I like how he egregiously throws Gabrielle Giffords into the conversation, as if terroristic acts of violence against authority/government figures weren't part of the frikkin' job. (If I was a clever/. poster I'd do the neat thing where each word of "part of the frikkin' job" would be a link to a separate story of political assassination from Abraham Lincoln, to Sissi of Austria, to President McKinley, to Archduke Ferdinand...)
I'm not saying what happened to her wasn't tragic; I'm saying it's PART of the position when one takes a seat of authority that ultimately, someone may object (crazy, right?).
And since William Tell, the ability of one of the governed to "reach out and touch" their government members has been ever-increasing (or is our society so incredibly safe and comfortable that we've forgotten this basic fact?).
For him to draw a line connecting some office vandalism to attempted murder is anyway pretty specious.
I don't think you're an antiamerican foreigner at all.
I think you have an excessively optimistic view of what the USA is. The US isn't special. Like ANY/EVERY country, it pursues its own geopolitical goals to the utmost limit of its power and influence. A powerful, dominant country can 'get away with' more. It's true today, as it's been true forever.
If Liechtenstein was the worlds global superpower, and saw the need to do this, they would do it too.
If anything, I'd argue that - as clumsily as the US has behaved over the last 50-60 years - they've acted with more restraint than any other potential superpower in our system. I doubt the Soviets/Russia, China, or India would self-restrain, or self-criticize nearly as much as the US does.
It's a difficult case; I can easily see this becoming an abusive precedent, where pernicious lawsuits are filed just to block Google/Youtube access to LEGITIMATE information on the web about a candidate.
It seems absurd on the face of it to suggest that it's Google's responsibility to block access to specific data in specific regions according to their local election schedule. If my local town of 1000 people has a mayoral election, can we 'insist' that Google block politically relevant (whatever that mean?) videos in my area for any period of time?
"NASA's woes are a classic case of the Republican game plan: 1) When in power, make grand plans without sweating the details or the cost. 2) When out of power, block all solutions to the problems that arise from your grand plans. 3) When seeking power, blame the opposition for failing to solve the problems you caused."
How is that different from any political party's game plan?
"Smart governments, at least those that also like to keep up true democratic values, will do whatever they can to prevent election fraud. "
Please, pray tell, illuminate me to one of these so-called 'smart governments'.
All I see in the "democracies" of the world are klepto-plutocracies or -oligarchies in which a demonstratably select few collude to maintain their hold on power (if not individually, then at least as a group) and generally refine policies that 'motivate' the easily-convinced masses to "democratically" validate their hold on power as they're occasionally required.
Orwell's prescience in writing 1984 wasn't the ever-hungry authoritarianism of goverment; that was recognized as long ago by Enlightenment philosophers and the US founding fathers. No, sadly his insight was how easily the polis was manipulated into WANTING the bit, bridle, and harness and what they'd put up with to ensure their own comfort and stability.
Didn't we know that would make us vulnerable to climatologically-induced sea-level rise? What craziness! It's almost like we sited our habitations for convenience, not for long-term sustainability.
This would be "Sky is Falling XVII", unless I miss my count?
Let me see if I can get them all: "Peak oil" has been predicted at least 5 or 6 times already (I'm talking about peaks that should have happened, not all the future ones). Overpopulation, concomitant with worldwide famine Nuclear power will most certainly kill us all, and if not that, Ron Reagan will most certainly start a nuclear war. DDT certainly will kill us. Chlorofluorocarbons. Acid Rain. Ice Age *was* predicted by the mass media, but we didn't have the internet yet to debunk it immediately. Oh GM crops/"Frankenfoods" for sure. And then of course obesity, AIDS, SARS, bird flu but those are mainly just human killers.
This naturally sets aside 'wrath of god' stuff that Islam suggests we'll all face for letting women wear pants, or the Rapture that evangelicals suggest will resolve "Sky Is Falling VII and VIII".
Oh no, panic panic panic. Sorry, I simply don't care. If it happens, it happens; humans are the most adaptable eukaryote this planet has ever seen. If we can't adapt....oh well. And yes, during the adaptation, millions may die. (shrug). Perhaps it's 24/7 news coverage, perhaps it's just me - I can't summon up the energy to give a shit if 400 million nearly-starving South Asians are flooded out. I really don't care. If it helps, I don't expect THEM to care when a tornado goes through my town.
