Still, the war on drugs is essentially Nixon's - and Reagan's - war against the hippies, based on their perception that the hippies were there personal enemies, and arguably enemies of everything essential to "America" - unbridled militarism, for instance.
There's nothing more political than substances that can help break people out of their followership trance.
I do not want the Scientologists, nor the Muslims, nor the Objectivists... (well, it's a long list) to know that I, personally, am both certain that their "prophet" is a fraud, but also that they follow that "prophet" at great risk to both themselves and to much that is good in this world. So maybe I should stop saying such things. Because they might like to kill me for it. Even though nothing may be more important to the future of humanity than that we stop following false prophets. Please don't count on me any longer to contribute to that future. Because Google has warned me that if I don't hide thoughts like this, maybe I deserve what's coming.
They're clearly aligning themselves precisely with evil here. Because it applies across the board. Even if you don't agree with my list, any group following any false leader that you might expose as such, and that might be truly threatening to you, Google wants you to be naked to their retaliation.
But the truth can have political implications. So you have scientists simply doing science, concluding there's serious danger of human-triggered climate change. Yes, that's danger from the "political" p.o.v. of humans, or of ecological systems. But there's nothing unscientific about assessing danger to a particular population. Say, scientists find a disease that's a danger to rabbits. Reporting the danger is within the mode and realm of pure science.
When the danger is to humans rather than rabbits, though, there are political interests who don't want the danger to be taken seriously, perhaps because their economic interests would be compromised by action to mitigate the danger the scientists have described. Then these political, economic players start attacking the scientists and their findings. Whe the scientists persist in their science, they then complain that since this has become a matter of politics, the scientists should simply bow out, on the principle that "politics has no place in science".
The scientists don't recognize, surprisingly enough, that political and economic interests of others should constrain the science done, or the reports from it. So they get a bit defensive, understandably. They should defend the territory of science. There's no reason they should surrender any of it to political and economic players.
19.6% of US electricity is nuclear generated. Not near 50%. That according to the Wikipedia, of course. And there's no chance it will all get shut down at once.
The article mentions the mishap-plagued Vermont Yankee, currently near relicensing and with a 120% uprate a couple of years ago. Entergy, the current owner, plans to spin off ownership of half its plants, including Yankee, to a new firm financed by massive debt. This way Entergy will no longer itself be financially responsible for any aspect of these plants, while pocketing most of the projected profits from their next two decades of licensed operation in advance.
So Entergy's got little reason to concern itself with whether Yankee will work as advertised after relicensing. Relicensing is merely a requirement to spin it off, and relinquish Entergy of any responsibility at all, beyond immediate, massive profit.
Let's say we're all in a large vehicle that's heading forward. Scientists scan the horizon with advanced instruments and deduce that there's a large sinkhole ahead, that will in likelihood swallow the bottom half of the vehicle. Those actually steering the vehicle live up on top. To execute all the steps to get this huge vehicle to change course and avoid the sinkhole would require them to work very hard. Even if it goes into the sinkhole, they'll be okay, since they're way up top. So they've little inclination to work hard at this one.
After the scientists fail to convince those steering the vehicle to change course, they start to communicate directly to those down in the hold, riding 3rd or 4th class, letting them know it might be in their longer-term interest to change who is up on the top deck steering. Those on the top deck, who are too lazy to turn the vehicle just for the sake of the well being of those down below, are also resistant to being replaced, of course. So they come up with every way they can to discredit the advice of the scientists.
Remember, it's the same people who are perfectly happy if those down below have no health care. Compassion is not in their kit. And honesty is for fools they'd say, if they were honest.
A good coder has to understand the context they're coding for. Generally that context is use in the course of a business. Generally that requires being able to integrate concepts about the business that are beyond the scope of coding.
There are exceptions. If you're a lower-level programmer, part of a larger team, and the team is run by people who can comprehend and integrate concepts beyond the scope of the code into the system design, then a two-year degree (or four-year degree focused solely on coding without a traditional liberal arts mix) will do you fine. But that's a lower pay grade than the person who is able to grasp larger concepts, and even more importantly communicate and coordinate with people handling aspects of whatever business it is who are in a position to leverage the code being created for real profit. Even if that person, likely with the broader educational and life experiences, isn't as good a coder by some technical measure, she or he is of far more value to the bottom line of the operation.
Where's your analysis of the degree to which this "isn't exactly sudo"? It's pretty damn close. If it comes down to the degree of "exactly," please provide some examples from patent case law that show that the degree of difference here is sufficient for the two programs not to be close enough to the same that sudo, had it been invented after this patent, wouldn't violate said patent.
