There's this funny thing happens to brains as one grows older. Its called Myelination. It has to do with the brain structure becoming more fixed and rigid as we mature, in exchange for doing what we do better, faster, and more effectively, think of is as intellectual specialization. Trying to explain to your managers why the problem they've chosen to bite off is NP Complete, won't make sense to them. Explaining the difference between an inner and outer join as a function of set theory and NULLs impacting the resulting data sets will simply return the same kind of empty stares you get when you try to explain particle physic to your schnauzer.
There's nothing wrong here. You simply need to tell them that what you do depends on an incredible amount of specialized knowledge, just as you wouldn't dream of telling them how to manage a poison pill strategy to prevent a hostile takeover. They need to discuss what they want to do together, come up with several contingencies to allow for workability and then discuss those ideas with the people who write software. Someone needs to put a learned person whose also a little bit of an asshole in the gatekeeper position. His job is to say that idea is either possible or impossible, or impossible in a workable time-frame. By all means the gatekeeper should explain himself to the other engineers, but in the end, he should have final say, because he is the gate keeper. When all is decided among the developers, the gatekeeper goes back and say Yea or Neh, on the project based on the science of information management, and he can gladly explain why if the execs are capable of understanding.
This will serve two purposes, 1. It will kill stupid ideas in the cradle where they need to die. 2. It will allow the creative minds the freedom to create, but also give the builders the right to say, that is a truly horrible idea, and it would behoove us all to walk away from it now with all due haste.
This could only improve the company and quality of lives for both the managers and the developers.
Welcome my friend to the land of the Pointy Haired Bosses... See, you can tell a person whose playing their first games of Chess, mate in 18 moves and that sounds like voodoo. But you've bothered to study openings, middle and end games, and you can see in those first 7 moves this is now a done deal. Telling the pointy haired boss, that an appreciation for consistent, tight code, that is syntactically succinct, clear, conforms to coding conventions, is well documented, but most of all, reflects that the coder understands abstraction, algorithms, reusable elements, and order of precedent to name but a few basic concepts, is the difference between an application that is quick, elegant and highly useable, and a reeking pile of digital sewage. If anyone could write software, it would pay $8 an hour and robust brown gentlemen you picked up a the day worker center would hustle you out an application after pulling your weeds. It actually takes years to learn enough to write proper programs and more years to hone that skill to a useful edge. Expecting people to just learn syntax who haven't the fundaments of logic or information management, to write code that isn't just a slow motion disaster, is at best deluded.
This is tantamount to saying, after working diligently for a decade, I've discovered that when I take my gorilla suit, leave off the monkey head and hands, slip the feet into dress shoes, brush it out real good and wear a cummerbund, I can go to a formal dress party and people don't point and scream any more. JS does useful work. A number of fair programmers have pounded a functional subset into operational submission. Its still a gorilla suit. Rather than spending vast amounts energy coding around, over or through JS insufficiencies, it is arguable that we should either fix JS, like from the ground up clean the pesky thing once and for all, or abandon it to better more elegant tools. Just a thought.
Hmmmm, let me see... You never have to wipe because every time you flush, 30 inches of balance sheet shoot up your Ass. The CEOs car explodes preventing the implementation of the next stupid idea. And finally, They find the bodies of would be industrial spies in a drain trap in the basement. Sounds like everything's working just fine to me.
I said "Just being in the fields of such things as radio and microwaves below a certain threshold have not been proven to cause illness". It seems you are agreeing with me in an argumentative fashion, I made no mention of any scientific study that suggests that microwaves cause cancer. The only known health issues regarding microwave is the increase chance of getting cataracts by standing too close to a old microwave over whose seals are no longer working properly. This is not a widespread problem.
As to my own parent comment I apologize, I may need new glasses, I originally read that as X-Rays are not EM, when in fact he said the reason they are dangerous is not because they are EM.but because they are ionizing which they indeed are.
