You joke and all, but this is the kind of thing I've always hoped to see from the editors of Slashdot. This story was submitted in such a fashion to (intentionally or not) start off a huge hysterical flamewar. Hemos actually did some quick research and posted accurate info on a very important case.
Um... both? There is a fine line between what's acceptable to do for yourself (work hard to buy what you want) and what's not (just steal it from the damn store).
All you can say for businesses is that they don't have as far to fall to act unethically for their own profit. This is why I don't trust publicly traded companies at all. With the executives forced to answer only to making their shareholders temporarily richer, it's no wonder we have companies like Enron, Monsanto, Haliburton, and Microsoft.
Let's lay the blame where it really belongs. It's the elected officials, returning favors to campaign donors and friends in business, who are stealing from the people.
If the government is the thugs, the businesses are the dons putting out the hits and reaping the rewards.
You know, I never, ever thought that I would side with Scalia over Ginsburg in my life, but what the hell where those 5 thinking when they allowed this?
I think you're confusing vertical and horizontal integration.
When Dahmler-Chrysler was formed, two companies that competed in the same space with the same type of products got rid of redundant offering within the same space. This is horizontal integration. This is not what Microsoft did.
When Standard Oil bought up all the producers of oil barrels to deny their competitors access, it was performing vertical integration to remove tools needed by competitors. This is what Microsoft did.
Microsoft has bought a product that makes UNIX and Linux servers more attractive by giving them needed security protections and has destroyed it for the express purpose of making UNIX and Linux servers less attractive. This is similar to what Standard Oil did only a little less drastic because you can still sell and use non-Windows servers without virus protection unlike oil without barrels to carry it in.
Whether this is an antitrust violation is a question for experts in the area, but it's certainly anticompetitive behavior.
Actually, my last line was edited -- I guess because it used a specific religion as an analogy.
It's a shame that the only changes editors seem to make to posts are to screw them up.
My point was science fiction has become a kind of faith that brings about a sense of well being that generates a positive hope for the future - not unlike various religions I guess I shouldn't name.
I think you have a very poor exposure to SF if that's what you think. SF is merely a lumping of anything that happens in the future and involves technology that isn't currently possible into a single category to avoid having to treat it with any sort of real positive (or negative) literary criticism by critics of more "mainstream" "genres." SF as the mainstream sees it is little more than geez-whiz exploration of what the world might be like if we had this neat widget, brainless action-adventure stories, and fantasy with an electronic veneer.
The good stuff in SF stretches far beyond this, and not all of it positive about the future. Have you ever read the good dystopias like "Brave New World" and "1984?" Those were all SF when they were written. Have you looked at the cyberpunk sub-genre, especially as written by William Gibson? The genre is an embodiment of what he feared most that the world would become from the viewpoint of the 1980s.
I think science fiction did influence the early rocket pioneers, and later space scientists, but all of that is in the past. I'm wondering if the Mundane SF people are not asking writers to write stories that will inspire new generations of engineers to work on practical forms of space exploration.
I've read a lot of science fiction, especially about space travel, and none of it strikes me as realistic. The idea of mankind hopping around the galaxy like we take jets around the world today strikes me as real as the promise of living after death and walking streets of gold in paradise.
To be honest, SF that is all about the nuts and bolts of a realistic technology is general extremely boring. Unless you use that as a framework to tell a good story, you're just engaging in wishful, what-if thinking, and you aren't really writing good fiction. Good SF uses future technology as a lens to look at ourselves now or as a backdrop to enable situations in a story that wouldn't be possible in the present.
For example, "Ender's Game" uses war in a non-FTL spacefaring setting to tell the story of a disposeable genius child used by the military to innocently do what they did not have the skills to accomplish nor the compunction to knowingly do -- genocidally wipe out an alien race that they couldn't communicate with. Subsequent books in the series are about his attempt to gain redemption for his deeds.
Besides, what's to inspire our engineers today if you stick to realism? FTL is impossible, so there will be no great exploration of unknown place after unknown place. Generation ships will take more effort on the psychological and political level to get right than on the engineering level. Do you want to try inspire kids by writing stories about how to best live in a smelly tin-can watching their bones and muscles degrade, or do you want them to dream about going cool places where no one has gone before?
