SOOOoo...this system makes it's way out into the marketplace, and soon after, content providers are providing "high quality" deliveries via wire or disc, and for the most part, the systems slowly go through an upgrade process to conforming hardware, finally letting the "high" in quality reach the user. Balloons fall, confetti flies and whistles and claps abound - you are running a "trusted system"
In a country far far away, a series of specifications, hardware manufacturers and technology folks band together to build the impossible: To make a machine decrypt the "high quality" content and push it to a jack. Nothing more, nothing less. They use a non-MS embedded OS and cook their scheme into an IC and viola! We have an unencumbered HD-DVD/BluRay player.
The market for this is illegal - in certain countries. But no matter, since once tapped on the above device, said port burns a new HD-DVD/BluRay disc, without licensing scheme. Some Volks-haXXor posts code to read port, strip tags from the raw stream, and pump back into a disc. Cheers from the masses, "it's been hacked!". Said streams make their way onto existing distribution mechanisms (torrent,p2p,the corner cart downtown) and you've got (wait for it) THE STATUS QUO.
Currently, only the tech-enlightened really got through the ever-lowering hurdles to download copyrighted content. Scare tactics and ethics keep most people in the DVD isle of the buy-it stores. I'm sure that will stay the same.
So, we'll simply have the MS bundled-systems with their crazy bugs, people complaining and conforming media for high quality. On the flip side will be folks not so much skipping the DRM in Windows, but getting non-DRM content to begin with. Windows has simply gone the way of the yes-man for DRM enforcement, leaving you with two choices: Lower audio/video resolution or playing only proper discs. Guess what you do with your big collection of "improper" discs: Play them on Linux. It could reinforce the sentiment that "Linux is for hackers, aka criminals" but I doubt that'll fly for long.
MS, like the media players before, will have to allow for "personal" content to be played at "high quality" eventually, since consumers are also media generators. Like now with audio, if you can get source content out of the DRM shackles, making it look personal, the entire SYSTEM from disc to monitor is bypassed quietly.
I'm prepared for a long period of relative component stagnation, while all this DRM for Vista gets sorted out. I doubt the legacy cards and peripherals will go away anytime soon.
Figuring in the costs of melting the coins: 100 pennies(1 ounce) -> melting temp(1984.32 F) = ? Joules, delivered from ? powersource = $ cost.
I doubt this is profitable. Then again power is cheap, or even free in some scenarios. Thieves are mostly concerned with spools found near industrial power infrastructure (thefts have sometimes been, um, sparky!)
Complexity is always a subjective term. When MTV started, the flashing, hyper-cut videos made our parents squirm. Kids have simply adjusted to a faster-paced stimulus. They are learning to navigate busy-busy web pages with ease, while we-of-the-earlier-age have to scan and scan for the stinkin' weather button.
So this is partly generational, and has always existed. So, then, has the backlash: Google's clean input box didn't arise because nobody had thought of it before, but simply because it was the motif they *wanted*: Low-noise, high-power; the soft-spoken strongman.
IMO, it comes down to: Do you want information pushed at you in bulk...the all-in-one portal page, where you may read 5% per hit, or do you want to drive to the pages that have info you like...the topic-focused sites, the subheading news page, etc. I believe most people start busy (or ignorant of choices to remove the clutter) and tire of it, then begin to build/find a page with link the way they like.
After working at a shop that wrote COBOL compilers for machine translation into C, I can tell you can it is interesting work, but by no means simple. What a lot of people misunderstand is that COBOL can react slightly differently under each IBM OS that was shipped. Writing a lexer/parser is easy, but the memory mapping and statement convolutions in COBOL were down-to-the-bit tricky.
COBOL was a huge exercise in data massaging, where hundreds of lines were used to map data into a structure which then fed a series of output channels, like a printer, screenmaps or files. Throw in a simple set of arithmetic, but apply it in hacker-esque ways to date bits, for example, and you're scratching your head a lot of the time.
I've read all the bashing here, but one must understand that COBOL's perspective of the world was far narrower than today's. Business data was a simple number-crunching exercise, not much further than the trajectory calculations of the earliest digital computers. I have some one of IBM's computer catalogs from 1971, a longwinded tome filled with secretary-models, low-level circuit specifications, and giant machines that would make a great B-movie these days.
