Unsurprisingly, there are moonbats of every persuasion in any given population.
Fervent Christians who feel it's appropriate to prosytelize in class; radical homosexual 'rights' advocates who lobby 3rd graders' students moral beliefs; neither has a place in the classroom. Neither is particularly the 'example' of the system that its opponents like to make it seem. Both are nuts, and need to be ejected from the profession (not just from the school).
I'm not one of those who believes that school is only about 'reading, writing' and 'rithmatic' - there is a necessity (at secondary and higher education) to discuss complex moral and philosphical issues like gender preference and religion as part of a solid educational experience. However, a GOOD teacher merely encourages and referees the discussion, without revealing his/her own preferences.
Or, they could make a game which is even slightly unpredictable in ways that a retarded-monkey-AI couldn't cope, and thus make bot writing either pointlessly difficult (or at least engender a whole new generation of complex heuristic programming and perhaps advance the science of AI...).
For all the backbiting and discord between the US and its long standing European friends, your analysis sounds very familiar.
I'm not sure the fact that we share an apparently-universal experience with weaselly politicians too old to understand the internet is encouraging, or discouraging, however.:|
SL is a virtual world, but it's a pretty crappy example of the tech.
This is getting as annoying as my mom constantly referring to herself as 'surfing the blogs' and for pretty much the same reasons.
Note to article writers: referring to Second Life as some sort of euphemism for Virtual World does a huge disservice to the many, many shared-world 3d engines that are out there, as well simply convincing everyone that you don't know anything about it.
Second Life is an absolutely horrific application of virtual world concepts, novel only in the universality of rights it gives its participants. The graphics are atrocious (1990 would like its polygons back, please), performance is sub-abysmal (is it normal that when I see more than 4 people on my screen, my fps drops to 3?), and efficiencies are nonexistent (I recall one of the Linden Labs guy referring to it running on 000's of servers...which, if true, suggests that they're running no more than about 1 server per 10 players online at a time).
To put it bluntly, I was a beta tester of the "Visual OS" ViOS that was never released. I cannot see anything in Second Life in 2006 that is superior to what ViOS was in the 1990s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViOS (and it's successor Croquet looks to do everything SL does, even better).
A brief glance at Wiki's MMOG list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MMORPGs) lists 9 3D-based MMOGs just in the A's that all look substantially better and perform (AFAIK) substantially better than Second Life.
Here we've had Kyotovocates telling us for a decade that they KNOW their calculations are correct (despite questions), they KNOW the impact of X amount of CO2 and particulates output by country Y over Z years, they KNOW that global warming is going to have such-and-such effects to the TENTH of a degree over a century...
So with the general public being slapped in the face repeatedly by such certitude, how ironic is it that OTHER people with OTHER agendas are claiming similar certainty with their 'global climate-changing' suggestions? Reminds me of Thomas Moore's comments about tearing down the law to attack the devil - if you justify global action based on theoretical mechanisms, you can't disupute OTHER people making use of the same mechanisms differently. That would be hypocrisy, and would (perhaps) reveal that your original goals were more political than scientfic, now wouldn't it?
Because you cannot claim that YOU know precisely how a system works, and then assail someone else using pretty much the same mechanics to come to a conclusion YOU don't like.
Which is beautifully stated. Those things seem to be true.
What is NOT apparent (and which Kyotovocates, as I call them, seem to keep avoiding) is: - is the increase contributed by greenhouse gases (compared to natural cycles) significant? (I mean, if greenhouse gases are adding 0.1% to the net temperature gain over the next 100 years, that's NOT significant.) - if it is significant, are the costs of attempted climate mitigation less than or greater than the costs of doing nothing? - even if it is less, could that money be better spent mitigating some other human ill? - even if it is less and there is nothing better to spend that money on, are we positive that the net result of global warming is bad? - if one is convinced that it's significant, that the costs of mitigation are less than the costs of waiting, and that what's coming is bad and there is NOTHING we could better spend the money on....does it make sense that the first effort to cope with the problem should be an agreement OMITTING ENTIRELY the 40% of the Earth's population that are going to be the most critical causal actors over the next several decades?