People hop around in ships like they were little more than jets because these stories are the same as stories about travelling the mysterious Orient on a train or sailing the Carribbean in a boat. If you quit thinking of SF as some special unique thing, you start to see how all those stories are alike because they are all about adventure in dangerous and unknown places. The spaceships are just trappings for yet another adventure story. That's why the themes have become universal -- they're just color and window dressing.
I was also asking, in a side-ways fashion, does that love of science fiction inspire a religious like belief in certain concepts because we want them to be true. People pass
Perhaps it is overreaching. After all, terrorism inherently requires violence which blacklisting doesn't involve.
However, I'll dispute that innocent clients of target ISPs are mere collateral damage. Angering them enough to force them to abandon their ISP or to force their ISP to change is the whole point of the blacklisting whole ranges of IPs that many blacklists engage in. It IS their goal to target innocents. It has been stated before, as others have commented in this article.
So you mean, appart from the fact that they lack the defining characteristic of terrorists, these people are just like terrorists.
No. That's the defining characteristic of murderers. There are other ways to commit acts of terror. Kidnapping (without murder), rape, sabotage, etc. all can be acts of terrorism if intended to shape someone's opinion or vote. Really, the place where the analogy fails is that terrorism is inherently violent, where spam blacklists are not.
However, the core issue of spam blacklists deliberately targetting innocents to get them to demand change puts them in the same philosophical camp in my mind.
Welllllll.... maybe. I did try to clearly deliniate that I did not see murder and extortion as morally equivalent, but I figured that I'll draw some flamebait mods anyway.
The point is still a good one. Is it morally reprehensible to target innocents for the purposes of shaping institutions of power? Is this not fundamentally the definition of terrorism? If you agree on both counts, then MAPS is an opt-in terrorist network dedicated to the destruction of spammers.
For some reason, journalists keep calling blackmail lists "vigilantes". But there's something they don't understand: nobody forces email system administrators to use those lists.
To be honest, I like his other analogy for blacklist maintainers -- terrorists. It's much truer to the point. Vigilante in my mind at least implies an attempt to go after the bad guys and protect the innocents thanks to the pop culture influence of TV, movies, and superhero comics.
This doesn't describe blacklist maintainers.
Blacklist maintainers are cynical, bitter, little men who care nothing for the people they hurt so long as they get a spammer. They deliberately target innocents in the hopes that the innocents will complain to the higher power to get rid of the things that bothers them. This leaves little to distinguish them from terrorists other than the fact that they don't kill people. Their deeds are less dark, but their tactics are the same as the Madrid bombers who hurt innocent people to push them to choose a government more favorable to their wishes.
Sure, nobody forces email admins to use those lists. Nobody forces people in the Middle East to contribute money to Hamas either. I don't care if you think you're funding hospitals and charity for Palestinians or if you think you're fighting to keep spam off the web -- you're paying to see people get hurt too. Stop it.
You mean that the Slashdot editors might've rejected a story whose only link requires registration while the other link is available to all? THOSE BASTARDS!
We must lead a revolution against the Slashdot editors!! BURN THEM ALL FOR SPITING MY BELOVED BALTIMORE SUN!! BURN THEM ALL!!!!
I'll ignore the anti-religious flamebait and move on to point out that the same pressures which cause one group of scientists to fudge data may exist across an entire field.
Read this Slashdot article. In the second linked article, on the forth page, the scientist who initially got a furor started about the effects of cell phones on DNA states:
Lai says there have been about 200 studies on the biological effects of cell-phone-related radiation. If you put all the ones that say there is a biological effect on one side and those that say there is no effect on the other, you'd have two piles roughly equal in size. The research splits about 50-50.
"That, in and of itself, is alarming," Lai says. But it's not the whole story. If you divide up the same 200 studies by who sponsored the research, the numbers change.
"When you look at the non-industry sponsored research, it's about three to one-three out of every four papers shows an effect," Lai says. "Then, if you look at the industry-funded research, it's almost opposite-only one out of every four papers shows an effect."
The problem, he adds, is that there is no longer funding available in the United States that isn't attached to the industry. Lai, for one, refuses to take any more industry money.
"There are too many strings attached," he maintains. "Everyone uses the analogy of the tobacco industry and what happened there. It's like letting the fox watch the henhouse." While the FDA administers cell phone radiation studies, the money comes from the industry, he adds.
