wouldn't it be easier to just drill a core sample from the comet?
No.
In the solar system frame, the comet is approaching very fast. Its aphelion is just inside Jupiter's orbit. Our probe is poking along at an Earthlike velocity in a roughly Earthlike orbit- it's the comet that's going to crash into the probe, really, not the other way around.
To get your Black & Decker to it in one piece, you'd have to accelerate to 0 mph relative to the comet. That alone requires gravity assists off other planets. Then you need to design robotics to move around on an object with almost no gravity and a surface that can't be surveyed very well from Earth (thanks to the bright coma). You'd have to drill a hole into a material of unknown composition, in a process lasting minutes to hours rather than microseconds. That means you'll have to make decisions at certain points during the operation, requiring bug-prone programming or impractical communication links to ground-based controllers.
Simply allowing the comet to crash into something and taking pictures of the explosion from a distance is much cheaper and more likely to work.
What if a person's attempted infection closes any possible holes for anyone else?
The number of possible holes is always much greater than the number of known holes that anyone will ever know about. Usually most of them disappear in successive OS/software versions before they are discovered.
Couldn't a Mac fan somehow patch the machine with his/her own virus?
To my knowledge the last time someone tried this kind of stunt was the Welchia worm that tried to download the Blaster patch from Microsoft. The only time a worm or virus succeeded in bringing our network down and destroying all our productivity for the day was the time one of our sales guys walked in the door with a Welchia-infected laptop. Even if the author has the best of motives, this is not an acceptable way to deploy software under almost any circumstances. The loss of control is too great.
If you have permission to run a virus on their computers, and lets assume that their two computers are walled off from the rest of the world so the infection strays no further, why would you have legal bills?
You wouldn't. But that's not what they're proposing:
All you have to do is put a harmless virus into circulation that makes its way onto two totally unprotected Mac OS X computers we have running in Hendersonville, Tennessee. No trick, no hidden barriers... just two open internet connections to two non-firewalled, unmodified, bone-stock OS X 10.3 Panther systems, each tied directly to the 'net by a T-1 line.
IANAL but I don't see a way to win this contest under these terms without getting in trouble, unless you don't bother to implicate yourself by actually collecting the prize.
They aren't asking for source code to the virus, or the virus to be sent to them (and only to them) in a polite form, they're leaving two Macs exposed to the net and expecting to pick a winner by what their virus scanning software finds. You claim the money by sending them a 32 character string that appears in the virus.
If you got a virus to them this way, I think the $25k would only begin to cover your legal bills.
Cash can be stolen and used easily. Cards can be stolen and used, but you can get the money back. Big difference.
Pay by value is much better than pay by reference. If you lose cash, you lose the value, but no pointer escapes the transaction. If you pay by reference, you leave a trail of pointers around increasing the risk of someone dereferencing your wallet.
I used to have real problems with sleep. For years I couldn't wake up in the morning or fall asleep at night. During the summer especially, my schedule would crank around the clock until I'd be waking up at 2 PM and falling asleep at 6 AM, and I'd periodically "fix" it by pulling an all-nighter which is really hard on your brain, especially when you're growing up.
Now when the alarm rings, I turn it off, take a caffeine pill, and go back to sleep. After 20 minutes I slowly wake up again, and after 30 I get out of bed with no effort. I used to snooze snooze snooze for at least an hour, but I never hit "snooze" anymore. And it's cheap! No-name brand caffeine tablets are about as cheap as aspirin.
Falling asleep at night is another matter. That's a much harder problem- not just a matter of sustaining willpower like the problem of continually waking up on schedule. I found an OTC solution for that too. I take a 3mg melatonin tablet at about 11 PM and by midnight this vague feeling comes over me that it's late- I'm not exactly tired, but it "feels late". Falling asleep once I'm in that state takes 5 minutes. It doesn't work for everybody. Some people complain that they feel the effects of melatonin all through the next day, but that hasn't been my experience with it. I have a completely regular sleep schedule now. Melatonin is also very cheap.
Over the long term I'm more nervous about the melatonin than the caffeine. The long term effects of melatonin supplements are not as well known. But otherwise I'd be spending 90 minutes in bed every night trying to fall asleep. That adds up to some serious time- a significant chunk of your life! And you avoid a lot of health problems by sleeping normal hours. So I'm willing to accept a certain amount of risk, because this was a serious problem in my life that now appears completely solved.
