I understand the compelling need to look for a short-term revenue reward. However, that sort of thing is precisely what business is GOOD at.
It's the long-term, vague "specific monetary value to individual"-value stuff like highways, armies, and SPACE PROGRAMS where governments need to participate.
Raw material shortages? A single decent-sized asteroid would provide more metals in a single go than have been mined in human history.
Energy shortages? On any human scale, the energy available in space is infinite.
Further, any reasonable view of the history of this planet shows that as time passes the ultimate survivability of any species approaches zero. Eggs in a single basket, if nothing else.
No, none of this puts revenue in a corporation or even perhaps a government's pocket.
However, the scale of value to humanity as a whole of getting OUT of this gravity well, OUT of this solar system, and sustainably among the stars is truly incalculable
First, let me be clear - I think the TSA is meaningless, expensive security theater. They should be disbanded, security should go back to normal with intelligent threat modeling and scanning people that are real risks, and armed agents on the planes.
In regards to this case: Who doesn't know that your choice is scan or patdown? It's been in the news for YEARS. This woman goes to the airport, gets subjected to an entirely-predictable situation, gets irate and abusive (Really? did you think swearing at the low-rent semi-cops is really going to make them say "oh, she said this is fucking stupid. Tom, let her through!"? Really?) and then continues to be a dick.
I think the scan-or-patdown IS INDEED a bullshit non-choice. But to be surprised by it today, or not be prepared to choose one - I'm a little incredulous that this wasn't set up. The mom's conduct in front of her small daughter is even more disappointing.
Are there particularly robust presentations needed for military purposes? Do the troops in the field need especially high-powered and durable light shone to display movies, or perhaps graphics?
It sounds as impressive as hell, perhaps a giant searchlight mounted on a trundle-carriage like a WWI tank?
Interestingly, as bad as the situation is in the US, it seems that the economic outlook in every other developed country is nearly as bad or worse.
Europe has the exact same problems except with an even larger demographic issue, a larger entitlement expectation, and the largest holes (the PIGs) shouldn't obscure the insolvency issues faced by the 'stabler' countries like the UK, Germany, etc. which has been nicely camouflaged by the 1990s adoption of their very-own-third-world-labor force (Eastern Europe) which will expire shortly when the Eastern Euros start to wonder why they don't get 72" flatscreens and 36 hour work weeks like their Western cousins.
Japan is moribund. Russia is pretty much a slavic-speaking Sicily. China - for all the quivering fear of its growth in the West - is a disaster waiting to happen; it's a beautifully-growing industrial economy...until you realize that's all economic smoke & mirrors, what little real growth is leveraged on a populace that's 40% peasant farmers, and their male/female demographic danger by 2040 is real and terrifying.
The world's going completely to hell, and while the US is doing its best to keep up, I'd say in terms of real fundamentals - food, water, natural resources, space - we're golden.
It makes perfect sense to track trends, and apply law enforcement manpower to the area for quick response.
Of course, this is ultimately a self-defeating algorithm to some degree - as the police get better at it, the smart criminals will pursue their crimes in unpredictable or (worst) randomly-chosen locations. Then again, the cops are rarely catching the smart criminals anyway, so this is just more of the same. Experience in the US from the 1960s-1990s would suggest that a higher incidence of patrol cops in 'bad neighborhoods' simply pushes crime into the quieter, less-policed adjacent regions.
Then again, if one supposes that the bulk of crimes are crimes of opportunity and passion, and only a relative few are motivated by rational calculus, this will probably do a good job of suppressing that segment of crimes.
As they say, "when seconds count, the cops are only minutes away". Perhaps this will reduce that to "a minute" or something better.
Maybe it's hearkening back to my teen years in the Cold War, but I cheerfully note that the analog watch on my wrist is self-winding, shockproof/resistent, supplemented by stem winding and therefore I will (until it breaks) know the time/date regardless of power source.
And, if I have a rough idea where the sun is, I'll also know which way north is, forever.
If the 'reveal' is misuse, charge the people holding the party for the FULL cost of the event, and hold them (as any party-holder would be) legally responsible for the consequences of the party.
