Then there is world war deux, remember back to the afternoon of June 22, 1940. That whole armistice treaty you signed with germany to protect your collective french butts? Yeah, thanks for standing strong with us there.
Um, what the hell are you talking about?
First off, France had been invaded, its supposedly foolproof Maginot Line had been completely circumvented, and the population was fleeing before the German advance. Sure, they should have planned better, but at that point, what else was there to do? The later collaborationist actions of the Vichy government were dispicable, but to go on actively fighting would have been bloody ridiculous.
And 'standing strong with us'? You admit with the reference to the Revolutionary War that you're an American. So how hard were the Americans fighting against the Germans in 1940?
Oh, right. They weren't in until Pearl Harbor, a year and a half later. (In fact, Prescott Bush, whose last name you may find familiar, had his assets seized after the Americans entered the war because comparies in which he had an interest had funded Nazi Germany.)
Now that sounds very cynical. Sadly, it's probably far more correct than anyone would like, too.
What do you mean? The point he was making was that this statement is completely correct, i.e. people are convicted because a jury convicts them, not because they committed a crime.
It is the job of the justice system to make sure these two events are correlated as strongly as possible, but it is not always possible for the correlation coefficient to be 1.
If you can't find something you like to do, something that fits in you mindset at the moment...do something anyway! If it sucks...too bad. You still need to, at the very least, support yourself. Because I won't. And neither will the next guy. And your parents shouldn't have to.
You said it, man. I think you've called it better than almost anyone on this thread.
Essentially this means that a Turing machine could solve the problem in polynomial time, if it had some magic 'oracle' which instructed it on the right computational path to follow for a given input.
Obviously there are problems out there that would require exponential time for even a nondeterministic Turing machine to solve. An example from the Wikipedia link I provided is finding the best move in a chess or Go game.
Such problems are not in NP, and proving P=NP would not suddenly give us algorithms for solving these problems deterministically in polynomial time.
However, most problems that are considered NP-Complete are not mathematically proven to be so.
What? Sorry, if there ain't a proof, it ain't NP-complete. There are a lot of problems that are described as "believed to be NP-complete", but that's different.
Shhh listen quietly, can you hear it? Chuga Chuga Choo Choo!! Its the Big Blue machine coming down the tracks. CHOO CHOO!!!!!
Would that be Stockwell Day's 'Freedom Train'.
Wow, I just suddenly realized that, after a Conservative victory, Stockwell Day would be foreign affairs critic. Holy crap.
Oh well, maybe my fears are unfounded. They might make him Minister of Education and he we could all be sent back to school to learn about literal creation and how our ancestors co-existed with dinosaurs. Yum.
May I suggest you look at the realistic value of each party making good on their campaign promises before your vote is bought and sold with a cute slogan and/or flakey commercial.
See, that's the thing. I have every confidence that the Conservatives would make good on their campaign promises if elected.
The Green Party is fiscally conservative these days. While the NDP and the Greens are both socially liberal parties that support environmentalism, they have different approaches to paying for it.
I think they've had a little trouble getting the 'fiscally-conservative' message out.
In any case, I kind of wonder how generally that message permeates the Green Party membership. I suspect that a number of them are disgruntled NDPers who wouldn't mind raising taxes.
I do hope they get one or two of those seats in B.C. It will create a little momentum on the left and perhaps rejuvenate the NDP as well.
Oh, there's no problem retaining teachers in Ontario. They are vastly overpaid and have a good union. Seems that the province can never get more than a 2 year contract with the teachers. Sometimes its just a one year contract! So, every year (or other year) there's the work slowdowns and threatend stikes to contend with.
May I hazard a guess that you voted Tory last fall?:)
Unfortunately Canadians don't have that option. They get to choose from Royal, CIBC, Scotiabank, and Bank of Montreal. There are a couple others I can't remember right now.
TD Canada Trust is another big one. The Dutch bank ING has been doing a lot of business in Canada in the last few years too.
Yay socialism.
What does this have to do with socialism? Hell, if Canada were more capitalistic, the government would have allowed the major banks to merge, as they've been asking to for years, and there would be less consumer choice.
I knew this for years. Most bad coffees use Robusta beans, which have far more caffeine than Arabica beans.
What you say seems to be true, but it certainly doesn't seem related to the article summary, which claims that more expensive coffees contain more caffeine, despite the lesser caffeine quantity in arabica beans.
I mean shifted as a unit, not like in the movement of the plates, but shifted all together like if the peel of an orange moved around the inside. This means that at some point antartica (part of it anyway) was in a more tropical like climate.
What? The standard theory of continential drift has Antarctica positioned somewhere around the latitude of central Peru and Argentina, which is far north enough to have a tropical climate. You don't need these additional theories of shifting to explain this.
