It's not France either, but my point was that someone who prefers to live elsewhere is really not someone I'm interested in listening to on how my country is run.
On the contrary, someone who hasn't lived elsewhere has no qualifications to comment on how the country is run. I lived four years in Canada and it was quite eye-opening -- was able to see how many features of the US are not quite state of the art. It's just like how people who have only used Windows have no way to measure the suckage.
Well, what bugs me about the movies is how Jackson mangled the dialog. To me, what really makes LOTR, as well as other great fantasy novels like Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea books, is the way the characters talk. They aren't 20th century Americans and shouldn't talk like they are. Jackson's dialog has absolutely no atmosphere.
Dickens may be wordy, as all Victorians were (Darwin is even wordier) but he's not that difficult -- it is pretty clear what he's getting at, no deep messages, etc. For a difficult book, try Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" -- it probably beats even Joyce's Ulysses.
If this continues indefinately we will end up approaching a system simular to Soviet Russia but from the opposite direction.
In Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, published 50 years ago, he presented a future United States where Soviet-style centralized planning was adopted -- because it turned out to be more profitable for the capitalists.
Labor unions solved that problem. Socialism in the USSR did not, as history shows.
Oh, I agree that the various patches to rampant free-market capitalism were more successful than the Soviet experiment.
Name a 3rd world country that has a free market system. There aren't any
Well, Chile under the murderous and corrupt dictator Pinochet was well regarded for its economic freedom, although certainly not for any other form of freedom.
It was the merchants and craftmans that formed the middle class which helped destroy feudalism, a system in which land was owned arbitrariyl by aristocrats, who forced peasants to till the land and took most of the profits, distributing a small amount to the peasants to keep them alive
Look up the "iron law of wages". In the 19th century, it was considered a *good* thing that capitalists only paid their workers starvation wages -- the silly workers would just waste any excess anyway. No wonder socialist ideas were attractive to workers.
Socialism is not much different than feudalism. A small minority (the rulling class or govt.) comtrols all the wealth, and doles out enough for the proletariat to keep them alive
That's pretty much a troll. While it was clear that the socialist nations during the Cold War didn't have as good quality of life as the first world nations, people there lived much better than in most capitalist third-world nations.
Who they are should be fairly irrelevant. The important question is: are they right?
Yes, but the two questions are interrelated. Just as a Linux feasability study funded by Microsoft is useless, a climate study funded by the petroleum industry is useless. That's why in most serious journals one is required to list one's source of funding.
Like the military and the police? They are a bunch of violent wackos aren't they? We should disband them!
I realize that post-9/11, people are supposed to look up to soldiers and cops with uncritical adoration, but I don't. In general, the people who are drawn to such careers are the same bullies who picked on the Slashdot crowd in high school. Whenever I read about soldiers stationed somewhere who raped a native girl or cops who beat the crap out of some suspect, I'm not surprised at all.
Personally, I don't find the selection of Mac games to be that bad. In terms of proprietory stuff, it has more ports of PC stuff than does Linux, plus being UNIX based, you can easily compile all the open source Linux stuff as well. But then, perhaps I'm not a "power gamer" as I only purchase 3 or 4 games per year.
Why on earth would you go to Amazon for that info instead of Google, though?
Well, there are beginning to be good freely available cookbooks and travel books on the web, but right now, most of the info of that type is somehow attached to a company or local government travel office, which means it probably isn't very objective. Sure, the city of Muncie, IN will try to convince you that it's a travel Mecca, but a real travel book would tell you not to bother going.
If you read the article, they bring up the examples of travel books or cookbooks. If I can just search to get info on a city I'm going to or a certain pie I want to bake, why buy the whole book?
Actually, my left-wing friend, any tool can become a weapon...Guns are tools which are used for deterrence, among other things. They are not used for killing unless I point it at you and shoot you with it.
Er, and how is a gun a deterrence to me unless I think you are a violent wacko who is going to shoot me with it? I've never understood why disliking guns was a left-wing concept. Plenty of wacko left-wing groups like the Red Flag Army loved guns just as much as wacko right-wing groups like the Branch Davidians. I dislike guns because I'm not into wacko violent groups of any stripe.
Actually, this isn't the case. Species are simply populations that *tend* not to breed together -- for example, dogs (Canis familiaris), wolves (Canis lupus) and coyotes (Canis latrans) can breed together just fine and produce viable offspring, but because matings are relatively rare, they are still counted as separate species.