There's the future this is all headed towards. The government will determine the best possible way to ID people is with a rectal scan. You'll go to the DMV, get in a long line of people bent over at the waste along a lengthy formica counter. A professionally dressed gentleman with rubber gloves holding an object that resembles a rubber drain snake will step behind each applicant (or supplicant as the case may be), and share with them the joy that comes from a 12 inch dose of national security. Pants will naturally come with a self sealing sphincter much like the meaty counter parts on the person wearing said pants. Everywhere you go in public, as soon as you sit down, a robotic device will plumb your identity and for this minor inconvenience we shall all be safe.
The irony being we will then all be known by our assholes, just like dogs, and the folks currently inhabiting D.C. these days.
I dunno, I think I'd be happy to trade a little national security for a wee bit more liberty... just a thought, don't wanna rock the boat or anything... sleep on it, eh?
Hmmmmmm, X-Rays are EM waves. Radio is an EM wave. X-Rays are carried by photons. Why look, Radio produces photons (though their incredibly low energy making it hard to see them individually above the background noise in the universe.) Therefore yes, X-Ray and Radio wave precisely the same phenomena, with the only difference being their wave length. The difference in their effects on physical matter is a function of their energy. X-Rays are highly energetic. Radio waves not so much.
You can warm a glass of water to 100 degrees and you now have bath water, you can also heat it to 1000 degrees and now you have live steam. Both made of identical water molecules, the same in every way save one. The impact that water has on your hand though will be impressively different, because one has a tremendously greater amount of kinetic energy to impart on the proteins in your flesh. EM is EM is EM, and what changes is the energy they to impart on you. The hard part is figuring out and comparing effects under different conditions. By the way, you Warfarin and Table Salt analogy is precisely valid here. Normally, you'd be absolutely correct, however there is a small population with a gene mutation that effects the way they metabolize salt. It results in making their mucous so thick that they have a hard time breathing. We can this condition Cystic Fibrosis. So these people are canaries in the mine for Salt contamination. There is almost certainly something like this for certain EM frequencies, people who are super sensitive. We need to show them compassion, their suffering is real, and gawd knows the average person now lives in a sea of artificial EM radiation. We just need to make certain that we balance that compassion with sanity regarding the benefit of all those waves are for the general populace.
Yes, but in large amounts H20 drowns you and wash away you village! In fact all chemicals are dangerous, the issue at hand is simply under what circumstances and what safety precautions need to be observed. Lead can poison you, pierce you as a bullet, or split your skull as a black-jack. Each expression of lead has its own safety considerations. There are plenty of chemicals far more scary than NaOH. Botulina Toxin is so toxic that a pound properly distributed could kill the entire human race several times, the same goes for Plutonium. There are innocuous organic compounds out there that can cause your cells to explode, or stop your DNA from replicating (Uracil). Seeing as virtually every single thing we enjoy in life exists at the business end of some kind of chemistry, it behooves us all to understand our relationship with the activities and processes of the physical universe.
Oh and not make silly comments, removing all doubt that someone doesn't know what they're talking about.
I see that physics isn't your strong suit. Here are the electromagnetic wave types that our science is familiar with;
Radio waves
Microwaves
Far - Near Infrared waves
Visible light
Ultraviolet - Hard Ultraviolet
X-rays
Gamma rays
Any light from mid visible through gamma rays can cause fluorescence, that is excite and electron to a higher state than well it drops have it emit a photon at a different wavelength. Ionization usually requires higher energies and demands light with wavelength from Ulraviolet to Gamma rays. The only difference between these forms of light are their wave length/frequency/source temperature. For instance we can now see the echo of the big bang as a microwave afterglow across the entire sky, and the static you see between channels on your TV or hear on your radio is part of the same phenomenon.