There is no epicenter like there is in an earthquake, but you can define any position at rest in the frame of the background radiation itself to be as good of an "epicenter" as any other for purposes of this discussion. The Earth doesn't meet this standard, because it's moving at a speed of 365 km/sec relative to the CMBR (hence the Doppler shift), but it probably doesn't matter.
Here is a good FAQ entry regarding the difference between the observable universe and the entire universe.
Huh? Why would you need more than one design? Aren't you using HTML and CSS as it was intended to be used, and letting it flow to whatever resoultion the browser wants?
People like clean, simple interfaces. Why do page designers always insist on flashy designs? The flashier it is, the more it looks like an advertisement. When important GUI elements are disguised with flashy colors and graphics to attract attention, they look like advertisements and you end up looking all over for them and not finding them.
The internal HR web site for my company isn't even usable in Mozilla; the major navigation "tabs" near the top of the screen are visible only in IE. In any other browser they appear sunken, like gravestones after a flood, so you can see only a few rows of pixels at the very top edge of each tab. You have to keep waiting while the page convulsively realigns itself as the flashy images load. If I see one more stock photo of people smiling at computers, I'm going to vomit.
As for my phone (mMode), forget it. You can enter an arbitrary URL but I have yet to find one that doesn't give an error message. It can't load even something simple like a blog. If there's a column at the left, right, or top with images from adservers, it always chokes on those. By default the phone dumps you into a menu-based structure where you can browse news, sports, or "what's hot", and from what I can tell, if you're looking for news, sports, or "what's hot" it's great. That's never what I've needed it for though. I tried doing a white pages search on the road once- surely that must be possible- and gave up after 20 minutes after getting errors from both Yahoo and MSN. I ended up using a "low tech solution": calling my wife at home and asking her to do the white pages search for me from her PC.
I wrote this "spam form" in December 2003. The form appears on Cory Doctorow's site and is occasionally attributed to him but it was originally written by me.
The general form of a "checklist" response is really old. I first saw such a form on USENET more than ten years ago. It originally appeared in in this rec.humor.funny post from December 1994 whose author claims to have gotten it from a VAX conferencing system. The general idea of a standardized checklist for blowing someone off is probably even older than that.
I got tired of explaining to people why their cockeyed spam solutions wouldn't work, so I wrote this particular one about spam one evening and posted it here and here. I'm surprised it took off, actually. Now in every thread about spam I do a search for "technical legislative vigilante" to see if it's reappeared and it's there half the time. I only wish I had included a little dig for challenge-response schemes!
The part at the end about burning your house down is there because someone in the original thread proposed a solution to spam that was so abysmally bad that the poster was suspected to be a spammer himself- hence the "( )spammers could easily use it to harvest email addresses" item.
Judging from Google searches, spam researchers seem to have mixed feelings about it. The form wears out its welcome all the time but keeps reappearing. Some like it and use it a lot to quickly dispatch stupid ideas from the peanut gallery. Others hate the form because it gets presented to them all the time when they present their proposals. It has actually appeared in a number of anti-spam research papers. One group of researchers, when proposing their solution, actually prepared a preemptive response to refute each form item.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Wow, that looks like a great idea! I'll be sure to vote for this when it comes down the pike!
I saw it. Did they prevent you from getting Showtime as well?
Wow, talk about missing the point. I shouldn't have to start subscribing to whatever "silver package" includes Showtime (along with 15 other unwanted pay channels) just because someone decides to protest a movie and force it off the public airwaves for political reasons. You can protest a movie without seeing it all you want, but don't place barriers in the way of me if I want to see it.
Plus, if you think it's worth renting a POS cable box just to see the Reagans you must be crazy.
It wasn't religious fundamentalists who protested Mel Gibson's film before they saw it.
You know, I used to think that you needed to see a movie before protesting it. Religious fundamentalists protested The Last Temptation of Christ when most of them hadn't seen it, and that pissed me off.
But I've changed my mind since then. You shouldn't necessarily have to see a movie before you protest it. What if the movie were a snuff film? (Mel's movie was a snuff film.) Other movies have been shut down by people who haven't seen them, like the Reagans or whatever it was. Unfortunately in that case the protestors not only didn't see the movie, they prevented the rest of us from seeing it. Now that is ridiculous.
