You have zero creditability talking about "Talking Points" while linking to a site that is named "Talking Points" to refute it. Thanks for playing though!
No, you have zero credibility when you cluelessly dismiss a site by its title. The "Talking Points" in "Talking Points Memo" is specifically referring to Republican talking points, and was originally set up to alert people to the latest ones being circulated around. It does a good job, too- pointing out when the same lie or distortion suddenly appears worded exactly the same way from several supposedly independent sources. Joe Wilson's a liar. Plame's covert status wasn't protected well by the CIA. It was just a short phone call. Rove really wanted to speak about welfare reform. He didn't say her name, he said "Wilson's wife". Wilson said Cheney sent him to Africa. Plame sent Wilson to Africa. Rove leaked Plame's identity in the interests of good journalism. Wilson went on too many TV shows. Rove is the whistleblower here. Rove deserves a medal. Etc etc etc.
(BTW, Rove did not know she was undercover. He got the name from Novak: [links to latest talking point deleted])
The evidence for Rove "not knowing she was undercover" probably boils down to an allegation coming from Rove's attorney, but it doesn't matter anyway. As a matter of law, intelligence professionals cannot confirm information that is classified even if they receive that information from a non-classified source.
This is good for more than spies- we can catch the terrorists this way! Mohammed Atta had no maiden name- I can tell you that without even doing a search. If someone had only told me he was going to commit a terrorist attack, I could have gone to Google and gotten a hi res aerial photo of the crappy apartment where he was living.
I like how Bush put it: "Commissioner, if I had known that Arab terrorists were going to hijack airliners and fly them into the World Trade Center, I would have done everything I could to stop that." And to think, he could have easily prevented the attacks by typing "Mohammed Atta" into Google!
You may be thinking of the case of Baker vs. Sanji which was decided in a venue somewhere in the Middle East of centuries past. In that particular case a poor defendant (Sanji) living in an apartment above a bakery was enjoined in a civil suit by the Baker, who sought damages arising from the defendant's habit of opening his apartment window every morning and taking in the aromas of the dark crusty bread, warm sweet rolls, and crunchy biscuits that wafted up from the bakery- without benefit or recompense to the plaintiff who toiled over the hot ovens to produce the smells. In his complaint the plaintiff argued in court that the defendant had been "stealing" the smells, and sought damages for the "whiffing and sniffing".
The court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, but in the remedy phase of the trial issued a symbolic judgment where it was arranged that the plaintiff would hear the "clink clink" sound of the defendant's money as it dropped into a bowl, in lieu of an actual settlement.
This happened to someone else, not to me, so my recollection may be faulty.
This guy had a routine in Java to decompress and grab a very small file out of a very large ZIP file containing thousands of tiny to midsize files. The version of the JVM he was using (1.3 I think, maybe this still happens in 1.5) implemented zip using JNI to delegate to a native ZLIB layer.
This routine worked fine, until we got complaints from a customer (a big pharma company). It turned out that the very first thing that ZLIB did when extracting anything was attempt to memory map the entire zip file. That caused an OutOfMemoryError once the ZIP files got too big to fit on the heap. (This was in a scientific app, so potential datasets within the ZIP could have unlimited size.) I think he ended up changing his protocol to a multiple-zip format as a workaround.
It was rumored that Sun was working on a Java-layer implementation for later JVM versions. In theory (knowing Sun) they could just have moved ZLIB's memory-mapping technique to the Java level. (I'm too lazy to check.)
As for overroasted coffee that might be what the market wants in America
I agree it's what the market wants. Markets don't always have smart reasons for wanting things- just look at real estate. In the case of cough syrups, as you mentioned, it could either be that individual consumers are looking for the crap their mothers gave them as kids, or it could be that people think the syrup acts topically, not centrally, and has to coat the throat. They add propylene glycol and glycerin to those syrups. Those ingredients both add sickly sweetness AND are sticky and gooey, consistent with both theories.
And 150ml in 200ml seems high. There's about 100mg of caffeine in an espresso shot which is 30ml so about 30g of water. So 1:300 by weight. Since caffeine is a solid at room temp, I'm not sure how your 150ml was made (I'm guessing dissolved in water rather than melted, in which case it could contain anythng from 0mg to whatever the saturation limit is - which I can't be bothered looking up). Or are my recollections completely wrong?
