I would personally fall into your malevolent (or evil) category... that doesn't seem fair at all. Of course, I'm not God. But still, not fair...
How does not being willing to solve problems make someone malevolent ? There are loads of problems I'm not willing to solve. Leading the list are problems that the people brought upon themselves. Second are hopeless problems. And yes, some preacher does convince me from time to time to give money to essentially hopeless causes, hoping against hope that this time will be different (though I prefer non-hopeless causes). I've even been known to have been surprised at times. But loads of problems will never see my help, knowing full well people are dying as a result of them (Palestina, or Bangladesh, and dozens of others)
Am I malevolent too, then ? Because that's where your classification would place me. I could provide a certain, nonzero, amount of aid, and I willingly withold it.
There are few countries in the world that are as responsible for their own problems as Haiti is. In addition to that it's a hopeless problem too.
It's sad... but nothing will change. It's great what the US is doing. But was the situation in Haiti so much better before the earthquake ? The honest answer is no.
Haiti, for whatever reasons (no racist crap) is not a good place, and is very unlikely indeed to become a good place. The natural resources are all but used up (1% trees left, freshwater is used up). The population is so far over the carrying capacity of the land that it's very unlikely even medium size animals will be able to survive the next few years.
And the worst news : all the aid in the world is not going to change that. Only relocating nearly all of Haitians will delay the problem. Delay, not solve. I won't kid anyone using the word "solve" here.
Why are we doing this ? Forestalling the inevitable for a year, if that ?
Okay,... wiretapping... maybe.... if used totally, totally out of place.
ACTA... again maybe.... maybe... not at the moment, certainly, but I can understand some trepidation.
And then... throttling ? WTF ? You're equating slightly slowing down your download of the latest fake britney spears porn with the violent censorship that the Chinese state is inflicting on it's citizens ? Why don't you call AT&T the Nazi SS ?
Let's keep some perspective here. This is not the way forward.
Now that I am found to have reasonable arguments, against your "I want free stuff" arguments I obviously have to be part of the evil empire.
We are, in fact, a small operation trying to compete with the incumbent telco. And no if you want to configure your network to treat certain traffic preferentially (QoS), or if you want to configure IPv6, I will help you out for free. Yes obviously only if you're a customer.
But if you want to send out your quake sessions preferentially marked, I'll help you out with that just the same. Of course, any preferential treatment stops at the network boundary, but hey. You could have inter-as agreements to solve that problem (we actually have one of those for a good customer).
The fact that the IP's PRINCIPLE is thoroughly violated by your suggestion apparently does not mean anything to you. The whole point of switching to IP was to make the massive overselling of capacity possible. Your complaints about service are as realistic as complaining in a garaga that the car they sold you doesn't fly.
The whole reason for packet based networking is to use the same bandwidth for different customers simultaneously. That's what made the internet possible in the first place. Things weren't better in 1910, so why you want to bring back the 1960's telephone (and "internet") system is beyond me.
Of course you don't want government interference; you want to screw users are much as possible. Of course if the government suddenly owned all the infrastructure, you'd have to compete on service alone, because all these nonsense peering agreements would go out the window. And who wants to do that when they can just screw people of money because they have no other choices?
Do we want to make a profit ? Yes.
But you are perfectly free today to go and see what happens if the government owns all the infrastructure. What's stopping you ? Just move to North Korea... nothing hard about it.
Don't forget to write back a little note explaining how it's better, alright ? Of course as even the mail doesn't operate there, never mind telephone or internet, it'll have to be a message bird. Don't forget to take a pigeon, alright ?
But the real sentiment is that "MY" culture never makes anything that sucks. Incidentally, I'm also always right. I once thought I was wrong, but that was a mistake. If that ever changes it's because evil democrats "healthcared" my good brain cells out and replaced them with more politically correct ones.
If you treat all VOIP as high priority, thats one thing. If you treat YOUR OWN better than your VOIP competitors, you should be forced to close your doors.
Customers pay extra to get their voip traffic to us treated preferentially. They are perfectly free to pay for preferential traffic to another voip provider (as customers get to specify, up to a certain bandwidth, which traffic is prioritized, that limit being dependant on how much they pay. We even allow residential customers to prioritize certain traffic over others. Except for my own home connection I doubt anyone actually does that, though).
One way customers use this is to have telephony interconnects over our network to their different sites. We don't mind this at all, in fact I make it a point to help anyone who wants to do this. Same goes for IPv6 : if you want to configure it native on our network, I'll personally help you do it.
Btw : has vonage decided to start cooperating with other telephony operators again ? Because Vonage complains (and so do we), but they also use preferential network connections to their advantage (they also ask money for preferential treatment on their network), disconnecting providers who refuse to pay up.
Your attitude is retarded; you're a tiny ISP. What happens when your upstream provider wants to compete, and they just raise your rates until your prices are forced higher than theirs?
What makes you think they don't do that already ? What keeps us alive is cooperation agreements with other small (and even somewhat larger) ISPs, and as much own infrastructure as we can get our hands on.
As for internet and telephony transit we have no local upstream provider, for obvious reasons.
We don't want the government to interfere, as it's government interference that brought us to this position in the first place. Corrupt government cannot get us out again. If we're going to beat the large telcos we're going to have to do it by adapting faster than telcos do and offering better service. And we're going to do it by only placing infrastructure in interesting locations.
The problem with democracy is large numbers of clueless uninvolved "do-gooders" interfering in everything. Needless to say, what they do never turns out to be all that good.
And if you do that, nobody will be able to offer up reliable voip services. Point. QoS is required to get professional voip services. And if you totally disable QoS, a single idiot bittorrenting to capacity will be able to disrupt the network control protocols, resulting in total disconnection of the entire AS (BGP is, after all, an inband protocol).
Of course the only result is that Verizon will still offer voip services, they'll just create a non-internet network to do it with. Then they can just have a generally shitty internet network, and raise prices further due to the extra equipment required. Verizon went to the trouble of building a huge network, Vonage is free to do the same.
