It'sa bit different really - with Amazon you buy the book and you also get it brought to you. With a traditional store, you have to go and get it yourself.
A better comparison would be if a bricks and mortar bookstore started giving customers cashback for their travel costs to the store.
I assume the French law would consider doing that to be discounting the cost of the books that you buy.
People are not allowed to use technical assistance in competitions.
But sprinters are allowed to wear expensive trainers that have been developed in expensive programmes (if they can afford them or have the right sponsor)
Not all sprinters have access to such trainers, so really they should be banned in order to provide a level playing field.
There are all kinds of other kinds of technical assistance that some runners have access to and others don't (nutrition, training aids, computer analysis, sweat channeling clothing, psychological training)
Competitive running is far from being a pure test of human body vs human body.
If you can call up a web page that shows who you voted for for your own verification, your boss can make you do so to make sure you voted for his candidate.
There's a solution to that problem.
When you vote, the system gives you a single digit number as your verification code. When you go on to the system to verify your vote, it presents you with a list of all the candidates with a single digit number (not the one it gave you earlier) next to each candidate that you didn't vote for and the number that it did give you next to the one you did vote for.
There is then no way for anyone other that you to see who you voted for - all you have to do is lie to your boss about which digit you were given.
This would need to be worked on a little to make it properly foolproof, but it could be done.
It _is_ common for books to be published about fictional universes without the consent of the creators of the origianl material.
The clue to look for is "unofficial guide" in the title.
Such books exist for all kinds of universes from books, tv shows and movies. Those based on TV or movies are also noticable because they do not use images from the original on their cover.
Look at it that way, would this site be worth anything without the original work. No, I don't think so.
How far do you want to take this idea? Do I need to get clearance from Adobe to write a guide to Photoshop? I mean, what would the value of my Photoshop guide be without the original IP in the software?
Do I need to get clearance from the town planners before I make a map of my town? What would my map be without their creativity? (and trust me, with our one-way system they got very creative)
First you need to find a projector that can make a decently sized image with only a foot or two of throw distance.
Unfortunately, such projectors aren't commonly available. Even projectors with short throw lenses (i.e. wide angle lenses) have a minimum throw distance of at least 4 feet in order to get a focussed image.
You be better off building a plasma/TFT/LCD screen into the table.
Less sunlight is reaching the earth, yet the earth is going to get 18 degrees Fahrenheit hotter in the next 95 years?
I think the point is that we are now controlling particulate air pollution more, the the effect of lowering the poullution (and thus letting more sunlight through) has not been accounted for in global warming predictions.
Things like rovers that stay in one place once they become refuse don't seem like much of a problem. Scraps of fabric blowing around in the martian wind seem a little more troublesome to me.
The thing that came across to me in that 'bunny ears' story was that the engineers were not at all suprised that might be bits of tape, fabric etc loose on the martian surface.
Each time one of these pieces of debris is observed, it will have to be identified to ensure it is not something more interesting. Wouldn't it be easier to spend some time making sure that the debris doesn't get loose in the first place?
No, you clearly don't get it: the whole worlds press is this way.
I know that;)
The original poster pointed out that there is a visible difference between what the US media reports and what the rest of the world is seeing. There was no claim that this is a one-way street that I saw.
To me, your post read very defensively, as if you were jumping up to say that its unfair to criticise the US media as international media does the same thing.
I see a lot of this nowerdays - rather than concentrating on the point in hand (in the case of this thread, Bhopal), people start pulling in all sorts of other issues as proof that everyone else is just as bad. So, in threads about wrongdoings in Iraq, you'll get people using things that happen at Guantanomo bay as comparisions. In threads about democracy in ex-soviet states, you'll get people bringing up disputed US elections.
Politicians are doing it, the media is doing it and even everyday folk are doing it.
I think all this just confuses the issue. If something is wrong, surely it is best to clearly say so, rather than mentioning a load of other wrong things as comparisions?
Apologies if I misread your post, but have a look back at it - did you make it clear that you were saying that the US medias ignoring the Bhopal anniversary was wrong, or could your post have been read as an attempt to confuse the issue by brining in a load of other topics?
Two wrongs definitely do make a right. We should ignore all wrongdoings providing we can find someone else who is doing wrong.
Maybe we should set up some sort of wrongdoing world market where one wrong could be traded off against another and we'd all agree not to mention any of them again. So, no more mentions of Bhopal or Oil for food corruption. Two wrongs makes two rights so no need to worry about either any more.
several independent studies and investigations have been done to show that this was sabatoge.
Care to reference them? I haven't seen any such independent studies.
A BBC documentary (53 minutes in to the RM stream on the right) says that an internal safety report on the Union Carbide MIC plant in the USA warned about the risk of a runaway reaction in MIC storage tanks just a few months before the Bhopal leak.
