*happy* "huh?" *guilty* "Oh that redlight district?" *evasive* "I'm not sure" *sincere* "I think that was the same town I was in, yes" *evasive* "But I was only there on business" . . . *relief*
Perhaps the 'marketplace' is a bad analogy, but maybe a 'democracy' of ideas is better: with Wiki, essentially you have a democracy of knowledge along with the (potentially) dangerous consequences that TFA is talking about: the tyranny of the majority, for example.
Because "most" people* agree on something as a fact, doesn't mean it's true. * and particularly when "people" in this case is defined as narrowly as individuals who care about the issue to edit it on Wiki...arguably, the only people that are going to waste time posting about something are A) altruists trying to actually correct something from an objective point of view B) zealots who obsess either in favor or against the certain subject.
I'm guessing in most cases (and in ALL subjects 10 years old) B exceeds A by a HUGE margin.
For any wiki entry, its worth as an article of information is DIRECTLY proportional to the ratio of A:B.
LOL, that's simply an absurd concept. Airports don't have anything to fear from the sorts of 'tactical' battlefield rockets that this would help against, and I'm extraordinarily doubtful that it would do jack *shit* against an RPG. Oh, and regarding it's promising utility against shoulder-launched SAMs? Yes, I've seen the test films on laser-missile defense and, in a clear sky with no clutter, no ground interference, it can take out AAMs in a second or two...of course, if Terrorist Abdullah is going to fire a SAM-9, he's not going to wait until that 747 full of people is 2 miles away on a departing vector at 5000' giving the laser a nice multi-second chase solution. He's going to nail it when it's 1000 yards away, 150' in the air, loaded to the gills with fuel, engines on HOT, and the pilot has no altitude to cope with the consequences. This laser system going to detect, track, power up, and fire early enough to kill the warhead in that case? (Not to mention to track and compensate for, I dunno, that landing JAL 747 full of 300 Mall of America shoppers that's about to cross the beam during firing????) Um, no. And can you imagine the maintenance contract on a ultra-high powered system with that sort of a hair-trigger, that has to basically sit "charged" 24/7? Egad. Yeah, I BET Northrop is hoping to sell a few of these.
Yes, but net surveillance is a mechanistic solution, that doesn't depend on anyone to act. Yes, throwing money down a surveillance rathole is going to generate (if you're damn lucky) perhaps a %0.0001 useful data return. But it's nearly assured you're going to get SOMETHING, and in the meanwhile, you can always PROVE to your constituencies that you are doing something useful, even if we all acknowlege it is trivial. It's not all that different from hiring umpteen-gajillion TSA screeners to make airports LOOK quite a bit more secure, even if we all ignore the facts that - its terrifically unlikely that anyone in the reasonable future will try to hijack a plane again due to the near certainty that the passengers will no longer 'cooperate' as they did before 9/11 - the 9/11 hijackers in any case DIDN'T 'sneak' **anything** through security. They were carrying AFAIK at the time perfectly legal stuff, box cutters, etc. - routine testing is showing that the current arrangement, while better than nothing, is only just, and is regularly penetrated by testers with guns, knives, and fake explosives.
OTOH, educating the public is a Brobingnagian task that presupposes a level of long term committment from the citizens (to say nothing of politicians) that's frankly unsustainable. And then, once they are educated, you're faced with the simple contradiction that an open society simply CANNOT be secured to the point that terror incidents can be prevented - full stop. So 'education' becomes synonymous with (what I would call) a more mature view that such things are going to happen like being struck by lightning. You can reduce the likelihood, but can't prevent it totally, not and live a normal life. And THEN the public is going to realize that the main motive traction behind terrorism is the media, and blame (rightly) the media's obsession with sensationalism. No, I think education, aside from being a utopian goal, opens entirely too many cans of worms for government, media, business, etc to be comfortable with the results. But hey, I'm just a complete cynic.
Finally, it's endemic to a democracy that its policies will blow whichever way the wind happens to be blowing. The public's attention and concern is fickle and short-lived.
I'm not sure that doesn't presuppose that biological development (ie evolution) is deterministic, it's not.
The value of biological development in evolution is the number of parallel iterations over time, and the system's redundancy. In the same sense, we look at biological systems now and marvel at their complexity, but really, we're seeing the itsy-bitsy proportion of successes and NOT immediately noticing that behind it is a huge timespan and multitudes of failures.
I have no doubt that EVENTUALLY such organisms might have something to teach us...but in the same timeframe in which they repeatedly 'try' to succeed, I expect that we'll probably have learned more, faster.
I'm not convinced that 'helping infertile couples have children' is the ultimate rationale - is everyone ENTITLED to have children?
I mean, is it so far fetched to believe that several million years of trial and error have produced a system of conception that is fairly fault-tolerant but will self-abort if a certain minimum level of viability is not achieved? And that short-circuiting this might not be in anyone's best interest - the parents', the child's, society's?
So then we come in with near-godlike medical technology, and FORCE certain sets of gametes together which would otherwise fail? Am I the only one that has a moral problem with that?
Personally, I'm a HUGE fan of the 'conventional' method of fertilization; if it works, great. If it doesn't, maybe there's a very good reason it doesn't.
Congratulations, that's not just how Wiki works. That's how the WORLD works.
The corollary being that once you have accepted the expansion, you keep getting handed jobs until you cannot accomplish them - a variant of the Peter Principle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
You have two choices - you can become cynical, underperform, and pat yourself on the back how you're getting a 'free ride' on all the other stupid patsies, or, you can simply do whatever you can and not be afraid to say "sorry, I simply don't have time to take on that additional responsibility and continue to do all the other things I'm already responsible for". HOWVER, YOU MUST NOT THEN TAKE IT AS YOUR FAULT IT IF NOBODY DOES THE TASK AND SOMETHING COMES CRASHING DOWN (the most frequent consequence, in my experience).
