Because my fellow man (which is what government in the US is supposed to be, the whole 'we the people' thing) spying on me willy-nilly using Monopoly on Violence is not the same thing at ALL as the shopkeeper next door keeping records of what i buy to use in his marketing and optimization research.
Really? You need to take a broader view, then. Let's start with your shopkeeper's surveillance of your spending habits. He knows what you buy, when you buy it, and exactly how much you spend in his shop, along with all of your other neighbors. Some simple analysis allows him to predict quite accurately what you are going to buy and when you are going to buy it. So he jacks up those prices on D-1 and lowers them again on D+1. The Walmart grocery store in my neighborhood appears to be already doing this; the variance I get in the price of a Red Baron pizza correlates too strongly with payroll dates for the lower middle class neighborhood I live in for it to be a coincidence. But hey, according to you, it's *different* -- I guess you believe the monopoly on violence only includes armed force, and not the "Monopoly on the only grocery store within miles" kind of violence. FWIW, boutique retailers have been doing this for millenia -- each customer gets a unique price, determined by the shopkeeper's ability to assess the depth of the customer's pockets. Thanks to your benign "marketing and optimization research" the guy who sells you food is going to be able to do the same damn thing...
More to the point, why on earth would you want to build a spaceship shaped like the Enterprise? It's not a particularly practical design for a spacecraft. It was picked for the show for exactly 3 reasons: 1) it looks like the ship from Forbidden Planet but with enough visual differences to avoid a lawsuit, 2) it looks cool and science-fictiony, 3) it fits in with all the fictional technology that it is fictionally loaded with (warp nacelles, deflector dish, etc). Assuming none of that stuff exists (and it doesn't), then don't make it that shape.
If what you want is a spaceship with ion engines and a rotating section with faux-gravity for pootling around the solar system, the best shape would not look like the Enterprise. If you must model it on something from fiction, the Discovery from 2001 is probably a better bet; but in reality it'll look much more pragmatically like the stuff we're building now.
Making it look like a prop from Star Trek is nothing but a nerdy wet dream.
uhhh, slight correction. Your points 1 and 3 did lead to a design that eventually became the Enterprise, but the final design was an accident, because Roddenberry's sense of your point 2 was offended by what the modellers had come up with, as documented in David Gerrold's "The World of Star Trek." In a bucket, the penultimate design was pretty similar to the ship we all know and love, except the saucer section was a globe, and the warp nacelles were below the fuselage, not above it. The camera crew was filming the opening title sequence when Roddenberry walked into the studio and slammed the stage door shut. He was (probably) angry, and loudly demanded who had greenlighted the title sequence shot. He really didn't like the globe version of the Enterprise, having rejected it and several other proposed designs because they just didn't appeal to his sense of spaceship aesthetics. The door slam caused the track that the model was moving on to vibrate, and the Enterprise crashed to the floor. It landed upside down (warp nacelles up) and the globe broke in two pieces. About a 1/4 of the globe remained attached to the model, and the other 3/4 rolled lop-sidedly across the studio. Roddenberry stared at the damaged model for a few moments, and then happily said, "That's it! Shoot it like that!" and left as abruptly as he entered. The modellers replaced the globe with a flat disk made of styrofoam, gluing what they could cannibalize from the damaged globe onto it, and the rest is history...
1. Why? Why target conservatives specifically with anti-science propaganda? Why aren't liberals being targeted too? (Arguments like "Conservatives are more gullible" will be ignored for obvious reasons.)
2. Why is there no backlash from conservatives themselves? How many conservatives actually want to (a) be subject to anti-science propaganda that will, inevitably, result - thanks to the wonder of echo chambers - in believing something that's wrong and (b) want to be in a group that will inevitably be considered anti-science?
What gives?
Nice way to frame the debate, dude. I'll reframe it by suggesting the answer to both your questions is pretty straight forward. The answer is rooted in the psychology of faith, i.e. the irrationality of believing in something in the absence of evidence, or more to the point in this debate, to continue to disbelieve in something in the face of steadily mounting evidence. You say gullible is an off-limits term; I say fine, let's use deliberate self-deception, instead.
For your first question, conservatives are being targeted because propaganda only works on people who *believe* in something, i.e., only on the faithful. Propoganda -- by definition -- can't be aimed at rational people. For your second question, there is no backlash from conservatives for largely the same reasons. People hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest, to quote Paul Simon's lyrics in "The Boxer." Rational people are not affected by propaganda, but people of faith are, and they will easily ignore the obvious lies and distortions in propaganda as long as the message being propogated affirms their irrational beliefs, i.e., their faith.
Maybe you're overstating things a bit but I roughly agree, and it's called nuclear capability. Iran is fully aware of the military capability of a civilian program, and this is part of their deterrence strategy. This is El Baradei's viewpoint and US and Israeli intelligence agrees with it. It is also a legitimate strategy.
An agreement with Iran would involve keeping the development time to a full bomb as long as possible and the safeguards as thorough as possible. The real sticking point lies elsewhere: normalization of relations with Iran will make them a regional player. Unfortunately that's happening anyway so the question for the US is whether they want to be part of it or not.
