I "tout" no particular line at all; I like to cast a wide net to see what knowledge I can snare from the rapidly receding seas of wisdom on this planet. I know nothing of de Tocqueville beyond what I gleaned from studying his writings, and the the analysis of his writings by my colleagues. Ditto Mill, though my understanding of Mill came from an analysis of broad political theory, where my understanding of de Tocqueville came through a fairly focused analysis of America's system of checks and balances. I can correlate many of de Tocqueville's observations with my own, but correlation is sterile; I doubt seriously that de Tocqueville (or Mill, for that matter) came to his conclusions the same way I came to mine. Thus, I refute your assertion that "I should know he [de Tocqueville] would have been involved in both the civil rights movement and other non-violent acts of civil disobedience."
In fact, I would go so far to say that you are very, very, misinformed about Monsieur de Tocqueville's political and social philosophy. You will no doubt be surprised to learn that De Tocqueville, though he was an abolitionist, openly advocated segregationist colonial policies. You may be further surprised that as the French minister of foreign affairs, he supported domestic laws that severely restricted the freedom of the press, and he successfully pressured his colleagues in the interior ministry to arrest and detain protesters, which were quite numerous during his time in office.
When somebody invokes absolutes like morality to exhort me to behave in a certain way (to break the law, as you put it) the shade of Descartes whispers clearly and distinctly in my mind that somebody is trying to deceive me. I will concede that standing up for what is moral is a noble sentiment, but sentiment is all it is; what is moral is highly context-sensitive. To slightly misquote my favorite science fiction author, one man's morality is another man's belly laugh. As a philosopher, I can, and often do, argue for one side of a moral issue in the morning, and then defend the other side in the afternoon. When I was a soldier, I got paid to stand up for a certain morality in various shitholes around the planet; believe me, dodging bullets puts morality into perspective real fast and no amount of noble sentiment can change that, though a significantly higher sum of money could purchase a new definition of morality for my more mercenary comrades.
It is my experience that there are no absolutes, save the inevitability of conflict. I'm with Hegel on this -- it is from conflict that meaning emerges, and the meaning lasts only as long as the conflict does. With each new conflict, there is a new definition of morality to justify our behavior.
Dude -- climb down out of the ivory tower for a moment. You are over-analyzing a very simple, straight forward situation. If it is not morally allowable for one person -- a single, solitary hacker let's say -- to take down a website (deface a system, in your terminology) why would it be morally allowable if a bunch of people conspired to do the same thing? Your attempt to mitigate the immorality of the act by diluting it over the number of conspirators, or diluting the harm done by spreading the damage out over society at large is interesting, but de Tocqueville and Mill, the architects of modern political philosophy and Utilitarians to the core (especially Mill,) rightly rejected that approach to the formulation of legislation and (in the case of de Tocqueville) the administration of justice. Indeed, in every jurisdiction that I am aware of, conspirators are all equally guilty; it follows that there is no safety in numbers if one is committing an immoral act.
A DDOS, if properly executed, is the digital equivalent of a sit-in. If the machines used were hacked however, it's a lot harder to justify. But if you run a public server, and the public decides to all use the server at the same time, it's hard to classify that as vigilantism.
Really? Seriously? Dude...if it is illegal for a single person to take down a website, what kind of perverted logic makes it legal for a mob to take it down? Your sit-in analogy fails -- a sit-in is just another mob, in the eyes of the law. It is not legal for a mob to do anything that is not legal for an individual to do. More to the point, the organizers of a sit-in can be charged with conspiracy, incitement, mayhem, creating a public nuisance, vandalism, and in my great State of Arizona, even murder, if it turns violent and somebody dies -- even if they were nowhere near the actual event. A DDOS, or digital sit-in if you prefer, would be treated in the exact same way by the legal system here; I'm certain it would be no different in your jurisdiction. I suggest you keep that in mind if you are ever tempted to do something illegal simply because a bunch of other people are going to be doing it with you.
So what's this old thing we used to call privacy? Is this even legal for them to be doing? Or will it, like everything else, fall into that gray area and be used against everyone?
You don't put private information on computers that are connected to other computers that you don't control, because the information will not stay private. There is no expectation of privacy on the internet, any more than there is an expectation of privacy in a theater, or at a sporting event, or in a restaurant, or rolling down the street as a passenger on a public bus.