150 mg in 200 mL. A 7 oz cup of coffee is about 200 mL and has between 110-190 mg of caffeine. (Compared to a 12 oz Coke which has 50 mg, a 12 oz Mountain Dew which has 60mg, or a Jolt which packs 100 mg caffeine in 12 oz. Even Jolt is still only half coffee's strength, but they make up for it in disgustingness by adding twice the sugar of Coke.) A saturated solution of caffeine at room temperature has about 10 mg/mL IIRC, about 15-20X that of coffee. But the solubility of caffeine varies enormously with temperature compared to other solutes. In boiling water it approaches 1:1. If you create a saturated solution in warm water you can see needlelike crystals nucleate around particles of dust in the water as the water cools. They look a little like spiky snowflakes.
They're sold in pill form as predissolved gel-caps. Always get them in that form unless they're more expensive or it's for a kid who will like the sickly-sweet syrup better. Thera-Flu (where you dissolve powder in hot liquid) is just for idiots who think they're buying chicken soup.
When I was 7 I got pneumonia and had to take penicillin. I was scared to swallow the pills so I chewed the first one. That taught me really fast!
Starbucks is overroasted. That's why it's horrible. Properly roasted coffee is what Americans call "light" roast. "Medium" and "dark" roasts are just overroasted.
Now coffee is an acquired taste. Nobody likes coffee when they first encounter it as a kid (although it does smell good, if brewed properly). Its popularity is mostly derived from its pharmacological effects. Even decaf lovers are probably pining for the caffeine rush they experienced beforehand and unconsciously still associate with coffee. Caffeine itself is bitter, and overroasted coffee is more bitter than properly roasted coffee, so people get it in their heads somehow that the coffee isn't "real" somehow unless it tastes like bitter crap. So there is market pressure to overroast the beans.
Caffeine's bitterness is actually quite "clean"- it lacks a flavor, and doesn't leave a nasty aftertaste like coffee oils do when they are overroasted. I once (back when I was an analytical chemist at a pharma lab) prepared a caffeine solution by dissolving 150 mL of caffeine in 200 mL water, similar to the concentration in coffee. It is noticeable as hell- there's no ignoring it when you drink it. But, chase it with one gulp of water and it's gone. Coffee has tannic acid in addition to caffeine, which also has a bitter taste, and coffee oils which taste worse and worse the more rancid they get from overroasting and exposure to oxygen. (This is why coffee "burns"- if it sits on the pot more than a half hour it gets this awful smell like burnt hot dogs and the taste is unbearable, hard to wash out of your mouth, and imparts a nasty odor to your breath.)
The same marketing phenomenon occurs with cough syrups. Usually these have centrally acting compounds like guaifenisin, dextromethorphan, and acetaminophen. They have to enter the bloodstream before they work and so they could just as well be pills. And they should be, since these compounds are extremely bitter, worse than anything even achievable with coffee. But, people won't buy them in that form, because they have the impression that cough syrup won't work unless it coats the throat. So they are sold as disgusting sweet syrups. One product (Thera-Flu) even has you mixing the active ingredients into a hot liquid, as if you're drinking chicken soup or something. Consumers are idiots, but they're always right.
Gas runs at $2.50/gal here. I have a 2001 Prius and it takes $25-26 to fill with about 9-10 gallons(?) of 87 unleaded. (The tank holds 11.9 gal.) For that $26 I get about 450 miles.
The display shows a running histogram of mileage. Generally you get 25 mpg during the first five minutes after a cold start. After that, 50 mpg and above is typical. (On the highway. In the city the car is really miserly with fuel- over 60 mpg.)
There was a recall on the batteries recently, because of some problem with leakage. So I got a brand new battery for free a few months back when the car was at the dealer for regular maintenance. Which is nice, because they're expensive (about $8k I've heard).
