It's being so far left that you complete the circle with the far right.
A popular cliche, but completely wrong. Politics is multi-dimensional; the left/right (labor/capital) axis is orthogonal to the the authoritarian/libertarian one. Facismism is authoritarian capitalism (Yes, the Nazis had "socialist" in their name, they lied, big surprise. Socialists don't supply slave labor to corporations. (Slave labor to the state, maybe.))
In the lead-up to the war in Iraq, for some reason, people who were against the war didn't speak...
Excuse me? Hundreds of thousands of us protested, you know. People were harrassed, even arrested for speaking their mind. Certainly there were those who were intimidated into silence, but this guy makes it sound like there was no anti-war movement before Dean spoke up. Please!
They are altering weather over a tiny area probably only 1/4 square mile
Have you not heard of chaos theory? The "butterfly effect"?
Hail isn't a good thing
Sure it is. Some of us enjoy hail. Interesting weather is beautiful! What the fsck gives them the right to deny it to us because we might live close to a Nissan dealership? (And to send noise pollution out in a five-mile radius?)
He lied in a public address. He (probably) didn't perjure himself by lying on the stand, because he was a smart lawyer. (As I understand it, the point of fact of the question of perjury comes down to whether or not he copped a feel somewhere along the line.)
But only a fool would compare his lying about getting sucked off with Bush the Second's lies about Iraq, or Reagan and Bush the First's lies about Iran/Contra, or Nixon's lies about...well, everything, or Johnson's lies about Vietnam.
A successor to Hubble is already in the works, one that will likely make Hubble look as pitiful and as obsolete as the Model T looks to a modern automobile.
...if it is ever actually deployed. And if it performs as promised. And if it doesn't meet with an accident (since it is non-servicable, given foreseeable launch technologies). And even then, it's not truly a successor - it operates in different wavelengths and so will not be able to do some of the observtions that the Hubble does. And the point of the article is that the argument that the Hubble is too risky to maintain doesn't hold water.
Better a telescope in the sky, than two on the drawing board.
Where I live they are building a HUGE industrial park with extremely attractive tax breaks for big business (and entrepreneurs if they can afford to invest) to bring jobs to the area.
...instead of putting those resources towards helping the existing small businesses grow. Homegrown jobs beat imported ones hands down.
When YOU have $10 million dollars to invest and have the option of going to a state or county that will save you 10% in taxes, which one would you pick?
You give Amalgamated Profits, Inc. a 10% tax break, they relocate their head office to your town. Your local economy becomes dependant on them - you become a Twenty-First Century company town. Ten years later, the next town over offers them a 15% tax break. They're gone. Your town is seriously fscked.
Interesting how the Chinese didn't even have a viable space program until the previous Administration allowed export of the appropriate technology.
In point of fact, Clinton only followed Reagan and Bush the First's policy of allowing dual-use technologies to be soldto China. As with most of the right wing's charges against Clinton, this one doesn't hold water.
(Which doesn't change that he's a rat bastard who, in any sane society, would have long ago been institutionalized for the protection of himself and others. But the same could be said of both Bushes, Reagan, Nixon, Johnson, and Kennedy - and that's giving the benefit of the doubt to the others.)
The ultimate future of Earth and Mars, and all the other planets in our system, is that they will be complete dissassembled for raw materials.
Possible, though I would hope that if our inheritor species reach such a level of technology, they would by that time have developed long-term thinking and ecological concerns, and would let Earth lie "fallow" to possibly develop new intelligent species. (See David Brin's "Earthclan" novels for some interesting ideas.
But I'd say it's about 50/50 at best as to whether humanity (or possible inheritor species) ever establishes a presence beyond lunar orbit.
However, there is no value in being able to see the same spot in both the rear and side mirrors.
Sure there is. Overlap helps mental processing. If you see "ah, there's an object on mirror 1; now it's on mirror 1 and mirror 2; now it's on mirror 2" it's easier to have a mental model that this is the same object, than if you see "there's an object on mirror 1; now there's an object on mirror 2". It's the same reason your browser gives a few lines of overlap when you page down.
