I thought the film was actually one of the few cases where it was actually a significant improvement on the book. I read the book expecting it to be much better than the dumbed-down Hollywood version, only to be very disappointed. The terrible plot twists, deus ex machina, and boring characters are still there (except the kids are much more annoying in the book), but there are none of the fun bits (the cgi, Jeff Goldblum, the one-liners, the score). The only thing of worth in the book was the central premise.
It's a shame that Crichton won't be around to come up with any more great ideas for entertainment, but I won't miss the books themselves, or his anti-science agenda.
Parent should be modded up. Many are screaming that any kind of progressive change to the health care system would be socialistic.
I'm not sure why the US is so scared of a little light socialism. It's not as if having public health care free at the point of use would suddenly lead to you, say, nationalising the banking system.
How is the NHS inefficient? It operates significantly more cheaply than the US system. As for unsustainable, the NHS has been going for 60 years now. When do you expect it to break down?
The difference is that the police and military force are part of the proper role of the government - to uphold and protect the rights of the citizenry. There is not and can be no right to healthcare, so for the government to enforce such a "right" can only serve to violate the rights that it was charged with protecting.
Hang on, your argument for the difference between the two cases is that one is the government's responsibility because you say so? Why do citizens have a right to be protected from foreign armies, but not diseases?
What's so clever about the ribbon? I've only had a quick play with it, but as far as I can see it's only a tabbed toolbar. I don't hate it, but I don't see that it's any better (or that different) compared to a menu system. It takes up a bit more space and is arguably prettier, but that's about it.
So it can get quite a bit hotter and life will still be sound.
An important aspect of the problem is the speed at which warming is occurring, not just the overall temperature change. The faster the increase, the more difficult it is for life to adapt. And the rate at which change is happening is unprecedented.
I just can't get those people to understand that the Real World doesn't care about consensus; facts are facts.
But facts, in very complicated problems, can only be understood filtered through the minds of experts. I don't have enough time or inclination to read up on all the literature of climate change, but when there is a massive consensus by the experts I listen to it.
The concept of the Higgs boson seems like bollocks to me, but the consensus of the physicists is that it's a real possibility, so I believe them.
No, I'm going to continue being a contrarian in this and demand proof
Proof only really exists in mathematics. For most real-world problems there is only evidence, and there is massive amounts of it that points towards anthropogenic climate change.
If they can start from 20 years ago and predict the present, they can predict tomorrow.
That's not true at all. See overfitting. There are an infinite number of models that can fit any known data series perfectly. You can only have confidence in it when it can predict unknown data successfully.
If what you say is true, why can't we predict the weather with any accuracy?
We can predict the weather with some accuracy. But it's a very difficult problem trying to predict it more than a week or two ahead.
And to anticipate your next point, that doesn't mean that predicting changes in the climate is impossible. It's much more difficult to estimate what number a die will come up on its next throw than to estimate the distribution of scores over 50 throws.
Frankly, I think we should be spending money on learning more about how the climate changes instead of just assuming that CO2 is the One True Answer.
We've already spent vast sums of money on studying this issue. It's one of the most researched subjects in science, and the experts involved have come as close to a consensus as they ever do.
A question for you: how much more study do you think is required before action is taken, and how do you decide when that point is reached?
Until we have a computer model that can start from 20 years ago and predict today correctly, we won't know enough to say that we understand what's happening.
You're obviously not a scientist. It's easy to find models that match what has already happened.
No, you missed the point. You 'gently pointed out'? That just makes you come across as a wuss, which led to her reaction. You should have kissed her. At best she would have responded. At worst she would have been offended -- but you would still have got points for having the balls to do it (and you'd have had the pretty decent excuse that she had just said she wanted to meet someone like you, so she couldn't really complain).
You don't have to be a bastard to attract girls -- but you won't do it by being nice to them either. Evolution has shaped their genes so that they're attracted to confidence and masculinity.
