That's sure not my experience with Indians. So what if someone on a call center doesn't know jack? Most of them here in the US don't either.
The Indian students here at the university I work at have always been excellent and fun to work with. (My fave joke from one of them: "The British gave us bureaucracy. But we PERFECTED it.")
(Just like I was joking around when posting that. But just to reassure you, Ramanujan was one of the greats of mathematics. And there is a long tradition of great Indian scientists doing mathematics going back centuries BC. My personal fave Indian scientist is J. C. Bose who was working wtih 60 Ghz radio waves in the late 1800s.)
"1970's president that told Americans they need to focus on science, alternative fuels, computers, and math to compete in a future world."
Just like the other two 1970s presidents did.
I think just about every president since Nixon has said that. Whether or not they got any funding for it.
The only reason that I'm starting with Nixon is that was the administration when the oil shocks started to bite. ERDA was created during a reorganization of the AEC in the very early Ford administration, though the work leading up to it had been done in the late Nixon admin.
Carter renamed it DOE and did another reorganization early in his administration.
As to telling Americans they need to focus on science and math etc, you can go back to at least Ike with Sputnik. Probably with Truman and FDR with WWII which was a massively technological war.
Though Carter did look snazzy in a sweater while he was telling us to turn down the thermostats.
Carter tried to return the US to being a space and science society? I'd sure not agree on space.
His VP was Walter Mondale, who along with William Proxmire with input from James Van Allen nearly got the office of manned spaceflight shut down.
Nasa did not do well under his administration. The great achievements were from long previous. The shuttle was completed in spite of them rather than due to them. And do you really think they would have done something better if it had been abandoned? Remember that was the time of double digit inflation. Big new projects weren't in the cards.
It had been suffering under others back to LBJ, but let's not rewrite history.
To quote Will Rogers "Things ain't what they used to be and never were."
God heavens, man! How can you bring facts into this?
You might even keep it from getting two hundred outraged replies.;)
I've got the later model that doesn't beep. I've also wondered about how to tell when the battery dies. I only get to Chicago and use it every couple of months, so it could die for quite a while before I'd know.
Up till now I just occasionally go through the non-openroad lanes and see if the blue toll paid indicator light comes on.
The whole premise of the book Megatrends was based on this sort of analysis. Keep a count of the headlines in newspapers on various subjects. See how that changes over time.
It sorta works. Sometimes. Intel agencies do this sort of thing so they aren't as easily blindsided. It's not a new idea.
Uh. I don't use an asthma inhaler. So, how am I getting this special handout you speak of?
I know that I tend to write long posts, and there is a lot of tl:dr around here, but please bear with me.
My point is a general one.
Was the point of the regulation simply to regulate or proscribe? Or was it to stop damage to the environment?
What the real intent was is often lost once a regulation goes into effect. The intent is to stop a harm. After the harm is alleviated, human instinct (just like you are displaying above) is to continue to punish any use even if it is harmless.
This comes from the instincts we developed when we were still troop monkeys on the savannahs. It worked well there, but is a little out of place in this case.
This is the same sort of thinking that leads to many rather silly absolute moral strictures in religion.
Eating pork got prohibited in some cultures since some fraction of those who eat it die from trichinosis. Once we learn that with proper cooking or freezing (and good agricultural measures to deal with the parasite in pigs) it's safe, there are still groups that proscribe it.
It's now not dangerous, but it's not halal, or kosher or whatever dictum limits it. It has become a moral offense rather than a public danger.
The real harm is gone, but the moral stricture that was put on it lives on like some zombie.
Does the concept "dose makes the toxin" have any meaning to you? It applies to natural systems as well.
If you've limited the other sources to the point the ozone hole is closing reasonably quickly, what added benefit is there from limiting even smaller sources?
Ozone is produced in the upper atmosphere and reaches an equillibrium. It can withstand some amount of ozone destruction from various sources and still be fine.
The problem was that with large amounts of CFCs being used for refrigeration and general aerosol propellant, far more was going into the atmosphere than it could tolerate. We reduced CFC use drastically for that reason.
What you're saying is much like someone noting that eating two bottles of aspirin will kill you. Thus, we must stop people from taking 2 aspirin pills.
It doesn't follow.
Chemistry is not like religion. In religion something that's evil is evil in all forms. In chemistry, it depends on whether there is enough of it, or the right conditions for it to cause problems.
If he's like me, he read the summary. But he wanted to use the unlimited data as a hotspot for his home network when he's there. It'd be a good backup for Comcast even if I didn't ditch their pretty scratchy cablemodem service.