In a philosophical sense, I'm not certain that this universalization of tragedy - in which we shed a tear over every shitty thing that happens worldwide - makes sense, except to exploitative media organizations, who instinctively understand that we are morbidly interested in disaster.
...as long as it logically is applied to everyone - meaning that burkhas ALSO have to be removed for ID pictures, and no more political-correctness-motivated concessions made.
I'm not sure that illustrates that you've 'reversed their moral compass'. I think it shows how vulnerable people are to carefully-phrased questions, and once they've dismissed the 'contemplation' of a question in their mind, it's resolved and - if presented with something that they believe indicates they've already cogitated on it - they won't think it through.
So really it shows that we don't deeply think on everything particularly if we think we've already thought it through, which is hardly a shocking conclusion?
A tech-savvy site like slashdot says: "...it's time for businesses who are running a perfectly adequate OS for their systems, with which their users are completely comfortable, and which runs all the software that they need to function across 100% of the needed daily tasks needs to (for no reason) REPLACE this OS with one that requires significant hardware upgrades and retraining, and in some cases new purchases of other software no longer functioning in the new OS" but phrases it as: "...it's time for the enterprise to stop dragging its tail."".
Pardon me, but it's pretty fucking sad that the marketing-driven 'upgrade for no reason' treadmill reaches here, where (you'd think) functionality and practicality MIGHT be more important than buying the latest, newest thing from MS.
"...One of the lessons sept 11 should have taught americans is that their notions of 'power' are outdated and whimsically useless, you could have nuked Kabul or Riyadh into the ground in retaliation but what would that have gotten you?..."
This has been obvious at least since 1950. Military doctrine since at least 1960. At the end of WW2 we thought "aha, we have nukes, nobody will mess with us!", by 1950 it was clear that nukes had psychologically escalated to a level of prominence that they were unusable short of armageddon....and thus essentially useless in any other context.
MAD is a check-option; powers with nuclear arms have long recognized that overwhelming power is paralysis and impotence in lower scales of force-projection. Nukes are nothing more than a guarantee against complete defeat; short of that, a rational state wouldn't use them against a peer opponent.
This is why the idea of a radical Islamic state like Iran getting nukes is making the powerful (not just the US, everyone) nervous; they clearly don't subscribe to what we would call a 'rational calculus' of geopolitics, and conceivably could feel that nuking Jerusalem or (more likely) Tel Aviv is WORTH the risk of annihilatory consequences.
So to your point, this isn't something "sept 11 should have taught Americans". American policy makers have understood this existentially since at least Eisenhower.
What we discovered in the Gulf War I era was that our Cold War concepts of encirclement and containment (which had arguably worked vs the Soviets) didn't apply vs non-state or minor state actors. We didn't have to tiptoe around using covert operations and deniable second parties to implement our policy goals; without the Soviets immediately there to bid everything into a nuclear-potential crisis, we could throw hefty conventional forces into play and once again act like a superpower historically acted.
"Not conservative. A conservative would want things to stay the same, to oppose human change for good or bad solely because its a human change, would want to conserve natural resources, be a "good steward of Gods creation" or whatever religious claim floats their boat of preserving the status quo."
That's just idiotic semantics, not an even an actual point. If you really need an education on how conservative 'applies' to the global warming argument, it's fairly clear that 'conservative' in this context means resisting a quasi-religious eco-marxist dogma (which is really only a nicely-polished re-hash of the same sky-is-falling hippy crap we've heard in other contexts since the 1970s).
By your original reasoning, a "liberal" would be about COMPULSIVE, constant change.
Further, according to your logic Obama, by remaining in office (as he was yesterday) is ipso facto, a "conservative". As a true liberal he should: - divorce his wife and become gay - quit office, leave politics, and go into business - spend only his own money.
Except for the fact that, when an emergency comes, the budget magically opens and people stop counting their pennies. That would mean that if/when the IPv4 crunch comes to a point where we HAVE to confront it, IT dept's will get fresh new budgets to buy the NEW Sun server that *does* have IPv6 functionality. I'm not saying omitting it was a good idea, but cynically it might make sense.
