because a disproportionate amount of outspoken Atheists are inflammatory jerk-offs with some misguided superiority complex (see Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, et al).
i
Right, because there are surely not thousands of outspoken religious inflammatory jerk-offs for each atheist one.
Yeah, but that's normal!
(Points for identifying the "literary" reference.;-)
... the amount of radiation is theoretically small, but if one flies a lot,...
The problem with sort of reasoning is that it assumes proper maintenance of the equipment. We've already seen some pretty bad news about the maintenance level (and the resulting radiation levels) of the scanning equipment in the US and some other countries. Do you want to trust that every Australian airport with keep all their scanners tuned up and well within spec?
I keep thinking it'd be interesting if someone were to carry a few radiation meters in their pockets, which would of course be detected, but by then they'd have already measured the radiation that they had just been exposed to. It'd be "interesting" if the airport people tried to confiscate them, especially if they showed an out-of-spec level.
(e) Avoid the acquisition of products that are known to make unauthorized transfers of information to, or permit unauthorized control of or modification of a state agencyâ(TM)s computer.
So if the vendor is careful not to inform the state agency that the software does such things, it's OK for the agency to purchase the closed-source software?
"Honestly; if we'd only known that the software did those things, we'd have never bought it. True, there were a number of "hackers" who told us about them, but we didn't trust them, because they were hackers. So we accepted the salesman's assertions that he didn't know of any such things that the software did."
Move voting to the weekend(for people who can't get away from work).
Indeed. This is very important. And this one does not even require thinking.
A number of historians have claimed that the American custom of voting on Tuesdays was created explicitly so that employers could prevent their employees from voting. Simply have an "emergency" at work that requires all employees stay on duty until the problem is fixed, and you've eliminated most of the wrong kind of votes from the people you employ.
I have wondered what the actual historical evidence for this is. It's easy enough to find claims of such things, but it's not quite as easy for a "layman" to spend the time it would take (without taking time off from work;-) to find the actual historical documents explaining why something as bizarre as Tuesday elections was implemented.
In any case, we might note that in many countries, elections days are national work-free holidays. Passing a law like this would undo the effects of the US's custom of voting on work days. It'd probably also result in elections being moved to the weekend, since there would no longer be a reason to hold elections during work days.
Just letting you know that there are witnesses to your humour.:)
I was hoping that others might build on it...
An alternate path I might have taken is to observe that "Primate" is a position in the Catholic heirarchy, so "primative" obviously has to do with such a person's duties. But how many people would even understand that? I wonder if very many catholics could even tell you what a Primate does, and how many would think you're asking about monkeys.
But I went with the automotive jokes, since this is slashdot.
What do you want to bet they'll be after Bandcamp some time real soon now?
What they're basically trying to get is firm legal precedent saying that they can get any web site shut down if there is even one infringing file on the site.
If this legal principle is established, any company can easily shut down any web site that markets any artist's works. They simply hire someone to pose as an artist, sign up with the site, and download a file owned by the company. Then the company reports them to the authorities, who shut down the site. The only defense against this sort of attack is to never accept any files from anyone, which would make online artists' sites impossible.
What I haven't been able to tell from any of the coverage of recent shutdowns is: Did the company ever have to present evidence that they actually owned the rights to the file(s) in question? It's easy enough for a company to make a claim without evidence; just look up the story about Professor Usher a few years ago. If a company makes an invalid claim like this, under the proposed new laws (or the current laws), could they be hit with a major fine for fraud that would be worth more than the value of shutting down a competitor? Or are we really heading for a legal system in which a big company with lots of legal funds can shut down the little guys by simply making fraudulent infringement claims (and maybe say "Oopsie!" if they're proved wrong l-)?
If I own a site and put nothing there but my own works, what happens when some company goes to my ISP and says that some of my files are their property? Can the ISP shut me down until I prove in court that their claim was invalid? Will the proposed new laws make it easier for them to shut me down for long stretches this way, or cause me to spend a lot on court cases to defend against them?
There is no such thing, english speaking, as 'primative'.
Sure, there is. It's just an adjective constructed out of two morphemes that you'll find in any good dictionary. The first, "primat-", is a root that refers to a specific family of mammals; the second, "-ive" is a suffix that produces an adjective that means having the first morpheme as a property. English grammar allows contructing new words by attaching prefixes and suffixes to simpler words, even when it's silly to do so.
Or the writer could have just been a crappy speller; we shouldn't automatically be dismissive of that possibility. Thought that thought does suggest that we might find a good automotive metaphor to explain it.
(And that's not an exhaustive list of the word play we might make here.)
define a living thing? Typically beyond single cell it is something that is made up of other living component parts.
Yeah, but a minor problem with most trees is that, strictly speaking, only the thin outer layers are "alive", and that part is typically only a few years old. The inner wood of the trunk isn't actually alive, and that's the part that may be hundreds or thousands of years old. Of course, that wood is a rather integral part of the tree; it's just not made of living cells.
The "clonal" organisms like the creosote bush is even more extreme, since its older woody part is both dead and non-structural. The bushes in a creosote ring may be a few hundred years old, and they may be still physically connected to the remnant wood inside the ring, but it'd be pretty easy to argue that the inner wood is no longer important to the living parts, which are just the bushes.
But we consider our hair and nails as a part of us, even though past the roots, they're made of dead cells. So it somewhat makes sense to consider a creosote ring as a single living organism, even if the central part is long dead, has no structural role, and removing it wouldn't harm the remaining bushes.
Methuselah, believed to be about 4,800 years old. It's a species of pine tree somewhere in California. The exact location is kept a secret. This is believed to be the oldest tree still alive.
Methuselah is a bristlecone pine. And there's a pretty good reason for the secrecy. The article mentions the fear of vandalism. But in the case of the bristlecones, something worse happened. In 1964, there was another one nicknamed Prometheus that was believed to be the oldest tree. The US Forest Service sent a guy in with a chainsaw to cut it down so they could verify its age. It turned out to be over 4900 years old. No older bristlecones have been found. Other forestry people were sufficiently outraged by this that it turned into a standard textbook-level warning, and people who study the oldest bristlecones refuse to report their locations, to protect them from the Forest Service as well as from common vandals.