Progressive? Why is it so hard for liberals to call themselves liberals?
Probably because multiple on-air personalities have succeeded in turning "liberal" into a radioactive word and convincing everyone that something called "liberals" is out to get them. Playing games with language is a very effective political strategy.
Plus, "liberal" implies "left". I consider myself a centrist but I always get called "liberal" simply because I don't like the president.
IIRC they got the 120000 figure by interviewing morticians. People get blown to bits and so they bypass the hospital, but everyone gets buried.
You know, if this whole thing was about oil, it would have been a hell of a lot easier and cheaper for Bush to agree to end the sanctions on Hussein's Iraq.
That's what I thought at the time. I also thought a targeted assassination would be much cheaper and would have gotten us much less flak from the rest of the world. According to my father, the war was an attempt to prop up the dollar. The dollar's current strength is unjustified on purely economic grounds and is supported by OPEC's requirement that all OPEC oil sales be denominated in dollars. This was secured in a secret agreement between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. That places great global demand on dollars, since countries need them to buy oil from OPEC. Iraq was one of the first countries to shift its denomination from dollars to Euros in 2000. Many OPEC nations are now also wanting to be paid in Euros. The only way to mitigate the effects of a currency shift is to undermine OPEC by expanding production from a large source like Iraq. Merely ending the sanctions on Iraq would not accomplish that- Iraq would be free to rejoin OPEC and be subject to its quotas.
if Iraq was all about oil, what does religious fundamentalism have to do with it? The pope opposed the war in Iraq, as did quite a few religious people, so by your own argument, the civilian deaths in Iraq have nothing to do with religious fundamentalism.
I'm not sure I agree with the OP, but your response is an example of a logical fallacy- that of hasty generalization. Ever hear anyone say "Slashdot does not speak with one voice?" All religious fundamentalists do not speak with one voice or act with one common motive. The Pope (assuming for sake of argument that he is a "religious fundamentalist" as you say he is) is certainly not the same kind of religious fundamentalist as the president- for one thing, he's Catholic. The Catholic Church was not pushing for a war. That doesn't imply a damn thing about the president. He could be a member of a secret fundamentalist oil-worshipping cult for all we know.
Is Bush a bible-thumping hick, or is he a master schemer serving exclusively a global oil elite?
I recently met a girl who chewed me out for accepting evolutionary theory. I was at first shocked, as I thought that the issue of evoultion and religion had been worked out. Then it really bugged me that she could be so backward and regressive in her thinking. Then I finally realised that none of it mattered, I was being just as closed-minded as she was.
Oh no! I'm guessing here, but it appears from reading your post that you are now romantically entangled with this girl. There's just no other way anyone would put up with that. It was completely reasonable for you to be shocked that someone would chew you out merely for accepting evolutionary theory. That's just ridiculous. Did she join you in "forgetting your differences", or did you just alter your own beliefs to keep her happy? You can't alter what you believe in like that just because someone wants you to. Especially a woman. That never works. You'll grow to resent her.
I hope you leave this relationship. You need to find someone who won't try to "change" you, and she needs to find an idiot^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H someone who doesn't need to be changed.
You'll have to explain better how scientists "are fucking everyone else over with their self-righteous bullshit". It only makes sense if you believe that science is some sort of publicly funded alternative religion that is competing with yours for attention, money, and followers. Science is not a religion. It's simply a methodology for finding things out about the world.
According to the article, religious people had little affect. Imax cancelled these films, an editor theorizes it could be because religious people might get upset at these films (what? we don't get upset at Discovery channel...sigh), and VOILA! We get a full-fledged Slashdot peanut gallery bashing us "religious fundamentalists".
Others have pointed out how you obviously haven't RTFA so I won't get into that here.
But even if your post were factually correct, your argument applies a double standard to creationists that wouldn't apply to other groups who produce a chilling effect and screw things up for the rest of us.
Take the example of lawyers. Now not all lawyers do this, but a subset of lawyers, as a group, have created a chilling effect in this country by filing negligence lawsuits left and right, and they don't even have to get involved in a particular situation to screw it up. When a landowner ends public access to a watering hole, for example, citing fears of lawsuits, we turn on lawyers as a group instantly. It doesn't matter, and probably shouldn't matter, that the individual landowner has not actually received a legal threat from an actual lawyer. By creating the chilling effect, such lawyers effectively interfere in a wider range of situations than they are directly involved in.