Re:Something I learned from Martin Gardner...
on
The Golden Ratio
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· Score: 1
You'll get a quadratic with the solutions (1 +/- sqrt(5))/2, or 1.618... and -0.618...
Re:Mathematics not universal?
on
The Golden Ratio
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· Score: 5, Interesting
If mathematics are not universal, then the mathematical reasoning that can be conducted to deduce the laws of nature is also not universal.
You're assuming a relationship between mathematics and the "laws of nature" that isn't there. As Einstein put it, As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
Mathematics is as socially constructed as any other form of language. It is based on axioms and defintions, not observation of reality. We select those axioms and definitions in a way to be useful to us, just as we select for those lingustic constructs that are useful. But this selection is based on our desire to communicate with others - it is a social construct. Once upon a time if you asked mathematicians what nubmer, when squared, gave negative one, they'd say there was no such number; now, any bright middle school kids know it's i.
"Reality" is also to a large degree socially constructed, since all can ever speak of is our observations, which are socially conditioned. You see what you expect to see or are trained to see. (You don't see the fnords, or Sombody Else's Problem, while the hypothetical planet Vulcan (the one inside the orbit of Mercury, not Mr. Spock's home) was observed several times, as were Blondlot's N-rays.) This is why double-blind protocols are used - though if everyone involved has an expectation, that doesn't help.
What we think of as "reality" is just a model that we mostly share. The electron, for example, is not a component of human experience but a component of a model that unifies and predicts many observations. That is a very good and useful model, but it is entirely conceivable that some extra-terrestrial civilization has (or some future human civilization will have) a model that is just as useful but doesn't contain anything like electrons. (Just like Chinese Medicine has a "patterne-thinking" model of the human being that is radically different than and incompatible with the reductionist model, yet is extremely useful.) What would such an electron-free model look like? I can't tell you, I'm too conditioned by the electron model.
Remember: for any set of observations, there are an infinite number of hypothesis to fit them. There's no end to the curves you can plot through any finite set of data points. We see the points and call them a line, but it ain't necessarily so. The best we can do is eliminate lines that don't go anywhere near the points.
While that idea might be more accurately stated as "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will accidentally shoot their own kids,"...
Off topic, but...accidental deaths by firearm are much lower than accidental deaths by motor vehicle accidents, fatal falls, poisonings, drownings, deaths from fire, or suffocation. (That's not even considering that many suicides by firearms are deliberately classified as "accidents" for financial (life insurance doesn't cover suicide) or emotional reasons.) While even one accidental death from firearms is one too many, the use of accidental shootings as a justification for a state monopoly on firearms doesn't hold water.
Anyway, to get vaugely back on topic, if it were really important to track down a domain owner, unless the registar is getting paid in cash, there's a payment trail that could be followed.
Anyone else think we're nearing the end of the analog phone system?
About as near as we are to flying cars in every driveway and robot butlers in every house.
The amazing thing about the modern phone system is its backwards compatibility. You might have some voice-over-IP scheme on your end, and be talking to someone on a system that's little better than a tin can with a string.
Something to keep an eye on, certainly, and something to look into the reasons why, of course, but let's not press the big red panic button just yet, ok?
If I lived on a low-lying island or costal region, I'd be jumping up an down on that button. Small rises in sea level can lead to large areas going from beachfront property to shallow water, displacing millions of people.
The ice at the poles have melted quiet a few times in earths history.
True. But it has not made for fun time for the various animals crawling on the planet's face.
It's likely earth won't be doomed this time either.
Yes, the rock will still be here, and there will be life on it, no matter what we do. That doesn't mean that civilized humans will be part of that life. We can't destroy the Earth, but we sure can destroy civilization. We could even wipe out our own species (along with all the others we're already destroying) if we're studpidly clever enough and work real hard.
