Point to the server room, tell them "we've got our own cloud in there and we've already paid for it". Then start talking about the expense of change.
And then tell the boss he can change that capital cost into a rent. You know a sort off "sell-and-rent-back" scheme. And he'll realize he can trade long-term stability and in-house knowledge for short term profit.
Btw : encryption means that the cloud provider does not necessarily have access to the data. It only has access insofar as it can delete it (if you have no other copies), but it cannot read or use the data, if properly implemented.
Seems like ISP's could solve this. I personally think it is mainly an opportunity for ISP's to offer these services at a premium, and offer them at the network's edge. (ie. put the disks in the LEXes so they don't have to share internet bandwidth with other customers)
the non-agression principle is the one true law free flow of knowledge and trade defend liberty better than force
How does this work... assuming there's at least 1 person in this world who would kill for forcing his ideology on you ? How would this protect you against people presenting that choice (ie. "terrorists" or just plain dangerous assholes) ? I realize it's off-topic. Yet either I fail to understand something truly fundamental or this is beyond normal lunacy and far into extra-stupid fantasyland.
Well you can build a refinery that does not, in fact, refine petroleum. Think a government "business", but slightly worse.
The "principle" of a refinery is dead simple : it's basically a cooking pot the size of a large building. In that cooking pot you needs lots of valves and pipes in order to extract the end products (or things that you mix into the end products).
That said there is no end to stupid mistakes to make either. Petroleum, especially the heavier products, do not exactly flow easily. You can misplace the pumps so that 2 pumps counteract one another. You can design pipes that clog up in 2 days time... lots of room for idiotic mistakes.
"The prize was not awarded today to a real life American president, who has to make difficult and sometimes unpopular decisions. It was awarded to the symbol of the 2008 election campaign in which the world* has placed it's trust. But Obama demanded to be seen as a superhuman in the campaign. Now he has to satisfy those expectations in the real world, a task which will prove impossible. The award from Oslo will not help him there. It is a burden, much more than an honor."
After this, the next 3 paragraphs talk about 3 "failures" of Obama : he hasn't implemented any healthcare and it seem unlikely it's ever going to happen. The war in Afghanistan has gotten worse and there are grave concerns for the evolution of the situation in Iraq after Bush's surge was de-facto recalled by Obama.
* I take exception to these assholes speaking for me, by the way
Show me one case where someone in America has been convicted of a hate crime for speech.
That's because the U.S., unlike most of Europe, does not in fact have hate crime laws.
In Europe, you find tons of people and convictions. And hate crime laws are used to destroy public debate. Just look to figures like Geert Wilders. Even in Canada you find these cases.
Still, the world is happy that we have elected someone better than Bush, and this is their way of saying 'thank you, America.' Who are we to reject their heartfelt thanks?
Actually most European newspapers are saying it is a way to pressure Obama into making his (rather absurd) campaign promises into reality. The nobel committee specifically stated that they wanted the president of the US to ignore the feelings of US citizens and instead "respect the prevailing norms and values of the international community" (presumably they mean themselves, as this type of idiots always do). Further in the text they also emphasized extending UN sovereignty over US citizens, primarily because of the "global warming" issue.
Well I'm sure that since Obama promised both palestine and Israel the same land (I mean the city of Jerusalem), just to name one example, that without some serious help from all gods involved he's going to fail.
These articles in euro newspapers are generally buried under a torrent of comments about how he doesn't deserve it, because he's fighting 3 wars (apparently the us is fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel). Apparently that Obama got the price is mainly "proof" of the "US domination" of the nobel prize committee ("ahmed" and "mohamed" named persons seem to make this "Jewish domination" of said committee)
Frankly if the world is about to start liking the US, they're doing a VERY good job of hiding those feelings.
Just so you know. The point of this thread was to discuss how hate crime laws influence talking about different groups. Presumably stating "white people" do more damage should be equally racist to stating "black people" do more damage.
Add to that that I find your argument dishonest. Yes white collar crime does more financial damage, obviously. The single crime that Enron represented probably did more financial damage than 5 years of "normal" crime in the entire US. Nevertheless nobody died from it. Nobody still has nightmares from it. So you might want to go out to the street and decide for yourself which kind of crime actually damages people's lives. I know we assign monetary damages to things like rape, beatings and murder, but in reality obviously nobody recovers from murder, and it is difficult recovering from the other 2 as well. Add to that the intimidation and terror those crimes cause.
I'd much rather live in a place with a lot of white collar crime than in a place with even a little bit of blue collar crime.
But that's obviously just because I'm racist, right ? Not because I think my nose is currently perfectly positioned on my face and dread the thought of remodeling in that area.
Well CANDU can use anything over 0.75% U235 according to wikipedia. This is because it's more of a modern "pebble-bed" reactor design and uses different design principles from the early heavy water reactors (which were built, not for power generation, but all were designed for making bombs. The nazi reactor, the Japanese one, the Soviet one, even the French and Belgian ones, the American one and more recently Indian and Chinese reactors). I don't know for sure, but I highly doubt the Iranian reactor will turn out to be a pebble-based design. If it isn't, it would lack the advantage of using unenriched fuel.
CANDU can use this fuel type due to the special shape of the fuel rods and of the fuel itself. They package the fuel into tons of really small diameter cylinders enveloped in some sort of package (zirconium + nibium), filled with "pellets" (little balls of 2 diameters), which massively increases exposure to the moderator. Then they had to adjust the moderator to be less effective, and so they went and used heavy water.
Normal reactors use fuel rods that are simply made of uranium and to avoid falling apart under their own weight they need rather large diameters (think 20-30 cm).