Tell me -- would you conduct confidential business at a restaurant, or store your private records under your seat at the theater, or go over your credit card bills at the ball game? Of course you wouldn't -- it is only fucking common sense, right? Why would the net be any different? Nobody is forcing you to put your private records on a publicly accessible device like an internet-connected computer, so be smart and don't do it voluntarily, either.
Personal information gathered without an investigators license is against the law. Correlation of a skype phone number with an IP address and data mining for that correlation is acting as a private investigator without a license. Your argument is what? That an IP is semi-public info? What does that have to do with the price of tea in china?
Dude, don't be an idiot -- look up public domain at your nearest law library before you go trolling again.
Hmmm...you realize that what may be a rare event to you is ho-hum reality for the rest of us, right? Demonstrations of the Meissner Effect (or more specifically, flux pinning) stopped making jaws drop during the Reagan administration, dude. This is circus science -- all spectacle, no substance.
This effect is well known and has been since somebody named Meissner wrote a paper about it in 1933. In 1986, I attended a public lecture at Caltech by Richard Feynman on the "Meissner Effect," which was accompanied by a video starring (surprise) a frozen hockey puck. It was mildly interesting at the time, but that was a quarter century ago -- to see the same effect treated like it is something strange and new is just sad. Science should be about discovery, not showmanship. Looking at you Sagan, Feynman, Tyson...
What about ESP is "extraordinary" to you? Is it more or less extraordinary than: time dilation, matter-energy equivalence, the atomic bomb, quantum tunneling, the Internet?
Don't be disingenuous. ESP is extraordinary to the exact extent that time dilation, matter-energy equivalence, the bomb and quantum tunneling are ho-hum, documented realities. Until someone comes up with a model for ESP that accommodates falsifiable hyptheses, ESP will sit at the back of the short bus, much like you probably did, if this is truly representative of your take on reality.
They are already cutting the defense budget by half and the social security / medicare budget is already twice that of the defense budget. I'm all for some sort of safety net and taking care of old folks but holy shit thats a lot of money.
Really? Take your lips away from the Fox News kool-aid. Presently, the US defense budget is $671B for fiscal 2012, which is 20% higher than the highest year of the Bush II era. With the exception of 1998, US defense spending has increased every year that it has been reported, with Obama significantly out spending Bush II, even if you factor in the supplemental spending for the Iraq and Afghan wars (listed as OCO, ongoing combat operations, in the cited sources). The only time the US defense budget actually changed downwards from the previous year was in 1998, when it dropped by a whopping 6/10 of one percent.
I'm waiting to hear from the fiscal conservatives who want to cancel the space program and asteroid-hunting programs because the Federal Government shouldn't be spending taxpayer money on such useless endeavors.
Usually those wingnuts cue a response from the other wingnuts complaining about how many schools we could build with the military budget.
No. Those "other wingnuts" complain about how many schools we could build for a tiny fraction of the military budget, say the cost of occupying Iraq for a week, or procuring a single B2 bomber...don't even go there, dude.
It's not "News for Nerds", and it sure as fuck doesn't matter to anyone except a tiny number of competitive eaters about which there is no reason to give a shit.
really? practical biochem seems suitable to this forum, with a dash of forensic toxicology thrown in for good measure. go the fuck away, if you can't appreciate the nerdiness of that.
well, for the purposes of this thread, a blister agent is anything that can neutralize capsaicin, which is the substance in chili peppers that gives them their characteristic "heat." I use good ol' NaHCO3, aka bicarb, in chile eating contests, because I can suspend a decent concentration in my beer before an impromptu chili eating contest, and take a swig every couple of bites. Works like a charm, honestly. Even in more formally proctored contests, I down 60g dissolved in 500ml of water before I even head to the venue. I regurgitate it surreptitiously while downing the hot wings, or peppers, or whatever capsaicin-bearing food is the object of the contest. Pretending to struggle to swallow the food because of the heat is all the cover I usually need while inducing my own gag reflex. I've been caught out a couple of times, usually by pre-med students or their MD parents, but hey, you can't fool all of the people all of the time...:)
fwiw, if you line your mouth with bicarb or some other pH increasing compound, it will significantly reduce the amount of capsaicin available to inflame the tissues of your gums, tongue, and cheeks. It works like a charm, and I've got the chili eating contest winner t-shirts to prove it. i've successfully downed stunning amounts of "impossibly hot" buffalo wings with this trick, winning hundreds of dollars from otherwise perfectly intelligent college students. It's always the chem majors that twig to me first...
the retirement age is 65. Don't expect that to last.