I'm nothing like a patent attorney. But my understanding is that if someone invents a special right-angle shovel, and patents it, you're going to be in trouble even if your shovel head is only at an 80 degree angle rather than 90 degrees. If not at 80, certainly at 89.
Besides, this patent ends with language claiming that the method of implementation is only the preferred one, while the patent covers other methods of implementation of the same underlying concept. And in which sense is the underlying concept even a few degrees different from what sudo does? Your analysis?
The CS graduates I've worked with have universally been careful, methodical....
Yup. They make what should be a simple half-day project into two weeks of applying the careful methods they've learned while getting their degree. They are more than happy to describe the theoretical justifications of their plodding ways. Not that there's not a place for this. It fits quite well with large projects where everything should be maximally comprehensible to other programmers. But the overhead for small-scale stuff is amazing. And they have little capacity for reading existing code that's not built to the design patterns their particular professors taught them. So they end up trashing a lot of quite serviceable stuff to rebuild it so they can bring it within their narrow understanding.
OPEC allocates production quotas as a percentage of each member nation's claimed reserves. So any member of OPEC who wants to sell more oil this year under their quota system will claim proven reserves larger than they really have. And any member of OPEC who thinks other members are inflating their numbers, will inflate their own just to keep the field level.
One source of modern awareness of the placebo effect came in WWII, in an incident (as I recall in Italy) where troops severely injured on the battlefield were treated by medics without a sufficient supply of morphine. They ended up giving some number of them shots without morphine, and despite the severity of the injuries many of those troops responded just as if morphine had been administered.
So the placebo can work for large amounts of acute pain. Reports for effectiveness in managing long-term chronic pain are more ambiguous. And as with hypnosis - whether or not it's a related phenomenon - there's great variability in the population as to whether it has much effect. Studies showing placebo effects generally show them for only a minority of the sample group.
They are not offering a new path, they are only offering old paths—spend more, regulate more, tax more in an attempt to make us more healthy locally and nationally. And in the long term everyone—well, not those in government, but most everyone else—seems to know that won't work. It's not a way out. It's not a path through.
Okay, so in pretty Peggy's view anything that government does by way of governing won't work. (Didn't she write Reagan's line, "Government is the problem"?) Since Democrats to some extent believe government can be, and should be, effective - well, we should just give up on this. We should become disheartened as Democrats. If "most everyone else" knows that government - which by its nature involves regulation, and public investment, and yes collecting taxes to pay for those activities - is "not a path through," we're left asking "Who is this 'everyone else'?" Pretty clearly it's the shrinking demographic which still identifies as Republican: prevalently old, white, and living in the Deep South - people who last liked government when it was run by Jefferson Davis.
Well, I'm middle aged, white, and live in New England. I'm hopeful. The way through looks obvious, and I see an administration with a fairly good vision of it - even if they're not going nearly far enough in regulating Peggy's friends on the street her Journal's named after. It's so brightly obvious, it's almost blinding. It's based on government, businesses, and individuals each doing our part. Yes, government should not go too far in controlling businesses; but in return businesses have to back way off, as they've gone much too far in recent years into endeavoring to control government. Why do people like Peggy never worry when businesses control government too much?
Been running a Jetway VIA box for about six months in a home server role - just added ram, a big cheap HD, and Ubuntu. Installed the OS over the LAN with PXE. Works just fine so far. Meets your budget. Haven't tested actual power draw though. It's small, reasonably quiet - an internal fan for the CPU but the power supply is a fanless external brick. No Ubuntu compatibility hitches at all, so Debian should be fine too.
I suspect (but do not know) that once we see the actual emails there's no way on earth anyone with an IQ above retarded would believe it was real.
Man, you've got your headquarters in your hindquarters. No offense. Even if we grant your premise, that some large proportion of people would spot the campaign as fake, you have to remember that (1) Telling lies from truth is different from IQ. Some very bright people are extremely gullible, some very dull people have an unerring radar for falsehoods. (2) It's neither morally nor legally permissible to purposely scare the hell out of someone merely because they're less intelligent. (3) Many tens of thousands of people - mostly women - are stalked each year in this great nation, and a portion of them murdered by their stalkers. So a campaign like this odds are will reach some of them, who already know that stalking threats are real, have already been stalked, and just like a veteran hearing a backfire and finding himself back in battle, can easily be returned to the real psychological state - even by an instance they intellectually know is fake.
