The brain you talk about (albeit without any citation) was obviously abnormal and so it's not surprising it didn't work properly, that doesn't mean people with larger than average brains are not more intelligent, most studies have shown that they are (Jensen and Johnson 1994, Gignac et al. 2003, etc.).
It the same with most/all bodily organs, e.g. lungs; larger lungs obviously allow for enhanced athletic activity, abnormally large lungs however will most probably prevent any athletic activity (and may well cause death in the subject).
Your logic is completely flawed as cases of abnormal extremities in organ/body-part size often do not indicate anything about the usual characteristics generally exhibited by people/animals which have a particular organ/body-part approaching that size.
Your highlighting a problem with lawyers trying to win elections by technicalities rather than any fault with the system.
The FL 2000 would have been a non-issue if it wasn't for the 10's of millions both parties were chucking at lawyers who were trying to force through there own favourable ruling.
Confusing ballot papers equally applies to electronic voting. The problem is simply that democracy hands - what can be - a difficult decision to people who quite simply don't have the intelligence to make that decision. A complicated ballot is going to appear just as complicated on a screen as on paper. It's only the layout/design of the ballot which can help...and once again party lawyers (the ones least interested in a fair election) always get the last say.
Is there any evidence that earth has been affected by massive sun flares before?
As the article states, the fact that the sun is "middle-aged" means that such flares are less likely but surely they must still happen occasionally over the course of hundreds of millions of years?
Religion is nothing more than a social control mechanism. I agree it's unfortunate that an unintended side-effect of this control mechanism is the public opposition to technologies which happen to disagree with the invented 'rules' set down by a particular religion.
"This is one of the things that I actually do consider terrorism-- the intent was probably never to kill anyone but to scare and intimidate people.... That's basically what terrorism is."
But why isn't spray painting a wall with hostile graffiti or yelling abuse at your neighbour also terrorism then? They are both also attempts to scare and intimidate. There doesn't appear to be any actual line between your definition of harassment and that of terrorism, just that one was a slightly more malicious example than the other. Fundamentally though, they all involved the same behavioural mindset, that of intimidation.
But my point is that it would be pretty easy to use that definition to state that a street robber / Mugger who threatens violence towards you unless you hand over your wallet is trying to persuade you - through fear of violence - that his POV that he deserves your wallet is correct. Which would mean he is using Terrorism.
What about someone who warns that there may be civil unrest in the future due to the consequences of a particular government policy? The word is so vague, that in addition to what I said before, even non-malicious actions could be perceived as terrorism.
It's scarey now that something like this - which is obviously a purely criminal act (one of vandalism and possibly GBH or even murder) - can now be called a "terrorist act". With all the negative connotations which are implied. I wonder what else our government will start declaring as "terrorism", surely any malicious act could ultimately fall under the government's ever widening definition of the word.
My point isn't that absolutely no-one ever mentions things that are completely contrary to the mainstream viewpoint, but that no-one is seriously allowed to discuss them, although all three of your examples face regular "ban them" cries from their opposer's. More to the point though, if someone with an actual political voice, say a politician, was to stand up and declare "a commission should be created to look at the potential advantages of Communism" or that "murder should be made not a crime", they would almost certainly be immediately laughed out of office for wanting to discuss a controversial idea.
I'm not saying that this necessarily a bad thing at all, but the immediate rejection by country leaders (or the electorate which appoints them) of ideologies contrary to their own is still a form of social control. Although to exist society needs social controls (in the most visual form their called "laws"), but it is a testament to naivety that most people don't realise that ideological social controls exist in every society - including their own. Normally people are quick to notice the forms of ideological control in other societies but very slow to even notice their existance in their own.
