I've seen some of those jingoes and peaceniks. I think that we both have an idea on how good they'd be at fighting. I'll be on the war side in the war on war, thank you.
My god. You have managed to be massively ill-informed. The bin Laden videos are shown on Al-Jazeera(sp?) TV before anybody in our government gets a chance to look at them. Hell, you can even get it on cable here. There is no one in government who later authorizes what is and is not all right to show on American English-speaking television. That would be suspiciously like an office of censorship.
Sure, there were a couple of videos picked up by special forces that got pre-viewed by the government, but that's about it. The media has it's own sources.
Forget the Columbian Government--our U.S. government has done all that.
I'm not a lefty either. But war is always horrible. I think this concentration on terrorism is too much emphasis on tactics and not enough on causes. We'd get a lot farther with a war on aggresion and oppresion.
I don't think that you understand our first ammendment. It is perfectly legal for a book publisher to publish a book by Hussein, or for a news organization to run bin Laden's videos. A newspaper can even run unibomber essays if it wants.
Perhaps you can be a bit clearer about the difference between "vehicles of communication" and "speech."
Is a "vehicle of communication" anything like a volkswagon van?
Spirited away is tremendous. There is no excuse not to see it, especially if you have small children. However, in some ways it feels weaker than some of Miyazaki's other masterpieces. I was disapointed in the lack of tension. Some of the plot resolutions (esp. concerning the witch's sister) didn't seem to stand up to the magnificance of the backdrop. The environmental theme was touched on, but it felt like Miyazaki couldn't decide whether it should be a major or minor part of the plot.
In the end, you have seen what amount to a series of viginettes, all exciting and interesting, but the fantasy world at the end of the movie seems smaller than the one introduced at the beginning.
Of course, saying that Spirited Away is one of Miyazaki's weakest films is like saying the same of Kubrick and The Shining. There is still nothing out there that compares.
The competance of professors evaluating course-work doesn't stack up much higher.
The amount of cheating and copying that goes on is astounding. Moreover, the difficultly of a given course varies wildly from professor to professor.
There is simply no way to do this perfectly. In fact, I don't think that standardized tests are that much worse than evaluation by a professor. I think that it may work better for many subjects and many situations.
I always make sure to choose my web hosts based on hair or eye color of the sys admin. I don't like people with the letter 'D' in their name. Also, the shirt style is a big deal to me.
I can tell that you are a discerning person, just like me.
I'm so glad that you've agreed to surrender your rights in order to fight child pornography. Tomorrow the police will be searching your house, just in case you might own some of it. They've tapped your phones in order to make sure you aren't accessing any illegal sites. And from now on, all published material will have to vetted through the Government anti-child-porn censorship comittee.
You don't mind do you? After all, it's to fight child porn.
Average Joe: Hello, I'd like you to sign this receipt before I let you touch my laptop.
Security Guy #1: Sir, hand me the laptop. You're causing a scene.
Average Joe: No I'm not. I just want to ensure that my laptop is handled safely.
Security Guy #1: Don't contradict me. I'm in charge here, and you're causing a scene.
Average Joe: I really wasn't trying to contradi--
Security Guy #1: All right, we've got a live one here. Bob, come over and help me out.
Bob removes his security wand out from under the skirt of a nine-year-old girl. The girl's mother is against the wall being "patted down" by a couple of other guards.
Security Guy #2 (Bob): What seems to be the problem?
Security Guy #1: We've got a non-cooperative.
Security Guy #2: Close the concourse. [Then speaking to our Average Joe, who tried to make a break for it, but has since been been detained by a couple of men in dark sunglasses.] Looks like we've found ourselves an enemy combatant.
Meanwhile a pair of dark complexioned men in turbans walk past the ruckus. Average Joe hears the one whisper to the other: "Hey Mohammad, do you think we're winning?"
I was asked just yesterday to find something very much like this (except for some text processing and databasing thrown in). I haven't found anything out of the box that fits (not that I was smart enough to do an ask slashdot on it), so I think that I may have to code my own in the next week. Are you willing to pay a little cash for a custom solution?
The G-forces in military aircraft are enough to make pilots blackout (the blood goes away from the head) or redout (the blood goes to the head) with little effort. The major G-forces aren't caused by engine acceleration, rather they are caused by centripital force. Generally, the pilot can sustain far less G-force than the aircraft.
Large segments of the population always "go without" what the wealthy enjoy.
Which is fine until 'what the wealthy enjoy' becomes basic necessities like food and energy.
Energy prices should be gradually but steadily increased, through taxation on both non-renewable fuels and inefficient consumption. Society would adapt to this by reducing energy usage. That's pretty much the only way, and it works.
