I think the only remaining limit on Dubya's power is "impeachable offense" and they decided the faking would be such. As you noted, there are a whole lot of things that could go wrong with such a forgery, and the resulting impeachment would be really hard even for Republicans to vote against.
On the other hand, the tin-hat crowd thinks that there was yet another foulup during the invasion, and a large CIA gang was wiped out by accident after they had gotten into Baghdad.
Okay, have it your way. Dubya isn't lying. In that case, he simply has no idea of what is going on and he's totally incompetent. Lots of evidence for that, too.
So which do you prefer? Dubya knows and lies, or he doesn't know and he's fucking up? Or would you prefer to mix and match depending on the issue and the particular counterfactual statements and results?
Quite the contrary, it would have been very easy to prove disarmament. Providing documentation as to how and when such activities occured, and allowing inspectors to check out the sites and scrap material to verify the truth of the documentation would have done the job.
No, that is not true. The Iraqis had no control over most of the situation. Things were destroyed or misplaced or hidden by them or by us, people who know what had been destroyed or where it had been sent were killed. Chaos everywhere. No, it is not possible to prove *ANYTHING* in such situations. Not just the things and the people, but of course the records and evidence.
Doesn't matter anyway. Dubya was going to have his war no matter what. http://www.counterpunch.org/davis01082005.html is an interesting explanation of many of the deeper reasons--but rather a heavy read on the fundamentalist mind.
Didn't think so, since it's almost certainly wrong. Depends on whether or not you can manage to redefine the majority "of the world" as being limited to the people as ignorant as you.
Unless it was supposed to be a joke. In which case it fell quite flat.
Right now it is actually knocked down to 0, though I think it should be a +5 funny/insightful. The topic has obviously attracted the attention of the Bible thumpers with mod points. Remember they are not able to accept the lack of evidence of God's existence as any reason for doubt.
To give you another chance to see it, the original said:
Dear Creationists,
We'll put these stickers on our science textbooks when you put "God's existence is a theory, not a fact" on your bibles.
Bullshit. You're playing word games with "theory". The scientific usage of the term does not mean "untrue" or "fantastic", any more than "liberal" means "enemy of the fatherland". Oh wait, that was somewhere else. Now it's supposed to mean "enemy of the homeland".
A scientific theory is an internally consistent model that explains the connections between various facts and evidence. The fundamental trait is that it is subject to test and refinement, and it *MUST* take all evidence into consideration. No fair dismissing awkward facts by just saying "That's merely the work of the Devil seeking to confound us!"
The fundamental problem with faith-based reasoning starting from a literal interpretation of the Bible is that you're saying your God is an idiot. The Bible is badly written, including plenty of internal inconsistencies. If your Bible-limited God was not an idiot, then He would have been aware of information theory even when He was causing the Bible to be written (though we poor and limited humans have only developed the necessary mathematics in the last century), and He would have taken it into account and even used it to "encode" His message in a way that would resist confusion and distortions.
It is *NOT* a coincidence that the religious fundamentalists are most concentrated in monolingual countries (like the US and certain Arab countries). People who are fluent in more than one language will (of course) be especially troubled by the inconsistencies between the translations. (Again, an area where an understanding of information theory could have helped out.)
When I was young and oh-so-naive I thought that together we would make the newsgroups grow and blossom like the sum of human knowledge. Au contraire, the proper image is of an abandoned garden overgrown with weeds. Compare the trolls' and spammers' posts to poison ivy and nettles? Contrary to my youthful fantasies, the only future interest in the newsgroups will be from a few mathematical epistemologists who will use the posts as data in order to analyze certain forms of signal loss. Though no one will look at the actual posts, they will write fine academic articles containing such thrilling snippets as:
"The graph in Figure 1 illustrates the information death of the newsgroups as evaluated using Equation 4. It covers the interval from the first time when the average SNR for the newsgroups reached zero until the last time it left the positive signal zone. The death of the newsgroups is usually assigned to the second date, in spite of the continued existence of pockets of actual information until early in 2007. In Table 3, we have some of the related demographic information about the Internet user population during this period...."
