Why? It IS just a phone. Phones don't just make phone calls anymore, but the iPhone can do the same thing my phone has been able to do for years. This ongoing infatuation with the iPhone is just getting old.
I believe the Kindle was also going to be the size of a standard paperback book. That means its screen size is going to be a lot more functional for reading than the relatively small size of the iPhone screen.
When will people get over the iPhone already? Really, it's just a phone.
The alternative to a ton of parameters passed on the URL is the use of cookies, which causes some cookie Nazis to start complaining about privacy--even if the cookie doesn't store anything that has anything to do with privacy. The result is that, sometimes, cookies are avoided as a matter of policy. Hence long parameterized URLs.
When I want to post a link like that, I usually can recognize the important parameters and get rid of the all the extra junk. I then copy/paste my best guess of what's really necessary and see if I actually do get the page. So a huge 180-character URL gets shorted down to 20 or 30 characters with no problem.
Yea, he is just abusing his 1st amendment rights. Its worth giving up a few rights as long as we are secure, right? Thank god we have people like you to stand up loud and proud to set the record straight, Mr. Anonymous.
Just because someone has the right to do something doesn't mean it's right to do it.
In this case, I agree with the GP. Uninformed idiots are going to think this stuff is real, then they're going to go around spewing, "You know what the Republicans think? Get this!" And all the sudden a lot of ignorant people are voting based on satire that went above their head. The author may have a right to do it, but that doesn't make it right nor in the best interest of the country.
Why would I say "that obviously isn't working"? Because the post I responded to posited that the problem with universal health care was that it didn't give people a chance to take care of societal ills (literally and figuratively). We have never had universal care yet we do have healthcare problems- and not just overpricing. Therefore these imaginary good samaritans have not taken care of the problems.
That's because with the current price of health care, it would take an unreasonable amount of money from good samaritans to fund them all. Ironically, that's what government-coerced universal health care tries to do: FORCE everyone to be good samaritans. And, in the process, health care will be even more expensive because the cost of health care will be further hidden from the users which leads to abuse which will lead to ever-increasing prices which will make the coerced-good-samartian system even more expensive.
Now, if we were to reform health care so that the costs were visible to everyone, costs would come down and more people would be insured. The number of people left uninsured might then be a low enough number who would have low enough premiums that charities might have a fighting chance at paying the premiums for those remaining people. That way the prices stay visible to the users, prices come down, and we have a good chance at actually getting everyone covered without government coercion and socialism.
How many people are *now given insurance by charities?
Because the price is so high. For the sake of an extreme example, if the annual premium for health care were $1 and we had one million uninsured, don't you think that some charity would pop up to raise a million dollars per year to get them covered? Heck, if one out of every 40 Democrats that want to take my money to pay for someone else's health care contributed a dollar to the charity, it'd be covered. Now obviously it wouldn't cost $1/year/person, but it stands to reason that the more accessible the price of health care becomes, the fewer people will be without it and the more charities will feel they have a reasonable chance at making a good dent in the remaining uninsured problem.
Regarding socialism... get over it. Our society is rife with "socialism" that people like to ignore. Fire departments? socialism parks and roads? socialism weather broadcasts? socialism clean water programs?
You gave examples of government public services, not wealth redistribution. We pay for fire departments with our taxes because we can't each have our own fire protection and because we don't normally need the fire department, but it needs to exist. Parks and roads? Again, we can't each build our own. Weather broadcasts? Not sure what you're talking about, but everyone is impacted by weather and not everyone can predict it themselves so it's reasonable. Clean water programs? I pay for my water by the gallon. And in all these cases, my use or non-use of the service does not have a significant impact on its cost.
Health care is entirely different. If you make health care free, people will saturate hospitals and doctors offices when they get the sniffles. It will lead to a lack of resources being available for real emergencies and medical needs. There has to be a cost by the user every time he uses it. If you made gas free tomorrow, gas would quickly run out and a heck of a lot more people would buy large, inefficient vehicles. In short, gas would be abused because there'd be no motivation not to abuse it. Same with free health insurance.
Anyway, the short answer: Health care is entirely different from the other public services you mentioned.
The older I get, the more I see how people who benefit from the system are not the ones doing the labor; the more I see that capitalism rewards parasitic investors, gamblers, the children of the wealthy, and the rapers of the land.
