Apparently naming asteroids his observatory found is entirely within Lowell's perview. He's free to name one "Honey Boo-Boo" if he feels like it.
So if he found an asteroid, and "Treyvon" means something to him, I don't see any reason to complain. If you don't like it, find your own asteroid and name it "Lance Armstrong" or whatever ostentatiously non-political thing you feel like.
So in your world view, a group of citizens -- organizing to vote in a block on a single issue they feel strongly about... is a terrorist organization?
Just looking over this again, I can't get over how profoundly you have missed my point. This is nothing whatsoever like what I said. It isn't even in the same universe.
The ASL was not a simple group of people voting in a block in every election. There indeed is nothing unusual about that. However, such groups' power is very diffuse, and they rarely get much done via the ballot box. If that's all they were, nobody would be talking about them today. What they did instead it target specific elections and just pour resources into them, including emotion-laden propaganda (emotions are far harder to counter than reason), and true believers from out of the district to supply more campaigning manpower and money that anybody could hope to compete with based on local resources alone. As a result, they could (and would) basically end the career of any politician they felt like at any time.
So where they got their power from was not from any true heft of their position at the ballot box, but by instilling fear in elected representatives. Was it legal? Sure. Was there anything really wrong with any of the ASL's individual campaign actions? Not really. Was it the overall effect democratic?Majority rule? Not even close.
The ASL's power came from fear of being specifically targeted, not from any concern about their popular support of their position. That isn't terrorisim. But a minority ruling a majority by fear of being personally targeted is certianly something similar to that.
Correct, you did indeed proceed to build yourself a strawman.
So in your world view, a group of citizens -- organizing to vote in a block on a single issue they feel strongly about... is a terrorist organization?
This is incorrect. I said no such thing. You may want to get out a dictionary and look up the word "practically". It means "nearly but not quite". Which is another way of saying the ASL was not a terrorist oganization.
But you did a nice job on that strawman over there. I don't think he's getting up from that.
Let's not be disinenuous. I think we all know that the NRA is quite a bit more than a meer club, and is in a whole different class than the ACLU.
The closest analog really is the ASL (anti-saloon league) from a century ago. This organization didn't meerly lobby for its point of view, but organized its members (small in number, but very zealous) to surgically target specific close congressional races with emotion-laden propaganda to take out any congressman in all but the safest wet districts who didn't brainlessly toe the current ASL line. The result was that nearly every elected representative lived in mortal fear of them, and Prohibition was put into the freaking Constitution, even though a majority of the country opposed it. They were practically a political terrorist organization.
Aching joints and dizzy spells? I long for the days I just had aching joints and dizzy spells...
Personally I think "authorities" are exactly the sorts of folks you should be looking to check the work on. Particularly when they are expounding on stuff that isn't directly in their field, like psychology. When you get old enough, you may start to notice a certian pattern of recurring mass folly associated with blindly believing experts.
In a country where the median yearly income is measured in hundreds of dollars, copper is relatively worth so much that you might as well be laying miles and miles of gold wire instead.
A man's first responsibility in this world is to keep his children from starving to death. Somewhere way, way after that comes his responsibility to obey laws that don't involve violent offenses.
Reading the patent, it appears Apple managed to patent allowing access to some programs without a passcode from the lock screen of a device while protecting others, so e.g. you can quickly swipe to make a phone call or control your music, but have to enter a code to read your email or access your word processor documents.
I doubt that highly, as this is excatly how Windows has behaved since Vista in 2006.
Interesting that you'd bring this up. In fact this was not the Syrian government's first use of chemical weapons, but the latest and biggest in a long list that includes last march outside rebel-held Allepo (I believe the one you are referring to), all of which targeted rebel-held or contested territory. The interesting thing is that the rumors I'm hearing this morning is that a Syrian general involved in the attacks has defected, with evidence that his government carried it out.
Unless you are a big Russia Today reader I suppose, in which case what happened was that the syrian rebels gassed their own women and children repeatedly in order to get the sympathy of the West (which has studiously looked the other way instead). Since that tactic hasn't been working, they've kept doing it. Genius! Or its been the CIA or USA State department, hoping to provide a great excuse for intervention so they can rush in and blow trillions more dollars with attacks that will get the whole world hating them. Because, well, they just love the attention or something. All the evidence to the contrary is fabricated.
You know, whichever scenario makes more sense to you.
