I dunno what you're trying to tell yourself, but I'm pretty sure sugar is not addictive.
That's what everyone has always assumed, but recent medical research is starting to prove otherwise.
And what soft drinks do you drink that give you a "buzz"? I don't think I've ever got a "buzz" or any kind of feeling from pepsi other than "Hey this tastes great!"
Are you trying to claim caffeine and sugar are not "uppers"? People pulling all-nighters fueled by coffee or cola will disagree with you, I guarantee it.
Let me ask you this: if you took away all the sugar or sugar-replacement in your can of pepsi, would you still like the taste? Here's another experiment: take a glass of cooled carbonated water, and start mixing sugar into it. See how it tastes at varying levels of sugar. Do you like the taste?
Honestly, who here didn't know caffeine is majorly addictive, just like sugar? Anything that gives you a "buzz" is majorly addictive. Most of the soft drinks sell not based on taste (other than tasting sweet they don't really offer much taste qualities), but based on how addicted people are to the buzz they get from drinking them. I know a lot of people with cola or coffee addictions, and those addictions are tolerated (or not even recognized) because a caffeine and sugar addiction tends to not obviously harm society.
I agree completely. It's the words that matter. That's the reason CSS exists, so you can separate the words from the layout. That way you can restyle the same content for different types of user agent, whether it be the blind, pda users, or some other niche group.
What slashdot doesn't allow with its html 3.2 layout is taking the regular slashdot page and stripping out the layout, colors or content you don't need or want. To do that you have to use the simple version of slashdot, which is entirely different code, and might not be exactly what you wanted. It's a burden on the slashdot devs, who have to maintain two different ways of outputting html, and it's a burden on the user, who is limited in how he or she can restyle the page.
Right now we're transitioning between the old way of doing things (in-page layout) and the new way (completely separate layout and content), so you're not yet reaping the full benefits of CSS-based sites, but once the transition is over browsers will have the ability to let you change any layout property of any webpage, and have it remember that across browsing sessions. Don't like the font some site is using? Change it. Don't like it that the site menu is on the right instead of the left? Move it over. That's what browsing is going to be like in a few years.
That does sound very convincing when you first read it, because the author is an excellent politician. But you should beware of people who use strawman arguments (the young man at the panel discussion) and unfounded ad hominem accusations (accusing the government of being infected by irrational environmentalists who want to destroy industry) in support of their case.
Any scientific issue, no matter how rooted in facts it is, always has naysayers. Even the round earth theory had considerable opposition. For someone to dispute accepted scientific theory requires extraordinary evidence, and frankly this james p. hogan doesn't provide much in the way of actual evidence.
Oh, and in general, paying attention to whether a text contains logical fallacies is very helpful too in weeding out truth from falsehood.
The Mozilla press release even has a "click here" link to automatically install the patch! Who doesn't think that this kind of thing will have endless potential for hackers to exploit in the years ahead.
I don't think that. Because mozilla uses whitelisting to mark servers you're allowed to install from. If you try installing from another server, it throws up an error. A user would have to manually add a server to the allowed list before an exploit could be installed. Ofcourse, there might be a bug in the whitelisting system, but overall I think the approach is reasonably secure.
Why not just design a browser that works on multiple platforms, using an established cross-platform GUI such as wxWidgets, rather than going away to create a browser and coming back with another new, slow, bloated, universal uber-platform swiss-army-knife UI language...
Because you can't. I am not aware of any native toolkit that allows you to implement a browser fully compliant with the W3C standards, and wxwindows is even less capable than native toolkits. Mozilla optimizes by using native controls where it can, but if it didn't have the xul toolkit, compliance and compatibility would be a lot worse.
David Hyatt, who was/is a developer on both the mozilla and safari teams has written about the trouble with native widgets before. It's just not as simple as you would think it is.
I know, "Do it yourself dude", and plenty of geeks out there just love the customizability of XUL, but truthfully all I want is a fast, small browser. It just seems like everything is getting larger, slower and more bloated these days.
With modern standards being what they are, firefox is about as good as it gets. We're no longer in the days of html 3.2 (well, ok, slashdot still is, but that's beside the point). A browser nowadays has to do a lot more than just render html.
One thing that many city dewllers seem to forget is just where all the food comes from.
And most supporters of the "farming lifestyle" seem to forget that farming wouldn't exist unless the city dwellers were paying for that quaint old farming to be kept around. You're acting like the farmers are the one providing a service to the cities, but it's in reality the other way around. The cities could buy their food overseas and save money. Farming in america isn't kept around because it's useful, it's kept around because it's politically sensitive. Europe is much the same.
You also seem to forget that the US is a unites group of states. The idea, and the law as written in the constution, is that the states have a great deal of rights and powers. They are unified and subordinate to a federal government, but still very free. Well, that requires the states to ahve equal power. If larger (either population or landwise) states got all the votes, they could simlpy dictate to smaller states, thus destroying the idea of states rights.
