Actually, "Junk science" is faulty scientific data and analysis used to used to further a special agenda.
By that definition, virtually all science is junk science. Special agendas have a range. Maybe there are rogue "watermelon" professors who secretly desire to crush capitalist industrialism. Maybe a lot of professors want to get tenure. Without any hard data to support it, I'd propose a theory suggessting that the latter agenda overwhelmingly dominates the former.
So if we agree that the science is all influenced by nonscientific agendas, and, for now, accepting your assertion that it's all about money (rather than fame, concern for the future, religion, etc), we have to play the game "follow the money."
You've given one example of how a big company can make money by claiming a substance is environmentally harmful. With one data point, I can draw you an infinite number of perfectly reasonable projections. But let's look at who stands to make money by reducing carbon emissions:
Nuclear Industry. Check.
Solar Industry. Check.
Wind Energy Industry. Check.
Lumber/Forest Products Industry. Maybe (if they can get reduction credits for their forests).
Oil Companies. Nope.
Coal Companies. Nope.
Natural Gas Companies. Nope.
Automotive Industry. Nope.
Aerospace / Defense Industry. Nope, but no strong interest one way or the other.
Entertainment Industry. No real interest one way or another.
(etc).
OK. So let's think about which of these industries have financed research. And let's think about what this research indicates. And then, the hard part. The combined monetary power of all the industries that have something to gain from reducing CO/CO2 emissions is some miniscule fraction of the financial power of companies who have something to gain from maintaining or increasing allowable CO/CO2 emissions. Why, then, is there still research being published that supports the "greenhouse gas" hypothesis?
Junk Science (djunk si-ens) n.: 1. The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena which results in a conclusion that contradicts the writer's beliefs.
2. A system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through the scientific method and concerned with the physical world and its phenomena, yet persists in presenting facts that the writer dislikes.
Example: "If it limits my ability to squander resources, it's obviously junk science."
Sorry, that term is just annoying. The only place it's ever used is in anti-global-warming-theory screeds. A recent global warming trend is a demonstrable, verifiable fact. Sure, we can dispute the causes. But let's argue on the merit of the research, not engage in school-yard name-calling.
If you read Bugtraq and/or Websec, you'll see a dozen of this kind of vulnerability each week.
There's still a lot of XSS bugs in a lot of products. And new ones get added all the time.
Just be careful out there, kids. Don't trust input. Barely trust output.
Democratization of the Means
on
Amateur Revolution?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, perhaps democratization is not the precise word. But the *means* of doing professional level work is more widespread than ever before.
In general (despite a recent local trend away from these achievements), people are more educated, people have more leisure time, and people have the means to acquire higher-quality tools and equipment. This is mostly a result of technology becoming ubiquitous and cheap.
Consider making movies: before the late 70s, a home movie maker could affordably use Super-8 format. The cameras were moderately expensive and had limited functionality. Professionals were shooting 35mm or 70mm on cameras that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Today, even some of the studios shoot on high-end video, and the quality difference between the high-end and the consumer low-end is not huge (since the "ama-pros" don't necessarily distribute on film stock, I'm willing to call video and film equivalent, even knowing the differences). But I haven't even mentioned the most important part: the editing. Nonlinear editing? Even ten years ago, that started around $20k. Today, it comes with any iMac.
Similarly, anyone can get an acceptable recording studio in their house for under $2k.
People can afford to own power tools that my father's generation could only dream about.
I could go on, but I think the point is made. Of course there are amateurs doing pro-level work. There always have been! But now the means are readily available to open up the opportunities to far more people; it should be no surprise that more people are taking those opportunities. That these same people are having ideas that hadn't been thought of by the "Pros" seems almost self-evident. The more minds on a subject, the more ideas.
I know California has laws on the books about electronic surveillance... although I can't seem to find them online. Maybe my Google-fu is weak today. I dunno.
In any case, I have my house under electronic surveillance as part of a security system. I've got video feeding into Motion (http://motion.sourceforge.net), and recording any events. Some of the cameras are obvious, others are quite well hidden. I have signs posted by the front door stating that the house is being monitored by "live video systems."
Anyone know where to look up the legal framework I need to know to defend this system in the event it's necessary? I'd hate to get a burglar to court, only to be sued for invasion of privacy or something.
The primary real danger from a dirty bomb (outside of the immediate blast radius) is that the populace panics in their haste to get away.
Big scared crowds tend to break things, trample one another, and lose their normal respect for things like charity towards their fellow human beings, not to mention law, property, and traffic regulations.
