Wrong. If they lied to you about occupant safety, don't you think they might also have been lying to you have crash incompatibility? Let me quote Sam Kazman from Reason:
Crash incompatibility is not a phenomenon that arose with sport utility vehicles. Trucks have long been incompatible with cars, and cars are incompatible with motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians. But while accident photos of subcompacts demolished by hulking SUVs grab attention, has the popularity of SUVs really changed the risks faced by car drivers? If it has, then the number of car drivers killed in two-vehicle crashes, as a fraction of all car drivers killed, should have risen dramatically as SUV sales soared.
But this simply hasn't happened, according to Dr. Leonard Evans, an internationally recognized traffic safety researcher: "If SUVs were substantially increasing risks to car occupants, then it must necessarily follow that this ratio would increase with increasing numbers of SUVs on the road. But in fact the data from 1994 forward show no hint of any such increase."
The people trashing SUVs have an agenda. You have a responsibility to go after unbiased information.
The part that I do not understand is the "Occupant Fatality Rate lower than any other class of vehicle for large SUVs" part. The over 5,000 pound SUVs (e.g., Ford Expeditions, Chevy Tahoes, and Toyota Land Cruisers--the ones that guzzle gas) are the safest vehicles on the road when judged by the only statistic that matters: occupant fatality rate. Even when you include the fuel efficient small SUVs, the OFR for SUVs is slightly better than that for cars in general. As with other things in life, bigger is better. Harping on things like rollover rates and ignoring actual fatality rates is a despicable practice because it actually causes people to make bad safety decisions. I suggest you make it clear to your information sources exactly what you think of having been fooled by them.
"Concept-form only" means that we have no idea how safe this vehicle will actually be. SUVs are already safer than most vehicles. The rollover danger you hear about only make up a small fraction of accidents, and can be avoided by safe driving practices.
The Government should not be making decisions about which vehicles consumers can choose to drive. Politicians get sidetracked about actual safety of vehicles because environmentalists spread misinformation about safety. This sort of thing kills people. If you would like the US to start using less fossil fuels, the price of gas will have to go up. This can be done with a tax. It will also happen inevitably when world oil supplies start to run out. It is possible that we have already hit world peak oil production in 2000. Like, that's all, folks.
I take it that GCC for Mac OS X has the same binary compatibility problems that it does for Intel architectures. What competing compilers are out there at the moment? How do they stack up against GCC speed-wise? Does any ensure binary compatibility?
How did I come to my conclusion? My father was a prison guard. He could tell you stories that would make you sick to your stomach. Your idea that "prison is the best place to start" on increased racial understanding is insane. I am interested in where you have formed your opinions on prison life.
I'll use number 8 on the list as an opportunity to highlight a serious social problem.
Number 8 Prison Rape Researcher: University of South Dakota psychologist Cindy Struckman- Johnson was one of the first to seek anonymous written narrative testimonies from prisoners about the realities of prison life, and she employed a handful of students to help process the returned surveys. What she got stunned them all: One in ten inmates in the survey had been the victim of a sexual assault, many repeatedly. But it wasn't the numbers alone that made the impact, it was the vividness of the accounts and the desperation expressed. To read page after first- person page of sexual torture--"This happens every day. Please, please, can you do something about it"--well, says Struckman- Johnson, "some of my students almost couldn't handle it."
More men get raped each year than women. It happens in prison. The people most at risk are the young--usually in for first time drug offenses. The disease consequences of sodomy are far worse than other types of rape.
One of the more serious issues about prison rape is the racial component. Prison gangs are almost entirely racial--usually Black or Hispanic. They do not protect their own from each other a great deal, but they do protect fellow gang members from outsiders. This leaves the White and Asian jail populations who tend to be less likely to form gangs at the highest risk of being targeted for rape.