How old are you? It's amazing how many people that have reaped (and continue to reap) the benefits of a strong economy driven by capitalism somehow think they'd be better off without it.
To take music as an example, the older I get, the more talented people I see playing for tips in bars and the more manufactured crap I see hitting the charts. The more I look into the history of music, the more I see the most creative people getting screwed by the corporate swine.
Talented musicians historically did play for tips in bars and small venues. I don't see anything wrong with that. There is no reason a musician should be valued any more than a software engineer or an accountant. This idea that a musician can record an album and sit back and collect royalties for the rest of his life is absurd. That was the case simply because the distribution technology made it possible--not because there's any inherent reason someone should be able to record music for a few months and then kick back the rest of his life.
I'm also not convinced that money has anything to do with quality. And I'm not particularly convinced that the quality of commercial music has fallen. Traditionally, generations aren't overly fond of music produced by subsequent generations. Parents in the 50's thought the rock of that day was vulgar and it had no redeeming value. Today, I'm parent-age and I think the same of rap. We tend to like the music we grew up listening to so just about everyone's always going to see the "quality" of music "fall" over their lifetime. It's not so much the quality has gone down, it's just that we get stuck in the type of music we like... and the music industry moves on. Now, though, people are just cynical and attribute it all to the big mean corporations depriving us of good music--because blaming bad evil capitalistic corporations is the "in" thing to do. Yet many young people like the music today. The day that they don't, the recording industry will go out of business. Older people just aren't the target audience of the recording industry... and really never have been.
Welcome to the phase of your life where you're not young anymore.:)
As long as we have had our current system people have had the chance to be "warm and loving to those less fortunate".
That obviously isn't working.
Why would you say that? The problem with health care isn't a lack of generosity of Americans but rather a bad system that hides the cost of health care from the user. If something looks free, people will use it carelessly by practicing no cost-benefit analysis. Regardless of the industry, this will always lead to an increase in prices.
The solution to health care is making the costs 100% visible to the users so that free market competition actually works. Once you do that, prices will come down and more people will be able to afford health care/health insurance. It's entirely possible that the remaining uninsured would be few enough in number that they could be given insurance by charities--something which Americans do contribute to willingly without coercion and which does not require destroying the quality of our health care with socialism.
Apparently you missed the part of the study that says that messages sent from iPhones have more errors than messages sent from other phones. So while there may be more tolerance for bad spelling in our society, that has nothing to do with the observation that iPhones lead to more typos.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that you're going to have more errors with an interface with no tactile response. The Atari 400 was a decent computer back in the early 80's but was generally scoffed at because of its mesh-type keyboard that offered very little tactile response and made touch typing very difficult. The iPhone is the same, but worse, because there is no tactile response.
I have a hard time believing I ever would get a phone that has no tactile buttons. I have a Treo and while I can dial phone numbers by tapping the screen and can use a virtual keyboard that would require me typing on the touchscreen, I almost always use the tactile keys instead. With the iPhone, that wouldn't be an option.
Me: It seems the only way evolution could explain this is by saying that the vast-majority of mice without this gene were promptly eliminated by cats and taken out of the gene pool.
You: Consider a population of pre-mice, without the gene, that are reasonably adept at avoiding predators for other reasons -- camouflage, fast, good hearing, whatever. Then some sub-population of these critters acquires this gene.
This seems unlikely to me.
This assumes that not only do all predators smell different, but that the odor-causing chemical in each species is completely unrelated to all others. This is highly improbable. More likely the odorant chemical is identical or very nearly so in mouse-predator species...
This seems reasonable to me, though I still feel that the question of a gene just happening to appear in a mouse that just happens to make that mouse sensitive to the odor of its likely predators pushes the envelope of statistical credibility.
But I do thank you for pointing out that the odor of its likely predators is probably similar. That's certainly a valid point.
The research suggests that the mechanism by which mammals determine whether or not to fear another animal they smell -- and whether or not to flee -- is not a higher-order cerebral function. Instead, that decision is made based on a lower-order function that is hardwired into the neural circuitry of the olfactory bulb.
Seriously, is there not an evolutionary/ID angle to this?
It seems to me that if the smell-based fear is hardwired into mice based on genes, it seems that means that the animal is pre-wired to fear only certain pre-programmed smells. The mouse doesn't know why it fears the cat, it just detects a smell that it is pre-programmed to detect and the reaction is to flee. Presumably, other animals that don't emit a smell that the mouse is pre-programmed to fear won't provoke immediate fear in the mouse. If that animal is a potential predator of the mouse, the mouse is screwed.