However CANDU produces (with a "trivial" modification involving mixing U238 with the fuel) all the components necessary to produce a highly effective hydrogen bomb (tritium and plutonium). You would need uranium enrichment facilities to create plutonium with this reactor though.
The CANDU reactor is certainly not the most efficient bomb making design you could make, but it would work. More to the point, it's design and implementation would make the design of a truly fast bomb-making plant trivial.
Actually since both of those statements could probably get you convicted for hate crime (whether it's white or black criminals doing more damage, surely one of the groups will have "hurt feelings" that seem to entitle people to monetary damages)... which was the whole point. You can't have a discussion about anything related in the slightest to groups of people without "being racist". Since we obviously need these discussions, we obviously cannot have hate-crime laws.
Have in practice done nothing but tilt the playing field. Affordable housing is in reality housing that you can only stay in while you're unemployed, meaning getting a job is a stupid financial move. What the hell does "equivalent" health care even mean ? That everyone grows equally old ? Face it : "yellow" people will outlive you, on average, and you'll outlive blacks, again on average. They will, however, run circles around you on the track, again on average. Some even say both effects are related. "Same level of educational opportunities" can only function if we do not use schools and classes. People drag eachother down, out of spite, out of... So putting anything more than individual troublemakers in "better performing" classes will simply destroy the scores of the class, not improve the troublemakers' scores.
All these sound like
... that's exactly what they do. They "sound like" they will do something, then turn out to achieve the exact opposite in reality. With massive government "equalization" programs only came a growth of the poor-rich divide. In all countries that did this on larger scales, there are larger poor-rich divides, culminating in the absurdly extreme divides that exist in a totally communist society : rich, weaponized political class, misery for everyone else.
The lunacy of it all is, it doesn't matter how well studied a problem is, in America (and fairly, in many other places), only the populist notion matters. No matter how wrong it is. Now we'll lower energy usage by "increasing efficiency". Except that this is a well-studied problem. Besides, actually lowering energy usage means either letting people starve, deprive them of products, or freeze. Everyone's grandmother and her dog know just how popular those prospects are.
The only "equal opportunity" that can be imposed from above is equal misery for all : a short, violent life followed by a painful death. All other opportunity has to be made by the person enjoying it later.
The problem with all hate crime laws is that they punish somebody more severely based on what they were thinking at the time they committed the crime. True, it doesn't come into effect until a crime is actually committed
The problem is that one of the "crimes" is voicing your opinions. Hate crime laws are an evident way of using police force to settle public debates. I am not contending the "slippery slope" argument. I am contending that merely the fact that outlawing voicing "hateful" opinions effectively destroys meaningful public debate.
The problem is that they cover everything. For example, in the health care debate it is important, to say the least, to state that pensioners are not productive citizens. Regardless over the action that said (evident) observation merits, the voicing of that fact itself will be considered hate crime. Needless to say, such observations do not merit executing the infirm, or denying health care to them. The only government ever to try that were the national socialists of germany and the soviet communists.
There are also a lot of other facts that are true, but could be construed to be hate crimes. There are studies ranking ethnicities by IQ. There is the (again obvious) observation that "black" crime is bigger than white crime, and there is obviously a necessity for research into the causes of that. There is the issue of what exactly a certain religion had to do with 9/11 (imho, a great deal). Such things NEED DISCUSSION.
Such discussions are not possible with hate crime laws. They are also critical to rational policies.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.
My opinion is simply : yes they're the same. But it'll take the republicans longer to destroy America than the democrats. Potentially postponing said collapse till after my death. If that's the best I can have, I'll gladly take it.
Refineries... Actually that was exactly Ahmadinejad's main election promise way back... to rebuild the refineries. He tried. He tried really hard, really really really hard, and failed. (ever notice how strange it is that the dictator's "main puppet" of a theological state holds a phd in civil engineering and has taught at the best university of the country ? His sons, of this theocratic dictator, are on the way to degrees in civil engineering, again one would assume they'd see more future in religious studies, but clearly daddy theocratic dictator doesn't see much future in all that allah babbling...). That said, if you read stories of his actions as mayor of Teheran, one thing cannot be denied : this is a serious thick-headed and stupid idiot. His actions during the "revolution" justify adding "extremely dangerous" to the "lunatic" description of his character (said "revolution" started out as a socialist/communist revolution, ended with the likes of ahmadinejad killing tens of thousands of people until the current Iranian state came into existence). Up to this day there is a big non-functional refinery standing on the outskirts of Teheran, built by Ahmadinejad. It doesn't work but it has what roughly translates to "yes we can" on the front gate. It is considered something between a failure and a sick joke by Iranians.
But the point I wanted to make, about Iran's intentions. Or more specifically, it's islamic theocratic dictator-nutcase's intentions :
There are different types of nuclear plants. You have lightwater plants and heavy water plants. (light water and heavy water denoting the isotopes of hydrogen in said water).
Light water plants are cheaper, easier to build and more energy efficient. They can be made in all sorts of power output levels (meaning they're capable of "low" output too). They can be built the size of a car up to the size of a small town. Their waste is far less toxic than the alternatives. Furthermore, they have far easier fuel requirements. They cannot, however, be used to build a bomb. They do not produce plutonium. They do not produce pollonium. They do not... Some fuel (found in Iran) does not even need to be enriched to be used in these reactors. All modern western reactors are of this type because of the obvious advantages (only exceptions being 1 medical research reactor, which are slowly becoming obsolete)
Heavy water reactors, the first type designed, are very, very big reactors (the power device itself is very small, but you need big structures surrounding them to absorb the massive power they produce, so you cannot have small plants). They produce power in the hundreds of megawatts at least. They produce heavy elements and highly radioactive isotopes as waste product. They are very picky in the fuel they use, and will only tolerate relatively highly enriched uranium.