They might even include a footnote about the actual shutdown of the last NNTP server. I wonder what the last post will be? However, I'm already certain it will be posted by a troll.
The big question is actually not when, but what to wear to the funeral. Traditional dark suit and black tie seems too cliche, so I'm leaning towards dressing as a circus clown. (This is actually mostly from a post I wrote in alt.config a few weeks ago.)
I think blaming JAWS or Microsoft is completely unreasonable, especially when you try to put the blame in economic terms. It's actually a very good thing that the "market" for blind people is so small and not a normal economic thing.
Also partly a disclaimer, but I do a lot of work for some of the accessibility researchers at IBM, including some who are themselves disabled in various ways. The economics are always problematic, so they are always trying to think of ways to generalize and leverage the technologies into broader markets. For example, trying to map normal Web pages to small-screen portable devices has many similarities to the experience of someone with certain visual problems. There are also situations where visual interfaces are not practical, and many of the principles of the blind interfaces are applicable.
By the way, I haven't seen any mention of their latest major project, aDesigner. It goes quite a bit beyond the regular accessibilty checkers like Bobby. It tries to give sighted designers a real understanding of the vision-impaired experience, while providing the supporting information to make effective changes easily. In a lot of cases, it's hard to link the accessibilty problem to the HTML (or Java) that created it.
Sorry to burst your little American bubble, but cell phones that receive TV are old news in Japan.http://www.jiten.com/dicmi/docs/k9/15861.htm is the only link I could easily find that included a bit of English. Some of the dates are last year, but the ones I glanced at seemed to be reviews, so the phones must have been available before that. I can't recall when the phones actually became available.
Interesting question about dealing with updated/deleted email, but I'd like to extend it to consider other features beyond email, such as identifying duplicate personal files (and email), identical files with different names, and maybe even identically named files with different content. (The last is mostly for digitical camera pictures, though I'm not sure what to do about resolving it conveniently, apart from my current use of seperate directories.)
Therefore, may I extend the question to ask if anyone has a reference to a good comparative review of these tools? The ones I know of are Google's and Copernic's, and I've heard a little about BlinkX (mostly in the old artical on/.), and now we have Yahoo's entry.
Perhaps I'm just jaded, but I don't think the Japanese gadgets are so great. It took me several days to get used to the bizarre new toilets after they remodeled the rest rooms at my office... Actually, I blame the French for that specific problem.
No, the manufacturing of ThinkPads is distributed to various companies (though I think some are made in Japan), but all of the design has been done in Japan up to now. Certain subsystems have drawn on work done elsewhere, mostly research, but the designs and testing are done here (since I'm located in that selfsame part of Japan).
Anyway, it's a funny world. Low-margin commodity businesses are good for the people and companies that get to buy the cheap commodities, but bad for the companies that have to produce the commodities and suffer from the competition. Stock price uber alles, you know.
However once someone gains solid control of the commodity market, then heaven help everyone, but that's long-term thinking, and very out of fashion.
Or should that be "Death of the newsgroups"? This new version has actually been around for a while, and I'm still unimpressed. It seems like the essential idea is to embrace and replace the newsgroups with an extension along some strange dimension. Vaguely reminds me of Yahoo's groups, which has always been a wasteland.
The real problem Google has to address if they want to restore value to the newsgroups is improvement of the SNR. The amount of garbage posted worldwide has been growing exponentially, but even faster since perpetual September arrived. Even the more technical areas are neck deep in tripe, but most of it is just like Hyde Park Speaker's Corner of the world and/or very cheap advertising.
Abuse of anonymity is one of the largest problems. There are proactive solutions (basically various forms of moderation--shades of/.) if you like that approach. However Google might have the capabilities to do it right, with analytical reaction to take revenge on the trolls. How about deep header analysis combined with personal usage patterns to track the trolls across all of their identities? Then they could offer a killfile feature that would really kill that troll dead!
