Not sure what part of the GUI was MS and what was IBM, as the original OS/2 was a DOS-esque command line affair with a GUI based on windows 2.0 following shortly. The GP is probably talking about the OS/2 2.0 GUI that was a significant step forward. Or maybe Warp.
Anyway, I always thought of it as more of an echo of the Amiga GUI....
Cool, I checked out your link. I don't follow this guy's show, so I don't know where he stands on any issues at all, so could be wrong. But it seems clear from the text of your link that this guy Beck has the opinion that "the Muslim community" has not done enough to condemn "Muslim Extremism". He also apparently has the opinion that the failure of the Muslim Community to vocally and visibly participate in opposing "Muslim Extremism" is very dangerous to the wider "Muslim Community", as he feels that there is a time coming when the anger with the extremists will be so great that the general public will no longer care about the distinction between "Extremist" and "Regular" Muslim.
With this as a background, he speaks to a Muslim member of congress. Someone Beck is clearly labeling as "Muslim Community". With some prefacing of the moment, he asks him to act as a spokesman for the "Muslim Community" and loudly denounce "Muslim Extremism" in the same kind of stark terms used by "regular americans". He basically puts him on the spot and gives him a chance to loudly proclaim "I hate those dirty bastard terrorists", thereby showing the way for the "Muslim Community" to head of the coming backlash by "regular Americans" who will soon cease to care about "Extremist/Regular" variations of "Muslim" and see "Enemy".
If this is the "I'm not calling you a murderer, but prove you aren't" stuff that people in this thread are talking about, then they are idiots. This conversation may be inartful and needlessly confrontational, but he is clearly not using implication to call the guy a terrorist. He is clearly arguing that he believes that the congressman and any other prominent Muslim has a duty to be loud in their support of the war on terror to avoid the kind of "All Muslims are Terrorists" belief from being widely held. I think it is abundantly clear from the quoted text that he is firmly on the side of "Keith Ellison is a loyal American" and is trying to lead him into taking a public stand that he believes will enhance Muslim/nonMuslim relations in the US.
It is not clear from the text, but it doesn't seem that Beck succeeds in communicating his intentions to the congressman. It seems that his over-the-top language puts him on the defensive and as such he doesn't take the cue from Beck to make a stump speech about defeating the terrorists. My guess is that Beck expected him to jump at the chance to condemn the terrorists and differentiate himself and his community from the extremist views. That may have been a stupid expectation given some of the extreme imagery he uses, but I really don't think an honest reading can conclude otherwise.
Of course, it could be that Media Matters didn't include the part right before where he says "watch me catch this traitorous Muslim terrorist on live TV. I doubt it though. It appears that the intention is to paint Beck in the worst light possible, and from what I can see of the text, there is no such "gotcha" game being played by Beck.
Remember that Social Security in the US is paid from current revenue. What you pay in is used today, it's not an investment fund. So when you turn 65, be sure not to claim any state support, or Medicare, lest you too become a communist.
And you really think this ponzi scheme isn't going to collapse by then? I hope you are not planning to retire on your Social Security checks. Even if we hadn't just run up a trillion dollars of debt this year we would have required a 70% tax rate to support the peak of the baby boom while the nadir of the baby bust is working. I haven't seen any new estimates that get us through the peak, but with a half-trillion and growing annual debt service, I really don't see that number going down. In fact, the GAO projects debt service taking up over 1/3 of the entire US GNP while I'm in my retirement years. Not 1/3 of the budget, (it is already 10% of the budget), 1/3 of the entire gross domestic product. Holy Crap! For a really depressing read, head over to wikipedia's United States Federal Budget page for links to the relevant sites at the GAO.
Because Obama personally ordered this? If you knew anything about the US system of governance, you'd know that the Judiciary is separate from the Executive.
And if you knew anything about the US system of governance, you would know that the Justice Department is not part of the Judiciary, it is part of the executive. Not that this necessarily has anything to do with Obama or the White House, although all such requests of media organizations are supposed to be approved by the Attorney General, which would be the White House. It is likely just a prosecutor asking for something hoping that indymedia will just comply. Once they questioned the subpoena, the Justice Department backed down from their threats and withdrew the subpoena. Good for them and good for the EFF. This is basically identical to the AT&T case, except tiny indymedia didn't back down and just provide the information requested. And the government folded immediately because legally they didn't have a leg to stand on.
The big threat discussed in the article is the "you may not disclose this request". Holy Crap!! Absent a court order, what the heck makes them believe they can issue a secret subpoena that is probably illegitimate and order you not to discuss it!? I hope that part is fully investigated and if that is really an official policy of the US attorney's office that it is changed immediately. Talk about ripe for abuse!
Parent's post is spot-on. I've been there as well, and getting priorities from the business is the key to everything. At 20 people, getting out of alignment with the business takes a lot of doing, but as you grow the opposite will be the case. Right now all of the decision makers fit at one table - later they won't even see each other. Then you'll have competing priorities - a definite prescription for failure if you can't get someone at the top of the business heap to prioritize - CEO, COO.