If the revelation was through a technical flaw in the social software, hold Facebook (or whomever) responsible.
One can't idiot-proof the world, only establish chains of causality and let people/companies respond to the incentives/disincentives that exist.
But, what are the input energy requirements to gather, collect, ship, process, and produce said eyeglass frames?
I doubt that they are going to beat the efficiencies of industrial-scale bulk material-handling and production. I don't recall any great hue & cry about the horrific environmental consequences of eyeglass-frame production?
In short, this is more "let's go green" wanking that makes people who care *feel* slightly better by paying for a product that ultimately saves/helps/does nothing.
It's the environmentalist equivalent of Catholic indulgences.
This reminds me of the Chinese 'spacewalk' with the bubbles rolling around the astronaut. Whatever happened there, did we just accept that they actually did a spacewalk?
...in my experience, the reason I hated my BB and love my Android is that BB had such tight built-in controls for locking down the client. New browser? Nope, no applications allowed by my IT dept! Better map software? Nope, no applications allowed by my IT dept! Music player? Nope, no applications allowed by my IT dept! even navigation software, required by our safety policy when traveling, nope. Nope, no applications allowed by my IT dept!
Sure, I understand how attractive this can be for an IT dept, but users will never be happy with this.
As I recall, NT-client also had nice capabilities (for the time) to lock down user's client stations even to the point of the icon layout, color scheme, wallpaper, etc. I had a boss who was almost giddy at the idea that his employees couldn't change ANYTHING.
So now my IT dept has said 'use what you want, we're not supporting the device' - which seems both far more workable, reasonable for them, and user-friendly.
Sadly, one of the defenses against FUD is willful ignorance, and it's not a bad one.
Bear with me please while I explain.
I grew up in a rural MN town, and shook my head in patronizing amazement that these poor ignorant farmers would sit and have coffee and chat about local crap. It was always variations on a few simple themes, about their neighbors, sports, the weather, local events and scandals, etc.. As a self-identified 'world citizen' long before such was cool, I would spend hours poring over world news in the newspapers. I generally skipped the local stuff (and never 'bothered' with the local paper at all) - who cared about such trivialities when the Cold War was going on? (this was in the 1970-1980s). Momentous things were happening in the shift of world geopolitics! National policy changes portended significant changes in the way our government works and how things will be in the next few years!
Now in middle age, I've discovered something. Willful ignorance works. I used to get really worked-up about politics and policy. But more and more, I just find all politicians (even the ones I allegedly agree with) tiresome and identical. The only people who reach the level of serious political involvement on a state and national stage seem to be so deeply co-opted by their party affiliations and fundraising requirements that they have no principles that remain to exceed their self-interest.
(And yes, for the readers who are Democrats: it's *clearly* Republicans who are whores to big business while Dem politicians are simply hard-working joes doing their best in difficult circumstances. For Republicans, the Dems are either pollyannish and ignorant, or whores to organized Labor/Lawyers, while Republican politicians are the only ones who actually care about their country. (rollseyes))
What I've found is that by ignoring international news, ignoring national news, not watching a single minute of any news channel, and only pretty much involving myself in local community issues including volunteering with the Boy Scouts, local faith organizations, and our schools - I'm one HELL of a lot happier most of the time.
I've (re)discovered what those 'ignorant' Norwegian farmers knew all those years ago either by choice or instinct: Nothing really changes. The government's always going to heck. The world is always going to heck. The grossly wealthy continue to manipulate the system for their benefit in collusion with the politicians, and will continue to screw everyone else for their own ends. One can either get worked up and fulminate about it 24/7, or one can go about ones' business and try to be happy, raise a balanced, intelligent, contributive family.
I have a friend who has always been intensely political. Every conversation with him is still an interesting challenge (we're on the opposite sides of the political fence) that forces me to question my assumptions and evaluate my givens, so to speak. For that I value his friendship tremendously. But more and more often, I find the conversations pointless and exhausting. We've been arguing over the same points, without serious changes in position, for nearly 30 years. In point of fact, we agree about most of the essentials of life - the importance of education, the things that are really important - but if you heard us talk you'd assume we must despise each other because (from what I see) the idea of an intellectual argument without hatred behind it is incomprehensible.
