Although I do not have much experience with schitzophrenics, there is a history of some mental illness in my family.
A real problem that I have to deal with is understanding how much responsibity to give to a person with mental illness. It is relatively easy to understand the limitations of a person with a physical disability. With the mentally ill, if they are hit with a disease like schitzophrenia, they are lucid and normal some times. Other times, with no outward indicators, they are not. When do you determine that someone is having a schitzophrenic attack and when do you reason that they're just being dumb, mean, or forgetful in a mundane way. It's easy to make this distinction at the extremes, but the day to day uncertainties are grueling.
On being forgetful: a huge part of living with m.i. is taking medication, which has to be taken on schedule every day, and regulating lifestyle (like sleep patterns, and alcohol is a big no no. Cigs are ok, especially for schitzophrenics--apparently nicotine helps us control the focus of our hearing somehow. Most s. are smokers). When people begin to have attacks, they tend stop taking medication (paranoia makes them think that the meds are making them sick) and tend to start acting more spontaneously than when they are in their regimine. This, at first, seems great to the friends and family members. (The drugs that people take for m.i. tend to sedate you far more than they should. This is because mixing psychiatric drugs is not an exact science, and doctors tend to err on the side of caution.) A few days after the person with m.i. cheers up, they have a severe attack. At that point, their circle of support looks back on the last few days and reinterprets all the signs that they should have noticed before. You, as a member of that support, will feel guilt that you did not realize that the good signs were actually symptoms. So, once the attack is over, you resolve to be more vigilant, and become more like a jailer than a family member, and feel guilty about that. Eventually you lighten up because you decide you are being ridiculous. Some time after that your sister will have another attack, and it is partially your fault for lightenning up on her. This cycle will continue as you try to deal with the disease. Unless you are unbelievably lucky, it will happen a lot. If it does happen a lot, your sister, in her paranoia, will become a very good liar and confuse the issue even more. Since normal and abnormal states are relative to each person, you have to learn. It can be done--a significant percentage of families deal with mental illness--but you need a lot of patience.
I remember a movie I saw back in college that I thought was a very good treatment of schitzophrenia: "clean, shaven". (I was a little bit of a film freak in college, so I might think the movie was overly sylistic if I saw it today.) From what I remember, it is harrowing. I would recommend not letting your sister watch it if possible.
A lot of good medical work is being done on schitzophrenia. From what I remember reading in the papers, doctors are beginning to think might be possible to cure a patient of the disease using normal drugs rather than psychiatric drugs.
Although it might take only $20M per plant, this tech. is still in it's infancy. You could build 10,000 plants exactly like this one (assuming there's enough bio-waste to supply them all), but in 5 years there may be a more efficient process. Any significant retooling would cost 50%-100% of the original cost of building the plants. (If you built the plants slower to offset the risks of obsolescence, then production wouldn't come online fast enough to make any difference in the near term strategy in the Middle East. I'm not sure if you were commenting on the Iraq war or just comparing our current difficulties in the Oil Region with what life could be like without dependancy.)
Also, the public's usage will increase as oil becomes cheaper. The 10K plants would probably result in a spike in domestic use moreso than a decline in foreign imports.
Well, the expense of Helium seems to be the deciding factor, then. A balloon stage would have to get high enough above a plane that the savings on rocket fuel would offset the additional cost of the gas. Thanks for the info.
I can't answer your question definitively, because searchs for the "Highest Altitude Plane" on Google tends to return the X-15, which would (in my view) be a booster rocket, not a plane to piggy-back on.
Helios seems designed to max out at about 100,000 ft.(Helios Site - 3rd paragraph)
The highest balloon flight was 113,740 ft. (assuming this site is up-to-date - 3rd paragraph).
JP Project's.pdf file marketting release on the subject says 140,000 feet, but I think they've only made it to 100,00 so far, so I don't know if that's a realistic expectation.
The price of jet fuel vs. the price of helium is a good issue to raise. I'd have to do some research to compare them. It would take me a while to figure out reasonable estimates for each (which is an example why I want to read someone elses analysis rather than do the work myself;-).
It also seems that a balloon launch with a parachute backup is a safer system than a jet airplane. Less working parts to malfunction, and easily understood principles.