Why should this be any different for creationists? People are shutting down movies and dumbing down school textbooks because they're scared of creationists. Even though only a few creationists actually have the time to run around complaining and making trouble, their actions have wider repurcussions than they pretend, and they know it.
IANAP but I'm guessing a "black hole" of this size would have an event horizon with such a tiny radius that the uncertainty principle alone would allow mass to escape unless the momentum uncertainty were infinite.
Both Microsoft and Firefox have made UI enhancements to make it more difficult for users to just reflexivly click "Yes" on every modal permission dialog that pops up. I think it's perfectly fair to hold Java to the same standard
You're clearly just trying to save face if this is all you can complain about. Not all vulnerabilities involve users clicking Yes in security dialogs.
since it turns out that Java really is not safer than "native" extentions like ActiveX or XUL or Plug-ins (despite years worth of propaganda saying otherwise).
The "years worth of propaganda" was probably referring to Java's immunity to buffer overflow vulnerabilities and other attacks that exploit the machine-level details of C-style calling conventions. Or it could have referred to the sandbox security model under which applets can be run safely without even requiring a security dialog- as opposed to ActiveX for example, which is typically implemented in "unmanaged" (but digitally signed) C++, has a security model consisting of nothing but a security dialog, and which must run either with full privileges or not at all- based on whether you feel you can trust the author. You can run Java code in a sandbox and not have to trust anybody. The sandbox has such restrictive security, in fact, that it partly (along with install base and JDK versioning issues) led to the demise of applets relative to ActiveX.
Carly made lots of money for stockholders. I can personally attest to this.
I bought 26 shares of HP stock on February 1 at 19.75. Carly leaves, and I dump my stock on the 9th at 21.50!!!Woo hoo! I made $45 in just 8 days (minus commission). Just look at that selloff spike. Some of that was me!
Anyone who knew anything about HP was partying that day. Even at Agilent everyone was giddy. If I had known Carly was about to get dumped I would have hurled my life savings into HPQ.
I understand she has a bright future ahead of her in the Republican Party. If the Republicans are smart they'll wait until right before an election to kick her out of the party.
Slashdot Mirror
wouldn't it be easier to just drill a core sample from the comet?
No.
In the solar system frame, the comet is approaching very fast. Its aphelion is just inside Jupiter's orbit. Our probe is poking along at an Earthlike velocity in a roughly Earthlike orbit- it's the comet that's going to crash into the probe, really, not the other way around.
To get your Black & Decker to it in one piece, you'd have to accelerate to 0 mph relative to the comet. That alone requires gravity assists off other planets. Then you need to design robotics to move around on an object with almost no gravity and a surface that can't be surveyed very well from Earth (thanks to the bright coma). You'd have to drill a hole into a material of unknown composition, in a process lasting minutes to hours rather than microseconds. That means you'll have to make decisions at certain points during the operation, requiring bug-prone programming or impractical communication links to ground-based controllers.
Simply allowing the comet to crash into something and taking pictures of the explosion from a distance is much cheaper and more likely to work.
What if a person's attempted infection closes any possible holes for anyone else?
The number of possible holes is always much greater than the number of known holes that anyone will ever know about. Usually most of them disappear in successive OS/software versions before they are discovered.
Couldn't a Mac fan somehow patch the machine with his/her own virus?
To my knowledge the last time someone tried this kind of stunt was the Welchia worm that tried to download the Blaster patch from Microsoft. The only time a worm or virus succeeded in bringing our network down and destroying all our productivity for the day was the time one of our sales guys walked in the door with a Welchia-infected laptop.
Even if the author has the best of motives, this is not an acceptable way to deploy software under almost any circumstances. The loss of control is too great.
You wouldn't. But that's not what they're proposing:IANAL but I don't see a way to win this contest under these terms without getting in trouble, unless you don't bother to implicate yourself by actually collecting the prize.
They aren't asking for source code to the virus, or the virus to be sent to them (and only to them) in a polite form, they're leaving two Macs exposed to the net and expecting to pick a winner by what their virus scanning software finds. You claim the money by sending them a 32 character string that appears in the virus.
If you got a virus to them this way, I think the $25k would only begin to cover your legal bills.
Pay backed in gold is by value. In God We Trust is refference.
U.S. paper money hasn't been backed by gold since 1971. And read this.