Perhaps you should read up on history a bit before you make such stupid comments. The Soviet Union didn't fall because of an arms race, it "fell" due to the 1980's modernisation of their governing system into a form which wasn't compatible with the "Soviet Block" system they had in place. To be anymore specific than that introduces debatable opinion points (the influence of Globalisation, inefficiency of centralization, Regional disputes and all the rest), but it definitely was not a simple "ran out of money to buy guns so the country collapsed", the Soviet Union was always (and Russia still is) amongst the worlds largest exporter of armshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_trade#Top_Ar ms_Exporters.
Also, maintaining social control intrinsically necessitates "locking down ideas", it is (and always has been) done in every society - including modern Western Countries (how often do you hear people in the USA discussing the pro's of Communism or Islamic extremism?). The difference though in maintaining social control in a centralized federal super-power consisting of 15 different countries spanning half the globe, and a small island/peninsula are so fundamentally different to be pretty much incomparable.
You obviously have never met a German government worker.
I have a friend who works for the civil service in Bavaria (in a city just outside Munich infact) and she often leaves for work at 5am. Maybe she is trying to get in a few early rounds of solitaire, I don't know but it's still a bloody early time to go to work!
Argh, I meant Costco. I have a peculiar habit of often getting those two companies mixed up. I remember I once started driving towards Best Buy when I actually wanted CostCo.
I would thoroughly recommend this documentory/movie. It is definitely not an anti-Bush propaganda film produced by the Democrats like many (who probably haven't seen it) say it is (it was produced by Spanish reporters for a start) and I would probably take some bits of the movie "with a pinch of salt", but they do have some amazing footage of a very odd event (or non-event as most have never heard of it) in modern history. If you like hearing about conspiracy theories than this is one, albeit focused on different factions conspiring against the people of Venezula rather than the U.S.A. (like in most conspiracy theory stories).
Another, kind of similar, movie called "Death of a president" is also quite insightful into the attitudes of the federal American political psyche. It is a British film focusing on the aftermath of an assassination of Bush. It also has some amazing imagary, this time Forest Gump style effects where actors appear to be on-stage with the president at events. Again it is definitely not an "anti-Bush" film, rather it examines how all sides use the obviously fictitious event for their own aims and - with both movies - they really show in the end the only people f%#ked over are the innocent people caught up in meddling by the higher powers.
Few people knowingly sleep with HIV+ people and basically no-one would have that "hot night of passion" if they knew it was going to give them HIV (and hence Aids). Eating super-size McDonald's meals when your already over-weight however, is definitely going to contribute to making you obese.
The difference being that moderately fat people know that fact but still eat purely because they can't control themselves, the vast majority of people who get Aids do so because they 1) underestimate the risk, 2) think "it won't ever happen to me" or 3) take the risk and are just plain unlucky.
It is maybe a bit much to pick one specific chain out and say they are responsible for obesity, but I did only use them as an example rather than state that their the cause. However I do think they definitely have a lot to answer for, the Walmart business model involves encouraging people to buy food in larger quantities than they need. They (and others like Bestbuy) actively encourage people to "buy in bulk for a longer time frame", with the business model succeeding so well largely on the simple truth that most people won't then have the self-control to eat their super-economy sized tub of ice-cream over a period of 2 weeks like they had initially planned.
To use your analogy, it is like having a gun store which encourages criminal gun use and sells guns to criminals in an area with a high gun crime rate (Walmart encourage bad eating habits and has absolutely no problem selling super-sized ice-cream to obese people). Sure, you can't blame all the gun crime on that gun store but that doesn't mean it isn't a near certainty that the store is part of the problem and personally I think Walmart and BestBuy (along with their peers) also have a lot to answer for regarding the state of the nation's obesity problem....so what do they do? rather than change their business models and stop selling large quantities of fatty foods to already fat people, they start selling diabetic supplies (http://www.walmart.com/catalog/catalog.gsp?cat=13 5355). Personally I think that is so immoral it's probably worse than the case of the gun store described above.
The article suggests a link is likely (although they don't quote an exact study into such). I think though, the drop in testosterone is among the least of fat people's worries.