Also, One page document is mandatory. I made the mistake of actually listing all of the projects I was working on after we had grown to about 100 people. My 5 man team had about 22 pages of projects on the boil at any one given moment. So I delivered 22 pages of single spaced project list to the CEO and COO (100 pages if you included everything completed in the last 2 months). The take from the senior execs was "nobody can do this much work" - which I took as a positive. They didn't view it as a positive at all. My "get twice the work done with half the budget" approach actually hurt my reputation. Strange, but that's how it works.
Look up "echolocation boy" on youtube- that kid plays video games despite being blind.
There was this famous kid named Tommy in the 60's that could play pinball despite being totally blind and deaf. I think they even made a movie about him. Man, that kid sure played a mean pinball!
... but my station list is currently full of crap as I've been trying to show my wife the possibilities).
Wow, I can sympathize with that! I did the same thing with my Tivo. It used to be great with recommendations for thing's I'd like, until I finally taught the wife how to use it. Now it records reality shows, celebrity news and Tyra Banks reruns. That's a true sign of the apocalypse there - when a great SI swimsuit model has a show and it's the wife who wants to watch it and the man who runs in horror!
One possibility would be some people being more sensitive to possible slight variations in electromagnetic fields which could be caused by pipes, wires, water, etc.
No, it isn't. This has been thoroughly tested and completely debunked. Absent normal sensory information (things you can see and hear and touch and make deductions from) there is no effect at all at work in dowsing.
I tested this myself as a kid. I tried out dowsing with coat-hanger wires. It worked like a champ. I could hide various metal items and the wires would cross right over the item! Super cool, and extremely sensitive. However, when I wasn't the one hiding the items and I couldn't tell where it was..... no luck finding it. As many others have pointed out - idoemotor effect and confirmation bias.
Here's a science moment for those out there who think there might be something to this dowsing thing... make a dowsing rod for yourself and see if you can find a metal object hidden under a bedsheet. With a little practice you'll be able to do it with great accuracy. Now have someone set up 3 cardboard boxes around the room and hide your metal object in one of the boxes - completely out of your view. Without seeing them at all, dowse for the object. Try it 10 times. If you are right more than 5 times, call James Randi.
Why would that be, if we're comparing apples to apples (and not wiring for stoves)? As far as copper goes, 220 would presumably take 4 wires (hot, hot, neutral, ground) rather than the 3 for 110V, but for the same (wattage) capacity the wires would be thinner, probably using less copper, since the current would be half as great.
It's not the voltage making it more expensive, it is the Amperage. 220 in the US is mainly for large appliances with a large current draw that would not be efficient or safe at 110v. Check out those big 30 amp breakers in your fuse box. Most of your 110v breakers are half that size, so the wiring can be much smaller and cheaper. Now imagine how big and expensive the wires would be to carry the same power at 110v.....
So, 220v is really only more expensive because of the application to high amp situations. (and perhaps a little bit due to the added insulation required for the doubling of the voltage) A 6 amp 220v circuit for household use would probably be identical cost or cheaper than 15 amp 110v. It's just that nobody uses that.
All software should, by default, be run in its own sandbox and only be granted access to shared resources (such as user documents) on an as-needed basis. Unfortunately, the software world is firmly entrenched in this horribly flawed model and it is unlikely to change any time in the next decade or two.
Actually, it looks like we might be headed there a lot quicker than you think. Virtualization is exploding all over the place, not only for servers but for desktops and applications. I have a buggy old SQL IDE that I really like, so I use it via virtualization in my Windows environment at work. Works like a champ because it doesn't have to contend with Outlook for the title of crappiest piece of software on the box any more. Our crappy old accounting system based on a heavy client? We're going to virtualize that piece of junk soon too. Better for the users, better for the admins who have to deal with the users. All of our in-house software is web-based, but any commercial stuff that is heavy client is likely to be virtualized soon. So you'll get your "All software should...be run in it's own sandbox", even more than you expected.
Even better, I get to run my favorite Linux apps side-by-side with my favorite windows apps on the same desktop, each running in native mode with no porting or rewrites! So at home I have a copy of Picasa running in a windows VM that I access on my Ubuntu desktop.
Actually, I think even a cursory look at history would tell a different story. Probably because nation-states are a more recent development you have a larger definition of "total war", but in the era before the nation-state war was generally winner take all. There is a reason we have a definition for the word "sack" that includes the plundering, looting and destruction of a city. Take a quick google of "Carthage" for a better understanding of what the norm in conflicts was prior to the current era. The Romans leveled the city to the ground, took 50,000 survivors into slavery and generally raped pillaged and plundered their way through the etire city/state. They even took the extraordinary step of sewing salt into the fields so nothing would grow there. This is over 2,000 years ago - so no, I don't think you can point to the French revolution as a sea change in the style of warfare. In fact, as you go back farther in time and get to smaller and smaller civil aggregations you would see a greater percentage of the populace involved in armed conflict, and a greater likelihood that they would be involved in armed conflict in their lifetimes. I think the distiction between military and civilian populations is a more recent development.
