No, no, no. Solar panels are under 20% efficient *when* they're pointing at the sun. Any other angle and you get less still. Claiming efficiencies way over 50% is, well.... incredible, in the worst sense of the word. If you could make panels that efficient you wouldn't waste them on making windows. You'd put them on the roof and point them at the sun, like everyone does now. Or, if they're really cheap, you'd cover the whole building with them.
If you mean "go against physics" in the usual sense, that it violates accepted theory, then your statement that cold fusion doesn't go against physics is categorically false.
Steve Koonin, of Caltech, delivered the fatal blow some years ago.
> You cannot argue that this biases any particular group because:
Yes I can, because we've already tried it, and it did. Your theories don't withstand the data.
There's no incentive for those who satisfy the requirement to enable others to do so. This is pretty basic US history. You can't vote because you can't pass the voting test. You can't pass the test because you're not educated. You can't get an education because of your skin color. To open education to people of your skin color, you have to be able to vote.
> Uhm. Not wanting to be picky, but Americans voted the current administration in power
This is false. Even if the votes had favored Bush (they didn't), the SC decision was to ignore the vote based on the fact that the press had already declared Bush the winner. Doing otherwise, they argued in an incredible example of NewSpeak, would cast doubt on the election results. Doubt is certainty!
Uh, no. There are exactly two countries in the entire world where a majority support the war: the US and Israel. In every other country -- including those whose governments are supporting the war -- it is wildly unpopular.
> Now, I agree that there shouldn't be an artificial bias towards US companies, the bidding should be open to anyone who can provide the goods and services the Iraqis need at the best price.
Please contact your president immediately and let him know that.
This argument doesn't make much sense. It can be about oil without being about Iraqi oil.
It has been a fundamental tenet of the neocons that we shouldn't be involved in humanitarian military actions, and they all howled bitterly when Clinton wanted to remove a brutal dictator. They clearly see US interest in this action -- they are not advocating war merely for the sake of the Iraqi people (except cynically, in response to critics of the war).
What is that US interest? The WMD threat is not remotely credible as a direct threat to the US. Saddam might dream of hitting us, but he doesn't have a prayer of doing so, and he knows (as evidenced by his restraint in the first Gulf War) that if he ever did he'd be risking nuclear retaliation.
The real threat Saddam poses is to his neighbors. And we care about that because they have oil. Oil has always been our reason for getting involved in Middle Eastern governments. Do you think we staged a coup in Iran just for grins? For the warm reception we'd get from the Iranian people? Or poured money into the Iran/Iraq war because we just happened to have some cash lying around?
We've been in the Middle East for decades because of oil, and Saddam threatened that.
> That's an interesting assertion since prior to the Gulf War, Iraq was considered to have a relatively modern society.
I've read in a few places that radical Islam is growing there, perhaps because they have nothing else: years of poverty and oppression drive people to extremes.
> Everyone is happy, the rulers get to stay in power over the economic side of life and the mosque gets to control the religious side of life.
Pfft. Yeah, right. That's why they're flying fucking jets into fuck buildings in the US, and trying to figure out how to get a dirty nuke into the country. We can look forward to more of this as people in the area are outraged by the creation of another US client state to rule over them.
> People around the globe will be mad at us no matter what we do.
This is just false. There's ample history to demonstrate that.
>We haven't done anything to the Saudis (or to Muslims in general) and yet they still hate us.
Excuse me? What are you talking about? We've been very, very active in setting up and taking down governments in the Middle East, regardless of the wishes of people who live there. Good lord, in addition to things like installing a government in Iran, we've poured tons of weapons and money into the area to prop up governments we liked. The people there don't appreciate it. How does that count as "nothing"? The Saudis who attacked us believed the US was backing an illegitimate non-democratic government in their country, and -- guess what? We were.
> Would you rather wait to remove Saddam until after he had weapons of mass destruction that he could sell to terrorists?
I'd rather have a president smart enough to build concensus, rather than routinely insulting our allies, telling them their opinions don't matter, presenting forged "evidence" to justify the war, and failing to get any Arab support for an action that ultimately will have to be seen an legitimate in the eyes of Arabs for it to have a prayer of succeeding. You can't inflict your vision of freedom on a region that disagrees with your motives and your vision.
I think we agree that removing brutal dictators is a worthy cause, and, in fact, most of those against the war would agree with this.