Oh, this will happen without taxation. Scarcity will increase the price. Unfortunately, scarcity has consequences in regard to basic necessities.
Now I don't get your argument. You say that a few people dying from radiation is such a catastrophe that we need to go massively overboard on our safety standards. On the other hand, millions dead in food riots doesn't seem to phase you. Am I being trolled here?
I'm sorry, but that just isn't a sound argument. You can measure double strand breaks in lots of systems, but you don't know whether those numbers apply to cells that matter, like stem cells, reproductive cells, and others. An organism can invest a lot of effort to protect a few important cells against chemical damage, but there is nothing it can do against radiation damage.
Many of the defense mechanisms that protect against chemical damage are also useful against radiation damage. As I mentioned, beyond direct repair, apoptosis is one way. The immune system also culls malformed cells. But again, this is theoretical, and theory has to be backed up by actual studies in humans and animals.
"Warranted" in what way? Why should we accept any significant extra risk for nuclear energy?
The studies regarding Japan that I referred to showed no significant risk from low level radiation exposure. They actually showed small (though statistically significant) increase in overall life expectancy. The LNT model is costing society in profound ways: increased pollution through reliance on fossil fuels, increased economic costs (bourne by rich and poor alike), diversion of money that could be more effectively spent on improving public safety in other ways. This "significant risk" you bring up is not backed by good science. The biggest reason to love LNT is not for any scientific or safety reason. Instead it is an awesome political stick.
There is a much easier solution: use less energy. There is absolutely no need to use the amount of energy we do even if we make no changes to our US lifestyle--countries with a higher standard of living use much less energy per capita.
And the best free market way of reducing energy consumption is to make it more expensive.
Have you ever seen what happens to the poor (in free markets) when basic necessities like energy and food become expensive? Sure, demand is reduced, but large segments of the population will often go without while the wealthy continue to enjoy abundance. Sure I'm all for free market capitalism as the best tool for keeping prices down for everyone, but that doesn't mean I look at it with rose-colored glasses.
That, too, is a ridiculous bugaboo and excuse. Places in the world where hunger is rampant do not rely on massive amounts of energy to produce food, and the lot of those people would get worse if they started relying on the costly and inefficient methods of food production we use (they are efficient only if you don't account for externalities).
Yes they are more efficent. They also import a large amount of their food. We (western nations) happen to be the ones exporting food to the world. If we stopped or raised prices significantly, many third world countries would no longer be able to afford enough to keep their large (and growing) populations fed.
Hunger stopped being a technological problem a few centuries ago, if it ever was a technological problem at all.
About the same time we started using modern industrial techniques for cultivation and transportion which happen to require a lot of energy.
Even if you only look at double-strand breaks that don't get repaired, oxygen still causes thousands of breaks (compared to 3 or 4 by radiation at the levels we were speaking of). Apoptosis and the immune system can often take care of cells that are too damaged.
But beyond the theoretical stuff, we have hard evidence in the case of Japanese atomic bomb survivors that a far more aggresive model than LNT is warrented. Moreover, animal studies provide a great deal of exact information on radiation damage to cells. There is solid data in abundance.
We are often able to come up with resonable standards for limiting heavy metals and toxic elements in our enviroment. It is important to do the same for radiation.
What is wild and dangerous is to rely on fossil fuels to get the major portion of our energy. And the only alternative energy source that could possibly generate a significant portion the power that society currently uses is nuclear. Solar, wind, water, can not provide energy in the scale necessary. And reducing energy requirements to the scale that they could provide would probably result in mass famine in many parts of the world as food production tanks. Though not perfect, nuclear power is safer and cleaner than the alternatives.
LNT stands for "linear no threshold" (a threshold below which no ill effect occurs). The presence of repair mechanisms does not cause a threshold to appear magically: if radiation can kill at high doses with a repair mechanism, then it can kill at very low doses with a repair mechanism because repair mechanisms are not perfect.
I agree totally.
I am all for safety standards on nuclear power. But I want them to be based on the latest scientific data, not on out-dated 1940's guesswork.
Rest assured, it is. In fact, the latest scientific data suggests that nuclear power is overall not such a good idea--neither from a safety point of view or from an economic point of view. It's just that some people are so enamored with the technology (or have so much money invested in it) that they simply don't want to face facts.
You forget. Politicians create safety standards, not scientists. If you live in the US, you might remember the big flap about Bush's reversal of Clinton's aresenic ppm standards for drinking water. Little of the discussion regarded science.