Certainly, I could just be furiously rationalizing; I could be trying to make myself feel better over my inability to care about the budget crisis, the presidential elections, or world events in general. I recognize that this may be a response to a sense of impotence, certainly. Maybe.
But again, I'm one heck of a lot happier. I'm not sure there's more to it than that. At least, not as sure as I used to be.
OK, so some designer says that a simple system of semi-addictive task/reward dependencies isn't "fun".
That's self-evidently not true by an objective measure. Lots of people play them, ergo, to many people it IS fun.
I don't think running on a treadmill (or any running, frankly; I *am* posting on slashot...) is "fun" either, but I'd expect that a significant number of runners would disagree with me.
It's more like he's complaining that the task/reward system is so dull and transparent that it is uninteresting. That may be true, I certainly don't find them fun myself. But for a good 6 years I played WoW intensively, which is only marginally more complex in essence (although a great deal more varied). I was having a lot of fun, although in retrospect I have trouble understanding why, even in my own personal context.
Arguing over what's objectively "fun" is like arguing which is "better", orange or blue.
The whole funding thing is a standard eco-marxist canard.
It's chicken/egg. Is it that X received funding, and thus acts as a mouthpiece for the people that paid him? Or is it that X is a lone voice fighting against a tidal wave, and someone wants to make sure he's able to keep fighting?
For that matter, our politicians gather GIANT piles of money from lots of people, how come that's ok but this isn't?
It's a good thing that this guy didn't 'massage' the data, or destroy the data, or 'lose' the data, or try to manipulate scientific publications, because that......wouldn't matter at all, apparently?
I read this aloud to my wife, and our 10lb yorkie-poo dog just walked over to me and said "If those goddamn animal activist hippies think they're going to make me live outdoors, they're fucking crazy."
Then he took his surgically-fixed knee, went back to his comfortable place on his knitted afghan in our predator free air-conditioned home, stopping by for a bite of nutritionally-balanced dog food and a sip of parasite-free drinking water, and proceeded to fall back asleep for his 20-hours-out-of-every-24 rest pattern.
Anyone have a recommendation for a USB boot setup?
I typically carry a USB (Tuff & Tiny) drive on my keychain, and am often greeted with the "Hi! While you're here, could you please look at my computer....?"
It's a 4 gig, so I could easily spare some of it to have a full bootable recovery OS available with a suite of repair/recover tools. I'd love to have actually a dual boot linux/ntfs option, since most of the systems I encounter are Win systems, and as much as I prefer operating from linux, I haven't always been impressed by linux' ability to 'reach into' an ntfs partition to really root out problems.
The kicker is that I also use the USB as a file transfer tool too. All the USB boot sets I've seen are meant to be the whole USB....I'd still like to have spare space available to shuffle files as needed.
I agree, we need to expand our horizons and not be so kingdomcentric.
Instead of just PETA, we should have: People for the Ethical Treatment of Bacteria (PEToB) People for the Ethical Treatment of Archaea (uh oh, maybe PEToA, that's probably going to confuse the mailing list...) People for the Ethical Treatment of Protista (PEToP) People for the Ethical Treatment of Plantae (PEToPL?) People for the Ethical Treatment of Fungi (PEToF)...although watching some people try to chain themselves to some mushrooms, or (better still) breaking into research labs to release sample of E.Coli into the wild might be hilarious. Or the PETx banquet, when the PETA people and the PEToPL people get into fistfights over the menu.
"Valve has once again turned to Team Fortress 2 as the studioâ(TM)s outlet for experimentation, this time with a daring move to make the triple-A game entirely free to play."
"Daring move"?
The original TF (1996+) was a FREE mod that you played by often connecting through the FREE Gamespy server, connecting to any of a number of FREE games hosted all over. It was an *excellent* game, with a variety of extremely well-designed maps, novel & varied gameplay, and challenging mods.
