It takes 9 months to a year to train a non-arabic speaker to speak well enough to just barely get by. It then usually takes an additional year of real-life exposure before they truly become proficient.[...]This all I know, being a former soldier with the 101st Airborne (311th MI bn, "Eyes of the Eagle") and a graduate myself of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.
Given that and your experience, would you say that kicking out 37+ students because they're gay is a great strategic move?
No, I'd say it's fucking stupid, but I'm not in charge of military sexual orientation policy. I do, however, understand their position. The military doesn't want to be used as a platform for activism because it compromises it's primary purpose: to wage war. The military is a very disciplined institution. It forbids a lot of things among them walking around shouting "I'M A GAY SOLDIER!" Frankly, the real problem is people who can't just do their god damn job without telling everyone about their sex lives:
She mastered Arabic but couldn't handle living a double life under the military policy known as "don't ask, don't tell." After two years in the Army, Glover, 26, voluntarily wrote a statement acknowledging her homosexuality.
Confronted with a shortage of Arabic interpreters and its policy banning openly gay service members, the Pentagon had a choice to make."
Christ almighty, since when is keeping your private life to yourself "living a double life"? Among my DLI classmates were three guys everyone knew were gay. Hell, two of them shared a room and constantly bickered like an old married couple! But nobody cared because that was entireley irrelevant to our common job as soldiers, and none of them turned in a signed "confession" of their homosexuality to the CO. Doing that and griping about the result is just dumb. Anyone who does that has to know that they're basically asking for a discharge. The "don't ask, don't tell" policy is about the best compromise the brass can come up with right now. I predict that'll change in the next 20 or so years, once the "stigma" of homosexuality starts to fade, and it'll be absorbed into the already existing rules forbidding overt expressions of sexuality while in uniform; but until then, there just too much socially conservative inetia to do that.
Being a translator or an interpreter is hard. Speaking a language isn't - it just requires time, and a degree of dedication. It does indeed take many years to train a reliable interpreter (at a minimum, a three year university degree in the language and then 1-2 further years of interpreter training),
Current military training already only turns out people at proficiency level 2 on a scale of 1-5. It takes 10 months to a year to train an arabic linguist to this bare minimum level. That's just the way it is. It's arabic, not mexican spanish.
but your reference to aptitude tests highlights the second problem: your reference to "aptitude tests". Why bother with aptitude tests?Everyone can learn a foreign language
Anyone can learn a foreign language, provided it's not TOO foreign, like French or German, and they have the time to study. You can't lump all foreign languages together. Not everyone can learn chinese, pashtun, arabic, or farsi quickly enough and proficiently enough to make training them in it worthwhile.
Or at least, anybody who managed to master a mother tongue can.
I'd argue you've just disqualified a full sixty percent of potential applicants. You need some grasp of basic grammar concepts before you can even begin, and most people don't have that.
The people who say they're "useless at languages" are the ones who tell themselves that they're useless: ie., they can't be bothered to apply themselves.
I watched a half dozen dedicated soldiers apply themselves like crazy to the Russian language, and that didn't keep them from washing out. You might argue that they were being made to learn too quickly, but the course took a YEAR to get us up to the bare minimum level 2 proficiency. Arabic is at least the equal of Russian in difficulty. Positive thinking and happy thoughts aren't enough.
But, immersed in a country - as a US soldier in Iraq is
But they're not immersed, they're only exposed. "Immersion" is when you basically force people into a "sink-or-swim" situation. US soldiers in Iraq spend the majority of their time in the company of their own fellow soldiers, not walking around the streets of Baghdad trying to get a job, a meal, or an apartment.
you could very easily teach Arabic on a large scale to the officers at the very least
When are we going to teach them? At ROTC or OCS? And how do you know they're going to end up in Iraq(arabic) and not Afghanistan(pashtun)? Like I said before, Arabic isn't mexican spanish and there's a lot more to language proficiency than learnign to ask "how much for the beer" and "where's the bathroom". It takes the better part of a year to learn Arabic well enough for it to be useful.
and possibly to the infantry as well.