Of course, you're assuming that whatever is traveling at >c is moving through our tangible universe. For example, the game Traveller2300 posited a "stutterwarp" drive that flicked the ship forward through an alternate dimension only about 100m. By cycling this drive say, 10 million times/second, you'd be traveling through our space at what, about 3.3c? yet not actually ever moving, building momentum, or (critically) having the problems you describe.
I'm not saying such is even possible, but I guess if we're fantasizing about a warp drive, it's not too much less conceivable that it would somehow bend the laws of physics that little bit more.
FromTFA:"...2.46 million gallons of wastewater produced annually by the typical data center, which must be pumped offsite and treated..."
Why does cooling water used in a typical data center need to be treated? Isn't it pretty much just flowing through stacks and carrying heat out to radiators or cooling towers? What in the process of gaining/releasing heat requires subsequent treatment?
Or is it just that the cooling systems haven't even been designed with the care needed to ensure the water flowing through them isn't tainted with lead solder, etc.?
...and your partisan mendacity is why we have such a gridlocked infantile congress.
Let me see if I can recap in 50 words or less: Dems controlling congress fail to pass any budget 2009 to present. Government running out of money, already borrowed to the hilt. - Republican solution: we need to stop spending more than we have. - Democratic solution: we need to "invest" (read: spend) more to get the economy moving.
Blaming Republicans for not wanting to spend more money is like blaming someone for refusing to use gasoline to try to put out a house fire.
Theoretically there's plenty of wind power. Theoretically there's plenty of solar power. Theoretically there's plenty of geothermal power. Theoretically there's plenty of power in the vacuum of space.
It's that niggling practicality of GETTING and USING that energy that confounds us.
Arguably, I'd say the only one that's really proven itself over the long term is solar; as the Earth is essentially a closed system with only solar energy as an input, it's proven that there is amply "enough" input solar energy falling on half of the globe at any given time to drive that system.
I find lately that commentators are more often referring to people from earlier eras as if they were stupid, when my interpretation is that they had an equal if not greater capacity for brilliance. "...Also known as Egyptian paste, faience is one of those remarkable crossroads materials that occur now and again in the history of technology. It was invented 7,000 years ago in Egypt, when the Egyptians were still trying to get the hang of pottery and smelting metal. It isnâ(TM)t actually a ceramic, but rather a paste made of quartz or sand, calcite lime and a mixture of alkalis. Because of this, it can be applied directly to wet clay. When the pottery is fired, the paste turns into a brilliant blue-green glaze reminiscent of lapis lazuli, which the Egyptians used faience as a substitute for...."
Atrocious writing aside, this would be an excellent example - how much determined experimentation would it take YOU to develop something like this...at the available tech from 5000 BC? You don't have calculus, you don't even have a basic understanding of chemistry, microscopes, hell, even an accurate thermometer?
It's not even a distribution problem. Shipping is crazy-cheap; go into Target or Wal Mart and look at the folding chairs that you can buy for $12. That's a bulky, awkward thing that doesn't fold particularly small or dense for travel, yet it can be made in China, travel 8000 miles, get unloaded into a distribution center, be stored there, get reloaded into a truck for local delivery and end up on your local shelf for what, less than $6? (I dunno what WalMart's usual margin is.) Likewise, food is crazy-cheap; the US gov't funds the destruction of foodstuffs every year and leaving acres fallow to keep food prices up.
Factually? Sure. Practically? Someone needs to review the term "Cry Wolf" and the ramifications.
Eventually bad shit will happen, yes.
Constantly claiming "it's about to happen now!" means yes, you will eventually be right but don't be surprised that people stop listening long before that point arrives.
Slashdot Mirror
I like how he egregiously throws Gabrielle Giffords into the conversation, as if terroristic acts of violence against authority/government figures weren't part of the frikkin' job. (If I was a clever /. poster I'd do the neat thing where each word of "part of the frikkin' job" would be a link to a separate story of political assassination from Abraham Lincoln, to Sissi of Austria, to President McKinley, to Archduke Ferdinand...)
I'm not saying what happened to her wasn't tragic; I'm saying it's PART of the position when one takes a seat of authority that ultimately, someone may object (crazy, right?).
And since William Tell, the ability of one of the governed to "reach out and touch" their government members has been ever-increasing (or is our society so incredibly safe and comfortable that we've forgotten this basic fact?).
For him to draw a line connecting some office vandalism to attempted murder is anyway pretty specious.