Actually, there are a number of plants that aren't trees that are known to be older, but their living parts are all young. The textbook example is the creosote bush, which sends up offshoots around its edges, and then the central parts die off. This produces "creosote rings" that spread out across the landscape. A few have been found whose oldest remnants are dated to over 11,000 years. But the living parts are only a few centuries old.
The question "What's the oldest living thing?" turns out to be trickier to answer than you might expect. There are more than one way to define a "living thing", and there are several ways to measure age.
Despite American arrogance, all companies are required to abide by the laws of the customer's nation if they do business there.
Except, of course, in the US itself, where fines imposed on corporate "persons" for violating laws are typically much less than the corporation has earned from the violations.
At the extreme, I've read a few studies that compared the fines for things (bad drugs, contaminated food, etc.) that killed people, and reported that the per-casualty fine was typically less than $500, often under $100. You and I would be jailed and/or executed for selling things that kill people; corporations usually just get what amounts to a slight surcharge on their taxes.
Of course, you are free to believe whatever you like about how companies are required to follow laws. But being fined a few thousand bucks for a violation that raked in millions isn't much of an incentive to be law abiding.
"Jesus man, pot doesn't need a conspiracy theory. You're saying that pot laws drive illegal immegration purposefully? To what end?"
Never ascribe to conspiracy what can adequately be explained by stupidity.
Except that in this case, there seems to be plenty of historical evidence for a specific "conspiracy" that resulted in hemp/marijuana being included in the US's new drug laws in the 1920s. The conspiracy was driven by William Randolph Hearst, who wanted to block development of a new paper-making process that could turn hemp into very cheap paper. This would have destroyed much of the value of his extensive forestry holdings that produced pulpwood. There was already the usual objection to marijuana from the religious "moral guardian" crowd, and he effectively teamed up with them to get hemp outlawed.
I wonder how he would have reacted to the Internet...;-)
Anyway, others haven't been saying that pot was made illegal explicitly to produce illegal immigration, etc. The claim is that such laws have effects that were quite well understood at the time (especially considering what happened with Prohibition), and the people pushing for the drug laws did so knowing full well what the consequences would be. This didn't matter to them, because the important thing was the moral issue of making drugs illegal. The fact that Prohibition failed simply taught them that they hadn't pushed hard enough, and that they needed to ignore all social side effects of such laws if they wanted to get their prohibitions into the laws.
But nobody is actually claiming that the drug laws were passed to produce illegal immigration (or the drug-based criminal enterprises or...). They're just claiming that nobody can credibly pretend to ignorance of the consequences of such laws.
... it was America and the incredibly popular American eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis in the first place.
Well, that's part of the story. But a number of historians have claimed that the main antecedents that the Nazis used to excuse their genocide were earlier. They repeatedly mentioned the world's reaction to 1) the Turkish genocide against the Armenians in the 1910-1920 years, and 2) the American extermination campaign against the Plains Indians during the last half of the 19th century. They pointed out that these genocides were documented, but the rest of the world mostly just ignored them, and didn't hold them against the Turks or Americans. So, the Nazis argued, the rest of the world would also ignore the extermination of the European Jews.
To a great degree, they were correct in this prediction. The outrage against the Jewish extermination developed mostly after WWII was over, when the photos and stories started to leak out and were widely published. Before 1945, the rest of the world (even the Allies) mostly ignored what was going on in the concentration/extermination camps. There were even cases of fleeing Jewish refugees who were refused entry to other countries, on the grounds that they were (in current terminology) "illegal aliens" who were sent back home.
Actually, it's hard to find a country of any size that doesn't have history like this. So it's basically wrong to attribute it to any group of people, especially any national or political group. It's better to recognize that, when conditions permit, people who commit such atrocities will emerge in any society, and they will carry out atrocities until those in power stop them. If the people in power quietly support them, they will kill a lot of people. The Nazis may be "poster children" for this, but it's easy to find bad examples just about anywhere in the world.
For a more recent example, look into the events in Rwanda in 1994, and pay special attention to the reactions in the rest of the world. Nobody stepped in to stop the killing, even when the news media reported it widely.
It's called a "slippery slope". One "right" at a time and we may find ourselves in Nazi land again.
Except that this is America. It's not and never has been "Nazi land". The appropriate phrase would be "McCarthy Land", as in Joe McCarthy. Not quite as horrific as the Nazis, since he and his ilk didn't kill people by the millions. But still awful enough to serve as a warning to us all.
Those of us who were kids in the 1950s or earlier know that it's nothing new in the US of A. There has long been pressure to go back to that time, including returning women to the kitchen, retracting the Negro^WColored^WBlack^African-American vote, etc., etc., etc.
The appropriate slogan here is probably that old one about the price of liberty...
It's a standard webkit based HTML5 browser since OS6 which puts it exactly on par with safari.
So, just out of curiosity, does it also have the same major usability killer as Safari on the iPhone and iPad? I'm talking, of course, about the way that it formats text, drawing it for a window much larger than the screen, and then shrinking it (and the font size) to illegibility. And not "reflowing" if you rotate the screen, showing that it's equally badly formatted for both layouts. To make it legible, you have to enlarge it to get a readable font, and then scroll back and forth horizontally to read each line.
Funny thing, I've asked about this on Apple's support forums. All the answers I got were of the form "Yeah, I've complained about that for years, and found no answer." A few people have said that the answer is to trade your iPhone or iPad in for an Android-based one that has a browser that knows how to format text. Actually, I recently found a simpler solution on my wife's iPhone: Install the Opera browser. It works fine, and does quite a good job of formatting simple text.
Part of the puzzle is that nobody can get an explanation from Apple for why it works so poorly. The dominant theory is that it's a ruse to get people to use their "apps" rather than their browser, the "walled garden" theory, but there's no direct support for this idea. This does make a lot of web developers wary of dealing with anything that claims to be "like Safari". What's especially funny is that Safari's formatting on OS X works just fine. Maybe it's just the name that they share, with all the code different.