5 gig gets eaten up pretty quickly for that. So, Sprint just removed the reason I was considering getting one of their smartphones. A pity.
In the rural area I live in, it's unlikely that their links would get saturated even with a fair number of users doing that.
I'll just stick with my trackfone. With as little as I do voice calls, a more featured phone/plan is little use to me. A high bandwidth limit/unlimited data connection plus a smartphone would have been useful.
Not only does it promise to let you get someone addicted to a game and then raise prices repeatedly to keep playing, it gives them nothing that they can make they're own changes to, or create an alternate server for. Total control.
(vogon) Resistance is useless! (/vogon)
That it would be quite difficult in the near term to implement due to bandwidth and other limitations won't bother them a bit.
Net bandwidth limits don't have any effect on demos run locally backed up by blingy powerpoint presentations. So, the higher ups will really be impressed.
And by the time the thing falls over on its face, they'll have moved on to the next job or position and let some other sucker catch the fallout for their "Brilliant Idea(tm)".
My apologies, but I'm not sure what you are saying. The AUC has become something quite different than it was originally intended when it started back the 1990s. That was the point I was making. That groups change over time and when large amounts of drug money are involved can easily become corrupt. When the group is already outside the traditional limits of law, such as a group doing assasinations, the lengths that they can go are much greater. If they are corrupted they are just that much more dangerous.
I think you misunderstand my position. I tend to be a law and order type who is willing to use pretty strong means. But at the same time, I recognize that without strong and (either publicly or representatively) reviewed controls it can easily go from being a controlled application of force to being an uncontrolled use of force. Thus you need a legal framework controlling the forces a country uses.
It's a bit like using fire. It's a wonderful servant, but when it escapes control, it is a terrible master.
Crud. Noticed that I typed Natanz. I meant Bushehr. That's the Russian built power reactor that just went online. Natanz is their main uranium separation plant.:P
From AAAS: "After declines in the NSF budget in the mid-1990's resulting from pressure to balance the federal budget, support for NSF surged in the late 1990's. The growing support for NSF was demonstrated when Congress passed and the President signed the NSF Authorization Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-368) that authorized a doubling of funding for NSF from its FY 2002 level of $4.8 billion to $9.8 billion in FY 2007. Despite high hopes, a dramatically changed federal fiscal environment-characterized by increasing budget deficits and costs associated with the war on terrorismresulted in NSF funding well below the authorized levels in those years."
"Which Central and South American death squads might you be indicating actually performed this scenario?"
Columbia, for a start. A number of what ended up as right wing "militias" started out as vigilante groups, but were perverted into actually protecting cartels.
And would you really have us believe that Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian Circles (mostly thugs rather than always outright assasins) are corruption free and only do their master's bidding?
And what about Mexico's Zetas themselves? They're largely former military who went over to the dark side as it was massively more profitable.
That's just a few. There've been many instances worldwide where extralegal anticrime groups have become the criminals or protectors of the criminals themselves.
Another example: Much of the Russian and other former Soviet state's mafias are former KGB operatives. The skills they learned for supporting the Soviet government translated directly into the skills needed to help themselves to a share of ill gotten gains.
What, you expected me to trot out a string of anecdotes about CIA funded drug dealing or some politically charged thing from Truthout or Mother Jones?
No need. There are too many documented examples on all sides of the political spectrum where extra-legal government and vigilante justice groups have gone bad throughout history.
"A good assassination team would remove 100% of the cartel operatives in Mexico fairly quickly"
Uh huh. Those Central and South American death squads did such an efficient job. Yeah, sure.
And what happens when the death squad gets bought off the way many of them were?
Or are you proposing sending US personnel in to conduct a massive extrajudicial killing of Mexican citizens with all of the fallout and collateral damage that would result.
Sheesh. I'm a hawk compared to most, but you're just being silly.
Slashdot Mirror
That's sure not my experience with Indians. So what if someone on a call center doesn't know jack? Most of them here in the US don't either.
The Indian students here at the university I work at have always been excellent and fun to work with. (My fave joke from one of them: "The British gave us bureaucracy. But we PERFECTED it.")
Hey, Belldandy would be my first choice, but Lakshmi would be pretty cool as well.
I'm sure he was joking around when he said it.
(Just like I was joking around when posting that. But just to reassure you, Ramanujan was one of the greats of mathematics. And there is a long tradition of great Indian scientists doing mathematics going back centuries BC. My personal fave Indian scientist is J. C. Bose who was working wtih 60 Ghz radio waves in the late 1800s.)
"1970's president that told Americans they need to focus on science, alternative fuels, computers, and math to compete in a future world."
Just like the other two 1970s presidents did.