Plus it gives all the assholes an excuse to drive their Hummers on the sidewalk and over your lawn.
Let's face it people, voter fraud is easy with or without computers.
Personal Anecdote: My polling station got upgraded from the punch-out-the-chad-with-a-stylus system to a poke-the-spot-with-an-ink-stylus system between the last two elections. My area is heavily Democratic. For efficiency's sake, the polling area has five carrels for Democrats, and two carrels for Republicans. As part of the semi-legendary radical socialist wing of the Republican party, I was waiting for one of the Republican carrels to open up. It was taking a long time, as an elderly Republican neighbor of mine was trying to vote. He complained to the polling place staff that the stylus was not poking out the chads. To demonstrate that it was OK, they pulled a blank ballot off the pad, stuck it in the machine, and stamped a few (possibly) random votes, and pulled it out to show him that the machine was, in fact, working. They then tossed the ballot away. (He was convinced they were trying to invalidate his vote, so he ended up punching each vote all the way through anyway).
But no-one batted an eye that they had just created an illegal ballot. When I called the election office to complain, they gave me a song and dance about how it would have been impossible for them to insert it into the ballot box without raising red flags, how the register would not match, etc. But they don't let you insert you ballot directly into the box yourself; you hand it to someone and you watch them put it into the box. It would be trivial to do a quick palming of one ballot and insertion of another.
With the last election being so close, it would only take a few votes per polling station to throw an election. Bruce Schneier calculated it out in a recent article in terms of cost per vote, and it was quite low. Sure, it would be more expensive and would involve more people to do it in the old-fashioned low-tech way than it would with Diebold's patented cheating system, but the difference is only a factor of two or so. Given the stakes in a national election, that's down in the noise.
So basically, you either have to trust the system and believe that people will not cheat in the election, or assume that cheating is ubiquitous regardless of the physical system used.
#cynicism on OK: cynicism mode on
In other words, We The People are fucked, we have been fucked, and we will continue to be fucked.
#cynicism off ERROR: Cynicism mode cannot be disabled.
You know, you're right. After I posted, I started thinking... uh... DB2? Universe? Oracle?
Still, this seems like more of an escalation of hostilities. IBM and Oracle have always been big wary sumo wrestlers circling one another in the professional services and business support system arenas. I suspect (though I don't have the energy to look up SEC filings) that these components of their businesses outweigh the database portions.
... was heard to say "Never mind. I'll just buy them too."
Kind of interesting, actually. These could be the first hairline fractures in the Vast Anti-Microsoft Pro-Linux Corporate Alliance.
It could have potentially profound effects in the world of Corporate Linux. Then again, it probably won't. Expect the MS and SCO FUD machines to spin it that way, though.
Oracle may be big, but going up against IBM is a bad strategy. As the old joke went in the "IBM is gonna buy Apple!" days:
Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM? A: IBM.
... improvements in Braking technology are pretty damn cool.
I have antilocks, which definitely saved the life of a pedestrian last Saturday, and may have saved me and/or other people involved in an accident. A drunk/insane/distracted driver in an Acura pulled a U-turn immediately in front of an '87 Suburban that was going around 45 mph. The Suburban hit the Acura headon, and proceeded to fly half-airborn into my lane (I was two lengths behind and a lane to the left). To avoid the flying SUV and the other wreckage that was rapidly filling the street in an uncontrolled way, I braked hard and swerved, ending up on the sidewalk, just a few feet from a panicking pedestrian.
This was a situation of millisecond tolerances. I think I'm pretty good with performance driving -- I know how to handle sharp braking. But there's no way I could have maintained control given all the factors. That ABS saved that pedestrian, and prevented me from slamming into an evolving collision situation.
So maybe future developments will include sonar controls on cars to prevent them from enabling U-turns into rapidly moving targets. Those'd have to be pretty intelligent, though, since there're lots of situations where you want to break into rapid moving traffic with reasonably narrow gaps. It's also have to be carefully calibrated to prevent problems on narrow mountain roads where (to the sonar at least) it may appear like cliff faces are approaching at 50mph on those inside curves...
Still, "in this context" is just your definition for WMD. If, by challenging this definition, I become a "radical leftist," we have just ceased to have any grounds for a meaningful dialogue. Feel free to call me other names you feel like, but I'll have been forced to stop taking you seriously.
I personally don't find it silly to define the word "weapon" to mean something that works. Webster certainly never says anything about "potential" weapons. Neither, really, did Bush. He was talking about actual, usable weapons.