(It'd be interesting if someone here at/. described a solution to the problem, when the Apple forums come up with a blank. If it really does HTML5, it should be able to ask the size of its screen and font.)
Oh, stop it, you... with your facts and your big picture... we must all partake in the blood orgy of applehate!
Heh. While it may be fun to pick on the Big Guy, there's a lot of history showing that that won't be effective, and more general solutions are needed.
I ran across an informative historical example some years ago, when my wife and I stayed in Savannah, Georgia for a while on a vacation. Savannah was one of the earlier English settlements in the area, and has a lot of nice old buildings, many of which offer tours. One tour we took was in a large synagogue right in the middle of the old part of town. The guide explained that most of the original businessmen who settled in the town were Jewish. She theorized this was due to a mixture of the British attitude that 1) Jews make good businessmen, and 2) If we send them to the Colonies, we'll get them out of London. Anyway, this was the reason that very quickly after the colony was formed, the local council outlawed slavery, mostly due to pressure from the Jewish community. But this only lasted about 20 years. Savannah was barely surviving, and much of it was because the nearby port of Charleston could undercut their prices, because they used slaves who weren't paid at all. So Savannah's council caved and re-legalized slavery, and went on to be a major port in the area.
The situation with Apple and other "Free World" producers is basically the same. China and other Asian countries can radically undercut production prices, because they have a local, growing population living in abject poverty who can be hired as laborers at semi-starvation wages. The workers have no legal rights, and (as the news stories make clear) can easily be fired for any or no reason at all. An injury that interferes with productivity means the worker is kicked out. This includes cases where the workers are poisoned by the toxic chemicals they're required to work with (and don't understand until it's too late). If a worker speaks out, it means dismissal and a permanent record that prevents subsequent employment anywhere else. Or jail.
But the fact is, corporations like Apple (or Walmart or...) aren't really in a position to do much about this. Like the early businesses in Savannah, if they choose to Do the Right Thing, it'll merely make them uncompetitive. Apple has caved, and moved production to the cheapest countries. As have most American corporations. We should be criticizing them, but we should face the fact that they really can't fix the problem.
The only way out of this is "government regulation" (i.e., labour laws) on an international scale. Anything less means that the production moves to the parts of the world with starvation-level wages. Transportation is now so cheap that production facilities in the world are in competition with everyone else who can make similar products. Retail outlets buy from the cheapest, which means that production dies anywhere with above-starvation wages.
If you don't like this, the only way out is to push to have it ended everywhere. Either that, or find ways to make transportation expensive once again. But that can also only happen with strong international laws, so it's unlikely to happen any time soon. Most of the transport happens in the oceans, in international waters, so a mere nation has no effective ways to impose prices on the shippers or the producers in other nations. And The Market bankrupts any company that chooses to use "expensive" workers or shipping, as it has done throughout history.
(Actually, I thought the Savannah story was an interesting example of unusual honesty about an area's history. And I remember wondering how long it would be before her employer got political pressure to fire her for saying such unpleasant things about the city's history. But if she was paid by the synagogue, it could be an interesting local political struggle.;-)
While I agree with you, it's "should have," not "should of."
Actually, that's not quite right. The writer almost certainly speaks one of the many English dialects in which "should have" is regularly contracted to "should've", and the writer was merely trying to spell that out. The correct correction (;-) would be to rewrite it as "should've" rather than "should have".
This is a common spelling mistake in the General American dialect, and it can be attributed to poor teaching of contractions in our schools. This is the basis of a common criticism of the beginning reading texts used in many of our schools: They often "uncontract" the common contractions, most of which turn out to be mandatory in the kids' native dialects. That is, most American children have never heard the uncontracted forms, because they don't occur in the speech of the people around them (or on television;-). This makes it more difficult for them to learn from their reading texts, which are typically written in the "official" language, which does use the uncontracted forms that are unfamiliar to the children.
The problems with "should've" are a linguistically interesting case of this. There is only a tiny phonetic difference between "should've" and "should have", with the vowel being slightly less reduced in the latter. Most people haven't been taught about such phonetic subtleties, and don't consciously hear the difference. This is made worse by the fact that "should of" is two valid English words, and the normal pronunciation would be between the other two. So saying that "should've" and "should have" are valid, while "should of" isn't, is highly confusing to someone who has only heard the first and can't hear the difference.
In such cases, spelling it as the contraction is the most reasonable way to deal with it. If a person has never heard "should have" pronounced, both that and "should of" are equally nonsensical, with no obvious mnemonic to help remember why someone else would consider one correct and the other incorrect. And "should of" makes a bit more sense, since it's pronunciation is closer to "should've" in the dialects where there is a difference. But you can avoid the problem entirely by writing the contracted form. Well, not entirely; the contracted form has that silly unpronounced 'e' at the end. Few grade-school textbooks will explain to you why that 'e' is there.;-)
[Corporations] have WAY too much money to "invest" in lobbyists over the will of the people,...
Lest people think this is hyperbole, you might try googling "lobbyists return on investment" (without the quotes) and read a few of the hits. Here's an informative passage from one of the articles on the first page of google hits:
... the most famous name in lobbying, Jack Abramoff, is out of jail these days and happy to talk to the press. The folks at Planet Money recently talked to him about the ROI on lobbying efforts, and you begin to get a sense of the scale of things. A company has no problem dumping $100,000/month into a lobbying operation if the end result is changing a law that will save them $4 billion. The report talks about a study of a particular lobbying effort that had an ROI of 22,000%. Yeah. That's a big number. But Abramoff's first response when asked about that study was that he was "surprised it's so little."
Read some of the others, and you'll get a real feel for the way "the System" works these days. Treating a lobyist as an "investment" isn't a joke at all; that's exactly how the corporate world views them.