According to the BBC, the report was never sent to the Bhopal managers.
You know that the Spanish public's shift towards the socialist opposition was largely because their government tried to make political capital out of the Madrid bombings by blaming them on ETA (The basque seperatist terrorists) don't you?
When it turned out (just before the election) that the government in fact had no evidence that ETA was involved and it became almost certain that the bombings were the work of an Islamic group, the Spanish public got very angry and ousted their government.
They nearly got away with it - a few more days and the Spanish public would have voted the government back in.
I wouldn't call that weak minded. I'd call that using democracy to get rid of a government that was prepared to use the deaths of innocents to gain a political advantage.
Unfortunately, a lot of Americans (and others) believe the claims from the Islamicists that it was them that caused the swing rather than the historical fact that the swing took place when the Spanish government's lies were revealed.
Bin Laden and the other Islamic terrorists are masters of propaganda.
I think it means that Bin Laden knows that he can get international publicity by making such a threat and can make a lot of Americans talk about how he is trying to affect the US election.
He knows that threatening states that back Bush will only get more Bush voters out. He knows that he is so hated in America that people will automatically react against anything he says. He knows that a new threat just before the election will favour the encumbent.
I suspect Bin Laden would actually prefer Bush in power to Kerry.
The Bush administration's confrontational foreign policy style (I think Kerry's foreign policy would be very similar but presented differently) is great for bin Laden - it helps his recruiters to con more young men into becoming his cannon fodder.
Bush's strong use of religion in his politics is great for bin Laden - it makes bin Ladens propaganda about an American crusade against Islam seem more beliveable that it would be were the American presidet more religiously moderate.
Bush's disagreements with America's allies are great for Bin Laden - they prevent a really strong international effort against terrorism and the factors that help it to grow.
In the Muslim world, Bush is now firmly established as an anti-islamic militarist (partly based on reality, mostly based on propaganda).
Public pronouncements about the 'war on terror' will not defeat terrorists. That will only happen when they are starved of publicity and fuel for their propaganda and they can be quietly disposed of by well trained special forces. Bin Laden knows that Bush will, if anything, hype up the terrorist threat rather than play it down. While Bush is in power, Bin Laden will always get the publicity he needs.
In any case, when you base your vote on anything that bin laden says or does, you are handing him a victory.
Do you think Osama Bin laden is so politically naive that he doesn't know that showing support for one candidate will end up giving votes to the other?
Every Osama bin Laden communication has been carefully thought out in terms of audience, content and timing. Why should this one be any different?
The only sensible thing to do is to ignore this broadcast completely when choosing who to vote for. To do anything else is to play into the hands of a master of propaganda.
How are such models tested? Are social models of real situations created and then tested against how real events pan out?
This must be a _really_ hard problem to model - cultural and historical factors are going to have a huge impact on how people react to things like airstrikes or ground assaults. Will they stay indoors until the fighting is over or will they come out with weapons? What about if their cousins house is hit? What about if they hear a rumour that a religious site was attacked?
My mind boggles at the sheer number of variables that would need to be considered to get a simulation that even approached relevence to the real world.
Hence my question about testing - how do you know how close the model is getting to how real people would react?
I wonder if this urban conflic simulator includes factors such as the fact that airstrikes of any intensity will always lead to some civilian casualties, which will in turn lead to easier recruitment by the bad guys.
If this simulation doesn't include such social/psychlogical factors then I submit that it is pretty useless in determining the optimum strategy for urban conflicts.
"The old crusade days when you go into a city with catapults and rubble everything are over,"
Tell that to the people of Falluja right now.
Are air strikes really the most effective way to deal with insurgency/terrorism?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you never had the kind of bookshops that people here are lamenting the loss of.
It'sa bit different really - with Amazon you buy the book and you also get it brought to you. With a traditional store, you have to go and get it yourself.
A better comparison would be if a bricks and mortar bookstore started giving customers cashback for their travel costs to the store.
I assume the French law would consider doing that to be discounting the cost of the books that you buy.
People are not allowed to use technical assistance in competitions.
But sprinters are allowed to wear expensive trainers that have been developed in expensive programmes (if they can afford them or have the right sponsor)
Not all sprinters have access to such trainers, so really they should be banned in order to provide a level playing field.
There are all kinds of other kinds of technical assistance that some runners have access to and others don't (nutrition, training aids, computer analysis, sweat channeling clothing, psychological training)
Competitive running is far from being a pure test of human body vs human body.
If you can call up a web page that shows who you voted for for your own verification, your boss can make you do so to make sure you voted for his candidate.
There's a solution to that problem.
