Heavy metal has lost any sort of melodic element and is now just a brutal assault with guitar-like sounds which for all we know might have been entirely generated by sampler (as Marylin Manson did with his Beautiful People song) and with not guitar virtuosity in sight (please somebody give me a challenging guitar solo - PLEASE!!).
Evanescence Fallen, for example. That whole CD rocks...
You do realize Evanescence was just a rip-off of Lacuna Coil's sound, right? So it's hard to give them credit for writing a whole album of good songs when they ripped off the whole style from someone else...
For example, the bass player and singer of French death metal band Carcariass has a PhD in CS, and publishes research on distributed numerical techniques. Not only that, he's been working and publishing while the band has been releasing new CDs...
Metaltabs.com recently went through this as well. Their solution was to get the permission of either the record labels or the bands themselves to publish tabs on their site. Of the ones who have responded, about 90-95% are giving permission. I wonder if guitartabs would have the same luck.
This line of thinking is discussed in The Parable of the Broken Window and is easily dismissed as bunk in any serious analysis.
I suppose if your idea of "serious analysis" is a lot of handwaving about "coulds" and "shoulds" and ridiculous assumptions, then you can easily dismiss it...
As I see it, the broken window "fallacy" has three serious flaws. First, it assumes that investment is a zero-sum game: that money spent on A will not be spent on B. This is of course not true, as it's possible to borrow money so as to invest in both A and B. Any businessman worth a damn will borrow to fund a worthwhile project before he'd kill it for lack of funding. There is some cost to this borrowing, but it's far less than the opportunity cost of not funding a project.
Second, it assumes that investment is done optimally and efficiently. Anyone familiar with government will tell you this isn't true. Any decrease in the amount spent on B needs to be measured in terms of its marginal impact; it's not enough to say "I decreased spending on B by $x and increased spending on A by $x and therefore it balances out." For example, take the case of the US workforce during WWII. Since the men were off fighting the war, women had to go to work. The marginal impact of the war on employment back home is far less than the Austrians would admit, because of the inefficiently used workforce. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but she's also the mother of getting stuff done efficiently.
But the main problem is that the Austrians fail to account for hidden benefits. For example, while many women returned to the home after WWII ended, there is no doubt that the WWII experience helped increase the number of women in the workforce. Thus, WWII directly aided productivity for years to come. Or consider the improvments in window energy efficiency over the last twenty years. The decrease in heating and cooling bills that the shopkeeper would see due to more efficient windows is completely ignored by the Austrians, who think that windows are all the same.
So I suppose if simpleminded analysis is good enough for you, then go ahead and dismiss it.
By that reasoning, what the economy really needs is more terrorism, war, and natural disasters. What a boon it must be to the economy, for a destructive hurricane to wreck a city and create a bunch of contracting jobs.
I know you're trying to be clever, but your argument is indeed correct. In general, natural disasters are net positive for the economy, as the temporary loss of economic activity is offset by the future rebuilding and enhanced productivity. War (that doesn't happen on your soil) is similar. The largest YoY % changes in US GDP in the 20th century happened in the early 40's, as WWII helped pull the US out of the Great Depression.
However, to sit around, throw up our hands and say "well, this can't be a war because we can't know when it's over." is silly and dangerous.
Oh, we know when it will be over: right about the same time as the War on Drugs (tm) and "Affirmative" Action... namely, never. What's silly and dangerous is to believe that the "War on Terra" is meant to be "winnable".
I think the easiest solution would be to just vote Democrat. Once the United States has a sane foriegn policy, as well as a sensible foreign policy, oil prices will come down.
Care to explain how voting for Hillary is going to get us a sane/sensible foreign policy?
Care to explain how raising gas taxes would launch a recession? Assuming the government spends the money it raises in the taxes...
Bad assumption. The (federal) government doesn't spend money like you or I do. They don't balance in-flows with out-flows; they just spend what they spend and figure out where the money comes from later (or run deficits in perpetuity).
So raising the gas tax will simply stifle consumer spending (mostly at the low end: Wal-Mart, etc.), and at least slow economic growth.
