Israel can do a perfectly fine job of taking care of itself. It has nukes and some of the most modern arms on the planet.
Why should we, the American taxpayers, pay for a squabble between Judaism Mk. I and Judaism Mk. III? (Probably because Judaism Mk. II has some ideological stake in it...)
If you go back to Reagan and zero out military spending since then, you also zero out the debt (to about 5%). This calculation was based on looking up year-to-year military spending and year-to-year interest on the debt.
My mother taught at a ghetto school for quite a while at the end of her career. I worked there for a semester, and volunteered quite a bit in addition to that. They had gobs and gobs of "technology" (computers, teleconferencing equipment) lying around that wasn't being used, paid for by federal grants -- and that nobody there really knew *how* to turn into actual student learning. They maintain an "aerospace science" magnet program in name only which (for a while) was there in name only and existed just to qualify for federal funding.
What we need to do to fix education is:
1) Pay teachers a salary that is commensurate with highly-trained competent professionals 2) Demand that they actually be highly-trained competent professionals 3) Get the hell out of their way and stop micromanaging them
You don't need a third party. For some reason we have gotten away from the very sensible solution of direct connections. We're not talking adhoc peer-to-peer in the Gnutella sense, we're talking about "I open a port and you connect to me". The only thing you need the cloud for is a way for two people to exchange IP addresses.
The birthrate will in the long term tend toward one birth per person (or two children per woman given a 50:50 sex ratio). The only question is whether this happens because most children that are born die of famine or violence before they get the opportunity to reproduce or whether it happens by a more benign mechanism.
I lived in a very nice 1-bedroom apartment in one of the wealthiest cities in northern AL that cost $420/month. I lived in a furnished 1-bedroom apartment in a desirable area of Tucson AZ that was about the same.
You can also get, y'know, roommates (if you're single).
This is why you have a real live DM to correct for those times in which it is broken.
Is it possible to, by the letter of the rules, break 3.5? Sure it is. But in my group we have players who're more interested in having fun than in rules-lawyering, and a DM to ensure that that things stay balanced.
A good RPG system doesn't have to be balanced; it just has to be balanced to first order.
"More efficient use" means "hey, instead of spewing nitrates all over the place, let's let the plants make their own right where they need it". There's basically no scenario where giving plants the ability to fix their own nitrogen will result in more wastage than the current strategy of "mix the stuff up with the dirt".
Now, Monsanto's lawyers in combination with patent law have been a disaster -- I'll grant you that. But the technology itself is safe (see above, and see the safety tests on Bacillus thuringensis bacteria themselves, which farmers used to put directly on their corn) and has prevented tons and tons of insecticide from being sprayed on crops.
I was a field hand in a study of Bt cotton vs. conventional cotton. The instructions to farmers were "farm both of these like you normally would, and ignore us -- we're going to come in and count bugs once in a while". The conventional field was a wasteland, since farmers had to spray to kill caterpillars, and then spray again to kill all the things that the predators who're now dead would have eaten.
The Bt field had bugs (and other insects, but mostly bugs) all over it, happily eating each other and eating pests -- especially aphids. Aphids are a notable critter here, since they're resistant to most insecticides but are a tasty snack for all sorts of predators.
There's a fascinating story with Greenpeace and GM corn. The folks making the GM corn did a study where they got both their GM corn and conventional corn that was as similar as possible, and then fed both to lab rats. They weighed the rats every week, then took the rats apart after a while and assayed... everything. Organ sizes, weights, chemistries, etc. They concluded that there were no significant differences.
Greenpeace sued to get the raw data, something I think they have a right to (since that study was used as the basis for approval). They got some folks (grad students in Germany, I think) to do their own statistics, which concluded that GM corn caused a statistically significant increase in growth rate for male rats and a statistically significant decrease for female rats. I looked at what they did, and it turns out they made a sophomoric statistics error that I teach, well, sophomore undergrads not to make.
What they did, essentially, was to neglect the fact that limited-sample-size uncertainties in "weight of rat at 6 weeks" and "weight of rat at 7 weeks" are correlated when they tested for statistical significance. Of course they're correlated -- they're the same damned rats! (In technical language, they calculated chi-squared based on the naive standard-errors-of-the-mean, rather than on the full covariance matrix which is required for [strongly] correlated data.)
If Greenpeace can't even get undergrad stats right in one of the cases where they *have* shown their work (and it's wrong) then I see no reason to give them any credibility unless someone who's better at this than they are checks their work.
That sort of behavior only needs defending against the government. It is right and proper for private citizens to attack it: saying "Apple is evil and bad and you shouldn't buy their iShit" is very different than adding "... and the government oughta stop them".
SF definitely has some weirdos, but they're far saner than DC overall. Sedona I will give you -- that place is utterly apeshit, having been taken over by new-agers looking for ley lines and selling aura photography and assorted bullshit like that. (Aura photography cracks me up -- I guess there is a use for shitty lenses after all.)
I (grandparent) voted for Obama, because I was scared of both McCain and Palin. Not saying that there weren't legitimate reasons to vote for him. (Not so happy with his presidency, but that is another story. McCain would probably have put into place more sensible economic policies but then we'd be at war with Iran by now, so...)
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Don't most Android phones support a mode that encrypts the whole shebang?
You should also note that these F-22's can't fly far from bases, since the pilots have been getting hypoxic: their oxygen systems don't work.
Israel can do a perfectly fine job of taking care of itself. It has nukes and some of the most modern arms on the planet.
Why should we, the American taxpayers, pay for a squabble between Judaism Mk. I and Judaism Mk. III? (Probably because Judaism Mk. II has some ideological stake in it...)
