will be the stupidity of the "think of the children" motivation for any laws, and how fundamentally flawed that concept is. and i agree
however, the same slashdot crowd will kvetch about computer noobs running wifi without any security, not even weak wep. i can look for wifi near my apartment and list about 5 such open connections, as could a lot of slashdotters anywhere in the country, or the world. and i myself have used such open connections to suck down pirate media (and you know that the next logical extension of "think of the children" is "think of the starving music executive"), as have some slashdotters here i bet
so the security-minded slashdot crowd will say you need wpa at least and encrypt everything that goes over the air anyways (and limit access by mac addresses, and block unnecessary ports, etc.)
ok, fine. well an insane law like this is the only thing that will get us such a world. i'm sorry, but that's the truth
what i'm saying is, noobs can not be motivated to be careful, unless the penalties are severe. in fact, the penalties are fundamentally unjust and insane must be to force such motivation on noobs to stop being careless and lazy and uneducate don the issue. i bet a lot of them even know all about the issue, but are just too lazy to configure their set up
that all major politicians in all major parties are whores of a corporatocracy
how truthful that cynicism is or not, i can defeat your point of view with an even more cynical observation: if a third party appeared, killing off the republican or the democrats, that party would merely replicate the previous party's level of degeneration and corruption
so the issue is structural: a law must be passed that must seal off the involvement of money in politics. anyone who gets enough signatures gets a pool of money to spend, that's it
then, any spending of any money in any case, no matter how peripheral, is punished. that owuld be easy to enforce, considering the spotlight that politicians labor under
but to get that law made, you need an issue-oriented candidate, of ANY PARTY
who would ride a wave to public office based on this issue and this issue alone, then his popularity must be big enough to muscle the change through
it's not like you will just be listening to your favorite radio stat- V1AGRA HERBAL ENHANCEMENT!-ion and all of a sudden you will get th-I AM MFUNE NIFONGO AND I HAVE 2 MILLION DO-is sort of random interruption fr-BARELY LEGAL TEENS DO-om random broadcasters who ju-EARN 10,000 DOLLARS A DAY FROM HOME SELL-st want to turn a buck without any consideration for decorum or common sense. most people are reasonable, and just a little shame is all it takes to prevent asocial activ-GOATSE.CX GOATSE.CX GOATSE.CX-ity
the editorial staff of any large collaboration will suffer the same trevails and useless insider versus outsider drama and cliques and power plays
but of course, the haters will come out of the woodwork trumpeting this scandal as a reason why wikipedia is wrong
this does in fact besmirch wikipedia in general, but it doesn't count as a reason to find wikipedia inferior in quality, as it is a problem that all encyclopedias or any publication with large editorial staff and the drama that comes with
so holding this scandal against wikipedia uniquely is not valid
it's a pretty weird place: gorgeous virgin mountain forest, everything is muddy and foggy and it rains all the time there, as it's basically nothing but humongous turbines plopped right over steam vents coming right out of the ground. there are communist NPA guerrillas in the area and the security of the place is pretty important, so there are guys with submachine guns at checkpoints everywhere too
but, notably, some of the streams running off from the area are a brilliant cobalt blue
so just a reality check: some of the problems associated with mining will be found with geothermal sources. mining often churns up lots of unhealthy metals from the earth, artificially. well, geothermal is basically that same process, but completely natural. so whereever you have geothermal energy sources, you have the potential to stir up nasty metals and deposit them on the surface, with or without man's involvement
are counterclaims possible? reversed judgments? all the extorted and strong armed soccer moms: do they have grounds for a class action lawsuit against the recording industry's attack dogs as the legal tide turns against them?
