Actually, if you did the same test in the Sahara, it would come back positive; a gram of Sahara soil contains maybe a billion bacteria. Bacteria *are* our ecosystem, in a lot of ways. In the water, in Antarctic ice, miles beneath the surface of the earth, they are in their millions.
Do you really think they would be pushing to drill in other areas if drilling where they already have leases were cost effective - particularly at the pace prices have been growing for the past 3 years?
Why, yes, yes I do. Because if they can get cheap leases now they can sit on them as long as they like, just *three-fourths* of their existing US leases.
Ancient Greeks did their voting by marking shards of pottery or shells, or using colored marbles, and tossing them into a voting urn. Thus, "casting your vote".
A bit different? UK: 6 on each of those PPP lists. Italy: 9 and 10. France: 8 on each of them. The only one that even drops out of the top eight with massaging is Italy.
You can argue that China should be in the G8, as it is in the top eight economies by any measure (though G8 was specfically created as a group of industrial *democracies*), and that Brazil and India should get an invite as full members, not just the G8+5 (as democracies with a GDP nearly at or more than Russia's), but that doesn't change the fact that the existing members are gigantic economies, the powers of the world.
You aren't one of those people that is obsessed with trying to prove that 'old Europe' is senescent, are you?
The G8 used to consist of the 8 largest economies in the world. Now it is mostly just a group of good-old-boys who wish they were still relevant on the world economic stage.
Members of the G8: US, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Canada, Russia.
Respective ranks in world GDP: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11. Total GDP: two thirds of the world.
The Lexicon website consisted for the most part of entries where the editors had gone through the books, chopped out the various bits describing the element at hand and plopped them in the entry. The amount of straight quoting was huge, the amount of barely reworded items possibly even larger. Let's go to Dave Langford for a typical wordcount: "When I checked, the on-line Lexicon's 1500 words on Albus Dumbledore had about 300 words of direct quotation from Rowling (which seemed risky) and linked to a page with some 3000 words of quotes (which seemed suicidal)." This is certainly very useful to fanfic authors, and as long as it was noncommercial, Rowlings quite kindly tolerated it.
Then in a perfect storm of stupidity, RDR Books decided that obviously this meant they could publish it at 24.95 a pop. Rowlings and her publishers said "uh, no". I'll note that they spent two months trying to get a manuscript out of RDR or Steve Vander Ark, and were informed that they should "just hit print on the website." Yes, the website that *mostly consisted of quotes and rewordings*. Eventually they realized how suicidal that was, and produced a hacked down manuscript that *still* took large amounts straight from her wording.
And like most bad lawsuits, it'll make bad law. If she wins, other publishers and authors will no doubt push the boundaries to claim that any kind of encyclopedia of their fictional universes is unlawful, even if the writers actually do their own work; and if she loses (highly unlikely, but if) other authors will feel like they need to be a bitch to every online effort of this sort, lest they be seen as authorizing similar publishings -- one of the claims that RDR/SVA made was that by tolerating it, she was authorizing it.
I guess my point is to emphasize that we weren't just lied to, and we weren't just sheep to believe the lies. We were misled by guys who later decided to take the heat as liars instead of guys who were too stupid to recognize bluff from data. I guess I'd damned well be neither, but if I had to admit to the American public that a) I'm a lying politician or b) I'm a politician dumber than Saddam, - well, let's just say I can maybe see how the choice was made.
No, people were pretty much morons. Anyone who seriously considered chemical weapons to be "WMDs" was a moron. Nukes are city-killers and weapons of "mass destruction"; chems are battlefield denial weapons and terror weapons, they are terribly inefficient mass killers. And you sure as hell don't need to import them from Iraq; a bunch you can cook in your kitchen and the rest can be done in an even minimally equipped lab. The idea of going to fucking WAR because a country had them was ludicrous beyond belief.
Someone will probably again use them again for the extra frisson of terror that novelty gives, but frankly, they'd be wasting their time. Give me 20 footsoldiers and with 20 liters of nice clear flammables in a water bottle, front and back of ten rush hour subway cars, and the emergency brake and I'll give you grief and terror that would make a dinky sarin attack look pathetic. If I want a chem attack, infiltrate a few people in as truck drivers -- and believe me, the standards are low -- or simply hijack a few chlorine tankers and drive them into an elementary school.
