The point has already been made that these linux-based minicomps may not be as accessible as you might like - having never used one, I'll just give the benefit of the doubt that they successfully fill the needs cheaply. If they don't play mp3s now, they'll do so sooner or later.
Microsoft can make money on windows without charging for it; they can charge $15/copy for the minicomputer version. Microsoft has an endless number of strategies, which they will employ to keep market dominance for as long as they can.
There will be a whole *series* of retrenchments. Microsoft is in a very powerful, very profitable place, so they will fight each retrenchment as hard as they can - but they're not stupid, they've got contingency plans to stay in the market and, frankly, to stay extremely profitable whatever happens. Put another way: they can compete with free, maybe not on a level playing field, but on the playing field that exists, and they intend to do so.
Forcing them to compete, even on a biased field, is good for the rest of us, so I'm all for it. But driving MS out of any market segment is going to be extremely difficult.
There are four general situations where apoptosis is medically interesting. This particular result increases our understanding of apoptsis generally, so is potentially relevant to all of them:
a) Cancer. This is the big one. Your body has a natural defense against cancer - cells that would become cancerous undergo apoptosis and die. Only when this defense fails do you actually get cancer.
b) Viral Infections. Viruses (and a few bacteria, but it's not the same thing) get inside the individual cells of your body and take them over to make viruses. Again, your body defends itself by inducing apoptosis in affected cells - the virus will typically contain genes to try and prevent this.
c) Some degenerative diseases result from apoptosis being triggerred improperly in certain cells (Parkinsons' disease probably works this way.)
d) Aptoptosis plays a major role in normal human development; if this goes wrong, this may cause certain development defects.
Someone gave a chubby-chaser a set of colored pencils and he has gone all out.
The book is worth reading (in a store, do not for the love of God give them any money) for quotes like "Strong, sensual, earthy and feminine, with an exotic beauty no one would think to splash a beard on."
It's funny *on purpose*.
There are other glimpses of humor that let you know the people who wrote this book know just how lame a bunch of the other stuff actually is.
My argument is: the proposals that are *actually being made* are equivalent to just giving the rich money. Myself, I skip any arguments which are based on hypothetical navel gazing and concentrate on the real world.
As for your specific proposal - everything depends on the details of implementation. If the proposal simply subsidizes slave labor, that doesn't benefit anyone.
This book also addresses some of my sibling comments (essentially false) statements on the economic successes of East Asian economies, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China and India.
Do you have any sources for this, monxrtr? I'll pretend to take you seriously.
Firstly, a mutual fund's "administration" costs are 100% of the actual costs associated with the fund. Counting the capital that the fund manages, and taking a % of that, is like counting up the dollar value of all the buildings and students, and taking the administrative costs as a % of that.
Secondly, our private health care system has higher administrative overhead than any socialist system in the world. Privatization of services results in things like the Enron fiasco, it does not and never has resulted in higher efficiency or better quality of services - research that purports to show such is invariably either faked (which should be obvious, given those paying for it have a financial interest in the outcome) or woefully deficient.
Thirdly, while I think that there are a lot of problems with the teaching profession, your suggestion is woefully inadequate. Anyone seriously interested in remote education should read digital diploma mills.
If you are a fanatical adherent to some ultra-free-market ideology, all of this may be opaque to you.
Nice rant, and I particularly ENJOY YOUR USE OF CAPS.
It is absolutely true that every dime the government gives out has been taken from someone else.
But, in the case of this program in particular, the government serves to generate a net flow of cash from the general public and towards the politically connected rich people who buy the laws. My post above explains one of a great many fictions by which this is achieved (when the government "contracts out" services.)
Firstly, for governments to "encourage" private corporations to help the poor basically means: the government should give the rich some money, and the rich will, in turn, give a fraction of that to the poor.
It's a scam to insert themselves into the revenue stream and suck at the public teat.
This is a bit off-topic, but I'm going to reproduce something my mother (who is a teacher) wrote in respect to the similarly-phrased venture philanthropy plans in education. Sorry that it is long, but since educationally venture philanthropy is very much part of the Gates' foundations agenda, it's relevant in entirety. I did the html formatting, but the content is my Mom's:
"Educational Entrepreneurship" is an enormously powerful nation-wide effort to sub-contract educational administration, curriculum, and professional development services in low-income public school districts to private for-profit partners, after districts are taken over under NCLB. Mass Insight is a leader in this drive, and you can view its proposal to coordinate the takeover process for its partners in a report on its website. They are explicit, in their report, that their eventual target is to take over the entire public education system and run it, free of "bureaucratic interference."