I disagree. Tools are transient, and the features of each become more commoditized each year. The american programmer chases "learning new tools" with each programming "generation." This in itself isn't bad, but more often than not, rolling your own for a specialized situation is a skill that needs to be present at all times.
It's been said before in the perspective of not knowing how things work on the inside (especially in language wars) but I've run into more junior programmers that don't understand how to analyze and debug systems because of a simple ignorance of the "magic" of , be it networking, compilers, operating systems, sparse and/or associative arrays, code optimization in large scalable systems, the network stack, internal type representation, threading, memory usage, security...
In each of these topics, I've been on a team of programmers that simply wrote VB-style windows apps for so long they couldn't tackle a bug in one of these more difficult issues. I don't advocate that every programmer needs to learn all these topics before starting, but they have to know that there are layers beneath the tool, and that such layers are subject to examination.
Even now, I'm reengineering a large-scale system that made some horrible scalability decisions. They had a simple point-click, drag-drop style of application construction, and couldn't understand how to optimize for the real-world data throughput the end product needed to satisfy. So here I am, the "math guy", ripping out chunks of tool-generated sequential searches, file caches, and other endless layers, to streamline.
SO I argue that the *jobs* will always have a mix of programmer types, but if you hire only mousemonkeys, you're risk not having a skillset ready to tackle the "difficult" things.
When these weapons can shoot as milli/microwave lasers, silently, we'll see the next generation in infantry warfare. Snipers get more than one shot, special goggles necessary to see fire, day or night, and no audible clues. I'm unsure how many shots/power you'd be able to get with a pack-based system, but it's got to feel a lot safer zapping enemy targets in a bunker than with a loud noisecannon.
i think the electronic machines should update a public database in near-real-time. we should see how each county/district is going across the day. if it seems slow or low-turnout, local news can prod people a little harder. participation needs a kick in the butt. plus, this is the first step to online voting anyway.
the 1st trail is to take home. the 2nd, duplicate receipt is to drop in a manual recount box. the receipts say plainly who you voted for, so you can protest if you like (and a key to extract the vote from the system on-the-spot if need be, and re-vote).
the receipts are also identical, so you can choose which one to put into the manual ballot box. this prevents any machine from hacking the electronic and the manual recount, but the receipt is not hacked to avoid suspicion from the voter.
more eyes on the results, instant feedback, and 3 layers of recounting (only 2 are summable, since the home receipts cannot be really collected again).
counting paper trails would be mandatory in each district, up to a random 50%. if the results seemed vastly skewed compared to the electronic results, the county uses the paper entirely, machines audited, people sued, etc.
Seems obvious that a game with personification of the player into playfield, simulating injury and death would trigger more emotional "fight or flight" activity in the brain.
Need For Speed is just driving, and vastly less interactive than a FPS. I'd like to see what the brain response was for a "virtual pet" type game, or a Black&White genre. When the player has an emotional connection to the game's results, I'm sure the brain activity is similar. In other words, I don't think the violence has much to do with it, but simply the emotional connection to success. Suspended disbelief to attach the gameplay to "death" is certainly going to be a strong correlation, but there are others.
You'd be surprised about shops like this. Feds will obviously track the payments and shipments of these things. Even medical devices which contain less damaging isotopes have strict tracking. Don't believe the friendly face isn't watching you.
I imagine it won't be more than a decade before larger planes fly along with UAV "swarms" that can act in unison against a target. If perfected, only another swarm would be able to match capabilities. This would make for some spectacular air-air/air-ground interaction, and eventually would be a step towards "headless swarms" or "multi-head swarms" where if the leader was taken out, the UAV's could attach to another friendly head.
The best strategy here is not to deliver a crippled ODF, or one with optional "licensing tags" built in, or even a "binary format option" that is defined by an existing member (MS).
No, the strategy is simply not to deliver. Stall. The longer ODF is not standardized by this group, the more things can slip out of focus among product deliveries. Not a new strategy, and I don't expect to hear much about this for some time.
Sir, I hate to break it to you, so I'll put it gently:
- There's not enough farmable land for everyone to "spread out"
- If everyone was a farmer, we'd have a population skill set diverted from many other important things.