Still, you'd expect that the cryophile descendents would find it easy to reinvade the ice; nature tends to be very parsimonious with genes, so you'd expect much of the cryophile suite to be available for reuse/reactivation when the environmental pressures started going the other way.
That's what I thought myself, until I looked up the originalSpanish articles. His insurance company settled with the family of the dead bicyclist, admitting that the driver was at fault since he was speeding (estimated at over 100 mph in a 55 mile zone), and he had also been drinking. Then the driver sued them, presumably because his own insurance didn't cover his damage. So yes, the guy is a dick, is at fault, and is probably going to regret the lawsuit; the family was too devastated in the immediate aftermath to push for criminal charges, but that has changed.
The solution to this is more information, not less. Someone comes screaming to the media that we're all going to die? Except the unversities, and the PIRGs, and everyone else interested in air quality has those same monitors and says "um, no. Someone's making up shit."
And guess what? _There are already laws against hoaxes_.
If they are destroying cell phones, they deserve to be arrested. Kicking people out, absolutely fine, their place, their rules about cell phones. Destroying other people's property is a criminal offense.
Electrifying the rebar as a man-trap is, however. For among other reasons, you don't know who is trying to cut through the wall: a thief or a fireman trying to get into a burning datacenter.
As far as I know, it's still in place; quite a few people lost their journals over that one. Including one that was using a classical painting of Mary feeding the infant Jesus.
"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
As it happens, the use of monetize to refer to converting an asset to money is coeval with the invention of the word itself. The economist John Alexander Ferris seems to have first used it in the mid-19th century, both to refer to both the coining of precious metals into currency and the conversion of assets into cash.
But even if people had just last year started using it so, it would still mean converting an asset to money. Because humans define words, words don't define reality.
2634 BC According to Legend, Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor designs the South Pointing Chariot. It is built for him by the craftsman Fang Bo.
I'll point out that the Yellow Emperor is also credited in Chinese lgeend with inventing the cart, the boat, and the calendar. He's a culture-hero and myth, not history to be cited. The Duke of Chou is similiarly legendified.
Note that the 'reinvention' of it (most likely, the actual invention) dates well after the Antikythera mechanism. And even then, there don't appear to be any surviving plans or carts, and at least one claim that it was an actual person in the cart, not a mechanism.
I've been happy with Washington Mutual. Free checking, free savings as long as you have direct deposit or allow a $25 monthly transfer from checking to savings (you can move the money back after.) Lots of branches, at least where I am, nice people, no bullshit. They even gave me a second free checking account that I use for checks by phone and other potentially dodgy transactions.
I also blame some of the genuine sites for inculcating bad habits.
My last two rate change emails from DirecTV did not have the rate changes in the mail, nor was the info accessible if you went to DirectTV and logged into your account. Instead, it had a link that led to a *third-party* site.
SallieMae communicates about my student loan by emailing PDFs that you are supposed to put your password into to unlock. Unbelievable.
Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I like pine, but that "+ Thumb Drive" is huge caveat. "works anywhere" is not the same as "works anywhere that has a USB port and where I happen to be carrying my drive".
I had a friend that ordered that, for the amusement value. Sadly, the joke doesn't go beyond the website (though they will take your money.) Had to extract the money back from PayPal.
You'd think they'd at least come up with an amusing package and put some seasoned tofu in it, or something, if they are going to actually take orders.
It wasn't until the '70s and '80s that followup studies identified the fact that PCBs are vastly (as in 100x type vastly) more toxic to people of Indian and Japanese descent than to people of Caucasion and African descent. If the studies had been done in South America, America, Canada, or Europe, we'd probably still be using PCBs all over the place.
Cite? Because I'm finding nothing in research journals suggesting that. And given the way PCBs work in the body, my bullshit meter is going off.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if you did the same test in the Sahara, it would come back positive; a gram of Sahara soil contains maybe a billion bacteria. Bacteria *are* our ecosystem, in a lot of ways. In the water, in Antarctic ice, miles beneath the surface of the earth, they are in their millions.
Do you really think they would be pushing to drill in other areas if drilling where they already have leases were cost effective - particularly at the pace prices have been growing for the past 3 years?