Cash can be stolen and used easily. Cards can be stolen and used, but you can get the money back. Big difference.
Pay by value is much better than pay by reference.
If you lose cash, you lose the value, but no pointer escapes the transaction. If you pay by reference, you leave a trail of pointers around increasing the risk of someone dereferencing your wallet.
I used to have real problems with sleep. For years I couldn't wake up in the morning or fall asleep at night. During the summer especially, my schedule would crank around the clock until I'd be waking up at 2 PM and falling asleep at 6 AM, and I'd periodically "fix" it by pulling an all-nighter which is really hard on your brain, especially when you're growing up.
Now when the alarm rings, I turn it off, take a caffeine pill, and go back to sleep. After 20 minutes I slowly wake up again, and after 30 I get out of bed with no effort. I used to snooze snooze snooze for at least an hour, but I never hit "snooze" anymore. And it's cheap! No-name brand caffeine tablets are about as cheap as aspirin.
Falling asleep at night is another matter. That's a much harder problem- not just a matter of sustaining willpower like the problem of continually waking up on schedule. I found an OTC solution for that too. I take a 3mg melatonin tablet at about 11 PM and by midnight this vague feeling comes over me that it's late- I'm not exactly tired, but it "feels late". Falling asleep once I'm in that state takes 5 minutes. It doesn't work for everybody. Some people complain that they feel the effects of melatonin all through the next day, but that hasn't been my experience with it. I have a completely regular sleep schedule now. Melatonin is also very cheap.
Over the long term I'm more nervous about the melatonin than the caffeine. The long term effects of melatonin supplements are not as well known. But otherwise I'd be spending 90 minutes in bed every night trying to fall asleep. That adds up to some serious time- a significant chunk of your life! And you avoid a lot of health problems by sleeping normal hours. So I'm willing to accept a certain amount of risk, because this was a serious problem in my life that now appears completely solved.
There is no epicenter like there is in an earthquake, but you can define any position at rest in the frame of the background radiation itself to be as good of an "epicenter" as any other for purposes of this discussion. The Earth doesn't meet this standard, because it's moving at a speed of 365 km/sec relative to the CMBR (hence the Doppler shift), but it probably doesn't matter.
Here is a good FAQ entry regarding the difference between the observable universe and the entire universe.
Wasn't something like this on MythBusters on Discovery Channel a while back?
It sounds like something David Letterman would do.
Huh? Why would you need more than one design? Aren't you using HTML and CSS as it was intended to be used, and letting it flow to whatever resoultion the browser wants?
That doesn't always work on IE.
People like clean, simple interfaces. Why do page designers always insist on flashy designs? The flashier it is, the more it looks like an advertisement. When important GUI elements are disguised with flashy colors and graphics to attract attention, they look like advertisements and you end up looking all over for them and not finding them.
The internal HR web site for my company isn't even usable in Mozilla; the major navigation "tabs" near the top of the screen are visible only in IE. In any other browser they appear sunken, like gravestones after a flood, so you can see only a few rows of pixels at the very top edge of each tab. You have to keep waiting while the page convulsively realigns itself as the flashy images load. If I see one more stock photo of people smiling at computers, I'm going to vomit.
As for my phone (mMode), forget it. You can enter an arbitrary URL but I have yet to find one that doesn't give an error message. It can't load even something simple like a blog. If there's a column at the left, right, or top with images from adservers, it always chokes on those. By default the phone dumps you into a menu-based structure where you can browse news, sports, or "what's hot", and from what I can tell, if you're looking for news, sports, or "what's hot" it's great. That's never what I've needed it for though. I tried doing a white pages search on the road once- surely that must be possible- and gave up after 20 minutes after getting errors from both Yahoo and MSN. I ended up using a "low tech solution": calling my wife at home and asking her to do the white pages search for me from her PC.
You're thinking of G.H. Hardy. He gave incoming proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem to his graduate students who used those little forms.
I wrote this "spam form" in December 2003. The form appears on Cory Doctorow's site and is occasionally attributed to him but it was originally written by me.
The general form of a "checklist" response is really old. I first saw such a form on USENET more than ten years ago. It originally appeared in in this rec.humor.funny post from December 1994 whose author claims to have gotten it from a VAX conferencing system. The general idea of a standardized checklist for blowing someone off is probably even older than that.