You've clearly never spent a lot of time with the infantry. Most of them are disqualified under the "anybody who managed to master a mother tongue" requirement. Some of them already barely speak english as their second language.
It's just a question of cost, but, expensive as good language teachers are, it would still only be a drop in the ocean compared to the overall cost of prosecuting this ludicrous war.
Actually, it's a question of resources, only ONE of which is money. They already don't have enough instructors. For Languages like pashto and uzbek, there exists no teaching materials at all, only a few obscure papers by linguists in the late 1800's. The resource that is lacking now is time. Time to find and train instructors, time to build the curriculum, time to teach the students.
As for motivation - I suspect that your average infantry grunt would not be hugely motivated to learn Arabic. But try this: "Making an effort in this class could very easily save your life tomorrow." I suspect that could make a big difference...
Man, you obviously never spent ANY time with the infantry! Every single bit of training for them is
Instead of doing the obvious thing--give soldiers training in Arabic and offer big bonuses for Arabic-speaking recruits--the U.S. does nothing for a couple of years and then tries to throw a cheap technical fix at the problem.
Bullshit. You clearly know absolutely nothing about the subject and are pulling crap out of your ass. They already do offer bonuses to qualified recruits based on their ability to speak foreign languages. And do you really think they're not cranking out arabic linguists as fast as they can? It takes 9 months to a year to train a non-arabic speaker to speak well enough to just barely get by. It then usually takes an additional year of real-life exposure before they truly become proficient. Furthermore, the language program only takes those who score in the top 5% on their aptitude tests, and of those they do accept, fully half still wash out. You may think it's just a matter of teaching all the infantry grunts a half dozen canned phrases, but making a usable translator out of someone is a hell of a lot harder than teaching them to shoot a machine gun. This all I know, being a former soldier with the 101st Airborne (311th MI bn, "Eyes of the Eagle") and a graduate myself of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.
Whil Wheaton? Snort! Look, I respect the guy and used to find his 'blog interesting (before he became fixated on his cat), and I even bought and enjoyed his book; but face it, the guy's an actor for bog's sake. He didn't get to where he is via incredible political acumen, he got there by playing a nerd on a sci-fi show. The sad fact is that people who pretend to be other people for a living are generally... how to put it... well, they're generally not very deep. Listening to Wil on politics and the media is as insane as relying on Ted Danson for a technical understanding of global warming. Actors find it easy to feel very deeply about things, and love to tell us about how deep their feelings are. People point the camera at them so much that they start believing that what they're saying is worth hearing, that their opinions are somehow more insightful. But frankly, I've yet to see the one of them who had more than the most rudimentary understanding of what they feel so deeply about.
Actual brewed coffee has more caffeine than an espresso.
Are you sure of that? I thought espresso had more caffeine because 212+ degree steam is passing over them and condensing into water as it passes, as opposed to soaking the beans in ~160 degree water.
The darker you roast coffee beans, the more caffeine is destroyed. The process for making espresso extracts more caffeine from the grounds than brewed coffee, but the actual beans themselves generally have a lower caffeine concentration than typical "green" americano roast beans (assuming starting from the same beans; some beans are naturally higher in caffeine). If you want a truly vicious caffeine buzz, try using light roast, espresso grind in the espresso machine. Doesn't taste as good as real espresso, but it packs a wallop.
It's illegal to glorify Nazi history, discussion is very much wanted.
Where does the law draw the distinction? Is a 1:1 ratio required in discussion, e.g. "they spawned much innovation in the aerospace industry-- but they used it to bomb foreigners"? Can one list all their positive accomplishmets, so long as one ends the sentence with a stern face and says "but they were very bad men"? Or is "glorification" defined the same way "pornaography" was famously defined by a judge here in the US: "I know it when I see it"?
For example, we have the "right to keep and bear arms" as stated in the U.S. Constitution, but there is no explicit right to "privacy".
The constitution is not-- I repeat-- is not a complete enumeration of the rights of the people. For bog's sake read the damn bill of rights! It's right there, in amendment 9:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
There does not need to be an explicit enumeration in the constitution in order for a right to exist!
let's keep in mind there is no right to privacy in the US constitution beyond the fourth amendment's guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure.