There's incredible poetry in Zelazny. It's easy to overlook, since his stories have good pace and momentum. But while there are a number of sci-fi writers whose entire works I've read, only Zelazny and Heinlein have been worth reading three or four times. And of the two, Zelazny's prose is the one which stands out for sheer beauty. Subtle, but magnificent.
In the one-reading-is-enough category, P.K. Dick is incredibly important. Heinlein was a big fan. And unlike Heinlein's work, Dick's has been turned into some first-rate movies, which can give your kids a hook to work back into it.
I got a couple of Brother HL-1450s a few years back. Totally shit quality. The print output and speed is fine when they work. But they're excessively prone to jamming. The front cover and tray are cheaply put together, and start falling apart over time. The Brothers are nothing close to the quality of older HP equipment. Haven't tried the newest HP stuff. But unless Brother has totally revamped their approach to quality, I'd never buy one again.
Here in New England the electrical transmission system is already about at capacity. So if there's a large-scale move to electric cars that will require a major investment in transmission lines. Those costs get passed through in electric rates. It will also require new generation capacity. We already get a big chunk of power from hydro in Quebec. But if we need more, well have to bid for it on the markets. If the rest of the nation (and Canada) are going massively to electric cars, that will be a sellers' market. Oh, we could erect thousands of windmills - we've got the ridge lines for 'em. But the rich retirees tend to live with views of and from the ridge lines, and love nothing more than a good fight against that sort of development. They also put up good fights against new transmission lines. And their hippie relatives are ferocious against the few nuclear power plants in New England - with some real chance of shutting one or more of those down.
So unless we're going to charge our cars from solar arrays on our roofs - at times under a foot of snow, and presuming our roofs aren't shaded by the hills and forests - the electricity to power our electric cars - not to mention our TVs and refrigerators and computers - is going to get far more spendy when those cars take off. Meanwhile the political and utility entities around here worship energy conservation, in the name of which they join our vacation and retirement home owners in fighting new generating and transmission capacity.
Would I buy an electric car? Sure, if the internal EM concerns can be alleviated. But it's going to be a disaster in the energy economy. And it'll probably lead to New England doing what it doesn't do much of now - importing large amounts of electricity from old, dirty coal plants in Ohio. On the plus side, this'll keep the price of oil lower for those still burning it. Many of us here heat our homes at least in part with oil.
I always learned more during vacations than the school year. In part that was because I could read books that fascinated me, and go deeply into them. In part that was because I could engage in more extended and elaborate play scenarios with other kids. In part it was because I could practice making my own selections for how to devote my time, rather than just mindlessly conforming to the sterile schedule of a school day.
This is not to knock my schools. I went to good ones. Maybe particularly if your school is good you benefit greatly from extended time off from it. If school's really taught you anything, you should be able to use time away from school well. If you can't, you should find another school - not extend its year!
Last night the Vermont Attorney General spoke to a small group of good Democrats and me about his various ongoing efforts. He's the guy who was suing the phone companies a few years ago for cooperating with Bush on spying on us, so generally on the bright side of things. But he ended his talk by claiming that the same file sharing software his college-enrolled sons are likely using is also being used to spread "millions" of child porn images.
I almost raised my hand to ask him if he was aware of the difference between public file sharing and the darknets, but it didn't seem wise to imply that I had any idea about such stuff to the state's chief law enforcement officer. He has this notion that he can force ISPs to stop file sharing, all in the name of stopping child porn distribution.
Someone should probably tell people like him about how the international terrorists can also use P2P, right? Because if you're drawing up massive terror plans, you're going to be just as likely as a serious child sex abuser to put the evidence where anyone and everyone can find it, right?
"The prediction of a problem from too [much|little] ___ is naive because 100 years ago ___, and 20 years ago ___ predicted the same thing, and it has never come to pass. Since it has never yet ___, it is only reasonable to expect that it never will. Those who are warning us against it are obviously fulfilling their own [psychological|political] need, rather than being useful contributors to the public conversation about the real dangers that may be ahead of us."
The wonderful thing about this formula is that it always works; until it doesn't. The vast majority of people living comfortably in modern civilization (only a minority of people currently living, but still a large number) has no personal memory of serious effects from too much or too little of anything. And we certainly are comforted to be told that we don't have to listen to those warning us of possible trouble ahead. There's a good living to be made by telling us what we want to hear. Even the nonprofessionals can get praised at dinner party conversations and modded up at/. by helping make sure we don't suffer from too little comforting about how the danger from ___ obviously won't come to pass, just because it hasn't yet, and [God|science] loves us, and our comfort will never be spoiled.
