The three main weapons in the arsenal against freedom.
And I always thought the three main weapons were: Surprise, fear, and ruthless efficiency. Could we get Mr. Alexander maybe join a reenaction of Monthy Phyton. It seems to fit quite well to the NSA.
If all this gene achieved was less cardiovascular diseases and higher intelligence, we would (nearly) all have it by now due to selection. So the question is, what else does it do which counterweights this?
But a revenue tax would stop all manners of shady profit shifting and hiding.
There is already a tax on revenue. It is called VAT and has its own tax evasion problems.
Doing a revenue tax in any other way than as a value added tax will immediatly give you massive vertical integration in the industry as companies not producing their own intermediate goods indirectly have to pay "revenue" tax on them with no way of deducing it from their own revenue tax. Thus you end up with more "too big to fail" companies.
From the article on botulism it appears that commercially canned goods are safe (and even terrorist would have a problem to get the toxin into the can after sealing and cooking which destroys spores and toxin). And on home-made goods it might be a bit difficult to enforce attachment of a chip on every glass of canned fruits.
The analyzed attack vectors seem to be (according to the German wikipedia entry on the toxin, the english one is too occupied with medical use) milk, water and air. All of them do not lend well to chip attachment.
Actually the chip talked about is for analyzing a patient's blood sample (see TFA) to detect he has been poisoned, not for detecting it in food.
Their hope had been that everyone would stay home sick from the local elections, so they'd be able to vote in their preferred candidate.
Sounds to me like a different form of gerrymandering of a group not privy to change the voting districts. Not terrorism as it does not aim at creating terror, so does not count as example. Not legal either, obviously, in contrast to the actual gerrymandering.
> Are you "Giftzwerg 88"? Because your furious spluttering reminds me of him.
No, I am not. But would you be so kind to explain the inconsistency of that comment above (refering to a German commentor on Wikipedia) and > I don't read German
I find it ironic that someone posting news on slashdot about an article about conflicts of interest does not reveal that he himself has one as coauthor of the mentioned article. And defends quoting out of context by bashing people pointing it out as "nitpickers".
First, metasonix, as you get so agitated about this and looking at your posting history, can we assume you are Marvin Oppong himself.
Second, as has been pointed out here as well as in the comments to the article you cite for the threat (which only gives your... uh... Marvin's shortening of the threat instead of the full line), the full line in question is
"Ein geistiger Tiefflieger, er soll aufpassen, dass er nicht mit dem Kinn am Borstein hängen bleibt." Translation (thanks to an AC) "A mental low-flyer (i.e., low-flying plane), he has to take care that his chin doesn't snag the curb".
Being German I understand the second part - as others have - as amplifying the - admittedly - insult of the first part, but definitely not a threat of violence. And you seem to understand it the same, because why else would you cite the second part out of context?
Also, the whole comment from giftzwerg (in German) ending in the insult seems to criticize not the publication of the misuse but your proposal to solve it (independent supervision council without editing rights) as non working (due to the lack of admin rights). I.e. he seems to criticize you as too weak. Does not sound at all like a paid shill threatining you after his exposure as you make it sound.
So while you might have a point with some Wikipedian authors following commercial interest, trying to exagerate the case it by makeing up a threat IMHO weakens it serverly.
> Kremlin had no other choices left with Ukraine. Really? Like peaceful coexistance?
Putin is wagering it all. If he does not get at least Crimea from this (or even the whole SE of the Ukraine) he has a major defeat on his hands: Confidence in Russia fulfilling its contracts (they guaranteed Ukraine's teritorial integrity for getting back USSR nuclear weapons) will be severly damaged (also damaging their natural gas trade), the Ukraine will make life a hell for the Russian fleet in Sewastopol by subtle sabotage and the Ukraine now will definitely want to get into NATO as soon as possible.
With such high stakes he must be very sure, he can win this.
I think the switch off experienced *are* the safety systems cutting in. The EMI will cause deviations in the electronics (be they a blocked CAN, corrupted sensor input or miscalculations in the MCUs) which the safety mechanisms will react to by switching apparently malfunctioning systems off. This would explain the dashboard warning lights.
Obviously relying on the safety systems to switch the car off is a dangerous approach. Those systems are designed to detect e.g. 99% of all errors in time. With a low electronic failure to start with, this leads to a reliable car as the very majority of the few errors happening is caught by the safety system and the remaing (we talk about e.g. 10^-8 per hour here) failures of one system might still be handable by the driver supported by the other electronic systems in the car.