I think the balloon platform idea, as attempted by JP Aerospace among others, is the most brilliant one out there. I would be interested in reading an explanation of why a group would decide not to use a balloon launch platform. The only drawback I can see is that it's boring, slow and vulnerable. These are only significant problems if you're building a space-fleet or something equally bizarre. For a space-truck, the balloon launch sounds like the cheapest way to go.
to achieve better performance you would only need to extend the distance between the observation points, rather than throw more satelites at it.
D'oh! At the back of my mind, I knew this. But I didn't think about it when speculating. So, in some ways, the idea I had is unnecessary.
However, shouldn't more satellites in formation provide better imaging? Not better in terms of higher resolution, but better in terms of more information at a given resolution?
From what little I understand of interferometry and the planet finder, the most difficult task is stabalizing the formation of telescope satellites. Once that can be done reliably, is it possible to add new satellites after the initial formation has been put in place? It seems reasonable to me that you could upgrade the telescope 5 years after launch by sending up another array of satellites that would combine their efforts with the initial group.
Is that something we could expect during the life of the planet finder, or would it be too costly to build that sort of expansibility into the initial system? (If it is possible to expand the interferometer then NASA and ESA could combine efforts by simply designing compatibility and launching on their own schedules. Since I don't know if it's possible, I can't suggest this as a good solution.)
Excellent points. Two things I can think of:
1) The set of people who forget to bring their RFID tags and get lost probably intersects with the set of people who today forget to tell the forest rangers where, and for how long, they are planning on hiking. That's not a flaw in your system, just Murphy's Law.
2) Once people start thinking there's some sort of radio tag capable of linking them back to civilization, they'll start clamouring for cel-phone access.
Solving the root problem of the conflict is very important, so I agree with your second paragraph, except the openning clause. War must be fought on many different levels, and improving weaponry is only on part of it. Another, vitally important, aspect is the long-term strategy of resolving the root of the conflict--restructuring a society that produces "bad men" at an alarming rate. You imply that we need to do the second before the first, but I think you are proposing an impractical constraint. We need to attempt to do both in parallel, protect our people and soldiers and try to simultaneously solve the root of the problem.
Spending all of our time and energy solving the root of the problem is an admirable idea, but in reality, we don't have the luxury of freedom from attack. In order to win the long term conflict we have to defend our people better than the enemy can attack and resolve the underlying social problems faster than the enemy can use them to grow and metasticize his network.
You may say that successfully pursuing multiple goals in this manner is impossible, but that's not actually what is at question. It must be possible and we must do it, or we lose. It is not a question of possibility, but of survival.
They didn't totally disappear (news search), they just aren't front-page news. Since discovering good evidence for water, there's not that much of excitment to the general public that's going on with the rovers. Heck, I think the rovers are great, but I don't do much more than look at pictures on the NASA website every few days. I don't know enough about geology to make much of the spectroscopy. All the successful space launches that went on before the Columbia disaster were not news-worthy either. The ADD public is interested in change and excitement, it's just the way news works.
That being said, I think your last question is fishing for a controversy that isn't there. I remember seeing a routine NASA rover briefing recently that was sparsely populated by reporters. The NASA people at the podium had to beg the reporters to ask them questions--the reporters either weren't interested, didn't have the scientific background, or (most likely, in my opinion) had been assigned to NASA's briefing that morning and didn't know enough about recent Rover events to have questions. NASA's trying to get the word out, but the new agencies aren't interested. They've got Michael Jackson and Iraq; that's much more interesting. I believe NASA has briefings every week, but not a lot of reporters show up unless there's something big about to be announced.
How are we supposed to send humans to the Moon and Mars if we are afraid to send them into Low Earth Orbit?
Easy, improve the developement of robots and launch vehicles, and allow private space launches.
People are willing to take risks for themselves and with their money, but politians in democratic societies are very risk-averse. Killing astronauts has much worse political ramifications than allowing the Hubble to possibly become junk. Bad things, that photograph well and happen to real people, put politicians' jobs at risk. Lost opportunities are generally too nebulous to lose a job over. It's one of the problems of living in a democracy.
(oh, we need to improve the developement of robots and launch vehicles because space exploration is currently too expensive for private ventures)
To tally:
Linking to weblogs, private web-pages, and discussion groups as reputable sources.
Claiming to be the victim of "ad hominem" attacks.
Accusing your opponent of being a troll, an idiot, and other general abuse.
Using tough words like "bullshit".
A real/. experience.
You might begin to understand why I have no patience for you. You cause people who hold your views to have a bad reputation.