Belgium called, since they're a sovereign nation they think they deserve equal power to the US inside the UN, and they want a permanent seat on the security council. You do agree we should give it to them, right? Or are you trying to destroy the rights of sovereign nations?
Oh, one more caveat. You must realize that *no* alternative voting system can make the US Presidential election fairer for minor parties as long as the Electoral College is in place. Trust me: it just can't be done. That's why I'm for aboloshing the EC. Unfortunately, many of my fellow conservatives are dead set against that, and it requires a Constitutional Amendment.
Even if you abandoned it, you'd still not have proprortional representation, meaning only one party would have access to the executive power, instead of a coalition representing a congressional majority, so third parties would still have to win the election to become part of the executive. You could modify the form of the presidential administration and the congress to support proportional representation, even while keeping the electoral college, so that like most other nations, you'd have a cabinet of ministers from different parties, each representing a certain percentage of the voters, with the entire executive perfectly representing the result of the vote, instead of just representing who got the most votes.
I wouldn't say the leaning is necessarily political, that would imply those who own the media actually care about anything but profit, and I see no evidence that's the case.
The media can legally lie, this has been the case for decades. So if you're a business, and your primary goal is to make profit, and it isn't always most profitable to tell the truth, and there's no financial harm in telling a lie, why not lie? Also, why try to do investigative journalism to find out the truth? If you do the hard research and find out the truth, you can get one story out of it, maybe two. If you don't do the research, you can report a new story every time someone involved in the story makes a comment about it. Perfect example of this: swift boat vets, with research you can validate or invalidate their claims, but no one in the mainstream media tried to do that because it would kill the story. So most news outlets tend to have stories biased in all directions, which is why the same news sources (CNN) get called biased to the right and biased to the left at the very same time. It's because they are biased in both directions, since their allegiance is not to politics, but to profitability.
The name of the game is drawing viewers to draw advertisers. In order to not scare away viewers, you can't tell them what they don't want to hear. What americans don't want to hear is that Iraq is a failed venture, so the failings in Iraq get downplayed and underreported. How often have you heard people complain the news is too negative, and how often have you heard them complain the news is too positive? People don't like to hear bad things about themselves or their country, so in order to keep them tuned to your station, you try to keep from telling them that. Also, advertisers. You can't take extreme positions, even if they're true, on issues because it will scare away advertisers. So the media tends to line stories in so much vagueness and he-said-she-said's that no advertiser can object to it, which doesn't exactly serve the truth either.
This is made worse by a republican message machine which is decades ahead of the democrat one. You have the conservative talk radio network, the white house which blocks access to reporters who ask the tough questions, the centralised talking points distribution network on the republican side, which dupes people into thinking a story has legitimacy because "everyone" is saying it, and on and on. This is why you can credibly argue a right wing bias in the media. It's not that the media sets out to be biased, it's that the republicans have tailored their PR to exploit the biases that are built into the media as it stands.
So, what to do about it? Number one is lots of media watchdog groups which inform the media of everything they report wrong from all sides of the political spectrum. That exists now. Number two is to bring back the illegality of lying in the press. No journalist in an official press capacity should ever be allowed to knowingly report a lie as fact. How to do this, I'm not exactly clear on. Maybe allowing people to sue for journalistic malpractice, like how you can sue your doctor for medical malpractice. But it still needs to be done. Number three is to get more variation in the media by bringing back reasonable ownership limits. I'm not advocating breaking up the media empires that exist, I'm just saying no one should be allowed to buy new outlets beyond a certain rather low marketshare, which over time will make the media market diversify again as media outlets get sold by the major media empires. And as long as I'm in fantasy land, number four would be to teach everyone a class on logic in high school, explaining what logical fallacies are, and how to recognize them, and explaining how to verify a claim you hear through logic, instead of through fallacy. But like I said, that would be fantasy land.
All the USPTO can make is a good effort and require that the patent application be written according to the guidelines so it can be understood by others (other patent lawyers that is).
There are a number of inherent problems with the USPTO:
* its financial resources are diverted to other ventures, instead of reinvested in patent examination, as a result, patent applications see less and less patent examination, and...
* patent examiners are woefully undertrained; they should be among the best in their field, but the low wage of examiners means that those who actually know what they're doing find other jobs
* a lot of classes of patents show no credible benefit to the industry they cover, like software patents. How many programmers do you know who go trawling through the patent database for a solution to their problem? I don't know a single one, and I've seen plenty of legal advice discouraging programmers from doing this. The entire reason for existance of the patent system is to spread new knowledge and inventions. The monopoly is what is given in exchange for the knowledge, and it is not the primary purpose of the patent system. Since no one ever looks at software patents except for when they are sued for patent infringement, the entire purpose of software patents is null and void.
