That's 386 *reported* cases. Since doctors have never heard of this disease, they don't diagnose it. We can assume the number of actual cases is somewhat higher, possibly much higher.
Think of Lyme disease. It was characterized in the late 70s and the infectious agent (a spirochete) was identified around '82 IIRC, and in the late 80s and early 90s doctors were on the lookout for it. There was a rapid rise in reported cases of Lyme throughout the 1990s; that rise had nothing to do with an increase in incidence and everything to do with awareness. Lyme disease has been infecting people globally for thousands of years. That iceman mummy they found in the Alps back in the 90s had Lyme disease, and he died 5000 years ago.
For all we know neurocysticercosis is quite common. We won't know until we look for it.
386 *reported cases*. According to TFA physicians are unaware of this disease and don't diagnose it, so we can assume that the number of actual infections is somewhat higher.
Take Lyme disease; it's not the common cold, but there have been something like thirty thousand cases in the US over the last decade, enough or a concern that "tick check" has entered our vocabulary. The infectious agent is not new; it has probably been infecting people worldwide for centuries. Even Ötzi the Iceman, the natural mummy found in the Alps in '91, had Lyme disease, and he died five thousand years ago. But until the infectious agent was identified in 1982 and the disease was given a name, and doctors began diagnosing it in the 90s, nobody knew how common and widespread it was.
Don't eat raw vegetables from fields people or dogs poop in
Don't eat raw meat.
Get regular checkups, you can always ask for blood tests to see if you have blood parasites.
I once met a farm worker activist who always washed his vegetable thoroughly because supervisors don't let immigrant farm workers take bathroom breaks. That means they go in the fields, but that's not the supervisor's problem. They also make the workers use short handled-shovels, even though it makes the work back-breaking, because it made it easy to know who was working and who was taking an unauthorized rest.
In any case, there's a simple, inexpensive answer to the problems of parasites and other pathogens in food (besides thorough washing and cooking): irradiation. If the ignorant public didn't think food irradiation would turn them into zombie mutants, you could eat rare meat, raw fish, and less than fanatically washed vegetables without any danger at all.
Look, I'm a Democrat and I'm fairly sure most Tea Partiers would call me a socialist, and even I can see that's not what Romney meant, any more than Obama meant "You didn't build your business." Romney's point, after he fumbled around for a few sentences, is that he said he was for a strong military, and that he sees supporting "the military" as being the same as supporting "the troops". That is an interesting in itself and debatable on several levels, but he clearly didn't intend to say that the troops weren't important.
Democracy in this country -- at least in terms of the political debate -- does not in the least resemble democracy as taught in our civics classes -- or as envisioned by the founders I suppose. It's not about appeal to reason, or even self-interest; it's about conditioning voters to have a negative emotional reaction to the opposition and a positive one to your candidate. It's about dumbing the electorate down. Now I happen to think the Republicans do this more than the Democrats -- if I didn't I wouldn't be a Democrat -- but Democrats are not as pure as they claim to be. Nobody's ever been that pure, and after watching the character assassination of the candidates in the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections the Democrats learned the lesson that winners don't hesitate to twist the truth to suit their purposes.
Still, I can prefer Obama's policies without demonizing Romney. Being a Massachusetts citizen I've seen Romney's governing style up close, and it's a mixed bag. He's astute enough, and under other circumstances he'd be an OK president -- let's say comparable to George Herbert Walker Bush -- but he's not someone I'd choose for the present circumstances.
You bring your opponent over to your point of view and they agree with your superior logic and evidence.
You are brought over to your opponents position and agree with their superior logic and evidence.
Unless I am mistaken, you haven't listed two way to win an argument; you've listed one way to win and one way to lose. These don't even exhaust the ways there are to end an argument.
There actually are two ways to win an argument, namely (1)You bring your opponent over to your point of view and they agree with your superior logic and evidence. (2) You bring your opponent over to your point of view through some logically irrelevant means.
The number of irrelevant means are endless: wear him down, make him feel stupid, encourage him to jump on the bandwagon... the list goes on.
Well, capitalists aren't exactly immune to ego-driven projects. Look at the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, built by a publicly traded joint stock company, and at 830m tall obviously a monument to management ego. Even after dropping rents by 40%, it only had about 17% occupancy for the residential components. The Petronas Towers in Malaysia was also created by a private developer, and currently has a 55% occupancy rate.