- Check your average rural fuel usage statistics, even culling down to trips of "necessity". Compare that to city life. Surprised?
- The NUMBER OF PEOPLE in an area form a city, naturally, not by force. It's a socio-economic reality that people "clump" (traffic, markets, trends, crowds, shopping). Cities are unavoidable.
- The carbon-uptake of a city IS lower, but can be easily mitigated by switching this (more easily contained) to a new fuel than an equal number of rural folk spread out. Consider: Converting commuters to bicycles is way easier in a city than the country. Hint: It's being done right now.
- I believe carbon uptake by trees is the most efficient atmospheric remediation technique for CO2, as you imply. However, the location of the trees doesn't need to be in the city. It can be anywhere.
- BY THE WAY, the power generators (NG, Coal) supplying our population are the real culprits. You should be concerned more with individual farms trying to heat/cook alone (4 walls against the cold) than cities, where the average temperature is 1-5 degrees higher, just from proximity.
Sir, I implore you. Don't tilt against the windmill. Think about the core of your argument, and start planting trees - even in cities. You alone could make a change and sway a small group that affects the world. Sitting here typing is just blowing smoke up everyone's ass, which (if you haven't figured out) is not making any friends.
This case may end up depending on: (answer what you want)
(1) Does the market allow for the selling of an iPod and a separate DVD disc?
(2) Does the market allow for someone to buy a movie onto their iPod?
(3) What is the difference between a movie on a DVD and a movie on an iPod? Are a distributor's rights changed?
(4) Can a business do for users what they can do for themselves? For example, rip a DVD copy onto a viewing device?
(5) Can a user pay someone, in any way, to copy their DVD onto any other device they own?
I bet there are some non-intuitive answers that the RIAA would put up there.
As to be expected, there isn't any critical information in the obvious searches (democracy, Tiananmen Square, PRC). I wonder if any of the edits will add this. I'm also curious of the Chinese authorities have secured a way of seeing all edits to the entire site from day to day, purging all the information that is damning to the government.
Under "democracy", I wonder intrigued to see how China is described on the map [from CIA world factbook originally] as "democratic, but does not allow for alternative parties" - which seems to be the standard Orwellian-speak of a communist nation. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is their most obvious map listing of a non-democractic government.
FYI, use babelfish and use to/from Chinese-trad for best-but-still-poor results. Remember to translate your search words into Chinese-trad before entering.
Then how does Fox news stay on the air? The hot air emanating from that desk is more speculation and opinion than I've ever seen. In fact, almost all news is opined spin now, so what types of accusations are allowed?
Perhaps via bodycount, but don't consider this invasion "cheap" using any metric. The "smart war" that was invisioned was based on incredible air power, a full capitulation by enemy ground forces once the social tide was moved. What they didn't understand is that these rules were based on a mildly religous western society - not a fractured, strongly-ingrained religion that painted any western presence as evil - regardless of who was outed from power. They simply didn't do their homework - which was caused by sheer top-down pressure to act first, think later. Bush and his administration should hang next to Saddam because of our kids for that cowboy move.
On the cost side, you may want to check your federal "off the sheet" numbers for this war, but there it is vastly more expensive than any before (adjust for inflation, on a per-week basis). We've tried to buy everything, using locals or contractors, in this state-building experiment. Bush's admin *must* press on, because to admit defeat would be to admit to stealing the cookies, jar and kitchen from the US. You can bet that we'll be getting around to scaling back our military super tech and investing in proven standards once the pentagon gets woken up.
But the problem is, if you search for truth in the rejects, then you betray the scientific method itself. All published papers are essentially demonstrating ideas/results they've found in the hope that they'll gain acclaim and acceptance.
Swaying the scientific mind is not aobut digging through the reject pile of past papers, but performing more and more investigation about why something initially proposed was decided to be false. This happens all the time, and yes consensus can switch.
I believe the general public has succumbed to the politicalization of this topic. The science may disagree about details, and even have dissenters, but practically all science does all the time. You don't ignore everything just because there is controversy. You have to make choices based on the best evidence you have at the time. Many of mankind's largest, most-life changing inventions had disbelievers and detractors (the need for hygienic behaviors, electricity to the home, unbiquitous internal combustion engine vehicles, personal computers) - so you can doubt, but unless you're a scientist, simply rooting for the underdog isn't the best way to act.
