are so quick to make that decision, do you want the mothers who cant afford their kids, or know they will be unable to raise them, to bring them to your door to pay for / love / raise them as your own??
What if his answer is yes? Can't we agree that at least some women choose not to abort because they know that an adoptive family can be found?
My sister in law found herself in this situation (someone who reads my posts regularly is starting to be able to piece together her life story together by now;)). The choice is a deeply personal one, so it's not right for me to say one way or another why she made the choice she did, but I would like to think that it was influenced by the promises (made and delivered upon) that the rest of the family would help her raise the baby without the assistance of the scumbag father.
The real point here is that what you're accusing the other fellow of is hypocrisy. Even if he is, that doesn't make him wrong; if I say murder is wrong, and then kill someone, that doesn't make murder right.
Consider the fact that murder of a two year old solves the problem of a mother who can't afford her kids as well as abortion of a 6th month fetus solves the same problem. Simply because an idea solves a problem doesn't make it right either.
As far as the anybody else's damn business business, you're begging the question that the baby is a separate life. Clearly you don't think so, and he does, and so that's the point of debate.
Re:For folks near Disney...
on
Robocoaster
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Any chair can do this if you throw them it out of a six story building.
But how does this relate to PVR? Allowing my DVD player to access PC content doesn't allow me to PVR, as far as I can tell. The article mentioned plans to network to Replay TV, but that's not what you're saying here.
One thing that has always bugged me about T2 and now T3 is that they didn't repeat a really cool tiny, tiny detail that made Arnie look really creepy in T-1.
No eyebrows.
Something so small that you don't notice it unless you're told about it. Something easily overlooked by a machine designing a human. And God knows, something easy for wardrobe to whip up before a shot.
The only thing that occurs to me about it is that it makes Arnie look really creepy and now he's the hero. Too bad.
Writing as a Canadian, I'm a little concerned about your characterization of my country as monolithic.
I didn't mean to imply that Canada is monolithic, simply more monolithic. Certainly there is a mixture/mosaic of cultures there as here, but simply as a matter of population, there is more racial diversity in America. This is a matter of statistics, and certainly doesn't make one better than the other.
For better or worse, most Canadian guns are long guns used primarily for hunting and sport shooting.
True. This is what you would expect if I'm correct.
If there was a gun in the house, she'd probably be dead right now.
What is certainly true is that she was left exactly as badly hurt as he had intended. He did not need a gun to kill her. What a gun certainly would have done is evened the score. In any event, I'm not willing to cut my losses without guns and just say "well, she may get the shit kicked out of her every few months, but at least she's alive".
Canada certainly has much more of a monolithic culture than does America. I think much of what America terms as "problems" are simply the costs of having a truly heterogenous society. Every such society has these culture clashes, and that is the source of the violence. The guns are simply the implementation.
Columnist Michael Medved makes the claim that
if you isolate the gun crime among people like Canadians (i.e., whites), the numbers even out quite a bit. Without delving into the quagmire of why that might be, if it is indeed true, and I can't confirm or refute it quickly, it sort of makes the whole Canada vs. U.S. argument go up in smoke.
My personal resolution to the argument is simple the question: if you do not allow citizens to own firearms, how shall they protect themselves from criminals? Your answer cannot be "the cops". That's not what they are for. It's easy to sit in front of a computer in suburban America with a BMW in the garage and wonder why in the world anyone would need a handgun to protect themselves. Talk to my sister in law, who was attacked and beaten by her boyfriend, and you might get a different point of view.
part of the business model is to license the content once and play it into the (*&(*&@ ground? With a PVR, you record desired content once, and then the other 538 times they play Mr. Deeds is of no value to you.
I mean really, now that the Sopranos is off for the next year, what do you have HBO for? Why don't you rent or pay per view? Band of Brothers kicked ass, but there's nothing like that on the horizon.
Well, it was intended to be a joke. I assumed that the post was a swipe from a Northerner at Dallas, and Fort Worth is about 30 miles from Dallas, so moving to Dallas would be less of a hassle.