The first requires a certain moral flexibility. The second requires some psychological cojones.
the objection is to them passing out the edited versions.
What if I send them one that I paid for (do I own it this week, I forget what the current belief is...?), and pay them for the service of editing it, to send it back to me?
I mean, if I bought the film, I should be able to NOT watch certain content, mayn't I? Or am I going to get sued if I blink at the wrong time, and ruin the 'original artistic vision' of the picture?
It is my opinion that in most parts of the world politics stopped being about "serious ideas of inteligent oponents" to transform into:
* "give me your votes"
* "how to look good in front of the voters in X easy steps"
Well, it's endemic to democracy. In the same sense that altruistic communism can only really works in the smallest of social units (say, a very small village or a family), democracy suffers from the same ailments. The moment that a democratic system is not a number of thoughtful members contemplating the leadership/election of someone KNOWN to them, it becomes a publicity campaign - whoever has the best publicity machine (and in these days, simply the most money) has a gigantic advantage. They can frame the debate, ask the 'right' questions, promote their strengths while their opponent(s) are reduced to mainly defending themselves. This is in particular a problem of direct democracy, which the framers of the US Constitution presciently foresaw; in response, they made the US a democratic REPUBLIC where the states have the primary powers of daily government, and the federal business is conducted by representatives chosen at the STATE level. The highest federal office, the Presidency, would be selected by the much maligned electoral system for PRECISELY this reason: the states could write their own laws about how electors were selected, and how they would be directed to vote by the population of the STATES.
In their view, it seems, they considered the state (in their context, a political organization that a man on horseback could cross in no more than about a week) to be the largest wieldy political body reliable enough to be subject to direct democracy.
Sadly, as modern states have grown (and in the US government, by the agglomeration of power to the federal government beginning in the 1860s) they have not understood this lesson (or it's been lost in the wave of power passing to individuals over the past 100 years). Now you can have a moderate-sized US county with a population far exceeding that of any of the original 13 colonies, and the concept that voters know the people they are voting for is totally lost. Likewise, the concept of voters as knowledgeable, caring individuals is also totally lost, and the 'right' of voting has been extended without question, regardless of educational level, interest, or competence - as sufferage is universalized you quite naturally evolve a system which is less cerebral, less considered, and more manipulateable by people who have the specific tools (media) for public manipulation.
I'm not saying democracy is broken, only that the things people complain about democracy are integral to the nature of democractic processes, particularly when they are stretched to functions and scopes that were totally beyond the imagination of the most far sighted Athenian democrat.
I entirely agree with the idea that bats make a better bug-killer than zappers.
However, relevant to the first post above (Minnesota State Bird) as a Minnesotan, I'm frightened to know that I house on my half-acre property a colony of 75+ bats who seem frightfully well-fed and happy. And it's STILL nearly intolerable to be outside around dusk or dawn, due to mosquitoes.
Congratulations, you just discovered the difference between a free market and USA-style capitalism. What, is it that one is based on what really happens in the behaviour of people in the marketplace, and one is entirely constructed of the tinfoil-hat suppositions by an anonymous poster who doesn't really KNOW anything?
No wait, that's USA style POLITICS, not USA-style capitalism.
Google finds some legislators stances on net neutrality unappealing?
Why don't they simply illustrate the value of neutrality to said legislators?
Joe User> Hm, I'd like to look up my congressperson. Search: "congressman minnesota" Result: (showing results 1 of 1) Netneutrality.org Joe User> what? That can't be right. Let me try by their name.... Search: "congressman john smith mn" result: (showing results 5 of 5) netneutrality.org, anyone_but_john_smith_for_congress.net, getridofjohnsmith.org, johnsmithmolestedmydog.com, adultmalediaperfetish.net
I would imagine they would get the point rather quickly.
Similarly, it's illegal to record a telephone conversation without telling all parties on the line that it's being recorded. I think that's federal law.
Nope. In MN for example, it's ok to record telephone conversations as long as (at least) one party to the conversation is aware of it.
While firms' profits have soared, wages for the typical worker have barely budged. The middle class--admittedly a vague term in America--feels squeezed. A college degree is no longer a passport to ever-higher pay.
Stop reading here. The number one medical problem of America's underclass is obesity. Something like 98% of families below the poverty line own a TV, 70% own TWO or more, 60% own a car.
"Poverty" here means you can't afford the XBox360 (this year) and can only afford a carton of cigarettes and a few lottery tickets every third day.
Arguably, the US as been stumbling along in this vicious cycle of government dependence since the Depression, when a segment of US society decided that the government knows better than individuals how to spend their money. Income tax, the welfare state, social security, all have created the largest class of dependent citizens this country has ever seen.
I don't think that and the current malaise are unrelated, although it would take extraordinary political courage to face it.
The robot dog has learnt to see a ball and tell another one where the ball is, if it's moving and what colour it is, and the other is capable of recognising it.
Just one more step, and it would make a perfect domestic companion. That and a wet, velvety tongue. We could call it the "Peanut Butter" paradigm.
Argue the minutae, miss the point. Throw in an ad-hominem, and you're golden.
Most scientific research depends on federal funding. SMBS. Nice fact, if you could prove it. Again, the Bush ban is on FEDERAL FUNDING only. The rest of your post agrees with that by referring to the Kalifornia efforts.
If any lab in any scientific research organization touches a non-Bush-approved stem cell line, it "poisons" the entire organization Because you and I both know that the same nutballs that believe that they are entitled to suck from the Federal Teat would have NO compunctions about buying equipment for their 'non stem-cell related project' and it "accidentally" ending up in the stem cell lab next door or down the hall.