The eventual for-profit providers of services are located under several layers of interlocking "advocacy" organizations, with a conscious strategy of leveraging investment of public and private money to promote the takeover. Texas, Massachusetts, and California are epicenters of the project, where Republican governors have built Education Boards dominated by adherents. An example of a "partner" might be K-12 Inc, which went public last week with a stock offering that raised $108 million, according to the current issue of Education Week.
The rationale for forcing public schools to consume these private services is that the services are "research-based" and have proven their effectiveness. A problem is that the research is often biased or distorted by researchers with hidden agendas. In many cases, especially in Texas, it was fabricated outright [she means Reading First]. Most activity has been in math and reading, since those are the high-stakes targets of NCLB. But as concern has risen over the condition of science instruction, vast amounts of money have been appropriated to improve it, and entrepreneurial attention has now focused on science education.
As you may know [remember this was originally sent to other teachers], the federal "What Works" clearinghouse has
At first level, you should absolutely have ranks in Bluff, Forgery, Gather Information and Craft (Bong).
Skill points permitting, Balance, Diplomacy, Decipher Script, Sense Motive and Intimidate are useful, but not required.
As you rise in level: * You can never have too many ranks in Bluff or Craft (Bong), put a point in each at every level. * By the time you graduate, you should have at least 4 ranks in Spot and Listen. Nothing will actually happen until near the end of Sophomore year, so there is no rush. * As your living quarters grow increasingly slovenly during your time as a student, more ranks in Search will be required. * Avoid Knowledge skills - they are useless. Likewise Concentration. * Disable Device and Open Locks are both useful even with a small number of ranks. * Use Rope sounds good, but it turns out that you actually won't get a chance to take advantage of it unless you have many ranks in Diplomacy. * If you take any ranks in Tumble or Move Silently, you will spend the rest of your life as a douchebag. * If you've read too many novels you may think that Climbing will enable you to go around on the tops of the buildings. It will get you arrested.
Just because you know that something is happening doesn't mean that you account for it correctly or fully appreciate the implications; I'm a biologist, all the systems I deal with are heterogeneous, and it's always a major bitch to deal with. That said, I share your skepticism but this doesn't strike me as implausible - although I know essentially nothing about astrophysics.
.... since there seems to be some confusion - I do not, in fact, endorse either dystopic transhumanism, or Ron Paul, or a cyberpunk-esque corporate-dominated hellscape. I would like a DNI, though. In case my sarcasm is completely lost on people: Ron Paul is a bespittled lunatic.
The political class is perfectly well aware that the general public is unhappy - it's not like we need to send them a message in order to make this clear. If we did, we could use giant billboards (notice - I am trying to stay on topic.)
Rather than taking action to "send messages", we need to take action to change policy. Elecing Ron Paul would certainly change policy although, assuming he was able to carry through on his proposals, most of the policy changes would be bad, and his fanatical adherence to his own particular brand of ideologically-based political economic theory would lead to disaster in any case.
This is a much-belated step in the right direction - it would have been an excellent policy move 20 or 30 *years* ago, when giant billboards to facilitiate the 3 minutes hate, or to flash "OBEY" in subliminal letters, were state of the art.
But this is the 21st century - we can implant chips in people's brains now! We can contract out the manufacture of wireless control collars to the lowest bidder!
The government deiberately squelches these technologies to pander to the minority of religious nuts who have disproportional influence over our government.
That's why I support Ron Paul and the transumanist dystopian party - deregulation and the ability to sell advertizers direct access to our subconscious will enable us to achieve the economic benefits of a nihilistic hellscape.
Your arguments are rather broad here- militarily, the invasion and elimination of the Iraqi regime was extraordinarily successful.
This is certainly true, but...
Iran fought Iraq for years, losing somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million men, and ultimately all that was achieved (by either side) was a stalemate.