Actually, no piping is necessary. A Stirling engine works by converting heat into mechanical energy, and is reversible. So the mechanical energy supplied by a power source is actually converted into the cooling effect.
I wonder if this could lead to a sort of inverse microwave oven, i.e., one that could freeze water in under two minutes. Aside from having Margaritas muy rapido: it seems like rapid cooling could have:
medical applications
automotive applications (cool engine with sound generated by engine; kind of an sound based turbocharger)
and obviously, chip cooling. I always thought loud music was cool.
Seconded. A group from my church will be traveling about 550 to a town in Mexico (I'm in Texas) to build beds for an orphanage where the children are currently sleeping on the ground. I'm sure Slashdot's Eastern European posters can put this in even greater perspective. Kind of makes you rethink your whole "My life is hell because I can't get digital cable" philosophy, and makes you want to pick up a hammer.
Re:Check out Cato Funding
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 2
Furthermore, the NHTSA's tests showing a decrease in fatality with decrease in vehicle mass (it's obviously not linear by the way), only accounts for total fatalities. If you're talking about fatalities for occupants, they show an increase. You choose which vehicle you want your family riding in.
Re:Check out Cato Funding
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 2
You're overlooking the whole point of the report: that while increased mass increases the incidence and degree of injury to others, it decreases the incidence and fatality of injuries to occupants by a greater degree.
As far as the whole "people don't need SUV's" argument goes, I could make the argument that you don't need an Integra. 90% of the people on the planet (wild out of the ass statistic alert) don't have a car at all. My family only uses one on a daily basis (a minivan used by my wife, and a 1971 SuperBeetle that only runs intermittently), while I carpool to work. Perhaps going off-road, hauling cargo, or carrying more passengers is what you would do with an SUV, but other people might have different priorities and values, like simply the fact that they like a big car or even...safety, the whole thing we've been talking about.
This clash of values and priorities is inevitable, and really what the whole SUV debate is all about. Civilized people like you and me have discussions and intelligent conversations about it, and endeavor to change each others' minds. The problem comes when the sufficiently organized and political influential brook no disagreement and establish their will by edict, rather than allowing that interchange that is the essence of democracy and <gasp>free markets.
I'll dissent from "clearly show". The NHTSA's tests (to which I assume you're referring) fail to take into account a decrease in structural strength for a corresponding decrease in mass. This implies using a different (and presumably more expensive) material such as titanium. So obviously, we're not comparing apples to apples here. Yes, I suppose it would be true that the whole world would be safer if SUV's were made out of stronger, lighter materials, but they would also be more expensive to manufacture. Once again, different values, different priorities.
Re:Check out Cato Funding
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Thank you for actually reading the report. At least you're actually thinking about the issue.
Having said that...
A quick read of the "article" indicates that they did a regression analysis of different light truck percentage use against number of fatalities. Of course, there were almost no light trucks at the beginning of the 80s and so many light trucks now.
Regression period 1994-1997.
The Cato article does state that other sources do show that light trucks increase the fatalities of other drivers in head-on and side-impact collisions, and that light trucks have an higher incidence of roll over. They seemly ignore this and suggest that the improvement in overall traffic fatalities is due to the stiffer construction, vehicle weight, more safety features of SUVs!
The study is doing what good studies do: present the counterarguments first. The confusing thing is that the study concludes that while both of the above statements are true, the increase in fatalities they contribute is outweighed by the decrease in fatalities due to the construction of SUV's:
The strong light truck effects in the case of single-vehicle
fatalities imply that the stiffer frames and greater weights
of light trucks are protective of life in collisions not involving
other vehicles. Moreover, the light truck effects substantially
offset any fatalities from increases in single-vehicle
accidents associated with light truck use. The
multiple-vehicle fatality equations imply that the protective
effects of light trucks to their occupants outweigh any
increase in fatalities associated with an increase in multiple vehicle
accidents due to light truck use and any increase in
fatalities to occupants of other vehicles.