Let's also keep in mind the words of the 9th Amendment:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
In other words, just because a right didn't make onto the Top Ten List, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The writings of the founding fathers were quite clear on this. Some of them were against having a bill of rights for fear that it would be misconstrued as a complete and inclusive list of the rights of the people. This is something I wish all those conservative jackasses who call themselves "strict constructionalists" would get through their thick skulls. Likewise, the liberal jackasses need to learn the 10th Amd ("If it ain't in the Constitution, the federal gov't can't do it!"), but that's the subject of a different rant...
From what I've read it's the physical properties of the gasseous hydrogen that helps combustion, not the fact there's extra hydrogen in there.
In a normal diesel cylinder the fuel closer to the glow plug ignites first, and the combustion travels to the rest of the fuel in time. But since hydrogen burns faster, what happens here is the hydrogen works as a carrier, it ignites and carries the ignition energy to the outer edges of the cylinder before it would normally get there. The time delay between the outer and inner areas of the fuel mix igniting is smaller, allowing it to burn more before the piston can move down and lower the pressure in the cylinder. Faster burning means more pressure on the piston and less unburnt fuel exiting the cylinder.
It's actually a really good idea, as long as it doesn't alter the engine's timing too much (if it ignites faster, some of the explosion might happen durring the upstroke and work against the rest of the engine).
I suggest you 1) RTFA:
"Fuel efficiency and horsepower are improved because hydrogen burns faster and hotter than diesel, dramatically boosting combustion efficiency."
and 2) go read the wikipedia entry on how diesel engines work.
Good old slashdot. You can get +3 Informative for spinnin' fanciful but plausible sounding yarns, no matter how inaccurate they are.
In a normal diesel cylinder the fuel closer to the glow plug ignites first,
Glow plugs are only used very briefly during the initial seconds of a cold start. Diesel engines compress air in the cylinder. According to Boyle's law, the air get very hot. At the peak of compression, diesel fuel is injected into the cylinder. The superheated compressed air ignites the fuel. The only time the glow plug is needed is for those rare occasions in the first few moments when the piston, cylinder, air, and fuel are too cold for the compression alone to ignite the fuel. I don't know what the hydrogen does, but I guarantee it has diddley-squat to do with the glow plugs.
And in the end, I still yearn for the blinking cursor.
At least on Tiger, that's Terminal > Window Settings..., select Display, check Blink, click "Use Settings as Defaults". HTH.:-)
Bah! It's not the True blinking cursor if it can be made to not blink. The True blinking cursor remains immutable, ineffable, and unavoidable from power on, to power off...
the fact of the matter is that for one reason or another the government of the United States of America does not believe that they would be able to convict these people if due process were observed.
"One reason or another"? It's pretty obvious why they are not being brought up on criminal charges through the court system: they haven't committed a crime on US soil! Calls for them to be given due process are absurd. Fact of the matter is that they are neither criminals under arrest nor Geneva Comvention POWs. What people need to start doing is demanding a modification of procedure for dealing with these "captured non-POW combatants". Demanding that they be given legal representation and court trials, or be afforded treatment as POWs under the Geneva Convention when they clearly and obviously qualify for neither under US law or the Geneva Convention is just asinine. Quit trying to pretend the large, glaring loophole doesn't exist and get it closed for fuck's sake!
It saves power by skipping an extra conversion from alternating current (AC).
No, it saves power by having one large, very efficient power supply do the conversion to DC rather than several dozen small ones. Either way, there is still only one conversion: 110AC -> 12/-12/5vDC.
Reminds me of the days with the C-64... the copy-protected discs eventually destroyed your floppy drive, by causing it to thrash uncontrollably, trying to read bad sectors. Many people, like myself, perfered to get cracked copies of games because they had this problem removed,
Nothing was worse than Electronic Arts games. Their crazy trick of cramming the data BETWEEN tracks on the diskette required the drive to rattle and chatter constantly as it was thrown again and again into the particular error condition that briefly caused the head to read at the "half track" position. Not only did their games bugger drives, they took forever to load-- and this is "forever" compared to other games using the full awesome serial throughput of 300bps.
