... and I'm not the only one. Don't take it personally.
Democracy doesn't just mean you have a say in government; you also share responsibility for its actions, even if you are opposed to them.
You have three options: 1) Reverse the decision (somehow) 2) Move out of state/country 3) Develop a thick skin
It is an embarrassing joke, but the joke's on you as a Kansan and on both of us as Americans. Don't feel too bad when the saner portions of the country do their best to pin it on Kansas specifically.
1) Like-minded fundies will be inclined to move there, making the rest of the country more rational. Keeps 'em from causing much trouble in the rest of the states.
2) It's not like Kansas has any other attractions.
3) It gives comedy writers a focus for jokes about religious nuts. Properly handled, Kansas will be the laughingstock and not the USA.
4) Destroying their state's reputation and their educational/research institutes will hurt their cause more than anything their opponents could do.
It's too bad we can't teach people like this a lesson by preventing them from benefitting from the technology that springs from science, including the theory of evolution which plays a large role in modern medicine and - ironically for Kansas - agriculture. But I'll settle for watching them flounder. Sometimes the best tack is give fools enough rope to hang themselves with.
My thoughts exactly. However, this new experiment has at least one clear advantage over the fusor: the heat of fusion helps and if I'm not mistaken could directly power the polarization; the cold side that sets up the gradient could be coupled to the working fluid used to extract power from the process. OTOH, some of the ways to directly extract electrical power from fast charged particles considered for fusors and plasma focus fusion don't sound as applicable.
Which is one of the things that bugs me about the tokomak - if you're using supercooled magnets on all sides that are bound to be absorbing a substantial fraction of the heat of fusion and heating, how are you supposed to extract useful energy out of it? Nearly every thermal design I've ever heard of extracts energy from the difference between the hot reactor and the cool environment, not uses energy to cool a hot reactor.
If they ever manage breakeven the setup could be modifed to use proton/boron-11 fusion which would produce few to no neutrons, instead of the D-D fusion they are using now. Of course detecting the neutrons is the easiest way to show it working for now.
I can think of a few ways to improve on PDFs. For starters, multimodality. WYSIWYG printing, like now... but also the ability to edit directly, like a regular word or image processing document. The ability to accomodate different viewing modalities, including print, plain text, and web, in the same file. An open document structure amenable to automatic generation or writing by hand, or better yet a directory-style bundle within a flattened archive. The ability to accomodate limited interactivity.
To take full advantage of some of these features you'd want to build them into the OS and APIs though...
Well if power is the be-all, end-all criteria, then there's really no choice, unless two countries happen to be neck and neck for the top spot (Russia and USA, most recently).
Right now, the USA is IT, power-wise. Both the EU and China have the potential to catch up rapidly, and maybe India eventually. Presently, the EU would probably be the most trustworthy of the lot, though that may not remain so for long.
Potentially power could be exercised via the UN, which would allow people from small countries to hold the secretary general position.
Well then, I guess Apple has nothing to lose by rolling out its own box and iTunes-based service, as has been rumored. Some say the mac mini is a trojan horse destined to serve exactly this purpose.
Yeah, but this one was totally predictable. Overloaded servers and bandwidth limitations have been THE obstacle to growth for internet media. BT and its ilk solve those problems nicely. But these would-be distributors going to have to convince the ISPs to give consumers synchronous bandwidth to really make this scheme work effectively.
Outsourcing and trade you mean. The US trade deficit means other countries are steadily accumulating wealth formerly belonging the the US.
The thing I find most vexing about economics is how much money gets in the way, and the fact that costs of living vary far more than quality of life would suggest in many cases. I mean, compare Bangalore to someplace here, or New York to Tokyo, or the California coast to Southern Florida.
More importantly, if you made your living on something that will ultimately be automated, you deserve what you get.
Then the whole human race has got it coming. There's nothing that can't ultimately be automated, particularly not given the present improvement rate in technology. Writing fiction will probably be the last to go.
China and India are competitive now because they have skilled but dirt-cheap labor. When their labor is no longer dirt-cheap, they won't be so competitive. But that's going to require some redistribution of wealth first.
Seriously, when I started seeing action packed advertisements with a real lack of british accents for a series of books I had always considered to be prime examples of that uniquely British brand of satrical absurdity, I knew something was probably very wrong.
Very cool. Much fewer hoops to jump through than BitTorrent. Peercasting possibilities. Sounds like dijjer could replace BT, if its efficiency and reliability works as advertised. My only concern is there appears to be no way to turn it on or off.