The problem may be that many people reproduce the results but many other people don't. Sometimes a powerful moneyed interest throws up all sorts of funding into research with strings attached to deliberately muddy the waters. As long as there are contradicting studies, those very people's lobbyists can say, "But look! Scientists can't all come to the same conclusion on the issue! Clearly there's more to it than what your scientists are saying!"
You see this in global warming research. You see this in research on the effects of cell phones and high-tension power lines on people. You see this in research about the toxicity of industrial chemicals. You see this in pharmaceutical research on drugs like Vioxx and Celebrex. We saw this with tobacco's effects on health. As long as tainted money is the only source of money for science, results will be reproduceably deceptive. This is a tool of modern industry to prevent the public from learning facts that would get in the way of their agenda.
As someone who has been a member of both predominantly geek- and non-geek social groups at one point, I've always wondered greatly why geeks, who always complain about being tortured and abused by non-geeks, turn around and do it amongst their own geek groups? "We outnumber everyone else" is hardly the way geeks should be fighting back against the non-geeks they claim abuse them so much, and if ya ask me, I'd tell you they were acting just like the non-geeks to one another. Just goes to show you that social structures work the same, geek or not.
Exactly. The same primitive, tribal instincts are hard-wired into us all. I highly recommend the book, "The Lucifer Principle." It's about the socio-biological and evolutionary origins of many of the behaviors in mankind that lead to evil acts.
One of the more interesting studies highlighted by the book is one where they looked into social groups at summer camps. They noted that groups of boys thrown into the same cabin tended quickly to organize into similar groups with a leader, a joker, and a loser to be picked on. When they took all the leaders from all of the groups and placed them together -- you guessed it -- they organized into a similar group with a leader, a joker, and a loser to be picked on. The same thing happens in geek society when you put all the picked on kids together. They quickly organize themselves like any other pack.
Geeks pick on geeks because humans pick on humans. It's the hard-wired social dynamic of picking the alpha male, the beta male, and the omega male. Once you become aware of it, you can see it in yourself and others and try to rise above it. However, most people aren't aware and so treat others like they themselves hate to be treated.
Good name, 'cause from what I'm getting, it sounds like something that I don't want to touch with a ten foot pole.
Could someone explain exactly what they mean by, "[C]ompanies will be able to search for an RFID tag without requiring connected links between each point of the tag's travels." That sounds ludicrously ominous to me. Are we talking about tracking items with RFID tags, and are talking about being able to track them once they've left the store?
The summary isn't confusing. It's outright deceiving. It's like *gasp* the editor on duty didn't even read the linked articles before posting it.
The article clearly states that the MPAA is giving up on getting a broadcast flag mandate in the current bill mandating DTV by 2008 because the bill's sponsor objects to doing so. It then immediately goes onto say that the MPAA is pursuing other means of convincing Congress to mandate the flag. They are backing off on one single bill, not on their entire quest as the title of this article suggests.
Christianity, like every major world religion, has been abused by those who seek power. This is not Christianitiy's fault.
The problem is that every religion can be followed spiritually and superficially. Every religion teaches people to be better to others than they would instinctually be. Every religion has prohibitions against treating your fellow man with contempt for their feelings and needs.
However, the forces that lead groups of men to kill other groups of men and the tribal instincts that make up our pack animal nature. These forces make us desperately need a way to identify people as "one of us" and as "not one of us." Religious belief is one of those ways.
Religions often have ways of marking who is a member of the religion and who is not. Do fix your hair like this. Do not eat that. Do cover your head like this. Do not do that to your body. The tribal leaders amongst us rally people to their causes by telling them that their Way of Life is superior and the way that others live shows their moral bankrupcy (that is, their non-human status).
Middle Eastern terrorists invoke Islam to do this. European colonialists and American settlers in the west invoked Christianity and the "white man's burden" to do this. WW2 Japanese invoked Shinto to do this. European fascists invoked God and national pride to do this. Communist revolutions in China and Russia invoked atheism and hatred of the wealthy to do this. Even Gandhi's Hindu religion has fueled riots and massacres in India against Muslim in the decades after his death.
Christianity is a victim of nationalism like all these other religions and causes. It is the ugly primal instincts within us and those who prey upon them for power and dominance who are to blame. Christianity is subject to the will of the so-called Christians who claim to practice it. To blame Christianity for slavers, conquerors, and tyrants is the same as blaming iron for being forged into swords and guns.
