There seem to be plenty of efforts to ensure security when other peoples' money is at stake. Last time I checked, HDMI is the new cable standard and that has absolutely NOTHING to do with signal quality, it's a hardware-enforced "copy prevention" scheme.
I was going to say "other peoples' money (particularly not the customer's)" but then I remembered - in the free TV equation I'm NOT the customer. I'm the product (well, my eyes). In that sense, I concede their need to 'protect' their baited hook...they NEED me to not-skip the ads, to pay for the programming. But the failure is of course to realize that I AM the customer (and thus no need to protect the baited hook) in pretty much every other transaction - watching rented DVDs, cable, etc in which I *pay* for the programming. In those cases the stream should be (but isn't) mine because I am paying for it, but of course that's the baby that's thrown out with the commercial-tv-justification bathwater.
Further, when I hear 'security people' say things like: "...we as a global society appear inclined to accept half-baked security solutions that are more like Band-Aids than real protection" I brace myself for the following solution. These are the sorts of things that come from people who insist on 36-bit random hash codes that are changed every other week and can never repeat even partially (which in the real world are then just written down on sticky notes under the desk pad).
And it sounds like you're pretty committed to opposing this platform regardless of whatever the facts may actually be.
I've heard these exact arguments against *any* sort of missile defense since the mid-1980s, the script is getting a little tired.
Yes, countermeasures are cheap. Yes, systems can be spoofed. (I will point out that decoy systems in the boost phase are not easy/cheap.)
But I'll point out too that bulletproof vests are also easily defeated but people still wear them. Why? Because even a marginal increase in one's chance of survivability is worth a fairly high cost. If you're talking about ballistic missile defense, you're talking about possibly saving a whole city or, in the era if MIRV warheads, a cluster of them. .
It's very easy from our keyboards and couches in 2012 to say "why didn't they understand how critical radio was??!?!?!?!" but let's understand that the captain and senior crew were long-serving officers, and the naval tradition in England wasn't one to quickly adapt novelty.
Ships had been sailing the high seas for centuries. The nominal state was that once a ship left land, and barring a rare meeting at sea, ships were ALONE. Thus the remarkable powers attributed legally to captains. They were truly worlds unto themselves.
Further, people generally didn't have telephones - unless you were in person, you generally corresponded by letter. People were used to not being 'connected'.
Wireless tech was only perhaps 15 years old in 1912, and extremely novel in shipboard service. It would be like skype today - although we live in such an interconnected world we really can't comprehend how naturally people accepted being alone/disconnected.
As I type this at 44, having grown up when you actually had to talk into phones connected to the wall and otherwise not being connected at all...I wonder if my generation is perhaps one of the last that will understand what it's like to have the 'natural state of things' being disconnected (in the US). I know teenagers today certainly couldn't comprehend it.
I understand that you have a meta-complaint and/or political viewpoint that suffuses your worldview, thus everything gets translated through that filter. Granted.
But: First you say that the CAPTAIN ignored the warning. Then you say the OWNERS should have gone to prison for "insisting" on him sailing at night in icy waters.
Is there proof or merely inference that the owners directly ordered the captain to make this call? You might say that "capitalist" motives caused the captain/owners to make bad judgement calls, but to then hyperbolize that into a blanket indictment against free-market capitalism seems at the very least specious.
I know that my mere questioning of your point has already probably painted me as a 'crony capitalist' and thus you've probably stopped reading. But your logic escapes me; by that same token Midas' story was also a criticism of 'free market capitalism' long before such was even formulated as an holistic concept.
Doesn't it ipso-facto follow from your assertion that people in socialist, monarchist, or other (non free-market) economic systems are contrariwise immune to the all the sorts of motivations that could make a captain of a huge ocean liner make errors in judgement? (If it logically was the "fault" of free-market capitalism, removing it from the situation would have made the accident impossible.)
Aside from the fact that you've apparently not read the law, sure.
Whether Trayvon took a swing at him first is ENTIRELY relevant.
Looking at it your way, Trayvon would have been entitled to swing if: "..He or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony;.." Someone looking at you, talking on a cellphone, even getting out of their car and walking up to you (which isn't what happened, according to witnesses, but we'll go there) wouldn't meet ANY court's standard of threat of imminent harm, barring the brandishing of a weapon.