Where is the line for 'competing financial interests'? How about a scientist who both works for a company and publishes a paper supporting that company's product. The publication directly affects the income of the company by promoting the product. Reviewers will pay close attention to the paper to make sure the science is good. But having the competing financial interest is not instantly grounds for rejection of the paper.
I didn't say it was grounds for rejecting the paper, but it absolutely needs to be disclosed. In your example, the scientist would most likely declare his affiliation to the company in the author list and in the competing financial interest statement, and that would be fine.
The question is not where the money comes from. The question is whether the science is true or not. That's all that matters in the end. Everything else is perception.
True enough, but the usual Slashbot reply to the papers questioning global warming is: "but that study was commissioned by the energy companies, so it's biased". Strangely enough, they usually neglect the financial interests of the other side.
In any case, my point was that it's not necessarily gratuitous for the congressman to seek the financial data. Undisclosed competing financial interests are certainly very relevant. However, this particular investigation certainly seems like a case of "I don't like the result, so I'll try to find something to discredit it".
But, I think the two zany Republicans overstepped their bounds by asking for personal financial information.
That depends upon exactly what information was requested. My guess is that they're looking for a competing financial interest that was not disclosed. Any reputable journal will require that all authors disclose any investments they have that stand to benefit from the conclusions of the paper. In this case, that would mean (non-profit) environmental organizations, or alternative energy companies like Ballard, Plug, etc. If the authors had such competing interests, then they are no better than the authors directly funded by the energy companies. And if they had such competing interests and failed to disclose them....
Problem is, if you are caught holding the stock today, you are going to be hard pressed to find anyone who will buy it.
A third of the float is sold short (Note "Short % of Float" under Share Statistics). Those shorts will have to buy eventually. So I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of traders are holding hoping for a quick double. Once the shorts start covering, it might shoot up quite quickly as they all try to lock in their profits.
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As for the one-time use numbers, how do they offer you any protection? You're only liable for $50 if your card is fraudulently used, and many CC companies waive this. As long as you check your statements every month (you do this, right?), you shouldn't have to worry. It's the retailers that carry the risk of fradulent purchases.
Try hovering over a link in fark. It seems the text to display it is so complex, it overhwelms Firefox.
An article link? A forum link? One of the links on the right or left sides? All of these seem to work for me (FF 1.03). Got a screenshot of what you're describing?
Let me fill in the blank: You send a message at noon to someone who is twelve hours ahead of you. They get the message at midnight. They come in to work at 8:00 AM their time, and read your message. They send a response, but it is already 8:00 PM your time, so you don't see the message for another 12 hours when you come in to work the next day at 8:00 AM.
Having to go through multiple iterations of the message to make sure your point is clearly presented can slow things down significantly.
One of the first things you learn when working with people several time zones away from you is to pick up the damn phone and call them. You don't need to go through multiple iterations of that process. You go through one or two, and if you're not making progress, you call them. Sometimes email is the right solution, and other times it's not.
I find it interesting that the part you quoted was taken out of context... Later on that webpage, you find the following:
However, validating even the lesser claim Gore intended to make is problematic. Any statement about the "creation" or "beginning" of the Internet is difficult to evaluate, because the Internet is not a homogenous entity (it's a collection of computers, networks, protocols, standards, and application programs), nor did it all spring into being at once (the components that comprise the Internet were developed in various places at different times and are continuously being modified, improved, and expanded). Despite a spirited defense of Gore's claim by Vint Cerf (often referred to as the "father of the Internet") in which he stated "that as a Senator and now as Vice President, Gore has made it a point to be as well-informed as possible on technology and issues that surround it," many of the components of today's Internet came into being well before Gore's first term in Congress began in 1977, and it's hard to find any specific action of Gore's (such as his sponsoring a Congressional bill or championing a particular piece of legislation) that one could claim helped bring the Internet into being, much less validate Gore's statement of having taken the "initiative in creating the Internet." (emphasis mine)
So yes, Al Gore didn't claim to "invent" the internet... but his claim of "I took the initiative in creating the internet" is pretty shaky.
