While I'm prepared to believe that the parents ought to have made sure their address with the VOIP company was current, I'm guessing there must have been some paperwork to fill out when they moved, for billing purposes at least. I expect more could be done to really drive the point home to people that unless you've provided your most recent address, the operator will have no idea where you are.
I am in favor of total isolation because I believed the Iraqi dissidents. I was in favor of this war and the Bush administration and honestly, the price of this intervention was too high.
Fair enough... but there's a wide gulf between wanting the U.S. to be the world's policeman and simply acknowledging (as an individual, even) that there do exist legitimate dissidents or governments-in-exile.
Well, believe that if you must. But do realize the implications of the position you're taking: if no government-in-exile is legitimate, then every puppet government set up by a conqueror must be. During World War II this fellow was the legitimate leader of Norway and this fellow the legitimate leader of the Netherlands. Your earlier statements suggest you are opposed to preemptive war, so you presumably oppose the conquest in the first place. But once effected you cannot oppose conquest because the conqueror is the legitimate leader.
If dissidents are undeserving of recognition, then dissent is impossible. If both internal dissent and external conquest are forbidden, then all mechanisms for removal of dictators are gone. Everywhere politics is frozen in place, except perhaps in democracies (as long as democratic political opposition is not classed as "dissent"). All in all, your position leads basically to an extreme form of quietism.
Okay, this view isn't new... but then you go and say that it was the Iraq war, alone of all things in history, that pushed you to it? I don't even know what to say. For someone who thought Bush was full of crap from the start and hopes for some improvement in the world, this sort of seamless progression from warmongering triumphalism to world-encompassing defeatism is pretty frickin' hard to take.
Honestly, after Iraq, I'm done with dissidents and governments in exile.
That's a pretty ridiculous thing to say. Gandhi, Mandela, and Aung San Suu Kyi were/are all dissidents. During WWII we had governments-in-exile for Norway, the Netherlands, and France, who had popular support and went on to set up stable governments after the war's end.
Yet because the propaganda of some CIA-backed fraudster happened to have been seized upon by Bush et al. to justify an illegal war, then all dissidents and all governments-in-exile are unworthy of recognition or credit?
The problem with Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress was not that it claimed to be a government-in-exile. The problem was that it had no recognition or legitimacy amongst most Iraqis. And I suspect there was no shortage of evidence for that fact available before the invasion if the invading coalition had cared to look hard enough.
First, HR departments don't care where your degree is from.
Where on earth did you get this idea? HR departments love simple criteria which they can use to rule in or rule out huge amounts of the massive numbers of applications they get. The name of college or university attended is one of the simplest such criteria.
I did my undergrad at a well-regarded tech school and a master's in CS at a different university with effectively no reputation for CS. Several HR people I've talked to have only noticed the second school, and act quite differently after I mention the first one.
Could it be that I missed those true alarmist reports I guessed would be there?! One read like:
It's not a scholarly reference, but there are definitely clear examples of deliberately-constructed artificial reefs which were ultimately damaging to marine ecology. Read about the Osborne Reef Waste Tire Removal Pilot Project in Florida:
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is partnering with the Broward County Environmental Protection Department, Navy Salvage Divers from Norfolk, VA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Marine Debris Program to conduct a pilot project to remove waste tires from a site known as the Osborne Reef. Approximately 2 million tires covering 36 acres were placed in the water off Broward County in the 1970s to create artificial reefs. Today the tires are physically damaging coral reefs as storms move the tires toward the shore. A pilot project will collect sample tires to determine how the 2 million tire pile can be collected and disposed of properly.
If a significant fraction of the dead plants sink, retention would be good, hundreds of years at the very least. If most of them decompose near the surface and the CO2 is released from the water, there wouldn't be much benefit.
Erm, if they decompose in the water and release tons of CO2, won't it turn into carbonic acid and decrease the water's pH? (It wouldn't be by a lot, but the whole point to this is that small changes may produce systemic effects.)
I wonder if this method could be applied to hiding messages in executables, too."
Um, no, because the two technologies are completely different?