I frequently find NEW books that I want selling at or below the price that Powell's is selling their *used* copies for.
Their prices are not always the best on common books. For rare/out-of-print ones, they're pretty good. (I've always found better deals on out-of-print martial arts and Asian bodywork there than at any other on-line bookseller.) And Powells is not, to my knowledge, evil like Amazon.
I. and others, are of the opinion that teaching ASL to all young children for precisely this reason is a good idea.
It would be wonderful if schools offered ASL just like a foreign language - sign would have been much more interesting and useful to me than the French I failed back in 8th grade...:-)
Voters should not have any way of obtaining proof they voted a certain way, because that'll lead to kickback schemes and bosses requiring their employees proving they voted a certain way.
This could happen right now with absentee ballots. Most states don't have any requirement that you be "absent" to vote by absentee ballots; your boss, or someone offering to buy your vote, could make you get one, fill it out under his/her watchful eye, seal it and mail it.
And there are schemes for secret ballots with anonymous receipts, like this one.
You're basically talking about eliminating the idea of a secret ballot. No effin' way.
There are schemes that provide a verifiable vote receipt, yet preserve secret balloting. David Chaum has an interesting one that uses a cut-and-choose protocol.
At one time, its largest single holding was stock in Gulf Oil Corporation. It was estimated some years ago to be a $200 million foundation. It became active in supporting conservative causes in 1973, when Richard Mellon Scaife became chairman. Since then, Scaife has been a leading financier of New Right causes. He controls not one -- but three (the Scaife, Carthage, and Allegheny) -- conservative family foundations. The Sarah Scaife Foundation is considered to be one of the top four conservative foundations.
The John M. Olin Foundation grew out of a family chemical and munitions manufacturing business, and funds right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
So if you want a source that's biased to industry and to the right wing, the ELC would be a good choice.
The bias is well and subtly crafted; for example, they state "A number of environmental problems are attributed to our reliance on fossil fuels, yet increased use of energy is a primary signal that a country is developing a higher standard of living" - the unspoken connotation being that conservation and efficency is a reduction in living standards.
I'm not looking now, so not really...but I do get calls from recruiters. (The calls are picking up a little in the past few months after being really dry for about a year.) If you're in the Baltimore/Washington area and do Unix-type stuff, drop me a line and if I get anyone asking I'll put them on to you.
Its troll's like you that get fired because they fuck off on 'THEIR' computer...go on welfare and make me pay more taxes to support their fucking lazy bum asses...Its called COMPANY EMAIL for a reason, it belongs to the company...your damn right I own it!!
Quite aside from what the law says or doesn't say, it's asshole bosses like you who make companies fail.
Treat your employees like shit, and you'll never get good performance. It is fundamentally impossible to have accurate communication with people who you're intimidating.
Treat them like people - and that means respective privacy - and things will get done.
If you had an employee that YOU were paying spending 30% of their time penning emails home or sitting on the phone, you are saying you wouldnt care???? That you wouldnt audit their email and phone use to verify that they are spending a ton of time on personal business, then fire them for it????
If they're spending 30% of their time on personal phone calls, their work won't get done, their job performance will be terrible, and you'll have adequate grounds for termination - without having to audit e-mail or phone use. Intrusive measures like phone auditing, e-mail monitoring, chemical drug screens, and so on, are just an admission that a company has no idea how well its its employees are doing.
Slashdot Mirror
A popular cliche, but completely wrong. Politics is multi-dimensional; the left/right (labor/capital) axis is orthogonal to the the authoritarian/libertarian one. Facismism is authoritarian capitalism (Yes, the Nazis had "socialist" in their name, they lied, big surprise. Socialists don't supply slave labor to corporations. (Slave labor to the state, maybe.))
Have you not heard of chaos theory? The "butterfly effect"?