Yes, I understand the 'punitive' pleasure and sort of masochistic schadenfreude the Guilty White West gets out of blaming each other and applying punishments to somehow expiate their consciences for something they did decades before anyone even had a clue about the science...but this is like soaking acres of already-burned ashes with water, while the fire elsewhere approaches a giant stand of dry tinder. OK my metaphors suck, sorry.
The "global warming" question is only superficially and immediately about "is global warming happening?" The consequences, our actions, and the expected results are the crux of the question, and I haven't seen any data about this that's worth donkey spit.
Well, actually, if you factor it by the proportion of people who actually vote, we're only talking about 20-30 people.
Personally, I think his wife wrote in "anyone but him" and the machines just considered that a -1 vote. This his vote +1 and her vote (-1) = 0. System works perfectly.
1) The United States is a democratic republic. There are plenty of reasons that power needs to remain at the state levels, not least because different regions have different feelings for the value of education. Rather than universalize the funding (across the US) I'd agree that such a plan is both more palatable, and more consistent with the original vision of the US by doing it on a state-by-state basis, dividing up the 'pot' of tax money paid within a state.
2) Your idea does disregard the burden placed on certain area schools bearing the non-homogenous brunt of immigrant or 'special needs' students. I don't disagree with it, but it's an observation which must be made. Schools which are located in areas with heavy immigrant populations are going to have a higher educational burden (cost per student average) than a small rural school district. Then again that rural district is going to have higher busing costs...does it all come out equivalent? I don't know, but I doubt it.
3) I think it's no coincidence that Fredrick the Great had an extraordinarily skilled military, and was the first to implement universal public education. I'd argue that not only does it DIRECTLY affect our economic success, it also bears directly on our military strength to have a well-educated populace, especially when our military philosophy depends on small-unit initiative and decisionmaking (particularly in a country which relies on a small cadre army and callups for the bulk of military numbers). Thus I'd say that a goodly chunk of the defense budget should ALSO go toward education...however, I would also say that this means that there isn't anything wrong with the military recruiting in schools (PC anti-military types, piss off!), nor is there anything wrong with spending more time/resources on physical fitness, camping, mapreading and geography, even shooting if the kids want to - all things that are disappearing from the curriculum (for lack of funding, usually), but which can be both fun for the kids and useful later in life in a military context.
This isn't precisely what you're talking about but...a son should never have to clean up his mom's computer. Or if you do, for the love of god, DON'T BROWSE THROUGH THE TEMPORARY INTERNET FILES.
Just wipe it. Trust me (shudder), a boy should never see that side of his mom.
That was no doubt the worst cleanup I ever had to do.
The duplication of effort seems mostly like a penis-length contest, and while I think competition in all things is generally good, I'm not sure that this is really happening for any rational reason. There are better uses that the investment and satellite space could be put towards, than simply overlapping each other's navigation systems.
Then you really simply don't get it. That's like saying "geez, why do we all print separate currencies, when we all could just be more efficient if we printed one and all used that..."
1) the ability to determine one's position on earth is vitally important, commercially, navigationally, and of course, tactically.
2) Whoever builds such a system, controls it. They can make it available as selectively or narrowly as they want. This availability can change over time.
3) Sometimes states don't like each other. When the disagreement becomes strong enough, sometimes they will try to mess with each other, and even occasionally fight. When this fighting happens (aka "war") one typically tries to hinder one's opponent as much as possible. As 'soft' methods of conflict go, locking them out of a positioning system as a not-so-subtle diplomatic move is benign enough that it's an attractive early option, so it's pretty likely to be used. As much as the Europeans are building Galileo because the evil US 'controls' GPS and they want an "open" system, if we ever see another general world war you can bet that Galileo would NOT remain universally available, either. To fail to build in the capacity to limit availability would be strategically stupid. (What would of course be curious is another European war - could the French turn off Galileo to the Germans?)
