Yes - if it is charged by a 12 volt circuit, it will never go over 12 volts. The current 12 volts will produce is limited by the resistance in the circuit. If the super-capacitor has none, and you touch the contacts, you're limited only by the resistance across you're hand. This is highly variable based on all sorts of factors, but can easily be low enough that 12 volts will hurt you quite badly.
The capacitor someone would use to power a laptop will have enough energy to power a laptop for several hours. If you short that with your hand, you will be very unhappy, if not maimed or dead. You won't be able to, because device designers will add safegaurds to prevent you from doing so. But if you get ahold of a raw capacitor with that kind of capacity, it is quite dangerous.
Capacitors do not have a fixed voltage "like 12V and 5V". The voltage thay supply is proportional to the amount of charge they are carrying. They have a voltage rating printed on the side of them, but this is not the voltage they supply, but the voltage it is safe to charge them up to; the voltage you can hook them up to, then later get out of them, without their exploding. (allowing for some amount of liability proof fudge factor, no doubt.) Touching it with your hand would be somewhat worse than touching a freshly topped up car battery. Your phone battery has huge internal resistance; the max rate it can supply energy is a trickle. A car battery has much lower internal resistance, it can hurt you. A capacitor has no internal resistance to speak of.
FWIW, the deep-cycle battery won't hurt him as much as a regular car one.
Car batteries are opimised for low internal resistance; providing energy at a high rate. They like to be kept pretty fully charged all the time, and their total capacity isn't that great, which is fine because they are going to provide that one quick jolt to start the engine, then get recharged by it.
Deep-cycle batteries are designed to provide power over a longer period; They're what you want if you are going to actually run stuff off the batteries. They have greater total capacity, and are more tolerant of actually getting significantly discharged, but with the trade off of not delivering quite so big a jolt all at once.
Either one will hurt you pretty good though.
"And another example how the content industry wants to make money out of thin air. Quite literally."
Gahhh, misuse of "literally"! Pet peeve alarm! Unless they have expressed a desire to somehow print dollars on the air molecules themselves, your statement is figurative. Which is a perfectly fine thing for a statement to be, but it is not literal. It is certainly not "quite literal". It's not even "not quite" literal. It is the very opposite of literal.
The whole point of the word "literally" is to indicate that the statement to which it applies is not figurative, even though it might appear so. The point is to clear up possible confusion. Yet some subset of the population to which you seem to belong insists on applying "literally" to obviously figurative expressions, as some sort of meaningless emphasizer. Thus you destroy the usefulness of a very useful word. When next I see the word "literally" applied to some statement whose figurative nature is less obvious than yours, how am I to know if the speaker knows what the word means, or if they are just one of your clueless cohorts?
Please, please, desist from this senseless meaning-destruction. I am literally begging you.
"Whether or not Perelman's proof is difficult to understand doesn't make a flipping bit of difference"
I must disagree. I could claim to have solved some very hard problem, and present some gobledy-gook nobody else understood as my "proof". But nobody would give me credit for solving the problem, even if my conclusion eventually turned out to be right. If you're going to get credit for proving something, your proof is going to have to pass some threshold of understandability by others.
I've not read Perelmans work, and I'm not enough of a topologist to judge it if I did. But it is my understanding that quite a few people who have and are were not entirely convinced. Cue the traditional denigrating of the abilities of ones doubters.
Maybe the chinese mathematicians have added something real to the proof. Maybe they've filled in stuff that just seemed obvious to Perelman. I don't know. Frankly, with my limited topology knowledge, the whole theorem seemed obviously true to me, but that doesn't mean I could prove it.
Priority disputes are annoying. I've no idea who deserves how much credit in this case, but I do know that whether one is clear absolutely does farking matter. Theorems are true or not on their own; the point of mathematics is to add them to human knowledge, and that requires clarity.
Was mostly a silly joke. But Apple is known for having interface standards that are strictly adhered to; for smoothly integrated consistency of user experience, Apple is king. And I'd argue that this is because these things are dictated top down by a hierarchy Steve sits atop.
You may not like the inconsistency of their corporate direction or whatever, but the internal consistency of their GUIs is impressive, and a fine example of what leaderless comittees don't do very well at.
"you'd think with all the brilliant contributers (and they do exist) I don't understand why consistency and usability fall so far behind"
You don't? It makes perfect sense to me. Put together a whole bunch of brilliant people, with none of them really in charge, and you'll get a system that is very flexible, and that does lots of things well, because it will support all of their visions. But using it will not be a smooth, integrated experience. You don't get consistency from large groups of decision makers.