Also, I'd want a tainting option. I don't even want to see the posts of the people who are suckered into feeding the trolls.
Come to think of it, they should go all the way and evaluate the perspicuity of the posters and use colors to indicate which posters actually know what the devil they are writing about!
Or how about a contagious killfile? There could be an option for killfile conflict resolution and filtering. If one poster has killfiled someone else in the thread, and you have that option enabled, then it would be like you had also killfiled the troll, and you'd have some hope of seeing it like an intelligible conversation. In case of conflicts, where two participants have killfiled each other, first it would check your killfile to break the tie, and if that didn't work, it could show you a few representative posts from each side so you could make up your mind if there's likely to be any signal anywhere in there.
Shouldn't that post be modified "funny"? There is no "wild distortion" modifier. He has to include part of the post and then try to make up a fantasy explanation of why it means what HE says it *REALLY* means, which is truly hilarious.
On second thought, I think it should have a "+5 hypocritical" rating.
Or should that be "Death of the newsgroups?" Anyway, Google already seems to have backed off of their new version and rerouted back to the older Group interface. This new version has actually been around for a while, and I'm still unimpressed. It seems like the essential idea is to embrace and replace the newsgroups with an extension along some strange dimension. Vaguely reminds me of Yahoo's groups, which has always been a wasteland.
The real problem Google has to address if they want to restore value to the newsgroups is improvement of the SNR. The amount of garbage posted worldwide has been growing exponentially, but even faster since perpetual September arrived. Even the more technical areas are neck deep in tripe, but most of it is just like Hyde Park Speaker's Corner of the world and/or very cheap advertising.
Abuse of anonymity is one of the largest problems. There are proactive solutions (basically various forms of moderation--shades of/.) if you like that approach. However Google might have the capabilities to do it right, with analytical reaction to take revenge on the trolls. How about deep header analysis combined with personal usage patterns to track the trolls across all of their identities? Then they could offer a killfile feature that would really kill that troll dead!
Also, I'd want a tainting option. I don't even want to see the posts of the people who are suckered into feeding the trolls.
Come to think of it, they should go all the way and evaluate the perspicuity of the posters and use colors to indicate which posters actually know what the devil they are writing about!
SCO ups the claims to $5 billion, Dubya stays in the White House, and SCO's stock price rises to $4.25. Harmless coincidences? I think not.
When SCO broke into the $2 territory, I really hoped they were going to continue all the way to the bottom. The stock market really is nuts (which is why I'm into Euros these days).
Sorry, and my apologies. However, I did search in a bunch of places and follow a bunch of the links without seeing an actual speed, either in kph or mph. I tried to make that clear in my original comment, but all the references I did find were metric. I wish you (or one of the other people reporting the higher value) had included a concrete link to go look at.
However, assuming that all the reports are accurate, then it is a significant technological improvement--that no one actually needs. At least not in Japan or the States, where you can't drive at such speeds in any case. Is the German autobahn still no limit?
On the battery exchange part of the post, I had one thought to add. The batteries could include a small memory to track the history of their usage and recharging, and that data should make it possible to callibrate the "gas gauge" quite accurately on the fly. Even in that case, I'm not sure how I'd want it to display. I think it would still be impractical for long-distance travel even if you could link it to the car navigation system to show the battery exchange locations close to your current range limit.
Uh, that MUST be 230 kph, not mph
on
230mph Electric Car
·
· Score: 2, Informative
All the units I can find on all of the linked pages are metric. It's still plenty fast enough for normal folks, but let's not get ridiculous. The ridiculous part is America clinging to weird archaic units and the even weirder Dubya Bush.
Someone else mentioned battery exchange. I don't know if I was the source for that, but I described it some time ago as part of the necessary infrastructure for electric taxis. In that case, the battery ownership can be "globalized" to the cab companies, but I think it would be harder to do for privately owned cars.