There are a number of EM waves that can harm or kill you. Microwaves tuned to the frequency of water can cook you, they are also known to cause cataracts and sterility. UV can damage your skin and cause sun burn and melanoma. X-rays can cause lethal radiation sickness and cancer as can gamma rays. Just being in the fields of such things as radio and microwaves below a certain threshold have not been proven to cause illness, though there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of possible cancer caused by radar emissions, and energy fields around high tension power lines. Sadly, anecdotal evidence is not proof, and we've built entire industries on these forms of radiation (every time you make a cell phone call you microwave your brain) so without hard evidence its very hard to justify costly industrial standards that might hurt cultural progress and innovation. That said, its seems very possible that there are human being with a prediliction to EM sensitivity, just as there are rare folks who can hear well about the normal 20 Khz. cut-off for most healthy, young people. Rather than demonizing them we need to study them and see if in fact that are canaries in the mine and may point to threat against the general public. As well, we have folks whose sensitivity lies more in the realm of hypochondria and irrational fear, for those folks we can show compassion (their suffering is real even if the cause isn't), but we need to enlighten them, that their fear is not based in any physical phenomenon and is more properly placed in the realm of the psychological.
Although, of course it devalues the textbook as well (IMO)... for no pictures or diagrams, the book should be less than $50 a pop.
Are you mad! An art appreciation book with no pictures... here let me frame this in a context you might better grasp. You go to an adult bookstore. You see a hot little DVD, the clerk says "Oh, great choice, this is so hot, that'll be $180." You say $180! How can this possibly be! Is it that good?" He assures you it is, so you put down your money, and go home, pop it in the player and every time someone is about to consummate the boom chicka wow wow, the image is replaced with the URL pointing you to a site where you can see people engaging in sexual acts. Now, tell me, how are you feeling? How much is that DVD worth? Would you say that DVD is now worth only $50? Would "Devalue" even be the first word that popped into your head?
This is education as rape. This is copyright gone bug fuck. This is student abuse in no uncertain terms and a dark cloud that threatens to extinguish education as we know it. What this is not is the devaluation of a text book. This is the devaluation of future society.
Its worse, even the original publisher will now have to pay for the authorized use of controlled content items otherwise in the public domain. Uses will conflict, law suits will fly like flocks of birds on the wing and ultimately every thought, every word, every idea will be locked down tighter than Lady Guinevere's chastity belt. You so much as hum more than 3 notes in public and a duly appointed officer of the court will pull you up so hard and so fast, you'll need to check to if your feet are still in the shoes. The stupid is accelerating people. It was fine a hundred years ago when your stupid only meant you'd have to learn to walk without the toe on your left foot anymore... damn farm machinery. Your neighbor couldn't even hear you scream curses, nobody was disturbed. Things worked just fine in spite of the stupid, because the percentage of stupid per unit mass was low.
Flash forward a century and now I can pay some imbecile to go to Washington, to have another imbecile pass a law that will require people have to drive with their children glued to the roof. And they'll do it, sure as Gawd made little green apples these crazy fucks will try to pass this law, and if I throw enough money around it'll pass, and the Supreme Court will find it Constitutional. We now live in a time where you can make people do anything if you just throw money around. You can remove consciousness from future generations by making it pay per view. You can put all our rights in little jars and show them in a museum. You can even turn flesh and blood people into "Human Resource Assets". Makes you want to throw up just a little, doesn't it? I don't know any more where to get off this bus, but I want off. Either someone please steer this thing in a sane direction or let me off at the next stop thanks.
Think about it, if your text book has 750 pictures in it, and you have to wrap a dollar bill around each image for licensing, your book in now $750 above your cost to publish it. Ergo an $850 test book. Which just goes to show you that the world is now officially Bat Fuck Crazy. Since the kids have to go to the web anyway to see the images, just turn the book into a webpage, with WORKING LINKS, and force each student to pay $180 to access the website for a semester. After the end of the semester, as a gift, they can have one of these image free door stops as a thank you for having taken this ridiculous class... or they can save the trees and waste of all other human resources and forgo dead tree version.