In fact the current game, while a significant facelift, doesn't markedly change much in terms of gameplay. Even the modern maps, while nicely prettified, are largely re-creations of 2fort4, Canalzone, Prison, etc. All of it was 100% free of charge.
So while I commend Valve for finally releasing the game from serfdom, let's remember that it was Valve that originally decided that they would take a free game and charge for it in the first place.
Personally, I think it's BS - she's tossing her staff in front of the bus to take the hit for her bad judgement.
My guess is that she was initially against it, but I will credit her for being very sensitive to the winds of public opinion, and reversed herself when she sensed the public relations disaster coming from her initial wrong decision.
I appreciate the link, and the 'debunking' of Pilmer. Thank you. That's generally a great link as well, it'll take some time to plow through the information there.
It's a very good point about the CO2 gradual increase, but wouldn't this be normal - the CO2 is deposited in the atmosphere in spikes, but takes time to diffuse around the globe, no? That would have been my assumption, but your source above pretty clearly anyway corrects my understanding of the various scales between human-emitted CO2 vs. volcanic.
Is there any explanation for the previous spikes of CO2/Warming, which seem similar both in magnitude, form, and frequency to the current one? Looking at the chart of temps over history at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology, what we're experiencing seems quite typical for the last 500,000 years - in fact, it looks like we were reasonably overdue for a heating cycle.
Considering that the Appellate Court is meant to essentially act as a gatekeeper to the next level of the legal system, I'm surprised that there's no mechanism to enforce SOME sense of intellectual rigor on appellate rulings. If the Supremes are consistently overruling a certain appellate court's findings (or any lower court, really) wouldn't that suggest that the lower court(s) are aren't doing their jobs, or in other words: that they don't correctly understand the law?
There are a lot of theories that are a century old; I'll freely grant Anthropogenic Global Warming exactly the same credibility I do to Luminiferous Aether.
And I'd challenge you to provide links to any of the 'peer reviewed scientific papers' SPECIFICALLY supporting Gore's eschatological "global warming" FUD - that global warming is imminent, real, and human-caused, dated before Gore's Earth in the Balance (1992) or even before his presidential campaign in 2000.
Not that the 'climate is changing', mind you, that the GLOBE is warming (no caveats or references to 'climate change' outside of warming were presented in the film), and that HUMANS are to blame *exclusively* (again, no hedging - the film was quite clear).
Let me be clear in turn, since I'm sure you already are certain that I'm some mouth-breathing, Palin-loving, 'denier': Do I think the globe is warming? Yep. And largely the scientific community as far back as the 70s believed this to be true. Do I think humans have an impact? Yep, I'd even say it's farcical to believe otherwise - just about every human activity ultimately generates heat. But here's the kicker: Do I believe that humans are the exclusive or even primary driver? Ha ha, not a chance. When a single-year's volcano eruption (Pinatubo) put out more CO2 than all of humanity, ever? Human input to the system is sub-margin-of-error numbers, and is inconsequential when compared to the variability of natural sources.
Even the sources referenced by AIT showed 'pulses' in temperature/CO2 at multi-hundred-thousand year intervals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Co2-temperature-plot.svg) - and this one doesn't look to be out of pattern. Further, the planet 'recovered' from each of those repeatedly. I fail to see how this situation is so strikingly unique, except insofar that there are a lot of hairless apes capering around on the surface of the planet this time, that solipsistically think it's their fault.
My point is that there are limited resources, and they can be far, far better spent than chasing some CO2 bogey (that not inconsequentially makes Mr Gore even more staggeringly wealthy, and carries along with it an anticapitalist, supragovernmental agenda that is disturbingly similar to that of ecomarxists for the last 50 years...).
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Bullshit.
Complete, apologist bullshit.
There are LOTS of people in the world that are in difficult circumstances, and don't then resort to violence, crime, and intimidation.
The fact is that not everything bad in the world reduces to "it's the white man's fault", as convenient as that might be for self-loathing westerners.
Somalia's a shithole for lots of reasons - most of them domestic. Far, far down the list is the 'exploitation' of its fisheries.
In fact, this is precisely the sort of patronizing racism the world doesn't need.