Apples and oranges! Firstly, in the 80s, when Iraq invaded Iran (not the other way around), Iraq had the support of *both* of the world's superpowers, while Iran had barely tolerable relations with the USSR and outright hostile relations with the US. At the end of the affair, Iran probably had the military might to go all the way to Baghdad - but the rest of the world let them know that if they did, Iran would get dogpiled. Also, the Iraqis had western-supplied non-conventional weapons at their disposal, which the Iranians did not.
To call that a *military* stalemate is deeply disingenuous; it was primarily political.
In the case of the US invasion, the country was completely helpless, basically destroyed, and most of their military refused to fight us. If there'd been Hezbollah style resistance throughout the south, things would've gone very differently. Iraq in 2003 was a completely different opponent than the one that Iran faced in the early 80s - it was openly acknowledged that Iran could have invaded and conquered the place in the state it was in when we went in. They would've suffered more casualties than we did, could not have managed it as quickly - and would have sufferred more casualties.
That said, our military is undeniably, awesomely powerful. No-one can stand against us in a straight fight - the US and our immediate clients (Japan,England,Israel) could probably take on the entire rest of the world.
our military was not built to be an occupying force, but yet it has also shown that they are fairly adaptive.
HA HA HA HA!
To be fair, the military is not responsible for the boundless incompetence and corruption of civilian planners in Iraq. From a military standpoint, they've done as well as could be expected given their circumstances, both the impossible nature of the mission, and the lack of resources they've been given.
However, Republican planners intend to run these counterinsurgency operations *at a profit*; if we expect the chronyism to continue, we can expect future counterinsurgency operations to be just as much of a disaster, and to have just as much of a negative impact on cohesiveness and morale. Thus, we need the mercenaries and the robots.
It is true that more competent leadership wouldn't have gone into Iraq. It is also true that more competent leadership would've done a better job in running the occupation, and that there are some improvements in competence recently. But none of this is going to be remotely enough to salvage this disaster.
It's clear from the public record that the leadership in this country (both parties) plan on fighting counterinsurgency wars of one kind or another for most of the next century, if not beyond.
This only makes sense from their perspective - economically, there is rough parity between the United States and the other centers of economic might (roughly: Western Europe and East Asia). Only in the area of military might does the US have an overwhelming advantage.
So, if there's a dispute or competition, US planners want it to be resolved militarily, because they expect to win.
However, it's impossible to fight colonial wars with a citizen's army, even a volunteer army. As we see in Iraq, the army destroys itself. We might try to fight it with mercenaries (Blackwater, etc.), and we probably will, if planners can get away with it, but they'll want to hedge their bets by automating as much of the process of occupation and counter-insurgency as they can.
As a test case for using American military might to dominate the next century, Iraq has been an abysmal failure. But don't think that will dissuade the ultra-right; they're committed to violence, and if the tools we have are inadequate, and however disastrous the consequences of failure, they won't give it up willingly.
Their calculations are off because they are educated to be evil, and fail to appreciate that each day is actually four days long!.
When you account for this 1:4 ratio, the extra dark energy drops out of the equations, and the universe does not collapse into an academic singularity, but into four nodes, two major and two minor! The academic community will not teach this because it is brainwashing.
(Actually, I just really want this story to have the Time Cube metatag.)
I agree that this is terrible policy - but: 1) The bill in question hasn't even been introduced and 2) Even if it passed, would it kill anybody?
Yes, the Democrats are lame. Yes, the Democrats are crooked, they're only a hairsbreadth from the Republicans on ideological issues, and they are mostly just as much chronies to the status quo as the pachyderms are.
But to say that this is just as bad as the stuff the Republican congress was doing? Come on.
In any case, these don't look like serious proposals to me - it looks to me as if congressman Hollywood is merely running a defensive action against the possibility that the DMCA might be revoked or overturned. It's not the most original rhetorical device but for all I know it might be successful.
Yes, because only western civilizatuon resulted in net improvement in living conditions, as all those brown skinned savages were living in mud huts before their aryan superiors came along to civilize them.
When western civilization burst onto the world scene starting around the 15th century, the main exports were backsliding and hobbesianism. India, which had been the economic center of the world, suffered an economic collapse. Central and southern America suferred an even more severe economic collapse, and the loss of on the order of 50% of their population, north America was more sparsely populated but fared even worse.
It is absolutely true that things have improved a great deal since that time - but they had been improving *before* our ancestors killed and/or subjugated the rest of the planet and there's no reason to think that India and the Americas wouldn't be in considerably better shape today without european meddling.