It seems the only way evolution could explain this is by saying that the vast-majority of mice without this gene were promptly eliminated by cats and taken out of the gene pool. Likewise for the smell of other predators. But that would imply that there was initially an enumerated list of odors that a mouse can detect and either flee or not flee and those that lacked those genes and did not provoke fear of predators would disappear from the gene pool.
But how did that enumerated list get into the mouse's genes to start with???
Indeed. And Slashdotters thought Republicans were the only bad guys. A a few more eye-opening stories like this before the 2008 Election and the Republicans could carry Slashdot--granted, it's good for zero electoral votes... but still.
They could be sifting through the data for specific ip address's and activity types, and selectivly backing what they want from the whole pile.
The "activity types" is a bit more nebulous, but if they're filtering on a specific IP address then that means they already have a pretty good idea of who they're looking for. Not a good thing without a warrant, but far from wholesale generic monitoring of everybody--which I continue to believe the government does not have the CPU cycles to do. Storing everything is one thing. Conducting any useful analysis on it in near real-time is pretty much impossible unless you severely drill down to a specific subset of the entire original content.
Perhaps they have some algorithm, some system or filter, for determining what they want to look at closer...
And a beowulf cluster of CPU's overclocked to about 42,000 terahertz, apparently. And a nuclear power plant cooling system to cool those babies down. How big was that "secret room" again?
I don't like the way this "feels," but agree 100% with your observation that in order to extract specific authorized calls/data, it must be extracted from all the rest of the data being carried on fiber-optics. There is no other way to do it.
Personally, I'm very skeptical of any wholesale monitoring going on. Sure, we're talking about the NSA. But come on, we're all nerds here. Analyzing billions of phone calls per day and highlighting only those that are of interest is more CPU cycles than even the government has. They have to have at least a reasonable idea of what calls to monitor to be able to get close to getting any useful data analysis done. Otherwise, they'll simply be overwhelmed.
Me: If we have reason to believe someone's intent is to do us harm, you nip that problem in the bud and save a lot of lives on both sides in the process.
You: That only works if you are correct in your assessments, both of the risk of taking action and of the risk of doing nothing.
That is a question of accurate intelligence and not a criticism of the concept of preemptive military strikes. Yes, if you have bad intelligence then you're going to make bad decisions. I don't think anyone questions that.
So it's equally absurd to act as if starting a "preemptive war" carries no risks, as it is something that should be done lightly without a sober and impartial review of the all of the evidence.
I never suggested otherwise.
the problem is that Bush wasn't defending us from a threat.
Regardless of the presence (or lack thereof) of WMDs in Iraq, that's debatable. And I honestly am undecided as to what side of the debate I'd be on. I definitely see both sides of the argument.
He was actively manufacturing a threat as an excuse to start a war that he had already decided he wanted to start.
That something had to be done about Iraq goes without saying since Clinton totally fumbled that ball in his eight years in office. If Bush had decided to take a firmer stance than Clinton, good for him. Whether he would have actually been able to pull off a full-scale invasion in the absence of 9/11 is hypothetical and we'll never know. The fact remains that the Iraq situation was not tolerable long-term.
In a perfect world, our government would only start a war when it was genuinely necessary to defend the country.
People will always differ on when that line is crossed. I personally think that Bush's plan to foster democracy in the Middle East is a reasonable idea because it's clear that the absence of opportunity and democracy in the Middle East was (and is) a festering problem that's only going to generate more and more terrorists regardless of what we do. Getting democracy flourishing in the Middle East is not an overnight project so if we assume that democracy and opportunity will lead to fewer terrorists, we had to get that idea moving now--before decades more oppression and lack of opportunities creates even more terrorists.
In the short-term I agree that Iraq looks like a big mistake. I am far from convinced that it was a mistake in the long-term. However, leaving Iraq now, prematurely, would definitely be a mistake.
"National defense" was a fig leaf for Iraq, not a genuine motivation.
That's your opinion and you're entitled to it. No-one but Bush knows the truth on that and anyone that claims otherwise is shoveling a pile of hot steamy stuff.
So again, if "national defense" means doing what Bush did in Iraq, we're against it. If the WMDs (or even credible evidence of WMDs) had existed in Iraq in 2003, you might have a point, but they didn't.