* use more spectrum (aka bandwidth)
* increase signal strength
* decrease noise
But you can use more spectrum while still using the same range of frequencies, by finding a way around interference of signals at frequencies close to eachother. From the blurb about OFDM it seems that's what they're doing. Combining different signals at frequencies very close to eachother in such a way that they interfere in the air, but can be picked apart again at the receiver due to the specific waveform and timing they use.
Speaking as someone who is not religious, I find it ironic that so many people are so intolorant of those that are religious.
It's not the religion that bothers people, it's the acts of fundamentalists who act under the banner of that religion, whether they are pretending to be muslims or pretending to be christians. Fundamentalist religion is a major threat to peace and democracy (a lot of wars have been fought over it, and it is used with regularity to keep dictators in power). To pretend that is not the case is to open the door to the fundamentalists to destroy the very freedoms regular people hold dear.
That doesn't mean we should target people who hold strong religious beliefs, but it does mean we shouldn't expressly not target them just because of "freedom of religion." Freedom of religion is not the freedom to act as you please, and way too many religious fundamentalists seem to think that's the case and that they have some special right to go about their business, regardless of how much it harms other people, without government or law interfering with them.
Personally, I'm an agnostic, and I fail to understand why religion gets a free ride for so many things. If you hear your dead grandmother talking to you inside your head, you get sent to a shrink and are ridiculed, if you hear god talking to you inside your head, you become a religious or political leader and are respected. The mere mark of religion lets you get away with so much in life. Bush will get an incredibly amount of votes just for having faith, regardless of his actual performance as a president, and regardless of how true his acts are to what the bible says.
When you try to get a job, and you list credentials, you have to prove you actually did the things you claim. But when you run for office and use your faith to get it, you don't have to prove your acts in life are in compliance with your faith. Why? Why does religion always get a free ride, even from agnostics?
So if you want people to vote for a 3rd party, either give them a proportional representation system where their vote means something even if their party doesn't get the majority, or give them a 3rd party that can actually win. Everything else being said is just hot air.
The problem is though that the very people who would institute a proportional system are members of the parties which are held in power by the current system. Why would they ever create a fair system when they benefit so much from not doing it?
The only way to get the big parties to do the right thing is to publicly shame them into doing it, so that's why 3rd parties should be a viable part of the debates and electoral process. Sure, people will still vote for democrats or republicans, but at least the two big candidates will have to really talk about the issues, instead of just attacking the other guy or talking about artificial non-issues that few people really care about (gay marriage ban anyone?).
Ofcourse, in the long term, for the democratic health of the US, there needs to be a radical reshaping of the executive and legislative, and how they are elected, to make them actually a fair representation of the will of the voter. But in the short term the most controllable element is the press coverage and the debates. Those two should be able to be swayed by public opinion to more fairly cover the issues.
On the other hand, the dictionary documents but doesn't define spelling. It is merely a record of the currently accepted "correct" spelling (or spellings) of a word. If enough people ignore the dictionary, their spelling becomes the correct one, and it gets reflected in the next edition of the dictionary.
So, I wouldn't necessarily bash someone for spelling a word unlike it appears in the dictionary, as long as they can show their spelling is more popular than the dictionary spelling.
It's simple, if you make the ballot in enough states to possibly win the elections, you should be part of any debate. Since you can get on enough ballots simply by mobilizing regular citizens, that would open up the debates to anyone with actual grassroots support across america.
"ALL X are Y" will only get you so far. Then you could add additional (numeric) fuzzy logic based on samples of other data. For instance, in the "People who live in France speak French" solliquism, the computer could attempt to validate it by pulling a language census of France. After pulling this data, it would know that approximately 95% of people living there speak French. Thus a "fuzzy" "all" could be made. Like "MOST people in France speak French" and even give it a decent probability.
But the semantic web, even employing fuzzy logic, would have no intelligence about why some parts of a group have a property and the others don't, unless it was specifically encoded. So, to be able to say if an individual in france is likely to speak french it is not enough to say 95 percent of people in france speak french, since you could easily find an individual who has properties that would tell a human they are not likely to speak french, but would still be deemed to be 95 percent likely to speak french by the computer.
So, the semantic web would have to have perfect knowledge of why things are the way they are, and that would require people not only knowing what implicit knowledge they have about the real world, but also why they have that knowledge, and how to encode it into a semantic system. I don't have to tell you how unlikely this would be. And since people are likely to be wrong or leave omissions even when they do have perfect self-awareness, this would poison the data well sufficiently that you wouldn't be able to make guarantees about the accuracy of computer-derived conclusions.
Now, it's good people are trying to increase the usefulness of computers through semantics, and I'm curious to see what the semantic web will result in, but I just have low expectations about the actual abilities of the semantic web.
How would you compare this to fighting Hitler in WWII or even the French Revolution where violence was used to replace a monarchy with a democracy.
Hitler was not a dictator, he was democratically elected. Also, both of those wars were wars of self-defense from the POV of the US. Germany and France attacked first. Iraq did not attack first.