I really don't like how it assumes that one hits the space bar with the right hand. I'm left-handed, and I use the left thumb 99% of the time to hit the space bar. It seems like a nice idea, but it makes too many assumptions.
If you've done a good amount of research on this subject already, do look up South Beach. It's not a crash diet. To sum it up:
1) Avoid trans-fats and saturated fats, but don't fear unsaturated fats. 2) Avoid sugar and easily digestible starches, but don't fear complex carbohydrates. 3) There is no real advice regarding protein, except that one is expected to avoid saturated fats and eat a lot of low-GI veggies.
The diet puts a lot of emphasis on glycemic index to lower your risk of developing type II diabetes as well as avoid saturated and trans-fats because the diet was written by a cardiologist who only cared about improving heart health. The fact that it reduces hunger by smoothing-out blood sugar level spikes and emphasizes foods that aren't calorie dense is a pair of coincidences that has led to it being a good weight-loss diet.
I had great success with the diet. The only problem is learning to give up all the sugary, starchy comfort foods. All it takes is a few days of indulging a sweet tooth or eating white bread at restraunts to fall off the wagon and starting craving sugars again. I've never gotten back on it properly since the last time. To be honest, next time I try it, I think I'm going to completely forsake sweet foods including "low-carb" candies and ice cremes and artificially sweetened drinks. It's not a long jump from enjoying good sweets to craving bad sweets constantly.
Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the ingredients from Kellogg's webiste doesn't seem as bad as what you posted. The bad news is that it still isn't that great.
The main ingredients are filling, enriched flour, whole grain oats, sugar, sunflower oil, and high fructose corn syrup. The filling is first and foremost corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup followed by actual strawberries, glycerine for texture, more sugars, easily digestible short-chain starches, and finally various trace preservatives and stabilizers.
Almost all of its 140 calories come from its 26g of carbohydrates (with 3g of fat and 1g of protein meaning almost nothing), half of which (13g) are sugars. Despite including whole oats and traces of wheat bran, it has less that 1g of fiber. In other words, this is little better than strawberry candy, wrapped in an oatmeal cookie with traces of a ground-up vitamin pill sprinkled over it. This is produced by Kellogg's Keebler division after all.
The good news is that Kellogg's stopped using partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oil. This is now completely trans-fat free. However, this is a bad idea for breakfast thanks to the amounts of glucose and fructose that would be coursing through your system afterwards. Elevated insulin levels are bad for long-term health, and too much fructose leads to higher triglyceride levels which are bad for the heart (and for the mind according to the article). You'd be better off eating another egg and another slice of toast or some real strawberries instead.
(Of course, I've fallen out of the habit of even eating breakfast for the past few months, so I shouldn't be casting stones too much.)
I'm curious to know exactly what other action you think that they took which could've resulted in one of the tubes exploding.
You do realize that petrol is gasoline and not nitroglycerin, right? It's not like shaking it will make it explode. Oh, wait. I know! Maybe you thought that petrol was diesel fuel and thought that they blew into one end really, really hard! Or maybe you thought that they plugged them in or held up a tesla coil in the hopes that petrol would make the tubes glow a different color!
No, seriously, there's no alternative explanation for the short blurb in the link that doesn't involve you looking foolish for getting all agitated about people thinking that they ignited the tubes deliberately. That's clearly the entire purpose of filling them with gas. I just think it's a shame that the short article neglected to mention that they'd mixed it with soap to get napalm first.
Shouldn't it be that providers can say "Whoops, sorry, no 911 with our service", and that's it? Why can't they?
They shouldn't be able to because you shouldn't be denied the ability to call 911 in an emergency just because the owner of the house/business/etc. that you're in is a cheapskate. Emergency services are one of those fundamentals of governance and society that most people agree need to be ubiquitous. In the case of VoIP, most people had a reasonable assumption of safety that wasn't present.
Currently, with many VoIP providers, you can log in to their website and explicitly tell them where your phone is. If you move, you update this info. The order currently only mandates that user-supplied info be used but strongly suggests that they expect automatic configuration in the future.
As for the traceroute question, the answer is, "Yes." However, I expect to see some resistance on this from the other telecom providers since it means that there will have to be an automated mechanism for finding out what physical line an IP address is connected to that is queriable by third parties. I can imagine all sorts of abuse for this sort of thing, but it seems to be a necessity to ensure emergency services.