If you want consistency, take a bunch of fairly talented people, and put one brilliant guy in charge of them. If you're really fanatical about it, make sure he's named "Steve".
How about free as in if I wrote it I'm going to feel free to do what I want with it, including keeping it to myself and charging for binaries. And any grant-supported ivory tower idealists who don't like it are Free (as feel free) to not buy it, but if they want to come up with perverted definitions of Free, I'll call them twits. Stallman is the uber-twit.
Guess I was in a rant mood, sorry. Most of Googles stuff rocks, but I'm not fond of Picassa.
On the scale needed to justify their share price, they don't make it at all.
I'm fine with them making their money from advertising, their software is good, and free, so I'll use it. Their advertising is fairly effective according to the marketing guys I know, I'd buy some if I were a marketing guy.
But I don't see their revenue going up by 1000% tomorrow, so I'm going to pass on their stock.
"If I was penniless on the street. No investor would do all that. They would laugh in my face."
An investor wouldn't hire you as an unskilled factory worker because you were poor?
"But yea, I don't have to take their money, and I wouldn't. I wouldn't want to build a business all the while knowing someone else owns it."
OK, what's the problem then?
"I might as well work for someone else in the first place."
If you work at a company funded by investors, whether through the stock market or otherwise, then it's not that you "might as well" work for someone else; you do work for someone else. If you don't want to do that, that's cool, no problem. But if other people do want to, why are you so worked up against the people who hire them?
You're penniless in the street, along comes some guy who buys the materials to build a factory, hires construction workers to build it, buys the machinery used in the factory, and hires you to work in the factory. He hires some salesmen to sell the stuff you make, which they do, and they bring back the money. And then you tell him "Screw you buddy, I did the work! Why should you get any of the money?" Or maybe the salesman can't sell any of it, and the factory has to close. You've got your salary for while it was open, but you think it's unfair that the you don't get the equiptment and the building too?
I'd love to make money by doing some stuff and producing stuff. I just need a bunch of startup money for equipment and expenses. Banks won't give me a loan for that, because if my business doesn't work out I won't be able to pay them back.
There's this other group of people who could give me the money, called "investors", and if the business doesn't work out, they'll just lose their money. Even if it does work out, I won't have to give the money back! Sounds cool right? But they expect to own part of my compnay, and if it does work out, they want a share of the profits. The nerve! They're not producing anything!
If I buy part of a company for $100, what sense does it make to say that part of that company is "actually" worth anything other than $100? What possible criteria could you use to set the value of a part of a company other than what people are willing to pay for it? Let's say I (and others) are willing to pay $100 to buy part of a company based on our expectation that that parts share of the companies profits for a year will be $10. Now it becomes apparent that this year that that parts share will only be $9. Would it make any sense at all for me still to be willing to pay the same amount for that part of that company? Of course not. Now I will be willing to pay less, and the companies stock will fall. I'm not sure what's so mystifying about this.
I guess you could say a company is "actually" worth the amount someone would pay for it if they knew for sure how much a company was going to make in the future. But nobody knows that, so it's not very useful.
Your understanding of the stock market is somewhat lacking.
"So you will have hugely profitable corporations that instead of making a record breaking profit of X will make X-3% (still a record), and as a result their value tumbles. Does it make sense ? "
It makes perfect sense. Investors thought they would make X, and decided how much to pay for the stock based on that assumption. The company made less than they thought they would, why wouldn't the amount investors are willing to pay go down?
"A long time ago it actually meant something to trade shares in a company; nowadays the company itself is only meaningful if you want to take it over. Apart from that the stock market is a kind of glorified bookmaker."
You're ignoring the part about dividends. You know, the part where your theoretical company's owners (the shareholders) divy up those record profits.
The basis for a stocks price is what the market thinks of it, yes. But the basis for what the market thinks of it is what investors expected to get paid when the companies they buy parts of go do stuff in the real world that makes money and then give it to their owners.
"Clearly we can see you have read the relevent sections of the constitution."
Yes, I have. I read the whole thing every once in a while. It's not really that long or hard to understand, so there's no excuse for the many wrong ideas people vaugely attribute to it.
"Constitutionally the newly elected congress is NOT a 'new' congress. Congress is congress is congress. Electing new officials is NOT a reset switch for ANY consitutional limitations that aren't related to choosing new congressmen."