I understand the compelling need to look for a short-term revenue reward.
However, that sort of thing is precisely what business is GOOD at.
It's the long-term, vague "specific monetary value to individual"-value stuff like highways, armies, and SPACE PROGRAMS where governments need to participate.
Raw material shortages? A single decent-sized asteroid would provide more metals in a single go than have been mined in human history.
Energy shortages? On any human scale, the energy available in space is infinite.
Further, any reasonable view of the history of this planet shows that as time passes the ultimate survivability of any species approaches zero. Eggs in a single basket, if nothing else.
No, none of this puts revenue in a corporation or even perhaps a government's pocket.
However, the scale of value to humanity as a whole of getting OUT of this gravity well, OUT of this solar system, and sustainably among the stars is truly incalculable
First, let me be clear - I think the TSA is meaningless, expensive security theater. They should be disbanded, security should go back to normal with intelligent threat modeling and scanning people that are real risks, and armed agents on the planes.
In regards to this case:
Who doesn't know that your choice is scan or patdown? It's been in the news for YEARS. This woman goes to the airport, gets subjected to an entirely-predictable situation, gets irate and abusive (Really? did you think swearing at the low-rent semi-cops is really going to make them say "oh, she said this is fucking stupid. Tom, let her through!"? Really?) and then continues to be a dick.
I think the scan-or-patdown IS INDEED a bullshit non-choice. But to be surprised by it today, or not be prepared to choose one - I'm a little incredulous that this wasn't set up. The mom's conduct in front of her small daughter is even more disappointing.
What exactly is a "military-grade" projector?
Are there particularly robust presentations needed for military purposes?
Do the troops in the field need especially high-powered and durable light shone to display movies, or perhaps graphics?
It sounds as impressive as hell, perhaps a giant searchlight mounted on a trundle-carriage like a WWI tank?
Interestingly, as bad as the situation is in the US, it seems that the economic outlook in every other developed country is nearly as bad or worse.
Europe has the exact same problems except with an even larger demographic issue, a larger entitlement expectation, and the largest holes (the PIGs) shouldn't obscure the insolvency issues faced by the 'stabler' countries like the UK, Germany, etc. which has been nicely camouflaged by the 1990s adoption of their very-own-third-world-labor force (Eastern Europe) which will expire shortly when the Eastern Euros start to wonder why they don't get 72" flatscreens and 36 hour work weeks like their Western cousins.
Japan is moribund. Russia is pretty much a slavic-speaking Sicily. China - for all the quivering fear of its growth in the West - is a disaster waiting to happen; it's a beautifully-growing industrial economy...until you realize that's all economic smoke & mirrors, what little real growth is leveraged on a populace that's 40% peasant farmers, and their male/female demographic danger by 2040 is real and terrifying.
The world's going completely to hell, and while the US is doing its best to keep up, I'd say in terms of real fundamentals - food, water, natural resources, space - we're golden.
It makes perfect sense to track trends, and apply law enforcement manpower to the area for quick response.
Of course, this is ultimately a self-defeating algorithm to some degree - as the police get better at it, the smart criminals will pursue their crimes in unpredictable or (worst) randomly-chosen locations. Then again, the cops are rarely catching the smart criminals anyway, so this is just more of the same. Experience in the US from the 1960s-1990s would suggest that a higher incidence of patrol cops in 'bad neighborhoods' simply pushes crime into the quieter, less-policed adjacent regions.
Then again, if one supposes that the bulk of crimes are crimes of opportunity and passion, and only a relative few are motivated by rational calculus, this will probably do a good job of suppressing that segment of crimes.
As they say, "when seconds count, the cops are only minutes away". Perhaps this will reduce that to "a minute" or something better.
Maybe it's hearkening back to my teen years in the Cold War, but I cheerfully note that the analog watch on my wrist is self-winding, shockproof/resistent, supplemented by stem winding and therefore I will (until it breaks) know the time/date regardless of power source.
And, if I have a rough idea where the sun is, I'll also know which way north is, forever.
If you spent a couple of months alone in space, growing breasts might not be all bad.
Simplest solution?