We had a similar failure here. Had to replace a battery in a redundant SAN controller... it was under support with the vendor so they sent out a rep to do the fix - everything went just fine. Then poof - one whole shelf went dark. No problem, we designed the system to handle that - all arrays striped vertically with no two drives on any one shelf. Then the vendor took the backup card offline to repair the problem. Poof - another shelf down. Uh, oh! A little more work got the shelves back on line - but the drives had been totally corrupted by the glitchy controller. Luckily, not being idiots our engineers had full backups. Unluckily it took days to fully recover everything. Lesson learned - there is no such thing as a safe fix. We moved critical systems off of our "Fisher-Price SAN" over the next several months and it has not caused any additional catastrophes, but we learned a lot about redundancy - a single hardware failure can cut through a lot of layers of redundancy and bring you down hard when the failure mode is less than "off".
capitalism has spawned the ability for a very small minority to amass a very enormous amount of wealth. These people are not contributing more to the world, are not necessarily smarter, and it is immoral to think that somehow they are worth 10,000 times more than the average human being.
If you believe that your worth and your wealth are the same thing, then there is no hope for you.
The pres of my company makes a modest salary by ceo/pres standards. I will work 20 years at a decent salary (top 10%) for my region, save 20% of my salary a year and it will not equal what he makes in one year! There's something woefully wrong with our system.
By your own logic; what makes you worthy of a salary greater than 90% of your neighbors? Why should you earn more than the unfit, 5'1" dullard who is illiterate in any language who cleans your table at lunchtime? How many years would she have to work to have what you make in a year? How is that fair? Indeed, why should anyone earn more than the minimum wage? Anything more would be unfair, wouldn't it?
Capitalism has given a majority in America the delusion that they too can win the lotto, they too can be the next 10million dollar a year winner but instead they don't realize that they are stuck as economic vassals.
Therein lies the misconception. Those who believe in capitalism don't believe you gain wealth by winning the lotto. You aren't given a prize for being the smartest either. You do it by adding value - not some metaphysical value that adds to your worth as a human being, but value that someone else can see and is willing to pay for. Sometimes that person is very smart, like Wozniak and Jobs, but more often they are just providing a service that a lot of people are willing to pay for. Like the lady who invented those little buttons that people put in their Crocs. I can personally attest that I would never in a million years have created that product - due to the fact that I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would ever don a pair of Crocs in the first place, let alone adorn it in such a hideous fashion. I would bet that I could best her in a "smarts" contest. You probably could too. But she made a couple of million bucks in her first year in business and you and I are collecting salaries working for someone else. And she deserves every penny of that money, and you and I don't no matter how great we think we are, because she went out there and earned it, and we didn't.
I live in Florida, I assure you baked potatoes can and DO purchase Drivers licenses here - especially in the St. Petersburg area.....
Amen Brother! Here in southern Florida the real challenge is all of the retirees from New York. They've never driven in their lives and suddenly get a big Lincoln and their first driver's license at 68 years of age. For those who've never visited, imagine the brusque NY city cabbie attitude combined with the "blue hair and knuckles" 37-in-a-65 mph zone typified of an aging driver combined with the situational experience of a 16 year old. It's incredibly confusing to be cut off in 5 mph slow motion by an angry senior mouthing obscenities. On the positive side, my rapid braking skills are constantly honed! In Boca Raton you exercise the auxiliary rule set for intersections: always brake for cars approaching from side roads and be prepared to swerve and stop.
I worked in Dr. Tim Townsend's lab during grad school. He was an all-American linebacker at the University of Tennessee as an undergrad and a rising star in transgenic animal research as a PhD. We used to play pickup basketball with Dr. Robert Guyette, a famous surgeon, who was the center for the 1975 UK NCAA finals basketball team. One of my grad school classmates in our pickup group was the division II player of the year, another started for Western Michigan. So yeah, all jocks are dumb. BTW, I was the late-blooming nerd who didn't have any athletic ability but got a fellowship for my academics. That didn't stop me from competing with all of these world-class athletes - and being world class athletes didn't stop them from being world class scientists. They also happened to be terrifically nice people. The whole world isn't high school - it just seems like it while you are there.
Yep, as a kid I played it on the mainframe at my dad's office.... via teletype! I'd input my commands on paper tape, play them over the modem, get the answer back on paper tape, take that over to the line printer and have it print out the result. Back and forth, using piles of paper - all just to find out that I impacted the moon at 4,000 miles per hour. I guess the math was a little complicated for a first grader.... A couple of years later they upgraded to an acoustic-coupled modem on their line printer terminal. It was basically a paper-based computer screen - no more paper tapes! Interacting with the computer in (semi-) real-time via a printer!! Now that was great stuff... I'd go home with stacks of paper printouts of my games. Ah.... good times....