One thing you have to watch out for is the LRR (low rolling resistance) tires that are standard on the Prius. They wear out after about 30000 miles. You can replace them with real tires, which last twice as long but incur a 3 mpg fuel penalty. If you figure an average of 45 mpg, you're buying 666 gal of fuel over the lifetime of the tire, costing $1666 at $2.50 per gallon (Bay Area). So that times 3/45 is in the ballpark of about $100 of saved fuel- about 25 gallons. It's probably cost effective to replace the tires but environmental and laziness concerns have to be weighed in as well. (All these numbers are from memory, so I may be a bit off.)
I was smart enough a while ago to pop the letters off my keyboard and move them to random places. So if anyone logs keystrokes on my machine, they'll get nothing but nonsense. -- "Wp HJAWVU ISHHWK, tjsi ljczsuvi njbh wpuj TJS!!!"
The point is, though, I knowingly and voluntarily accept the risks of driving on the roads, or even eating fatty foods.
But you also knowingly and voluntarily accept the risks associated with terrorism. Are you not flying anymore? Are you refusing to visit major cities with high profile targets? Both would be strange decisions given the numbers involved.
I don't choose to get randomly blown up by deranged folks trying to make a political point.
Of course you don't choose to get blown up (unless you're a suicide bomber). Are people who live in wooden buildings choosing to die in fires? No, they're accepting the risk of a fire, which is different.
While I agree that there are opportunists of all kinds who will take advantage of our grief to advance their own warped agenda, there is still a distinct moral difference between death from accidental and natural causes and death from deliberate terrorist attacks (or military action), which justifies getting more pissed off about a quantitatively small group of deaths.
Yep, terrorism is immoral, I agree. And this does justify getting more pissed off than if it were some other small group of deaths. I'm pissed off too. But that has little to do with what I said, which was about assessment of risk. Don't confuse the acceptance of the risk of terrorism with the question of whether terrorism is immoral or not. It's like confusing the acceptance of the risk of dying in a building fire with the immorality of arson. We still build wooden houses even though arson is immoral, and we still fly in planes and ride buses even though terrorism is immoral.
Yes, some Zen Buddhist will claim he can as easily accept death from a suicide bomber as dying in ones sleep after 95 years; expecting all of us to live to the same standard is unfair.
I'm no Zen Buddhist, and I wouldn't live to that standard either. Fortunately I don't have to. The risk of death from a suicide bomber is much, much lower than the chance that I'll die in my sleep when I'm 95, so I don't need to "easily accept death" of both kinds- and neither do you.
You should recognize, that getting you pissed off is the goal all along. They are hoping to provoke a response. You can lobby in favor of a police state for yourself. You can push for a war, which they can then participate in (this is not a peace-loving enemy). They hate secularism, they hate our culture, and they hate our way of life. I'm pissed off too, and rightly so. But I think our responses to these things usually play into their hands. So it helps to actually gauge the risk that these attacks present, which after all is still pretty small- unless you include the risks inherent in an ill-conceived foreign policy that feels like retribution but that actually strengthens the position of extremism in that part of the world.
Not many people realize that overall terrorism doesn't really cause that many deaths. Your chance of dying in a terrorist attack is vanishingly small. They are certainly high profile deaths, but not many. The point of these attacks isn't so much to kill people as it is to cause political change.
We need to remember to be very suspicious of people who are attempting to score political points from this. They are the attacks' intended beneficiaries. I've been seeing them all over the Internet this morning, cashing in on this tragedy.
Sounds like a bunch of cloned democrats to me. Well, that's one way for Democrats to win elections... start "cloning" people who will vote for them. They should be able to get console of at least one part of the govt in about 30years from now.
Once I get a "console of at least one part of the government", I'll have total control over the system and can have you arrested from the command line.
No, this is orbital, because definition # 1 fits with respect to the sun. You don't need to meet all the definitions in a dictionary, just one of them. And in a few years Deep Impact will have completed its first solar orbit after nobody is paying attention anymore, so it will meet #2 as well.
This was definitely not suborbital. A suborbital path around the sun would require an intersection with the sun's surface at some future point. An orbit like that would require more rocket fuel than it would take to escape the sun entirely.
The result is a huge waste of time at a limited green interval just getting back up to speed, whereas if everyone looked at the light and just went, it would allow faster and more coordinated acceleration and smoother traffic flow.