Yes, there is an analogue for "background noise" in an executable, and there is a lot of redundancy there too. But I can't imagine how any approach to removing encoded data there could share anything except on the most basic conceptual level.
i just wonder at the point of criticizing the usa alone for what every country does, has ever done, and will always do
Oversensitive much? People will always lie and governments will always propagandize, sure. But there's no law that when calling out a liar you must name all liars that ever existed.
The U.S. government deserves attention not because they are uniquely evil, but because the evil they do has more potential for damage: that goes with the territory of being a superpower. I don't believe there's anything in the parent's post to suggest he/she believes the U.S. is uniquely evil.
Aside from this point, there are two reasons we occasional critics of the U.S. don't always bother to mention all the other evil manipulative governments of the world: 1) we are English speakers, and considerably more aware of the status of the sole superpower in the Anglosphere, and 2) the U.S. has a functioning electoral system, meaning criticism of the administration's evils might actually DO something. I should emphasize these are reasons, not excuses.
[Drat, mangled the URL in my last post. Here's the correctly-formatted version.]
WTF? A cow is order Artiodactyla, and a whale is order Cetacea. Their DNA would be miles apart. The only thing they have in common is that they are mammals. How did anyone ever think this could work? And a biologist at that? Again I say, WTF?
Not that it's not crazy—it is—but genetics has shown that cows and whales are more related that was previously realized. Hippos have always been classified as artiodactyls, but comparison of DNA has suggested that hippo's closest relatives are actually whales, i.e. that whales form a subclade inside what was previously called Artiodactyla. The new name Cetartiodactyla, combining Artiodactyla and Cetacea, has been proposed.
The morphological distinctness between whales and artiodactyls is pinned on the very different selection pressures of a marine environment.
In any case, your point stands: whether or not they're different orders, they're different families. It would be like crossing us with lemurs or baboons.
WTF? A cow is order Artiodactyla, and a whale is order Cetacea. Their DNA would be miles apart. The only thing they have in common is that they are mammals. How did anyone ever think this could work? And a biologist at that? Again I say, WTF?
Not that it's not crazy -- it is -- but genetics has shown that http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/434566.stm'>cows and whales are more related that was previously realized. Hippos have always been classified as artiodactyls, but comparison of DNA has suggested that hippo's closest relatives are actually whales, i.e. that whales form a subclade inside what was previously called Artiodactyla. The new name Cetartiodactyla, combining Artiodactyla and Cetacea, has been proposed.
The morphological distinctness between whales and artiodactyls is pinned on the very different selection pressures of a marine environment.
In any case, your point stands: whether or not they're different orders, they're different families. It would be like crossing us with lemurs or baboons.
People who survived the Plague in Europe either did not encounter it or almost universally had a genetic anomaly commonly referred to as the delta-32 marker. Their ancestors survive other diseases because of this causing what amounts to an odd protein binding issue on the cellular level. Those people are also naturally immune to HIV.
Your claims are not proved. In the words of the Wikipedia article, "it has been hypothesized that this allele was favored by natural selection during the Black Death".
As I've been given to understand (I myself don't know tha much about this), this hypothesis has been put forward because the coalescence dates for the CCR5-32 mutation in Europe go back to about 1300, which seems to fit with the Black Death, but no clear link between CCR5-32 has been shown.
Interestingly, the CCR5-32/Black Death theory has also been used to argue that the Black Death was not caused by bubonic plague at all, but a different and separate pathogen, possibly a filovirus, like Marburg virus or ebola.
How can you engage with people like this in a productive way without being insulting?
You didn't specify exactly what he does believe. If he believes that snakes are related to worms, he at least believes in a common origin to all life, right? In that case, it's just the question of what the evolutionary tree looks like.
According to current theories, Neanderthals did not evolve in Africa. Neanderthals evolved in Eurasia from an ancestral population of Homo heidelbergensis. These in turn are very similar to the slightly older Homo ergaster specimens from Africa, so there's a natural progression from Africa to the Neanderthals. We, on the other hand, stayed in Africa a lot longer before some of us came to displace the Neanderthals.
I note that Mr Guo's name is mentioned nowhere in the Slashdot summary. Coincidence, or deliberate so as to not cause Slashdot's page to be temporarily blocked in China? And if so, is that bad (cowardice) or good (working around the restrictions)?
