Unfortunately for your imagination, it has decided on a scenario that has been the actual case for decades: gas couplings in the OR are in fact unique so, for example, oxygen and anesthesia cannot be confused with each other (this is the case in Canada, at least).
And strangely enough the disaster you fantasize about hasn't happened.
Maybe you're just a fearful conservative making shit up to save yourself the dreadful pain of dealing with change.
So this is a "green" home for people who hate the environment? I don't get it.
It is well-known and uncontroversial that urban living is far more environmentally friendly than country living. If you live in downtown NYC you are using less of everything than if you live in rural Vermont.
Epistemology is the philosophy of how you know something for certain.
Nope. Epistemology is the study of how we know. Certainty is almost completely irrelevant, unless you're a Cartesian Rationalist or insane (but I repeat myself...)
Hardly anything is certain and yet we somehow manage to get along just fine. I'm certain of a trivially small number of things, yet have no difficulty whatsoever answering a vast array of practical questions like, "How do I build a killer robot?" and "Where are my socks?"
Why anyone thinks that certainty is a remotely interesting aspect of knowledge is beyond me. I guess a few mathmaticians might care about it, but no physicist or other scientist does, nor does any engineer nor anyone else. It is only a few sophomoronic philosophers who really keep harping on about it, who are apparently too stupid to realize how uninteresting and irrelevant it is.
The link didn't mention a lower bound for the detection sensitivity based on looking at Cassini power outputs.
The arxiv.org link at the bottom of the article provides just that. The variation in counting (not decay) rates observed is about 0.1% over the 3% variation in Earth's orbital distance, implying about (3E-2)/R**2 as the relationship, and the Cassini results put an upper limit on of less than (0.84E-4)/R**2 and comparable for a/R term.
Ergo, the Cassini results put on a limit that is more than two orders of magnitude smaller than the original observation. Ergo, the original observation is not due to simply radial distance from the sun, by the perfectly ordinary standards of proof that we use every day.
That is, there might be some bizzare confounding effect, but I wouldn't bet my next mortgage payment on it. Would you?
Biblical truth has been handed down for over 2000 years. In the last 2000 years how many times have scientists changed their mind about what they know to be true? Sorry, I have more faith in God than I do in man. But then I don't have a vested interest in disproving His existence.
You seem to think you're making an argument here, but it isn't clear what it is.
What scientists know to be true is: to be credible ideas must be tested by systematic observation and controlled experiment. We have never changed that belief, and never will, because when we do we will cease to be scientists and become something else. Religious nutjobs, maybe.
You also state "Biblical truth" has been handed down for over 2000 years, as if you know that the Bible is true, but this is begging the question. HOW do you know that the Bible is true? It obviously isn't simply that the text of the Bible (the OT anyway) has been handed down for over two millenia. Sumerian myth, various bits of Chinese and other Eastern philosophy, and so on have all been handed down for at least that long, and you obviously can't believe them too, as they frequently contradict the Bible, which also contradicts itself.
So it isn't clear why you think the Bible is in the perfectly ordinary sense of the word "true", or why anyone would believe it. Being handed down with relatively modest changes over a long period of time is no criterion for truth. In a few thousand years people will no-doubt still have copies of Shakespeare's plays, and only a gibbering idiot would believe that Romeo and Juliet is true because it has been handed down unchanged for over 2000 years.
So why do you believe the Bible is true, but you do not believe that ideas, to be credible, must survive being tested by systematic observation and controlled experiment?
The price fluctuates, but mainly not because of variations in supply and demand...
Err... the price of gold fluctuates entirely due to supply and demand, mostly demand, and most of that demand is speculative. But speculative demand is still demand, just as government supply in the case of helium is still supply. You don't get to decide what supply or demand is "real": it all is.
The GP is correct that markets are price-setting mechanisms that match supply and demand, however imperfectly. The problem with markets is not that people are greedy but that they are dishonest. The power of markets comes from greed, the flaws from dishonesty. Strong legal protections and various kinds of open, transparent, comprehensible government regulation are required to deal with people's dishonesty.
God is all-knowing, so any attempt at knowing anything is an attempt to step on divine prerogative, obviously. And why were Adam and Eve thrown out of Paradise? That's right! Eating the fruit of the Tree of KNOWLEDGE.
God doesn't want us to know. Anything. It's right there in the Bible. Read it. Live it. Die miserably of a preventable disase by it!
So because students are taught with years of 1 + 2 = ( ) "Fill in the blank" They are suddenly supposed to understand that "= ( )" doesn't mean "do the math on the left and put the answer on the right"?
Aha! I've been trying to figure out what everyone is going on about, and your comment explains it. The problem is that American students think an equals sign is like an "execute" button, not a passive statement of equality.
So basically, everyone here who disagrees with the statement of the question is agreeing with the research conclusion: most Americans--apparently even nominally educated ones--don't knwo what "=" means, because if they did there would be absolutely no way they could interpret 4+3+2=()+2 as ANYTHING other than 4+3+2=x+2. There is simply no other possible interpetation if you accept that "=" means "the things on either side of this symbol are strictly identical".