I don't beleive I ever said differently. Calling a newly elected set of congresspeople a 'new' congress is not a terribly radical bit of terminology, and makes it easier to talk about than saying "a newly elected set of congresspeople" all the time. It does not serve as a 'reset' on any constitutional limits; but I don't think it is too wildly speculative an interpretation to imagine that the fact the limit on funding of Armies is the same as the term length of Congressmen is more than random coincidence. Regardless, the point is moot; Congress re-authorizes the military budget yearly.
"The limitation only applies in time of peace...."
Let's have a look at that relevant section shall we? Article 1, section 8 : "Congress shall have the Power To... raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years". Yes, the same section gives them some powers relative to navies and state militias, but there is no further elaboration on that power or mention of "in time of peace".
"when the constitution was framed there were no U.S. Citizens" Really? Given that they required the President to be a "Citizen of the United States" (Article 2, section 1), amongst various other references to US Citizenship, I find that claim dubious. Certainly the framers established a federal government which they intended to be not as strong relative to the states as it is today (though stronger than before the constitution); and certainly the federal government has consolidated power since, most obviously during the civil war era. But if you want to inteligently discuss that consolidation, and how it may relate to the spirit and/or letter of the Constituion, you should first familiarize yourself with the actual text. Which I assure you is not really that long or hard to understand.
"... the 16th amendment (I bet you thought it was about making slaves equal) " Actually, I thought the 16th amendment was about clarifying the legal status of the income tax as an indirect tax not subject to aportionment. It is the one some people claim (not very convincingly) was never properly ratified, but the citizenship one was the 14th; which really was about civil rights, because the concept of being a citizen of both the United States and of a particular state is perfectly reasonable, and was already assumed by, and enshrined in, earlier parts of the Constitution.
And since there was nothing wrong with doing it, he felt no need to mention that he had done it. Through years of expensive investigations, reporters going to jail, appeals to the supreme court, etc. Do you think maybe he could have helped out a bit and mentioned "Oh yeah, that was me", since it was all so innocent? Maybe it slipped his mind. No wait, he went on about how he sure would like to ge to the bottom of this, so he was certainly aware people cared.
But in anycase, the explination is BS. There are specific procedures for declassifying stuff, established by his own authority. He neither followed these, nor ammended them. He didn't declassify it. He leaked it, doing real damage to our national security interests for purely partisan political reasons.
"The federal government isn't supposed to keep a standing army for a period greater than two years."
Uh, no. Congress has the power to raise and support armies. They may not apropriate money for armies for a term longer than two years. No congress can set up an army with funding that can't be cut off by the next congress. So every congress must re-authorize the military budget which they do. Saying you can't keep an army for more than 2 years would have been stupid even back when; what if a war went longer than that? Back in the day, navies required much bigger capital investment than armies, and there wern't any airplanes, so it makes sense why they handled navies differently, and an air force not at all. In any case, congress has side-stepped the whole issue by re-authorizing the military budget every year regardless of branch. Which is perfectly constitutional, even if the sheer size of that budget is stupid.
Values and beleifs like "People who wish to critisize their government should be allowed to do so"? Yes. I am absolutely convinced that that is a principle which should be universally observed. If you'd care to give us some idea why you think this principle is merely a quaint artifact of my western background, I'll be happy to consider your arguments (though I can't imagine what they would be). Until you do, I think I shall remain convinced.
"FR was the 'flagship' or 'main' campaign setting for a lot of years. It was very popular and rightly so."
Agreed.
"It was a very rich land, very detailed, and well supported."
And all of that material still exists. FR couldn't run forever. The sheer volume of material becomes a dettriment: no relatively new player could possibly be the ultimate master of all FR knowledge (as a certain 14-year-old segment of the D&D market yearns to be) While rightly loved by current players, FR was not drawing in new players the way something new and different would. So I don't think it's at all surprising WotC decided to do something new.
"They tried to mimic the way FR was created by having non-designers make submissions."
I don't know if mimicing the creation of FR was a motivation in setting up their contest. In any case, Keith Baker was a professional, published game designer before he ever entered their contest.
I beleive your spotting an Eberron book in a bargain bin is an anomoly. My understanding is that it has been quite successful.
I'm just saying, it's great that you like FR. Don't hate Eberron for pushing it our of the spotlight, because something had to. Also don't hate Eberron for being different than FR; if it weren't it really would be threatening it. This way, they each appeal to different sorts of player, so it's reasonable for Wotc to keep going with both.
