The economy is booming; stock market is steady, unemployment is virtually non-existant, interest rates are low, and inflation is not a problem (except at the gas pump).
Which shows how economic statistics are disconnected from the reality of working class life. To all except the ruling class, the peformance of the stock market matters much less than the size of one's weekly paycheck.
Unemployment may be low but underemployment is tremendous; it is not economic progress when after a factory closes, a skilled worker can only find a job stocking shelves at Wal-Mart with the very Chinese-prison-made goods that put his old employer out of business. Wages are not keeping up with inflation, and you can't conveniently exclude the gas pump (and heating fuel). More and more people can't afford health insurance, and real estate prices are so high that new home buyers are saddled with enormous mortgage payments.
Economically these aren't the worst of times, but they sure as hell aren't the best either.
Meanwhile the Bush administrations kills tens of thousands, engages in torture, violates civil liberties, and treats the Constitution with even more contempt than the past few presidents, essentially asserting that "Commander in Chief" means "Emperor". In any sane society, it would be recognized that this man (who believes, you'll recall, that God speaks through him) would be institutionalized for his on protection and that of others.
Yeah, but why can't we take a break, relax, and go to a nice dinner without a protest speech?
In a sane world, a man responsible for as many deaths, mutilations, acts of torture, and assorted high crimes as George W. Bush, would not be able to go anywhere (except the jail cell he has so richly earned) without encountering a protest.
if anyone is "hurting america", it is stewart, for implying that any media source a responsibility to do anything other than report whatever they want.
Inherently contradictory. If any media source has no responsibility to do anything other than report whatever they want, then as a media source, Jon Stewart has no responsibility to do anything other than report whatever he wants, including the idea that media sources have responsibility to do things other than report whatever they want.
Re:Annoyance as a marketing technique?
on
Explorer Destroyer
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· Score: 1
if we're not supposed to eat animals then why are they made of meat?;-)
Being in a small car behind a mini-van is like driving blind. Sure you can leave plenty of space between you and the mini-van (if some other idiot doesn't try and put his vehicle in that space) but you still can't see past the mini-van especially if the rear window is tinted black.
If you can't deal with not having X-ray vision on the road, you're just screwed; even in an SUV you can't see through a tractor-trailer or a box truck.
You are completely relying on the driver in front of you to know what they are doing and to react to traffic in an appropriate amount of time.
You can't rely on that whether you can see through their vehicle or not. If they ram into the back of the vehicle in front of them, from my perspective it's just another sudden stop of their vehicle, something I have to be prepared for.
So what's the deal? Does my ability to safely navigate a Toyota Tercel through SUV-heavy traffic just mean I'm a much better driver than you and everyone else using this reasoning for commuting in a gas-guzzler, or what?
For some years, as the rhetoric of the RIAA and MPAA grew hotter, I've been predicting a "War on Copying" similar to (and about as successful as) the "War on Drugs".
In a few years, look for guys selling copy-protection busting software on the streetcorners next to the heroin dealers.
(Hmm, but then, this could be an opportunity for code geeks to make drug-dealer cash, to live that romantic cyberpunk outlaw hacker lifestyle...)
Just once, I'd like to make a pessimistic prediction about the United States government and be wrong.
Where might one find voices or proposals which attempt to combat child pornography without encroaching on reasonable civil liberties or turning the internet into a police state?
A reasonable proposal begins with the realization that child pornography is not a special case.
Is sexual abuse of children justly illegal? Yes. No special "child pornography" law is needed for that.
Is being an accessory to a crime of violence, fraud, or intimidation justly illegal? Yes. So we do not need any special "child pornography" law to take actions against other people (beside the abuser) involved in producing or selling films made by sexually abusing people.
Are fictitious depictions of the sexual abuse of children justly illegal? No, no more than is would be legitimate to censor fictitious depictions of murder, rape, robbery, or other violent crime. The fact that some people may enjoy, even get erotic pleasure from, such depictions is vile and distasteful, but should be irrelevant to their legal status.