Pierre S. Du Pont wasn't a socialist by any means, and he underwrote in The Empire State Building. Clearly that was an ego trip. Two other "tallest buildings in the world" were being constructed at the same time in Manhattan. The Empire State Building was so inconveniently located its nickname was "the Empty State Building"; it didn't turn a profit for its first 20 years.
Shit, I don't even think we have the MATH to travel those kind of distances. The accuracy and tolerances for a trajectory that could get anywhere close to another body over light-year scale distances are all-but-impossible. It would be harder than throwing a dart in the U.S. and hitting a bullseye on a dartboard in China.
Here is where you go off the tracks. Of course we have the *math* to do it; we don't have the *lifespan* or the *energy*. As for hitting a bullseye in China, of course you won't use a dart -- that's what ballistic missiles are for, and while they can't quite get a bullseye they can get within 200m so, which is close enough. The reason they can do this is that the reentry vehicles aren't ballistic -- they make course corrections. Likewise in any trip to a nearby star, you wouldn't send the vehicle on a completely ballistic trajectory, you'd correct the trajectory periodically. If you solved the lifetime problem but not the energy problem, you'd still have to correct the spacecraft's trajectory, but it wouldn't be the energy budget-buster that constant acceleration would be. A little course correction applied early goes a long way.
Of course based on what we know, any kind of interstellar mission is completely impractical. *That's why it's worth thinking about*. If people looked at a problem, said, "I don't know how to solve that," and just threw up their hands, progress of all kinds would grind to a halt.
Now I don't think we'll see a practical design for an interstellar craft in my lifetime, so I wouldn't throw in Apollo program sized chunks of the GDP at the project. But having people with spaceflight expertise sit down from time to time and noodle about it isn't very expensive, and might turn up a few useful ideas. Arthur C. Clarke came up with the idea of geostationary communication satellites -- something which is almost inconceivably valuable to us -- because he was thinking of spaceflight, something no sensible person in 1945 would have considered a practical use of time, unless raining death down on another country was somehow involved.
From the article summary it sounds as if they have already decided on the "facts" and are simply launching an expedition to search for supporting/confirming evidence.
Oddly enough, you've got that almost right. The Aquarius instrument has been orbiting since June 2011 sending back surface salinity data -- "facts" if you prefer that term. The principal investigators on the SPURS cruise seem to be in it for the modeling data, but NASA's interest no doubt includes checking the reliability and usability of the Aquarius data.
I understand that reading the linked article is bad form, but before jumping to conclusions then working yourself up into a dudgeon, you might spend two or three minutes of quality time with Google to figure out what actually is happening. It could spare you the trouble of getting up on your high horse.
[How scientific, present conclusion, then gather data which can't rebutt conclusion, but can only show the manifestation of said conclusion.
what happened to theories?
Actually, the salinity data is already in, from NASA's Aquarius instrument on the SAC-D satellite. What they're doing is paying for part of a surface expedition that will among other things check their Aquarius results.
As for "theories", I think you mean "hypotheses". I think they're interested in how the surface data from the satellite does or does not correlate with the water underneath the surface.
NASA has a physical oceanography program because of its special capabilities in remote sensing. But while you may build a research program around a highly specialized golden hammer, it doesn't mean the golden hammer can do *everything* the program needs.
So the why here is simple: NASA's research program needed some ocean-based fieldwork done. Rather than buy and staff it's own ship, it farmed out this project to a group of academics who already had a ship (the R/V Knorr), and who had complementary research interests. Simple as that. No conspiracy to branch out into NOAA's turf, quite the opposite. If you look at the project personnel, the only government scientists are from NOAA. NASA's paying a certain fraction of the cost to fill a hole in their research program, and they've been given "primary sponsor" status as a courtesy. NOAA, NSF, ESA and the Spanish Ministry of Science are also underwriting the research.
Copyright isn't the issue per se here. The restriction on copying here is a legal hack used to induce customers into buying a package of rights, which constitute a lot of the convenience of digital formats (no more carrying boxes of tapes car). What is at stake is passing on that package of rights, not the copy.
True, he could buy an iPod for each of his daughters, put his entire music collection on each iPod and leave it to them that way. He could even burn audio CDs and do it that way. But they wouldn't have the *rights* package he paid for. They could not legally transfer those copies to their own iPhones, a right *he* enjoys. They're back to carrying, not a box of tapes but a box of devices.