The best aspects of western civilization are mostly arabic anyway.
This is obviously a precursor to Google's plan to replace the entire jury system.... with Google Trial! (they'd call it gtrial but that's already trademarked in the Netherlands).
As the article mentions, bacteria - conventional, non-alien bacteria, which share a common ancestor with other conventional life like you, me and a tree - are found everywhere on earth.
Living things are, in general, very competitive, and very effective competitors. Otherwise, they wouldn't still be here. So the odds that a new abiogenesis event, if one occurred, would produce a lifeform that would actually be viable in the face of a billion years of evolution by the competition are, I think, remote.
Also, while living things may thrive under extreme conditions (for example, in a bath of deadly oxygen gas) this does not mean that abiogenesis can occur under such conditions.
Finally, while it is true that many lab techniques are specific to detecting conventional terrestrial life, others are not. So, unless this non-conventional life is *restricted* to some remote environment - which conventional life certainly is not, so this again seems unlikely - we would be expected to have seen it.
There are some exotic coincidences which might allow for this to be true - maybe this exotic life looks just like a bacterium under the microscope, but for whatever reason cannot be cultured at all. Maybe it can't live on sugar - maybe it requires some other exotic organic nutrient which is found out in the wild but no-one has thought to add to culture medium. All possible, but also all unlikely.
Nonetheless, problems of detection of this kind remain a serious and useful direction for inquiry, in preparation for serious efforts to locate alien life on other worlds, where we will need a wide array of avenues for detection to allow for a completely-unknown level of chemical diversity.
I'm in favor of nuclear power - as long as no-one tries to run it at profit.
Trying to run the thing at a profit, even a hugely government subsidized profit, leads to cutting corners, which means that waste is not properly disposed of (which is by far the leading relevant concern) and that proper precautions are not taken to prevent sabotage or attack (which is still a concern with a modern nuke plant, even though meltdowns are not.)
However, since there is no evidence that artificial sweeteners actually make you thin, I think it unlikely that is causal. For a variety of reasons, indirect genetic effects are probably the most likely cause, although they did correct for "race".
JAMA. 2007;298(17):2028-2037:
The model included BMI categories, sex, smoking status (never, former, current), race (white, black, other), and alcohol consumption categories in ounces per day (none,
Even if this is true - and I'll allow those with a better background in this field to explain why it probably isn't - isn't this suspiciously similar to a scam from a few years back where this guy was peddling a supposedly similar gain in transmission speed over telephone lines? He had this elaborate setup to supposedly demonstrate it that he wouldn't let anyone examine closely?
I must be remembering some of the details wrong because I can't find the article - I remember that it was on slashdot as well as elsewhere, maybe 3 or 4 yrs ago? The guy attracted all kinds of venture capital and then was convicted of fraud, IIRC.
Anyway, even if this is true, I think he'll have trouble getting support for this reason.
If we pay attention to the legitimate grievances of the local population, and behave ourselves, the local population, who fear and despise the Jihadist movements as a rule, will turn the Jihadists in (those that remain Jihadist in outlook).
Even a bare minimum regard for the economic well-being of the general population nips these movements in the bud, which is why they are absent in Turkey (which has religious conservatives, but they are not at all the same) and Libya (hardly a paradigm example in other respects) but so prevalent in Algeria and Egypt.
In fact, in the wake of 9/11, this is what began to happen. The Jihadist movements were on the run and would have been destroyed.
Except that we invaded Iraq, religitimizing these movements in the eyes of the general population to a significant extent, and saving them from destruction at the hands of their own populations, who are also their primary victims. So while Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, the invasion of Iraq contributed immensely the possibility that we'll see further attacks.
As for nuking Saudi Arabia - we'd see a similar effect. The rest of the world would see attacks against the US as legitimate, and they'd unite against us. US-friendly regimes in Turkey, the Balkans and Indonesia would become unviable. It would be an absolute disaster.
There are two basic things that we could do to reduce the threat of terror, and they would work: 1) Police work, as you say.
and 2) Basic honor and decency.
I can't recall ever reading a comment over 0 that made anything like the strawman argument you are presenting - you are, at best, railing against an imagined point of view that no-one actually holds.
