I was all set to vote against Feinstein because she completely ignored my letters and those of countless other Silicon Valley folks who expressed our opinions on a number of laws similar to SOPA in past years. I even voted (as a registered independent) in the Republican primary to try to get somebody electable to unseat her.
There's your problem right there. California has been a very safe senate/presidential win for Democrats for decades. I think the last Republican to get elected (rather than appointed) was more than 20 years ago. If you want to put a scare into a California senator, you have to support a good challenger in the Democratic primary.
No. The history of this country has quite clearly demonstrated that there will not ever be more than two viable parties. Every time a new party has arisen, the weaker of the other two quickly died. Two parties is quite clearly the stable state for the system our Constitution has given us.
Poly-party systems only exist in parlimentary democracies that allow minority representatives in their government. For example, if a party gets 20% of the vote nationwide, they may get to make up 20% of the representaves in the legislature. We have a system where you have to get majority support somewhere to get any representation at all in government. The top two parties have a shot at that. A third place party has no chance.
The Mayor's office is reporting that Sanitation workers, not police, cleaned up things and that they handled books separately from trash. Books are being held at a city garage and may be picked up.
Yes, that was their story.
OWS's story is that they went down to this supposed holding area and were presented with 25 boxes of books. That was it. I don't know how many books were in those 25 boxes, but it's a pretty good bet it was only a very tiny percentage of 5,000.
The mayor gave himself a major black-eye over this, and he'd kinda like to stay mayor after the next election. He has every incentive in the world to paint this action in the most positive light possible, perhaps even fudge the facts a little. Why on earth would you take the statements of such a person at face-value without even looking into the facts?
...and was living in Auckland the night the Rainbow Warrior [wikipedia.org] was bombed. The two official French secret agents were sentenced...
That was the first thing I thought of too. What exactly does France have against Greenpeace anyway? Its almost as if they want to beat up on somebody, but don't feel compentent enough to pick on anyone but the one scrawny little kid off in the corner eating paste.
A lot of time they don't want "help". A great many of them happen when someone is just coming out of the "too depressed to get out of bed" phase of cyclical depression, and they just don't ever want to go through that again.
No, it's not. Subsidies to employers mean that, given 2 people of "close-enough"qualifications, the one from the military, who qualifies for subsidies and tax credits, will get the job.
How is that NOT economic discrimination?
Perhaps it is. But speaking as someone who sat in a cushy chair eating chips while these folks were overseas doing my fighting for me, I think I'm fine with this instance of discrimination.
What if Obama was simply lying about his opinion of Netanyahu to amuse and placate Sarkozy?
...which seems rather likely to me. Sarkozy strikes me as the kind of guy who is much harder to get along with if you aren't willing to agree with (or at least humor) everything he says.
I also have an EVO (3D now), and you are defintitely right about how worthless its voice rec stuff is. However, its going to take a lot of convincing to get me to think such a feature on an electronic device would ever be something I'll find useful.
People used to say the exact same crapola about hadwriting recognition. Look how useless and unwanted that turned out to be.
IMHO it isn't "vision" to think that people will want to use the same error-prone interfaces for their electronic devices that they use with other human beings. That is lack of vision.
Yup. My previous generation Android phone had voice search and command input (as does my current one). Damned annoying. Its the first thing I turn off. I remember once looking down and seeing it had "recognized" a couple of words from an NPR show I was listening to and was starting a search while I was trying to use it to navigate. Arg!
This entire announcement sounds to me like a Newton engineer 20 years ago bragging about how their handwriting recognition will put them years ahead of the competition. For some reason it never occured to those folks that we didn't want the same interface on an electronic device as on a real-world object and we certianly don't want one that's worse at doing it than your average fifth-grader.
The video seems to be selling it as sort of a remote head unit for your smartphone. It would probably be damn useful in that capacity in certian situations. eg: checking who is calling you while driving to decide if you need to pull over and take the calls. Switching songs while jogging, etc. At least at around a $100 price point it would be. At $400, I'd have to be pretty dang low on ideas of other ways to blow my money.
True. Really this is mostly an issue for mechanics on their test-drives to make sure the previous fixes worked.
I once saw a V12 Jag out driving, and made a comment to that effect to my wife. When we pulled up next to it, it was indeed being driven by a guy wearing a dirty light blue shirt with a patch on the chest with his name on it.