Ah, you're claiming to be in Brazil, pretending to be beyond the reach of US copyright corporations. They're right now tracing your message, and you'll be contacted by their thugs shortly to work out an "agreement".
To me it is ridiculous to pay an actor and author millions of dollars for a couple of weeks of work. While plumbers, electricians work harder yet get paid less.
Huh? What planet do you live on where that happens? Here on Earth, most of the actors, authors, and other artistic types get paid less than a living wage, because those millions go to the big corporations that control the distribution channels. This has been written about here and in other forums a zillion times, but apparently it hasn't gotten through to whatever planet you're living on.
We do have a new, much cheaper distribution channel that they don't control, called the Internet, and Earth's artists are starting to abandon the older corporate-controlled channels for this new one. The fuss you're reading about here is the corporate controllers' attempts to take control of the Internet, so they can shut down the new, independent distributors and continue to claim the artists' income as their own. If the people on your planet have learned how to block such a takeover, please let us know, so we can try it here.
It's true that we on Earth do have a very few commercial artist that are paid well by the old distribution corporations. This is basically a PR trick, to make the customers think that all artists get that sort of money. But the other 99.9% get close to nothing, unless they've switched over to Internet distribution. Many of us are hoping we can hold off the corporations until they've gone bankrupt, and we've established a permanent system that actually pays the artists. But, as explained in the news stories we're discussing, our governments are trying to pass laws that shut down the new startups and hand the Internet over to the big corporations. Stay tuned, and you might hear how it turns out.
But if you're an alien artist, I'd advise staying home, and not trying to sell your art here on Earth until we manage to establish a system that will actually pay you. Of course, there are a lot of Earthlings who would probably love to see/hear/taste/smell your creations; maybe you could try making them available on our Internet and see how it goes. (Actually, the Internet doesn't do taste or smell very well, so you should just stick to visual, audio, and written works of art.) But our big corporations will probably go after you if they discover you, and claim that they own the Earth rights to your work.
I am of the understanding that new growth trees sequester CO2 better than old growth ones. This makes intuitive sense as well.
Actually, the best comment on this question is probably "It's complicated...".;-)
It depends a lot on things like the species of tree, the conditions it's growing in, the nutrients available, etc. I've also seen comments from botanists that in general, the new growth in "harvested" forest areas generally soaks up more CO2 than do the mature trees. But this comes with a lot of qualifications, and may or may not be true in any particular case.
Biological systems are never as simple as the bumper-sticker sort of slogans that human political systems (and many/. discussions) like to work with.
But other than that, the article actually supports my point: it asserts that the two species came together at some point in the past, presumably at times that were warm.
Hmmm... When I read that some time back, I understood it to mean that the hybridization happened during a period when the ice cap extended from North America to the British Isles (and Scandinavia). That's the easiest way to explain how polar bears happened to mingle with Irish bears. During warm times, it would be quite difficult for polar bears to reach Ireland. During times of maximum glaciation, they'd just have to follow the "coastline" along the edge of the ice cap, munching on fish and seals the whole way.
I find it sad to read this, knowing many actually think this way:'(
Well, I found it quite funny. While it's true that many people in the world (and in the US) do think like that bit of parody, I sorta suspect that not many of them are regular readers of slashdot. So there were probably only a handful of readers here who didn't just laugh at it and go on to the next message.
Of course, there is always Poe's Law to take into account. I wonder if we could actually find out whether anyone here mistook that post for a genuine, heart-felt comment. (I just know someone will reply with "Hey, I did, you insensitive clod!" But how would I know that they're not just pulling my leg?)
CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us"
Lie. Lie, and um Lie. I'd like to give the authors of that a sniff of pure CO2 to see how odorless it is.
Hmmm... I've smelled CO2 on a number of occasions. Of course, it wasn't actually "pure", it was in the form of the "smoke" given off from dry ice. But it should have been concentrated enough to be able to smell, and it didn't have a smell. It was just cold, even a foot above the ice. So what's the pure stuff smell like?
Actually, on a number of occasions, the CO2 "smoke" did have an aroma. This was because I was working in some bio labs, where we had lots of dry ice "for research use". Some portion of it inevitably found its way into the punch bowls at various staff gatherings, where we'd have bowls of bubbly, frothing, smoking stuff that always looked sorta cool, and in fact was literally quite cool, due to the block of dry ice in the bottom of the bowls. I'd often nab a little chunk of the ice, drop it in my drink, and walk around with a glass of smoking, bubbling, evil-looking stuff, nonchalantly sipping it. The smoke smelled a lot like whatever I was drinking. It makes for some very interesting margaritas.
But the high levels of CO2 seem to be entirely inert to the human nose. And unless you're exercising vigorously, your body can easily deal with the slight rise in blood CO2 level that this produces. Any effects you feel is more likely from the C2H5OH in your drink.
And if I weren't so lazy, I'd go back and insert the <sub> tags in those formulae... which the slashcode would strip out.
Sure they are, when you collect enough of them.;-) A contrary saying might be that all large bodies of data are made up of nothing but insignificant, local anecdotes.
Also, there are many situations where single anecdotes are quite useful data. Thus, biologists try to keep track of the ranges of zillions of species. This primarily means keeping track of the edges of each species' range, and at the edges, a species tends to be rather sparse. A local example is that our backyard bird feeder is regularly visited by cardinals and chickadees. Not very many, as we're fairly far north in both species' winter ranges. But the few scattered reports every year of where they are seen in January is valuable data. These reports have been coming from places farther and farther north over the past couple of decades. Birders collect such "anecdotes" and send them to various databases, and have documented the range shifts for many species.
Actually, a real shocker of this sort happened here in southern New England just a few years ago. One of the regular signs of spring has always been when the first robins arrive. Several years ago, they didn't arrive at all -- because they never left. Well, some of them did, but there was a population of robins that spent the entire winter here. I watched a small flock of them in our yard all winter. This got a bit of publicity hereabouts, and it's happened most years since then. This has helped get the message across to the local population of humans that something significant is going on. The robins obviously think that Boston is now subtropical.