Ar worst, you are deliberately misrepresenting and criticizing something legitimate - which is, that we, most of us are Americans, are first and foremost responsible for what *we* do, and if we are serious about moral questions, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Thus, if we're going to criticize the Chinese government, we should also criticize our own.
More importantly, if we are morally obligated to take action to help the Chinese people fight censorship (and I take it as self-evident that we are,) then we are *even more obligated* to fight censorship here at home.
Notice that this is IN NO WAY equivalent to saying "we should not criticize the Chinese government", for any or whatever reason.
Slashdot Mirror
The point has already been made that these linux-based minicomps may not be as accessible as you might like - having never used one, I'll just give the benefit of the doubt that they successfully fill the needs cheaply. If they don't play mp3s now, they'll do so sooner or later.
Microsoft can make money on windows without charging for it; they can charge $15/copy for the minicomputer version. Microsoft has an endless number of strategies, which they will employ to keep market dominance for as long as they can.
There will be a whole *series* of retrenchments. Microsoft is in a very powerful, very profitable place, so they will fight each retrenchment as hard as they can - but they're not stupid, they've got contingency plans to stay in the market and, frankly, to stay extremely profitable whatever happens. Put another way: they can compete with free, maybe not on a level playing field, but on the playing field that exists, and they intend to do so.
Forcing them to compete, even on a biased field, is good for the rest of us, so I'm all for it. But driving MS out of any market segment is going to be extremely difficult.
There are four general situations where apoptosis is medically interesting. This particular result increases our understanding of apoptsis generally, so is potentially relevant to all of them:
a) Cancer. This is the big one. Your body has a natural defense against cancer - cells that would become cancerous undergo apoptosis and die. Only when this defense fails do you actually get cancer.
b) Viral Infections. Viruses (and a few bacteria, but it's not the same thing) get inside the individual cells of your body and take them over to make viruses. Again, your body defends itself by inducing apoptosis in affected cells - the virus will typically contain genes to try and prevent this.
c) Some degenerative diseases result from apoptosis being triggerred improperly in certain cells (Parkinsons' disease probably works this way.)
d) Aptoptosis plays a major role in normal human development; if this goes wrong, this may cause certain development defects.
Someone gave a chubby-chaser a set of colored pencils and he has gone all out.
The book is worth reading (in a store, do not for the love of God give them any money) for quotes like "Strong, sensual, earthy and feminine, with an exotic beauty no one would think to splash a beard on."
It's funny *on purpose*.
There are other glimpses of humor that let you know the people who wrote this book know just how lame a bunch of the other stuff actually is.
My argument is: the proposals that are *actually being made* are equivalent to just giving the rich money. Myself, I skip any arguments which are based on hypothetical navel gazing and concentrate on the real world.
As for your specific proposal - everything depends on the details of implementation. If the proposal simply subsidizes slave labor, that doesn't benefit anyone.
While people are recommending books, I'll plug Kicking Away the Ladder.
This book also addresses some of my sibling comments (essentially false) statements on the economic successes of East Asian economies, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China and India.
Do you have any sources for this, monxrtr? I'll pretend to take you seriously.
Firstly, a mutual fund's "administration" costs are 100% of the actual costs associated with the fund. Counting the capital that the fund manages, and taking a % of that, is like counting up the dollar value of all the buildings and students, and taking the administrative costs as a % of that.
Secondly, our private health care system has higher administrative overhead than any socialist system in the world. Privatization of services results in things like the Enron fiasco, it does not and never has resulted in higher efficiency or better quality of services - research that purports to show such is invariably either faked (which should be obvious, given those paying for it have a financial interest in the outcome) or woefully deficient.
Thirdly, while I think that there are a lot of problems with the teaching profession, your suggestion is woefully inadequate. Anyone seriously interested in remote education should read digital diploma mills.
If you are a fanatical adherent to some ultra-free-market ideology, all of this may be opaque to you.
Nice rant, and I particularly ENJOY YOUR USE OF CAPS.
It is absolutely true that every dime the government gives out has been taken from someone else.
But, in the case of this program in particular, the government serves to generate a net flow of cash from the general public and towards the politically connected rich people who buy the laws. My post above explains one of a great many fictions by which this is achieved (when the government "contracts out" services.)
It's a scam to insert themselves into the revenue stream and suck at the public teat.