Indeed, Antarctica is believed to have had a rich and varied mammal population, and until they all became extinct, it was probably quite distinct from those on other continents because of its isolation.
It IS though. Ever heard of the Khadrs? You don't want to know how many times we replaced "lost" passports for them. We let a kid who was injured in a fight with Pakistani forces come back for free medicare. Our gov't isn't serious about stopping terrorism, Canada is quite vulnerable to attack.
Yes, of course I've heard of the Khadrs. Two points:
The fact that Abdul Karim Khadr was shot by Pakistanis does not convince me that he is or was intent on committing an act of terrorism, or even of shooting a gun. For that matter, there are plenty of quite innocent people shot by Pakistani soldiers in recent years, most of them Pakistani.
Yeah, I'm not particularly happy that we replaced all those passports either, or that Chretien intervened personally to help the elder Khadr. But, aside from bringing the Khadrs home, all that was all before 9/11.
I think letting them back home was the right decision, but that we ought not to do them any more favours. If any of the Khadrs ever lose their passport again, tough shit, time to brave those Canadian winters with the lot of us.
Stockwell Day's arguments on the Khadr issue piss me right off. He isn't arguing that the Khadrs are a security threat or that they're guilty of terrorist crimes, because he's got no evidence for these. He simply says, straight out, that the Khadrs don't deserve to come back because they happen to be acquainted with someone we don't like (Osama bin Laden) and they happen to agree with his political aims. Perhaps there was a 'political orthodoxy' bit in the fine print on that passport application that I didn't get around to reading?
I'm quite proud of the government, and the public generally, for ignoring Day on this.
By securing the lives of law enforcement officials everywhere, Canada has contributed to making everyone safer, and in turn, improving the quality of life in America.
You seem pretty quick to ascribe credit to your nation for this. Why? It's not like Canada is really a haven for terrorists, like all the right-wing American T.V. stations claim. Canada has nothing to prove to the States.
In Scalia's case, his limited socialization with Cheney has no impact on his hearing of the case because the case has nothing to do with Cheney himself, only the office of the vice president in the abstract.
Can you provide any court precedent to support making this sort of distinction (person versus office) in conflict-of-interest cases?
...and I'm much more inclined to trust handling of it to 9 wise people with decades of legal experience than an enraged geek, whose side happened to lose.
Well, that's not really fair, as there are lot more conventionally respectable people who would make the same argument as that enraged geek.
In any case, I haven't been enormously impressed with certain members of the Supreme Court of late. The Scalia thing isn't much by itself, but his repeated insistence that there was not even a shade of impropriety does not make me feel good about his respect for the court's independence.
Water was tested in both the Gulf of Mexico and Indian Ocean for salinity. They apprarently discovered about the same time on both sides of the world a sudden drop. It wasn't a slight drop either. It was a major drop.
Care to provide a reference?
It's true that it is generally believed that there has been global flooding within the last 50,000 years or so. Ocean levels were lower and there was almost certainly a land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska. I've even heard it suggested that the Mediterranean was then an inland sea.
When the glaciers melted, ocean levels rose abruptly, and are still at these levels now. It's likely the addition of this fresh water would be accompanied by a measurable decrease in salinity.
However, this would probably not be significant when compared with the variation in salinity levels created by normal ocean currents.
I'm thinking something must have happened on a global scale for this to happen. IANAS (I am not a scientist) however I don't believe on coincidence.
Well, it isn't a leap to say that something needed to happen on a global scale to explain a global decrease in salinity levels. It is a leap, however, to say that this provides strong evidence for the literal truth of Noah's Flood.
I think the person is claiming that the salinity drop occurred a few thousand years ago, when the flood was supposed to have occurred. By implication ey's arguing that this serves as evidence for a literal Biblical flood, which is of course noticeable and unsubtle.
Ey didn't explain how they supposedly gathered salinity data for a relatively precise date several thousand years in the past, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow, the topic icon of Bill as a Borg seems more appropriate than ever.
I'm sure glad the United States has never supported genocidal dictators!
That was the reason I mentioned the bit about Rumsfeld.
France is evil because they were singlehandeldy building Saddam's arsenal and tunnels.
Single-handedly? I seem to remember seeing an old picture of Saddam warmly shaking the hand of a certain war^H^H^Hdefense secretary.
A better reason to think that France is evil is that the French helped shelter the génocidaires in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which over a million people died.
Then there is world war deux, remember back to the afternoon of June 22, 1940. That whole armistice treaty you signed with germany to protect your collective french butts? Yeah, thanks for standing strong with us there.
Um, what the hell are you talking about?