It is very hard to find any serious discussion of this side of the problem--not to mention any discussion of the problem at all. Jared Taylor is one of the few writers courageous enough to detail the racial side to prison rape: http://www.amren.com/hardtime.htm
I would rather pick a writer more mainstream than Jared Taylor to quote on this issue. Taylor is an advocate of a white ethnic consciousness to be modeled after the ethnic consciousnesses of other minorities. He feels that this is an important counterbalance to maintain equal rights in our democratic political system. That makes Jared Taylor a racist in a lot of people's books. On the other hand, he is the only writer I know of who writes about this sort of thing, so I think it is important to at least give him a chance to say his peace. And, distressingly to me, his proposal of racial separation at prisons is probably a good idea. Prisoners are not, and will never beb tolerant members of our society. Even if we can eliminate racism from our communities, we will never be able to do so from our prisons. And the prison environment is certainly not the kind to foster increased understanding of other races. As a protective matter for all prisoners, Taylor may be right.
I am reminded of a quote on video game piracy that I once read:
The mainstream consumer has made it absolutely plain time and time again that the price he or she will pay for standard new-release items of leisure software, be they books, movies, pop albums, graphic novels, concert tickets or absolutely anything else, is 15 [pounds], give or take a couple of quid.
The problem is psychological. People simply do not compare the prices of CDs and DVDs. It is not how we think. In America, everything is $15 instead. Exchange rates do not matter--it is the number that is significant.
My list of kooks was not meant to arbitrate between who was right and who was wrong. I meant to highlight some very unpopular ideas. I share the views that you have expressed on Plato and also on Sagan's fans.
(I want to point out, however, that my kook list is not from Sagan. I do not know of anything that he has written on Democracy or Plato.)
I have a relative who is really into the Bigfoot scene. The Bigfoot believers are quite committed. They make a lot of mistakes because of that, though. What is really interesting to me is how so many of the same thought errors get made in radically different areas of human belief.
It is a terribly complex mental exercise to absorb all of the information in modern life and make intelligent decisions. The fact is that there are far too many claims to investigate for anybody to examine all of them with the necessary care. So we have to rely on the consensus of experts to make decisions. And the organizations necessary for consensus have the same flaws as all human hierarchal bodies.
Here are some of the various brands of kooky ideas that I have come across:
The AIDS Myth The medical analysis is surprisingly deep. A lot of qualified people have weighed in on this idea. Carbohydrates not calories. They claim that our genes are still adapting to the modern high-carbohydrate diet, and that is why so many of us are so fat. (Enter Atkins.) Democracy is not good government Global Warming. Discussed on Slashdot a number of times Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare Joe Sobran thinks that the Earl of Oxford wrote everything attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon. Race and IQ Probably true, but kooky nonetheless. Multiregional Evolution You can find most of Wolpoff's papers that are cited here somewhere online. I recommend "Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution" and "Modern Human Ancestry at the Peripheries: A Test of the Replacement Theory." Wolpoff is kooky because there are very few anthropoligists left who will side with the Multiregional theory over the Out of Africa theory. (Wolpoff technically supports an Out of Africa theory, but that is how everyone refers to the debate.)
And here is one that I will actually advocate: Bohmian Mechanics It is about as kooky as you can get for a physicist, but I am convinced that it beats QM on the merits.
A rather amazing reply. In essence he says: "You're right. We don't care about the future anymore. But that is because this is the future now, and there is nothing much down the road."
Reminds me of Francis Fukuyama in a way. The important decisions of history have been made, and things will not got significantly better or worse than they are right now. Democracy and capitalism have conquered the world.
Ultimately, all the technically adept -> sexually undesirable propaganda among the nerd community is self-defeating. Girls like guys who talk big, not guys who commiserate about being losers.
For a counter-example, take a look at the Jews. They have managed to tie male intelligence into sexual desirability for thousands of years. Torah scholars get some serious action. And all of is based on a concerted propaganda effort by those same Torah scholars. You should read the stuff they write. It is a constant barage of "study the Bible and get women hanging all over you."
