Isaac should make landfall (at most) as a Category 2 hurricaine, according to info as of Monday 5 pm Eastern. 7 years ago Irene was a Category 5 before making landfall, and was downgraded to a Category 3 by the time it made land.
I don't know about NOLA, but Northern Florida has been pretty squishy underfoot for weeks between the actual tropical storms and the systems that probably would have become tropical storms if tropical storms could form over land. And, after all, it wasn't the wind that trashed New Orleans in Katrina, it was the water. If the ground there is as saturated as the ground in the Florida Panhandle, the extra rainfall could make a real mess of things.
On the plus side, they hopefully have fixed the worst of the levee-related problems by now.
On the other hand, as soon as you do need to do anything creative, or do any real computation, or scale up to multiple users, or support non-trivial interactions, the current crop of mobile devices suck. All those downsides that didn't matter before are now dominant, and the high price, low power and almost zero flexibility are fatal liabilities. And no matter how much window dressing you lay out, they always will be, because it's not the job these devices were designed for.
On the other hand, I don't use desktop computers or workstations for that sort of stuff either. OK, maybe a workstation for basic 3-d rendering and stuff like that, but for the computationally-intensive stuff, I go straight for the server hardware..
The bulk of what I do I can do with power to spare on a portable device. The rest of it is mostly server-based, and there I can use a portable device as the front-end terminal to the server.
Once upon a time there was this thing called a "minicomputer". It supported a small number of multiple users and briefly filled a gap between PCs and mainframes. In fact, before PCs, it basically was PCs. Then the PCs grew up and the minicomputers all went extinct.
During SUN's era, the motto for Java was : "if there is a vulnerability, stop everything until it's fixed"... Sun was quite responsive in order to keep java's secure reputation...
But now, it's Oracle... Oracle screwed on OpenOffice... Oracle is screwing up over MySQL... And it looks like Oracle is screwing up over Java... I wonder what treatement gets VirtualBox...
Well, Oracle doesn't need to fix Java. Oracle is "Unbreakable"[TM]
No. Capitalism is about voluntary exchange of goods (with money being just one of those goods), in which both parties benefit.
In a free capitalist market, greedy players go out of business, because word gets around and nobody wants to trade. End of story.
Wrong and wrong.
CAPITALism is about groups of people coming together and pooling CAPITAL to accomplish jointly what they could not do severally. It is particulary well-suited to factory-based business because factories require a significant amount of up-front money to get started. That is, they're capital-intensive. Before factories probably the biggest such operations were trade-related, where corporations were formed to buy or lease ships, outfit and crew them.
COMMERCE is when people (or other entities) exchange goods and services. You can do COMMERCE without any capitalism whatsoever, and in fact, most business was done so up until the beginning of the industrial era.
Capitalism, by its very nature is undemocratic. You don't need massive amounts of capital to open a taco stand. Taco stands are pretty much a free market, subject to local government meddling. On the other hand, microchip fabrication facilities cannot be built without a significant amount of capital. To get that capital, you either need many people with small amounts of money or a smaller amount of people with deeper pockets. Because most new businesses fail, the people most likely to invest are the ones with the deep pockets, because they can afford to gamble and lose.
The more capital-intensive an operation is, the fewer players. Once established, however, the old business adage that "nothing succeeds like success" kicks in. The bigger you are, the more you can grow. You can put more pressure on suppliers, achieve economies of scale and do other things that smaller fish can only dream about. You are, in short, in a positive feedback loop, to use engineering terms.
At this point, the Invisible Hand gets broken fingers. The slower, less-capitalized competitors fall by the wayside. They can't get favorable terms, so they can't offer favorable prices. They get bought up by the bigger players or go out of business. Until finally, you have only a handful of major players - if not outright monopoly - and everyone else is reduced to also-rans, if not extinction.
Greedy companies abound - Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, all have reputations for rough dealing. But because they're big, they're "safe". It's not that you cannot fall from the top, but you have to work a lot harder to do so.
So, the govt should force me to be my brothers keeper? Where is that in the constitution?
Somewhere right about the part where they force me to support armed forces so that Communists can't move in and carry you and yours off to re-education camps.