Is it legitimate to censor images of actual events of children being harmed? The child's right of privacy should be the consideration here, and it shouldn't matter if the harm is sexual abuse or a violent accident (e.g., photos published on sites like rotten.com). Again, there shouldn't be any special treatment for "child pornography".
Grey listing works quite effectively, but requires implementation at your mail server, but I guess those of us who are sufficiently important can't risk delayed mail.
If you're important to me, you'll be whitelisted. But the effectiveness of greylisting seems to be decreasing, I'm seeing more spam get through. Still, between Spamcop's RBL and SQLGrey, I usually only have to delete about 20 spam messages a day.
Communism attempted to equate everyone as equals. How well did THAT work out?
Which communism was that?
Party leaders in the USSR never seemed to be all the equal with everyone else. Which was the fatal flaw in Marx's style of communism - once a bunch of "workers" seize power, they're not "workers" anymore, they're a government.
Or as a noted socialist critic of Soviet-style communism put it, "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."
I finally decided that it would be easier to ask on their irc channel, #linux-ha @ freenode...at this point #linux-ha folks suggested I post the entire error log on the mailing list "because more people read the mailing list". I wasn't interested in waiting another week for a "RTFM" response from a mailing list, so I told them "why not help me now, or at least say you arent qualified to help, etc".
I've never understood the attraction of IRC. I understand it even less when seeking technical help.
Not only are you relying on the chance that someone who knows the answer is on the channel at the same time as you, but you're also implictly demanding "I want an answer now!" which is not going to go over well.
I hear many more stories about rude behavior on IRC than other forums; it seems that maybe IRC attracts younger, ruder, and less experienced people.
I think forums like mailing lists, websites, even USENET, would be much more appropriate. You get a wider exposure for your question, and those who see it have more time to respond.
So why do people seek help from IRC? I'd like to know.
and right now, due to orders of magnitude advances in nuclear technology safety and fuel usage and pollution limiting, and advances in global warming and islamic extremism and oil prices, nuclear is looking better than oil
You fail to factor in the connection between nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and extremism. Scan the headlines for "Iran".
And very little electric power comes from oil, it's mostly coal with some natural gas. So "Islamic extremism" and oil prices don't figure in the question of how to best generate electric power.
However, it was pointed out elsewhere in this thread that I got the math wrong wrt thorium reserves. So I will tentatively modify my stance to say that uranium fission is at best a short-term stopgap, and we'd be better served putting those resources into renewables, efficiency, and research into the possibilities of fusion and thorium-based fission.
With a conservative estimate it will take 1,000,000 years to burn all that U233 breeded from Thorium.
You are correct that I got the math wrong.
It does seem that if a safe and practical method is found to run fission from thorium, it would be a long-lived solution. (Modulo reactor safety, security/proliferation, and waste issues; which are all less with thorium than uranium, but still significant.)
I'd tentatively move it into the same category as fusion, then; currently theoretically promising, but needing much more research to be practical. So I'll modify my stance to say that uranium fission is at best a short-term stopgap, and we'd be better served putting those resources into renewables, efficiency, and research into fusion and thorium-based fission.
And if it prevents you from switching channels? Return it as defective.
According to TFA, it does (or can be used to) stop a viewer from changing channels during commercials. (And if the show you want to watch starts during a commercial break in the one you're watching now? I guess that's tough luck.)
If in 50 + 150 years, we can't find another good source of energy, we deserve to starve from laziness.
I don't think pushing the problem onto future generations is a responsible solution. Fix it the right way now; rather that putting resources towards fission power, put them into the development of fusion, renewables, and efficiency.
Thinking about the future of the human race on this planet calls for long term planning.
That completely defeats the purpose of having a single portable device that you can carry with you.
Having an expandible device gives you options.
My Zaurus has a small built-in keyboard (as well as an on-screen one and handwriting reco for use in PDA mode, but I pretty much always open the clamshell for typing). It's usable for brief typing into the scheduler, or a quick remote login, and still handy to carry around.