I don't understand why people go on and on so much about diseases like Aids in Africa when there is a disease killing millions here in America also, the only difference being it is caused by lack of self-control rather than a virus. Yet so many people treat obesity like it's no big deal unlike other diseases. I can understand Walmart not giving a crap about obesity (after all, the disease makes the company billions) but surely everyone else must be concerned that their obese friend/colleague/themselves/relative is going to die decades before they're meant to. Would people ignore their friend/colleague/themselves/relative's disease so much if it was Aids?
They kill over 40,000 people and leave hundreds of thousands with permanent disabilities every year in the USA alone! Kind of puts the relatively few racist, paedophilic and even terrorist murders into perspective.
At the end of the day though I think it's only the freaks who commit such acts who should be punished not whatever they claimed "motivated" them or else we'd see everything being eventually banned. For example: sometimes computers just piss me off (and I'm sure millions of others) so much I could kill!...so ban computers?
I agree its frustrating and odd that an option was not at least put on the preferences/options panel, especially considering some of the numerous crazy options that appear on there.
I wonder how many people must be out there wishing they could switch back but not having happened to see some info like that displayed in the post above. Personally I tried searching on their website and via Firefox but only found one extremely involved method which didn't even work.
Slashdot Mirror
Why the '+Funny' moderation?
This is a serious question. Us nerds should be trying out the OS which will be making all our lives a misery over the next few years.
I've seen countless Vista RC# and similar torrents. But as yet no (real) final release torrents.
Why is that food for thought?
The brain you talk about (albeit without any citation) was obviously abnormal and so it's not surprising it didn't work properly, that doesn't mean people with larger than average brains are not more intelligent, most studies have shown that they are (Jensen and Johnson 1994, Gignac et al. 2003, etc.).
It the same with most/all bodily organs, e.g. lungs; larger lungs obviously allow for enhanced athletic activity, abnormally large lungs however will most probably prevent any athletic activity (and may well cause death in the subject).
Your logic is completely flawed as cases of abnormal extremities in organ/body-part size often do not indicate anything about the usual characteristics generally exhibited by people/animals which have a particular organ/body-part approaching that size.
You must drink out of extremely narrow cups!
I was actually only enquiring about "massive sun flares".
i.e. flares which are 1. form our sun and 2. far bigger than the usual or even occasional flares
Your highlighting a problem with lawyers trying to win elections by technicalities rather than any fault with the system.
...and once again party lawyers (the ones least interested in a fair election) always get the last say.
The FL 2000 would have been a non-issue if it wasn't for the 10's of millions both parties were chucking at lawyers who were trying to force through there own favourable ruling.
Confusing ballot papers equally applies to electronic voting. The problem is simply that democracy hands - what can be - a difficult decision to people who quite simply don't have the intelligence to make that decision. A complicated ballot is going to appear just as complicated on a screen as on paper. It's only the layout/design of the ballot which can help
Is there any evidence that earth has been affected by massive sun flares before?
As the article states, the fact that the sun is "middle-aged" means that such flares are less likely but surely they must still happen occasionally over the course of hundreds of millions of years?
Religion is nothing more than a social control mechanism. I agree it's unfortunate that an unintended side-effect of this control mechanism is the public opposition to technologies which happen to disagree with the invented 'rules' set down by a particular religion.
% 3F.
e vil
An interesting documentary "The Root of all evil" by the prominent scientist Richard Dawkins touches on this subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Root_of_All_Evil
link to torrent: http://isohunt.com/download/12430614/Root+of+all+
So if I keep telling myself that my software I write needs to make me money, it'll automatically make itself bug-free?
Dammit! I have really been wasting a lot of time debugging software if all I needed was a little positive thinking!
"This is one of the things that I actually do consider terrorism-- the intent was probably never to kill anyone but to scare and intimidate people.... That's basically what terrorism is."
But why isn't spray painting a wall with hostile graffiti or yelling abuse at your neighbour also terrorism then?