'What a UDP port is' was intended as a random example of a piece of detailed network knowledge basic users would not have.
"Again, Google will provide the "good/bad" information they need"
Again (and again, and agian), it does not. "SvcHost.exe is trying to access the internet" is what Norton tells me and asks me to block or not. I am not sure why you keep persisting in telling me Google will provide this information. You've now spent a lot longer assuring me google will tell me this than you apparently expect it would take to find this info via google, so please google it ad tell me, block or ok?
Google does not provide that information. That information is not in existence in the world, for Google or any one else to provide, because Norton is not providing enough data to make the decision. Vint Cerf, Bill Gates, and Peter Norton could get together and discuss that statement for a week, and they wouldn't know whether to block the traffic or not. No amount of research can make the data sufficient.
Right, because people who use computers without knowing what a UDP port is get killed doing it all the time.
"Ignition timing isn't all that complicated anyway."
So I would assume, but I don't know squat about it. I'm confident there are many things whose workings you depend on every day that you could easily understand if you wished to, but you don't bother, because you don't have to. I don't consider you stupid for that.
"And I'd say the society is only as smart as its stupidest component."
Gods, let's hope not. That's really incredibly stupid. Not mind you that I think "stupid" has anything to do with not knowing what a UDP port is. I mean, why should anyone but some small subsety of geeks care what a UDP port is? It's just not important or interesting in the grand scheme of things.
Your definition of "stupid" seems to be anyone who doesn't know the things you know, or who isn't interested in the things you're interested in. Well, that's stupid.
Well, I don't accept your definition of "stupid". We should allow people to spend more time thinking about the things they care about, and less about those they don't need to. We should be glad that we each can benefit from the expertise of others. Some auto designer has made my life better by letting me drive across town without having to understand ignition timings; I'll return the favor by letting him check the weather online without having to understand UDP ports. It's OK for people to specialize. It's the only way the society can be smarter than a single individual.
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Yes - if it is charged by a 12 volt circuit, it will never go over 12 volts. The current 12 volts will produce is limited by the resistance in the circuit. If the super-capacitor has none, and you touch the contacts, you're limited only by the resistance across you're hand. This is highly variable based on all sorts of factors, but can easily be low enough that 12 volts will hurt you quite badly.
The capacitor someone would use to power a laptop will have enough energy to power a laptop for several hours. If you short that with your hand, you will be very unhappy, if not maimed or dead. You won't be able to, because device designers will add safegaurds to prevent you from doing so. But if you get ahold of a raw capacitor with that kind of capacity, it is quite dangerous.
Capacitors do not have a fixed voltage "like 12V and 5V". The voltage thay supply is proportional to the amount of charge they are carrying. They have a voltage rating printed on the side of them, but this is not the voltage they supply, but the voltage it is safe to charge them up to; the voltage you can hook them up to, then later get out of them, without their exploding. (allowing for some amount of liability proof fudge factor, no doubt.)
Touching it with your hand would be somewhat worse than touching a freshly topped up car battery. Your phone battery has huge internal resistance; the max rate it can supply energy is a trickle. A car battery has much lower internal resistance, it can hurt you. A capacitor has no internal resistance to speak of.
FWIW, the deep-cycle battery won't hurt him as much as a regular car one.
Car batteries are opimised for low internal resistance; providing energy at a high rate. They like to be kept pretty fully charged all the time, and their total capacity isn't that great, which is fine because they are going to provide that one quick jolt to start the engine, then get recharged by it.
Deep-cycle batteries are designed to provide power over a longer period; They're what you want if you are going to actually run stuff off the batteries. They have greater total capacity, and are more tolerant of actually getting significantly discharged, but with the trade off of not delivering quite so big a jolt all at once.
Either one will hurt you pretty good though.
"And another example how the content industry wants to make money out of thin air. Quite literally."
Gahhh, misuse of "literally"! Pet peeve alarm! Unless they have expressed a desire to somehow print dollars on the air molecules themselves, your statement is figurative. Which is a perfectly fine thing for a statement to be, but it is not literal. It is certainly not "quite literal". It's not even "not quite" literal. It is the very opposite of literal.