I'll go through it again: The taxpayer (I wish it was only them!) votes for the elected officials, who in turn then decide how the taxpayer's money is spent. Majority voted for the clearly-Christian Bush, ergo don't really have much problem with a funding ban in a morally grey area. In Kalifornia, they voted to spend their money on the stem cell research project - TERRIFIC. Why (in your mind) aren't Federal taxpayers/voters entitled to make the same decisions regarding their tax dollars?
Don't like it? Find enough of your friends that agree with you, and vote in a different guy.
And, how are these 'litigious wingnuts' distinctly different from the 'litigious wingnuts' that prevent freedom of speech from being applicable within X yards of abortion clinics? From the ones that have effectively stopped all civilian nuclear power development in this country for 30 years? That are trying to effectively neuter the 2nd Amendment? That shut down massive projects over the fate of an utterly meaningless little amphibian that exists in a handful of ponds?
Do I think that our country is too litigious? Yep. Personally, I'd LIKE to see the Kalifornia initiative continue. That's what being a REPUBLIC is all about....STATES' rights. (Which in a sense brings us back to the original point, doesn't it?)
Well, I think the first step in the argument is to get rid of the strawmen. There are a number of debates that are lumped together as "global warming", which may or may not have validity, and which may be more or less POLITICAL arguments, instead of scientific ones.
1) is the global temperature increasing? As I understand it, the answer seems to be a qualified yes. Qualified becuase: - it depends on your timescale - it depends on your measuring device; I understand that air temperature measurements are not entirely consistent with the ground temperature readings. Not knowing the answer myself (everyone seems to have a political axe to grind) I went and grabbed this raw data from the NOAA paleologic climate site (assuming that's as neutral as I'll find), dropped it briefly into excel to chart it, which confuses the issue even more. This is just RAW data...no smoothing, no 'forcing', no extrapolations, no 'models' (aside from the first-order interpretation that gives us the raw temperature data, of course). http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/7956/green8aq.gif http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/5454/alps2000yrte mp8zu.gif IIRC one of them is the Alps tree ring data, going back about 2000 years, the other is Greenland icecore data going back 50,000 years. Links to the source are on the Alps chart. Based on these charts, I have to say, the 'warming' looks fairly mild, and certainly not outside of the range of natural possibilities. NOTE: it doesn't help people arguing that warming is occuring, that they keep doing a bait'n'switch, flipping back and forth between temperature and CO2 levels interchangeably. That costs credibility.
2) how much of the warming is due to human effects? Intuitively, my gut says "a lot". Look at the amount of heat put out by a single city - every home has artificial heat (or cooling, generating hear), cars, industry....it just makes SENSE that humans are heating up the planet to some degree. But then again, the planet is a HUGE system, not easily influenced. And human industry - say since the era of powered machines, is fleetingly recent in climatological timescales. Looking at the charts above, I *don't* see a significant recent impact. I know about dinosaurs in the Antarctic, wood samples in Greenland glaciers, etc. all of which point to a globe which was significantly warmer historically. It's clearly gone through massive heating and cooling cycles, regardless of human activity (or even existence). Recent temps on Mars have also increased, suggesting that there is a significant extra-systemic input (the Sun) which hardly is even mentioned in most popular debates on the subject.
3) assuming a significant fraction of the effect is anthropogenic, is there something we can do about it? Previous cycles prove that the Earth's climate system has a number of stable 'rest points', with potentially chaotic climate change during transitions, and a bias toward returning to these rest-states. Has anyone proven, for that matter, that warming is an unalloyed BAD thing? Poison ivy will grow faster, but then again, there will also be more arable land than in the past. Ultimately, it seems futile to try to control a system of such staggering scope - it's a waste of money and finite resources to try to 'freeze' the climate in this current anthropophilic setting. The climate is GOING to change, that's a certainty. It also seems a certainty that Kyoto's a ridiculous, hypocritical treaty: if climate change is so imminent, so catastrophic, and so avoidable then why does the treaty OMIT 40% of the world's population, the 40% that is going to be most aggressively industrializing in the next 20 years? I understand that 'fairness' aspect, but one should understand that trivializes the argument: if your house is burning down, you don't stop Betty from getting out because it's Timmy's
..."This is an important first step, but it really is a first step, a proof of principle that... you can rewire part of the nervous system," said Dr. Douglas Kerr, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins University who led the work being published Monday in the journal Annals of Neurology
Would that be stem cell research...going on at an AMERICAN university? OH MY GOD - WHERE ARE THE BLACK HELICOPTERS? WHERE ARE THE BUSH-CHENEY-ROVENAZI STORMTROOPERS TO STOP THIS EVIL?
Oh wait, the president only said that federal funding wouldn't be available, he didn't actually ban anything (except human cloning), now did he? In fact, there aren't really a 'raft of restrictions' at all, just a short list of stem cell lines for which federal funding is available, and not for any others.
If this is the universal panacea that it's being touted to be, then there should be no difficulty finding state, local, or private funding sources. You just can't feed out of the FEDERAL money-trough on this one.
Given that roughly half the country has moral qualms about this, and in fact a majority voted for a president whose Christian ethic was prominent in his campaign, the holdback on funding makes perfect sense.
(Granted, the OTHER half of the country has achieved a level of moral certainty (or at least self-justification) that they are both able sleep peacefully AND sneer contemptuously at the other half of the country for being stupid Christian hicks...some of us aren't quite so conceited as to self-declare omniscience in this matter.)
The role of government is to insure the secure the people against the tyranny of those who do not subscribe to the concept of liberty. The people are free to then do what they want - whether it be profitable or not.
So you'd advocate a tyranny to ensure liberty? Tyranny is ok as long as it's 'the good guys'? That IS ironic.
No, the OP was correct. The role of government is to handle the things that are necessary but do not profit anyone particularly enough to make it worth while in a capitalist sense (national security is one example, but also diplomacy, fire depts, etc.). It's arguable if 'social programs' are rightly within the provenance of government, as they are less and less about basic support, and more often becoming engines of social engineering and vote-buying.
