Think you well illustrate where the public relations divide is. There are a large number of people in our culture who assume that Nature is something like a beneficent Earth Mother who is all-powerful and would never let harm come to Her favorite children - us... or something like a Jehovah with similar power and intentions. There is another group of us who look at examples like nuclear bombs and the view from space of how thin the biosphere is upon the rind of this rock, and historical examples like the deforestation of Easter Island and North Africa (a couple of thousand years back - there didn't used to be nearly so huge a desert there), and conclude, "Wow. The Earth's fragile; we're powerful but often short-sighted and accident-prone; we could really fuck this up!"
The first group, however you dress up its beliefs, is essentially betting on a religious view - and not just any religious view, not one with angry deities or out-of-control demons or End Times, but rather one where the Powers strongly favor the conditions conducive to the continuation of 20th Century American suburban lifestyles. The second group, we like to think we're more realists, believing in physics and chemistry and the records laid down in rocks and ice. A small amount of plutonium can, used a certain way, produce a nuclear bomb capable of destroying many square miles; and some several thousand of those bombs of producing nuclear winter. A small increment of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, input over years, globally, can produce similar large results from a small thing. And a germ can fell an elephant.
When a baby plays with matches it's not his fault - exactly - when the house burns down. So maybe it's not 'man's' fault either. But it still burns down, and the baby still did it.
Jesu Kryst! Democrats are not in some sort of collusion with Republicans. If there ever was a back-room power-sharing agreement that vanished years ago - sometime before the Republicans ran down Max Cleland as cowardly for losing those limbs in Nam. So instead of putting out that suppress the vote rhetoric about how it doesn't matter which party wins - which only serves the Republicans this time around since "independent" voters are polling better than 2-to-1 as favoring Democrats... well, look, since you're being a Republican troll in effect, I hope at least they're scratching your back.
As for the betrayal of liberty by the Republicans, look up any of Senator Leahy's recent speaches. He may have been behind the Mickey Mouse copyright extension, but on the core issues behind our Republic, he's been calling it true.
Okay, take farm-raised salmon. These are grown in pens which generally sit in bays where the wild salmon migrate by. The farm-raised salmon, it turns out, being crowded in pens like that, are wonderful hosts for parasites. Those parasites then spread to the wild salmon migrating by with disasterous results for their mortality. The practice of "farm"-raised salmon is directly responsible for killing off wild salmon runs.
They also turn out to be collecting a lot more of our industrial toxins in their flesh, caged in the bays like that, rather than free-swimming far out to sea and upriver. It's a lot healthier to eat the wild ones.
Remember the low-power community radio law of just a few years back? NPR fought it, and got Congress to cut the number of licences issued by the program in half. Now, you might ask, "Why does National Public Radio fight the creation of low-power, local, public radio stations? Isn't NPR supposed to be not-for-profit and concerned only that there are abundant public radio resources outside of the corporate, commercialized sphere, especially those that can serve to build healthy community among Americans?.
Well, obviously not. NPR has embraced the dark side as thoroughly as Clear Channel, their holier-than-thou goody-two-shoes programming notwithstanding. Their velvet glove covers a fist of iron.
The Gentoo forums are good. The Gentoo Bugzilla, however, is a constant struggle against gatekeepers with a strong disposition against admitting that anything is a bug, and the bias that the distro should be a toy for the developers rather than a toolset for professional sysadmins - and therefore if a workaround is obscure to mere professionals, but obvious to those living half their lives on the IRC channels, well you're just too lame for not knowing about it and the underlying problem doesn't actually need fixing in the packages.
That said, I use Gentoo on a number of servers precisely because it's the most consistently upgradeable distro in the context of a customized production environment. Redhat, Slack, Debian - forget it, you just have to do a fresh install with major OS version changes, and then reinstall all your customizations on top of that. That's more of a headache - over the course of a few years of running a server - than the minor glitches that require either help from the Gentoo forums or persistence in getting the Bugzilla crew to actually accept that bugs should be fixed, rather than denied (they do respond to persistence, usually, eventually).
But I've been hoping Ubuntu would turn out to be the distro that supplanted Gentoo in upgradeability - since hardware is now fast enough that Gentoo's other virtue of custom compilation for speed means less. Hope Ubuntu gets back on track after this. Gentoo is also far out in front is in documentation for more advanced setups - but Ubuntu should naturally catch up in that department over the next year or so.
It's not "stealing" intellectual "property" - and the "for profit" part... would you say it's okay if it's to "steal from the rich and give to the poor"? Probably not. So how does it make a difference to your argument?