Taking a "vacation" without going to a country with an extradition treaty with the USA isn't all that easy. By my count, that's about 110 countries you can't visit. Your vacations are pretty much going to be confied to Africa or the poorer areas Asia. Essentially, if it has yearly cholera outbreaks, that's your vacation spot.
Not one of those companies happened until after a government-sponsored expidition to those areas showed what was there, and that it was feasible to go there and back in a ship.
The Dutch East India company was particularly interesting, in that pretty much all it did was send out warships and soldiers to take over Portugese possessions. An interesting instance of a private company going to war with a soverign nation for sure, but the creative work was done by the Portugese government (at massive expense).
Also, most of those entities actually obtained a royal monopoly. That makes them independent competitive companies in the modern sense about as much as your local utility company.
Oddly enough however, a friend of mine got a photo accepted where he poses with a beer mug.... Maybe because that's a religious symbol as well?
Well, in fact it is for some neo-Heathens, depending on which Germanic god(ess) they decide to venerate. I don't know much about modern Germany, but I wouldn't be shocked to find out that Heathenisim is a relatively popular minor religon there.
"Sola scriptura" is a part of protestant Christianity, but there are many book based religions without such a rule.
"Sola scriptura" came out of protestant theology, but that doesn't mean all protestants believe that. Calvinists and Lutherans tend to, but In fact, most others don't. The Methodists, for instance, base their faith on what they call a "quadrialteral", only one vertex of which is scripture.
The confusion comes in because the protestants that do believe it also tend to be quite vocal (that's part of being "evangelical" after all), and tend to insist everyone else isn't a real Christian. It serves the purpose of a lot of vocal atheists to agree with them (as absolutists philosophies are far easier to refute). So an appalling amount of discussion about Christianity gets carried out with an implicit assumption that the majority of professed Christians don't actually exist.
Most of those locations appear to be near the shore, only if you define "near" as "within a few miles".
However, I did notice rather a lot of dots clustered around Mossel Bay, South Africa, including one that was so close that I could still see it on the map when zoomed in close enough to see individual houses. Yikes!
I think the explanation is probably the Seal Preserve there. Seals are known to be the Great White's favorite food. After seeing that, if it were me, I'd consider avoiding any beach that has seals nearby.
Well, if you consider learning learning pre-college Algerbra, literary analysis, and writing skills "drinking the kool-aid", then I suppose so. If in your world that's a bad thing, there's always places like Kenya, where even the elementary schools cost money. Very little kool-aid drinking of any kind going on there!
Richest - The US is so deep in debt it can't hope to ever pay it off.
Don't know many actual rich people, I see. The difference between poor people and rich people isn't net worth. The difference is that a poor person is just broke, while rich person owes money. Often eye-popping amounts of it.
The US school system is not very good at fostering high achieving students, they focus on getting most people to average education and
This is actually one of the unsung successes of the USA system. Almost no other country in the world even attempts to educate everybody like we do. Others tend to wash out (aka: "leave behind") low achieving kids, shunting them off to lower "tracks" where they are groomed to be menial laborers. It makes us look bad on international tests, as our below-average kids get their scores thrown against everyone else's college-track kids.
You are also quite right that it means we aren't serving our high-achievers as well as a system set up to specifically do that would. There are measures that districts take to try to alleviate this (eg: Magnet Schools), but it is a fact that with so much of our energies absorbed by trying to teach everyone, the high achievers aren't going to fare as well here.
However, I kind of like this feature of our system. A lot of "low achievers" have issues that are holding them back (bad eyesight, dislexia, ADHD) that they might eventually get a handle on. I'd really hate it if we just gave up on those kids at an early age and consigned them to menial labor for life.
So the basic argument is that if Microsoft hadn't appealed in 2000 and had just abided by Judge Jackson's ruling, they wouldn't be in the mess they are in today?
So the company's no better off for all that extra legal wrangling, but in the meantime a lot of lawyers and investors made a mint.
In the 80's, women made up most of CS programs around the country.
[citation needed]
Umm...no. I was in a CS program in the 80's. Admittedly, half of the department's professors were female. However, I only had two women in my graduating class (roughly 20 of us I think). One of the two wanted to go into teaching, and was only taking CS because her father was a professor in the Engineering School, so she got her degree for free as long as it was in that school. She thought CS would be the easiest program in the Engineering School to major in.