Capitalism has a really cruddy underside because someone has to lose for someone else to win
I hate to flame a post that I generally agree with, but this point is completely wrong. Nobody has to lose in capitalism. I buy my broccoli at the farmers market and nobody loses. I get to eat broccoli without having to grow it myself and the retailer, shipper and farmer get my cash. It is a win/win.
to be fair use as a parody, something has to be a parody of the copyright work, not the subject of that work. Second, it's not at all obvious to me that this is a parody of Time Magazine. What feature of the Time cover is being parodied, exactly?
Congratulations, in traditional slashdot fashion, you forgot to RTFA. The original work on Flickr was a version of the Time Magazine cover with the doctored Obama photo. According to the artist, it was done out of curiosity about photoshopping an image and not really any sort of political statement (educational, also fair use). A different faceless internet artist grabbed his photoshop and did more photoshopping to produce the poster with "Socialist" on it. And you might want to read up on parody, I don't think you really came close in your analysis of the legal definition of parody. But, I'm no lawyer, so I won't pretend my opinion on the matter carries any weight.
In addition to which the Constitution does not grant rights to the people. It is the other way around. The framers of the constitution debated even including the bill of rights, that's why they were tacked on as amendments after the fact. A major faction opposed adding them because they were obviously not needed and if enumerated in a list they worried that future generations would see this as an all-encompassing list. If the constitution didn't grant a specific power to the government it was reserved to the people - it says so right there in the document itself. So no list is needed. As the GP demonstrates, this view has been manifest. The meaning of the words has been completely flipped so that if the constitution doesn't specifically prohibit the government from doing something, then it is OK. Even to the point of claiming that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" doesn't mean that the people themselves are allowed to own guns.
Our 15% unemployment is a fake number. double it for the real number.
the US 15% number is from only those that are collecting unemployment. Those that had it run out are not counted. The numbers are easily double what they are reporting.
This is not true. First, it isn't 15% - As of today it is 9.7%, seasonally unadjusted. Second, it is not "collecting unemployment", unemployment insurance doesn't enter into it at all. It is "unemployed and is currently seeking work." This number is less than the "I don't have a job" number. Traditionally reporters and pundits will caveat the unemployment number to say that it doesn't count those who have given up and are no longer looking for work. I'm not sure how big this number can be though, because most of us have to work to eat, so we are strongly motivated to keep looking. I guess if you are a two income household and one of you looses your job, you could eventually decide that you can make it on one paycheck and live in a traditional single earner household.
The other big caveat often quoted is the "underemployed" are not counted in the unemployment number. This number would be those who are working but are not working as many hours as they would like. I would assume that this would include most low income workers since most of us want to make more than "low".
I have to wonder at someone who could look around and think 1 out of 3 workers in the US is unemployed. 30% unemployment is riot inducing. Heck, unemployment peaked at nearly 25% during the great depression, and that was a period where most women were not in the workforce - so that's 25% of families with no income. (as opposed to our current workforce, where there is a 90% chance that the other spouse is still working.) Do you see huge "Hooverville" style refugee camps around the country? No? Well then you can guess that we probably don't have "easily double" 15% unemployment.
It is not a site that is being scanned. They take actual copies of magazines, etc. and cut them up and scan them to TIFF and OCR them. Then they do a keyword search, printing out the keyword and its location in the file with 10 surrounding characters. Here's the example from the actual case decision:
4 November 2005 - Dagbladet Arbejderen, page 3:
TDC: 73% "a forthcoming sale of the telecommunications group TDC which is expected to be bought".
This is printed on a piece of paper. The electronic files are then destroyed. All that remains is a piece of paper with a piece of a sentence on it. From reading the decision it appears that the court doesn't have a problem up until this moment. But because the snippet is not automatically destroyed, they say it could be a violation of copyright.
The decision appears to require that each individual snippet would have to be adjudicated in a court of law as to possible copyright violation if the company doesn't get prior approval from the rights holder. It doesn't seem to say that 11 words is an automatic copyright violation.
Re:Screw Dan Brown's facts, or lack thereof
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Tetraktys
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Perhaps Dan Brown is actually a giant psychology experiment gone horribly wrong. The thesis was to create a work of fiction that was utterly horrific but create a buzz in literary and entertainment circles to see how the public would respond. Much to the dismay of the research team, the buzz was more effective than they had ever hypothesized. In reality the only real use of a Dan Brown work is to segregate people into two groups... those worth discussing literature with and those with whom to avoid such discussions.
Slashdot Mirror
You are aware that Microsoft wrote OS/2?
Co-wrote.
