They should somehow connect it conceptually to Star Citizen. There seems to be no limits to the gullibility, er, resources of the funding crowd for that.
"The railroads" is a pretty bad example (at least in the US).
The US government grandfathered land for sale, or otherwise facilitated the purchase/theft of the land, but the bulk of the railroads were NOT built by the government.
"Young Staten Island men impersonate police officers to skip line to buy Grand Theft Auto V Kirolos Abdel Sayed, 19, Matthew Kirshen, 20, and Frank Santanastoso, 19, drove to the Staten Island Mall in what appeared to be an unmarked car complete with lights and sirens only to have their fun ended by real police officers."
Another American here, and I entirely agree. And I don't really mind the NSA spying stuff. I've just always thought that distributing the infrastructure is a good idea - even if that means that parts of it become shady, dangerous places, other parts are run by their governments, etc. Universality is better than monopoly.
The page is down, so hopefully someone can explain: how can the GDP of a system which is itself only a fraction of the planet, exceed the value of the planet?
If, as I suspect, this is calculated by totaling transactions alone - ie if I sell you an apple for $1, and then buy it back for $1, we've just added $2 to the total GDP of the system...well then my next question is why we even pay attention to such a worthless number in the first place?
It's not just China. I'm a rather cutting-edge tech person, but even I have left XP on my work laptop and a couple of our home systems simply because they simply can't run Win7, nor do I see any compelling reason to upgrade - they function perfectly fine for the limited uses they serve (ie one's a minecraft server for a dozen friends, the other is a guest-internet machine for my kids' friends that come over).
Not to mention, the HUGE bulk of computers that I support - ie my extended family - are all XP.
Further, isn't about the 34th time "XP end of life" has been announced? I was told they would NEVER be patching xp again, and I just GOT another patch last week.
Which is true as far as it goes, but... this sort of story IS exactly that. The public's response to the act of an organization.
The fact is that most organizations have some god-complex assholes in them somewhere, other organizations have lots of them.
When a federal agency is given gross and overwhelming powers "for emergencies" then the limits on such assholes' powers need to be strictly circumscribed and people that tend that way need to be slapped down crazy-hard.
Or perhaps the answer's not (as the teachers' unions have asserted) simply to keep pouring more cash into the system - particularly when they're going to waste it on ipads.
Personally, I'd rather see more arts and humanities programs in schools than another class equipped with ipads.
Certainly they're concerned, but honestly, the drones that follow every whiff of apple are going to do just that. There's no convincing them that anything not-apple is any good, it's nigh unto a religious zeal, so that audience has ALWAYS been lost to anyone not named Jobs.
Nevertheless, this has equally spawned a smaller but dedicated cadre of apple-haters, who will use any service that ISN'T apple for a number of reasons.
Personally, I think one could have a comfortably successful business based solely on the latter. No, your customers wouldn't be the prius-driving, precious metrosexual intelligentsia, but I think Pandora could survive without them.
""The picture that seems to be emerging is that they were a fairly dynamic species that went through local extinctions, expansions and migrations. It is quite exciting that so much was going on," he told BBC News."
The idea that they were a dynamic and occasionally migratory species, yet died out because they couldn't find GRASS seems a little odd. I mean, it's not like the last Ice Age ENTIRELY covered the planet with glaciers.
"They found that the species nearly went extinct 120,000 years ago when the world warmed up for a while. Numbers are thought to have dropped from several million to tens of thousands but numbers recovered as the planet entered another ice age."
So wait, I thought the theory was that they couldn't find food due to climate change? They almost went extinct when the climate warmed UP? Remember, we're talking about a climate SUBSTANTIALLY colder than today, with sea levels 120m or more below today's levels. The "warming" was to levels still quite a bit cooler than today....and grass is pretty common?
"The researchers also found that the decline that led to their eventual extinction began 20,000 years ago when the Ice Age was at its height, rather than 14,000 years ago when the world began to warm again as previously thought.