Slashdot Mirror
You joke and all, but this is the kind of thing I've always hoped to see from the editors of Slashdot. This story was submitted in such a fashion to (intentionally or not) start off a huge hysterical flamewar. Hemos actually did some quick research and posted accurate info on a very important case.
Two thumbs up for Hemos.
Um... both? There is a fine line between what's acceptable to do for yourself (work hard to buy what you want) and what's not (just steal it from the damn store).
All you can say for businesses is that they don't have as far to fall to act unethically for their own profit. This is why I don't trust publicly traded companies at all. With the executives forced to answer only to making their shareholders temporarily richer, it's no wonder we have companies like Enron, Monsanto, Haliburton, and Microsoft.
Let's lay the blame where it really belongs. It's the elected officials, returning favors to campaign donors and friends in business, who are stealing from the people.
If the government is the thugs, the businesses are the dons putting out the hits and reaping the rewards.
You know, I never, ever thought that I would side with Scalia over Ginsburg in my life, but what the hell where those 5 thinking when they allowed this?
I think you're confusing vertical and horizontal integration.
When Dahmler-Chrysler was formed, two companies that competed in the same space with the same type of products got rid of redundant offering within the same space. This is horizontal integration. This is not what Microsoft did.
When Standard Oil bought up all the producers of oil barrels to deny their competitors access, it was performing vertical integration to remove tools needed by competitors. This is what Microsoft did.
Microsoft has bought a product that makes UNIX and Linux servers more attractive by giving them needed security protections and has destroyed it for the express purpose of making UNIX and Linux servers less attractive. This is similar to what Standard Oil did only a little less drastic because you can still sell and use non-Windows servers without virus protection unlike oil without barrels to carry it in.
Whether this is an antitrust violation is a question for experts in the area, but it's certainly anticompetitive behavior.
Actually, my last line was edited -- I guess because it used a specific religion as an analogy.
It's a shame that the only changes editors seem to make to posts are to screw them up.
My point was science fiction has become a kind of faith that brings about a sense of well being that generates a positive hope for the future - not unlike various religions I guess I shouldn't name.
I think you have a very poor exposure to SF if that's what you think. SF is merely a lumping of anything that happens in the future and involves technology that isn't currently possible into a single category to avoid having to treat it with any sort of real positive (or negative) literary criticism by critics of more "mainstream" "genres." SF as the mainstream sees it is little more than geez-whiz exploration of what the world might be like if we had this neat widget, brainless action-adventure stories, and fantasy with an electronic veneer.
The good stuff in SF stretches far beyond this, and not all of it positive about the future. Have you ever read the good dystopias like "Brave New World" and "1984?" Those were all SF when they were written. Have you looked at the cyberpunk sub-genre, especially as written by William Gibson? The genre is an embodiment of what he feared most that the world would become from the viewpoint of the 1980s.
I think science fiction did influence the early rocket pioneers, and later space scientists, but all of that is in the past. I'm wondering if the Mundane SF people are not asking writers to write stories that will inspire new generations of engineers to work on practical forms of space exploration.
I've read a lot of science fiction, especially about space travel, and none of it strikes me as realistic. The idea of mankind hopping around the galaxy like we take jets around the world today strikes me as real as the promise of living after death and walking streets of gold in paradise.
To be honest, SF that is all about the nuts and bolts of a realistic technology is general extremely boring. Unless you use that as a framework to tell a good story, you're just engaging in wishful, what-if thinking, and you aren't really writing good fiction. Good SF uses future technology as a lens to look at ourselves now or as a backdrop to enable situations in a story that wouldn't be possible in the present.
For example, "Ender's Game" uses war in a non-FTL spacefaring setting to tell the story of a disposeable genius child used by the military to innocently do what they did not have the skills to accomplish nor the compunction to knowingly do -- genocidally wipe out an alien race that they couldn't communicate with. Subsequent books in the series are about his attempt to gain redemption for his deeds.
Besides, what's to inspire our engineers today if you stick to realism? FTL is impossible, so there will be no great exploration of unknown place after unknown place. Generation ships will take more effort on the psychological and political level to get right than on the engineering level. Do you want to try inspire kids by writing stories about how to best live in a smelly tin-can watching their bones and muscles degrade, or do you want them to dream about going cool places where no one has gone before?
