Besides, in terms of prediction, what matters is whether the 15-year-old kid would have predicted the outcome. If you'd done the same thing, it wouldn't have been irony, but rather would have been civil disobedience.
The definition provided by the poster you responded to was the more correct definition. Irony is identified by recognizing the contrariness of the outcome with respect to the initiator; the actors need not be aware of their roles for a situation to be recognized as ironic since the recognition of irony is subjective, even if the definition is objective.
For example, your typical slashdotian 'geek' might accurately consider this statement:
Being geeks, the honest, popular yet informed meaning of "irony" is being dropped for an acedemic definition sepcific to the English department.
ironic because to his mind, "geeks" are techno-junkies that don't care about english, but a 'geek' who graduated with a degree in English would not.
Then why is the wholesale price for gasoline (i.e. before tax) in Europe pretty much the same (or even cheaper) than in the States ?
It's not. We currently pay about $3.50/gal in the US which is the highest it's ever been. When consumers started writing congress to complain, congress held a dog and pony show that made the British parliment look like 2nd rate second rate actors. The government blamed the the industry for artificially hiking prices, and the industry blamed its government pals for increasing the taxes. Even if it were true that our government didn't tax oil, by your figures, we would still end up paying about %20 less than Europe does.
And I don't see how any amount of political or military "clout" will help you with the prices at one of the oil/distillate exchanges (e.g. in Rotterdam) of the world - the only thing that'll count there is all the "clout" in your wallet.
Irrelevent. In the contemporary global economy crude prices are determined where military power translates most readily into money, long before it reaches any distillery, or even comes out of the ground.
Even the oldest, simplest, resistive heating elements have damn near 100% efficiency.
Key to recognizing the problem is recognizing that any conversion process is going to result in a net loss of some magnitude, %100 conversion efficiency is theoretically the best you can possibly hope for. If you convert from solar to electric (which is only %40 at present) to heat, you are not going to get the efficiency you would if you went directly from solar to heat. However, since solar energy is 'free', is doesn't really matter how efficient the conversion process is -- it will add to the net energy efficiency, especially where heat pumps are used in conjuction with solar heating. And heat pumps are only about 2-3 times as efficient as conventional resistive heaters which aren't anywhere near %100 efficient at converting elecricity into heat, so I don't know where you are getting your figures from.
the government (neither state nor federal) does not dare to tax gasoline heavily.
Why would they do that while at the same time subsidizing the industry? The US is after all, still a primarily crude based economy. I'm arguing for shift away from this, which means I would be in favor of eliminating subsidies and increasing taxes on oil.
There, fixed that for you.
It appears to me that you haven't fixed anything, unless you want to argue that the worlds largest empire/police state has little clout in obtaining good deals on internation oil agreements -- good luck with that.
If you're talking about generating electricity via steam or the like, the laws of thermodynamics don't work out well with such small (single-household) installations,
You don't know what you're talking about. Solar thermal is an integral part of modern high efficiency home power solutions primarily because electricity is extremely inefficient at generating heat. At the other end of the spectrum, low energy solar which is good for generating heat is not that great for use in PV panels because of opposing charge recombination losses, which is what nano-wire collection/channeling grids are used to prevent. Optimum use of solar energy isn't and either/or proposition.
Even at $110/barrel people don't realize just how good America has it on the cost of oil. Americans buy gas at roughly 2-3 times less on average than other nations -- primarily because of our political/economic power base, fossil technology is pretty much state of the art. Additionally we have to consider that the increasing availability shortage will impact the price of dirty energy particularly as developing economies ramp up. The accompanying shift in the powerbase to countries like China and India will make alternative energy sources that are easily available/renewable, like solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal all that much more attractive in the near future.
Consequently we need to shift away from subsidizing the production of crude and start subsidizing the production of these alternatives. The technology to do this is at hand, the will however, seems to be lacking.
He is not dumb. Doing a tour to an uranium enrichment plan with your minister of defense and going public about it is not really what you do if you have a nuke program running and want to keep it secret.