Now, Americans can argue that their interpretation of "=" is superior and threaten to invade anyone who disagrees, but they will then need to introduce a new symbol (like C's "==") that has the same meaning as "=" does in the rest of the world, because you really can't do math without it.
Traditionally mens jobs were more dangerous, and fatalities among men were more common
Traditionally? You mean: in the modern world, today.
If someone dies on the job today the odds are over 90% they are male. Most of the really dangerous jobs like farming, lumbering and so on are still overwhelmingly dominated by men.
It's true that everything has become safer, so this is no longer a major demographic issue, but don't kid yourself: "Men last!" is still alive and well as a slogan (it is usually stated in the converse form, mind, but the logical implication is inescapable.)
All that said: male-male mate competition is a huge factor in human evolution. It explains why we have such a high degree of sexual dimorphism, which is only seen in species where males compete for multiple mating opportunties. All the "just so" stories about hunting and crap are just that: crap. Male lions are bigger than female lions, but guess which one does the majority of the hunting?
Male humans are big and agressive not because we compete over external resources or hunt down wild animals, but because our male ancestors were able to intimidate and bully their way into more-or-less exclusive control of more than one female. This doesn't make polygamy right or appropriate for modern society, but it is the key to understanding why we are the way we are, and therefore controlling and channeling our aggressive and inappropriate impulses into avenues that are more useful and productive than violence and war.
I'm sure that the Taliban greatly appreciated suddenly having a comprehensive list of the names of hundreds of Afghan civilian informants.
Since the Taliban already have this list, you will of course have no compuntion about showing it to the rest of us? You and others like you keep making this claim, but I've yet to see any list of names, and have thus far heard of only three names in the documents, and possibly a few more people that are identifiable via some more-or-less-shakey chain of indirect inference.
That's fewer people than NATO troops kill on in a single mistaken attack on a wedding party, so if you're all so deeply concerned about Afghan civilians, could you please point us to your heartfelt protests regarding unfortunate events of that kind?
Or could it be you're more concerned that the US military and its political masters have been made to look bad? That would explain your outrage over the entirely speculative deaths of Afghan civilians resulting from the Wikileaks release and your astonishing silence regarding the various mass killings of Afghan civilians that NATO troops have carried out due to a wide range of operational errors with depressing regularity over the past five years.
Its extremely likely, and in fact, extremely common, for an informant to be identified without ever need knowing their name.
It's actually extremely common for arrogant idiots to claim that they can infer the absolute truth in remarkable detail from a long and precarious chain of inference grounded on nothing much.
It is just this kind of arrogant evil that puts innocent people in Guantanamo Bay and in secret prisons around the world.
But I'm a scientist, and science is the discipline of testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment. So let's perform the experiment, shall we: show us ten documents out of the 75,000 that have been released that allow YOU to identify individuals, even indirectly. You don't have to come up with the name, but find the village they live in, the timeframe they spoke to NATO troops or intelligence operatives, the operations, individuals or bases they were supposed to have compromised, the name of anyone in their family/clan/whatever that might allow them to be identified by someone familiar with the area.
After all, given the strength of your assertions it should be no problem at all to come up with a mere ten cases where such an indirect inference is clearly plausible. Otherwise you're just thumping your chest like any other bellicose wanker, expecting us to take your word for all the remarkable "logical" conclusions you can draw simply because of how loud and ugly you are (metaphorically speaking.)
If you're an arrogant idiot. The example you give is a perfect example of this kind of moronic thinking: you incorrectly assume that you have perfect knowledge of all the people who could have been informants, and perfect knowledge of all the paths by which they could have transmitted the information to the enemy.
On the basis of those false assumptions you incorrectly identify an innocent person and kill them.
People who are that stupid--the kind of people who put child soldiers on trial in Guantanamo Bay--are going to go about their ignorant, murderous ways regardless of what nominal evidence they have. They do it because they like to kill people.
So there are two and only two choices: we can live in a world where ignorant, murderous people kill random individuals for no readily apparent reason based on completely bogus "logic", or a world where exactly the same thing happens but the public at large also knows that the US military has been telling lies about the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the better part of a decade (but honest, things are better now!)
You do not get to choose a world where murderous morons aren't killing random people based on bogus logic. At worst, the information released in these documents will change the names of some of the random people killed. There is no reason at all to believe that it will increase the absolute number--which rose dramatically in the first seven months of 2010 independently of any release of secret information by Wikileaks or anyone else.
What I hate are the scummy, one-flat-stomach rule, teeth whitening, acai berry, and other similar ads that show up on almost every website, major and minor.
I surf at work with IE--no apb, no noscript--and near as I can tell if you removed those ads, there would be no ads at all.
Could this be a product of anyone with a brain using Firefox/abp/noscript, so the entire audience for webads is so stupid they'll go for ads like that? Seriously: why advertise to intelligent people in a medium that allows intelligent people to block ads?
Why is it okay for a CEO to steal $20k, but not okay for a peon to do the same?