As opposed to climatologists that are getting funding based on their global warming research? Or politicians that sense that this is a workable issue with at least a significant percentage of their core audience, and that it neatly reinforces their anti-corporate credentials?
He's an "industry shill", but they're both entirely neutral and disinterested observers reporting the facts with no FUD?
Indeed, read with caution.
I've been reading at "4" and frankly, while there are a NUMBER of posts pointing out this guy's background and job, I haven't seen ANY that directly dispute any of the presented alleged facts? IS the net ice/snow mass in the Antarctic increasing? Do historically high CO2 numbers correlate with only warm periods, or also with cold periods? If you want to persuade anyone, argue the facts.
Enough histrionics about the source: one could also EQUALLY argue that you're reversing cause and effect - it could just as well be that he has these views and is persuasive, so he's getting industry backing to counteract the massive Global Warming Propoganda Campaign (like, for example, a mainstream movie released on thousands of theater screens...paid for by whom again?).
If you can't argue the case, argue the law. If you can't argue the law, attack the lawyer, right?
What I find so ironic in the political comments on/. is the startling hypocrisy of the people declaring the US hypocritical.
As I understand it, their logic is: US has nukes, ergo the US is bad. More nukes, more bad. But nukes in the hands of an unstable middle eastern state = (somehow) justifiable comeuppance for that nasty USA?
Teh?
Humanity has been struggling to develop, as fast as possible, better and more efficient ways of killing each other NONSTOP since they figured out tool use. To suggest that somehow we're now suddenly 'enlightened' enough to stop doing this is either a staggering level of naivete or (more probably) an overoptimistic judgment of how much more 'advanced' we are than our Cro-Magnon ancestors.
War is FOR KEEPS. There are no 'reset' buttons, no 'extra games', and no 'do over'. War is (now) about murdering another state's people until that state either collapses or does what you want. That's horrible, that's barbaric, and in some cases it IS regrettably necessary (and you can argue about varying levels of who decides what's 'necessary', of course). But the fact remains that when you fight a war, you want to cause as little harm to your own people, generally by causing the maximum harm to the enemy. [As a side argument, the US *did* use nukes on Japan for precisely this simple reason: we had them, we could use them, and there were reasonable arguments that it might end the war, so we did. End of story, morally. Some might say that the casualties of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were killed to prevent the much greater general slaughter of an invasion of the Home Islands. Some others might say 'better two Jap cities than 1 battalion of US soldiers'. Whatever your justification, we DID use them, they DID end the war almost immediately. To ignore that and then cry about the US being the only country to use nukes is nothing but political disingenuity.]
So when you're talking about nuclear weapons, there is no 'fair'. It's not sandlot baseball, where if only your team has gloves, it's only 'fair' that you either play without or share with the other team. If you can keep something like this devastating technology limited (prefereably to yourself; failing that, to your friends; failing that to your friends and enemies with whom you have an 'understanding'), that's an unalloyed 'good'. We're not talking about 'fair', merely 'good'.
As a wise man once said "If you're in a fair fight, your tactics suck."
If you feel morally repelled by the idea that "we" have something that "they" don't, I can only breathe a sigh of relief that you have utterly no policy-making responsibility. Again, we're not talking candy, comic books, or toys - we're talking about the capability of killing each other. I can trust me. I have no problem if I have a gun and you don't, because I know I'm only going to use it as a last resort. Now yes, this may give YOU an incentive to get your own gun - and me a very good reason to prevent you. The question is of course, how badly do I want to prevent you getting one? Between two people with complex motivations and history, this model is hard enough; between two states with an antagonistic history and a propensity toward violence? It's a complicated problem whose variables are approaching the infinite.
Now, consequently, let me point out that I certainly don't feel that Iran has any MORAL obligation not to seek nuclear weapons. It IS hypocritical for the US to take some injured tone about Iran, but I suppose simply saying baldly "Yes, we have them, and we don't want anyone ELSE to have them if we can help it," is just entirely too Realpolitik for your average civilian (particularly for the pantywaists that see geopolitics as some sort of theory exercise or amusing game).
(Likewise, we are under no moral requirement to allow them to develop same, however.) As a signatory of the NNPT, the ethical thing would have been for them to simply withdraw (there is a mechanism for that). They are only
"Aside from cosmetic differences there does not appear to be much that sets the two mice apart from one another."
"Very few mice use an APM rating and while Razer does not explain how they did the testing, it suffices to say that 1200 APM is a lot." I wonder if you can turn it up to 11?
"During gaming the Razer did very well though there was no major difference between it and the Viper or even the Diamondback "
Translation: I got this free mouse I have to review, so, um, it's REALLY COOL. OK?
Funny stuff aside, want to build a "MMOG mouse"? (assuming cost is no object) - adjustable body size, mouse location: like the Saitek joystics, have adjustment dials that could actually move the body components of the mouse to compensate for larger or smaller hands. Let you raise the restpad of the body of the mouse, laterally move the button locations forward/back or side/side. - adjustable weight; I hate light mice, some people hate heavy ones - I like their 'rubber rails', that's a good idea, although likely to get skanky after a few hundred hours of sweaty-handed gaming. - additional programmable buttons, programmable 'chords' with keyboard keys - a perforated body and a small internal fan that blows air on up through the mouse to cool your hand for long-duration gaming. - force-feedback. I thought this was incredibly stupid on a mouse until I tried it for a long time, now I kind of like the subtle tactile cue.
Slashdot Mirror
*happy* "huh?"
*guilty* "Oh that redlight district?"
*evasive* "I'm not sure"
*sincere* "I think that was the same town I was in, yes"
*evasive* "But I was only there on business"
.
.
.