If I'm going down to the coffeehouse to do some writing, I pack along a foldable USB keyboard and plug it in. More to carry, but still smaller and lighter than my Vaio notebook.
pebble bed reactors make all the difference...because they are super safe.
Except, they're not. Surrounding your fissionable with graphite - the stuff that fueled the Chernobyl fire - is not really bright. And a 1986 accident in Germany with a damaged "pebble" led to the release of radiation.
and with breeder reactors, we can reprocess the nuclear waste from the bygone era of old-style reactors and do away with all of that left-over pollution
Reprocessing leaves around plenty of thorium, radium, radon, and radioactive lead isotopes.
there is no peak uranium like there is peak oil. mainly because we can run nuclear power off of thorium as well as uranium.
Of course there's a "peak uranium", thorium doesn't change that. But thorium is a lousy fuel, it has to be "bred" into U233. And then you've still got a "peak thorium"; as thorium is about three times as abundant as uranium, maybe that's in 150 years instead of 50. (But then you need more thorium to get the same energy, so maybe sooner.)
Is fission less dangerous to the environment than coal? Perhaps. If it were a choice between only between building more coal plants and building fission ones, it's possible that fission might win out. (Though I think it would have to depend of the specifics of the technologies and implementations involved.)
But that's the wrong question.
At best, fission is still a stop-gap: supplies of fissionables are limited, on the order of a century or two at most, perhaps much less. So is it not more reasonable to divert resources to solving the problem right - with fusion reseach, renewables (i.e., using that big fusion reactor in the sky, including ideas like orbital photovoltaics) and better energy efficiency - than to build fission reactors and pushing the problem onto our great-grandchildren? (Or rather, for us non-breeders, our friends' great-grandchildren?)
The TFA mentions the Iran situation only to gloss over it, but there are massive security concerns with fission technology.
Also TFA is inaccurate in talking about nuclear waste; the problem is not the U and Pu in spent fuel, which can be processed and reused, but thorium, radium, radon, and radioactive lead isotopes.
Is some of the opposition to fission irrational? Yes. But so is some of its support, based on an almost romantic notion of "man harnassing the mighty power of the atom!"
So you're saying it is inappropriate to make fun of a convicted sexual offenders?
I don't know the specifics of this case; but if a man accidently ripped a woman's skirt and is therefore branded as "sex offender", we should be making fun of the legislature for passing such a law, the executive for arresting anyone under it, and the judiciary for convicting anyone under it.
People have been turned into "sex offenders" for mooning, for taking photos of their toddlers with pants around their ankles, and similar harmless acts. While removing rapists and the like from our company, or putting them under close supervision, is a darned good idea, many "sex crimes" are minor, or not justly crimes at all. (Check the laws of your state - if your sex life is at all interesting, you're probably violating some law that's on the books.)
Most of your neighbors have the potential to be concentration camp guards under the right circumstances. There is tremendous pleasure in murder and rape, and all that they really lack is the opportunity.
It's not so much a question of "pleasure", as it is of our dangerous and powerful tendancy toward submission to authority.
It's only a thin veneer of civilization that separates us from our demons
It's exactly this sort of belief that causes people to set up more authority in order to supress these "demons"...i.e., creating real monsters to fight ones that are mostly imaginary.
"Mostly" because yes, there are a few folks out there who, under the paint, are psychopaths. But they are few, and creating authoritarian stuctures for them to hijack lets them do more damage.
I don't understand why you people are getting on my case like I just committed some heinous crime. I won't buy X10 products, but have found many that I'd like to buy.
No one's getting on your case. You sounded (and still sound) confused by the distinction between the X10 protocol, and a specific company that happens to make products that use that protocol. The confusion is unfortunately common. I was trying to help.
How does not buying any X10 products make me a punisher of the X-10 protocol?
"X10 products" is an ambiguous identifier, that most people would parse as meaning "products using the X10 protocol". (Just as "Ethernet products" is taken to mean "any 802.3 hardware".)
If by "not purchasing X10 products" you mean "not buy products from X10 Wireless Technology/X10.com", great, we're all in agreement, and I'd just suggest you disambiguate your phrasing.