For the same reason it is okay for a large failed business to recieve billions in taxpayer support under the Bush/Obama bailout plan but not okay for anyone with an underwater mortgage to walk away from it.
One law for the ultra-rich, one law for the rest. Welcome to America.
The only problem is that most of what you've described is not philosophy, and much of the rest of your comment is just false.
If you're interested in how subjectivities arise from neural and (more importantly in my view) neuro-chemical activity, you should be studying cognitive science or neurophysiology, or both. The mutterings of dead people who thought the brain cooled the blood are certain to be irrelevant and almost all the interesting work in the relevant scientific disciplines has been done in the past 25 years by scientists, not philosophers who arrogantly expostulate on results they themselves do not have the skills to achieve.
Ethical systems are a question for evolutionary psychology, sociology and economics. Philosophers, who remain steadfastly ignorant of all of these, are irrelevant.
Scientists can and do think hard about logic--we know for example the identity of indisceribles is a false doctrine, although philosophers again remain steadfastly ignorant of this. We also understand the problem of logical induction and wonder why philosphers haven't noticed that the solution to it is consistent definition, even though we have been doing that for three hundred years. Philsophers still think tautologies don't entail any onotological commitments, whereas all of physics is based just on tautologies (known as "laws") that precisely entail particular ontological commitments.
And so on. These things are only "problems in philosophy" because philosophers are too stupid to understand the solutions that already exist, or the scientific approaches to their ongoing solution.
Science is the discipline of testing ideas by controlled experiment and systematic observation. Philosophy is the discipline of making shit up. I know which has contributed more to my well-being.
Even if there is global warming, it can still be colder one year than the other, even though the trend is upwards.
Right, except no Warmist ever writes in a correction to any popular news site when they post things that say, "2010 has been an exceptoinally warm year, increasing fears and awareness regarding Global Warming."
If Warmists were merely the honest toilers in the halls of science they claim to be, surely they would be as concerned to correct that error as any of the many similar errors of the Denialists, and we would see earnest comments from them explaining that although 2010 has been exceptionally warm that's just "weather", not "climate", and conscendingly explain the difference.
I don't know about you, but I'd call having a veritable freshwater sea the size of California suddenly drain into the ocean to be a pretty radical event.
Undoing a lot of mods by posting this (a couple of which were even positive to you) but really, your zealotry and myoptia are too much.
On the one hand, you believe fundamentally that anthropogenic CO2 emission is going to create an "unprecedented" (carefully ignoring Dansgaard-Oeschger events) warming, but on the other hand believe that dumping a glacial lake the size of California into the ocean and shutting down one of the world's major thermo-haline circulation systems had fairly minor local effects.
Does this dichotomy not strike you as odd to the point of untenability, believing that the Earth's climate is profoundly robust against an event like the one that spawned the Younger Dryas but incredibly fragile against anthropogenic CO2 emissions?
does he mean that regenerate like the newt and completely regrow a limb, or just regenerate tissue that is there but maybe damaged...?
This work is all in vito, cell line stuff. The purpose is to understand the underlying mechanisms of regrowth regulation based on some inferences from the evolutionary history of mammals relative to reptiles, which the Bible strangely neglects to mention.
Amazingly, despite the Bible not mentioning this stuff, these scientists have found a gene that is turned off in newts during regeneration which can also result in regeneration when turned off in mammals, almost as if mammals evolved from reptiles by a process of partially heritable variation and differential reproduction.
The reason why mammals don't regenerate is probabaly related to energy budget: we need to eat frequently, and so have been optimized for rapid healing in the form of scar formation. Reptiles, being cold blooded, can slow down their metabolism and do nothing much while they regenerate. At the biochemical level this means that mammals have been selected from ancestral individuals who were less and less likely to have the ability to turn off these genes in the face of traumatic injury.
Incredibly, the Bible doesn't explain any of that, either. Almost like it was written by people who knew almost nothing of the world God made, and instead just made up a bunch of nonsense.
It would be easy, for instance, to write a virus...
Even easier: steganography could be used to hide "offending" images in innocent ones. Get just one of those on CuteOverload or similar and you'd have millions of "infected" computers.
The world is also full of people who will happily forward funny/cute/stupid images to everyone in their address book. Get an image into the hands of a few of those people and it wouldn't be a question of browser cache anymore.
The idea that bits that happen to be on my hard drive are in any sense in my "possession" is insane. Like drug laws--if we have to have them at all--this is a case where intent really needs to be embedded in the law: unless a person can be proven to have had intent to possess a particular pattern of bits, I don't see how throwing them in jail resembles anything like justice.
If, instead, they had marketed as "21st century email", it would have had a better chance
I don't get it. If they had marketed it to be something that is totally unlike what it actually is, it would have had a better chance?
Wave is nothing like e-mail.
For one, you have to be logged into some proprietary website to use it, and you can only communicate with people on the same proprietary system, so it's more like Prodigy or pre-1995 AOL than SMTP-style e-mail.
It isn't primarily a COMMUNICATION system but a COLLABORATION system.