More to the point, it didn't mention that there was anything political about Guo's name being removed at all., or even that he was involved with a pro-democracy movement. The wording suggested it was just another frivolous lawsuit out of vanity, like the companies who sue Google after their PageRank-exploiting schemes are defeated.
I'm more inclined to think the submitter was being lazy than deliberately suppressing details, but it's a pretty misleading summary.
Probably more like because if it isn't censorship, it isn't censorship. I mean that is what the post was saying right?
and I will add because if it isn't totalitarianism, it isn't totalitarianism. Nothing suggest our government is doing either on the internet as the conversation has been going.
So, nothing is totalitarian until it's fully and completely totalitarian, at which point it's rather too late. The only insight I see displayed in your post is in your choice of username.
But exactly how did they come up with this particular formula? Given three numbers [A,B,C] what methodology tells them to interpret the combination as the ratio (A+B)/(A+B+C) and not, say, A+B+C or A+B*C, or (A+B)/(A+C)?
Oops, I actually inverted the ratio: it is (A+B+C)/(A+B). No inerrancy here!
Quite remarkable indeed. One might even call it special pleading.
The q has a value of 100; the v has a value of 6; thus, the normal spelling would yield a numerical value of 106. The addition of the h, with a value of 5, increases the numerical value to 111.
Hebrew letters have associated numerical values, that's well known. For the purposes of the argument I'll accept that these letters have the cited values.
But exactly how did they come up with this particular formula? Given three numbers [A,B,C] what methodology tells them to interpret the combination as the ratio (A+B)/(A+B+C) and not, say, A+B+C or A+B*C, or (A+B)/(A+C)? I don't think there is such a methodology, and I think this means that they will pick whatever formula works for the occasion.
I take it there is some good reason why a new but backwards-compatible version of DNS can't be released that uses unicode? Never mind Cyrillic, or Chinese characters, I want a domain name in Tengwar!
And you can get it if you can get Tengwar in Unicode, with the exception of the top-level domain. Unicode characters are already supported and used, but no top-level domains using non-Latin Unicode characters yet exist. Russia is proposing a new top-level domain.
Thinking about it, there's no need to reinvent the wheel here, is there? The existing IDNA system can be used: if Russia wants "" (or some other abbreviation of the Cyrillic ) as a top-level domain, just give them whatever that maps to in the ToASCII conversion (described in the article I linked). Then the existing software that supports international domain names will work without trouble.
Of course then Japan will want , and China (maybe Taiwan will want it too), and this may make the top-level domain system balloon out of proportions. But these sorts of top-level domains make a hell of lot more sense to me than dot-biz or dot-museum!
Err...what is the argument for _not_ including proofs? I can't come up with any good reason for that...
As I've heard them before, the arguments are that proofs might:
take up way more room than the theorem itself
be difficult to verify as correct by any but a handful of experts who may not be Wikipedians
be inaccessible to most readers (the proof can be much, much more technical than the thorem statement)
introduce copyright issues (pulling proofs out of textbooks)
lead to arguments over proof style and proof correctness
require mathematical experts to have greater editorial power over the content. Wikipedia has refrained from giving special powers to experts in the past.
PlanetMath has a large collection of proofs and more of an infrastructure for handling some of the above issues. I don't like their article ownership model myself; if someone has found an error I'd rather she were able to make the correction herself than bother me. But something like PlanetMath, a dedicated corner of the web for a free mathematical encyclopedia, is probably the way to go here.
Even if nothing goes wrong, they've set a dangerous precedent of basically telling their watchdog group "Well, we'll let you do your thing, but even though we know little about the engineering behind a reactor, we are also going to basically feel free to disregard you and tell you to suck it if we don't like what you say."
And on top of that, beyond just ignoring the advice of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, our incorribly partisan Prime Minister decided to attack them as the "Liberal appointed Nuclear Safety Commission".
(Yes, the head of the commission is an appointee of the previous administration. But deriding the concerns of nuclear experts as a partisan issue is not one of Harper's better moments.)
Slashdot Mirror
911 works on VOIP -they call it e911. It works as long as your provider has your address
The "as long as your provider has your address" is the catch: a kid died recently in Alberta after the parents called 911 via a VOIP line and the company didn't have their most recent address on file.