They even suggests more SUVs! This ignores two decades of vehicle improvements (air bags, anti-lock brakes, side impact beams, superior crush zones, increased vehicular weight) and improvements in driver behavior (more DUI stops, seat belts, child safety seats, etc...). By concentrating on percent light truck versus traffic fatalities a really incorrect picture is drawn. Just crash various light-truck versus various cars and cars versus cars from the current years and look at the results - oh just wait the NHTSA and insurance institute equivalent have done that comparison and guess what they reported.
Once again, 1994-1997.
It's amazing that a think tank that does such a shoddy analysis can reject years of actual crash tests by governmental organizations and private insurace research groups. I'm not saying that my critique is perfect, but their methodology is pretty goofy. I tend to trust actual research.
Take a look at the controls in this study:
Light truck and SUV registration per
licensed driver
Dummy variable identifying states
with 55 mph interstate highways
Average inches of rain
Inches of snow
Proportion of licensed drivers who are
male and under 25 years of age
Proportion of licensed drivers who are
are over 60 years of age
and a bunch more I'm too lazy to list. These are two Ph.D's in Economics at Rutgers; we're not talking community college here. You're saying we shouldn't trust academic research? I realize I didn't make it perfectly clear when I posted, but Regulation was simply the magazine that published the study.
Consider the study. What if it's right? If it's right, then opposing SUV's can cost lives. Of course, any choice that anyone makes can potentially "cost" lives; the point is, what public policy goals are we going to pursue, and do the choices we make further them?
Re:Check out Cato Funding
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Did you have a problem with the data, or the analysis of the data?
Oh, I'm sorry, that was an ad hominem attack. Okay, well then...
Of course Cato gets funding from car and oil companies. Cato lists as the title on its home page The Cato Institute: Public Policy Analysis, Limited Government, Free Markets. If they're engaged in a shadow conspiracy with the oil companies, they're not covering it up very well.
So...let's hear some criticism of the actual report. What? You can't tell a regression analysis from a Subway sandwich? Color me surprised.
Actually, here is the data, published by Regulation magazine, an adjunct to the Cato Institute. The full regression portion of the document is hairy, so here's the Conclusion:
CONCLUSION
the results of this research suggest that the
increase in light truck use in the United States in recent
years has helped to reduce motor vehicle fatalities. During
the years of our sample period (1994-1997), light truck
registrations per driver increased five percent. Our elasticity
estimates indicate this increase consequently lowered
single-vehicle fatalities per driver by 7.5 percent and multiple-
vehicle fatalities per driver by two percent. These figures
translate into about 2,000 lives saved between 1994 and
1997 because of the increase in light truck use.
As for environmental concerns, I suppose your point is true if you're comparing new to new, but comparing a new SUV to a sedan just a few years older, the data changes. If you compare a diesel SUV to a current standard sedan, it changes even further. If you're comparing a RAV-4 to a Cadillac Deville, well, you get the idea; it's not as simple as it seems.
From the tenor of your post, it sounds like there's something more than cold, hard data in your equation...read the report all the way through and make your own conclusion.
Ideally, I suppose, but like another poster noted, it's mostly the bone structure that determines what someone's face looks like.
What the story really relates is that surgery has advanced to the degree that all of the fine nerve and blood vessel work that is necessary to make a face more than a "skin mask" is in place. To get "Mel Gibson", all I really need is an intact face, heavy:( maxillofacial surgery / facial implants and a surgeon that has done some facial transplants.
Oh, and the aforementioned hours on the treadmill;).
The insurance claims start rolling in for the "facially challenged"...
Seriously though. This seems to take plastic surgery to an entirely new level. If my old face was destroyed in an accident, I might think for a few moments about getting Mel Gibson's face as a bolt-on.
Of course, without quite a few hours on the treadmill it's not exactly going to have the desired effect, but doesn't this open up a Pandora's Box for copyright issues...