Communications systems are both ordered and asynchronous: they have an identifiable talker and listener at any given moment, with an expectation of a degree of turn-taking between them, but the time-lag between turns may be large. Even IM has an easily discernible back-and-forth turn-taking aspect, where one person writes and the other reads, then the roles are swapped, and long delays between sends are common. Communication systems are also almost universally either one-to-one (IM, e-mail) or one-to-many (e-mail, mailing lists, blogs/RSS, Twatter, etc...) with weak many-to-many features that scale poorly and are rarely used.
Collaboration systems have been the holy grail of the Web since Lotus Notes days.
Commercial attempts at collaboration systems are relatively synchronous: they want everyone working on the same document/problem/whatever at more-or-less the same time. Wave was on the extreme end of this continuum. They are also relatively unstructured. People are supposed to be able to dive into any part of the shared space and do anything with it. There has thus far been no effective mechanism for giving order to the shared space.
For my money the most practical collaboration system is a wiki, but I've found my collaborators (non-geeks) struggle with the lack of structure. USENet newsgroups had a certain collaborative aspect about them, but suffered from a high degree of disorder that neither.kill files nor moderators could adequately deal with.
The problem is that most people do not have a burning need to collaborate in the same way they have a burning need to communicate, and unstructured collaboration of the kind enabled by most commercial offerings in this space is simply ineffective for the vast majority of ordinary human beings, who need some form of external structure to guide their interactions with others.
It lets people expand their power over others, not by working, but by lending.
I'm curious as to why you believe it is possible for people to expand their power over others by working, which belief is clearly implied by using it as a contrast object in the quoted sentence. If I posted something critical of modern flying technology that said, "Aerodynamics lets people fly not by flapping their arms and wishing, but by the smooth flow of air over properly shaped wings under sufficient motive power to create adequate lift" you might reasonably assume that I believed it was in fact possible for people to fly by flapping their arms and wishing.
I can't think of a single historical fact from any period--from the stone age to the various experiments in totalitarianism that have taken place in the past century--that would suggest it has ever been possible, anywhere, under any circumstances, for a person to increase their power over others, or increase their command of available resources, by "working", if by "working" you mean "creating goods and services that other people find useful and are willing to voluntarily trade for".
Before capitalism we had kings and aristocrats gaining power with pure unadulterated violence and various kinds of more-or-less hateful ideology, from Confucian doctrines in China that put power in the hands of the rich people who could afford the ridiculous educational requirements, to Hindu doctrines that told the poor they deserved to be there, to Christian doctrines of kingship in Europe that made royalty god-given.
After capitalism we have had various experiments in state power that are indistinguishable from each other by anyone not utterly addled by ideology, all of which have been famously bloody and which have use and continue to use the threat of prompt, direct and extreme violence to maintain the leaders of the appropriate Party in power. They have also used various ideological props.
So I think it would make a lot more sense to say, "Capitalism lets people expand their power over others not by direct and often deadly violence, but by lending."
I agree that capitalism is not entirely benign, and that the Left's arguments regarding the implicit violence behind capitalism are worth taking seriously, but I also believe that it is important to point out that the only known systems that we can contrast capitalism with are systems of explicit violence, which many of us find even more distasteful than capitalism, not least because those other systems are massively unproductive and environmentally damaging on a scale that makes capitalism--BP and all--look like a good global citzen.
Any way you look at it, the trader is screwed. He has no leverage and no arbitrage.
Nope, just friends in Washington named George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama who will bail him out and absolve him of responsibility.
Then, when the lobsterman--who has just been screwed out of of $1000 by a manipulative leach--can't pay the bank for the loan he took out to buy his boat, the same people will refuse to help him, because that would be "socialism."
By entering the stock market, you are entering a casino, with rules on the conduct of the game but no rules on the setting of odds, and no information on the actual odds.
The remarkable thing is that there's actually a lot of information about the actual odds, at least with regard to the overall market. I have an algorithm that can predict the direction in with the DJIA moves over a two-week period with between 70 and 90% accuracy (that is, it has odds of 2:1 or better in calling the market's direction--the "better" version of the algorithm makes much less frequent calls) Nor did I have to look very hard to find it, although admittedly I've done various kinds of pattern recognition for a living most of my professional life.
The trick is trading on such information effectively: cash flow management is the biggest problem for the small investor (and I am a very small investor) unlike the larger firms that can in the best socialist tradition get bailed out by the American worker when they make a large bet in the wrong direction.
That's right blair1q Enron really was worth all that money way back when (even though it was all fraud).
All what money?
The canonical example is: A, B and C own shares in X. They all bought at $100 in the IPO. A sells their shares to B for $200 and goes to the beach. C's shares are now "worth" $200... but where is the money? Unless C can find a buyer at that price, it isn't what the shares are worth.
The notion that "all that money is real" is based on the demonstrably false assumption of nearly perfect liquidity at a price that differs from the last price traded by no more than epsilon.
Slashdot Mirror
I can just imagine the scenario now
Unfortunately for your imagination, it has decided on a scenario that has been the actual case for decades: gas couplings in the OR are in fact unique so, for example, oxygen and anesthesia cannot be confused with each other (this is the case in Canada, at least).