you allude to a secret fixed intelligence everyone has. ok, let's for a moment say you are correct, that your thesis is true. now the problem is measuring it
if we were to have a magical device that could measure this secret value we'd have something here. but being that we don't have a magical device to put an absolute sticker on the back of everyone's head, we are left with what the article says is a better measure of intelligence: a subjective, malleable one
but i'll give you the benefit of the doubt: as soon as you invent your magical objective intelligence measuring device, get back to us. until then, the conclusions in the article are superior to yours, because the fixed number you allude to is completely and utterly beyond anyone's ability to measure with any remotely useful accuracy
all children and adults need downtime. how you spend that downtime doesn't matter, but you don't want that downtime to be a majority of your time. it's as simple as that
it's not about television, it's not about video games. hell, if a kid is playing something like civilization, he's growing some iq points there. what it's about is epnding the balance of your daytime engaging your mind, AND having some carefree time too. wathcing tv during that downtime, as long as it is a MINORITY of your time, is perfetly ok
so where does this bizarre FUD spewing cult of television=brain poison come from?
television is harmless. no, really, television is 100% harmless. lack of effort is the problem. of which constant television watching is a SYMPTOM of, an effect of, not a CAUSE of
avoiding television is like avoiding kleenex when you are sick because you see sick people with kleenex all the time. you have your cause and effect all screwed up
the television is harmless entertainment. you limit exposure to television simply because you want your kids to spend time doing something challenging, not because the tv is some sort of alien brain poison which decreases iq
all kids need downtime. hell, all human beings need downtime. there are a number of ways to spend your downtime, and watching television, for hours a day, is one of a number of harmless choices no worse or better than any other carefree time waster
as long as the significant balance of daytime activity is spent doing something that challenges the mind, AND the kid has carefree downtime (spent doing a number of things, which could include tv or not, no matter), you are raising a healthy intelligent child
there's this weird, dare i say, stupid fear of the tv as some sort of iq destroyer. it's quite a bizarre fundamentalist cult, like apple aficionados or free software zealots
the movies and tv create stupid stereotypes, but they are also embraced in kitsch ways by those who are depicted as such, and often have basis in real life fact
only brittle weirdos with a chip on their shoulder would have a problem with ridiculous stereotypes no one believes and have no real life consequences
did you know everyone from minnesota talks like they do in that movie "fargo"?
did you know everyone in california is a surfer dude?
please, by all means, don't let light hearted humor get in the way of your need to get off on high holy indignation
psychotic murderous psychopaths on death row with multiple female admirers sending them their panties in the mail and even a bride or two. and aren't women supposed to like the "bad" type?
maybe new jersey (teh state that gives us the sopranos, irony) has the wrong idea. maybe the real issue here is the nugget of a new online dating business: a place for women to meet and date proven criminals, not avoid them
but from my understanding of neutrons (that they go through everything), could you set one of these up on each coast and cover the whole coast? well, probably 3 each coast, to triangulate. cancel out the known, nonmoving sources (our reactors, medical equipment, etc.) and presto: you can see all moving backpack/ container nukes
additionally (again, pardon my ignorance), are there nuclear elements that don't give off neutrons as they decay? which means you can salt a typical c4 or tnt explosive with this element, and irradiate times square or the washington mall, without any previous neutron detection?