When you vote, the system gives you a single digit number as your verification code. When you go on to the system to verify your vote, it presents you with a list of all the candidates with a single digit number (not the one it gave you earlier) next to each candidate that you didn't vote for and the number that it did give you next to the one you did vote for.
There is then no way for anyone other that you to see who you voted for - all you have to do is lie to your boss about which digit you were given.
This would need to be worked on a little to make it properly foolproof, but it could be done.
The traveling salesman problem wasn't meant to be tested in real life.
;) )
Actually, travelling salesman solvers are used in all kinds of real world applications.
Some examples can be found here: http://www.tsp.gatech.edu/apps/index.html
A TSP solver on google maps would be useful to some people (such as travelling salesmen
I could imagine tourists using such a function to plan a route around all the sights they want to see
It could also be used by anyone who needs to make several deliveries
You said "crowdsourcing" too!
And "Jehovah"!
Stone him! Stone him!
Microsoft is a company, there goal is profit. ... not making linux geeks smile
Explain Vista then.
It _is_ common for books to be published about fictional universes without the consent of the creators of the origianl material.
The clue to look for is "unofficial guide" in the title.
Such books exist for all kinds of universes from books, tv shows and movies. Those based on TV or movies are also noticable because they do not use images from the original on their cover.
Look at it that way, would this site be worth anything without the original work. No, I don't think so.
How far do you want to take this idea? Do I need to get clearance from Adobe to write a guide to Photoshop? I mean, what would the value of my Photoshop guide be without the original IP in the software?
Do I need to get clearance from the town planners before I make a map of my town? What would my map be without their creativity? (and trust me, with our one-way system they got very creative)
First you need to find a projector that can make a decently sized image with only a foot or two of throw distance.
Unfortunately, such projectors aren't commonly available. Even projectors with short throw lenses (i.e. wide angle lenses) have a minimum throw distance of at least 4 feet in order to get a focussed image.
You be better off building a plasma/TFT/LCD screen into the table.
Dan.
If the spammers realise that wikipedia comes up first for online gambling, won't they just turn their attentions to editing the wikipedia page?
things can be delayed for the right reasons (e.g. for testing).
I think the sentence is saying that things getting lost is not a desirable reason for a delay, which makes sense to me.
Maybe if it said: "the risk of the thing getting lost and thus delayed for the wrong reasons", its intent would be clearer.
Less sunlight is reaching the earth, yet the earth is going to get 18 degrees Fahrenheit hotter in the next 95 years?
I think the point is that we are now controlling particulate air pollution more, the the effect of lowering the poullution (and thus letting more sunlight through) has not been accounted for in global warming predictions.
Things like rovers that stay in one place once they become refuse don't seem like much of a problem. Scraps of fabric blowing around in the martian wind seem a little more troublesome to me.
The thing that came across to me in that 'bunny ears' story was that the engineers were not at all suprised that might be bits of tape, fabric etc loose on the martian surface.
Each time one of these pieces of debris is observed, it will have to be identified to ensure it is not something more interesting. Wouldn't it be easier to spend some time making sure that the debris doesn't get loose in the first place?
An interesting thing about that story is that it seems we've already started littering on other planets.
Shouldn't preventing pollution of the environment be quite important to missions to other planets?
By the time there are tourist trips to Mars, the place will be ruined...
No, you clearly don't get it: the whole worlds press is this way.
;)
I know that
The original poster pointed out that there is a visible difference between what the US media reports and what the rest of the world is seeing. There was no claim that this is a one-way street that I saw.
To me, your post read very defensively, as if you were jumping up to say that its unfair to criticise the US media as international media does the same thing.
I see a lot of this nowerdays - rather than concentrating on the point in hand (in the case of this thread, Bhopal), people start pulling in all sorts of other issues as proof that everyone else is just as bad. So, in threads about wrongdoings in Iraq, you'll get people using things that happen at Guantanomo bay as comparisions. In threads about democracy in ex-soviet states, you'll get people bringing up disputed US elections.
Politicians are doing it, the media is doing it and even everyday folk are doing it.
I think all this just confuses the issue. If something is wrong, surely it is best to clearly say so, rather than mentioning a load of other wrong things as comparisions?
Apologies if I misread your post, but have a look back at it - did you make it clear that you were saying that the US medias ignoring the Bhopal anniversary was wrong, or could your post have been read as an attempt to confuse the issue by brining in a load of other topics?
Dan.
Quite right!
Two wrongs definitely do make a right. We should ignore all wrongdoings providing we can find someone else who is doing wrong.
Maybe we should set up some sort of wrongdoing world market where one wrong could be traded off against another and we'd all agree not to mention any of them again. So, no more mentions of Bhopal or Oil for food corruption. Two wrongs makes two rights so no need to worry about either any more.
several independent studies and investigations have been done to show that this was sabatoge.