So if you are rich or have a very GOLDEN medical package with your work, the US is definitely the better option; for everyone else, they are the worst. And when I say GOLDEN, I mean you better be paying upwards of $1000 US per month as a healthy 30 year old or you'll be sorry when it comes time to collect.....
Or be a member of congress, who unfortunately do not believe the rest of the country deserves the same level of medical care that they get. Or I should say that about half of them don't believe the rest of the country deserves the same level of health care they get.
Funny, that half will all be in Tampa, FL this weekend and a hurricane is bearing down on them. Unfortunately, life isn't fair so they'll probably all be safe. You won't see members of the House of Representatives floating face down in the streets of a hurricane-ravaged city. Pity.
Oh, go on, use the word, don't be a wimp. Our government officials are all covered by SOCIALIZED medicine.
sue engineers for degraded roads or 9/11. As time passes, holes emerge and the code shows age. things that were once determined safe and sound like blowfish are no longer the norm, much as roads from the sixties can no longer handle multi-ton SUV traffic. maybe its a problem with the roads, or a problem that can be addressed by changing the environmental factors contributing to its degradation. Security, much as road construction, continues to improve but to retroactively fault an engineer for not knowing that which was unthinkable at the time is wrong-headed.
its also why you cant sue an engineer for a building that collapses under the shock force of an earthquake that meets or exceeds its structurally rated limit. In russia it was actually fair practice to jail engineers for failing to prevent catastrophic accidents. Hence the recount of senior control room engineers who were incarcerated for failing to safeguard against bureaucratic failures that precipitated the chernobyl disaster.
People DO sue for 9/11. They'll sue for degraded roads, too, but that one's harder to win, since roads are Wear Items, and degredation is wear, so only failure to wear as expected is likely to win the lottery. People sue for EVERYTHING.
Although IT is an area where it's virtually impossible to guarantee perfection, there are aspects. Systems of formal correctness exist like the one IBM used to develop CICS, but they're rarely used because it's all "All You Have to Do Is.." and "Git 'R Dun!" and no time to spend on formal proofs or getting customers to actually admit what they really want. Still, certain things like SQL Injection are out-and-out malpractice, and it wouldn't break my heart to see a few people nailed to the wall over it.
Unfortunately, software development isn't like the medical, legal, or engineering disciplines where there are small groups of people to blame. Much of the software development is done inside larger companies whose primary product isn't IT at all. And to top it off, Corporate Personhood has come to mean "all of the priviliges that people have, but none of the responsbilities".
Not to mention I'm sure they're tracking this approaching storm using the national weather service, relying on local emergency response services, using publicly-funded roads, hosting the event in a taxpayer-funded stadium, etc.
Let the spin, begin.
Damn Socialists!
Remember when Rick Santorum was pushing to get weather forecasting all privatized and "pay per view"? Disclaimer: State College PA, home of Accuweather is in the heart of Santorum's old district.
Good thing for Mitt that "Heck of a Job Brownie" doesn't still run FEMA. Either way Tampa will be in the eye of the hurricane. But take heart.
... the priority of law enforcement is to evacuate residents, leaving GOP officials to make the decision of when to evacuate delegates...
I'll bet that if they're own butts are on the line, they move faster than when it's only the 99.9%.
They can debate the economics of deficit spending, and perhaps, if they're 'conservative' or Republican enough, even a woman's obligation to follow a religious tenet. It's a bit harder to snow a tropical storm.
Don't get too excited now. Later projections keep moving the eye track West. And it's not even a full hurricane, so far, and won't be for quite a while if it follows current projections and gets torn up moving over the mountains of Haiti and Cuba. While having God's Wrath (so to speak) descend on the Republican Convention would be sweet irony for some, I'd actually lay better odds on it skirting Tampa, building up in the Gulf, then slamming New Orleans. Now THAT'S irony.
It never ceases to amaze me how the group that likes to stomp and swagger and march in lockstep breaks down into helpless crying babies when presented with history. Apparently, this group is so feeble and helpless that Democrats were able in a few short years to more than negate everything that the Republicans did while holding most of the Federal Government for the better part of a decade.