Why, yes, yes I do. Because if they can get cheap leases now they can sit on them as long as they like, just *three-fourths* of their existing US leases.
Ancient Greeks did their voting by marking shards of pottery or shells, or using colored marbles, and tossing them into a voting urn. Thus, "casting your vote".
A bit different? UK: 6 on each of those PPP lists. Italy: 9 and 10. France: 8 on each of them. The only one that even drops out of the top eight with massaging is Italy.
You can argue that China should be in the G8, as it is in the top eight economies by any measure (though G8 was specfically created as a group of industrial *democracies*), and that Brazil and India should get an invite as full members, not just the G8+5 (as democracies with a GDP nearly at or more than Russia's), but that doesn't change the fact that the existing members are gigantic economies, the powers of the world.
You aren't one of those people that is obsessed with trying to prove that 'old Europe' is senescent, are you?
The G8 used to consist of the 8 largest economies in the world. Now it is mostly just a group of good-old-boys who wish they were still relevant on the world economic stage.
Members of the G8: US, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Canada, Russia.
Respective ranks in world GDP: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11. Total GDP: two thirds of the world.
Some has-beens.
No, it's 3300 out of 4500, in other words a mere 26% original work; the linked to page is *internal*, not external.
Yeah, that would probably be the best outcome: a ruling on very narrow legal grounds, that avoided the broader issues.
...why am I not surprised?
To clarify:
The Lexicon website consisted for the most part of entries where the editors had gone through the books, chopped out the various bits describing the element at hand and plopped them in the entry. The amount of straight quoting was huge, the amount of barely reworded items possibly even larger. Let's go to Dave Langford for a typical wordcount: "When I checked, the on-line Lexicon's 1500 words on Albus Dumbledore had about 300 words of direct quotation from Rowling (which seemed risky) and linked to a page with some 3000 words of quotes (which seemed suicidal)." This is certainly very useful to fanfic authors, and as long as it was noncommercial, Rowlings quite kindly tolerated it.
Then in a perfect storm of stupidity, RDR Books decided that obviously this meant they could publish it at 24.95 a pop. Rowlings and her publishers said "uh, no". I'll note that they spent two months trying to get a manuscript out of RDR or Steve Vander Ark, and were informed that they should "just hit print on the website." Yes, the website that *mostly consisted of quotes and rewordings*. Eventually they realized how suicidal that was, and produced a hacked down manuscript that *still* took large amounts straight from her wording.
And like most bad lawsuits, it'll make bad law. If she wins, other publishers and authors will no doubt push the boundaries to claim that any kind of encyclopedia of their fictional universes is unlawful, even if the writers actually do their own work; and if she loses (highly unlikely, but if) other authors will feel like they need to be a bitch to every online effort of this sort, lest they be seen as authorizing similar publishings -- one of the claims that RDR/SVA made was that by tolerating it, she was authorizing it.
I guess my point is to emphasize that we weren't just lied to, and we weren't just sheep to believe the lies. We were misled by guys who later decided to take the heat as liars instead of guys who were too stupid to recognize bluff from data. I guess I'd damned well be neither, but if I had to admit to the American public that a) I'm a lying politician or b) I'm a politician dumber than Saddam, - well, let's just say I can maybe see how the choice was made.
No, people were pretty much morons. Anyone who seriously considered chemical weapons to be "WMDs" was a moron. Nukes are city-killers and weapons of "mass destruction"; chems are battlefield denial weapons and terror weapons, they are terribly inefficient mass killers. And you sure as hell don't need to import them from Iraq; a bunch you can cook in your kitchen and the rest can be done in an even minimally equipped lab. The idea of going to fucking WAR because a country had them was ludicrous beyond belief.
Someone will probably again use them again for the extra frisson of terror that novelty gives, but frankly, they'd be wasting their time. Give me 20 footsoldiers and with 20 liters of nice clear flammables in a water bottle, front and back of ten rush hour subway cars, and the emergency brake and I'll give you grief and terror that would make a dinky sarin attack look pathetic. If I want a chem attack, infiltrate a few people in as truck drivers -- and believe me, the standards are low -- or simply hijack a few chlorine tankers and drive them into an elementary school.