While I'm prepared to believe that the parents ought to have made sure their address with the VOIP company was current, I'm guessing there must have been some paperwork to fill out when they moved, for billing purposes at least. I expect more could be done to really drive the point home to people that unless you've provided your most recent address, the operator will have no idea where you are.
I am in favor of total isolation because I believed the Iraqi dissidents. I was in favor of this war and the Bush administration and honestly, the price of this intervention was too high.
Fair enough... but there's a wide gulf between wanting the U.S. to be the world's policeman and simply acknowledging (as an individual, even) that there do exist legitimate dissidents or governments-in-exile.
Yes.
Well, believe that if you must. But do realize the implications of the position you're taking: if no government-in-exile is legitimate, then every puppet government set up by a conqueror must be. During World War II this fellow was the legitimate leader of Norway and this fellow the legitimate leader of the Netherlands. Your earlier statements suggest you are opposed to preemptive war, so you presumably oppose the conquest in the first place. But once effected you cannot oppose conquest because the conqueror is the legitimate leader.
If dissidents are undeserving of recognition, then dissent is impossible. If both internal dissent and external conquest are forbidden, then all mechanisms for removal of dictators are gone. Everywhere politics is frozen in place, except perhaps in democracies (as long as democratic political opposition is not classed as "dissent"). All in all, your position leads basically to an extreme form of quietism.
Okay, this view isn't new... but then you go and say that it was the Iraq war, alone of all things in history, that pushed you to it? I don't even know what to say. For someone who thought Bush was full of crap from the start and hopes for some improvement in the world, this sort of seamless progression from warmongering triumphalism to world-encompassing defeatism is pretty frickin' hard to take.
Honestly, after Iraq, I'm done with dissidents and governments in exile.
That's a pretty ridiculous thing to say. Gandhi, Mandela, and Aung San Suu Kyi were/are all dissidents. During WWII we had governments-in-exile for Norway, the Netherlands, and France, who had popular support and went on to set up stable governments after the war's end.
Yet because the propaganda of some CIA-backed fraudster happened to have been seized upon by Bush et al. to justify an illegal war, then all dissidents and all governments-in-exile are unworthy of recognition or credit?
The problem with Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress was not that it claimed to be a government-in-exile. The problem was that it had no recognition or legitimacy amongst most Iraqis. And I suspect there was no shortage of evidence for that fact available before the invasion if the invading coalition had cared to look hard enough.
First, HR departments don't care where your degree is from.
Where on earth did you get this idea? HR departments love simple criteria which they can use to rule in or rule out huge amounts of the massive numbers of applications they get. The name of college or university attended is one of the simplest such criteria.
I did my undergrad at a well-regarded tech school and a master's in CS at a different university with effectively no reputation for CS. Several HR people I've talked to have only noticed the second school, and act quite differently after I mention the first one.
It's not a scholarly reference, but there are definitely clear examples of deliberately-constructed artificial reefs which were ultimately damaging to marine ecology. Read about the Osborne Reef Waste Tire Removal Pilot Project in Florida:
If a significant fraction of the dead plants sink, retention would be good, hundreds of years at the very least. If most of them decompose near the surface and the CO2 is released from the water, there wouldn't be much benefit.
Erm, if they decompose in the water and release tons of CO2, won't it turn into carbonic acid and decrease the water's pH? (It wouldn't be by a lot, but the whole point to this is that small changes may produce systemic effects.)
I wonder if this method could be applied to hiding messages in executables, too."
Um, no, because the two technologies are completely different?
Yes, there is an analogue for "background noise" in an executable, and there is a lot of redundancy there too. But I can't imagine how any approach to removing encoded data there could share anything except on the most basic conceptual level.
i just wonder at the point of criticizing the usa alone for what every country does, has ever done, and will always do
Oversensitive much? People will always lie and governments will always propagandize, sure. But there's no law that when calling out a liar you must name all liars that ever existed.
The U.S. government deserves attention not because they are uniquely evil, but because the evil they do has more potential for damage: that goes with the territory of being a superpower. I don't believe there's anything in the parent's post to suggest he/she believes the U.S. is uniquely evil.