*relief*
Perhaps the 'marketplace' is a bad analogy, but maybe a 'democracy' of ideas is better: with Wiki, essentially you have a democracy of knowledge along with the (potentially) dangerous consequences that TFA is talking about: the tyranny of the majority, for example.
Because "most" people* agree on something as a fact, doesn't mean it's true.
* and particularly when "people" in this case is defined as narrowly as individuals who care about the issue to edit it on Wiki...arguably, the only people that are going to waste time posting about something are
A) altruists trying to actually correct something from an objective point of view
B) zealots who obsess either in favor or against the certain subject.
I'm guessing in most cases (and in ALL subjects 10 years old) B exceeds A by a HUGE margin.
For any wiki entry, its worth as an article of information is DIRECTLY proportional to the ratio of A:B.
LOL, that's simply an absurd concept. Airports don't have anything to fear from the sorts of 'tactical' battlefield rockets that this would help against, and I'm extraordinarily doubtful that it would do jack *shit* against an RPG.
Oh, and regarding it's promising utility against shoulder-launched SAMs? Yes, I've seen the test films on laser-missile defense and, in a clear sky with no clutter, no ground interference, it can take out AAMs in a second or two...of course, if Terrorist Abdullah is going to fire a SAM-9, he's not going to wait until that 747 full of people is 2 miles away on a departing vector at 5000' giving the laser a nice multi-second chase solution. He's going to nail it when it's 1000 yards away, 150' in the air, loaded to the gills with fuel, engines on HOT, and the pilot has no altitude to cope with the consequences. This laser system going to detect, track, power up, and fire early enough to kill the warhead in that case? (Not to mention to track and compensate for, I dunno, that landing JAL 747 full of 300 Mall of America shoppers that's about to cross the beam during firing????) Um, no.
And can you imagine the maintenance contract on a ultra-high powered system with that sort of a hair-trigger, that has to basically sit "charged" 24/7? Egad. Yeah, I BET Northrop is hoping to sell a few of these.
Yes, but net surveillance is a mechanistic solution, that doesn't depend on anyone to act. Yes, throwing money down a surveillance rathole is going to generate (if you're damn lucky) perhaps a %0.0001 useful data return. But it's nearly assured you're going to get SOMETHING, and in the meanwhile, you can always PROVE to your constituencies that you are doing something useful, even if we all acknowlege it is trivial. It's not all that different from hiring umpteen-gajillion TSA screeners to make airports LOOK quite a bit more secure, even if we all ignore the facts that
- its terrifically unlikely that anyone in the reasonable future will try to hijack a plane again due to the near certainty that the passengers will no longer 'cooperate' as they did before 9/11
- the 9/11 hijackers in any case DIDN'T 'sneak' **anything** through security. They were carrying AFAIK at the time perfectly legal stuff, box cutters, etc.
- routine testing is showing that the current arrangement, while better than nothing, is only just, and is regularly penetrated by testers with guns, knives, and fake explosives.
OTOH, educating the public is a Brobingnagian task that presupposes a level of long term committment from the citizens (to say nothing of politicians) that's frankly unsustainable. And then, once they are educated, you're faced with the simple contradiction that an open society simply CANNOT be secured to the point that terror incidents can be prevented - full stop. So 'education' becomes synonymous with (what I would call) a more mature view that such things are going to happen like being struck by lightning. You can reduce the likelihood, but can't prevent it totally, not and live a normal life. And THEN the public is going to realize that the main motive traction behind terrorism is the media, and blame (rightly) the media's obsession with sensationalism.
No, I think education, aside from being a utopian goal, opens entirely too many cans of worms for government, media, business, etc to be comfortable with the results. But hey, I'm just a complete cynic.
Finally, it's endemic to a democracy that its policies will blow whichever way the wind happens to be blowing. The public's attention and concern is fickle and short-lived.
I'm not sure that doesn't presuppose that biological development (ie evolution) is deterministic, it's not.
The value of biological development in evolution is the number of parallel iterations over time, and the system's redundancy. In the same sense, we look at biological systems now and marvel at their complexity, but really, we're seeing the itsy-bitsy proportion of successes and NOT immediately noticing that behind it is a huge timespan and multitudes of failures.
I have no doubt that EVENTUALLY such organisms might have something to teach us...but in the same timeframe in which they repeatedly 'try' to succeed, I expect that we'll probably have learned more, faster.
I'm not convinced that 'helping infertile couples have children' is the ultimate rationale - is everyone ENTITLED to have children?
I mean, is it so far fetched to believe that several million years of trial and error have produced a system of conception that is fairly fault-tolerant but will self-abort if a certain minimum level of viability is not achieved? And that short-circuiting this might not be in anyone's best interest - the parents', the child's, society's?
So then we come in with near-godlike medical technology, and FORCE certain sets of gametes together which would otherwise fail? Am I the only one that has a moral problem with that?
Personally, I'm a HUGE fan of the 'conventional' method of fertilization; if it works, great. If it doesn't, maybe there's a very good reason it doesn't.
Congratulations, that's not just how Wiki works. That's how the WORLD works.
The corollary being that once you have accepted the expansion, you keep getting handed jobs until you cannot accomplish them - a variant of the Peter Principle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
You have two choices - you can become cynical, underperform, and pat yourself on the back how you're getting a 'free ride' on all the other stupid patsies, or, you can simply do whatever you can and not be afraid to say "sorry, I simply don't have time to take on that additional responsibility and continue to do all the other things I'm already responsible for". HOWVER, YOU MUST NOT THEN TAKE IT AS YOUR FAULT IT IF NOBODY DOES THE TASK AND SOMETHING COMES CRASHING DOWN (the most frequent consequence, in my experience).
The first requires a certain moral flexibility. The second requires some psychological cojones.
the objection is to them passing out the edited versions.
What if I send them one that I paid for (do I own it this week, I forget what the current belief is...?), and pay them for the service of editing it, to send it back to me?