Sure it is. Some of us enjoy hail. Interesting weather is beautiful! What the fsck gives them the right to deny it to us because we might live close to a Nissan dealership? (And to send noise pollution out in a five-mile radius?)
He lied in a public address. He (probably) didn't perjure himself by lying on the stand, because he was a smart lawyer. (As I understand it, the point of fact of the question of perjury comes down to whether or not he copped a feel somewhere along the line.)
But only a fool would compare his lying about getting sucked off with Bush the Second's lies about Iraq, or Reagan and Bush the First's lies about Iran/Contra, or Nixon's lies about...well, everything, or Johnson's lies about Vietnam.
...if it is ever actually deployed. And if it performs as promised. And if it doesn't meet with an accident (since it is non-servicable, given foreseeable launch technologies). And even then, it's not truly a successor - it operates in different wavelengths and so will not be able to do some of the observtions that the Hubble does. And the point of the article is that the argument that the Hubble is too risky to maintain doesn't hold water.
Better a telescope in the sky, than two on the drawing board.
...instead of putting those resources towards helping the existing small businesses grow. Homegrown jobs beat imported ones hands down.
You give Amalgamated Profits, Inc. a 10% tax break, they relocate their head office to your town. Your local economy becomes dependant on them - you become a Twenty-First Century company town. Ten years later, the next town over offers them a 15% tax break. They're gone. Your town is seriously fscked.
In point of fact, Clinton only followed Reagan and Bush the First's policy of allowing dual-use technologies to be soldto China. As with most of the right wing's charges against Clinton, this one doesn't hold water.
(Which doesn't change that he's a rat bastard who, in any sane society, would have long ago been institutionalized for the protection of himself and others. But the same could be said of both Bushes, Reagan, Nixon, Johnson, and Kennedy - and that's giving the benefit of the doubt to the others.)
Possible, though I would hope that if our inheritor species reach such a level of technology, they would by that time have developed long-term thinking and ecological concerns, and would let Earth lie "fallow" to possibly develop new intelligent species. (See David Brin's "Earthclan" novels for some interesting ideas.
But I'd say it's about 50/50 at best as to whether humanity (or possible inheritor species) ever establishes a presence beyond lunar orbit.
Sure there is. Overlap helps mental processing. If you see "ah, there's an object on mirror 1; now it's on mirror 1 and mirror 2; now it's on mirror 2" it's easier to have a mental model that this is the same object, than if you see "there's an object on mirror 1; now there's an object on mirror 2". It's the same reason your browser gives a few lines of overlap when you page down.
Phi is the arithmetic mean of 1 and the square root of five. Discordians should consider the significance of this...
You're assuming a relationship between mathematics and the "laws of nature" that isn't there. As Einstein put it, As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
Mathematics is as socially constructed as any other form of language. It is based on axioms and defintions, not observation of reality. We select those axioms and definitions in a way to be useful to us, just as we select for those lingustic constructs that are useful. But this selection is based on our desire to communicate with others - it is a social construct. Once upon a time if you asked mathematicians what nubmer, when squared, gave negative one, they'd say there was no such number; now, any bright middle school kids know it's i.
"Reality" is also to a large degree socially constructed, since all can ever speak of is our observations, which are socially conditioned. You see what you expect to see or are trained to see. (You don't see the fnords, or Sombody Else's Problem, while the hypothetical planet Vulcan (the one inside the orbit of Mercury, not Mr. Spock's home) was observed several times, as were Blondlot's N-rays.) This is why double-blind protocols are used - though if everyone involved has an expectation, that doesn't help.
What we think of as "reality" is just a model that we mostly share. The electron, for example, is not a component of human experience but a component of a model that unifies and predicts many observations. That is a very good and useful model, but it is entirely conceivable that some extra-terrestrial civilization has (or some future human civilization will have) a model that is just as useful but doesn't contain anything like electrons. (Just like Chinese Medicine has a "patterne-thinking" model of the human being that is radically different than and incompatible with the reductionist model, yet is extremely useful.) What would such an electron-free model look like? I can't tell you, I'm too conditioned by the electron model.