I don't think you're an antiamerican foreigner at all.
I think you have an excessively optimistic view of what the USA is. The US isn't special. Like ANY/EVERY country, it pursues its own geopolitical goals to the utmost limit of its power and influence. A powerful, dominant country can 'get away with' more. It's true today, as it's been true forever.
If Liechtenstein was the worlds global superpower, and saw the need to do this, they would do it too.
If anything, I'd argue that - as clumsily as the US has behaved over the last 50-60 years - they've acted with more restraint than any other potential superpower in our system. I doubt the Soviets/Russia, China, or India would self-restrain, or self-criticize nearly as much as the US does.
It's a difficult case; I can easily see this becoming an abusive precedent, where pernicious lawsuits are filed just to block Google/Youtube access to LEGITIMATE information on the web about a candidate.
It seems absurd on the face of it to suggest that it's Google's responsibility to block access to specific data in specific regions according to their local election schedule. If my local town of 1000 people has a mayoral election, can we 'insist' that Google block politically relevant (whatever that mean?) videos in my area for any period of time?
"NASA's woes are a classic case of the Republican game plan:
1) When in power, make grand plans without sweating the details or the cost.
2) When out of power, block all solutions to the problems that arise from your grand plans.
3) When seeking power, blame the opposition for failing to solve the problems you caused."
How is that different from any political party's game plan?
"Smart governments, at least those that also like to keep up true democratic values, will do whatever they can to prevent election fraud. "
Please, pray tell, illuminate me to one of these so-called 'smart governments'.
All I see in the "democracies" of the world are klepto-plutocracies or -oligarchies in which a demonstratably select few collude to maintain their hold on power (if not individually, then at least as a group) and generally refine policies that 'motivate' the easily-convinced masses to "democratically" validate their hold on power as they're occasionally required.
Orwell's prescience in writing 1984 wasn't the ever-hungry authoritarianism of goverment; that was recognized as long ago by Enlightenment philosophers and the US founding fathers. No, sadly his insight was how easily the polis was manipulated into WANTING the bit, bridle, and harness and what they'd put up with to ensure their own comfort and stability.
We're still living near water?
Didn't we know that would make us vulnerable to climatologically-induced sea-level rise? What craziness! It's almost like we sited our habitations for convenience, not for long-term sustainability.
Stupid monkeys.
This would be "Sky is Falling XVII", unless I miss my count?
Let me see if I can get them all:
"Peak oil" has been predicted at least 5 or 6 times already (I'm talking about peaks that should have happened, not all the future ones).
Overpopulation, concomitant with worldwide famine
Nuclear power will most certainly kill us all, and if not that, Ron Reagan will most certainly start a nuclear war.
DDT certainly will kill us.
Chlorofluorocarbons.
Acid Rain.
Ice Age *was* predicted by the mass media, but we didn't have the internet yet to debunk it immediately.
Oh GM crops/"Frankenfoods" for sure.
And then of course obesity, AIDS, SARS, bird flu but those are mainly just human killers.
This naturally sets aside 'wrath of god' stuff that Islam suggests we'll all face for letting women wear pants, or the Rapture that evangelicals suggest will resolve "Sky Is Falling VII and VIII".
Oh no, panic panic panic. Sorry, I simply don't care. If it happens, it happens; humans are the most adaptable eukaryote this planet has ever seen. If we can't adapt....oh well. And yes, during the adaptation, millions may die. (shrug). Perhaps it's 24/7 news coverage, perhaps it's just me - I can't summon up the energy to give a shit if 400 million nearly-starving South Asians are flooded out. I really don't care. If it helps, I don't expect THEM to care when a tornado goes through my town.
In a philosophical sense, I'm not certain that this universalization of tragedy - in which we shed a tear over every shitty thing that happens worldwide - makes sense, except to exploitative media organizations, who instinctively understand that we are morbidly interested in disaster.
...as long as it logically is applied to everyone - meaning that burkhas ALSO have to be removed for ID pictures, and no more political-correctness-motivated concessions made.
I'm not sure that illustrates that you've 'reversed their moral compass'.
I think it shows how vulnerable people are to carefully-phrased questions, and once they've dismissed the 'contemplation' of a question in their mind, it's resolved and - if presented with something that they believe indicates they've already cogitated on it - they won't think it through.