Aside from this point, there are two reasons we occasional critics of the U.S. don't always bother to mention all the other evil manipulative governments of the world: 1) we are English speakers, and considerably more aware of the status of the sole superpower in the Anglosphere, and 2) the U.S. has a functioning electoral system, meaning criticism of the administration's evils might actually DO something. I should emphasize these are reasons, not excuses.
[Drat, mangled the URL in my last post. Here's the correctly-formatted version.]
WTF? A cow is order Artiodactyla, and a whale is order Cetacea. Their DNA would be miles apart. The only thing they have in common is that they are mammals. How did anyone ever think this could work? And a biologist at that? Again I say, WTF?
Not that it's not crazy—it is—but genetics has shown that cows and whales are more related that was previously realized. Hippos have always been classified as artiodactyls, but comparison of DNA has suggested that hippo's closest relatives are actually whales, i.e. that whales form a subclade inside what was previously called Artiodactyla. The new name Cetartiodactyla, combining Artiodactyla and Cetacea, has been proposed.
The morphological distinctness between whales and artiodactyls is pinned on the very different selection pressures of a marine environment.
In any case, your point stands: whether or not they're different orders, they're different families. It would be like crossing us with lemurs or baboons.
WTF? A cow is order Artiodactyla, and a whale is order Cetacea. Their DNA would be miles apart. The only thing they have in common is that they are mammals. How did anyone ever think this could work? And a biologist at that? Again I say, WTF?
Not that it's not crazy -- it is -- but genetics has shown that http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/434566.stm'>cows and whales are more related that was previously realized. Hippos have always been classified as artiodactyls, but comparison of DNA has suggested that hippo's closest relatives are actually whales, i.e. that whales form a subclade inside what was previously called Artiodactyla. The new name Cetartiodactyla, combining Artiodactyla and Cetacea, has been proposed.
The morphological distinctness between whales and artiodactyls is pinned on the very different selection pressures of a marine environment.
In any case, your point stands: whether or not they're different orders, they're different families. It would be like crossing us with lemurs or baboons.
People who survived the Plague in Europe either did not encounter it or almost universally had a genetic anomaly commonly referred to as the delta-32 marker. Their ancestors survive other diseases because of this causing what amounts to an odd protein binding issue on the cellular level. Those people are also naturally immune to HIV.
Your claims are not proved. In the words of the Wikipedia article, "it has been hypothesized that this allele was favored by natural selection during the Black Death".
As I've been given to understand (I myself don't know tha much about this), this hypothesis has been put forward because the coalescence dates for the CCR5-32 mutation in Europe go back to about 1300, which seems to fit with the Black Death, but no clear link between CCR5-32 has been shown.
Interestingly, the CCR5-32/Black Death theory has also been used to argue that the Black Death was not caused by bubonic plague at all, but a different and separate pathogen, possibly a filovirus, like Marburg virus or ebola.
How can you engage with people like this in a productive way without being insulting?
You didn't specify exactly what he does believe. If he believes that snakes are related to worms, he at least believes in a common origin to all life, right? In that case, it's just the question of what the evolutionary tree looks like.
According to current theories, Neanderthals did not evolve in Africa. Neanderthals evolved in Eurasia from an ancestral population of Homo heidelbergensis . These in turn are very similar to the slightly older Homo ergaster specimens from Africa, so there's a natural progression from Africa to the Neanderthals. We, on the other hand, stayed in Africa a lot longer before some of us came to displace the Neanderthals.
I note that Mr Guo's name is mentioned nowhere in the Slashdot summary. Coincidence, or deliberate so as to not cause Slashdot's page to be temporarily blocked in China? And if so, is that bad (cowardice) or good (working around the restrictions)?
More to the point, it didn't mention that there was anything political about Guo's name being removed at all., or even that he was involved with a pro-democracy movement. The wording suggested it was just another frivolous lawsuit out of vanity, like the companies who sue Google after their PageRank-exploiting schemes are defeated.
I'm more inclined to think the submitter was being lazy than deliberately suppressing details, but it's a pretty misleading summary.