Okay, let's see: The "ignorant" parent post you object to has (1) an hypothesis on the role of consumer debt in social control, and thus the (political-economic) incentive to promote such debt, and (2) an hypothesis about why power tools from the 50s often still run reliably today, while those from within the last ten years have useful lifespans of a few years at best. In both cases it notes a change in phenomena, and posits a plausible explanation.
Your response only insults the degree to which the poster is "educated" in "economics." Now, economics has often been called "the dismal science" by economists. And that was before the near-total failure of their theories to enable 99+% of them to comprehend what was happening over the last several years until it nearly crashed the world economy. Maybe where we need innovation is in throwing the fucking economists out, into the same trash heap where the 19th Century's snake-oil salesmen and the 14th Century's peddlers of saints' finger bones lie moldering?
Perhaps the parent poster's hypotheses will be core realizations of the first scientific economics, once it has been realized that the "rational actor" at the core of current theory explains economics as well as phlogiston explains fire?
Hey, I'm responsible for mail servers. What's the fuss? Any reasonable competent *nix admin can keep a reasonably complex mail system running happily, along with many other systems. Assuming you've got other systems to manage, what's the point in not also running a couple of mail servers? You hardly need a FTE just to keep a mail system running for a few score, even a few hundred, people. Now, if you just can't get competent sysadmins, or your business is so unconnected from computers that all you really need is e-mail, so you've nothing else for sysadmins to do, go fly Google. Otherwise, what's to be gained? If you've already got sysadmins and they can't give you a reliable mail system putting in, at most, a couple of hundred man-hours per year (tops, most years < 100), fire 'em and hire better.
I love the suggestion that this would be used to strangle public blogging against the plan to kill our grandmothers by forcing down their throats the unborn children of the last of our unsterilized white teen girls.
How perfectly nutty. And by "perfect" I mean overwhelmingly beautiful.
Analysis depends on where you parse your task units. Walking miles while focusing intently on the scenery and composing a complex poem and committing it to memory can be two separate tasks, competing for attention, or they can be one single task. Making them one task was the poetic practice of Wordsworth as well as of Wallace Stevens, Basho, and Gary Snyder. Similarly listening to the melody line of a single instrument may be one task, and listening to each of the other instruments in an ensemble separate tasks, competing. Or they can all be aspects of one task, focusing on the whole of the performance while aware of each instrumental line.
Similarly driving and listening to music can be two tasks, competing for attention. Or they can be one task, where the music and road melds to a single experience. Driving, while listening to music, while holding a conversation, while composing a poem can be separate tasks, dividing the attention, or one task, unifying it. The analyses of people driving poorly when on a cell phone suggest the problem is that people create in their minds two spaces, one of the conversation, one of the road. We might all tend to do that. But is it the only way? Can we blend multiple strands into the same space such that, rather than competing and conflicting, they create a harmonious whole? Because it seems it was precisely from such a creation that Wordsworth's poetry flowed.
To what degree can we take a variety of activities and make a single task of them? Is it multitasking any more when we succeed?
This is about differences in how cultures track expressions, not in the expressions themselves. There's long been solid evidence that basic facial expressions are universal across human cultures, in their natural form. So if you're really smiling, it's the same muscles involved in much the same way, no matter what culture you're in. However, people also pretend to smile when it's not real. It's long been know that counterfeit expressions don't use all the same muscles, or the same overall pattern. People can be trained to spot this difference quite effectively.
Now, with this recent research showing that different cultures monitor expressions differently, this implies that good counterfeiting is going to be specific to which monitoring patterns it is trying to fool. That would be interesting research. It should show, for instance, that people are better at counterfeiting expressions to other people from their same culture. People from another culture should be better at seeing through your counterfeit expressions than people from your own culture, if that other culture focuses on different parts of the face than yours.
That cultures would focus differently fits with the extensive research on "joint attention." From infancy, we're wired to look at what we see other people looking at. We're very, very good a adopting the perceptual patterns of those around us, at a level that's almost automatic.
But contra the broad claim here, genuine emotions expressed through facial expressions are not culture-specific, but universal to humanity, essentially genetic.