Guess which type of reactor Iran is building ? (hint : they wouldn't need a heavy water plant for one of these types)
Also : to enrich fuel for even a heavy water reactor they'd need a relatively small enrichment facility, having a cascade of at most a few dozen centrifuges. They did not do this, instead they've built a cascade of over 6000 centrifuges (meaning they're connected centrifuge 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 ->...). You do not need a cascade like this for power requirements, in fact it's a huge waste of power (these things need more energy per piece than Al Gore's house and boats combined).
Incidentally that cascade is precisely the critical part necessary for bomb construction (and totally useless and hopelessly inefficient for any other purpose).
Of course these facts are total coincidence and if you feel more secure ignoring this, don't let me stand in your way...
You mean until certain groups are filmed taking unemployment money straight to the liquor store... or to prostitutes.
Or until it is shown that certain "cultural enrichers" attack women just because. Or that they gang up on anyone with a different posse/religion/color/... or attack anything looking remotely gay in public parks... Or a nice conversation between 2 of these guys on how to prevent anyone from hiring them, so as to continue to receive benefits.
In other words, these camera images are sure to make a total mockery of the prevailing ideology, whether it is about poverty causing crime, who exactly opresses who, how women's rights really function in other cultures, or how peaceful other cultures really are, or... you name it. This will not be pretty. Confronting people with an ideotic (I mean idealized) view of the world never is.
Videos exposing prevailing dogma for the idiocy that those dogmas are will never be allowed to be publicized. People will scream bloody murder, not over the obvious truth, but over people exposing truth.
Yeah well, obviously one cannot talk about evolutionary theory without being called racist.
That's the fate of so much research these days. Different impacts of disease on different ethnicities. Racist ! Aspects of environmental impact of cultural traditions. Racist ! Statistics on the prevalence of disease in different countries... Racist !
Stating that having different races within a single species is extremely rare in nature, and really only occurs with physical walls of separation between groups of said species... now that's racist. Stating that breaking down said walls in all experiments resulted in an end to differing fenotypes ("races")... that apparently makes ons a "klansman".
I realize science does not quite agree with your political ideology and that name calling is oh-so-comforting. But please. Get your head out of your ass.
The incas and mayas have fought wars. So presumably one would state that they did, in fact, have something to do with eachother. They fought the aztecs too. Presumably there were other contacts between them than just wars.
Eventually, or so I've heard, both the Mayans and Incas went from large powers to much smaller ones due to internal conflict, long before the arrival of the first European. The power of the empires was broken before Pizarro "broke" it.
-> alphabet : came out of Egypt (which is not considered part of the middle east. Those Egyptians specifically that it came to were Indo-Europeans. We're not sure if they were Jewish, in fact we think not, but there were Jews amongst them). Besides if you're a linguist and you look at that first alphabet, you'll see it's similar to Hebrew, even though we've not been able to translate them.
-> numbering system : The hindu numerals (the ones we use) : was created by Hindu Indians, some of which were subsequently kidnapped by muslims and sold into slavery. One of them escaped to Venice. The rest is history.
-> concept of zero : came as a free desert with the last one.
-> astronomy. Conceived of in Egypt. Again possibly by Jews. Not middle eastern.
Any more you need the history off ? The totality of important "middle eastern" (we all know you mean muslim) scientific minds is... 2. Muslims have probably destroyed more (esp. more varied) scientific knowledge than we have today, and their own contributions can be counted, not on 2 hands. Not on one hand. Half of one hand is more than sufficient. For both cases, it is questionable if the person involved was really muslim, since their family was not. It is truly a pitiful history. Unless, of course, you count kidnapping and selling scientists into slavery as some sort of scientific achievement.
There are multiple species of the family "Hominidae" alive today, there are multiple, and historically there have been a great deal of different hominid species. Nearly all were evolutionary dead ends and do not have any descendants at all alive today. That same fate awaits over 99% of us too, of course.
The human "races" are most certainly separate races, they're just not separate species (and with a few races you could say that perhaps they are. Normally the determinant is if members of both groups cannot produce viable offspring. It is assumed possible that humans can successfully conceive with pygmees, but it's most certainly extremely difficult. Those people, however, are so extremely similar to us that you probably would never want to say they're a separate species.
Having different races in a species is in actuality an exceedingly rare phenomenon (and a temporary phenomenon). But because people are seeing an exceptional situation they don't realize just how rare it is. The same goes for religion, the "peaceful" religions are few and far between. All natural religions that I've ever taken a look at have exceedingly violent daily life for their adherents. So do most "world religions". But all people know here is Christianity, that's all they see around them, and so "everyone wants peace". Riiiight.
I know your political ideology requires massive revisionism in order to make sense (since tolerance, for example, versus muslims is not likely to increase our accomplishments in any way, nor will it be reciprocated by tolerance from them. In fact I daresay any state that chose to do so regretted it enormously).
Aren't you supposed to be against that sort of thing, revisionism ? I mean you always seem to complain loudly about it. Of course with "liberals" in general accusing others seems to be considered a way to project their own faults away.
Why not ? I've even seen a professor construct a "water based" transistor. What specific formula do you need to describe a transistor ?
Yes we've all been taught to think about them in terms of Bohr's model of the atom, which, btw, is still (although not perfectly) Newtonian.
Transistor radios were constructed long before anything resembling quantum physics existed. I suppose you think they were just shooting blind ?
You most certainly do not require quantum physics to describe the workings of a transistor. Their quantization properties are *still* not used in current computers.
Note also that your definitions of "civilization" are largely arbitrary, and designed to support your conclusion. Lumping the various European civilizations together into one "Western Christian civilization" is misleading, at the least.