Indeed. For what it is worth, according to current legislation, the full retirement age is 65 if you were born before 1937. It goes up after 1937, until 1960 where it levels off at 67. John Boehner (R - OH), Speaker of the House, has already floated the idea of rasing it to 70; he did that last year when the Republicans were still a minority in the House. Now that they have a majority, expect to see legislation to raise it higher than 67 if a Republican takes the White House in 2012.
Unless you earn too much, are a minority, have been raped or abused by an ex-partner, are too young or too old to have good judgment, etc.
If privacy isn't a right inherent to all people, then perhaps it is better if we enforce nudism. If we remove all of our clothing for queen and country, it would be much easier to spot any terrorist bombs.
Privacy is not an absolute right, because the expectation of privacy is constrained by the venue. Tell me, do you think you have a right to privacy when you are sitting in the right field bleachers at a Red Sox home game? Of course you don't. How about at a political rally? In a movie theater, maybe? How about at the local mall? You no more have an expectation of privacy on the internet than you do at a baseball game, or any of those other venues. Your attempt to defend privacy as an absolute right via your reductio ad absurdum argument is a non-starter.
It happens automatically. See the "Like" button? It's because it's already been downloaded - even if you NEVER dealt with facebook. Facebook even tracks users vi IP+browser fingerprinting who they can't tie to an existing account so that if/when you DO sign up, they can match that history with you. Totally illegal.
Totally illegal where, dude? The web, last time I checked, is a public venue with planetary visibility and zero expectation of privacy. What legislation, in what country, makes this illegal? More to the point, how on earth would such legislation ever be enforced? I'm not kidding, dude -- put up or shut up.
Ghostery says that TFA site is infested with Facebook Social Plugins (which Ghostery blocked).
Ghostery and NoScript are strongly recommended for avoiding this sort of crap. Disabling third-party cookies is another method. If you're not a user of Facebook, then yet another technique is to add a bunch of Facebook's sites to the blocked list in your router, or redirect them to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file. The sad thing is, we should not have to do these things; tracking without explicit authorization per site should not occur.
I'm cheering for the plaintiffs here, and hoping Facebook gets (i) stopped from doing this stuff in the future, and (ii) enough of a punishment that it makes a material difference to their financial results. Having Zuckerberg as the star of Ow, my balls hurt for several episodes could be an optional extra.
Since brick-and-mortar businesses don't need your explicit authorization to track you when you are on their premises, why should a website be any different? Brick-and-mortar stores like your local supermarket accumulate as much, if not more data about you than any website on the net (including your likeness, if you will allow that their security cam data can easily be correlated with purchase history.) Supermarkets routinely share (read: profit by selling) this information to anybody that wants it and can afford it; I'm not understanding why you think online retailers should be held to a different tracking standard than their brick-and-mortar competitors.
And what, you're going to go building to building and fill each one with impact grenades? I'm sure that will do tons to motivate the locals to help the US.
...no. I think you are missing the point. The idea is not to motivate the locals to help the US -- that was the so-called "hearts and minds" doctrine that failed so spectacularly in Vietnam. Rather, you want to motivate the locals not to help the terrorists. If the locals begin to understand that their non-combatant status isn't going to prevent them from being mowed down along side the terrorists, they will stop associating with the terrorists, and will in fact start actively cooperating with the occupation to remove that threat.
Having read that article, I would add, it says a "basic assumption"-- that is, a foundational assumption.
Every bit of knowledge and observation we have is fundamentally based on a set of assumptions; without them you would be left doubting everything, including your ability to doubt and your very existence.
Hmmm, I think you need to re-read your Descartes, especially the first, second, and third meditations in Meditations on First Philosophy. You can doubt everything, including the act of doubting, but you can't doubt that you are actually *doing* the doubting, so you must, therefore, exist. From that first philosophy, via the famous Cogito Descartes establishes Dualism, which survived in one form or another for three centuries, until it was thoroughly demolished by Dennet, Serle, and Churchland around the middle of the last century. You do seem to be sliding into the Existential Trap, though, so I highly recommend that you read Dennett's The Intensional Stance for an easy way out of it.
If we stop assuming causality, how on earth do you go about setting up experiments? You would have no reason to believe that you could POSSIBLY reproduce anything, if effects are simply random occurrences.