Again, you're arguing over the accuracy of intelligence--not the moral or legal validity of preemptive military action. Sometimes intelligence is wrong. But you can't make any decision if you always assume your intelligence is bad, and sometimes you won't know if the intelligence is bad until you have made a decision.
That was the case with Bush and Iraq. Slam Bush all you want, pretty much the whole world believed that Saddam had WMDs. Putin even said that while he thinks the Iraq war was a mistake, that in defense of Bush, pretty much everyone thought Saddam had them. He didn't just fool the U.S. and Bush wasn't a fool. To the contrary. Bush was the only one that, given intelligence that everyone believed was right, was willing to do what had to be done. And if you look at the long-term possibility of democracy exp
How is invading a foreign country "defense"? It's offense. Defense would have been stopping the Iraqi army from invading US territory.
Like I said, I'm not going to get into a useless argument about the merits of the Iraq war. That dead horse has been thoroughly flogged many times.
Having said that, it is absolutely absurd for you to suggest that we should wait until an enemy is massing on our border before we take action--especially since, in this day and age, a physical cross-border incursion is highly unlikely. Whether we're talking about a nuclear threat from Chinese ballistic missiles or a terrorist threat from individuals (state-sponsored or not), threats to our security most likely will not be from a million-man army massing on the border.
If we have reason to believe someone's intent is to do us harm, you nip that problem in the bud and save a lot of lives on both sides in the process. Feel free to make the argument that Iraq (or Iran) isn't one of those cases, but don't even try to sell an idea that we should wait naively to be attacked before we defend ourselves. As much as you may hate Bush, that position is absolutely indefensible.
The above might be accurate if you were talking about Democrats, but as a card-carrying member of "The Left", I can assure that we were, are, and always have been 100% against the war in Iraq.
That's nonsense unless you are making the statement that everyone on "the left" is opposed to national defense. No, I'm not going to get into an argument as to whether or not Iraq was necessary for the national defense, but as long as the left believes the country can defend itself, I refuse to believe that 100% of "the left" agreed that Iraq was not a threat. A strong majority, sure. But 100%? Nope.
Unless, of course, you answer the first sentence with "Yes, the left is opposed to national defense." Because if that's the case, that's something the public needs to know. It's often been suspected but concrete proof would be great.
So what, exactly, do you think they can do when they don't have a veto proof majority? Clearly you don't understand the constitutional rules here.
Of course I understand the constitutional rules here. The painful thing is that the Democrats counted on their constituents not understanding the constitutional rules. They were scurrying around last year trying to get control of Congress, promising that if they won, they'd get us out of Iraq. Anyone that knows anything about the Constitution knows they were making a promise that they couldn't deliver on yet there they were saying it. The fact that they won the Congress on that platform is really an insult to the intelligence of their constituents because people had to be gullible fools to believe them.
That ignores the fact that they could de-fund the war. But they don't. Why? Because that would lose them the 2008 election in the snap of a finger. They'd rather win the 2008 election than do what they (or those that voted for them) think is right. They're just hoping they can keep up the scam long enough to win in 2008. It's a gamble. If people wise up before the election, the Democrats could find themselves in one heck of a pickle.
If a Democrat becomes president, we won't be pulling out of Iraq. And the Democratic front-runners are starting to hedge their bets because they know they won't pull out. They want Bush to pull out the troops so the failure becomes his problem. But be under no illusion, the Democrats don't want to be responsible for a troop pull-out in Iraq. Everyone knows (but no-one wants to say) that as bad as things are in Iraq, things would be even worse if we leave--including us. And while they'd be happy to see Bush make that mistake, they aren't going to do it themselves.
So, no, the Democrats aren't going to do much in the way of promising an Iraq withdrawal. They aren't going to do it if they win and their main men (and woman) are already starting to shy away from that battle cry.
Which leaves Democrats with the same thing to talk about issue-wise as usual: Nothing. Because when Democrats run on the issues instead of appealing to emotions, Democrats lose.
Ever think that one of the reasons why Congress's ratings are so low is because they haven't impeached yet?
Nope. Probably because they're the most useless Congress we've had in over a decade. They haven't done anything useful, they pulled a bait-and-switch on their arguments for why they should be elected last year. i.e. "Elect us and we'll get out of Iraq... oh, sorry, you voted for us but now you also need to give us the presidency. We couldn't do anything before and we still can't do anything."