I mean, if I bought the film, I should be able to NOT watch certain content, mayn't I? Or am I going to get sued if I blink at the wrong time, and ruin the 'original artistic vision' of the picture?
It is my opinion that in most parts of the world politics stopped being about "serious ideas of inteligent oponents" to transform into:
* "give me your votes"
* "how to look good in front of the voters in X easy steps"
Well, it's endemic to democracy.
In the same sense that altruistic communism can only really works in the smallest of social units (say, a very small village or a family), democracy suffers from the same ailments. The moment that a democratic system is not a number of thoughtful members contemplating the leadership/election of someone KNOWN to them, it becomes a publicity campaign - whoever has the best publicity machine (and in these days, simply the most money) has a gigantic advantage. They can frame the debate, ask the 'right' questions, promote their strengths while their opponent(s) are reduced to mainly defending themselves.
This is in particular a problem of direct democracy, which the framers of the US Constitution presciently foresaw; in response, they made the US a democratic REPUBLIC where the states have the primary powers of daily government, and the federal business is conducted by representatives chosen at the STATE level. The highest federal office, the Presidency, would be selected by the much maligned electoral system for PRECISELY this reason: the states could write their own laws about how electors were selected, and how they would be directed to vote by the population of the STATES.
In their view, it seems, they considered the state (in their context, a political organization that a man on horseback could cross in no more than about a week) to be the largest wieldy political body reliable enough to be subject to direct democracy.
Sadly, as modern states have grown (and in the US government, by the agglomeration of power to the federal government beginning in the 1860s) they have not understood this lesson (or it's been lost in the wave of power passing to individuals over the past 100 years). Now you can have a moderate-sized US county with a population far exceeding that of any of the original 13 colonies, and the concept that voters know the people they are voting for is totally lost. Likewise, the concept of voters as knowledgeable, caring individuals is also totally lost, and the 'right' of voting has been extended without question, regardless of educational level, interest, or competence - as sufferage is universalized you quite naturally evolve a system which is less cerebral, less considered, and more manipulateable by people who have the specific tools (media) for public manipulation.
I'm not saying democracy is broken, only that the things people complain about democracy are integral to the nature of democractic processes, particularly when they are stretched to functions and scopes that were totally beyond the imagination of the most far sighted Athenian democrat.
I entirely agree with the idea that bats make a better bug-killer than zappers.
However, relevant to the first post above (Minnesota State Bird) as a Minnesotan, I'm frightened to know that I house on my half-acre property a colony of 75+ bats who seem frightfully well-fed and happy. And it's STILL nearly intolerable to be outside around dusk or dawn, due to mosquitoes.
Congratulations, you just discovered the difference between a free market and USA-style capitalism.
What, is it that one is based on what really happens in the behaviour of people in the marketplace, and one is entirely constructed of the tinfoil-hat suppositions by an anonymous poster who doesn't really KNOW anything?
No wait, that's USA style POLITICS, not USA-style capitalism.
Google finds some legislators stances on net neutrality unappealing?
Why don't they simply illustrate the value of neutrality to said legislators?
Joe User> Hm, I'd like to look up my congressperson.
Search: "congressman minnesota"
Result: (showing results 1 of 1) Netneutrality.org
Joe User> what? That can't be right. Let me try by their name....
Search: "congressman john smith mn"
result: (showing results 5 of 5) netneutrality.org, anyone_but_john_smith_for_congress.net, getridofjohnsmith.org, johnsmithmolestedmydog.com, adultmalediaperfetish.net
I would imagine they would get the point rather quickly.
Seriously, what the fuck have they been doing all this time? Pounding their dicks with mallets?
In a Darwinistic sense, at least that would provide some hope to young webdevs.
Similarly, it's illegal to record a telephone conversation without telling all parties on the line that it's being recorded. I think that's federal law.
Nope. In MN for example, it's ok to record telephone conversations as long as (at least) one party to the conversation is aware of it.
Heinlein was one of the Sci-Fi authors that stimulated the imagination,
That wasn't all he stimulated. Very engaging reading for the early pubsecent teen male, too.
While firms' profits have soared, wages for the typical worker have barely budged. The middle class--admittedly a vague term in America--feels squeezed. A college degree is no longer a passport to ever-higher pay.
Stop reading here.
The number one medical problem of America's underclass is obesity.
Something like 98% of families below the poverty line own a TV, 70% own TWO or more, 60% own a car.
"Poverty" here means you can't afford the XBox360 (this year) and can only afford a carton of cigarettes and a few lottery tickets every third day.
Arguably, the US as been stumbling along in this vicious cycle of government dependence since the Depression, when a segment of US society decided that the government knows better than individuals how to spend their money. Income tax, the welfare state, social security, all have created the largest class of dependent citizens this country has ever seen.
I don't think that and the current malaise are unrelated, although it would take extraordinary political courage to face it.
Funny, I thought we already had freely-provided education. Hm, I guess we should throw MORE money at it, I'm *sure* that will solve everything.
The robot dog has learnt to see a ball and tell another one where the ball is, if it's moving and what colour it is, and the other is capable of recognising it.
Just one more step, and it would make a perfect domestic companion. That and a wet, velvety tongue.
We could call it the "Peanut Butter" paradigm.
Argue the minutae, miss the point. Throw in an ad-hominem, and you're golden.
Most scientific research depends on federal funding.
SMBS. Nice fact, if you could prove it.
Again, the Bush ban is on FEDERAL FUNDING only. The rest of your post agrees with that by referring to the Kalifornia efforts.
If any lab in any scientific research organization touches a non-Bush-approved stem cell line, it "poisons" the entire organization
Because you and I both know that the same nutballs that believe that they are entitled to suck from the Federal Teat would have NO compunctions about buying equipment for their 'non stem-cell related project' and it "accidentally" ending up in the stem cell lab next door or down the hall.