What's even more amazing is that we're talking about DEMOCRATS here. As in Will Rogers: "I belong to no organized political party, I'm a Democrat". Which they spent a lot of time demonstrating while they had the majority - I can't count the number of votes that failed because all the Reublicans voted against it plus a handful of loose-cannon Democrats. You didn't see much of the opposite - Maybe a little McCain, some Olympia Snow kind of stuff, but McCain sold it out to run with Palin and Snow just gave up and quit.
George Washington was right. Political parties are poison.
Actually, the normal fluctuations of patterns confirms that all life on this planet will not be destroyed like some of the extreme political fear mongers championing the cause for their own ends want us to believe.
You have to remember, there isn't just one front of believers verses deniers here. There is the science and political fronts with several sets of extremes within subgroups of each.
My broker always tells me: "Past performance is no indication of future results".
Say what you want, but I've been having a hard time gauging Slashdot GroupThink on the subject of Climate change. It's ether:
A) Climate Deniers are Stupid
B) Climate Deniers are Justified
or
C) You're just a shill
It really seems to come down to which group has the most Mod Points or which group has the most dedication to the thread. Each side just views the other as Trolls so it goes nowhere.
Agreed, on top of the fact that expending energy on this particular study is wasteful. The story might as well be "water wet, sky blue", basically it's just more evidence that was already had, that temperature variations in the past have happened naturally (read: change MIGHT be non-anthropogenic.) Given that it's not proof or even indicative of anything happening in the present (since there was not a change taking place until after the point where anthropogenic affects came into being) it is particularly only useful to the deniers, so expect to see a lot of that.
That's the difference between Science and cherry-picking facts to justify one's position. The normal pattern of fluctuation confirms nothing but that the normal pattern IS fluctuation. Climate Change doesn't happen in isolation or for only a single reason. It's part of a large and untidy cloud of general statistics of which this is just one.
This is not the way to do it. What sense does it make to harass the line workers? Did they come up with the policies? Will this cause the real decision makers to even notice? Unlikely. All this accomplishes is slowing down the already too slow security and pissing people off.
Now, if you wanted to protest outside the TSA offices in DC or pin a Congress critter to the wall, you're starting to make some sense. If you're going to do something like clog up the works, sympathy for you and your cause is going to be limited, at best.
If wealth can trickle down, misery can trickle up.
Agreed. annoying the grunts is not the best way to do things. But if the job was so unpleasant that no one do it, that would necessarily invite attention. They're not totally innocent, after all. No one forced them to do it.
In an ideal world, we'd descend on the people at the top. However, in this world, demonstrations are often kettled into Free Speech Zones far enough away so that the people who should be listening don't even know they're there, we elect our officials on silly things like their opponent is "too Liberal" instead of on being responsive to the common people, and most people can't spare the time or money to travel to the halls of power, anyway.
The TSA workers are close at hand at the time the annoyance is felt, which makes them natural targets.
The market is slow to make decisions, because it relies on the input of everybody involved. That's as opposed to government bureaucracy which makes bad decisions relatively quickly and then forces those bad decisions down everyone's throat.
That's interesting. I'd always had the impression that the market resembled a stampeding herd of lemmings. Frequently making bad decisions (VHS anyone?) and forcing them down everyone's throat ("Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM!").
When you get pregnant after rape, you either secretly liked it, or it was consentual. The bastards the US calls politicians never seize to amaze me with their vile.
So if a raped woman wants an abortion, do they call it "buyers remorse"?
I'm sorry, but if it can be argued that science is a systematic methodology for identifying likely truth, and distinguish it from certain untruth. Enforced ignorance might or might not be anti-science but it would certainly be impossible to practice any kind of meaningful science in the absence of verifiable facts.
Sorry. That didn't come out right. REJECTING enforced ignorance is not anti-science.
to see how well planned obsolescence worked out for the American auto industry.
The main difference is that automobile obsolescence was mostly about changes in superficial styling, not in technology. In computers, the technology has (so far) vastly outstripped the change rate for styling.
I don't have any great desire to become a member of the clone army that Apple wants as customers, but we're pretty much at the point where the best deal is to get something that's monolithic with everything soldered down so that it won't fall out, use it for a year or 2, then replace it with the next generation technology, since by then, if you haven't broken it, it's obsolete.