Do you really believe that Fidel Castro is *not* a dictator? What definition of dictator would that be? Do you believe that violence was not used to install him in power? Do you think the people have chosen to keep him as their leader all this time?
When people are ready for democracy, it comes inevitably. You can not rule without a willing populace. Iraq's social structure makes it incredibly hard to form a democracy there without it quickly turning into either a civil war or a theocratic dictatorship. I would say most iraqis tolerated saddam in power because he kept the peace.
Also, in international law, just being a dictator isn't enough to allow other nations to overthrow you. There is such a thing as national sovereignity, and it is not specific about which form of government a sovereign nation must have. That's why you have Kofi Annan saying the iraq war was illegal. It was. Saddam did not attack the US, was not provably planning to attack the US, and was not provably cooperating with anyone who attacked the US or planned to, so the US could not possibly claim legitimate self-defense, and hence the only reason one nation is allowed to go to war legally with another was invalidated. If you want to get international law changed so democracy becomes compulsory, with america the global policeman to enforce it, please, by all means, try to get it done, but until then please respect the laws as they are.
When you mention the "rest of the world", what does that include in your view? Europe? How do some of the African nations feel. Any reason why Middle Eastern dictators might not like our policies?
I would say that most middle eastern dictators love the US and its policies, because royal families like the house of Saud couldn't stay in power without american support, and they wouldn't have all the money they have without america buying up so much oil. The dictatorships in the middle east (including iraq) have always been supported by the US because it kept the oil flowing. Democracy was desirable, but it always had to move aside if the oil supply was threatened.
Europe has always looked the other way, because the US involvement in the middle east has kept the oil cheap and the region more-or-less stable, even if it hasn't always been the best thing for human rights. I guess the iraqi invasion was just too blatant a form of involvement for some european nations to swallow.
the U.S. has allready admitted to having large amounts of weapons of mass destruction, namely nuclear weapons, ready for use.
Not only that. The US also has sizeable stockpiles of chemical weapons, and it is still actively developing weapons systems for delivery of biological and chemical warfare agents.
I wasn't bashing invidual christians or christianity, just the organized church structures that teach people to be subservient to authority figures and to be satisfied with their position in life, even if they are at an unfair disadvantage compared to other groups of people.
Re:Ohio is a mess...
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Religion has always been used to subdue the lower social classes. A lot of religions glorify poverty and promise the poor that they will be rewarded for a life of misery in the afterlife. Organized christianity is especially guilty of this, with it teaching people from a young age to "accept god's plan" and not rebel against the system that gives them less opportunity in life than someone born in a rich family. Note that I'm not bashing christianity as a religion, which I think has very nice values (being nice to your neighbor, helping those in need, peace, love), but you need to make a clear distinction between the religion and the people and organizations who claim to represent it.
when this country rebelled in 1776 the average literacy rate was 98% despite having no forced schooling
I believe that was the literacy rate among voters, not the overall literacy rate.
Re:Where is American Society going
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America currently has a regressive tax rate at the top end. The richer you are the smaller the percentage of your income you pay, mostly due to extremely low dividends and capital gains taxes. Most of the flat tax rate proposals aim to do away with dividends and capital gains taxes entirely, which would make the rich essentially untaxable (since they make their money through investment, not labor), and thus institute a completely regressive taxation system. The measures to eradicate progressive taxation are slowly shifting the tax burden. The bush tax cuts were a large instrument in this.
Money has a natural tendency to pool because rich people can invest their money instead of having to spend it. You need a progressive taxation system to ensure the gap between rich and poor doesn't grow steadily.
Look up the evolution of the GINI index, which represents income inequality. America has one of the highest gaps between rich and poor in the world, on the level of a third world nation, and almost every year it grows wider.
Now, if the poor had a minimum quality of life, this wouldn't be a problem, but the figures are clear that the poor in the US don't have access to basic human rights like healthcare and education anymore.
So, I say, let the rich be rich, as long as they pay enough taxes to ensure everyone who is willing to work has a minimum quality of life. If you're holding down a job, or trying to get one, you should be able to get affordable healthcare and send your kids to a decent college.
The Hercules configuration could have done a whopping 175 metric tons!!! That's only about a dozen tons shy of the current weight of the ISS! One launch!
Impressive indeed, but that configuration was never built. If we're talking about spaceships that were conceived but never built, you might as well mention project orion, which would have been able to lift masses that dwarfed what chemical rockets can.
I've had a USB watch for a while now. It's inconspicuous enough that no one has noticed it's anything but a normal watch without me pointing it out to them, and extremely difficult to lose (unless you make a habit of losing your watch). That's the way I think technology should be: invisible, functional and highly usable.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno what you're trying to tell yourself, but I'm pretty sure sugar is not addictive.
That's what everyone has always assumed, but recent medical research is starting to prove otherwise.