Not sure what part of the GUI was MS and what was IBM, as the original OS/2 was a DOS-esque command line affair with a GUI based on windows 2.0 following shortly. The GP is probably talking about the OS/2 2.0 GUI that was a significant step forward. Or maybe Warp.
Anyway, I always thought of it as more of an echo of the Amiga GUI....
Cool, I checked out your link. I don't follow this guy's show, so I don't know where he stands on any issues at all, so could be wrong. But it seems clear from the text of your link that this guy Beck has the opinion that "the Muslim community" has not done enough to condemn "Muslim Extremism". He also apparently has the opinion that the failure of the Muslim Community to vocally and visibly participate in opposing "Muslim Extremism" is very dangerous to the wider "Muslim Community", as he feels that there is a time coming when the anger with the extremists will be so great that the general public will no longer care about the distinction between "Extremist" and "Regular" Muslim.
With this as a background, he speaks to a Muslim member of congress. Someone Beck is clearly labeling as "Muslim Community". With some prefacing of the moment, he asks him to act as a spokesman for the "Muslim Community" and loudly denounce "Muslim Extremism" in the same kind of stark terms used by "regular americans". He basically puts him on the spot and gives him a chance to loudly proclaim "I hate those dirty bastard terrorists", thereby showing the way for the "Muslim Community" to head of the coming backlash by "regular Americans" who will soon cease to care about "Extremist/Regular" variations of "Muslim" and see "Enemy".
If this is the "I'm not calling you a murderer, but prove you aren't" stuff that people in this thread are talking about, then they are idiots. This conversation may be inartful and needlessly confrontational, but he is clearly not using implication to call the guy a terrorist. He is clearly arguing that he believes that the congressman and any other prominent Muslim has a duty to be loud in their support of the war on terror to avoid the kind of "All Muslims are Terrorists" belief from being widely held. I think it is abundantly clear from the quoted text that he is firmly on the side of "Keith Ellison is a loyal American" and is trying to lead him into taking a public stand that he believes will enhance Muslim/nonMuslim relations in the US.
It is not clear from the text, but it doesn't seem that Beck succeeds in communicating his intentions to the congressman. It seems that his over-the-top language puts him on the defensive and as such he doesn't take the cue from Beck to make a stump speech about defeating the terrorists. My guess is that Beck expected him to jump at the chance to condemn the terrorists and differentiate himself and his community from the extremist views. That may have been a stupid expectation given some of the extreme imagery he uses, but I really don't think an honest reading can conclude otherwise.
Of course, it could be that Media Matters didn't include the part right before where he says "watch me catch this traitorous Muslim terrorist on live TV. I doubt it though. It appears that the intention is to paint Beck in the worst light possible, and from what I can see of the text, there is no such "gotcha" game being played by Beck.
Remember that Social Security in the US is paid from current revenue. What you pay in is used today, it's not an investment fund. So when you turn 65, be sure not to claim any state support, or Medicare, lest you too become a communist.
And you really think this ponzi scheme isn't going to collapse by then? I hope you are not planning to retire on your Social Security checks. Even if we hadn't just run up a trillion dollars of debt this year we would have required a 70% tax rate to support the peak of the baby boom while the nadir of the baby bust is working. I haven't seen any new estimates that get us through the peak, but with a half-trillion and growing annual debt service, I really don't see that number going down. In fact, the GAO projects debt service taking up over 1/3 of the entire US GNP while I'm in my retirement years. Not 1/3 of the budget, (it is already 10% of the budget), 1/3 of the entire gross domestic product. Holy Crap! For a really depressing read, head over to wikipedia's United States Federal Budget page for links to the relevant sites at the GAO.
Because Obama personally ordered this? If you knew anything about the US system of governance, you'd know that the Judiciary is separate from the Executive.
And if you knew anything about the US system of governance, you would know that the Justice Department is not part of the Judiciary, it is part of the executive. Not that this necessarily has anything to do with Obama or the White House, although all such requests of media organizations are supposed to be approved by the Attorney General, which would be the White House. It is likely just a prosecutor asking for something hoping that indymedia will just comply. Once they questioned the subpoena, the Justice Department backed down from their threats and withdrew the subpoena. Good for them and good for the EFF. This is basically identical to the AT&T case, except tiny indymedia didn't back down and just provide the information requested. And the government folded immediately because legally they didn't have a leg to stand on.
The big threat discussed in the article is the "you may not disclose this request". Holy Crap!! Absent a court order, what the heck makes them believe they can issue a secret subpoena that is probably illegitimate and order you not to discuss it!? I hope that part is fully investigated and if that is really an official policy of the US attorney's office that it is changed immediately. Talk about ripe for abuse!
Parent's post is spot-on. I've been there as well, and getting priorities from the business is the key to everything. At 20 people, getting out of alignment with the business takes a lot of doing, but as you grow the opposite will be the case. Right now all of the decision makers fit at one table - later they won't even see each other. Then you'll have competing priorities - a definite prescription for failure if you can't get someone at the top of the business heap to prioritize - CEO, COO.