Except that you're reading a script prepared for you by the 'sympathy media'.
Listen to the 911 call. http://www.orlandosentinel.com/videogallery/68871920/News/George-Zimmerman-911-call-reporting-Trayvon-Martin (not edited by NBC) There were a number of break-ins in the neighborhood. Neighborhood watch individual sees him, calls it in. Trayvon approaches guy calling him in. Trayvon moves out of sight. Zimmerman leaves car. Dispatcher tells him to get back into his car. Can't tell if he's getting back into his car, but the wind noise substantially decreases so it MAY be that he got back into his car. End of call.
It doesn't sound like he ignored the operators instructions to me, so where did you hear that?
SYG law is supposed to leave the benefit of the doubt with the person apparently defending himself. In this case, I suspect that the police determined there was no significant likelihood of conviction. They questioned Zimmerman for hours afterward. The physical evidence - his condition when the paramedics arrived, the location, grass stains, etc. - as well as witnesses corroborated his version of events. All the puzzle pieces fit, which is all police look for (they could still be wrong, but if they all fit, it's a tough road to convince a jury otherwise).
I sincerely hope that with a trial, discovery, and conclusion, we'll wrap this up (I expect Zimmerman will be exonerated). But this looks terribly like the police and DA are caving to the threats of mob violence (more likely they are caving to pressure from the White House and Justice, who have both seemed to already taken a side in the issue, unfortunately).
Coincidence: next story (if you just let that audio play out, it rolls to the next queued one) is about 2 black males holding a family at gunpoint in a home invasion. I wonder if either of them would have looked like Obama's son?
It's an interesting result, my only doubt is that these sorts of models are so critically sensitive on (for lack of a better term) 'moral' assumptions built into the rules - that valuations of the results.
For the Snowdrift game, for example, if you do nothing while the other driver shovels, you 'win' with 300. If you shovel and the other driver doesn't, you still get 100. If you both shovel, you both get 200. So in a sense they 'bias' the game by rewarding you for accepting being exploited, you're just rewarded less than if you did the exploiting. If the point values were 300 for sitting and letting them shovel, 100 for both shoveling, and -100 if you were exploited, I suspect that the results would be significantly different.
Of course, I understand that we simplify models to simplify complex subjects but to me the number of assumptions inherent in these simplifications often overshadows the value we can draw from the models.
"It's in fact very difficult to fire a person." FTFY
I know it's very trendy at slashdot to point out the flaws in (any) US system, and you get bonus points for talking about how much better the Europeans do it, from employment, to health care, to measurement systems.
But let's be honest - the systems are simply different.
In the US, both the employer AND THE EMPLOYED are much more flexible in their relationship. Sure, in this case (and in many popularized ones) the employee is arbitrarily fired. But the opposite is true - the employee can also bolt for a better job with very little obligation on their part.
One might suggest that this is one of the fundamental reasons that Americans have a higher disposable income, worker productivity, and probably standard of living (by most measures) than the rest of the world.
In European system(s) employees have a much more long-term relationship with their employer which gives them much more stability. It's *much* harder for an employer to get rid of someone arbitrarily...but also that much harder to get rid of a slacker that's not worth his pay.
I have worked in management for a US subsidiary of a German (Bavarian) company for 15+ years and have discussed this at length at all management levels with Americans and Euros. I'll can tell you a story about my peer who is an MD of a French mfg plant who struggled to fire a salesman who simply refused to bother to visit customers or do his job - ultimately they had to settle on paying him a years' salary just to get rid of him. Or how about the one where the guy used his sick time to vacation in Ibiza, and (IIRC) they STILL haven't been able to fire him?
Which system is "better"? Personally as an American, I prefer to work in a situation where I'm rewarded for my effort, and if I'm not happy I can find some other company that will compensate me what I'm worth (or I'm simply not worth what I think). As a Euro, I could certainly understand that sort of uncertainty could make someone very very nervous.
They're just different systems. In a down economy, the US one looks harsh. Trust me, when employment is at 2% (or lower) the US one looks damn awesome.
"...almost nobody in Europe would so much as contemplate the idea of bombing another European country..."
I recall reading almost exactly the same sentiment in a book written in about 1906. And then again, in a book written in 1931.