No, they were self-aggrandizing and over-reaching. He did not take the initiative in creating the internet. He took the initiative to encourage and foster (through legislation and funding) an environment where other people could create what would eventually become the internet. But that doesn't sound nearly as impressive, which is why he didn't say it that way.
Just as we say that Bush II invaded Iraq even though he's not out there with a rifle, or we say that "Eisenhower created the Interstate system" even though he wasn't out there with a bulldozer.
I don't think your analogies are accurate at all. I think both Bush and Eisenhower could understand what they were proposing and had a vision for what the end result would be. I don't think that Gore had such a vision. I seriously doubt that he could have forseen the WWW (remember, he made this statement in 2000) in the 70's and early 80's. So he didn't do something that was equivalent to Bush's invasion of Iraq or Eisenhower's creation of the interstate system.
I think a better analogy would be the following:
Richard Stallman states: "During my time at MIT, I took the initiative in creating Linux.".
It's as true as Gore's statement: without Gore, the internet wouldn't be the same as it is today, and without Stallman and GNU, Linux wouldn't be where it is today. But do you think that Stallman "took the initiative" in creating Linux? No, he took the initiative in creating GNU, which laid the groundwork for other people to create Linux, just like Gore helped provide the funding for other people to lay the groundwork for still other people to create the internet (read: WWW).
So, no, you shouldn't distort an accurate statement and then mock the distorted version. Especially where there's so much else about Gore worthy of being mocked. I'm all for mocking politicians, just keep it accurate.
Don't fret this. It's karmic justice, just like mocking Dan Quayle about the "potato[e]" incident.
The reasons why the losing politicians (I assume this means the Democrats) aren't demanding electoral change is a matter for themselves.
It means whoever lost in every race. That includes Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. Your argument was that switching to e-voting would cause a massive number of losers to demand recounts, and that simply didn't happen. Of course, with the number of polls done right before the elections, the outcomes in many races were very predictable.
This is a matter of the government endorsing a black box voting method and people going along with it without stopping to question it or the interests who are pushing it;
I agree that people are going along with it too easily, but I don't think it's a sinister plot.
E-voting can have advantages over hand-counting paper ballots, in both speed and accuracy. But this is only if it's done right, and this includes a verifiable paper trail and strict quality control. Some of the e-voting machines clearly did not meet these standards, and that is troubling. Unfortunately, the fact that these voting machines were used can be attributed to the incompetence of the government employees responsible for them, and therefore shouldn't be attributed to malice (yet).
I can't think of anything more obvious which completely flies in the face of American values.
Slashdot Mirror
No guitar virtuosity? Are you joking?
Here try this: Necrophagist - Stabwound
Or this if you prefer cheesy: Dragonforce - Fury of the Storm (sorry, couldn't find a good mp3 of it)
Or for something different I just discovered yesterday: Direwolf - Final Flight
There's plenty of good music around (virtuosic or not), you just need to look a bit...
You do realize Evanescence was just a rip-off of Lacuna Coil's sound, right? So it's hard to give them credit for writing a whole album of good songs when they ripped off the whole style from someone else...
For example, the bass player and singer of French death metal band Carcariass has a PhD in CS, and publishes research on distributed numerical techniques. Not only that, he's been working and publishing while the band has been releasing new CDs...
Metaltabs.com recently went through this as well. Their solution was to get the permission of either the record labels or the bands themselves to publish tabs on their site. Of the ones who have responded, about 90-95% are giving permission. I wonder if guitartabs would have the same luck.
Apparently, not enough of a fortune. Their stock lost 8% last Friday because they missed earnings estimates.
I suppose if your idea of "serious analysis" is a lot of handwaving about "coulds" and "shoulds" and ridiculous assumptions, then you can easily dismiss it...
As I see it, the broken window "fallacy" has three serious flaws. First, it assumes that investment is a zero-sum game: that money spent on A will not be spent on B. This is of course not true, as it's possible to borrow money so as to invest in both A and B. Any businessman worth a damn will borrow to fund a worthwhile project before he'd kill it for lack of funding. There is some cost to this borrowing, but it's far less than the opportunity cost of not funding a project.