Also, the troublesome side effect of battery exchange would be like having different size gas tanks depending on the condition of your current battery. I don't think this approach would be very practical for long distance travel, though it would be fine for commuters and cabs. It depends on your personal confidence level, but in my case, if my daily travel was less than about 2/3 of the normal charge state, I'd feel secure enough. If I was able to charge it up while I was at work or parked elsewhere, that would of course improve the effective range without battery swapping. You'd notice your battery deteriorating over time, but it would be a gradual thing, not like a sudden shock when you exchanged a factory fresh battery for an almost unchargeable one.
Actually, SCOX was in the $2 territory, but they've miraculously bounced back up to $3.50 over the last couple of days. No, I can't understand it. Makes as much sense as the recent election.
40% "none of the above" 30% Dubya 15% Not-Bush 14% Kerry
(Okay, guessing on the split, but "none of the above" definitely won again.)
I predict there will be lots of sudden network communication problems on election night--while they figure out how many votes they need to switch around to make the "correct" result. The electronic votes are going to be the *LAST* ones "counted".
I think the main point of that article was not made very clear. What we have here are two diametrically opposed world views. The scientific world view is bound by the facts and everything is subject to question. The competing view is the fanatic world view where the conclusions are decided in advance, and any disagreeable facts have to be rejected. That's where Dubya is coming from, and it's no wonder that so many of his supporters are in the same weird place. Not all religious people are that way, but it's much more common for them.
From outside of the US, I think the scientific view is clearly dominant in most countries, and they are basically befuddled by what is going on on in America, and alarmed by the force behind the befuddlement. There are a few crazy and fanatical countries out there, but the US is clearly the strongest and most dangerous one.
I think that explains how a lot of our friends see the Iraq situation. They agree that it is a mess and that it needs to be cleaned up, and they would even be willing to help. However, on the other hand, it is keeping the suddenly belligerent US busy, and it is also clearly BushCo's own deliberate mistake. From that perspective, it's just as well to let the US keep playing with the tar baby for now, and their biggest fear is probably that BushCo might unilaterally withdraw and thereby force the rest of the world to clean it up. Fortunately (from their perspective), the oil aspect makes that unfeasible and unlikely.
The ugly facts are that Saddam was only a nuisance and not worth an entire war. Dubya believed otherwise, and to heck with those facts. What other crazy things does Dubya believe?
I believe I don't want to find out, and I hope Dubya is out of there very soon. Fortunately, fanatical birds of a feather tend to flock together in their little red states, so it increasingly looks like the swing states are going to swing the other way.
What's wrong with paper? Well, what if the outcome is wrong? For example, what if Gore actually won Florida and someone looks at the paper ballots and finds out?
Whoops. Too late.
But at least with Diebold's electronic system even if no one knows who really won the election, at least there won't be any of those nasty residual questions. The machine says who won, and that's it.
What do you mean the total number of votes reported is larger than the population of China?
Okay, I confess I haven't read all of the answers, but... Unless someone can certify that the candidates actually sat down and wrote or even READ the answers submitted in their names, I think you have to regard this as a really meaningless substitute for poking in their heads. You want the truth? A hefty shot of truth serum and a lie detector would be useful aids, too, though we can stop short of Abu Ghraib techniques. We already know politicians are going to tell us whatever they think we want to hear, even without torture. In reality some staff hack handled it, and it's barely possible they even mentioned the/. crowd's interest to the actual candidate. Only reason the candidate would really be interested would be if the staff member could say something like "... and here are some questions from/. which reaches about 7,000 undecided voters in the crucial undecided state of...."
"Kerry" says the right things in the usual way, so whoopee. The important thing to me is that I'm pro-science and Dubya is VERY clearly anti-science, and LOTS of real scientists of every stripe are endorsing Kerry or opposing Dubya. Dubya is fundamentally a non-scientific fanatic--Dubya already knows what he thinks and isn't going to allow himself to be confused by any contradictory facts.