People hop around in ships like they were little more than jets because these stories are the same as stories about travelling the mysterious Orient on a train or sailing the Carribbean in a boat. If you quit thinking of SF as some special unique thing, you start to see how all those stories are alike because they are all about adventure in dangerous and unknown places. The spaceships are just trappings for yet another adventure story. That's why the themes have become universal -- they're just color and window dressing.
I was also asking, in a side-ways fashion, does that love of science fiction inspire a religious like belief in certain concepts because we want them to be true. People pass
Perhaps it is overreaching. After all, terrorism inherently requires violence which blacklisting doesn't involve.
However, I'll dispute that innocent clients of target ISPs are mere collateral damage. Angering them enough to force them to abandon their ISP or to force their ISP to change is the whole point of the blacklisting whole ranges of IPs that many blacklists engage in. It IS their goal to target innocents. It has been stated before, as others have commented in this article.
So you mean, appart from the fact that they lack the defining characteristic of terrorists, these people are just like terrorists.
No. That's the defining characteristic of murderers. There are other ways to commit acts of terror. Kidnapping (without murder), rape, sabotage, etc. all can be acts of terrorism if intended to shape someone's opinion or vote. Really, the place where the analogy fails is that terrorism is inherently violent, where spam blacklists are not.
However, the core issue of spam blacklists deliberately targetting innocents to get them to demand change puts them in the same philosophical camp in my mind.
Welllllll.... maybe. I did try to clearly deliniate that I did not see murder and extortion as morally equivalent, but I figured that I'll draw some flamebait mods anyway.
The point is still a good one. Is it morally reprehensible to target innocents for the purposes of shaping institutions of power? Is this not fundamentally the definition of terrorism? If you agree on both counts, then MAPS is an opt-in terrorist network dedicated to the destruction of spammers.
For some reason, journalists keep calling blackmail lists "vigilantes". But there's something they don't understand: nobody forces email system administrators to use those lists.
To be honest, I like his other analogy for blacklist maintainers -- terrorists. It's much truer to the point. Vigilante in my mind at least implies an attempt to go after the bad guys and protect the innocents thanks to the pop culture influence of TV, movies, and superhero comics.
This doesn't describe blacklist maintainers.
Blacklist maintainers are cynical, bitter, little men who care nothing for the people they hurt so long as they get a spammer. They deliberately target innocents in the hopes that the innocents will complain to the higher power to get rid of the things that bothers them. This leaves little to distinguish them from terrorists other than the fact that they don't kill people. Their deeds are less dark, but their tactics are the same as the Madrid bombers who hurt innocent people to push them to choose a government more favorable to their wishes.
Sure, nobody forces email admins to use those lists. Nobody forces people in the Middle East to contribute money to Hamas either. I don't care if you think you're funding hospitals and charity for Palestinians or if you think you're fighting to keep spam off the web -- you're paying to see people get hurt too. Stop it.
Aren't .OGM format movies movies that use OGG Vorbis Audio, the Ogg container, and typically some non-OGG video codec like DivX or Xvid?
You mean that the Slashdot editors might've rejected a story whose only link requires registration while the other link is available to all? THOSE BASTARDS!
We must lead a revolution against the Slashdot editors!! BURN THEM ALL FOR SPITING MY BELOVED BALTIMORE SUN!! BURN THEM ALL!!!!
I'll ignore the anti-religious flamebait and move on to point out that the same pressures which cause one group of scientists to fudge data may exist across an entire field.
Read this Slashdot article. In the second linked article, on the forth page, the scientist who initially got a furor started about the effects of cell phones on DNA states:
The problem may be that many people reproduce the results but many other people don't. Sometimes a powerful moneyed interest throws up all sorts of funding into research with strings attached to deliberately muddy the waters. As long as there are contradicting studies, those very people's lobbyists can say, "But look! Scientists can't all come to the same conclusion on the issue! Clearly there's more to it than what your scientists are saying!"
You see this in global warming research. You see this in research on the effects of cell phones and high-tension power lines on people. You see this in research about the toxicity of industrial chemicals. You see this in pharmaceutical research on drugs like Vioxx and Celebrex. We saw this with tobacco's effects on health. As long as tainted money is the only source of money for science, results will be reproduceably deceptive. This is a tool of modern industry to prevent the public from learning facts that would get in the way of their agenda.