They speculate that it was so cold that the grass on which they fed became scarce. The decline was spurred on as the Ice Age ended, possibly because the grassland on which the creatures thrived was replaced by forests in the south and tundra in the north."
"But from about 20,000 years ago onwards, the population started the dramatic decline that led to its extinction, first on the mainland about 10,000 years ago, and finally on some outlying Arctic islands. The pattern seems to fit forcing by natural climate change: any role of humans in the process has yet to be demonstrated".'
This pattern fits no such thing. Maximum glaciation was reached about 22,000 years ago. Thus the mammoth population started its dramatic decline shortly after WARMING began. Now, granted, it's possible this was an inertial effect, the way it gets coldest in the morning as the sun is coming up, but the fact that the bulk of their decline was only 10,000 years ago (when the climate had significantly warmed and grasses were again widespread), their last remnants (that we know of) were on ARCTIC islands (why would they have gone North?), are both far better fits to the "human success killed them off" theories.
Frankly, this all sounds like bollocks to me, unless your sole goal was to try to spread more FUD that "warming" - of any kind, in any context, and from any start point - is "bad"...and that would be somewhere between politics and religion, not science.
I know, it's a struggle but as with most posts in Slashdot, one is rarely replying to the individual, but speaking to the cloud.
The fact is that people with an inherently statist viewpoint (and beyond that, federalist viewpoint) have overwhelmed US society, mainly as a result of deliberate indoctrination on the "joy of government" by the (statist) educational establishment.
Therefore, libertarians are often caricatured as desiring naked Mogadishu-like anarchy, without that even being recognized as hyperbolic.
"What Libertarians tend to actually want is the ability for the more powerful private actor to take advantage of the less powerful private actor with impunity."
Is "dkleinsc" the word for 'strawman' in your native tongue?
Why in the HELL would Libertarians want that? And where would you come up with such an asinine interpretation?
You can form whatever collective you like and become as powerful as you want, whether you call it a company, a guild, a union, a government, or a state.
Just don't force me (or anyone else) into your collective. In your example, as long as there's not government legislation forcing me to sell to ADM or nothing, then I'm free to sell to my neighbor Bill for whatever price I can convince him to pay.
Most libertarians, for that matter, approve of the ROOT functions of government - roads, collective defense, etc. Hell, most of us even recognize the idea of taxation...as long as there is a connection between the taxpayer, and what the funds are used for.
As with most "question" headlines, the answer's probably "no".
TVs are cheap, and usually of extremely high quality. If you've got a nice HD picture, no ghosting, and good color - fuck it, don't fall for their "you need to upgrade to the current tech" nonsense.
We're talking about the government doing just about anything they want, and we're wondering if they'd restrain themselves according to something as little as the "letter" of the law?
Isn't it curious that *most* of the discussions on arctic ice coverage were solely about extent until recently? Now when ice area is increasing, the discussion switches critically to volume of ice.
The regular amount of goalpost-shifting by "global warming" - sorry, "climate change" - alarmists is frenetic.
"Weather on Earth might be shifting in part because of human activity,"....It sort of starts to sound like Medivalist's cant, doesn't it?
In the same sense that, for them, God suffused everything ("Glory be to God, the cow calved today and I didn't stub my toe!"), AGW is referenced ever-more frequently entirely out of context ("Humans are changing the climate, and my coffee was too hot this morning, I think I'll read the paper!").
Slashdot Mirror
They should somehow connect it conceptually to Star Citizen. There seems to be no limits to the gullibility, er, resources of the funding crowd for that.
"The railroads" is a pretty bad example (at least in the US).
The US government grandfathered land for sale, or otherwise facilitated the purchase/theft of the land, but the bulk of the railroads were NOT built by the government.
One has a $16 billion budget.
The other nearly $60 billion.
Guess which is which?
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/young-men-impersonate-cops-buy-gta-4-article-1.1459299
"Young Staten Island men impersonate police officers to skip line to buy Grand Theft Auto V
Kirolos Abdel Sayed, 19, Matthew Kirshen, 20, and Frank Santanastoso, 19, drove to the Staten Island Mall in what appeared to be an unmarked car complete with lights and sirens only to have their fun ended by real police officers."