The difficulty is in how it is executed. Leaving behind a void, or a government which is perceived by its citizens or neighbors as illegitimate will not be an improvement. It will only foster more war at the expense of the Iraqi people, and more hatred of America, making the world less safe and less free for all of us. The people who took down the Twin Towers were Arabs who considered their US backed non-democratic government to be illegitimate.
Lack of Arab support is significant. Lack of popular support for the governments that are with us is significant. These all greatly weaken the prospects of a stable future for Iraq. The extreme position of the Bush administration is needlessly creating many new converts to anti-Americanism.
Trouble is, there's not a convincing case that we are defending our freedom by this action. We might be defending (creating might be a better word) the freedom of the Iraqi people, but that's a different question.
It's quite likely that this action will reduce our freedoms by inflaming anti-American feeling around the globe, and making it far more dangerous to be an American. Certainly the attacks we've suffered so far have had a large impact on our freedom.
I'm not specifically referring to the UN, though buy-in from the UN would have gone a long way -- and the Bush administration made that virtually impossible by allowing their loud-mouthed neocons to declare the UN irrelevant at every opportunity.
I meant, more generally, world public opinion. Right now the whole world hates the US, and most importantly, people in the Middle East hate the US. Building a democracy of the unwilling with people who hate us and neighbors who will consider the new goverment to be illegitimate is... well, problematic -- especially as Bush claims we're not going to occupy Iraq any longer than it takes to remove Saddam. How is that going to work?
The coalition is not remotely as large as it was in the first gulf war. The statements from the administration on this subject have been almost entirely fabrications. Very, very few countries are giving military aid, and the governments that are supporting us do not have the backing of their voters. In Australia war is opposed by 80% of the public. In England the numbers nearly that bad.
It's worth noting, again, that Clinton, Gore, and Lieberman were all in favor of invading Iraq, and that Clinton pursued similar military targets without inflaming every country on the planet.
Bush has no credibility in world politics. Whether on not it's true, most of the world believes he's after Iraq's oil. It is problematic to give an oil man the job of removing a dictator in an oil producing country -- especially when that oil man is distainful of all things foreign, a swaggering Texan that routinely insults allies and enemies alike.
This has made world reactions to the war far more intense. Clinton was credible and persuasive in world politics. He also was not instigating a war, as Bush is.
Do you think the American people have the attention span to do this sort of work? Based on our last 50 years of foreign policy, I strongly doubt it. I don't think Bush has a viable plan, and I think Americans are going to tire of the story within three months.
This is greatly complicated by the fact that Bush has no buy-in from anyone in his vision of Iraq. Democracy in Japan involved a long-term occupation that Bush has already stated he's unwilling to do.
I don't see how he's going to build a democracy of the unwilling overnight, as he implies.
No one is opposed to removing brutal dictators (well.. except conservative foreign policy advisors for the last 50 years), but it has to be done with some semblance of credibility.
Bush has no credibility beyond the US Republican party. Everyone else on the planet believes he's motivated by oil. Whether or not this is true is mostly irrelevant. To succeed in this war he needed to convince people this wasn't true. His swaggering "fuck you" attitude has cost us dearly in anti-American sentiment around the globe. Our chances of any improvement in Iraq are now about zero, because he has buy-in from no one in his vision for the future of Iraq. Meanwhile the rest of the globe is horrified by the actions of the US, and religious leaders throughout the Middle East are calling for war against the US.
Bush has already lost this war, because he never understood what war he was fighting.
Re:What does "supporting the troops" mean, exactly
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
It's a weasel phrase for people who want to avoid the moral implications of war.
In long past wars it was generally thought in the US that people were responsible for making moral decisions even when in uniform. Stories were related of workers who pleaded "I just work here", when asked to explain their willingness to exterminate Jews. Derogatory terms were used to describe enemy peoples that did immoral things (e.g. holding your nose while the ovens burned made you a "good German", so this term became an insult).
This didn't cause any mental dissonance until we found ourselves dropping bombs on peasant farmers in Asia, and listening to US military officials saying "We had to destroy them in order to save them." We might have had this internal dialog sooner -- say, after nuking Japanese civilians -- if we hadn't at the time secretly (at times not so secretly) felt that the Japanese were less than human.
When the conflict did arise, the response of many was to decry the "good Germans" in our military who delivered death to so many Asian civilians. However many of our combatants were drafted into service, were morally opposed to their orders, but didn't see any way out. Blaming them for the crimes came to be seen as counter productive, and cruel.
So great pains are now made to distinguish between those who set policy and those who carry it out. This is supposedly what "supporting our troops" means.