So really it shows that we don't deeply think on everything particularly if we think we've already thought it through, which is hardly a shocking conclusion?
A tech-savvy site like slashdot says: "...it's time for businesses who are running a perfectly adequate OS for their systems, with which their users are completely comfortable, and which runs all the software that they need to function across 100% of the needed daily tasks needs to (for no reason) REPLACE this OS with one that requires significant hardware upgrades and retraining, and in some cases new purchases of other software no longer functioning in the new OS"
but phrases it as:
"...it's time for the enterprise to stop dragging its tail."".
Pardon me, but it's pretty fucking sad that the marketing-driven 'upgrade for no reason' treadmill reaches here, where (you'd think) functionality and practicality MIGHT be more important than buying the latest, newest thing from MS.
"...One of the lessons sept 11 should have taught americans is that their notions of 'power' are outdated and whimsically useless, you could have nuked Kabul or Riyadh into the ground in retaliation but what would that have gotten you?..."
This has been obvious at least since 1950. Military doctrine since at least 1960. At the end of WW2 we thought "aha, we have nukes, nobody will mess with us!", by 1950 it was clear that nukes had psychologically escalated to a level of prominence that they were unusable short of armageddon....and thus essentially useless in any other context.
MAD is a check-option; powers with nuclear arms have long recognized that overwhelming power is paralysis and impotence in lower scales of force-projection. Nukes are nothing more than a guarantee against complete defeat; short of that, a rational state wouldn't use them against a peer opponent.
This is why the idea of a radical Islamic state like Iran getting nukes is making the powerful (not just the US, everyone) nervous; they clearly don't subscribe to what we would call a 'rational calculus' of geopolitics, and conceivably could feel that nuking Jerusalem or (more likely) Tel Aviv is WORTH the risk of annihilatory consequences.
So to your point, this isn't something "sept 11 should have taught Americans". American policy makers have understood this existentially since at least Eisenhower.
What we discovered in the Gulf War I era was that our Cold War concepts of encirclement and containment (which had arguably worked vs the Soviets) didn't apply vs non-state or minor state actors. We didn't have to tiptoe around using covert operations and deniable second parties to implement our policy goals; without the Soviets immediately there to bid everything into a nuclear-potential crisis, we could throw hefty conventional forces into play and once again act like a superpower historically acted.
"Not conservative. A conservative would want things to stay the same, to oppose human change for good or bad solely because its a human change, would want to conserve natural resources, be a "good steward of Gods creation" or whatever religious claim floats their boat of preserving the status quo."
That's just idiotic semantics, not an even an actual point. If you really need an education on how conservative 'applies' to the global warming argument, it's fairly clear that 'conservative' in this context means resisting a quasi-religious eco-marxist dogma (which is really only a nicely-polished re-hash of the same sky-is-falling hippy crap we've heard in other contexts since the 1970s).
By your original reasoning, a "liberal" would be about COMPULSIVE, constant change.
Further, according to your logic Obama, by remaining in office (as he was yesterday) is ipso facto, a "conservative". As a true liberal he should:
- divorce his wife and become gay
- quit office, leave politics, and go into business
- spend only his own money.
Except for the fact that, when an emergency comes, the budget magically opens and people stop counting their pennies.
That would mean that if/when the IPv4 crunch comes to a point where we HAVE to confront it, IT dept's will get fresh new budgets to buy the NEW Sun server that *does* have IPv6 functionality.
I'm not saying omitting it was a good idea, but cynically it might make sense.
Of course, you're assuming that whatever is traveling at >c is moving through our tangible universe. For example, the game Traveller2300 posited a "stutterwarp" drive that flicked the ship forward through an alternate dimension only about 100m. By cycling this drive say, 10 million times/second, you'd be traveling through our space at what, about 3.3c? yet not actually ever moving, building momentum, or (critically) having the problems you describe.
I'm not saying such is even possible, but I guess if we're fantasizing about a warp drive, it's not too much less conceivable that it would somehow bend the laws of physics that little bit more.
FromTFA:"...2.46 million gallons of wastewater produced annually by the typical data center, which must be pumped offsite and treated..."
Why does cooling water used in a typical data center need to be treated?
Isn't it pretty much just flowing through stacks and carrying heat out to radiators or cooling towers? What in the process of gaining/releasing heat requires subsequent treatment?