First off, France had been invaded, its supposedly foolproof Maginot Line had been completely circumvented, and the population was fleeing before the German advance. Sure, they should have planned better, but at that point, what else was there to do? The later collaborationist actions of the Vichy government were dispicable, but to go on actively fighting would have been bloody ridiculous.
And 'standing strong with us'? You admit with the reference to the Revolutionary War that you're an American. So how hard were the Americans fighting against the Germans in 1940?
Oh, right. They weren't in until Pearl Harbor, a year and a half later. (In fact, Prescott Bush, whose last name you may find familiar, had his assets seized after the Americans entered the war because comparies in which he had an interest had funded Nazi Germany.)
Now that sounds very cynical. Sadly, it's probably far more correct than anyone would like, too.
What do you mean? The point he was making was that this statement is completely correct, i.e. people are convicted because a jury convicts them, not because they committed a crime.
It is the job of the justice system to make sure these two events are correlated as strongly as possible, but it is not always possible for the correlation coefficient to be 1.
If you can't find something you like to do, something that fits in you mindset at the moment...do something anyway! If it sucks...too bad. You still need to, at the very least, support yourself. Because I won't. And neither will the next guy. And your parents shouldn't have to.
You said it, man. I think you've called it better than almost anyone on this thread.
NP-Complete problems are by definition problems that can't be solved in polynomial time(at least not by a Turing machine?).
.
No, you're wrong. NP problems are, by definition, problems that can be solved in polynomial time by a nondeterministic Turing machine
Essentially this means that a Turing machine could solve the problem in polynomial time, if it had some magic 'oracle' which instructed it on the right computational path to follow for a given input.
Obviously there are problems out there that would require exponential time for even a nondeterministic Turing machine to solve. An example from the Wikipedia link I provided is finding the best move in a chess or Go game.
Such problems are not in NP, and proving P=NP would not suddenly give us algorithms for solving these problems deterministically in polynomial time.
However, most problems that are considered NP-Complete are not mathematically proven to be so.
What? Sorry, if there ain't a proof, it ain't NP-complete. There are a lot of problems that are described as "believed to be NP-complete", but that's different.
Shhh listen quietly, can you hear it?
Chuga Chuga Choo Choo!!
Its the Big Blue machine coming down the tracks.
CHOO CHOO!!!!!
Would that be Stockwell Day's 'Freedom Train'.
Wow, I just suddenly realized that, after a Conservative victory, Stockwell Day would be foreign affairs critic. Holy crap.
Oh well, maybe my fears are unfounded. They might make him Minister of Education and he we could all be sent back to school to learn about literal creation and how our ancestors co-existed with dinosaurs. Yum.
May I suggest you look at the realistic value of each party making good on their campaign promises before your vote is bought and sold with a cute slogan and/or flakey commercial.
:)
See, that's the thing. I have every confidence that the Conservatives would make good on their campaign promises if elected.
That's exactly why I'm not voting for them.
The Green Party is fiscally conservative these days. While the NDP and the Greens are both socially liberal parties that support environmentalism, they have different approaches to paying for it.
I think they've had a little trouble getting the 'fiscally-conservative' message out.
In any case, I kind of wonder how generally that message permeates the Green Party membership. I suspect that a number of them are disgruntled NDPers who wouldn't mind raising taxes.
I do hope they get one or two of those seats in B.C. It will create a little momentum on the left and perhaps rejuvenate the NDP as well.
Oh, there's no problem retaining teachers in Ontario. They are vastly overpaid and have a good union. Seems that the province can never get more than a 2 year contract with the teachers. Sometimes its just a one year contract! So, every year (or other year) there's the work slowdowns and threatend stikes to contend with.
:)
May I hazard a guess that you voted Tory last fall?
Unfortunately Canadians don't have that option. They get to choose from Royal, CIBC, Scotiabank, and Bank of Montreal. There are a couple others I can't remember right now.
TD Canada Trust is another big one. The Dutch bank ING has been doing a lot of business in Canada in the last few years too.
Yay socialism.
What does this have to do with socialism? Hell, if Canada were more capitalistic, the government would have allowed the major banks to merge, as they've been asking to for years, and there would be less consumer choice.
Does the U.S. have an equivalent for the CDIC?
Comcast IS proposing....
Damn illiterate fuck.
Maybe ey's British.
I knew this for years. Most bad coffees use Robusta beans, which have far more caffeine than Arabica beans.
What you say seems to be true, but it certainly doesn't seem related to the article summary, which claims that more expensive coffees contain more caffeine, despite the lesser caffeine quantity in arabica beans.
He was correct in the first place :-)
In the UK, everyone uses billion just like other countries use it (i.e. 1000 x million)
Really? Why have I then heard 'milliard' used on BBC International?