Then the residential users will get a network that the price they pay can provide, instead of being allowed to freeload on excess capacity of business customers, and trust me, you don't want that. That will be the end of anything over 1 mbit residential internet connections.
In other words, net neutrality is a big bucket of rules that are neither consistent, nor practical. It's just "I NEED free stuff, and damn the consequences". It is people demanding unrealistic bandwidth, not willing to pay the real price of it, so they find the telcos (and any other ISP, they're not all huge companies, some are small and just trying to survive) must simply force others to pay for it.
And yes : I work for one (a tiny one). And yes we throttle. We give residential users access to all UNUSED bandwidth available. Of course how much bandwidth is unused is determined by how active the business users (fortunately business usage drops just before 18h and residential usage starts spiking just after 18h), who pay for the interlinks. The business reality is simple : if we can't use QoS, we will terminate our residential customers, because they aren't worth it.
To get rid of "net neutrality" was of course the whole point of the transition to packet based networks. Dynamically sharing bandwidth. The old networks, like SDH, either provided their specced network bandwidth between two points, or they refused to connect at all. Anyone care to return to that situation ?
Come on, the question of the motivation of Plato, Artistotle cannot be a real question, right ?
They did what they did for increased social status and for money. Also they had a rather strong, religiously motivated obsession with circles, and a disdain for the natural religions that ruled their cities.
Gallileo and Newton's motivation is also beyond obvious : they wanted to "appreciate the beauty of God" (Jesus Christ), through looking at the world and understanding some small part of it. The money and social status probably did not hurt either. Why ? Because that's what everyone did, under the direction of Rome (which was at least partly motivated by that ancient Greek philosophy, and the competition with Byzantium).
The question is not what motivated these people. The question is what motivated the various city states (in the ancient Greek case) and Rome (in the case of Gallileo and Rome) to create this environment in which these people discovered the things they did discover. The answer is an imitation-based ideology : philosophy (natural classical philosophy to be exact) and the Christian religion.
On the other hand, in the counterexamples, the question is what created the environment that burned the library of Alexandria. What destroyed the libraries of ancient China. And the answers in both cases are equally well known. What killed (literally) medical science in the muslim empires ? The answer are those same imitation-based ideologies : the islamic religion and a specific chinese religion.
The vast, vast majority of religions and ideologies destroyed science (they did not just "not support it", they actively sought it out and eradicated at least the knowledge, sometimes, like the muslims, the people). These religions were not, at all, exceptional in their eradication of scientific endeavours (they're only somewhat exceptional in their size).
Rather, what makes some religions and ideologies exceptional is not killing science of entirely. The question is not really why people kill of science : the very short answer is that science has the potential of altering the balance of power in a society. The question is what makes ancient Greece and Rome (the Christian Rome) special. I believe that the answer is that they are both ideologies that are not so easy to punch holes in with science (though most people consider -wrongly- then to be inconsistent with science. Miracle-based Christian ("mostly mechanical God" in Einstein's words) ideology is not disproven, nor would anyone but people who've had physics or math at university level know exactly what is wrong with ancient Greek philosophy (though disagreement, mostly due to "other philosophies provide more free stuff" like communism, or say islam's jizya and slavery based society, or other slavery based ideologies). The real scientific criticism is that there is no positive proof either. Which is not entirely true, as there are certainly enough historical mentions of miracles, but they are discarded by scientific belief which then declares that they've never seen any miracles. In other words, the only real criticism is that these miracles, these extremely unlikely or impossible events do not prove the historical accuracy of the bible and we frankly do not trust the observations made by many scientists. Of course, to exclude miracles, there is a rather long list of scientists that have to be excluded)
An example of what the problem is with science in relation to religions can be illustrated with the difference between the islamic worldview and the Christian worldview. Muslims believe that everything, every last little thing, is a conscious act of allah. If you let a ball go and it falls, the fact that it fell down was supposed to be a direct expression of the will of allah. Obviously, Newton's theory is therefore a proof that islam is false. In fact, for the taliban (but really for all muslims, certainly all islamic "universities" agree on this point) ANY theory that says anything at all about the real world is directly contradic
And... where would you tether it on earth ? The moon is not in geostationary orbit.
You know, if you just anchor a rope and pull it into space there is a point where the centrifugal force of the end of the rope would start to pull the rope upwards. Presumbaly you want to go a bit beyond that point, so that the cable just hangs there, without any support, and it's weight (not mass) is slightly negative (btw : mass can never be negative, weight, however, can). Just long enough so the tension is enough to carry the scenic cable car.
Our brains are merely a bunch of grey matter that works together to solve problems, whether that problem is putting the square peg in the right hole, or remembering where you put that tool.
Funny how our brains do none of that according to AI. The "AI" of living animals does not solve problems logically or rationally (and since mathematicians have proven that to be impossible, no serious AI researcher continues trying to). The cells of the brains of animals (and humans) do one thing, and one thing only : correlate events. An immediate consequence of doing that is that they imitate one another. Nearly everything we do beyond that is purely cultural. Yes, including "instinctive" behavior, violence, sex, you name it. There does not exist any brain, animal or human, that rationally solves problems.
The brain is created to help animals survive. Rationally solving problems, art, maths, aesthetics, rights, are all totally and completely superfluous compared to the goal of surviving. So what do animals do ? They imitate things they see (in the real world). Since those things are clearly capable of survival, or they wouldn't be in the real world at all, that leads mostly to behavior that increases the chances of survival of an individual.