It would stupid of the Iranian president not to heavily guard their nuclear plants since they are ticking time bombs in their own regard. The population of Iran is easily swayed by ideolgies. Muslim extremists (or even suspected CIA assisted 'muslim extremists') could turn nuclear power plants into nuclear catastrophies. The same goes for any other power that employs the technology; every country has to take the risks into account.
Yeah, the Earth is continuosly being bombarded by meteorites that burn up entirely in the atmosphere. No doubt that hydrogen is released and mixed into the atmosphere in the process. We know that oxygen is produced via natural processes, and is crucial for the development the Ozone layer. So I'm sure the Earth (with it's atmosphere) is constantly producing new water.
Now if we could find 5 billion year old wine, *that* would be news!
The main problem is that there are groups of people who are against any type of GM modified food, the fears range from stories out of Outer Limits to fears that they will increase poverty(you cannot produce the better product no-one wants yours) to loss of diverisity.
The solution to the problem is to trust the word of these profit motivated corporations who lie and intimidate, and their govt. regulatory partners who ignore legitimate concerns to protect their bottom line interests.
Infants and young children are most sensitive to bad milk. If we can't drink bad milk, then I guess goat milk will have to do, maybe satan will leave goat milk alone.
The dangers are real, not fictitious, do the research folks.
Dell doesn't provide a high end video card on the 15" platform, unless you are talking about the Alienware model. AFAIK, AW and Clevo resellers are the only ones that offer high end video in that form factor.
Sadly, this is yet another example of the stunning closed-mindedness of the Bush administration. Censorship in the guise of politically mandated morality.
What? How is would this censorship in any way be the fault of the Bush administration? It was USAID that granted John Hopkins the funds. USAID is known for not always following the federal mandate that prevents funding organizations that perform or promote abortion. If John Hopkins performed or promoted abortions, or if JH had information in their database that indicated that other USAID funded organizations performed or promoted abortions, then it would seem to me that USAID is solely to blame for this. In any case, I find it hard to believe that anyone could reasonably blame Bush for this.
If M$ were to include VMs for both WinXP and Win98-atop-DOS, everything would be covered, including old games (maybe even DOS games!), old apps, old installers, old drivers...
Except that MS Virtual PC doesn't emulate 3d video hardware. Any apps that require 3d functionality (like games) would not run on VPC.
Piro claims that Saddam admitted that the Kuwait war was over some Kuwaiti official calling Iraqi women 10 dollar whores.
And we went into Iraq to combat terrorism. Whether these things are true or not I can't say, but what I can say is that in both instances, these statements made by politicians sound like just the sort of thing that their respective populations would rally around with guns in their hands. In a battle amoung snakes, its usually the smartest and/or strongest snake that wins.
He also claims that Saddam said he kept the appearance of having WMDs up because he was fearful of being invaded by neighboring countries.
And probably also as an effective deterent to revolt within his own population.
So it is interesting that we now have confirmation that Saddam at least wanted us to think he had WMDs. This is something that makes the Bush Lied argument a little less believable but for some reason it isn't being talked about that much in the press.
Saddam wanted his enemies to think he had WMD, he wanted the US to think that he did not have them; I'm sure you see the contradiction. Saddam wasn't stupid, I'm sure he realized that his WMD were of little value against a US military invasion...
If you get a chance, watch or read the interview. It offers some insight into Saddam's thinking of the time, how he mistook the US's political system and so on.
I read it. The most 'interesting' part of the article was this:
"He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the '90s. And those that hadn't been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq," Piro says.
If you really think that Saddam underestimated the resolve of the son of the guy who said we should have invaded Iraq during the gulf war, then I've got some land in florida I'd like to sell you. I'm guessing that Saddam asked his army for two weeks in order to insure that his WMD were compltetely dismantled and distributed throughout the land in three ounce bottles so to speak.
...if you think about it, this could be why Bush is biting the bullet while the bought and paid for 'media' distort the facts in an attempt to put their favored candidate into office. Its almost sureal watching all these dollar chasers jockey for power. To bad nobody seems to be able to get their priorities in order; God before mammon and we wouldn't be in this mess right now. BTW, I'm NPA in case you haven't guessed.