As far as computers are concerned, Dubya is completely out of it. His recent discovery of the "internets" says pretty much everything in his case. Remember that Dubya is NOT a reader. He gets his information by listening, and presumably by asking questions, though the reports are that he rarely bothers to ask. Still, if he was asking any questions about computer-related issues he would have learned how to say "Internet" by now. You might want to dismiss it as yet another stupid slip of his tongue, evidence of excessive medication, or even senility, but it doesn't matter. If you are a scientist or a computerist or any stripe, Dubya is NOT your real friend.
Nader has samply fallen off the wall too many times and no one is going to be able to put his head together again. It doesn't matter that he's right on many issues. What matters is the way the system is set up and the fact that you have to play the game by the rules. If Nader is not simply crazy, then I think his real game plan at this point is to help Dubya stay in the White House so the system will collapse and Nader is hoping the resulting revolution will produce a better system. Putting on my historian's hat, I think that on the average that is what happens, but there's no guarantee--but it is guaranteed that a lot of people will get nastily stepped on during the revolution whether or not the new system is better.
Sorry, but unless someone can certify that the candidates actually sat down and wrote or even READ the answers submitted in their names, I think you have to regard this as a really meaningless substitute for poking in their heads. A hefty shot of truth serum and a lie detector would be useful aids, too, though we can stop short of Abu Ghraib techniques. We already know they're going to tell us whatever they think we want to hear, even without torture. In reality some staff hack handled it, and it's barely possible they even mentioned the/. crowd's interest to the actual candidate. Only reason the candidate would really be interested would be if the staff member could say something like "... and here are some questions from/. which reaches about 7,000 undecided voters in the crucial undecided state of...."
Kerry has said the right things in the usual way, so whoopee. The important thing to me is that I'm pro-science and Dubya is VERY clearly anti-science, and LOTS of real scientists of every stripe are endorsing Kerry or opposing Dubya.
Dubya is completely out of it. His recent discovery of the "internets" says pretty much everything in his case. Remember that Dubya is NOT a reader. He gets his information by listening, and presumably by asking questions, though the reports are that he rarely bothers to ask. Still, if he was asking any questions about computer-related issues he would have learned how to say "Internet" by now. You might want to dismiss it as yet another stupid slip of his tongue, evidence of excessive medication, or even senility, but it doesn't matter. If you are a scientist or a computerist or any stripe, Dubya is NOT your real friend.
Nader has samply fallen off the wall too many times and no one is going to be able to put his head together again. It doesn't matter that he's right on many issues. What matters is the way the system is set up and the fact that you have to play the game by the rules. If Nader is not simply crazy, then I think his real game plan at this point is to help Dubya stay in the White House so the system will collapse and Nader is hoping the resulting revolution will produce a better system. Putting on my historian's hat, I think that on the average that is what happens, but there's no guarantee--but it is guaranteed that a lot of people will get nastily stepped on during the revolution whether or not the new system is better.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, the tin-hat crowd thinks that there was yet another foulup during the invasion, and a large CIA gang was wiped out by accident after they had gotten into Baghdad.
So which do you prefer? Dubya knows and lies, or he doesn't know and he's fucking up? Or would you prefer to mix and match depending on the issue and the particular counterfactual statements and results?
No, that is not true. The Iraqis had no control over most of the situation. Things were destroyed or misplaced or hidden by them or by us, people who know what had been destroyed or where it had been sent were killed. Chaos everywhere. No, it is not possible to prove *ANYTHING* in such situations. Not just the things and the people, but of course the records and evidence.
Doesn't matter anyway. Dubya was going to have his war no matter what. http://www.counterpunch.org/davis01082005.html is an interesting explanation of many of the deeper reasons--but rather a heavy read on the fundamentalist mind.
Got a source for that?
Didn't think so, since it's almost certainly wrong. Depends on whether or not you can manage to redefine the majority "of the world" as being limited to the people as ignorant as you.
Unless it was supposed to be a joke. In which case it fell quite flat.
"Yes and Yes. Now what is your third question?"
To give you another chance to see it, the original said:
Dear Creationists,
We'll put these stickers on our science textbooks when you put "God's existence is a theory, not a fact" on your bibles.
I say "Right on!"