This is effecting the people of our nation, and it's helping to shape policy in our government. The EPA has not made coal power plant treat mercury as a pollutant to clean up to meet standards set by the Clean Air Act. A senior White House environment official (and former American Petroleum Institute lobbyist) has been caught deleting findings from environmental science reports. There is a concerted effort right now to hide the truth from the American people to avoid hurting the profits of certain wealthy people in power, and science is losing.
Yeah, that's cute and all, but maybe you failed to notice the following:
Oh, but you'll correct "good" instead of "well" because YOU FAILED TO DETECT IRONY.
As someone who has been a member of both predominantly geek- and non-geek social groups at one point, I've always wondered greatly why geeks, who always complain about being tortured and abused by non-geeks, turn around and do it amongst their own geek groups? "We outnumber everyone else" is hardly the way geeks should be fighting back against the non-geeks they claim abuse them so much, and if ya ask me, I'd tell you they were acting just like the non-geeks to one another. Just goes to show you that social structures work the same, geek or not.
Exactly. The same primitive, tribal instincts are hard-wired into us all. I highly recommend the book, "The Lucifer Principle." It's about the socio-biological and evolutionary origins of many of the behaviors in mankind that lead to evil acts.
One of the more interesting studies highlighted by the book is one where they looked into social groups at summer camps. They noted that groups of boys thrown into the same cabin tended quickly to organize into similar groups with a leader, a joker, and a loser to be picked on. When they took all the leaders from all of the groups and placed them together -- you guessed it -- they organized into a similar group with a leader, a joker, and a loser to be picked on. The same thing happens in geek society when you put all the picked on kids together. They quickly organize themselves like any other pack.
Geeks pick on geeks because humans pick on humans. It's the hard-wired social dynamic of picking the alpha male, the beta male, and the omega male. Once you become aware of it, you can see it in yourself and others and try to rise above it. However, most people aren't aware and so treat others like they themselves hate to be treated.
Good name, 'cause from what I'm getting, it sounds like something that I don't want to touch with a ten foot pole.
Could someone explain exactly what they mean by, "[C]ompanies will be able to search for an RFID tag without requiring connected links between each point of the tag's travels." That sounds ludicrously ominous to me. Are we talking about tracking items with RFID tags, and are talking about being able to track them once they've left the store?
The summary isn't confusing. It's outright deceiving. It's like *gasp* the editor on duty didn't even read the linked articles before posting it.
The article clearly states that the MPAA is giving up on getting a broadcast flag mandate in the current bill mandating DTV by 2008 because the bill's sponsor objects to doing so. It then immediately goes onto say that the MPAA is pursuing other means of convincing Congress to mandate the flag. They are backing off on one single bill, not on their entire quest as the title of this article suggests.
Christianity, like every major world religion, has been abused by those who seek power. This is not Christianitiy's fault.
The problem is that every religion can be followed spiritually and superficially. Every religion teaches people to be better to others than they would instinctually be. Every religion has prohibitions against treating your fellow man with contempt for their feelings and needs.
However, the forces that lead groups of men to kill other groups of men and the tribal instincts that make up our pack animal nature. These forces make us desperately need a way to identify people as "one of us" and as "not one of us." Religious belief is one of those ways.
Religions often have ways of marking who is a member of the religion and who is not. Do fix your hair like this. Do not eat that. Do cover your head like this. Do not do that to your body. The tribal leaders amongst us rally people to their causes by telling them that their Way of Life is superior and the way that others live shows their moral bankrupcy (that is, their non-human status).
Middle Eastern terrorists invoke Islam to do this. European colonialists and American settlers in the west invoked Christianity and the "white man's burden" to do this. WW2 Japanese invoked Shinto to do this. European fascists invoked God and national pride to do this. Communist revolutions in China and Russia invoked atheism and hatred of the wealthy to do this. Even Gandhi's Hindu religion has fueled riots and massacres in India against Muslim in the decades after his death.
Christianity is a victim of nationalism like all these other religions and causes. It is the ugly primal instincts within us and those who prey upon them for power and dominance who are to blame. Christianity is subject to the will of the so-called Christians who claim to practice it. To blame Christianity for slavers, conquerors, and tyrants is the same as blaming iron for being forged into swords and guns.
We already have this technology. It's called a subwoofer, and it works whether people want to hear your music or not.
If the users of the current technology are any indication, I doubt that there will be anything worth listening to with the new technology.