You youngsters out there don't realize how good you have it nowadays.
More to the point, food producers don't have any claim of intellectual property over the food they sell. If you can find a cheaper way to produce it, they must either adopt your method or go bankrupt. Even if there ever was a patent on soybeans, it ran out about 6,000 years ago.
Hah! Have you seen Monsanto's patent portfolio? They have patented variations of wheat, corn, soy, canola.... you name it.
Selling recorded music is a multi-million dollar industry, the owners of which surely don't want to just give up, just because technology has made them completely unnecessary.
Now, with... a 30+ [year] campaign to put Federalist Society judges on the bench
Totally in agreement with you on the general argument, but I'm not sure what the above means. The Federalist Society has only been around for 20 years, and it's mostly an organization of libertarians and "Eisenhower conservatives" who dislike the over-reaching of the federal government. I certainly wouldn't say that the expansion of federal copyright law is in any way something they'd condone.
Re:Sounds like things aren't going as planned
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...like you, I have my own favorite theory. It links the headlines "Italy forged oil-for-food documents" to "Italy's top spook killed by friendly fire". Who needs fiction when you have the six-o-clock news.
Heh. As a former 101st Airborne grunt with many hours spent guarding empty roads with a machine gun, I think it unlikely. No way in hell such a sensitive mission as a "hit" on a foreign agent would be delegated to a bunch of mooks like us and we were "regular army", not guard or reserve like those guys! The whole thing sounds to me like it was just a typical wartime chaos. Besides, if they really wanted to hit 'em, wouldn't it make more sense to blow up the car with a hellfire from a predator out in the desert where no one would see it, rather than hoping that the driver would make the mistake of not slowing down and turning on his lights, and hoping a bunch of part-time soldier yahoos will shoot rather than hesitate? I know there's a temptation to look for conspiracy because in a way it's comforting to think that there's someone in control, albeit someone with evil intent; but really, most things like that are just random fuckups mixed with dumb luck. There ain't no one running anything. Real life is, for the most part, totally out of control.
Overall, I think we're in substantial agreement, but there is some reason for advocating windfall profit taxes...The chief reasons why windfall taxes aren't accomplishing anything is the government just uses them to fuel yet more government growth, the definition of windfall is made arbitrary and not aimed at reinforcing the negative consequences that would naturally follow from making gambling on sheer dumb luck your core business model
Indeed, I think we are in complete agreement. The "windfall profit tax" I refer to is narrowly limited to the type commonly called for by people only described as "activists". You know, the punitively defined "tax at 90% any profit that looks like too big a number to me as an ill-reformed Marxist/Leninist" kind. Actual reasoned economic policy is certainly excepted.
Why would you want to tax corporations, anyway? Corporations never pay taxes...their customers do. I own a small business, which is set up as a sub-chapter S corporation. Taxes are simply factored into our cost of doing business, the same way insurance or office supplies or anything else is, and then passed on to our customers. Corporate taxes are just another way politicians hide your true tax burden from you. If it weren't for corporate taxes, the cost of goods and services would be lower (driven down by competition).
Yep. Ignorance of economics, like when people call for windfall-profit taxes for big corps-- how is giving all that cash to the federal monster going to stop corps from "gouging"? How does that do ANYTHING for we, the citizenry? It's petty, absurd vindictiveness. The idiocy of schadenfreude. Quit calling for government to "tighten the screws"! Don't you realize that the actual screws are on us? But the harder they're crushed, the louder they shout "tighter"!
This is something I don't get. A contract must have consideration for both parties. If Microsoft got the use of the name and the other guy got screwed, what legal basis does any "signing over" of the rights to the name have?
Likely the consideration he received was a guarantee that he wouldn't be sued into the stone age over the issue. Whether or not MS had reasonable grounds to sue is entirely irrelevant.
Really, do you think MS' lawyers would write a contract that wasn't legally binding because of a blatant technicality like that?
If you plan to use the Lindows example, then you can't leave out the settlement they got from MS.
Why did you leave that out? Could it be that the example you gave directly contradicts the point you tried to make?