Another differentiator between engineering and other fields is that there are often many different ways by which a problem can be approached. For example, I remember my highschool senior honors math class teacher taught us a method he developed himself for finding the roots of any polynomial equation. This often leads to a wide variety of text books being developed by the professors (often to make money); I took several classes where the textbook was little more than a typed/hand written draft of a new book the professor was still working on.
Sure, the projects are challenging, the homework is difficult and often draining, but it's all worth it when you get to the other end and see things come to life.
Einstein and I say Amen to that!!
YGTBKM! LOL! I like your enthusiasm, but you know the Air Force neither encourages nor condones criminal activity.
Are you sure this is a general and not some 14 year old girl?
Oh sure; example: "YGTBKM! Send in the MALP!"
Seriously though, the responses to all of these questions we're probably written by young lieutenants and filtered up the chain; the AF does this in order to train staff officers to be good politicians.
Now when every democrat in the US claims Bush is an idiot, do you actually think he lied? Or just got it really wrong? And BTW, in order to lie, you have to have knowledge that your not telling the truth. It isn't a lie to be wrong.
Not they carry any weight. If dem's thought they could prove that Bush lied, you'd think they would have gone after Bush in a way that would make the laughable Clinton 'impeachment' look like childsplay. But lies and hypocrisy seem to be acceptable to both parties.
Now people are being called to believe that Bush was lying and that congress had been mislead by Bush as if the reason they unanimously voted to go to war was because they trusted Bush's word on the matter (rather than the words of their membership who had access to the same intel).
Compounding the folly is the fact that Hussein had already waged an offensive campaign against its weakest neighbor so that he could garner oil resources to bolster the Iraqi military (and scare every mid-east nation). Moreover there was the fact that we had already sold WMD's to Iraq, some of which we knew Hussein had used against Iraqi Kurds. Then there was the public testimony given by Hussein's chief scientist that he thought he might have been seeking to build WMD's.
What's really surprising is that people actually seem to be buying into the 360 that spin artists and the 'media' are pushing now, rather than thinking critically for themselves about the actions of their govt (and media). I can't believe how many of the comments in this forum get modded up that are more the product of ignorance than critical thought.
The accusation of heresy was mostly just a heavy-handed abuse of the law, to make it fall under the Pope's own tribunals' jurisdiction. (Things which weren't of a religious nature, otherwise fell under the jurisdiction of the secular authorities.) But make no mistake, it wasn't about science _or_ heresy. It was simply that the Pope didn't take lightly to heavy-handed public ridicule.
And if I'm to be a supporter of science in the whole science-vs-religion circus, I'd actually say the opposite: Galileo there actually did science a disservice. He created a conflict with the church where one hadn't existed before. The pope (and popes) before couldn't care less what rotates around what. The pope only became opposed to heliocentrism all of a sudden, so he could prosecute Galileo for the thorough public flaming.
It does appear as though the theological charges that were brought against Galileo by the inquisition were fabricated. I find it interesting that the coerced confession Galileo signed only seems to reference a scientific dispute rather than a theological one. Had Galileo truely been guilty of commiting anything close to heresy, I imagine the inquisitors would have included it in his confession.
However, I think the real reasons behind Galileo's censure and 'imprisonment' go beyond petty insults. The church (and thus the people in general) had evolved through the dark ages to believe that geocentrism confirmed the dignity of man and that this could be found in certain biblical passages. I see a two fold problem here: while the dignity of man amoung creation is pious, it was usually not the point of the 'geocentric' biblical passages that were used to support it. Second, by inappropriately tying theological intepretations of biblical passages to percieved natural phenomena, the church was setting up the people for disappointment should science determine an alternate reality to be true. For example, in the last paragraph of the section entitled "The Astronomer's Beligerence" at the following link(a good read btw): http://www.catholic.net/rcc/Periodicals/Issues/GalileoAffair.html, can be found the following quote:
But in 1614, Galileo felt that he had to answer the objection that the new science contradicted certain passages of Scripture. There was, for example, Joshua's command that the sun stand still. Why would Joshua do that if, as Galileo asserted, the sun didn't move at all?
