No, you're not the only only thoroughly revolted by this, but you're in the definite minority. Ever since the TV came into people's lives in the 50s, American parents have been looking for more and more ways to get their kids to tune out so that they'll shut up. It isn't good for America's kids, and it's the growing root of America's dysfunctional attitude and miniscule attention span. If I ever have kids, I'm making damn sure that we don't have TV in my car nor cable TV in my house.
As for the last comment, what makes you think our current generation has the attention span to track al-Qaeda down? We still haven't nabbed Osama bin Laden or Sadaam Hussein, and I'll bet you money that neither failure will do a thing to hurt GWB in the polls. The majority of Americans can't even remember why we went to war with Iraq and how badly the President lied to us.
Anyone else find it ironic that the guy who's advocating this system has the same last name as the fireman protagonist from "Fahrenheit 451?"
The people who drive while watching will eventually hit something, and hopefully what they hit won't be a person. After that they'll either learn very quickly not to do it again, or go broke repairing everything they keep hitting.
Statistically speaking, it's most likely to be a car -- with at least one person inside. In the mean time, that person who may have once been a responsible driver has to suffer injury and loss of property because of the lack of responsibility of the first driver. Considering my luck in driving, I don't want to be a "learning example" for some self-possessed moron who is enjoying their "freedom" to make use of their "rightfully earned property."
By the way...
Anyone with kids knows that travelling is much, much easier if you give them something to do on long trips. DVDs in the headrests so the kids can watch/play from the back seat are a GOOD THING.
You know what my sister and I did as kids on road trips? We read BOOKS. That's right, books -- those little, fun, and informative things made out of paper that actually engage a kids mind rather than shutting it off. When we weren't doing that, we were playing with our toys or *horrified gasp* talking with our parents as a family. Maybe if more parents were interested in raising their children instead of pacifying them, our society wouldn't be so incredibly fubared right now.
I think he was referring to the fact that ALL power plants in SimCity except for hydroelectric plants will self-destruct after 50 years to force you to upgrade and replace them. My favorite cheat in SimCity 2000 was to build a pyramid of land, cover it in falling water that mysteriously comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, and then cover that with hydroelectric plant tiles. I never had to worry about irritating power plant explosions again.
Based on this, even if the lasers did go "strafing across the landscape" the biggest problem would be slightly darker tans or maybe one or two more cases a year of skin cancer:)
That's cute except for the little fact that an SPS sends down microwave, not ultra-violet, radiation. Microwaves can't cause cancer nor can they increase melatonin production.
The sad thing is that SimCity 2000 did as much to demonize microwave transmitted power as it did to popularize the idea. Glaser's original design poses very little risk to life around the unit because the beam would be very diffused. Learn more about the idea here.
I have the misfortune of owning a DI-754 dual A/B wireless AP and 4-port router. Ever since I updated it to the latest firmware (which was last updated in December of 2002), the router has locked up about 4-5 times/week. It's extremely irritating because my computer relies on the router to connect to the internet, it most frequently locks up over night, and it's situated in my roommate's room who doesn't wake up until long after I've gone to work in the morning. If I didn't have a neighbor with an unprotected connection to leech off of in the mornings, I would've thrown the damn thing in the garbage months ago.
Of course, D-Link's technical support is utterly useless on the issue. All they said was to reflash the firmware on the machine, which did nothing to help. The main reason I went with D-Link was the fact that I could configure the router without a Windows machine, but now I could just care less. I'm never buying another D-Link products.
(Oh, and on top of all that, the 802.11a range on the unit is atrocious. I can't even get it to work more than ten feet away from the unit. I should've gone with a 802.11g setup.)
Request for the future. I know you said SPOILERS in the title, but I missed that until I had already read the first spoiler, which I really didn't want to know. You might want to put it at the top of the body of the message too next time for people who foolishly just skim the articles like me.