However the term is almost universally only used by weasels who believe it eliminates any need to consider whether a war is just. Ask them whether we should be in Iraq and they will say "I support our troops". At some point it becomes equivalent to "I just work here." It's primarily used dismissively.
Very, very unlikely. It could be if there were a reasonable plan to do something after taking him out. But there isn't one, and Bush's gross incompetance at diplomacy have made it virtually impossible to make one. He has no credibility in the region, and creating a stable country without buy-in from anyone is not going to work.
All we will succeed in doing if this goes off like Bush plans, is creating a void in Iraq that will be quickly filled, and boosting anti-American feelings to record heights around the globe.
This will not make us, or anyone, safer. It will make us less safe.
Immigrants are not random samples of their native populations. There are strongly biasing selection criteria, e.g. not everyone manages to successfully smuggle themselves out of a communist labor camp and end up in America. Factors that may contribute include wealth and thinking skills.
I use USB audio on linux and it's great. Zero configuration. It just works. The same equipment on Windows will drop out and skip.
Seems to be a latency issue. Without the low latency patches Linux will skip. Redhat ships with the patches, so I didn't need to do anything. I discovered the effect later when compiling a kernel for something else, and left out the patches.
> To say that "no one understands how the hippocampus encodes information" is to admit to not even glancing at the research literature.
I think you're overstating this by a few miles. Yes, there are models. Yes, there is some data that can be mapped to real information, e.g. "place". But there's a vast gulf between a few reproducible results in a few very highly stereotyped lab settings (rats in a maze), and claiming to understanding how the hippocampus encodes information.
We have a few hints about how the hippocampus works and a few very preliminary and very cautious theories about what it might be doing.
Btw, do I know you? Say hi to Mike if you see him.
No, that's fusion. I'm quite aware of the difference. Fusion is frequently pitched as "clean" nuclear energy, because in theory it generates less or less dangerous radioactive waste that fission. If you visit some labs that work on this stuff, you'll find no end of promotional material on this subject. But it's not at all clear that the "cleaner" fusion reactions will ever be viable, and most of the other fusion reactions being considered are quite dirty.
Slashdot Mirror
No, no, no. Solar panels are under 20% efficient *when* they're pointing at the sun. Any other angle and you get less still. Claiming efficiencies way over 50% is, well.... incredible, in the worst sense of the word. If you could make panels that efficient you wouldn't waste them on making windows. You'd put them on the roof and point them at the sun, like everyone does now. Or, if they're really cheap, you'd cover the whole building with them.
This article is not very believable.
If you mean "go against physics" in the usual sense, that it violates accepted theory, then your statement that cold fusion doesn't go against physics is categorically false.
Steve Koonin, of Caltech, delivered the fatal blow some years ago.
It was investigated by all the best labs in the world. Result: they have no theory; they have no data.
> counted and recounted (about 8 times I think) and G.W. always won .
This is false.
... and then your address changes as the building settles.
> You cannot argue that this biases any particular group because:
Yes I can, because we've already tried it, and it did. Your theories don't withstand the data.
There's no incentive for those who satisfy
the requirement to enable others to do so. This is pretty basic US history. You can't vote because you can't pass the voting test. You can't pass the test because you're not educated. You can't get an education because of your skin color. To open education to people of your skin color, you have to be able to vote.
> Uhm. Not wanting to be picky, but Americans voted the current administration in power
This is false. Even if the votes had favored Bush (they didn't), the SC decision was to ignore the vote based on the fact that the press had already declared Bush the winner. Doing otherwise, they argued in an incredible example of NewSpeak, would cast doubt on the election results. Doubt is certainty!
Uh, no. There are exactly two countries in the entire world where a majority support the war: the US and Israel. In every other country -- including those whose governments are supporting the war -- it is wildly unpopular.
> Now, I agree that there shouldn't be an artificial bias towards US companies, the bidding should be open to anyone who can provide the goods and services the Iraqis need at the best price.
Please contact your president immediately and let him know that.
This argument doesn't make much sense. It can be about oil without being about Iraqi oil.
It has been a fundamental tenet of the neocons that we shouldn't be involved in humanitarian military actions, and they all howled bitterly when Clinton wanted to remove a brutal dictator. They clearly see US interest in this action -- they are not advocating war merely for the sake of the Iraqi people (except cynically, in response to critics of the war).
What is that US interest? The WMD threat is not remotely credible as a direct threat to the US. Saddam might dream of hitting us, but he doesn't have a prayer of doing so, and he knows (as evidenced by his restraint in the first Gulf War) that if he ever did he'd be risking nuclear retaliation.