This is a bit off-topic, but I'm going to reproduce something my mother (who is a teacher) wrote in respect to the similarly-phrased venture philanthropy plans in education. Sorry that it is long, but since educationally venture philanthropy is very much part of the Gates' foundations agenda, it's relevant in entirety. I did the html formatting, but the content is my Mom's:
At first level, you should absolutely have ranks in Bluff, Forgery, Gather Information and Craft (Bong).
Skill points permitting, Balance, Diplomacy, Decipher Script, Sense Motive and Intimidate are useful, but not required.
As you rise in level:
* You can never have too many ranks in Bluff or Craft (Bong), put a point in each at every level.
* By the time you graduate, you should have at least 4 ranks in Spot and Listen. Nothing will actually happen until near the end of Sophomore year, so there is no rush.
* As your living quarters grow increasingly slovenly during your time as a student, more ranks in Search will be required.
* Avoid Knowledge skills - they are useless. Likewise Concentration.
* Disable Device and Open Locks are both useful even with a small number of ranks.
* Use Rope sounds good, but it turns out that you actually won't get a chance to take advantage of it unless you have many ranks in Diplomacy.
* If you take any ranks in Tumble or Move Silently, you will spend the rest of your life as a douchebag.
* If you've read too many novels you may think that Climbing will enable you to go around on the tops of the buildings. It will get you arrested.
Hope that helps.
Just because you know that something is happening doesn't mean that you account for it correctly or fully appreciate the implications; I'm a biologist, all the systems I deal with are heterogeneous, and it's always a major bitch to deal with. That said, I share your skepticism but this doesn't strike me as implausible - although I know essentially nothing about astrophysics.
The political class is perfectly well aware that the general public is unhappy - it's not like we need to send them a message in order to make this clear. If we did, we could use giant billboards (notice - I am trying to stay on topic.)
Rather than taking action to "send messages", we need to take action to change policy. Elecing Ron Paul would certainly change policy although, assuming he was able to carry through on his proposals, most of the policy changes would be bad, and his fanatical adherence to his own particular brand of ideologically-based political economic theory would lead to disaster in any case.
This is a much-belated step in the right direction - it would have been an excellent policy move 20 or 30 *years* ago, when giant billboards to facilitiate the 3 minutes hate, or to flash "OBEY" in subliminal letters, were state of the art.
But this is the 21st century - we can implant chips in people's brains now! We can contract out the manufacture of wireless control collars to the lowest bidder!
The government deiberately squelches these technologies to pander to the minority of religious nuts who have disproportional influence over our government.
That's why I support Ron Paul and the transumanist dystopian party - deregulation and the ability to sell advertizers direct access to our subconscious will enable us to achieve the economic benefits of a nihilistic hellscape.
Your arguments are rather broad here- militarily, the invasion and elimination of the Iraqi regime was extraordinarily successful.
This is certainly true, but...
Iran fought Iraq for years, losing somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million men, and ultimately all that was achieved (by either side) was a stalemate.
Apples and oranges! Firstly, in the 80s, when Iraq invaded Iran (not the other way around), Iraq had the support of *both* of the world's superpowers, while Iran had barely tolerable relations with the USSR and outright hostile relations with the US. At the end of the affair, Iran probably had the military might to go all the way to Baghdad - but the rest of the world let them know that if they did, Iran would get dogpiled. Also, the Iraqis had western-supplied non-conventional weapons at their disposal, which the Iranians did not.
To call that a *military* stalemate is deeply disingenuous; it was primarily political.
In the case of the US invasion, the country was completely helpless, basically destroyed, and most of their military refused to fight us. If there'd been Hezbollah style resistance throughout the south, things would've gone very differently. Iraq in 2003 was a completely different opponent than the one that Iran faced in the early 80s - it was openly acknowledged that Iran could have invaded and conquered the place in the state it was in when we went in. They would've suffered more casualties than we did, could not have managed it as quickly - and would have sufferred more casualties.
That said, our military is undeniably, awesomely powerful. No-one can stand against us in a straight fight - the US and our immediate clients (Japan,England,Israel) could probably take on the entire rest of the world.
our military was not built to be an occupying force, but yet it has also shown that they are fairly adaptive.
HA HA HA HA!
To be fair, the military is not responsible for the boundless incompetence and corruption of civilian planners in Iraq. From a military standpoint, they've done as well as could be expected given their circumstances, both the impossible nature of the mission, and the lack of resources they've been given.