You'll find that this view explains history much, much better than treating humans as rational. How could people once think that eating your own child would ensure military success (the Carthagens did this, and so did a few native american tribes) ? Or stoning women ? Or bathing in the blood streaming out of the throat of a black slave (Hera worship in the Roman empire, sometimes this was combined with having sex in that blood)... (the list goes on). This is not rational. Yet behaviors like this are 99% of history, and quite possibly 100%. Science, with the exception of the christian west, was only ever continued, in any culture (with the one exception), as long as it provided increased economic or military capability. And then it was abandoned when it ran into a wall (as science has done so many times). The Romans(/Greeks, not 100% clear), the Persians, at least 4 muslim dynasties, the Chinese, and possibly the ancient Egyptians knew about electrical conductivity, most even had "demonstrations" : little toys actually using electrical effects. None of them ever developed any electrical circuitry or engines that we know of. In fairness, it still took the christians 120 years from the discovery of electricity to "hey we can make circuits", but that's a whole lot better than the knowledge destruction that occured in every other culture (for various reasons, Romans were overrun and much more interested in trade than in science, muslims killed their scientists every 50 or-so years and burned their books including the library of alexandria and the many lesser byzantine libraries, Chinese kept conquering and -more importantly- plundering and killing one another,... the list is long and very sad. And very irrational).
I've looked up his paper. Whatever mr "Global warming" states it does indeed say that global warming may be stopped for anywhere from a few years to a few decades by the ocean's heat transfer.
He does say that the models have the ocean heat transfer wrong for the 21st century. The ocean is not currently eating up heat like the models predict, it is adding heat to the athmosphere, and he warns that this effect is about to reverse and might turn out to be quite a big effect. That was in 2008.
Yet last week in Geneva, at the UN's World Climate Conference -- an annual gathering of the so-called "scientific consensus" on man-made climate change -- Prof. Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool."
The global warming theory has been based all along on the idea that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, then they would let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land.
But as Prof. Latif pointed out, the Atlantic, and particularly the North Atlantic, has been cooling instead. And it looks set to continue a cooling phase for 10 to 20 more years. "How much?" he wondered before the assembled delegates. "The jury is still out."
Who claims this ? Good question : Prof. Latif, of the university of Leibniz, lead author of the IPCC last 2 global warming reports.
So you're, it seems stuck, if you assault this guys credibility, of course you're also assaulting the IPCC's credibility. If you don't, obviously you have to accept the conclusions "as you're not a climate scientist". So which is it ? Or are we going to go with the rotten apple theory, which of course would mean the scientific consensus mainly rests on a few rotten apples...
But we all know what is motivating your global warming beliefs. And it's not science.
(and this is by no means the worst news for climate change theory, there is a revolution going on in thermodynamics relating how out-of-balance "systems" (like the earth and it's climate) behave, and it's very bad news : in the long term, anything that happens, including pumping huge amounts of co2 in the air, can only result in one of 2 things : a. nothing at all b. a return to equilibrium. If this theory gets proven, it is a theoretical proof, independant of any particular climate equation being right or wrong, that nothing inside the system can break the climate cycle that we're in, unless it fully obliterates earth)
Btw : I still find the IPCC a bunch of overpaid elititists with conflicts of intrest Obama himself would be ashamed of, but I love the situation this puts global warming nazis into.
You do realize that Europe's (and America's, a bit later) welfare systems are collapsing, right ?
I realize it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, but if population does not rise, the elders (that would be you, in case you're confused) can only be left to die.
Tritium decays into a low-energy electron and an antineutrino.
Antineutrino's will start flying at near-light speeds and extremely likely not interact with anything until they hit a neutron star or a black hole. They are not dangerous for living beings, as they simply fly right through them. It carries off the majority of the energy (11-12 KeV)
The electron has an energy of close to 6 KeV (kilo electron volt). At these speeds electrons are not capable of penetrating human skin, or any layer of fluid. The only way to make tritium dangerous is to drink large amounts of it. The water in it gets built into your cells, and there it is close enough to do some (minor, compared to gamma decay) damage.
You can, however, shower perfectly safely in tritium. As rain can theoretically contain up to 0.5% tritium (though ten times less is much more likely), most of us will turn out to have actually done just that.
Conclusion : tritium is not corrosive. It is not dangerous (except as a useful component to make an atomic bomb)
Yeah, one kinda wonders if they have already decided which string theory they believe in nowadays. Apparently there were some 10^500 different theories, and that's ignoring the fact that the fundamental constants can be chosen rather freely. Furthermore, there is no proof that amongst those 10^500 (or more) theories there is one that has a positive cosmological constant.
Actually the theory has so many different permutations that starts to wonder if it wouldn't happen to be turing-complete, and therefore have zero predictive power. It would be about as useful for determining how the universe works as a calculator without a manual. Well, without the actual calculator I mean.
In connection to that : does this unification make any useful prediction ? Is it too much to presume it must lead to a way to generate gravitational attraction using electrical power, no ? Preferably a method not require TeV collisions ?
Your point is basically that it'd be impossible for you to convict an innocent, since you'd vote everyone innocent.
Granted, that would make it quite hard. I doubt it would provide much justice, though.
Btw, in the case of the mobster, you'd probably have 1 witness against him (the victim) and objective evidence. In addition to that there'd be masses of witnesses for the defense.
The solution to this, it seems to me, is to put more faith in objective evidence. Subjective justice is mob justice is not just at all.
I think the parent poster takes issue with your near 100% reliance on subjective evidence, and treatment of objective evidence (as reported to you by imperfect humans) as no better.
You could at least see that you would never convict a mobster (who'd have heaps of false witnesses standing by). Or anyone from a closely-enough-knit group for that matter.
It'd also be relatively easy to get you to convict an innocent. If you based yourself on witnesses alone, obviously, you can see why you'd be liable to convict someone of witchcraft, for example. Even in this day and age. There is never any shortage of witnesses for idiotic accusations.
Objective evidence must take precedence over subjective evidence. Yes, DNA can be planted/faked, but if that's the case, more research will find inconsistencies. The solution is not less reliance on objective evidence, imho, but more, and better methods. Perhaps some of this "stimulus" money could be put into creating an agency to improve the collection of objective evidence (like DNA evidence). Say paying a few people to plant fake evidence using a variety of methods without telling the researches and work that way on improved detection methods.