I'll go through it again:
The taxpayer (I wish it was only them!) votes for the elected officials, who in turn then decide how the taxpayer's money is spent. Majority voted for the clearly-Christian Bush, ergo don't really have much problem with a funding ban in a morally grey area. In Kalifornia, they voted to spend their money on the stem cell research project - TERRIFIC. Why (in your mind) aren't Federal taxpayers/voters entitled to make the same decisions regarding their tax dollars?
Don't like it? Find enough of your friends that agree with you, and vote in a different guy.
And, how are these 'litigious wingnuts' distinctly different from the 'litigious wingnuts' that prevent freedom of speech from being applicable within X yards of abortion clinics? From the ones that have effectively stopped all civilian nuclear power development in this country for 30 years? That are trying to effectively neuter the 2nd Amendment? That shut down massive projects over the fate of an utterly meaningless little amphibian that exists in a handful of ponds?
Do I think that our country is too litigious? Yep. Personally, I'd LIKE to see the Kalifornia initiative continue. That's what being a REPUBLIC is all about....STATES' rights. (Which in a sense brings us back to the original point, doesn't it?)
Well, I think the first step in the argument is to get rid of the strawmen.
There are a number of debates that are lumped together as "global warming", which may or may not have validity, and which may be more or less POLITICAL arguments, instead of scientific ones.
1) is the global temperature increasing? As I understand it, the answer seems to be a qualified yes. Qualified becuase:
- it depends on your timescale
- it depends on your measuring device; I understand that air temperature measurements are not entirely consistent with the ground temperature readings.
Not knowing the answer myself (everyone seems to have a political axe to grind) I went and grabbed this raw data from the NOAA paleologic climate site (assuming that's as neutral as I'll find), dropped it briefly into excel to chart it, which confuses the issue even more. This is just RAW data...no smoothing, no 'forcing', no extrapolations, no 'models' (aside from the first-order interpretation that gives us the raw temperature data, of course).
http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/7956/green8aq.gif
http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/5454/alps2000yrte mp8zu.gif
IIRC one of them is the Alps tree ring data, going back about 2000 years, the other is Greenland icecore data going back 50,000 years. Links to the source are on the Alps chart. Based on these charts, I have to say, the 'warming' looks fairly mild, and certainly not outside of the range of natural possibilities.
NOTE: it doesn't help people arguing that warming is occuring, that they keep doing a bait'n'switch, flipping back and forth between temperature and CO2 levels interchangeably. That costs credibility.
2) how much of the warming is due to human effects?
Intuitively, my gut says "a lot". Look at the amount of heat put out by a single city - every home has artificial heat (or cooling, generating hear), cars, industry....it just makes SENSE that humans are heating up the planet to some degree.
But then again, the planet is a HUGE system, not easily influenced. And human industry - say since the era of powered machines, is fleetingly recent in climatological timescales. Looking at the charts above, I *don't* see a significant recent impact. I know about dinosaurs in the Antarctic, wood samples in Greenland glaciers, etc. all of which point to a globe which was significantly warmer historically. It's clearly gone through massive heating and cooling cycles, regardless of human activity (or even existence).
Recent temps on Mars have also increased, suggesting that there is a significant extra-systemic input (the Sun) which hardly is even mentioned in most popular debates on the subject.
3) assuming a significant fraction of the effect is anthropogenic, is there something we can do about it? Previous cycles prove that the Earth's climate system has a number of stable 'rest points', with potentially chaotic climate change during transitions, and a bias toward returning to these rest-states. Has anyone proven, for that matter, that warming is an unalloyed BAD thing? Poison ivy will grow faster, but then again, there will also be more arable land than in the past. Ultimately, it seems futile to try to control a system of such staggering scope - it's a waste of money and finite resources to try to 'freeze' the climate in this current anthropophilic setting. The climate is GOING to change, that's a certainty. It also seems a certainty that Kyoto's a ridiculous, hypocritical treaty: if climate change is so imminent, so catastrophic, and so avoidable then why does the treaty OMIT 40% of the world's population, the 40% that is going to be most aggressively industrializing in the next 20 years? I understand that 'fairness' aspect, but one should understand that trivializes the argument: if your house is burning down, you don't stop Betty from getting out because it's Timmy's
..."This is an important first step, but it really is a first step, a proof of principle that ... you can rewire part of the nervous system," said Dr. Douglas Kerr, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins University who led the work being published Monday in the journal Annals of Neurology
Would that be stem cell research...going on at an AMERICAN university? OH MY GOD - WHERE ARE THE BLACK HELICOPTERS? WHERE ARE THE BUSH-CHENEY-ROVENAZI STORMTROOPERS TO STOP THIS EVIL?
Oh wait, the president only said that federal funding wouldn't be available, he didn't actually ban anything (except human cloning), now did he? In fact, there aren't really a 'raft of restrictions' at all, just a short list of stem cell lines for which federal funding is available, and not for any others.
If this is the universal panacea that it's being touted to be, then there should be no difficulty finding state, local, or private funding sources. You just can't feed out of the FEDERAL money-trough on this one.
Given that roughly half the country has moral qualms about this, and in fact a majority voted for a president whose Christian ethic was prominent in his campaign, the holdback on funding makes perfect sense.
(Granted, the OTHER half of the country has achieved a level of moral certainty (or at least self-justification) that they are both able sleep peacefully AND sneer contemptuously at the other half of the country for being stupid Christian hicks...some of us aren't quite so conceited as to self-declare omniscience in this matter.)
Irony?
The role of government is to insure the secure the people against the tyranny of those who do not subscribe to the concept of liberty. The people are free to then do what they want - whether it be profitable or not.
So you'd advocate a tyranny to ensure liberty? Tyranny is ok as long as it's 'the good guys'? That IS ironic.