Slashdot Mirror
The "war on drugs" is fundamentally political. It was started by Nixon as a way to punish what he saw as his chief enemies: the hippies who were constantly protesting against his Vietnam policies. Before Nixon's war on drugs, while drug use was technically illegal, there were far fewer arrests and incarcerations than after it got underway. Even then, the really intense number of incarcerations didn't happen until Reagan - again as a political measure against those he had seen as his enemies since they opposed his governorship in California - redoubled the effort.
Of course the war on drugs has been hardest on blacks. One of the chief political complaints against the hippies was they were taking too much of their culture and attitude from blacks. And blacks are less likely to have political connections - say through parents and college friends - to defend themselves against drug persecution. So they've been the easiest target. Still, the war on drugs is essentially Nixon's - and Reagan's - war against the hippies, based on their perception that the hippies were there personal enemies, and arguably enemies of everything essential to "America" - unbridled militarism, for instance.
There's nothing more political than substances that can help break people out of their followership trance.
I do not want the Scientologists, nor the Muslims, nor the Objectivists ... (well, it's a long list) to know that I, personally, am both certain that their "prophet" is a fraud, but also that they follow that "prophet" at great risk to both themselves and to much that is good in this world. So maybe I should stop saying such things. Because they might like to kill me for it. Even though nothing may be more important to the future of humanity than that we stop following false prophets. Please don't count on me any longer to contribute to that future. Because Google has warned me that if I don't hide thoughts like this, maybe I deserve what's coming.
They're clearly aligning themselves precisely with evil here. Because it applies across the board. Even if you don't agree with my list, any group following any false leader that you might expose as such, and that might be truly threatening to you, Google wants you to be naked to their retaliation.
But the truth can have political implications. So you have scientists simply doing science, concluding there's serious danger of human-triggered climate change. Yes, that's danger from the "political" p.o.v. of humans, or of ecological systems. But there's nothing unscientific about assessing danger to a particular population. Say, scientists find a disease that's a danger to rabbits. Reporting the danger is within the mode and realm of pure science.
When the danger is to humans rather than rabbits, though, there are political interests who don't want the danger to be taken seriously, perhaps because their economic interests would be compromised by action to mitigate the danger the scientists have described. Then these political, economic players start attacking the scientists and their findings. Whe the scientists persist in their science, they then complain that since this has become a matter of politics, the scientists should simply bow out, on the principle that "politics has no place in science".
The scientists don't recognize, surprisingly enough, that political and economic interests of others should constrain the science done, or the reports from it. So they get a bit defensive, understandably. They should defend the territory of science. There's no reason they should surrender any of it to political and economic players.
19.6% of US electricity is nuclear generated. Not near 50%. That according to the Wikipedia, of course. And there's no chance it will all get shut down at once.
The article mentions the mishap-plagued Vermont Yankee, currently near relicensing and with a 120% uprate a couple of years ago. Entergy, the current owner, plans to spin off ownership of half its plants, including Yankee, to a new firm financed by massive debt. This way Entergy will no longer itself be financially responsible for any aspect of these plants, while pocketing most of the projected profits from their next two decades of licensed operation in advance.
So Entergy's got little reason to concern itself with whether Yankee will work as advertised after relicensing. Relicensing is merely a requirement to spin it off, and relinquish Entergy of any responsibility at all, beyond immediate, massive profit.
Let's say we're all in a large vehicle that's heading forward. Scientists scan the horizon with advanced instruments and deduce that there's a large sinkhole ahead, that will in likelihood swallow the bottom half of the vehicle. Those actually steering the vehicle live up on top. To execute all the steps to get this huge vehicle to change course and avoid the sinkhole would require them to work very hard. Even if it goes into the sinkhole, they'll be okay, since they're way up top. So they've little inclination to work hard at this one.
After the scientists fail to convince those steering the vehicle to change course, they start to communicate directly to those down in the hold, riding 3rd or 4th class, letting them know it might be in their longer-term interest to change who is up on the top deck steering. Those on the top deck, who are too lazy to turn the vehicle just for the sake of the well being of those down below, are also resistant to being replaced, of course. So they come up with every way they can to discredit the advice of the scientists.
Remember, it's the same people who are perfectly happy if those down below have no health care. Compassion is not in their kit. And honesty is for fools they'd say, if they were honest.
A good coder has to understand the context they're coding for. Generally that context is use in the course of a business. Generally that requires being able to integrate concepts about the business that are beyond the scope of coding.