But I wouldn't expect the WSJ editors to notice "anecdotal evidence" of that nature.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
because a disproportionate amount of outspoken Atheists are inflammatory jerk-offs with some misguided superiority complex (see Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, et al). i
Right, because there are surely not thousands of outspoken religious inflammatory jerk-offs for each atheist one.
Yeah, but that's normal!
(Points for identifying the "literary" reference. ;-)
... the amount of radiation is theoretically small, but if one flies a lot, ...
The problem with sort of reasoning is that it assumes proper maintenance of the equipment. We've already seen some pretty bad news about the maintenance level (and the resulting radiation levels) of the scanning equipment in the US and some other countries. Do you want to trust that every Australian airport with keep all their scanners tuned up and well within spec?
I keep thinking it'd be interesting if someone were to carry a few radiation meters in their pockets, which would of course be detected, but by then they'd have already measured the radiation that they had just been exposed to. It'd be "interesting" if the airport people tried to confiscate them, especially if they showed an out-of-spec level.
(e) Avoid the acquisition of products that are known to make unauthorized transfers of information to, or permit unauthorized control of or modification of a state agencyâ(TM)s computer.
So if the vendor is careful not to inform the state agency that the software does such things, it's OK for the agency to purchase the closed-source software?
"Honestly; if we'd only known that the software did those things, we'd have never bought it. True, there were a number of "hackers" who told us about them, but we didn't trust them, because they were hackers. So we accepted the salesman's assertions that he didn't know of any such things that the software did."
Yeah; sounds about how things usually work.
Move voting to the weekend(for people who can't get away from work).
Indeed. This is very important. And this one does not even require thinking.
A number of historians have claimed that the American custom of voting on Tuesdays was created explicitly so that employers could prevent their employees from voting. Simply have an "emergency" at work that requires all employees stay on duty until the problem is fixed, and you've eliminated most of the wrong kind of votes from the people you employ.
I have wondered what the actual historical evidence for this is. It's easy enough to find claims of such things, but it's not quite as easy for a "layman" to spend the time it would take (without taking time off from work ;-) to find the actual historical documents explaining why something as bizarre as Tuesday elections was implemented.
In any case, we might note that in many countries, elections days are national work-free holidays. Passing a law like this would undo the effects of the US's custom of voting on work days. It'd probably also result in elections being moved to the weekend, since there would no longer be a reason to hold elections during work days.
Just letting you know that there are witnesses to your humour. :)
I was hoping that others might build on it ...
An alternate path I might have taken is to observe that "Primate" is a position in the Catholic heirarchy, so "primative" obviously has to do with such a person's duties. But how many people would even understand that? I wonder if very many catholics could even tell you what a Primate does, and how many would think you're asking about monkeys.
But I went with the automotive jokes, since this is slashdot.
What do you want to bet they'll be after Bandcamp some time real soon now?
What they're basically trying to get is firm legal precedent saying that they can get any web site shut down if there is even one infringing file on the site.
If this legal principle is established, any company can easily shut down any web site that markets any artist's works. They simply hire someone to pose as an artist, sign up with the site, and download a file owned by the company. Then the company reports them to the authorities, who shut down the site. The only defense against this sort of attack is to never accept any files from anyone, which would make online artists' sites impossible.
What I haven't been able to tell from any of the coverage of recent shutdowns is: Did the company ever have to present evidence that they actually owned the rights to the file(s) in question? It's easy enough for a company to make a claim without evidence; just look up the story about Professor Usher a few years ago. If a company makes an invalid claim like this, under the proposed new laws (or the current laws), could they be hit with a major fine for fraud that would be worth more than the value of shutting down a competitor? Or are we really heading for a legal system in which a big company with lots of legal funds can shut down the little guys by simply making fraudulent infringement claims (and maybe say "Oopsie!" if they're proved wrong l-)?
If I own a site and put nothing there but my own works, what happens when some company goes to my ISP and says that some of my files are their property? Can the ISP shut me down until I prove in court that their claim was invalid? Will the proposed new laws make it easier for them to shut me down for long stretches this way, or cause me to spend a lot on court cases to defend against them?
There is no such thing, english speaking, as 'primative'.
Sure, there is. It's just an adjective constructed out of two morphemes that you'll find in any good dictionary. The first, "primat-", is a root that refers to a specific family of mammals; the second, "-ive" is a suffix that produces an adjective that means having the first morpheme as a property. English grammar allows contructing new words by attaching prefixes and suffixes to simpler words, even when it's silly to do so.
Or the writer could have just been a crappy speller; we shouldn't automatically be dismissive of that possibility. Thought that thought does suggest that we might find a good automotive metaphor to explain it.
(And that's not an exhaustive list of the word play we might make here.)
define a living thing? Typically beyond single cell it is something that is made up of other living component parts.
Yeah, but a minor problem with most trees is that, strictly speaking, only the thin outer layers are "alive", and that part is typically only a few years old. The inner wood of the trunk isn't actually alive, and that's the part that may be hundreds or thousands of years old. Of course, that wood is a rather integral part of the tree; it's just not made of living cells.
The "clonal" organisms like the creosote bush is even more extreme, since its older woody part is both dead and non-structural. The bushes in a creosote ring may be a few hundred years old, and they may be still physically connected to the remnant wood inside the ring, but it'd be pretty easy to argue that the inner wood is no longer important to the living parts, which are just the bushes.
But we consider our hair and nails as a part of us, even though past the roots, they're made of dead cells. So it somewhat makes sense to consider a creosote ring as a single living organism, even if the central part is long dead, has no structural role, and removing it wouldn't harm the remaining bushes.
Methuselah, believed to be about 4,800 years old. It's a species of pine tree somewhere in California. The exact location is kept a secret. This is believed to be the oldest tree still alive.