If you mean "not purchasing products based on the X10 protocol", I want to point out that just because X10 Wireless Technology/X10.com sucks eggs, that's reason to not buy, say, Black and Decker X10 products.
what made you think that I am "blaming" anyone but X10 for X10's business practices?
You said, "I really want to buy X10 products, but refuse to on the principal of their advertising methods."
X10 (the protocol) doesn't have advertising methods. X10.com ("X10 Wireless Technology", the company) does. If you speak of "X10's advertising methods" it sounds like you are confusing the two, using an ambiguous indentifier.
It's somewhat like saying "I really want to use TCP, but refuse to on the principal the tcp.com is an ugly website." (I don't know anything about the guy who runs tcp.com and don't mean to allege any likeness to x10.com's business practices, just a handy example of a website taking its name from a protocol.)
The X10 protocol long predates X10.com, it was developed in 1975. This company did not develop the X10 protocol, and is not the sole supplier of X10 products.
If you want to buy X10 products without patronizing X10.com, it's easily done.
Slashdot Mirror
Which shows how economic statistics are disconnected from the reality of working class life. To all except the ruling class, the peformance of the stock market matters much less than the size of one's weekly paycheck.
Unemployment may be low but underemployment is tremendous; it is not economic progress when after a factory closes, a skilled worker can only find a job stocking shelves at Wal-Mart with the very Chinese-prison-made goods that put his old employer out of business. Wages are not keeping up with inflation, and you can't conveniently exclude the gas pump (and heating fuel). More and more people can't afford health insurance, and real estate prices are so high that new home buyers are saddled with enormous mortgage payments.
Economically these aren't the worst of times, but they sure as hell aren't the best either.
Meanwhile the Bush administrations kills tens of thousands, engages in torture, violates civil liberties, and treats the Constitution with even more contempt than the past few presidents, essentially asserting that "Commander in Chief" means "Emperor". In any sane society, it would be recognized that this man (who believes, you'll recall, that God speaks through him) would be institutionalized for his on protection and that of others.
ITMFA.
In a sane world, a man responsible for as many deaths, mutilations, acts of torture, and assorted high crimes as George W. Bush, would not be able to go anywhere (except the jail cell he has so richly earned) without encountering a protest.
Inherently contradictory. If any media source has no responsibility to do anything other than report whatever they want, then as a media source, Jon Stewart has no responsibility to do anything other than report whatever he wants, including the idea that media sources have responsibility to do things other than report whatever they want.
You're made out of meat too, buddy.
If you can't deal with not having X-ray vision on the road, you're just screwed; even in an SUV you can't see through a tractor-trailer or a box truck.
You can't rely on that whether you can see through their vehicle or not. If they ram into the back of the vehicle in front of them, from my perspective it's just another sudden stop of their vehicle, something I have to be prepared for.
So what's the deal? Does my ability to safely navigate a Toyota Tercel through SUV-heavy traffic just mean I'm a much better driver than you and everyone else using this reasoning for commuting in a gas-guzzler, or what?
For some years, as the rhetoric of the RIAA and MPAA grew hotter, I've been predicting a "War on Copying" similar to (and about as successful as) the "War on Drugs".
In a few years, look for guys selling copy-protection busting software on the streetcorners next to the heroin dealers.
(Hmm, but then, this could be an opportunity for code geeks to make drug-dealer cash, to live that romantic cyberpunk outlaw hacker lifestyle...)
Just once, I'd like to make a pessimistic prediction about the United States government and be wrong.
But it's not just my privacy. It's yours, and my neighbors' - and that of the adults these children will grow up to be.
A reasonable proposal begins with the realization that child pornography is not a special case.
Is sexual abuse of children justly illegal? Yes. No special "child pornography" law is needed for that.
Is being an accessory to a crime of violence, fraud, or intimidation justly illegal? Yes. So we do not need any special "child pornography" law to take actions against other people (beside the abuser) involved in producing or selling films made by sexually abusing people.