Perhaps free degrees is what it takes then? Our motto: "Computer Science: Its easier than Electrical Engineering"
Actually, the Vikings lived in the Americas for five hundred years. This was fairly well known at the time in Iceland.
What Columbus had that the Vikings didn't was that thier American culture died out before the printing press was invented. Columbus, who was by all accounts a total buffoon, too stupid to even realise what he'd bumped into, became famous because the printing press had been invented a few decades earlier. Thus all of Europe found out about his explorations, rather than just a few nautically-inclined iberians. Empowered to communicate, they could figure out what he'd found, even if he was too stupid to see it.
Exactly. The Peter Principle is just a thought experiement: the natural result if we lived in a world where promotions are handed out purely based on competence at the existing job.
The Dilbert Principle, on the other hand, is an actual theory put forth to explain obseved behavior in the real world.
Reminder:
I wrote The Dilbert Principle around the concept that in many cases the least competent, least smart people are promoted, simply because they’re the ones you don't want doing actual work. You want them ordering the doughnuts and yelling at people for not doing their assignments—you know, the easy work. Your heart surgeons and your computer programmers—your smart people—aren’t in management. That principle was literally happening everywhere.
So while the former aspires to be philosophy (an exercise in logic), the latter aspires to be a scientific theory.
Both my parents and my wife's parents have a habit of saying "Screw you, J. Edgar Hoover" any time they are on the phone and funny noises are heard. For their generation (Baby Boomers), it was just an expectation that the FBI was listening in on random phone conversations.
No folks, this shit did not start yesterday. Every generation has to fight it. Welcome to the battle.
How do you propose to keep 3 million people desperate for fuel with absolutely nothing to lose but their lives from your newly-planted tree for the 50+ years it takes to mature? If I were to pick one metaphor for the exact problem with the desparate situation in Haiti right now, it would in fact be the impossibility of waiting around for trees to grow.
After Spectre or whoever heisted their Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve last year, it only makes sense to beef up their military. To do any less would be irresponsible.
After all, next time it might be C.O.B.R.A. Make sure to load those snowmobiles with parachutes.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently naming asteroids his observatory found is entirely within Lowell's perview. He's free to name one "Honey Boo-Boo" if he feels like it.
So if he found an asteroid, and "Treyvon" means something to him, I don't see any reason to complain. If you don't like it, find your own asteroid and name it "Lance Armstrong" or whatever ostentatiously non-political thing you feel like.
So in your world view, a group of citizens -- organizing to vote in a block on a single issue they feel strongly about... is a terrorist organization?
Just looking over this again, I can't get over how profoundly you have missed my point. This is nothing whatsoever like what I said. It isn't even in the same universe.
The ASL was not a simple group of people voting in a block in every election. There indeed is nothing unusual about that. However, such groups' power is very diffuse, and they rarely get much done via the ballot box. If that's all they were, nobody would be talking about them today. What they did instead it target specific elections and just pour resources into them, including emotion-laden propaganda (emotions are far harder to counter than reason), and true believers from out of the district to supply more campaigning manpower and money that anybody could hope to compete with based on local resources alone. As a result, they could (and would) basically end the career of any politician they felt like at any time.
So where they got their power from was not from any true heft of their position at the ballot box, but by instilling fear in elected representatives. Was it legal? Sure. Was there anything really wrong with any of the ASL's individual campaign actions? Not really. Was it the overall effect democratic?Majority rule? Not even close.
The ASL's power came from fear of being specifically targeted, not from any concern about their popular support of their position. That isn't terrorisim. But a minority ruling a majority by fear of being personally targeted is certianly something similar to that.
Please excuse me for /gently/ straw manning you...
Correct, you did indeed proceed to build yourself a strawman.
So in your world view, a group of citizens -- organizing to vote in a block on a single issue they feel strongly about... is a terrorist organization?
This is incorrect. I said no such thing. You may want to get out a dictionary and look up the word "practically". It means "nearly but not quite". Which is another way of saying the ASL was not a terrorist oganization.
But you did a nice job on that strawman over there. I don't think he's getting up from that.
Let's not be disinenuous. I think we all know that the NRA is quite a bit more than a meer club, and is in a whole different class than the ACLU.