4) Security trumps economy. Tanks and guns provide no food directly, they simply COST an economy some wealth that could be used more beneficially, but is 'wasted' in essence as insurance against the actions of a future enemy. This is PRECISELY the same thing. Each country/group that can afford it, will build their own system as the value of having it 'unblockable' trumps the vulnerability of sharing resources.
How was it that Zinni was 'fired by Rumsfeld for predicting the current disaster in Iraq' when Zinni RETIRED from the USMC in September 2000? You might notice that we hadn't invaded Iraq by then?
While Zinni was a successful officer, without the benefit of later hindsight it's hard to credit his tactical/operational skills, as he was Director for Operations for the Unified Task Force in Somalia...I don't think the Black Hawk Down incident was a credit to stunning operational brilliance.
Shinseki retired precisely when his term ended, not a moment before. Yes, there was a history of irritation between them, but do you think that's much different than ANY top corporate executive team?
But hey, don't let facts get in the way of a good partisan rant. Maybe you'll get it off your chest and feel better?
Wait, I thought that the United States was the world's worst police state? Der Fuhrer George Bush and his Goebbels-analogue Rove, along with their glassy-eyed and jackbooted minions crushing all internal dissent with waves of black helicopters or stampeding Religious Fundamentalists?
I say: WTF?
Clearly, they 'got to' RSF and co-opted them. It's a tragedy when attention-whores, er, I mean "journalists" are afraid to 'speak truth to power'.
If we're using four bbls for every new one discovered (slightly misleading statistic, actually; if I eat 4 potato chips for every new one you give me, that's meaningless if I already have a million bags of chips, no?), doesn't that pretty strongly imply that there will be economically a 'fix' for the problems?
I mean, eventually, oil will become scarce enough that we HAVE to find another solution, because it will be too valuable to spend in everyone's gas tank. Then we adapt, or die. One way or another, it's solved.
Amazing any life lived though that but some plankton made it through
That's liable to be a touch misleading.
We're talking 600-700 million years ago. That "some plankton made it through" is pretty predictable, since there was nothing BUT single-cell and very early multicellular organisms (such as choanoflagellates) at that time.
One of the big headlines that it generated was that polar bears are going to go extinct because of climate change. the Washington Post quoted Lara Hansen of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), who expressed serious concern that populations will stop reproducing as climate warms.
In 2002, the WWF published a huge report on polar bears and global warming, called "Polar Bears at Risk." The organization found 22,000 polar bears scattered in 20 somewhat distinct populations around the Arctic. According to the WWF, 46 percent of the populations were stable, 17 percent were in decline, 14 percent were increasing, and the status of 23 percent was unknown.
Red flags waving on bad math! Any number divided by 20 yields a multiple of 5 -- 5, 10, 15, etc... An accompanying map only showed 19 populations, but no whole number divided by 19 yields 46, 17, 14, or 23.
The WWF did not map out the regions where the polar bear populations were changing. They left that to enviro-curmudgeons like me. And what I found was this: Where the polar bear populations are in decline -- around Baffin Bay (the region between Canada and Greenland), temperatures are also going down, big time. And the area where temperatures are rising the most -- in the Pacific region bordering on Alaska and Siberia, polar bear populations are increasing.
Not even CLOSE to what was reported. And environmentalists wonder why people don't believe the nonsense they spew?
So, if I understand this correctly, the NYT (which insists that Saddam never really had any WMDs, and that any development program was phony) publishes an article critical of the administration for putting documents up the web from the so-called Iraqi development programs because they reveal too much information about bomb making?
Huh?
How (precisely) does someone get to the point of knowing enough about developing nukes that his notes are classified as sensitive, without actually trying to build those nukes himself?
Bush's dictatorship? Never really lived under a dictatorship, have you? Either your disingenuous, or criminally naive. If this were truly the place you seem to believe, you DO understand that you, for holding such views, would be dead? Or the black helicopters would be on their way, at least?