And what soft drinks do you drink that give you a "buzz"? I don't think I've ever got a "buzz" or any kind of feeling from pepsi other than "Hey this tastes great!"
Are you trying to claim caffeine and sugar are not "uppers"? People pulling all-nighters fueled by coffee or cola will disagree with you, I guarantee it.
Let me ask you this: if you took away all the sugar or sugar-replacement in your can of pepsi, would you still like the taste? Here's another experiment: take a glass of cooled carbonated water, and start mixing sugar into it. See how it tastes at varying levels of sugar. Do you like the taste?
Honestly, who here didn't know caffeine is majorly addictive, just like sugar? Anything that gives you a "buzz" is majorly addictive. Most of the soft drinks sell not based on taste (other than tasting sweet they don't really offer much taste qualities), but based on how addicted people are to the buzz they get from drinking them. I know a lot of people with cola or coffee addictions, and those addictions are tolerated (or not even recognized) because a caffeine and sugar addiction tends to not obviously harm society.
I agree completely. It's the words that matter. That's the reason CSS exists, so you can separate the words from the layout. That way you can restyle the same content for different types of user agent, whether it be the blind, pda users, or some other niche group.
What slashdot doesn't allow with its html 3.2 layout is taking the regular slashdot page and stripping out the layout, colors or content you don't need or want. To do that you have to use the simple version of slashdot, which is entirely different code, and might not be exactly what you wanted. It's a burden on the slashdot devs, who have to maintain two different ways of outputting html, and it's a burden on the user, who is limited in how he or she can restyle the page.
Right now we're transitioning between the old way of doing things (in-page layout) and the new way (completely separate layout and content), so you're not yet reaping the full benefits of CSS-based sites, but once the transition is over browsers will have the ability to let you change any layout property of any webpage, and have it remember that across browsing sessions. Don't like the font some site is using? Change it. Don't like it that the site menu is on the right instead of the left? Move it over. That's what browsing is going to be like in a few years.
That does sound very convincing when you first read it, because the author is an excellent politician. But you should beware of people who use strawman arguments (the young man at the panel discussion) and unfounded ad hominem accusations (accusing the government of being infected by irrational environmentalists who want to destroy industry) in support of their case.
Anyway, here's a generic rebuttal to the ozone naysayers.
Any scientific issue, no matter how rooted in facts it is, always has naysayers. Even the round earth theory had considerable opposition. For someone to dispute accepted scientific theory requires extraordinary evidence, and frankly this james p. hogan doesn't provide much in the way of actual evidence.
Oh, and in general, paying attention to whether a text contains logical fallacies is very helpful too in weeding out truth from falsehood.
The Mozilla press release even has a "click here" link to automatically install the patch! Who doesn't think that this kind of thing will have endless potential for hackers to exploit in the years ahead.
I don't think that. Because mozilla uses whitelisting to mark servers you're allowed to install from. If you try installing from another server, it throws up an error. A user would have to manually add a server to the allowed list before an exploit could be installed. Ofcourse, there might be a bug in the whitelisting system, but overall I think the approach is reasonably secure.
Why not just design a browser that works on multiple platforms, using an established cross-platform GUI such as wxWidgets, rather than going away to create a browser and coming back with another new, slow, bloated, universal uber-platform swiss-army-knife UI language...
Because you can't. I am not aware of any native toolkit that allows you to implement a browser fully compliant with the W3C standards, and wxwindows is even less capable than native toolkits. Mozilla optimizes by using native controls where it can, but if it didn't have the xul toolkit, compliance and compatibility would be a lot worse.
David Hyatt, who was/is a developer on both the mozilla and safari teams has written about the trouble with native widgets before. It's just not as simple as you would think it is.
I know, "Do it yourself dude", and plenty of geeks out there just love the customizability of XUL, but truthfully all I want is a fast, small browser. It just seems like everything is getting larger, slower and more bloated these days.
With modern standards being what they are, firefox is about as good as it gets. We're no longer in the days of html 3.2 (well, ok, slashdot still is, but that's beside the point). A browser nowadays has to do a lot more than just render html.
But if you think you can do better, please try.
One thing that many city dewllers seem to forget is just where all the food comes from.
And most supporters of the "farming lifestyle" seem to forget that farming wouldn't exist unless the city dwellers were paying for that quaint old farming to be kept around. You're acting like the farmers are the one providing a service to the cities, but it's in reality the other way around. The cities could buy their food overseas and save money. Farming in america isn't kept around because it's useful, it's kept around because it's politically sensitive. Europe is much the same.
You also seem to forget that the US is a unites group of states. The idea, and the law as written in the constution, is that the states have a great deal of rights and powers. They are unified and subordinate to a federal government, but still very free. Well, that requires the states to ahve equal power. If larger (either population or landwise) states got all the votes, they could simlpy dictate to smaller states, thus destroying the idea of states rights.