I haven't purchased any textbooks overseas, but I have purchased quite a few normal books and CDs from Europe and have never received any customs bill.
Particularly when reading foreign language books. I know basic German and French, but my vocabulary in those languages is so small that reading books not written for children means that I'm constantly consulting a dictionary. Clicking on a word and getting the definition is much nicer.
My field is microbial genomics and am rather tired of the whole "bioterrorism" angle. The simple fact is that biological agents just aren't very effective weapons, despite what fiction and movies would lead you to believe. That's why just about every country except the Soviet Union abandoned biowarfare programs by the 1960's.
And while good old Ken Alibek tells good horror stories about the supposed successes of Biopreparat, consider for a moment the vast number of unemployed former Soviet scientists -- Ken has good economic reasons to be a prophet of doom.
Similarly, people studying harmless Bacillus strains and who had trouble getting grants suddenly realized that anthrax is caused by a related strain, and shifted focus to anthrax, where grants are easy.
It's just like the physicists in the Reagan admin who got money by tying their reasearch to SDI.
Would you care to list some rights that you personally used to enjoy but no longer can, due to the Patriot Act? If 'a bunch' of your rights are gone, I would think you could at least name a couple.
Basically *all* my rights are no longer protected. All the authorities have to do is claim that I'm (or you are, or that guy over there is) a suspected terrorist (mind you, not *prove* it in a fair trial, just *claim*) and *bingo* all the accused's rights disappear. Just like suspected thoughtcriminals in Orwell's Oceanania.
I find it astounding that the same people who complained about the Clinton administration's occasional minor abuses of authority aren't up in arms against Dubya. With the Patriot Act, Homeland Security, etc, the "black helicopters" aren't just paranoid ravings, but rapidly becoming reality.
Here's the interesting bit. Laptops were the real hit. The grunts love them. PDA's have gone almost unused. Why? Because the battery life is so short they're virtually useless in the field.
Sorry, but no. Even power-sucking PocketPC's last longer than a laptop -- eight hours is typical usage from a PocketPC, whereas three or four hours is normal for a typical laptop. And of course Palms last much longer than eight hours.
Hey, I liked being a postdoc too -- in fact I recently left an industrial job to become a Staff Scientist at TIGR, which is sort of like going back to being a postdoc (but long term).
On the other hand I can see what the complainers are talking about. Not having a lot of spare money is fine if you live alone, as I do (it just means you eat out less), but people who have families often have really horrible times trying to make ends meet.
urprisingly no. Everywhere in the commonwealth (England, Canada, Australia, etc.) we follow the strict rules about the usage of the term engineer.
I worked for a time for a biotech company in Canada. The programmers were all officially "Software Engineers", which royally ticked off one of them who actually *was* an engineer by training.
Probably not, but they had universities when the anglo-saxons were still living in grass huts.
Only for a very, very, very loose definition of "universities". A bunch of people studying together doesn't quite cut it. It's like claiming the ancient Chinese or Egyptians had "science", when they didn't even understand the difference between induction and deduction -- they just some technological tricks that they learned more or less by trial and error, and even those were mixed with a lot of mystic nonsense. There's no question that today China has some first class universities like Beijing University where they do first-class science, but both those concepts came from the West.
If he's worried about the military import of his work, he should not do the work. Picking and choosing among the money is splitting hairs beyond that point.
I don't think you understand how grants work. Very few grants these days are blank checks to do what you want, despite how things worked in the glory days of funding during the cold war. Most DoD grants force you to conduct your research differently and with a different slant than with a normal grant from the NSF or NIH.
he reason so much "interesting" tech is now funded by the military is that we live in a high-tech society -- it isn't all just a-bombs and battleships and radar any more
But this doesn't change the fact that the DoD in the 1960's and 70's was far less demanding that the results have military application than nowadays.
In the news media, I've often come across the assertion that "to google" is now common usage, but to date, the only place I've seen the usage of the mythical verb "to google" was in the dialog in William Gibson's recent novel "Pattern Recognition" -- has anyone run into this verb in real life?
t would be nice to know if a particular nation is bluffing about its capabilities, or has an ulterior motive for a stance that I can take advantage of... Jimmy has NO way of knowing any of that with any reliability.
Then again, George has no way of knowing if the CIA, etc. is bluffing or has an ulterior motive. History isn't too kind to "intelligence services" in general. Corruption and incompetence were pretty common on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Having the mental capacity to analyze the situation for oneself rather than relying on dubious "advisors" is a better plan, I think.