It's not stealing because it's potlatch. Gifts are being passed around at the cultural feast. The movie is getting promoted as a gift, in part by people wearing t-shirts. Those t-shirts are got in exchange for money, but t-shirt makers most always expect to make some return on their labor. So in the potlatch circle promotion is gifted to the movie studio, which then uses that promotion to achieve profit. And those doing the promotion, those involved in actually producing goods, also are allowed some small profit. Those doing just blogs on it may get some profit through advertising links.
Potlatch was an important part of Northwest Native American economies - which were until disrupted by European culture among the most prosperous in the world. They ate and lived very, very well. Those who made the most profits in their various lines of work were expected to also be the most generous at the potlatch festivities. It was part of how they solidified their positions, got the social cred to go on living even better than their neighbors, because they were for whatever reason getting more profit from their positions in the business and governmental communities than their neighbors were.
So a whole lot of us joined in the Serenity Dance at the feast. Many gifts were passed around, but in the end the Leader of the Serenity Dance ended up even more prosperous than before the dance. The circle of giving establishes the basis for profit - it is not a distraction from it (except for an evening), let alone an undermining of it. But now Universal doesn't understand that the circle has to be, well, "universal," or it won't continue to work - both cultural and economic idiots.
The authors (economists, not pathologists) take as unbiased the statistics on prevalence in the various counties. Yet, as is much discussed, the statistics on prevalence are befuddled because there is a strong recent trend towards diagnosing autism today, in children who in the past would not have been diagnosed. So in looking at the counties with more penetration of television in Washington and Oregon mainly (and some in California), they're looking, as they say, mostly west of the mountains for high-television-availability areas - meaning the culturally modern and trendy populations of Seattle and Portland - and east of the mountains for low-television-availability areas - meaning largely-rural counties where both popular culture and medical practice lag far behind the curve.
This isn't to say that autism isn't a serious and increasing problem; just that this whole study (which doesn't seem to have made it past peer review yet) is likely looking at an artifact of where autism's been looked for, and finding that it's most looked for in those counties where the population has been bombarded with, for instance, cable shows about the epidemic of autism, and how to look for it in your children.
Would it be possible to design a power strip for wall warts that could sense whether an external device was actually drawing on each of them at the time, and cut back the input power when it's not?
How about a media center power strip with a remote control - just a simple on and off - with the option to train it to accept the on and off signals from other remotes?
Or have a media center power strip which can be trained to recognize the power draw of one key device when it's in on rather than standby mode, where the key device is then left in its normal standby/on mode but plugged into a special socket in the strip, and the strip then cuts or restores power to all the other devices according to whether the key device is turned on?
If you start manufacturing that last one, please send me one!
Anything involving chip design depends heavily not just on your patent portfolio, but on accumulating a set of minds with deep experience. Yes, you need to keep bringing in fresh genius; but you also need to retain the old, both for its continued insights and to help cultivate the new talent. So if Intel is really shipping out any of its major chip design work (as compared to testing, where the more different angles you test from the better - and which may really be all that's involved here), that's a sign that it currently values its accumulated "live capital" - its stock of engineering geniuses - low enough that it figures it might as well start over again with virgin staff elsewhere.
Now, there can be reasons for that. The American car makers are crashing because they should have fired their engineering staffs a couple of decades ago and simply started over. But has Intel really reached a similar point?
CNN reported on Sunday morning that investigators of Morgellons Disease (previously discussed) have found plant genetic material in association with it. Could this be horizontal transfer from genmod plants (perhaps through other plant intermediaries)? All of the victims have worked with plants, either as hobby or profession.
The ongoing incorporation of nanotech may lead to a lot more need for health care. It should create more jobs in the legal industry, too. Database integration between health and legal could be a profitable IT venture.
By your analysis the way to avoid polarization is for the Democrats to try to resemble the Republicans as much as possible, so that the electorate won't have to feel "polarized"? Yeah, and let's make the Linux desktop look as much like Windows as possible. For that matter, let's make the stores and restaurants just about everywhere look as much the same as possible. If everything is done just the same way everywhere by everyone, then everyone can enjoy the totally free choice, without polarization, of having it make no real difference.
On the other hand, there's a strong case to be made that the mistake the Democrats made was to run a man with the sensibilities of someone who comes from money, and belonged to Skull and Bones at Yale, against someone who comes from money, and belonged to Skull and Bones at Yale. Then at the congressional level just about all the Democratic candidates were trying to sound like, on foreign policy, there was nothing to distinguish them from the Republicans. So if you're going to vote for foreign policy, you may as well vote for the guys who had those (brilliant?) ideas first. And if you're going to vote for domestic policy - say because you're seeing your wage fail to gain while education, medicine, energy and housing get much more expensive - if both guys are mostly going to watch out for the rich (and Kerry said next to nothing that the Republicans could cry "Class war!" about), what's the real motivator to go out and vote?