Sure, that sort of eugenics program has not resulted in too many Jewish supermodels, but damn if they don't make great physicists, doctors, and lawyers.
If I had heard about this any place except Slashdot, I would have assumed that the intended market for this product was 12-year-old girls. I had to re-read the article twice to confirm that there really wasn't anything at all interesting about this phone. News for Nerds? What the hell?
You can be sure that there will never be any place in this Solar System more hospitable to life than Earth. We do not have the power to make Earth like Mars or Venus. And if we ever create the technology to sustain life on such barren worlds we will be able to sustain life here much more easily despite any kind of pollution.
Is there some point to doing this? If we are in it just for the new technology, then there are much better ways to spend science research dollars. Is this "exploration" going to bring any tangible benefits? Is there any economic justification to this?
If life ever arose on Venus, it is still going to be there. Simply raising the temperature 100K until it is hot enough to melt lead and bathing the entire planet in acid isn't enough to wipe out all life. There are going to be extremophiles all over. And the best thing is that we probably don't have to worry much about about contamination when we're studying it.
The best way to help out the Apple community is to specifically design your web pages to be viewable by IE but not any other browser. That will help disabuse non-Windows programmers from the foolish idea that there is some web standard other than "it works on IE." They will work on making their browsers into better IE clones rather than by wasting time on something foolish idea of independant standards that could obviously never gain the influence on designers Microsoft has. Moreover, breaking your web page for non-Windows users will accustom those users to having an inferior experience without Windows. That way they don't have to be surprised when they discover it later.
Same here. I can't stand a monitor with less than 75Hz refresh.
If you live in the U.S., you might remember that campaign dust up between Gore and Bush in 2000 over one of the campaign ads. Bush's ad flashed "RATS" on one frame during a photograph of Gore or some such. I saw it quite clearly when the ad first came out. Most people claimed that they couldn't see it until it was slowed down.
However, the government has neglected to make "discrimination" illegal. It is only discrimination on account of age, gender, race, and whatever else that they have spelled out in statute that is illegal.
True enough. And that is why it is especially important to point out the inconsistencies of the current PC accepted dogma.
I am a reasonably good-natured fellow. I would never call anyone any one of the things I wrote above. But on the other hand, I view them to be more or less equal terms, and I would not call someone evil for stumbling into the wrong one either. Imagine what would have happened had the original poster called SCO "greedy Jews." That is quite an inconsistency, you have got to admit.
More interesting is that a number of people who would say "to gyp" would never say "to jew"--a verb connotating harsh dealings. And a word like niggardly has been driven out of the language for less reason; no one uses it because of what it rhymes with.
Amazing. You got away with "thieving gypsies." Good thing that they are not an 'approved' victim group. You know enough to aviod such terms as "greedy Jews" or "lazy Negros" because that would be wrong. With Gypsies it is all in good fun.
Slashdot Mirror
The part that I do not understand is the "Occupant Fatality Rate lower than any other class of vehicle for large SUVs" part. The over 5,000 pound SUVs (e.g., Ford Expeditions, Chevy Tahoes, and Toyota Land Cruisers--the ones that guzzle gas) are the safest vehicles on the road when judged by the only statistic that matters: occupant fatality rate. Even when you include the fuel efficient small SUVs, the OFR for SUVs is slightly better than that for cars in general. As with other things in life, bigger is better. Harping on things like rollover rates and ignoring actual fatality rates is a despicable practice because it actually causes people to make bad safety decisions. I suggest you make it clear to your information sources exactly what you think of having been fooled by them.
"Concept-form only" means that we have no idea how safe this vehicle will actually be. SUVs are already safer than most vehicles. The rollover danger you hear about only make up a small fraction of accidents, and can be avoided by safe driving practices.
The Government should not be making decisions about which vehicles consumers can choose to drive. Politicians get sidetracked about actual safety of vehicles because environmentalists spread misinformation about safety. This sort of thing kills people. If you would like the US to start using less fossil fuels, the price of gas will have to go up. This can be done with a tax. It will also happen inevitably when world oil supplies start to run out. It is possible that we have already hit world peak oil production in 2000. Like, that's all, folks.