Actually, it's quite irrelevant. How much did they have to spend on legal representation to get that settlement? How many minutes of legal representation can your average college student afford before he's in serious debt? I doubt Lindows' lawyers were working on a contingency basis. A 22 year old with no significant resources can't afford to fight for a settlement.
Re:Sounds like things aren't going as planned
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Innovation, or desperation?
Desperation would imply that current methods are ineffective. As certain italian secret agents have discovered, the current method of "shoot first, and a lot" is quite effective. This is more of an innovation, as it gives reckless friendlies with no better escape plan than "drive towards the americans, at night, very fast" at least SOME chance of survival.
Ditto. I once owned a (cheap) combination padlock that jammed on me. The shackle was made of solid 1/4" steel (or something like that). It was securing a heavy steel cable that was (extremely difficult) to cut... Unfortunately, the side opposite the combination dial was just a very thin aluminum backing (while the rest of the lock case was much thicker/stronger). I easily pried the back out of the lock with a jeweler's screwdriver . Of course, opening the lock (by taking it apart) was quite easy then. Parent poster makes a very good point about locks and security.
Indeed, combo padlocks are a joke. Take, for example, the everyday common Master black-dial 1500 series combo padlock. The dial face has forty marks on it (numbered 0||||5||||10, etc.) giving one the impression that the "key space" is 40*40*40=64000 possible combinations. Well, in reality the "resolution" of the notches in the wheel packs is about 1/3 that-- i.e. if you are within 1.5 either direction of the correct number, the gate will still "fall in". The practical upshot of this is that you can very quickly go through every possible combination in a very short time. When I do it I dial it in increments of 2.5 so that way I'll never be farther than 1.25 from the REAL number, giving me a little "fudge room" for loose dialing. Also, this makes it easier to keep track as you'll be dialing 0, 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, etc. for a total of sixteen all the way around (rather than 40). Three numbers, 16 possible combinations each, that's only 4096 possible; but wait, it gets EASIER STILL! You don't need to do the last number, meaning there are really only 16*16=256 combinations. Dial the first two, then rotate the dial a little to the right while pulling on the shackle. You'll feel the gat dragging on the "warding notches" on the last wheel until it drops into one. Once it drops in, if the dial feels LOOSE, then the gate is resting on wheel 1 or 2-- you don't have the first two numbers right. If the wheel is TIGHT, that means the third wheel is all that stopping it. Let up on the shackle and start turning the dial a couple digits at a time. When you get to the right number, the LOCK WILL OPEN.
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Given that and your experience, would you say that kicking out 37+ students because they're gay is a great strategic move?
No, I'd say it's fucking stupid, but I'm not in charge of military sexual orientation policy. I do, however, understand their position. The military doesn't want to be used as a platform for activism because it compromises it's primary purpose: to wage war. The military is a very disciplined institution. It forbids a lot of things among them walking around shouting "I'M A GAY SOLDIER!" Frankly, the real problem is people who can't just do their god damn job without telling everyone about their sex lives:
Christ almighty, since when is keeping your private life to yourself "living a double life"? Among my DLI classmates were three guys everyone knew were gay. Hell, two of them shared a room and constantly bickered like an old married couple! But nobody cared because that was entireley irrelevant to our common job as soldiers, and none of them turned in a signed "confession" of their homosexuality to the CO. Doing that and griping about the result is just dumb. Anyone who does that has to know that they're basically asking for a discharge. The "don't ask, don't tell" policy is about the best compromise the brass can come up with right now. I predict that'll change in the next 20 or so years, once the "stigma" of homosexuality starts to fade, and it'll be absorbed into the already existing rules forbidding overt expressions of sexuality while in uniform; but until then, there just too much socially conservative inetia to do that.
Current military training already only turns out people at proficiency level 2 on a scale of 1-5. It takes 10 months to a year to train an arabic linguist to this bare minimum level. That's just the way it is. It's arabic, not mexican spanish.
but your reference to aptitude tests highlights the second problem: your reference to "aptitude tests". Why bother with aptitude tests?Everyone can learn a foreign language
Anyone can learn a foreign language, provided it's not TOO foreign, like French or German, and they have the time to study. You can't lump all foreign languages together. Not everyone can learn chinese, pashtun, arabic, or farsi quickly enough and proficiently enough to make training them in it worthwhile.