No, the reason why Congress's approval ratings are so low is because they've shown the public what they have to offer, and they don't have anything. The Democrats should've tried to lose 2006 so they'd have a chance in 2008. In 2008, the Republicans have Bush dragging them down but Democrats have the Congress dragging them down even more. It's entirely possible the Democrats peaked in 2006 and won't be able to get the job done in 2008. By the time the election comes, they'll have had 2 years in Congress and nothing to show for it. Not a good way to go into a presidential election.
On my belt. For years. And probably will be for years. The iPhone was--and remains--a lot of hype. I'm happy for Apple with their success and if users like the device, I'm happy for them too. But they're not doing anything with their iPhones that I haven't been doing (or able to do) with my Treo for years.
Inasmuch as they may have improved some user interfaces, great. Competition is always a good thing.
I personally hate Blockbuster. Even so, I subscribed to their Netflix-like service where you could order DVDs by mail. I used it a bit at first, then I tapered off. But with the service, we still got a coupon for one free movie at the physical store per week. We didn't use the online ordering thing but used the coupon each week to rent something at the store. Then they "improved" their plan such that you only got one coupon per month. So we cancelled.
The advantage Blockbuster has IS its store. My wife and I seldom know what we want to see days in advance. We go to Blockbuster and rent something that looks good and we go home and watch it. If Blockbuster folds, it'll be interesting to see what we do. Probably we'll just watch a few network TV shows, some of the FreeViews on Comcast, and *maybe* every now and then buy a new On-Demand movie. I can't imagine going back to ordering things via the mail and on-demand over the Net still isn't high enough quality.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? It IS just a phone. Phones don't just make phone calls anymore, but the iPhone can do the same thing my phone has been able to do for years. This ongoing infatuation with the iPhone is just getting old.
I believe the Kindle was also going to be the size of a standard paperback book. That means its screen size is going to be a lot more functional for reading than the relatively small size of the iPhone screen.
When will people get over the iPhone already? Really, it's just a phone.
The alternative to a ton of parameters passed on the URL is the use of cookies, which causes some cookie Nazis to start complaining about privacy--even if the cookie doesn't store anything that has anything to do with privacy. The result is that, sometimes, cookies are avoided as a matter of policy. Hence long parameterized URLs.
When I want to post a link like that, I usually can recognize the important parameters and get rid of the all the extra junk. I then copy/paste my best guess of what's really necessary and see if I actually do get the page. So a huge 180-character URL gets shorted down to 20 or 30 characters with no problem.
Just because someone has the right to do something doesn't mean it's right to do it.
In this case, I agree with the GP. Uninformed idiots are going to think this stuff is real, then they're going to go around spewing, "You know what the Republicans think? Get this!" And all the sudden a lot of ignorant people are voting based on satire that went above their head. The author may have a right to do it, but that doesn't make it right nor in the best interest of the country.
Speaks volumes to the ignorance of the latter.
That's because with the current price of health care, it would take an unreasonable amount of money from good samaritans to fund them all. Ironically, that's what government-coerced universal health care tries to do: FORCE everyone to be good samaritans. And, in the process, health care will be even more expensive because the cost of health care will be further hidden from the users which leads to abuse which will lead to ever-increasing prices which will make the coerced-good-samartian system even more expensive.
Now, if we were to reform health care so that the costs were visible to everyone, costs would come down and more people would be insured. The number of people left uninsured might then be a low enough number who would have low enough premiums that charities might have a fighting chance at paying the premiums for those remaining people. That way the prices stay visible to the users, prices come down, and we have a good chance at actually getting everyone covered without government coercion and socialism.
Because the price is so high. For the sake of an extreme example, if the annual premium for health care were $1 and we had one million uninsured, don't you think that some charity would pop up to raise a million dollars per year to get them covered? Heck, if one out of every 40 Democrats that want to take my money to pay for someone else's health care contributed a dollar to the charity, it'd be covered. Now obviously it wouldn't cost $1/year/person, but it stands to reason that the more accessible the price of health care becomes, the fewer people will be without it and the more charities will feel they have a reasonable chance at making a good dent in the remaining uninsured problem.