That's exactly right. Not assuming causality is no impediment to scientific inquiry -- ask any grad student studying quantum theory, if you don't want to take my word for it. You should read How the Laws of Physics Lie by Nancy Cartwright, a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics. Her theories on causal inference and objectivity are the direct result of her inquiry into the nature of quantum mixture states and this book is a standard text for students of the philosophy of science. You don't need causality to explain *anything* at the quantum level. Probabilities do just fine.
If science didnt believe there was a "why", it wouldnt bother with experiments in the first place. The why is what we are generally after-- what is the cause?
Nonsense. Priests and shaman want to tell you "why' something happened, scientists will only tell you "what" happened. "Why" questions are not scientific -- because to even ask a "why" question requires faith that there exists some kind of meaningful answer in the first place. Faith, by definition, is irrational, so "why" questions are, by extension, also irrational. A scientist, on the other hand, will tell you only "what" happened, and he will insist that he tell you what the error bars in his observations were, as well. If pressed, he will share with you the details of the model from which his assertions about reality flow, but he will then also be at pains to explain exactly where his model stops and reality continues. His is a rational approach to inquiry, unlike the shaman's and priest's approach, who demand the very same irrationality from their flock as they exhibit in their own assertions about reality.
Sounds like those morons who broke down on some mountain in Utah last year and one died when he ventured away from the truck. GPS is no fucking substitute for knowing how to read maps and find directions. Those skills should be required for tour bus drivers precisely because roads can get blocked for any number of reasons.
Really? you think you can legislate stupidity away? Darwin trumps the nanny state, dude. People stupid enough to hire a tour guide that doesn't have a plan B deserve their fate.
Wouldn't relying on GPS in a nuclear war be a bit crazy unless you were planning a first strike? That is, unless you expect your GPS satellites to survive the first strike?
I would think that LEO would be EMP city not long into WWIII.
Of course, if the submarine updates its position periodically then it would have a moderately accurate fix to start with, but I can't imagine that INS is that reliable with the accuracy of modern ICBMs. Then again, don't ICBMs have star-finders or such built into them once they get outside the atmosphere? So, you really should only need a pretty general idea of your location to launch one...
ICBMs don't rely on GPS, and neither do the boomers that are hosting them. As long as the ICBM knows the coordinates of target and the coordinates of the launch point, Newton is pretty much in the driver's seat -- the B in ICBM stands for ballistic, after all. ICBMs have inertial nav units that know precisely where they are at any time...they will hit the CEP whether they are launched from dockside at a US Navy yard, or three weeks into a patrol from 20 fathoms beneath the Bering Strait. I think this is why the military really didn't press the issue in this case. GPS is a tactical tool, not a strategic one. Loss of GPS capability is a minor contingency at best; it would compromise tactical command and control, and little else. And it would only be a contingency until the lost assets were replaced, a matter of seconds, or at most, minutes. For every known GPS sat, there are probably half a dozen dark ones that can be switched on and off as needed, and there are probably plans to loft replacements on very short notice should the need arise.
Look at a map of the area, a lot of the naval exercises are held less than 20 miles from shore. Islands and west coast of Scotland is prime tourist area, walking in wild places and outdoor sports are big here. Jamming GPS here might mean walkers getting lost (yes I know they should be able to navigate without GPS, but hey, they still come, and they still spend money in the hotels and local shops) and if they do get lost, mountain rescue might have to go out in rain and fog and snow and try to get them back off the hills and moors, so they might need GPS to coordinate with air sea rescue helicopters etc.
Close down tourism in this area and you've got a lot of unhappy local people and a lot more local unemployment.
This isn't the Pacific Ocean we're talking about here, where you can just shove off another couple of hundred miles....
Yep, tourists vs national security. Hard to make a profit off tourists that are carrying Kalishnikovs, dude...
...if you aren't part of the exercise, you shouldn't be in the fucking neighborhood, eh? Here in the beautiful but empty desert southwest of the US, we routinely conduct live-fire military exercises in the middle of an off-road playground used by people with more money than common sense. If they ignore the big red banners and cut through the padlocks on the gates while we are testing our latest and greatest munitions, it's their ass. If their next-of-kin try to litigate for damages, no jury on the planet would find for them. Why would it be different off the coast of Scotland?