I don't do that. I wear stuff into the ground. But I've wasted a lot of time and money agonizing over upgradability only to discover that by they time I was ready to upgrade, all the upgradeable parts had changed socket types, fan sizes, memory technologies and even disk interfaces. The only reason, in fact, that I don't just chuck it is that current recycling options are so poor.
Except the calculator probably takes a couple of AA batteries (or possibly a watch battery of some sort) which is easily procurable and replaceable. You'd be a fool to throw it out and buy a new one when $2 worth of batteries is all you'd need to get it working again. You can't say the same thing for any newer portable electronics devices -- it's all proprietary, custom batteries that likely have to be ordered online and are only useful in a single device.
Apple's devices are some of the worst offenders, of course, because their proprietary, custom batteries aren't even user serviceable.
--Jeremy
I bought a very nice little credit card calculator way, way, back circa 1985. It was very handy. I got it off a blister pack next to the cash register as an impulse purchase - it was only $5 and back then "blister pack" didn't mean "$300 in surgical stitches to open what you'd paid for".
It came with a nice warranty. It said that if the unit failed within 3 years, ship it to the manufacturer along with $5 to cover postage and handling.
Eventually the batteries wore out. They're $6.50 for a new pair.
Genes from animals? Genes from other plants? Genes inserted directly?
Where does 200+ years of cross breeding come in? Is that considered 'intelligent design' or genetic modification?
Ir is quite definitely genetic modification, unless you're God, in which I suppose it is "intelligent design".
However, it's not just simply genetic modification. Like everything else these days, it's accelerated genetic modification. Barring clone-plants such as banannas, pretty much every plant has unique DNA. As do we. We're not so fragile that a single gene change is likely to prove dangerous. But that doesn't mean that you can just run rampant over the entire DNA. Peppers, tomatoes, eggplants and nightshade are all close genetic relatives. Some we can eat with relative impunity, some have to be handled with a bit more care, and nightshade itself is just plain bad news.
Conversely, I don't get all that much in a lather over the carcinogens produced by cooking food. We, too have mutated. Many of us can drink milk as adults with impunity and we've spent well over 20,000 years weeding out the people who can't stand a little fire on their food. The ancestors of lab rats only got the occasional leftovers, so their opinion doesn't count.
What worries me about GM foods is that, as I said, the mutation rate has been accelerated, but our own rate has not. And cannot, since it takes generations to adapt. While in theory GM is actually safer than natural mutation, since it's more precise, in practice people tend to develop all sorts of subtle side effects. Imagine, for example, that a genetic breakthrough 100 years or so ago had developed a new kind of wheat with much-reduced husk material. Flour made with this new "white wheat" would be very popular, I think - unlike older types of wheat, you could make bread and pastries with a much softer, more pleasant texture. It wouldn't be as bitter or sour as products created with legacy wheat. So how long do you think it would take people to figure out that this lack of coarse fiber wasn't all it was cracked up to be? When they started developing obesity problems and diabetes and fine flour products was discovered to be a significant contributor.
It's not that I object to playing "lab rat". I'm willing to take the occasional risk. After all, what is life but one big risk? It's not like you can live forever just by avoiding risks. I just prefer to know when I'm taking risks, whether it's the genes of the food or the pesticides sprayed on them.
While the motivations for this may be unscientific, not telling people what they're eating doesn't really help either. People need to learn more about the science so there's less unknown for them to be afraid of.
Blaming the shareholders for the decisions made by the board is like blaming a populace for the decisions made by the government that rules over them. Common sense is all you need to realize that it's just a stinking pile of B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.
If you have to strip naked to fly from one part of the USA to another part of the USA, it's because you - and 314 million of your closest friends - elected people who passed the laws that made it not merely possible, but mandatory. We may be a "republic", but we're a democratic republic.
On the other hand, corporations are "Citizens United" democratic republics. Not one person, one vote, but one share, one vote, and the bulk of the shares are almost always in the hands of a few executives and/or insitutional investors. Thus the board doesn't reflect the majority of the share holders, just the majority shareholders. Which, in the case of SCO...
Slashdot Mirror
Isaac should make landfall (at most) as a Category 2 hurricaine, according to info as of Monday 5 pm Eastern. 7 years ago Irene was a Category 5 before making landfall, and was downgraded to a Category 3 by the time it made land.