There are exceptions. If you're a lower-level programmer, part of a larger team, and the team is run by people who can comprehend and integrate concepts beyond the scope of the code into the system design, then a two-year degree (or four-year degree focused solely on coding without a traditional liberal arts mix) will do you fine. But that's a lower pay grade than the person who is able to grasp larger concepts, and even more importantly communicate and coordinate with people handling aspects of whatever business it is who are in a position to leverage the code being created for real profit. Even if that person, likely with the broader educational and life experiences, isn't as good a coder by some technical measure, she or he is of far more value to the bottom line of the operation.
Where's your analysis of the degree to which this "isn't exactly sudo"? It's pretty damn close. If it comes down to the degree of "exactly," please provide some examples from patent case law that show that the degree of difference here is sufficient for the two programs not to be close enough to the same that sudo, had it been invented after this patent, wouldn't violate said patent.
I'm nothing like a patent attorney. But my understanding is that if someone invents a special right-angle shovel, and patents it, you're going to be in trouble even if your shovel head is only at an 80 degree angle rather than 90 degrees. If not at 80, certainly at 89.
Besides, this patent ends with language claiming that the method of implementation is only the preferred one, while the patent covers other methods of implementation of the same underlying concept. And in which sense is the underlying concept even a few degrees different from what sudo does? Your analysis?
Yup. They make what should be a simple half-day project into two weeks of applying the careful methods they've learned while getting their degree. They are more than happy to describe the theoretical justifications of their plodding ways. Not that there's not a place for this. It fits quite well with large projects where everything should be maximally comprehensible to other programmers. But the overhead for small-scale stuff is amazing. And they have little capacity for reading existing code that's not built to the design patterns their particular professors taught them. So they end up trashing a lot of quite serviceable stuff to rebuild it so they can bring it within their narrow understanding.
OPEC allocates production quotas as a percentage of each member nation's claimed reserves. So any member of OPEC who wants to sell more oil this year under their quota system will claim proven reserves larger than they really have. And any member of OPEC who thinks other members are inflating their numbers, will inflate their own just to keep the field level.
One source of modern awareness of the placebo effect came in WWII, in an incident (as I recall in Italy) where troops severely injured on the battlefield were treated by medics without a sufficient supply of morphine. They ended up giving some number of them shots without morphine, and despite the severity of the injuries many of those troops responded just as if morphine had been administered.
So the placebo can work for large amounts of acute pain. Reports for effectiveness in managing long-term chronic pain are more ambiguous. And as with hypnosis - whether or not it's a related phenomenon - there's great variability in the population as to whether it has much effect. Studies showing placebo effects generally show them for only a minority of the sample group.
Okay, so in pretty Peggy's view anything that government does by way of governing won't work. (Didn't she write Reagan's line, "Government is the problem"?) Since Democrats to some extent believe government can be, and should be, effective - well, we should just give up on this. We should become disheartened as Democrats. If "most everyone else" knows that government - which by its nature involves regulation, and public investment, and yes collecting taxes to pay for those activities - is "not a path through," we're left asking "Who is this 'everyone else'?" Pretty clearly it's the shrinking demographic which still identifies as Republican: prevalently old, white, and living in the Deep South - people who last liked government when it was run by Jefferson Davis.
Well, I'm middle aged, white, and live in New England. I'm hopeful. The way through looks obvious, and I see an administration with a fairly good vision of it - even if they're not going nearly far enough in regulating Peggy's friends on the street her Journal's named after. It's so brightly obvious, it's almost blinding. It's based on government, businesses, and individuals each doing our part. Yes, government should not go too far in controlling businesses; but in return businesses have to back way off, as they've gone much too far in recent years into endeavoring to control government. Why do people like Peggy never worry when businesses control government too much?
Been running a Jetway VIA box for about six months in a home server role - just added ram, a big cheap HD, and Ubuntu. Installed the OS over the LAN with PXE. Works just fine so far. Meets your budget. Haven't tested actual power draw though. It's small, reasonably quiet - an internal fan for the CPU but the power supply is a fanless external brick. No Ubuntu compatibility hitches at all, so Debian should be fine too.
Man, you've got your headquarters in your hindquarters. No offense. Even if we grant your premise, that some large proportion of people would spot the campaign as fake, you have to remember that (1) Telling lies from truth is different from IQ. Some very bright people are extremely gullible, some very dull people have an unerring radar for falsehoods. (2) It's neither morally nor legally permissible to purposely scare the hell out of someone merely because they're less intelligent. (3) Many tens of thousands of people - mostly women - are stalked each year in this great nation, and a portion of them murdered by their stalkers. So a campaign like this odds are will reach some of them, who already know that stalking threats are real, have already been stalked, and just like a veteran hearing a backfire and finding himself back in battle, can easily be returned to the real psychological state - even by an instance they intellectually know is fake.