And then considering the genteel, restrained conflict that took place in Europe 1992-1995 (you might remember the RAPE CAMPS?), I'm going to take those genteel protestations of "European Pacifism" with a gigantic grain of salt.
Europe has had the longest period of interstate peace in its history, MAINLY because of the Cold War (something few Europeans I've met will credit) and the likelihood of nuclear annihilation. It's had very little to do with general Euro-amity.
Now that the nuclear arsenals of the US and Russians are no longer necessarily hair-triggered on Europe, well, good luck with that European peace.
Having traveled and worked extensively in Europe and with Europeans for the past 2 decades (British, German, Dutch, Belgian, Swedes, Austrians, and Italians, primarily) I find them generally MORE fundamentally racist in their judgments and assertions than any but the most redneck rural Americans.
The fact is that the arguments for and against nationalized healthcare, etc are all just canards for the real question that we (as far as I can tell) don't have the seeds to face: resources are finite - need is not.
Is it worth $250,000...$500,000....$1 million or more to prolong some 85-year old's life another 6 months or year? In the US, we have a schizoid system: if the 85yr-old has enough money and wants to spend it that way they can. If they have NO insurance, often they can get very expensive treatments for free. If they have "some" money and insurance, they can only get some of these treatments. In countries with national health care programs, on the other hand, generally its the decision of a bureaucrat somewhere (granted, most systems leave the tactical decisions to the doctors - but somewhere further back, that doctor's choices have been somehow constrained strategically by a lawmaker, bureaucrat, or agency).
We have staggering technical capabilities, but they come with staggering costs in sophisticated capital, training, expertise, etc.
For that matter, what is the value of any human life, at any stage?
I'm reminded of one of the most difficult situations I ever witnessed. A cousin had a child that was severely allergic to most everything. She was a nurse, and since they had a very specially-designed home, she took in high-(medical)-maintenance foster children. She had one beautiful, sweet little girl who'd been born to a crack-mommy. This girl, aside from allergies to pretty much everything including gluten, had severe haemophilia. Even TOUCHING a countertop where a sandwich had sat (bread=gluten) could give her a severe nosebleed, which could easily kill her. This girl was 3, and had had more than 200 transfusions. She essentially lived in a hospital her whole life. My cousin said one of the aid workers said the state had spent nearly $350,000/year on her care.
On the other hand, my sister-in-law adopted several equally-adorable children from a Guatemalan orphanage, where they were told that their "thank you" gift of $500 would feed and clothe many of the kids for a year as well as provide basic medical care for the whole orphanage.
So you tell me: Is the life of one sweet little American crack-baby girl worth the care and health of more than 700 Guatemalan orphans?
That's a moral dilemma I've struggled with for more than a decade since, and I've seen that a variation on this theme seems to be the *real* root of the healthcare debate. One party sees the crazy costs the other is paying for not-significantly-better outcomes, the other is uncomfortable with external constraints (theoretically) limiting access to resources.
Both want to give people the best healthcare possible given limited resources; one sees an 'impartial 3rd party' (government) as the fairest way to divide things, while the other prefers a system that (theoretically) allows anyone to have anything, as long as work hard enough and think ahead.
I walk into BB's big flatscreen section. Drone comes up, asks if he can help. Me: "Hi, thanks for coming over. I'm a moderately knowledgeable customer, familiar with the basic functional differences between LCD, plasma, etc. I would like to buy a 50"-55" flatscreen. I know I can buy anything here cheaper online. I'm fine with that. I want to see the screen before I buy, so I'm willing to pay a small premium for your bricks and mortar. I will not shop here, then go buy it on Amazon. I'd like your particular help finding the best cross-section of price and my list of features that you have in the store today. I will stay as long as you deal intelligently with me, and don't insult my intelligence by touting 'infinite' black ratios or crap like that. Deal?" Drone: "Sounds good, so what are your criteria" (I review the list of things I want; I don't tell him, but my goal is a TV for around $1200, an AV receiver for about $300, and a blu-ray player for $100) A few minutes pass as we browse through the store to the bigger TVs. Then - I shit you not - we go past the cables, and he pauses saying "...and we'll make sure we come back here and get you top-of-the-line cabling, you don't want to spend all this dough and get interference with cheap cables." M: "You sell cheap cabling?" (knowing where this was going) D: "Not to smart buyers. The guys that know what they're doing just go straight here and grab the Monsters."