Slashdot Mirror
are so quick to make that decision, do you want the mothers who cant afford their kids, or know they will be unable to raise them, to bring them to your door to pay for / love / raise them as your own??
;)). The choice is a deeply personal one, so it's not right for me to say one way or another why she made the choice she did, but I would like to think that it was influenced by the promises (made and delivered upon) that the rest of the family would help her raise the baby without the assistance of the scumbag father.
What if his answer is yes? Can't we agree that at least some women choose not to abort because they know that an adoptive family can be found?
My sister in law found herself in this situation (someone who reads my posts regularly is starting to be able to piece together her life story together by now
The real point here is that what you're accusing the other fellow of is hypocrisy. Even if he is, that doesn't make him wrong; if I say murder is wrong, and then kill someone, that doesn't make murder right.
Consider the fact that murder of a two year old solves the problem of a mother who can't afford her kids as well as abortion of a 6th month fetus solves the same problem. Simply because an idea solves a problem doesn't make it right either.
As far as the anybody else's damn business business, you're begging the question that the baby is a separate life. Clearly you don't think so, and he does, and so that's the point of debate.
Any chair can do this if you throw them it out of a six story building.
The 6G turn comes at the end.
But how does this relate to PVR? Allowing my DVD player to access PC content doesn't allow me to PVR, as far as I can tell. The article mentioned plans to network to Replay TV, but that's not what you're saying here.
Did I miss something?
One thing that has always bugged me about T2 and now T3 is that they didn't repeat a really cool tiny, tiny detail that made Arnie look really creepy in T-1.
No eyebrows.
Something so small that you don't notice it unless you're told about it. Something easily overlooked by a machine designing a human. And God knows, something easy for wardrobe to whip up before a shot.
The only thing that occurs to me about it is that it makes Arnie look really creepy and now he's the hero. Too bad.
Opporknockety strings.
Why?
Opporknockety only tunes once.
until Wesley Crusher's scene was cut.
More details here. This has become a frosh rite of passage for CSE's, i.e., to read this case.
"Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration"
- Thomas Edison
"Maybe if he'd studied harder he wouldn't have to work so hard"
- Nikola Tesla (somebody get me the exact quote)
Both education and a fresh perspective have their place.
from 1996. Conservatively definining "white" without including the following ethnic groups:
Canada comes out to a 3,718,005 non-white population. That means about 91% white, whereas according to the CIA Factbook, America is 77.1% white.
Sheesh. Only on Slashdot would I have to cite statitics to prove that Canada is whiter than America.
Writing as a Canadian, I'm a little concerned about your characterization of my country as monolithic.
I didn't mean to imply that Canada is monolithic, simply more monolithic. Certainly there is a mixture/mosaic of cultures there as here, but simply as a matter of population, there is more racial diversity in America. This is a matter of statistics, and certainly doesn't make one better than the other.
For better or worse, most Canadian guns are long guns used primarily for hunting and sport shooting.
True. This is what you would expect if I'm correct.
If there was a gun in the house, she'd probably be dead right now.
What is certainly true is that she was left exactly as badly hurt as he had intended. He did not need a gun to kill her. What a gun certainly would have done is evened the score. In any event, I'm not willing to cut my losses without guns and just say "well, she may get the shit kicked out of her every few months, but at least she's alive".
Canada certainly has much more of a monolithic culture than does America. I think much of what America terms as "problems" are simply the costs of having a truly heterogenous society. Every such society has these culture clashes, and that is the source of the violence. The guns are simply the implementation.
Columnist Michael Medved makes the claim that if you isolate the gun crime among people like Canadians (i.e., whites), the numbers even out quite a bit. Without delving into the quagmire of why that might be, if it is indeed true, and I can't confirm or refute it quickly, it sort of makes the whole Canada vs. U.S. argument go up in smoke.
