Stanford can afford to do it. Most of the lesser-known colleges cannot.
Either way, I wonder where they will put the money. After all, almost any actually profitable stock out there is connected to a company that in some form or another is considered 'evil' in the eyes of some activist organization, so what's to stop some activist group form using this as a precedent?
One of the absolute best series of stories that Asimov wrote concerning such things, and yet no one made a movie of it (that I know of). It concerns one Daneel Olivaw. Seeing the character progress and rise all the way up from a mere experiment (Caves of Steel series) to 'the real power behind the throne' (beginning of the Foundation series) was awesome, to say the least.
If they can find a way to make that a series of movies out of the stories without totally screwing it up (or worse, Hollywoodizing it), that would seriously rock.
Dude - if she was cheating on you, man up and leave. You do not have the right to do anything else, and unless you're a sociopath who loves mentally beating down a woman just to feel better about yourself, your story has no relevance here.
My wife had to put up with an asshole ex-husband who thought the same thing during the early stages of our relationship. He loved to call her up once in a great while and screw with her head - usually after she'd gotten over the last time he called and once he figured out her new phone number. It wasn't until I called him up one day and said two things that he shut up and went away, never to pester her again.
Her personality brightened up a whole hell of a lot more after that, and we've been extremely happy about things ever since.
(...those two things? The first was a recitation of his home address and the hours he was usually home. I'll plead the fifth before I tell you the second one.)
I look forward to claims along the lines of, "It's not abuse unless you physically injure them,".
It's a hard line to draw without sufficient and legally-clear context; for example, consider a facebook/twitter/whatever post addressed to someone, stating "You look lovely today", posted without any further context from someone you know. To an ordinary non-abused person, and many abused persons, this statement is nothing more than a pleasantry. To someone hiding in a battered women's shelter, this could be a direct threat.
You see, abusers are (often) smart enough to not use words that any jury member would immediately recognize as a threatening/abusive gesture.
On the other hand, minus a no-contact restraining order, how do you legally tell the difference in a way that is meaningful? After all, if I said that to some random stranger, and they decide to scream for a cop to lock my ass up... err, what standing is there to do so? Maybe the person in question was raped a day ago and the rapist whispered those words - but I had no clue as to that having ever happened. Saying it may well have hurt the person due to PTSD, but even if I didn't know, there's a legal concept where ignorance of the law is no excuse, so if there were a law that could get me arrested for mental assault (for lack of a better term)...
I guess what I'm getting at is that you have to be damned careful as to where and how much you get the law involved with such things. It's likely much better for all involved that a simple no-contact restraining order draw the line instead, so that only those who the order is leveled against are, well, restrained, and the rest of us can go about our day.
Cross-posted w/ you, but yeah, agreed - headline fail, big-time. This doesn't even count the fact that the electrons passing through said transistor still occupy three dimensions as well.
"The transistors, just a few atoms thick and hence transparent,"
Sorry, but "a few atoms thick" still gives it all three axes in Cartesian space, no matter how small any given axis may be. Hell, even "one atom thick" qualifies as three-dimensional.
We could fix this problem easily with barely any significant change to our style of life.
...so why hasn't anyone proposed this mysterious solution if it fixed the problem that "easily", with "barely any significant change in our style of life"?
I predict that the sun will rise tomorrow, and also the next day.
Sidereal rotation of Earth in Cartesian space while in orbit about a medium-sized star - itself orbiting lazily within a larger galaxy, with no reference for "up" and "down"? What is this "rise" you refer to?
In my recent experience most "home" users who can make the switch to linux can probably switch to a tablet, and forego a computer entirely.
She has an iPad, but wanted to write docs and track cases for her local hobby group (ghost-hunting).
So your solution to the windows 7 vs windows 8 price dilemma was to buy a Mac with OSX, then bought VMWare Fusion, and then bought Windows 7 anyway?
I already had a Windows 7 install disk (well,.iso - I ripped it years ago), so no cost there really. As for the rest, my use case is highly atypical (hence the "but it works well for me." bit.)