Remember: for any set of observations, there are an infinite number of hypothesis to fit them. There's no end to the curves you can plot through any finite set of data points. We see the points and call them a line, but it ain't necessarily so. The best we can do is eliminate lines that don't go anywhere near the points.
Off topic, but...accidental deaths by firearm are much lower than accidental deaths by motor vehicle accidents, fatal falls, poisonings, drownings, deaths from fire, or suffocation. (That's not even considering that many suicides by firearms are deliberately classified as "accidents" for financial (life insurance doesn't cover suicide) or emotional reasons.) While even one accidental death from firearms is one too many, the use of accidental shootings as a justification for a state monopoly on firearms doesn't hold water.
Anyway, to get vaugely back on topic, if it were really important to track down a domain owner, unless the registar is getting paid in cash, there's a payment trail that could be followed.
About as near as we are to flying cars in every driveway and robot butlers in every house.
The amazing thing about the modern phone system is its backwards compatibility. You might have some voice-over-IP scheme on your end, and be talking to someone on a system that's little better than a tin can with a string.
If I lived on a low-lying island or costal region, I'd be jumping up an down on that button. Small rises in sea level can lead to large areas going from beachfront property to shallow water, displacing millions of people.
True. But it has not made for fun time for the various animals crawling on the planet's face.
Yes, the rock will still be here, and there will be life on it, no matter what we do. That doesn't mean that civilized humans will be part of that life. We can't destroy the Earth, but we sure can destroy civilization. We could even wipe out our own species (along with all the others we're already destroying) if we're studpidly clever enough and work real hard.
Their prices are not always the best on common books. For rare/out-of-print ones, they're pretty good. (I've always found better deals on out-of-print martial arts and Asian bodywork there than at any other on-line bookseller.) And Powells is not, to my knowledge, evil like Amazon.
It would be wonderful if schools offered ASL just like a foreign language - sign would have been much more interesting and useful to me than the French I failed back in 8th grade... :-)
This could happen right now with absentee ballots. Most states don't have any requirement that you be "absent" to vote by absentee ballots; your boss, or someone offering to buy your vote, could make you get one, fill it out under his/her watchful eye, seal it and mail it.
And there are schemes for secret ballots with anonymous receipts, like this one.
There are schemes that provide a verifiable vote receipt, yet preserve secret balloting. David Chaum has an interesting one that uses a cut-and-choose protocol.
The ELC's main funding comes from the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the John M. Olin Foundation.
The Scaife Foundations are financed by the Mellon family fortune (from industrial, oil, and banking business):
The John M. Olin Foundation grew out of a family chemical and munitions manufacturing business, and funds right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
So if you want a source that's biased to industry and to the right wing, the ELC would be a good choice.
The bias is well and subtly crafted; for example, they state "A number of environmental problems are attributed to our reliance on fossil fuels, yet increased use of energy is a primary signal that a country is developing a higher standard of living" - the unspoken connotation being that conservation and efficency is a reduction in living standards.
Where is this world where you live, and can I move there?
I'm not looking now, so not really...but I do get calls from recruiters. (The calls are picking up a little in the past few months after being really dry for about a year.) If you're in the Baltimore/Washington area and do Unix-type stuff, drop me a line and if I get anyone asking I'll put them on to you.
Quite aside from what the law says or doesn't say, it's asshole bosses like you who make companies fail.
Treat your employees like shit, and you'll never get good performance. It is fundamentally impossible to have accurate communication with people who you're intimidating.
Treat them like people - and that means respective privacy - and things will get done.
If they're spending 30% of their time on personal phone calls, their work won't get done, their job performance will be terrible, and you'll have adequate grounds for termination - without having to audit e-mail or phone use. Intrusive measures like phone auditing, e-mail monitoring, chemical drug screens, and so on, are just an admission that a company has no idea how well its its employees are doing.