My personal resolution to the argument is simple the question: if you do not allow citizens to own firearms, how shall they protect themselves from criminals? Your answer cannot be "the cops". That's not what they are for. It's easy to sit in front of a computer in suburban America with a BMW in the garage and wonder why in the world anyone would need a handgun to protect themselves. Talk to my sister in law, who was attacked and beaten by her boyfriend, and you might get a different point of view.
part of the business model is to license the content once and play it into the (*&(*&@ ground? With a PVR, you record desired content once, and then the other 538 times they play Mr. Deeds is of no value to you. I mean really, now that the Sopranos is off for the next year, what do you have HBO for? Why don't you rent or pay per view? Band of Brothers kicked ass, but there's nothing like that on the horizon.
Well, it was intended to be a joke. I assumed that the post was a swipe from a Northerner at Dallas, and Fort Worth is about 30 miles from Dallas, so moving to Dallas would be less of a hassle.
KERCLUNK!! Guess you had to be there (literally).
is that this post was written from Fort Worth.
Actually, no piping is necessary. A Stirling engine works by converting heat into mechanical energy, and is reversible. So the mechanical energy supplied by a power source is actually converted into the cooling effect.
and obviously, chip cooling. I always thought loud music was cool.
Seconded. A group from my church will be traveling about 550 to a town in Mexico (I'm in Texas) to build beds for an orphanage where the children are currently sleeping on the ground. I'm sure Slashdot's Eastern European posters can put this in even greater perspective. Kind of makes you rethink your whole "My life is hell because I can't get digital cable" philosophy, and makes you want to pick up a hammer.
Furthermore, the NHTSA's tests showing a decrease in fatality with decrease in vehicle mass (it's obviously not linear by the way), only accounts for total fatalities. If you're talking about fatalities for occupants, they show an increase. You choose which vehicle you want your family riding in.
You're overlooking the whole point of the report: that while increased mass increases the incidence and degree of injury to others, it decreases the incidence and fatality of injuries to occupants by a greater degree.
As far as the whole "people don't need SUV's" argument goes, I could make the argument that you don't need an Integra. 90% of the people on the planet (wild out of the ass statistic alert) don't have a car at all. My family only uses one on a daily basis (a minivan used by my wife, and a 1971 SuperBeetle that only runs intermittently), while I carpool to work. Perhaps going off-road, hauling cargo, or carrying more passengers is what you would do with an SUV, but other people might have different priorities and values, like simply the fact that they like a big car or even...safety, the whole thing we've been talking about.
This clash of values and priorities is inevitable, and really what the whole SUV debate is all about. Civilized people like you and me have discussions and intelligent conversations about it, and endeavor to change each others' minds. The problem comes when the sufficiently organized and political influential brook no disagreement and establish their will by edict, rather than allowing that interchange that is the essence of democracy and <gasp>free markets.
I'll dissent from "clearly show". The NHTSA's tests (to which I assume you're referring) fail to take into account a decrease in structural strength for a corresponding decrease in mass. This implies using a different (and presumably more expensive) material such as titanium. So obviously, we're not comparing apples to apples here. Yes, I suppose it would be true that the whole world would be safer if SUV's were made out of stronger, lighter materials, but they would also be more expensive to manufacture. Once again, different values, different priorities.
Having said that... A quick read of the "article" indicates that they did a regression analysis of different light truck percentage use against number of fatalities. Of course, there were almost no light trucks at the beginning of the 80s and so many light trucks now.
Regression period 1994-1997.
The Cato article does state that other sources do show that light trucks increase the fatalities of other drivers in head-on and side-impact collisions, and that light trucks have an higher incidence of roll over. They seemly ignore this and suggest that the improvement in overall traffic fatalities is due to the stiffer construction, vehicle weight, more safety features of SUVs!
The study is doing what good studies do: present the counterarguments first. The confusing thing is that the study concludes that while both of the above statements are true, the increase in fatalities they contribute is outweighed by the decrease in fatalities due to the construction of SUV's:
The strong light truck effects in the case of single-vehicle fatalities imply that the stiffer frames and greater weights of light trucks are protective of life in collisions not involving other vehicles. Moreover, the light truck effects substantially offset any fatalities from increases in single-vehicle accidents associated with light truck use. The multiple-vehicle fatality equations imply that the protective effects of light trucks to their occupants outweigh any increase in fatalities associated with an increase in multiple vehicle accidents due to light truck use and any increase in fatalities to occupants of other vehicles.