This device - if used widely - inreases the basic error rate significantly and supresses all electronics. There might be a reason they tried it only with a car driving 24 km/h.
> Fucking idiots Want to get rid of them? Go from a majority voting system to a proportional voting system (with a minimum percentage threshold). Gets you new parties in no time and rid of the old, clogged ones.
It is interesting that the U.S., which is so in favor of capitalistic competition, allowed their politicians to form a duopol preventing actual competition in the political field.
they can write a check or automated payment in your name.
No cheques anymore in Germany (and the rest of Europe) for decades. We use bank transfers for which you either need login credetials for the internet access to the account or a somewhat similar looking signature for a written transfer form. And a scapegoat whose account you can use as the target account. So the GP is right. Not enough information to withdraw money or transfer it. Maybe the US is a bit behind in this;-)
At least according to the abstract of the research paper (couldn't read the paper itself) if Earth is brought into the hot moist athmosphere state, that state would maintain itself. From the abstract (emphasis mine):
Therefore, a steam atmosphere induced by such a runaway greenhouse may be a stable state for a planet receiving a similar amount of solar radiation as Earth today. Avoiding a runaway greenhouse on Earth requires that the atmosphere is subsaturated with water, and that the albedo effect of clouds exceeds their greenhouse effect. A runaway greenhouse could in theory be triggered by increased greenhouse forcing, but anthropogenic emissions are probably insufficient.
So we will probably not manage to terraform Earth into Venus just by continuing CO2 emissions. But maybe if the Vogons help a bit....
> Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few - Spock
Although this statement can be considered true most of the times, it is also an extremely dangerous statement..... when made by one of the many. Follow it too much and you will set yourself up for ridicule by people of other cultural backgrounds how you couldn't see the murder of a minority coming.
Except we are not talking about spying on embassies here. We talk about large scale surveillance of internet activity of the populace by NSA and GCHQ listening to major internet hubs. Now the U.S. citizens might not care about that. After all where is the uproar about the NSA's surveillance of US citizens? But the EU and its individual countries have laws and constitutional provisions against that which have been upheld again and again by our supreme courts.
The question is more: Why did the four alleged countries follow the US request. Let's check:
France: Not known for its love of America. Currently leftist government.
Italy: Mixed government with leftist leader. Tried to arrest CIA agents.
Spain & Portugal: Strong ties to South America from colonial times. At least the current Spain government party should have learned from being wiped out of office over its US support during Bush times.
Why would such governments close the airspace on US request causing a diplomatic incident? Snowden did a service to them revealing that the US does large scale surveillance of EU citizens (and probably companies).
Unless, of course, these goervernment weren't as clueless as they claim and used the NSA as a nice, hidden backdoor for domestic surveillance far beyond the laws. And now fear Snowden could prove that, too.
>>> the "pragmatic" view that killing U.S. citizens without judicial review [....] is necessary for the national interest > US government [....] is primarily responsible to its citizens who elected it
I hear that on certain cemeteries on the east coast one can hear ongoing groaning from the ground:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
There are different "degrees" of infinity but not as you define them. E.g. there is countable and uncountable infinite. But different sequences converging to infinity at different "rates" are not different degrees of infinity.
BTW, Wolfram Alpha thinks that your example doesn't converge.
Yes 'just' execute ORBX.js. And if ORBX.js will work as well the the pdf.js Firefox has started to use instead of arcoread, I will soon have to use another browser to see content besides HTML more than half of the time.
Javascript is slow and insecure. There is a reason I use noscript. I don't want every application re-implemented in Javascript and the browser using it instead of native applications just because it is possible.
So hyper- and super- mean different things in English? Did the English loosen themselves from the fixation of the Western World of the sacrosanctity of the classical languages and recycled those prefixes into new meanings? Let's check: super-: 1. above, over, or upon; 2. superior in size, quality, number, degree, status, title, or position hyper-: 1. over, above or beyond; 2. excessive Hmm, maybe its the ordering......
Note that I do understand that supersonic and hypersonic mean different things. That's why I posted the definition. But they sure should have thought of a different prefix to avoid confusion. BTW, in German it isn't much better: supersonic is "Überschall" (über=more than) and for hypersonic nobody seemingly though of anything better than "Hyperschall".