Belgium called, since they're a sovereign nation they think they deserve equal power to the US inside the UN, and they want a permanent seat on the security council. You do agree we should give it to them, right? Or are you trying to destroy the rights of sovereign nations?
Oh, one more caveat. You must realize that *no* alternative voting system can make the US Presidential election fairer for minor parties as long as the Electoral College is in place. Trust me: it just can't be done. That's why I'm for aboloshing the EC. Unfortunately, many of my fellow conservatives are dead set against that, and it requires a Constitutional Amendment.
Even if you abandoned it, you'd still not have proprortional representation, meaning only one party would have access to the executive power, instead of a coalition representing a congressional majority, so third parties would still have to win the election to become part of the executive. You could modify the form of the presidential administration and the congress to support proportional representation, even while keeping the electoral college, so that like most other nations, you'd have a cabinet of ministers from different parties, each representing a certain percentage of the voters, with the entire executive perfectly representing the result of the vote, instead of just representing who got the most votes.
I wouldn't say the leaning is necessarily political, that would imply those who own the media actually care about anything but profit, and I see no evidence that's the case.
The media can legally lie, this has been the case for decades. So if you're a business, and your primary goal is to make profit, and it isn't always most profitable to tell the truth, and there's no financial harm in telling a lie, why not lie? Also, why try to do investigative journalism to find out the truth? If you do the hard research and find out the truth, you can get one story out of it, maybe two. If you don't do the research, you can report a new story every time someone involved in the story makes a comment about it. Perfect example of this: swift boat vets, with research you can validate or invalidate their claims, but no one in the mainstream media tried to do that because it would kill the story. So most news outlets tend to have stories biased in all directions, which is why the same news sources (CNN) get called biased to the right and biased to the left at the very same time. It's because they are biased in both directions, since their allegiance is not to politics, but to profitability.
The name of the game is drawing viewers to draw advertisers. In order to not scare away viewers, you can't tell them what they don't want to hear. What americans don't want to hear is that Iraq is a failed venture, so the failings in Iraq get downplayed and underreported. How often have you heard people complain the news is too negative, and how often have you heard them complain the news is too positive? People don't like to hear bad things about themselves or their country, so in order to keep them tuned to your station, you try to keep from telling them that. Also, advertisers. You can't take extreme positions, even if they're true, on issues because it will scare away advertisers. So the media tends to line stories in so much vagueness and he-said-she-said's that no advertiser can object to it, which doesn't exactly serve the truth either.
This is made worse by a republican message machine which is decades ahead of the democrat one. You have the conservative talk radio network, the white house which blocks access to reporters who ask the tough questions, the centralised talking points distribution network on the republican side, which dupes people into thinking a story has legitimacy because "everyone" is saying it, and on and on. This is why you can credibly argue a right wing bias in the media. It's not that the media sets out to be biased, it's that the republicans have tailored their PR to exploit the biases that are built into the media as it stands.
So, what to do about it? Number one is lots of media watchdog groups which inform the media of everything they report wrong from all sides of the political spectrum. That exists now. Number two is to bring back the illegality of lying in the press. No journalist in an official press capacity should ever be allowed to knowingly report a lie as fact. How to do this, I'm not exactly clear on. Maybe allowing people to sue for journalistic malpractice, like how you can sue your doctor for medical malpractice. But it still needs to be done. Number three is to get more variation in the media by bringing back reasonable ownership limits. I'm not advocating breaking up the media empires that exist, I'm just saying no one should be allowed to buy new outlets beyond a certain rather low marketshare, which over time will make the media market diversify again as media outlets get sold by the major media empires. And as long as I'm in fantasy land, number four would be to teach everyone a class on logic in high school, explaining what logical fallacies are, and how to recognize them, and explaining how to verify a claim you hear through logic, instead of through fallacy. But like I said, that would be fantasy land.
All the USPTO can make is a good effort and require that the patent application be written according to the guidelines so it can be understood by others (other patent lawyers that is).
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There are a number of inherent problems with the USPTO:
* its financial resources are diverted to other ventures, instead of reinvested in patent examination, as a result, patent applications see less and less patent examination, and
* patent examiners are woefully undertrained; they should be among the best in their field, but the low wage of examiners means that those who actually know what they're doing find other jobs
* a lot of classes of patents show no credible benefit to the industry they cover, like software patents. How many programmers do you know who go trawling through the patent database for a solution to their problem? I don't know a single one, and I've seen plenty of legal advice discouraging programmers from doing this. The entire reason for existance of the patent system is to spread new knowledge and inventions. The monopoly is what is given in exchange for the knowledge, and it is not the primary purpose of the patent system. Since no one ever looks at software patents except for when they are sued for patent infringement, the entire purpose of software patents is null and void.
If you want more, you have to either
* use more spectrum (aka bandwidth)
* increase signal strength
* decrease noise
But you can use more spectrum while still using the same range of frequencies, by finding a way around interference of signals at frequencies close to eachother. From the blurb about OFDM it seems that's what they're doing. Combining different signals at frequencies very close to eachother in such a way that they interfere in the air, but can be picked apart again at the receiver due to the specific waveform and timing they use.