I wish (for the love of God) that for once no-one invokes Godwin's law.
But (here goes nothing) : a communist (centrally controlled economy) country that allows big companies to exist as juridically separate entities, but controls them directly by controlling upper management... that style of government has a name : fascism. It generally fails after the first wave of technologies that get exploited by those large companies becomes obsolete. The companies are unwilling to invest in change, and prefer to use legal and physical force to keep inefficient business models going (and before anyone claims how "rightist" this is, in Germany this was done as least as much by the unions as by the government)
I wouldn't like living in a govt. like that, but then again I hear it makes the trains run on time. Of course it has the same problem as any centrally controlled system : if the central control doesn't like you, it might be wise to develop an obsessive fear of showering.
Using terrorism to fight terrorism is rather self-defeating, no? Or did I miss something?
Read up on history. The only ever effective military tactic against terrorirsm was terrorist-style attacks carried out by the regular military against the group that harbors the terrorists ("terrorists kill 1 christian, we round up 100 muslims and shoot them" - type policies)
I am fully aware just how badly this sucks. It's also the evident truth.
And obviously the tactic of tolerance against terrorist groups (even if not against terrorists themselves) has always led straight to defeat. If you don't want to fight, the terrorists will win. That's what historically happened. That's what will happen. (though I doubt that once terrorist tactics are established as succesfull against the US there will not another party that beats the muslims at their own game)
I find your "the US is responsible for terrorism" argument more than just dishonest, and frankly disgusting.
You might want to read up on muslim history and see how they historically responded to diplomatic attempts to resolve terrorism (obviously, by increasing the terror attacks). There has never been a permanent (even 15 years) peace with muslims. That is, by the way, against the rules of islam : peace treaties can only be accepted by muslims to prevent a superior enemy from crushing them. If in any situation they are the superior force they should attack and eradicate (that's the term used btw) the non-muslims.
I'm bigoted against technology????!!!! Surely you jest. Rather, I am a very big technology proponent!
Here's another quote from you:
Surely you jest. I'm against the use of UAVs, period.
You know, like many countries the situation is simple. The probable answer is yes, but nobody knows for sure. It's quite an investment to find out for sure. There are not nearly enough discovery wells. Generally speaking, the foot of any young mountain range should have at least some oil (and older ones should have lots and lots of coal).
In America, Alaska, for example, should have much more oil than is presently discovered, as should california. In Latin America there are supposed to be many undiscovered oil giants.
Exploration for oil is, however, quite costly. Given what happens to a country once oil gets discovered, It'd probably be best to hope there is no oil in Ethiopia. And they have muslim neighbors. We all know what will happen if oil is discovered.
You don't seem to understand the mathematics of chaos (not many people bother to, but I like fractals). If you think you can predict a chaotic system using measured data, even if that measurement were to be infinitely accurate (and climate measurements are seriously imperfect), you should not be talking to me, but to the nobel prize comittee.
As I said, even though predicting when water will boil is nowhere near as simple as you make it out to be (try any substance other than water, predicting when iron melts for example is MUCH easier). As I said water does not necessarily respond as you would expect due to a variety of effects. Water responds strangely in magnetic fields. Water can convert inserted heat energy into electrical current instead of boiling. Water can convert incoming heat into a magnetic field. The list goes on. I've been told that there are viruses that use a water layer around their shell that enables them to survive temperatures of over 2500 degrees, where the water manages to redirect the force of the impacts around the virus molecule (which brings the question of why a virus would evolve the ability to withstand temperatures like that, but that's not the subject here). And the point is that it's *not* even a chaotic process. It's mathematical resemblance to weather patterns is ZERO. I repeat : this process is not chaotic, it bears no resemblance whatsoever to weather or climate patterns.
The collapse of the wave function is neither chaotic nor nondeterministic. It is perfectly predictable.
What is not deterministic (but NOT chaotic either) about the wave function is the VALUE it will assume AFTER collapsing (and to say the least the last word about when and how such collapses take place has not been said. Quantum mechanics is not a physics theory. It is a theory about what we see, unlike relativity theory which is a theory about what is. There can be no question the planets rotate around the sun whether or not someone is watching, but there is the (non-stupid) question of what happens in quantum mechanics when nobody's watching, and it's an unsolved question)
The fact that average temperatures for a given year are outside of the prediction for that year does not invalidate the model, as long as the general trends remain within the margins for error. Any scientist will recognize that a single outlier does not invalidate a model.
Except their predictions now failed for 10 years. Since their predictions only go 100 years, and they're differential equations. They calculate x+1, based on x. Therefore if they miss the first year, they're sure to miss all subsequent years. And unless temperature rises like a son of a bitch, 11. Given that the prediction was made for 100 years and it failed ALL of the first 10 years, and is very nicely on it's way to fail for the 11th, does that also mean nothing ?
Say if the predictions for the Higgs boson were checked by the LHC. They test, they don't find it. They build another particle accelerator, test, don't find it. 10 times they don't find it. The 11th test is underway, and it looks to be VERY unlikely to yield a different result. When exactly do you, in all your amateur wisdom, discard a theory ? (in physics, that would be after 2 failures, just in case the first was a fluke) ?
And what is it now ? Is the climate or weather chaotic, making any prediction about it totally worthless, or is it not chaotic, and do you demand the IPCC why they don't know the exact weather it will be in wisconsin on 23 Jan 2091...
Slashdot Mirror
A little explanation :
I would personally fall into your malevolent (or evil) category ... that doesn't seem fair at all. Of course, I'm not God. But still, not fair ...
How does not being willing to solve problems make someone malevolent ? There are loads of problems I'm not willing to solve. Leading the list are problems that the people brought upon themselves. Second are hopeless problems. And yes, some preacher does convince me from time to time to give money to essentially hopeless causes, hoping against hope that this time will be different (though I prefer non-hopeless causes). I've even been known to have been surprised at times. But loads of problems will never see my help, knowing full well people are dying as a result of them (Palestina, or Bangladesh, and dozens of others)
Am I malevolent too, then ? Because that's where your classification would place me. I could provide a certain, nonzero, amount of aid, and I willingly withold it.