The proposition the accusers put forth completely misses the spiritual significance of the meaning of the sun as religious symbology. The absense of explanation of the meanings of religious symbology created an environment where interpretational errors could be spread. The papacy and many curia members for their part seemed to agree with Galileo when he said that it was inappropriate to use natural phenomena to confirm biblical passages, nevertheless it seems to me that those in the church who knew better failed to defend truth by specifying exactly what the symbology did mean in order that the theological errors that were prevalent in the church at the time might be refuted.
All this said, Galileo still seemed to enjoy arguing scientific points with clergy and being a jerk (and often times wrong) in the process. But, IMHO it was papal weakness in addressing faults in the body of the church itself that allowed Galileo to be censured. I find myself wondering why the pope didn't do more to censure priests that had allied theselves with contemporary scientific figures.
It appears as though they still in the early research phase. I don't think they can determine what is merely imagined, only what is viewed visually. Beyond this remains the ability to distiguish between what thoughts are in a person's consiousness vs. subconsiousness.
As for consistancy, I'm not sure how reliable bain scanning technology could ultimately become given that the brain can re-wire itself in response to external stimuli. Whereas a brain injury might turn that dog into a three headed monster, If people can subvert lie detector tests, could they not also train themselves to deceive a 'brain scanner"?
The immunity provisions were meant to apply to activities related to the president's warrantless wiretapping program instituted as a result of 911. I had thought that those activities would have been covered under the previous FISA passsage, but evidently that was not the case.
I'm not sure that the 4th ammendment would apply in this case as I believe that precedent indicates that executive wartime powers might supercede that protection. It hasn't been tested in court yet, but this: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/012760.php seems to indicate that there is a decent chance that the activities of the government/telco's might be upheld. No doubt the telco's view the provision they got as an insurance policy, though I believe the executive is primariy the responsible party in this case.
I don't see how the telco's could be held resposible for granting executive requests that the justice department (at least at the time) thought were legal. Considering the relatively low number of senators who voted against the immunity provision, it could be argued that the Democratic leadership was also for granting immunity and simply authorized those members for whom it might have posed political problems permission to vote against it. As I see it, the issue here is not the retroactive immunity granted to telco's but the (at least implied) immunity that certain govt parties might then be able to claim. It will interesting to see how this plays out in the house.
I think what he has in mind is a 'second network' constructed of voluntary participants who agree to make themselves accountable to regulation in return for a more open and secure networking experience. I can't immediately see this as having a huge impact on the existing internet, though it might reduce the noise level with respect to investigative activities. In time, if this second net is successfull, it could end up selling itself to the point where the current internet becomes relegated to the same status the porn industry now has: a small 'haven' for those who engage in, or are likely to engage in shadey illegal activities.
Abiogenesis is how to bridge the gap between to show how "Not alive" and "alive" are part of a spectrum and something "not alive" can gain the characteristics we assign to the "alive" side. If we never find how that happens, maybe THAT is the "irreducible complexity".
This would seem to amount to little more than a creator that can not be proven to exist, at least in the eyes of the faithless.
But the IDers aren't looking for it.
Perhaps irreducable complexity is not the best of tools to use for understanding ID.
They take on faith that anything they don't understand NOW is irreducibly complex.
Perhaps for some, but considering how open ended the concept of ID is, that seems a bit presumptuous to me. In fact ID could be recognized through a number of varied concepts in a number of 'fields of study', so it seems rather silly to rely on irreducable complexity (for which a lack of understanding may be genuine or simply unarrived at or even uncontrived yet) as the basis for finding a creator.
There will always be things that mankind does not understand as well as things that simply cannot be proven. While irreducible complexity could be evidence of a creator, I believe evidence for ID is better found in what one understands. Properly understood, I suppose ID could be even be found in evolutionary processes themselves.