*cough* Multiply the 367500km by 1.6. I got confused with units (please, please switch to the metric system) and calculated with 20 km per gallon. So you get 38 years of car use.
The point is in the numbers after the quote, which you silently ignore. 1% to 4% mass:fuel ratio means the following Assumptions
* Virgin's delivery vehicle is significantly improved over the Shuttle and thus achieves 2% mass to fuel (if you want to go for the nonreusable Saturn V approach, please add the resources needed for a new rocket for each delivery).
* A tourist needs 3 metric tons of mass delivered into orbit for his trip (including the tourist). As this includes food, clothing, replacement water and oxygen as well as other material to maintain the space station it is probably a rather small number. Feel free to get some real numbers from ISS history but remember that that is not really tourist level.
* The rocket uses hydrogen-oxygen fuel where 9kg (1kg hydrogen and 8 kg oxygen) store ca. 40kWh (143MJ) of energy
Calculation 2% = 3 tons delivery mass 98% required fuel = 147t = 147.000 kg 147.000 kg oxygen-hydrogen fuel = 588.000 kWh= 588MWh (Note that this does not contain the energy cost of the non re-usable parts of the delivery system, placing the space station, replacing the delivery system,...)
So how much is 588MWh? One US gallon is defined as the equivalent of 34kWh. If you have a car with 20 miles per gallon (not really an efficient one, e.g. most BMWs do better), with 588MWh you can go for 367500 km. With let's say 15000km/year (a little less than 10000 miles/year) of car use that means you can drive a car for 24 years for the same energy cost of one tourist holiday in space.
Conclusion Earth's resources are limited. Space exploration for science, resource mining or colonization is fine. Wasting, and I can only call it that, wasting absurd amounts of energy for a new "but nobody else did it" gimmick for the super-rich is something Mankind (!) can not afford.
Taking up a whole lane going 20mph on a 45mph road when doing so in a motor vehicle would get you a ticket for obstructing traffic.
But you are aware that safety tips for cyclist specifically recommend to take hold of the complete lane in heavy traffic on narrow roads because otherwise cars will try to overtake with an exessively small distance due to oncoming traffic despite the inherently instable driving mode of the bicycle. Even if 90% of the car drivers behave and wait for a break in the oncoming traffic it's the 10% which don't who eventually kill the cyclist.
Slashdot Mirror
The three main weapons in the arsenal against freedom.
And I always thought the three main weapons were: Surprise, fear, and ruthless efficiency.
Could we get Mr. Alexander maybe join a reenaction of Monthy Phyton. It seems to fit quite well to the NSA.
If all this gene achieved was less cardiovascular diseases and higher intelligence, we would (nearly) all have it by now due to selection. So the question is, what else does it do which counterweights this?
And for Europeans, there are ready-made maps available (one click to load into google earth instead of downloading a .tif and positioning it).
The summary writes:
The rodents are also less stressed out.
The article writes:
The male aroma ramped up their stress levels, which deadened the hurt.
Was this the daily "Find the inconsistency" test on slashdot? Did I win something?
But a revenue tax would stop all manners of shady profit shifting and hiding.
There is already a tax on revenue. It is called VAT and has its own tax evasion problems.
Doing a revenue tax in any other way than as a value added tax will immediatly give you massive vertical integration in the industry as companies not producing their own intermediate goods indirectly have to pay "revenue" tax on them with no way of deducing it from their own revenue tax. Thus you end up with more "too big to fail" companies.
From the article on botulism it appears that commercially canned goods are safe (and even terrorist would have a problem to get the toxin into the can after sealing and cooking which destroys spores and toxin). And on home-made goods it might be a bit difficult to enforce attachment of a chip on every glass of canned fruits.
The analyzed attack vectors seem to be (according to the German wikipedia entry on the toxin, the english one is too occupied with medical use) milk, water and air. All of them do not lend well to chip attachment.
Actually the chip talked about is for analyzing a patient's blood sample (see TFA) to detect he has been poisoned, not for detecting it in food.
Their hope had been that everyone would stay home sick from the local elections, so they'd be able to vote in their preferred candidate.
Sounds to me like a different form of gerrymandering of a group not privy to change the voting districts. Not terrorism as it does not aim at creating terror, so does not count as example. Not legal either, obviously, in contrast to the actual gerrymandering.
> Are you "Giftzwerg 88"? Because your furious spluttering reminds me of him.