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I "tout" no particular line at all; I like to cast a wide net to see what knowledge I can snare from the rapidly receding seas of wisdom on this planet. I know nothing of de Tocqueville beyond what I gleaned from studying his writings, and the the analysis of his writings by my colleagues. Ditto Mill, though my understanding of Mill came from an analysis of broad political theory, where my understanding of de Tocqueville came through a fairly focused analysis of America's system of checks and balances. I can correlate many of de Tocqueville's observations with my own, but correlation is sterile; I doubt seriously that de Tocqueville (or Mill, for that matter) came to his conclusions the same way I came to mine. Thus, I refute your assertion that "I should know he [de Tocqueville] would have been involved in both the civil rights movement and other non-violent acts of civil disobedience."
In fact, I would go so far to say that you are very, very, misinformed about Monsieur de Tocqueville's political and social philosophy. You will no doubt be surprised to learn that De Tocqueville, though he was an abolitionist, openly advocated segregationist colonial policies. You may be further surprised that as the French minister of foreign affairs, he supported domestic laws that severely restricted the freedom of the press, and he successfully pressured his colleagues in the interior ministry to arrest and detain protesters, which were quite numerous during his time in office.
When somebody invokes absolutes like morality to exhort me to behave in a certain way (to break the law, as you put it) the shade of Descartes whispers clearly and distinctly in my mind that somebody is trying to deceive me. I will concede that standing up for what is moral is a noble sentiment, but sentiment is all it is; what is moral is highly context-sensitive. To slightly misquote my favorite science fiction author, one man's morality is another man's belly laugh. As a philosopher, I can, and often do, argue for one side of a moral issue in the morning, and then defend the other side in the afternoon. When I was a soldier, I got paid to stand up for a certain morality in various shitholes around the planet; believe me, dodging bullets puts morality into perspective real fast and no amount of noble sentiment can change that, though a significantly higher sum of money could purchase a new definition of morality for my more mercenary comrades.
It is my experience that there are no absolutes, save the inevitability of conflict. I'm with Hegel on this -- it is from conflict that meaning emerges, and the meaning lasts only as long as the conflict does. With each new conflict, there is a new definition of morality to justify our behavior.
Dude -- climb down out of the ivory tower for a moment. You are over-analyzing a very simple, straight forward situation. If it is not morally allowable for one person -- a single, solitary hacker let's say -- to take down a website (deface a system, in your terminology) why would it be morally allowable if a bunch of people conspired to do the same thing? Your attempt to mitigate the immorality of the act by diluting it over the number of conspirators, or diluting the harm done by spreading the damage out over society at large is interesting, but de Tocqueville and Mill, the architects of modern political philosophy and Utilitarians to the core (especially Mill,) rightly rejected that approach to the formulation of legislation and (in the case of de Tocqueville) the administration of justice. Indeed, in every jurisdiction that I am aware of, conspirators are all equally guilty; it follows that there is no safety in numbers if one is committing an immoral act.
A DDOS, if properly executed, is the digital equivalent of a sit-in. If the machines used were hacked however, it's a lot harder to justify. But if you run a public server, and the public decides to all use the server at the same time, it's hard to classify that as vigilantism.
Really? Seriously? Dude...if it is illegal for a single person to take down a website, what kind of perverted logic makes it legal for a mob to take it down? Your sit-in analogy fails -- a sit-in is just another mob, in the eyes of the law. It is not legal for a mob to do anything that is not legal for an individual to do. More to the point, the organizers of a sit-in can be charged with conspiracy, incitement, mayhem, creating a public nuisance, vandalism, and in my great State of Arizona, even murder, if it turns violent and somebody dies -- even if they were nowhere near the actual event. A DDOS, or digital sit-in if you prefer, would be treated in the exact same way by the legal system here; I'm certain it would be no different in your jurisdiction. I suggest you keep that in mind if you are ever tempted to do something illegal simply because a bunch of other people are going to be doing it with you.
So what's this old thing we used to call privacy? Is this even legal for them to be doing? Or will it, like everything else, fall into that gray area and be used against everyone?
You don't put private information on computers that are connected to other computers that you don't control, because the information will not stay private. There is no expectation of privacy on the internet, any more than there is an expectation of privacy in a theater, or at a sporting event, or in a restaurant, or rolling down the street as a passenger on a public bus.