Second, it assumes that investment is done optimally and efficiently. Anyone familiar with government will tell you this isn't true. Any decrease in the amount spent on B needs to be measured in terms of its marginal impact; it's not enough to say "I decreased spending on B by $x and increased spending on A by $x and therefore it balances out." For example, take the case of the US workforce during WWII. Since the men were off fighting the war, women had to go to work. The marginal impact of the war on employment back home is far less than the Austrians would admit, because of the inefficiently used workforce. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but she's also the mother of getting stuff done efficiently.
But the main problem is that the Austrians fail to account for hidden benefits. For example, while many women returned to the home after WWII ended, there is no doubt that the WWII experience helped increase the number of women in the workforce. Thus, WWII directly aided productivity for years to come. Or consider the improvments in window energy efficiency over the last twenty years. The decrease in heating and cooling bills that the shopkeeper would see due to more efficient windows is completely ignored by the Austrians, who think that windows are all the same.
So I suppose if simpleminded analysis is good enough for you, then go ahead and dismiss it.
I know you're trying to be clever, but your argument is indeed correct. In general, natural disasters are net positive for the economy, as the temporary loss of economic activity is offset by the future rebuilding and enhanced productivity. War (that doesn't happen on your soil) is similar. The largest YoY % changes in US GDP in the 20th century happened in the early 40's, as WWII helped pull the US out of the Great Depression.
Oh, we know when it will be over: right about the same time as the War on Drugs (tm) and "Affirmative" Action... namely, never. What's silly and dangerous is to believe that the "War on Terra" is meant to be "winnable".
So that would be 14 GB of mp3s and 286 GB of porn that you don't have?
Pfft. Every real mathematician knows that the entire field of complex analysis can be boiled down to the Schwartz Lemma.
Care to explain how voting for Hillary is going to get us a sane/sensible foreign policy?
Bad assumption. The (federal) government doesn't spend money like you or I do. They don't balance in-flows with out-flows; they just spend what they spend and figure out where the money comes from later (or run deficits in perpetuity).
So raising the gas tax will simply stifle consumer spending (mostly at the low end: Wal-Mart, etc.), and at least slow economic growth.
I didn't say it was grounds for rejecting the paper, but it absolutely needs to be disclosed. In your example, the scientist would most likely declare his affiliation to the company in the author list and in the competing financial interest statement, and that would be fine.
The question is not where the money comes from. The question is whether the science is true or not. That's all that matters in the end. Everything else is perception.
True enough, but the usual Slashbot reply to the papers questioning global warming is: "but that study was commissioned by the energy companies, so it's biased". Strangely enough, they usually neglect the financial interests of the other side.
In any case, my point was that it's not necessarily gratuitous for the congressman to seek the financial data. Undisclosed competing financial interests are certainly very relevant. However, this particular investigation certainly seems like a case of "I don't like the result, so I'll try to find something to discredit it".
That depends upon exactly what information was requested. My guess is that they're looking for a competing financial interest that was not disclosed. Any reputable journal will require that all authors disclose any investments they have that stand to benefit from the conclusions of the paper. In this case, that would mean (non-profit) environmental organizations, or alternative energy companies like Ballard, Plug, etc. If the authors had such competing interests, then they are no better than the authors directly funded by the energy companies. And if they had such competing interests and failed to disclose them....
Unless by "cool", they mean "totally sweet".
A third of the float is sold short (Note "Short % of Float" under Share Statistics). Those shorts will have to buy eventually. So I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of traders are holding hoping for a quick double. Once the shorts start covering, it might shoot up quite quickly as they all try to lock in their profits.
Who cares about that? The real question (for Slashdotters) is if it means no more playing spank the monkey.
- Discover: 1% cash back on purchases (after your first $4K in a single year, 0.25% or 0.5% before that). No limit on cash back.
- Citi Platinum Dividend Select: 1% cash back, 5% at supermarkets, gas stations, drugstores. Limited to $300 back per year.
- Chase PerfectCard: 1% cash back, 3% at gas stations. No limit on cash back per year.
As for the one-time use numbers, how do they offer you any protection? You're only liable for $50 if your card is fraudulently used, and many CC companies waive this. As long as you check your statements every month (you do this, right?), you shouldn't have to worry. It's the retailers that carry the risk of fradulent purchases.An article link? A forum link? One of the links on the right or left sides? All of these seem to work for me (FF 1.03). Got a screenshot of what you're describing?