I don't know about NOLA, but Northern Florida has been pretty squishy underfoot for weeks between the actual tropical storms and the systems that probably would have become tropical storms if tropical storms could form over land. And, after all, it wasn't the wind that trashed New Orleans in Katrina, it was the water. If the ground there is as saturated as the ground in the Florida Panhandle, the extra rainfall could make a real mess of things.
On the plus side, they hopefully have fixed the worst of the levee-related problems by now.
On the other hand, as soon as you do need to do anything creative, or do any real computation, or scale up to multiple users, or support non-trivial interactions, the current crop of mobile devices suck. All those downsides that didn't matter before are now dominant, and the high price, low power and almost zero flexibility are fatal liabilities. And no matter how much window dressing you lay out, they
always will be, because it's not the job these devices were designed for.
On the other hand, I don't use desktop computers or workstations for that sort of stuff either. OK, maybe a workstation for basic 3-d rendering and stuff like that, but for the computationally-intensive stuff, I go straight for the server hardware..
The bulk of what I do I can do with power to spare on a portable device. The rest of it is mostly server-based, and there I can use a portable device as the front-end terminal to the server.
Once upon a time there was this thing called a "minicomputer". It supported a small number of multiple users and briefly filled a gap between PCs and mainframes. In fact, before PCs, it basically was PCs. Then the PCs grew up and the minicomputers all went extinct.
Now it's the PC's turn, I think.
During SUN's era, the motto for Java was : "if there is a vulnerability, stop everything until it's fixed"... Sun was quite responsive in order to keep java's secure reputation...
But now, it's Oracle... Oracle screwed on OpenOffice... Oracle is screwing up over MySQL... And it looks like Oracle is screwing up over Java... I wonder what treatement gets VirtualBox...
Well, Oracle doesn't need to fix Java. Oracle is "Unbreakable"[TM]
No. Capitalism is about voluntary exchange of goods (with money being just one of those goods), in which both parties benefit.
In a free capitalist market, greedy players go out of business, because word gets around and nobody wants to trade. End of story.
Wrong and wrong.
CAPITALism is about groups of people coming together and pooling CAPITAL to accomplish jointly what they could not do severally. It is particulary well-suited to factory-based business because factories require a significant amount of up-front money to get started. That is, they're capital-intensive. Before factories probably the biggest such operations were trade-related, where corporations were formed to buy or lease ships, outfit and crew them.
COMMERCE is when people (or other entities) exchange goods and services. You can do COMMERCE without any capitalism whatsoever, and in fact, most business was done so up until the beginning of the industrial era.
Capitalism, by its very nature is undemocratic. You don't need massive amounts of capital to open a taco stand. Taco stands are pretty much a free market, subject to local government meddling. On the other hand, microchip fabrication facilities cannot be built without a significant amount of capital. To get that capital, you either need many people with small amounts of money or a smaller amount of people with deeper pockets. Because most new businesses fail, the people most likely to invest are the ones with the deep pockets, because they can afford to gamble and lose.
The more capital-intensive an operation is, the fewer players. Once established, however, the old business adage that "nothing succeeds like success" kicks in. The bigger you are, the more you can grow. You can put more pressure on suppliers, achieve economies of scale and do other things that smaller fish can only dream about. You are, in short, in a positive feedback loop, to use engineering terms.
At this point, the Invisible Hand gets broken fingers. The slower, less-capitalized competitors fall by the wayside. They can't get favorable terms, so they can't offer favorable prices. They get bought up by the bigger players or go out of business. Until finally, you have only a handful of major players - if not outright monopoly - and everyone else is reduced to also-rans, if not extinction.
Greedy companies abound - Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, all have reputations for rough dealing. But because they're big, they're "safe". It's not that you cannot fall from the top, but you have to work a lot harder to do so.
I think there is a Vaccine for that. Maybe that is the problem, the parents missed their vaccinations?
Unfortunately, no. There's no vaccine against stupid.
Although some people work at stupid so hard, a lobotomy would actually make them smarter.
Not invited to the table? Did you somehow miss the (IIRC) 170 amendments they made to the bill?
--Jeremy
Not invited to the table? Heck, they BUILT the table. "Obamacare" is almost exactly what they were pushing instead of HilaryCare.