Tell me -- would you conduct confidential business at a restaurant, or store your private records under your seat at the theater, or go over your credit card bills at the ball game? Of course you wouldn't -- it is only fucking common sense, right? Why would the net be any different? Nobody is forcing you to put your private records on a publicly accessible device like an internet-connected computer, so be smart and don't do it voluntarily, either.
Personal information gathered without an investigators license is against the law. Correlation of a skype phone number with an IP address and data mining for that correlation is acting as a private investigator without a license.
Your argument is what? That an IP is semi-public info?
What does that have to do with the price of tea in china?
Dude, don't be an idiot -- look up public domain at your nearest law library before you go trolling again.
Hmmm...you realize that what may be a rare event to you is ho-hum reality for the rest of us, right? Demonstrations of the Meissner Effect (or more specifically, flux pinning) stopped making jaws drop during the Reagan administration, dude. This is circus science -- all spectacle, no substance.
This effect is well known and has been since somebody named Meissner wrote a paper about it in 1933. In 1986, I attended a public lecture at Caltech by Richard Feynman on the "Meissner Effect," which was accompanied by a video starring (surprise) a frozen hockey puck. It was mildly interesting at the time, but that was a quarter century ago -- to see the same effect treated like it is something strange and new is just sad. Science should be about discovery, not showmanship. Looking at you Sagan, Feynman, Tyson...
What about ESP is "extraordinary" to you? Is it more or less extraordinary than: time dilation, matter-energy equivalence, the atomic bomb, quantum tunneling, the Internet?
Don't be disingenuous. ESP is extraordinary to the exact extent that time dilation, matter-energy equivalence, the bomb and quantum tunneling are ho-hum, documented realities. Until someone comes up with a model for ESP that accommodates falsifiable hyptheses, ESP will sit at the back of the short bus, much like you probably did, if this is truly representative of your take on reality.
They are already cutting the defense budget by half and the social security / medicare budget is already twice that of the defense budget. I'm all for some sort of safety net and taking care of old folks but holy shit thats a lot of money.
Really? Take your lips away from the Fox News kool-aid. Presently, the US defense budget is $671B for fiscal 2012, which is 20% higher than the highest year of the Bush II era. With the exception of 1998, US defense spending has increased every year that it has been reported, with Obama significantly out spending Bush II, even if you factor in the supplemental spending for the Iraq and Afghan wars (listed as OCO, ongoing combat operations, in the cited sources). The only time the US defense budget actually changed downwards from the previous year was in 1998, when it dropped by a whopping 6/10 of one percent.
I'm waiting to hear from the fiscal conservatives who want to cancel the space program and asteroid-hunting programs because the Federal Government shouldn't be spending taxpayer money on such useless endeavors.
Usually those wingnuts cue a response from the other wingnuts complaining about how many schools we could build with the military budget.
No. Those "other wingnuts" complain about how many schools we could build for a tiny fraction of the military budget, say the cost of occupying Iraq for a week, or procuring a single B2 bomber...don't even go there, dude.
It's not "News for Nerds", and it sure as fuck doesn't matter to anyone except a tiny number of competitive eaters about which there is no reason to give a shit.
really? practical biochem seems suitable to this forum, with a dash of forensic toxicology thrown in for good measure. go the fuck away, if you can't appreciate the nerdiness of that.
What the hell is a blister agent?
well, for the purposes of this thread, a blister agent is anything that can neutralize capsaicin, which is the substance in chili peppers that gives them their characteristic "heat." I use good ol' NaHCO3, aka bicarb, in chile eating contests, because I can suspend a decent concentration in my beer before an impromptu chili eating contest, and take a swig every couple of bites. Works like a charm, honestly. Even in more formally proctored contests, I down 60g dissolved in 500ml of water before I even head to the venue. I regurgitate it surreptitiously while downing the hot wings, or peppers, or whatever capsaicin-bearing food is the object of the contest. Pretending to struggle to swallow the food because of the heat is all the cover I usually need while inducing my own gag reflex. I've been caught out a couple of times, usually by pre-med students or their MD parents, but hey, you can't fool all of the people all of the time... :)
fwiw, if you line your mouth with bicarb or some other pH increasing compound, it will significantly reduce the amount of capsaicin available to inflame the tissues of your gums, tongue, and cheeks. It works like a charm, and I've got the chili eating contest winner t-shirts to prove it. i've successfully downed stunning amounts of "impossibly hot" buffalo wings with this trick, winning hundreds of dollars from otherwise perfectly intelligent college students. It's always the chem majors that twig to me first...
the retirement age is 65. Don't expect that to last.