Speaking as someone who is not religious, I find it ironic that so many people are so intolorant of those that are religious.
It's not the religion that bothers people, it's the acts of fundamentalists who act under the banner of that religion, whether they are pretending to be muslims or pretending to be christians. Fundamentalist religion is a major threat to peace and democracy (a lot of wars have been fought over it, and it is used with regularity to keep dictators in power). To pretend that is not the case is to open the door to the fundamentalists to destroy the very freedoms regular people hold dear.
That doesn't mean we should target people who hold strong religious beliefs, but it does mean we shouldn't expressly not target them just because of "freedom of religion." Freedom of religion is not the freedom to act as you please, and way too many religious fundamentalists seem to think that's the case and that they have some special right to go about their business, regardless of how much it harms other people, without government or law interfering with them.
Personally, I'm an agnostic, and I fail to understand why religion gets a free ride for so many things. If you hear your dead grandmother talking to you inside your head, you get sent to a shrink and are ridiculed, if you hear god talking to you inside your head, you become a religious or political leader and are respected. The mere mark of religion lets you get away with so much in life. Bush will get an incredibly amount of votes just for having faith, regardless of his actual performance as a president, and regardless of how true his acts are to what the bible says.
When you try to get a job, and you list credentials, you have to prove you actually did the things you claim. But when you run for office and use your faith to get it, you don't have to prove your acts in life are in compliance with your faith. Why? Why does religion always get a free ride, even from agnostics?
In "sans serif" sans still means without, as in without serifs, the little squiggly bits at the extremities of letters in fonts like times new roman.
So if you want people to vote for a 3rd party, either give them a proportional representation system where their vote means something even if their party doesn't get the majority, or give them a 3rd party that can actually win. Everything else being said is just hot air.
The problem is though that the very people who would institute a proportional system are members of the parties which are held in power by the current system. Why would they ever create a fair system when they benefit so much from not doing it?
The only way to get the big parties to do the right thing is to publicly shame them into doing it, so that's why 3rd parties should be a viable part of the debates and electoral process. Sure, people will still vote for democrats or republicans, but at least the two big candidates will have to really talk about the issues, instead of just attacking the other guy or talking about artificial non-issues that few people really care about (gay marriage ban anyone?).
Ofcourse, in the long term, for the democratic health of the US, there needs to be a radical reshaping of the executive and legislative, and how they are elected, to make them actually a fair representation of the will of the voter. But in the short term the most controllable element is the press coverage and the debates. Those two should be able to be swayed by public opinion to more fairly cover the issues.
On the other hand, the dictionary documents but doesn't define spelling. It is merely a record of the currently accepted "correct" spelling (or spellings) of a word. If enough people ignore the dictionary, their spelling becomes the correct one, and it gets reflected in the next edition of the dictionary.
:)
So, I wouldn't necessarily bash someone for spelling a word unlike it appears in the dictionary, as long as they can show their spelling is more popular than the dictionary spelling.
I have my doubts about "barock" though.
Where would you suggest they set the limit?
It's simple, if you make the ballot in enough states to possibly win the elections, you should be part of any debate. Since you can get on enough ballots simply by mobilizing regular citizens, that would open up the debates to anyone with actual grassroots support across america.
"ALL X are Y" will only get you so far. Then you could add additional (numeric) fuzzy logic based on samples of other data. For instance, in the "People who live in France speak French" solliquism, the computer could attempt to validate it by pulling a language census of France. After pulling this data, it would know that approximately 95% of people living there speak French. Thus a "fuzzy" "all" could be made. Like "MOST people in France speak French" and even give it a decent probability.
But the semantic web, even employing fuzzy logic, would have no intelligence about why some parts of a group have a property and the others don't, unless it was specifically encoded. So, to be able to say if an individual in france is likely to speak french it is not enough to say 95 percent of people in france speak french, since you could easily find an individual who has properties that would tell a human they are not likely to speak french, but would still be deemed to be 95 percent likely to speak french by the computer.
So, the semantic web would have to have perfect knowledge of why things are the way they are, and that would require people not only knowing what implicit knowledge they have about the real world, but also why they have that knowledge, and how to encode it into a semantic system. I don't have to tell you how unlikely this would be. And since people are likely to be wrong or leave omissions even when they do have perfect self-awareness, this would poison the data well sufficiently that you wouldn't be able to make guarantees about the accuracy of computer-derived conclusions.
Now, it's good people are trying to increase the usefulness of computers through semantics, and I'm curious to see what the semantic web will result in, but I just have low expectations about the actual abilities of the semantic web.
Also, both of those wars were wars of self-defense from the POV of the US. Germany and France attacked first.
Argh, that'll teach me not to reread what I typed. What I meant to say was both of those wars were wars of self-defense. Forget the US part.