You gave examples of government public services, not wealth redistribution. We pay for fire departments with our taxes because we can't each have our own fire protection and because we don't normally need the fire department, but it needs to exist. Parks and roads? Again, we can't each build our own. Weather broadcasts? Not sure what you're talking about, but everyone is impacted by weather and not everyone can predict it themselves so it's reasonable. Clean water programs? I pay for my water by the gallon. And in all these cases, my use or non-use of the service does not have a significant impact on its cost.
Health care is entirely different. If you make health care free, people will saturate hospitals and doctors offices when they get the sniffles. It will lead to a lack of resources being available for real emergencies and medical needs. There has to be a cost by the user every time he uses it. If you made gas free tomorrow, gas would quickly run out and a heck of a lot more people would buy large, inefficient vehicles. In short, gas would be abused because there'd be no motivation not to abuse it. Same with free health insurance.
Anyway, the short answer: Health care is entirely different from the other public services you mentioned.
How old are you? It's amazing how many people that have reaped (and continue to reap) the benefits of a strong economy driven by capitalism somehow think they'd be better off without it.
Talented musicians historically did play for tips in bars and small venues. I don't see anything wrong with that. There is no reason a musician should be valued any more than a software engineer or an accountant. This idea that a musician can record an album and sit back and collect royalties for the rest of his life is absurd. That was the case simply because the distribution technology made it possible--not because there's any inherent reason someone should be able to record music for a few months and then kick back the rest of his life.
I'm also not convinced that money has anything to do with quality. And I'm not particularly convinced that the quality of commercial music has fallen. Traditionally, generations aren't overly fond of music produced by subsequent generations. Parents in the 50's thought the rock of that day was vulgar and it had no redeeming value. Today, I'm parent-age and I think the same of rap. We tend to like the music we grew up listening to so just about everyone's always going to see the "quality" of music "fall" over their lifetime. It's not so much the quality has gone down, it's just that we get stuck in the type of music we like... and the music industry moves on. Now, though, people are just cynical and attribute it all to the big mean corporations depriving us of good music--because blaming bad evil capitalistic corporations is the "in" thing to do. Yet many young people like the music today. The day that they don't, the recording industry will go out of business. Older people just aren't the target audience of the recording industry... and really never have been.
Welcome to the phase of your life where you're not young anymore. :)
Why would you say that? The problem with health care isn't a lack of generosity of Americans but rather a bad system that hides the cost of health care from the user. If something looks free, people will use it carelessly by practicing no cost-benefit analysis. Regardless of the industry, this will always lead to an increase in prices.
The solution to health care is making the costs 100% visible to the users so that free market competition actually works. Once you do that, prices will come down and more people will be able to afford health care/health insurance. It's entirely possible that the remaining uninsured would be few enough in number that they could be given insurance by charities--something which Americans do contribute to willingly without coercion and which does not require destroying the quality of our health care with socialism.
Apparently you missed the part of the study that says that messages sent from iPhones have more errors than messages sent from other phones. So while there may be more tolerance for bad spelling in our society, that has nothing to do with the observation that iPhones lead to more typos.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that you're going to have more errors with an interface with no tactile response. The Atari 400 was a decent computer back in the early 80's but was generally scoffed at because of its mesh-type keyboard that offered very little tactile response and made touch typing very difficult. The iPhone is the same, but worse, because there is no tactile response.
I have a hard time believing I ever would get a phone that has no tactile buttons. I have a Treo and while I can dial phone numbers by tapping the screen and can use a virtual keyboard that would require me typing on the touchscreen, I almost always use the tactile keys instead. With the iPhone, that wouldn't be an option.
This seems unlikely to me.
This seems reasonable to me, though I still feel that the question of a gene just happening to appear in a mouse that just happens to make that mouse sensitive to the odor of its likely predators pushes the envelope of statistical credibility.
But I do thank you for pointing out that the odor of its likely predators is probably similar. That's certainly a valid point.
Seriously, is there not an evolutionary/ID angle to this?
It seems to me that if the smell-based fear is hardwired into mice based on genes, it seems that means that the animal is pre-wired to fear only certain pre-programmed smells. The mouse doesn't know why it fears the cat, it just detects a smell that it is pre-programmed to detect and the reaction is to flee. Presumably, other animals that don't emit a smell that the mouse is pre-programmed to fear won't provoke immediate fear in the mouse. If that animal is a potential predator of the mouse, the mouse is screwed.