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It's not France either, but my point was that someone who prefers to live elsewhere is really not someone I'm interested in listening to on how my country is run.
On the contrary, someone who hasn't lived elsewhere has no qualifications to comment on how the country is run. I lived four years in Canada and it was quite eye-opening -- was able to see how many features of the US are not quite state of the art. It's just like how people who have only used Windows have no way to measure the suckage.
Well, what bugs me about the movies is how Jackson mangled the dialog. To me, what really makes LOTR, as well as other great fantasy novels like Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea books, is the way the characters talk. They aren't 20th century Americans and shouldn't talk like they are. Jackson's dialog has absolutely no atmosphere.
Dickens may be wordy, as all Victorians were (Darwin is even wordier) but he's not that difficult -- it is pretty clear what he's getting at, no deep messages, etc. For a difficult book, try Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" -- it probably beats even Joyce's Ulysses.
If this continues indefinately we will end up approaching a system simular to Soviet Russia but from the opposite direction.
In Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, published 50 years ago, he presented a future United States where Soviet-style centralized planning was adopted -- because it turned out to be more profitable for the capitalists.
Labor unions solved that problem. Socialism in the USSR did not, as history shows.
Oh, I agree that the various patches to rampant free-market capitalism were more successful than the Soviet experiment.
Name a 3rd world country that has a free market system. There aren't any
Well, Chile under the murderous and corrupt dictator Pinochet was well regarded for its economic freedom, although certainly not for any other form of freedom.
It was the merchants and craftmans that formed the middle class which helped destroy feudalism, a system in which land was owned arbitrariyl by aristocrats, who forced peasants to till the land and took most of the profits, distributing a small amount to the peasants to keep them alive
Look up the "iron law of wages". In the 19th century, it was considered a *good* thing that capitalists only paid their workers starvation wages -- the silly workers would just waste any excess anyway. No wonder socialist ideas were attractive to workers.
Socialism is not much different than feudalism. A small minority (the rulling class or govt.) comtrols all the wealth, and doles out enough for the proletariat to keep them alive
That's pretty much a troll. While it was clear that the socialist nations during the Cold War didn't have as good quality of life as the first world nations, people there lived much better than in most capitalist third-world nations.
Who they are should be fairly irrelevant. The important question is: are they right?
Yes, but the two questions are interrelated. Just as a Linux feasability study funded by Microsoft is useless, a climate study funded by the petroleum industry is useless. That's why in most serious journals one is required to list one's source of funding.
Like the military and the police? They are a bunch of violent wackos aren't they? We should disband them!
I realize that post-9/11, people are supposed to look up to soldiers and cops with uncritical adoration, but I don't. In general, the people who are drawn to such careers are the same bullies who picked on the Slashdot crowd in high school. Whenever I read about soldiers stationed somewhere who raped a native girl or cops who beat the crap out of some suspect, I'm not surprised at all.
Personally, I don't find the selection of Mac games to be that bad. In terms of proprietory stuff, it has more ports of PC stuff than does Linux, plus being UNIX based, you can easily compile all the open source Linux stuff as well. But then, perhaps I'm not a "power gamer" as I only purchase 3 or 4 games per year.
Why on earth would you go to Amazon for that info instead of Google, though?
Well, there are beginning to be good freely available cookbooks and travel books on the web, but right now, most of the info of that type is somehow attached to a company or local government travel office, which means it probably isn't very objective. Sure, the city of Muncie, IN will try to convince you that it's a travel Mecca, but a real travel book would tell you not to bother going.
If you read the article, they bring up the examples of travel books or cookbooks. If I can just search to get info on a city I'm going to or a certain pie I want to bake, why buy the whole book?
Actually, my left-wing friend, any tool can become a weapon...Guns are tools which are used for deterrence, among other things. They are not used for killing unless I point it at you and shoot you with it.
Er, and how is a gun a deterrence to me unless I think you are a violent wacko who is going to shoot me with it? I've never understood why disliking guns was a left-wing concept. Plenty of wacko left-wing groups like the Red Flag Army loved guns just as much as wacko right-wing groups like the Branch Davidians. I dislike guns because I'm not into wacko violent groups of any stripe.
Actually, this isn't the case. Species are simply populations that *tend* not to breed together -- for example, dogs (Canis familiaris), wolves (Canis lupus) and coyotes (Canis latrans) can breed together just fine and produce viable offspring, but because matings are relatively rare, they are still counted as separate species.