How would you compare this to fighting Hitler in WWII or even the French Revolution where violence was used to replace a monarchy with a democracy.
Hitler was not a dictator, he was democratically elected. Also, both of those wars were wars of self-defense from the POV of the US. Germany and France attacked first. Iraq did not attack first.
Do you really believe that Fidel Castro is *not* a dictator? What definition of dictator would that be? Do you believe that violence was not used to install him in power? Do you think the people have chosen to keep him as their leader all this time?
When people are ready for democracy, it comes inevitably. You can not rule without a willing populace. Iraq's social structure makes it incredibly hard to form a democracy there without it quickly turning into either a civil war or a theocratic dictatorship. I would say most iraqis tolerated saddam in power because he kept the peace.
Also, in international law, just being a dictator isn't enough to allow other nations to overthrow you. There is such a thing as national sovereignity, and it is not specific about which form of government a sovereign nation must have. That's why you have Kofi Annan saying the iraq war was illegal. It was. Saddam did not attack the US, was not provably planning to attack the US, and was not provably cooperating with anyone who attacked the US or planned to, so the US could not possibly claim legitimate self-defense, and hence the only reason one nation is allowed to go to war legally with another was invalidated. If you want to get international law changed so democracy becomes compulsory, with america the global policeman to enforce it, please, by all means, try to get it done, but until then please respect the laws as they are.
When you mention the "rest of the world", what does that include in your view? Europe? How do some of the African nations feel. Any reason why Middle Eastern dictators might not like our policies?
I would say that most middle eastern dictators love the US and its policies, because royal families like the house of Saud couldn't stay in power without american support, and they wouldn't have all the money they have without america buying up so much oil. The dictatorships in the middle east (including iraq) have always been supported by the US because it kept the oil flowing. Democracy was desirable, but it always had to move aside if the oil supply was threatened.
Europe has always looked the other way, because the US involvement in the middle east has kept the oil cheap and the region more-or-less stable, even if it hasn't always been the best thing for human rights. I guess the iraqi invasion was just too blatant a form of involvement for some european nations to swallow.
the U.S. has allready admitted to having large amounts of weapons of mass destruction, namely nuclear weapons, ready for use.
Not only that. The US also has sizeable stockpiles of chemical weapons, and it is still actively developing weapons systems for delivery of biological and chemical warfare agents.
I wasn't bashing invidual christians or christianity, just the organized church structures that teach people to be subservient to authority figures and to be satisfied with their position in life, even if they are at an unfair disadvantage compared to other groups of people.
Religion has always been used to subdue the lower social classes. A lot of religions glorify poverty and promise the poor that they will be rewarded for a life of misery in the afterlife. Organized christianity is especially guilty of this, with it teaching people from a young age to "accept god's plan" and not rebel against the system that gives them less opportunity in life than someone born in a rich family. Note that I'm not bashing christianity as a religion, which I think has very nice values (being nice to your neighbor, helping those in need, peace, love), but you need to make a clear distinction between the religion and the people and organizations who claim to represent it.
when this country rebelled in 1776 the average literacy rate was 98% despite having no forced schooling
I believe that was the literacy rate among voters, not the overall literacy rate.
America currently has a regressive tax rate at the top end. The richer you are the smaller the percentage of your income you pay, mostly due to extremely low dividends and capital gains taxes. Most of the flat tax rate proposals aim to do away with dividends and capital gains taxes entirely, which would make the rich essentially untaxable (since they make their money through investment, not labor), and thus institute a completely regressive taxation system. The measures to eradicate progressive taxation are slowly shifting the tax burden. The bush tax cuts were a large instrument in this.
Money has a natural tendency to pool because rich people can invest their money instead of having to spend it. You need a progressive taxation system to ensure the gap between rich and poor doesn't grow steadily.
Look up the evolution of the GINI index, which represents income inequality. America has one of the highest gaps between rich and poor in the world, on the level of a third world nation, and almost every year it grows wider.
Now, if the poor had a minimum quality of life, this wouldn't be a problem, but the figures are clear that the poor in the US don't have access to basic human rights like healthcare and education anymore.
So, I say, let the rich be rich, as long as they pay enough taxes to ensure everyone who is willing to work has a minimum quality of life. If you're holding down a job, or trying to get one, you should be able to get affordable healthcare and send your kids to a decent college.
The Hercules configuration could have done a whopping 175 metric tons!!! That's only about a dozen tons shy of the current weight of the ISS! One launch!
Impressive indeed, but that configuration was never built. If we're talking about spaceships that were conceived but never built, you might as well mention project orion, which would have been able to lift masses that dwarfed what chemical rockets can.
I've had a USB watch for a while now. It's inconspicuous enough that no one has noticed it's anything but a normal watch without me pointing it out to them, and extremely difficult to lose (unless you make a habit of losing your watch). That's the way I think technology should be: invisible, functional and highly usable.