But surely you would do the same, no? Or would you really drop nearly $250 on an operating system?
...err, not really. I mean, seriously - my missus looked at the same situation and decided that she really didn't need Windows for anything.
For my own new laptop, I found my own slightly costlier solution, but it works well for me. It has been working like a champ for almost year now, in spite of the abuse I regularly give it (which is, so far, longer than most laptops hold up under my not-so-tender mercies.) I keep Windows 7 around on a VMWare Fusion partition, but that's about it.
This leads to a follow-on question: What criteria does one give when determining whether a species should be revived or not?
Personally, not every species should be revived, no matter how cute it may or may not be, or its perceived usefulness, or some misguided idea that all species must be saved no matter what (in spite of species having gone extinct since the dawn of time with no help from mankind whatsoever, and many of whom would have prevented mankind from rising up had they not gone extinct, etc...) Now if it's clearly mankind's fault that one dies off, sure - let's see if we can bring it back. Otherwise, well...
I'm big into documentaries and there have been dozens since that have come out that are just as important that barely made a whiff in theaters.
Depends - how much does Discovery Networks pay nowadays for a documentary?
It's ludicrous to think that someone would use the documentary genre to get rich. Al Gore's efforts took off and to add to that he turned out to be a damned good businessman with his Current network.
Besides, the way to get rich is to be a scientist on the take from Big Oil who uses is credentials to pretend GW isn't real.
Err, I have nothing to rebut this quote, because I don't have to - you did it for me. After all, how much does that so-called "big oil" scientist make versus, oh, Al Gore?:/
Agreed, wholeheartedly. I doubt you will find many people who would credibly argue that pollution is a good thing.
On the other hand, pollution seems so pedestrian... no scare factor in it anymore. No alarms to be raised. The corporations have long since either spun their message to convince the world they're perfectly clean, or they outsourced all the dirty stuff to China.
The ideologues? Well, they no longer have craptacular pollution wonders to point at like they did in the '60s and '70s... I mean, back then you had Love Canal, and thousands of similar examples. They had the public's imagination captured by Soylent Green and Silent Spring. What do you have today? Not even a weak simulacrum compared to back then - at least in the Western world.
A lot of the global warming "solutions" proposed by a politicians may well be exploitative power grabs, but that's true of a lot of *everything* they propose. That doesn't mean the problem isn't real, just that they're power-hungry bastards trying to exploit a very real problem for personal gain.
The point isn't whether or not AGW is real or not - the point is that, contrary to GP's post, there are huge incentives to promote the theory, and more importantly, to shut down any and all opposing viewpoints (as they tend to impede the flow of money).
Devil's Advocate here: Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't a professor.
Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't relevant in any way.
Not directly to the actual debates and studies, no. On the other hand, he managed to make a little movie, do a little activism, and made a metric ton of money off the subject. He also elevated the status and notoriety of quite a few scientists in the process.
The point wasn't that Gore is some kind of scientist. The point is that he, like many others surrounding this whole subject, are busily using it to enrich themselves. They also amplify the message, manipulate it, and happily treat it as unquestioned gospel. The masses who follow the ideology in turn parrot the results - rather hotly, I might add.
Meanwhile, the scientists most associated with the theory are given the aforementioned fame, prestige, recognition, etc.
Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't a professor. None of those folks trading in carbon credit are professors. Professional 'Greenwashers' (read: marketing folks who make companies look pretty to the public and environmental orgs) are not professors. The environmental orgs themselves (who often take in some rather healthy donations from corporations, well-heeled individuals, etc).
Also consider that profit does not always mean money. To the average and otherwise-obscure prof or environmental organization, it also means prestige, fame, name recognition, and influence (see also Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, etc.)
1) What you claim and what you actually do are apparently two different things.
2) That little witticism I wrote at the beginning is in direct challenge to the tired old ideologue's soundbite of "ZOMG! EducateYourself!!!111BBQ!1!';)
... you'd put down your favorite media, and educate yourself...