And everyone would be tailgating the guy in front of them. A fender bender at any point in the line would propagate back through more cars causing more property damage. But, that would be one less red light for someone to wait I guess.
Traffic gets compressed at a red light. It needs time to decompress once the light turns green.
C++ was 14 around 1997 and was widely used and known for its high performance.
That's not how I remember it. I remember in 1996-1997 people were scoffing at C++ because it was "slower than C".
Re:What is with java people and groovy?
on
James Gosling on Java
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· Score: 2, Interesting
We considered Jython and Groovy when we were adding scripting to an app, since they were the only two scripting languages that came with licenses that were found to be acceptable by our legal department. We went with Groovy. Although the Jython guys angrily insist that they are still working on the project, it's been 3 years since the last stable version of Jython was released. Since then the only release has been in July 2003, and it was an early alpha. Groovy OTOH has a lot of people working on it who have been putting out a new release every few months. Jython has not been updated in years. Which is a shame, because I was rooting for Jython.
What about them? You people are acting like watching TV is a right. It isn't.
It may not be a right, but I don't see where anybody said it was, either. It looked like an ordinary conversation about what technical solutions would work for the most people. Whether it's a "right" or not doesn't enter into it, unless you're trying to confuse everybody with an irrelevant observation.
A net result is that you make the trip in what feels like 25 years, and millions or billions of years have passed for your origin and destination.
No, stationary observers in the frame of your origin and destination will measure 25 years for the trip (minus a little bit because your speed isn't quite c). Proper time on the ship approaches a limit of zero seconds as your speed approaches c. Remember, from your POV the origin and destination are moving and you are at rest. So you observe them moving at your speed in the opposite direction. You observe a length contraction of the line connecting them, and the length contraction determines how much proper time you experience.
Of course you'll want to accelerate and decelerate near the endpoints of your journey and this screws things up a bit.
What is it that causes legal-types to completely lose their marbles whenever anything high-tech happens?
They don't know how to parlay the common sense they use in the real world to a virtual realm with which they are unfamiliar.
Plus, the professions they are in are usually dominated by "guardian" personality types. Such people tend to be comfortable with rigid interpretations of language and law, so if something falls under the rubric of "hacking" they will pigeonhole it as one specific type of behavior. Their reaction to it is determined not by the details of the behavior itself, which they may or may not understand, but the pigeonhole they have classified it into. Hacking is hacking. Hence the old saying that "the law is an ass."
When Mitnick was arrested the cops wouldn't let him have a phone. They thought he could launch nuclear missles by whistling into a phone at specific frequencies.
I can see it now: The Aborter. He's a mild mannered abortion clinic doctor by day, helping rid the world of unwanted babies... By night he's on par with The Punisher, except he has a custom-formulated serum that makes villians crap their intestines right out, resulting in a long, miserable (and incredibly messy) death!
I was thinking of something more along the lines of Tom the Dancing Bug's "God Man". He prowls the streets, looking for criminals, and when he finds one, he goes back in time and either prevents the criminal's parents from meeting or induces a spontaneous abortion- and by day he poses as Stephen Levitt and promotes his book on talk shows.
I think 3.4 million is an underestimate. That car would be wrapped around a tree in a week.
Anyhow, fostering the presence of a superhero is not a very cost-effective way for a city to lower its overall crime figures. Legalized abortion costs the public virtually nothing and has a much greater effect on reducing crime than competing strategies such as incarceration or tax breaks to encourage millionaire superheroes to relocate.
Yeah, and that's amazing when you think about it. They needed a "nerdy" villian, so they called Gene Simmons of KISS. Who else?
The writer and director was Michael Crichton. He recently wrote a novel where all the villians are mass murdering environmentalist ecoterrorists and the hero is a scientist double agent who likes to bring lawyers and hot babes on adventures where he learns how global warming is all made up. Crichton is an insightful guy.
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You have zero creditability talking about "Talking Points" while linking to a site that is named "Talking Points" to refute it. Thanks for playing though!