Perhaps. However there is a continuing civilization during all that period. You would be correct to state there is no continuous state structure (though in that contest western civilization also "wins" : Christian empires populate 4 positions out of 5 for longest existing state structure, otoh that form of state doesn't exist anymore...)
Nevertheless everyone who looks at the different other civilizations, and where to split them will agree with the massive split that existed, for example between Inca's and Maya's. Or the massive split that the shift from abbasids to mamluks to ottomans represented. These, despite current propaganda to the contrary, represented huge differences in the way everyday life proceeded in those parts. Just to name one thing : they each burned their predecessor's books (and yes there are *some* ottoman exceptions, but not many).
I realize that today you have this "multiculturalism" that states all cultures are "equal". I haven't got a clue what "equal" means in that sentence though. I can tell you what it does not mean :
it does not mean human rights accomplishment equality... all human rights are singularly the product of western civilization (specifically it's origin is catholic)
it does not mean cultural accomplishment equality... 90% of all cultural accomplishment occured within western christian civilization. The rest being the largely the product of very active tiny minorities, the Jews being the most famous example, but Japanese belong in there, along with a few (tiny) Chinese kingdoms. Even though these had an output far greater than their numbers would suggest, they are only a small influence in the total. muslims, mongols, Incas, or Mayans just either did not produce any significant amount of culture, or failed massively in the preservation of it.
it does not mean economic accomplishment equality... I doubt there is any need for further comments here. Note, though that the situation you see today in economics has been "roughly" a constant throughout history : western christians having large numbers and large output, several minorities having large output disproportionate to their numbers (Japan, Jews), and the rest of the planet... basically does nothing at all. Generally the rest of the planet doesn't even have an economy at the subsistence level, but actually below it (and "aided" by the rest)
it does not mean scientific accomplishment equality... there are precious few civilizations that have noteworthy accomplishments, Mayans, Incas, Chinese, Japanese, and Christian. All of these, except Japanese and Christians managed to destroy their scientific accomplishments. Muslims inherited massive scientific knowledge from their conquests... and destroyed what they had instead of building upon it.
Individuals are equal, and even then, only at birth. In practice, they are only equal in the eyes of the law. As accomplishments mount (or fail to mount) people do not remain equal. Cultures, ideas, economic systems, countries,religions (or "lack of such")... are not equal.
Sorry if your current political ideology requires revisionism. It truly sucks in that way. I will not cater to such revisionism, however.
Nearly every civilization has fallen, which usually meant the death of > 99% of it's people.
Easter Island, Inca's, Maya's, (and there were several others in that region), Lots of Chinese civilizations, Buddhists, Persians, Babylon, Mamluks, Ottoman (the various "muslim" (though mostly less than 10% actual muslims) civlizations),... all have perished and taken a huge death toll in their last few years.
But we can derive a lot of hope. Western, Christian civilization now continuously exists for over 1500 years. You might even say 2000 years. That's a hell of a long time, and few others have ever reached that age.
I disagree with the bioweapon stuff. Ethnic cleansing, whether we're talking about the muslim black gold (the muslim slave trade in blacks), or even the WWII atrocities against jews and pow's were done using relatively low tech means. The vast majority of victims died of starvation and illness. The quintessential state that comitted masses of ethnic cleansing, the muslim mongol state, did so manually. Using just knives, they literally massacred their way into majority in an area larger than the entire US. Whatever the weapons, the ideology behind them is to blame. The main ideologies that have comitted massive ethnic cleansing in history are well known : islam, fascism and communism. Those are to blame, nothing else.
Besides, those massacres did not allow them to survive, and for all their troubles, they (mongols) got massacred by the arabs. Funny how things turn out.
and creatures in the wild cross species lines quite often. Instead of a tree coming up from a single ancestral organism, life is more like a complex web, with some branches ending, some continuing, and some merging back into the main trunk (or another branch).
While true, it's a bit out of proportion. The vast majority (> 99.99%) of "evolutionary branches" (ie. species) are extinct. There are over 400 known types of human (and a few million years of missing pieces), and there are 4 left alive. Mergers are unheard of (except 1 special case : that a part of a species starts to differentiate, and that differentiation ending, which happens constantly)
So perhaps rephrasing your sentence would be appropriate :
Instead of a tree coming up from a single ancestral organism, life is more like a complex web, starting at a single ancestral organism and branching out, the vast majority of branches being dead ends. The very, very few branches continuing, a few times swapping genes with eachother (via viruses) in addition to mutating (the advantage of gene swapping is that it gives an evolutionary advantage much quicker). While there is a "main trunk" (a single species will eventually destroy all others, and be the only line left), we have no idea which species are part of this "main trunk", and specifically we don't know if humans are part of it (I'm betting "no").
What you might call a "merger" is what you see happening to human races right now. The globalisation has caused intermarrying between all human species. The only reason those human species were separated is a very, very long physical separation, preventing intermarriage. But not long enough to actually create separate species. A merger can, however, only happen to different races, not to different species.
So now we do have intermarriage, thanks to the emancipation (of blacks) movement started in the United States, so the genes are getting mixed. What will happen next (and in an astonishingly short timeframe) is that in a few generations all humans will have genes from all races. Genes that used to be distinctly "african" or "european" 100 years ago. Then evolution will force a choice between useful and useless genes, and all our great grandchildren will end up with a very, very similar set of genes. They will not differ in color like different races do today.
The scary part is that this will happen in less than 400-500 years and the process is already 100 years or-so underway.
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Point to the server room, tell them "we've got our own cloud in there and we've already paid for it". Then start talking about the expense of change.
And then tell the boss he can change that capital cost into a rent. You know a sort off "sell-and-rent-back" scheme. And he'll realize he can trade long-term stability and in-house knowledge for short term profit.