In Bush's own words:
"Some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them." (in reference to Chemical and Biological weapons).
and
"In defiance of pledges to the UN [Iraq] has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons."
I'm not in this discussion to argue about the war, or its justifications. I'm concerned about the redefinition of language used in a bunch of those justifications. But it seems to me that it's not the "radical leftists" who have tried to redefine what the Administration was talking about when they raised the spectre of WMDs.
OK. I hate the partisan game that gets played. I usually try to stay out of it. I'm not always successful.
Here's a case where I'm not.
Yellowcake uranium from pre-Gulf War I does not qualify as a WMD, as used in the justification for Gulf War II.
It's pretty clear from the current evidence that the only countries possessing stocks of WMDs are: Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, United States. It would be plausible to add Iran and North Korea to that list, although in all likelihood neither country is quite there yet. North Korea is reputed to be further along in their development. South Africa evidently had the bomb, but claims to have dismantled their stockpile of six devices. Several foremer-Soviet republics (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine) gave their nukes back to Russia, or destroyed them, or sold them to AlQaida, depending on which reports you believe.
(Sources for above assertions available upon suitably impressive challenge. Otherwise, I'll just play the "Hell, this is Slashdot; I don't need no stinkin' facts!" card.)
Just because we may never know the answer does not mean that there isn't an answer. It IS either true or false, even though we may never discover which.
Well, maybe. It could be that with deeper knowledge, the question is not meaningful. For example, I state that the Gostak distims the doshes. This is neither true nor false if the Gostak is nonexistant, distimming is actually fragonarding, and doshes are really just an observable side-effect of boradas nikto-ing a Klatuu.
That's probably not the best example, but it seems to me that there are questions that are in and of themselves not valid.
I suppose someone who actually knows something about logic can correct me here:)
Being the retrogeek I am, I feel obliged to point out that there never was a Burroughs Mark II.
I know.
However, I am going to assume that you are referring to the Harvard Mark II...
Actually, I was just making it all up. The oldest machine I've actually used in person was a PDP-11.
My old man had a machine with delay-line memory, but it wasn't at the house and I wasn't allowed to touch it:) I don't recall the make / model. It had 12-bit words, with, if I recall correctly, 15 panel switches for data entry: bits 0-11, clear, store, and jump/run. There may have been a halt switch or some others, it's all sort of hazy. I do remember that the jump/run switch was right next to the clear switch, and on more than one occasion I'd hear cursing as memory got blanked instead of a program run. But this was all a long time ago, so I may have that wrong too.
I have a model 33 in my room...
Glock model 33? They're only noisy for brief periods of time. Oh, perhaps you mean Teletype Corp ASR33? Man, we had one of those in our machine room, and, yeah, they could create quite a racket. I hope you don't try to sleep in there!
I see a lot of suggestions to use tape: electrical, duct, gaffer's, etc.
I don't know what's the matter with you kids these days.
When I was in college and being kept awake by the glow of all those vacuum tubes, I'd attack them relentlessly with a big can of black enamel spray paint. Sure, made it harder to identify which tube blew when stuff shut down. But you can generally tell by the temperature, if you hold the tip of your finger to the side of the tube. And a good spray of enamel keeps the light way down. Remember to turn the machine off before spraying, though, because most spray paints use a flammable propellant, and those tubes can get hot under heavy use.
The tube machine, needless to say, was a huge improvement over the machine I had in my room the previous year. I set up a web server on my Burroughs Mark II. That machine didn't have any lights of any sort, but the fuckin' racket the relays would make! Especially when someone tried to download some ASCII porn, and it used ever one of the memory cells in the 4kb array. If you haven't heard 4096 relays clattering at once, you don't know what noise is!
(and if you actually believe any of this, you kids are worse off today than even a old curmudgeon like me can imagine)
Books that deal with issues of race are often banned by people who object to racism. I sometimes think it's because they haven't actually read the books, but have merely done the kind of sanctimonious counting of "offensive" terms or situations (e.g., like the CAP Alerts. Or anybody remember that lady who talked to the Meese commission, and enumerated the number of times the word "horny" was used in Catcher in the Rye?). You could argue this for several of the books:
Huck Finn was clearly written with an anti-racist agenda, but was written ironically, from the perspective of an ignorant kid. It contains the word "nigger" many, many times. As a result of these two factors, it's considered by some as inappropriate for children.
To Kill A Mockingbird deals with a rape trial, and therefore could be considered inappropriate for kids. It also contains a lot of racial slurs and violence.