Hmmm. I'm thinking Iran will *never* be allowed to become a regional player as long as the mullahs are in charge, because another group of religious zealots with nuclear capability is the last thing this planet needs. If economic and political measures fail to dislodge the mullahs in Iran, then military action to force a regime change will be the logical next step. Frankly, the US is *already* prepared to take that step. The Obama administration has made it abundantly clear, though, that no direct military action in Iran is possible until the US election cycle is over, which has created an unprecedented rift in US-Israel relations. That is the sticking point -- Israel wants war now; the US says wait at least until the elections are over. I'm thinking the US sanctioned this attack to mollify the hardliners in the Knesset and buy some time for the economic and political measures to work.
Judges only evaluate the admissibility of evidence, not it's efficacy. It's up to the jury to decide if the evidence is valid, and the process of voir dire ensures that prospective jurors with a clue about any scientific evidence to be presented in the trial will be rejected.
And what's the ultimate goal? To build an aircraft that goes faster than the previous ones? With enough money you can always best the previous record, but after a while it becomes pointless, just like those record speed cars that are basically just a rocket on wheels. This is basically just a rocket on wings.
DARPA's goal is to increase the ability of the US to project national power (that's the "Defense" part of "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in case you were wondering.) A mach 20 airframe could deliver practically instant military power to anywhere on the planet it was needed, a truly significant military advantage. And by launching it on a polar trajectory, it would minimize the need to negotiate over-fly rights with any of the nations between the US and the conflict zone. Make no mistake, this DARPA project will significantly increase the US's ability to project national power if it is successful.
Blew $300 on a new tire last week. Had to swerve so I wouldn't hit a deer, and went straight over a pothole.
$300 for a tire? Either you drive an 6 figure exotic something, or you are an idiot, or you got fleeced. Or some combination of those.
Oh, and you know you should almost never replace only one tire, right? Both fronts or both rears, unless they are really, really new.
Hmmm, my "exotic" 'Vette C4 cost me all of $16k when I bought it ten years ago, but I run Goodyear F1 tires on it, which are about $400 each. My equally "exotic" BMW 318Ti Sport cost me $12k seven years ago, and the Yokohama A048 tires that I run on it are about $300 each. Tires are the last thing you want to compromise on your vehicle, whether you are driving a beater or a track-worthy speed demon. It's like buying a motorcycle helmet -- if you have a $10 head, by all means buy a $10 helmet.:)
That's a huge amount for a single tyre. Someone is ripping you off
I hope this NNF patch idea works out. As far as tire prices go, if you've got a $50 car, by all means go ahead and put $50 tires on it. The Goodyear F1 for my 'Vette C4 rears are $311 today at Tirerack. Toss in shipping, mounting/balancing and disposal fees and you are hitting $400 per tire. Ditto the Yokohama A048s for my BMW 318Ti Sport -- they are $222 today at Tirerack, and when you add shipping, M/B, disposal, and heat cycling/shaving, they are pushing $300 each. You can compromise on a lot of things when it comes to a vehicle, but tires should not be one of them. Hitting a pothole at speed with a $400 tire is a cringe-inducing experience, but I'd rather have good rubber under me for all the other miles that aren't peppered with potholes...
I watched an A7D Corsair II narrowly miss a junior high school and crash into an intersection in Tucson back in 1978. The plane developed engine trouble just before final approach to Davis-Monthan AFB. The pilot wrestled with the plane for nearly two and a half minutes, trying to nurse enough out of the stalling engine to get it to the runway, but it flamed out on him for the last time well short of the DM runway. He aimed for an empty football practice field, and then ejected at 200 feet of altitude, less than five seconds before the plane impacted. Unfortunately, the plane banked sharply after he ejected, and instead of hitting the practice field, it impacted in the street between the school and the practice field. It landed practically on top of a small car, instantly killing the two passengers. I was waiting for a bus less than half a block away from the impact point, and I felt the heat from the explosion when it hit. That pilot rode that beast down as far as he could, and punched out at the edge of the safe envelope for his ejector seat. Two people died, but a school full of kids didn't. Kudos to him, and to the F18 pilots for staying with the plane until the last possible moment before ejecting.
I see your Poe and Godwin and raise you Alinsky's 5th rule -- attack through humorous ridicule. As Saul said, it is almost impossible to counter with facts because the truth usually isn't as simple as a lie.
Take the ridicule against Palin. In an interview she said "There are places in Alaska from which one can see Russia." A TRUE statement. The Left "quoted" her as saying "I can see Russia from my house."., Being good researchers, some on the Left consulted maps and noticed that one can not see Russia from Palin's house. So the mockery began and was repeated endlessly and recycled in the forums and blogs on the Left. Repeat a lie often enough, Right or Left, and the faithful believe it as fact, even to the point of self-righteousness, quoting the lie as proof of their intelligence. It really gets interesting when psychological terms are thrown at "unbelievers". Terms like "denier", etc...