If the 'reveal' is misuse, charge the people holding the party for the FULL cost of the event, and hold them (as any party-holder would be) legally responsible for the consequences of the party.
If the revelation was through a technical flaw in the social software, hold Facebook (or whomever) responsible.
One can't idiot-proof the world, only establish chains of causality and let people/companies respond to the incentives/disincentives that exist.
So they're using waste, great.
But, what are the input energy requirements to gather, collect, ship, process, and produce said eyeglass frames?
I doubt that they are going to beat the efficiencies of industrial-scale bulk material-handling and production. I don't recall any great hue & cry about the horrific environmental consequences of eyeglass-frame production?
In short, this is more "let's go green" wanking that makes people who care *feel* slightly better by paying for a product that ultimately saves/helps/does nothing.
It's the environmentalist equivalent of Catholic indulgences.
Kind of like the Kyoto Protocol.
Stop posting as AC, we promise we'll treat you as an unfriend deserves.
This reminds me of the Chinese 'spacewalk' with the bubbles rolling around the astronaut. Whatever happened there, did we just accept that they actually did a spacewalk?
...in my experience, the reason I hated my BB and love my Android is that BB had such tight built-in controls for locking down the client.
New browser? Nope, no applications allowed by my IT dept!
Better map software? Nope, no applications allowed by my IT dept!
Music player? Nope, no applications allowed by my IT dept!
even navigation software, required by our safety policy when traveling, nope. Nope, no applications allowed by my IT dept!
Sure, I understand how attractive this can be for an IT dept, but users will never be happy with this.
As I recall, NT-client also had nice capabilities (for the time) to lock down user's client stations even to the point of the icon layout, color scheme, wallpaper, etc. I had a boss who was almost giddy at the idea that his employees couldn't change ANYTHING.
So now my IT dept has said 'use what you want, we're not supporting the device' - which seems both far more workable, reasonable for them, and user-friendly.
Sadly, one of the defenses against FUD is willful ignorance, and it's not a bad one.
Bear with me please while I explain.
I grew up in a rural MN town, and shook my head in patronizing amazement that these poor ignorant farmers would sit and have coffee and chat about local crap. It was always variations on a few simple themes, about their neighbors, sports, the weather, local events and scandals, etc..
As a self-identified 'world citizen' long before such was cool, I would spend hours poring over world news in the newspapers. I generally skipped the local stuff (and never 'bothered' with the local paper at all) - who cared about such trivialities when the Cold War was going on? (this was in the 1970-1980s). Momentous things were happening in the shift of world geopolitics! National policy changes portended significant changes in the way our government works and how things will be in the next few years!
Now in middle age, I've discovered something. Willful ignorance works. I used to get really worked-up about politics and policy. But more and more, I just find all politicians (even the ones I allegedly agree with) tiresome and identical. The only people who reach the level of serious political involvement on a state and national stage seem to be so deeply co-opted by their party affiliations and fundraising requirements that they have no principles that remain to exceed their self-interest.
(And yes, for the readers who are Democrats: it's *clearly* Republicans who are whores to big business while Dem politicians are simply hard-working joes doing their best in difficult circumstances. For Republicans, the Dems are either pollyannish and ignorant, or whores to organized Labor/Lawyers, while Republican politicians are the only ones who actually care about their country. (rollseyes))
What I've found is that by ignoring international news, ignoring national news, not watching a single minute of any news channel, and only pretty much involving myself in local community issues including volunteering with the Boy Scouts, local faith organizations, and our schools - I'm one HELL of a lot happier most of the time.
I've (re)discovered what those 'ignorant' Norwegian farmers knew all those years ago either by choice or instinct: Nothing really changes. The government's always going to heck. The world is always going to heck. The grossly wealthy continue to manipulate the system for their benefit in collusion with the politicians, and will continue to screw everyone else for their own ends. One can either get worked up and fulminate about it 24/7, or one can go about ones' business and try to be happy, raise a balanced, intelligent, contributive family.