I think what's underlying the attacks on these books, though, is less these characteristics (which are usually the nominal reasons for banning them), but the anti-authority themes running through the books. They question the conventional morality of the times they describe. People who don't like that kind of thinking may find that mroe offensive than all of the ostensible faults of the books. They don't wnat to encourage this kind of questioning (of course, they're way too late to try to stop it now.)
You can see a similar effect, by the way, against some of the best anti-authoritarian books like Animal Farm ("it makes kids think animals can talk!"), Brave New World ("but it mentions sex!"), Slaugherhouse Five ("it's filthy!"), and so forth.
Any posts with references to 1984 will be ignored.
Even if I get clever?
And write about the year US and the Vatican established full diplomatic relations? Or the year when Apple released a computer with the humorous name "Macintosh?" Or make an aside mention of the Los Angeles Olympics? Or talk about the publication of "Neuromancer?"
So you're the bastard who prevented the rest of us from getting a chance to use the Public Copy of the textbooks!
You singlehandedly increased the cost of my education by about $5k.
(the term "YOU" in this context is to be construed as the general "you" and indicating a hypothetical person or class of persons exhibiting the behavior described in parent post. Under no circumstances should this post be construed as being directly referring to any specific individual, except in the case where they really did only attend engineering school and do not practice law nor have any lawyer friends; regardless, damages shall be limited to the monetary value of the electrons contained in this post or $0.01 US whichever is the lesser value).
Clearly. Well, I warned you, right up there in the subject, that it was a Grumpy Old Man Rant. I feel like I did my part to provide full disclosure that I was going to post a contrarian diatribe.
If you don't need an MP3 player in your phone, you can still buy one with an MP3 player. Here's a tip: don't use it.
Well, here's the deal. I don't much care about MP3 players one way or the other. But each added feature adds to 1) the cost of the device, 2) the number of components that may fail, 3) the power consumption of the device, and in the case of cameras, 4) where I can bring the device without causing problems.
I'm happy to see all the great capabilities of your phone. I'm glad it makes you happy too.
Perhaps you want me to bring my notebook to Blockbuster
No, I really want you to carry an IBM S/360, which is the only appropriate machine for the job. If you're going to do databases, I say do 'em right.
Perhaps you want me to bring my notebook to restaurants so I can show people photos.
Having done this, I don't really recommend it. Young kids have this tendancy to want to push stewed carrots into your keyboard. I'd recommend a Konica Slide Projector (and shooting on Ektachrome).
I use Pocket Slides to collaborate on PowerPoint presentations at lunch.
Hey, while I'm giving advice, I'll say you should really just relax over lunch. Working while eating causes indigestion, stress, and is indicated in numerous other health problems. As for dealing with the slides, I'd say that that Konica projector is still a good call. Less chance of getting hollandaise sauce on the presentation that way.
OK, I take back my previous statement about the IBM and the slide projector. Really, I don't want you to do anything in particular. Except maybe have a nice, peaceful day somewhere where nasty grumpy rants can't annoy you.
I frankly don't give a fuck what you think a PDA is for.
You obviously do, otherwise you wouldn't have felt it necessary to respond with suych vigor.
Go buy a PDA that's right for you. I would recommend the Treo 180, but the screen is crap.
Thanks, but I already have an ancient Kyocera 6035. Like the Treo, the screen is crap, but it meets my needs. Thing's rock solid, does everything I need. Sure, a bit more speed, more memory, and bright colors would be nice, but I don't really need them.
But don't tell me that I'm somehow wrong because I use a PDA for more than keeping my schedule.
I don't recall telling you that. I certainly use my PDA for more than keeping my schedule, and I would hate to be hypocritical about it. And I'll refrain form telling you that you really want a laptop. Even though I suspect you secretly do. Man, those things are cool. Some of those neat 2.8GHz P4s are pretty rad. You know you want one. You know you do...
I did read your whole comment. I was merely disagreeing with you on the definition of inferior.
Now, if you'd said Palm OS was inferior because it didn't have memory protection, preemptive multitasking, or something along those lines, we could have had a nice happy conversation. I've done Palm development, and have a love/hate relationship with the platform.
My rant differentiating PDA and notebook capabilities was merely my own opinion. I carry a smartphone myself, and love it. Perhaps we're really in agreement about everything but the definition of PDA -- your definition seems closer to a fully functional computer in a tiny form-factor, whereas mine is a more limited machine optimized for a few tasks. Whatever.
(and in answer to your last question... I'd answer "toy!!")