Or is it just that the cooling systems haven't even been designed with the care needed to ensure the water flowing through them isn't tainted with lead solder, etc.?
...and your partisan mendacity is why we have such a gridlocked infantile congress.
Let me see if I can recap in 50 words or less:
Dems controlling congress fail to pass any budget 2009 to present.
Government running out of money, already borrowed to the hilt.
- Republican solution: we need to stop spending more than we have.
- Democratic solution: we need to "invest" (read: spend) more to get the economy moving.
Blaming Republicans for not wanting to spend more money is like blaming someone for refusing to use gasoline to try to put out a house fire.
Personally, I'm pissed that the Republicans agreed to this retarded sequestration:
Non-exempt defense discretionary funding - 9.4% spending reduction.
Non-exempt mandatory defense spending - 10% percent.
Non-exempt, non-defense discretionary funding - 8.2% percent.
Non-exempt, non-defense mandatory programs - 7.6%
Medicare - 2%
So the mandatory cuts land more heavily on defense (19% of the federal budget) than on non-defense discretionary (also 19%)? Or Medicare (24%)?
Personally, it sounds like whoever negotiated this for the Republicans was a moron; if the Dems did nothing (like they did), they 'win' anyway.
Let's not forget that these salaries (which are good, compared to other full-time careers) are for work that equates to HALF TIME.
36-37 weeks a year, 8-3 every weekday with ample vacation and workshop days ends up being about 1260 hours/year.
So, ample salary, great benefits, fat pension AND you're only working half a job.
No, not really too bad.
Theoretically there's plenty of wind power.
Theoretically there's plenty of solar power.
Theoretically there's plenty of geothermal power.
Theoretically there's plenty of power in the vacuum of space.
It's that niggling practicality of GETTING and USING that energy that confounds us.
Arguably, I'd say the only one that's really proven itself over the long term is solar; as the Earth is essentially a closed system with only solar energy as an input, it's proven that there is amply "enough" input solar energy falling on half of the globe at any given time to drive that system.
I find lately that commentators are more often referring to people from earlier eras as if they were stupid, when my interpretation is that they had an equal if not greater capacity for brilliance.
"...Also known as Egyptian paste, faience is one of those remarkable crossroads materials that occur now and again in the history of technology. It was invented 7,000 years ago in Egypt, when the Egyptians were still trying to get the hang of pottery and smelting metal. It isnâ(TM)t actually a ceramic, but rather a paste made of quartz or sand, calcite lime and a mixture of alkalis. Because of this, it can be applied directly to wet clay. When the pottery is fired, the paste turns into a brilliant blue-green glaze reminiscent of lapis lazuli, which the Egyptians used faience as a substitute for...."
Atrocious writing aside, this would be an excellent example - how much determined experimentation would it take YOU to develop something like this...at the available tech from 5000 BC? You don't have calculus, you don't even have a basic understanding of chemistry, microscopes, hell, even an accurate thermometer?
Since you're here & now produced a "written account of child abuse", I'm afraid that you are now going to be arrested.
Sorry about that.
And North Korea, Iran, and Muslims in general!
I'm thinking we should update our 'national bird' to something more Terminator-like anyway.
It's not even a distribution problem.
Shipping is crazy-cheap; go into Target or Wal Mart and look at the folding chairs that you can buy for $12. That's a bulky, awkward thing that doesn't fold particularly small or dense for travel, yet it can be made in China, travel 8000 miles, get unloaded into a distribution center, be stored there, get reloaded into a truck for local delivery and end up on your local shelf for what, less than $6? (I dunno what WalMart's usual margin is.)
Likewise, food is crazy-cheap; the US gov't funds the destruction of foodstuffs every year and leaving acres fallow to keep food prices up.
It's a POLITICAL problem, pure and simple.
Factually? Sure.
Practically? Someone needs to review the term "Cry Wolf" and the ramifications.
Eventually bad shit will happen, yes.
Constantly claiming "it's about to happen now!" means yes, you will eventually be right but don't be surprised that people stop listening long before that point arrives.
"...asking for money while giving nothing in return in Finland requires a license..."
Does the Finnish government have the license required for asking for money for a license (that gives nothing in return)?
Exactly what I thought.
They don't use cell phones while driving?
GPS?
Radio?
Seems like a ridiculous ruling.