Methuselah is a bristlecone pine. And there's a pretty good reason for the secrecy. The article mentions the fear of vandalism. But in the case of the bristlecones, something worse happened. In 1964, there was another one nicknamed Prometheus that was believed to be the oldest tree. The US Forest Service sent a guy in with a chainsaw to cut it down so they could verify its age. It turned out to be over 4900 years old. No older bristlecones have been found. Other forestry people were sufficiently outraged by this that it turned into a standard textbook-level warning, and people who study the oldest bristlecones refuse to report their locations, to protect them from the Forest Service as well as from common vandals.
Actually, there are a number of plants that aren't trees that are known to be older, but their living parts are all young. The textbook example is the creosote bush, which sends up offshoots around its edges, and then the central parts die off. This produces "creosote rings" that spread out across the landscape. A few have been found whose oldest remnants are dated to over 11,000 years. But the living parts are only a few centuries old.
The question "What's the oldest living thing?" turns out to be trickier to answer than you might expect. There are more than one way to define a "living thing", and there are several ways to measure age.
Despite American arrogance, all companies are required to abide by the laws of the customer's nation if they do business there.
Except, of course, in the US itself, where fines imposed on corporate "persons" for violating laws are typically much less than the corporation has earned from the violations.
At the extreme, I've read a few studies that compared the fines for things (bad drugs, contaminated food, etc.) that killed people, and reported that the per-casualty fine was typically less than $500, often under $100. You and I would be jailed and/or executed for selling things that kill people; corporations usually just get what amounts to a slight surcharge on their taxes.
Of course, you are free to believe whatever you like about how companies are required to follow laws. But being fined a few thousand bucks for a violation that raked in millions isn't much of an incentive to be law abiding.
How did this not (yet) get modded +5 insightful?
Because you just blew away your mod point by commenting. But I can fix it for you ...
(Oops!)
"Jesus man, pot doesn't need a conspiracy theory. You're saying that pot laws drive illegal immegration purposefully? To what end?"
Never ascribe to conspiracy what can adequately be explained by stupidity.
Except that in this case, there seems to be plenty of historical evidence for a specific "conspiracy" that resulted in hemp/marijuana being included in the US's new drug laws in the 1920s. The conspiracy was driven by William Randolph Hearst, who wanted to block development of a new paper-making process that could turn hemp into very cheap paper. This would have destroyed much of the value of his extensive forestry holdings that produced pulpwood. There was already the usual objection to marijuana from the religious "moral guardian" crowd, and he effectively teamed up with them to get hemp outlawed.
I wonder how he would have reacted to the Internet ... ;-)
Anyway, others haven't been saying that pot was made illegal explicitly to produce illegal immigration, etc. The claim is that such laws have effects that were quite well understood at the time (especially considering what happened with Prohibition), and the people pushing for the drug laws did so knowing full well what the consequences would be. This didn't matter to them, because the important thing was the moral issue of making drugs illegal. The fact that Prohibition failed simply taught them that they hadn't pushed hard enough, and that they needed to ignore all social side effects of such laws if they wanted to get their prohibitions into the laws.
But nobody is actually claiming that the drug laws were passed to produce illegal immigration (or the drug-based criminal enterprises or ...). They're just claiming that nobody can credibly pretend to ignorance of the consequences of such laws.
... it was America and the incredibly popular American eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis in the first place.
Well, that's part of the story. But a number of historians have claimed that the main antecedents that the Nazis used to excuse their genocide were earlier. They repeatedly mentioned the world's reaction to 1) the Turkish genocide against the Armenians in the 1910-1920 years, and 2) the American extermination campaign against the Plains Indians during the last half of the 19th century. They pointed out that these genocides were documented, but the rest of the world mostly just ignored them, and didn't hold them against the Turks or Americans. So, the Nazis argued, the rest of the world would also ignore the extermination of the European Jews.
To a great degree, they were correct in this prediction. The outrage against the Jewish extermination developed mostly after WWII was over, when the photos and stories started to leak out and were widely published. Before 1945, the rest of the world (even the Allies) mostly ignored what was going on in the concentration/extermination camps. There were even cases of fleeing Jewish refugees who were refused entry to other countries, on the grounds that they were (in current terminology) "illegal aliens" who were sent back home.
Actually, it's hard to find a country of any size that doesn't have history like this. So it's basically wrong to attribute it to any group of people, especially any national or political group. It's better to recognize that, when conditions permit, people who commit such atrocities will emerge in any society, and they will carry out atrocities until those in power stop them. If the people in power quietly support them, they will kill a lot of people. The Nazis may be "poster children" for this, but it's easy to find bad examples just about anywhere in the world.
For a more recent example, look into the events in Rwanda in 1994, and pay special attention to the reactions in the rest of the world. Nobody stepped in to stop the killing, even when the news media reported it widely.
It's called a "slippery slope". One "right" at a time and we may find ourselves in Nazi land again.
Except that this is America. It's not and never has been "Nazi land". The appropriate phrase would be "McCarthy Land", as in Joe McCarthy. Not quite as horrific as the Nazis, since he and his ilk didn't kill people by the millions. But still awful enough to serve as a warning to us all.
Those of us who were kids in the 1950s or earlier know that it's nothing new in the US of A. There has long been pressure to go back to that time, including returning women to the kitchen, retracting the Negro^WColored^WBlack^African-American vote, etc., etc., etc.
The appropriate slogan here is probably that old one about the price of liberty ...
It's a standard webkit based HTML5 browser since OS6 which puts it exactly on par with safari.
So, just out of curiosity, does it also have the same major usability killer as Safari on the iPhone and iPad? I'm talking, of course, about the way that it formats text, drawing it for a window much larger than the screen, and then shrinking it (and the font size) to illegibility. And not "reflowing" if you rotate the screen, showing that it's equally badly formatted for both layouts. To make it legible, you have to enlarge it to get a readable font, and then scroll back and forth horizontally to read each line.
Funny thing, I've asked about this on Apple's support forums. All the answers I got were of the form "Yeah, I've complained about that for years, and found no answer." A few people have said that the answer is to trade your iPhone or iPad in for an Android-based one that has a browser that knows how to format text. Actually, I recently found a simpler solution on my wife's iPhone: Install the Opera browser. It works fine, and does quite a good job of formatting simple text.