Are fictitious depictions of the sexual abuse of children justly illegal? No, no more than is would be legitimate to censor fictitious depictions of murder, rape, robbery, or other violent crime. The fact that some people may enjoy, even get erotic pleasure from, such depictions is vile and distasteful, but should be irrelevant to their legal status.
Is it legitimate to censor images of actual events of children being harmed? The child's right of privacy should be the consideration here, and it shouldn't matter if the harm is sexual abuse or a violent accident (e.g., photos published on sites like rotten.com). Again, there shouldn't be any special treatment for "child pornography".
If you have two seventeen-year-olds flirting in a chat roon, you've just had two "children solicited".
If you're important to me, you'll be whitelisted. But the effectiveness of greylisting seems to be decreasing, I'm seeing more spam get through. Still, between Spamcop's RBL and SQLGrey, I usually only have to delete about 20 spam messages a day.
Which communism was that?
Party leaders in the USSR never seemed to be all the equal with everyone else. Which was the fatal flaw in Marx's style of communism - once a bunch of "workers" seize power, they're not "workers" anymore, they're a government.
Or as a noted socialist critic of Soviet-style communism put it, "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."
Ah, so DRM is a bogus psudeo-contract which attempts to turn a purchase into some sort of limited "licence" con job? Yeah, seems about right.
I've never understood the attraction of IRC. I understand it even less when seeking technical help.
Not only are you relying on the chance that someone who knows the answer is on the channel at the same time as you, but you're also implictly demanding "I want an answer now!" which is not going to go over well.
I hear many more stories about rude behavior on IRC than other forums; it seems that maybe IRC attracts younger, ruder, and less experienced people.
I think forums like mailing lists, websites, even USENET, would be much more appropriate. You get a wider exposure for your question, and those who see it have more time to respond.
So why do people seek help from IRC? I'd like to know.
You fail to factor in the connection between nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and extremism. Scan the headlines for "Iran".
And very little electric power comes from oil, it's mostly coal with some natural gas. So "Islamic extremism" and oil prices don't figure in the question of how to best generate electric power.
However, it was pointed out elsewhere in this thread that I got the math wrong wrt thorium reserves. So I will tentatively modify my stance to say that uranium fission is at best a short-term stopgap, and we'd be better served putting those resources into renewables, efficiency, and research into the possibilities of fusion and thorium-based fission.
You are correct that I got the math wrong.
It does seem that if a safe and practical method is found to run fission from thorium, it would be a long-lived solution. (Modulo reactor safety, security/proliferation, and waste issues; which are all less with thorium than uranium, but still significant.)
I'd tentatively move it into the same category as fusion, then; currently theoretically promising, but needing much more research to be practical. So I'll modify my stance to say that uranium fission is at best a short-term stopgap, and we'd be better served putting those resources into renewables, efficiency, and research into fusion and thorium-based fission.
According to TFA, it does (or can be used to) stop a viewer from changing channels during commercials. (And if the show you want to watch starts during a commercial break in the one you're watching now? I guess that's tough luck.)
I don't think pushing the problem onto future generations is a responsible solution. Fix it the right way now; rather that putting resources towards fission power, put them into the development of fusion, renewables, and efficiency.
Thinking about the future of the human race on this planet calls for long term planning.
Having an expandible device gives you options.
My Zaurus has a small built-in keyboard (as well as an on-screen one and handwriting reco for use in PDA mode, but I pretty much always open the clamshell for typing). It's usable for brief typing into the scheduler, or a quick remote login, and still handy to carry around.
If I'm going down to the coffeehouse to do some writing, I pack along a foldable USB keyboard and plug it in. More to carry, but still smaller and lighter than my Vaio notebook.
Except, they're not. Surrounding your fissionable with graphite - the stuff that fueled the Chernobyl fire - is not really bright. And a 1986 accident in Germany with a damaged "pebble" led to the release of radiation.
Reprocessing leaves around plenty of thorium, radium, radon, and radioactive lead isotopes.