There are few countries in the world that are as responsible for their own problems as Haiti is. In addition to that it's a hopeless problem too.
It's sad ... but nothing will change. It's great what the US is doing. But was the situation in Haiti so much better before the earthquake ? The honest answer is no.
Haiti, for whatever reasons (no racist crap) is not a good place, and is very unlikely indeed to become a good place. The natural resources are all but used up (1% trees left, freshwater is used up). The population is so far over the carrying capacity of the land that it's very unlikely even medium size animals will be able to survive the next few years.
And the worst news : all the aid in the world is not going to change that. Only relocating nearly all of Haitians will delay the problem. Delay, not solve. I won't kid anyone using the word "solve" here.
Why are we doing this ? Forestalling the inevitable for a year, if that ?
Okay, ... wiretapping ... maybe .... if used totally, totally out of place.
ACTA ... again maybe .... maybe ... not at the moment, certainly, but I can understand some trepidation.
And then ... throttling ? WTF ? You're equating slightly slowing down your download of the latest fake britney spears porn with the violent censorship that the Chinese state is inflicting on it's citizens ? Why don't you call AT&T the Nazi SS ?
Let's keep some perspective here. This is not the way forward.
How many paid kernel developers does microsoft have ? How many does Sun have ? I can't find any straight numbers on the web.
A thought strikes me, though. It seems unlikely to be more than a few dozen each, at most.
Heh,
Now that I am found to have reasonable arguments, against your "I want free stuff" arguments I obviously have to be part of the evil empire.
We are, in fact, a small operation trying to compete with the incumbent telco. And no if you want to configure your network to treat certain traffic preferentially (QoS), or if you want to configure IPv6, I will help you out for free. Yes obviously only if you're a customer.
But if you want to send out your quake sessions preferentially marked, I'll help you out with that just the same. Of course, any preferential treatment stops at the network boundary, but hey. You could have inter-as agreements to solve that problem (we actually have one of those for a good customer).
The fact that the IP's PRINCIPLE is thoroughly violated by your suggestion apparently does not mean anything to you. The whole point of switching to IP was to make the massive overselling of capacity possible. Your complaints about service are as realistic as complaining in a garaga that the car they sold you doesn't fly.
The whole reason for packet based networking is to use the same bandwidth for different customers simultaneously. That's what made the internet possible in the first place. Things weren't better in 1910, so why you want to bring back the 1960's telephone (and "internet") system is beyond me.
Of course you don't want government interference; you want to screw users are much as possible. Of course if the government suddenly owned all the infrastructure, you'd have to compete on service alone, because all these nonsense peering agreements would go out the window. And who wants to do that when they can just screw people of money because they have no other choices?
Do we want to make a profit ? Yes.
But you are perfectly free today to go and see what happens if the government owns all the infrastructure. What's stopping you ? Just move to North Korea ... nothing hard about it.
Don't forget to write back a little note explaining how it's better, alright ? Of course as even the mail doesn't operate there, never mind telephone or internet, it'll have to be a message bird. Don't forget to take a pigeon, alright ?
But the real sentiment is that "MY" culture never makes anything that sucks. Incidentally, I'm also always right. I once thought I was wrong, but that was a mistake. If that ever changes it's because evil democrats "healthcared" my good brain cells out and replaced them with more politically correct ones.
If you treat all VOIP as high priority, thats one thing. If you treat YOUR OWN better than your VOIP competitors, you should be forced to close your doors.
Customers pay extra to get their voip traffic to us treated preferentially. They are perfectly free to pay for preferential traffic to another voip provider (as customers get to specify, up to a certain bandwidth, which traffic is prioritized, that limit being dependant on how much they pay. We even allow residential customers to prioritize certain traffic over others. Except for my own home connection I doubt anyone actually does that, though).
One way customers use this is to have telephony interconnects over our network to their different sites. We don't mind this at all, in fact I make it a point to help anyone who wants to do this. Same goes for IPv6 : if you want to configure it native on our network, I'll personally help you do it.
Btw : has vonage decided to start cooperating with other telephony operators again ? Because Vonage complains (and so do we), but they also use preferential network connections to their advantage (they also ask money for preferential treatment on their network), disconnecting providers who refuse to pay up.
Your attitude is retarded; you're a tiny ISP. What happens when your upstream provider wants to compete, and they just raise your rates until your prices are forced higher than theirs?
What makes you think they don't do that already ? What keeps us alive is cooperation agreements with other small (and even somewhat larger) ISPs, and as much own infrastructure as we can get our hands on.
As for internet and telephony transit we have no local upstream provider, for obvious reasons.
We don't want the government to interfere, as it's government interference that brought us to this position in the first place. Corrupt government cannot get us out again. If we're going to beat the large telcos we're going to have to do it by adapting faster than telcos do and offering better service. And we're going to do it by only placing infrastructure in interesting locations.
The problem with democracy is large numbers of clueless uninvolved "do-gooders" interfering in everything. Needless to say, what they do never turns out to be all that good.
And if you do that, nobody will be able to offer up reliable voip services. Point. QoS is required to get professional voip services. And if you totally disable QoS, a single idiot bittorrenting to capacity will be able to disrupt the network control protocols, resulting in total disconnection of the entire AS (BGP is, after all, an inband protocol).
Of course the only result is that Verizon will still offer voip services, they'll just create a non-internet network to do it with. Then they can just have a generally shitty internet network, and raise prices further due to the extra equipment required. Verizon went to the trouble of building a huge network, Vonage is free to do the same.
Then the residential users will get a network that the price they pay can provide, instead of being allowed to freeload on excess capacity of business customers, and trust me, you don't want that. That will be the end of anything over 1 mbit residential internet connections.