It seems the only way evolution could explain this is by saying that the vast-majority of mice without this gene were promptly eliminated by cats and taken out of the gene pool. Likewise for the smell of other predators. But that would imply that there was initially an enumerated list of odors that a mouse can detect and either flee or not flee and those that lacked those genes and did not provoke fear of predators would disappear from the gene pool.
But how did that enumerated list get into the mouse's genes to start with???
Indeed. And Slashdotters thought Republicans were the only bad guys. A a few more eye-opening stories like this before the 2008 Election and the Republicans could carry Slashdot--granted, it's good for zero electoral votes... but still.
The "activity types" is a bit more nebulous, but if they're filtering on a specific IP address then that means they already have a pretty good idea of who they're looking for. Not a good thing without a warrant, but far from wholesale generic monitoring of everybody--which I continue to believe the government does not have the CPU cycles to do. Storing everything is one thing. Conducting any useful analysis on it in near real-time is pretty much impossible unless you severely drill down to a specific subset of the entire original content.
And a beowulf cluster of CPU's overclocked to about 42,000 terahertz, apparently. And a nuclear power plant cooling system to cool those babies down. How big was that "secret room" again?
I don't like the way this "feels," but agree 100% with your observation that in order to extract specific authorized calls/data, it must be extracted from all the rest of the data being carried on fiber-optics. There is no other way to do it.
Personally, I'm very skeptical of any wholesale monitoring going on. Sure, we're talking about the NSA. But come on, we're all nerds here. Analyzing billions of phone calls per day and highlighting only those that are of interest is more CPU cycles than even the government has. They have to have at least a reasonable idea of what calls to monitor to be able to get close to getting any useful data analysis done. Otherwise, they'll simply be overwhelmed.
That is a question of accurate intelligence and not a criticism of the concept of preemptive military strikes. Yes, if you have bad intelligence then you're going to make bad decisions. I don't think anyone questions that.
I never suggested otherwise.
Regardless of the presence (or lack thereof) of WMDs in Iraq, that's debatable. And I honestly am undecided as to what side of the debate I'd be on. I definitely see both sides of the argument.
That something had to be done about Iraq goes without saying since Clinton totally fumbled that ball in his eight years in office. If Bush had decided to take a firmer stance than Clinton, good for him. Whether he would have actually been able to pull off a full-scale invasion in the absence of 9/11 is hypothetical and we'll never know. The fact remains that the Iraq situation was not tolerable long-term.
People will always differ on when that line is crossed. I personally think that Bush's plan to foster democracy in the Middle East is a reasonable idea because it's clear that the absence of opportunity and democracy in the Middle East was (and is) a festering problem that's only going to generate more and more terrorists regardless of what we do. Getting democracy flourishing in the Middle East is not an overnight project so if we assume that democracy and opportunity will lead to fewer terrorists, we had to get that idea moving now--before decades more oppression and lack of opportunities creates even more terrorists.
In the short-term I agree that Iraq looks like a big mistake. I am far from convinced that it was a mistake in the long-term. However, leaving Iraq now, prematurely, would definitely be a mistake.
That's your opinion and you're entitled to it. No-one but Bush knows the truth on that and anyone that claims otherwise is shoveling a pile of hot steamy stuff.
Again, you're arguing over the accuracy of intelligence--not the moral or legal validity of preemptive military action. Sometimes intelligence is wrong. But you can't make any decision if you always assume your intelligence is bad, and sometimes you won't know if the intelligence is bad until you have made a decision.
That was the case with Bush and Iraq. Slam Bush all you want, pretty much the whole world believed that Saddam had WMDs. Putin even said that while he thinks the Iraq war was a mistake, that in defense of Bush, pretty much everyone thought Saddam had them. He didn't just fool the U.S. and Bush wasn't a fool. To the contrary. Bush was the only one that, given intelligence that everyone believed was right, was willing to do what had to be done. And if you look at the long-term possibility of democracy exp
Like I said, I'm not going to get into a useless argument about the merits of the Iraq war. That dead horse has been thoroughly flogged many times.
Having said that, it is absolutely absurd for you to suggest that we should wait until an enemy is massing on our border before we take action--especially since, in this day and age, a physical cross-border incursion is highly unlikely. Whether we're talking about a nuclear threat from Chinese ballistic missiles or a terrorist threat from individuals (state-sponsored or not), threats to our security most likely will not be from a million-man army massing on the border.