I was always a fan of Codemasters back in their Spectrum days (come on, it's time for a new generation of Dizzy games) so when someone from the company came to my university to give a talk on working for Codemasters I went along to see if I could be persuaded. Rather than selling the idea to me though, it really put me off. The gist of the talk was that Codemasters weren't interested in producing good games, only games that sold well. The guy actually said that the company wasn't interested in people who wanted to work on producing good games. I understood the point in principle, but the emphasis on commercialism ensured that I never even considered applying to them.
Re:This is how economics is supposed to work!
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
·
· Score: 1
SUVs (4X4s in British) do have one advantage -- you can almost guarantee that anyone driving one is going to be a bad, inconsiderate driver. It's quite handy actually as it warns you to drive extra defensively, and (e.g.) not to let them out in front of you.
Scotland, Wales, and England are each considered both countries and nations (and so is the UK, confusingly). Scotland and Wales have partial control of their own affairs, Scotland more so than Wales, but mostly they are run from London. Northern Ireland is... different.
The difference is mainly cultural rather than political, but the Scots and Welsh at least take it seriously.
See here. Not that I'm a royalist, but they do serve in the forces. (Though if they feel like "borrowing" a Chinook to impress their birds/go on a stag weekend, that seems OK too.)
Scientists today have fancier computer models and a little better data gathering capability than back in 1895, but are likely just as wrong as their ancestor scientists were over time. Allow me to paraphrase your argument.
"Eratosthenes calculation of the diameter of the Earth around 200BC was out by 20%. Sure, scientists nowadays have fancier instruments and better measurements, but their estimate of the diameter of the Earth is likely to be just as wrong as Eratosthenes'!"
Do you have the slightest idea about how science works?
I don't know why positive feedback needs a comment anyway. All I'm interested in with a buyer/seller is the proportion of +ve transactions, and any -ve comments.
100 pages of "AAAAAAAAA++++++A+A+A+==!@£ GR8 WOULD HAVE BUYERS BABIES" just serves to hide any negative comments. I'd rather just see a list of negative comments and the user's reaction to them. Last I checked, eBay wouldn't let you just view bad reactions, though they were thinking about it.
I'd go for an Asus Eee then. Ultra portable (approx the size of two stacked DVD cases closed if you haven't seen one), solid state disk, cheap, and widespread enough to replace if necessary. No easy way of burning CD/DVDs, but SD cards/USB flash drives are pretty cheap these days.
I've got one I find it very handy for just sticking in a bag and keeping it handy.
they have to design a tRNA that recognizes the new bases
Plus if they want this to work in living organisms they presumably have to work out what (if any) sequence of DNA (with or without the new bases!) will produce that tRNA, and then add the new gene(s) into the host's genome.
It takes a fair amount of trauma to the brain to cause unconsciousness in an otherwise healthy person, and the chance that the trauma involved also caused some spinal injury is very, very high.
That does sound quite persuasive. Actually, I looked up spinal injuries specifically, and it does say not to move the casualty if breathing, so although the general first aid points don't mention it, it looks like I gave bad info (can someone mod me down?)
I remember asking specifically about unconsciousness due to trauma and was told that unconsciousness trumps everything, and to put the casualty in the recovery position -- but the course it was partly based on wilderness first aid/cave rescue so it may have been in that context -- leaving a casualty for a long time.
Unless someone's life is in IMMEDIATE danger, do not move them, especially if they are unconscious
This is contrary to my first aid training. The rule I learnt (and this was a first aid course taken less than a year ago) was that if you find someone unconscious, you put them in the recovery position if (or once) they're breathing. The risk of someone suffocating is greater than any potential damage you might do to them in moving them.
I've just looked it up (DK First Aid Manual authorised by the British Red Cross, St. John's Ambulance, and St. Andrew's Ambulance).
The rule is:
First, assess the situation (act on any immediate danger)
Then, check for consciousness or response
If the casualty is not conscious, open airway (if not breathing, go to CPR)
If the casualty is breathing, put in the recovery position
(After the above, treat other conditions, such as bleeding)
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the film was actually one of the few cases where it was actually a significant improvement on the book. I read the book expecting it to be much better than the dumbed-down Hollywood version, only to be very disappointed. The terrible plot twists, deus ex machina, and boring characters are still there (except the kids are much more annoying in the book), but there are none of the fun bits (the cgi, Jeff Goldblum, the one-liners, the score). The only thing of worth in the book was the central premise.