In other words, net neutrality is a big bucket of rules that are neither consistent, nor practical. It's just "I NEED free stuff, and damn the consequences". It is people demanding unrealistic bandwidth, not willing to pay the real price of it, so they find the telcos (and any other ISP, they're not all huge companies, some are small and just trying to survive) must simply force others to pay for it.
And yes : I work for one (a tiny one). And yes we throttle. We give residential users access to all UNUSED bandwidth available. Of course how much bandwidth is unused is determined by how active the business users (fortunately business usage drops just before 18h and residential usage starts spiking just after 18h), who pay for the interlinks. The business reality is simple : if we can't use QoS, we will terminate our residential customers, because they aren't worth it.
To get rid of "net neutrality" was of course the whole point of the transition to packet based networks. Dynamically sharing bandwidth. The old networks, like SDH, either provided their specced network bandwidth between two points, or they refused to connect at all. Anyone care to return to that situation ?
Come on, the question of the motivation of Plato, Artistotle cannot be a real question, right ?
They did what they did for increased social status and for money. Also they had a rather strong, religiously motivated obsession with circles, and a disdain for the natural religions that ruled their cities.
Gallileo and Newton's motivation is also beyond obvious : they wanted to "appreciate the beauty of God" (Jesus Christ), through looking at the world and understanding some small part of it. The money and social status probably did not hurt either. Why ? Because that's what everyone did, under the direction of Rome (which was at least partly motivated by that ancient Greek philosophy, and the competition with Byzantium).
The question is not what motivated these people. The question is what motivated the various city states (in the ancient Greek case) and Rome (in the case of Gallileo and Rome) to create this environment in which these people discovered the things they did discover. The answer is an imitation-based ideology : philosophy (natural classical philosophy to be exact) and the Christian religion.
On the other hand, in the counterexamples, the question is what created the environment that burned the library of Alexandria. What destroyed the libraries of ancient China. And the answers in both cases are equally well known. What killed (literally) medical science in the muslim empires ? The answer are those same imitation-based ideologies : the islamic religion and a specific chinese religion.
The vast, vast majority of religions and ideologies destroyed science (they did not just "not support it", they actively sought it out and eradicated at least the knowledge, sometimes, like the muslims, the people). These religions were not, at all, exceptional in their eradication of scientific endeavours (they're only somewhat exceptional in their size).
Rather, what makes some religions and ideologies exceptional is not killing science of entirely. The question is not really why people kill of science : the very short answer is that science has the potential of altering the balance of power in a society. The question is what makes ancient Greece and Rome (the Christian Rome) special. I believe that the answer is that they are both ideologies that are not so easy to punch holes in with science (though most people consider -wrongly- then to be inconsistent with science. Miracle-based Christian ("mostly mechanical God" in Einstein's words) ideology is not disproven, nor would anyone but people who've had physics or math at university level know exactly what is wrong with ancient Greek philosophy (though disagreement, mostly due to "other philosophies provide more free stuff" like communism, or say islam's jizya and slavery based society, or other slavery based ideologies). The real scientific criticism is that there is no positive proof either. Which is not entirely true, as there are certainly enough historical mentions of miracles, but they are discarded by scientific belief which then declares that they've never seen any miracles. In other words, the only real criticism is that these miracles, these extremely unlikely or impossible events do not prove the historical accuracy of the bible and we frankly do not trust the observations made by many scientists. Of course, to exclude miracles, there is a rather long list of scientists that have to be excluded)
An example of what the problem is with science in relation to religions can be illustrated with the difference between the islamic worldview and the Christian worldview. Muslims believe that everything, every last little thing, is a conscious act of allah. If you let a ball go and it falls, the fact that it fell down was supposed to be a direct expression of the will of allah. Obviously, Newton's theory is therefore a proof that islam is false. In fact, for the taliban (but really for all muslims, certainly all islamic "universities" agree on this point) ANY theory that says anything at all about the real world is directly contradic
Just for the fun of it someone should call them. Record the conversation.
And ... where would you tether it on earth ? The moon is not in geostationary orbit.
You know, if you just anchor a rope and pull it into space there is a point where the centrifugal force of the end of the rope would start to pull the rope upwards. Presumbaly you want to go a bit beyond that point, so that the cable just hangs there, without any support, and it's weight (not mass) is slightly negative (btw : mass can never be negative, weight, however, can). Just long enough so the tension is enough to carry the scenic cable car.
Our brains are merely a bunch of grey matter that works together to solve problems, whether that problem is putting the square peg in the right hole, or remembering where you put that tool.
Funny how our brains do none of that according to AI. The "AI" of living animals does not solve problems logically or rationally (and since mathematicians have proven that to be impossible, no serious AI researcher continues trying to). The cells of the brains of animals (and humans) do one thing, and one thing only : correlate events. An immediate consequence of doing that is that they imitate one another. Nearly everything we do beyond that is purely cultural. Yes, including "instinctive" behavior, violence, sex, you name it. There does not exist any brain, animal or human, that rationally solves problems.
The brain is created to help animals survive. Rationally solving problems, art, maths, aesthetics, rights, are all totally and completely superfluous compared to the goal of surviving. So what do animals do ? They imitate things they see (in the real world). Since those things are clearly capable of survival, or they wouldn't be in the real world at all, that leads mostly to behavior that increases the chances of survival of an individual.