If we have reason to believe someone's intent is to do us harm, you nip that problem in the bud and save a lot of lives on both sides in the process. Feel free to make the argument that Iraq (or Iran) isn't one of those cases, but don't even try to sell an idea that we should wait naively to be attacked before we defend ourselves. As much as you may hate Bush, that position is absolutely indefensible.
That's nonsense unless you are making the statement that everyone on "the left" is opposed to national defense. No, I'm not going to get into an argument as to whether or not Iraq was necessary for the national defense, but as long as the left believes the country can defend itself, I refuse to believe that 100% of "the left" agreed that Iraq was not a threat. A strong majority, sure. But 100%? Nope.
Unless, of course, you answer the first sentence with "Yes, the left is opposed to national defense." Because if that's the case, that's something the public needs to know. It's often been suspected but concrete proof would be great.
Of course I understand the constitutional rules here. The painful thing is that the Democrats counted on their constituents not understanding the constitutional rules. They were scurrying around last year trying to get control of Congress, promising that if they won, they'd get us out of Iraq. Anyone that knows anything about the Constitution knows they were making a promise that they couldn't deliver on yet there they were saying it. The fact that they won the Congress on that platform is really an insult to the intelligence of their constituents because people had to be gullible fools to believe them.
That ignores the fact that they could de-fund the war. But they don't. Why? Because that would lose them the 2008 election in the snap of a finger. They'd rather win the 2008 election than do what they (or those that voted for them) think is right. They're just hoping they can keep up the scam long enough to win in 2008. It's a gamble. If people wise up before the election, the Democrats could find themselves in one heck of a pickle.
If a Democrat becomes president, we won't be pulling out of Iraq. And the Democratic front-runners are starting to hedge their bets because they know they won't pull out. They want Bush to pull out the troops so the failure becomes his problem. But be under no illusion, the Democrats don't want to be responsible for a troop pull-out in Iraq. Everyone knows (but no-one wants to say) that as bad as things are in Iraq, things would be even worse if we leave--including us. And while they'd be happy to see Bush make that mistake, they aren't going to do it themselves.
So, no, the Democrats aren't going to do much in the way of promising an Iraq withdrawal. They aren't going to do it if they win and their main men (and woman) are already starting to shy away from that battle cry.
Which leaves Democrats with the same thing to talk about issue-wise as usual: Nothing. Because when Democrats run on the issues instead of appealing to emotions, Democrats lose.
Nope. Probably because they're the most useless Congress we've had in over a decade. They haven't done anything useful, they pulled a bait-and-switch on their arguments for why they should be elected last year. i.e. "Elect us and we'll get out of Iraq... oh, sorry, you voted for us but now you also need to give us the presidency. We couldn't do anything before and we still can't do anything."
No, the reason why Congress's approval ratings are so low is because they've shown the public what they have to offer, and they don't have anything. The Democrats should've tried to lose 2006 so they'd have a chance in 2008. In 2008, the Republicans have Bush dragging them down but Democrats have the Congress dragging them down even more. It's entirely possible the Democrats peaked in 2006 and won't be able to get the job done in 2008. By the time the election comes, they'll have had 2 years in Congress and nothing to show for it. Not a good way to go into a presidential election.
I have Palm OS on my Treo and I wouldn't have it any other way. The thing friggin' works.
On my belt. For years. And probably will be for years. The iPhone was--and remains--a lot of hype. I'm happy for Apple with their success and if users like the device, I'm happy for them too. But they're not doing anything with their iPhones that I haven't been doing (or able to do) with my Treo for years.
Inasmuch as they may have improved some user interfaces, great. Competition is always a good thing.
I'll be selling Stupidity Credits soon. Hey, they sell carbon credits successfully...
I personally hate Blockbuster. Even so, I subscribed to their Netflix-like service where you could order DVDs by mail. I used it a bit at first, then I tapered off. But with the service, we still got a coupon for one free movie at the physical store per week. We didn't use the online ordering thing but used the coupon each week to rent something at the store. Then they "improved" their plan such that you only got one coupon per month. So we cancelled.
The advantage Blockbuster has IS its store. My wife and I seldom know what we want to see days in advance. We go to Blockbuster and rent something that looks good and we go home and watch it. If Blockbuster folds, it'll be interesting to see what we do. Probably we'll just watch a few network TV shows, some of the FreeViews on Comcast, and *maybe* every now and then buy a new On-Demand movie. I can't imagine going back to ordering things via the mail and on-demand over the Net still isn't high enough quality.