Why is this worth discussing again? Because we're about to have another election! Maybe if we'd wake the f**k up and insist that the press pay attention when crooked stuff like Kennedy documented is pulled again, over time we'll see less of it - rather than the great amount more that's now likely with easily-hackable voting systems. Of course if both parties will just hurry up and be the same about everything, the joke will be on those who waste their time hacking the voting machines.
It is straightforward, and inexpensive, to purchase title insurance. Title insurance precisely insures that your title to the home is valid. So if you are the buyer, and it turns out that the seller did not posess valid title, then the real owner gets the house back, but you get paid back your loss by the insurance company. If they buyer does not get title insurance - an absolutely standard feature of most house purchases - it's their own risk, as it should be.
Wonder what Louisiana law says on this. Like Quebec, their laws are based on a French rather than English foundation.
In the two sample chapters, it's obvious Spider sees Variable Star as a close relative to Citizen of the Galaxy. The estate the hero is wisked to this time is similar to the estate where the hero ends up that time, this time moved northward from the Tetons (once actually a Rockefeller estate) into the Canadian Rockies - and in both cases there's a Surname of Surname construction to signify extreme upper class wealth and position. In both cases the dynastic family is engaged in space exploration modelled on the "age of discovery" when England and Holland were, for commercial reasons, exploring the seas.
What's interesting about the politics of Citizen, for those who place Heinlein on the "right wing," is that the central plot element concerns how a major American corporation can end up deeply complicit in the slave trade and other harshly abusive colonial practices. If Spider (and RAH's outline) has taken Star down a parallel path - since so far it looks like a set up for a reverse telling of the same story - no doubt those of the right who fancy Heinlein a compatriot will scream that Spider has perverted Heinleins vision, injecting left wing themes.
Take a look at his first book, For Us the Living. It reflects his political background in California, where he'd been a candidate of the very radical (although not Marxist) left. To assimilate him to some flavor of current conservative thought ignores where he was coming from. It's generally a mistake made because the left isn't supposed to respect the need for a military, and he wrote Starship Troopers. Well, he wrote that in the same period as Stranger in a Strange Land and Glory Road - the first of which was distinctly against the sort of authoritarianism that characterizes our current conservative movement; the latter of which was among other things the first novel to take a strong stand against the absurdity of our adventure in Viet Nam. And don't even begin to think about his treatment of fundamentalist religion. It's just flat-out false to assimilate him to any normal conservative position, at any point in his career.
Heinlein often moved notes and outlines to the back burner. Many of his strongest books, including Stranger in a Strange Land, were sitting in his files half-conceived for years before he finally wrote a finished draft and published. So when something was still in his files, it didn't always mean he thought it no good; sometimes he thought it so good that he felt himself not quite ready to do justice to it yet.
1. There is a complex system involving equilibrium in which for a relatively long time period the proportion of X in a gas suffused throughout the system has been Y. That gas plays an active role in interaction with many other parts of the system.
2. Over a relatively short period the proportion of X is increased towards 2 * Y.
Would you venture then, having a general background knowledge of complex systems in equilibrium, that the doubling of Y would:
A. Dissrupt the equilibrium, with diverse changes throughout the system.
or
B. Have no effect?
If B is your choice, is this because you believe that complex equilibriums are not in fact properties of interactions within systems (and in relation to their inputs and outputs) but instead are maintained magically, perhaps by nature spirits or gods?
Sometimes I wish those who have beliefs which preclude putting their bets on scientific reasoning would just come out and say so, rather than couching their own arguments as if they were within scientific discourse. Carbon dioxide playing, as it does, an important role in many natural processes, doubling it as we're doing is much more likely to dissrupt the equilibrium than do nothing. Absent specific models and proof of elaborate homeostatic mechanisms capable of specifically compensating for each of the projectable disruptions from doubling X in this system, the default assumption should be that we're in for a rough ride.
If you want to bet there's a God in Heaven capable and willing to fill the role even if such elaborate homeostatic mechanisms prove lacking, get to praying. With an attitude like that towards science, prayer may be the best the world can ask of you.
by educating people, improving their quality of life, allowing them self-determination and treating them fairly - that's how you stop terrorism, by taking away its recruits.
Yes, if a subset of some group of people sees, "We can get wonderful subsidies from the richer nations by launching a few terror strikes to bring their humanitarian attention to our people," what will they do? We gave some pretty wonderful humanitarian subsidies to North Korea when they made a nuclear threat. What did they do next? Why, they made an even bigger nuclear threat, built some missiles, and shared their technologies with friends like Iran.