But it's important to look at the standards as they are. Every mammalian cell suffers about 70 million spontaneous DNA-damaging events per year. (The LNT model was developed before this was known, of course.) Most of that is caused by oxygen free radicals. The maximum annual dose of radiation recommended by ICRP is 1 mSv. That is equivalent to about 2.3 DNA damaging events per year. Natural radiation is responsible for about 5. Even if we raised the standard to around 100 mSv, oxygen would still be responsible for thousands times more damaging events.
Putting aside the technical difficulty of shutting down a P2P network, some of this software may stand a chance in court. They are very much geared to 'file'-sharing rather than music sharing. That improves the chances that some court might see them as substantially non-infringing. Moreover, they are software programs, rather than centralized server, making the case for "the users are responsible for their own actions" stronger.
None of it matters in the end, though. There are three types of people out there: 1) There are those people who don't understand computer technology. 2) There are those people who understand it a little because they've used it. But they don't really understand it. They think that the icon is the program. They think of electronic mail as 'mail, but electronic.' And they have a fuzzy perception of information ownership. They think of people who alter the information on their computers in ways that were not intended as 'hackers' and slightly nefarious. 3) There are people who understand how computers work, and have a good idea what is happening with the 1's and 0's at any given time. Sure, they couldn't build their own OS, but they understand how it works to some degree. (Like someone who couldn't fix his car, but understands the basic concept of an internal combustion engine.)
Unfortunately, it is highly probable that the judge will belong to category 1 or 2.
Yeah, but the thing is, if it were that, you'd see a much higher thyroid cancer rise in infants than in adults. Since we don't, it suggests that there wasn't enough radiation released over large areas to actually impact thyroid cancer rates. (We know how much radiation was released, it's the models used for estimation of low level radiation damage that were at fault. Mainly the linear no-threshold model.) For that reason whether they took iodine or not shouldn't matter (except for the small number of people close in who got high radiation exposure, mostly firefighters and workers).
A lot more studies need to be conducted in order to find out just what the effects of low-level radiation were. Things like downs-syndrome rates is something that needs to be investigated. However, the effect certainly wasn't the tens of thousands dead by cancer as predicted by the LNT model. And the studies that have been conducted (long-term studies of atomic bomb victims in Japan) seem to point to either a low threat from low-level radiation, or the absence of a threat.
It's not my personal observation of thyroid cancer rates. You can find out more in a number of places, including a special issue of Physics Today a couple years back. I said nothing about the absence of radiation. I was talking about the danger of low level radiation (radiation level can be measured with a geiger counter). How many rads is too much? The LNT model had a guess as to the answer to that problem. That guess has been used to make policy.
Pointing to the inadequacy of one method of estimation used without any real attempt to make a scientific evaluation of the situation based on all the available evidence doesn't convince me of anything.
I wasn't trying to conduct a fullscale scientific evalutation in a slashdot post. Instead I was merely pointing out a possibility that has been raised by a number of scientists in the field. Judging from your post, I'd imagine that you didn't get your opinion about the matter from a detailed scientific evaluation either, so I couldn't have done much damage. If you're interested, you can take a look at the relevant journals yourself.
I imagine that all copies of Office XP will stop working on January 1, 2004 (or whenever the support promise runs out) due to some bug which "prevents proper start up of program file once the system clock passes 01012004:00:00:00, and instead displays upgrade flash screen and and crashes."
Since the service period will have expired, Microsoft will not be fixing this problem, and will instead recommend upgrading to OfficeBall Z for $1000 a copy.
Slashdot Mirror
They wound up with their hands stuck together for most of childhood. Did wonders for my peace of mind.
I've seen some of those jingoes and peaceniks. I think that we both have an idea on how good they'd be at fighting. I'll be on the war side in the war on war, thank you.
My god. You have managed to be massively ill-informed. The bin Laden videos are shown on Al-Jazeera(sp?) TV before anybody in our government gets a chance to look at them. Hell, you can even get it on cable here. There is no one in government who later authorizes what is and is not all right to show on American English-speaking television. That would be suspiciously like an office of censorship.
Sure, there were a couple of videos picked up by special forces that got pre-viewed by the government, but that's about it. The media has it's own sources.
Forget the Columbian Government--our U.S. government has done all that.
I'm not a lefty either. But war is always horrible. I think this concentration on terrorism is too much emphasis on tactics and not enough on causes. We'd get a lot farther with a war on aggresion and oppresion.
Look up the Sedition Act in a history book.
I don't think that you understand our first ammendment. It is perfectly legal for a book publisher to publish a book by Hussein, or for a news organization to run bin Laden's videos. A newspaper can even run unibomber essays if it wants.