This really is a fascinating question, because no matter what is decided, one side comes out with more and the other less, than what they'd have got under the traditional analog scenarios. When music was on vinyl, giving that record to another person in effect transferred the rights to listen to the music, but the utility of that right degraded with the physical copy.every time the record was played. Thus you might well have inherited a copy of the Beatles *White Album* from your parents, but if you want to listen to the music regularly there's a good chance you've bought a digital copy. The physical album probably stays on the shelf and comes down only for special occasions.
If iTunes rights cannot be inherited, Mr Willis can't leave his offspring something he has paid for and enjoys. If they *can* he leaves them perpetual utility and the next generation sale won't be made. Of course maybe that's a good thing, given perpetual copyright extension.
And I've met Muslims who won't touch food that's been cooked with wine as an ingredient. I asked one my friends about this and she said, "there's probably no rational reason not to, but you have to draw the line somewhere and total prohibition is easier."
By the way, I've also met Christians who don't love their neighbor, turn the other cheek, or pick the log out of their own eye.
I've yet to seen a case of blindness caused by home brewed mead.
Having made mead myself, I'd say that until it's aged a year or two you can probably strip paint with it. The problem is that honey, unlike malt, isn't that nutritious, and fermentation proceeds opportunistically, starting with the easy step, converting sugar to long chain alcohols, then breaking down the long chain alcohols to ethanol. Beer fermentation completes in weeks; the same batch of mead that is very good at two years at six months is dominated by compounds used as industrial solvents and paint thinners. Will it blind you? Possibly; I can't imagine being desperate enough to drink the stuff.
Obama didn't inherit shit. He asked for the chance to do the task just like anyone else who applies for a job. He made a promise that if he couldn't do the job by his own metric that he wouldn't seek re-election. The man is a fucking liar. Love him or hate him, those are the facts.
You are missing the point. The question isn't whether we should feel sorry for Obama, the question is whether he is an incompetent president. For that you have to consider what it would be reasonable for him to have accomplished, and that depends on the situation when he took office.
Actually, the White House has three kitchens, an executive chef, four sous chefs and an executive *pastry* chef (the current officeholder is the author of "Desserts for Dummies" -- make of that what you will, but he *was* hired in the Bush Administration). The White House has a large kitchen and wait staff as well -- all to host state dinners that will blow jaded diplomats' socks off. Since the White House is in effect the world's largest three-star restaurant, and most of that capability goes unused most of the time, it hardly makes sense to make the Commander-in-chief microwave his own Hot Pockets.
The White House also has an official calligrapher who does insanely perfect work.
No,the GP's talking about something different than having a bunch of fungible people pull on a rope.
Suppose some designers want a device to be sleek and lightweight. The engineers naturally choose plastic, but the designers are displeased -- the prototype feels cheap and flimsy. This is nonsense to the engineers: the numbers say the design is rugged and light, and numbers don't lie. They think the designers want the impossible: for the product to be light and heavy at the same time.
The reason "synergy" hasn't happened is that people have split into cliques of like-minded people, working at cross purposes to the other group and reinforcing conformity of thinking in their own. If they worked together they'd realize that "feels solid in the hand" is something distinct from "rugged", then produce a device that is lighter than the competition but slightly heavier than it looks.
This is "synergy" in the sense the GP is using it. More commonly, "synergy" means to have two or more complementary business areas. This is a real phenomenon which is easier to achieve and natural in small businesses where people tend to have a clearer view of the big picture -- at least until the dis-economies of scale force them to focus on one business area. With a larger businesses it takes planning.
The problem is that "synergy" scenarios are often poorly thought out. I worked for a small software developer that sold hardware as well, so we could be a "one stop shop" for our clients. Other aspects of the "one stop shop" worked well: training services led to custom software projects which led to products which led to more training. The problem with hardware was that it's a commodity. We had to sell a high precision GPS handhelds at market prices, but margins were small. Our customer base didn't produce enough volume to have specialists, so hardware was a big, unprofitable distraction.
The problem *isn't* that we have too many buzzwords, it's that we don't have enough critical thinking. "Synergy" is a valid concept, but it takes more than a happy scenario and a label to slap on it to make that scenario happen.
Well, this is the biggest problem of any political system: every power we give the government is subject to abuse. Yes, the Soviets used mental illness as a pretense to silence dissidents, but the also used the power a state has to imprison people for similar purposes -- as China does today. Everybody (except for anarchists) think the state should *have* the power to imprison people, but it's probably the single most abused power there is.
We give the police the privilege of bashing in somebody's door and searching the premises, but we don't expect or want that ever to be done to *us*. What makes government powers like that tolerable is that they are restricted by law, that the process is transparent, leaves a paper trail, and can be challenged.