Those who rely exclusively on themselves for education have an idiot for a pupil and a fool for an instructor.
I find it amusing that you go out of your way to demonize a single political party, when fact is that both major parties in the US are happily raking the public over the coals - often for the same lusts: money and power. I find it doubly amusing that for someone who supposedly thinks for himself and is allegedly self-educated on the topic, I find that in other posts you seem to parrot soundbites, absolutes, and pre-digested phrases.
The point I'm getting at is not petty insult, but is instead this: If you *truly* were interested in independent thought and independent politics/ideology, you would at least stop and consider that maybe those whom you oppose have arguments with at least some merit (if not in delivery, then at least in concept).
Stop and show some empathy sometime - I find that one tends to learn more that way.:)
You will take a hit on your water and heating bills.
Not necessarily - greater flow means a faster shower; instead of having to stay in longer while waiting for that slow flow to get everything wet, then wait for it to wash off the soap, I can cut shower times down to a mere fraction of what they would otherwise take. Then you have the fact that with a restricted flow, a huge percentage of the heat in your hot water is radiating out into your walls while it sits there waiting its turn to go out the shower head (few houses insulate hot water pipes all the way from heater to bathroom, so...) Finally, you don't have to wait as long for the shower water to heat up in the first place, so you can get right in without waiting.
To be honest, I haven't seen hardly any an increase in water or heating costs since I did it, and it saves me a bit of time.
Also, there are folks living in areas where water flow is kind of sluggish in the first place - why should they have to suffer even more?
Slashdot Mirror
Stanford can afford to do it. Most of the lesser-known colleges cannot.
Either way, I wonder where they will put the money. After all, almost any actually profitable stock out there is connected to a company that in some form or another is considered 'evil' in the eyes of some activist organization, so what's to stop some activist group form using this as a precedent?
One of the absolute best series of stories that Asimov wrote concerning such things, and yet no one made a movie of it (that I know of). It concerns one Daneel Olivaw. Seeing the character progress and rise all the way up from a mere experiment (Caves of Steel series) to 'the real power behind the throne' (beginning of the Foundation series) was awesome, to say the least.
If they can find a way to make that a series of movies out of the stories without totally screwing it up (or worse, Hollywoodizing it), that would seriously rock.
Dude - if she was cheating on you, man up and leave. You do not have the right to do anything else, and unless you're a sociopath who loves mentally beating down a woman just to feel better about yourself, your story has no relevance here.
Sending a nasty email is not domestic abuse.
My wife had to put up with an asshole ex-husband who thought the same thing during the early stages of our relationship. He loved to call her up once in a great while and screw with her head - usually after she'd gotten over the last time he called and once he figured out her new phone number. It wasn't until I called him up one day and said two things that he shut up and went away, never to pester her again.
Her personality brightened up a whole hell of a lot more after that, and we've been extremely happy about things ever since.
(...those two things? The first was a recitation of his home address and the hours he was usually home. I'll plead the fifth before I tell you the second one.)
I look forward to claims along the lines of, "It's not abuse unless you physically injure them,".
It's a hard line to draw without sufficient and legally-clear context; for example, consider a facebook/twitter/whatever post addressed to someone, stating "You look lovely today", posted without any further context from someone you know. To an ordinary non-abused person, and many abused persons, this statement is nothing more than a pleasantry. To someone hiding in a battered women's shelter, this could be a direct threat.
You see, abusers are (often) smart enough to not use words that any jury member would immediately recognize as a threatening/abusive gesture.
On the other hand, minus a no-contact restraining order, how do you legally tell the difference in a way that is meaningful? After all, if I said that to some random stranger, and they decide to scream for a cop to lock my ass up... err, what standing is there to do so? Maybe the person in question was raped a day ago and the rapist whispered those words - but I had no clue as to that having ever happened. Saying it may well have hurt the person due to PTSD, but even if I didn't know, there's a legal concept where ignorance of the law is no excuse, so if there were a law that could get me arrested for mental assault (for lack of a better term)...