There's incredible poetry in Zelazny. It's easy to overlook, since his stories have good pace and momentum. But while there are a number of sci-fi writers whose entire works I've read, only Zelazny and Heinlein have been worth reading three or four times. And of the two, Zelazny's prose is the one which stands out for sheer beauty. Subtle, but magnificent.
In the one-reading-is-enough category, P.K. Dick is incredibly important. Heinlein was a big fan. And unlike Heinlein's work, Dick's has been turned into some first-rate movies, which can give your kids a hook to work back into it.
I got a couple of Brother HL-1450s a few years back. Totally shit quality. The print output and speed is fine when they work. But they're excessively prone to jamming. The front cover and tray are cheaply put together, and start falling apart over time. The Brothers are nothing close to the quality of older HP equipment. Haven't tried the newest HP stuff. But unless Brother has totally revamped their approach to quality, I'd never buy one again.
Here in New England the electrical transmission system is already about at capacity. So if there's a large-scale move to electric cars that will require a major investment in transmission lines. Those costs get passed through in electric rates. It will also require new generation capacity. We already get a big chunk of power from hydro in Quebec. But if we need more, well have to bid for it on the markets. If the rest of the nation (and Canada) are going massively to electric cars, that will be a sellers' market. Oh, we could erect thousands of windmills - we've got the ridge lines for 'em. But the rich retirees tend to live with views of and from the ridge lines, and love nothing more than a good fight against that sort of development. They also put up good fights against new transmission lines. And their hippie relatives are ferocious against the few nuclear power plants in New England - with some real chance of shutting one or more of those down.
So unless we're going to charge our cars from solar arrays on our roofs - at times under a foot of snow, and presuming our roofs aren't shaded by the hills and forests - the electricity to power our electric cars - not to mention our TVs and refrigerators and computers - is going to get far more spendy when those cars take off. Meanwhile the political and utility entities around here worship energy conservation, in the name of which they join our vacation and retirement home owners in fighting new generating and transmission capacity.
Would I buy an electric car? Sure, if the internal EM concerns can be alleviated. But it's going to be a disaster in the energy economy. And it'll probably lead to New England doing what it doesn't do much of now - importing large amounts of electricity from old, dirty coal plants in Ohio. On the plus side, this'll keep the price of oil lower for those still burning it. Many of us here heat our homes at least in part with oil.
I always learned more during vacations than the school year. In part that was because I could read books that fascinated me, and go deeply into them. In part that was because I could engage in more extended and elaborate play scenarios with other kids. In part it was because I could practice making my own selections for how to devote my time, rather than just mindlessly conforming to the sterile schedule of a school day.
This is not to knock my schools. I went to good ones. Maybe particularly if your school is good you benefit greatly from extended time off from it. If school's really taught you anything, you should be able to use time away from school well. If you can't, you should find another school - not extend its year!
Last night the Vermont Attorney General spoke to a small group of good Democrats and me about his various ongoing efforts. He's the guy who was suing the phone companies a few years ago for cooperating with Bush on spying on us, so generally on the bright side of things. But he ended his talk by claiming that the same file sharing software his college-enrolled sons are likely using is also being used to spread "millions" of child porn images.
I almost raised my hand to ask him if he was aware of the difference between public file sharing and the darknets, but it didn't seem wise to imply that I had any idea about such stuff to the state's chief law enforcement officer. He has this notion that he can force ISPs to stop file sharing, all in the name of stopping child porn distribution.
Someone should probably tell people like him about how the international terrorists can also use P2P, right? Because if you're drawing up massive terror plans, you're going to be just as likely as a serious child sex abuser to put the evidence where anyone and everyone can find it, right?
"The prediction of a problem from too [much|little] ___ is naive because 100 years ago ___, and 20 years ago ___ predicted the same thing, and it has never come to pass. Since it has never yet ___, it is only reasonable to expect that it never will. Those who are warning us against it are obviously fulfilling their own [psychological|political] need, rather than being useful contributors to the public conversation about the real dangers that may be ahead of us."