Slashdot Mirror
By that definition, virtually all science is junk science. Special agendas have a range. Maybe there are rogue "watermelon" professors who secretly desire to crush capitalist industrialism. Maybe a lot of professors want to get tenure. Without any hard data to support it, I'd propose a theory suggessting that the latter agenda overwhelmingly dominates the former.
So if we agree that the science is all influenced by nonscientific agendas, and, for now, accepting your assertion that it's all about money (rather than fame, concern for the future, religion, etc), we have to play the game "follow the money."
You've given one example of how a big company can make money by claiming a substance is environmentally harmful. With one data point, I can draw you an infinite number of perfectly reasonable projections. But let's look at who stands to make money by reducing carbon emissions:
OK. So let's think about which of these industries have financed research. And let's think about what this research indicates. And then, the hard part. The combined monetary power of all the industries that have something to gain from reducing CO/CO2 emissions is some miniscule fraction of the financial power of companies who have something to gain from maintaining or increasing allowable CO/CO2 emissions. Why, then, is there still research being published that supports the "greenhouse gas" hypothesis?
Junk Science (djunk si-ens)
n.:
1. The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena which results in a conclusion that contradicts the writer's beliefs.
2. A system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through the scientific method and concerned with the physical world and its phenomena, yet persists in presenting facts that the writer dislikes.
Example: "If it limits my ability to squander resources, it's obviously junk science."
Sorry, that term is just annoying. The only place it's ever used is in anti-global-warming-theory screeds. A recent global warming trend is a demonstrable, verifiable fact. Sure, we can dispute the causes. But let's argue on the merit of the research, not engage in school-yard name-calling.
If you read Bugtraq and/or Websec, you'll see a dozen of this kind of vulnerability each week.
There's still a lot of XSS bugs in a lot of products. And new ones get added all the time.
Just be careful out there, kids. Don't trust input. Barely trust output.
Well, perhaps democratization is not the precise word. But the *means* of doing professional level work is more widespread than ever before.
In general (despite a recent local trend away from these achievements), people are more educated, people have more leisure time, and people have the means to acquire higher-quality tools and equipment. This is mostly a result of technology becoming ubiquitous and cheap.
Consider making movies: before the late 70s, a home movie maker could affordably use Super-8 format. The cameras were moderately expensive and had limited functionality. Professionals were shooting 35mm or 70mm on cameras that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Today, even some of the studios shoot on high-end video, and the quality difference between the high-end and the consumer low-end is not huge (since the "ama-pros" don't necessarily distribute on film stock, I'm willing to call video and film equivalent, even knowing the differences). But I haven't even mentioned the most important part: the editing. Nonlinear editing? Even ten years ago, that started around $20k. Today, it comes with any iMac.
Similarly, anyone can get an acceptable recording studio in their house for under $2k.
People can afford to own power tools that my father's generation could only dream about.
I could go on, but I think the point is made. Of course there are amateurs doing pro-level work. There always have been! But now the means are readily available to open up the opportunities to far more people; it should be no surprise that more people are taking those opportunities. That these same people are having ideas that hadn't been thought of by the "Pros" seems almost self-evident. The more minds on a subject, the more ideas.
OK, following up a question with a question:
... although I can't seem to find them online. Maybe my Google-fu is weak today. I dunno.
I know California has laws on the books about electronic surveillance
In any case, I have my house under electronic surveillance as part of a security system. I've got video feeding into Motion (http://motion.sourceforge.net), and recording any events. Some of the cameras are obvious, others are quite well hidden. I have signs posted by the front door stating that the house is being monitored by "live video systems."
Anyone know where to look up the legal framework I need to know to defend this system in the event it's necessary? I'd hate to get a burglar to court, only to be sued for invasion of privacy or something.
The primary real danger from a dirty bomb (outside of the immediate blast radius) is that the populace panics in their haste to get away.
Big scared crowds tend to break things, trample one another, and lose their normal respect for things like charity towards their fellow human beings, not to mention law, property, and traffic regulations.
Plus it gives all the assholes an excuse to drive their Hummers on the sidewalk and over your lawn.
Let's face it people, voter fraud is easy with or without computers.
Personal Anecdote:
My polling station got upgraded from the punch-out-the-chad-with-a-stylus system to a poke-the-spot-with-an-ink-stylus system between the last two elections.