And strangely enough the disaster you fantasize about hasn't happened.
Maybe you're just a fearful conservative making shit up to save yourself the dreadful pain of dealing with change.
to buy a small country plot
So this is a "green" home for people who hate the environment? I don't get it.
It is well-known and uncontroversial that urban living is far more environmentally friendly than country living. If you live in downtown NYC you are using less of everything than if you live in rural Vermont.
Epistemology is the philosophy of how you know something for certain.
Nope. Epistemology is the study of how we know. Certainty is almost completely irrelevant, unless you're a Cartesian Rationalist or insane (but I repeat myself...)
Hardly anything is certain and yet we somehow manage to get along just fine. I'm certain of a trivially small number of things, yet have no difficulty whatsoever answering a vast array of practical questions like, "How do I build a killer robot?" and "Where are my socks?"
Why anyone thinks that certainty is a remotely interesting aspect of knowledge is beyond me. I guess a few mathmaticians might care about it, but no physicist or other scientist does, nor does any engineer nor anyone else. It is only a few sophomoronic philosophers who really keep harping on about it, who are apparently too stupid to realize how uninteresting and irrelevant it is.
The link didn't mention a lower bound for the detection sensitivity based on looking at Cassini power outputs.
The arxiv.org link at the bottom of the article provides just that. The variation in counting (not decay) rates observed is about 0.1% over the 3% variation in Earth's orbital distance, implying about (3E-2)/R**2 as the relationship, and the Cassini results put an upper limit on of less than (0.84E-4)/R**2 and comparable for a /R term.
Ergo, the Cassini results put on a limit that is more than two orders of magnitude smaller than the original observation. Ergo, the original observation is not due to simply radial distance from the sun, by the perfectly ordinary standards of proof that we use every day.
That is, there might be some bizzare confounding effect, but I wouldn't bet my next mortgage payment on it. Would you?
Biblical truth has been handed down for over 2000 years. In the last 2000 years how many times have scientists changed their mind about what they know to be true? Sorry, I have more faith in God than I do in man. But then I don't have a vested interest in disproving His existence.
You seem to think you're making an argument here, but it isn't clear what it is.
What scientists know to be true is: to be credible ideas must be tested by systematic observation and controlled experiment. We have never changed that belief, and never will, because when we do we will cease to be scientists and become something else. Religious nutjobs, maybe.
You also state "Biblical truth" has been handed down for over 2000 years, as if you know that the Bible is true, but this is begging the question. HOW do you know that the Bible is true? It obviously isn't simply that the text of the Bible (the OT anyway) has been handed down for over two millenia. Sumerian myth, various bits of Chinese and other Eastern philosophy, and so on have all been handed down for at least that long, and you obviously can't believe them too, as they frequently contradict the Bible, which also contradicts itself.
So it isn't clear why you think the Bible is in the perfectly ordinary sense of the word "true", or why anyone would believe it. Being handed down with relatively modest changes over a long period of time is no criterion for truth. In a few thousand years people will no-doubt still have copies of Shakespeare's plays, and only a gibbering idiot would believe that Romeo and Juliet is true because it has been handed down unchanged for over 2000 years.
So why do you believe the Bible is true, but you do not believe that ideas, to be credible, must survive being tested by systematic observation and controlled experiment?
The price fluctuates, but mainly not because of variations in supply and demand...
Err... the price of gold fluctuates entirely due to supply and demand, mostly demand, and most of that demand is speculative. But speculative demand is still demand, just as government supply in the case of helium is still supply. You don't get to decide what supply or demand is "real": it all is.
The GP is correct that markets are price-setting mechanisms that match supply and demand, however imperfectly. The problem with markets is not that people are greedy but that they are dishonest. The power of markets comes from greed, the flaws from dishonesty. Strong legal protections and various kinds of open, transparent, comprehensible government regulation are required to deal with people's dishonesty.
How is measuring something "playing God"?
God is all-knowing, so any attempt at knowing anything is an attempt to step on divine prerogative, obviously. And why were Adam and Eve thrown out of Paradise? That's right! Eating the fruit of the Tree of KNOWLEDGE.
God doesn't want us to know. Anything. It's right there in the Bible. Read it. Live it. Die miserably of a preventable disase by it!
So because students are taught with years of 1 + 2 = ( ) "Fill in the blank"
They are suddenly supposed to understand that "= ( )" doesn't mean "do the math on the left and put the answer on the right"?
Aha! I've been trying to figure out what everyone is going on about, and your comment explains it. The problem is that American students think an equals sign is like an "execute" button, not a passive statement of equality.
So basically, everyone here who disagrees with the statement of the question is agreeing with the research conclusion: most Americans--apparently even nominally educated ones--don't knwo what "=" means, because if they did there would be absolutely no way they could interpret 4+3+2=()+2 as ANYTHING other than 4+3+2=x+2. There is simply no other possible interpetation if you accept that "=" means "the things on either side of this symbol are strictly identical".