In an overwhelming way, the growing pattern of global extremes of temperature and storm activity has been observed. Global warming is the current-best answer. Why not move in the direction of remedying this? There's no need to fight about it. I don't know how many people each year witness some atmospheric anomaly and then re-evaluate their stance on global warming's causes and effects. If you wait until your home is in a blackout in 110-degree heat for several days, you can get angry, but you can't say you didn't know it might happen.
Despite the rhetoric to the contrary, the list of requirements for a "perfect" electronic voting machine is quite long and somewhat conflicted. Anonyminity and verification comes to mind.
I have to point out that each successive generation of voting machines has undergone more or less backlash, until the populace came to flush out the details. I believe this should prompt us to stronger and stronger oversight and transparency in designs, but not cause us to give up altogether.
Diebold, even if it is a politically corrupt company, has something to work with. If any machine's code and design can be legally exposed (possibly through legislatio state-by-state) - then we can iterate until we've purged the back doors and added the physical duplications so necessary.
Until then, this country could risk a real quagmire of representation (even without proven corruption, nation-states suffer greatly when democracy seems abuse at the ballot box). In simply churning about it, we're fueling a discontent and distrust of one another that lives on way past any electrion - and this is what I fear most. That the country will seemingly still be easy prey for any political trolls who drum up far-wing issues, just keep the conversation/ratings/dislike of ourselves high. This is how civil wars are born.
I've always been curious - why don't modern drive have a spiral array of heads per suface, instead of the slower mechanical heads? It seems like track-seek speeds would disappear in such a design. Is the cost of a drive head than great, and how much of that cost is due to the movement mechanism itself?
Slashdot Mirror
SOOOoo...this system makes it's way out into the marketplace, and soon after, content providers are providing "high quality" deliveries via wire or disc, and for the most part, the systems slowly go through an upgrade process to conforming hardware, finally letting the "high" in quality reach the user. Balloons fall, confetti flies and whistles and claps abound - you are running a "trusted system"
In a country far far away, a series of specifications, hardware manufacturers and technology folks band together to build the impossible: To make a machine decrypt the "high quality" content and push it to a jack. Nothing more, nothing less. They use a non-MS embedded OS and cook their scheme into an IC and viola! We have an unencumbered HD-DVD/BluRay player.
The market for this is illegal - in certain countries. But no matter, since once tapped on the above device, said port burns a new HD-DVD/BluRay disc, without licensing scheme. Some Volks-haXXor posts code to read port, strip tags from the raw stream, and pump back into a disc. Cheers from the masses, "it's been hacked!". Said streams make their way onto existing distribution mechanisms (torrent,p2p,the corner cart downtown) and you've got (wait for it) THE STATUS QUO.
Currently, only the tech-enlightened really got through the ever-lowering hurdles to download copyrighted content. Scare tactics and ethics keep most people in the DVD isle of the buy-it stores. I'm sure that will stay the same.
So, we'll simply have the MS bundled-systems with their crazy bugs, people complaining and conforming media for high quality. On the flip side will be folks not so much skipping the DRM in Windows, but getting non-DRM content to begin with. Windows has simply gone the way of the yes-man for DRM enforcement, leaving you with two choices: Lower audio/video resolution or playing only proper discs. Guess what you do with your big collection of "improper" discs: Play them on Linux. It could reinforce the sentiment that "Linux is for hackers, aka criminals" but I doubt that'll fly for long.
MS, like the media players before, will have to allow for "personal" content to be played at "high quality" eventually, since consumers are also media generators. Like now with audio, if you can get source content out of the DRM shackles, making it look personal, the entire SYSTEM from disc to monitor is bypassed quietly.
I'm prepared for a long period of relative component stagnation, while all this DRM for Vista gets sorted out. I doubt the legacy cards and peripherals will go away anytime soon.
Figuring in the costs of melting the coins: 100 pennies(1 ounce) -> melting temp(1984.32 F) = ? Joules, delivered from ? powersource = $ cost.
I doubt this is profitable. Then again power is cheap, or even free in some scenarios. Thieves are mostly concerned with spools found near industrial power infrastructure (thefts have sometimes been, um, sparky!)