The whole point of the word "literally" is to indicate that the statement to which it applies is not figurative, even though it might appear so. The point is to clear up possible confusion. Yet some subset of the population to which you seem to belong insists on applying "literally" to obviously figurative expressions, as some sort of meaningless emphasizer. Thus you destroy the usefulness of a very useful word. When next I see the word "literally" applied to some statement whose figurative nature is less obvious than yours, how am I to know if the speaker knows what the word means, or if they are just one of your clueless cohorts?
Please, please, desist from this senseless meaning-destruction. I am literally begging you.
Um, yes, I agree. What's that got to do with anything?
"Whether or not Perelman's proof is difficult to understand doesn't make a flipping bit of difference"
I must disagree. I could claim to have solved some very hard problem, and present some gobledy-gook nobody else understood as my "proof". But nobody would give me credit for solving the problem, even if my conclusion eventually turned out to be right. If you're going to get credit for proving something, your proof is going to have to pass some threshold of understandability by others.
I've not read Perelmans work, and I'm not enough of a topologist to judge it if I did. But it is my understanding that quite a few people who have and are were not entirely convinced. Cue the traditional denigrating of the abilities of ones doubters.
Maybe the chinese mathematicians have added something real to the proof. Maybe they've filled in stuff that just seemed obvious to Perelman. I don't know. Frankly, with my limited topology knowledge, the whole theorem seemed obviously true to me, but that doesn't mean I could prove it.
Priority disputes are annoying. I've no idea who deserves how much credit in this case, but I do know that whether one is clear absolutely does farking matter. Theorems are true or not on their own; the point of mathematics is to add them to human knowledge, and that requires clarity.
"But the Steve Jobs line?"
Was mostly a silly joke. But Apple is known for having interface standards that are strictly adhered to; for smoothly integrated consistency of user experience, Apple is king. And I'd argue that this is because these things are dictated top down by a hierarchy Steve sits atop.
You may not like the inconsistency of their corporate direction or whatever, but the internal consistency of their GUIs is impressive, and a fine example of what leaderless comittees don't do very well at.
"you'd think with all the brilliant contributers (and they do exist) I don't understand why consistency and usability fall so far behind"
You don't? It makes perfect sense to me. Put together a whole bunch of brilliant people, with none of them really in charge, and you'll get a system that is very flexible, and that does lots of things well, because it will support all of their visions. But using it will not be a smooth, integrated experience. You don't get consistency from large groups of decision makers.
If you want consistency, take a bunch of fairly talented people, and put one brilliant guy in charge of them. If you're really fanatical about it, make sure he's named "Steve".
How about free as in if I wrote it I'm going to feel free to do what I want with it, including keeping it to myself and charging for binaries. And any grant-supported ivory tower idealists who don't like it are Free (as feel free) to not buy it, but if they want to come up with perverted definitions of Free, I'll call them twits. Stallman is the uber-twit.
Guess I was in a rant mood, sorry. Most of Googles stuff rocks, but I'm not fond of Picassa.
On the scale needed to justify their share price, they don't make it at all.
I'm fine with them making their money from advertising, their software is good, and free, so I'll use it. Their advertising is fairly effective according to the marketing guys I know, I'd buy some if I were a marketing guy.
But I don't see their revenue going up by 1000% tomorrow, so I'm going to pass on their stock.
"If I was penniless on the street. No investor would do all that. They would laugh in my face."
An investor wouldn't hire you as an unskilled factory worker because you were poor?
"But yea, I don't have to take their money, and I wouldn't. I wouldn't want to build a business all the while knowing someone else owns it."
OK, what's the problem then?
"I might as well work for someone else in the first place."
If you work at a company funded by investors, whether through the stock market or otherwise, then it's not that you "might as well" work for someone else; you do work for someone else. If you don't want to do that, that's cool, no problem. But if other people do want to, why are you so worked up against the people who hire them?
You don't have to take their money.
You're penniless in the street, along comes some guy who buys the materials to build a factory, hires construction workers to build it, buys the machinery used in the factory, and hires you to work in the factory. He hires some salesmen to sell the stuff you make, which they do, and they bring back the money. And then you tell him "Screw you buddy, I did the work! Why should you get any of the money?" Or maybe the salesman can't sell any of it, and the factory has to close. You've got your salary for while it was open, but you think it's unfair that the you don't get the equiptment and the building too?
I'd love to make money by doing some stuff and producing stuff. I just need a bunch of startup money for equipment and expenses. Banks won't give me a loan for that, because if my business doesn't work out I won't be able to pay them back.