I think just about every president since Nixon has said that. Whether or not they got any funding for it.
The only reason that I'm starting with Nixon is that was the administration when the oil shocks started to bite. ERDA was created during a reorganization of the AEC in the very early Ford administration, though the work leading up to it had been done in the late Nixon admin.
Carter renamed it DOE and did another reorganization early in his administration.
As to telling Americans they need to focus on science and math etc, you can go back to at least Ike with Sputnik. Probably with Truman and FDR with WWII which was a massively technological war.
Though Carter did look snazzy in a sweater while he was telling us to turn down the thermostats.
I won't hold my breath waiting on the proof.
But I certainly wish him the best.
There are thousands of proofs that begin with "Assuming the Riemann Hypothesis"
Ramanujan said the goddess Lakshmi read the answers to him out of a book.
"Electric Sun Theory?"
I think they call that a light bulb and it's why I can now read late at night.
Indeed. I meant Nixon, but had a brain fade.
Must be one of those senior moments I started having about age 11.
Carter tried to return the US to being a space and science society? I'd sure not agree on space.
His VP was Walter Mondale, who along with William Proxmire with input from James Van Allen nearly got the office of manned spaceflight shut down.
Nasa did not do well under his administration. The great achievements were from long previous. The shuttle was completed in spite of them rather than due to them. And do you really think they would have done something better if it had been abandoned? Remember that was the time of double digit inflation. Big new projects weren't in the cards.
It had been suffering under others back to LBJ, but let's not rewrite history.
To quote Will Rogers "Things ain't what they used to be and never were."
God heavens, man! How can you bring facts into this?
You might even keep it from getting two hundred outraged replies. ;)
I've got the later model that doesn't beep. I've also wondered about how to tell when the battery dies. I only get to Chicago and use it every couple of months, so it could die for quite a while before I'd know.
Up till now I just occasionally go through the non-openroad lanes and see if the blue toll paid indicator light comes on.
Obvious troll is obvious.
The whole premise of the book Megatrends was based on this sort of analysis. Keep a count of the headlines in newspapers on various subjects. See how that changes over time.
It sorta works. Sometimes. Intel agencies do this sort of thing so they aren't as easily blindsided. It's not a new idea.
Uh. I don't use an asthma inhaler. So, how am I getting this special handout you speak of?
I know that I tend to write long posts, and there is a lot of tl:dr around here, but please bear with me.
My point is a general one.
Was the point of the regulation simply to regulate or proscribe? Or was it to stop damage to the environment?
What the real intent was is often lost once a regulation goes into effect. The intent is to stop a harm. After the harm is alleviated, human instinct (just like you are displaying above) is to continue to punish any use even if it is harmless.
This comes from the instincts we developed when we were still troop monkeys on the savannahs. It worked well there, but is a little out of place in this case.
This is the same sort of thinking that leads to many rather silly absolute moral strictures in religion.
Eating pork got prohibited in some cultures since some fraction of those who eat it die from trichinosis. Once we learn that with proper cooking or freezing (and good agricultural measures to deal with the parasite in pigs) it's safe, there are still groups that proscribe it.
It's now not dangerous, but it's not halal, or kosher or whatever dictum limits it. It has become a moral offense rather than a public danger.
The real harm is gone, but the moral stricture that was put on it lives on like some zombie.
Could well be. But those I've talked to in the area haven't noticed a saturation problem as yet.
We 're 20 miles or so from a major university town, so there could be similar trouble depending on whether the data goes over the same connections.
Does the concept "dose makes the toxin" have any meaning to you? It applies to natural systems as well.
If you've limited the other sources to the point the ozone hole is closing reasonably quickly, what added benefit is there from limiting even smaller sources?
Ozone is produced in the upper atmosphere and reaches an equillibrium. It can withstand some amount of ozone destruction from various sources and still be fine.
The problem was that with large amounts of CFCs being used for refrigeration and general aerosol propellant, far more was going into the atmosphere than it could tolerate. We reduced CFC use drastically for that reason.
What you're saying is much like someone noting that eating two bottles of aspirin will kill you. Thus, we must stop people from taking 2 aspirin pills.
It doesn't follow.
Chemistry is not like religion. In religion something that's evil is evil in all forms. In chemistry, it depends on whether there is enough of it, or the right conditions for it to cause problems.
If he's like me, he read the summary. But he wanted to use the unlimited data as a hotspot for his home network when he's there. It'd be a good backup for Comcast even if I didn't ditch their pretty scratchy cablemodem service.
5 gig gets eaten up pretty quickly for that. So, Sprint just removed the reason I was considering getting one of their smartphones. A pity.