Seriously. He went with the Monster cables.
So I left. I think I'll buy online.
NOTE TO BEST BUY: IT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH SALES TAXES. This was your Richfield store, 494 & Penn I think. You know, like 1km from your HQ.
Every organism breeds itself to catastrophe, then it either evolves a stasis point or goes extinct.
Why should humans be any different? To suggest that we're somehow intrinsically 'different' is farcical; we're clever, nearly-hairless primates, but we clearly haven't developed any sort of better strategic view than lemmings.
All the compact fluorescent bulbs, Prius's, and tree-hugging isn't going change that in any meaningful way. The fact is that humans are breeding ourselves to the brink; unless you seriously are going to put a dent in that (ready for the moral implications of prohibiting reproduction?), all you might be doing is trivially delaying the days of reckoning.
I do understand mendacious presentations, however. This happens when a major result and a minor result are conflated, usually implying that the major result wasn't impressive enough and needs to be 'buffed'.
Note, for example, in your recap, you stated "a majority of the polyps died or showed severe stress" - either you were being tendentious, or you fell for one of the oldest rhetorical trick in the book. As the article stated: "...In almost half of the 43 corals studied at the site, the majority of animals had died or were showing signs of stress,..". Note - not "severe" stress. ANY stress.
From the article referenced by the article: "Of the 43 corals imaged at that site, 46% exhibited evidence of impact on more than half of the colony, whereas nearly a quarter of all of the corals showed impact to >90% of the colony." Again, not severe impact, ANY impact. This is news? A coral colony is flooded with gunk from the worst oil spill in history and it's news that some of the colony had SOME impact? Duh. One dead polyp = "impact". Shocking!
You, apparently, were the one who inferred the term "severe" from the summary, precisely as I would expect you were intended to.
So while I admire your sophisticated understanding of coral biology, you might want to review Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information as a general primer on the critical interpretation of statistical info.
I'd like to see some sort of extensive interview with the implementation team, to hear what they ran into in terms of hardware, software, and operational barriers. What were the expected problems, and how did they solve them? What were the unexpected challenges? Were there any expected challenges that turned out to be non-issues?
Training an entire cadre of windows-adept office staff to switch to Linux? There have to be some interesting and educational stories there, useful tlo a broad range of people: from the corporate IT staffer deciding if she's willing to start this crusade, down even to the small home user that's trying to see if it's worth it to re-educate his entire family.
It's unclear from the article, but is this actually the fault of OIL (which, as I understand, naturally seeps quite frequently from the Gulf floor) or is it more an issue with the dispersants applied to push the oil down into the water column? To me, that seems more a likely culprit than the oil alone.
"In almost half of the 43 corals studied at the site, the majority of animals had died or were showing signs of stress, the researchers say. And in more than one-quarter of the corals, more than 90% of the animals showed such damage. Also, more than half of the brittle stars, a relative of starfish, found clinging to the sea fans were partially or completely bleached white, another certain sign of stress, says Fisher."
Lots of stats being layered suspiciously here.
So in "almost half" a "majority" had died or showed "some" stress. And in "more than 1/4", "more than 90%" showed "such" damage.
Meaning in the first case that an actual majority of corals (and significant portions of the remainder) showed no stress at all? And in the second case that (roughly) 75% showed NO damage?
To me, that's downright astonishing.
It's far more worthy of reporting than the summary/title that some downstream corals have been harmed by the largest spill in human history.
Slashdot Mirror
Burgess, Heinlen, Dick, even Ray Bradbury were all writing dystopian science fiction before you were even born.
There seem to be plenty of efforts to ensure security when other peoples' money is at stake. Last time I checked, HDMI is the new cable standard and that has absolutely NOTHING to do with signal quality, it's a hardware-enforced "copy prevention" scheme.
I was going to say "other peoples' money (particularly not the customer's)" but then I remembered - in the free TV equation I'm NOT the customer. I'm the product (well, my eyes). In that sense, I concede their need to 'protect' their baited hook...they NEED me to not-skip the ads, to pay for the programming. But the failure is of course to realize that I AM the customer (and thus no need to protect the baited hook) in pretty much every other transaction - watching rented DVDs, cable, etc in which I *pay* for the programming. In those cases the stream should be (but isn't) mine because I am paying for it, but of course that's the baby that's thrown out with the commercial-tv-justification bathwater.