No, I am not. But would you be so kind to explain the inconsistency of that comment above (refering to a German commentor on Wikipedia) and
> I don't read German
I find it ironic that someone posting news on slashdot about an article about conflicts of interest does not reveal that he himself has one as coauthor of the mentioned article. And defends quoting out of context by bashing people pointing it out as "nitpickers".
First, metasonix, as you get so agitated about this and looking at your posting history, can we assume you are Marvin Oppong himself.
Second, as has been pointed out here as well as in the comments to the article you cite for the threat (which only gives your ... uh ... Marvin's shortening of the threat instead of the full line), the full line in question is
"Ein geistiger Tiefflieger, er soll aufpassen, dass er nicht mit dem Kinn am Borstein hängen bleibt."
Translation (thanks to an AC) "A mental low-flyer (i.e., low-flying plane), he has to take care that his chin doesn't snag the curb".
Being German I understand the second part - as others have - as amplifying the - admittedly - insult of the first part, but definitely not a threat of violence. And you seem to understand it the same, because why else would you cite the second part out of context?
Also, the whole comment from giftzwerg (in German) ending in the insult seems to criticize not the publication of the misuse but your proposal to solve it (independent supervision council without editing rights) as non working (due to the lack of admin rights). I.e. he seems to criticize you as too weak. Does not sound at all like a paid shill threatining you after his exposure as you make it sound.
So while you might have a point with some Wikipedian authors following commercial interest, trying to exagerate the case it by makeing up a threat IMHO weakens it serverly.
> Kremlin had no other choices left with Ukraine.
Really? Like peaceful coexistance?
Putin is wagering it all. If he does not get at least Crimea from this (or even the whole SE of the Ukraine) he has a major defeat on his hands: Confidence in Russia fulfilling its contracts (they guaranteed Ukraine's teritorial integrity for getting back USSR nuclear weapons) will be severly damaged (also damaging their natural gas trade), the Ukraine will make life a hell for the Russian fleet in Sewastopol by subtle sabotage and the Ukraine now will definitely want to get into NATO as soon as possible.
With such high stakes he must be very sure, he can win this.
I think the switch off experienced *are* the safety systems cutting in. The EMI will cause deviations in the electronics (be they a blocked CAN, corrupted sensor input or miscalculations in the MCUs) which the safety mechanisms will react to by switching apparently malfunctioning systems off. This would explain the dashboard warning lights.
Obviously relying on the safety systems to switch the car off is a dangerous approach. Those systems are designed to detect e.g. 99% of all errors in time. With a low electronic failure to start with, this leads to a reliable car as the very majority of the few errors happening is caught by the safety system and the remaing (we talk about e.g. 10^-8 per hour here) failures of one system might still be handable by the driver supported by the other electronic systems in the car.
This device - if used widely - inreases the basic error rate significantly and supresses all electronics. There might be a reason they tried it only with a car driving 24 km/h.
> Fucking idiots
Want to get rid of them? Go from a majority voting system to a proportional voting system (with a minimum percentage threshold). Gets you new parties in no time and rid of the old, clogged ones.
It is interesting that the U.S., which is so in favor of capitalistic competition, allowed their politicians to form a duopol preventing actual competition in the political field.
they can write a check or automated payment in your name.
No cheques anymore in Germany (and the rest of Europe) for decades. We use bank transfers for which you either need login credetials for the internet access to the account or a somewhat similar looking signature for a written transfer form. And a scapegoat whose account you can use as the target account. So the GP is right. Not enough information to withdraw money or transfer it. Maybe the US is a bit behind in this ;-)
At least according to the abstract of the research paper (couldn't read the paper itself) if Earth is brought into the hot moist athmosphere state, that state would maintain itself. From the abstract (emphasis mine):
Therefore, a steam atmosphere induced by such a runaway greenhouse may be a stable state for a planet receiving a similar amount of solar radiation as Earth today. Avoiding a runaway greenhouse on Earth requires that the atmosphere is subsaturated with water, and that the albedo effect of clouds exceeds their greenhouse effect. A runaway greenhouse could in theory be triggered by increased greenhouse forcing, but anthropogenic emissions are probably insufficient.
So we will probably not manage to terraform Earth into Venus just by continuing CO2 emissions. But maybe if the Vogons help a bit ....
> Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few - Spock
Although this statement can be considered true most of the times, it is also an extremely dangerous statement ..... when made by one of the many.
Follow it too much and you will set yourself up for ridicule by people of other cultural backgrounds how you couldn't see the murder of a minority coming.