Another American here, and I entirely agree. And I don't really mind the NSA spying stuff. I've just always thought that distributing the infrastructure is a good idea - even if that means that parts of it become shady, dangerous places, other parts are run by their governments, etc. Universality is better than monopoly.
...not to carp, doesn't the president have a few more IMPORTANT things on his plate right now?
Or is this just tossing technological bread and circuses to the masses, in the hopes we won't notice all the other stuff that's going wrong?
Maybe this time we'll get a real six million dollar man.
The page is down, so hopefully someone can explain: how can the GDP of a system which is itself only a fraction of the planet, exceed the value of the planet?
If, as I suspect, this is calculated by totaling transactions alone - ie if I sell you an apple for $1, and then buy it back for $1, we've just added $2 to the total GDP of the system...well then my next question is why we even pay attention to such a worthless number in the first place?
It's not just China.
I'm a rather cutting-edge tech person, but even I have left XP on my work laptop and a couple of our home systems simply because they simply can't run Win7, nor do I see any compelling reason to upgrade - they function perfectly fine for the limited uses they serve (ie one's a minecraft server for a dozen friends, the other is a guest-internet machine for my kids' friends that come over).
Not to mention, the HUGE bulk of computers that I support - ie my extended family - are all XP.
Further, isn't about the 34th time "XP end of life" has been announced? I was told they would NEVER be patching xp again, and I just GOT another patch last week.
Which is true as far as it goes, but ... this sort of story IS exactly that. The public's response to the act of an organization.
The fact is that most organizations have some god-complex assholes in them somewhere, other organizations have lots of them.
When a federal agency is given gross and overwhelming powers "for emergencies" then the limits on such assholes' powers need to be strictly circumscribed and people that tend that way need to be slapped down crazy-hard.
I keep hearing this - was this the "talking point" posted on DU the day this story came out?
Because I looked it up at NOAA and this doesn't look nearly as 'scary'.
http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z36/hogan99/screenhunter_561-sep-14-06-01_zps52aaf3b0.jpg
Or perhaps the answer's not (as the teachers' unions have asserted) simply to keep pouring more cash into the system - particularly when they're going to waste it on ipads.
Personally, I'd rather see more arts and humanities programs in schools than another class equipped with ipads.
Certainly they're concerned, but honestly, the drones that follow every whiff of apple are going to do just that. There's no convincing them that anything not-apple is any good, it's nigh unto a religious zeal, so that audience has ALWAYS been lost to anyone not named Jobs.
Nevertheless, this has equally spawned a smaller but dedicated cadre of apple-haters, who will use any service that ISN'T apple for a number of reasons.
Personally, I think one could have a comfortably successful business based solely on the latter. No, your customers wouldn't be the prius-driving, precious metrosexual intelligentsia, but I think Pandora could survive without them.
...the only thing that would make this even better is if these 'diseases' were fatal.
Any disease spreadable to the special snowflakes that could catch such 'diseases' over social media could ONLY be a win for Darwin generally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari_F40
(1987...top speed, 201.4 mph)
The BBC News version is pretty damn confusing.
""The picture that seems to be emerging is that they were a fairly dynamic species that went through local extinctions, expansions and migrations. It is quite exciting that so much was going on," he told BBC News."
The idea that they were a dynamic and occasionally migratory species, yet died out because they couldn't find GRASS seems a little odd. I mean, it's not like the last Ice Age ENTIRELY covered the planet with glaciers.
"They found that the species nearly went extinct 120,000 years ago when the world warmed up for a while. Numbers are thought to have dropped from several million to tens of thousands but numbers recovered as the planet entered another ice age."
So wait, I thought the theory was that they couldn't find food due to climate change? They almost went extinct when the climate warmed UP? Remember, we're talking about a climate SUBSTANTIALLY colder than today, with sea levels 120m or more below today's levels. The "warming" was to levels still quite a bit cooler than today....and grass is pretty common?