Talk about lifting things out of context. Palin was responding to a question about her foreign policy credentials when she made that famous assertion. She was in dead earnest about it, and the press on both sides saw it for what it was -- evidence that Palin was ill-equipped to make foreign policy as a president, let alone execute it. The Left amplified it, and the Right tried to downplay it. There is no two ways about that quote, yet you've managed to find a third by lifting it out of context and trying to spin the coverage as some kind of leftist version of the well-known right-wing echo chamber. Nice try, pal.
And it's likely to backfire on the Republicans. You've just given him a bunch of perfectly free publicity of the worst sort - your opponent comes off as the good guy. Likely a significant fraction of the voting population would never had cottoned on to the fact that he is / was an astronaut. Now everybody knows. And if there is a generic hero in the 21st Century, it's got to be astronauts.
Even if you don't really care about NASA and space exploration, astronauts still have a pretty good (albeit not totally unblemished) reputation.
Nice work, bozos.
Hmmm. Generic hero for the 21st century? The one astronaut I can think of who went into politics is forever linked with various financial scams, one of which was quite major. Not sure I'd want to remind people of the link between astronauts and scams. Senator and former astronaut John Glenn provided us with a couple financial scandals that, at least for *this* voter, pretty much tarnished astronauts' squeeky-clean image forever. Glenn's failed bid for the vice presidency left over $3M dollars owed to contributors, a debt that he dodged for over twenty years. But that was small potatoes, compared to the other. Glenn was also a member of the Keating Five, a group of US senators who helped an S&L owner named Keating scam thousands and thousands of people out of their life savings by putting pressure on S&L regulators to back off on investigations of Keating's business practices, in return for financial contributions to their election campaigns.
Being an astronaut does not automatically make you a saint. Just ask the people who were bilked out of $3M in campaign contributions in Senator (and former astronaut) John Glenn's failed bid for the vice-presidency. Or better yet, ask any of the thousands of members of Lincoln Savings and Loan who were scammed out of their life savings by Senator (and former astronaut) John Glenn and his buddies in the Keating Five.
...which in turn says more about your system of values than it does about Steam's or their millions of customers. Don't knock it 'til you've tried it, dude.
I have to wonder if this won't present legal challenges to Sony. Although I understand their reasons, since when is it illegal to sell something you've purchased? There are some ties here to licensing, but the ability to sell used titles already exists and as far as I know, hasn't faced any serious legal challenges.
Is there a lawyer in the house?
Doctrine of first sale is what you are alluding to; it is why used game stores can exist in the US. Business is all about eliminating competition, and used games are competition -- used games compete with current games for consumers' disposable income. One effective way for game makers to eliminate competition from their own games in markets where the doctrine of first sale exists is to engineer the games to be impossible to re-sell, which is is perfectly legal for them to do. The EU, as far as I understand it, does not recognize the doctrine of first sale, but I will happily defer to any of our European friends that wish to weigh-in on this.
Did it occur to anybody besides me that violent behavior is something that *should* be encouraged in a soldier? I'm not seeing how a drug with these observed effects gets anybody off the hook for that Afghan massacre -- not Bales, not his squad mates, nor his commanders. The massacre was the result of failure to manage Bales, period. He's a trained killer, and one with a history of deceiving people for monetary gain predating his enlistment in the military. It also looks like the military ignored some red flags, including his propensity for violent confrontation, about him long before he deployed to Afghanistan, if the stories about his security clearance are even close to accurate.
How does the presence of this drug, with its documented behavioral side effects that is routinely supplied to soldiers, coupled with what looks like malfeasance on the part of the military in not acting on information that was publicly available on Bales, exculpate anybody for this senseless tragedy?
Because they collude and no telco will offer the service that people want at a reasonable price, that's why. Also, telcos and ISPs shouldn't be allowed to interfere with traffic in any way shape or form beyond what's necessary to make sure it's delivered to its proper destination.
I don't think that network neutrality makes sense when the flow of packets is pretty much unidirectional. Treating every packet identically as it moves through the internet means that this one-way flow cannot be optimized. For a car analogy, network neutrality is like having unsynchronized traffic lights. I live in a town where most people commute from east to west in the mornings, and west to east in the evenings. The traffic lights on the east-west corridors in my town are synchronized to optimize that east-west flow for several hours each day. Sure, it compromises north-south traffic flow, but there is a lot less of that than the east-west flow. I think that much of the bandwidth provided by the the internet, perhaps most of it, is used to move information in one direction only, from content providers to content consumers. Packet shaping that one-way flow makes sense to me, and it really can't be done if network neutrality must be maintained. I think packet shaping on a planetary scale is coming, and the tiered internet that it will create is pretty much inevitable. Producers have to have a way to get their product into the market place, and the costs associated with getting the product to market have to be minimized, just like any other cost, if the producer wants to maximize profits. A content provider who can secure a more direct channel to the content consumer has a decided competitive advantage over one that can't, and packet shaping provides that competitive advantage.
Science is a human artifact. Every human artifact is potentially susceptible to fraud, manipulation, trolling, marketing, and every other foible and evil humans are capable of. Almost any human intention and motive can be expressed through the manipulation and corruption of the scientific process. And scientific fraud is no less about science than financial fraud is about finance.