The closest analog really is the ASL (anti-saloon league) from a century ago. This organization didn't meerly lobby for its point of view, but organized its members (small in number, but very zealous) to surgically target specific close congressional races with emotion-laden propaganda to take out any congressman in all but the safest wet districts who didn't brainlessly toe the current ASL line. The result was that nearly every elected representative lived in mortal fear of them, and Prohibition was put into the freaking Constitution, even though a majority of the country opposed it. They were practically a political terrorist organization.
Sound familar?
Aching joints and dizzy spells? I long for the days I just had aching joints and dizzy spells...
Personally I think "authorities" are exactly the sorts of folks you should be looking to check the work on. Particularly when they are expounding on stuff that isn't directly in their field, like psychology. When you get old enough, you may start to notice a certian pattern of recurring mass folly associated with blindly believing experts.
Its amazing how much of life boils down to a failure to properly apply Amdahl's Law.
In a country where the median yearly income is measured in hundreds of dollars, copper is relatively worth so much that you might as well be laying miles and miles of gold wire instead.
A man's first responsibility in this world is to keep his children from starving to death. Somewhere way, way after that comes his responsibility to obey laws that don't involve violent offenses.
Reading the patent, it appears Apple managed to patent allowing access to some programs without a passcode from the lock screen of a device while protecting others, so e.g. you can quickly swipe to make a phone call or control your music, but have to enter a code to read your email or access your word processor documents.
I doubt that highly, as this is excatly how Windows has behaved since Vista in 2006.
Interesting that you'd bring this up. In fact this was not the Syrian government's first use of chemical weapons, but the latest and biggest in a long list that includes last march outside rebel-held Allepo (I believe the one you are referring to), all of which targeted rebel-held or contested territory. The interesting thing is that the rumors I'm hearing this morning is that a Syrian general involved in the attacks has defected, with evidence that his government carried it out.
Unless you are a big Russia Today reader I suppose, in which case what happened was that the syrian rebels gassed their own women and children repeatedly in order to get the sympathy of the West (which has studiously looked the other way instead). Since that tactic hasn't been working, they've kept doing it. Genius! Or its been the CIA or USA State department, hoping to provide a great excuse for intervention so they can rush in and blow trillions more dollars with attacks that will get the whole world hating them. Because, well, they just love the attention or something. All the evidence to the contrary is fabricated.
You know, whichever scenario makes more sense to you.
Taking a "vacation" without going to a country with an extradition treaty with the USA isn't all that easy. By my count, that's about 110 countries you can't visit. Your vacations are pretty much going to be confied to Africa or the poorer areas Asia. Essentially, if it has yearly cholera outbreaks, that's your vacation spot.
Not one of those companies happened until after a government-sponsored expidition to those areas showed what was there, and that it was feasible to go there and back in a ship.
The Dutch East India company was particularly interesting, in that pretty much all it did was send out warships and soldiers to take over Portugese possessions. An interesting instance of a private company going to war with a soverign nation for sure, but the creative work was done by the Portugese government (at massive expense).
Also, most of those entities actually obtained a royal monopoly. That makes them independent competitive companies in the modern sense about as much as your local utility company.
The Northern parts of North America and Europe are still springing back up from the last Ice Age, 20,000 - 8,000 years or so ago.
So it may take a little while.
Oddly enough however, a friend of mine got a photo accepted where he poses with a beer mug .... Maybe because that's a religious symbol as well?
Well, in fact it is for some neo-Heathens, depending on which Germanic god(ess) they decide to venerate. I don't know much about modern Germany, but I wouldn't be shocked to find out that Heathenisim is a relatively popular minor religon there.
"Sola scriptura" is a part of protestant Christianity, but there are many book based religions without such a rule.
"Sola scriptura" came out of protestant theology, but that doesn't mean all protestants believe that. Calvinists and Lutherans tend to, but In fact, most others don't. The Methodists, for instance, base their faith on what they call a "quadrialteral", only one vertex of which is scripture.
The confusion comes in because the protestants that do believe it also tend to be quite vocal (that's part of being "evangelical" after all), and tend to insist everyone else isn't a real Christian. It serves the purpose of a lot of vocal atheists to agree with them (as absolutists philosophies are far easier to refute). So an appalling amount of discussion about Christianity gets carried out with an implicit assumption that the majority of professed Christians don't actually exist.
Most of those locations appear to be near the shore, only if you define "near" as "within a few miles".
However, I did notice rather a lot of dots clustered around Mossel Bay, South Africa, including one that was so close that I could still see it on the map when zoomed in close enough to see individual houses. Yikes!