I really don't like how it assumes that one hits the space bar with the right hand. I'm left-handed, and I use the left thumb 99% of the time to hit the space bar. It seems like a nice idea, but it makes too many assumptions.
If you've done a good amount of research on this subject already, do look up South Beach. It's not a crash diet. To sum it up:
1) Avoid trans-fats and saturated fats, but don't fear unsaturated fats.
2) Avoid sugar and easily digestible starches, but don't fear complex carbohydrates.
3) There is no real advice regarding protein, except that one is expected to avoid saturated fats and eat a lot of low-GI veggies.
The diet puts a lot of emphasis on glycemic index to lower your risk of developing type II diabetes as well as avoid saturated and trans-fats because the diet was written by a cardiologist who only cared about improving heart health. The fact that it reduces hunger by smoothing-out blood sugar level spikes and emphasizes foods that aren't calorie dense is a pair of coincidences that has led to it being a good weight-loss diet.
I had great success with the diet. The only problem is learning to give up all the sugary, starchy comfort foods. All it takes is a few days of indulging a sweet tooth or eating white bread at restraunts to fall off the wagon and starting craving sugars again. I've never gotten back on it properly since the last time. To be honest, next time I try it, I think I'm going to completely forsake sweet foods including "low-carb" candies and ice cremes and artificially sweetened drinks. It's not a long jump from enjoying good sweets to craving bad sweets constantly.
Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the ingredients from Kellogg's webiste doesn't seem as bad as what you posted. The bad news is that it still isn't that great.
The main ingredients are filling, enriched flour, whole grain oats, sugar, sunflower oil, and high fructose corn syrup. The filling is first and foremost corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup followed by actual strawberries, glycerine for texture, more sugars, easily digestible short-chain starches, and finally various trace preservatives and stabilizers.
Almost all of its 140 calories come from its 26g of carbohydrates (with 3g of fat and 1g of protein meaning almost nothing), half of which (13g) are sugars. Despite including whole oats and traces of wheat bran, it has less that 1g of fiber. In other words, this is little better than strawberry candy, wrapped in an oatmeal cookie with traces of a ground-up vitamin pill sprinkled over it. This is produced by Kellogg's Keebler division after all.
The good news is that Kellogg's stopped using partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oil. This is now completely trans-fat free. However, this is a bad idea for breakfast thanks to the amounts of glucose and fructose that would be coursing through your system afterwards. Elevated insulin levels are bad for long-term health, and too much fructose leads to higher triglyceride levels which are bad for the heart (and for the mind according to the article). You'd be better off eating another egg and another slice of toast or some real strawberries instead.
(Of course, I've fallen out of the habit of even eating breakfast for the past few months, so I shouldn't be casting stones too much.)
I'm curious to know exactly what other action you think that they took which could've resulted in one of the tubes exploding.
You do realize that petrol is gasoline and not nitroglycerin, right? It's not like shaking it will make it explode. Oh, wait. I know! Maybe you thought that petrol was diesel fuel and thought that they blew into one end really, really hard! Or maybe you thought that they plugged them in or held up a tesla coil in the hopes that petrol would make the tubes glow a different color!
No, seriously, there's no alternative explanation for the short blurb in the link that doesn't involve you looking foolish for getting all agitated about people thinking that they ignited the tubes deliberately. That's clearly the entire purpose of filling them with gas. I just think it's a shame that the short article neglected to mention that they'd mixed it with soap to get napalm first.
Shouldn't it be that providers can say "Whoops, sorry, no 911 with our service", and that's it?
Why can't they?
They shouldn't be able to because you shouldn't be denied the ability to call 911 in an emergency just because the owner of the house/business/etc. that you're in is a cheapskate. Emergency services are one of those fundamentals of governance and society that most people agree need to be ubiquitous. In the case of VoIP, most people had a reasonable assumption of safety that wasn't present.
Currently, with many VoIP providers, you can log in to their website and explicitly tell them where your phone is. If you move, you update this info. The order currently only mandates that user-supplied info be used but strongly suggests that they expect automatic configuration in the future.
As for the traceroute question, the answer is, "Yes." However, I expect to see some resistance on this from the other telecom providers since it means that there will have to be an automated mechanism for finding out what physical line an IP address is connected to that is queriable by third parties. I can imagine all sorts of abuse for this sort of thing, but it seems to be a necessity to ensure emergency services.