Not that there's anything wrong with being a mechanic. Its good honest work, plus you get to drive the Jaguars more than their owners do.:-)
have been generous in funding the economics department at Florida State University, with strings attached to assure that department will support economic theories the Kochs agree with ("Austrian school" economics).
AKA: Economics that doesn't use the Scientific Method.
From Wikipedia:
Austrian economists reject empirical statistical methods, natural experiments and constructed experiments as tools applicable to economics
It's quite a coincidence how economists that doen't rely on the Scientific Method consistently seem to come up with results that rich contributors like.
This is of course completely wrong. Steve Jobs himself figured out how to make iPhones entirely on his own. His first breakthrough was learning how to make tools by banging a couple of rocks together. Mining and forging metal was his next great idea, followed by molded plastics. Electricity and Radio tranmission theory were required too of course, as were the fossil fuels and internal combustion and jet engines required to move the parts and finished product all over the world. Its truly amazing how shameless people are to steal all of his innovations. Putting all the pieces together in the last couple of years was meerly a culmination of a 100,000 year process of development Steve used to create everything that went into the iPhone.
Which means that the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field ultimately claimed the life of it's creator.
That's the problem with Reality Distortion Fields; they don't distort reality, just your perception of it. Reality itself doesn't give a shit what you think.
This is a lesson all of our climate/economic/etc. denialist folks in Congress will one day learn as well. Sadly, many only only learn the hard way (and sometimes not even then).
You know, every time I start to actually believe the people who try to paint Stallman as a paranoid extremist, somebody goes and proves him right like this.
Well, another point would be that the natives they had contact with were mostly Inuit. Their culture initially developed in Alaska and spread across the entirety of North America. In their Alaskan homeland they already had contact with Eurasia, and thus already had as much exposure to Eurasian diseases as they were likely to get from the Norse.
Really though I think the best argument here is population density. In order for disease to really make population inroads, it has to hit a settled (generally agricultural) community. Those are the places where people are living so close together that a virus can be assured of finding a new host (or 20) before its done killing its existing one. The Inca and Aztecs certianly qualified, as did a debatable amount of natives in the NE USA and Mississippi valley. The various small bands of Inuit whale hunters really don't.
The ironic part about this is that the Little Ice Age is actually blamed for killing off the earliest European settlement in the Western Hemisphere.
The Norse had a settlement in Greenland for almost half a millenium (from 986 AD to sometime in the 1400s), and during their better times were in contact with mainland North America ("Vinland"). As the weather turned colder, things became tougher for the Norse livestock agriculture, and better for the Inuit hunting culture. The last records we have show incresing hardships, including increasing attacks from Inuit ("skraeling") bands.
The influx of Eurasian diseases in the Americans has typically been portrayed as a tremendous disaster for native American populations and a great boon to Europeans. I would be rather ironic if this were in fact a case where it instead helped the natives wipe out European settlement.
there would have to be evidence the supposed "kraken" existed, which there isn't
You wouldn't call Enteroctopus Dofleini "evidence"? Existing specimens are commonly found with 14 foot long tentacles, one has been certified at 23 ft, and there are reports of specimens as long as 30ft. That last specimen would probably be large enough to take out a 45ft ictheosaur.
We know the order octopoda dates back that far, and they are carnivores. If placed in an environment where they had lots of available prey that large, it makes perfect sense that they would have evolved even more size. They certianly wouldn't have been smaller! Given that shell-free cephlapods don't exectly leave a good direct fossil record, finding a kill-bone arrangement that they are known to favor today is about the best you can ask for.
Quite. In fact, growing up in an oil state, I can remember when "horizontal drilling" used to be a euphamisim for stealing. Drilling sideways a bit under the ground is a real good way to swipe someone else's oil from your own (relatively oil-poor) franchise site.
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I was all set to vote against Feinstein because she completely ignored my letters and those of countless other Silicon Valley folks who expressed our opinions on a number of laws similar to SOPA in past years. I even voted (as a registered independent) in the Republican primary to try to get somebody electable to unseat her.
There's your problem right there. California has been a very safe senate/presidential win for Democrats for decades. I think the last Republican to get elected (rather than appointed) was more than 20 years ago. If you want to put a scare into a California senator, you have to support a good challenger in the Democratic primary.