No, you have zero credibility when you cluelessly dismiss a site by its title. The "Talking Points" in "Talking Points Memo" is specifically referring to Republican talking points, and was originally set up to alert people to the latest ones being circulated around. It does a good job, too- pointing out when the same lie or distortion suddenly appears worded exactly the same way from several supposedly independent sources. Joe Wilson's a liar. Plame's covert status wasn't protected well by the CIA. It was just a short phone call. Rove really wanted to speak about welfare reform. He didn't say her name, he said "Wilson's wife". Wilson said Cheney sent him to Africa. Plame sent Wilson to Africa. Rove leaked Plame's identity in the interests of good journalism. Wilson went on too many TV shows. Rove is the whistleblower here. Rove deserves a medal. Etc etc etc.
(BTW, Rove did not know she was undercover. He got the name from Novak: [links to latest talking point deleted])
The evidence for Rove "not knowing she was undercover" probably boils down to an allegation coming from Rove's attorney, but it doesn't matter anyway. As a matter of law, intelligence professionals cannot confirm information that is classified even if they receive that information from a non-classified source.
No, but Microsoft's TerraServer was around.
This is good for more than spies- we can catch the terrorists this way! Mohammed Atta had no maiden name- I can tell you that without even doing a search. If someone had only told me he was going to commit a terrorist attack, I could have gone to Google and gotten a hi res aerial photo of the crappy apartment where he was living.
I like how Bush put it: "Commissioner, if I had known that Arab terrorists were going to hijack airliners and fly them into the World Trade Center, I would have done everything I could to stop that." And to think, he could have easily prevented the attacks by typing "Mohammed Atta" into Google!
You may be thinking of the case of Baker vs. Sanji which was decided in a venue somewhere in the Middle East of centuries past. In that particular case a poor defendant (Sanji) living in an apartment above a bakery was enjoined in a civil suit by the Baker, who sought damages arising from the defendant's habit of opening his apartment window every morning and taking in the aromas of the dark crusty bread, warm sweet rolls, and crunchy biscuits that wafted up from the bakery- without benefit or recompense to the plaintiff who toiled over the hot ovens to produce the smells. In his complaint the plaintiff argued in court that the defendant had been "stealing" the smells, and sought damages for the "whiffing and sniffing".
The court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, but in the remedy phase of the trial issued a symbolic judgment where it was arranged that the plaintiff would hear the "clink clink" sound of the defendant's money as it dropped into a bowl, in lieu of an actual settlement.
This happened to someone else, not to me, so my recollection may be faulty.
This guy had a routine in Java to decompress and grab a very small file out of a very large ZIP file containing thousands of tiny to midsize files. The version of the JVM he was using (1.3 I think, maybe this still happens in 1.5) implemented zip using JNI to delegate to a native ZLIB layer.
This routine worked fine, until we got complaints from a customer (a big pharma company). It turned out that the very first thing that ZLIB did when extracting anything was attempt to memory map the entire zip file. That caused an OutOfMemoryError once the ZIP files got too big to fit on the heap. (This was in a scientific app, so potential datasets within the ZIP could have unlimited size.) I think he ended up changing his protocol to a multiple-zip format as a workaround.
It was rumored that Sun was working on a Java-layer implementation for later JVM versions. In theory (knowing Sun) they could just have moved ZLIB's memory-mapping technique to the Java level. (I'm too lazy to check.)
As for overroasted coffee that might be what the market wants in America
I agree it's what the market wants. Markets don't always have smart reasons for wanting things- just look at real estate. In the case of cough syrups, as you mentioned, it could either be that individual consumers are looking for the crap their mothers gave them as kids, or it could be that people think the syrup acts topically, not centrally, and has to coat the throat. They add propylene glycol and glycerin to those syrups. Those ingredients both add sickly sweetness AND are sticky and gooey, consistent with both theories.
And 150ml in 200ml seems high. There's about 100mg of caffeine in an espresso shot which is 30ml so about 30g of water. So 1:300 by weight. Since caffeine is a solid at room temp, I'm not sure how your 150ml was made (I'm guessing dissolved in water rather than melted, in which case it could contain anythng from 0mg to whatever the saturation limit is - which I can't be bothered looking up). Or are my recollections completely wrong?