There is no great, glorious and impersonal "Science". Insisting otherwise is just another form of deism, one that gives rise to the criticism that science is just another religion. And I'm sure no one here wants that.
Wow, 12 mod points left, and I really wanted to mod you into oblivion. Instead, I'll just point out why you are wrong, and let some other mods go medieval on your ass. To answer your question, science is a process, not an artifact, so it doesn't matter if there are scientists around, unscrupulous or otherwise. It is a methodology, not a thing. If humans didn't exist, the process would still be there for some other species to discover and use. Since your premise is demonstrably false, your assertions founded on that premise are false, too -- including and especially your maladroit attempt to link science with religion via the deism argument.
...so I need GPS, period. I have a Garmin Zumo mounted on the triple tree of my Ducati 1098, and I supplement that with turn-by-turn directions from Miri. Glancing down at the Zumo while piloting my bike is not distracting, and the real time velocity indication on the Zumo is *way* more accurate than the bike's, which is (deliberately I'm certain) too high. With that said, for people who need four wheels under them, the obvious solution to me is integrating GPS into a HUD on the windshield. My 'Vette has an outstanding HUD -- it integrates forward-looking video that enhances the edge of the road, other moving vehicles, and objects like pedestrians and parked vehicles. In low visibility conditions like nighttime or rain, it is nothing short of amazing. Overlaying the HUD with a route and turn indicators should be trivial.
If I were more devilish I might suggest nitrogen tri-iodide in the water. I'm not sure that it would work unless in high concentrations, but it might be amusing once it dries on the squirrel - and/or on the roof of the feeder. The experimentalist in me wants to know - purely for the knowledge to be gained, of course!
hmmm. have to agree. Nothing like the shocked look on some meathead jock's face when he opened a locker door painted with NI3 in solution. I saw NI3 demonstrated at a science fair when I was in junior high (during the Nixon administration -- get off my lawn.) Stuff is fucking simple to make, and as long as you keep it in solution, it won't blow up on you. It makes a very loud snapping sound when it detonates, along with a cloud of purplish smoke. We'd paint it on locker doors in the gym and tool chests in the auto shop. Any kind of impact after it dried would detonate it. It was invisible if applied while still in solution, and it took less than 5 seconds after detonation for the residual iodine to sublimate and the residual ammonium iodide to dissolve in our always humid air, so it was practically untraceable. Revenge of the nerds, and better living through chemistry, indeed...:)
This is a transient field generated by an electric current that was created through the discharge of capacitor banks.
If you're going to pour on the snark, you could at least read enough of the article to understand that, while a capacitor bank is used in establishing the magnetic field, the primary energy storage was from a motor-generator that stores 1.2 GJ of energy for the experiments. So, while I agree that it's frustrating to hear half baked ideas for applications of exciting new science to pet science fiction dreams, doing so in a confrontational manner does little to actually enhance the knowledge of the folks making those sorts of suggestions.
...but it does enhance the entertainment value of the thread for those of us who don't expect, let alone *require*, that every slashdot post have a high signal-to-noise ratio. Frankly, I *love* browsing at -1. People are too funny, really...
I want interfaces that augment human decision making, not supplant it. Computers are very good at certain kinds of reasoning. People are very good at other kinds of reasoning. Lets try to combine the two to make a greater whole instead of having one or the other.
Hmmm. And I want strong AI. Not sure that the distinction you are making between computers and humans is valid. I would hope that there is only one kind of reasoning in the universe, dude.
When it comes to our civil liberties, we should have no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, just permanent interests...
(10pts to anyone who knows where that line originates)
If this is an occassion that you find Google fighting in defense of your rights, support them with a cautious eye. If you find Google fighting against your rights, oppose them with everything else.
Charles de Gaulle, I think. Also attributed to George Washington and Henry John Temple (3rd Viscount Palmerston), but I can't find any direct references. 5 points, maybe...?
...neither as in beer, nor as in speech. Despite protestations to the contrary, the days of independent researchers contributing something unique and significant to any of the myriad fields of human endeavor are long gone. Corporations that fund scientific research are entitled to profit from the knowledge they've gained, and that means they have a right to control its dissemination. Period. Knowledge is power, so knowledge shared is power diminished. Companies like Elsevier carve out a niche for themselves by allowing corporations to realize a return on scientific research by insuring the corporations can be compensated for sharing that knowledge. "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" as my favorite sci-fi author put it in one of his best novels; it applies to scientific research, too. People in this thread have pointed out repeatedly that corporations are in some way obligated to give away this knowledge. They aren't. This may have been a sustainable position when independent research was possible, but the world has changed. Corporate research teams have replaced the Newtons, Gausses, and Diracs and they are driven by the bottom line and nothing else. NB: I don't like this new paradigm any more than anybody else does; I think it sucks, actually. Until we can find a different way to organize our pursuit of knowledge as a species though, I believe we are stuck with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Because my fellow man (which is what government in the US is supposed to be, the whole 'we the people' thing) spying on me willy-nilly using Monopoly on Violence is not the same thing at ALL as the shopkeeper next door keeping records of what i buy to use in his marketing and optimization research.