You won't be interested to know that I thought the Clinton trial was a partisan, pointless, and possibly dangerous distraction.
While Penguinshit gives the standard, uncontestable, response, I like your naming conventions better. In addition, I wonder what will be said when a round object with atmosphere is found to orbit the galactic center. Going by Penguinshit's definitions, this hypothetical object will need a new name (unless he wants to call it a star), while according to your definitions, this object would still be called a planet.
Just idle speculation. This type of reassessment won't gain traction until more is known about other solar systems. Tradition has a lot of inertia.
You wasted your time. Don't innundate me with non-reputable sources. I'm not going to waste my valuable time reading them. Don't squeek about ad hominem attacks, I didn't discount your arguments because you were a fool, I said your arguments made you sound like a fool. They still do. Your general approach seems to be to front-load a bunch of facts, and then imply that the facts prove that Bush did this or did not do that. However, you haven't actually made the logical progression necessary to prove your case.
Let me give you a little hint. You cannot convince me that everything Bush has done is evil. It would take too much time, and I'm not terribly interested in listening to you. I have the patience for some discussion, but I already have a pretty low opinion of you, so you're going to have to sweet-talk me into listening to you. You should limit yourself to one or two points. Try to make them concisely and clearly (using full logic, not a bunch of assumed jumps). If you can do that, I might listen. I don't think you can, but that's your only chance.
I can't resist saying the rest of this, although there isn't much point...You keep mentioning two things which underscore a rather myopic view of Bush's administration. One is Bush's remark about "That's a bad pilot" when the first plane struck the WTC. Obviously, if Bush had grasped at that moment that there was an attack going on, he might have been able to do more to stop it--but he didn't get it. There are a lot of possible reasons for this. The most reasonable explanation is that the person he heard it from didn't accurately convey the seriousness of the crash--the size of the plane, or the fact that the plane hit the tower dead-center (not just clipping it with a wing, for example). And the most reasonable explanation for that lack of information is that the person telling Bush about the crash didn't know themselves the seriousness of the crash. Ancillary to this is the fact that the administration as a whole was not expecting a terrorist attack of this sort, so when Bush heard of the crash he assumed it was an accident. You, however, contend that Bush knew the full extent of the damage caused and chose to make a joke about it. You have not proved this, and your contention shows that you are more interested in making Bush look bad than in being reasonable. Another point you keep harping on is that the Bush admin had all sorts of intelligence about the coming attacks, but deliberately chose to do nothing about it. Again, this is a partisan view of their failure. Certainly there turns out to have been lots of intelligence about the terrorists, but because of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, that information was not shared to the correct agencies. You blame this failure to share information on the Bush administration. There is no way to exonerate them from blame completely, but it is not reasonable to assign them special negligence when their attempts to abide by FISA lead to the horrible failures of 9/11. As an aside to this, the Patriot Act does much to correct the problems created by FISA. I would be willing to bet you hate the Patriot Act, but know of no alternative to it. I don't know that you hate it; it's just a hunch.
Why should I waste my time disputing what you say? You haven't proved any of it. Your facts are occasionally wrong and definitely imcomplete and your insinuations are unprovable.
Did Bush f things up before 9/11? Yes. Did everyone else? Yes. Did Bush do a good job after 9/11? Yes. That's what I'm voting on.
You're a contentious fool. You have to prove the spirit of your attacks is true, or I'm not even going to be bothered responding. "The time he wasted could have prevented the second WTC plane from hitting." Of course it could have. You're a partisan hack to imply that his inaction is somehow his intentional irresponsibility. If you respond with anything worth talking about, I'll talk. I'm assuming from your initial posture that you're more interested in making insinuating jibes than in having an actual discussion. If that's true, I'll just go ahead and say you're a fool now and not waste time responding later.
Thanks for the link. I had forgotten what he had said and I had become worried that I was believing some anti-Bush propaganda. Being "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president next year" is a remarkably poor turn of phrase for Mr. O'Dell to use.
But, although it was a pretty stupid thing for him to say given his position, I don't think it points to a conspiracy; it's the kind of energetic, pompous thing that any member of the "party faithful" might write. That being said, I also admit that there's no strong reason to give Mr. O'Dell the benefit of the doubt. It would be nice if he could recuse himself from building voting machines, but that's sort of an absurd thing to ask, since you can't force people to give up all political interests just because they are working on political infrastructure.