However, Republican planners intend to run these counterinsurgency operations *at a profit*; if we expect the chronyism to continue, we can expect future counterinsurgency operations to be just as much of a disaster, and to have just as much of a negative impact on cohesiveness and morale. Thus, we need the mercenaries and the robots.
It is true that more competent leadership wouldn't have gone into Iraq. It is also true that more competent leadership would've done a better job in running the occupation, and that there are some improvements in competence recently. But none of this is going to be remotely enough to salvage this disaster.
It's clear from the public record that the leadership in this country (both parties) plan on fighting counterinsurgency wars of one kind or another for most of the next century, if not beyond.
This only makes sense from their perspective - economically, there is rough parity between the United States and the other centers of economic might (roughly: Western Europe and East Asia). Only in the area of military might does the US have an overwhelming advantage.
So, if there's a dispute or competition, US planners want it to be resolved militarily, because they expect to win.
However, it's impossible to fight colonial wars with a citizen's army, even a volunteer army. As we see in Iraq, the army destroys itself. We might try to fight it with mercenaries (Blackwater, etc.), and we probably will, if planners can get away with it, but they'll want to hedge their bets by automating as much of the process of occupation and counter-insurgency as they can.
As a test case for using American military might to dominate the next century, Iraq has been an abysmal failure. But don't think that will dissuade the ultra-right; they're committed to violence, and if the tools we have are inadequate, and however disastrous the consequences of failure, they won't give it up willingly.
Their calculations are off because they are educated to be evil, and fail to appreciate that each day is actually four days long!.
When you account for this 1:4 ratio, the extra dark energy drops out of the equations, and the universe does not collapse into an academic singularity, but into four nodes, two major and two minor! The academic community will not teach this because it is brainwashing.
(Actually, I just really want this story to have the Time Cube metatag.)
Oh, come on.
I agree that this is terrible policy - but:
1) The bill in question hasn't even been introduced
and
2) Even if it passed, would it kill anybody?
Yes, the Democrats are lame. Yes, the Democrats are crooked, they're only a hairsbreadth from the Republicans on ideological issues, and they are mostly just as much chronies to the status quo as the pachyderms are.
But to say that this is just as bad as the stuff the Republican congress was doing? Come on.
In any case, these don't look like serious proposals to me - it looks to me as if congressman Hollywood is merely running a defensive action against the possibility that the DMCA might be revoked or overturned. It's not the most original rhetorical device but for all I know it might be successful.
Yes, because only western civilizatuon resulted in net improvement in living conditions, as all those brown skinned savages were living in mud huts before their aryan superiors came along to civilize them.
When western civilization burst onto the world scene starting around the 15th century, the main exports were backsliding and hobbesianism. India, which had been the economic center of the world, suffered an economic collapse. Central and southern America suferred an even more severe economic collapse, and the loss of on the order of 50% of their population, north America was more sparsely populated but fared even worse.
It is absolutely true that things have improved a great deal since that time - but they had been improving *before* our ancestors killed and/or subjugated the rest of the planet and there's no reason to think that India and the Americas wouldn't be in considerably better shape today without european meddling.
The best aspects of western civilization are mostly arabic anyway.
This is obviously a precursor to Google's plan to replace the entire jury system.... with Google Trial! (they'd call it gtrial but that's already trademarked in the Netherlands).
O.J. Simpson? GUILTY!
Mumia? INNOCENT BY A HAIR!
Slobodan Milosevic, a war criminal? YES INDEED.
And so is President Bush.
As the article mentions, bacteria - conventional, non-alien bacteria, which share a common ancestor with other conventional life like you, me and a tree - are found everywhere on earth.
Living things are, in general, very competitive, and very effective competitors. Otherwise, they wouldn't still be here. So the odds that a new abiogenesis event, if one occurred, would produce a lifeform that would actually be viable in the face of a billion years of evolution by the competition are, I think, remote.
Also, while living things may thrive under extreme conditions (for example, in a bath of deadly oxygen gas) this does not mean that abiogenesis can occur under such conditions.
Finally, while it is true that many lab techniques are specific to detecting conventional terrestrial life, others are not. So, unless this non-conventional life is *restricted* to some remote environment - which conventional life certainly is not, so this again seems unlikely - we would be expected to have seen it.