They are both also attempts to scare and intimidate. There doesn't appear to be any actual line between your definition of harassment and that of terrorism, just that one was a slightly more malicious example than the other. Fundamentally though, they all involved the same behavioural mindset, that of intimidation.
But my point is that it would be pretty easy to use that definition to state that a street robber / Mugger who threatens violence towards you unless you hand over your wallet is trying to persuade you - through fear of violence - that his POV that he deserves your wallet is correct. Which would mean he is using Terrorism.
What about someone who warns that there may be civil unrest in the future due to the consequences of a particular government policy?
The word is so vague, that in addition to what I said before, even non-malicious actions could be perceived as terrorism.
It's scarey now that something like this - which is obviously a purely criminal act (one of vandalism and possibly GBH or even murder) - can now be called a "terrorist act". With all the negative connotations which are implied. I wonder what else our government will start declaring as "terrorism", surely any malicious act could ultimately fall under the government's ever widening definition of the word.
Uhh, how exactly is that historic research?
My point isn't that absolutely no-one ever mentions things that are completely contrary to the mainstream viewpoint, but that no-one is seriously allowed to discuss them, although all three of your examples face regular "ban them" cries from their opposer's. More to the point though, if someone with an actual political voice, say a politician, was to stand up and declare "a commission should be created to look at the potential advantages of Communism" or that "murder should be made not a crime", they would almost certainly be immediately laughed out of office for wanting to discuss a controversial idea.
I'm not saying that this necessarily a bad thing at all, but the immediate rejection by country leaders (or the electorate which appoints them) of ideologies contrary to their own is still a form of social control. Although to exist society needs social controls (in the most visual form their called "laws"), but it is a testament to naivety that most people don't realise that ideological social controls exist in every society - including their own. Normally people are quick to notice the forms of ideological control in other societies but very slow to even notice their existance in their own.
Perhaps you should read up on history a bit before you make such stupid comments. The Soviet Union didn't fall because of an arms race, it "fell" due to the 1980's modernisation of their governing system into a form which wasn't compatible with the "Soviet Block" system they had in place. To be anymore specific than that introduces debatable opinion points (the influence of Globalisation, inefficiency of centralization, Regional disputes and all the rest), but it definitely was not a simple "ran out of money to buy guns so the country collapsed", the Soviet Union was always (and Russia still is) amongst the worlds largest exporter of armshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_trade#Top_Ar ms_Exporters.
Also, maintaining social control intrinsically necessitates "locking down ideas", it is (and always has been) done in every society - including modern Western Countries (how often do you hear people in the USA discussing the pro's of Communism or Islamic extremism?). The difference though in maintaining social control in a centralized federal super-power consisting of 15 different countries spanning half the globe, and a small island/peninsula are so fundamentally different to be pretty much incomparable.
Most of those 'side-effects' are very pleasant. Slahdot people should try this - what will certainly be a - new experience.
You obviously have never met a German government worker.
I have a friend who works for the civil service in Bavaria (in a city just outside Munich infact) and she often leaves for work at 5am. Maybe she is trying to get in a few early rounds of solitaire, I don't know but it's still a bloody early time to go to work!
Argh, I meant Costco. I have a peculiar habit of often getting those two companies mixed up. I remember I once started driving towards Best Buy when I actually wanted CostCo.
I would thoroughly recommend this documentory/movie. It is definitely not an anti-Bush propaganda film produced by the Democrats like many (who probably haven't seen it) say it is (it was produced by Spanish reporters for a start) and I would probably take some bits of the movie "with a pinch of salt", but they do have some amazing footage of a very odd event (or non-event as most have never heard of it) in modern history. If you like hearing about conspiracy theories than this is one, albeit focused on different factions conspiring against the people of Venezula rather than the U.S.A. (like in most conspiracy theory stories).