There's this other group of people who could give me the money, called "investors", and if the business doesn't work out, they'll just lose their money. Even if it does work out, I won't have to give the money back! Sounds cool right? But they expect to own part of my compnay, and if it does work out, they want a share of the profits. The nerve! They're not producing anything!
If I buy part of a company for $100, what sense does it make to say that part of that company is "actually" worth anything other than $100? What possible criteria could you use to set the value of a part of a company other than what people are willing to pay for it? Let's say I (and others) are willing to pay $100 to buy part of a company based on our expectation that that parts share of the companies profits for a year will be $10. Now it becomes apparent that this year that that parts share will only be $9. Would it make any sense at all for me still to be willing to pay the same amount for that part of that company? Of course not. Now I will be willing to pay less, and the companies stock will fall. I'm not sure what's so mystifying about this.
I guess you could say a company is "actually" worth the amount someone would pay for it if they knew for sure how much a company was going to make in the future. But nobody knows that, so it's not very useful.
Your understanding of the stock market is somewhat lacking.
"So you will have hugely profitable corporations that instead of making a record breaking profit of X will make X-3% (still a record), and as a result their value tumbles. Does it make sense ? "
It makes perfect sense. Investors thought they would make X, and decided how much to pay for the stock based on that assumption. The company made less than they thought they would, why wouldn't the amount investors are willing to pay go down?
"A long time ago it actually meant something to trade shares in a company; nowadays the company itself is only meaningful if you want to take it over. Apart from that the stock market is a kind of glorified bookmaker."
You're ignoring the part about dividends. You know, the part where your theoretical company's owners (the shareholders) divy up those record profits.
The basis for a stocks price is what the market thinks of it, yes. But the basis for what the market thinks of it is what investors expected to get paid when the companies they buy parts of go do stuff in the real world that makes money and then give it to their owners.
"Clearly we can see you have read the relevent sections of the constitution."
... the 16th amendment (I bet you thought it was about making slaves equal) "
Yes, I have. I read the whole thing every once in a while. It's not really that long or hard to understand, so there's no excuse for the many wrong ideas people vaugely attribute to it.
"Constitutionally the newly elected congress is NOT a 'new' congress. Congress is congress is congress. Electing new officials is NOT a reset switch for ANY consitutional limitations that aren't related to choosing new congressmen."
I don't beleive I ever said differently. Calling a newly elected set of congresspeople a 'new' congress is not a terribly radical bit of terminology, and makes it easier to talk about than saying "a newly elected set of congresspeople" all the time. It does not serve as a 'reset' on any constitutional limits; but I don't think it is too wildly speculative an interpretation to imagine that the fact the limit on funding of Armies is the same as the term length of Congressmen is more than random coincidence. Regardless, the point is moot; Congress re-authorizes the military budget yearly.
"The limitation only applies in time of peace...."
Let's have a look at that relevant section shall we? Article 1, section 8 : "Congress shall have the Power To... raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years". Yes, the same section gives them some powers relative to navies and state militias, but there is no further elaboration on that power or mention of "in time of peace".
"when the constitution was framed there were no U.S. Citizens"
Really? Given that they required the President to be a "Citizen of the United States" (Article 2, section 1), amongst various other references to US Citizenship, I find that claim dubious. Certainly the framers established a federal government which they intended to be not as strong relative to the states as it is today (though stronger than before the constitution); and certainly the federal government has consolidated power since, most obviously during the civil war era. But if you want to inteligently discuss that consolidation, and how it may relate to the spirit and/or letter of the Constituion, you should first familiarize yourself with the actual text. Which I assure you is not really that long or hard to understand.
"
Actually, I thought the 16th amendment was about clarifying the legal status of the income tax as an indirect tax not subject to aportionment. It is the one some people claim (not very convincingly) was never properly ratified, but the citizenship one was the 14th; which really was about civil rights, because the concept of being a citizen of both the United States and of a particular state is perfectly reasonable, and was already assumed by, and enshrined in, earlier parts of the Constitution.
And since there was nothing wrong with doing it, he felt no need to mention that he had done it. Through years of expensive investigations, reporters going to jail, appeals to the supreme court, etc. Do you think maybe he could have helped out a bit and mentioned "Oh yeah, that was me", since it was all so innocent? Maybe it slipped his mind. No wait, he went on about how he sure would like to ge to the bottom of this, so he was certainly aware people cared.