If you go back to Reagan and zero out military spending since then, you also zero out the debt (to about 5%). This calculation was based on looking up year-to-year military spending and year-to-year interest on the debt.
Yeah, this.
My mother taught at a ghetto school for quite a while at the end of her career. I worked there for a semester, and volunteered quite a bit in addition to that. They had gobs and gobs of "technology" (computers, teleconferencing equipment) lying around that wasn't being used, paid for by federal grants -- and that nobody there really knew *how* to turn into actual student learning. They maintain an "aerospace science" magnet program in name only which (for a while) was there in name only and existed just to qualify for federal funding.
What we need to do to fix education is:
1) Pay teachers a salary that is commensurate with highly-trained competent professionals
2) Demand that they actually be highly-trained competent professionals
3) Get the hell out of their way and stop micromanaging them
You don't need a third party. For some reason we have gotten away from the very sensible solution of direct connections. We're not talking adhoc peer-to-peer in the Gnutella sense, we're talking about "I open a port and you connect to me". The only thing you need the cloud for is a way for two people to exchange IP addresses.
The birthrate will in the long term tend toward one birth per person (or two children per woman given a 50:50 sex ratio). The only question is whether this happens because most children that are born die of famine or violence before they get the opportunity to reproduce or whether it happens by a more benign mechanism.
I lived in a very nice 1-bedroom apartment in one of the wealthiest cities in northern AL that cost $420/month. I lived in a furnished 1-bedroom apartment in a desirable area of Tucson AZ that was about the same.
You can also get, y'know, roommates (if you're single).
This is why you have a real live DM to correct for those times in which it is broken.
Is it possible to, by the letter of the rules, break 3.5? Sure it is. But in my group we have players who're more interested in having fun than in rules-lawyering, and a DM to ensure that that things stay balanced.
A good RPG system doesn't have to be balanced; it just has to be balanced to first order.
If I hadn't posted already you'd get mod points.
"More efficient use" means "hey, instead of spewing nitrates all over the place, let's let the plants make their own right where they need it". There's basically no scenario where giving plants the ability to fix their own nitrogen will result in more wastage than the current strategy of "mix the stuff up with the dirt".
GM corn has been a disaster?
Now, Monsanto's lawyers in combination with patent law have been a disaster -- I'll grant you that. But the technology itself is safe (see above, and see the safety tests on Bacillus thuringensis bacteria themselves, which farmers used to put directly on their corn) and has prevented tons and tons of insecticide from being sprayed on crops.
I was a field hand in a study of Bt cotton vs. conventional cotton. The instructions to farmers were "farm both of these like you normally would, and ignore us -- we're going to come in and count bugs once in a while". The conventional field was a wasteland, since farmers had to spray to kill caterpillars, and then spray again to kill all the things that the predators who're now dead would have eaten.
The Bt field had bugs (and other insects, but mostly bugs) all over it, happily eating each other and eating pests -- especially aphids. Aphids are a notable critter here, since they're resistant to most insecticides but are a tasty snack for all sorts of predators.
There's a fascinating story with Greenpeace and GM corn. The folks making the GM corn did a study where they got both their GM corn and conventional corn that was as similar as possible, and then fed both to lab rats. They weighed the rats every week, then took the rats apart after a while and assayed ... everything. Organ sizes, weights, chemistries, etc. They concluded that there were no significant differences.
Greenpeace sued to get the raw data, something I think they have a right to (since that study was used as the basis for approval). They got some folks (grad students in Germany, I think) to do their own statistics, which concluded that GM corn caused a statistically significant increase in growth rate for male rats and a statistically significant decrease for female rats. I looked at what they did, and it turns out they made a sophomoric statistics error that I teach, well, sophomore undergrads not to make.
What they did, essentially, was to neglect the fact that limited-sample-size uncertainties in "weight of rat at 6 weeks" and "weight of rat at 7 weeks" are correlated when they tested for statistical significance. Of course they're correlated -- they're the same damned rats! (In technical language, they calculated chi-squared based on the naive standard-errors-of-the-mean, rather than on the full covariance matrix which is required for [strongly] correlated data.)
If Greenpeace can't even get undergrad stats right in one of the cases where they *have* shown their work (and it's wrong) then I see no reason to give them any credibility unless someone who's better at this than they are checks their work.
Actually, these "anti-GM-anything-full-stop" morons are all over, and grandparent hasn't inaccurately characterized them.
That sort of behavior only needs defending against the government. It is right and proper for private citizens to attack it: saying "Apple is evil and bad and you shouldn't buy their iShit" is very different than adding "... and the government oughta stop them".
Can't wait to be forced to provide mouth* swabs at airports.
*(or vagina)
also you are always at war with your own penis*
*(or vagina)
BSD is dead. CERT confirms it?
(or vagina)
SF definitely has some weirdos, but they're far saner than DC overall. Sedona I will give you -- that place is utterly apeshit, having been taken over by new-agers looking for ley lines and selling aura photography and assorted bullshit like that. (Aura photography cracks me up -- I guess there is a use for shitty lenses after all.)
Never been to Joshua Tree to comment.
This is DC. Next to Baltimore it has the highest density of morons and crazies of anywhere I've seen.
(*or vagina)
Hookers with hard, dry vulvas that will abrade the skin off your dick?
*or vagina
I (grandparent) voted for Obama, because I was scared of both McCain and Palin. Not saying that there weren't legitimate reasons to vote for him. (Not so happy with his presidency, but that is another story. McCain would probably have put into place more sensible economic policies but then we'd be at war with Iran by now, so...)
RTFA; they did exactly this, figuring that nigga-googlers wanted rap lyrics.