Part of the puzzle is that nobody can get an explanation from Apple for why it works so poorly. The dominant theory is that it's a ruse to get people to use their "apps" rather than their browser, the "walled garden" theory, but there's no direct support for this idea. This does make a lot of web developers wary of dealing with anything that claims to be "like Safari". What's especially funny is that Safari's formatting on OS X works just fine. Maybe it's just the name that they share, with all the code different.
(It'd be interesting if someone here at /. described a solution to the problem, when the Apple forums come up with a blank. If it really does HTML5, it should be able to ask the size of its screen and font.)
Oh, stop it, you... with your facts and your big picture... we must all partake in the blood orgy of applehate!
Heh. While it may be fun to pick on the Big Guy, there's a lot of history showing that that won't be effective, and more general solutions are needed.
I ran across an informative historical example some years ago, when my wife and I stayed in Savannah, Georgia for a while on a vacation. Savannah was one of the earlier English settlements in the area, and has a lot of nice old buildings, many of which offer tours. One tour we took was in a large synagogue right in the middle of the old part of town. The guide explained that most of the original businessmen who settled in the town were Jewish. She theorized this was due to a mixture of the British attitude that 1) Jews make good businessmen, and 2) If we send them to the Colonies, we'll get them out of London. Anyway, this was the reason that very quickly after the colony was formed, the local council outlawed slavery, mostly due to pressure from the Jewish community. But this only lasted about 20 years. Savannah was barely surviving, and much of it was because the nearby port of Charleston could undercut their prices, because they used slaves who weren't paid at all. So Savannah's council caved and re-legalized slavery, and went on to be a major port in the area.
The situation with Apple and other "Free World" producers is basically the same. China and other Asian countries can radically undercut production prices, because they have a local, growing population living in abject poverty who can be hired as laborers at semi-starvation wages. The workers have no legal rights, and (as the news stories make clear) can easily be fired for any or no reason at all. An injury that interferes with productivity means the worker is kicked out. This includes cases where the workers are poisoned by the toxic chemicals they're required to work with (and don't understand until it's too late). If a worker speaks out, it means dismissal and a permanent record that prevents subsequent employment anywhere else. Or jail.
But the fact is, corporations like Apple (or Walmart or ...) aren't really in a position to do much about this. Like the early businesses in Savannah, if they choose to Do the Right Thing, it'll merely make them uncompetitive. Apple has caved, and moved production to the cheapest countries. As have most American corporations. We should be criticizing them, but we should face the fact that they really can't fix the problem.
The only way out of this is "government regulation" (i.e., labour laws) on an international scale. Anything less means that the production moves to the parts of the world with starvation-level wages. Transportation is now so cheap that production facilities in the world are in competition with everyone else who can make similar products. Retail outlets buy from the cheapest, which means that production dies anywhere with above-starvation wages.
If you don't like this, the only way out is to push to have it ended everywhere. Either that, or find ways to make transportation expensive once again. But that can also only happen with strong international laws, so it's unlikely to happen any time soon. Most of the transport happens in the oceans, in international waters, so a mere nation has no effective ways to impose prices on the shippers or the producers in other nations. And The Market bankrupts any company that chooses to use "expensive" workers or shipping, as it has done throughout history.
(Actually, I thought the Savannah story was an interesting example of unusual honesty about an area's history. And I remember wondering how long it would be before her employer got political pressure to fire her for saying such unpleasant things about the city's history. But if she was paid by the synagogue, it could be an interesting local political struggle. ;-)
While I agree with you, it's "should have," not "should of."
Actually, that's not quite right. The writer almost certainly speaks one of the many English dialects in which "should have" is regularly contracted to "should've", and the writer was merely trying to spell that out. The correct correction (;-) would be to rewrite it as "should've" rather than "should have".
This is a common spelling mistake in the General American dialect, and it can be attributed to poor teaching of contractions in our schools. This is the basis of a common criticism of the beginning reading texts used in many of our schools: They often "uncontract" the common contractions, most of which turn out to be mandatory in the kids' native dialects. That is, most American children have never heard the uncontracted forms, because they don't occur in the speech of the people around them (or on television ;-). This makes it more difficult for them to learn from their reading texts, which are typically written in the "official" language, which does use the uncontracted forms that are unfamiliar to the children.
The problems with "should've" are a linguistically interesting case of this. There is only a tiny phonetic difference between "should've" and "should have", with the vowel being slightly less reduced in the latter. Most people haven't been taught about such phonetic subtleties, and don't consciously hear the difference. This is made worse by the fact that "should of" is two valid English words, and the normal pronunciation would be between the other two. So saying that "should've" and "should have" are valid, while "should of" isn't, is highly confusing to someone who has only heard the first and can't hear the difference.
In such cases, spelling it as the contraction is the most reasonable way to deal with it. If a person has never heard "should have" pronounced, both that and "should of" are equally nonsensical, with no obvious mnemonic to help remember why someone else would consider one correct and the other incorrect. And "should of" makes a bit more sense, since it's pronunciation is closer to "should've" in the dialects where there is a difference. But you can avoid the problem entirely by writing the contracted form. Well, not entirely; the contracted form has that silly unpronounced 'e' at the end. Few grade-school textbooks will explain to you why that 'e' is there. ;-)
[Corporations] have WAY too much money to "invest" in lobbyists over the will of the people, ...
Lest people think this is hyperbole, you might try googling "lobbyists return on investment" (without the quotes) and read a few of the hits. Here's an informative passage from one of the articles on the first page of google hits:
Read some of the others, and you'll get a real feel for the way "the System" works these days. Treating a lobyist as an "investment" isn't a joke at all; that's exactly how the corporate world views them.
Look at my /. username, Mr. Reading Comprehension.
Ah, you're claiming to be in Brazil, pretending to be beyond the reach of US copyright corporations. They're right now tracing your message, and you'll be contacted by their thugs shortly to work out an "agreement".