Further, when I hear 'security people' say things like: "...we as a global society appear inclined to accept half-baked security solutions that are more like Band-Aids than real protection" I brace myself for the following solution. These are the sorts of things that come from people who insist on 36-bit random hash codes that are changed every other week and can never repeat even partially (which in the real world are then just written down on sticky notes under the desk pad).
And it sounds like you're pretty committed to opposing this platform regardless of whatever the facts may actually be.
I've heard these exact arguments against *any* sort of missile defense since the mid-1980s, the script is getting a little tired.
Yes, countermeasures are cheap. Yes, systems can be spoofed. (I will point out that decoy systems in the boost phase are not easy/cheap.)
But I'll point out too that bulletproof vests are also easily defeated but people still wear them. Why? Because even a marginal increase in one's chance of survivability is worth a fairly high cost. If you're talking about ballistic missile defense, you're talking about possibly saving a whole city or, in the era if MIRV warheads, a cluster of them.
.
Darwinistically, as bad as that is for the individual kids, it's a "win" for Humanity.
Take the long view, it's better.
It's very easy from our keyboards and couches in 2012 to say "why didn't they understand how critical radio was??!?!?!?!" but let's understand that the captain and senior crew were long-serving officers, and the naval tradition in England wasn't one to quickly adapt novelty.
Ships had been sailing the high seas for centuries. The nominal state was that once a ship left land, and barring a rare meeting at sea, ships were ALONE. Thus the remarkable powers attributed legally to captains. They were truly worlds unto themselves.
Further, people generally didn't have telephones - unless you were in person, you generally corresponded by letter. People were used to not being 'connected'.
Wireless tech was only perhaps 15 years old in 1912, and extremely novel in shipboard service. It would be like skype today - although we live in such an interconnected world we really can't comprehend how naturally people accepted being alone/disconnected.
As I type this at 44, having grown up when you actually had to talk into phones connected to the wall and otherwise not being connected at all...I wonder if my generation is perhaps one of the last that will understand what it's like to have the 'natural state of things' being disconnected (in the US). I know teenagers today certainly couldn't comprehend it.
I understand that you have a meta-complaint and/or political viewpoint that suffuses your worldview, thus everything gets translated through that filter. Granted.
But:
First you say that the CAPTAIN ignored the warning. Then you say the OWNERS should have gone to prison for "insisting" on him sailing at night in icy waters.
Is there proof or merely inference that the owners directly ordered the captain to make this call? You might say that "capitalist" motives caused the captain/owners to make bad judgement calls, but to then hyperbolize that into a blanket indictment against free-market capitalism seems at the very least specious.
I know that my mere questioning of your point has already probably painted me as a 'crony capitalist' and thus you've probably stopped reading. But your logic escapes me; by that same token Midas' story was also a criticism of 'free market capitalism' long before such was even formulated as an holistic concept.
Doesn't it ipso-facto follow from your assertion that people in socialist, monarchist, or other (non free-market) economic systems are contrariwise immune to the all the sorts of motivations that could make a captain of a huge ocean liner make errors in judgement? (If it logically was the "fault" of free-market capitalism, removing it from the situation would have made the accident impossible.)
Correct me if I'm wrong, please, but haven't we heard many previous times about "MS stopping XP support"...at least 2 or 3 times?
I still get patches nonetheless?
What's different about "this" end-of-support deadline?
Aside from the fact that you've apparently not read the law, sure.
Whether Trayvon took a swing at him first is ENTIRELY relevant.
Looking at it your way, Trayvon would have been entitled to swing if:
"..He or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony;.."
Someone looking at you, talking on a cellphone, even getting out of their car and walking up to you (which isn't what happened, according to witnesses, but we'll go there) wouldn't meet ANY court's standard of threat of imminent harm, barring the brandishing of a weapon.
Except that you're reading a script prepared for you by the 'sympathy media'.
Listen to the 911 call. http://www.orlandosentinel.com/videogallery/68871920/News/George-Zimmerman-911-call-reporting-Trayvon-Martin (not edited by NBC)
There were a number of break-ins in the neighborhood.