Really? You need to take a broader view, then. Let's start with your shopkeeper's surveillance of your spending habits. He knows what you buy, when you buy it, and exactly how much you spend in his shop, along with all of your other neighbors. Some simple analysis allows him to predict quite accurately what you are going to buy and when you are going to buy it. So he jacks up those prices on D-1 and lowers them again on D+1. The Walmart grocery store in my neighborhood appears to be already doing this; the variance I get in the price of a Red Baron pizza correlates too strongly with payroll dates for the lower middle class neighborhood I live in for it to be a coincidence. But hey, according to you, it's *different* -- I guess you believe the monopoly on violence only includes armed force, and not the "Monopoly on the only grocery store within miles" kind of violence. FWIW, boutique retailers have been doing this for millenia -- each customer gets a unique price, determined by the shopkeeper's ability to assess the depth of the customer's pockets. Thanks to your benign "marketing and optimization research" the guy who sells you food is going to be able to do the same damn thing...
More to the point, why on earth would you want to build a spaceship shaped like the Enterprise? It's not a particularly practical design for a spacecraft. It was picked for the show for exactly 3 reasons: 1) it looks like the ship from Forbidden Planet but with enough visual differences to avoid a lawsuit, 2) it looks cool and science-fictiony, 3) it fits in with all the fictional technology that it is fictionally loaded with (warp nacelles, deflector dish, etc). Assuming none of that stuff exists (and it doesn't), then don't make it that shape.
If what you want is a spaceship with ion engines and a rotating section with faux-gravity for pootling around the solar system, the best shape would not look like the Enterprise. If you must model it on something from fiction, the Discovery from 2001 is probably a better bet; but in reality it'll look much more pragmatically like the stuff we're building now.
Making it look like a prop from Star Trek is nothing but a nerdy wet dream.
uhhh, slight correction. Your points 1 and 3 did lead to a design that eventually became the Enterprise, but the final design was an accident, because Roddenberry's sense of your point 2 was offended by what the modellers had come up with, as documented in David Gerrold's "The World of Star Trek." In a bucket, the penultimate design was pretty similar to the ship we all know and love, except the saucer section was a globe, and the warp nacelles were below the fuselage, not above it. The camera crew was filming the opening title sequence when Roddenberry walked into the studio and slammed the stage door shut. He was (probably) angry, and loudly demanded who had greenlighted the title sequence shot. He really didn't like the globe version of the Enterprise, having rejected it and several other proposed designs because they just didn't appeal to his sense of spaceship aesthetics. The door slam caused the track that the model was moving on to vibrate, and the Enterprise crashed to the floor. It landed upside down (warp nacelles up) and the globe broke in two pieces. About a 1/4 of the globe remained attached to the model, and the other 3/4 rolled lop-sidedly across the studio. Roddenberry stared at the damaged model for a few moments, and then happily said, "That's it! Shoot it like that!" and left as abruptly as he entered. The modellers replaced the globe with a flat disk made of styrofoam, gluing what they could cannibalize from the damaged globe onto it, and the rest is history...
So here's what I want to know:
1. Why? Why target conservatives specifically with anti-science propaganda? Why aren't liberals being targeted too? (Arguments like "Conservatives are more gullible" will be ignored for obvious reasons.)
2. Why is there no backlash from conservatives themselves? How many conservatives actually want to (a) be subject to anti-science propaganda that will, inevitably, result - thanks to the wonder of echo chambers - in believing something that's wrong and (b) want to be in a group that will inevitably be considered anti-science?
What gives?
Nice way to frame the debate, dude. I'll reframe it by suggesting the answer to both your questions is pretty straight forward. The answer is rooted in the psychology of faith, i.e. the irrationality of believing in something in the absence of evidence, or more to the point in this debate, to continue to disbelieve in something in the face of steadily mounting evidence. You say gullible is an off-limits term; I say fine, let's use deliberate self-deception, instead.
For your first question, conservatives are being targeted because propaganda only works on people who *believe* in something, i.e., only on the faithful. Propoganda -- by definition -- can't be aimed at rational people. For your second question, there is no backlash from conservatives for largely the same reasons. People hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest, to quote Paul Simon's lyrics in "The Boxer." Rational people are not affected by propaganda, but people of faith are, and they will easily ignore the obvious lies and distortions in propaganda as long as the message being propogated affirms their irrational beliefs, i.e., their faith.
...with remaining eye.
Maybe you're overstating things a bit but I roughly agree, and it's called nuclear capability. Iran is fully aware of the military capability of a civilian program, and this is part of their deterrence strategy. This is El Baradei's viewpoint and US and Israeli intelligence agrees with it. It is also a legitimate strategy.
An agreement with Iran would involve keeping the development time to a full bomb as long as possible and the safeguards as thorough as possible. The real sticking point lies elsewhere: normalization of relations with Iran will make them a regional player. Unfortunately that's happening anyway so the question for the US is whether they want to be part of it or not.