Perhaps you can be a bit clearer about the difference between "vehicles of communication" and "speech."
Is a "vehicle of communication" anything like a volkswagon van?
MS doesn't buy Visual Studio ads on /. in order to sell Visual Studio. They do it to laugh in our faces.
It's their way of saying: "Ha ha, you dirty hippies. Who's the corporate shill now? At least we're not hypocrites."
Well, they do. Flowering plants. It's the ferns that are evil.
Spirited away is tremendous. There is no excuse not to see it, especially if you have small children. However, in some ways it feels weaker than some of Miyazaki's other masterpieces. I was disapointed in the lack of tension. Some of the plot resolutions (esp. concerning the witch's sister) didn't seem to stand up to the magnificance of the backdrop. The environmental theme was touched on, but it felt like Miyazaki couldn't decide whether it should be a major or minor part of the plot.
In the end, you have seen what amount to a series of viginettes, all exciting and interesting, but the fantasy world at the end of the movie seems smaller than the one introduced at the beginning.
Of course, saying that Spirited Away is one of Miyazaki's weakest films is like saying the same of Kubrick and The Shining. There is still nothing out there that compares.
The competance of professors evaluating course-work doesn't stack up much higher.
The amount of cheating and copying that goes on is astounding. Moreover, the difficultly of a given course varies wildly from professor to professor.
There is simply no way to do this perfectly. In fact, I don't think that standardized tests are that much worse than evaluation by a professor. I think that it may work better for many subjects and many situations.
For changing subtitles, I use DVDsubber. The region code thing is great, though. Couldn't everything be done better in hardware though?
I always make sure to choose my web hosts based on hair or eye color of the sys admin. I don't like people with the letter 'D' in their name. Also, the shirt style is a big deal to me.
I can tell that you are a discerning person, just like me.
I'm so glad that you've agreed to surrender your rights in order to fight child pornography. Tomorrow the police will be searching your house, just in case you might own some of it. They've tapped your phones in order to make sure you aren't accessing any illegal sites. And from now on, all published material will have to vetted through the Government anti-child-porn censorship comittee.
You don't mind do you? After all, it's to fight child porn.
Average Joe: Hello, I'd like you to sign this receipt before I let you touch my laptop.
Security Guy #1: Sir, hand me the laptop. You're causing a scene.
Average Joe: No I'm not. I just want to ensure that my laptop is handled safely.
Security Guy #1: Don't contradict me. I'm in charge here, and you're causing a scene.
Average Joe: I really wasn't trying to contradi--
Security Guy #1: All right, we've got a live one here. Bob, come over and help me out.
Bob removes his security wand out from under the skirt of a nine-year-old girl. The girl's mother is against the wall being "patted down" by a couple of other guards.
Security Guy #2 (Bob): What seems to be the problem?
Security Guy #1: We've got a non-cooperative.
Security Guy #2: Close the concourse. [Then speaking to our Average Joe, who tried to make a break for it, but has since been been detained by a couple of men in dark sunglasses.] Looks like we've found ourselves an enemy combatant.
Meanwhile a pair of dark complexioned men in turbans walk past the ruckus. Average Joe hears the one whisper to the other: "Hey Mohammad, do you think we're winning?"
I was asked just yesterday to find something very much like this (except for some text processing and databasing thrown in). I haven't found anything out of the box that fits (not that I was smart enough to do an ask slashdot on it), so I think that I may have to code my own in the next week. Are you willing to pay a little cash for a custom solution?
I worship you with my plus+2 posting bonus.
The G-forces in military aircraft are enough to make pilots blackout (the blood goes away from the head) or redout (the blood goes to the head) with little effort. The major G-forces aren't caused by engine acceleration, rather they are caused by centripital force. Generally, the pilot can sustain far less G-force than the aircraft.
Now I don't get your argument. You say that a few people dying from radiation is such a catastrophe that we need to go massively overboard on our safety standards. On the other hand, millions dead in food riots doesn't seem to phase you. Am I being trolled here?
Have you ever seen what happens to the poor (in free markets) when basic necessities like energy and food become expensive? Sure, demand is reduced, but large segments of the population will often go without while the wealthy continue to enjoy abundance. Sure I'm all for free market capitalism as the best tool for keeping prices down for everyone, but that doesn't mean I look at it with rose-colored glasses. Yes they are more efficent. They also import a large amount of their food. We (western nations) happen to be the ones exporting food to the world. If we stopped or raised prices significantly, many third world countries would no longer be able to afford enough to keep their large (and growing) populations fed. About the same time we started using modern industrial techniques for cultivation and transportion which happen to require a lot of energy.