"The researchers also found that the decline that led to their eventual extinction began 20,000 years ago when the Ice Age was at its height, rather than 14,000 years ago when the world began to warm again as previously thought.
They speculate that it was so cold that the grass on which they fed became scarce. The decline was spurred on as the Ice Age ended, possibly because the grassland on which the creatures thrived was replaced by forests in the south and tundra in the north."
"But from about 20,000 years ago onwards, the population started the dramatic decline that led to its extinction, first on the mainland about 10,000 years ago, and finally on some outlying Arctic islands. The pattern seems to fit forcing by natural climate change: any role of humans in the process has yet to be demonstrated".'
This pattern fits no such thing. Maximum glaciation was reached about 22,000 years ago. Thus the mammoth population started its dramatic decline shortly after WARMING began. Now, granted, it's possible this was an inertial effect, the way it gets coldest in the morning as the sun is coming up, but the fact that the bulk of their decline was only 10,000 years ago (when the climate had significantly warmed and grasses were again widespread), their last remnants (that we know of) were on ARCTIC islands (why would they have gone North?), are both far better fits to the "human success killed them off" theories.
Frankly, this all sounds like bollocks to me, unless your sole goal was to try to spread more FUD that "warming" - of any kind, in any context, and from any start point - is "bad"...and that would be somewhere between politics and religion, not science.
I know, it's a struggle but as with most posts in Slashdot, one is rarely replying to the individual, but speaking to the cloud.
The fact is that people with an inherently statist viewpoint (and beyond that, federalist viewpoint) have overwhelmed US society, mainly as a result of deliberate indoctrination on the "joy of government" by the (statist) educational establishment.
Therefore, libertarians are often caricatured as desiring naked Mogadishu-like anarchy, without that even being recognized as hyperbolic.
"What Libertarians tend to actually want is the ability for the more powerful private actor to take advantage of the less powerful private actor with impunity."
Is "dkleinsc" the word for 'strawman' in your native tongue?
Why in the HELL would Libertarians want that? And where would you come up with such an asinine interpretation?
You can form whatever collective you like and become as powerful as you want, whether you call it a company, a guild, a union, a government, or a state.
Just don't force me (or anyone else) into your collective.
In your example, as long as there's not government legislation forcing me to sell to ADM or nothing, then I'm free to sell to my neighbor Bill for whatever price I can convince him to pay.
Most libertarians, for that matter, approve of the ROOT functions of government - roads, collective defense, etc. Hell, most of us even recognize the idea of taxation...as long as there is a connection between the taxpayer, and what the funds are used for.
So really, your whole assertion is just bollocks.
As with most "question" headlines, the answer's probably "no".
TVs are cheap, and usually of extremely high quality. If you've got a nice HD picture, no ghosting, and good color - fuck it, don't fall for their "you need to upgrade to the current tech" nonsense.
You DON'T.
3d is silly, btw.
I think you're touching on an important point re the objectivity of science.
James Hansen departed being a 'scientist' and became a 'scientifically-literate advocate' ages ago.
We're talking about the government doing just about anything they want, and we're wondering if they'd restrain themselves according to something as little as the "letter" of the law?
+2 Funny.
+4 Sad.
Isn't it curious that *most* of the discussions on arctic ice coverage were solely about extent until recently? Now when ice area is increasing, the discussion switches critically to volume of ice.
The regular amount of goalpost-shifting by "global warming" - sorry, "climate change" - alarmists is frenetic.
Except that year-to-year variations are REGULARLY trotted out as "proof" of AGW when they appear to benefit that argument.
We call it "a library".
Loans out ebooks free to anyone with a library card.
"Weather on Earth might be shifting in part because of human activity,"....It sort of starts to sound like Medivalist's cant, doesn't it?
In the same sense that, for them, God suffused everything ("Glory be to God, the cow calved today and I didn't stub my toe!"), AGW is referenced ever-more frequently entirely out of context ("Humans are changing the climate, and my coffee was too hot this morning, I think I'll read the paper!").
Funny, that.