There are some exotic coincidences which might allow for this to be true - maybe this exotic life looks just like a bacterium under the microscope, but for whatever reason cannot be cultured at all. Maybe it can't live on sugar - maybe it requires some other exotic organic nutrient which is found out in the wild but no-one has thought to add to culture medium. All possible, but also all unlikely.
Nonetheless, problems of detection of this kind remain a serious and useful direction for inquiry, in preparation for serious efforts to locate alien life on other worlds, where we will need a wide array of avenues for detection to allow for a completely-unknown level of chemical diversity.
I'm in favor of nuclear power - as long as no-one tries to run it at profit.
Trying to run the thing at a profit, even a hugely government subsidized profit, leads to cutting corners, which means that waste is not properly disposed of (which is by far the leading relevant concern) and that proper precautions are not taken to prevent sabotage or attack (which is still a concern with a modern nuke plant, even though meltdowns are not.)
No, nothing about dieting.
However, since there is no evidence that artificial sweeteners actually make you thin, I think it unlikely that is causal. For a variety of reasons, indirect genetic effects are probably the most likely cause, although they did correct for "race".
JAMA. 2007;298(17):2028-2037:
The model included BMI categories, sex, smoking status (never, former, current), race (white, black, other), and alcohol consumption categories in ounces per day (none,
I understand that no-one RTFA, but they corrected for that: and they did it correctly. That's not why.
Oh, yes, I *actually do* biostatistics and know what I am talking about.
Now, you are *correct* that there is no cause and effect established here!
It's entirely possible that genes-which-make-you-thin are also genes-which-give-you-alzheimers, or that they are proxies for such genes.
For example: being white makes you much more likely to have Cystic Fibrosis. This does not mean that getting a tan prevents CF.
Even if this is true - and I'll allow those with a better background in this field to explain why it probably isn't - isn't this suspiciously similar to a scam from a few years back where this guy was peddling a supposedly similar gain in transmission speed over telephone lines? He had this elaborate setup to supposedly demonstrate it that he wouldn't let anyone examine closely?
I must be remembering some of the details wrong because I can't find the article - I remember that it was on slashdot as well as elsewhere, maybe 3 or 4 yrs ago? The guy attracted all kinds of venture capital and then was convicted of fraud, IIRC.
Anyway, even if this is true, I think he'll have trouble getting support for this reason.
I disagree that Nukes would solve anything.
If we pay attention to the legitimate grievances of the local population, and behave ourselves, the local population, who fear and despise the Jihadist movements as a rule, will turn the Jihadists in (those that remain Jihadist in outlook).
Even a bare minimum regard for the economic well-being of the general population nips these movements in the bud, which is why they are absent in Turkey (which has religious conservatives, but they are not at all the same) and Libya (hardly a paradigm example in other respects) but so prevalent in Algeria and Egypt.
In fact, in the wake of 9/11, this is what began to happen. The Jihadist movements were on the run and would have been destroyed.
Except that we invaded Iraq, religitimizing these movements in the eyes of the general population to a significant extent, and saving them from destruction at the hands of their own populations, who are also their primary victims. So while Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, the invasion of Iraq contributed immensely the possibility that we'll see further attacks.
As for nuking Saudi Arabia - we'd see a similar effect. The rest of the world would see attacks against the US as legitimate, and they'd unite against us. US-friendly regimes in Turkey, the Balkans and Indonesia would become unviable. It would be an absolute disaster.
There are two basic things that we could do to reduce the threat of terror, and they would work:
1) Police work, as you say.
and
2) Basic honor and decency.
I can't recall ever reading a comment over 0 that made anything like the strawman argument you are presenting - you are, at best, railing against an imagined point of view that no-one actually holds.
Ar worst, you are deliberately misrepresenting and criticizing something legitimate - which is, that we, most of us are Americans, are first and foremost responsible for what *we* do, and if we are serious about moral questions, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Thus, if we're going to criticize the Chinese government, we should also criticize our own.
More importantly, if we are morally obligated to take action to help the Chinese people fight censorship (and I take it as self-evident that we are,) then we are *even more obligated* to fight censorship here at home.
Notice that this is IN NO WAY equivalent to saying "we should not criticize the Chinese government", for any or whatever reason.