So, the govt should force me to be my brothers keeper? Where is that in the constitution?
Somewhere right about the part where they force me to support armed forces so that Communists can't move in and carry you and yours off to re-education camps.
Or be a member of congress, who unfortunately do not believe the rest of the country deserves the same level of medical care that they get. Or I should say that about half of them don't believe the rest of the country deserves the same level of health care they get.
Funny, that half will all be in Tampa, FL this weekend and a hurricane is bearing down on them. Unfortunately, life isn't fair so they'll probably all be safe. You won't see members of the House of Representatives floating face down in the streets of a hurricane-ravaged city. Pity.
Oh, go on, use the word, don't be a wimp. Our government officials are all covered by SOCIALIZED medicine.
sue engineers for degraded roads or 9/11. As time passes, holes emerge and the code shows age. things that were once determined safe and sound like blowfish are no longer the norm, much as roads from the sixties can no longer handle multi-ton SUV traffic. maybe its a problem with the roads, or a problem that can be addressed by changing the environmental factors contributing to its degradation. Security, much as road construction, continues to improve but to retroactively fault an engineer for not knowing that which was unthinkable at the time is wrong-headed.
its also why you cant sue an engineer for a building that collapses under the shock force of an earthquake that meets or exceeds its structurally rated limit. In russia it was actually fair practice to jail engineers for failing to prevent catastrophic accidents. Hence the recount of senior control room engineers who were incarcerated for failing to safeguard against bureaucratic failures that precipitated the chernobyl disaster.
People DO sue for 9/11. They'll sue for degraded roads, too, but that one's harder to win, since roads are Wear Items, and degredation is wear, so only failure to wear as expected is likely to win the lottery. People sue for EVERYTHING.
Although IT is an area where it's virtually impossible to guarantee perfection, there are aspects. Systems of formal correctness exist like the one IBM used to develop CICS, but they're rarely used because it's all "All You Have to Do Is.." and "Git 'R Dun!" and no time to spend on formal proofs or getting customers to actually admit what they really want. Still, certain things like SQL Injection are out-and-out malpractice, and it wouldn't break my heart to see a few people nailed to the wall over it.
Unfortunately, software development isn't like the medical, legal, or engineering disciplines where there are small groups of people to blame. Much of the software development is done inside larger companies whose primary product isn't IT at all. And to top it off, Corporate Personhood has come to mean "all of the priviliges that people have, but none of the responsbilities".
Let the spin, begin.
The hurricane beat you to it.
Whoosh?
Not to mention I'm sure they're tracking this approaching storm using the national weather service, relying on local emergency response services, using publicly-funded roads, hosting the event in a taxpayer-funded stadium, etc.
Let the spin, begin.
Damn Socialists!
Remember when Rick Santorum was pushing to get weather forecasting all privatized and "pay per view"? Disclaimer: State College PA, home of Accuweather is in the heart of Santorum's old district.
Good thing for Mitt that "Heck of a Job Brownie" doesn't still run FEMA. Either way Tampa will be in the eye of the hurricane. But take heart.
... the priority of law enforcement is to evacuate residents, leaving GOP officials to make the decision of when to evacuate delegates...
I'll bet that if they're own butts are on the line, they move faster than when it's only the 99.9%.
They can debate the economics of deficit spending, and perhaps, if they're 'conservative' or Republican enough, even a woman's obligation to follow a religious tenet. It's a bit harder to snow a tropical storm.
Don't get too excited now. Later projections keep moving the eye track West. And it's not even a full hurricane, so far, and won't be for quite a while if it follows current projections and gets torn up moving over the mountains of Haiti and Cuba. While having God's Wrath (so to speak) descend on the Republican Convention would be sweet irony for some, I'd actually lay better odds on it skirting Tampa, building up in the Gulf, then slamming New Orleans. Now THAT'S irony.
It never ceases to amaze me how the group that likes to stomp and swagger and march in lockstep breaks down into helpless crying babies when presented with history. Apparently, this group is so feeble and helpless that Democrats were able in a few short years to more than negate everything that the Republicans did while holding most of the Federal Government for the better part of a decade.