The best way to trust these things is to give them a thorough 3rd-party testing and certification (what the gov't is most useful for!). It may indicate more about the ineptitude of bureaucracy than Mr. O'Dell's possible conspiracy that this hasn't been done to everyone's satisfaction.
In this case there is real and legitimate fear that the voting machines may be rigged to help one party and hurt another one. Look at some of the statements and actions made by the CEO of Diebold...
I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but I don't know where to find original sources for this. Are there reputable sources that quote or describe the diebold ceo saying he would give the election to Bush? There may be, I'm not yet contending that what you are saying is false, but I would like to see them.
Personally, regardless of the fact that I find myself agreeing with Bush more than Kerry, I am vehemently against Diebold's election machines used in any important election. They are obviously buggy and have been rushed to market for the profit rather than having concerns about reliability. However, I find it hard to believe that the CEO of Diebold was promissing to rig the machines for Bush's benefit. People are stupid enough to say things like that, but it's a rarity.
Oh, the rest of your point is well made. Random failures are unfortunate, but acceptable. Systematic failures, either by exploits descovered after release, or by original design, are unacceptable.
It isn't a perfect solution--the person in the situation you describe is screwed and will have to work temporarily in another field to get by. Another problem is, I don't believe you get a tax break if you are changing careers, just if you are getting new training in the same field. For the significant percentage of people who get outsourced and then choose to follow their bliss, they have to pay for it themselves.
That being said, balance those cases against a gov't-sponsored "retraining" department that takes its part of the tax-pie every year, regardless of need, and raises everyone's taxes proportionally. That cost is a constant drag on the economy. You decide it it's worth it. I don't have the economics training or the statistics on hand to make a good argument one way or the other.
In answer to #2, there's a tax-break for retraining. So, you get reimbursed for your retraining costs. It's not a perfect solution, but it does mean that the US Gov't only pays for the retraining of those people who are motivated to retrain themselves, which I think is a pretty efficient way to spend tax money.
A friend of mine tried working for a registry. The hospitals in the area would call up for 15+ nurses just to make sure they had enough to cover the shifts of nurses who called in. When the hired employees showed up for their shifts, the registry nurses were told to leave. No guarantee of work or anything. Sounds even worse working for a registry than it is to work for one hospital.
I don't know if my friend is still working for a registry. I know she started looking to get a regular job as soon as she realized how messed up the system was. I don't see how registrys can keep treating their nurses that way and hope to retain employees.
The situation with nurses seems ripe for unionizing--high demand for workers and poor treatment of employees.
While I agree that software patents and DMCA are enemies to future success. I think the education needs to improve drastically. We've been coasting on the fact that the US has a combination of better political freedoms and a better ideology about work and innovation than most of its competitors. Eventually, if China or India really become as free as the US, or Europe or Japan wins out against their unions, then we'll be screwed. Our kids won't have the smarts and the immigrants who have helped power our success will find just as much opportunity at home.
As side note to this, I think the No Child Left Behind and voucher programs make a lot of sense in theory, except that there isn't nearly enough money going toward education. Keep NCLB, add vouchers like they have in DC, and every time there's a tax increase for public schools, vote for it.
But I figured that any president that was for NASA spending would be supported here.
I hypothesize that the knee-jerk anti-Bush vitriol found on this site is produced largely by college students who haven't grown up enough to realize that being blindly against one party/candidate just leaves them open to abuse by the other party/candidate. They've also had so much anti-Bush rhetoric forced on them on campus that they haven't stopped to think that there are other valid positions.
Just my theory, though. I have lots of grown friends who can't seem to realize that not every single thing Bush does is bad or stupid.
Interesting problem he has with choosing to emphasize the font size vs. the size of the story's block. Two stories with equal-sized blocks have different fonts based on the size of their headline. Being used to newspapers, I tend to think the headline with larger font is more important story. I think he is right to go with block-size as the indicator of a story's prominence in the media. Think of the opposite approach: A story with a one-word headline, but a huge font ("War") would have the same-sized block as a story with a multiple-word headline that was less important. I think that would result in a more confusing visual metaphor.
So, I think the programmer had a difficult design choice, but made the right decision. In order to use this effectively, I have to retrain my eye to judge importance according to the amount of real-estate being taken up, not by the size of the font.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I do not have much experience with schitzophrenics, there is a history of some mental illness in my family.