Also, One page document is mandatory. I made the mistake of actually listing all of the projects I was working on after we had grown to about 100 people. My 5 man team had about 22 pages of projects on the boil at any one given moment. So I delivered 22 pages of single spaced project list to the CEO and COO (100 pages if you included everything completed in the last 2 months). The take from the senior execs was "nobody can do this much work" - which I took as a positive. They didn't view it as a positive at all. My "get twice the work done with half the budget" approach actually hurt my reputation. Strange, but that's how it works.
Look up "echolocation boy" on youtube- that kid plays video games despite being blind.
There was this famous kid named Tommy in the 60's that could play pinball despite being totally blind and deaf. I think they even made a movie about him. Man, that kid sure played a mean pinball!
... but my station list is currently full of crap as I've been trying to show my wife the possibilities).
Wow, I can sympathize with that! I did the same thing with my Tivo. It used to be great with recommendations for thing's I'd like, until I finally taught the wife how to use it. Now it records reality shows, celebrity news and Tyra Banks reruns. That's a true sign of the apocalypse there - when a great SI swimsuit model has a show and it's the wife who wants to watch it and the man who runs in horror!
One possibility would be some people being more sensitive to possible slight variations in electromagnetic fields which could be caused by pipes, wires, water, etc.
No, it isn't. This has been thoroughly tested and completely debunked. Absent normal sensory information (things you can see and hear and touch and make deductions from) there is no effect at all at work in dowsing.
I tested this myself as a kid. I tried out dowsing with coat-hanger wires. It worked like a champ. I could hide various metal items and the wires would cross right over the item! Super cool, and extremely sensitive. However, when I wasn't the one hiding the items and I couldn't tell where it was..... no luck finding it. As many others have pointed out - idoemotor effect and confirmation bias.
Here's a science moment for those out there who think there might be something to this dowsing thing... make a dowsing rod for yourself and see if you can find a metal object hidden under a bedsheet. With a little practice you'll be able to do it with great accuracy. Now have someone set up 3 cardboard boxes around the room and hide your metal object in one of the boxes - completely out of your view. Without seeing them at all, dowse for the object. Try it 10 times. If you are right more than 5 times, call James Randi.
Why would that be, if we're comparing apples to apples (and not wiring for stoves)? As far as copper goes, 220 would presumably take 4 wires (hot, hot, neutral, ground) rather than the 3 for 110V, but for the same (wattage) capacity the wires would be thinner, probably using less copper, since the current would be half as great.
It's not the voltage making it more expensive, it is the Amperage. 220 in the US is mainly for large appliances with a large current draw that would not be efficient or safe at 110v. Check out those big 30 amp breakers in your fuse box. Most of your 110v breakers are half that size, so the wiring can be much smaller and cheaper. Now imagine how big and expensive the wires would be to carry the same power at 110v.....
So, 220v is really only more expensive because of the application to high amp situations. (and perhaps a little bit due to the added insulation required for the doubling of the voltage) A 6 amp 220v circuit for household use would probably be identical cost or cheaper than 15 amp 110v. It's just that nobody uses that.
All software should, by default, be run in its own sandbox and only be granted access to shared resources (such as user documents) on an as-needed basis. Unfortunately, the software world is firmly entrenched in this horribly flawed model and it is unlikely to change any time in the next decade or two.
Actually, it looks like we might be headed there a lot quicker than you think. Virtualization is exploding all over the place, not only for servers but for desktops and applications. I have a buggy old SQL IDE that I really like, so I use it via virtualization in my Windows environment at work. Works like a champ because it doesn't have to contend with Outlook for the title of crappiest piece of software on the box any more. Our crappy old accounting system based on a heavy client? We're going to virtualize that piece of junk soon too. Better for the users, better for the admins who have to deal with the users. All of our in-house software is web-based, but any commercial stuff that is heavy client is likely to be virtualized soon. So you'll get your "All software should...be run in it's own sandbox", even more than you expected.
Even better, I get to run my favorite Linux apps side-by-side with my favorite windows apps on the same desktop, each running in native mode with no porting or rewrites! So at home I have a copy of Picasa running in a windows VM that I access on my Ubuntu desktop.
Actually, I think even a cursory look at history would tell a different story. Probably because nation-states are a more recent development you have a larger definition of "total war", but in the era before the nation-state war was generally winner take all. There is a reason we have a definition for the word "sack" that includes the plundering, looting and destruction of a city. Take a quick google of "Carthage" for a better understanding of what the norm in conflicts was prior to the current era. The Romans leveled the city to the ground, took 50,000 survivors into slavery and generally raped pillaged and plundered their way through the etire city/state. They even took the extraordinary step of sewing salt into the fields so nothing would grow there. This is over 2,000 years ago - so no, I don't think you can point to the French revolution as a sea change in the style of warfare. In fact, as you go back farther in time and get to smaller and smaller civil aggregations you would see a greater percentage of the populace involved in armed conflict, and a greater likelihood that they would be involved in armed conflict in their lifetimes. I think the distiction between military and civilian populations is a more recent development.