Btw : encryption means that the cloud provider does not necessarily have access to the data. It only has access insofar as it can delete it (if you have no other copies), but it cannot read or use the data, if properly implemented.
P.S. : yes I'm evil, I know
Seems like ISP's could solve this. I personally think it is mainly an opportunity for ISP's to offer these services at a premium, and offer them at the network's edge. (ie. put the disks in the LEXes so they don't have to share internet bandwidth with other customers)
the non-agression principle is the one true law
free flow of knowledge and trade defend liberty better than force
How does this work ... assuming there's at least 1 person in this world who would kill for forcing his ideology on you ? How would this protect you against people presenting that choice (ie. "terrorists" or just plain dangerous assholes) ? I realize it's off-topic. Yet either I fail to understand something truly fundamental or this is beyond normal lunacy and far into extra-stupid fantasyland.
Well you can build a refinery that does not, in fact, refine petroleum. Think a government "business", but slightly worse.
The "principle" of a refinery is dead simple : it's basically a cooking pot the size of a large building. In that cooking pot you needs lots of valves and pipes in order to extract the end products (or things that you mix into the end products).
That said there is no end to stupid mistakes to make either. Petroleum, especially the heavier products, do not exactly flow easily. You can misplace the pumps so that 2 pumps counteract one another. You can design pipes that clog up in 2 days time ... lots of room for idiotic mistakes.
Another headline from Spiegel (mirror) :
"Former Nobel Peace Prize winner calls choice 'sad'"
Apparently Mairead Corrigan Maguire did this. Can't you just feel the love of Europe ?
How about this, for example :
"Mehr Bürde als Ehre"
(translates to : "more a burden than an honor")
Let's take a paragraph from it :
"The prize was not awarded today to a real life American president, who has to make difficult and sometimes unpopular decisions. It was awarded to the symbol of the 2008 election campaign in which the world* has placed it's trust. But Obama demanded to be seen as a superhuman in the campaign. Now he has to satisfy those expectations in the real world, a task which will prove impossible. The award from Oslo will not help him there. It is a burden, much more than an honor."
After this, the next 3 paragraphs talk about 3 "failures" of Obama : he hasn't implemented any healthcare and it seem unlikely it's ever going to happen. The war in Afghanistan has gotten worse and there are grave concerns for the evolution of the situation in Iraq after Bush's surge was de-facto recalled by Obama.
* I take exception to these assholes speaking for me, by the way
Show me one case where someone in America has been convicted of a hate crime for speech.
That's because the U.S., unlike most of Europe, does not in fact have hate crime laws.
In Europe, you find tons of people and convictions. And hate crime laws are used to destroy public debate. Just look to figures like Geert Wilders. Even in Canada you find these cases.
Still, the world is happy that we have elected someone better than Bush, and this is their way of saying 'thank you, America.' Who are we to reject their heartfelt thanks?
Actually most European newspapers are saying it is a way to pressure Obama into making his (rather absurd) campaign promises into reality. The nobel committee specifically stated that they wanted the president of the US to ignore the feelings of US citizens and instead "respect the prevailing norms and values of the international community" (presumably they mean themselves, as this type of idiots always do). Further in the text they also emphasized extending UN sovereignty over US citizens, primarily because of the "global warming" issue.
Well I'm sure that since Obama promised both palestine and Israel the same land (I mean the city of Jerusalem), just to name one example, that without some serious help from all gods involved he's going to fail.
These articles in euro newspapers are generally buried under a torrent of comments about how he doesn't deserve it, because he's fighting 3 wars (apparently the us is fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel). Apparently that Obama got the price is mainly "proof" of the "US domination" of the nobel prize committee ("ahmed" and "mohamed" named persons seem to make this "Jewish domination" of said committee)
Frankly if the world is about to start liking the US, they're doing a VERY good job of hiding those feelings.
Just so you know. The point of this thread was to discuss how hate crime laws influence talking about different groups. Presumably stating "white people" do more damage should be equally racist to stating "black people" do more damage.
Add to that that I find your argument dishonest. Yes white collar crime does more financial damage, obviously. The single crime that Enron represented probably did more financial damage than 5 years of "normal" crime in the entire US. Nevertheless nobody died from it. Nobody still has nightmares from it. So you might want to go out to the street and decide for yourself which kind of crime actually damages people's lives. I know we assign monetary damages to things like rape, beatings and murder, but in reality obviously nobody recovers from murder, and it is difficult recovering from the other 2 as well. Add to that the intimidation and terror those crimes cause.
I'd much rather live in a place with a lot of white collar crime than in a place with even a little bit of blue collar crime.
But that's obviously just because I'm racist, right ? Not because I think my nose is currently perfectly positioned on my face and dread the thought of remodeling in that area.
Well CANDU can use anything over 0.75% U235 according to wikipedia. This is because it's more of a modern "pebble-bed" reactor design and uses different design principles from the early heavy water reactors (which were built, not for power generation, but all were designed for making bombs. The nazi reactor, the Japanese one, the Soviet one, even the French and Belgian ones, the American one and more recently Indian and Chinese reactors). I don't know for sure, but I highly doubt the Iranian reactor will turn out to be a pebble-based design. If it isn't, it would lack the advantage of using unenriched fuel.
CANDU can use this fuel type due to the special shape of the fuel rods and of the fuel itself. They package the fuel into tons of really small diameter cylinders enveloped in some sort of package (zirconium + nibium), filled with "pellets" (little balls of 2 diameters), which massively increases exposure to the moderator. Then they had to adjust the moderator to be less effective, and so they went and used heavy water.