Napster wants to force Apple to open its DRM, so it can offer "competition" in the marketplace for music. In theory, music prices will go down.
However, try thinking a bit further, and know that they will squeeze every cent they can out of you. Can you guess what will happen if they get this?
Distributors like Napster will start negotiating EXCLUSIVE agreements with labels. DUH! Except the Labels will probably open their own distribution operations.
They will charge whatever the hell they want, they will force you to buy the album and not just the song, they will force whatever format or licensing terms they want on you regardless of whether it's compatible with your system. If they can swing it, they will actually exclude the independent artists. Microsoft will get in on this by leveraging windows-specific WMA. So guess what? You'll be screwed far more thoroughly you are now. Especially if you use a Mac. JUST LIKE IT WAS BEFORE.
The iPod was the carrot and iTMS the stick that forced the music industry to be a part of an eminently reasonable and consistent online sales system. The market Apple built with great effort. Napster and Real are just parasites looking for a piece of the action that Real squandered and Napster used to steal.
I can't help but think air hybrids would make more sense, since you can dump the electrical components entirely. But then of course you'd have emissions, especially if you used a 2-stroke.
They are trying to foster economic growth, but the social changes that will cause is certain to destroy the sense of stability which is their reason to exist.
Too true. There's a lot of justified fear and worry over letting an autocracy like China become a superpower. But the path China is taking is economic, and that comes with certain conditions. The WHOLE REASON China is doing so well economically now is because they have a key resource the developed countries don't have - a seemingly endless supply of dirt-cheap labor, including semi-skilled labor. But as cash flows into China two things will happen: 1) that labor will turn middle-class, inflation will set in, and it won't be so cheap anymore. Also it will start having opinions and expecting more out of life. 2) The have-nots will get very unhappy - we're seeing that already. Never mind 3) other, poorer countries will imitate and out-China China and 4) Corruption will sap prosperity and power.
I figure the powers-that-be are keen on this, and are looking at options for maintaining their power by other means, such as external warfare to distract the populace or de-privitization of industry, once the infrastructure has been built.
Actually men in that case was refering to women as well. It was refering to the race of man.
That's debateable, but it raises a good point. English could really use the following:
1) There's a lot of griping over the fact that "man" is the basis for "woman". The feminist solution of "womyn" is lousy, unless they consider themselves to be members of the humyn race (And "herstory" is just plain silly). It also neglects the confusion over whether "man" is meant in the male sense or in the general sense, etc. A much better solution is a few new words for male cases specifically. At the moment I can only think of three cases, all of which can be solved by substituting a new word or two to eliminate the bias. Here's my suggestions: old m:f:either -> new m:f:either man: WOman: man -> WAPman: WOman: man men: WOmen: men -> WAPmen: WOmen: men male: FEmale: - -> mel: fem: -
2)Gender-neutral pronouns so people aren't forced to pick one unnecessarily or use alkward him/her or he/she constructs, or abuse of the plural they/them: male: he, him, his female: she, her, hers neither: it, it, its any: ey, em, eir (Spivak pronouns) Or we could just submit to the inevitable and officially make they/them both gender and number neutral.
3) The re-establishment of the words "man" and "men" as a general concept inclusive of both genders. That way we can still say "fireman" or "human" or "woman" without a lot of griping over sexism. And we can dump a lot of unnecessarily gendered words.
4) Adoption of gender-neutral titles: Ser instead of sir/madam.
I think I read somewhere that the word "man" in words like "fireman" actually comes from the latin "manus", meaning not a male but "hand". Makes sense. Actually, "jack" is used in a similar way for manual laborers.
My line of reasoning is that Chinese immigrants in America/TheWest know far more about how America/TheWest actually is than those who have never lived here. Those who have lived under both systems are most qualified experience-wise to have an opinion regarding relative levels of oppression, among other things.
Granted some who came here were probably trying to escape the chinese gov't in the first place and would therefore be biased, but most Chinese immigrants I've met are either here for an education or looking for economic opportunity/following relatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they should work on something a little more durable, like Mini-Magnetosphere Plasma Propulsion.
Please say he'll do Return of the Jedi too.
... and I'm not the only one. Don't take it personally.
Democracy doesn't just mean you have a say in government; you also share responsibility for its actions, even if you are opposed to them.
You have three options:
1) Reverse the decision (somehow)
2) Move out of state/country
3) Develop a thick skin
It is an embarrassing joke, but the joke's on you as a Kansan and on both of us as Americans. Don't feel too bad when the saner portions of the country do their best to pin it on Kansas specifically.