I have a friend who has always been intensely political. Every conversation with him is still an interesting challenge (we're on the opposite sides of the political fence) that forces me to question my assumptions and evaluate my givens, so to speak. For that I value his friendship tremendously. But more and more often, I find the conversations pointless and exhausting. We've been arguing over the same points, without serious changes in position, for nearly 30 years. In point of fact, we agree about most of the essentials of life - the importance of education, the things that are really important - but if you heard us talk you'd assume we must despise each other because (from what I see) the idea of an intellectual argument without hatred behind it is incomprehensible.
Certainly, I could just be furiously rationalizing; I could be trying to make myself feel better over my inability to care about the budget crisis, the presidential elections, or world events in general. I recognize that this may be a response to a sense of impotence, certainly. Maybe.
But again, I'm one heck of a lot happier. I'm not sure there's more to it than that. At least, not as sure as I used to be.
OK, so some designer says that a simple system of semi-addictive task/reward dependencies isn't "fun".
That's self-evidently not true by an objective measure. Lots of people play them, ergo, to many people it IS fun.
I don't think running on a treadmill (or any running, frankly; I *am* posting on slashot...) is "fun" either, but I'd expect that a significant number of runners would disagree with me.
It's more like he's complaining that the task/reward system is so dull and transparent that it is uninteresting. That may be true, I certainly don't find them fun myself. But for a good 6 years I played WoW intensively, which is only marginally more complex in essence (although a great deal more varied). I was having a lot of fun, although in retrospect I have trouble understanding why, even in my own personal context.
Arguing over what's objectively "fun" is like arguing which is "better", orange or blue.
The whole funding thing is a standard eco-marxist canard.
It's chicken/egg.
Is it that X received funding, and thus acts as a mouthpiece for the people that paid him?
Or is it that X is a lone voice fighting against a tidal wave, and someone wants to make sure he's able to keep fighting?
For that matter, our politicians gather GIANT piles of money from lots of people, how come that's ok but this isn't?
It's a good thing that this guy didn't 'massage' the data, or destroy the data, or 'lose' the data, or try to manipulate scientific publications, because that......wouldn't matter at all, apparently?
I read this aloud to my wife, and our 10lb yorkie-poo dog just walked over to me and said "If those goddamn animal activist hippies think they're going to make me live outdoors, they're fucking crazy."
Then he took his surgically-fixed knee, went back to his comfortable place on his knitted afghan in our predator free air-conditioned home, stopping by for a bite of nutritionally-balanced dog food and a sip of parasite-free drinking water, and proceeded to fall back asleep for his 20-hours-out-of-every-24 rest pattern.
Anyone have a recommendation for a USB boot setup?
I typically carry a USB (Tuff & Tiny) drive on my keychain, and am often greeted with the "Hi! While you're here, could you please look at my computer....?"
It's a 4 gig, so I could easily spare some of it to have a full bootable recovery OS available with a suite of repair/recover tools. I'd love to have actually a dual boot linux/ntfs option, since most of the systems I encounter are Win systems, and as much as I prefer operating from linux, I haven't always been impressed by linux' ability to 'reach into' an ntfs partition to really root out problems.
The kicker is that I also use the USB as a file transfer tool too. All the USB boot sets I've seen are meant to be the whole USB....I'd still like to have spare space available to shuffle files as needed.
Any suggestions would be great.
I agree, we need to expand our horizons and not be so kingdomcentric.
Instead of just PETA, we should have: ...although watching some people try to chain themselves to some mushrooms, or (better still) breaking into research labs to release sample of E.Coli into the wild might be hilarious. Or the PETx banquet, when the PETA people and the PEToPL people get into fistfights over the menu.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Bacteria (PEToB)
People for the Ethical Treatment of Archaea (uh oh, maybe PEToA, that's probably going to confuse the mailing list...)
People for the Ethical Treatment of Protista (PEToP)
People for the Ethical Treatment of Plantae (PEToPL?)
People for the Ethical Treatment of Fungi (PEToF)
"Valve has once again turned to Team Fortress 2 as the studioâ(TM)s outlet for experimentation, this time with a daring move to make the triple-A game entirely free to play."
"Daring move"?