A real problem that I have to deal with is understanding how much responsibity to give to a person with mental illness. It is relatively easy to understand the limitations of a person with a physical disability. With the mentally ill, if they are hit with a disease like schitzophrenia, they are lucid and normal some times. Other times, with no outward indicators, they are not. When do you determine that someone is having a schitzophrenic attack and when do you reason that they're just being dumb, mean, or forgetful in a mundane way. It's easy to make this distinction at the extremes, but the day to day uncertainties are grueling.
On being forgetful: a huge part of living with m.i. is taking medication, which has to be taken on schedule every day, and regulating lifestyle (like sleep patterns, and alcohol is a big no no. Cigs are ok, especially for schitzophrenics--apparently nicotine helps us control the focus of our hearing somehow. Most s. are smokers). When people begin to have attacks, they tend stop taking medication (paranoia makes them think that the meds are making them sick) and tend to start acting more spontaneously than when they are in their regimine. This, at first, seems great to the friends and family members. (The drugs that people take for m.i. tend to sedate you far more than they should. This is because mixing psychiatric drugs is not an exact science, and doctors tend to err on the side of caution.) A few days after the person with m.i. cheers up, they have a severe attack. At that point, their circle of support looks back on the last few days and reinterprets all the signs that they should have noticed before. You, as a member of that support, will feel guilt that you did not realize that the good signs were actually symptoms. So, once the attack is over, you resolve to be more vigilant, and become more like a jailer than a family member, and feel guilty about that. Eventually you lighten up because you decide you are being ridiculous. Some time after that your sister will have another attack, and it is partially your fault for lightenning up on her. This cycle will continue as you try to deal with the disease. Unless you are unbelievably lucky, it will happen a lot. If it does happen a lot, your sister, in her paranoia, will become a very good liar and confuse the issue even more. Since normal and abnormal states are relative to each person, you have to learn. It can be done--a significant percentage of families deal with mental illness--but you need a lot of patience.
I remember a movie I saw back in college that I thought was a very good treatment of schitzophrenia: "clean, shaven". (I was a little bit of a film freak in college, so I might think the movie was overly sylistic if I saw it today.) From what I remember, it is harrowing. I would recommend not letting your sister watch it if possible.
A lot of good medical work is being done on schitzophrenia. From what I remember reading in the papers, doctors are beginning to think might be possible to cure a patient of the disease using normal drugs rather than psychiatric drugs.
Although it might take only $20M per plant, this tech. is still in it's infancy. You could build 10,000 plants exactly like this one (assuming there's enough bio-waste to supply them all), but in 5 years there may be a more efficient process. Any significant retooling would cost 50%-100% of the original cost of building the plants.
(If you built the plants slower to offset the risks of obsolescence, then production wouldn't come online fast enough to make any difference in the near term strategy in the Middle East. I'm not sure if you were commenting on the Iraq war or just comparing our current difficulties in the Oil Region with what life could be like without dependancy.)
Also, the public's usage will increase as oil becomes cheaper. The 10K plants would probably result in a spike in domestic use moreso than a decline in foreign imports.
Well, the expense of Helium seems to be the deciding factor, then. A balloon stage would have to get high enough above a plane that the savings on rocket fuel would offset the additional cost of the gas. Thanks for the info.
I can't answer your question definitively, because searchs for the "Highest Altitude Plane" on Google tends to return the X-15, which would (in my view) be a booster rocket, not a plane to piggy-back on. .pdf file marketting release on the subject says 140,000 feet, but I think they've only made it to 100,00 so far, so I don't know if that's a realistic expectation.
;-).
Helios seems designed to max out at about 100,000 ft.(Helios Site - 3rd paragraph)
The highest balloon flight was 113,740 ft. (assuming this site is up-to-date - 3rd paragraph).
JP Project's
The price of jet fuel vs. the price of helium is a good issue to raise. I'd have to do some research to compare them. It would take me a while to figure out reasonable estimates for each (which is an example why I want to read someone elses analysis rather than do the work myself
It also seems that a balloon launch with a parachute backup is a safer system than a jet airplane. Less working parts to malfunction, and easily understood principles.
I think the balloon platform idea, as attempted by JP Aerospace among others, is the most brilliant one out there. I would be interested in reading an explanation of why a group would decide not to use a balloon launch platform. The only drawback I can see is that it's boring, slow and vulnerable. These are only significant problems if you're building a space-fleet or something equally bizarre. For a space-truck, the balloon launch sounds like the cheapest way to go.