Rent it, but fast-forward through the intro until you see a guy wake up in a bathtub. The intro of Keifer Sutherland's character explaining the setup was obviously a Hollywood edit to dumb-down the movie for people who just wouldn't "get" what was going on from watching the story develop. Everything will eventually be explained later for the sake of the main character anyway, and it's much more absorbing if you know nothing about what's going on going into it.
It's a neurotoxin, just like Asparthame (Nutra-Sweet), only more people are affected by MSG than Asparthame.
I call Shenannigans! Shenannigans!
The whole bit about Aspartame being a neurotoxin is an internet urban legend. It has absolutely no basis in science. In particular, the claim about methanol poisoning from digesting the stuff is just wrongheaded since you get far more from drinking an equivalent amount of fruit juice or beer.
Furthermore, the G in MSG is glutamate, an amino acid and is pretty safe. This is the component that people claim is a neurotoxin. It is true that glutamate can do nerve damage in high doses, but consuming MSG in food will not bring blood glutamate levels that high. You get a good amount of the amino acid from just breaking down proteins from plant and animal sources in the body. By the way, the reason that MSG works as a "flavor enhancer" is because the tongue actually has a fifth chemical receptor beyond those of salty, sweet, sour, and bitter -- one that bonds to glutamate.
The DMCA and EUCD are both legislation that implements treaties already agreed to in the 90s in the WIPO, which I believe is very closely related to the WTO. The TRIPS accord which also has had effects on copyright and patent laws came out of the WTO. In both cases, treaties were signed and then it was left up to the legislators to find a way to implement them fully to avoid trade penalties. This is a decision-making process several steps removed from the American people and from a democratic system.
The US rarely gets slapped for trade imbalances. In the two most prominent cases I can think of off the top of my head, a major industrialized nation was hurt by our actions. In the case of the US steel tariffs, Japan (at G8 country) and South Korea have been hit and have loudly complained. In the case of the incident over the EU's objection to Chiquita entering the European banana market, a tariffs war between the EU and America cost G8 countries money.
In the mean time, the US is quietly but aggresively pursuing action against compulsory licensing of AIDS drugs that could save millions of lives in Africa to uphold its trade advantage against smaller generic manufacturers. It's pushing for broader protection of agricultural patents on genetically engineered crop seeds to be sold to third world farmers. It's pushing for enhanced copyright laws and mandated copy protections at the expense of fair use to help out its entrenched content industry. Guess what? Our views win out much of the time (with the exception of drug patents where the WHO has gotten involved). It's just disgusting.
Beautiful Quote. I take it that you don't understand that the term means an absence of tarriffs, targeted taxes and or impediments towards imported products in exchange for similar relaxation against exported products.
I guess you don't understand that "Bipartisanship" means enacting legislation with a spirit of compromise and cooperation in the US two-party system. In common usage, it's used whenever one party tries to block or modify legislation introduced by the other party that they disagree with. They're accused of "bipartisanship" by the party the bill belongs to as an attempt to give the impression that they're "uncompromising" and that it's "partisan politics," which has also gotten an unfair "dirty" feeling to it. In other words, you've completely missed the point of what I was saying.
Free Trade is a wonderful idea. I just wish that the people thumping their chests the loudest for it actually wanted it to happen instead of only waving its flag whenever other countries don't lower tariffs that they don't like all while sputtering justifications for their own tariffs.
Your government is a member. Same as the EU etc. You do remember voting don't you?
No. Actually, I don't remember voting for our representative on the WTO and WIPO. Funny how the DMCA, or the WIPO Copyright Treaties Implementation Act, passed in the House and Senate under unaccountable voice vote as if to shield Congress against payback in the polls. A lot of treaties get rubber-stamped through Congress that way as part of our obligations to the UN. This is the undemocratic part. These treaties are rarely if ever discussed by our Congressmen who instead sign-on to whatever our trade representatives (who always represent our business interests over any other concerns) sign us up for.