It's a shame that Crichton won't be around to come up with any more great ideas for entertainment, but I won't miss the books themselves, or his anti-science agenda.
Parent should be modded up. Many are screaming that any kind of progressive change to the health care system would be socialistic.
I'm not sure why the US is so scared of a little light socialism. It's not as if having public health care free at the point of use would suddenly lead to you, say, nationalising the banking system.
How is the NHS inefficient? It operates significantly more cheaply than the US system. As for unsustainable, the NHS has been going for 60 years now. When do you expect it to break down?
The difference is that the police and military force are part of the proper role of the government - to uphold and protect the rights of the citizenry. There is not and can be no right to healthcare, so for the government to enforce such a "right" can only serve to violate the rights that it was charged with protecting.
Hang on, your argument for the difference between the two cases is that one is the government's responsibility because you say so? Why do citizens have a right to be protected from foreign armies, but not diseases?
What's so clever about the ribbon? I've only had a quick play with it, but as far as I can see it's only a tabbed toolbar. I don't hate it, but I don't see that it's any better (or that different) compared to a menu system. It takes up a bit more space and is arguably prettier, but that's about it.
Crichton should stick with novels, which he's good at
I was with you up to this point.
So it can get quite a bit hotter and life will still be sound.
An important aspect of the problem is the speed at which warming is occurring, not just the overall temperature change. The faster the increase, the more difficult it is for life to adapt. And the rate at which change is happening is unprecedented.
I just can't get those people to understand that the Real World doesn't care about consensus; facts are facts.
But facts, in very complicated problems, can only be understood filtered through the minds of experts. I don't have enough time or inclination to read up on all the literature of climate change, but when there is a massive consensus by the experts I listen to it.
The concept of the Higgs boson seems like bollocks to me, but the consensus of the physicists is that it's a real possibility, so I believe them.
No, I'm going to continue being a contrarian in this and demand proof
Proof only really exists in mathematics. For most real-world problems there is only evidence, and there is massive amounts of it that points towards anthropogenic climate change.
If they can start from 20 years ago and predict the present, they can predict tomorrow.
That's not true at all. See overfitting. There are an infinite number of models that can fit any known data series perfectly. You can only have confidence in it when it can predict unknown data successfully.
If what you say is true, why can't we predict the weather with any accuracy?
We can predict the weather with some accuracy. But it's a very difficult problem trying to predict it more than a week or two ahead.
And to anticipate your next point, that doesn't mean that predicting changes in the climate is impossible. It's much more difficult to estimate what number a die will come up on its next throw than to estimate the distribution of scores over 50 throws.
Reptiles have perfectly good immune systems: in the case of alligators, they're better than human ones
Assuming the theory is correct (a big if), then the only reptiles to survive would have been the ones with particularly good immune systems :)
Frankly, I think we should be spending money on learning more about how the climate changes instead of just assuming that CO2 is the One True Answer.
We've already spent vast sums of money on studying this issue. It's one of the most researched subjects in science, and the experts involved have come as close to a consensus as they ever do.
A question for you: how much more study do you think is required before action is taken, and how do you decide when that point is reached?
Until we have a computer model that can start from 20 years ago and predict today correctly, we won't know enough to say that we understand what's happening.
You're obviously not a scientist. It's easy to find models that match what has already happened.
Actually, it *is* pretty much drowning. The main advantage of it is that you can handwave and pretend that you aren't slowly drowning someone.
Have you seen
Christopher Hitchen's experience of waterboarding?
I'd be happy with either of those. Or ~/.config. The point is they should be somewhere logical, and they shouldn't clutter up the home directory.
Why the buggery fuck can't user config files go in ~/.configuration/ and system files in /configuration/ ?