Only the hysterically-emo, hang-wringing naive suburban leftist could POSSIBLY equate the current political structure of the US with a dictatorship, the same kind of person that would have no trouble slinging the terms 'genocide' or 'holocaust' at whatever happens to fill their 'fear-o-meter' for the moment.
You're a palpably insane, with paranoid delusions. It's a sordid comment on the audience of slashdot, and the no-holds-barred political climate that sees value in feeding your particular phobia rather than getting you the professional help you need, that you are rated 'insightful'.
So if I understand correctly, you're first presupposing a brilliant conspiracy to defraud tens if not hundreds of millions of voters in order to steal an election. A conspiracy that would require the complaisance of at LEAST hundreds or thousands of people, none of whom have slipped up even ONCE. Then you're presupposing that the masterminds behind this giant conspiracy are so flabbergastingly stupid that they'd implement their master plan so catastrophically badly that a 3 year old could see it? Do I have that right?
Alternately, it could be just stupidity, or crappy machines, or any number of BENIGN explanations and not an evil plan at all. But then I guess that tinfoil hat would look pretty damn stupid, wouldn't it?
I highly doubt they would attack us first, because there's absolutely nothing for them to gain. I also highly doubt NK will share their nukes with anybody willingly.
DPRK has hardly, by any standards, behaved rationally. Ever. Their entire history has been about constant frothing brinksmanship for the most trivial of issues. On what basis do you assume that they are going to start making reasonable cost/benefit analyses now?
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft encounters someone with a more flawed and aberrent understanding of copyright ownership than themselves? Now that IS news.
Unsurprisingly, there are moonbats of every persuasion in any given population.
Fervent Christians who feel it's appropriate to prosytelize in class; radical homosexual 'rights' advocates who lobby 3rd graders' students moral beliefs; neither has a place in the classroom. Neither is particularly the 'example' of the system that its opponents like to make it seem. Both are nuts, and need to be ejected from the profession (not just from the school).
I'm not one of those who believes that school is only about 'reading, writing' and 'rithmatic' - there is a necessity (at secondary and higher education) to discuss complex moral and philosphical issues like gender preference and religion as part of a solid educational experience. However, a GOOD teacher merely encourages and referees the discussion, without revealing his/her own preferences.
Fire this teacher. Case closed.
Or, they could make a game which is even slightly unpredictable in ways that a retarded-monkey-AI couldn't cope, and thus make bot writing either pointlessly difficult (or at least engender a whole new generation of complex heuristic programming and perhaps advance the science of AI...).
That might EVEN be interesting?
For all the backbiting and discord between the US and its long standing European friends, your analysis sounds very familiar.
:|
I'm not sure the fact that we share an apparently-universal experience with weaselly politicians too old to understand the internet is encouraging, or discouraging, however.
SL is a virtual world, but it's a pretty crappy example of the tech.
This is getting as annoying as my mom constantly referring to herself as 'surfing the blogs' and for pretty much the same reasons.
Note to article writers: referring to Second Life as some sort of euphemism for Virtual World does a huge disservice to the many, many shared-world 3d engines that are out there, as well simply convincing everyone that you don't know anything about it.
Second Life is an absolutely horrific application of virtual world concepts, novel only in the universality of rights it gives its participants. The graphics are atrocious (1990 would like its polygons back, please), performance is sub-abysmal (is it normal that when I see more than 4 people on my screen, my fps drops to 3?), and efficiencies are nonexistent (I recall one of the Linden Labs guy referring to it running on 000's of servers...which, if true, suggests that they're running no more than about 1 server per 10 players online at a time).
To put it bluntly, I was a beta tester of the "Visual OS" ViOS that was never released. I cannot see anything in Second Life in 2006 that is superior to what ViOS was in the 1990s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViOS (and it's successor Croquet looks to do everything SL does, even better).
A brief glance at Wiki's MMOG list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MMORPGs) lists 9 3D-based MMOGs just in the A's that all look substantially better and perform (AFAIK) substantially better than Second Life.
People laugh, scorn, disregard some brilliant ideas. ... is not equal to...