Neat-o. Thanks for the link.
to achieve better performance you would only need to extend the distance between the observation points, rather than throw more satelites at it.
D'oh! At the back of my mind, I knew this. But I didn't think about it when speculating. So, in some ways, the idea I had is unnecessary.
However, shouldn't more satellites in formation provide better imaging? Not better in terms of higher resolution, but better in terms of more information at a given resolution?
From what little I understand of interferometry and the planet finder, the most difficult task is stabalizing the formation of telescope satellites. Once that can be done reliably, is it possible to add new satellites after the initial formation has been put in place? It seems reasonable to me that you could upgrade the telescope 5 years after launch by sending up another array of satellites that would combine their efforts with the initial group.
Is that something we could expect during the life of the planet finder, or would it be too costly to build that sort of expansibility into the initial system? (If it is possible to expand the interferometer then NASA and ESA could combine efforts by simply designing compatibility and launching on their own schedules. Since I don't know if it's possible, I can't suggest this as a good solution.)
Excellent points. Two things I can think of:
1) The set of people who forget to bring their RFID tags and get lost probably intersects with the set of people who today forget to tell the forest rangers where, and for how long, they are planning on hiking. That's not a flaw in your system, just Murphy's Law.
2) Once people start thinking there's some sort of radio tag capable of linking them back to civilization, they'll start clamouring for cel-phone access.
Solving the root problem of the conflict is very important, so I agree with your second paragraph, except the openning clause. War must be fought on many different levels, and improving weaponry is only on part of it. Another, vitally important, aspect is the long-term strategy of resolving the root of the conflict--restructuring a society that produces "bad men" at an alarming rate. You imply that we need to do the second before the first, but I think you are proposing an impractical constraint. We need to attempt to do both in parallel, protect our people and soldiers and try to simultaneously solve the root of the problem.
Spending all of our time and energy solving the root of the problem is an admirable idea, but in reality, we don't have the luxury of freedom from attack. In order to win the long term conflict we have to defend our people better than the enemy can attack and resolve the underlying social problems faster than the enemy can use them to grow and metasticize his network.
You may say that successfully pursuing multiple goals in this manner is impossible, but that's not actually what is at question. It must be possible and we must do it, or we lose. It is not a question of possibility, but of survival.
Create an almost entirely closed environment (receiving only heat and sunlight from outside), that is able to support human life indefinitely.
I know the name is cringe-worthy, but (I think) it hasn't been done successfully yet, and it needs to be.
They didn't totally disappear (news search), they just aren't front-page news. Since discovering good evidence for water, there's not that much of excitment to the general public that's going on with the rovers. Heck, I think the rovers are great, but I don't do much more than look at pictures on the NASA website every few days. I don't know enough about geology to make much of the spectroscopy. All the successful space launches that went on before the Columbia disaster were not news-worthy either. The ADD public is interested in change and excitement, it's just the way news works.
That being said, I think your last question is fishing for a controversy that isn't there. I remember seeing a routine NASA rover briefing recently that was sparsely populated by reporters. The NASA people at the podium had to beg the reporters to ask them questions--the reporters either weren't interested, didn't have the scientific background, or (most likely, in my opinion) had been assigned to NASA's briefing that morning and didn't know enough about recent Rover events to have questions. NASA's trying to get the word out, but the new agencies aren't interested. They've got Michael Jackson and Iraq; that's much more interesting. I believe NASA has briefings every week, but not a lot of reporters show up unless there's something big about to be announced.
How are we supposed to send humans to the Moon and Mars if we are afraid to send them into Low Earth Orbit?
Easy, improve the developement of robots and launch vehicles, and allow private space launches.
People are willing to take risks for themselves and with their money, but politians in democratic societies are very risk-averse. Killing astronauts has much worse political ramifications than allowing the Hubble to possibly become junk. Bad things, that photograph well and happen to real people, put politicians' jobs at risk. Lost opportunities are generally too nebulous to lose a job over. It's one of the problems of living in a democracy.
(oh, we need to improve the developement of robots and launch vehicles because space exploration is currently too expensive for private ventures)
That was a truly unpleasant conversation.
/. experience.
To tally:
Linking to weblogs, private web-pages, and discussion groups as reputable sources.
Claiming to be the victim of "ad hominem" attacks.
Accusing your opponent of being a troll, an idiot, and other general abuse.