Thank god I'm using something secure like Telnet instead.
I take it that GCC for Mac OS X has the same binary compatibility problems that it does for Intel architectures. What competing compilers are out there at the moment? How do they stack up against GCC speed-wise? Does any ensure binary compatibility?
How did I come to my conclusion? My father was a prison guard. He could tell you stories that would make you sick to your stomach. Your idea that "prison is the best place to start" on increased racial understanding is insane. I am interested in where you have formed your opinions on prison life.
One of the more serious issues about prison rape is the racial component. Prison gangs are almost entirely racial--usually Black or Hispanic. They do not protect their own from each other a great deal, but they do protect fellow gang members from outsiders. This leaves the White and Asian jail populations who tend to be less likely to form gangs at the highest risk of being targeted for rape.
It is very hard to find any serious discussion of this side of the problem--not to mention any discussion of the problem at all. Jared Taylor is one of the few writers courageous enough to detail the racial side to prison rape: http://www.amren.com/hardtime.htm
I would rather pick a writer more mainstream than Jared Taylor to quote on this issue. Taylor is an advocate of a white ethnic consciousness to be modeled after the ethnic consciousnesses of other minorities. He feels that this is an important counterbalance to maintain equal rights in our democratic political system. That makes Jared Taylor a racist in a lot of people's books. On the other hand, he is the only writer I know of who writes about this sort of thing, so I think it is important to at least give him a chance to say his peace. And, distressingly to me, his proposal of racial separation at prisons is probably a good idea. Prisoners are not, and will never beb tolerant members of our society. Even if we can eliminate racism from our communities, we will never be able to do so from our prisons. And the prison environment is certainly not the kind to foster increased understanding of other races. As a protective matter for all prisoners, Taylor may be right.
http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/town/estate/dh69/
The problem is psychological. People simply do not compare the prices of CDs and DVDs. It is not how we think. In America, everything is $15 instead. Exchange rates do not matter--it is the number that is significant.
P.S. Why does slashdot strip the pound symbol?
My list of kooks was not meant to arbitrate between who was right and who was wrong. I meant to highlight some very unpopular ideas. I share the views that you have expressed on Plato and also on Sagan's fans.
(I want to point out, however, that my kook list is not from Sagan. I do not know of anything that he has written on Democracy or Plato.)
I have a relative who is really into the Bigfoot scene. The Bigfoot believers are quite committed. They make a lot of mistakes because of that, though. What is really interesting to me is how so many of the same thought errors get made in radically different areas of human belief.
Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World is an interesting investigation of the entire phenomenon.
It is a terribly complex mental exercise to absorb all of the information in modern life and make intelligent decisions. The fact is that there are far too many claims to investigate for anybody to examine all of them with the necessary care. So we have to rely on the consensus of experts to make decisions. And the organizations necessary for consensus have the same flaws as all human hierarchal bodies.
Here are some of the various brands of kooky ideas that I have come across:
The AIDS Myth The medical analysis is surprisingly deep. A lot of qualified people have weighed in on this idea.
Carbohydrates not calories. They claim that our genes are still adapting to the modern high-carbohydrate diet, and that is why so many of us are so fat. (Enter Atkins.)
Democracy is not good government
Global Warming. Discussed on Slashdot a number of times
Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare Joe Sobran thinks that the Earl of Oxford wrote everything attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon.
Race and IQ Probably true, but kooky nonetheless.
Multiregional Evolution You can find most of Wolpoff's papers that are cited here somewhere online. I recommend "Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution" and "Modern Human Ancestry at the Peripheries: A Test of the Replacement Theory." Wolpoff is kooky because there are very few anthropoligists left who will side with the Multiregional theory over the Out of Africa theory. (Wolpoff technically supports an Out of Africa theory, but that is how everyone refers to the debate.)