But in anycase, the explination is BS. There are specific procedures for declassifying stuff, established by his own authority. He neither followed these, nor ammended them. He didn't declassify it. He leaked it, doing real damage to our national security interests for purely partisan political reasons.
"If there is any meat to this report, you can bet that the democrats will demand hearings.
Then we'll have something to talk about."
Why? Democrats demand hearings all the time; why should the Republican Congress listen to them this time?
"The federal government isn't supposed to keep a standing army for a period greater than two years."
Uh, no. Congress has the power to raise and support armies. They may not apropriate money for armies for a term longer than two years. No congress can set up an army with funding that can't be cut off by the next congress. So every congress must re-authorize the military budget which they do. Saying you can't keep an army for more than 2 years would have been stupid even back when; what if a war went longer than that? Back in the day, navies required much bigger capital investment than armies, and there wern't any airplanes, so it makes sense why they handled navies differently, and an air force not at all. In any case, congress has side-stepped the whole issue by re-authorizing the military budget every year regardless of branch. Which is perfectly constitutional, even if the sheer size of that budget is stupid.
Values and beleifs like "People who wish to critisize their government should be allowed to do so"? Yes. I am absolutely convinced that that is a principle which should be universally observed. If you'd care to give us some idea why you think this principle is merely a quaint artifact of my western background, I'll be happy to consider your arguments (though I can't imagine what they would be). Until you do, I think I shall remain convinced.
"FR was the 'flagship' or 'main' campaign setting for a lot of years. It was very popular and rightly so."
Agreed.
"It was a very rich land, very detailed, and well supported."
And all of that material still exists. FR couldn't run forever. The sheer volume of material becomes a dettriment: no relatively new player could possibly be the ultimate master of all FR knowledge (as a certain 14-year-old segment of the D&D market yearns to be) While rightly loved by current players, FR was not drawing in new players the way something new and different would. So I don't think it's at all surprising WotC decided to do something new.
"They tried to mimic the way FR was created by having non-designers make submissions."
I don't know if mimicing the creation of FR was a motivation in setting up their contest. In any case, Keith Baker was a professional, published game designer before he ever entered their contest.
I beleive your spotting an Eberron book in a bargain bin is an anomoly. My understanding is that it has been quite successful.
I'm just saying, it's great that you like FR. Don't hate Eberron for pushing it our of the spotlight, because something had to. Also don't hate Eberron for being different than FR; if it weren't it really would be threatening it. This way, they each appeal to different sorts of player, so it's reasonable for Wotc to keep going with both.
Nah. Java and Javascript have entirely different retarded syntax.
'What a UDP port is' was intended as a random example of a piece of detailed network knowledge basic users would not have.
"Again, Google will provide the "good/bad" information they need"
Again (and again, and agian), it does not. "SvcHost.exe is trying to access the internet" is what Norton tells me and asks me to block or not. I am not sure why you keep persisting in telling me Google will provide this information. You've now spent a lot longer assuring me google will tell me this than you apparently expect it would take to find this info via google, so please google it ad tell me, block or ok?
Google does not provide that information. That information is not in existence in the world, for Google or any one else to provide, because Norton is not providing enough data to make the decision. Vint Cerf, Bill Gates, and Peter Norton could get together and discuss that statement for a week, and they wouldn't know whether to block the traffic or not. No amount of research can make the data sufficient.
Right, because people who use computers without knowing what a UDP port is get killed doing it all the time.
"Ignition timing isn't all that complicated anyway."
So I would assume, but I don't know squat about it. I'm confident there are many things whose workings you depend on every day that you could easily understand if you wished to, but you don't bother, because you don't have to. I don't consider you stupid for that.
"And I'd say the society is only as smart as its stupidest component."
Gods, let's hope not. That's really incredibly stupid. Not mind you that I think "stupid" has anything to do with not knowing what a UDP port is. I mean, why should anyone but some small subsety of geeks care what a UDP port is? It's just not important or interesting in the grand scheme of things.
Your definition of "stupid" seems to be anyone who doesn't know the things you know, or who isn't interested in the things you're interested in. Well, that's stupid.
Well, I don't accept your definition of "stupid". We should allow people to spend more time thinking about the things they care about, and less about those they don't need to. We should be glad that we each can benefit from the expertise of others. Some auto designer has made my life better by letting me drive across town without having to understand ignition timings; I'll return the favor by letting him check the weather online without having to understand UDP ports. It's OK for people to specialize. It's the only way the society can be smarter than a single individual.
Hooray for that.