Hmmm. I'm thinking Iran will *never* be allowed to become a regional player as long as the mullahs are in charge, because another group of religious zealots with nuclear capability is the last thing this planet needs. If economic and political measures fail to dislodge the mullahs in Iran, then military action to force a regime change will be the logical next step. Frankly, the US is *already* prepared to take that step. The Obama administration has made it abundantly clear, though, that no direct military action in Iran is possible until the US election cycle is over, which has created an unprecedented rift in US-Israel relations. That is the sticking point -- Israel wants war now; the US says wait at least until the elections are over. I'm thinking the US sanctioned this attack to mollify the hardliners in the Knesset and buy some time for the economic and political measures to work.
Judges only evaluate the admissibility of evidence, not it's efficacy. It's up to the jury to decide if the evidence is valid, and the process of voir dire ensures that prospective jurors with a clue about any scientific evidence to be presented in the trial will be rejected.
And what's the ultimate goal? To build an aircraft that goes faster than the previous ones? With enough money you can always best the previous record, but after a while it becomes pointless, just like those record speed cars that are basically just a rocket on wheels. This is basically just a rocket on wings.
DARPA's goal is to increase the ability of the US to project national power (that's the "Defense" part of "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in case you were wondering.) A mach 20 airframe could deliver practically instant military power to anywhere on the planet it was needed, a truly significant military advantage. And by launching it on a polar trajectory, it would minimize the need to negotiate over-fly rights with any of the nations between the US and the conflict zone. Make no mistake, this DARPA project will significantly increase the US's ability to project national power if it is successful.
Blew $300 on a new tire last week. Had to swerve so I wouldn't hit a deer, and went straight over a pothole. $300 for a tire? Either you drive an 6 figure exotic something, or you are an idiot, or you got fleeced. Or some combination of those. Oh, and you know you should almost never replace only one tire, right? Both fronts or both rears, unless they are really, really new.
Hmmm, my "exotic" 'Vette C4 cost me all of $16k when I bought it ten years ago, but I run Goodyear F1 tires on it, which are about $400 each. My equally "exotic" BMW 318Ti Sport cost me $12k seven years ago, and the Yokohama A048 tires that I run on it are about $300 each. Tires are the last thing you want to compromise on your vehicle, whether you are driving a beater or a track-worthy speed demon. It's like buying a motorcycle helmet -- if you have a $10 head, by all means buy a $10 helmet. :)
That's a huge amount for a single tyre. Someone is ripping you off
I hope this NNF patch idea works out. As far as tire prices go, if you've got a $50 car, by all means go ahead and put $50 tires on it. The Goodyear F1 for my 'Vette C4 rears are $311 today at Tirerack. Toss in shipping, mounting/balancing and disposal fees and you are hitting $400 per tire. Ditto the Yokohama A048s for my BMW 318Ti Sport -- they are $222 today at Tirerack, and when you add shipping, M/B, disposal, and heat cycling/shaving, they are pushing $300 each. You can compromise on a lot of things when it comes to a vehicle, but tires should not be one of them. Hitting a pothole at speed with a $400 tire is a cringe-inducing experience, but I'd rather have good rubber under me for all the other miles that aren't peppered with potholes...
I watched an A7D Corsair II narrowly miss a junior high school and crash into an intersection in Tucson back in 1978. The plane developed engine trouble just before final approach to Davis-Monthan AFB. The pilot wrestled with the plane for nearly two and a half minutes, trying to nurse enough out of the stalling engine to get it to the runway, but it flamed out on him for the last time well short of the DM runway. He aimed for an empty football practice field, and then ejected at 200 feet of altitude, less than five seconds before the plane impacted. Unfortunately, the plane banked sharply after he ejected, and instead of hitting the practice field, it impacted in the street between the school and the practice field. It landed practically on top of a small car, instantly killing the two passengers. I was waiting for a bus less than half a block away from the impact point, and I felt the heat from the explosion when it hit. That pilot rode that beast down as far as he could, and punched out at the edge of the safe envelope for his ejector seat. Two people died, but a school full of kids didn't. Kudos to him, and to the F18 pilots for staying with the plane until the last possible moment before ejecting.
I see your Poe and Godwin and raise you Alinsky's 5th rule -- attack through humorous ridicule. As Saul said, it is almost impossible to counter with facts because the truth usually isn't as simple as a lie.
Take the ridicule against Palin. In an interview she said "There are places in Alaska from which one can see Russia." A TRUE statement. The Left "quoted" her as saying "I can see Russia from my house."., Being good researchers, some on the Left consulted maps and noticed that one can not see Russia from Palin's house. So the mockery began and was repeated endlessly and recycled in the forums and blogs on the Left. Repeat a lie often enough, Right or Left, and the faithful believe it as fact, even to the point of self-righteousness, quoting the lie as proof of their intelligence. It really gets interesting when psychological terms are thrown at "unbelievers". Terms like "denier", etc...
Talk about lifting things out of context. Palin was responding to a question about her foreign policy credentials when she made that famous assertion. She was in dead earnest about it, and the press on both sides saw it for what it was -- evidence that Palin was ill-equipped to make foreign policy as a president, let alone execute it. The Left amplified it, and the Right tried to downplay it. There is no two ways about that quote, yet you've managed to find a third by lifting it out of context and trying to spin the coverage as some kind of leftist version of the well-known right-wing echo chamber. Nice try, pal.