We had a similar failure here. Had to replace a battery in a redundant SAN controller... it was under support with the vendor so they sent out a rep to do the fix - everything went just fine. Then poof - one whole shelf went dark. No problem, we designed the system to handle that - all arrays striped vertically with no two drives on any one shelf. Then the vendor took the backup card offline to repair the problem. Poof - another shelf down. Uh, oh! A little more work got the shelves back on line - but the drives had been totally corrupted by the glitchy controller. Luckily, not being idiots our engineers had full backups. Unluckily it took days to fully recover everything. Lesson learned - there is no such thing as a safe fix. We moved critical systems off of our "Fisher-Price SAN" over the next several months and it has not caused any additional catastrophes, but we learned a lot about redundancy - a single hardware failure can cut through a lot of layers of redundancy and bring you down hard when the failure mode is less than "off".
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Pop-pop pop goes the Weasel, the weasel. Pop-pop pop goes the Weasel, the Weasel.
---I'll see your obscure reference and I raise you an even more obscure reference to your reference.
capitalism has spawned the ability for a very small minority to amass a very enormous amount of wealth. These people are not contributing more to the world, are not necessarily smarter, and it is immoral to think that somehow they are worth 10,000 times more than the average human being.
If you believe that your worth and your wealth are the same thing, then there is no hope for you.
The pres of my company makes a modest salary by ceo/pres standards. I will work 20 years at a decent salary (top 10%) for my region, save 20% of my salary a year and it will not equal what he makes in one year! There's something woefully wrong with our system.
By your own logic; what makes you worthy of a salary greater than 90% of your neighbors? Why should you earn more than the unfit, 5'1" dullard who is illiterate in any language who cleans your table at lunchtime? How many years would she have to work to have what you make in a year? How is that fair? Indeed, why should anyone earn more than the minimum wage? Anything more would be unfair, wouldn't it?
Capitalism has given a majority in America the delusion that they too can win the lotto, they too can be the next 10million dollar a year winner but instead they don't realize that they are stuck as economic vassals.
Therein lies the misconception. Those who believe in capitalism don't believe you gain wealth by winning the lotto. You aren't given a prize for being the smartest either. You do it by adding value - not some metaphysical value that adds to your worth as a human being, but value that someone else can see and is willing to pay for. Sometimes that person is very smart, like Wozniak and Jobs, but more often they are just providing a service that a lot of people are willing to pay for. Like the lady who invented those little buttons that people put in their Crocs. I can personally attest that I would never in a million years have created that product - due to the fact that I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would ever don a pair of Crocs in the first place, let alone adorn it in such a hideous fashion. I would bet that I could best her in a "smarts" contest. You probably could too. But she made a couple of million bucks in her first year in business and you and I are collecting salaries working for someone else. And she deserves every penny of that money, and you and I don't no matter how great we think we are, because she went out there and earned it, and we didn't.
I think this had more to do with SAG contracts than with respect.
I live in Florida, I assure you baked potatoes can and DO purchase Drivers licenses here - especially in the St. Petersburg area.....
Amen Brother! Here in southern Florida the real challenge is all of the retirees from New York. They've never driven in their lives and suddenly get a big Lincoln and their first driver's license at 68 years of age. For those who've never visited, imagine the brusque NY city cabbie attitude combined with the "blue hair and knuckles" 37-in-a-65 mph zone typified of an aging driver combined with the situational experience of a 16 year old. It's incredibly confusing to be cut off in 5 mph slow motion by an angry senior mouthing obscenities. On the positive side, my rapid braking skills are constantly honed! In Boca Raton you exercise the auxiliary rule set for intersections: always brake for cars approaching from side roads and be prepared to swerve and stop.
I worked in Dr. Tim Townsend's lab during grad school. He was an all-American linebacker at the University of Tennessee as an undergrad and a rising star in transgenic animal research as a PhD. We used to play pickup basketball with Dr. Robert Guyette, a famous surgeon, who was the center for the 1975 UK NCAA finals basketball team. One of my grad school classmates in our pickup group was the division II player of the year, another started for Western Michigan. So yeah, all jocks are dumb. BTW, I was the late-blooming nerd who didn't have any athletic ability but got a fellowship for my academics. That didn't stop me from competing with all of these world-class athletes - and being world class athletes didn't stop them from being world class scientists. They also happened to be terrifically nice people. The whole world isn't high school - it just seems like it while you are there.