What's even more amazing is that we're talking about DEMOCRATS here. As in Will Rogers: "I belong to no organized political party, I'm a Democrat". Which they spent a lot of time demonstrating while they had the majority - I can't count the number of votes that failed because all the Reublicans voted against it plus a handful of loose-cannon Democrats. You didn't see much of the opposite - Maybe a little McCain, some Olympia Snow kind of stuff, but McCain sold it out to run with Palin and Snow just gave up and quit.
George Washington was right. Political parties are poison.
Actually, the normal fluctuations of patterns confirms that all life on this planet will not be destroyed like some of the extreme political fear mongers championing the cause for their own ends want us to believe.
You have to remember, there isn't just one front of believers verses deniers here. There is the science and political fronts with several sets of extremes within subgroups of each.
My broker always tells me: "Past performance is no indication of future results".
Giant bugs?
We already have Florida for that.
Say what you want, but I've been having a hard time gauging Slashdot GroupThink on the subject of Climate change. It's ether:
A) Climate Deniers are Stupid
B) Climate Deniers are Justified
or
C) You're just a shill
It really seems to come down to which group has the most Mod Points or which group has the most dedication to the thread. Each side just views the other as Trolls so it goes nowhere.
Agreed, on top of the fact that expending energy on this particular study is wasteful. The story might as well be "water wet, sky blue", basically it's just more evidence that was already had, that temperature variations in the past have happened naturally (read: change MIGHT be non-anthropogenic.) Given that it's not proof or even indicative of anything happening in the present (since there was not a change taking place until after the point where anthropogenic affects came into being) it is particularly only useful to the deniers, so expect to see a lot of that.
That's the difference between Science and cherry-picking facts to justify one's position. The normal pattern of fluctuation confirms nothing but that the normal pattern IS fluctuation. Climate Change doesn't happen in isolation or for only a single reason. It's part of a large and untidy cloud of general statistics of which this is just one.
This is not the way to do it. What sense does it make to harass the line workers? Did they come up with the policies? Will this cause the real decision makers to even notice? Unlikely. All this accomplishes is slowing down the already too slow security and pissing people off.
Now, if you wanted to protest outside the TSA offices in DC or pin a Congress critter to the wall, you're starting to make some sense. If you're going to do something like clog up the works, sympathy for you and your cause is going to be limited, at best.
If wealth can trickle down, misery can trickle up.
Agreed. annoying the grunts is not the best way to do things. But if the job was so unpleasant that no one do it, that would necessarily invite attention. They're not totally innocent, after all. No one forced them to do it.
In an ideal world, we'd descend on the people at the top. However, in this world, demonstrations are often kettled into Free Speech Zones far enough away so that the people who should be listening don't even know they're there, we elect our officials on silly things like their opponent is "too Liberal" instead of on being responsive to the common people, and most people can't spare the time or money to travel to the halls of power, anyway.
The TSA workers are close at hand at the time the annoyance is felt, which makes them natural targets.
The market is slow to make decisions, because it relies on the input of everybody involved. That's as opposed to government bureaucracy which makes bad decisions relatively quickly and then forces those bad decisions down everyone's throat.
That's interesting. I'd always had the impression that the market resembled a stampeding herd of lemmings. Frequently making bad decisions (VHS anyone?) and forcing them down everyone's throat ("Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM!").
When you get pregnant after rape, you either secretly liked it, or it was consentual.
The bastards the US calls politicians never seize to amaze me with their vile.
So if a raped woman wants an abortion, do they call it "buyers remorse"?
I'm sorry, but if it can be argued that science is a systematic methodology for identifying likely truth, and distinguish it from certain untruth. Enforced ignorance might or might not be anti-science but it would certainly be impossible to practice any kind of meaningful science in the absence of verifiable facts.
Sorry. That didn't come out right. REJECTING enforced ignorance is not anti-science.
to see how well planned obsolescence worked out for the American auto industry.
The main difference is that automobile obsolescence was mostly about changes in superficial styling, not in technology. In computers, the technology has (so far) vastly outstripped the change rate for styling.
I don't have any great desire to become a member of the clone army that Apple wants as customers, but we're pretty much at the point where the best deal is to get something that's monolithic with everything soldered down so that it won't fall out, use it for a year or 2, then replace it with the next generation technology, since by then, if you haven't broken it, it's obsolete.