How about scientists? I certainly don't pull in $75k
I haven't purchased any textbooks overseas, but I have purchased quite a few normal books and CDs from Europe and have never received any customs bill.
Particularly when reading foreign language books. I know basic German and French, but my vocabulary in those languages is so small that reading books not written for children means that I'm constantly consulting a dictionary. Clicking on a word and getting the definition is much nicer.
My field is microbial genomics and am rather tired of the whole "bioterrorism" angle. The simple fact is that biological agents just aren't very effective weapons, despite what fiction and movies would lead you to believe. That's why just about every country except the Soviet Union abandoned biowarfare programs by the 1960's.
And while good old Ken Alibek tells good horror stories about the supposed successes of Biopreparat, consider for a moment the vast number of unemployed former Soviet scientists -- Ken has good economic reasons to be a prophet of doom.
Similarly, people studying harmless Bacillus strains and who had trouble getting grants suddenly realized that anthrax is caused by a related strain, and shifted focus to anthrax, where grants are easy.
It's just like the physicists in the Reagan admin who got money by tying their reasearch to SDI.
Would you care to list some rights that you personally used to enjoy but no longer can, due to the Patriot Act? If 'a bunch' of your rights are gone, I would think you could at least name a couple.
Basically *all* my rights are no longer protected. All the authorities have to do is claim that I'm (or you are, or that guy over there is) a suspected terrorist (mind you, not *prove* it in a fair trial, just *claim*) and *bingo* all the accused's rights disappear. Just like suspected thoughtcriminals in Orwell's Oceanania.
I find it astounding that the same people who complained about the Clinton administration's occasional minor abuses of authority aren't up in arms against Dubya. With the Patriot Act, Homeland Security, etc, the "black helicopters" aren't just paranoid ravings, but rapidly becoming reality.
Here's the interesting bit. Laptops were the real hit. The grunts love them. PDA's have gone almost unused. Why? Because the battery life is so short they're virtually useless in the field.
Sorry, but no. Even power-sucking PocketPC's last longer than a laptop -- eight hours is typical usage from a PocketPC, whereas three or four hours is normal for a typical laptop. And of course Palms last much longer than eight hours.
Hey, I liked being a postdoc too -- in fact I recently left an industrial job to become a Staff Scientist at TIGR, which is sort of like going back to being a postdoc (but long term).
On the other hand I can see what the complainers are talking about. Not having a lot of spare money is fine if you live alone, as I do (it just means you eat out less), but people who have families often have really horrible times trying to make ends meet.
urprisingly no. Everywhere in the commonwealth (England, Canada, Australia, etc.) we follow the strict rules about the usage of the term engineer.
I worked for a time for a biotech company in Canada. The programmers were all officially "Software Engineers", which royally ticked off one of them who actually *was* an engineer by training.
Probably not, but they had universities when the anglo-saxons were still living in grass huts.
Only for a very, very, very loose definition of "universities". A bunch of people studying together doesn't quite cut it. It's like claiming the ancient Chinese or Egyptians had "science", when they didn't even understand the difference between induction and deduction -- they just some technological tricks that they learned more or less by trial and error, and even those were mixed with a lot of mystic nonsense. There's no question that today China has some first class universities like Beijing University where they do first-class science, but both those concepts came from the West.
If he's worried about the military import of his work, he should not do the work. Picking and choosing among the money is splitting hairs beyond that point.
I don't think you understand how grants work. Very few grants these days are blank checks to do what you want, despite how things worked in the glory days of funding during the cold war. Most DoD grants force you to conduct your research differently and with a different slant than with a normal grant from the NSF or NIH.
he reason so much "interesting" tech is now funded by the military is that we live in a high-tech society -- it isn't all just a-bombs and battleships and radar any more
But this doesn't change the fact that the DoD in the 1960's and 70's was far less demanding that the results have military application than nowadays.
In the news media, I've often come across the assertion that "to google" is now common usage, but to date, the only place I've seen the usage of the mythical verb "to google" was in the dialog in William Gibson's recent novel "Pattern Recognition" -- has anyone run into this verb in real life?
t would be nice to know if a particular nation is bluffing about its capabilities, or has an ulterior motive for a stance that I can take advantage of... Jimmy has NO way of knowing any of that with any reliability.
Then again, George has no way of knowing if the CIA, etc. is bluffing or has an ulterior motive. History isn't too kind to "intelligence services" in general. Corruption and incompetence were pretty common on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Having the mental capacity to analyze the situation for oneself rather than relying on dubious "advisors" is a better plan, I think.