You'll find that this view explains history much, much better than treating humans as rational. How could people once think that eating your own child would ensure military success (the Carthagens did this, and so did a few native american tribes) ? Or stoning women ? Or bathing in the blood streaming out of the throat of a black slave (Hera worship in the Roman empire, sometimes this was combined with having sex in that blood)... (the list goes on). This is not rational. Yet behaviors like this are 99% of history, and quite possibly 100%. Science, with the exception of the christian west, was only ever continued, in any culture (with the one exception), as long as it provided increased economic or military capability. And then it was abandoned when it ran into a wall (as science has done so many times). The Romans(/Greeks, not 100% clear), the Persians, at least 4 muslim dynasties, the Chinese, and possibly the ancient Egyptians knew about electrical conductivity, most even had "demonstrations" : little toys actually using electrical effects. None of them ever developed any electrical circuitry or engines that we know of. In fairness, it still took the christians 120 years from the discovery of electricity to "hey we can make circuits", but that's a whole lot better than the knowledge destruction that occured in every other culture (for various reasons, Romans were overrun and much more interested in trade than in science, muslims killed their scientists every 50 or-so years and burned their books including the library of alexandria and the many lesser byzantine libraries, Chinese kept conquering and -more importantly- plundering and killing one another, ... the list is long and very sad. And very irrational).
Because mostly links from within the university pointing to articles like this don't work from other networks ...
I've looked up his paper. Whatever mr "Global warming" states it does indeed say that global warming may be stopped for anywhere from a few years to a few decades by the ocean's heat transfer.
He does say that the models have the ocean heat transfer wrong for the 21st century. The ocean is not currently eating up heat like the models predict, it is adding heat to the athmosphere, and he warns that this effect is about to reverse and might turn out to be quite a big effect. That was in 2008.
And about the accuracy of the IPCC 2000-2010 predictions one can be short - and funny !
Do tell, btw, if a scientific theory or model makes a totally wrong prediction, what, exactly, should be done to said theory ?
So you don't believe the IPCC's scientists then ?
Mini Ice age predicted, with 30 years of global cooling at least, co2 effect on climate grossly overblown, models in agreement with co2-climate link wrong.
Yet last week in Geneva, at the UN's World Climate Conference -- an annual gathering of the so-called "scientific consensus" on man-made climate change -- Prof. Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool."
The global warming theory has been based all along on the idea that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, then they would let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land.
But as Prof. Latif pointed out, the Atlantic, and particularly the North Atlantic, has been cooling instead. And it looks set to continue a cooling phase for 10 to 20 more years. "How much?" he wondered before the assembled delegates. "The jury is still out."
Who claims this ? Good question : Prof. Latif, of the university of Leibniz, lead author of the IPCC last 2 global warming reports.
So you're, it seems stuck, if you assault this guys credibility, of course you're also assaulting the IPCC's credibility. If you don't, obviously you have to accept the conclusions "as you're not a climate scientist". So which is it ? Or are we going to go with the rotten apple theory, which of course would mean the scientific consensus mainly rests on a few rotten apples ...
But we all know what is motivating your global warming beliefs. And it's not science.
(and this is by no means the worst news for climate change theory, there is a revolution going on in thermodynamics relating how out-of-balance "systems" (like the earth and it's climate) behave, and it's very bad news : in the long term, anything that happens, including pumping huge amounts of co2 in the air, can only result in one of 2 things : a. nothing at all b. a return to equilibrium. If this theory gets proven, it is a theoretical proof, independant of any particular climate equation being right or wrong, that nothing inside the system can break the climate cycle that we're in, unless it fully obliterates earth)
Btw : I still find the IPCC a bunch of overpaid elititists with conflicts of intrest Obama himself would be ashamed of, but I love the situation this puts global warming nazis into.
If you're interested in "baby making machines", the term is "ectogenesis". Google it. We can't do it yet, but there is significant research.
You do realize that Europe's (and America's, a bit later) welfare systems are collapsing, right ?
I realize it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, but if population does not rise, the elders (that would be you, in case you're confused) can only be left to die.
Tritium decay : (3,1)H -> (3,2) He + e- + ve-
Tritium decays into a low-energy electron and an antineutrino.
Antineutrino's will start flying at near-light speeds and extremely likely not interact with anything until they hit a neutron star or a black hole. They are not dangerous for living beings, as they simply fly right through them. It carries off the majority of the energy (11-12 KeV)
The electron has an energy of close to 6 KeV (kilo electron volt). At these speeds electrons are not capable of penetrating human skin, or any layer of fluid. The only way to make tritium dangerous is to drink large amounts of it. The water in it gets built into your cells, and there it is close enough to do some (minor, compared to gamma decay) damage.
You can, however, shower perfectly safely in tritium. As rain can theoretically contain up to 0.5% tritium (though ten times less is much more likely), most of us will turn out to have actually done just that.
Conclusion : tritium is not corrosive. It is not dangerous (except as a useful component to make an atomic bomb)
Yeah, one kinda wonders if they have already decided which string theory they believe in nowadays. Apparently there were some 10^500 different theories, and that's ignoring the fact that the fundamental constants can be chosen rather freely. Furthermore, there is no proof that amongst those 10^500 (or more) theories there is one that has a positive cosmological constant.
Actually the theory has so many different permutations that starts to wonder if it wouldn't happen to be turing-complete, and therefore have zero predictive power. It would be about as useful for determining how the universe works as a calculator without a manual. Well, without the actual calculator I mean.
In connection to that : does this unification make any useful prediction ? Is it too much to presume it must lead to a way to generate gravitational attraction using electrical power, no ? Preferably a method not require TeV collisions ?
Your point is basically that it'd be impossible for you to convict an innocent, since you'd vote everyone innocent.
Granted, that would make it quite hard. I doubt it would provide much justice, though.
Btw, in the case of the mobster, you'd probably have 1 witness against him (the victim) and objective evidence. In addition to that there'd be masses of witnesses for the defense.
The solution to this, it seems to me, is to put more faith in objective evidence. Subjective justice is mob justice is not just at all.
I think the parent poster takes issue with your near 100% reliance on subjective evidence, and treatment of objective evidence (as reported to you by imperfect humans) as no better.
You could at least see that you would never convict a mobster (who'd have heaps of false witnesses standing by). Or anyone from a closely-enough-knit group for that matter.