Using tough words like "bullshit".
A real
You might begin to understand why I have no patience for you. You cause people who hold your views to have a bad reputation.
You won't be interested to know that I thought the Clinton trial was a partisan, pointless, and possibly dangerous distraction.
While Penguinshit gives the standard, uncontestable, response, I like your naming conventions better. In addition, I wonder what will be said when a round object with atmosphere is found to orbit the galactic center. Going by Penguinshit's definitions, this hypothetical object will need a new name (unless he wants to call it a star), while according to your definitions, this object would still be called a planet. Just idle speculation. This type of reassessment won't gain traction until more is known about other solar systems. Tradition has a lot of inertia.
You wasted your time. Don't innundate me with non-reputable sources. I'm not going to waste my valuable time reading them. Don't squeek about ad hominem attacks, I didn't discount your arguments because you were a fool, I said your arguments made you sound like a fool. They still do. Your general approach seems to be to front-load a bunch of facts, and then imply that the facts prove that Bush did this or did not do that. However, you haven't actually made the logical progression necessary to prove your case.
Let me give you a little hint. You cannot convince me that everything Bush has done is evil. It would take too much time, and I'm not terribly interested in listening to you. I have the patience for some discussion, but I already have a pretty low opinion of you, so you're going to have to sweet-talk me into listening to you. You should limit yourself to one or two points. Try to make them concisely and clearly (using full logic, not a bunch of assumed jumps). If you can do that, I might listen. I don't think you can, but that's your only chance.
I can't resist saying the rest of this, although there isn't much point...You keep mentioning two things which underscore a rather myopic view of Bush's administration.
One is Bush's remark about "That's a bad pilot" when the first plane struck the WTC. Obviously, if Bush had grasped at that moment that there was an attack going on, he might have been able to do more to stop it--but he didn't get it. There are a lot of possible reasons for this. The most reasonable explanation is that the person he heard it from didn't accurately convey the seriousness of the crash--the size of the plane, or the fact that the plane hit the tower dead-center (not just clipping it with a wing, for example). And the most reasonable explanation for that lack of information is that the person telling Bush about the crash didn't know themselves the seriousness of the crash. Ancillary to this is the fact that the administration as a whole was not expecting a terrorist attack of this sort, so when Bush heard of the crash he assumed it was an accident. You, however, contend that Bush knew the full extent of the damage caused and chose to make a joke about it. You have not proved this, and your contention shows that you are more interested in making Bush look bad than in being reasonable.
Another point you keep harping on is that the Bush admin had all sorts of intelligence about the coming attacks, but deliberately chose to do nothing about it. Again, this is a partisan view of their failure. Certainly there turns out to have been lots of intelligence about the terrorists, but because of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, that information was not shared to the correct agencies. You blame this failure to share information on the Bush administration. There is no way to exonerate them from blame completely, but it is not reasonable to assign them special negligence when their attempts to abide by FISA lead to the horrible failures of 9/11. As an aside to this, the Patriot Act does much to correct the problems created by FISA. I would be willing to bet you hate the Patriot Act, but know of no alternative to it. I don't know that you hate it; it's just a hunch.
Why should I waste my time disputing what you say? You haven't proved any of it. Your facts are occasionally wrong and definitely imcomplete and your insinuations are unprovable.
Did Bush f things up before 9/11? Yes. Did everyone else? Yes. Did Bush do a good job after 9/11? Yes. That's what I'm voting on.
You're a contentious fool. You have to prove the spirit of your attacks is true, or I'm not even going to be bothered responding. "The time he wasted could have prevented the second WTC plane from hitting." Of course it could have. You're a partisan hack to imply that his inaction is somehow his intentional irresponsibility. If you respond with anything worth talking about, I'll talk. I'm assuming from your initial posture that you're more interested in making insinuating jibes than in having an actual discussion. If that's true, I'll just go ahead and say you're a fool now and not waste time responding later.
Thanks for the link. I had forgotten what he had said and I had become worried that I was believing some anti-Bush propaganda. Being "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president next year" is a remarkably poor turn of phrase for Mr. O'Dell to use.
But, although it was a pretty stupid thing for him to say given his position, I don't think it points to a conspiracy; it's the kind of energetic, pompous thing that any member of the "party faithful" might write. That being said, I also admit that there's no strong reason to give Mr. O'Dell the benefit of the doubt. It would be nice if he could recuse himself from building voting machines, but that's sort of an absurd thing to ask, since you can't force people to give up all political interests just because they are working on political infrastructure.