Normal reactors use fuel rods that are simply made of uranium and to avoid falling apart under their own weight they need rather large diameters (think 20-30 cm).
However CANDU produces (with a "trivial" modification involving mixing U238 with the fuel) all the components necessary to produce a highly effective hydrogen bomb (tritium and plutonium). You would need uranium enrichment facilities to create plutonium with this reactor though.
The CANDU reactor is certainly not the most efficient bomb making design you could make, but it would work. More to the point, it's design and implementation would make the design of a truly fast bomb-making plant trivial.
Actually since both of those statements could probably get you convicted for hate crime (whether it's white or black criminals doing more damage, surely one of the groups will have "hurt feelings" that seem to entitle people to monetary damages) ... which was the whole point. You can't have a discussion about anything related in the slightest to groups of people without "being racist". Since we obviously need these discussions, we obviously cannot have hate-crime laws.
Have in practice done nothing but tilt the playing field. Affordable housing is in reality housing that you can only stay in while you're unemployed, meaning getting a job is a stupid financial move. What the hell does "equivalent" health care even mean ? That everyone grows equally old ? Face it : "yellow" people will outlive you, on average, and you'll outlive blacks, again on average. They will, however, run circles around you on the track, again on average. Some even say both effects are related. "Same level of educational opportunities" can only function if we do not use schools and classes. People drag eachother down, out of spite, out of ... So putting anything more than individual troublemakers in "better performing" classes will simply destroy the scores of the class, not improve the troublemakers' scores.
All these sound like
The lunacy of it all is, it doesn't matter how well studied a problem is, in America (and fairly, in many other places), only the populist notion matters. No matter how wrong it is. Now we'll lower energy usage by "increasing efficiency". Except that this is a well-studied problem. Besides, actually lowering energy usage means either letting people starve, deprive them of products, or freeze. Everyone's grandmother and her dog know just how popular those prospects are.
The only "equal opportunity" that can be imposed from above is equal misery for all : a short, violent life followed by a painful death. All other opportunity has to be made by the person enjoying it later.
The problem with all hate crime laws is that they punish somebody more severely based on what they were thinking at the time they committed the crime. True, it doesn't come into effect until a crime is actually committed
The problem is that one of the "crimes" is voicing your opinions. Hate crime laws are an evident way of using police force to settle public debates. I am not contending the "slippery slope" argument. I am contending that merely the fact that outlawing voicing "hateful" opinions effectively destroys meaningful public debate.
The problem is that they cover everything. For example, in the health care debate it is important, to say the least, to state that pensioners are not productive citizens. Regardless over the action that said (evident) observation merits, the voicing of that fact itself will be considered hate crime. Needless to say, such observations do not merit executing the infirm, or denying health care to them. The only government ever to try that were the national socialists of germany and the soviet communists.
There are also a lot of other facts that are true, but could be construed to be hate crimes. There are studies ranking ethnicities by IQ. There is the (again obvious) observation that "black" crime is bigger than white crime, and there is obviously a necessity for research into the causes of that. There is the issue of what exactly a certain religion had to do with 9/11 (imho, a great deal). Such things NEED DISCUSSION.
Such discussions are not possible with hate crime laws. They are also critical to rational policies.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.
My opinion is simply : yes they're the same. But it'll take the republicans longer to destroy America than the democrats. Potentially postponing said collapse till after my death. If that's the best I can have, I'll gladly take it.
Refineries ... Actually that was exactly Ahmadinejad's main election promise way back ... to rebuild the refineries. He tried. He tried really hard, really really really hard, and failed. (ever notice how strange it is that the dictator's "main puppet" of a theological state holds a phd in civil engineering and has taught at the best university of the country ? His sons, of this theocratic dictator, are on the way to degrees in civil engineering, again one would assume they'd see more future in religious studies, but clearly daddy theocratic dictator doesn't see much future in all that allah babbling ...). That said, if you read stories of his actions as mayor of Teheran, one thing cannot be denied : this is a serious thick-headed and stupid idiot. His actions during the "revolution" justify adding "extremely dangerous" to the "lunatic" description of his character (said "revolution" started out as a socialist/communist revolution, ended with the likes of ahmadinejad killing tens of thousands of people until the current Iranian state came into existence). Up to this day there is a big non-functional refinery standing on the outskirts of Teheran, built by Ahmadinejad. It doesn't work but it has what roughly translates to "yes we can" on the front gate. It is considered something between a failure and a sick joke by Iranians.
But the point I wanted to make, about Iran's intentions. Or more specifically, it's islamic theocratic dictator-nutcase's intentions :
There are different types of nuclear plants. You have lightwater plants and heavy water plants. (light water and heavy water denoting the isotopes of hydrogen in said water).
Light water plants are cheaper, easier to build and more energy efficient. They can be made in all sorts of power output levels (meaning they're capable of "low" output too). They can be built the size of a car up to the size of a small town. Their waste is far less toxic than the alternatives. Furthermore, they have far easier fuel requirements. They cannot, however, be used to build a bomb. They do not produce plutonium. They do not produce pollonium. They do not ... Some fuel (found in Iran) does not even need to be enriched to be used in these reactors. All modern western reactors are of this type because of the obvious advantages (only exceptions being 1 medical research reactor, which are slowly becoming obsolete)
Heavy water reactors, the first type designed, are very, very big reactors (the power device itself is very small, but you need big structures surrounding them to absorb the massive power they produce, so you cannot have small plants). They produce power in the hundreds of megawatts at least. They produce heavy elements and highly radioactive isotopes as waste product. They are very picky in the fuel they use, and will only tolerate relatively highly enriched uranium.