BTW, Spock said it as member of the few.
Except we are not talking about spying on embassies here. We talk about large scale surveillance of internet activity of the populace by NSA and GCHQ listening to major internet hubs.
Now the U.S. citizens might not care about that. After all where is the uproar about the NSA's surveillance of US citizens? But the EU and its individual countries have laws and constitutional provisions against that which have been upheld again and again by our supreme courts.
The question is more: Why did the four alleged countries follow the US request. Let's check:
Why would such governments close the airspace on US request causing a diplomatic incident? Snowden did a service to them revealing that the US does large scale surveillance of EU citizens (and probably companies).
Unless, of course, these goervernment weren't as clueless as they claim and used the NSA as a nice, hidden backdoor for domestic surveillance far beyond the laws. And now fear Snowden could prove that, too.
>>> the "pragmatic" view that killing U.S. citizens without judicial review [....] is necessary for the national interest
> US government [....] is primarily responsible to its citizens who elected it
I hear that on certain cemeteries on the east coast one can hear ongoing groaning from the ground:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
There are different "degrees" of infinity but not as you define them. E.g. there is countable and uncountable infinite. But different sequences converging to infinity at different "rates" are not different degrees of infinity.
BTW, Wolfram Alpha thinks that your example doesn't converge.
Yes 'just' execute ORBX.js. And if ORBX.js will work as well the the pdf.js Firefox has started to use instead of arcoread, I will soon have to use another browser to see content besides HTML more than half of the time.
Javascript is slow and insecure. There is a reason I use noscript. I don't want every application re-implemented in Javascript and the browser using it instead of native applications just because it is possible.
but different definitions in a third (English)
So hyper- and super- mean different things in English? Did the English loosen themselves from the fixation of the Western World of the sacrosanctity of the classical languages and recycled those prefixes into new meanings? Let's check: ......
super-: 1. above, over, or upon; 2. superior in size, quality, number, degree, status, title, or position
hyper-: 1. over, above or beyond; 2. excessive
Hmm, maybe its the ordering
Note that I do understand that supersonic and hypersonic mean different things. That's why I posted the definition. But they sure should have thought of a different prefix to avoid confusion.
BTW, in German it isn't much better: supersonic is "Überschall" (über=more than) and for hypersonic nobody seemingly though of anything better than "Hyperschall".
A short definition for all those non-native speakers who wonder - like me - how 6 minutes of flight are more than hours of flight by a Concorde:
Supersonic: Above speed of sound but only up to Mach 5
Hypersonic: Above Mach 5
The fact that both the latin Super and the greek Hyper translate into the same word does not really help the distinction.
*cough* Multiply the 367500km by 1.6. I got confused with units (please, please switch to the metric system) and calculated with 20 km per gallon. So you get 38 years of car use.
The point is in the numbers after the quote, which you silently ignore. 1% to 4% mass:fuel ratio means the following
Assumptions
Calculation ...)
2% = 3 tons delivery mass
98% required fuel = 147t = 147.000 kg
147.000 kg oxygen-hydrogen fuel = 588.000 kWh= 588MWh
(Note that this does not contain the energy cost of the non re-usable parts of the delivery system, placing the space station, replacing the delivery system,
So how much is 588MWh?
One US gallon is defined as the equivalent of 34kWh.
If you have a car with 20 miles per gallon (not really an efficient one, e.g. most BMWs do better), with 588MWh you can go for 367500 km.
With let's say 15000km/year (a little less than 10000 miles/year) of car use that means you can drive a car for 24 years for the same energy cost of one tourist holiday in space.
Conclusion
Earth's resources are limited. Space exploration for science, resource mining or colonization is fine. Wasting, and I can only call it that, wasting absurd amounts of energy for a new "but nobody else did it" gimmick for the super-rich is something Mankind (!) can not afford.
Taking up a whole lane going 20mph on a 45mph road when doing so in a motor vehicle would get you a ticket for obstructing traffic.
But you are aware that safety tips for cyclist specifically recommend to take hold of the complete lane in heavy traffic on narrow roads because otherwise cars will try to overtake with an exessively small distance due to oncoming traffic despite the inherently instable driving mode of the bicycle. Even if 90% of the car drivers behave and wait for a break in the oncoming traffic it's the 10% which don't who eventually kill the cyclist.
BTW, I doubt many cyclist will go 20mph.