I guess what I'm getting at is that you have to be damned careful as to where and how much you get the law involved with such things. It's likely much better for all involved that a simple no-contact restraining order draw the line instead, so that only those who the order is leveled against are, well, restrained, and the rest of us can go about our day.
Thing is, the electrons are still able to move in 3-dimensional space, since they orbit the nucleus, and that orbital plane can be in any direction.
Cross-posted w/ you, but yeah, agreed - headline fail, big-time. This doesn't even count the fact that the electrons passing through said transistor still occupy three dimensions as well.
"The transistors, just a few atoms thick and hence transparent,"
Sorry, but "a few atoms thick" still gives it all three axes in Cartesian space, no matter how small any given axis may be. Hell, even "one atom thick" qualifies as three-dimensional.
Pedant Headline Fail, eh?
Okay, which one? (see also this thread ;) )
We could fix this problem easily with barely any significant change to our style of life.
...so why hasn't anyone proposed this mysterious solution if it fixed the problem that "easily", with "barely any significant change in our style of life"?
Just for fun:
I predict that the sun will rise tomorrow, and also the next day.
Sidereal rotation of Earth in Cartesian space while in orbit about a medium-sized star - itself orbiting lazily within a larger galaxy, with no reference for "up" and "down"? What is this "rise" you refer to?
In my recent experience most "home" users who can make the switch to linux can probably switch to a tablet, and forego a computer entirely.
She has an iPad, but wanted to write docs and track cases for her local hobby group (ghost-hunting).
So your solution to the windows 7 vs windows 8 price dilemma was to buy a Mac with OSX, then bought VMWare Fusion, and then bought Windows 7 anyway?
I already had a Windows 7 install disk (well, .iso - I ripped it years ago), so no cost there really. As for the rest, my use case is highly atypical (hence the "but it works well for me." bit.)
But surely you would do the same, no? Or would you really drop nearly $250 on an operating system?
...err, not really. I mean, seriously - my missus looked at the same situation and decided that she really didn't need Windows for anything.
For my own new laptop, I found my own slightly costlier solution, but it works well for me. It has been working like a champ for almost year now, in spite of the abuse I regularly give it (which is, so far, longer than most laptops hold up under my not-so-tender mercies.) I keep Windows 7 around on a VMWare Fusion partition, but that's about it.
Yeah. Oregon would stand a chance against one of the largest power in the world.
You keep forgetting that Northern Cali is in-between. You know, where all the weed is. ;)
(Hell, there's even a town called Weed there if memory serves...)
*sigh* - time to start building a fence and putting in machine-gun emplacements at the Oregon border...
Much WISER would be to deny frackers the CLEAN POTABLE WATER they pump deep into oil fields to get their 1 barrel of oil per 10 barrels wasted water.
1) I sincerely doubt the oil companies use the same water that you get from the tap to do that.
2) Southern California is a semi-desert anyway... always has been, always will be (well, within the next few centuries, anyway).
3) If they hadn't been so busy diverting existing water to save some obscure and hyper-local species of fish...
This leads to a follow-on question: What criteria does one give when determining whether a species should be revived or not?
Personally, not every species should be revived, no matter how cute it may or may not be, or its perceived usefulness, or some misguided idea that all species must be saved no matter what (in spite of species having gone extinct since the dawn of time with no help from mankind whatsoever, and many of whom would have prevented mankind from rising up had they not gone extinct, etc...) Now if it's clearly mankind's fault that one dies off, sure - let's see if we can bring it back. Otherwise, well...
I'm big into documentaries and there have been dozens since that have come out that are just as important that barely made a whiff in theaters.
Depends - how much does Discovery Networks pay nowadays for a documentary?
It's ludicrous to think that someone would use the documentary genre to get rich. Al Gore's efforts took off and to add to that he turned out to be a damned good businessman with his Current network.
Besides, the way to get rich is to be a scientist on the take from Big Oil who uses is credentials to pretend GW isn't real.
Err, I have nothing to rebut this quote, because I don't have to - you did it for me. After all, how much does that so-called "big oil" scientist make versus, oh, Al Gore? :/
Pollution is not under dispute.