And it's likely to backfire on the Republicans. You've just given him a bunch of perfectly free publicity of the worst sort - your opponent comes off as the good guy. Likely a significant fraction of the voting population would never had cottoned on to the fact that he is / was an astronaut. Now everybody knows. And if there is a generic hero in the 21st Century, it's got to be astronauts.
Even if you don't really care about NASA and space exploration, astronauts still have a pretty good (albeit not totally unblemished) reputation.
Nice work, bozos.
Hmmm. Generic hero for the 21st century? The one astronaut I can think of who went into politics is forever linked with various financial scams, one of which was quite major. Not sure I'd want to remind people of the link between astronauts and scams. Senator and former astronaut John Glenn provided us with a couple financial scandals that, at least for *this* voter, pretty much tarnished astronauts' squeeky-clean image forever. Glenn's failed bid for the vice presidency left over $3M dollars owed to contributors, a debt that he dodged for over twenty years. But that was small potatoes, compared to the other. Glenn was also a member of the Keating Five, a group of US senators who helped an S&L owner named Keating scam thousands and thousands of people out of their life savings by putting pressure on S&L regulators to back off on investigations of Keating's business practices, in return for financial contributions to their election campaigns.
Being an astronaut does not automatically make you a saint. Just ask the people who were bilked out of $3M in campaign contributions in Senator (and former astronaut) John Glenn's failed bid for the vice-presidency. Or better yet, ask any of the thousands of members of Lincoln Savings and Loan who were scammed out of their life savings by Senator (and former astronaut) John Glenn and his buddies in the Keating Five.
Steam ADDS value
That's an odd way of saying, "least of evils."
...which in turn says more about your system of values than it does about Steam's or their millions of customers. Don't knock it 'til you've tried it, dude.
Advantage Origin has:
- You can install a game anywhere. Steam requires you to install games inside it's directory.
just a quibble -- I can (and did) move my Steam dir off my system drive to my storage drive.
I have to wonder if this won't present legal challenges to Sony. Although I understand their reasons, since when is it illegal to sell something you've purchased? There are some ties here to licensing, but the ability to sell used titles already exists and as far as I know, hasn't faced any serious legal challenges.
Is there a lawyer in the house?
Doctrine of first sale is what you are alluding to; it is why used game stores can exist in the US. Business is all about eliminating competition, and used games are competition -- used games compete with current games for consumers' disposable income. One effective way for game makers to eliminate competition from their own games in markets where the doctrine of first sale exists is to engineer the games to be impossible to re-sell, which is is perfectly legal for them to do. The EU, as far as I understand it, does not recognize the doctrine of first sale, but I will happily defer to any of our European friends that wish to weigh-in on this.
Did it occur to anybody besides me that violent behavior is something that *should* be encouraged in a soldier? I'm not seeing how a drug with these observed effects gets anybody off the hook for that Afghan massacre -- not Bales, not his squad mates, nor his commanders. The massacre was the result of failure to manage Bales, period. He's a trained killer, and one with a history of deceiving people for monetary gain predating his enlistment in the military. It also looks like the military ignored some red flags, including his propensity for violent confrontation, about him long before he deployed to Afghanistan, if the stories about his security clearance are even close to accurate.
How does the presence of this drug, with its documented behavioral side effects that is routinely supplied to soldiers, coupled with what looks like malfeasance on the part of the military in not acting on information that was publicly available on Bales, exculpate anybody for this senseless tragedy?
Because they collude and no telco will offer the service that people want at a reasonable price, that's why. Also, telcos and ISPs shouldn't be allowed to interfere with traffic in any way shape or form beyond what's necessary to make sure it's delivered to its proper destination.
I don't think that network neutrality makes sense when the flow of packets is pretty much unidirectional. Treating every packet identically as it moves through the internet means that this one-way flow cannot be optimized. For a car analogy, network neutrality is like having unsynchronized traffic lights. I live in a town where most people commute from east to west in the mornings, and west to east in the evenings. The traffic lights on the east-west corridors in my town are synchronized to optimize that east-west flow for several hours each day. Sure, it compromises north-south traffic flow, but there is a lot less of that than the east-west flow. I think that much of the bandwidth provided by the the internet, perhaps most of it, is used to move information in one direction only, from content providers to content consumers. Packet shaping that one-way flow makes sense to me, and it really can't be done if network neutrality must be maintained. I think packet shaping on a planetary scale is coming, and the tiered internet that it will create is pretty much inevitable. Producers have to have a way to get their product into the market place, and the costs associated with getting the product to market have to be minimized, just like any other cost, if the producer wants to maximize profits. A content provider who can secure a more direct channel to the content consumer has a decided competitive advantage over one that can't, and packet shaping provides that competitive advantage.
And what is "Science" (must capitalize correctly) without scientists? Including unscrupulous ones?
Way to posit "no true scientist.".