And here is one that I will actually advocate: Bohmian Mechanics It is about as kooky as you can get for a physicist, but I am convinced that it beats QM on the merits.
A rather amazing reply. In essence he says: "You're right. We don't care about the future anymore. But that is because this is the future now, and there is nothing much down the road."
Reminds me of Francis Fukuyama in a way. The important decisions of history have been made, and things will not got significantly better or worse than they are right now. Democracy and capitalism have conquered the world.
Ultimately, all the technically adept -> sexually undesirable propaganda among the nerd community is self-defeating. Girls like guys who talk big, not guys who commiserate about being losers.
For a counter-example, take a look at the Jews. They have managed to tie male intelligence into sexual desirability for thousands of years. Torah scholars get some serious action. And all of is based on a concerted propaganda effort by those same Torah scholars. You should read the stuff they write. It is a constant barage of "study the Bible and get women hanging all over you."
Sure, that sort of eugenics program has not resulted in too many Jewish supermodels, but damn if they don't make great physicists, doctors, and lawyers.
If I had heard about this any place except Slashdot, I would have assumed that the intended market for this product was 12-year-old girls. I had to re-read the article twice to confirm that there really wasn't anything at all interesting about this phone. News for Nerds? What the hell?
You can be sure that there will never be any place in this Solar System more hospitable to life than Earth. We do not have the power to make Earth like Mars or Venus. And if we ever create the technology to sustain life on such barren worlds we will be able to sustain life here much more easily despite any kind of pollution.
Is there some point to doing this? If we are in it just for the new technology, then there are much better ways to spend science research dollars. Is this "exploration" going to bring any tangible benefits? Is there any economic justification to this?
If life ever arose on Venus, it is still going to be there. Simply raising the temperature 100K until it is hot enough to melt lead and bathing the entire planet in acid isn't enough to wipe out all life. There are going to be extremophiles all over. And the best thing is that we probably don't have to worry much about about contamination when we're studying it.
You know, I should steal my own identity if it could get me $10,000 and on a yacht with 2 dozen swedish maidens.
Thank God my Slashdot user ID is still safe.
The best way to help out the Apple community is to specifically design your web pages to be viewable by IE but not any other browser. That will help disabuse non-Windows programmers from the foolish idea that there is some web standard other than "it works on IE." They will work on making their browsers into better IE clones rather than by wasting time on something foolish idea of independant standards that could obviously never gain the influence on designers Microsoft has. Moreover, breaking your web page for non-Windows users will accustom those users to having an inferior experience without Windows. That way they don't have to be surprised when they discover it later.
Same here. I can't stand a monitor with less than 75Hz refresh.
If you live in the U.S., you might remember that campaign dust up between Gore and Bush in 2000 over one of the campaign ads. Bush's ad flashed "RATS" on one frame during a photograph of Gore or some such. I saw it quite clearly when the ad first came out. Most people claimed that they couldn't see it until it was slowed down.
It is discrimination.
However, the government has neglected to make "discrimination" illegal. It is only discrimination on account of age, gender, race, and whatever else that they have spelled out in statute that is illegal.
True enough. And that is why it is especially important to point out the inconsistencies of the current PC accepted dogma.
I am a reasonably good-natured fellow. I would never call anyone any one of the things I wrote above. But on the other hand, I view them to be more or less equal terms, and I would not call someone evil for stumbling into the wrong one either. Imagine what would have happened had the original poster called SCO "greedy Jews." That is quite an inconsistency, you have got to admit.
More interesting is that a number of people who would say "to gyp" would never say "to jew"--a verb connotating harsh dealings. And a word like niggardly has been driven out of the language for less reason; no one uses it because of what it rhymes with.
Amazing. You got away with "thieving gypsies." Good thing that they are not an 'approved' victim group. You know enough to aviod such terms as "greedy Jews" or "lazy Negros" because that would be wrong. With Gypsies it is all in good fun.
That was the best example of geek ownage that I have seen in some time. Bravo.