My area is heavily Democratic. For efficiency's sake, the polling area has five carrels for Democrats, and two carrels for Republicans. As part of the semi-legendary radical socialist wing of the Republican party, I was waiting for one of the Republican carrels to open up. It was taking a long time, as an elderly Republican neighbor of mine was trying to vote. He complained to the polling place staff that the stylus was not poking out the chads. To demonstrate that it was OK, they pulled a blank ballot off the pad, stuck it in the machine, and stamped a few (possibly) random votes, and pulled it out to show him that the machine was, in fact, working. They then tossed the ballot away. (He was convinced they were trying to invalidate his vote, so he ended up punching each vote all the way through anyway).
But no-one batted an eye that they had just created an illegal ballot. When I called the election office to complain, they gave me a song and dance about how it would have been impossible for them to insert it into the ballot box without raising red flags, how the register would not match, etc. But they don't let you insert you ballot directly into the box yourself; you hand it to someone and you watch them put it into the box. It would be trivial to do a quick palming of one ballot and insertion of another.
With the last election being so close, it would only take a few votes per polling station to throw an election. Bruce Schneier calculated it out in a recent article in terms of cost per vote, and it was quite low. Sure, it would be more expensive and would involve more people to do it in the old-fashioned low-tech way than it would with Diebold's patented cheating system, but the difference is only a factor of two or so. Given the stakes in a national election, that's down in the noise.
So basically, you either have to trust the system and believe that people will not cheat in the election, or assume that cheating is ubiquitous regardless of the physical system used.
#cynicism on
OK: cynicism mode on
In other words, We The People are fucked, we have been fucked, and we will continue to be fucked.
#cynicism off
ERROR: Cynicism mode cannot be disabled.
You know, you're right. After I posted, I started thinking ... uh ... DB2? Universe? Oracle?
Still, this seems like more of an escalation of hostilities. IBM and Oracle have always been big wary sumo wrestlers circling one another in the professional services and business support system arenas. I suspect (though I don't have the energy to look up SEC filings) that these components of their businesses outweigh the database portions.
... was heard to say "Never mind. I'll just buy them too."
Kind of interesting, actually. These could be the first hairline fractures in the Vast Anti-Microsoft Pro-Linux Corporate Alliance.
It could have potentially profound effects in the world of Corporate Linux. Then again, it probably won't. Expect the MS and SCO FUD machines to spin it that way, though.
Oracle may be big, but going up against IBM is a bad strategy. As the old joke went in the "IBM is gonna buy Apple!" days:
Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?
A: IBM.
... improvements in Braking technology are pretty damn cool.
I have antilocks, which definitely saved the life of a pedestrian last Saturday, and may have saved me and/or other people involved in an accident. A drunk/insane/distracted driver in an Acura pulled a U-turn immediately in front of an '87 Suburban that was going around 45 mph. The Suburban hit the Acura headon, and proceeded to fly half-airborn into my lane (I was two lengths behind and a lane to the left). To avoid the flying SUV and the other wreckage that was rapidly filling the street in an uncontrolled way, I braked hard and swerved, ending up on the sidewalk, just a few feet from a panicking pedestrian.
This was a situation of millisecond tolerances. I think I'm pretty good with performance driving -- I know how to handle sharp braking. But there's no way I could have maintained control given all the factors. That ABS saved that pedestrian, and prevented me from slamming into an evolving collision situation.
So maybe future developments will include sonar controls on cars to prevent them from enabling U-turns into rapidly moving targets. Those'd have to be pretty intelligent, though, since there're lots of situations where you want to break into rapid moving traffic with reasonably narrow gaps. It's also have to be carefully calibrated to prevent problems on narrow mountain roads where (to the sonar at least) it may appear like cliff faces are approaching at 50mph on those inside curves...
But the yellowcake in question was pre-91!
Still, "in this context" is just your definition for WMD. If, by challenging this definition, I become a "radical leftist," we have just ceased to have any grounds for a meaningful dialogue. Feel free to call me other names you feel like, but I'll have been forced to stop taking you seriously.
I personally don't find it silly to define the word "weapon" to mean something that works. Webster certainly never says anything about "potential" weapons. Neither, really, did Bush. He was talking about actual, usable weapons.
In Bush's own words:
"Some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them." (in reference to Chemical and Biological weapons).
and
"In defiance of pledges to the UN [Iraq] has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons."
I'm not in this discussion to argue about the war, or its justifications. I'm concerned about the redefinition of language used in a bunch of those justifications. But it seems to me that it's not the "radical leftists" who have tried to redefine what the Administration was talking about when they raised the spectre of WMDs.
OK. I hate the partisan game that gets played. I usually try to stay out of it. I'm not always successful.