The best way to trust these things is to give them a thorough 3rd-party testing and certification (what the gov't is most useful for!). It may indicate more about the ineptitude of bureaucracy than Mr. O'Dell's possible conspiracy that this hasn't been done to everyone's satisfaction.
In this case there is real and legitimate fear that the voting machines may be rigged to help one party and hurt another one. Look at some of the statements and actions made by the CEO of Diebold...
I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but I don't know where to find original sources for this. Are there reputable sources that quote or describe the diebold ceo saying he would give the election to Bush? There may be, I'm not yet contending that what you are saying is false, but I would like to see them.
Personally, regardless of the fact that I find myself agreeing with Bush more than Kerry, I am vehemently against Diebold's election machines used in any important election. They are obviously buggy and have been rushed to market for the profit rather than having concerns about reliability. However, I find it hard to believe that the CEO of Diebold was promissing to rig the machines for Bush's benefit. People are stupid enough to say things like that, but it's a rarity.
Oh, the rest of your point is well made. Random failures are unfortunate, but acceptable. Systematic failures, either by exploits descovered after release, or by original design, are unacceptable.
It isn't a perfect solution--the person in the situation you describe is screwed and will have to work temporarily in another field to get by. Another problem is, I don't believe you get a tax break if you are changing careers, just if you are getting new training in the same field. For the significant percentage of people who get outsourced and then choose to follow their bliss, they have to pay for it themselves.
That being said, balance those cases against a gov't-sponsored "retraining" department that takes its part of the tax-pie every year, regardless of need, and raises everyone's taxes proportionally. That cost is a constant drag on the economy. You decide it it's worth it. I don't have the economics training or the statistics on hand to make a good argument one way or the other.
In answer to #2, there's a tax-break for retraining. So, you get reimbursed for your retraining costs. It's not a perfect solution, but it does mean that the US Gov't only pays for the retraining of those people who are motivated to retrain themselves, which I think is a pretty efficient way to spend tax money.
A friend of mine tried working for a registry. The hospitals in the area would call up for 15+ nurses just to make sure they had enough to cover the shifts of nurses who called in. When the hired employees showed up for their shifts, the registry nurses were told to leave. No guarantee of work or anything. Sounds even worse working for a registry than it is to work for one hospital.
I don't know if my friend is still working for a registry. I know she started looking to get a regular job as soon as she realized how messed up the system was. I don't see how registrys can keep treating their nurses that way and hope to retain employees.
The situation with nurses seems ripe for unionizing--high demand for workers and poor treatment of employees.
While I agree that software patents and DMCA are enemies to future success. I think the education needs to improve drastically. We've been coasting on the fact that the US has a combination of better political freedoms and a better ideology about work and innovation than most of its competitors. Eventually, if China or India really become as free as the US, or Europe or Japan wins out against their unions, then we'll be screwed. Our kids won't have the smarts and the immigrants who have helped power our success will find just as much opportunity at home.
As side note to this, I think the No Child Left Behind and voucher programs make a lot of sense in theory, except that there isn't nearly enough money going toward education. Keep NCLB, add vouchers like they have in DC, and every time there's a tax increase for public schools, vote for it.
But I figured that any president that was for NASA spending would be supported here.
I hypothesize that the knee-jerk anti-Bush vitriol found on this site is produced largely by college students who haven't grown up enough to realize that being blindly against one party/candidate just leaves them open to abuse by the other party/candidate. They've also had so much anti-Bush rhetoric forced on them on campus that they haven't stopped to think that there are other valid positions.
Just my theory, though. I have lots of grown friends who can't seem to realize that not every single thing Bush does is bad or stupid.
Interesting problem he has with choosing to emphasize the font size vs. the size of the story's block. Two stories with equal-sized blocks have different fonts based on the size of their headline. Being used to newspapers, I tend to think the headline with larger font is more important story. I think he is right to go with block-size as the indicator of a story's prominence in the media. Think of the opposite approach: A story with a one-word headline, but a huge font ("War") would have the same-sized block as a story with a multiple-word headline that was less important. I think that would result in a more confusing visual metaphor.
So, I think the programmer had a difficult design choice, but made the right decision. In order to use this effectively, I have to retrain my eye to judge importance according to the amount of real-estate being taken up, not by the size of the font.