A scientific theory is an internally consistent model that explains the connections between various facts and evidence. The fundamental trait is that it is subject to test and refinement, and it *MUST* take all evidence into consideration. No fair dismissing awkward facts by just saying "That's merely the work of the Devil seeking to confound us!"
The fundamental problem with faith-based reasoning starting from a literal interpretation of the Bible is that you're saying your God is an idiot. The Bible is badly written, including plenty of internal inconsistencies. If your Bible-limited God was not an idiot, then He would have been aware of information theory even when He was causing the Bible to be written (though we poor and limited humans have only developed the necessary mathematics in the last century), and He would have taken it into account and even used it to "encode" His message in a way that would resist confusion and distortions.
It is *NOT* a coincidence that the religious fundamentalists are most concentrated in monolingual countries (like the US and certain Arab countries). People who are fluent in more than one language will (of course) be especially troubled by the inconsistencies between the translations. (Again, an area where an understanding of information theory could have helped out.)
"The graph in Figure 1 illustrates the information death of the newsgroups as evaluated using Equation 4. It covers the interval from the first time when the average SNR for the newsgroups reached zero until the last time it left the positive signal zone. The death of the newsgroups is usually assigned to the second date, in spite of the continued existence of pockets of actual information until early in 2007. In Table 3, we have some of the related demographic information about the Internet user population during this period...."
They might even include a footnote about the actual shutdown of the last NNTP server. I wonder what the last post will be? However, I'm already certain it will be posted by a troll.
The big question is actually not when, but what to wear to the funeral. Traditional dark suit and black tie seems too cliche, so I'm leaning towards dressing as a circus clown. (This is actually mostly from a post I wrote in alt.config a few weeks ago.)
Also partly a disclaimer, but I do a lot of work for some of the accessibility researchers at IBM, including some who are themselves disabled in various ways. The economics are always problematic, so they are always trying to think of ways to generalize and leverage the technologies into broader markets. For example, trying to map normal Web pages to small-screen portable devices has many similarities to the experience of someone with certain visual problems. There are also situations where visual interfaces are not practical, and many of the principles of the blind interfaces are applicable.
By the way, I haven't seen any mention of their latest major project, aDesigner. It goes quite a bit beyond the regular accessibilty checkers like Bobby. It tries to give sighted designers a real understanding of the vision-impaired experience, while providing the supporting information to make effective changes easily. In a lot of cases, it's hard to link the accessibilty problem to the HTML (or Java) that created it.
Sorry to burst your little American bubble, but cell phones that receive TV are old news in Japan.http://www.jiten.com/dicmi/docs/k9/15861.htm is the only link I could easily find that included a bit of English. Some of the dates are last year, but the ones I glanced at seemed to be reviews, so the phones must have been available before that. I can't recall when the phones actually became available.
Therefore, may I extend the question to ask if anyone has a reference to a good comparative review of these tools? The ones I know of are Google's and Copernic's, and I've heard a little about BlinkX (mostly in the old artical on /.), and now we have Yahoo's entry.
Plastic Ninjas, Fake Nurses, and other Chindonya Stories
Perhaps I'm just jaded, but I don't think the Japanese gadgets are so great. It took me several days to get used to the bizarre new toilets after they remodeled the rest rooms at my office... Actually, I blame the French for that specific problem.
Anyway, it's a funny world. Low-margin commodity businesses are good for the people and companies that get to buy the cheap commodities, but bad for the companies that have to produce the commodities and suffer from the competition. Stock price uber alles, you know.
However once someone gains solid control of the commodity market, then heaven help everyone, but that's long-term thinking, and very out of fashion.
The real problem Google has to address if they want to restore value to the newsgroups is improvement of the SNR. The amount of garbage posted worldwide has been growing exponentially, but even faster since perpetual September arrived. Even the more technical areas are neck deep in tripe, but most of it is just like Hyde Park Speaker's Corner of the world and/or very cheap advertising.