The wonderful thing about this formula is that it always works; until it doesn't. The vast majority of people living comfortably in modern civilization (only a minority of people currently living, but still a large number) has no personal memory of serious effects from too much or too little of anything. And we certainly are comforted to be told that we don't have to listen to those warning us of possible trouble ahead. There's a good living to be made by telling us what we want to hear. Even the nonprofessionals can get praised at dinner party conversations and modded up at /. by helping make sure we don't suffer from too little comforting about how the danger from ___ obviously won't come to pass, just because it hasn't yet, and [God|science] loves us, and our comfort will never be spoiled.
Okay, let's see: The "ignorant" parent post you object to has (1) an hypothesis on the role of consumer debt in social control, and thus the (political-economic) incentive to promote such debt, and (2) an hypothesis about why power tools from the 50s often still run reliably today, while those from within the last ten years have useful lifespans of a few years at best. In both cases it notes a change in phenomena, and posits a plausible explanation.
Your response only insults the degree to which the poster is "educated" in "economics." Now, economics has often been called "the dismal science" by economists. And that was before the near-total failure of their theories to enable 99+% of them to comprehend what was happening over the last several years until it nearly crashed the world economy. Maybe where we need innovation is in throwing the fucking economists out, into the same trash heap where the 19th Century's snake-oil salesmen and the 14th Century's peddlers of saints' finger bones lie moldering?
Perhaps the parent poster's hypotheses will be core realizations of the first scientific economics, once it has been realized that the "rational actor" at the core of current theory explains economics as well as phlogiston explains fire?
Hey, I'm responsible for mail servers. What's the fuss? Any reasonable competent *nix admin can keep a reasonably complex mail system running happily, along with many other systems. Assuming you've got other systems to manage, what's the point in not also running a couple of mail servers? You hardly need a FTE just to keep a mail system running for a few score, even a few hundred, people. Now, if you just can't get competent sysadmins, or your business is so unconnected from computers that all you really need is e-mail, so you've nothing else for sysadmins to do, go fly Google. Otherwise, what's to be gained? If you've already got sysadmins and they can't give you a reliable mail system putting in, at most, a couple of hundred man-hours per year (tops, most years < 100), fire 'em and hire better.
I love the suggestion that this would be used to strangle public blogging against the plan to kill our grandmothers by forcing down their throats the unborn children of the last of our unsterilized white teen girls.
How perfectly nutty. And by "perfect" I mean overwhelmingly beautiful.
Analysis depends on where you parse your task units. Walking miles while focusing intently on the scenery and composing a complex poem and committing it to memory can be two separate tasks, competing for attention, or they can be one single task. Making them one task was the poetic practice of Wordsworth as well as of Wallace Stevens, Basho, and Gary Snyder. Similarly listening to the melody line of a single instrument may be one task, and listening to each of the other instruments in an ensemble separate tasks, competing. Or they can all be aspects of one task, focusing on the whole of the performance while aware of each instrumental line.
Similarly driving and listening to music can be two tasks, competing for attention. Or they can be one task, where the music and road melds to a single experience. Driving, while listening to music, while holding a conversation, while composing a poem can be separate tasks, dividing the attention, or one task, unifying it. The analyses of people driving poorly when on a cell phone suggest the problem is that people create in their minds two spaces, one of the conversation, one of the road. We might all tend to do that. But is it the only way? Can we blend multiple strands into the same space such that, rather than competing and conflicting, they create a harmonious whole? Because it seems it was precisely from such a creation that Wordsworth's poetry flowed.
To what degree can we take a variety of activities and make a single task of them? Is it multitasking any more when we succeed?
This is about differences in how cultures track expressions, not in the expressions themselves. There's long been solid evidence that basic facial expressions are universal across human cultures, in their natural form. So if you're really smiling, it's the same muscles involved in much the same way, no matter what culture you're in. However, people also pretend to smile when it's not real. It's long been know that counterfeit expressions don't use all the same muscles, or the same overall pattern. People can be trained to spot this difference quite effectively.
Now, with this recent research showing that different cultures monitor expressions differently, this implies that good counterfeiting is going to be specific to which monitoring patterns it is trying to fool. That would be interesting research. It should show, for instance, that people are better at counterfeiting expressions to other people from their same culture. People from another culture should be better at seeing through your counterfeit expressions than people from your own culture, if that other culture focuses on different parts of the face than yours.
That cultures would focus differently fits with the extensive research on "joint attention." From infancy, we're wired to look at what we see other people looking at. We're very, very good a adopting the perceptual patterns of those around us, at a level that's almost automatic.
But contra the broad claim here, genuine emotions expressed through facial expressions are not culture-specific, but universal to humanity, essentially genetic.