Of course there's a "peak uranium", thorium doesn't change that. But thorium is a lousy fuel, it has to be "bred" into U233. And then you've still got a "peak thorium"; as thorium is about three times as abundant as uranium, maybe that's in 150 years instead of 50. (But then you need more thorium to get the same energy, so maybe sooner.)
Is fission less dangerous to the environment than coal? Perhaps. If it were a choice between only between building more coal plants and building fission ones, it's possible that fission might win out. (Though I think it would have to depend of the specifics of the technologies and implementations involved.)
But that's the wrong question.
At best, fission is still a stop-gap: supplies of fissionables are limited, on the order of a century or two at most, perhaps much less. So is it not more reasonable to divert resources to solving the problem right - with fusion reseach, renewables (i.e., using that big fusion reactor in the sky, including ideas like orbital photovoltaics) and better energy efficiency - than to build fission reactors and pushing the problem onto our great-grandchildren? (Or rather, for us non-breeders, our friends' great-grandchildren?)
The TFA mentions the Iran situation only to gloss over it, but there are massive security concerns with fission technology.
Also TFA is inaccurate in talking about nuclear waste; the problem is not the U and Pu in spent fuel, which can be processed and reused, but thorium, radium, radon, and radioactive lead isotopes.
Is some of the opposition to fission irrational? Yes. But so is some of its support, based on an almost romantic notion of "man harnassing the mighty power of the atom!"
I don't know the specifics of this case; but if a man accidently ripped a woman's skirt and is therefore branded as "sex offender", we should be making fun of the legislature for passing such a law, the executive for arresting anyone under it, and the judiciary for convicting anyone under it.
People have been turned into "sex offenders" for mooning, for taking photos of their toddlers with pants around their ankles, and similar harmless acts. While removing rapists and the like from our company, or putting them under close supervision, is a darned good idea, many "sex crimes" are minor, or not justly crimes at all. (Check the laws of your state - if your sex life is at all interesting, you're probably violating some law that's on the books.)
It is practical for a small group of people to start a new web project; cyberspace is extensible.
It's rather difficult for a small group of people - or even a large group of people - to start a new nation; the planet is not extensible.
It's not so much a question of "pleasure", as it is of our dangerous and powerful tendancy toward submission to authority.
It's exactly this sort of belief that causes people to set up more authority in order to supress these "demons"...i.e., creating real monsters to fight ones that are mostly imaginary.
"Mostly" because yes, there are a few folks out there who, under the paint, are psychopaths. But they are few, and creating authoritarian stuctures for them to hijack lets them do more damage.
No one's getting on your case. You sounded (and still sound) confused by the distinction between the X10 protocol, and a specific company that happens to make products that use that protocol. The confusion is unfortunately common. I was trying to help.
"X10 products" is an ambiguous identifier, that most people would parse as meaning "products using the X10 protocol". (Just as "Ethernet products" is taken to mean "any 802.3 hardware".)
If by "not purchasing X10 products" you mean "not buy products from X10 Wireless Technology/X10.com", great, we're all in agreement, and I'd just suggest you disambiguate your phrasing.
If you mean "not purchasing products based on the X10 protocol", I want to point out that just because X10 Wireless Technology/X10.com sucks eggs, that's reason to not buy, say, Black and Decker X10 products.
You said, "I really want to buy X10 products, but refuse to on the principal of their advertising methods."
X10 (the protocol) doesn't have advertising methods. X10.com ("X10 Wireless Technology", the company) does. If you speak of "X10's advertising methods" it sounds like you are confusing the two, using an ambiguous indentifier.
It's somewhat like saying "I really want to use TCP, but refuse to on the principal the tcp.com is an ugly website." (I don't know anything about the guy who runs tcp.com and don't mean to allege any likeness to x10.com's business practices, just a handy example of a website taking its name from a protocol.)
The X10 protocol long predates X10.com, it was developed in 1975. This company did not develop the X10 protocol, and is not the sole supplier of X10 products.
If you want to buy X10 products without patronizing X10.com, it's easily done.