The real threat Saddam poses is to his neighbors. And we care about that because they have oil. Oil has always been our reason for getting involved in Middle Eastern governments. Do you think we staged a coup in Iran just for grins? For the warm reception we'd get from the Iranian people? Or poured money into the Iran/Iraq war because we just happened to have some cash lying around?
We've been in the Middle East for decades because of oil, and Saddam threatened that.
> That's an interesting assertion since prior to the Gulf War, Iraq was considered to have a relatively modern society.
I've read in a few places that radical Islam is growing there, perhaps because they have nothing else: years of poverty and oppression drive people to extremes.
> Everyone is happy, the rulers get to stay in power over the economic side of life and the mosque gets to control the religious side of life.
Pfft. Yeah, right. That's why they're flying fucking jets into fuck buildings in the US, and trying to figure out how to get a dirty nuke into the country. We can look forward to more of this as people in the area are outraged by the creation of another US client state to rule over them.
> People around the globe will be mad at us no matter what we do.
This is just false. There's ample history to demonstrate that.
>We haven't done anything to the Saudis (or to Muslims in general) and yet they still hate us.
Excuse me? What are you talking about? We've been very, very active in setting up and taking down governments in the Middle East, regardless of the wishes of people who live there. Good lord, in addition to things like installing a government in Iran, we've poured tons of weapons and money into the area to prop up governments we liked. The people there don't appreciate it. How does that count as "nothing"? The Saudis who attacked us believed the US was backing an illegitimate non-democratic government in their country, and -- guess what? We were.
> Would you rather wait to remove Saddam until after he had weapons of mass destruction that he could sell to terrorists?
I'd rather have a president smart enough to build concensus, rather than routinely insulting our allies, telling them their opinions don't matter, presenting forged "evidence" to justify the war, and failing to get any Arab support for an action that ultimately will have to be seen an legitimate in the eyes of Arabs for it to have a prayer of succeeding. You can't inflict your vision of freedom on a region that disagrees with your motives and your vision.
I think we agree that removing brutal dictators is a worthy cause, and, in fact, most of those against the war would agree with this.
The difficulty is in how it is executed. Leaving behind a void, or a government which is perceived by its citizens or neighbors as illegitimate will not be an improvement. It will only foster more war at the expense of the Iraqi people, and more hatred of America, making the world less safe and less free for all of us. The people who took down the Twin Towers were Arabs who considered their US backed non-democratic government to be illegitimate.
Lack of Arab support is significant. Lack of popular support for the governments that are with us is significant. These all greatly weaken the prospects of a stable future for Iraq. The extreme position of the Bush administration is needlessly creating many new converts to anti-Americanism.
Trouble is, there's not a convincing case that we are defending our freedom by this action. We might be defending (creating might be a better word) the freedom of the Iraqi people, but that's a different question.
It's quite likely that this action will reduce our freedoms by inflaming anti-American feeling around the globe, and making it far more dangerous to be an American. Certainly the attacks we've suffered so far have had a large impact on our freedom.
I'm not specifically referring to the UN, though buy-in from the UN would have gone a long way -- and the Bush administration made that virtually impossible by allowing their loud-mouthed neocons to declare the UN irrelevant at every opportunity.
I meant, more generally, world public opinion. Right now the whole world hates the US, and most importantly, people in the Middle East hate the US. Building a democracy of the unwilling with people who hate us and neighbors who will consider the new goverment to be illegitimate is... well, problematic -- especially as Bush claims we're not going to occupy Iraq any longer than it takes to remove Saddam. How is that going to work?
The coalition is not remotely as large as it was in the first gulf war. The statements from the administration on this subject have been almost entirely fabrications. Very, very few countries are giving military aid, and the governments that are supporting us do not have the backing of their voters. In Australia war is opposed by 80% of the public. In England the numbers nearly that bad.
It's worth noting, again, that Clinton, Gore, and Lieberman were all in favor of invading Iraq, and that Clinton pursued similar military targets without inflaming every country on the planet.
Bush has no credibility in world politics. Whether on not it's true, most of the world believes he's after Iraq's oil. It is problematic to give an oil man the job of removing a dictator in an oil producing country -- especially when that oil man is distainful of all things foreign, a swaggering Texan that routinely insults allies and enemies alike.
This has made world reactions to the war far more intense. Clinton was credible and persuasive in world politics. He also was not instigating a war, as Bush is.