Even if you only look at double-strand breaks that don't get repaired, oxygen still causes thousands of breaks (compared to 3 or 4 by radiation at the levels we were speaking of). Apoptosis and the immune system can often take care of cells that are too damaged.
But beyond the theoretical stuff, we have hard evidence in the case of Japanese atomic bomb survivors that a far more aggresive model than LNT is warrented. Moreover, animal studies provide a great deal of exact information on radiation damage to cells. There is solid data in abundance.
We are often able to come up with resonable standards for limiting heavy metals and toxic elements in our enviroment. It is important to do the same for radiation.
What is wild and dangerous is to rely on fossil fuels to get the major portion of our energy. And the only alternative energy source that could possibly generate a significant portion the power that society currently uses is nuclear. Solar, wind, water, can not provide energy in the scale necessary. And reducing energy requirements to the scale that they could provide would probably result in mass famine in many parts of the world as food production tanks. Though not perfect, nuclear power is safer and cleaner than the alternatives.
But it's important to look at the standards as they are. Every mammalian cell suffers about 70 million spontaneous DNA-damaging events per year. (The LNT model was developed before this was known, of course.) Most of that is caused by oxygen free radicals. The maximum annual dose of radiation recommended by ICRP is 1 mSv. That is equivalent to about 2.3 DNA damaging events per year. Natural radiation is responsible for about 5. Even if we raised the standard to around 100 mSv, oxygen would still be responsible for thousands times more damaging events.
Putting aside the technical difficulty of shutting down a P2P network, some of this software may stand a chance in court. They are very much geared to 'file'-sharing rather than music sharing. That improves the chances that some court might see them as substantially non-infringing. Moreover, they are software programs, rather than centralized server, making the case for "the users are responsible for their own actions" stronger.
None of it matters in the end, though. There are three types of people out there: 1) There are those people who don't understand computer technology. 2) There are those people who understand it a little because they've used it. But they don't really understand it. They think that the icon is the program. They think of electronic mail as 'mail, but electronic.' And they have a fuzzy perception of information ownership. They think of people who alter the information on their computers in ways that were not intended as 'hackers' and slightly nefarious. 3) There are people who understand how computers work, and have a good idea what is happening with the 1's and 0's at any given time. Sure, they couldn't build their own OS, but they understand how it works to some degree. (Like someone who couldn't fix his car, but understands the basic concept of an internal combustion engine.)
Unfortunately, it is highly probable that the judge will belong to category 1 or 2.
Yeah, but the thing is, if it were that, you'd see a much higher thyroid cancer rise in infants than in adults. Since we don't, it suggests that there wasn't enough radiation released over large areas to actually impact thyroid cancer rates. (We know how much radiation was released, it's the models used for estimation of low level radiation damage that were at fault. Mainly the linear no-threshold model.) For that reason whether they took iodine or not shouldn't matter (except for the small number of people close in who got high radiation exposure, mostly firefighters and workers).
A lot more studies need to be conducted in order to find out just what the effects of low-level radiation were. Things like downs-syndrome rates is something that needs to be investigated. However, the effect certainly wasn't the tens of thousands dead by cancer as predicted by the LNT model. And the studies that have been conducted (long-term studies of atomic bomb victims in Japan) seem to point to either a low threat from low-level radiation, or the absence of a threat.
It's not my personal observation of thyroid cancer rates. You can find out more in a number of places, including a special issue of Physics Today a couple years back. I said nothing about the absence of radiation. I was talking about the danger of low level radiation (radiation level can be measured with a geiger counter). How many rads is too much? The LNT model had a guess as to the answer to that problem. That guess has been used to make policy.
Pointing to the inadequacy of one method of estimation used without any real attempt to make a scientific evaluation of the situation based on all the available evidence doesn't convince me of anything.
I wasn't trying to conduct a fullscale scientific evalutation in a slashdot post. Instead I was merely pointing out a possibility that has been raised by a number of scientists in the field. Judging from your post, I'd imagine that you didn't get your opinion about the matter from a detailed scientific evaluation either, so I couldn't have done much damage. If you're interested, you can take a look at the relevant journals yourself.
I imagine that all copies of Office XP will stop working on January 1, 2004 (or whenever the support promise runs out) due to some bug which "prevents proper start up of program file once the system clock passes 01012004:00:00:00, and instead displays upgrade flash screen and and crashes."
Since the service period will have expired, Microsoft will not be fixing this problem, and will instead recommend upgrading to OfficeBall Z for $1000 a copy.