except that, you need to give cops SOMETHING to control people. that cops will use these tools outside of the proper scenarios is a given: cops will always use lethal and nonlethal tools in ways they shouldn't. yes, you can make the case that because it is supposed to be nonlethal, they will use them when otherwise a few well chosen words would suffice instead
and still, given all of that, tasers should still be used
simply because there are plenty of scenarios where lethal force shouldn't be the only option available to a cop. i am making the case that the number of lives using a taser instead of a gun has saved outweighs the situations where someone died who didn't need any force at all
in other words, tasers are not perfect. but NO weapons of force are perfect, AND not having a range of weapons of force in police force is a nonstarter (cue the wackjobs who think we don't need a police force). welcome to the real world: there is no silver bullet (no pun intended), there is always a downside between two competing concepts you MUST satisfy
this is actually how propaganda works: you look at the negatives of a technology: say nuclear power, or stem cell research, without looking at the positives, and without the realization that there isn't a better option out there
in life, you are never given the choice between a golden wonderful choice, and a terrible horrible one. in life, most of the time on complex questions like the proper tool for police work, or who to vote for in an election, or how to confront violent fundamentalists in the middle east, there are propagandists (or downright naive or ignorant people) who glom onto the negatives of one particular attitude, and hurl invectives at it, without ANY ocnsideraiton of how much worse the other choices before you are
some naive, ignorant, and propagandized people need to recognize that EVERY choice before us is full of negatives, and it is your job, as it is often in life, to attempt to choose from varying shades of gray, choices that are ALL negative, but one less negative than another
this is called "context"
and simpletons, propaganda, and the naive haven't mastered the concept
in such a way, we complain about tasers, without realizing they are an improvement on nothing but guns and pepper spray for police work. but because tasers still have negatives, people will go in to blinders mode, and whine about that. as if whining about the negatives of one choice wihtout balancing them against the negatives of other choices is supposed to have any value in this life on the complex questions that confront us
"context" people. learn the concept, use it. stop being naive, ignorant, or propagandized
i did not know about that fungus. that truly floors me
but to me that has to be a dead end for life, perhaps even non-DNA/RNA based life. i would think you cannot successfully pass on the traits to survive and thrive and evolve under gamma radiation when the molecular mechanism of inheritance itself is being decimated by said same gamma radiation. so it is truly an exotic dead end little niche, but amazing nonetheless
Slashdot Mirror
will be the stupidity of the "think of the children" motivation for any laws, and how fundamentally flawed that concept is. and i agree
however, the same slashdot crowd will kvetch about computer noobs running wifi without any security, not even weak wep. i can look for wifi near my apartment and list about 5 such open connections, as could a lot of slashdotters anywhere in the country, or the world. and i myself have used such open connections to suck down pirate media (and you know that the next logical extension of "think of the children" is "think of the starving music executive"), as have some slashdotters here i bet
so the security-minded slashdot crowd will say you need wpa at least and encrypt everything that goes over the air anyways (and limit access by mac addresses, and block unnecessary ports, etc.)
ok, fine. well an insane law like this is the only thing that will get us such a world. i'm sorry, but that's the truth
what i'm saying is, noobs can not be motivated to be careful, unless the penalties are severe. in fact, the penalties are fundamentally unjust and insane must be to force such motivation on noobs to stop being careless and lazy and uneducate don the issue. i bet a lot of them even know all about the issue, but are just too lazy to configure their set up
so take your pick slashdot:
1. insane law, sane security practices
2. sane legislators, insane security lapses
you can't have both in this world with today's wifi technology
i'm not saying this dichotomy is correct, i am just saying it is reality
story is about shrinky dinks. omg ponies is the same sort of little sister handicraft
thus a silly throw away joke. exactly how humor deprived are you?
http://slashdot.org/articles/06/04/01/1526216.shtml
that all major politicians in all major parties are whores of a corporatocracy
how truthful that cynicism is or not, i can defeat your point of view with an even more cynical observation: if a third party appeared, killing off the republican or the democrats, that party would merely replicate the previous party's level of degeneration and corruption
so the issue is structural: a law must be passed that must seal off the involvement of money in politics. anyone who gets enough signatures gets a pool of money to spend, that's it
then, any spending of any money in any case, no matter how peripheral, is punished. that owuld be easy to enforce, considering the spotlight that politicians labor under
but to get that law made, you need an issue-oriented candidate, of ANY PARTY
who would ride a wave to public office based on this issue and this issue alone, then his popularity must be big enough to muscle the change through
it has nothing to do with party politics