No more than George W. Bush and Mother Teresa are morally equal. You're wrong -- righteousness is relevant in your eyes if you're pushing our current administration as the Good Guys. This is an administration that has may have deliberately misreported intelligence information to its people to justify a war that has cost over 7000 Iraqi civilians their lives and injured 20,000 more. Maybe the rest of the Iraqis will be better off, but it's pure utilitarian philosophy so say that that justifies the death of the 7000 others.
This is also the same administration that authored the PATRIOT Act and that wanted to have citizens spy on each other. This is the same administration that keeps protesters walled off from the president in so-called "Free Speech" zones. This is the same administration that has awarded expensive civil contracts in the reconstruction of Iraq to the vice president's former oil company without competitive bidding. This is the same administration that continues to fund warlord butchers in Columbia at the expense of lives in the name of fighting drugs.
The United States of America was founded on the principle that freedom is an inalienable right of ALL people.
Yeah, too bad we're currently tossing those rights out the window in our own country in the name of security over freedom via the PATRIOT Act. We also don't seem to be applying the rights of a fair trial, of habeus corpus, and of counsel with an attorney to the captured Taleban soldiers (who happen to be a part of "ALL people").
It is not hypocritical of the US to engage in behaviors that we find unacceptable for others.
You do realize that that is the definition of hypocrisy, right?
I'm embarrased that my government, arguably the world's greatest proponent of free trade and the WTO...
I'm sorry, but you've bought into the propoganda of the US and the WTO. "Free trade" has never been anything but a weasel word along the lines of "bipartisanship." What the person who says it really means is that they want things to go their way, and they want a nice word to demonize their opponents who don't knuckle under to their demands. The WTO basically exists to ensure the continued dominance of the Western world over the rest of the planet. Just look on their increasing emphasis on intellectual property laws which only benefit rich countries like America, Japan, and the European nations at the expense of Africa and South America. Particularly, look at the WTO's opinions on medical patents and patents on genetically engineered organisms. The only honest areas for debate in the WTO are when the G8 countries disagree over something, like Europe's refusal to accept GM food, Japan's rice tariffs, and America's steel tariffs.
The WTO is nothing but an undemocratic avenue for the industrialized world's major business interests to foist treaties on us that must be turned into laws like the DMCA or the EUCD.
To moot means to bring up for discussion. The word has fallen out of usage in American English (at least).
The adjective
moot is originally a legal term going back to the mid-16th century. It derives from the noun moot, in its sense of a hypothetical case argued as an exercise by law students. Consequently, a moot question is one that is arguable or open to debate. But in the mid-19th century people also began to look at the hypothetical side of moot as its essential meaning, and they started to use the word to mean "of no significance or relevance." Thus, a moot point, however debatable, is one that has no practical value. A number of critics have objected to this use, but 59 percent of the Usage Panel accepts it in the sentence The nominee himself chastised the White House for failing to do more to support him, but his concerns became moot when a number of Republicans announced that they, too, would oppose the nomination. When using moot one should be sure that the context makes clear which sense is meant.
If you like fine-grained control over cookies like I do, use Firebird or Camino. You can set the browser to only accept cookies from certain sites, and you never have to fiddle with those sites again. In Safari, you have to manually turn on and off ALL cookies blocking to use sites that have cookies. This means that you can't block ad company cookies while allowing cookies for a shopping site, for example.
Because we get them used to and comfortable with the concept of the government tracking their every movement when they grow up. If we don't imbue in their mind the wrongess of this being done to them, they'll be totally prepared and calmly waiting for when the next megalomaniac in charge gets the idea to finally implement the Big Brother society that will be the end of democracy.
If you're really unlucky, you might still be alive when that happens.
The point is that it can be safely kept in storage for much longer at room temperature (which is a huge boon for developing countries) and doesn't require type-matching (which is a minor speedup for emergency care). Furthermore, it can apparently eventually be made from non-human sources. This is, in every way, cool.