Science is a human artifact. Every human artifact is potentially susceptible to fraud, manipulation, trolling, marketing, and every other foible and evil humans are capable of. Almost any human intention and motive can be expressed through the manipulation and corruption of the scientific process. And scientific fraud is no less about science than financial fraud is about finance.
There is no great, glorious and impersonal "Science". Insisting otherwise is just another form of deism, one that gives rise to the criticism that science is just another religion. And I'm sure no one here wants that.
Wow, 12 mod points left, and I really wanted to mod you into oblivion. Instead, I'll just point out why you are wrong, and let some other mods go medieval on your ass. To answer your question, science is a process, not an artifact, so it doesn't matter if there are scientists around, unscrupulous or otherwise. It is a methodology, not a thing. If humans didn't exist, the process would still be there for some other species to discover and use. Since your premise is demonstrably false, your assertions founded on that premise are false, too -- including and especially your maladroit attempt to link science with religion via the deism argument.
...so I need GPS, period. I have a Garmin Zumo mounted on the triple tree of my Ducati 1098, and I supplement that with turn-by-turn directions from Miri. Glancing down at the Zumo while piloting my bike is not distracting, and the real time velocity indication on the Zumo is *way* more accurate than the bike's, which is (deliberately I'm certain) too high. With that said, for people who need four wheels under them, the obvious solution to me is integrating GPS into a HUD on the windshield. My 'Vette has an outstanding HUD -- it integrates forward-looking video that enhances the edge of the road, other moving vehicles, and objects like pedestrians and parked vehicles. In low visibility conditions like nighttime or rain, it is nothing short of amazing. Overlaying the HUD with a route and turn indicators should be trivial.
If I were more devilish I might suggest nitrogen tri-iodide in the water. I'm not sure that it would work unless in high concentrations, but it might be amusing once it dries on the squirrel - and/or on the roof of the feeder. The experimentalist in me wants to know - purely for the knowledge to be gained, of course!
hmmm. have to agree. Nothing like the shocked look on some meathead jock's face when he opened a locker door painted with NI3 in solution. I saw NI3 demonstrated at a science fair when I was in junior high (during the Nixon administration -- get off my lawn.) Stuff is fucking simple to make, and as long as you keep it in solution, it won't blow up on you. It makes a very loud snapping sound when it detonates, along with a cloud of purplish smoke. We'd paint it on locker doors in the gym and tool chests in the auto shop. Any kind of impact after it dried would detonate it. It was invisible if applied while still in solution, and it took less than 5 seconds after detonation for the residual iodine to sublimate and the residual ammonium iodide to dissolve in our always humid air, so it was practically untraceable. Revenge of the nerds, and better living through chemistry, indeed... :)
This is a transient field generated by an electric current that was created through the discharge of capacitor banks.
If you're going to pour on the snark, you could at least read enough of the article to understand that, while a capacitor bank is used in establishing the magnetic field, the primary energy storage was from a motor-generator that stores 1.2 GJ of energy for the experiments. So, while I agree that it's frustrating to hear half baked ideas for applications of exciting new science to pet science fiction dreams, doing so in a confrontational manner does little to actually enhance the knowledge of the folks making those sorts of suggestions.
...but it does enhance the entertainment value of the thread for those of us who don't expect, let alone *require*, that every slashdot post have a high signal-to-noise ratio. Frankly, I *love* browsing at -1. People are too funny, really...
I want interfaces that augment human decision making, not supplant it. Computers are very good at certain kinds of reasoning. People are very good at other kinds of reasoning. Lets try to combine the two to make a greater whole instead of having one or the other.
Hmmm. And I want strong AI. Not sure that the distinction you are making between computers and humans is valid. I would hope that there is only one kind of reasoning in the universe, dude.
When it comes to our civil liberties, we should have no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, just permanent interests...
(10pts to anyone who knows where that line originates)
If this is an occassion that you find Google fighting in defense of your rights, support them with a cautious eye. If you find Google fighting against your rights, oppose them with everything else.
Charles de Gaulle, I think. Also attributed to George Washington and Henry John Temple (3rd Viscount Palmerston), but I can't find any direct references. 5 points, maybe...?
...neither as in beer, nor as in speech. Despite protestations to the contrary, the days of independent researchers contributing something unique and significant to any of the myriad fields of human endeavor are long gone. Corporations that fund scientific research are entitled to profit from the knowledge they've gained, and that means they have a right to control its dissemination. Period. Knowledge is power, so knowledge shared is power diminished. Companies like Elsevier carve out a niche for themselves by allowing corporations to realize a return on scientific research by insuring the corporations can be compensated for sharing that knowledge. "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" as my favorite sci-fi author put it in one of his best novels; it applies to scientific research, too. People in this thread have pointed out repeatedly that corporations are in some way obligated to give away this knowledge. They aren't. This may have been a sustainable position when independent research was possible, but the world has changed. Corporate research teams have replaced the Newtons, Gausses, and Diracs and they are driven by the bottom line and nothing else. NB: I don't like this new paradigm any more than anybody else does; I think it sucks, actually. Until we can find a different way to organize our pursuit of knowledge as a species though, I believe we are stuck with it.