Care to reference them? I haven't seen any such independent studies.
A BBC documentary (53 minutes in to the RM stream on the right)
says that an internal safety report on the Union Carbide MIC plant in the USA warned about the risk of a runaway reaction in MIC storage tanks just a few months before the Bhopal leak.
According to the BBC, the report was never sent to the Bhopal managers.
That's exactly why I think we should ignore the things he says when making voting decisions.
There are some reasons to prefer Bush over Kerry, but this message by Bin Laden is not one of them.
You know that the Spanish public's shift towards the socialist opposition was largely because their government tried to make political capital out of the Madrid bombings by blaming them on ETA (The basque seperatist terrorists) don't you?
When it turned out (just before the election) that the government in fact had no evidence that ETA was involved and it became almost certain that the bombings were the work of an Islamic group, the Spanish public got very angry and ousted their government.
They nearly got away with it - a few more days and the Spanish public would have voted the government back in.
I wouldn't call that weak minded. I'd call that using democracy to get rid of a government that was prepared to use the deaths of innocents to gain a political advantage.
Unfortunately, a lot of Americans (and others) believe the claims from the Islamicists that it was them that caused the swing rather than the historical fact that the swing took place when the Spanish government's lies were revealed.
Bin Laden and the other Islamic terrorists are masters of propaganda.
I've read the article that you link to.
I think it means that Bin Laden knows that he can get international publicity by making such a threat and can make a lot of Americans talk about how he is trying to affect the US election.
He knows that threatening states that back Bush will only get more Bush voters out. He knows that he is so hated in America that people will automatically react against anything he says. He knows that a new threat just before the election will favour the encumbent.
I suspect Bin Laden would actually prefer Bush in power to Kerry.
The Bush administration's confrontational foreign policy style (I think Kerry's foreign policy would be very similar but presented differently) is great for bin Laden - it helps his recruiters to con more young men into becoming his cannon fodder.
Bush's strong use of religion in his politics is great for bin Laden - it makes bin Ladens propaganda about an American crusade against Islam seem more beliveable that it would be were the American presidet more religiously moderate.
Bush's disagreements with America's allies are great for Bin Laden - they prevent a really strong international effort against terrorism and the factors that help it to grow.
In the Muslim world, Bush is now firmly established as an anti-islamic militarist (partly based on reality, mostly based on propaganda).
Public pronouncements about the 'war on terror' will not defeat terrorists. That will only happen when they are starved of publicity and fuel for their propaganda and they can be quietly disposed of by well trained special forces. Bin Laden knows that Bush will, if anything, hype up the terrorist threat rather than play it down. While Bush is in power, Bin Laden will always get the publicity he needs.
In any case, when you base your vote on anything that bin laden says or does, you are handing him a victory.
Do you think Osama Bin laden is so politically naive that he doesn't know that showing support for one candidate will end up giving votes to the other?
Every Osama bin Laden communication has been carefully thought out in terms of audience, content and timing. Why should this one be any different?
The only sensible thing to do is to ignore this broadcast completely when choosing who to vote for. To do anything else is to play into the hands of a master of propaganda.
Some sort of chemical or biological weapon might be better - remove the undesirables (along with the desirables) but leave the infrastructure intact.
Hmmm, maybe once the crime rate of a city reaches a certain value, the population should be wiped out so that new folks can move in.
Solve the crime problem and overpopulation in one neat policy.
That's good news!
How are such models tested? Are social models of real situations created and then tested against how real events pan out?
This must be a _really_ hard problem to model - cultural and historical factors are going to have a huge impact on how people react to things like airstrikes or ground assaults. Will they stay indoors until the fighting is over or will they come out with weapons? What about if their cousins house is hit? What about if they hear a rumour that a religious site was attacked?
My mind boggles at the sheer number of variables that would need to be considered to get a simulation that even approached relevence to the real world.
Hence my question about testing - how do you know how close the model is getting to how real people would react?
f those airstrikes involve nuclear weapons, then yes because all the insurgents and terrorists will be vaporized along with everything else.
;)
True enough.
So the most effective way to deal with domestic crime is the nuclear annihilation of cities where criminals are. Glad we cleared that up
I wonder if this urban conflic simulator includes factors such as the fact that airstrikes of any intensity will always lead to some civilian casualties, which will in turn lead to easier recruitment by the bad guys.
If this simulation doesn't include such social/psychlogical factors then I submit that it is pretty useless in determining the optimum strategy for urban conflicts.
"The old crusade days when you go into a city with catapults and rubble everything are over,"
Tell that to the people of Falluja right now.
Are air strikes really the most effective way to deal with insurgency/terrorism?