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No, you're not the only only thoroughly revolted by this, but you're in the definite minority. Ever since the TV came into people's lives in the 50s, American parents have been looking for more and more ways to get their kids to tune out so that they'll shut up. It isn't good for America's kids, and it's the growing root of America's dysfunctional attitude and miniscule attention span. If I ever have kids, I'm making damn sure that we don't have TV in my car nor cable TV in my house.
As for the last comment, what makes you think our current generation has the attention span to track al-Qaeda down? We still haven't nabbed Osama bin Laden or Sadaam Hussein, and I'll bet you money that neither failure will do a thing to hurt GWB in the polls. The majority of Americans can't even remember why we went to war with Iraq and how badly the President lied to us.
Anyone else find it ironic that the guy who's advocating this system has the same last name as the fireman protagonist from "Fahrenheit 451?"
The people who drive while watching will eventually hit something, and hopefully what they hit won't be a person. After that they'll either learn very quickly not to do it again, or go broke repairing everything they keep hitting.
Statistically speaking, it's most likely to be a car -- with at least one person inside. In the mean time, that person who may have once been a responsible driver has to suffer injury and loss of property because of the lack of responsibility of the first driver. Considering my luck in driving, I don't want to be a "learning example" for some self-possessed moron who is enjoying their "freedom" to make use of their "rightfully earned property."
By the way...
Anyone with kids knows that travelling is much, much easier if you give them something to do on long trips. DVDs in the headrests so the kids can watch/play from the back seat are a GOOD THING.
You know what my sister and I did as kids on road trips? We read BOOKS. That's right, books -- those little, fun, and informative things made out of paper that actually engage a kids mind rather than shutting it off. When we weren't doing that, we were playing with our toys or *horrified gasp* talking with our parents as a family. Maybe if more parents were interested in raising their children instead of pacifying them, our society wouldn't be so incredibly fubared right now.
I think he was referring to the fact that ALL power plants in SimCity except for hydroelectric plants will self-destruct after 50 years to force you to upgrade and replace them. My favorite cheat in SimCity 2000 was to build a pyramid of land, cover it in falling water that mysteriously comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, and then cover that with hydroelectric plant tiles. I never had to worry about irritating power plant explosions again.
Based on this, even if the lasers did go "strafing across the landscape" the biggest problem would be slightly darker tans or maybe one or two more cases a year of skin cancer :)
That's cute except for the little fact that an SPS sends down microwave, not ultra-violet, radiation. Microwaves can't cause cancer nor can they increase melatonin production.
The sad thing is that SimCity 2000 did as much to demonize microwave transmitted power as it did to popularize the idea. Glaser's original design poses very little risk to life around the unit because the beam would be very diffused. Learn more about the idea here.
I have the misfortune of owning a DI-754 dual A/B wireless AP and 4-port router. Ever since I updated it to the latest firmware (which was last updated in December of 2002), the router has locked up about 4-5 times/week. It's extremely irritating because my computer relies on the router to connect to the internet, it most frequently locks up over night, and it's situated in my roommate's room who doesn't wake up until long after I've gone to work in the morning. If I didn't have a neighbor with an unprotected connection to leech off of in the mornings, I would've thrown the damn thing in the garbage months ago.
Of course, D-Link's technical support is utterly useless on the issue. All they said was to reflash the firmware on the machine, which did nothing to help. The main reason I went with D-Link was the fact that I could configure the router without a Windows machine, but now I could just care less. I'm never buying another D-Link products.
(Oh, and on top of all that, the 802.11a range on the unit is atrocious. I can't even get it to work more than ten feet away from the unit. I should've gone with a 802.11g setup.)
Thanks, jackass. We have porn-monitoring software at my workplace, and I probably just got tagged.
Naievity?
Request for the future. I know you said SPOILERS in the title, but I missed that until I had already read the first spoiler, which I really didn't want to know. You might want to put it at the top of the body of the message too next time for people who foolishly just skim the articles like me.