I don't do that. I wear stuff into the ground. But I've wasted a lot of time and money agonizing over upgradability only to discover that by they time I was ready to upgrade, all the upgradeable parts had changed socket types, fan sizes, memory technologies and even disk interfaces. The only reason, in fact, that I don't just chuck it is that current recycling options are so poor.
Except the calculator probably takes a couple of AA batteries (or possibly a watch battery of some sort) which is easily procurable and replaceable. You'd be a fool to throw it out and buy a new one when $2 worth of batteries is all you'd need to get it working again. You can't say the same thing for any newer portable electronics devices -- it's all proprietary, custom batteries that likely have to be ordered online and are only useful in a single device.
Apple's devices are some of the worst offenders, of course, because their proprietary, custom batteries aren't even user serviceable.
--Jeremy
I bought a very nice little credit card calculator way, way, back circa 1985. It was very handy. I got it off a blister pack next to the cash register as an impulse purchase - it was only $5 and back then "blister pack" didn't mean "$300 in surgical stitches to open what you'd paid for".
It came with a nice warranty. It said that if the unit failed within 3 years, ship it to the manufacturer along with $5 to cover postage and handling.
Eventually the batteries wore out. They're $6.50 for a new pair.
Genes from animals? Genes from other plants? Genes inserted directly?
Where does 200+ years of cross breeding come in? Is that considered 'intelligent design' or genetic modification?
Ir is quite definitely genetic modification, unless you're God, in which I suppose it is "intelligent design".
However, it's not just simply genetic modification. Like everything else these days, it's accelerated genetic modification. Barring clone-plants such as banannas, pretty much every plant has unique DNA. As do we. We're not so fragile that a single gene change is likely to prove dangerous. But that doesn't mean that you can just run rampant over the entire DNA. Peppers, tomatoes, eggplants and nightshade are all close genetic relatives. Some we can eat with relative impunity, some have to be handled with a bit more care, and nightshade itself is just plain bad news.
Conversely, I don't get all that much in a lather over the carcinogens produced by cooking food. We, too have mutated. Many of us can drink milk as adults with impunity and we've spent well over 20,000 years weeding out the people who can't stand a little fire on their food. The ancestors of lab rats only got the occasional leftovers, so their opinion doesn't count.
What worries me about GM foods is that, as I said, the mutation rate has been accelerated, but our own rate has not. And cannot, since it takes generations to adapt. While in theory GM is actually safer than natural mutation, since it's more precise, in practice people tend to develop all sorts of subtle side effects. Imagine, for example, that a genetic breakthrough 100 years or so ago had developed a new kind of wheat with much-reduced husk material. Flour made with this new "white wheat" would be very popular, I think - unlike older types of wheat, you could make bread and pastries with a much softer, more pleasant texture. It wouldn't be as bitter or sour as products created with legacy wheat. So how long do you think it would take people to figure out that this lack of coarse fiber wasn't all it was cracked up to be? When they started developing obesity problems and diabetes and fine flour products was discovered to be a significant contributor.
It's not that I object to playing "lab rat". I'm willing to take the occasional risk. After all, what is life but one big risk? It's not like you can live forever just by avoiding risks. I just prefer to know when I'm taking risks, whether it's the genes of the food or the pesticides sprayed on them.
If that makes me anti-science, then so be it.
While the motivations for this may be unscientific, not telling people what they're eating doesn't really help either. People need to learn more about the science so there's less unknown for them to be afraid of.
Enforced ignorance is not anti-science.
Blaming the shareholders for the decisions made by the board is like blaming a populace for the decisions made by the government that rules over them. Common sense is all you need to realize that it's just a stinking pile of B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.
If you have to strip naked to fly from one part of the USA to another part of the USA, it's because you - and 314 million of your closest friends - elected people who passed the laws that made it not merely possible, but mandatory. We may be a "republic", but we're a democratic republic.
On the other hand, corporations are "Citizens United" democratic republics. Not one person, one vote, but one share, one vote, and the bulk of the shares are almost always in the hands of a few executives and/or insitutional investors. Thus the board doesn't reflect the majority of the share holders, just the majority shareholders. Which, in the case of SCO...