Here's a case where I'm not.
Yellowcake uranium from pre-Gulf War I does not qualify as a WMD, as used in the justification for Gulf War II.
It's pretty clear from the current evidence that the only countries possessing stocks of WMDs are:
Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, United States. It would be plausible to add Iran and North Korea to that list, although in all likelihood neither country is quite there yet. North Korea is reputed to be further along in their development. South Africa evidently had the bomb, but claims to have dismantled their stockpile of six devices. Several foremer-Soviet republics (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine) gave their nukes back to Russia, or destroyed them, or sold them to AlQaida, depending on which reports you believe.
(Sources for above assertions available upon suitably impressive challenge. Otherwise, I'll just play the "Hell, this is Slashdot; I don't need no stinkin' facts!" card.)
if one were willing to make a legal battle out of it
Yes.
But, of course, by disenfranchising those who can't afford housing, much less laywers, there's not much chance of that.
Well, maybe. It could be that with deeper knowledge, the question is not meaningful. For example, I state that the Gostak distims the doshes. This is neither true nor false if the Gostak is nonexistant, distimming is actually fragonarding, and doshes are really just an observable side-effect of boradas nikto-ing a Klatuu.
That's probably not the best example, but it seems to me that there are questions that are in and of themselves not valid.
I suppose someone who actually knows something about logic can correct me here :)
I know.
However, I am going to assume that you are referring to the Harvard Mark II...
Actually, I was just making it all up. The oldest machine I've actually used in person was a PDP-11.
My old man had a machine with delay-line memory, but it wasn't at the house and I wasn't allowed to touch it :) I don't recall the make / model. It had 12-bit words, with, if I recall correctly, 15 panel switches for data entry: bits 0-11, clear, store, and jump/run. There may have been a halt switch or some others, it's all sort of hazy. I do remember that the jump/run switch was right next to the clear switch, and on more than one occasion I'd hear cursing as memory got blanked instead of a program run. But this was all a long time ago, so I may have that wrong too.
I have a model 33 in my room...
Glock model 33? They're only noisy for brief periods of time. Oh, perhaps you mean Teletype Corp ASR33? Man, we had one of those in our machine room, and, yeah, they could create quite a racket. I hope you don't try to sleep in there!
I see a lot of suggestions to use tape: electrical, duct, gaffer's, etc.
I don't know what's the matter with you kids these days.
When I was in college and being kept awake by the glow of all those vacuum tubes, I'd attack them relentlessly with a big can of black enamel spray paint. Sure, made it harder to identify which tube blew when stuff shut down. But you can generally tell by the temperature, if you hold the tip of your finger to the side of the tube. And a good spray of enamel keeps the light way down. Remember to turn the machine off before spraying, though, because most spray paints use a flammable propellant, and those tubes can get hot under heavy use.
The tube machine, needless to say, was a huge improvement over the machine I had in my room the previous year. I set up a web server on my Burroughs Mark II. That machine didn't have any lights of any sort, but the fuckin' racket the relays would make! Especially when someone tried to download some ASCII porn, and it used ever one of the memory cells in the 4kb array. If you haven't heard 4096 relays clattering at once, you don't know what noise is!
(and if you actually believe any of this, you kids are worse off today than even a old curmudgeon like me can imagine)
This is one that always confounded me.
Books that deal with issues of race are often banned by people who object to racism. I sometimes think it's because they haven't actually read the books, but have merely done the kind of sanctimonious counting of "offensive" terms or situations (e.g., like the CAP Alerts. Or anybody remember that lady who talked to the Meese commission, and enumerated the number of times the word "horny" was used in Catcher in the Rye?). You could argue this for several of the books:
Huck Finn was clearly written with an anti-racist agenda, but was written ironically, from the perspective of an ignorant kid. It contains the word "nigger" many, many times. As a result of these two factors, it's considered by some as inappropriate for children.
To Kill A Mockingbird deals with a rape trial, and therefore could be considered inappropriate for kids. It also contains a lot of racial slurs and violence.
I think what's underlying the attacks on these books, though, is less these characteristics (which are usually the nominal reasons for banning them), but the anti-authority themes running through the books. They question the conventional morality of the times they describe. People who don't like that kind of thinking may find that mroe offensive than all of the ostensible faults of the books. They don't wnat to encourage this kind of questioning (of course, they're way too late to try to stop it now.)
You can see a similar effect, by the way, against some of the best anti-authoritarian books like Animal Farm ("it makes kids think animals can talk!"), Brave New World ("but it mentions sex!"), Slaugherhouse Five ("it's filthy!"), and so forth.