Rent it, but fast-forward through the intro until you see a guy wake up in a bathtub. The intro of Keifer Sutherland's character explaining the setup was obviously a Hollywood edit to dumb-down the movie for people who just wouldn't "get" what was going on from watching the story develop. Everything will eventually be explained later for the sake of the main character anyway, and it's much more absorbing if you know nothing about what's going on going into it.
Is cannabis a grass? If not, then why do habitual users of MJ call it "grass"?
Is cannabis cookware? If not, then why do habitual users of MJ call is "pot?"
Hence, tomatoes are legally vegetables in the US, botany be damned.
So is ketchup if you listen to the Reagan administration.
As does my ability to spell said language....
The idea that the grammar and vocabulary of the English language is a subest of the Laws of Nature horrifies and disturbs me.
It's a neurotoxin, just like Asparthame (Nutra-Sweet), only more people are affected by MSG than Asparthame.
I call Shenannigans! Shenannigans!
The whole bit about Aspartame being a neurotoxin is an internet urban legend. It has absolutely no basis in science. In particular, the claim about methanol poisoning from digesting the stuff is just wrongheaded since you get far more from drinking an equivalent amount of fruit juice or beer.
Furthermore, the G in MSG is glutamate, an amino acid and is pretty safe. This is the component that people claim is a neurotoxin. It is true that glutamate can do nerve damage in high doses, but consuming MSG in food will not bring blood glutamate levels that high. You get a good amount of the amino acid from just breaking down proteins from plant and animal sources in the body. By the way, the reason that MSG works as a "flavor enhancer" is because the tongue actually has a fifth chemical receptor beyond those of salty, sweet, sour, and bitter -- one that bonds to glutamate.
The DMCA and EUCD are both legislation that implements treaties already agreed to in the 90s in the WIPO, which I believe is very closely related to the WTO. The TRIPS accord which also has had effects on copyright and patent laws came out of the WTO. In both cases, treaties were signed and then it was left up to the legislators to find a way to implement them fully to avoid trade penalties. This is a decision-making process several steps removed from the American people and from a democratic system.
The US rarely gets slapped for trade imbalances. In the two most prominent cases I can think of off the top of my head, a major industrialized nation was hurt by our actions. In the case of the US steel tariffs, Japan (at G8 country) and South Korea have been hit and have loudly complained. In the case of the incident over the EU's objection to Chiquita entering the European banana market, a tariffs war between the EU and America cost G8 countries money.
In the mean time, the US is quietly but aggresively pursuing action against compulsory licensing of AIDS drugs that could save millions of lives in Africa to uphold its trade advantage against smaller generic manufacturers. It's pushing for broader protection of agricultural patents on genetically engineered crop seeds to be sold to third world farmers. It's pushing for enhanced copyright laws and mandated copy protections at the expense of fair use to help out its entrenched content industry. Guess what? Our views win out much of the time (with the exception of drug patents where the WHO has gotten involved). It's just disgusting.
Beautiful Quote. I take it that you don't understand that the term means an absence of tarriffs, targeted taxes and or impediments towards imported products in exchange for similar relaxation against exported products.
I guess you don't understand that "Bipartisanship" means enacting legislation with a spirit of compromise and cooperation in the US two-party system. In common usage, it's used whenever one party tries to block or modify legislation introduced by the other party that they disagree with. They're accused of "bipartisanship" by the party the bill belongs to as an attempt to give the impression that they're "uncompromising" and that it's "partisan politics," which has also gotten an unfair "dirty" feeling to it. In other words, you've completely missed the point of what I was saying.
Free Trade is a wonderful idea. I just wish that the people thumping their chests the loudest for it actually wanted it to happen instead of only waving its flag whenever other countries don't lower tariffs that they don't like all while sputtering justifications for their own tariffs.
Your government is a member. Same as the EU etc. You do remember voting don't you?