They even suggests more SUVs! This ignores two decades of vehicle improvements (air bags, anti-lock brakes, side impact beams, superior crush zones, increased vehicular weight) and improvements in driver behavior (more DUI stops, seat belts, child safety seats, etc...). By concentrating on percent light truck versus traffic fatalities a really incorrect picture is drawn. Just crash various light-truck versus various cars and cars versus cars from the current years and look at the results - oh just wait the NHTSA and insurance institute equivalent have done that comparison and guess what they reported.
Once again, 1994-1997.
It's amazing that a think tank that does such a shoddy analysis can reject years of actual crash tests by governmental organizations and private insurace research groups. I'm not saying that my critique is perfect, but their methodology is pretty goofy. I tend to trust actual research.
Take a look at the controls in this study:
and a bunch more I'm too lazy to list. These are two Ph.D's in Economics at Rutgers; we're not talking community college here. You're saying we shouldn't trust academic research? I realize I didn't make it perfectly clear when I posted, but Regulation was simply the magazine that published the study.
Consider the study. What if it's right? If it's right, then opposing SUV's can cost lives. Of course, any choice that anyone makes can potentially "cost" lives; the point is, what public policy goals are we going to pursue, and do the choices we make further them?
Did you have a problem with the data, or the analysis of the data?
Oh, I'm sorry, that was an ad hominem attack. Okay, well then...
Of course Cato gets funding from car and oil companies. Cato lists as the title on its home page The Cato Institute: Public Policy Analysis, Limited Government, Free Markets. If they're engaged in a shadow conspiracy with the oil companies, they're not covering it up very well.
So...let's hear some criticism of the actual report. What? You can't tell a regression analysis from a Subway sandwich? Color me surprised.
Actually, here is the data, published by Regulation magazine, an adjunct to the Cato Institute. The full regression portion of the document is hairy, so here's the Conclusion:
CONCLUSION the results of this research suggest that the increase in light truck use in the United States in recent years has helped to reduce motor vehicle fatalities. During the years of our sample period (1994-1997), light truck registrations per driver increased five percent. Our elasticity estimates indicate this increase consequently lowered single-vehicle fatalities per driver by 7.5 percent and multiple- vehicle fatalities per driver by two percent. These figures translate into about 2,000 lives saved between 1994 and 1997 because of the increase in light truck use.
As for environmental concerns, I suppose your point is true if you're comparing new to new, but comparing a new SUV to a sedan just a few years older, the data changes. If you compare a diesel SUV to a current standard sedan, it changes even further. If you're comparing a RAV-4 to a Cadillac Deville, well, you get the idea; it's not as simple as it seems.
From the tenor of your post, it sounds like there's something more than cold, hard data in your equation...read the report all the way through and make your own conclusion.
Perhaps we shouldn't be selling anything to China? Perhaps this whole strategy of constructive engagement is a bad idea?
Ideally, I suppose, but like another poster noted, it's mostly the bone structure that determines what someone's face looks like.
:( maxillofacial surgery / facial implants and a surgeon that has done some facial transplants.
;).
What the story really relates is that surgery has advanced to the degree that all of the fine nerve and blood vessel work that is necessary to make a face more than a "skin mask" is in place. To get "Mel Gibson", all I really need is an intact face, heavy
Oh, and the aforementioned hours on the treadmill
The insurance claims start rolling in for the "facially challenged"...
Seriously though. This seems to take plastic surgery to an entirely new level. If my old face was destroyed in an accident, I might think for a few moments about getting Mel Gibson's face as a bolt-on.
Of course, without quite a few hours on the treadmill it's not exactly going to have the desired effect, but doesn't this open up a Pandora's Box for copyright issues...