No, you missed the point. You 'gently pointed out'? That just makes you come across as a wuss, which led to her reaction. You should have kissed her. At best she would have responded. At worst she would have been offended -- but you would still have got points for having the balls to do it (and you'd have had the pretty decent excuse that she had just said she wanted to meet someone like you, so she couldn't really complain).
You don't have to be a bastard to attract girls -- but you won't do it by being nice to them either. Evolution has shaped their genes so that they're attracted to confidence and masculinity.
I was always a fan of Codemasters back in their Spectrum days (come on, it's time for a new generation of Dizzy games) so when someone from the company came to my university to give a talk on working for Codemasters I went along to see if I could be persuaded. Rather than selling the idea to me though, it really put me off. The gist of the talk was that Codemasters weren't interested in producing good games, only games that sold well. The guy actually said that the company wasn't interested in people who wanted to work on producing good games. I understood the point in principle, but the emphasis on commercialism ensured that I never even considered applying to them.
SUVs (4X4s in British) do have one advantage -- you can almost guarantee that anyone driving one is going to be a bad, inconsiderate driver. It's quite handy actually as it warns you to drive extra defensively, and (e.g.) not to let them out in front of you.
Scotland, Wales, and England are each considered both countries and nations (and so is the UK, confusingly). Scotland and Wales have partial control of their own affairs, Scotland more so than Wales, but mostly they are run from London. Northern Ireland is... different.
The difference is mainly cultural rather than political, but the Scots and Welsh at least take it seriously.
See here. Not that I'm a royalist, but they do serve in the forces. (Though if they feel like "borrowing" a Chinook to impress their birds/go on a stag weekend, that seems OK too.)
"Eratosthenes calculation of the diameter of the Earth around 200BC was out by 20%. Sure, scientists nowadays have fancier instruments and better measurements, but their estimate of the diameter of the Earth is likely to be just as wrong as Eratosthenes'!"
Do you have the slightest idea about how science works?
I don't know why positive feedback needs a comment anyway. All I'm interested in with a buyer/seller is the proportion of +ve transactions, and any -ve comments.
100 pages of "AAAAAAAAA++++++A+A+A+==!@£ GR8 WOULD HAVE BUYERS BABIES" just serves to hide any negative comments. I'd rather just see a list of negative comments and the user's reaction to them. Last I checked, eBay wouldn't let you just view bad reactions, though they were thinking about it.
I'd go for an Asus Eee then. Ultra portable (approx the size of two stacked DVD cases closed if you haven't seen one), solid state disk, cheap, and widespread enough to replace if necessary. No easy way of burning CD/DVDs, but SD cards/USB flash drives are pretty cheap these days. I've got one I find it very handy for just sticking in a bag and keeping it handy.
they have to design a tRNA that recognizes the new bases
Plus if they want this to work in living organisms they presumably have to work out what (if any) sequence of DNA (with or without the new bases!) will produce that tRNA, and then add the new gene(s) into the host's genome.
It takes a fair amount of trauma to the brain to cause unconsciousness in an otherwise healthy person, and the chance that the trauma involved also caused some spinal injury is very, very high.
That does sound quite persuasive. Actually, I looked up spinal injuries specifically, and it does say not to move the casualty if breathing, so although the general first aid points don't mention it, it looks like I gave bad info (can someone mod me down?)
I remember asking specifically about unconsciousness due to trauma and was told that unconsciousness trumps everything, and to put the casualty in the recovery position -- but the course it was partly based on wilderness first aid/cave rescue so it may have been in that context -- leaving a casualty for a long time.
This is contrary to my first aid training. The rule I learnt (and this was a first aid course taken less than a year ago) was that if you find someone unconscious, you put them in the recovery position if (or once) they're breathing. The risk of someone suffocating is greater than any potential damage you might do to them in moving them.
I've just looked it up (DK First Aid Manual authorised by the British Red Cross, St. John's Ambulance, and St. Andrew's Ambulance).
The rule is:
(After the above, treat other conditions, such as bleeding)