1) Like-minded fundies will be inclined to move there, making the rest of the country more rational. Keeps 'em from causing much trouble in the rest of the states.
2) It's not like Kansas has any other attractions.
3) It gives comedy writers a focus for jokes about religious nuts. Properly handled, Kansas will be the laughingstock and not the USA.
4) Destroying their state's reputation and their educational/research institutes will hurt their cause more than anything their opponents could do.
It's too bad we can't teach people like this a lesson by preventing them from benefitting from the technology that springs from science, including the theory of evolution which plays a large role in modern medicine and - ironically for Kansas - agriculture. But I'll settle for watching them flounder. Sometimes the best tack is give fools enough rope to hang themselves with.
My thoughts exactly. However, this new experiment has at least one clear advantage over the fusor: the heat of fusion helps and if I'm not mistaken could directly power the polarization; the cold side that sets up the gradient could be coupled to the working fluid used to extract power from the process. OTOH, some of the ways to directly extract electrical power from fast charged particles considered for fusors and plasma focus fusion don't sound as applicable.
Which is one of the things that bugs me about the tokomak - if you're using supercooled magnets on all sides that are bound to be absorbing a substantial fraction of the heat of fusion and heating, how are you supposed to extract useful energy out of it? Nearly every thermal design I've ever heard of extracts energy from the difference between the hot reactor and the cool environment, not uses energy to cool a hot reactor.
If they ever manage breakeven the setup could be modifed to use proton/boron-11 fusion which would produce few to no neutrons, instead of the D-D fusion they are using now. Of course detecting the neutrons is the easiest way to show it working for now.
I can think of a few ways to improve on PDFs. For starters, multimodality. WYSIWYG printing, like now... but also the ability to edit directly, like a regular word or image processing document. The ability to accomodate different viewing modalities, including print, plain text, and web, in the same file. An open document structure amenable to automatic generation or writing by hand, or better yet a directory-style bundle within a flattened archive. The ability to accomodate limited interactivity.
To take full advantage of some of these features you'd want to build them into the OS and APIs though...
Well if power is the be-all, end-all criteria, then there's really no choice, unless two countries happen to be neck and neck for the top spot (Russia and USA, most recently).
Right now, the USA is IT, power-wise. Both the EU and China have the potential to catch up rapidly, and maybe India eventually. Presently, the EU would probably be the most trustworthy of the lot, though that may not remain so for long.
Potentially power could be exercised via the UN, which would allow people from small countries to hold the secretary general position.
I guess that just goes to show that the world is dumb, or perhaps greedy.
A small, efficient, uncorrupt, open minded country like the Netherlands or something seems like a much better bet.
Well then, I guess Apple has nothing to lose by rolling out its own box and iTunes-based service, as has been rumored. Some say the mac mini is a trojan horse destined to serve exactly this purpose.
I just wish there were low cost plug-n-play car audio options available. The tape deck and cigarrette lighter solution sucks.
Yeah, but this one was totally predictable. Overloaded servers and bandwidth limitations have been THE obstacle to growth for internet media. BT and its ilk solve those problems nicely. But these would-be distributors going to have to convince the ISPs to give consumers synchronous bandwidth to really make this scheme work effectively.
who the best Doctor was
Oh come on. Everybody already knows it was the fourth Doctor, Tom Baker.
Outsourcing and trade you mean. The US trade deficit means other countries are steadily accumulating wealth formerly belonging the the US.
The thing I find most vexing about economics is how much money gets in the way, and the fact that costs of living vary far more than quality of life would suggest in many cases. I mean, compare Bangalore to someplace here, or New York to Tokyo, or the California coast to Southern Florida.
More importantly, if you made your living on something that will ultimately be automated, you deserve what you get.
Then the whole human race has got it coming. There's nothing that can't ultimately be automated, particularly not given the present improvement rate in technology. Writing fiction will probably be the last to go.
China and India are competitive now because they have skilled but dirt-cheap labor. When their labor is no longer dirt-cheap, they won't be so competitive. But that's going to require some redistribution of wealth first.
Seriously, when I started seeing action packed advertisements with a real lack of british accents for a series of books I had always considered to be prime examples of that uniquely British brand of satrical absurdity, I knew something was probably very wrong.
Oh gee, with oil prices going down why bother saving electricity?
Very cool. Much fewer hoops to jump through than BitTorrent. Peercasting possibilities. Sounds like dijjer could replace BT, if its efficiency and reliability works as advertised. My only concern is there appears to be no way to turn it on or off.