I think here we see another of the mechanisms that makes the government power to detain people tolerable. Even if police never made procedural errors (which of course is untrue), they'd still occasionally detain someone who shouldn't be detained. Being human, they aren't going to believe it was a mistake, even if confronted with clear evidence. That's why you need an independent judiciary (which, for example China does not have).
It's quite possible this person should be involuntarily confined to a psychiatric hospital, but the police failed to prove he met the legal criteria for that, and they failed publicly. This kind of public failure and correction is essential to any government that is neither anarchy nor tyranny. Even if you assume the police are well-meaning, which they probably are in this case, you can't assume they are infallible.
Look, politicians are professional opinion staters. They nearly always have a positive sounding opinion on anything, but when they get to the presidential level people scrutinize their *every* word, and aren't shy about taking it out of context ("You didn't build that."). Very few people, even presidents, can make that transition without sounding like an idiot occasionally. One of the few presidents who handled this well was Dwight Eisenhower, who not coincidentally had a background in military/diplomatic politics, but not *electoral* politics. When faced with a question he didn't want to answer, he'd toss out some zen-master quote that sounded so wise everyone wanted to agree with it, while not quite understanding what it meant.
George W. Bush wasn't stupid, at least when it comes to figuring out how to get his way with people. What he was is something that should be familiar to most of us here on/.: he was bright, but *cocksure*. He confused making snap decisions with being decisive; sticking to his plan in the face failure with being resolute; not listening to contrary opinions with leadership. Those things might make him an obstinate fool, but that's not quite the same as being "dumb".
There is no reason to tolerate intolerance. Absolutes are for fools.
Absolutely!
Of course, not all conservatives are assholes, but the GOP panders to these assholes, along with the stupid and selfish to form their base of support.
Well, without making a partisan remark which will surely be questionable, let me say that in the US we've fallen into the habit of identifying "conservative" with "Republican" and "liberal" with "Democrat". We've bought the brand messages. The GOP is a radical party now. This doesn't mean they're *wrong*, they want to remake the country according to a grand vision. They all that grand vision "conservatism", but it's not conservatism in the Burkean sense.
Well, in custom software a lot of software badness comes from unresponsive clients who force developers to race against the clock to meet deadlines. If the developer drops the ball, sure it's his fault. But sometimes customers hold things up by not answering simple questions or doing the testing they promised to do.
Coding isn't magic; if you make a coder deliver something in twenty hours when he estimated one hundred, something's going to give. Most likely it'll be non-functional requirements: performance, security, stability, and maintainability.
It's smart to include customer responsibilities in any development contract and to predicate all delivery dates on customers holding up their end.
I was scheduled to fly from Boston to LA on 9/11, but cancelled the day before to go to a meeting at Oracle's office up in Nashua.
With the mess I wasn't able to book a flight for my CA trip until the following week, and the security lines were unlike anything I'd ever seen. I was in the middle of a line well over a hundred passengers long, with my colleague Arun. A security guard strolled down the line, stopped at Arun and said, "Sir, you have been chosen for a random security check." "I'm with him," I said. "Do you want to do me too?" "That won't be necessary," the security guard said. Arun was a good sport about it, but they picked him out because he was the only brown person in the line. Isn't it kind of useless to pat down the brown suspect when his white companion gets a free pass?
Anyhow I suspect the issue here is the same: flying while South Asian. If this were a white man it wouldn't have been an issue. We haven't come far from September 2001. Americans are still suspicious of people who look different. Sikhs still get grief because even after eleven years still we can't get it through our fat heads they aren't Muslims.
WRONG. There was NEVER consensus as to the cooling. Not ever. In fact, it was never more then a tiny percent of climatologist.
I've actually looked into this by searching out abstracts from the 50s - 80s.
I can't make claims about "scientific consensus", but the earliest AGW papers I found from the 50s were couched in the highly conditional language you'd expect when challenging an accepted idea, and the papers they cite assume or favor cooling. That looks a lot like a cooling consensus to me. Of course climate science was much smaller back then, so the notion that the Earth was cooling was probably not as strongly held as warming is today. Likewise in the early years cooling vs. warming was contentious, but neither position appears to have been controversial until much later, after 1991 and Al Gore's VP candidacy.
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That's 386 *reported* cases. Since doctors have never heard of this disease, they don't diagnose it. We can assume the number of actual cases is somewhat higher, possibly much higher.