Complexity is always a subjective term. When MTV started, the flashing, hyper-cut videos made our parents squirm. Kids have simply adjusted to a faster-paced stimulus. They are learning to navigate busy-busy web pages with ease, while we-of-the-earlier-age have to scan and scan for the stinkin' weather button.
So this is partly generational, and has always existed. So, then, has the backlash: Google's clean input box didn't arise because nobody had thought of it before, but simply because it was the motif they *wanted*: Low-noise, high-power; the soft-spoken strongman.
IMO, it comes down to: Do you want information pushed at you in bulk...the all-in-one portal page, where you may read 5% per hit, or do you want to drive to the pages that have info you like...the topic-focused sites, the subheading news page, etc. I believe most people start busy (or ignorant of choices to remove the clutter) and tire of it, then begin to build/find a page with link the way they like.
...pull together a COBOL compiler...
After working at a shop that wrote COBOL compilers for machine translation into C, I can tell you can it is interesting work, but by no means simple. What a lot of people misunderstand is that COBOL can react slightly differently under each IBM OS that was shipped. Writing a lexer/parser is easy, but the memory mapping and statement convolutions in COBOL were down-to-the-bit tricky.
COBOL was a huge exercise in data massaging, where hundreds of lines were used to map data into a structure which then fed a series of output channels, like a printer, screenmaps or files. Throw in a simple set of arithmetic, but apply it in hacker-esque ways to date bits, for example, and you're scratching your head a lot of the time.
I've read all the bashing here, but one must understand that COBOL's perspective of the world was far narrower than today's. Business data was a simple number-crunching exercise, not much further than the trajectory calculations of the earliest digital computers. I have some one of IBM's computer catalogs from 1971, a longwinded tome filled with secretary-models, low-level circuit specifications, and giant machines that would make a great B-movie these days.
You insensitive clod! Haven't they paid enough?! Think of the children!
I disagree. Tools are transient, and the features of each become more commoditized each year. The american programmer chases "learning new tools" with each programming "generation." This in itself isn't bad, but more often than not, rolling your own for a specialized situation is a skill that needs to be present at all times.
It's been said before in the perspective of not knowing how things work on the inside (especially in language wars) but I've run into more junior programmers that don't understand how to analyze and debug systems because of a simple ignorance of the "magic" of , be it networking, compilers, operating systems, sparse and/or associative arrays, code optimization in large scalable systems, the network stack, internal type representation, threading, memory usage, security...
In each of these topics, I've been on a team of programmers that simply wrote VB-style windows apps for so long they couldn't tackle a bug in one of these more difficult issues. I don't advocate that every programmer needs to learn all these topics before starting, but they have to know that there are layers beneath the tool, and that such layers are subject to examination.
Even now, I'm reengineering a large-scale system that made some horrible scalability decisions. They had a simple point-click, drag-drop style of application construction, and couldn't understand how to optimize for the real-world data throughput the end product needed to satisfy. So here I am, the "math guy", ripping out chunks of tool-generated sequential searches, file caches, and other endless layers, to streamline.
SO I argue that the *jobs* will always have a mix of programmer types, but if you hire only mousemonkeys, you're risk not having a skillset ready to tackle the "difficult" things.
Spoken plainly as one who doesn't use any advanced algorithms in their coding. Lemme guess, you paint forms and play with DB rows?
Let me enlighten you: The heart of Computer Science is ALL "math crap".
When these weapons can shoot as milli/microwave lasers, silently, we'll see the next generation in infantry warfare. Snipers get more than one shot, special goggles necessary to see fire, day or night, and no audible clues. I'm unsure how many shots/power you'd be able to get with a pack-based system, but it's got to feel a lot safer zapping enemy targets in a bunker than with a loud noisecannon.
i think the electronic machines should update a public database in near-real-time. we should see how each county/district is going across the day. if it seems slow or low-turnout, local news can prod people a little harder. participation needs a kick in the butt. plus, this is the first step to online voting anyway.
the 1st trail is to take home. the 2nd, duplicate receipt is to drop in a manual recount box. the receipts say plainly who you voted for, so you can protest if you like (and a key to extract the vote from the system on-the-spot if need be, and re-vote).
the receipts are also identical, so you can choose which one to put into the manual ballot box. this prevents any machine from hacking the electronic and the manual recount, but the receipt is not hacked to avoid suspicion from the voter.
more eyes on the results, instant feedback, and 3 layers of recounting (only 2 are summable, since the home receipts cannot be really collected again).
counting paper trails would be mandatory in each district, up to a random 50%. if the results seemed vastly skewed compared to the electronic results, the county uses the paper entirely, machines audited, people sued, etc.