"Masses?" Both of those networks combined have lower ratings that any aired episode of "Hello Larry".
No. The history of this country has quite clearly demonstrated that there will not ever be more than two viable parties. Every time a new party has arisen, the weaker of the other two quickly died. Two parties is quite clearly the stable state for the system our Constitution has given us.
Poly-party systems only exist in parlimentary democracies that allow minority representatives in their government. For example, if a party gets 20% of the vote nationwide, they may get to make up 20% of the representaves in the legislature. We have a system where you have to get majority support somewhere to get any representation at all in government. The top two parties have a shot at that. A third place party has no chance.
The Mayor's office is reporting that Sanitation workers, not police, cleaned up things and that they handled books separately from trash. Books are being held at a city garage and may be picked up.
Yes, that was their story.
OWS's story is that they went down to this supposed holding area and were presented with 25 boxes of books. That was it. I don't know how many books were in those 25 boxes, but it's a pretty good bet it was only a very tiny percentage of 5,000.
The mayor gave himself a major black-eye over this, and he'd kinda like to stay mayor after the next election. He has every incentive in the world to paint this action in the most positive light possible, perhaps even fudge the facts a little. Why on earth would you take the statements of such a person at face-value without even looking into the facts?
...and was living in Auckland the night the Rainbow Warrior [wikipedia.org] was bombed. The two official French secret agents were sentenced...
That was the first thing I thought of too. What exactly does France have against Greenpeace anyway? Its almost as if they want to beat up on somebody, but don't feel compentent enough to pick on anyone but the one scrawny little kid off in the corner eating paste.
A lot of time they don't want "help". A great many of them happen when someone is just coming out of the "too depressed to get out of bed" phase of cyclical depression, and they just don't ever want to go through that again.
No, it's not. Subsidies to employers mean that, given 2 people of "close-enough"qualifications, the one from the military, who qualifies for subsidies and tax credits, will get the job. How is that NOT economic discrimination?
Perhaps it is. But speaking as someone who sat in a cushy chair eating chips while these folks were overseas doing my fighting for me, I think I'm fine with this instance of discrimination.
oh and if everyone wants to know what killed Visa for ordinary folks, Canel/allow? constantly drove them nuts
Which means your "ordinary folks" were running as priveledged users (a big security no-no. We've known this since at least the 80's.).
So then I guess the big "innovation" in Win 7 that won everyone over was the installer creating separate user and admin accounts by default.
Cool. I've been wondering what it was.
What if Obama was simply lying about his opinion of Netanyahu to amuse and placate Sarkozy?
...which seems rather likely to me. Sarkozy strikes me as the kind of guy who is much harder to get along with if you aren't willing to agree with (or at least humor) everything he says.
...or perhaps there's just no real personal benifit to it either.
I also have an EVO (3D now), and you are defintitely right about how worthless its voice rec stuff is. However, its going to take a lot of convincing to get me to think such a feature on an electronic device would ever be something I'll find useful.
People used to say the exact same crapola about hadwriting recognition. Look how useless and unwanted that turned out to be.
IMHO it isn't "vision" to think that people will want to use the same error-prone interfaces for their electronic devices that they use with other human beings. That is lack of vision.
Yup. My previous generation Android phone had voice search and command input (as does my current one). Damned annoying. Its the first thing I turn off. I remember once looking down and seeing it had "recognized" a couple of words from an NPR show I was listening to and was starting a search while I was trying to use it to navigate. Arg!
This entire announcement sounds to me like a Newton engineer 20 years ago bragging about how their handwriting recognition will put them years ahead of the competition. For some reason it never occured to those folks that we didn't want the same interface on an electronic device as on a real-world object and we certianly don't want one that's worse at doing it than your average fifth-grader.
The video seems to be selling it as sort of a remote head unit for your smartphone. It would probably be damn useful in that capacity in certian situations. eg: checking who is calling you while driving to decide if you need to pull over and take the calls. Switching songs while jogging, etc. At least at around a $100 price point it would be. At $400, I'd have to be pretty dang low on ideas of other ways to blow my money.
It looks to me more like a remote-control unit for your smartphone. A day of charge for something like that doesn't seem all that unreasonable.
True. Really this is mostly an issue for mechanics on their test-drives to make sure the previous fixes worked.