Any idea that is laughed at, scorned, and disregarded is actually a brilliant idea.
...if the Flying Spaghetti Monster is using his noodly appendage to design lizards with longer legs, the noodle gets longer?
I'm so confused how this stuff works now.
I think it's a matter of consistency.
Here we've had Kyotovocates telling us for a decade that they KNOW their calculations are correct (despite questions), they KNOW the impact of X amount of CO2 and particulates output by country Y over Z years, they KNOW that global warming is going to have such-and-such effects to the TENTH of a degree over a century...
So with the general public being slapped in the face repeatedly by such certitude, how ironic is it that OTHER people with OTHER agendas are claiming similar certainty with their 'global climate-changing' suggestions? Reminds me of Thomas Moore's comments about tearing down the law to attack the devil - if you justify global action based on theoretical mechanisms, you can't disupute OTHER people making use of the same mechanisms differently. That would be hypocrisy, and would (perhaps) reveal that your original goals were more political than scientfic, now wouldn't it?
Because you cannot claim that YOU know precisely how a system works, and then assail someone else using pretty much the same mechanics to come to a conclusion YOU don't like.
Yes, that IS my position.
Unless you can prove that what you're doing ISN'T going to cause more harm than good, yes, I believe 'doing nothing' is a perfectly adequate strategy.
To suggest anything else is actually pretty damn reckless with the future of the human race, no?
Which is beautifully stated.
Those things seem to be true.
What is NOT apparent (and which Kyotovocates, as I call them, seem to keep avoiding) is:
- is the increase contributed by greenhouse gases (compared to natural cycles) significant? (I mean, if greenhouse gases are adding 0.1% to the net temperature gain over the next 100 years, that's NOT significant.)
- if it is significant, are the costs of attempted climate mitigation less than or greater than the costs of doing nothing?
- even if it is less, could that money be better spent mitigating some other human ill?
- even if it is less and there is nothing better to spend that money on, are we positive that the net result of global warming is bad?
- if one is convinced that it's significant, that the costs of mitigation are less than the costs of waiting, and that what's coming is bad and there is NOTHING we could better spend the money on....does it make sense that the first effort to cope with the problem should be an agreement OMITTING ENTIRELY the 40% of the Earth's population that are going to be the most critical causal actors over the next several decades?
Yes, I understand the 'punitive' pleasure and sort of masochistic schadenfreude the Guilty White West gets out of blaming each other and applying punishments to somehow expiate their consciences for something they did decades before anyone even had a clue about the science...but this is like soaking acres of already-burned ashes with water, while the fire elsewhere approaches a giant stand of dry tinder. OK my metaphors suck, sorry.
The "global warming" question is only superficially and immediately about "is global warming happening?" The consequences, our actions, and the expected results are the crux of the question, and I haven't seen any data about this that's worth donkey spit.
Well, actually, if you factor it by the proportion of people who actually vote, we're only talking about 20-30 people.
Personally, I think his wife wrote in "anyone but him" and the machines just considered that a -1 vote. This his vote +1 and her vote (-1) = 0. System works perfectly.
Interesting world where 'trash' can be defined as "stuff that we paid $10,000/lb to get up here, but we don't need anymore".
I'd agree in principle, but with a few caveats.
1) The United States is a democratic republic. There are plenty of reasons that power needs to remain at the state levels, not least because different regions have different feelings for the value of education. Rather than universalize the funding (across the US) I'd agree that such a plan is both more palatable, and more consistent with the original vision of the US by doing it on a state-by-state basis, dividing up the 'pot' of tax money paid within a state.
2) Your idea does disregard the burden placed on certain area schools bearing the non-homogenous brunt of immigrant or 'special needs' students. I don't disagree with it, but it's an observation which must be made. Schools which are located in areas with heavy immigrant populations are going to have a higher educational burden (cost per student average) than a small rural school district. Then again that rural district is going to have higher busing costs...does it all come out equivalent? I don't know, but I doubt it.