150 mg in 200 mL. A 7 oz cup of coffee is about 200 mL and has between 110-190 mg of caffeine. (Compared to a 12 oz Coke which has 50 mg, a 12 oz Mountain Dew which has 60mg, or a Jolt which packs 100 mg caffeine in 12 oz. Even Jolt is still only half coffee's strength, but they make up for it in disgustingness by adding twice the sugar of Coke.) A saturated solution of caffeine at room temperature has about 10 mg/mL IIRC, about 15-20X that of coffee. But the solubility of caffeine varies enormously with temperature compared to other solutes. In boiling water it approaches 1:1. If you create a saturated solution in warm water you can see needlelike crystals nucleate around particles of dust in the water as the water cools. They look a little like spiky snowflakes.
They're sold in pill form as predissolved gel-caps. Always get them in that form unless they're more expensive or it's for a kid who will like the sickly-sweet syrup better. Thera-Flu (where you dissolve powder in hot liquid) is just for idiots who think they're buying chicken soup.
When I was 7 I got pneumonia and had to take penicillin. I was scared to swallow the pills so I chewed the first one. That taught me really fast!
Starbucks is overroasted. That's why it's horrible. Properly roasted coffee is what Americans call "light" roast. "Medium" and "dark" roasts are just overroasted.
Now coffee is an acquired taste. Nobody likes coffee when they first encounter it as a kid (although it does smell good, if brewed properly). Its popularity is mostly derived from its pharmacological effects. Even decaf lovers are probably pining for the caffeine rush they experienced beforehand and unconsciously still associate with coffee. Caffeine itself is bitter, and overroasted coffee is more bitter than properly roasted coffee, so people get it in their heads somehow that the coffee isn't "real" somehow unless it tastes like bitter crap. So there is market pressure to overroast the beans.
Caffeine's bitterness is actually quite "clean"- it lacks a flavor, and doesn't leave a nasty aftertaste like coffee oils do when they are overroasted. I once (back when I was an analytical chemist at a pharma lab) prepared a caffeine solution by dissolving 150 mL of caffeine in 200 mL water, similar to the concentration in coffee. It is noticeable as hell- there's no ignoring it when you drink it. But, chase it with one gulp of water and it's gone. Coffee has tannic acid in addition to caffeine, which also has a bitter taste, and coffee oils which taste worse and worse the more rancid they get from overroasting and exposure to oxygen. (This is why coffee "burns"- if it sits on the pot more than a half hour it gets this awful smell like burnt hot dogs and the taste is unbearable, hard to wash out of your mouth, and imparts a nasty odor to your breath.)
The same marketing phenomenon occurs with cough syrups. Usually these have centrally acting compounds like guaifenisin, dextromethorphan, and acetaminophen. They have to enter the bloodstream before they work and so they could just as well be pills. And they should be, since these compounds are extremely bitter, worse than anything even achievable with coffee. But, people won't buy them in that form, because they have the impression that cough syrup won't work unless it coats the throat. So they are sold as disgusting sweet syrups. One product (Thera-Flu) even has you mixing the active ingredients into a hot liquid, as if you're drinking chicken soup or something. Consumers are idiots, but they're always right.
Gas runs at $2.50/gal here. I have a 2001 Prius and it takes $25-26 to fill with about 9-10 gallons(?) of 87 unleaded. (The tank holds 11.9 gal.) For that $26 I get about 450 miles.
The display shows a running histogram of mileage. Generally you get 25 mpg during the first five minutes after a cold start. After that, 50 mpg and above is typical. (On the highway. In the city the car is really miserly with fuel- over 60 mpg.)
There was a recall on the batteries recently, because of some problem with leakage. So I got a brand new battery for free a few months back when the car was at the dealer for regular maintenance. Which is nice, because they're expensive (about $8k I've heard).
One thing you have to watch out for is the LRR (low rolling resistance) tires that are standard on the Prius. They wear out after about 30000 miles. You can replace them with real tires, which last twice as long but incur a 3 mpg fuel penalty. If you figure an average of 45 mpg, you're buying 666 gal of fuel over the lifetime of the tire, costing $1666 at $2.50 per gallon (Bay Area). So that times 3/45 is in the ballpark of about $100 of saved fuel- about 25 gallons. It's probably cost effective to replace the tires but environmental and laziness concerns have to be weighed in as well. (All these numbers are from memory, so I may be a bit off.)