Neighborhood watch individual sees him, calls it in.
Trayvon approaches guy calling him in.
Trayvon moves out of sight.
Zimmerman leaves car.
Dispatcher tells him to get back into his car.
Can't tell if he's getting back into his car, but the wind noise substantially decreases so it MAY be that he got back into his car.
End of call.
It doesn't sound like he ignored the operators instructions to me, so where did you hear that?
SYG law is supposed to leave the benefit of the doubt with the person apparently defending himself. In this case, I suspect that the police determined there was no significant likelihood of conviction. They questioned Zimmerman for hours afterward. The physical evidence - his condition when the paramedics arrived, the location, grass stains, etc. - as well as witnesses corroborated his version of events. All the puzzle pieces fit, which is all police look for (they could still be wrong, but if they all fit, it's a tough road to convince a jury otherwise).
I sincerely hope that with a trial, discovery, and conclusion, we'll wrap this up (I expect Zimmerman will be exonerated). But this looks terribly like the police and DA are caving to the threats of mob violence (more likely they are caving to pressure from the White House and Justice, who have both seemed to already taken a side in the issue, unfortunately).
Coincidence: next story (if you just let that audio play out, it rolls to the next queued one) is about 2 black males holding a family at gunpoint in a home invasion.
I wonder if either of them would have looked like Obama's son?
It's an interesting result, my only doubt is that these sorts of models are so critically sensitive on (for lack of a better term) 'moral' assumptions built into the rules - that valuations of the results.
For the Snowdrift game, for example, if you do nothing while the other driver shovels, you 'win' with 300. If you shovel and the other driver doesn't, you still get 100. If you both shovel, you both get 200. So in a sense they 'bias' the game by rewarding you for accepting being exploited, you're just rewarded less than if you did the exploiting. If the point values were 300 for sitting and letting them shovel, 100 for both shoveling, and -100 if you were exploited, I suspect that the results would be significantly different.
Of course, I understand that we simplify models to simplify complex subjects but to me the number of assumptions inherent in these simplifications often overshadows the value we can draw from the models.
"It's in fact very difficult to fire a person."
FTFY
I know it's very trendy at slashdot to point out the flaws in (any) US system, and you get bonus points for talking about how much better the Europeans do it, from employment, to health care, to measurement systems.
But let's be honest - the systems are simply different.
In the US, both the employer AND THE EMPLOYED are much more flexible in their relationship. Sure, in this case (and in many popularized ones) the employee is arbitrarily fired. But the opposite is true - the employee can also bolt for a better job with very little obligation on their part.
One might suggest that this is one of the fundamental reasons that Americans have a higher disposable income, worker productivity, and probably standard of living (by most measures) than the rest of the world.
In European system(s) employees have a much more long-term relationship with their employer which gives them much more stability. It's *much* harder for an employer to get rid of someone arbitrarily...but also that much harder to get rid of a slacker that's not worth his pay.
I have worked in management for a US subsidiary of a German (Bavarian) company for 15+ years and have discussed this at length at all management levels with Americans and Euros. I'll can tell you a story about my peer who is an MD of a French mfg plant who struggled to fire a salesman who simply refused to bother to visit customers or do his job - ultimately they had to settle on paying him a years' salary just to get rid of him. Or how about the one where the guy used his sick time to vacation in Ibiza, and (IIRC) they STILL haven't been able to fire him?
Which system is "better"? Personally as an American, I prefer to work in a situation where I'm rewarded for my effort, and if I'm not happy I can find some other company that will compensate me what I'm worth (or I'm simply not worth what I think). As a Euro, I could certainly understand that sort of uncertainty could make someone very very nervous.
They're just different systems. In a down economy, the US one looks harsh. Trust me, when employment is at 2% (or lower) the US one looks damn awesome.
Good thing it's required to prevent fraud in important stuff like electronics returns, and not trivial stuff like voting for president.
Ha ha ha ha.
"...almost nobody in Europe would so much as contemplate the idea of bombing another European country..."
I recall reading almost exactly the same sentiment in a book written in about 1906.
And then again, in a book written in 1931.
And then considering the genteel, restrained conflict that took place in Europe 1992-1995 (you might remember the RAPE CAMPS?), I'm going to take those genteel protestations of "European Pacifism" with a gigantic grain of salt.