3) I think it's no coincidence that Fredrick the Great had an extraordinarily skilled military, and was the first to implement universal public education. I'd argue that not only does it DIRECTLY affect our economic success, it also bears directly on our military strength to have a well-educated populace, especially when our military philosophy depends on small-unit initiative and decisionmaking (particularly in a country which relies on a small cadre army and callups for the bulk of military numbers). Thus I'd say that a goodly chunk of the defense budget should ALSO go toward education...however, I would also say that this means that there isn't anything wrong with the military recruiting in schools (PC anti-military types, piss off!), nor is there anything wrong with spending more time/resources on physical fitness, camping, mapreading and geography, even shooting if the kids want to - all things that are disappearing from the curriculum (for lack of funding, usually), but which can be both fun for the kids and useful later in life in a military context.
This isn't precisely what you're talking about but...a son should never have to clean up his mom's computer. Or if you do, for the love of god, DON'T BROWSE THROUGH THE TEMPORARY INTERNET FILES.
Just wipe it. Trust me (shudder), a boy should never see that side of his mom.
That was no doubt the worst cleanup I ever had to do.
The duplication of effort seems mostly like a penis-length contest, and while I think competition in all things is generally good, I'm not sure that this is really happening for any rational reason. There are better uses that the investment and satellite space could be put towards, than simply overlapping each other's navigation systems.
Then you really simply don't get it. That's like saying "geez, why do we all print separate currencies, when we all could just be more efficient if we printed one and all used that..."
1) the ability to determine one's position on earth is vitally important, commercially, navigationally, and of course, tactically.
2) Whoever builds such a system, controls it. They can make it available as selectively or narrowly as they want. This availability can change over time.
3) Sometimes states don't like each other. When the disagreement becomes strong enough, sometimes they will try to mess with each other, and even occasionally fight. When this fighting happens (aka "war") one typically tries to hinder one's opponent as much as possible. As 'soft' methods of conflict go, locking them out of a positioning system as a not-so-subtle diplomatic move is benign enough that it's an attractive early option, so it's pretty likely to be used.
As much as the Europeans are building Galileo because the evil US 'controls' GPS and they want an "open" system, if we ever see another general world war you can bet that Galileo would NOT remain universally available, either. To fail to build in the capacity to limit availability would be strategically stupid. (What would of course be curious is another European war - could the French turn off Galileo to the Germans?)
4) Security trumps economy. Tanks and guns provide no food directly, they simply COST an economy some wealth that could be used more beneficially, but is 'wasted' in essence as insurance against the actions of a future enemy. This is PRECISELY the same thing. Each country/group that can afford it, will build their own system as the value of having it 'unblockable' trumps the vulnerability of sharing resources.
How was it that Zinni was 'fired by Rumsfeld for predicting the current disaster in Iraq' when Zinni RETIRED from the USMC in September 2000? You might notice that we hadn't invaded Iraq by then?
While Zinni was a successful officer, without the benefit of later hindsight it's hard to credit his tactical/operational skills, as he was Director for Operations for the Unified Task Force in Somalia...I don't think the Black Hawk Down incident was a credit to stunning operational brilliance.
Shinseki retired precisely when his term ended, not a moment before. Yes, there was a history of irritation between them, but do you think that's much different than ANY top corporate executive team?
But hey, don't let facts get in the way of a good partisan rant. Maybe you'll get it off your chest and feel better?
Wait, I thought that the United States was the world's worst police state? Der Fuhrer George Bush and his Goebbels-analogue Rove, along with their glassy-eyed and jackbooted minions crushing all internal dissent with waves of black helicopters or stampeding Religious Fundamentalists?
I say: WTF?
Clearly, they 'got to' RSF and co-opted them. It's a tragedy when attention-whores, er, I mean "journalists" are afraid to 'speak truth to power'.
I know, I know......-842 Troll.
If we're using four bbls for every new one discovered (slightly misleading statistic, actually; if I eat 4 potato chips for every new one you give me, that's meaningless if I already have a million bags of chips, no?), doesn't that pretty strongly imply that there will be economically a 'fix' for the problems?