Guess which type of reactor Iran is building ? (hint : they wouldn't need a heavy water plant for one of these types)
Also : to enrich fuel for even a heavy water reactor they'd need a relatively small enrichment facility, having a cascade of at most a few dozen centrifuges. They did not do this, instead they've built a cascade of over 6000 centrifuges (meaning they're connected centrifuge 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> ...). You do not need a cascade like this for power requirements, in fact it's a huge waste of power (these things need more energy per piece than Al Gore's house and boats combined).
Incidentally that cascade is precisely the critical part necessary for bomb construction (and totally useless and hopelessly inefficient for any other purpose).
Of course these facts are total coincidence and if you feel more secure ignoring this, don't let me stand in your way ...
You mean until certain groups are filmed taking unemployment money straight to the liquor store ... or to prostitutes.
Or until it is shown that certain "cultural enrichers" attack women just because. Or that they gang up on anyone with a different posse/religion/color/... or attack anything looking remotely gay in public parks ... Or a nice conversation between 2 of these guys on how to prevent anyone from hiring them, so as to continue to receive benefits.
In other words, these camera images are sure to make a total mockery of the prevailing ideology, whether it is about poverty causing crime, who exactly opresses who, how women's rights really function in other cultures, or how peaceful other cultures really are, or ... you name it. This will not be pretty. Confronting people with an ideotic (I mean idealized) view of the world never is.
Videos exposing prevailing dogma for the idiocy that those dogmas are will never be allowed to be publicized. People will scream bloody murder, not over the obvious truth, but over people exposing truth.
Yeah well, obviously one cannot talk about evolutionary theory without being called racist.
That's the fate of so much research these days. Different impacts of disease on different ethnicities. Racist ! Aspects of environmental impact of cultural traditions. Racist ! Statistics on the prevalence of disease in different countries ... Racist !
Stating that having different races within a single species is extremely rare in nature, and really only occurs with physical walls of separation between groups of said species ... now that's racist. Stating that breaking down said walls in all experiments resulted in an end to differing fenotypes ("races") ... that apparently makes ons a "klansman".
I realize science does not quite agree with your political ideology and that name calling is oh-so-comforting. But please. Get your head out of your ass.
The incas and mayas have fought wars. So presumably one would state that they did, in fact, have something to do with eachother. They fought the aztecs too. Presumably there were other contacts between them than just wars.
Eventually, or so I've heard, both the Mayans and Incas went from large powers to much smaller ones due to internal conflict, long before the arrival of the first European. The power of the empires was broken before Pizarro "broke" it.
Let's analyse the concepts :
-> alphabet : came out of Egypt (which is not considered part of the middle east. Those Egyptians specifically that it came to were Indo-Europeans. We're not sure if they were Jewish, in fact we think not, but there were Jews amongst them). Besides if you're a linguist and you look at that first alphabet, you'll see it's similar to Hebrew, even though we've not been able to translate them.
-> numbering system : The hindu numerals (the ones we use) : was created by Hindu Indians, some of which were subsequently kidnapped by muslims and sold into slavery. One of them escaped to Venice. The rest is history.
-> concept of zero : came as a free desert with the last one.
-> astronomy. Conceived of in Egypt. Again possibly by Jews. Not middle eastern.
Any more you need the history off ? The totality of important "middle eastern" (we all know you mean muslim) scientific minds is ... 2. Muslims have probably destroyed more (esp. more varied) scientific knowledge than we have today, and their own contributions can be counted, not on 2 hands. Not on one hand. Half of one hand is more than sufficient. For both cases, it is questionable if the person involved was really muslim, since their family was not. It is truly a pitiful history. Unless, of course, you count kidnapping and selling scientists into slavery as some sort of scientific achievement.
There are multiple species of the family "Hominidae" alive today, there are multiple, and historically there have been a great deal of different hominid species. Nearly all were evolutionary dead ends and do not have any descendants at all alive today. That same fate awaits over 99% of us too, of course.
The human "races" are most certainly separate races, they're just not separate species (and with a few races you could say that perhaps they are. Normally the determinant is if members of both groups cannot produce viable offspring. It is assumed possible that humans can successfully conceive with pygmees, but it's most certainly extremely difficult. Those people, however, are so extremely similar to us that you probably would never want to say they're a separate species.
Having different races in a species is in actuality an exceedingly rare phenomenon (and a temporary phenomenon). But because people are seeing an exceptional situation they don't realize just how rare it is. The same goes for religion, the "peaceful" religions are few and far between. All natural religions that I've ever taken a look at have exceedingly violent daily life for their adherents. So do most "world religions". But all people know here is Christianity, that's all they see around them, and so "everyone wants peace". Riiiight.
I know your political ideology requires massive revisionism in order to make sense (since tolerance, for example, versus muslims is not likely to increase our accomplishments in any way, nor will it be reciprocated by tolerance from them. In fact I daresay any state that chose to do so regretted it enormously).
Aren't you supposed to be against that sort of thing, revisionism ? I mean you always seem to complain loudly about it. Of course with "liberals" in general accusing others seems to be considered a way to project their own faults away.
Time dilation is important for navigation because we're using off-world devices to do it (stars, sattelites).
They matter for accuracy, but navigation can work perfectly well without compensating for time dilation.
Why not ? I've even seen a professor construct a "water based" transistor. What specific formula do you need to describe a transistor ?
Yes we've all been taught to think about them in terms of Bohr's model of the atom, which, btw, is still (although not perfectly) Newtonian.
Transistor radios were constructed long before anything resembling quantum physics existed. I suppose you think they were just shooting blind ?
You most certainly do not require quantum physics to describe the workings of a transistor. Their quantization properties are *still* not used in current computers.
Note also that your definitions of "civilization" are largely arbitrary, and designed to support your conclusion. Lumping the various European civilizations together into one "Western Christian civilization" is misleading, at the least.