Indeed. For what it is worth, according to current legislation, the full retirement age is 65 if you were born before 1937. It goes up after 1937, until 1960 where it levels off at 67. John Boehner (R - OH), Speaker of the House, has already floated the idea of rasing it to 70; he did that last year when the Republicans were still a minority in the House. Now that they have a majority, expect to see legislation to raise it higher than 67 if a Republican takes the White House in 2012.
Unless you earn too much, are a minority, have been raped or abused by an ex-partner, are too young or too old to have good judgment, etc.
If privacy isn't a right inherent to all people, then perhaps it is better if we enforce nudism. If we remove all of our clothing for queen and country, it would be much easier to spot any terrorist bombs.
Privacy is not an absolute right, because the expectation of privacy is constrained by the venue. Tell me, do you think you have a right to privacy when you are sitting in the right field bleachers at a Red Sox home game? Of course you don't. How about at a political rally? In a movie theater, maybe? How about at the local mall? You no more have an expectation of privacy on the internet than you do at a baseball game, or any of those other venues. Your attempt to defend privacy as an absolute right via your reductio ad absurdum argument is a non-starter.
It happens automatically. See the "Like" button? It's because it's already been downloaded - even if you NEVER dealt with facebook. Facebook even tracks users vi IP+browser fingerprinting who they can't tie to an existing account so that if/when you DO sign up, they can match that history with you. Totally illegal.
Totally illegal where, dude? The web, last time I checked, is a public venue with planetary visibility and zero expectation of privacy. What legislation, in what country, makes this illegal? More to the point, how on earth would such legislation ever be enforced? I'm not kidding, dude -- put up or shut up.
Ghostery says that TFA site is infested with Facebook Social Plugins (which Ghostery blocked).
Ghostery and NoScript are strongly recommended for avoiding this sort of crap. Disabling third-party cookies is another method. If you're not a user of Facebook, then yet another technique is to add a bunch of Facebook's sites to the blocked list in your router, or redirect them to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file. The sad thing is, we should not have to do these things; tracking without explicit authorization per site should not occur.
I'm cheering for the plaintiffs here, and hoping Facebook gets (i) stopped from doing this stuff in the future, and (ii) enough of a punishment that it makes a material difference to their financial results. Having Zuckerberg as the star of Ow, my balls hurt for several episodes could be an optional extra.
Since brick-and-mortar businesses don't need your explicit authorization to track you when you are on their premises, why should a website be any different? Brick-and-mortar stores like your local supermarket accumulate as much, if not more data about you than any website on the net (including your likeness, if you will allow that their security cam data can easily be correlated with purchase history.) Supermarkets routinely share (read: profit by selling) this information to anybody that wants it and can afford it; I'm not understanding why you think online retailers should be held to a different tracking standard than their brick-and-mortar competitors.
And what, you're going to go building to building and fill each one with impact grenades? I'm sure that will do tons to motivate the locals to help the US.
...no. I think you are missing the point. The idea is not to motivate the locals to help the US -- that was the so-called "hearts and minds" doctrine that failed so spectacularly in Vietnam. Rather, you want to motivate the locals not to help the terrorists. If the locals begin to understand that their non-combatant status isn't going to prevent them from being mowed down along side the terrorists, they will stop associating with the terrorists, and will in fact start actively cooperating with the occupation to remove that threat.
Having read that article, I would add, it says a "basic assumption"-- that is, a foundational assumption.
Every bit of knowledge and observation we have is fundamentally based on a set of assumptions; without them you would be left doubting everything, including your ability to doubt and your very existence.
Hmmm, I think you need to re-read your Descartes, especially the first, second, and third meditations in Meditations on First Philosophy. You can doubt everything, including the act of doubting, but you can't doubt that you are actually *doing* the doubting, so you must, therefore, exist. From that first philosophy, via the famous Cogito Descartes establishes Dualism, which survived in one form or another for three centuries, until it was thoroughly demolished by Dennet, Serle, and Churchland around the middle of the last century. You do seem to be sliding into the Existential Trap, though, so I highly recommend that you read Dennett's The Intensional Stance for an easy way out of it.