Napster wants to force Apple to open its DRM, so it can offer "competition" in the marketplace for music. In theory, music prices will go down.
However, try thinking a bit further, and know that they will squeeze every cent they can out of you. Can you guess what will happen if they get this?
Distributors like Napster will start negotiating EXCLUSIVE agreements with labels. DUH! Except the Labels will probably open their own distribution operations.
They will charge whatever the hell they want, they will force you to buy the album and not just the song, they will force whatever format or licensing terms they want on you regardless of whether it's compatible with your system. If they can swing it, they will actually exclude the independent artists. Microsoft will get in on this by leveraging windows-specific WMA. So guess what? You'll be screwed far more thoroughly you are now. Especially if you use a Mac. JUST LIKE IT WAS BEFORE.
The iPod was the carrot and iTMS the stick that forced the music industry to be a part of an eminently reasonable and consistent online sales system. The market Apple built with great effort. Napster and Real are just parasites looking for a piece of the action that Real squandered and Napster used to steal.
Remember how Al was always smacking around that ziggy calculator?
Well, that's the first thing that came to my mind.
So basically you're using a small piston engine and an air tank instead of the capacitor bank and larger motor you'd need otherwise. That might be a sound strategy, but with those new fast-charging lithium ions you may be able to do away with the capacitors.
I can't help but think air hybrids would make more sense, since you can dump the electrical components entirely. But then of course you'd have emissions, especially if you used a 2-stroke.
Here's an obligatory energy density link.
"Road Use Fees"
Beats toll booths. Nice complement to the gas tax.
I played Rogue on the compaq I had access too.
When the original Macintosh portable came out, I played Leather Goddesses of Phobos on it, in all it's non-backlit LCD display goodness.
They are trying to foster economic growth, but the social changes that will cause is certain to destroy the sense of stability which is their reason to exist.
Too true. There's a lot of justified fear and worry over letting an autocracy like China become a superpower. But the path China is taking is economic, and that comes with certain conditions. The WHOLE REASON China is doing so well economically now is because they have a key resource the developed countries don't have - a seemingly endless supply of dirt-cheap labor, including semi-skilled labor. But as cash flows into China two things will happen: 1) that labor will turn middle-class, inflation will set in, and it won't be so cheap anymore. Also it will start having opinions and expecting more out of life. 2) The have-nots will get very unhappy - we're seeing that already. Never mind 3) other, poorer countries will imitate and out-China China and 4) Corruption will sap prosperity and power.
I figure the powers-that-be are keen on this, and are looking at options for maintaining their power by other means, such as external warfare to distract the populace or de-privitization of industry, once the infrastructure has been built.
Actually men in that case was refering to women as well. It was refering to the race of man.
That's debateable, but it raises a good point. English could really use the following:
1) There's a lot of griping over the fact that "man" is the basis for "woman". The feminist solution of "womyn" is lousy, unless they consider themselves to be members of the humyn race (And "herstory" is just plain silly). It also neglects the confusion over whether "man" is meant in the male sense or in the general sense, etc. A much better solution is a few new words for male cases specifically. At the moment I can only think of three cases, all of which can be solved by substituting a new word or two to eliminate the bias. Here's my suggestions:
old m:f:either -> new m:f:either
man: WOman: man -> WAPman: WOman: man
men: WOmen: men -> WAPmen: WOmen: men
male: FEmale: - -> mel: fem: -
2)Gender-neutral pronouns so people aren't forced to pick one unnecessarily or use alkward him/her or he/she constructs, or abuse of the plural they/them:
male: he, him, his
female: she, her, hers
neither: it, it, its
any: ey, em, eir (Spivak pronouns)
Or we could just submit to the inevitable and officially make they/them both gender and number neutral.
3) The re-establishment of the words "man" and "men" as a general concept inclusive of both genders. That way we can still say "fireman" or "human" or "woman" without a lot of griping over sexism. And we can dump a lot of unnecessarily gendered words.
4) Adoption of gender-neutral titles: Ser instead of sir/madam.
I think I read somewhere that the word "man" in words like "fireman" actually comes from the latin "manus", meaning not a male but "hand". Makes sense. Actually, "jack" is used in a similar way for manual laborers.
My line of reasoning is that Chinese immigrants in America/TheWest know far more about how America/TheWest actually is than those who have never lived here. Those who have lived under both systems are most qualified experience-wise to have an opinion regarding relative levels of oppression, among other things.
Granted some who came here were probably trying to escape the chinese gov't in the first place and would therefore be biased, but most Chinese immigrants I've met are either here for an education or looking for economic opportunity/following relatives.