Europe has had the longest period of interstate peace in its history, MAINLY because of the Cold War (something few Europeans I've met will credit) and the likelihood of nuclear annihilation. It's had very little to do with general Euro-amity.
Now that the nuclear arsenals of the US and Russians are no longer necessarily hair-triggered on Europe, well, good luck with that European peace.
Having traveled and worked extensively in Europe and with Europeans for the past 2 decades (British, German, Dutch, Belgian, Swedes, Austrians, and Italians, primarily) I find them generally MORE fundamentally racist in their judgments and assertions than any but the most redneck rural Americans.
...so Cameron can reach the OTHER two udders.
Is this cheaper/more efficient than electrolysis?
Solar cell+2 wires+water+capture vessel = clean, cheap hydrogen anytime there's any light at all. Scales infinitely. Can use any bulk water.
There must be some reason this is better? It's certainly not cleaner...
The fact is that the arguments for and against nationalized healthcare, etc are all just canards for the real question that we (as far as I can tell) don't have the seeds to face: resources are finite - need is not.
Is it worth $250,000...$500,000....$1 million or more to prolong some 85-year old's life another 6 months or year? In the US, we have a schizoid system: if the 85yr-old has enough money and wants to spend it that way they can. If they have NO insurance, often they can get very expensive treatments for free. If they have "some" money and insurance, they can only get some of these treatments.
In countries with national health care programs, on the other hand, generally its the decision of a bureaucrat somewhere (granted, most systems leave the tactical decisions to the doctors - but somewhere further back, that doctor's choices have been somehow constrained strategically by a lawmaker, bureaucrat, or agency).
We have staggering technical capabilities, but they come with staggering costs in sophisticated capital, training, expertise, etc.
For that matter, what is the value of any human life, at any stage?
I'm reminded of one of the most difficult situations I ever witnessed. A cousin had a child that was severely allergic to most everything. She was a nurse, and since they had a very specially-designed home, she took in high-(medical)-maintenance foster children. She had one beautiful, sweet little girl who'd been born to a crack-mommy. This girl, aside from allergies to pretty much everything including gluten, had severe haemophilia. Even TOUCHING a countertop where a sandwich had sat (bread=gluten) could give her a severe nosebleed, which could easily kill her. This girl was 3, and had had more than 200 transfusions. She essentially lived in a hospital her whole life. My cousin said one of the aid workers said the state had spent nearly $350,000/year on her care.
On the other hand, my sister-in-law adopted several equally-adorable children from a Guatemalan orphanage, where they were told that their "thank you" gift of $500 would feed and clothe many of the kids for a year as well as provide basic medical care for the whole orphanage.
So you tell me: Is the life of one sweet little American crack-baby girl worth the care and health of more than 700 Guatemalan orphans?
That's a moral dilemma I've struggled with for more than a decade since, and I've seen that a variation on this theme seems to be the *real* root of the healthcare debate. One party sees the crazy costs the other is paying for not-significantly-better outcomes, the other is uncomfortable with external constraints (theoretically) limiting access to resources.
Both want to give people the best healthcare possible given limited resources; one sees an 'impartial 3rd party' (government) as the fairest way to divide things, while the other prefers a system that (theoretically) allows anyone to have anything, as long as work hard enough and think ahead.
The world is so fundamentally ridiculous, April Fools' Day has been deemed redundant and surplus to requirements.
I walk into BB's big flatscreen section.
Drone comes up, asks if he can help.
Me: "Hi, thanks for coming over. I'm a moderately knowledgeable customer, familiar with the basic functional differences between LCD, plasma, etc. I would like to buy a 50"-55" flatscreen. I know I can buy anything here cheaper online. I'm fine with that. I want to see the screen before I buy, so I'm willing to pay a small premium for your bricks and mortar. I will not shop here, then go buy it on Amazon. I'd like your particular help finding the best cross-section of price and my list of features that you have in the store today. I will stay as long as you deal intelligently with me, and don't insult my intelligence by touting 'infinite' black ratios or crap like that. Deal?"
Drone: "Sounds good, so what are your criteria"
(I review the list of things I want; I don't tell him, but my goal is a TV for around $1200, an AV receiver for about $300, and a blu-ray player for $100)
A few minutes pass as we browse through the store to the bigger TVs.