So now we need to beat the author, the School Administration, and perhaps kill all the lawyers involved in passing the laws resulting in the absurdity. Then as a fitting finale, we can bring all the people responsible for this body of legal atrocities and who've put their profit ahead of the future education of our society and launch them to the moon without benefit of a space capsule. When their collective bodies hit the lunar surface we can rename the region Mare Stultitia et Avaritia, The Sea of Stupidity and Greed. We can take a picture of it. Put in a book at no cost and show our children this is what happens to scum sucking pigs. Its a dream, I know, but its a good dream.
Actually friend, the Bush White house consisted of a virtual Rogues Gallery, and where George himself could be fully explained by ineptitude (with the possibility that his greatest crimes are simple complicity), and possibly Rummy as well (more than anything else, his greatest failure was his loyalty to Cheny.) The actions of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove can in no way be construed as simple lack of ability or ineptitude. They left the reservation for parts unknown in a cynical attempt line their own pockets or the pockets of their friends and partners and further their corporate and political ambitions to the detriment of the world at large and the United State in particular. The events in question are exquisitely documented and it doesn't take but the slightest investigation to see that there's a virtual ocean of misconduct here.
Indeed Halliburton had no-bid contracts before the war, Dick Cheney was its CEO and a Washington insider. The whole ridiculous points was the insane conflict of interest that occurred during the Bush years lead to hundreds of billions flooding into Halliburton with effectively zero over sight. You say it saved us money, but GAO records indicate that literally hundreds of billions of dollars just disappeared and nobody was held in any way accountable. Explain that to me please. This was not a savings to America, it was a fiscal rape and the fingerprints on the assault all belong to Dick.
The WMD was the thinnest of contrivances, a made up tale designed to justify a wild goose chase for oil and a strategic base in the middle east. You don't remember the ridiculous comment Dick Cheney made when we were actually pursuing Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, "That there are no good targets in Afghanistan." To which I can only assume he meant that there was no possible way he was going to throw his company a half trillion dollar bone fighting mountain people in a guerrilla war. The yellow cake was a scam perpetrated between friend in the British government and the Bush cabinet, even the originating source was a stooge working for British Intelligence, and when top CIA operatives went to vet the authenticity of the report, they were summarily attacked and discredited by none other than Karl Rove, up to and including the release of the name of an active CIA agents name to the public news media, An act which could easily be construed as an act treason (and in some places was.) Even Colin Powell spoke later about being mislead, that without the bogus yellow cake story, that there was NO SANE justification for going into Iraq... but perhaps you remember none of this, eh? Why would you spout the party line, when so much of it has been discredited, so many lies have been revealed, so many first hand accounts make it perfectly clear this was a power grab on a global scale.
As for Obama, you got me, he was warned and he should have been on his toes instead of running for office. Of course when Clinton left the White House, he provided the new Bush cabinet with a document of CRITICAL importance describing the danger presented by Osama Bin Laden, and that he was plotting to perform a major act of terrorism on American soil. The First 9 months of the Bush Presidency was given to Cheney trying to revive the Missile Defense program from the 80s so he could throw Halliburton that half trillion dollar bone previously mentioned. That was also the summer that George took the longest presidential vacation in history, making his ranch look real nice. The deaths in the embassies in Libya were the result of smoke inhalation in the safe room the embassy personnel retired to. When they were found the mob on the street actually passed them out the embassy window, bucket brigade style to an awaiting ambulance. This is tragic, but just as the Muslims have blown the silly movie all out of proportion, we've turned a tragic accident into a reason for declaring war. Obama certainly could have handled this better, but compared to letting terrorists blow up the twin towers, again, I have to say you're comparing firecrac
Not thought through hard enough? Where were you when Colin Powell said "You break it, you buy it.." And Rummy decided to go in with half the force needed to actually accomplish the job. There was plenty of thought. It just involved privateers in the Cabinet raping both Iraq and the U.S. simultaneously while they got their econo-political nut off. Dubyah, said he was going to succeed where his Father failed PUBLICALLY. He Dad, the exhead of the CIA understood one strongman was better than 50 all shooting at one another with collateral damage out the wazoo.