Contrarily, if a subset of a population goes terrorist, perhaps what we should do is not provide rewards to the entire population, but treat it as Israel is treating Lebanon. There were plenty of terrorists in the past, for instance in the 19th Century. They were invariably treated harshly. Did their organizations prosper by the harsh treatment bringing in new recruits? How many 19th Century terrorist organizations are around today? Pretty close to none.
People are generally rational enough not to engage in activities which will bring on hardship and death for most of their friends and relations. People are also rational enough, and cold enough, to do evil things if the end result is an improved situation for their friends and relations. So the first world has to do two things: (1) Richly reward any third-world movements that follow the examples of Gandhi and MLK; (2) Treat any populations which harbor terrorists with utmost severity. There is no profit in letting them play to our conscience unless they show one of their own.
Well, having gone from Slackware to Redhat to Debian to Gentoo for servers, what were my motivations?
Slack was great, but hard to keep up to date
Redhat upgraded better within a version, but was a real pain to upgrade between versions (this was a few years back; better now?)
Debian handled upgrade continuity well, but too many packages were too far behind to give my employers the desired functionality
Gentoo has been very good, aside from the slight inconvenience of compile cycles and the occassional user-disrespecting attitude from their bug-report gatekeepers - upgrades are mostly smooth, software stays current, my employers are happy
I've looked at Ubuntu on the desktop, and like they say it's well done. Haven't checked the server version yet, and I mean to next week when I set up a new system for failover. If the reports here are right, and the server software isn't much advanced over Debian's versions, I could end up a bit frustrated, but I'd like to check it out anyhow. I'm also concerned about the relative lack of documentation (Gentoo's is pretty good), and what it takes to deviate from the Ubuntu team's defaults. But the potential for Ubuntu on servers is there: If it can become as current with its packages on the server end as it is on the desktop end, and accomodate customization well, hardware's getting enough faster than most server functions need that the penalty of not compiling specifically for hardware (in the Gentoo way) won't matter much.
Anyone working even tangentially in computer security knows that, if the means exists to hack a system, even or especially if it is tremendously obscure and/or complex, it will be discovered and used. When we're lucky, it's first discovered and used by someone just doing it for fun, who leaves their Kilroy Was Here on our systems, and we do forensics, find the entry point, and fix it before the truly malicious show up. If we're unlucky, we've just had our career toasted and lost our employers $millions.
What's brilliant about Diebold's engineering is that there's no challenge. Nothing obscure or complex is required to hack the systems, so those seeking a serious challenge will just go elsewhere. This makes them honeypots for the truly malicious, who after identification can then be recruited into the NSA, to help on important projects like monitoring communications. Elections? They're obsolete anyhow because most of the electorate is so seriously disinformed, and most of the candidates working so hard to appeal to the disinformed, that the votes altered by hacking don't measurably affect the outcome in any way that seriously matters to those who control our media corporations, our "think" tanks, and the dittoheads of America.
Future historians will say, "While they were working hard to 'save' their elections, their brains were stolen, and the battle was lost anyway."
They didn't hire the cheapest. They hired Bechtel - one of the largest, most prestigious engineering firms on the planet.
Bechtel, the engineering corporation hired to oversee the construction of the Big Dig, is also the company currently overseeing the U.S. rebuilding efforts in Iraq. (source).
Bechtel, as you would imagine, has major political ties worldwide. They also managed to get the contract to specify that their liability limit is quite low on this job.
Israel? It has long been al Qaeda's prime goal to retake Spain! Why not give it to them? It's barely even attached to Europe?
The main lesson from all this - getting back to topic - is that civilization's worth defending. And civilization isn't whatever crazy belief set some group of people manages to share among them. Civilization is specifically an allegiance to bedrock values of science, individual freedoms, environmental preservation, and a flourishing of aesthetics that we cannot succeed or survive in any worthwhile way without. Fundamentalists and fascists and those who'd trash the Earth in the long term for a little short-term profit are arrayed against civilization.
Defeating these fascistic incursions on our basic liberties of communication is part of the front line defense of civilization's future. Defeating Hizbollah and the like is also part of the front-line defense - even if the currently fundamentalist, anti-science-leaning US government is necessarily the source of arms for Israel to do so. Heck, we got the Internet from the US government. Civilization takes raw materials where it finds them, and turns them to better use.
If a state can decide to cast its electoral votes not either for the winner in that state, nor in a way proportional to the votes in that state, then the state could equally well decide to simply cast its votes to whichever member of the Bush family is running that year. If enough states consent to do this, we can have the monarchy that evidently a majority of Americans desire, without having to abolish the rituals of voting.