Keystroke logging doesn't affect me either.
I was smart enough a while ago to pop the letters off my keyboard and move them to random places. So if anyone logs keystrokes on my machine, they'll get nothing but nonsense.
--
"Wp HJAWVU ISHHWK, tjsi ljczsuvi njbh wpuj TJS!!!"
The point is, though, I knowingly and voluntarily accept the risks of driving on the roads, or even eating fatty foods.
But you also knowingly and voluntarily accept the risks associated with terrorism. Are you not flying anymore? Are you refusing to visit major cities with high profile targets? Both would be strange decisions given the numbers involved.
I don't choose to get randomly blown up by deranged folks trying to make a political point.
Of course you don't choose to get blown up (unless you're a suicide bomber). Are people who live in wooden buildings choosing to die in fires? No, they're accepting the risk of a fire, which is different.
While I agree that there are opportunists of all kinds who will take advantage of our grief to advance their own warped agenda, there is still a distinct moral difference between death from accidental and natural causes and death from deliberate terrorist attacks (or military action), which justifies getting more pissed off about a quantitatively small group of deaths.
Yep, terrorism is immoral, I agree. And this does justify getting more pissed off than if it were some other small group of deaths. I'm pissed off too. But that has little to do with what I said, which was about assessment of risk. Don't confuse the acceptance of the risk of terrorism with the question of whether terrorism is immoral or not. It's like confusing the acceptance of the risk of dying in a building fire with the immorality of arson. We still build wooden houses even though arson is immoral, and we still fly in planes and ride buses even though terrorism is immoral.
Yes, some Zen Buddhist will claim he can as easily accept death from a suicide bomber as dying in ones sleep after 95 years; expecting all of us to live to the same standard is unfair.
I'm no Zen Buddhist, and I wouldn't live to that standard either. Fortunately I don't have to. The risk of death from a suicide bomber is much, much lower than the chance that I'll die in my sleep when I'm 95, so I don't need to "easily accept death" of both kinds- and neither do you.
You should recognize, that getting you pissed off is the goal all along. They are hoping to provoke a response. You can lobby in favor of a police state for yourself. You can push for a war, which they can then participate in (this is not a peace-loving enemy). They hate secularism, they hate our culture, and they hate our way of life. I'm pissed off too, and rightly so. But I think our responses to these things usually play into their hands. So it helps to actually gauge the risk that these attacks present, which after all is still pretty small- unless you include the risks inherent in an ill-conceived foreign policy that feels like retribution but that actually strengthens the position of extremism in that part of the world.
Not many people realize that overall terrorism doesn't really cause that many deaths. Your chance of dying in a terrorist attack is vanishingly small. They are certainly high profile deaths, but not many. The point of these attacks isn't so much to kill people as it is to cause political change.
We need to remember to be very suspicious of people who are attempting to score political points from this. They are the attacks' intended beneficiaries. I've been seeing them all over the Internet this morning, cashing in on this tragedy.
Sounds like a bunch of cloned democrats to me.
Well, that's one way for Democrats to win elections... start "cloning" people who will vote for them. They should be able to get console of at least one part of the govt in about 30years from now.
Once I get a "console of at least one part of the government", I'll have total control over the system and can have you arrested from the command line.
No, this is orbital, because definition # 1 fits with respect to the sun. You don't need to meet all the definitions in a dictionary, just one of them. And in a few years Deep Impact will have completed its first solar orbit after nobody is paying attention anymore, so it will meet #2 as well.
This was definitely not suborbital. A suborbital path around the sun would require an intersection with the sun's surface at some future point. An orbit like that would require more rocket fuel than it would take to escape the sun entirely.
The result is a huge waste of time at a limited green interval just getting back up to speed, whereas if everyone looked at the light and just went, it would allow faster and more coordinated acceleration and smoother traffic flow.
And everyone would be tailgating the guy in front of them. A fender bender at any point in the line would propagate back through more cars causing more property damage. But, that would be one less red light for someone to wait I guess.
Traffic gets compressed at a red light. It needs time to decompress once the light turns green.