Or at least, anybody who managed to master a mother tongue can.
I'd argue you've just disqualified a full sixty percent of potential applicants. You need some grasp of basic grammar concepts before you can even begin, and most people don't have that.
The people who say they're "useless at languages" are the ones who tell themselves that they're useless: ie., they can't be bothered to apply themselves.
I watched a half dozen dedicated soldiers apply themselves like crazy to the Russian language, and that didn't keep them from washing out. You might argue that they were being made to learn too quickly, but the course took a YEAR to get us up to the bare minimum level 2 proficiency. Arabic is at least the equal of Russian in difficulty. Positive thinking and happy thoughts aren't enough.
But, immersed in a country - as a US soldier in Iraq is
But they're not immersed, they're only exposed. "Immersion" is when you basically force people into a "sink-or-swim" situation. US soldiers in Iraq spend the majority of their time in the company of their own fellow soldiers, not walking around the streets of Baghdad trying to get a job, a meal, or an apartment.
you could very easily teach Arabic on a large scale to the officers at the very least
When are we going to teach them? At ROTC or OCS? And how do you know they're going to end up in Iraq(arabic) and not Afghanistan(pashtun)? Like I said before, Arabic isn't mexican spanish and there's a lot more to language proficiency than learnign to ask "how much for the beer" and "where's the bathroom". It takes the better part of a year to learn Arabic well enough for it to be useful.
and possibly to the infantry as well.
You've clearly never spent a lot of time with the infantry. Most of them are disqualified under the "anybody who managed to master a mother tongue" requirement. Some of them already barely speak english as their second language.
It's just a question of cost, but, expensive as good language teachers are, it would still only be a drop in the ocean compared to the overall cost of prosecuting this ludicrous war.
Actually, it's a question of resources, only ONE of which is money. They already don't have enough instructors. For Languages like pashto and uzbek, there exists no teaching materials at all, only a few obscure papers by linguists in the late 1800's. The resource that is lacking now is time. Time to find and train instructors, time to build the curriculum, time to teach the students.
As for motivation - I suspect that your average infantry grunt would not be hugely motivated to learn Arabic. But try this: "Making an effort in this class could very easily save your life tomorrow." I suspect that could make a big difference...
Man, you obviously never spent ANY time with the infantry! Every single bit of training for them is
Bullshit. You clearly know absolutely nothing about the subject and are pulling crap out of your ass. They already do offer bonuses to qualified recruits based on their ability to speak foreign languages. And do you really think they're not cranking out arabic linguists as fast as they can? It takes 9 months to a year to train a non-arabic speaker to speak well enough to just barely get by. It then usually takes an additional year of real-life exposure before they truly become proficient. Furthermore, the language program only takes those who score in the top 5% on their aptitude tests, and of those they do accept, fully half still wash out. You may think it's just a matter of teaching all the infantry grunts a half dozen canned phrases, but making a usable translator out of someone is a hell of a lot harder than teaching them to shoot a machine gun. This all I know, being a former soldier with the 101st Airborne (311th MI bn, "Eyes of the Eagle") and a graduate myself of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.
Whil Wheaton? Snort! Look, I respect the guy and used to find his 'blog interesting (before he became fixated on his cat), and I even bought and enjoyed his book; but face it, the guy's an actor for bog's sake. He didn't get to where he is via incredible political acumen, he got there by playing a nerd on a sci-fi show. The sad fact is that people who pretend to be other people for a living are generally... how to put it... well, they're generally not very deep. Listening to Wil on politics and the media is as insane as relying on Ted Danson for a technical understanding of global warming. Actors find it easy to feel very deeply about things, and love to tell us about how deep their feelings are. People point the camera at them so much that they start believing that what they're saying is worth hearing, that their opinions are somehow more insightful. But frankly, I've yet to see the one of them who had more than the most rudimentary understanding of what they feel so deeply about.
Are you sure of that? I thought espresso had more caffeine because 212+ degree steam is passing over them and condensing into water as it passes, as opposed to soaking the beans in ~160 degree water.