Now, Americans can argue that their interpretation of "=" is superior and threaten to invade anyone who disagrees, but they will then need to introduce a new symbol (like C's "==") that has the same meaning as "=" does in the rest of the world, because you really can't do math without it.
Traditionally mens jobs were more dangerous, and fatalities among men were more common
Traditionally? You mean: in the modern world, today.
If someone dies on the job today the odds are over 90% they are male. Most of the really dangerous jobs like farming, lumbering and so on are still overwhelmingly dominated by men.
It's true that everything has become safer, so this is no longer a major demographic issue, but don't kid yourself: "Men last!" is still alive and well as a slogan (it is usually stated in the converse form, mind, but the logical implication is inescapable.)
All that said: male-male mate competition is a huge factor in human evolution. It explains why we have such a high degree of sexual dimorphism, which is only seen in species where males compete for multiple mating opportunties. All the "just so" stories about hunting and crap are just that: crap. Male lions are bigger than female lions, but guess which one does the majority of the hunting?
Male humans are big and agressive not because we compete over external resources or hunt down wild animals, but because our male ancestors were able to intimidate and bully their way into more-or-less exclusive control of more than one female. This doesn't make polygamy right or appropriate for modern society, but it is the key to understanding why we are the way we are, and therefore controlling and channeling our aggressive and inappropriate impulses into avenues that are more useful and productive than violence and war.
I'm sure that the Taliban greatly appreciated suddenly having a comprehensive list of the names of hundreds of Afghan civilian informants.
Since the Taliban already have this list, you will of course have no compuntion about showing it to the rest of us? You and others like you keep making this claim, but I've yet to see any list of names, and have thus far heard of only three names in the documents, and possibly a few more people that are identifiable via some more-or-less-shakey chain of indirect inference.
That's fewer people than NATO troops kill on in a single mistaken attack on a wedding party, so if you're all so deeply concerned about Afghan civilians, could you please point us to your heartfelt protests regarding unfortunate events of that kind?
Or could it be you're more concerned that the US military and its political masters have been made to look bad? That would explain your outrage over the entirely speculative deaths of Afghan civilians resulting from the Wikileaks release and your astonishing silence regarding the various mass killings of Afghan civilians that NATO troops have carried out due to a wide range of operational errors with depressing regularity over the past five years.
Its extremely likely, and in fact, extremely common, for an informant to be identified without ever need knowing their name.
It's actually extremely common for arrogant idiots to claim that they can infer the absolute truth in remarkable detail from a long and precarious chain of inference grounded on nothing much.
It is just this kind of arrogant evil that puts innocent people in Guantanamo Bay and in secret prisons around the world.
But I'm a scientist, and science is the discipline of testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment. So let's perform the experiment, shall we: show us ten documents out of the 75,000 that have been released that allow YOU to identify individuals, even indirectly. You don't have to come up with the name, but find the village they live in, the timeframe they spoke to NATO troops or intelligence operatives, the operations, individuals or bases they were supposed to have compromised, the name of anyone in their family/clan/whatever that might allow them to be identified by someone familiar with the area.
After all, given the strength of your assertions it should be no problem at all to come up with a mere ten cases where such an indirect inference is clearly plausible. Otherwise you're just thumping your chest like any other bellicose wanker, expecting us to take your word for all the remarkable "logical" conclusions you can draw simply because of how loud and ugly you are (metaphorically speaking.)
identifying the informant is just a logic puzzle
If you're an arrogant idiot. The example you give is a perfect example of this kind of moronic thinking: you incorrectly assume that you have perfect knowledge of all the people who could have been informants, and perfect knowledge of all the paths by which they could have transmitted the information to the enemy.
On the basis of those false assumptions you incorrectly identify an innocent person and kill them.
People who are that stupid--the kind of people who put child soldiers on trial in Guantanamo Bay--are going to go about their ignorant, murderous ways regardless of what nominal evidence they have. They do it because they like to kill people.
So there are two and only two choices: we can live in a world where ignorant, murderous people kill random individuals for no readily apparent reason based on completely bogus "logic", or a world where exactly the same thing happens but the public at large also knows that the US military has been telling lies about the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the better part of a decade (but honest, things are better now!)
You do not get to choose a world where murderous morons aren't killing random people based on bogus logic. At worst, the information released in these documents will change the names of some of the random people killed. There is no reason at all to believe that it will increase the absolute number--which rose dramatically in the first seven months of 2010 independently of any release of secret information by Wikileaks or anyone else.
What I hate are the scummy, one-flat-stomach rule, teeth whitening, acai berry, and other similar ads that show up on almost every website, major and minor.
I surf at work with IE--no apb, no noscript--and near as I can tell if you removed those ads, there would be no ads at all.
Could this be a product of anyone with a brain using Firefox/abp/noscript, so the entire audience for webads is so stupid they'll go for ads like that? Seriously: why advertise to intelligent people in a medium that allows intelligent people to block ads?
Why is it okay for a CEO to steal $20k, but not okay for a peon to do the same?
For the same reason it is okay for a large failed business to recieve billions in taxpayer support under the Bush/Obama bailout plan but not okay for anyone with an underwater mortgage to walk away from it.