or you respond without reading
it's not like you will just be listening to your favorite radio stat- V1AGRA HERBAL ENHANCEMENT!-ion and all of a sudden you will get th-I AM MFUNE NIFONGO AND I HAVE 2 MILLION DO-is sort of random interruption fr-BARELY LEGAL TEENS DO-om random broadcasters who ju-EARN 10,000 DOLLARS A DAY FROM HOME SELL-st want to turn a buck without any consideration for decorum or common sense. most people are reasonable, and just a little shame is all it takes to prevent asocial activ-GOATSE.CX GOATSE.CX GOATSE.CX-ity
the editorial staff of any large collaboration will suffer the same trevails and useless insider versus outsider drama and cliques and power plays
but of course, the haters will come out of the woodwork trumpeting this scandal as a reason why wikipedia is wrong
this does in fact besmirch wikipedia in general, but it doesn't count as a reason to find wikipedia inferior in quality, as it is a problem that all encyclopedias or any publication with large editorial staff and the drama that comes with
so holding this scandal against wikipedia uniquely is not valid
"context"
it's a valuable concept
the summary said peru ordered 260K OnLine Complex Processings (olcp). that's not going to help the cause of One Laptop per Child (olpc)
i can think of many larger vents by pure size, but they are untapped energy sources
it's not in iceland as one might guess, it's in the philippines
on leyte, near lake danao above ormoc city, called tongonan geothermal field, run by calenergy
it's a pretty weird place: gorgeous virgin mountain forest, everything is muddy and foggy and it rains all the time there, as it's basically nothing but humongous turbines plopped right over steam vents coming right out of the ground. there are communist NPA guerrillas in the area and the security of the place is pretty important, so there are guys with submachine guns at checkpoints everywhere too
but, notably, some of the streams running off from the area are a brilliant cobalt blue
so just a reality check: some of the problems associated with mining will be found with geothermal sources. mining often churns up lots of unhealthy metals from the earth, artificially. well, geothermal is basically that same process, but completely natural. so whereever you have geothermal energy sources, you have the potential to stir up nasty metals and deposit them on the surface, with or without man's involvement
not my blog, but some good pics and summary
are counterclaims possible? reversed judgments? all the extorted and strong armed soccer moms: do they have grounds for a class action lawsuit against the recording industry's attack dogs as the legal tide turns against them?
you can't just randomly give people untested drugs, you need to try it out on rats first
so obviously, in the future, rats will use aol and we will get human usage pattern information from that
you allude to a secret fixed intelligence everyone has. ok, let's for a moment say you are correct, that your thesis is true. now the problem is measuring it
if we were to have a magical device that could measure this secret value we'd have something here. but being that we don't have a magical device to put an absolute sticker on the back of everyone's head, we are left with what the article says is a better measure of intelligence: a subjective, malleable one
but i'll give you the benefit of the doubt: as soon as you invent your magical objective intelligence measuring device, get back to us. until then, the conclusions in the article are superior to yours, because the fixed number you allude to is completely and utterly beyond anyone's ability to measure with any remotely useful accuracy
all children and adults need downtime. how you spend that downtime doesn't matter, but you don't want that downtime to be a majority of your time. it's as simple as that
it's not about television, it's not about video games. hell, if a kid is playing something like civilization, he's growing some iq points there. what it's about is epnding the balance of your daytime engaging your mind, AND having some carefree time too. wathcing tv during that downtime, as long as it is a MINORITY of your time, is perfetly ok
so where does this bizarre FUD spewing cult of television=brain poison come from?
television is harmless. no, really, television is 100% harmless. lack of effort is the problem. of which constant television watching is a SYMPTOM of, an effect of, not a CAUSE of
avoiding television is like avoiding kleenex when you are sick because you see sick people with kleenex all the time. you have your cause and effect all screwed up
the television is harmless entertainment. you limit exposure to television simply because you want your kids to spend time doing something challenging, not because the tv is some sort of alien brain poison which decreases iq
all kids need downtime. hell, all human beings need downtime. there are a number of ways to spend your downtime, and watching television, for hours a day, is one of a number of harmless choices no worse or better than any other carefree time waster
as long as the significant balance of daytime activity is spent doing something that challenges the mind, AND the kid has carefree downtime (spent doing a number of things, which could include tv or not, no matter), you are raising a healthy intelligent child
there's this weird, dare i say, stupid fear of the tv as some sort of iq destroyer. it's quite a bizarre fundamentalist cult, like apple aficionados or free software zealots
oops, wrong website to mention that
or as a sales copy editor at an antivirus vendor
that was the most craptastic display of doom and gloom paranoid hysteric FUD i've seen in a long time
"If you believe that the NSA is NOT using one, you need to go get a tin foil hat this afternoon, and I mean it"
yeah, okay then
!?