The biblical creation accounts aren't meant to literally describe the creation of our planet and solar system, they are primarily intended to teach us about the creation of visible and invisible realities of a spiritual nature. For example, consider that the Bible tells us that God created man from the clay of the earth: the earth then could be understood as analogous to man. The waters that 'well up from the earth' could be understood as that which allows the earth (man) to develop/evolve in a spiritual sense as water has the characteristic of bringing about life. Understood this way, the creation accounts can be seen as baptismal stories of the creation of life both seen and unseen.
It is interesting to note that the events of the biblical accounts seem to correlate to some degree with the evolution of life in our universe, and while I have faith to believe these things were also created (ordered) by God, the teling of the creation of our solar system, or what science percieves the universe to be, are not the primary purpose of the biblical creation accounts.
Slashdot Mirror
Even at $110/barrel people don't realize just how good America has it on the cost of oil. Americans buy gas at roughly 2-3 times less on average than other nations -- primarily because of our political/economic power base, fossil technology is pretty much state of the art. Additionally we have to consider that the increasing availability shortage will impact the price of dirty energy particularly as developing economies ramp up. The accompanying shift in the powerbase to countries like China and India will make alternative energy sources that are easily available/renewable, like solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal all that much more attractive in the near future.
Consequently we need to shift away from subsidizing the production of crude and start subsidizing the production of these alternatives. The technology to do this is at hand, the will however, seems to be lacking.
Yeah, the Earth is continuosly being bombarded by meteorites that burn up entirely in the atmosphere. No doubt that hydrogen is released and mixed into the atmosphere in the process. We know that oxygen is produced via natural processes, and is crucial for the development the Ozone layer. So I'm sure the Earth (with it's atmosphere) is constantly producing new water.
Now if we could find 5 billion year old wine, *that* would be news!
...at zone.msn.com has all kinds of free games including arcade style, card games, and puzzles.
Infants and young children are most sensitive to bad milk. If we can't drink bad milk, then I guess goat milk will have to do, maybe satan will leave goat milk alone.
The dangers are real, not fictitious, do the research folks.
Ohhh the temptation to let you fall is so great... http://www.preventcancer.com/consumers/general/milk.htm
Dell doesn't provide a high end video card on the 15" platform, unless you are talking about the Alienware model. AFAIK, AW and Clevo resellers are the only ones that offer high end video in that form factor.
Seriously though, the responses to all of these questions we're probably written by young lieutenants and filtered up the chain; the AF does this in order to train staff officers to be good politicians.
Now people are being called to believe that Bush was lying and that congress had been mislead by Bush as if the reason they unanimously voted to go to war was because they trusted Bush's word on the matter (rather than the words of their membership who had access to the same intel).
Compounding the folly is the fact that Hussein had already waged an offensive campaign against its weakest neighbor so that he could garner oil resources to bolster the Iraqi military (and scare every mid-east nation). Moreover there was the fact that we had already sold WMD's to Iraq, some of which we knew Hussein had used against Iraqi Kurds. Then there was the public testimony given by Hussein's chief scientist that he thought he might have been seeking to build WMD's.
What's really surprising is that people actually seem to be buying into the 360 that spin artists and the 'media' are pushing now, rather than thinking critically for themselves about the actions of their govt (and media). I can't believe how many of the comments in this forum get modded up that are more the product of ignorance than critical thought.
However, I think the real reasons behind Galileo's censure and 'imprisonment' go beyond petty insults. The church (and thus the people in general) had evolved through the dark ages to believe that geocentrism confirmed the dignity of man and that this could be found in certain biblical passages. I see a two fold problem here: while the dignity of man amoung creation is pious, it was usually not the point of the 'geocentric' biblical passages that were used to support it. Second, by inappropriately tying theological intepretations of biblical passages to percieved natural phenomena, the church was setting up the people for disappointment should science determine an alternate reality to be true. For example, in the last paragraph of the section entitled "The Astronomer's Beligerence" at the following link(a good read btw): http://www.catholic.net/rcc/Periodicals/Issues/GalileoAffair.html, can be found the following quote: The proposition the accusers put forth completely misses the spiritual significance of the meaning of the sun as religious symbology. The absense of explanation of the meanings of religious symbology created an environment where interpretational errors could be spread. The papacy and many curia members for their part seemed to agree with Galileo when he said that it was inappropriate to use natural phenomena to confirm biblical passages, nevertheless it seems to me that those in the church who knew better failed to defend truth by specifying exactly what the symbology did mean in order that the theological errors that were prevalent in the church at the time might be refuted.