I mean shifted as a unit, not like in the movement of the plates, but shifted all together like if the peel of an orange moved around the inside. This means that at some point antartica (part of it anyway) was in a more tropical like climate.
What? The standard theory of continential drift has Antarctica positioned somewhere around the latitude of central Peru and Argentina, which is far north enough to have a tropical climate. You don't need these additional theories of shifting to explain this.
Indeed, Antarctica is believed to have had a rich and varied mammal population, and until they all became extinct, it was probably quite distinct from those on other continents because of its isolation.
Now, like so many insurgents in Fallujah, Linux advocates will face the full power and attention of the beast.
It's somewhat amusing that I read your comment just after reading, in my other browser tab, about how the Americans are evacuating Fallujah.
It IS though. Ever heard of the Khadrs? You don't want to know how many times we replaced "lost" passports for them. We let a kid who was injured in a fight with Pakistani forces come back for free medicare. Our gov't isn't serious about stopping terrorism, Canada is quite vulnerable to attack.
Yes, of course I've heard of the Khadrs. Two points:
The fact that Abdul Karim Khadr was shot by Pakistanis does not convince me that he is or was intent on committing an act of terrorism, or even of shooting a gun. For that matter, there are plenty of quite innocent people shot by Pakistani soldiers in recent years, most of them Pakistani.
Yeah, I'm not particularly happy that we replaced all those passports either, or that Chretien intervened personally to help the elder Khadr. But, aside from bringing the Khadrs home, all that was all before 9/11.
I think letting them back home was the right decision, but that we ought not to do them any more favours. If any of the Khadrs ever lose their passport again, tough shit, time to brave those Canadian winters with the lot of us.
Stockwell Day's arguments on the Khadr issue piss me right off. He isn't arguing that the Khadrs are a security threat or that they're guilty of terrorist crimes, because he's got no evidence for these. He simply says, straight out, that the Khadrs don't deserve to come back because they happen to be acquainted with someone we don't like (Osama bin Laden) and they happen to agree with his political aims. Perhaps there was a 'political orthodoxy' bit in the fine print on that passport application that I didn't get around to reading?
I'm quite proud of the government, and the public generally, for ignoring Day on this.
By securing the lives of law enforcement officials everywhere, Canada has contributed to making everyone safer, and in turn, improving the quality of life in America.
You seem pretty quick to ascribe credit to your nation for this. Why? It's not like Canada is really a haven for terrorists, like all the right-wing American T.V. stations claim. Canada has nothing to prove to the States.
I'm tired of hearing Canada being labled as a safe-haven for terrorists...
:)
Well, you could just stop watching Fox News.
In Scalia's case, his limited socialization with Cheney has no impact on his hearing of the case because the case has nothing to do with Cheney himself, only the office of the vice president in the abstract.
Can you provide any court precedent to support making this sort of distinction (person versus office) in conflict-of-interest cases?
...and I'm much more inclined to trust handling of it to 9 wise people with decades of legal experience than an enraged geek, whose side happened to lose.
Well, that's not really fair, as there are lot more conventionally respectable people who would make the same argument as that enraged geek.
In any case, I haven't been enormously impressed with certain members of the Supreme Court of late. The Scalia thing isn't much by itself, but his repeated insistence that there was not even a shade of impropriety does not make me feel good about his respect for the court's independence.
Water was tested in both the Gulf of Mexico and Indian Ocean for salinity. They apprarently discovered about the same time on both sides of the world a sudden drop. It wasn't a slight drop either. It was a major drop.
Care to provide a reference?
It's true that it is generally believed that there has been global flooding within the last 50,000 years or so. Ocean levels were lower and there was almost certainly a land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska. I've even heard it suggested that the Mediterranean was then an inland sea.
When the glaciers melted, ocean levels rose abruptly, and are still at these levels now. It's likely the addition of this fresh water would be accompanied by a measurable decrease in salinity.
However, this would probably not be significant when compared with the variation in salinity levels created by normal ocean currents.
I'm thinking something must have happened on a global scale for this to happen. IANAS (I am not a scientist) however I don't believe on coincidence.
Well, it isn't a leap to say that something needed to happen on a global scale to explain a global decrease in salinity levels. It is a leap, however, to say that this provides strong evidence for the literal truth of Noah's Flood.
I think the person is claiming that the salinity drop occurred a few thousand years ago, when the flood was supposed to have occurred. By implication ey's arguing that this serves as evidence for a literal Biblical flood, which is of course noticeable and unsubtle.
Ey didn't explain how they supposedly gathered salinity data for a relatively precise date several thousand years in the past, though.
Best. Title. Ever.
I don't know. I still liked Lance Bass To Continue To Plague Earth's Surface.