Think of Lyme disease. It was characterized in the late 70s and the infectious agent (a spirochete) was identified around '82 IIRC, and in the late 80s and early 90s doctors were on the lookout for it. There was a rapid rise in reported cases of Lyme throughout the 1990s; that rise had nothing to do with an increase in incidence and everything to do with awareness. Lyme disease has been infecting people globally for thousands of years. That iceman mummy they found in the Alps back in the 90s had Lyme disease, and he died 5000 years ago.
For all we know neurocysticercosis is quite common. We won't know until we look for it.
386 *reported cases*. According to TFA physicians are unaware of this disease and don't diagnose it, so we can assume that the number of actual infections is somewhat higher.
Take Lyme disease; it's not the common cold, but there have been something like thirty thousand cases in the US over the last decade, enough or a concern that "tick check" has entered our vocabulary. The infectious agent is not new; it has probably been infecting people worldwide for centuries. Even Ötzi the Iceman, the natural mummy found in the Alps in '91, had Lyme disease, and he died five thousand years ago. But until the infectious agent was identified in 1982 and the disease was given a name, and doctors began diagnosing it in the 90s, nobody knew how common and widespread it was.
Don't walk around bare foot.
Don't eat raw vegetables from fields people or dogs poop in
Don't eat raw meat.
Get regular checkups, you can always ask for blood tests to see if you have blood parasites.
I once met a farm worker activist who always washed his vegetable thoroughly because supervisors don't let immigrant farm workers take bathroom breaks. That means they go in the fields, but that's not the supervisor's problem. They also make the workers use short handled-shovels, even though it makes the work back-breaking, because it made it easy to know who was working and who was taking an unauthorized rest.
In any case, there's a simple, inexpensive answer to the problems of parasites and other pathogens in food (besides thorough washing and cooking): irradiation. If the ignorant public didn't think food irradiation would turn them into zombie mutants, you could eat rare meat, raw fish, and less than fanatically washed vegetables without any danger at all.
Look, I'm a Democrat and I'm fairly sure most Tea Partiers would call me a socialist, and even I can see that's not what Romney meant, any more than Obama meant "You didn't build your business." Romney's point, after he fumbled around for a few sentences, is that he said he was for a strong military, and that he sees supporting "the military" as being the same as supporting "the troops". That is an interesting in itself and debatable on several levels, but he clearly didn't intend to say that the troops weren't important.
Democracy in this country -- at least in terms of the political debate -- does not in the least resemble democracy as taught in our civics classes -- or as envisioned by the founders I suppose. It's not about appeal to reason, or even self-interest; it's about conditioning voters to have a negative emotional reaction to the opposition and a positive one to your candidate. It's about dumbing the electorate down. Now I happen to think the Republicans do this more than the Democrats -- if I didn't I wouldn't be a Democrat -- but Democrats are not as pure as they claim to be. Nobody's ever been that pure, and after watching the character assassination of the candidates in the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections the Democrats learned the lesson that winners don't hesitate to twist the truth to suit their purposes.
Still, I can prefer Obama's policies without demonizing Romney. Being a Massachusetts citizen I've seen Romney's governing style up close, and it's a mixed bag. He's astute enough, and under other circumstances he'd be an OK president -- let's say comparable to George Herbert Walker Bush -- but he's not someone I'd choose for the present circumstances.
There are only 2 ways to win an argument:
You bring your opponent over to your point of view and they agree with your superior logic and evidence.
You are brought over to your opponents position and agree with their superior logic and evidence.
Unless I am mistaken, you haven't listed two way to win an argument; you've listed one way to win and one way to lose. These don't even exhaust the ways there are to end an argument.
There actually are two ways to win an argument, namely
(1)You bring your opponent over to your point of view and they agree with your superior logic and evidence.
(2) You bring your opponent over to your point of view through some logically irrelevant means.
The number of irrelevant means are endless: wear him down, make him feel stupid, encourage him to jump on the bandwagon ... the list goes on.
Well, capitalists aren't exactly immune to ego-driven projects. Look at the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, built by a publicly traded joint stock company, and at 830m tall obviously a monument to management ego. Even after dropping rents by 40%, it only had about 17% occupancy for the residential components. The Petronas Towers in Malaysia was also created by a private developer, and currently has a 55% occupancy rate.