Abuse of anonymity is one of the largest problems. There are proactive solutions (basically various forms of moderation--shades of /.) if you like that approach. However Google might have the capabilities to do it right, with analytical reaction to take revenge on the trolls. How about deep header analysis combined with personal usage patterns to track the trolls across all of their identities? Then they could offer a killfile feature that would really kill that troll dead!
Also, I'd want a tainting option. I don't even want to see the posts of the people who are suckered into feeding the trolls.
Come to think of it, they should go all the way and evaluate the perspicuity of the posters and use colors to indicate which posters actually know what the devil they are writing about!
Or how about a contagious killfile? There could be an option for killfile conflict resolution and filtering. If one poster has killfiled someone else in the thread, and you have that option enabled, then it would be like you had also killfiled the troll, and you'd have some hope of seeing it like an intelligible conversation. In case of conflicts, where two participants have killfiled each other, first it would check your killfile to break the tie, and if that didn't work, it could show you a few representative posts from each side so you could make up your mind if there's likely to be any signal anywhere in there.
On second thought, I think it should have a "+5 hypocritical" rating.
The real problem Google has to address if they want to restore value to the newsgroups is improvement of the SNR. The amount of garbage posted worldwide has been growing exponentially, but even faster since perpetual September arrived. Even the more technical areas are neck deep in tripe, but most of it is just like Hyde Park Speaker's Corner of the world and/or very cheap advertising.
Abuse of anonymity is one of the largest problems. There are proactive solutions (basically various forms of moderation--shades of /.) if you like that approach. However Google might have the capabilities to do it right, with analytical reaction to take revenge on the trolls. How about deep header analysis combined with personal usage patterns to track the trolls across all of their identities? Then they could offer a killfile feature that would really kill that troll dead!
Also, I'd want a tainting option. I don't even want to see the posts of the people who are suckered into feeding the trolls.
Come to think of it, they should go all the way and evaluate the perspicuity of the posters and use colors to indicate which posters actually know what the devil they are writing about!
When SCO broke into the $2 territory, I really hoped they were going to continue all the way to the bottom. The stock market really is nuts (which is why I'm into Euros these days).
However, assuming that all the reports are accurate, then it is a significant technological improvement--that no one actually needs. At least not in Japan or the States, where you can't drive at such speeds in any case. Is the German autobahn still no limit?
On the battery exchange part of the post, I had one thought to add. The batteries could include a small memory to track the history of their usage and recharging, and that data should make it possible to callibrate the "gas gauge" quite accurately on the fly. Even in that case, I'm not sure how I'd want it to display. I think it would still be impractical for long-distance travel even if you could link it to the car navigation system to show the battery exchange locations close to your current range limit.
Someone else mentioned battery exchange. I don't know if I was the source for that, but I described it some time ago as part of the necessary infrastructure for electric taxis. In that case, the battery ownership can be "globalized" to the cab companies, but I think it would be harder to do for privately owned cars.
Also, the troublesome side effect of battery exchange would be like having different size gas tanks depending on the condition of your current battery. I don't think this approach would be very practical for long distance travel, though it would be fine for commuters and cabs. It depends on your personal confidence level, but in my case, if my daily travel was less than about 2/3 of the normal charge state, I'd feel secure enough. If I was able to charge it up while I was at work or parked elsewhere, that would of course improve the effective range without battery swapping. You'd notice your battery deteriorating over time, but it would be a gradual thing, not like a sudden shock when you exchanged a factory fresh battery for an almost unchargeable one.
Actually, SCOX was in the $2 territory, but they've miraculously bounced back up to $3.50 over the last couple of days. No, I can't understand it. Makes as much sense as the recent election.
40% "none of the above"
30% Dubya
15% Not-Bush
14% Kerry
(Okay, guessing on the split, but "none of the above" definitely won again.)
I predict there will be lots of sudden network communication problems on election night--while they figure out how many votes they need to switch around to make the "correct" result. The electronic votes are going to be the *LAST* ones "counted".
From outside of the US, I think the scientific view is clearly dominant in most countries, and they are basically befuddled by what is going on on in America, and alarmed by the force behind the befuddlement. There are a few crazy and fanatical countries out there, but the US is clearly the strongest and most dangerous one.