I think the explanation is probably the Seal Preserve there. Seals are known to be the Great White's favorite food. After seeing that, if it were me, I'd consider avoiding any beach that has seals nearby.
Well, if you consider learning learning pre-college Algerbra, literary analysis, and writing skills "drinking the kool-aid", then I suppose so. If in your world that's a bad thing, there's always places like Kenya, where even the elementary schools cost money. Very little kool-aid drinking of any kind going on there!
Richest - The US is so deep in debt it can't hope to ever pay it off.
Don't know many actual rich people, I see. The difference between poor people and rich people isn't net worth. The difference is that a poor person is just broke, while rich person owes money. Often eye-popping amounts of it.
The US school system is not very good at fostering high achieving students, they focus on getting most people to average education and
This is actually one of the unsung successes of the USA system. Almost no other country in the world even attempts to educate everybody like we do. Others tend to wash out (aka: "leave behind") low achieving kids, shunting them off to lower "tracks" where they are groomed to be menial laborers. It makes us look bad on international tests, as our below-average kids get their scores thrown against everyone else's college-track kids.
You are also quite right that it means we aren't serving our high-achievers as well as a system set up to specifically do that would. There are measures that districts take to try to alleviate this (eg: Magnet Schools), but it is a fact that with so much of our energies absorbed by trying to teach everyone, the high achievers aren't going to fare as well here.
However, I kind of like this feature of our system. A lot of "low achievers" have issues that are holding them back (bad eyesight, dislexia, ADHD) that they might eventually get a handle on. I'd really hate it if we just gave up on those kids at an early age and consigned them to menial labor for life.
So the basic argument is that if Microsoft hadn't appealed in 2000 and had just abided by Judge Jackson's ruling, they wouldn't be in the mess they are in today?
So the company's no better off for all that extra legal wrangling, but in the meantime a lot of lawyers and investors made a mint.
In the 80's, women made up most of CS programs around the country.
[citation needed]
Umm...no. I was in a CS program in the 80's. Admittedly, half of the department's professors were female. However, I only had two women in my graduating class (roughly 20 of us I think). One of the two wanted to go into teaching, and was only taking CS because her father was a professor in the Engineering School, so she got her degree for free as long as it was in that school. She thought CS would be the easiest program in the Engineering School to major in.
Perhaps free degrees is what it takes then? Our motto: "Computer Science: Its easier than Electrical Engineering"
Actually, the Vikings lived in the Americas for five hundred years. This was fairly well known at the time in Iceland.
What Columbus had that the Vikings didn't was that thier American culture died out before the printing press was invented. Columbus, who was by all accounts a total buffoon, too stupid to even realise what he'd bumped into, became famous because the printing press had been invented a few decades earlier. Thus all of Europe found out about his explorations, rather than just a few nautically-inclined iberians. Empowered to communicate, they could figure out what he'd found, even if he was too stupid to see it.
Exactly. The Peter Principle is just a thought experiement: the natural result if we lived in a world where promotions are handed out purely based on competence at the existing job.
The Dilbert Principle, on the other hand, is an actual theory put forth to explain obseved behavior in the real world.
Reminder:
I wrote The Dilbert Principle around the concept that in many cases the least competent, least smart people are promoted, simply because they’re the ones you don't want doing actual work. You want them ordering the doughnuts and yelling at people for not doing their assignments—you know, the easy work. Your heart surgeons and your computer programmers—your smart people—aren’t in management. That principle was literally happening everywhere.
So while the former aspires to be philosophy (an exercise in logic), the latter aspires to be a scientific theory.
Both my parents and my wife's parents have a habit of saying "Screw you, J. Edgar Hoover" any time they are on the phone and funny noises are heard. For their generation (Baby Boomers), it was just an expectation that the FBI was listening in on random phone conversations.
No folks, this shit did not start yesterday. Every generation has to fight it. Welcome to the battle.
Ever heard of the tragety of the commons?
How do you propose to keep 3 million people desperate for fuel with absolutely nothing to lose but their lives from your newly-planted tree for the 50+ years it takes to mature? If I were to pick one metaphor for the exact problem with the desparate situation in Haiti right now, it would in fact be the impossibility of waiting around for trees to grow.
After Spectre or whoever heisted their Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve last year, it only makes sense to beef up their military. To do any less would be irresponsible.
After all, next time it might be C.O.B.R.A. Make sure to load those snowmobiles with parachutes.