Having to go through multiple iterations of the message to make sure your point is clearly presented can slow things down significantly.
One of the first things you learn when working with people several time zones away from you is to pick up the damn phone and call them. You don't need to go through multiple iterations of that process. You go through one or two, and if you're not making progress, you call them. Sometimes email is the right solution, and other times it's not.
Well, there's at least this one. It was rejected because it wasn't important enough... Right...
However, validating even the lesser claim Gore intended to make is problematic. Any statement about the "creation" or "beginning" of the Internet is difficult to evaluate, because the Internet is not a homogenous entity (it's a collection of computers, networks, protocols, standards, and application programs), nor did it all spring into being at once (the components that comprise the Internet were developed in various places at different times and are continuously being modified, improved, and expanded). Despite a spirited defense of Gore's claim by Vint Cerf (often referred to as the "father of the Internet") in which he stated "that as a Senator and now as Vice President, Gore has made it a point to be as well-informed as possible on technology and issues that surround it," many of the components of today's Internet came into being well before Gore's first term in Congress began in 1977, and it's hard to find any specific action of Gore's (such as his sponsoring a Congressional bill or championing a particular piece of legislation) that one could claim helped bring the Internet into being, much less validate Gore's statement of having taken the "initiative in creating the Internet." (emphasis mine)
So yes, Al Gore didn't claim to "invent" the internet... but his claim of "I took the initiative in creating the internet" is pretty shaky.
No, they were self-aggrandizing and over-reaching. He did not take the initiative in creating the internet. He took the initiative to encourage and foster (through legislation and funding) an environment where other people could create what would eventually become the internet. But that doesn't sound nearly as impressive, which is why he didn't say it that way.
Just as we say that Bush II invaded Iraq even though he's not out there with a rifle, or we say that "Eisenhower created the Interstate system" even though he wasn't out there with a bulldozer.
I don't think your analogies are accurate at all. I think both Bush and Eisenhower could understand what they were proposing and had a vision for what the end result would be. I don't think that Gore had such a vision. I seriously doubt that he could have forseen the WWW (remember, he made this statement in 2000) in the 70's and early 80's. So he didn't do something that was equivalent to Bush's invasion of Iraq or Eisenhower's creation of the interstate system.
I think a better analogy would be the following:
Richard Stallman states: "During my time at MIT, I took the initiative in creating Linux.".
It's as true as Gore's statement: without Gore, the internet wouldn't be the same as it is today, and without Stallman and GNU, Linux wouldn't be where it is today. But do you think that Stallman "took the initiative" in creating Linux? No, he took the initiative in creating GNU, which laid the groundwork for other people to create Linux, just like Gore helped provide the funding for other people to lay the groundwork for still other people to create the internet (read: WWW).
So, no, you shouldn't distort an accurate statement and then mock the distorted version. Especially where there's so much else about Gore worthy of being mocked. I'm all for mocking politicians, just keep it accurate.
Don't fret this. It's karmic justice, just like mocking Dan Quayle about the "potato[e]" incident.
Let me guess... you live in an apartment above a grocery store and below another grocery store.
It means whoever lost in every race. That includes Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. Your argument was that switching to e-voting would cause a massive number of losers to demand recounts, and that simply didn't happen. Of course, with the number of polls done right before the elections, the outcomes in many races were very predictable.
This is a matter of the government endorsing a black box voting method and people going along with it without stopping to question it or the interests who are pushing it;
I agree that people are going along with it too easily, but I don't think it's a sinister plot. E-voting can have advantages over hand-counting paper ballots, in both speed and accuracy. But this is only if it's done right, and this includes a verifiable paper trail and strict quality control. Some of the e-voting machines clearly did not meet these standards, and that is troubling. Unfortunately, the fact that these voting machines were used can be attributed to the incompetence of the government employees responsible for them, and therefore shouldn't be attributed to malice (yet).
I can't think of anything more obvious which completely flies in the face of American values.
What about gay marriage? :)