Pierre S. Du Pont wasn't a socialist by any means, and he underwrote in The Empire State Building. Clearly that was an ego trip. Two other "tallest buildings in the world" were being constructed at the same time in Manhattan. The Empire State Building was so inconveniently located its nickname was "the Empty State Building"; it didn't turn a profit for its first 20 years.
Shit, I don't even think we have the MATH to travel those kind of distances. The accuracy and tolerances for a trajectory that could get anywhere close to another body over light-year scale distances are all-but-impossible. It would be harder than throwing a dart in the U.S. and hitting a bullseye on a dartboard in China.
Here is where you go off the tracks. Of course we have the *math* to do it; we don't have the *lifespan* or the *energy*. As for hitting a bullseye in China, of course you won't use a dart -- that's what ballistic missiles are for, and while they can't quite get a bullseye they can get within 200m so, which is close enough. The reason they can do this is that the reentry vehicles aren't ballistic -- they make course corrections. Likewise in any trip to a nearby star, you wouldn't send the vehicle on a completely ballistic trajectory, you'd correct the trajectory periodically. If you solved the lifetime problem but not the energy problem, you'd still have to correct the spacecraft's trajectory, but it wouldn't be the energy budget-buster that constant acceleration would be. A little course correction applied early goes a long way.
Of course based on what we know, any kind of interstellar mission is completely impractical. *That's why it's worth thinking about*. If people looked at a problem, said, "I don't know how to solve that," and just threw up their hands, progress of all kinds would grind to a halt.
Now I don't think we'll see a practical design for an interstellar craft in my lifetime, so I wouldn't throw in Apollo program sized chunks of the GDP at the project. But having people with spaceflight expertise sit down from time to time and noodle about it isn't very expensive, and might turn up a few useful ideas. Arthur C. Clarke came up with the idea of geostationary communication satellites -- something which is almost inconceivably valuable to us -- because he was thinking of spaceflight, something no sensible person in 1945 would have considered a practical use of time, unless raining death down on another country was somehow involved.
From the article summary it sounds as if they have already decided on the "facts" and are simply launching an expedition to search for supporting/confirming evidence.
Oddly enough, you've got that almost right. The Aquarius instrument has been orbiting since June 2011 sending back surface salinity data -- "facts" if you prefer that term. The principal investigators on the SPURS cruise seem to be in it for the modeling data, but NASA's interest no doubt includes checking the reliability and usability of the Aquarius data.
I understand that reading the linked article is bad form, but before jumping to conclusions then working yourself up into a dudgeon, you might spend two or three minutes of quality time with Google to figure out what actually is happening. It could spare you the trouble of getting up on your high horse.
[How scientific, present conclusion, then gather data which can't rebutt conclusion,
but can only show the manifestation of said conclusion.
what happened to theories?
Actually, the salinity data is already in, from NASA's Aquarius instrument on the SAC-D satellite. What they're doing is paying for part of a surface expedition that will among other things check their Aquarius results.
As for "theories", I think you mean "hypotheses". I think they're interested in how the surface data from the satellite does or does not correlate with the water underneath the surface.
NASA has a physical oceanography program because of its special capabilities in remote sensing. But while you may build a research program around a highly specialized golden hammer, it doesn't mean the golden hammer can do *everything* the program needs.
So the why here is simple: NASA's research program needed some ocean-based fieldwork done. Rather than buy and staff it's own ship, it farmed out this project to a group of academics who already had a ship (the R/V Knorr), and who had complementary research interests. Simple as that. No conspiracy to branch out into NOAA's turf, quite the opposite. If you look at the project personnel, the only government scientists are from NOAA. NASA's paying a certain fraction of the cost to fill a hole in their research program, and they've been given "primary sponsor" status as a courtesy. NOAA, NSF, ESA and the Spanish Ministry of Science are also underwriting the research.
Copyright isn't the issue per se here. The restriction on copying here is a legal hack used to induce customers into buying a package of rights, which constitute a lot of the convenience of digital formats (no more carrying boxes of tapes car). What is at stake is passing on that package of rights, not the copy.
True, he could buy an iPod for each of his daughters, put his entire music collection on each iPod and leave it to them that way. He could even burn audio CDs and do it that way. But they wouldn't have the *rights* package he paid for. They could not legally transfer those copies to their own iPhones, a right *he* enjoys. They're back to carrying, not a box of tapes but a box of devices.