Do you think the American people have the attention span to do this sort of work? Based on our last 50 years of foreign policy, I strongly doubt it. I don't think Bush has a viable plan, and I think Americans are going to tire of the story within three months.
This is greatly complicated by the fact that Bush has no buy-in from anyone in his vision of Iraq. Democracy in Japan involved a long-term occupation that Bush has already stated he's unwilling to do.
I don't see how he's going to build a democracy of the unwilling overnight, as he implies.
No one is opposed to removing brutal dictators (well.. except conservative foreign policy advisors for the last 50 years), but it has to be done with some semblance of credibility.
Bush has no credibility beyond the US Republican party. Everyone else on the planet believes he's motivated by oil. Whether or not this is true is mostly irrelevant. To succeed in this war he needed to convince people this wasn't true. His swaggering "fuck you" attitude has cost us dearly in anti-American sentiment around the globe. Our chances of any improvement in Iraq are now about zero, because he has buy-in from no one in his vision for the future of Iraq. Meanwhile the rest of the globe is horrified by the actions of the US, and religious leaders throughout the Middle East are calling for war against the US.
Bush has already lost this war, because he never understood what war he was fighting.
It's a weasel phrase for people who want to avoid the moral implications of war.
In long past wars it was generally thought in the US that people were responsible for making moral decisions even when in uniform. Stories were related of workers who pleaded "I just work here", when asked to explain their willingness to exterminate Jews. Derogatory terms were used to describe enemy peoples that did immoral things (e.g. holding your nose while the ovens burned made you a "good German", so this term became an insult).
This didn't cause any mental dissonance until we found ourselves dropping bombs on peasant farmers in Asia, and listening to US military officials saying "We had to destroy them in order to save them." We might have had this internal dialog sooner -- say, after nuking Japanese civilians -- if we hadn't at the time secretly (at times not so secretly) felt that the Japanese were less than human.
When the conflict did arise, the response of many was to decry the "good Germans" in our military who delivered death to so many Asian civilians. However many of our combatants were drafted into service, were morally opposed to their orders, but didn't see any way out. Blaming them for the crimes came to be seen as counter productive, and cruel.
So great pains are now made to distinguish between those who set policy and those who carry it out. This is supposedly what "supporting our troops" means.
However the term is almost universally only used by weasels who believe it eliminates any need to consider whether a war is just. Ask them whether we should be in Iraq and they will say "I support our troops". At some point it becomes equivalent to "I just work here." It's primarily used dismissively.
> In the end, the world will be safer
Very, very unlikely. It could be if there were a reasonable plan to do something after taking him out. But there isn't one, and Bush's gross incompetance at diplomacy have made it virtually impossible to make one. He has no credibility in the region, and creating a stable country without buy-in from anyone is not going to work.
All we will succeed in doing if this goes off like Bush plans, is creating a void in Iraq that will be quickly filled, and boosting anti-American feelings to record heights around the globe.
This will not make us, or anyone, safer. It will make us less safe.
You missed the point by a mile or two.
Immigrants are not random samples of their native populations. There are strongly biasing selection criteria, e.g. not everyone manages to successfully smuggle themselves out of a communist labor camp and end up in America. Factors that may contribute include wealth and thinking skills.
I use USB audio on linux and it's great. Zero configuration. It just works. The same equipment on Windows will drop out and skip.
Seems to be a latency issue. Without the low latency patches Linux will skip. Redhat ships with the patches, so I didn't need to do anything. I discovered the effect later when compiling a kernel for something else, and left out the patches.
> To say that "no one understands how the hippocampus encodes information" is to admit to not even glancing at the research literature.
I think you're overstating this by a few miles. Yes, there are models. Yes, there is some data that can be mapped to real information, e.g. "place". But there's a vast gulf between a few reproducible results in a few very highly stereotyped lab settings (rats in a maze), and claiming to understanding how the hippocampus encodes information.
We have a few hints about how the hippocampus works and a few very preliminary and very cautious theories about what it might be doing.
Btw, do I know you? Say hi to Mike if you see him.
> That's fission not fusion.
No, that's fusion. I'm quite aware of the difference. Fusion is frequently pitched as "clean" nuclear energy, because in theory it generates less or less dangerous radioactive waste that fission. If you visit some labs that work on this stuff, you'll find no end of promotional material on this subject. But it's not at all clear that the "cleaner" fusion reactions will ever be viable, and most of the other fusion reactions being considered are quite dirty.
errr... What? Where do you get this information?
The efficiency of electricity->hydrogen->motive energy would have to be microscopic for this to be true.