The whole thing was a bunch of guy each with their own personal agenda lying like rugs to get what the wanted and screwing everyone else over in the process. What part of this is unclear?
I'd pay good cash money to see Captain Jack Sparrow played by "mini-me" Verne Troyer. Have it be about a shrinking curse... that would certainly be having me blowing my favorite beverage outta my nose... hairy feet would be optional.
Wow... you know this whole mindset that has been creeping in since the 80s is simply shocking. Okay everyone gather around, because Momma Mary is going to tell you a little bit about history. In the 40s and 50s the top tax bracket was over 90%, that's right, if you made $10,000,000 you only took home, $1,000,000, but wealthy people did just fine anyway. On the other side, businesses believed in loyalty to their workers, people often worked for the same business all their livers, Chairmen were taught they had a civic trust to protect their businesses and the people that worked in them. People got pensions paid for by their employers. The middle class was strong. A man could work a 40 hour week and make enough money to buy a car, buy a house, keep his wife at home, and put his kids through college. In this time the economy boomed, and the nations infrastructure blossomed making it even more capable of competing on a global scale.
Fast forward. We live in a time where labor is a commodity, their not even people any more. You don't hire them, you contract them so you don't have to give them benefits. We live in a corporate state of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation. A person is either highly skilled and make over $100,000 a year or he's flipping burgers for $10 an hour, a wage no human being can live on any more so this person needs 2 or three jobs to stay alive. Both parents work. They run up an average of $20,000 in credit debt and the only college these kids are gonna see is a a 2 year City School, and tuitions there are rising faster than the national debt. So the next generation is almost virtually doomed as the imbalance of wealth begins to create the implosion of the American Middle class.
And you says it's because Teachers, Firemen, and Policemen are being greedy? I think not. There was a time when we all had pensions and that was the norm. The unions have done their jobs on behalf of the labor to preserve these benefits. It is the society that sold out the common man that is the culprit here. It is the government of the corporation that has tilted the society in favor of the highest bidder. Yes those union contracts were made when the economy looked red hot, but that was the mistake of the state governments. They made poor or even no contingencies for economic downturn. By all means, renegotiate the union contracts in the light of dire economic shortfalls. Just remember that automation is going to eventually replace all our jobs. If we don't come up with some way to have all people benefit from the coming technological transformation, we will end up with a society where a half dozen people own everything, and the rest of us own nothing. You need to notice the way things are already pulling, the trajectory is clear. The ass you save may well be your own.
Don't forget, Senators and Congressmen kids get to be drafted too, Add the kids of billionaires and business magnates as well as the kids of bureaucrats and judges and I think we could pretty much put an end to American wars as we now know them. We have no business forcing anything on the world and its about time we got out of the war business. Its screwed up our karma.
I'm not at all certain that this isn't planned. I'm not certain that Obama isn't being given this 8 years of "Spear Catching" Because the Republican party is smart enough to know that the party that get's stuck with the decade following Dubya, is going to be steeped in his stank. I would pick a candidate that would lose so four more years of viscous nasty will potentially so undermine the Democratic party that the Reps will have 2 decades to play as they will. Look what happened to Jimmy Carter. They gutted him. Then 12 years of Republican domination. Guys the machine is broken, and its paying out to the guys who own the house, they are going to stay broken. This isn't gambling... This is "Head I win, Tails you lose..."