Perhaps. However there is a continuing civilization during all that period. You would be correct to state there is no continuous state structure (though in that contest western civilization also "wins" : Christian empires populate 4 positions out of 5 for longest existing state structure, otoh that form of state doesn't exist anymore ...)
Nevertheless everyone who looks at the different other civilizations, and where to split them will agree with the massive split that existed, for example between Inca's and Maya's. Or the massive split that the shift from abbasids to mamluks to ottomans represented. These, despite current propaganda to the contrary, represented huge differences in the way everyday life proceeded in those parts. Just to name one thing : they each burned their predecessor's books (and yes there are *some* ottoman exceptions, but not many).
I realize that today you have this "multiculturalism" that states all cultures are "equal". I haven't got a clue what "equal" means in that sentence though. I can tell you what it does not mean :
it does not mean human rights accomplishment equality ... all human rights are singularly the product of western civilization (specifically it's origin is catholic)
it does not mean cultural accomplishment equality ... 90% of all cultural accomplishment occured within western christian civilization. The rest being the largely the product of very active tiny minorities, the Jews being the most famous example, but Japanese belong in there, along with a few (tiny) Chinese kingdoms. Even though these had an output far greater than their numbers would suggest, they are only a small influence in the total. muslims, mongols, Incas, or Mayans just either did not produce any significant amount of culture, or failed massively in the preservation of it.
it does not mean economic accomplishment equality ... I doubt there is any need for further comments here. Note, though that the situation you see today in economics has been "roughly" a constant throughout history : western christians having large numbers and large output, several minorities having large output disproportionate to their numbers (Japan, Jews), and the rest of the planet ... basically does nothing at all. Generally the rest of the planet doesn't even have an economy at the subsistence level, but actually below it (and "aided" by the rest)
it does not mean scientific accomplishment equality ... there are precious few civilizations that have noteworthy accomplishments, Mayans, Incas, Chinese, Japanese, and Christian. All of these, except Japanese and Christians managed to destroy their scientific accomplishments. Muslims inherited massive scientific knowledge from their conquests ... and destroyed what they had instead of building upon it.
Individuals are equal, and even then, only at birth. In practice, they are only equal in the eyes of the law. As accomplishments mount (or fail to mount) people do not remain equal. Cultures, ideas, economic systems, countries,religions (or "lack of such") ... are not equal.
Sorry if your current political ideology requires revisionism. It truly sucks in that way. I will not cater to such revisionism, however.
Nearly every civilization has fallen, which usually meant the death of > 99% of it's people.
Easter Island, Inca's, Maya's, (and there were several others in that region), Lots of Chinese civilizations, Buddhists, Persians, Babylon, Mamluks, Ottoman (the various "muslim" (though mostly less than 10% actual muslims) civlizations), ... all have perished and taken a huge death toll in their last few years.
But we can derive a lot of hope. Western, Christian civilization now continuously exists for over 1500 years. You might even say 2000 years. That's a hell of a long time, and few others have ever reached that age.
I disagree with the bioweapon stuff. Ethnic cleansing, whether we're talking about the muslim black gold (the muslim slave trade in blacks), or even the WWII atrocities against jews and pow's were done using relatively low tech means. The vast majority of victims died of starvation and illness. The quintessential state that comitted masses of ethnic cleansing, the muslim mongol state, did so manually. Using just knives, they literally massacred their way into majority in an area larger than the entire US. Whatever the weapons, the ideology behind them is to blame. The main ideologies that have comitted massive ethnic cleansing in history are well known : islam, fascism and communism. Those are to blame, nothing else.
Besides, those massacres did not allow them to survive, and for all their troubles, they (mongols) got massacred by the arabs. Funny how things turn out.
and creatures in the wild cross species lines quite often. Instead of a tree coming up from a single ancestral organism, life is more like a complex web, with some branches ending, some continuing, and some merging back into the main trunk (or another branch).
While true, it's a bit out of proportion. The vast majority (> 99.99%) of "evolutionary branches" (ie. species) are extinct. There are over 400 known types of human (and a few million years of missing pieces), and there are 4 left alive. Mergers are unheard of (except 1 special case : that a part of a species starts to differentiate, and that differentiation ending, which happens constantly)
So perhaps rephrasing your sentence would be appropriate :
Instead of a tree coming up from a single ancestral organism, life is more like a complex web, starting at a single ancestral organism and branching out, the vast majority of branches being dead ends. The very, very few branches continuing, a few times swapping genes with eachother (via viruses) in addition to mutating (the advantage of gene swapping is that it gives an evolutionary advantage much quicker). While there is a "main trunk" (a single species will eventually destroy all others, and be the only line left), we have no idea which species are part of this "main trunk", and specifically we don't know if humans are part of it (I'm betting "no").
What you might call a "merger" is what you see happening to human races right now. The globalisation has caused intermarrying between all human species. The only reason those human species were separated is a very, very long physical separation, preventing intermarriage. But not long enough to actually create separate species. A merger can, however, only happen to different races, not to different species.
So now we do have intermarriage, thanks to the emancipation (of blacks) movement started in the United States, so the genes are getting mixed. What will happen next (and in an astonishingly short timeframe) is that in a few generations all humans will have genes from all races. Genes that used to be distinctly "african" or "european" 100 years ago. Then evolution will force a choice between useful and useless genes, and all our great grandchildren will end up with a very, very similar set of genes. They will not differ in color like different races do today.
The scary part is that this will happen in less than 400-500 years and the process is already 100 years or-so underway.
Is that you ? Can you return my hockey stick, the kids are asking for it ?
10^104 entropy ought to be enough for everybody.