The darker you roast coffee beans, the more caffeine is destroyed. The process for making espresso extracts more caffeine from the grounds than brewed coffee, but the actual beans themselves generally have a lower caffeine concentration than typical "green" americano roast beans (assuming starting from the same beans; some beans are naturally higher in caffeine). If you want a truly vicious caffeine buzz, try using light roast, espresso grind in the espresso machine. Doesn't taste as good as real espresso, but it packs a wallop.
In theory, any client that properly mimics the AIM protocol got it. I use Trillian and it showed up for me as well.
Where does the law draw the distinction? Is a 1:1 ratio required in discussion, e.g. "they spawned much innovation in the aerospace industry-- but they used it to bomb foreigners"? Can one list all their positive accomplishmets, so long as one ends the sentence with a stern face and says "but they were very bad men"? Or is "glorification" defined the same way "pornaography" was famously defined by a judge here in the US: "I know it when I see it"?
The constitution is not-- I repeat-- is not a complete enumeration of the rights of the people. For bog's sake read the damn bill of rights! It's right there, in amendment 9:
There does not need to be an explicit enumeration in the constitution in order for a right to exist!
Let's also keep in mind the words of the 9th Amendment:
In other words, just because a right didn't make onto the Top Ten List, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The writings of the founding fathers were quite clear on this. Some of them were against having a bill of rights for fear that it would be misconstrued as a complete and inclusive list of the rights of the people. This is something I wish all those conservative jackasses who call themselves "strict constructionalists" would get through their thick skulls. Likewise, the liberal jackasses need to learn the 10th Amd ("If it ain't in the Constitution, the federal gov't can't do it!"), but that's the subject of a different rant...I suggest you 1) RTFA:
and 2) go read the wikipedia entry on how diesel engines work.
Good old slashdot. You can get +3 Informative for spinnin' fanciful but plausible sounding yarns, no matter how inaccurate they are.
Glow plugs are only used very briefly during the initial seconds of a cold start. Diesel engines compress air in the cylinder. According to Boyle's law, the air get very hot. At the peak of compression, diesel fuel is injected into the cylinder. The superheated compressed air ignites the fuel. The only time the glow plug is needed is for those rare occasions in the first few moments when the piston, cylinder, air, and fuel are too cold for the compression alone to ignite the fuel. I don't know what the hydrogen does, but I guarantee it has diddley-squat to do with the glow plugs.
At least on Tiger, that's Terminal > Window Settings..., select Display, check Blink, click "Use Settings as Defaults". HTH. :-)
Bah! It's not the True blinking cursor if it can be made to not blink. The True blinking cursor remains immutable, ineffable, and unavoidable from power on, to power off...
"One reason or another"? It's pretty obvious why they are not being brought up on criminal charges through the court system: they haven't committed a crime on US soil! Calls for them to be given due process are absurd. Fact of the matter is that they are neither criminals under arrest nor Geneva Comvention POWs. What people need to start doing is demanding a modification of procedure for dealing with these "captured non-POW combatants". Demanding that they be given legal representation and court trials, or be afforded treatment as POWs under the Geneva Convention when they clearly and obviously qualify for neither under US law or the Geneva Convention is just asinine. Quit trying to pretend the large, glaring loophole doesn't exist and get it closed for fuck's sake!
No, it saves power by having one large, very efficient power supply do the conversion to DC rather than several dozen small ones. Either way, there is still only one conversion: 110AC -> 12/-12/5vDC.
Nothing was worse than Electronic Arts games. Their crazy trick of cramming the data BETWEEN tracks on the diskette required the drive to rattle and chatter constantly as it was thrown again and again into the particular error condition that briefly caused the head to read at the "half track" position. Not only did their games bugger drives, they took forever to load-- and this is "forever" compared to other games using the full awesome serial throughput of 300bps.
You youngsters out there don't realize how good you have it nowadays.
Hah! Have you seen Monsanto's patent portfolio? They have patented variations of wheat, corn, soy, canola.... you name it.
There. Fixed that for you. ;-)
(applause)
Best. Edit. Ever.