Agreed, wholeheartedly. I doubt you will find many people who would credibly argue that pollution is a good thing.
On the other hand, pollution seems so pedestrian... no scare factor in it anymore. No alarms to be raised. The corporations have long since either spun their message to convince the world they're perfectly clean, or they outsourced all the dirty stuff to China.
The ideologues? Well, they no longer have craptacular pollution wonders to point at like they did in the '60s and '70s... I mean, back then you had Love Canal, and thousands of similar examples. They had the public's imagination captured by Soylent Green and Silent Spring. What do you have today? Not even a weak simulacrum compared to back then - at least in the Western world.
So, well, what to do?
A lot of the global warming "solutions" proposed by a politicians may well be exploitative power grabs, but that's true of a lot of *everything* they propose. That doesn't mean the problem isn't real, just that they're power-hungry bastards trying to exploit a very real problem for personal gain.
The point isn't whether or not AGW is real or not - the point is that, contrary to GP's post, there are huge incentives to promote the theory, and more importantly, to shut down any and all opposing viewpoints (as they tend to impede the flow of money).
Devil's Advocate here: Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't a professor.
Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't relevant in any way.
Not directly to the actual debates and studies, no. On the other hand, he managed to make a little movie, do a little activism, and made a metric ton of money off the subject. He also elevated the status and notoriety of quite a few scientists in the process.
The point wasn't that Gore is some kind of scientist. The point is that he, like many others surrounding this whole subject, are busily using it to enrich themselves. They also amplify the message, manipulate it, and happily treat it as unquestioned gospel. The masses who follow the ideology in turn parrot the results - rather hotly, I might add.
Meanwhile, the scientists most associated with the theory are given the aforementioned fame, prestige, recognition, etc.
Devil's Advocate here:
Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't a professor. None of those folks trading in carbon credit are professors. Professional 'Greenwashers' (read: marketing folks who make companies look pretty to the public and environmental orgs) are not professors. The environmental orgs themselves (who often take in some rather healthy donations from corporations, well-heeled individuals, etc).
Also consider that profit does not always mean money. To the average and otherwise-obscure prof or environmental organization, it also means prestige, fame, name recognition, and influence (see also Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, etc.)
1) What you claim and what you actually do are apparently two different things.
2) That little witticism I wrote at the beginning is in direct challenge to the tired old ideologue's soundbite of "ZOMG! EducateYourself!!!111BBQ!1!' ;)
... you'd put down your favorite media, and educate yourself...
Those who rely exclusively on themselves for education have an idiot for a pupil and a fool for an instructor.
I find it amusing that you go out of your way to demonize a single political party, when fact is that both major parties in the US are happily raking the public over the coals - often for the same lusts: money and power. I find it doubly amusing that for someone who supposedly thinks for himself and is allegedly self-educated on the topic, I find that in other posts you seem to parrot soundbites, absolutes, and pre-digested phrases.
The point I'm getting at is not petty insult, but is instead this: If you *truly* were interested in independent thought and independent politics/ideology, you would at least stop and consider that maybe those whom you oppose have arguments with at least some merit (if not in delivery, then at least in concept).
Stop and show some empathy sometime - I find that one tends to learn more that way. :)
You will take a hit on your water and heating bills.
Not necessarily - greater flow means a faster shower; instead of having to stay in longer while waiting for that slow flow to get everything wet, then wait for it to wash off the soap, I can cut shower times down to a mere fraction of what they would otherwise take. Then you have the fact that with a restricted flow, a huge percentage of the heat in your hot water is radiating out into your walls while it sits there waiting its turn to go out the shower head (few houses insulate hot water pipes all the way from heater to bathroom, so...) Finally, you don't have to wait as long for the shower water to heat up in the first place, so you can get right in without waiting.
To be honest, I haven't seen hardly any an increase in water or heating costs since I did it, and it saves me a bit of time.
Also, there are folks living in areas where water flow is kind of sluggish in the first place - why should they have to suffer even more?