>I'm sorry, does Bezos actually have a clue about doing things
Bezos net worth in 2003 was $4.95 billion dollars.
Here is the OP quote, including the half you deleted:
>I'm sorry, does Bezos actually have a clue about doing things, or is all he knows how to game the patent and legal system?
The sheer size of Bezos's net worth isn't relevant to the question, which was concerned with its origin.
In most circles, getting a parcel delivered on time and to the right address is considered a good thing.
And is preventing others from doing likewise also considered a good thing?
C++ was 14 around 1997 and was widely used and known for its high performance.
That's not how I remember it. I remember in 1996-1997 people were scoffing at C++ because it was "slower than C".
We considered Jython and Groovy when we were adding scripting to an app, since they were the only two scripting languages that came with licenses that were found to be acceptable by our legal department. We went with Groovy. Although the Jython guys angrily insist that they are still working on the project, it's been 3 years since the last stable version of Jython was released. Since then the only release has been in July 2003, and it was an early alpha. Groovy OTOH has a lot of people working on it who have been putting out a new release every few months. Jython has not been updated in years. Which is a shame, because I was rooting for Jython.
What about them? You people are acting like watching TV is a right. It isn't.
It may not be a right, but I don't see where anybody said it was, either. It looked like an ordinary conversation about what technical solutions would work for the most people.
Whether it's a "right" or not doesn't enter into it, unless you're trying to confuse everybody with an irrelevant observation.
A net result is that you make the trip in what feels like 25 years, and millions or billions of years have passed for your origin and destination.
No, stationary observers in the frame of your origin and destination will measure 25 years for the trip (minus a little bit because your speed isn't quite c). Proper time on the ship approaches a limit of zero seconds as your speed approaches c. Remember, from your POV the origin and destination are moving and you are at rest. So you observe them moving at your speed in the opposite direction. You observe a length contraction of the line connecting them, and the length contraction determines how much proper time you experience.
Of course you'll want to accelerate and decelerate near the endpoints of your journey and this screws things up a bit.
What is it that causes legal-types to completely lose their marbles whenever anything high-tech happens?
They don't know how to parlay the common sense they use in the real world to a virtual realm with which they are unfamiliar.
Plus, the professions they are in are usually dominated by "guardian" personality types. Such people tend to be comfortable with rigid interpretations of language and law, so if something falls under the rubric of "hacking" they will pigeonhole it as one specific type of behavior. Their reaction to it is determined not by the details of the behavior itself, which they may or may not understand, but the pigeonhole they have classified it into. Hacking is hacking. Hence the old saying that "the law is an ass."
When Mitnick was arrested the cops wouldn't let him have a phone. They thought he could launch nuclear missles by whistling into a phone at specific frequencies.
I can see it now: The Aborter. He's a mild mannered abortion clinic doctor by day, helping rid the world of unwanted babies... By night he's on par with The Punisher, except he has a custom-formulated serum that makes villians crap their intestines right out, resulting in a long, miserable (and incredibly messy) death!
I was thinking of something more along the lines of Tom the Dancing Bug's "God Man". He prowls the streets, looking for criminals, and when he finds one, he goes back in time and either prevents the criminal's parents from meeting or induces a spontaneous abortion- and by day he poses as Stephen Levitt and promotes his book on talk shows.
Looks like someone's been reading Steven Levitt.
Nah, saw him on TV. He was talking about Batman I think.
I think 3.4 million is an underestimate. That car would be wrapped around a tree in a week.
Anyhow, fostering the presence of a superhero is not a very cost-effective way for a city to lower its overall crime figures. Legalized abortion costs the public virtually nothing and has a much greater effect on reducing crime than competing strategies such as incarceration or tax breaks to encourage millionaire superheroes to relocate.
Yeah, and that's amazing when you think about it. They needed a "nerdy" villian, so they called Gene Simmons of KISS. Who else?
The writer and director was Michael Crichton. He recently wrote a novel where all the villians are mass murdering environmentalist ecoterrorists and the hero is a scientist double agent who likes to bring lawyers and hot babes on adventures where he learns how global warming is all made up. Crichton is an insightful guy.