The original TF (1996+) was a FREE mod that you played by often connecting through the FREE Gamespy server, connecting to any of a number of FREE games hosted all over. It was an *excellent* game, with a variety of extremely well-designed maps, novel & varied gameplay, and challenging mods.
In fact the current game, while a significant facelift, doesn't markedly change much in terms of gameplay. Even the modern maps, while nicely prettified, are largely re-creations of 2fort4, Canalzone, Prison, etc. All of it was 100% free of charge.
So while I commend Valve for finally releasing the game from serfdom, let's remember that it was Valve that originally decided that they would take a free game and charge for it in the first place.
Personally, I think it's BS - she's tossing her staff in front of the bus to take the hit for her bad judgement.
My guess is that she was initially against it, but I will credit her for being very sensitive to the winds of public opinion, and reversed herself when she sensed the public relations disaster coming from her initial wrong decision.
It seems like a better use of $100,000 to pay an organization to hunt down and kill a few hackers in some demonstrably brutal way.
Kind of two birds with one stone - cure for the immediate issue, plus a future prophylactic value.
I appreciate the link, and the 'debunking' of Pilmer. Thank you. That's generally a great link as well, it'll take some time to plow through the information there.
It's a very good point about the CO2 gradual increase, but wouldn't this be normal - the CO2 is deposited in the atmosphere in spikes, but takes time to diffuse around the globe, no? That would have been my assumption, but your source above pretty clearly anyway corrects my understanding of the various scales between human-emitted CO2 vs. volcanic.
Is there any explanation for the previous spikes of CO2/Warming, which seem similar both in magnitude, form, and frequency to the current one?
Looking at the chart of temps over history at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology, what we're experiencing seems quite typical for the last 500,000 years - in fact, it looks like we were reasonably overdue for a heating cycle.
Considering that the Appellate Court is meant to essentially act as a gatekeeper to the next level of the legal system, I'm surprised that there's no mechanism to enforce SOME sense of intellectual rigor on appellate rulings. If the Supremes are consistently overruling a certain appellate court's findings (or any lower court, really) wouldn't that suggest that the lower court(s) are aren't doing their jobs, or in other words: that they don't correctly understand the law?
There are a lot of theories that are a century old; I'll freely grant Anthropogenic Global Warming exactly the same credibility I do to Luminiferous Aether.
And I'd challenge you to provide links to any of the 'peer reviewed scientific papers' SPECIFICALLY supporting Gore's eschatological "global warming" FUD - that global warming is imminent, real, and human-caused, dated before Gore's Earth in the Balance (1992) or even before his presidential campaign in 2000.
Not that the 'climate is changing', mind you, that the GLOBE is warming (no caveats or references to 'climate change' outside of warming were presented in the film), and that HUMANS are to blame *exclusively* (again, no hedging - the film was quite clear).
Let me be clear in turn, since I'm sure you already are certain that I'm some mouth-breathing, Palin-loving, 'denier':
Do I think the globe is warming? Yep. And largely the scientific community as far back as the 70s believed this to be true.
Do I think humans have an impact? Yep, I'd even say it's farcical to believe otherwise - just about every human activity ultimately generates heat.
But here's the kicker: Do I believe that humans are the exclusive or even primary driver? Ha ha, not a chance. When a single-year's volcano eruption (Pinatubo) put out more CO2 than all of humanity, ever? Human input to the system is sub-margin-of-error numbers, and is inconsequential when compared to the variability of natural sources.
Even the sources referenced by AIT showed 'pulses' in temperature/CO2 at multi-hundred-thousand year intervals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Co2-temperature-plot.svg) - and this one doesn't look to be out of pattern. Further, the planet 'recovered' from each of those repeatedly. I fail to see how this situation is so strikingly unique, except insofar that there are a lot of hairless apes capering around on the surface of the planet this time, that solipsistically think it's their fault.
My point is that there are limited resources, and they can be far, far better spent than chasing some CO2 bogey (that not inconsequentially makes Mr Gore even more staggeringly wealthy, and carries along with it an anticapitalist, supragovernmental agenda that is disturbingly similar to that of ecomarxists for the last 50 years...).