I got tired of explaining to people why their cockeyed spam solutions wouldn't work, so I wrote this particular one about spam one evening and posted it here and here. I'm surprised it took off, actually. Now in every thread about spam I do a search for "technical legislative vigilante" to see if it's reappeared and it's there half the time. I only wish I had included a little dig for challenge-response schemes!
The part at the end about burning your house down is there because someone in the original thread proposed a solution to spam that was so abysmally bad that the poster was suspected to be a spammer himself- hence the "( )spammers could easily use it to harvest email addresses" item.
Judging from Google searches, spam researchers seem to have mixed feelings about it. The form wears out its welcome all the time but keeps reappearing. Some like it and use it a lot to quickly dispatch stupid ideas from the peanut gallery. Others hate the form because it gets presented to them all the time when they present their proposals. It has actually appeared in a number of anti-spam research papers. One group of researchers, when proposing their solution, actually prepared a preemptive response to refute each form item.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Wow, that looks like a great idea! I'll be sure to vote for this when it comes down the pike!
What proposition number is it?
I saw it. Did they prevent you from getting Showtime as well?
Wow, talk about missing the point. I shouldn't have to start subscribing to whatever "silver package" includes Showtime (along with 15 other unwanted pay channels) just because someone decides to protest a movie and force it off the public airwaves for political reasons. You can protest a movie without seeing it all you want, but don't place barriers in the way of me if I want to see it.
Plus, if you think it's worth renting a POS cable box just to see the Reagans you must be crazy.
It wasn't religious fundamentalists who protested Mel Gibson's film before they saw it.
You know, I used to think that you needed to see a movie before protesting it. Religious fundamentalists protested The Last Temptation of Christ when most of them hadn't seen it, and that pissed me off.
But I've changed my mind since then. You shouldn't necessarily have to see a movie before you protest it. What if the movie were a snuff film? (Mel's movie was a snuff film.) Other movies have been shut down by people who haven't seen them, like the Reagans or whatever it was. Unfortunately in that case the protestors not only didn't see the movie, they prevented the rest of us from seeing it. Now that is ridiculous.
Progressive? Why is it so hard for liberals to call themselves liberals?
Probably because multiple on-air personalities have succeeded in turning "liberal" into a radioactive word and convincing everyone that something called "liberals" is out to get them. Playing games with language is a very effective political strategy.
Plus, "liberal" implies "left". I consider myself a centrist but I always get called "liberal" simply because I don't like the president.
Bodycount.org is registered to a cybersquatter.
IIRC they got the 120000 figure by interviewing morticians. People get blown to bits and so they bypass the hospital, but everyone gets buried.
You know, if this whole thing was about oil, it would have been a hell of a lot easier and cheaper for Bush to agree to end the sanctions on Hussein's Iraq.
That's what I thought at the time. I also thought a targeted assassination would be much cheaper and would have gotten us much less flak from the rest of the world.
According to my father, the war was an attempt to prop up the dollar. The dollar's current strength is unjustified on purely economic grounds and is supported by OPEC's requirement that all OPEC oil sales be denominated in dollars. This was secured in a secret agreement between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. That places great global demand on dollars, since countries need them to buy oil from OPEC. Iraq was one of the first countries to shift its denomination from dollars to Euros in 2000. Many OPEC nations are now also wanting to be paid in Euros. The only way to mitigate the effects of a currency shift is to undermine OPEC by expanding production from a large source like Iraq. Merely ending the sanctions on Iraq would not accomplish that- Iraq would be free to rejoin OPEC and be subject to its quotas.
if Iraq was all about oil, what does religious fundamentalism have to do with it? The pope opposed the war in Iraq, as did quite a few religious people, so by your own argument, the civilian deaths in Iraq have nothing to do with religious fundamentalism.
I'm not sure I agree with the OP, but your response is an example of a logical fallacy- that of hasty generalization. Ever hear anyone say "Slashdot does not speak with one voice?" All religious fundamentalists do not speak with one voice or act with one common motive. The Pope (assuming for sake of argument that he is a "religious fundamentalist" as you say he is) is certainly not the same kind of religious fundamentalist as the president- for one thing, he's Catholic. The Catholic Church was not pushing for a war. That doesn't imply a damn thing about the president. He could be a member of a secret fundamentalist oil-worshipping cult for all we know.