This really is a fascinating question, because no matter what is decided, one side comes out with more and the other less, than what they'd have got under the traditional analog scenarios. When music was on vinyl, giving that record to another person in effect transferred the rights to listen to the music, but the utility of that right degraded with the physical copy.every time the record was played. Thus you might well have inherited a copy of the Beatles *White Album* from your parents, but if you want to listen to the music regularly there's a good chance you've bought a digital copy. The physical album probably stays on the shelf and comes down only for special occasions.
If iTunes rights cannot be inherited, Mr Willis can't leave his offspring something he has paid for and enjoys. If they *can* he leaves them perpetual utility and the next generation sale won't be made. Of course maybe that's a good thing, given perpetual copyright extension.
And I've met Muslims who won't touch food that's been cooked with wine as an ingredient. I asked one my friends about this and she said, "there's probably no rational reason not to, but you have to draw the line somewhere and total prohibition is easier."
By the way, I've also met Christians who don't love their neighbor, turn the other cheek, or pick the log out of their own eye.
I don't know. I think the problem with extracts is largely shelf-life.
Because right-thinking people go to church to be told how awesome they are.
I've yet to seen a case of blindness caused by home brewed mead.
Having made mead myself, I'd say that until it's aged a year or two you can probably strip paint with it. The problem is that honey, unlike malt, isn't that nutritious, and fermentation proceeds opportunistically, starting with the easy step, converting sugar to long chain alcohols, then breaking down the long chain alcohols to ethanol. Beer fermentation completes in weeks; the same batch of mead that is very good at two years at six months is dominated by compounds used as industrial solvents and paint thinners. Will it blind you? Possibly; I can't imagine being desperate enough to drink the stuff.
Obama didn't inherit shit. He asked for the chance to do the task just like anyone else who applies for a job. He made a promise that if he couldn't do the job by his own metric that he wouldn't seek re-election. The man is a fucking liar. Love him or hate him, those are the facts.
You are missing the point. The question isn't whether we should feel sorry for Obama, the question is whether he is an incompetent president. For that you have to consider what it would be reasonable for him to have accomplished, and that depends on the situation when he took office.
Actually, the White House has three kitchens, an executive chef, four sous chefs and an executive *pastry* chef (the current officeholder is the author of "Desserts for Dummies" -- make of that what you will, but he *was* hired in the Bush Administration). The White House has a large kitchen and wait staff as well -- all to host state dinners that will blow jaded diplomats' socks off. Since the White House is in effect the world's largest three-star restaurant, and most of that capability goes unused most of the time, it hardly makes sense to make the Commander-in-chief microwave his own Hot Pockets.
The White House also has an official calligrapher who does insanely perfect work.
No,the GP's talking about something different than having a bunch of fungible people pull on a rope.
Suppose some designers want a device to be sleek and lightweight. The engineers naturally choose plastic, but the designers are displeased -- the prototype feels cheap and flimsy. This is nonsense to the engineers: the numbers say the design is rugged and light, and numbers don't lie. They think the designers want the impossible: for the product to be light and heavy at the same time.
The reason "synergy" hasn't happened is that people have split into cliques of like-minded people, working at cross purposes to the other group and reinforcing conformity of thinking in their own. If they worked together they'd realize that "feels solid in the hand" is something distinct from "rugged", then produce a device that is lighter than the competition but slightly heavier than it looks.
This is "synergy" in the sense the GP is using it. More commonly, "synergy" means to have two or more complementary business areas. This is a real phenomenon which is easier to achieve and natural in small businesses where people tend to have a clearer view of the big picture -- at least until the dis-economies of scale force them to focus on one business area. With a larger businesses it takes planning.
The problem is that "synergy" scenarios are often poorly thought out. I worked for a small software developer that sold hardware as well, so we could be a "one stop shop" for our clients. Other aspects of the "one stop shop" worked well: training services led to custom software projects which led to products which led to more training. The problem with hardware was that it's a commodity. We had to sell a high precision GPS handhelds at market prices, but margins were small. Our customer base didn't produce enough volume to have specialists, so hardware was a big, unprofitable distraction.
The problem *isn't* that we have too many buzzwords, it's that we don't have enough critical thinking. "Synergy" is a valid concept, but it takes more than a happy scenario and a label to slap on it to make that scenario happen.
You are literally looking at a very distant relative of yourself.
Only more charismatic than most of your other relatives.
Well, this is the biggest problem of any political system: every power we give the government is subject to abuse. Yes, the Soviets used mental illness as a pretense to silence dissidents, but the also used the power a state has to imprison people for similar purposes -- as China does today. Everybody (except for anarchists) think the state should *have* the power to imprison people, but it's probably the single most abused power there is.