I think that explains how a lot of our friends see the Iraq situation. They agree that it is a mess and that it needs to be cleaned up, and they would even be willing to help. However, on the other hand, it is keeping the suddenly belligerent US busy, and it is also clearly BushCo's own deliberate mistake. From that perspective, it's just as well to let the US keep playing with the tar baby for now, and their biggest fear is probably that BushCo might unilaterally withdraw and thereby force the rest of the world to clean it up. Fortunately (from their perspective), the oil aspect makes that unfeasible and unlikely.
The ugly facts are that Saddam was only a nuisance and not worth an entire war. Dubya believed otherwise, and to heck with those facts. What other crazy things does Dubya believe?
I believe I don't want to find out, and I hope Dubya is out of there very soon. Fortunately, fanatical birds of a feather tend to flock together in their little red states, so it increasingly looks like the swing states are going to swing the other way.
What's wrong with paper? Well, what if the outcome is wrong? For example, what if Gore actually won Florida and someone looks at the paper ballots and finds out?
Whoops. Too late.
But at least with Diebold's electronic system even if no one knows who really won the election, at least there won't be any of those nasty residual questions. The machine says who won, and that's it.
What do you mean the total number of votes reported is larger than the population of China?
"Kerry" says the right things in the usual way, so whoopee. The important thing to me is that I'm pro-science and Dubya is VERY clearly anti-science, and LOTS of real scientists of every stripe are endorsing Kerry or opposing Dubya. Dubya is fundamentally a non-scientific fanatic--Dubya already knows what he thinks and isn't going to allow himself to be confused by any contradictory facts.
As far as computers are concerned, Dubya is completely out of it. His recent discovery of the "internets" says pretty much everything in his case. Remember that Dubya is NOT a reader. He gets his information by listening, and presumably by asking questions, though the reports are that he rarely bothers to ask. Still, if he was asking any questions about computer-related issues he would have learned how to say "Internet" by now. You might want to dismiss it as yet another stupid slip of his tongue, evidence of excessive medication, or even senility, but it doesn't matter. If you are a scientist or a computerist or any stripe, Dubya is NOT your real friend.
Nader has samply fallen off the wall too many times and no one is going to be able to put his head together again. It doesn't matter that he's right on many issues. What matters is the way the system is set up and the fact that you have to play the game by the rules. If Nader is not simply crazy, then I think his real game plan at this point is to help Dubya stay in the White House so the system will collapse and Nader is hoping the resulting revolution will produce a better system. Putting on my historian's hat, I think that on the average that is what happens, but there's no guarantee--but it is guaranteed that a lot of people will get nastily stepped on during the revolution whether or not the new system is better.
Kerry has said the right things in the usual way, so whoopee. The important thing to me is that I'm pro-science and Dubya is VERY clearly anti-science, and LOTS of real scientists of every stripe are endorsing Kerry or opposing Dubya.
Dubya is completely out of it. His recent discovery of the "internets" says pretty much everything in his case. Remember that Dubya is NOT a reader. He gets his information by listening, and presumably by asking questions, though the reports are that he rarely bothers to ask. Still, if he was asking any questions about computer-related issues he would have learned how to say "Internet" by now. You might want to dismiss it as yet another stupid slip of his tongue, evidence of excessive medication, or even senility, but it doesn't matter. If you are a scientist or a computerist or any stripe, Dubya is NOT your real friend.
Nader has samply fallen off the wall too many times and no one is going to be able to put his head together again. It doesn't matter that he's right on many issues. What matters is the way the system is set up and the fact that you have to play the game by the rules. If Nader is not simply crazy, then I think his real game plan at this point is to help Dubya stay in the White House so the system will collapse and Nader is hoping the resulting revolution will produce a better system. Putting on my historian's hat, I think that on the average that is what happens, but there's no guarantee--but it is guaranteed that a lot of people will get nastily stepped on during the revolution whether or not the new system is better.