One law for the ultra-rich, one law for the rest. Welcome to America.
Philosophy is more a way of life than anything.
So it's just like everything else.
The only problem is that most of what you've described is not philosophy, and much of the rest of your comment is just false.
If you're interested in how subjectivities arise from neural and (more importantly in my view) neuro-chemical activity, you should be studying cognitive science or neurophysiology, or both. The mutterings of dead people who thought the brain cooled the blood are certain to be irrelevant and almost all the interesting work in the relevant scientific disciplines has been done in the past 25 years by scientists, not philosophers who arrogantly expostulate on results they themselves do not have the skills to achieve.
Ethical systems are a question for evolutionary psychology, sociology and economics. Philosophers, who remain steadfastly ignorant of all of these, are irrelevant.
Scientists can and do think hard about logic--we know for example the identity of indisceribles is a false doctrine, although philosophers again remain steadfastly ignorant of this. We also understand the problem of logical induction and wonder why philosphers haven't noticed that the solution to it is consistent definition, even though we have been doing that for three hundred years. Philsophers still think tautologies don't entail any onotological commitments, whereas all of physics is based just on tautologies (known as "laws") that precisely entail particular ontological commitments.
And so on. These things are only "problems in philosophy" because philosophers are too stupid to understand the solutions that already exist, or the scientific approaches to their ongoing solution.
Science is the discipline of testing ideas by controlled experiment and systematic observation. Philosophy is the discipline of making shit up. I know which has contributed more to my well-being.
Yes, at using a CLI. The command line is just as much of an abstraction as a GUI is, just harder to learn
Assume too much you do, Grasshopper.
Some of us learned to program with dip switches and a push-button. There ain't a whole lot of abstraction there...
Even if there is global warming, it can still be colder one year than the other, even though the trend is upwards.
Right, except no Warmist ever writes in a correction to any popular news site when they post things that say, "2010 has been an exceptoinally warm year, increasing fears and awareness regarding Global Warming."
If Warmists were merely the honest toilers in the halls of science they claim to be, surely they would be as concerned to correct that error as any of the many similar errors of the Denialists, and we would see earnest comments from them explaining that although 2010 has been exceptionally warm that's just "weather", not "climate", and conscendingly explain the difference.
Why is it that we never see that?
I don't know about you, but I'd call having a veritable freshwater sea the size of California suddenly drain into the ocean to be a pretty radical event.
Undoing a lot of mods by posting this (a couple of which were even positive to you) but really, your zealotry and myoptia are too much.
On the one hand, you believe fundamentally that anthropogenic CO2 emission is going to create an "unprecedented" (carefully ignoring Dansgaard-Oeschger events) warming, but on the other hand believe that dumping a glacial lake the size of California into the ocean and shutting down one of the world's major thermo-haline circulation systems had fairly minor local effects.
Does this dichotomy not strike you as odd to the point of untenability, believing that the Earth's climate is profoundly robust against an event like the one that spawned the Younger Dryas but incredibly fragile against anthropogenic CO2 emissions?
does he mean that regenerate like the newt and completely regrow a limb, or just regenerate tissue that is there but maybe damaged...?
This work is all in vito, cell line stuff. The purpose is to understand the underlying mechanisms of regrowth regulation based on some inferences from the evolutionary history of mammals relative to reptiles, which the Bible strangely neglects to mention.
Amazingly, despite the Bible not mentioning this stuff, these scientists have found a gene that is turned off in newts during regeneration which can also result in regeneration when turned off in mammals, almost as if mammals evolved from reptiles by a process of partially heritable variation and differential reproduction.
The reason why mammals don't regenerate is probabaly related to energy budget: we need to eat frequently, and so have been optimized for rapid healing in the form of scar formation. Reptiles, being cold blooded, can slow down their metabolism and do nothing much while they regenerate. At the biochemical level this means that mammals have been selected from ancestral individuals who were less and less likely to have the ability to turn off these genes in the face of traumatic injury.
Incredibly, the Bible doesn't explain any of that, either. Almost like it was written by people who knew almost nothing of the world God made, and instead just made up a bunch of nonsense.
It would be easy, for instance, to write a virus...
Even easier: steganography could be used to hide "offending" images in innocent ones. Get just one of those on CuteOverload or similar and you'd have millions of "infected" computers.
The world is also full of people who will happily forward funny/cute/stupid images to everyone in their address book. Get an image into the hands of a few of those people and it wouldn't be a question of browser cache anymore.
The idea that bits that happen to be on my hard drive are in any sense in my "possession" is insane. Like drug laws--if we have to have them at all--this is a case where intent really needs to be embedded in the law: unless a person can be proven to have had intent to possess a particular pattern of bits, I don't see how throwing them in jail resembles anything like justice.
If, instead, they had marketed as "21st century email", it would have had a better chance
I don't get it. If they had marketed it to be something that is totally unlike what it actually is, it would have had a better chance?
Wave is nothing like e-mail.
For one, you have to be logged into some proprietary website to use it, and you can only communicate with people on the same proprietary system, so it's more like Prodigy or pre-1995 AOL than SMTP-style e-mail.