If we stop assuming causality, how on earth do you go about setting up experiments? You would have no reason to believe that you could POSSIBLY reproduce anything, if effects are simply random occurrences.
That's exactly right. Not assuming causality is no impediment to scientific inquiry -- ask any grad student studying quantum theory, if you don't want to take my word for it. You should read How the Laws of Physics Lie by Nancy Cartwright, a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics. Her theories on causal inference and objectivity are the direct result of her inquiry into the nature of quantum mixture states and this book is a standard text for students of the philosophy of science. You don't need causality to explain *anything* at the quantum level. Probabilities do just fine.
If science didnt believe there was a "why", it wouldnt bother with experiments in the first place. The why is what we are generally after-- what is the cause?
Nonsense. Priests and shaman want to tell you "why' something happened, scientists will only tell you "what" happened. "Why" questions are not scientific -- because to even ask a "why" question requires faith that there exists some kind of meaningful answer in the first place. Faith, by definition, is irrational, so "why" questions are, by extension, also irrational. A scientist, on the other hand, will tell you only "what" happened, and he will insist that he tell you what the error bars in his observations were, as well. If pressed, he will share with you the details of the model from which his assertions about reality flow, but he will then also be at pains to explain exactly where his model stops and reality continues. His is a rational approach to inquiry, unlike the shaman's and priest's approach, who demand the very same irrationality from their flock as they exhibit in their own assertions about reality.
Sounds like those morons who broke down on some mountain in Utah last year and one died when he ventured away from the truck. GPS is no fucking substitute for knowing how to read maps and find directions. Those skills should be required for tour bus drivers precisely because roads can get blocked for any number of reasons.
Really? you think you can legislate stupidity away? Darwin trumps the nanny state, dude. People stupid enough to hire a tour guide that doesn't have a plan B deserve their fate.
Wouldn't relying on GPS in a nuclear war be a bit crazy unless you were planning a first strike? That is, unless you expect your GPS satellites to survive the first strike?
I would think that LEO would be EMP city not long into WWIII.
Of course, if the submarine updates its position periodically then it would have a moderately accurate fix to start with, but I can't imagine that INS is that reliable with the accuracy of modern ICBMs. Then again, don't ICBMs have star-finders or such built into them once they get outside the atmosphere? So, you really should only need a pretty general idea of your location to launch one...
ICBMs don't rely on GPS, and neither do the boomers that are hosting them. As long as the ICBM knows the coordinates of target and the coordinates of the launch point, Newton is pretty much in the driver's seat -- the B in ICBM stands for ballistic, after all. ICBMs have inertial nav units that know precisely where they are at any time...they will hit the CEP whether they are launched from dockside at a US Navy yard, or three weeks into a patrol from 20 fathoms beneath the Bering Strait. I think this is why the military really didn't press the issue in this case. GPS is a tactical tool, not a strategic one. Loss of GPS capability is a minor contingency at best; it would compromise tactical command and control, and little else. And it would only be a contingency until the lost assets were replaced, a matter of seconds, or at most, minutes. For every known GPS sat, there are probably half a dozen dark ones that can be switched on and off as needed, and there are probably plans to loft replacements on very short notice should the need arise.
Look at a map of the area, a lot of the naval exercises are held less than 20 miles from shore. Islands and west coast of Scotland is prime tourist area, walking in wild places and outdoor sports are big here. Jamming GPS here might mean walkers getting lost (yes I know they should be able to navigate without GPS, but hey, they still come, and they still spend money in the hotels and local shops) and if they do get lost, mountain rescue might have to go out in rain and fog and snow and try to get them back off the hills and moors, so they might need GPS to coordinate with air sea rescue helicopters etc.
Close down tourism in this area and you've got a lot of unhappy local people and a lot more local unemployment.
This isn't the Pacific Ocean we're talking about here, where you can just shove off another couple of hundred miles....
Yep, tourists vs national security. Hard to make a profit off tourists that are carrying Kalishnikovs, dude...
...if you aren't part of the exercise, you shouldn't be in the fucking neighborhood, eh? Here in the beautiful but empty desert southwest of the US, we routinely conduct live-fire military exercises in the middle of an off-road playground used by people with more money than common sense. If they ignore the big red banners and cut through the padlocks on the gates while we are testing our latest and greatest munitions, it's their ass. If their next-of-kin try to litigate for damages, no jury on the planet would find for them. Why would it be different off the coast of Scotland?