In the rural area I live in, it's unlikely that their links would get saturated even with a fair number of users doing that.
I'll just stick with my trackfone. With as little as I do voice calls, a more featured phone/plan is little use to me. A high bandwidth limit/unlimited data connection plus a smartphone would have been useful.
Not only does it promise to let you get someone addicted to a game and then raise prices repeatedly to keep playing, it gives them nothing that they can make they're own changes to, or create an alternate server for. Total control.
(vogon) Resistance is useless! (/vogon)
That it would be quite difficult in the near term to implement due to bandwidth and other limitations won't bother them a bit.
Net bandwidth limits don't have any effect on demos run locally backed up by blingy powerpoint presentations. So, the higher ups will really be impressed.
And by the time the thing falls over on its face, they'll have moved on to the next job or position and let some other sucker catch the fallout for their "Brilliant Idea(tm)".
My apologies, but I'm not sure what you are saying. The AUC has become something quite different than it was originally intended when it started back the 1990s. That was the point I was making. That groups change over time and when large amounts of drug money are involved can easily become corrupt. When the group is already outside the traditional limits of law, such as a group doing assasinations, the lengths that they can go are much greater. If they are corrupted they are just that much more dangerous.
I think you misunderstand my position. I tend to be a law and order type who is willing to use pretty strong means. But at the same time, I recognize that without strong and (either publicly or representatively) reviewed controls it can easily go from being a controlled application of force to being an uncontrolled use of force. Thus you need a legal framework controlling the forces a country uses.
It's a bit like using fire. It's a wonderful servant, but when it escapes control, it is a terrible master.
Crud. Noticed that I typed Natanz. I meant Bushehr. That's the Russian built power reactor that just went online. Natanz is their main uranium separation plant. :P
"They should make sure to check the crew's DNA very carefully"
Oh, the crew's DNA is just fine.
It's all that extra with the unusual nucleotide coding that we're worried about.
"There is 15 minutes of silence recorded on all their recorders!!!!"
There was 15 minutes of being out of communications.
There was 23 hours and 15 minutes of silence on their onboard recorders.
From AAAS: "After declines in the NSF budget in the mid-1990's resulting from
pressure to balance the federal budget, support for NSF surged in the late
1990's. The growing support for NSF was demonstrated when Congress
passed and the President signed the NSF Authorization Act of 2002 (P.L.
107-368) that authorized a doubling of funding for NSF from its FY
2002 level of $4.8 billion to $9.8 billion in FY 2007. Despite high hopes,
a dramatically changed federal fiscal environment-characterized by
increasing budget deficits and costs associated with the war on terrorismresulted
in NSF funding well below the authorized levels in those years."
Full report chapter: http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/rdreport2010/ch06.pdf
SSC was killed in 1993, and the rebound didn't happen till much later. You're using a window that doesn't give the real picture.
I saw too many groups lose funding in the mid 90s to begin to swallow what you're selling for a minute.
When some surprising calamity happened, didn't they sometimes execute the king's fortune teller for not predicting it?
This makes about as much sense, though I have less sympathy for the fortuneteller than I do the seismologists.
"Which Central and South American death squads might you be indicating actually performed this scenario?"
Columbia, for a start. A number of what ended up as right wing "militias" started out as vigilante groups, but were perverted into actually protecting cartels.
See: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/latin_america/colombia/players_auc.html
And would you really have us believe that Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian Circles (mostly thugs rather than always outright assasins) are corruption free and only do their master's bidding?
And what about Mexico's Zetas themselves? They're largely former military who went over to the dark side as it was massively more profitable.
That's just a few. There've been many instances worldwide where extralegal anticrime groups have become the criminals or protectors of the criminals themselves.
Another example: Much of the Russian and other former Soviet state's mafias are former KGB operatives. The skills they learned for supporting the Soviet government translated directly into the skills needed to help themselves to a share of ill gotten gains.
What, you expected me to trot out a string of anecdotes about CIA funded drug dealing or some politically charged thing from Truthout or Mother Jones?
No need. There are too many documented examples on all sides of the political spectrum where extra-legal government and vigilante justice groups have gone bad throughout history.
"A good assassination team would remove 100% of the cartel operatives in Mexico fairly quickly"
Uh huh. Those Central and South American death squads did such an efficient job. Yeah, sure.
And what happens when the death squad gets bought off the way many of them were?
Or are you proposing sending US personnel in to conduct a massive extrajudicial killing of Mexican citizens with all of the fallout and collateral damage that would result.
Sheesh. I'm a hawk compared to most, but you're just being silly.