Still, you'd expect that the cryophile descendents would find it easy to reinvade the ice; nature tends to be very parsimonious with genes, so you'd expect much of the cryophile suite to be available for reuse/reactivation when the environmental pressures started going the other way.
That's what I thought myself, until I looked up the original Spanish articles. His insurance company settled with the family of the dead bicyclist, admitting that the driver was at fault since he was speeding (estimated at over 100 mph in a 55 mile zone), and he had also been drinking. Then the driver sued them, presumably because his own insurance didn't cover his damage. So yes, the guy is a dick, is at fault, and is probably going to regret the lawsuit; the family was too devastated in the immediate aftermath to push for criminal charges, but that has changed.
The solution to this is more information, not less. Someone comes screaming to the media that we're all going to die? Except the unversities, and the PIRGs, and everyone else interested in air quality has those same monitors and says "um, no. Someone's making up shit."
And guess what? _There are already laws against hoaxes_.
If they are destroying cell phones, they deserve to be arrested. Kicking people out, absolutely fine, their place, their rules about cell phones. Destroying other people's property is a criminal offense.
Electrifying the rebar as a man-trap is, however. For among other reasons, you don't know who is trying to cut through the wall: a thief or a fireman trying to get into a burning datacenter.
As far as I know, it's still in place; quite a few people lost their journals over that one. Including one that was using a classical painting of Mary feeding the infant Jesus.
"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
As it happens, the use of monetize to refer to converting an asset to money is coeval with the invention of the word itself. The economist John Alexander Ferris seems to have first used it in the mid-19th century, both to refer to both the coining of precious metals into currency and the conversion of assets into cash.
But even if people had just last year started using it so, it would still mean converting an asset to money. Because humans define words, words don't define reality.
Legend, rather than fact. The article says:
2634 BC According to Legend, Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor designs the South Pointing Chariot. It is built for him by the craftsman Fang Bo.
I'll point out that the Yellow Emperor is also credited in Chinese lgeend with inventing the cart, the boat, and the calendar. He's a culture-hero and myth, not history to be cited. The Duke of Chou is similiarly legendified.
Note that the 'reinvention' of it (most likely, the actual invention) dates well after the Antikythera mechanism. And even then, there don't appear to be any surviving plans or carts, and at least one claim that it was an actual person in the cart, not a mechanism.
I've been happy with Washington Mutual. Free checking, free savings as long as you have direct deposit or allow a $25 monthly transfer from checking to savings (you can move the money back after.) Lots of branches, at least where I am, nice people, no bullshit. They even gave me a second free checking account that I use for checks by phone and other potentially dodgy transactions.
I also blame some of the genuine sites for inculcating bad habits.
My last two rate change emails from DirecTV did not have the rate changes in the mail, nor was the info accessible if you went to DirectTV and logged into your account. Instead, it had a link that led to a *third-party* site.
SallieMae communicates about my student loan by emailing PDFs that you are supposed to put your password into to unlock. Unbelievable.
I like pine, but that "+ Thumb Drive" is huge caveat. "works anywhere" is not the same as "works anywhere that has a USB port and where I happen to be carrying my drive".
Sadly, that's more truth than comedy!
Mustard gas also isn't a WMD (despite the hype.) Terror weapon, battlefield denial weapon, but if it's a WMD then gasoline is too.
Huh. If you focus in on the eastern ring shape, it looks even more concentric. And they aren't in the database I looked at, nor does googling on Morson and crater note anything.
But it is hard to believe that no one has noticed, given there's a (small) town sitting on top of one of them!
I had a friend that ordered that, for the amusement value. Sadly, the joke doesn't go beyond the website (though they will take your money.) Had to extract the money back from PayPal.
You'd think they'd at least come up with an amusing package and put some seasoned tofu in it, or something, if they are going to actually take orders.
It wasn't until the '70s and '80s that followup studies identified the fact that PCBs are vastly (as in 100x type vastly) more toxic to people of Indian and Japanese descent than to people of Caucasion and African descent. If the studies had been done in South America, America, Canada, or Europe, we'd probably still be using PCBs all over the place.
Cite? Because I'm finding nothing in research journals suggesting that. And given the way PCBs work in the body, my bullshit meter is going off.