Another, kind of similar, movie called "Death of a president" is also quite insightful into the attitudes of the federal American political psyche. It is a British film focusing on the aftermath of an assassination of Bush. It also has some amazing imagary, this time Forest Gump style effects where actors appear to be on-stage with the president at events. Again it is definitely not an "anti-Bush" film, rather it examines how all sides use the obviously fictitious event for their own aims and - with both movies - they really show in the end the only people f%#ked over are the innocent people caught up in meddling by the higher powers.
I think there is definite difference though.
Few people knowingly sleep with HIV+ people and basically no-one would have that "hot night of passion" if they knew it was going to give them HIV (and hence Aids). Eating super-size McDonald's meals when your already over-weight however, is definitely going to contribute to making you obese.
The difference being that moderately fat people know that fact but still eat purely because they can't control themselves, the vast majority of people who get Aids do so because they 1) underestimate the risk, 2) think "it won't ever happen to me" or 3) take the risk and are just plain unlucky.
It is maybe a bit much to pick one specific chain out and say they are responsible for obesity, but I did only use them as an example rather than state that their the cause. However I do think they definitely have a lot to answer for, the Walmart business model involves encouraging people to buy food in larger quantities than they need. They (and others like Bestbuy) actively encourage people to "buy in bulk for a longer time frame", with the business model succeeding so well largely on the simple truth that most people won't then have the self-control to eat their super-economy sized tub of ice-cream over a period of 2 weeks like they had initially planned.
...so what do they do? rather than change their business models and stop selling large quantities of fatty foods to already fat people, they start selling diabetic supplies (http://www.walmart.com/catalog/catalog.gsp?cat=13 5355). Personally I think that is so immoral it's probably worse than the case of the gun store described above.
To use your analogy, it is like having a gun store which encourages criminal gun use and sells guns to criminals in an area with a high gun crime rate (Walmart encourage bad eating habits and has absolutely no problem selling super-sized ice-cream to obese people). Sure, you can't blame all the gun crime on that gun store but that doesn't mean it isn't a near certainty that the store is part of the problem and personally I think Walmart and BestBuy (along with their peers) also have a lot to answer for regarding the state of the nation's obesity problem.
The article suggests a link is likely (although they don't quote an exact study into such). I think though, the drop in testosterone is among the least of fat people's worries.
I don't understand why people go on and on so much about diseases like Aids in Africa when there is a disease killing millions here in America also, the only difference being it is caused by lack of self-control rather than a virus. Yet so many people treat obesity like it's no big deal unlike other diseases. I can understand Walmart not giving a crap about obesity (after all, the disease makes the company billions) but surely everyone else must be concerned that their obese friend/colleague/themselves/relative is going to die decades before they're meant to. Would people ignore their friend/colleague/themselves/relative's disease so much if it was Aids?
What sort of level of loss are we talking about here?
Is it actually going to reduce the quality below that of around say 192k?
Personally, for anything higher than that I really can't tell the difference anyway.
Hmm, that sounds really weird referring to myself in 3rd person point of view. I guess I should read what I write before posting it :)
But the poster was pointing out that even with those laws 40,000 people die each year, so they should be banned outright.
Shouldn't we therefore ban cars as well?
...so ban computers?
They kill over 40,000 people and leave hundreds of thousands with permanent disabilities every year in the USA alone! Kind of puts the relatively few racist, paedophilic and even terrorist murders into perspective.
At the end of the day though I think it's only the freaks who commit such acts who should be punished not whatever they claimed "motivated" them or else we'd see everything being eventually banned. For example: sometimes computers just piss me off (and I'm sure millions of others) so much I could kill!
I agree its frustrating and odd that an option was not at least put on the preferences/options panel, especially considering some of the numerous crazy options that appear on there.
I wonder how many people must be out there wishing they could switch back but not having happened to see some info like that displayed in the post above. Personally I tried searching on their website and via Firefox but only found one extremely involved method which didn't even work.