but he does hold magnets under the surface of the table, moving objects on top as if by magic, just to bemuse and entertain us
just don't sully the bloodlines of us pure rift valleyians
the movies and tv create stupid stereotypes, but they are also embraced in kitsch ways by those who are depicted as such, and often have basis in real life fact
only brittle weirdos with a chip on their shoulder would have a problem with ridiculous stereotypes no one believes and have no real life consequences
did you know everyone from minnesota talks like they do in that movie "fargo"?
did you know everyone in california is a surfer dude?
please, by all means, don't let light hearted humor get in the way of your need to get off on high holy indignation
zzz
psychotic murderous psychopaths on death row with multiple female admirers sending them their panties in the mail and even a bride or two. and aren't women supposed to like the "bad" type?
maybe new jersey (teh state that gives us the sopranos, irony) has the wrong idea. maybe the real issue here is the nugget of a new online dating business: a place for women to meet and date proven criminals, not avoid them
but from my understanding of neutrons (that they go through everything), could you set one of these up on each coast and cover the whole coast? well, probably 3 each coast, to triangulate. cancel out the known, nonmoving sources (our reactors, medical equipment, etc.) and presto: you can see all moving backpack/ container nukes
additionally (again, pardon my ignorance), are there nuclear elements that don't give off neutrons as they decay? which means you can salt a typical c4 or tnt explosive with this element, and irradiate times square or the washington mall, without any previous neutron detection?
ok, tasers kill some people, and they hurt
except that, you need to give cops SOMETHING to control people. that cops will use these tools outside of the proper scenarios is a given: cops will always use lethal and nonlethal tools in ways they shouldn't. yes, you can make the case that because it is supposed to be nonlethal, they will use them when otherwise a few well chosen words would suffice instead
and still, given all of that, tasers should still be used
simply because there are plenty of scenarios where lethal force shouldn't be the only option available to a cop. i am making the case that the number of lives using a taser instead of a gun has saved outweighs the situations where someone died who didn't need any force at all
in other words, tasers are not perfect. but NO weapons of force are perfect, AND not having a range of weapons of force in police force is a nonstarter (cue the wackjobs who think we don't need a police force). welcome to the real world: there is no silver bullet (no pun intended), there is always a downside between two competing concepts you MUST satisfy
this is actually how propaganda works: you look at the negatives of a technology: say nuclear power, or stem cell research, without looking at the positives, and without the realization that there isn't a better option out there
in life, you are never given the choice between a golden wonderful choice, and a terrible horrible one. in life, most of the time on complex questions like the proper tool for police work, or who to vote for in an election, or how to confront violent fundamentalists in the middle east, there are propagandists (or downright naive or ignorant people) who glom onto the negatives of one particular attitude, and hurl invectives at it, without ANY ocnsideraiton of how much worse the other choices before you are
some naive, ignorant, and propagandized people need to recognize that EVERY choice before us is full of negatives, and it is your job, as it is often in life, to attempt to choose from varying shades of gray, choices that are ALL negative, but one less negative than another
this is called "context"
and simpletons, propaganda, and the naive haven't mastered the concept
in such a way, we complain about tasers, without realizing they are an improvement on nothing but guns and pepper spray for police work. but because tasers still have negatives, people will go in to blinders mode, and whine about that. as if whining about the negatives of one choice wihtout balancing them against the negatives of other choices is supposed to have any value in this life on the complex questions that confront us
"context" people. learn the concept, use it. stop being naive, ignorant, or propagandized
there's no reason to insult me like that! ;-)
i want to see the buggers that can survive on cosmic rays ;-)
i did not know about that fungus. that truly floors me
but to me that has to be a dead end for life, perhaps even non-DNA/RNA based life. i would think you cannot successfully pass on the traits to survive and thrive and evolve under gamma radiation when the molecular mechanism of inheritance itself is being decimated by said same gamma radiation. so it is truly an exotic dead end little niche, but amazing nonetheless