Not all humans have an instinctive fear of snakes.
My developmental psychology professor assured us that infants are universally afraid of a few things - including snakes and heights. Other fears they can quickly learn, but depend on their environment. (This was three decades ago, so maybe it's debated since. Certainly the term "instinct" was debated even then.) Nor do all the fears we're born with necessarily carry over into later life. If we're comfortable calling a fear everyone is born with "instinctual," then fear of snakes is. Being able to grow out of it later doesn't prove the contrary. Geese have an "instinct" for migration, yet given the year-round goose-friendly environment human beings have created in some locations, there are now flocks which have totally given up on migration. An "instinct" is what a creature begins with, not necessarily where it ends up.
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Think you well illustrate where the public relations divide is. There are a large number of people in our culture who assume that Nature is something like a beneficent Earth Mother who is all-powerful and would never let harm come to Her favorite children - us ... or something like a Jehovah with similar power and intentions. There is another group of us who look at examples like nuclear bombs and the view from space of how thin the biosphere is upon the rind of this rock, and historical examples like the deforestation of Easter Island and North Africa (a couple of thousand years back - there didn't used to be nearly so huge a desert there), and conclude, "Wow. The Earth's fragile; we're powerful but often short-sighted and accident-prone; we could really fuck this up!"
The first group, however you dress up its beliefs, is essentially betting on a religious view - and not just any religious view, not one with angry deities or out-of-control demons or End Times, but rather one where the Powers strongly favor the conditions conducive to the continuation of 20th Century American suburban lifestyles. The second group, we like to think we're more realists, believing in physics and chemistry and the records laid down in rocks and ice. A small amount of plutonium can, used a certain way, produce a nuclear bomb capable of destroying many square miles; and some several thousand of those bombs of producing nuclear winter. A small increment of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, input over years, globally, can produce similar large results from a small thing. And a germ can fell an elephant.
When a baby plays with matches it's not his fault - exactly - when the house burns down. So maybe it's not 'man's' fault either. But it still burns down, and the baby still did it.
Jesu Kryst! Democrats are not in some sort of collusion with Republicans. If there ever was a back-room power-sharing agreement that vanished years ago - sometime before the Republicans ran down Max Cleland as cowardly for losing those limbs in Nam. So instead of putting out that suppress the vote rhetoric about how it doesn't matter which party wins - which only serves the Republicans this time around since "independent" voters are polling better than 2-to-1 as favoring Democrats ... well, look, since you're being a Republican troll in effect, I hope at least they're scratching your back.
As for the betrayal of liberty by the Republicans, look up any of Senator Leahy's recent speaches. He may have been behind the Mickey Mouse copyright extension, but on the core issues behind our Republic, he's been calling it true.
Okay, take farm-raised salmon. These are grown in pens which generally sit in bays where the wild salmon migrate by. The farm-raised salmon, it turns out, being crowded in pens like that, are wonderful hosts for parasites. Those parasites then spread to the wild salmon migrating by with disasterous results for their mortality. The practice of "farm"-raised salmon is directly responsible for killing off wild salmon runs.
They also turn out to be collecting a lot more of our industrial toxins in their flesh, caged in the bays like that, rather than free-swimming far out to sea and upriver. It's a lot healthier to eat the wild ones.
Remember the low-power community radio law of just a few years back? NPR fought it, and got Congress to cut the number of licences issued by the program in half. Now, you might ask, "Why does National Public Radio fight the creation of low-power, local, public radio stations? Isn't NPR supposed to be not-for-profit and concerned only that there are abundant public radio resources outside of the corporate, commercialized sphere, especially those that can serve to build healthy community among Americans?.
Well, obviously not. NPR has embraced the dark side as thoroughly as Clear Channel, their holier-than-thou goody-two-shoes programming notwithstanding. Their velvet glove covers a fist of iron.
The Gentoo forums are good. The Gentoo Bugzilla, however, is a constant struggle against gatekeepers with a strong disposition against admitting that anything is a bug, and the bias that the distro should be a toy for the developers rather than a toolset for professional sysadmins - and therefore if a workaround is obscure to mere professionals, but obvious to those living half their lives on the IRC channels, well you're just too lame for not knowing about it and the underlying problem doesn't actually need fixing in the packages.
That said, I use Gentoo on a number of servers precisely because it's the most consistently upgradeable distro in the context of a customized production environment. Redhat, Slack, Debian - forget it, you just have to do a fresh install with major OS version changes, and then reinstall all your customizations on top of that. That's more of a headache - over the course of a few years of running a server - than the minor glitches that require either help from the Gentoo forums or persistence in getting the Bugzilla crew to actually accept that bugs should be fixed, rather than denied (they do respond to persistence, usually, eventually).