It'd also be relatively easy to get you to convict an innocent. If you based yourself on witnesses alone, obviously, you can see why you'd be liable to convict someone of witchcraft, for example. Even in this day and age. There is never any shortage of witnesses for idiotic accusations.
Objective evidence must take precedence over subjective evidence. Yes, DNA can be planted/faked, but if that's the case, more research will find inconsistencies. The solution is not less reliance on objective evidence, imho, but more, and better methods. Perhaps some of this "stimulus" money could be put into creating an agency to improve the collection of objective evidence (like DNA evidence). Say paying a few people to plant fake evidence using a variety of methods without telling the researches and work that way on improved detection methods.
I wish (for the love of God) that for once no-one invokes Godwin's law.
But (here goes nothing) : a communist (centrally controlled economy) country that allows big companies to exist as juridically separate entities, but controls them directly by controlling upper management ... that style of government has a name : fascism. It generally fails after the first wave of technologies that get exploited by those large companies becomes obsolete. The companies are unwilling to invest in change, and prefer to use legal and physical force to keep inefficient business models going (and before anyone claims how "rightist" this is, in Germany this was done as least as much by the unions as by the government)
I wouldn't like living in a govt. like that, but then again I hear it makes the trains run on time. Of course it has the same problem as any centrally controlled system : if the central control doesn't like you, it might be wise to develop an obsessive fear of showering.
Using terrorism to fight terrorism is rather self-defeating, no? Or did I miss something?
Read up on history. The only ever effective military tactic against terrorirsm was terrorist-style attacks carried out by the regular military against the group that harbors the terrorists ("terrorists kill 1 christian, we round up 100 muslims and shoot them" - type policies)
I am fully aware just how badly this sucks. It's also the evident truth.
And obviously the tactic of tolerance against terrorist groups (even if not against terrorists themselves) has always led straight to defeat. If you don't want to fight, the terrorists will win. That's what historically happened. That's what will happen. (though I doubt that once terrorist tactics are established as succesfull against the US there will not another party that beats the muslims at their own game)
I find your "the US is responsible for terrorism" argument more than just dishonest, and frankly disgusting.
You might want to read up on muslim history and see how they historically responded to diplomatic attempts to resolve terrorism (obviously, by increasing the terror attacks). There has never been a permanent (even 15 years) peace with muslims. That is, by the way, against the rules of islam : peace treaties can only be accepted by muslims to prevent a superior enemy from crushing them. If in any situation they are the superior force they should attack and eradicate (that's the term used btw) the non-muslims.
I'm bigoted against technology????!!!! Surely you jest. Rather, I am a very big technology proponent!
Here's another quote from you :
Surely you jest. I'm against the use of UAVs, period.
You know, like many countries the situation is simple. The probable answer is yes, but nobody knows for sure. It's quite an investment to find out for sure. There are not nearly enough discovery wells. Generally speaking, the foot of any young mountain range should have at least some oil (and older ones should have lots and lots of coal).
In America, Alaska, for example, should have much more oil than is presently discovered, as should california. In Latin America there are supposed to be many undiscovered oil giants.
Exploration for oil is, however, quite costly. Given what happens to a country once oil gets discovered, It'd probably be best to hope there is no oil in Ethiopia. And they have muslim neighbors. We all know what will happen if oil is discovered.
You don't seem to understand the mathematics of chaos (not many people bother to, but I like fractals). If you think you can predict a chaotic system using measured data, even if that measurement were to be infinitely accurate (and climate measurements are seriously imperfect), you should not be talking to me, but to the nobel prize comittee.
As I said, even though predicting when water will boil is nowhere near as simple as you make it out to be (try any substance other than water, predicting when iron melts for example is MUCH easier). As I said water does not necessarily respond as you would expect due to a variety of effects. Water responds strangely in magnetic fields. Water can convert inserted heat energy into electrical current instead of boiling. Water can convert incoming heat into a magnetic field. The list goes on. I've been told that there are viruses that use a water layer around their shell that enables them to survive temperatures of over 2500 degrees, where the water manages to redirect the force of the impacts around the virus molecule (which brings the question of why a virus would evolve the ability to withstand temperatures like that, but that's not the subject here). And the point is that it's *not* even a chaotic process. It's mathematical resemblance to weather patterns is ZERO. I repeat : this process is not chaotic, it bears no resemblance whatsoever to weather or climate patterns.
The collapse of the wave function is neither chaotic nor nondeterministic. It is perfectly predictable.
What is not deterministic (but NOT chaotic either) about the wave function is the VALUE it will assume AFTER collapsing (and to say the least the last word about when and how such collapses take place has not been said. Quantum mechanics is not a physics theory. It is a theory about what we see, unlike relativity theory which is a theory about what is. There can be no question the planets rotate around the sun whether or not someone is watching, but there is the (non-stupid) question of what happens in quantum mechanics when nobody's watching, and it's an unsolved question)
The fact that average temperatures for a given year are outside of the prediction for that year does not invalidate the model, as long as the general trends remain within the margins for error. Any scientist will recognize that a single outlier does not invalidate a model.
Except their predictions now failed for 10 years. Since their predictions only go 100 years, and they're differential equations. They calculate x+1, based on x. Therefore if they miss the first year, they're sure to miss all subsequent years. And unless temperature rises like a son of a bitch, 11. Given that the prediction was made for 100 years and it failed ALL of the first 10 years, and is very nicely on it's way to fail for the 11th, does that also mean nothing ?
Say if the predictions for the Higgs boson were checked by the LHC. They test, they don't find it. They build another particle accelerator, test, don't find it. 10 times they don't find it. The 11th test is underway, and it looks to be VERY unlikely to yield a different result. When exactly do you, in all your amateur wisdom, discard a theory ? (in physics, that would be after 2 failures, just in case the first was a fluke) ?
And what is it now ? Is the climate or weather chaotic, making any prediction about it totally worthless, or is it not chaotic, and do you demand the IPCC why they don't know the exact weather it will be in wisconsin on 23 Jan 2091 ...