Seems obvious that a game with personification of the player into playfield, simulating injury and death would trigger more emotional "fight or flight" activity in the brain.
Need For Speed is just driving, and vastly less interactive than a FPS. I'd like to see what the brain response was for a "virtual pet" type game, or a Black&White genre. When the player has an emotional connection to the game's results, I'm sure the brain activity is similar. In other words, I don't think the violence has much to do with it, but simply the emotional connection to success. Suspended disbelief to attach the gameplay to "death" is certainly going to be a strong correlation, but there are others.
You'd be surprised about shops like this. Feds will obviously track the payments and shipments of these things. Even medical devices which contain less damaging isotopes have strict tracking. Don't believe the friendly face isn't watching you.
I imagine it won't be more than a decade before larger planes fly along with UAV "swarms" that can act in unison against a target. If perfected, only another swarm would be able to match capabilities. This would make for some spectacular air-air/air-ground interaction, and eventually would be a step towards "headless swarms" or "multi-head swarms" where if the leader was taken out, the UAV's could attach to another friendly head.
The best strategy here is not to deliver a crippled ODF, or one with optional "licensing tags" built in, or even a "binary format option" that is defined by an existing member (MS).
No, the strategy is simply not to deliver. Stall. The longer ODF is not standardized by this group, the more things can slip out of focus among product deliveries. Not a new strategy, and I don't expect to hear much about this for some time.
Sir, I hate to break it to you, so I'll put it gently:
- There's not enough farmable land for everyone to "spread out"
- If everyone was a farmer, we'd have a population skill set diverted from many other important things.
- Check your average rural fuel usage statistics, even culling down to trips of "necessity". Compare that to city life. Surprised?
- The NUMBER OF PEOPLE in an area form a city, naturally, not by force. It's a socio-economic reality that people "clump" (traffic, markets, trends, crowds, shopping). Cities are unavoidable.
- The carbon-uptake of a city IS lower, but can be easily mitigated by switching this (more easily contained) to a new fuel than an equal number of rural folk spread out. Consider: Converting commuters to bicycles is way easier in a city than the country. Hint: It's being done right now.
- I believe carbon uptake by trees is the most efficient atmospheric remediation technique for CO2, as you imply. However, the location of the trees doesn't need to be in the city. It can be anywhere.
- BY THE WAY, the power generators (NG, Coal) supplying our population are the real culprits. You should be concerned more with individual farms trying to heat/cook alone (4 walls against the cold) than cities, where the average temperature is 1-5 degrees higher, just from proximity.
Sir, I implore you. Don't tilt against the windmill. Think about the core of your argument, and start planting trees - even in cities. You alone could make a change and sway a small group that affects the world. Sitting here typing is just blowing smoke up everyone's ass, which (if you haven't figured out) is not making any friends.
This case may end up depending on: (answer what you want)
(1) Does the market allow for the selling of an iPod and a separate DVD disc?
(2) Does the market allow for someone to buy a movie onto their iPod?
(3) What is the difference between a movie on a DVD and a movie on an iPod? Are a distributor's rights changed?
(4) Can a business do for users what they can do for themselves? For example, rip a DVD copy onto a viewing device?
(5) Can a user pay someone, in any way, to copy their DVD onto any other device they own?
I bet there are some non-intuitive answers that the RIAA would put up there.
As to be expected, there isn't any critical information in the obvious searches (democracy, Tiananmen Square, PRC). I wonder if any of the edits will add this. I'm also curious of the Chinese authorities have secured a way of seeing all edits to the entire site from day to day, purging all the information that is damning to the government.