Totally in agreement with you on the general argument, but I'm not sure what the above means. The Federalist Society has only been around for 20 years, and it's mostly an organization of libertarians and "Eisenhower conservatives" who dislike the over-reaching of the federal government. I certainly wouldn't say that the expansion of federal copyright law is in any way something they'd condone.
Heh. As a former 101st Airborne grunt with many hours spent guarding empty roads with a machine gun, I think it unlikely. No way in hell such a sensitive mission as a "hit" on a foreign agent would be delegated to a bunch of mooks like us and we were "regular army", not guard or reserve like those guys! The whole thing sounds to me like it was just a typical wartime chaos. Besides, if they really wanted to hit 'em, wouldn't it make more sense to blow up the car with a hellfire from a predator out in the desert where no one would see it, rather than hoping that the driver would make the mistake of not slowing down and turning on his lights, and hoping a bunch of part-time soldier yahoos will shoot rather than hesitate? I know there's a temptation to look for conspiracy because in a way it's comforting to think that there's someone in control, albeit someone with evil intent; but really, most things like that are just random fuckups mixed with dumb luck. There ain't no one running anything. Real life is, for the most part, totally out of control.
Indeed, I think we are in complete agreement. The "windfall profit tax" I refer to is narrowly limited to the type commonly called for by people only described as "activists". You know, the punitively defined "tax at 90% any profit that looks like too big a number to me as an ill-reformed Marxist/Leninist" kind. Actual reasoned economic policy is certainly excepted.
Yep. Ignorance of economics, like when people call for windfall-profit taxes for big corps-- how is giving all that cash to the federal monster going to stop corps from "gouging"? How does that do ANYTHING for we, the citizenry? It's petty, absurd vindictiveness. The idiocy of schadenfreude. Quit calling for government to "tighten the screws"! Don't you realize that the actual screws are on us? But the harder they're crushed, the louder they shout "tighter"!
Likely the consideration he received was a guarantee that he wouldn't be sued into the stone age over the issue. Whether or not MS had reasonable grounds to sue is entirely irrelevant.
Really, do you think MS' lawyers would write a contract that wasn't legally binding because of a blatant technicality like that?
Actually, it's quite irrelevant. How much did they have to spend on legal representation to get that settlement? How many minutes of legal representation can your average college student afford before he's in serious debt? I doubt Lindows' lawyers were working on a contingency basis. A 22 year old with no significant resources can't afford to fight for a settlement.
Desperation would imply that current methods are ineffective. As certain italian secret agents have discovered, the current method of "shoot first, and a lot" is quite effective. This is more of an innovation, as it gives reckless friendlies with no better escape plan than "drive towards the americans, at night, very fast" at least SOME chance of survival.
Indeed, combo padlocks are a joke. Take, for example, the everyday common Master black-dial 1500 series combo padlock. The dial face has forty marks on it (numbered 0||||5||||10, etc.) giving one the impression that the "key space" is 40*40*40=64000 possible combinations. Well, in reality the "resolution" of the notches in the wheel packs is about 1/3 that-- i.e. if you are within 1.5 either direction of the correct number, the gate will still "fall in". The practical upshot of this is that you can very quickly go through every possible combination in a very short time. When I do it I dial it in increments of 2.5 so that way I'll never be farther than 1.25 from the REAL number, giving me a little "fudge room" for loose dialing. Also, this makes it easier to keep track as you'll be dialing 0, 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, etc. for a total of sixteen all the way around (rather than 40). Three numbers, 16 possible combinations each, that's only 4096 possible; but wait, it gets EASIER STILL! You don't need to do the last number, meaning there are really only 16*16=256 combinations. Dial the first two, then rotate the dial a little to the right while pulling on the shackle. You'll feel the gat dragging on the "warding notches" on the last wheel until it drops into one. Once it drops in, if the dial feels LOOSE, then the gate is resting on wheel 1 or 2-- you don't have the first two numbers right. If the wheel is TIGHT, that means the third wheel is all that stopping it. Let up on the shackle and start turning the dial a couple digits at a time. When you get to the right number, the LOCK WILL OPEN.