No, the OP was correct. The role of government is to handle the things that are necessary but do not profit anyone particularly enough to make it worth while in a capitalist sense (national security is one example, but also diplomacy, fire depts, etc.). It's arguable if 'social programs' are rightly within the provenance of government, as they are less and less about basic support, and more often becoming engines of social engineering and vote-buying.
The author is paid to have his opinion.
As opposed to climatologists that are getting funding based on their global warming research?
Or politicians that sense that this is a workable issue with at least a significant percentage of their core audience, and that it neatly reinforces their anti-corporate credentials?
He's an "industry shill", but they're both entirely neutral and disinterested observers reporting the facts with no FUD?
Indeed, read with caution.
I've been reading at "4" and frankly, while there are a NUMBER of posts pointing out this guy's background and job, I haven't seen ANY that directly dispute any of the presented alleged facts? IS the net ice/snow mass in the Antarctic increasing? Do historically high CO2 numbers correlate with only warm periods, or also with cold periods? If you want to persuade anyone, argue the facts.
Enough histrionics about the source: one could also EQUALLY argue that you're reversing cause and effect - it could just as well be that he has these views and is persuasive, so he's getting industry backing to counteract the massive Global Warming Propoganda Campaign (like, for example, a mainstream movie released on thousands of theater screens...paid for by whom again?).
If you can't argue the case, argue the law. If you can't argue the law, attack the lawyer, right?
What I find so ironic in the political comments on /. is the startling hypocrisy of the people declaring the US hypocritical.
As I understand it, their logic is:
US has nukes, ergo the US is bad. More nukes, more bad.
But nukes in the hands of an unstable middle eastern state = (somehow) justifiable comeuppance for that nasty USA?
Teh?
Humanity has been struggling to develop, as fast as possible, better and more efficient ways of killing each other NONSTOP since they figured out tool use. To suggest that somehow we're now suddenly 'enlightened' enough to stop doing this is either a staggering level of naivete or (more probably) an overoptimistic judgment of how much more 'advanced' we are than our Cro-Magnon ancestors.
War is FOR KEEPS. There are no 'reset' buttons, no 'extra games', and no 'do over'. War is (now) about murdering another state's people until that state either collapses or does what you want. That's horrible, that's barbaric, and in some cases it IS regrettably necessary (and you can argue about varying levels of who decides what's 'necessary', of course). But the fact remains that when you fight a war, you want to cause as little harm to your own people, generally by causing the maximum harm to the enemy. [As a side argument, the US *did* use nukes on Japan for precisely this simple reason: we had them, we could use them, and there were reasonable arguments that it might end the war, so we did. End of story, morally. Some might say that the casualties of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were killed to prevent the much greater general slaughter of an invasion of the Home Islands. Some others might say 'better two Jap cities than 1 battalion of US soldiers'. Whatever your justification, we DID use them, they DID end the war almost immediately. To ignore that and then cry about the US being the only country to use nukes is nothing but political disingenuity.]
So when you're talking about nuclear weapons, there is no 'fair'. It's not sandlot baseball, where if only your team has gloves, it's only 'fair' that you either play without or share with the other team. If you can keep something like this devastating technology limited (prefereably to yourself; failing that, to your friends; failing that to your friends and enemies with whom you have an 'understanding'), that's an unalloyed 'good'. We're not talking about 'fair', merely 'good'.
As a wise man once said "If you're in a fair fight, your tactics suck."
If you feel morally repelled by the idea that "we" have something that "they" don't, I can only breathe a sigh of relief that you have utterly no policy-making responsibility. Again, we're not talking candy, comic books, or toys - we're talking about the capability of killing each other. I can trust me. I have no problem if I have a gun and you don't, because I know I'm only going to use it as a last resort. Now yes, this may give YOU an incentive to get your own gun - and me a very good reason to prevent you. The question is of course, how badly do I want to prevent you getting one? Between two people with complex motivations and history, this model is hard enough; between two states with an antagonistic history and a propensity toward violence? It's a complicated problem whose variables are approaching the infinite.
Now, consequently, let me point out that I certainly don't feel that Iran has any MORAL obligation not to seek nuclear weapons. It IS hypocritical for the US to take some injured tone about Iran, but I suppose simply saying baldly "Yes, we have them, and we don't want anyone ELSE to have them if we can help it," is just entirely too Realpolitik for your average civilian (particularly for the pantywaists that see geopolitics as some sort of theory exercise or amusing game).
(Likewise, we are under no moral requirement to allow them to develop same, however.) As a signatory of the NNPT, the ethical thing would have been for them to simply withdraw (there is a mechanism for that). They are only
Relevant quotes from the review:
"Aside from cosmetic differences there does not appear to be much that sets the two mice apart from one another."
"Very few mice use an APM rating and while Razer does not explain how they did the testing, it suffices to say that 1200 APM is a lot." I wonder if you can turn it up to 11?
"During gaming the Razer did very well though there was no major difference between it and the Viper or even the Diamondback "
Translation: I got this free mouse I have to review, so, um, it's REALLY COOL. OK?
Funny stuff aside, want to build a "MMOG mouse"? (assuming cost is no object)
- adjustable body size, mouse location: like the Saitek joystics, have adjustment dials that could actually move the body components of the mouse to compensate for larger or smaller hands. Let you raise the restpad of the body of the mouse, laterally move the button locations forward/back or side/side.
- adjustable weight; I hate light mice, some people hate heavy ones
- I like their 'rubber rails', that's a good idea, although likely to get skanky after a few hundred hours of sweaty-handed gaming.
- additional programmable buttons, programmable 'chords' with keyboard keys
- a perforated body and a small internal fan that blows air on up through the mouse to cool your hand for long-duration gaming.
- force-feedback. I thought this was incredibly stupid on a mouse until I tried it for a long time, now I kind of like the subtle tactile cue.