Heinrich Heine said:
"Dort, wo man Buecher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen."
or
In the place where one burns books, in the end they will also burn people.
Even if I get clever?
And write about the year US and the Vatican established full diplomatic relations? Or the year when Apple released a computer with the humorous name "Macintosh?" Or make an aside mention of the Los Angeles Olympics? Or talk about the publication of "Neuromancer?"
So you're the bastard who prevented the rest of us from getting a chance to use the Public Copy of the textbooks!
You singlehandedly increased the cost of my education by about $5k.
(the term "YOU" in this context is to be construed as the general "you" and indicating a hypothetical person or class of persons exhibiting the behavior described in parent post. Under no circumstances should this post be construed as being directly referring to any specific individual, except in the case where they really did only attend engineering school and do not practice law nor have any lawyer friends; regardless, damages shall be limited to the monetary value of the electrons contained in this post or $0.01 US whichever is the lesser value).
When using a Markov Chain text generator, it helps to have a seed length greater than one.
If you want really good Markov Trolls, I'd recommend a seed length of three; for a more schizophrenic feel, go for two.
All I can say is that is fucking awesome.
Clearly. Well, I warned you, right up there in the subject, that it was a Grumpy Old Man Rant. I feel like I did my part to provide full disclosure that I was going to post a contrarian diatribe.
If you don't need an MP3 player in your phone, you can still buy one with an MP3 player. Here's a tip: don't use it.
Well, here's the deal. I don't much care about MP3 players one way or the other. But each added feature adds to 1) the cost of the device, 2) the number of components that may fail, 3) the power consumption of the device, and in the case of cameras, 4) where I can bring the device without causing problems.
I'm happy to see all the great capabilities of your phone. I'm glad it makes you happy too.
Perhaps you want me to bring my notebook to Blockbuster
No, I really want you to carry an IBM S/360, which is the only appropriate machine for the job. If you're going to do databases, I say do 'em right.
Perhaps you want me to bring my notebook to restaurants so I can show people photos.
Having done this, I don't really recommend it. Young kids have this tendancy to want to push stewed carrots into your keyboard. I'd recommend a Konica Slide Projector (and shooting on Ektachrome).
I use Pocket Slides to collaborate on PowerPoint presentations at lunch.
Hey, while I'm giving advice, I'll say you should really just relax over lunch. Working while eating causes indigestion, stress, and is indicated in numerous other health problems. As for dealing with the slides, I'd say that that Konica projector is still a good call. Less chance of getting hollandaise sauce on the presentation that way.
OK, I take back my previous statement about the IBM and the slide projector. Really, I don't want you to do anything in particular. Except maybe have a nice, peaceful day somewhere where nasty grumpy rants can't annoy you.
I frankly don't give a fuck what you think a PDA is for.
You obviously do, otherwise you wouldn't have felt it necessary to respond with suych vigor.
Go buy a PDA that's right for you. I would recommend the Treo 180, but the screen is crap.
Thanks, but I already have an ancient Kyocera 6035. Like the Treo, the screen is crap, but it meets my needs. Thing's rock solid, does everything I need. Sure, a bit more speed, more memory, and bright colors would be nice, but I don't really need them.
But don't tell me that I'm somehow wrong because I use a PDA for more than keeping my schedule.
I don't recall telling you that. I certainly use my PDA for more than keeping my schedule, and I would hate to be hypocritical about it. And I'll refrain form telling you that you really want a laptop. Even though I suspect you secretly do. Man, those things are cool. Some of those neat 2.8GHz P4s are pretty rad. You know you want one. You know you do...
I did read your whole comment. I was merely disagreeing with you on the definition of inferior.
... I'd answer "toy!!")
Now, if you'd said Palm OS was inferior because it didn't have memory protection, preemptive multitasking, or something along those lines, we could have had a nice happy conversation. I've done Palm development, and have a love/hate relationship with the platform.
My rant differentiating PDA and notebook capabilities was merely my own opinion. I carry a smartphone myself, and love it. Perhaps we're really in agreement about everything but the definition of PDA -- your definition seems closer to a fully functional computer in a tiny form-factor, whereas mine is a more limited machine optimized for a few tasks. Whatever.
(and in answer to your last question
Hm.
My browser's user agent string claims to be "Mozilla/4.8 [en] (TRS-80 Model I; U)"
You'd be surprised how many sites that insist on "modern browsers" still work.
Ph34r my '1337 Tr@sh-80!