But I've been hoping Ubuntu would turn out to be the distro that supplanted Gentoo in upgradeability - since hardware is now fast enough that Gentoo's other virtue of custom compilation for speed means less. Hope Ubuntu gets back on track after this. Gentoo is also far out in front is in documentation for more advanced setups - but Ubuntu should naturally catch up in that department over the next year or so.
It's not "stealing" intellectual "property" - and the "for profit" part ... would you say it's okay if it's to "steal from the rich and give to the poor"? Probably not. So how does it make a difference to your argument?
It's not stealing because it's potlatch. Gifts are being passed around at the cultural feast. The movie is getting promoted as a gift, in part by people wearing t-shirts. Those t-shirts are got in exchange for money, but t-shirt makers most always expect to make some return on their labor. So in the potlatch circle promotion is gifted to the movie studio, which then uses that promotion to achieve profit. And those doing the promotion, those involved in actually producing goods, also are allowed some small profit. Those doing just blogs on it may get some profit through advertising links.
Potlatch was an important part of Northwest Native American economies - which were until disrupted by European culture among the most prosperous in the world. They ate and lived very, very well. Those who made the most profits in their various lines of work were expected to also be the most generous at the potlatch festivities. It was part of how they solidified their positions, got the social cred to go on living even better than their neighbors, because they were for whatever reason getting more profit from their positions in the business and governmental communities than their neighbors were.
So a whole lot of us joined in the Serenity Dance at the feast. Many gifts were passed around, but in the end the Leader of the Serenity Dance ended up even more prosperous than before the dance. The circle of giving establishes the basis for profit - it is not a distraction from it (except for an evening), let alone an undermining of it. But now Universal doesn't understand that the circle has to be, well, "universal," or it won't continue to work - both cultural and economic idiots.
The authors (economists, not pathologists) take as unbiased the statistics on prevalence in the various counties. Yet, as is much discussed, the statistics on prevalence are befuddled because there is a strong recent trend towards diagnosing autism today, in children who in the past would not have been diagnosed. So in looking at the counties with more penetration of television in Washington and Oregon mainly (and some in California), they're looking, as they say, mostly west of the mountains for high-television-availability areas - meaning the culturally modern and trendy populations of Seattle and Portland - and east of the mountains for low-television-availability areas - meaning largely-rural counties where both popular culture and medical practice lag far behind the curve.
This isn't to say that autism isn't a serious and increasing problem; just that this whole study (which doesn't seem to have made it past peer review yet) is likely looking at an artifact of where autism's been looked for, and finding that it's most looked for in those counties where the population has been bombarded with, for instance, cable shows about the epidemic of autism, and how to look for it in your children.
Would it be possible to design a power strip for wall warts that could sense whether an external device was actually drawing on each of them at the time, and cut back the input power when it's not?
How about a media center power strip with a remote control - just a simple on and off - with the option to train it to accept the on and off signals from other remotes?
Or have a media center power strip which can be trained to recognize the power draw of one key device when it's in on rather than standby mode, where the key device is then left in its normal standby/on mode but plugged into a special socket in the strip, and the strip then cuts or restores power to all the other devices according to whether the key device is turned on?
If you start manufacturing that last one, please send me one!
Anything involving chip design depends heavily not just on your patent portfolio, but on accumulating a set of minds with deep experience. Yes, you need to keep bringing in fresh genius; but you also need to retain the old, both for its continued insights and to help cultivate the new talent. So if Intel is really shipping out any of its major chip design work (as compared to testing, where the more different angles you test from the better - and which may really be all that's involved here), that's a sign that it currently values its accumulated "live capital" - its stock of engineering geniuses - low enough that it figures it might as well start over again with virgin staff elsewhere.
Now, there can be reasons for that. The American car makers are crashing because they should have fired their engineering staffs a couple of decades ago and simply started over. But has Intel really reached a similar point?
Did it become popular because it looks also like "Pawned" - that is, made a pawn of?
CNN reported on Sunday morning that investigators of Morgellons Disease (previously discussed) have found plant genetic material in association with it. Could this be horizontal transfer from genmod plants (perhaps through other plant intermediaries)? All of the victims have worked with plants, either as hobby or profession.
The ongoing incorporation of nanotech may lead to a lot more need for health care. It should create more jobs in the legal industry, too. Database integration between health and legal could be a profitable IT venture.