We give the police the privilege of bashing in somebody's door and searching the premises, but we don't expect or want that ever to be done to *us*. What makes government powers like that tolerable is that they are restricted by law, that the process is transparent, leaves a paper trail, and can be challenged.
I think here we see another of the mechanisms that makes the government power to detain people tolerable. Even if police never made procedural errors (which of course is untrue), they'd still occasionally detain someone who shouldn't be detained. Being human, they aren't going to believe it was a mistake, even if confronted with clear evidence. That's why you need an independent judiciary (which, for example China does not have).
It's quite possible this person should be involuntarily confined to a psychiatric hospital, but the police failed to prove he met the legal criteria for that, and they failed publicly. This kind of public failure and correction is essential to any government that is neither anarchy nor tyranny. Even if you assume the police are well-meaning, which they probably are in this case, you can't assume they are infallible.
Look, politicians are professional opinion staters. They nearly always have a positive sounding opinion on anything, but when they get to the presidential level people scrutinize their *every* word, and aren't shy about taking it out of context ("You didn't build that."). Very few people, even presidents, can make that transition without sounding like an idiot occasionally. One of the few presidents who handled this well was Dwight Eisenhower, who not coincidentally had a background in military/diplomatic politics, but not *electoral* politics. When faced with a question he didn't want to answer, he'd toss out some zen-master quote that sounded so wise everyone wanted to agree with it, while not quite understanding what it meant.
George W. Bush wasn't stupid, at least when it comes to figuring out how to get his way with people. What he was is something that should be familiar to most of us here on /.: he was bright, but *cocksure*. He confused making snap decisions with being decisive; sticking to his plan in the face failure with being resolute; not listening to contrary opinions with leadership. Those things might make him an obstinate fool, but that's not quite the same as being "dumb".
There is no reason to tolerate intolerance. Absolutes are for fools.
Absolutely!
Of course, not all conservatives are assholes, but the GOP panders to these assholes, along with the stupid and selfish to form their base of support.
Well, without making a partisan remark which will surely be questionable, let me say that in the US we've fallen into the habit of identifying "conservative" with "Republican" and "liberal" with "Democrat". We've bought the brand messages. The GOP is a radical party now. This doesn't mean they're *wrong*, they want to remake the country according to a grand vision. They all that grand vision "conservatism", but it's not conservatism in the Burkean sense.
Well, in custom software a lot of software badness comes from unresponsive clients who force developers to race against the clock to meet deadlines. If the developer drops the ball, sure it's his fault. But sometimes customers hold things up by not answering simple questions or doing the testing they promised to do.
Coding isn't magic; if you make a coder deliver something in twenty hours when he estimated one hundred, something's going to give. Most likely it'll be non-functional requirements: performance, security, stability, and maintainability.
It's smart to include customer responsibilities in any development contract and to predicate all delivery dates on customers holding up their end.
I was scheduled to fly from Boston to LA on 9/11, but cancelled the day before to go to a meeting at Oracle's office up in Nashua.
With the mess I wasn't able to book a flight for my CA trip until the following week, and the security lines were unlike anything I'd ever seen. I was in the middle of a line well over a hundred passengers long, with my colleague Arun. A security guard strolled down the line, stopped at Arun and said, "Sir, you have been chosen for a random security check." "I'm with him," I said. "Do you want to do me too?" "That won't be necessary," the security guard said. Arun was a good sport about it, but they picked him out because he was the only brown person in the line. Isn't it kind of useless to pat down the brown suspect when his white companion gets a free pass?
Anyhow I suspect the issue here is the same: flying while South Asian. If this were a white man it wouldn't have been an issue. We haven't come far from September 2001. Americans are still suspicious of people who look different. Sikhs still get grief because even after eleven years still we can't get it through our fat heads they aren't Muslims.
WRONG. There was NEVER consensus as to the cooling. Not ever. In fact, it was never more then a tiny percent of climatologist.
I've actually looked into this by searching out abstracts from the 50s - 80s.
I can't make claims about "scientific consensus", but the earliest AGW papers I found from the 50s were couched in the highly conditional language you'd expect when challenging an accepted idea, and the papers they cite assume or favor cooling. That looks a lot like a cooling consensus to me. Of course climate science was much smaller back then, so the notion that the Earth was cooling was probably not as strongly held as warming is today. Likewise in the early years cooling vs. warming was contentious, but neither position appears to have been controversial until much later, after 1991 and Al Gore's VP candidacy.