I mean, eventually, oil will become scarce enough that we HAVE to find another solution, because it will be too valuable to spend in everyone's gas tank. Then we adapt, or die. One way or another, it's solved.
Amazing any life lived though that but some plankton made it through
That's liable to be a touch misleading.
We're talking 600-700 million years ago. That "some plankton made it through" is pretty predictable, since there was nothing BUT single-cell and very early multicellular organisms (such as choanoflagellates) at that time.
http://www.cato.org/dailys/11-22-04.html
One of the big headlines that it generated was that polar bears are going to go extinct because of climate change. the Washington Post quoted Lara Hansen of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), who expressed serious concern that populations will stop reproducing as climate warms.
In 2002, the WWF published a huge report on polar bears and global warming, called "Polar Bears at Risk." The organization found 22,000 polar bears scattered in 20 somewhat distinct populations around the Arctic. According to the WWF, 46 percent of the populations were stable, 17 percent were in decline, 14 percent were increasing, and the status of 23 percent was unknown.
Red flags waving on bad math! Any number divided by 20 yields a multiple of 5 -- 5, 10, 15, etc... An accompanying map only showed 19 populations, but no whole number divided by 19 yields 46, 17, 14, or 23.
The WWF did not map out the regions where the polar bear populations were changing. They left that to enviro-curmudgeons like me. And what I found was this: Where the polar bear populations are in decline -- around Baffin Bay (the region between Canada and Greenland), temperatures are also going down, big time. And the area where temperatures are rising the most -- in the Pacific region bordering on Alaska and Siberia, polar bear populations are increasing.
Not even CLOSE to what was reported.
And environmentalists wonder why people don't believe the nonsense they spew?
So, if I understand this correctly, the NYT (which insists that Saddam never really had any WMDs, and that any development program was phony) publishes an article critical of the administration for putting documents up the web from the so-called Iraqi development programs because they reveal too much information about bomb making?
Huh?
How (precisely) does someone get to the point of knowing enough about developing nukes that his notes are classified as sensitive, without actually trying to build those nukes himself?
You insensitive, anonymous clod.
I for one welcome our Diebold overlords, who realized that:
1. make voting machines
2. get them accepted by the government
3. ***
4. Profit!
It will only work here in the US, though, because in Russa, voting machines hack you!
Bush's dictatorship? Never really lived under a dictatorship, have you? Either your disingenuous, or criminally naive. If this were truly the place you seem to believe, you DO understand that you, for holding such views, would be dead? Or the black helicopters would be on their way, at least?
Only the hysterically-emo, hang-wringing naive suburban leftist could POSSIBLY equate the current political structure of the US with a dictatorship, the same kind of person that would have no trouble slinging the terms 'genocide' or 'holocaust' at whatever happens to fill their 'fear-o-meter' for the moment.
You're a palpably insane, with paranoid delusions. It's a sordid comment on the audience of slashdot, and the no-holds-barred political climate that sees value in feeding your particular phobia rather than getting you the professional help you need, that you are rated 'insightful'.
So if I understand correctly, you're first presupposing a brilliant conspiracy to defraud tens if not hundreds of millions of voters in order to steal an election. A conspiracy that would require the complaisance of at LEAST hundreds or thousands of people, none of whom have slipped up even ONCE. Then you're presupposing that the masterminds behind this giant conspiracy are so flabbergastingly stupid that they'd implement their master plan so catastrophically badly that a 3 year old could see it? Do I have that right?
Alternately, it could be just stupidity, or crappy machines, or any number of BENIGN explanations and not an evil plan at all. But then I guess that tinfoil hat would look pretty damn stupid, wouldn't it?
I highly doubt they would attack us first, because there's absolutely nothing for them to gain. I also highly doubt NK will share their nukes with anybody willingly.
DPRK has hardly, by any standards, behaved rationally. Ever. Their entire history has been about constant frothing brinksmanship for the most trivial of issues. On what basis do you assume that they are going to start making reasonable cost/benefit analyses now?