Then - I shit you not - we go past the cables, and he pauses saying "...and we'll make sure we come back here and get you top-of-the-line cabling, you don't want to spend all this dough and get interference with cheap cables."
M: "You sell cheap cabling?" (knowing where this was going)
D: "Not to smart buyers. The guys that know what they're doing just go straight here and grab the Monsters."
Seriously. He went with the Monster cables.
So I left. I think I'll buy online.
NOTE TO BEST BUY: IT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH SALES TAXES. This was your Richfield store, 494 & Penn I think. You know, like 1km from your HQ.
Every organism breeds itself to catastrophe, then it either evolves a stasis point or goes extinct.
Why should humans be any different? To suggest that we're somehow intrinsically 'different' is farcical; we're clever, nearly-hairless primates, but we clearly haven't developed any sort of better strategic view than lemmings.
All the compact fluorescent bulbs, Prius's, and tree-hugging isn't going change that in any meaningful way. The fact is that humans are breeding ourselves to the brink; unless you seriously are going to put a dent in that (ready for the moral implications of prohibiting reproduction?), all you might be doing is trivially delaying the days of reckoning.
Well, perhaps I don't.
I do understand mendacious presentations, however. This happens when a major result and a minor result are conflated, usually implying that the major result wasn't impressive enough and needs to be 'buffed'.
Note, for example, in your recap, you stated "a majority of the polyps died or showed severe stress" - either you were being tendentious, or you fell for one of the oldest rhetorical trick in the book. As the article stated: "...In almost half of the 43 corals studied at the site, the majority of animals had died or were showing signs of stress,..". Note - not "severe" stress. ANY stress.
From the article referenced by the article: "Of the 43 corals imaged at that site, 46% exhibited evidence of impact on more than half of the colony, whereas nearly a quarter of all of the corals showed impact to >90% of the colony."
Again, not severe impact, ANY impact. This is news? A coral colony is flooded with gunk from the worst oil spill in history and it's news that some of the colony had SOME impact? Duh. One dead polyp = "impact". Shocking!
You, apparently, were the one who inferred the term "severe" from the summary, precisely as I would expect you were intended to.
So while I admire your sophisticated understanding of coral biology, you might want to review Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information as a general primer on the critical interpretation of statistical info.
"...Get the african nations to stop fighting each other ... We have the technology to do this..."
I must have missed something, because I haven't noticed a significant lack of fighting on Earth in the last 100 years, or even the last 10.
We have the technology to solve a lot of problems; the challenges are human ones that tech can't easily solve.
I'd like to see some sort of extensive interview with the implementation team, to hear what they ran into in terms of hardware, software, and operational barriers.
What were the expected problems, and how did they solve them?
What were the unexpected challenges?
Were there any expected challenges that turned out to be non-issues?
Training an entire cadre of windows-adept office staff to switch to Linux?
There have to be some interesting and educational stories there, useful tlo a broad range of people: from the corporate IT staffer deciding if she's willing to start this crusade, down even to the small home user that's trying to see if it's worth it to re-educate his entire family.
Really, it would be a fascinating debrief.
Good thing this doesn't apply to Global Warming science.
It's unclear from the article, but is this actually the fault of OIL (which, as I understand, naturally seeps quite frequently from the Gulf floor) or is it more an issue with the dispersants applied to push the oil down into the water column? To me, that seems more a likely culprit than the oil alone.
"In almost half of the 43 corals studied at the site, the majority of animals had died or were showing signs of stress, the researchers say. And in more than one-quarter of the corals, more than 90% of the animals showed such damage. Also, more than half of the brittle stars, a relative of starfish, found clinging to the sea fans were partially or completely bleached white, another certain sign of stress, says Fisher."
Lots of stats being layered suspiciously here.
So in "almost half" a "majority" had died or showed "some" stress.
And in "more than 1/4", "more than 90%" showed "such" damage.
Meaning in the first case that an actual majority of corals (and significant portions of the remainder) showed no stress at all? And in the second case that (roughly) 75% showed NO damage?
To me, that's downright astonishing.
It's far more worthy of reporting than the summary/title that some downstream corals have been harmed by the largest spill in human history.
I know that our local high school driver's ed has been instructing students on the new locations for at least 4-5 years.