I once saw a V12 Jag out driving, and made a comment to that effect to my wife. When we pulled up next to it, it was indeed being driven by a guy wearing a dirty light blue shirt with a patch on the chest with his name on it.
Not that there's anything wrong with being a mechanic. Its good honest work, plus you get to drive the Jaguars more than their owners do. :-)
Jaguars have two gas tanks. Just keep the second one empty, and switch to it if your cruise control won't disengage.
have been generous in funding the economics department at Florida State University, with strings attached to assure that department will support economic theories the Kochs agree with ("Austrian school" economics).
AKA: Economics that doesn't use the Scientific Method. From Wikipedia:
Austrian economists reject empirical statistical methods, natural experiments and constructed experiments as tools applicable to economics
It's quite a coincidence how economists that doen't rely on the Scientific Method consistently seem to come up with results that rich contributors like.
"Good artists borrow; great artists steal." -Steve Jobs [youtube.com]
This has to be the most hilariously appropriate quote misattribution I've ever seen.
This is of course completely wrong. Steve Jobs himself figured out how to make iPhones entirely on his own. His first breakthrough was learning how to make tools by banging a couple of rocks together. Mining and forging metal was his next great idea, followed by molded plastics. Electricity and Radio tranmission theory were required too of course, as were the fossil fuels and internal combustion and jet engines required to move the parts and finished product all over the world. Its truly amazing how shameless people are to steal all of his innovations. Putting all the pieces together in the last couple of years was meerly a culmination of a 100,000 year process of development Steve used to create everything that went into the iPhone.
You theives should be ashamed of yourselves.
Which means that the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field ultimately claimed the life of it's creator.
That's the problem with Reality Distortion Fields; they don't distort reality, just your perception of it. Reality itself doesn't give a shit what you think.
This is a lesson all of our climate/economic/etc. denialist folks in Congress will one day learn as well. Sadly, many only only learn the hard way (and sometimes not even then).
You know, every time I start to actually believe the people who try to paint Stallman as a paranoid extremist, somebody goes and proves him right like this.
Its GPL v3 for me from now on.
Well, another point would be that the natives they had contact with were mostly Inuit. Their culture initially developed in Alaska and spread across the entirety of North America. In their Alaskan homeland they already had contact with Eurasia, and thus already had as much exposure to Eurasian diseases as they were likely to get from the Norse.
Really though I think the best argument here is population density. In order for disease to really make population inroads, it has to hit a settled (generally agricultural) community. Those are the places where people are living so close together that a virus can be assured of finding a new host (or 20) before its done killing its existing one. The Inca and Aztecs certianly qualified, as did a debatable amount of natives in the NE USA and Mississippi valley. The various small bands of Inuit whale hunters really don't.
The ironic part about this is that the Little Ice Age is actually blamed for killing off the earliest European settlement in the Western Hemisphere.
The Norse had a settlement in Greenland for almost half a millenium (from 986 AD to sometime in the 1400s), and during their better times were in contact with mainland North America ("Vinland"). As the weather turned colder, things became tougher for the Norse livestock agriculture, and better for the Inuit hunting culture. The last records we have show incresing hardships, including increasing attacks from Inuit ("skraeling") bands.
The influx of Eurasian diseases in the Americans has typically been portrayed as a tremendous disaster for native American populations and a great boon to Europeans. I would be rather ironic if this were in fact a case where it instead helped the natives wipe out European settlement.
there would have to be evidence the supposed "kraken" existed, which there isn't
You wouldn't call Enteroctopus Dofleini "evidence"? Existing specimens are commonly found with 14 foot long tentacles, one has been certified at 23 ft, and there are reports of specimens as long as 30ft. That last specimen would probably be large enough to take out a 45ft ictheosaur.
We know the order octopoda dates back that far, and they are carnivores. If placed in an environment where they had lots of available prey that large, it makes perfect sense that they would have evolved even more size. They certianly wouldn't have been smaller! Given that shell-free cephlapods don't exectly leave a good direct fossil record, finding a kill-bone arrangement that they are known to favor today is about the best you can ask for.
Quite. In fact, growing up in an oil state, I can remember when "horizontal drilling" used to be a euphamisim for stealing. Drilling sideways a bit under the ground is a real good way to swipe someone else's oil from your own (relatively oil-poor) franchise site.