Yep, as a kid I played it on the mainframe at my dad's office.... via teletype! I'd input my commands on paper tape, play them over the modem, get the answer back on paper tape, take that over to the line printer and have it print out the result. Back and forth, using piles of paper - all just to find out that I impacted the moon at 4,000 miles per hour. I guess the math was a little complicated for a first grader.... A couple of years later they upgraded to an acoustic-coupled modem on their line printer terminal. It was basically a paper-based computer screen - no more paper tapes! Interacting with the computer in (semi-) real-time via a printer!! Now that was great stuff... I'd go home with stacks of paper printouts of my games. Ah.... good times....
Capitalism has a really cruddy underside because someone has to lose for someone else to win
I hate to flame a post that I generally agree with, but this point is completely wrong. Nobody has to lose in capitalism. I buy my broccoli at the farmers market and nobody loses. I get to eat broccoli without having to grow it myself and the retailer, shipper and farmer get my cash. It is a win/win.
to be fair use as a parody, something has to be a parody of the copyright work, not the subject of that work. Second, it's not at all obvious to me that this is a parody of Time Magazine. What feature of the Time cover is being parodied, exactly?
Congratulations, in traditional slashdot fashion, you forgot to RTFA. The original work on Flickr was a version of the Time Magazine cover with the doctored Obama photo. According to the artist, it was done out of curiosity about photoshopping an image and not really any sort of political statement (educational, also fair use). A different faceless internet artist grabbed his photoshop and did more photoshopping to produce the poster with "Socialist" on it. And you might want to read up on parody, I don't think you really came close in your analysis of the legal definition of parody. But, I'm no lawyer, so I won't pretend my opinion on the matter carries any weight.
In addition to which the Constitution does not grant rights to the people. It is the other way around. The framers of the constitution debated even including the bill of rights, that's why they were tacked on as amendments after the fact. A major faction opposed adding them because they were obviously not needed and if enumerated in a list they worried that future generations would see this as an all-encompassing list. If the constitution didn't grant a specific power to the government it was reserved to the people - it says so right there in the document itself. So no list is needed. As the GP demonstrates, this view has been manifest. The meaning of the words has been completely flipped so that if the constitution doesn't specifically prohibit the government from doing something, then it is OK. Even to the point of claiming that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" doesn't mean that the people themselves are allowed to own guns.
Our 15% unemployment is a fake number. double it for the real number.
the US 15% number is from only those that are collecting unemployment. Those that had it run out are not counted. The numbers are easily double what they are reporting.
This is not true. First, it isn't 15% - As of today it is 9.7%, seasonally unadjusted. Second, it is not "collecting unemployment", unemployment insurance doesn't enter into it at all. It is "unemployed and is currently seeking work." This number is less than the "I don't have a job" number. Traditionally reporters and pundits will caveat the unemployment number to say that it doesn't count those who have given up and are no longer looking for work. I'm not sure how big this number can be though, because most of us have to work to eat, so we are strongly motivated to keep looking. I guess if you are a two income household and one of you looses your job, you could eventually decide that you can make it on one paycheck and live in a traditional single earner household.
The other big caveat often quoted is the "underemployed" are not counted in the unemployment number. This number would be those who are working but are not working as many hours as they would like. I would assume that this would include most low income workers since most of us want to make more than "low". I have to wonder at someone who could look around and think 1 out of 3 workers in the US is unemployed. 30% unemployment is riot inducing. Heck, unemployment peaked at nearly 25% during the great depression, and that was a period where most women were not in the workforce - so that's 25% of families with no income. (as opposed to our current workforce, where there is a 90% chance that the other spouse is still working.) Do you see huge "Hooverville" style refugee camps around the country? No? Well then you can guess that we probably don't have "easily double" 15% unemployment.
It is not a site that is being scanned. They take actual copies of magazines, etc. and cut them up and scan them to TIFF and OCR them. Then they do a keyword search, printing out the keyword and its location in the file with 10 surrounding characters. Here's the example from the actual case decision:
4 November 2005 - Dagbladet Arbejderen, page 3:
TDC: 73% "a forthcoming sale of the telecommunications group TDC which is expected to be bought".
This is printed on a piece of paper. The electronic files are then destroyed. All that remains is a piece of paper with a piece of a sentence on it. From reading the decision it appears that the court doesn't have a problem up until this moment. But because the snippet is not automatically destroyed, they say it could be a violation of copyright.
The decision appears to require that each individual snippet would have to be adjudicated in a court of law as to possible copyright violation if the company doesn't get prior approval from the rights holder. It doesn't seem to say that 11 words is an automatic copyright violation.
Perhaps Dan Brown is actually a giant psychology experiment gone horribly wrong. The thesis was to create a work of fiction that was utterly horrific but create a buzz in literary and entertainment circles to see how the public would respond. Much to the dismay of the research team, the buzz was more effective than they had ever hypothesized. In reality the only real use of a Dan Brown work is to segregate people into two groups... those worth discussing literature with and those with whom to avoid such discussions.