No. Actually, I don't remember voting for our representative on the WTO and WIPO. Funny how the DMCA, or the WIPO Copyright Treaties Implementation Act, passed in the House and Senate under unaccountable voice vote as if to shield Congress against payback in the polls. A lot of treaties get rubber-stamped through Congress that way as part of our obligations to the UN. This is the undemocratic part. These treaties are rarely if ever discussed by our Congressmen who instead sign-on to whatever our trade representatives (who always represent our business interests over any other concerns) sign us up for.
Idi Amin and Tony Blair are morally equal?
No more than George W. Bush and Mother Teresa are morally equal. You're wrong -- righteousness is relevant in your eyes if you're pushing our current administration as the Good Guys. This is an administration that has may have deliberately misreported intelligence information to its people to justify a war that has cost over 7000 Iraqi civilians their lives and injured 20,000 more. Maybe the rest of the Iraqis will be better off, but it's pure utilitarian philosophy so say that that justifies the death of the 7000 others.
This is also the same administration that authored the PATRIOT Act and that wanted to have citizens spy on each other. This is the same administration that keeps protesters walled off from the president in so-called "Free Speech" zones. This is the same administration that has awarded expensive civil contracts in the reconstruction of Iraq to the vice president's former oil company without competitive bidding. This is the same administration that continues to fund warlord butchers in Columbia at the expense of lives in the name of fighting drugs.
The United States of America was founded on the principle that freedom is an inalienable right of ALL people.
Yeah, too bad we're currently tossing those rights out the window in our own country in the name of security over freedom via the PATRIOT Act. We also don't seem to be applying the rights of a fair trial, of habeus corpus, and of counsel with an attorney to the captured Taleban soldiers (who happen to be a part of "ALL people").
It is not hypocritical of the US to engage in behaviors that we find unacceptable for others.
You do realize that that is the definition of hypocrisy, right?
I'm embarrased that my government, arguably the world's greatest proponent of free trade and the WTO...
I'm sorry, but you've bought into the propoganda of the US and the WTO. "Free trade" has never been anything but a weasel word along the lines of "bipartisanship." What the person who says it really means is that they want things to go their way, and they want a nice word to demonize their opponents who don't knuckle under to their demands. The WTO basically exists to ensure the continued dominance of the Western world over the rest of the planet. Just look on their increasing emphasis on intellectual property laws which only benefit rich countries like America, Japan, and the European nations at the expense of Africa and South America. Particularly, look at the WTO's opinions on medical patents and patents on genetically engineered organisms. The only honest areas for debate in the WTO are when the G8 countries disagree over something, like Europe's refusal to accept GM food, Japan's rice tariffs, and America's steel tariffs.
The WTO is nothing but an undemocratic avenue for the industrialized world's major business interests to foist treaties on us that must be turned into laws like the DMCA or the EUCD.
0.5% Profit!!!
Now we know why the "New Economy" failed.
To moot means to bring up for discussion. The word has fallen out of usage in American English (at least).
-- The American Heritage Dictionary
If you like fine-grained control over cookies like I do, use Firebird or Camino. You can set the browser to only accept cookies from certain sites, and you never have to fiddle with those sites again. In Safari, you have to manually turn on and off ALL cookies blocking to use sites that have cookies. This means that you can't block ad company cookies while allowing cookies for a shopping site, for example.
It's gonna be real funny when the principal sees 50 kids all go to the same stall, though.
Because we get them used to and comfortable with the concept of the government tracking their every movement when they grow up. If we don't imbue in their mind the wrongess of this being done to them, they'll be totally prepared and calmly waiting for when the next megalomaniac in charge gets the idea to finally implement the Big Brother society that will be the end of democracy.
If you're really unlucky, you might still be alive when that happens.
The point is that it can be safely kept in storage for much longer at room temperature (which is a huge boon for developing countries) and doesn't require type-matching (which is a minor speedup for emergency care). Furthermore, it can apparently eventually be made from non-human sources. This is, in every way, cool.