Under "democracy", I wonder intrigued to see how China is described on the map [from CIA world factbook originally] as "democratic, but does not allow for alternative parties" - which seems to be the standard Orwellian-speak of a communist nation. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is their most obvious map listing of a non-democractic government.
FYI, use babelfish and use to/from Chinese-trad for best-but-still-poor results. Remember to translate your search words into Chinese-trad before entering.
at the end of the vid, does the camera heli blow the edge of the logo away? Drat! more effort!
Then how does Fox news stay on the air? The hot air emanating from that desk is more speculation and opinion than I've ever seen. In fact, almost all news is opined spin now, so what types of accusations are allowed?
Perhaps via bodycount, but don't consider this invasion "cheap" using any metric. The "smart war" that was invisioned was based on incredible air power, a full capitulation by enemy ground forces once the social tide was moved. What they didn't understand is that these rules were based on a mildly religous western society - not a fractured, strongly-ingrained religion that painted any western presence as evil - regardless of who was outed from power. They simply didn't do their homework - which was caused by sheer top-down pressure to act first, think later. Bush and his administration should hang next to Saddam because of our kids for that cowboy move.
On the cost side, you may want to check your federal "off the sheet" numbers for this war, but there it is vastly more expensive than any before (adjust for inflation, on a per-week basis). We've tried to buy everything, using locals or contractors, in this state-building experiment. Bush's admin *must* press on, because to admit defeat would be to admit to stealing the cookies, jar and kitchen from the US. You can bet that we'll be getting around to scaling back our military super tech and investing in proven standards once the pentagon gets woken up.
But the problem is, if you search for truth in the rejects, then you betray the scientific method itself. All published papers are essentially demonstrating ideas/results they've found in the hope that they'll gain acclaim and acceptance.
Swaying the scientific mind is not aobut digging through the reject pile of past papers, but performing more and more investigation about why something initially proposed was decided to be false. This happens all the time, and yes consensus can switch.
I believe the general public has succumbed to the politicalization of this topic. The science may disagree about details, and even have dissenters, but practically all science does all the time. You don't ignore everything just because there is controversy. You have to make choices based on the best evidence you have at the time. Many of mankind's largest, most-life changing inventions had disbelievers and detractors (the need for hygienic behaviors, electricity to the home, unbiquitous internal combustion engine vehicles, personal computers) - so you can doubt, but unless you're a scientist, simply rooting for the underdog isn't the best way to act.
In an overwhelming way, the growing pattern of global extremes of temperature and storm activity has been observed. Global warming is the current-best answer. Why not move in the direction of remedying this? There's no need to fight about it. I don't know how many people each year witness some atmospheric anomaly and then re-evaluate their stance on global warming's causes and effects. If you wait until your home is in a blackout in 110-degree heat for several days, you can get angry, but you can't say you didn't know it might happen.
Despite the rhetoric to the contrary, the list of requirements for a "perfect" electronic voting machine is quite long and somewhat conflicted. Anonyminity and verification comes to mind.
I have to point out that each successive generation of voting machines has undergone more or less backlash, until the populace came to flush out the details. I believe this should prompt us to stronger and stronger oversight and transparency in designs, but not cause us to give up altogether.
Diebold, even if it is a politically corrupt company, has something to work with. If any machine's code and design can be legally exposed (possibly through legislatio state-by-state) - then we can iterate until we've purged the back doors and added the physical duplications so necessary.
Until then, this country could risk a real quagmire of representation (even without proven corruption, nation-states suffer greatly when democracy seems abuse at the ballot box). In simply churning about it, we're fueling a discontent and distrust of one another that lives on way past any electrion - and this is what I fear most. That the country will seemingly still be easy prey for any political trolls who drum up far-wing issues, just keep the conversation/ratings/dislike of ourselves high. This is how civil wars are born.
I've always been curious - why don't modern drive have a spiral array of heads per suface, instead of the slower mechanical heads? It seems like track-seek speeds would disappear in such a design. Is the cost of a drive head than great, and how much of that cost is due to the movement mechanism itself?
Sounds like the RAC payment system was coded using some of their top bidders.
The program! She is having bugs!
the wires posted this one recently, but the science article came out in May. Old news?
Any time I'm due to pay taxes, I'm going to claim a loss on my virtual accounts to balance it out. Wheee!