All this said, Galileo still seemed to enjoy arguing scientific points with clergy and being a jerk (and often times wrong) in the process. But, IMHO it was papal weakness in addressing faults in the body of the church itself that allowed Galileo to be censured. I find myself wondering why the pope didn't do more to censure priests that had allied theselves with contemporary scientific figures.
It appears as though they still in the early research phase. I don't think they can determine what is merely imagined, only what is viewed visually. Beyond this remains the ability to distiguish between what thoughts are in a person's consiousness vs. subconsiousness.
As for consistancy, I'm not sure how reliable bain scanning technology could ultimately become given that the brain can re-wire itself in response to external stimuli. Whereas a brain injury might turn that dog into a three headed monster, If people can subvert lie detector tests, could they not also train themselves to deceive a 'brain scanner"?
I would have PM'ed or emailed this to you since the discussion has been archived, but felt compelled to reply to this: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=451310&cid=22440922, and this is the only way possible it seems.
The immunity provisions were meant to apply to activities related to the president's warrantless wiretapping program instituted as a result of 911. I had thought that those activities would have been covered under the previous FISA passsage, but evidently that was not the case.
I'm not sure that the 4th ammendment would apply in this case as I believe that precedent indicates that executive wartime powers might supercede that protection. It hasn't been tested in court yet, but this: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/012760.php seems to indicate that there is a decent chance that the activities of the government/telco's might be upheld. No doubt the telco's view the provision they got as an insurance policy, though I believe the executive is primariy the responsible party in this case.
I don't see how the telco's could be held resposible for granting executive requests that the justice department (at least at the time) thought were legal. Considering the relatively low number of senators who voted against the immunity provision, it could be argued that the Democratic leadership was also for granting immunity and simply authorized those members for whom it might have posed political problems permission to vote against it. As I see it, the issue here is not the retroactive immunity granted to telco's but the (at least implied) immunity that certain govt parties might then be able to claim. It will interesting to see how this plays out in the house.
I think what he has in mind is a 'second network' constructed of voluntary participants who agree to make themselves accountable to regulation in return for a more open and secure networking experience. I can't immediately see this as having a huge impact on the existing internet, though it might reduce the noise level with respect to investigative activities. In time, if this second net is successfull, it could end up selling itself to the point where the current internet becomes relegated to the same status the porn industry now has: a small 'haven' for those who engage in, or are likely to engage in shadey illegal activities.
There will always be things that mankind does not understand as well as things that simply cannot be proven. While irreducible complexity could be evidence of a creator, I believe evidence for ID is better found in what one understands. Properly understood, I suppose ID could be even be found in evolutionary processes themselves.
The biblical creation accounts aren't meant to literally describe the creation of our planet and solar system, they are primarily intended to teach us about the creation of visible and invisible realities of a spiritual nature. For example, consider that the Bible tells us that God created man from the clay of the earth: the earth then could be understood as analogous to man. The waters that 'well up from the earth' could be understood as that which allows the earth (man) to develop/evolve in a spiritual sense as water has the characteristic of bringing about life. Understood this way, the creation accounts can be seen as baptismal stories of the creation of life both seen and unseen.
It is interesting to note that the events of the biblical accounts seem to correlate to some degree with the evolution of life in our universe, and while I have faith to believe these things were also created (ordered) by God, the teling of the creation of our solar system, or what science percieves the universe to be, are not the primary purpose of the biblical creation accounts.