By your analysis the way to avoid polarization is for the Democrats to try to resemble the Republicans as much as possible, so that the electorate won't have to feel "polarized"? Yeah, and let's make the Linux desktop look as much like Windows as possible. For that matter, let's make the stores and restaurants just about everywhere look as much the same as possible. If everything is done just the same way everywhere by everyone, then everyone can enjoy the totally free choice, without polarization, of having it make no real difference.
On the other hand, there's a strong case to be made that the mistake the Democrats made was to run a man with the sensibilities of someone who comes from money, and belonged to Skull and Bones at Yale, against someone who comes from money, and belonged to Skull and Bones at Yale. Then at the congressional level just about all the Democratic candidates were trying to sound like, on foreign policy, there was nothing to distinguish them from the Republicans. So if you're going to vote for foreign policy, you may as well vote for the guys who had those (brilliant?) ideas first. And if you're going to vote for domestic policy - say because you're seeing your wage fail to gain while education, medicine, energy and housing get much more expensive - if both guys are mostly going to watch out for the rich (and Kerry said next to nothing that the Republicans could cry "Class war!" about), what's the real motivator to go out and vote?
Why is this worth discussing again? Because we're about to have another election! Maybe if we'd wake the f**k up and insist that the press pay attention when crooked stuff like Kennedy documented is pulled again, over time we'll see less of it - rather than the great amount more that's now likely with easily-hackable voting systems. Of course if both parties will just hurry up and be the same about everything, the joke will be on those who waste their time hacking the voting machines.
It is straightforward, and inexpensive, to purchase title insurance. Title insurance precisely insures that your title to the home is valid. So if you are the buyer, and it turns out that the seller did not posess valid title, then the real owner gets the house back, but you get paid back your loss by the insurance company. If they buyer does not get title insurance - an absolutely standard feature of most house purchases - it's their own risk, as it should be.
Wonder what Louisiana law says on this. Like Quebec, their laws are based on a French rather than English foundation.
In the two sample chapters, it's obvious Spider sees Variable Star as a close relative to Citizen of the Galaxy. The estate the hero is wisked to this time is similar to the estate where the hero ends up that time, this time moved northward from the Tetons (once actually a Rockefeller estate) into the Canadian Rockies - and in both cases there's a Surname of Surname construction to signify extreme upper class wealth and position. In both cases the dynastic family is engaged in space exploration modelled on the "age of discovery" when England and Holland were, for commercial reasons, exploring the seas.
What's interesting about the politics of Citizen, for those who place Heinlein on the "right wing," is that the central plot element concerns how a major American corporation can end up deeply complicit in the slave trade and other harshly abusive colonial practices. If Spider (and RAH's outline) has taken Star down a parallel path - since so far it looks like a set up for a reverse telling of the same story - no doubt those of the right who fancy Heinlein a compatriot will scream that Spider has perverted Heinleins vision, injecting left wing themes.
Take a look at his first book, For Us the Living . It reflects his political background in California, where he'd been a candidate of the very radical (although not Marxist) left. To assimilate him to some flavor of current conservative thought ignores where he was coming from. It's generally a mistake made because the left isn't supposed to respect the need for a military, and he wrote Starship Troopers. Well, he wrote that in the same period as Stranger in a Strange Land and Glory Road - the first of which was distinctly against the sort of authoritarianism that characterizes our current conservative movement; the latter of which was among other things the first novel to take a strong stand against the absurdity of our adventure in Viet Nam. And don't even begin to think about his treatment of fundamentalist religion. It's just flat-out false to assimilate him to any normal conservative position, at any point in his career.
Heinlein often moved notes and outlines to the back burner. Many of his strongest books, including Stranger in a Strange Land, were sitting in his files half-conceived for years before he finally wrote a finished draft and published. So when something was still in his files, it didn't always mean he thought it no good; sometimes he thought it so good that he felt himself not quite ready to do justice to it yet.
Pretend you don't know anything more than:
1. There is a complex system involving equilibrium in which for a relatively long time period the proportion of X in a gas suffused throughout the system has been Y. That gas plays an active role in interaction with many other parts of the system.
2. Over a relatively short period the proportion of X is increased towards 2 * Y.
Would you venture then, having a general background knowledge of complex systems in equilibrium, that the doubling of Y would:
A. Dissrupt the equilibrium, with diverse changes throughout the system.
or
B. Have no effect?
If B is your choice, is this because you believe that complex equilibriums are not in fact properties of interactions within systems (and in relation to their inputs and outputs) but instead are maintained magically, perhaps by nature spirits or gods?
Sometimes I wish those who have beliefs which preclude putting their bets on scientific reasoning would just come out and say so, rather than couching their own arguments as if they were within scientific discourse. Carbon dioxide playing, as it does, an important role in many natural processes, doubling it as we're doing is much more likely to dissrupt the equilibrium than do nothing. Absent specific models and proof of elaborate homeostatic mechanisms capable of specifically compensating for each of the projectable disruptions from doubling X in this system, the default assumption should be that we're in for a rough ride.