Is Bush a bible-thumping hick, or is he a master schemer serving exclusively a global oil elite?
Yes.
I recently met a girl who chewed me out for accepting evolutionary theory. I was at first shocked, as I thought that the issue of evoultion and religion had been worked out. Then it really bugged me that she could be so backward and regressive in her thinking. Then I finally realised that none of it mattered, I was being just as closed-minded as she was.
Oh no! I'm guessing here, but it appears from reading your post that you are now romantically entangled with this girl. There's just no other way anyone would put up with that. It was completely reasonable for you to be shocked that someone would chew you out merely for accepting evolutionary theory. That's just ridiculous. Did she join you in "forgetting your differences", or did you just alter your own beliefs to keep her happy? You can't alter what you believe in like that just because someone wants you to. Especially a woman. That never works. You'll grow to resent her.
I hope you leave this relationship. You need to find someone who won't try to "change" you, and she needs to find an idiot^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H someone who doesn't need to be changed.
You'll have to explain better how scientists "are fucking everyone else over with their self-righteous bullshit". It only makes sense if you believe that science is some sort of publicly funded alternative religion that is competing with yours for attention, money, and followers. Science is not a religion. It's simply a methodology for finding things out about the world.
According to the article, religious people had little affect. Imax cancelled these films, an editor theorizes it could be because religious people might get upset at these films (what? we don't get upset at Discovery channel...sigh), and VOILA! We get a full-fledged Slashdot peanut gallery bashing us "religious fundamentalists".
Others have pointed out how you obviously haven't RTFA so I won't get into that here.
But even if your post were factually correct, your argument applies a double standard to creationists that wouldn't apply to other groups who produce a chilling effect and screw things up for the rest of us.
Take the example of lawyers. Now not all lawyers do this, but a subset of lawyers, as a group, have created a chilling effect in this country by filing negligence lawsuits left and right, and they don't even have to get involved in a particular situation to screw it up. When a landowner ends public access to a watering hole, for example, citing fears of lawsuits, we turn on lawyers as a group instantly. It doesn't matter, and probably shouldn't matter, that the individual landowner has not actually received a legal threat from an actual lawyer. By creating the chilling effect, such lawyers effectively interfere in a wider range of situations than they are directly involved in.
Why should this be any different for creationists? People are shutting down movies and dumbing down school textbooks because they're scared of creationists. Even though only a few creationists actually have the time to run around complaining and making trouble, their actions have wider repurcussions than they pretend, and they know it.
IANAP but I'm guessing a "black hole" of this size would have an event horizon with such a tiny radius that the uncertainty principle alone would allow mass to escape unless the momentum uncertainty were infinite.
Both Microsoft and Firefox have made UI enhancements to make it more difficult for users to just reflexivly click "Yes" on every modal permission dialog that pops up. I think it's perfectly fair to hold Java to the same standard
You're clearly just trying to save face if this is all you can complain about. Not all vulnerabilities involve users clicking Yes in security dialogs.
since it turns out that Java really is not safer than "native" extentions like ActiveX or XUL or Plug-ins (despite years worth of propaganda saying otherwise).
The "years worth of propaganda" was probably referring to Java's immunity to buffer overflow vulnerabilities and other attacks that exploit the machine-level details of C-style calling conventions. Or it could have referred to the sandbox security model under which applets can be run safely without even requiring a security dialog- as opposed to ActiveX for example, which is typically implemented in "unmanaged" (but digitally signed) C++, has a security model consisting of nothing but a security dialog, and which must run either with full privileges or not at all- based on whether you feel you can trust the author. You can run Java code in a sandbox and not have to trust anybody. The sandbox has such restrictive security, in fact, that it partly (along with install base and JDK versioning issues) led to the demise of applets relative to ActiveX.
Carly made lots of money for stockholders. I can personally attest to this.
I bought 26 shares of HP stock on February 1 at 19.75. Carly leaves, and I dump my stock on the 9th at 21.50!!! Woo hoo! I made $45 in just 8 days (minus commission). Just look at that selloff spike. Some of that was me!
Anyone who knew anything about HP was partying that day. Even at Agilent everyone was giddy. If I had known Carly was about to get dumped I would have hurled my life savings into HPQ.
I understand she has a bright future ahead of her in the Republican Party. If the Republicans are smart they'll wait until right before an election to kick her out of the party.