To me it is ridiculous to pay an actor and author millions of dollars for a couple of weeks of work. While plumbers, electricians work harder yet get paid less.
Huh? What planet do you live on where that happens? Here on Earth, most of the actors, authors, and other artistic types get paid less than a living wage, because those millions go to the big corporations that control the distribution channels. This has been written about here and in other forums a zillion times, but apparently it hasn't gotten through to whatever planet you're living on.
We do have a new, much cheaper distribution channel that they don't control, called the Internet, and Earth's artists are starting to abandon the older corporate-controlled channels for this new one. The fuss you're reading about here is the corporate controllers' attempts to take control of the Internet, so they can shut down the new, independent distributors and continue to claim the artists' income as their own. If the people on your planet have learned how to block such a takeover, please let us know, so we can try it here.
It's true that we on Earth do have a very few commercial artist that are paid well by the old distribution corporations. This is basically a PR trick, to make the customers think that all artists get that sort of money. But the other 99.9% get close to nothing, unless they've switched over to Internet distribution. Many of us are hoping we can hold off the corporations until they've gone bankrupt, and we've established a permanent system that actually pays the artists. But, as explained in the news stories we're discussing, our governments are trying to pass laws that shut down the new startups and hand the Internet over to the big corporations. Stay tuned, and you might hear how it turns out.
But if you're an alien artist, I'd advise staying home, and not trying to sell your art here on Earth until we manage to establish a system that will actually pay you. Of course, there are a lot of Earthlings who would probably love to see/hear/taste/smell your creations; maybe you could try making them available on our Internet and see how it goes. (Actually, the Internet doesn't do taste or smell very well, so you should just stick to visual, audio, and written works of art.) But our big corporations will probably go after you if they discover you, and claim that they own the Earth rights to your work.
I am of the understanding that new growth trees sequester CO2 better than old growth ones. This makes intuitive sense as well.
Actually, the best comment on this question is probably "It's complicated ...". ;-)
It depends a lot on things like the species of tree, the conditions it's growing in, the nutrients available, etc. I've also seen comments from botanists that in general, the new growth in "harvested" forest areas generally soaks up more CO2 than do the mature trees. But this comes with a lot of qualifications, and may or may not be true in any particular case.
Biological systems are never as simple as the bumper-sticker sort of slogans that human political systems (and many /. discussions) like to work with.
But other than that, the article actually supports my point: it asserts that the two species came together at some point in the past, presumably at times that were warm.
Hmmm ... When I read that some time back, I understood it to mean that the hybridization happened during a period when the ice cap extended from North America to the British Isles (and Scandinavia). That's the easiest way to explain how polar bears happened to mingle with Irish bears. During warm times, it would be quite difficult for polar bears to reach Ireland. During times of maximum glaciation, they'd just have to follow the "coastline" along the edge of the ice cap, munching on fish and seals the whole way.
I find it sad to read this, knowing many actually think this way :'(
Well, I found it quite funny. While it's true that many people in the world (and in the US) do think like that bit of parody, I sorta suspect that not many of them are regular readers of slashdot. So there were probably only a handful of readers here who didn't just laugh at it and go on to the next message.
Of course, there is always Poe's Law to take into account. I wonder if we could actually find out whether anyone here mistook that post for a genuine, heart-felt comment. (I just know someone will reply with "Hey, I did, you insensitive clod!" But how would I know that they're not just pulling my leg?)
CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us"
Lie. Lie, and um Lie. I'd like to give the authors of that a sniff of pure CO2 to see how odorless it is.
Hmmm ... I've smelled CO2 on a number of occasions. Of course, it wasn't actually "pure", it was in the form of the "smoke" given off from dry ice. But it should have been concentrated enough to be able to smell, and it didn't have a smell. It was just cold, even a foot above the ice. So what's the pure stuff smell like?
Actually, on a number of occasions, the CO2 "smoke" did have an aroma. This was because I was working in some bio labs, where we had lots of dry ice "for research use". Some portion of it inevitably found its way into the punch bowls at various staff gatherings, where we'd have bowls of bubbly, frothing, smoking stuff that always looked sorta cool, and in fact was literally quite cool, due to the block of dry ice in the bottom of the bowls. I'd often nab a little chunk of the ice, drop it in my drink, and walk around with a glass of smoking, bubbling, evil-looking stuff, nonchalantly sipping it. The smoke smelled a lot like whatever I was drinking. It makes for some very interesting margaritas.
But the high levels of CO2 seem to be entirely inert to the human nose. And unless you're exercising vigorously, your body can easily deal with the slight rise in blood CO2 level that this produces. Any effects you feel is more likely from the C2H5OH in your drink.
And if I weren't so lazy, I'd go back and insert the <sub> tags in those formulae ... which the slashcode would strip out.
... and no, personally anecdotes aren't data
Sure they are, when you collect enough of them. ;-) A contrary saying might be that all large bodies of data are made up of nothing but insignificant, local anecdotes.
Also, there are many situations where single anecdotes are quite useful data. Thus, biologists try to keep track of the ranges of zillions of species. This primarily means keeping track of the edges of each species' range, and at the edges, a species tends to be rather sparse. A local example is that our backyard bird feeder is regularly visited by cardinals and chickadees. Not very many, as we're fairly far north in both species' winter ranges. But the few scattered reports every year of where they are seen in January is valuable data. These reports have been coming from places farther and farther north over the past couple of decades. Birders collect such "anecdotes" and send them to various databases, and have documented the range shifts for many species.
Actually, a real shocker of this sort happened here in southern New England just a few years ago. One of the regular signs of spring has always been when the first robins arrive. Several years ago, they didn't arrive at all -- because they never left. Well, some of them did, but there was a population of robins that spent the entire winter here. I watched a small flock of them in our yard all winter. This got a bit of publicity hereabouts, and it's happened most years since then. This has helped get the message across to the local population of humans that something significant is going on. The robins obviously think that Boston is now subtropical.
But I wouldn't expect the WSJ editors to notice "anecdotal evidence" of that nature. ;-)