Probably more like because if it isn't censorship, it isn't censorship. I mean that is what the post was saying right?
and I will add because if it isn't totalitarianism, it isn't totalitarianism. Nothing suggest our government is doing either on the internet as the conversation has been going.
So, nothing is totalitarian until it's fully and completely totalitarian, at which point it's rather too late.
The only insight I see displayed in your post is in your choice of username.
But exactly how did they come up with this particular formula? Given three numbers [A,B,C] what methodology tells them to interpret the combination as the ratio (A+B)/(A+B+C) and not, say, A+B+C or A+B*C, or (A+B)/(A+C)?
Oops, I actually inverted the ratio: it is (A+B+C)/(A+B). No inerrancy here!
It gives an error of 0.00265%. Quite remarkable.
Quite remarkable indeed. One might even call it special pleading.
The q has a value of 100; the v has a value of 6; thus, the normal spelling would yield a numerical value of 106. The addition of the h, with a value of 5, increases the numerical value to 111.
Hebrew letters have associated numerical values, that's well known. For the purposes of the argument I'll accept that these letters have the cited values.
But exactly how did they come up with this particular formula? Given three numbers [A,B,C] what methodology tells them to interpret the combination as the ratio (A+B)/(A+B+C) and not, say, A+B+C or A+B*C, or (A+B)/(A+C)? I don't think there is such a methodology, and I think this means that they will pick whatever formula works for the occasion.
"Checkmate", from the Persian "shah mat" meaning, "the king is dead".
This etymology is not quite true: apparently "shah mat" means "the king is helpless/ambushed/defeated". See this reference.
As far as I know, the top level domain is the .de part.
Sorry, I meant "domain names support..." not "top-level domain names support...".
Even that doesn't really make sense: I should have said "Unicode characters in domain names are supported."
Apparently top-level domains support Unicode characters in URLs, but Slashdot chokes on them! (In links, anyway). Here are some attempts, all failing:
bücher.de (UTF-8 or ISO 8859-1)
bücher.de (HTML entity u-uml)
bücher.de (Unicode character 00FC as entity)
I take it there is some good reason why a new but backwards-compatible version of DNS can't be released that uses unicode? Never mind Cyrillic, or Chinese characters, I want a domain name in Tengwar!
And you can get it if you can get Tengwar in Unicode, with the exception of the top-level domain. Unicode characters are already supported and used, but no top-level domains using non-Latin Unicode characters yet exist. Russia is proposing a new top-level domain.
Thinking about it, there's no need to reinvent the wheel here, is there? The existing IDNA system can be used: if Russia wants "" (or some other abbreviation of the Cyrillic ) as a top-level domain, just give them whatever that maps to in the ToASCII conversion (described in the article I linked). Then the existing software that supports international domain names will work without trouble.
Of course then Japan will want , and China (maybe Taiwan will want it too), and this may make the top-level domain system balloon out of proportions. But these sorts of top-level domains make a hell of lot more sense to me than dot-biz or dot-museum!
.....that were it not for these jokes many people wouldn't even know that he was still alive, or that he even exists at all.
Norris has even taken advantage of the jokes himself on occasion. See this video of Norris endorsing Mike Huckabee.
As I've heard them before, the arguments are that proofs might:
PlanetMath has a large collection of proofs and more of an infrastructure for handling some of the above issues. I don't like their article ownership model myself; if someone has found an error I'd rather she were able to make the correction herself than bother me. But something like PlanetMath, a dedicated corner of the web for a free mathematical encyclopedia, is probably the way to go here.
Even if nothing goes wrong, they've set a dangerous precedent of basically telling their watchdog group "Well, we'll let you do your thing, but even though we know little about the engineering behind a reactor, we are also going to basically feel free to disregard you and tell you to suck it if we don't like what you say."
And on top of that, beyond just ignoring the advice of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, our incorribly partisan Prime Minister decided to attack them as the "Liberal appointed Nuclear Safety Commission".
(Yes, the head of the commission is an appointee of the previous administration. But deriding the concerns of nuclear experts as a partisan issue is not one of Harper's better moments.)
Even in high school I would have gotten crucified for beginning three subsequent sentences with "Firstly", "Secondly", and "Thirdly".
"subsequent" should be "successive". I woulda gotten crucified for that too!