It isn't primarily a COMMUNICATION system but a COLLABORATION system.
Communications systems are both ordered and asynchronous: they have an identifiable talker and listener at any given moment, with an expectation of a degree of turn-taking between them, but the time-lag between turns may be large. Even IM has an easily discernible back-and-forth turn-taking aspect, where one person writes and the other reads, then the roles are swapped, and long delays between sends are common. Communication systems are also almost universally either one-to-one (IM, e-mail) or one-to-many (e-mail, mailing lists, blogs/RSS, Twatter, etc...) with weak many-to-many features that scale poorly and are rarely used.
Collaboration systems have been the holy grail of the Web since Lotus Notes days.
Commercial attempts at collaboration systems are relatively synchronous: they want everyone working on the same document/problem/whatever at more-or-less the same time. Wave was on the extreme end of this continuum. They are also relatively unstructured. People are supposed to be able to dive into any part of the shared space and do anything with it. There has thus far been no effective mechanism for giving order to the shared space.
For my money the most practical collaboration system is a wiki, but I've found my collaborators (non-geeks) struggle with the lack of structure. USENet newsgroups had a certain collaborative aspect about them, but suffered from a high degree of disorder that neither .kill files nor moderators could adequately deal with.
The problem is that most people do not have a burning need to collaborate in the same way they have a burning need to communicate, and unstructured collaboration of the kind enabled by most commercial offerings in this space is simply ineffective for the vast majority of ordinary human beings, who need some form of external structure to guide their interactions with others.
It lets people expand their power over others, not by working, but by lending.
I'm curious as to why you believe it is possible for people to expand their power over others by working, which belief is clearly implied by using it as a contrast object in the quoted sentence. If I posted something critical of modern flying technology that said, "Aerodynamics lets people fly not by flapping their arms and wishing, but by the smooth flow of air over properly shaped wings under sufficient motive power to create adequate lift" you might reasonably assume that I believed it was in fact possible for people to fly by flapping their arms and wishing.
I can't think of a single historical fact from any period--from the stone age to the various experiments in totalitarianism that have taken place in the past century--that would suggest it has ever been possible, anywhere, under any circumstances, for a person to increase their power over others, or increase their command of available resources, by "working", if by "working" you mean "creating goods and services that other people find useful and are willing to voluntarily trade for".
Before capitalism we had kings and aristocrats gaining power with pure unadulterated violence and various kinds of more-or-less hateful ideology, from Confucian doctrines in China that put power in the hands of the rich people who could afford the ridiculous educational requirements, to Hindu doctrines that told the poor they deserved to be there, to Christian doctrines of kingship in Europe that made royalty god-given.
After capitalism we have had various experiments in state power that are indistinguishable from each other by anyone not utterly addled by ideology, all of which have been famously bloody and which have use and continue to use the threat of prompt, direct and extreme violence to maintain the leaders of the appropriate Party in power. They have also used various ideological props.
So I think it would make a lot more sense to say, "Capitalism lets people expand their power over others not by direct and often deadly violence, but by lending."
I agree that capitalism is not entirely benign, and that the Left's arguments regarding the implicit violence behind capitalism are worth taking seriously, but I also believe that it is important to point out that the only known systems that we can contrast capitalism with are systems of explicit violence, which many of us find even more distasteful than capitalism, not least because those other systems are massively unproductive and environmentally damaging on a scale that makes capitalism--BP and all--look like a good global citzen.
Any way you look at it, the trader is screwed. He has no leverage and no arbitrage.
Nope, just friends in Washington named George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama who will bail him out and absolve him of responsibility.
Then, when the lobsterman--who has just been screwed out of of $1000 by a manipulative leach--can't pay the bank for the loan he took out to buy his boat, the same people will refuse to help him, because that would be "socialism."
By entering the stock market, you are entering a casino, with rules on the conduct of the game but no rules on the setting of odds, and no information on the actual odds.
The remarkable thing is that there's actually a lot of information about the actual odds, at least with regard to the overall market. I have an algorithm that can predict the direction in with the DJIA moves over a two-week period with between 70 and 90% accuracy (that is, it has odds of 2:1 or better in calling the market's direction--the "better" version of the algorithm makes much less frequent calls) Nor did I have to look very hard to find it, although admittedly I've done various kinds of pattern recognition for a living most of my professional life.
The trick is trading on such information effectively: cash flow management is the biggest problem for the small investor (and I am a very small investor) unlike the larger firms that can in the best socialist tradition get bailed out by the American worker when they make a large bet in the wrong direction.
That's right blair1q Enron really was worth all that money way back when (even though it was all fraud).
All what money?
The canonical example is: A, B and C own shares in X. They all bought at $100 in the IPO. A sells their shares to B for $200 and goes to the beach. C's shares are now "worth" $200... but where is the money? Unless C can find a buyer at that price, it isn't what the shares are worth.
The notion that "all that money is real" is based on the demonstrably false assumption of nearly perfect liquidity at a price that differs from the last price traded by no more than epsilon.