If you want to bet there's a God in Heaven capable and willing to fill the role even if such elaborate homeostatic mechanisms prove lacking, get to praying. With an attitude like that towards science, prayer may be the best the world can ask of you.
Yes, if a subset of some group of people sees, "We can get wonderful subsidies from the richer nations by launching a few terror strikes to bring their humanitarian attention to our people," what will they do? We gave some pretty wonderful humanitarian subsidies to North Korea when they made a nuclear threat. What did they do next? Why, they made an even bigger nuclear threat, built some missiles, and shared their technologies with friends like Iran.
Contrarily, if a subset of a population goes terrorist, perhaps what we should do is not provide rewards to the entire population, but treat it as Israel is treating Lebanon. There were plenty of terrorists in the past, for instance in the 19th Century. They were invariably treated harshly. Did their organizations prosper by the harsh treatment bringing in new recruits? How many 19th Century terrorist organizations are around today? Pretty close to none.
People are generally rational enough not to engage in activities which will bring on hardship and death for most of their friends and relations. People are also rational enough, and cold enough, to do evil things if the end result is an improved situation for their friends and relations. So the first world has to do two things: (1) Richly reward any third-world movements that follow the examples of Gandhi and MLK; (2) Treat any populations which harbor terrorists with utmost severity. There is no profit in letting them play to our conscience unless they show one of their own.
Anyone working even tangentially in computer security knows that, if the means exists to hack a system, even or especially if it is tremendously obscure and/or complex, it will be discovered and used. When we're lucky, it's first discovered and used by someone just doing it for fun, who leaves their Kilroy Was Here on our systems, and we do forensics, find the entry point, and fix it before the truly malicious show up. If we're unlucky, we've just had our career toasted and lost our employers $millions.
What's brilliant about Diebold's engineering is that there's no challenge. Nothing obscure or complex is required to hack the systems, so those seeking a serious challenge will just go elsewhere. This makes them honeypots for the truly malicious, who after identification can then be recruited into the NSA, to help on important projects like monitoring communications. Elections? They're obsolete anyhow because most of the electorate is so seriously disinformed, and most of the candidates working so hard to appeal to the disinformed, that the votes altered by hacking don't measurably affect the outcome in any way that seriously matters to those who control our media corporations, our "think" tanks, and the dittoheads of America.
Future historians will say, "While they were working hard to 'save' their elections, their brains were stolen, and the battle was lost anyway."
Bechtel, as you would imagine, has major political ties worldwide. They also managed to get the contract to specify that their liability limit is quite low on this job.
Israel? It has long been al Qaeda's prime goal to retake Spain! Why not give it to them? It's barely even attached to Europe?
The main lesson from all this - getting back to topic - is that civilization's worth defending. And civilization isn't whatever crazy belief set some group of people manages to share among them. Civilization is specifically an allegiance to bedrock values of science, individual freedoms, environmental preservation, and a flourishing of aesthetics that we cannot succeed or survive in any worthwhile way without. Fundamentalists and fascists and those who'd trash the Earth in the long term for a little short-term profit are arrayed against civilization.
Defeating these fascistic incursions on our basic liberties of communication is part of the front line defense of civilization's future. Defeating Hizbollah and the like is also part of the front-line defense - even if the currently fundamentalist, anti-science-leaning US government is necessarily the source of arms for Israel to do so. Heck, we got the Internet from the US government. Civilization takes raw materials where it finds them, and turns them to better use.
If a state can decide to cast its electoral votes not either for the winner in that state, nor in a way proportional to the votes in that state, then the state could equally well decide to simply cast its votes to whichever member of the Bush family is running that year. If enough states consent to do this, we can have the monarchy that evidently a majority of Americans desire, without having to abolish the rituals of voting.
It's a win-win.
Not all humans have an instinctive fear of snakes.
My developmental psychology professor assured us that infants are universally afraid of a few things - including snakes and heights. Other fears they can quickly learn, but depend on their environment. (This was three decades ago, so maybe it's debated since. Certainly the term "instinct" was debated even then.) Nor do all the fears we're born with necessarily carry over into later life. If we're comfortable calling a fear everyone is born with "instinctual," then fear of snakes is. Being able to grow out of it later doesn't prove the contrary. Geese have an "instinct" for migration, yet given the year-round goose-friendly environment human beings have created in some locations, there are now flocks which have totally given up on migration. An "instinct" is what a creature begins with, not necessarily where it ends up.