Dude, I'd be the first to say Big O is scoring about a C- right now, but you've left out so many fact, your comments simply don't hold water. Baby Bush got us into Iraq to prove something to his DAD. He was put up to it by Dick Cheney who saw endless no competition contracts for Halliburton, and Rove who had wet dreams about building a military base in a country flush with Oil and managed with a puppet government installed by the U.S. Did I miss anything... Oh yeah, the "Yellow Cake" cluster fuck they dreamed up and the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" that we never found. Lies and more lies. Are we clear yet? There is NOTHING in the Obama administration to compare, not even vaguely. Even a cursory revue of the Bush Presidency would certainly turn up events that would justifiably end with a firing squad. Obama's a jerk, but he's no traitor. Nearly everything he's done, has been dancing between getting us unstuck from the disasters that Dubya impaled us on, and trying to keep all the moving part inside the bus... (ie. Working inside the disaster that is re Democratic Party) not an easy dance, especially with folks from the right side of aisle taking frequent pot shots at you. The real problem is he should have let go of trying to get people to like him, and pressed on kicking ass and getting jobs done. Of course, it is D.C. and you have to play the game or they make you go away. Strange place we live in.
Actually, I'd love to see what Obama can do as a lame duck, when he no longer has to fellate Hollywood to get reelected. That and he now is clear that trying to build consensus with the Republicans is as pointless as inviting Ted Nugent to a vegan Barbeque. This isn't to say that I haven't been sorely disappointed with Mr. O to date. He has done some excellent things, but the real jobs that need to be performed... putting Glass Steagall back, giving both Israel and Palestine a pair of twisty nipples until they square their collective crap up, Tell Britain to rein their greedy bastards in and give the Platinum miners in South Africa an 'F'ing subsistence wage with basic human benefits... my gawd people, you're mining platinum, jeeze!, Explain to China, LEAD is not a food additive, stocking stuffer, ingredient to anything a child might put in their mouth, or Pet Supplement of any kind and that we're getting a wee bit put out by being poisoned repeatedly. Call us picky that way.
So Mr. Obama, now that you have no illusions to what this job entails, should you be reelected, would you please stop doing all the stupid stuff and actually accomplish the things we need getting done now... eh?
You know, we should just say, listen, we've tried to do this in as civil a manner as possible. We are now going to eliminate your reactor facility. You have exactly 2 hours to evacuate the facility, at which point anyone within a mile of the enrichment facility and the reactors is committing suicide.
Then you converge a constellation of high altitude laser platforms just outside of Iranian air space, and proceed to slag the entire operation. Melt it down to scrap metal. Nobody is dead. Nothing was damaged outside of a site that was involved in making weapons grade fissionable material. They've been warned and warned and warned again. This is a resolution showing that we mean what we say, we are peace loving and committed to avoiding unnecessary brutality, and that in the same breath we'll brook no bullshit from an upstart nation of nerf herfers attempting get ahead by waving threats of mass murder at the world.
There fixed that for ya!
"If ya move, I'm gonna shootcha!" -- Frances McDormand "Fargo"
Slashdot Mirror
There's this funny thing happens to brains as one grows older. Its called Myelination. It has to do with the brain structure becoming more fixed and rigid as we mature, in exchange for doing what we do better, faster, and more effectively, think of is as intellectual specialization. Trying to explain to your managers why the problem they've chosen to bite off is NP Complete, won't make sense to them. Explaining the difference between an inner and outer join as a function of set theory and NULLs impacting the resulting data sets will simply return the same kind of empty stares you get when you try to explain particle physic to your schnauzer.
There's nothing wrong here. You simply need to tell them that what you do depends on an incredible amount of specialized knowledge, just as you wouldn't dream of telling them how to manage a poison pill strategy to prevent a hostile takeover. They need to discuss what they want to do together, come up with several contingencies to allow for workability and then discuss those ideas with the people who write software. Someone needs to put a learned person whose also a little bit of an asshole in the gatekeeper position. His job is to say that idea is either possible or impossible, or impossible in a workable time-frame. By all means the gatekeeper should explain himself to the other engineers, but in the end, he should have final say, because he is the gate keeper. When all is decided among the developers, the gatekeeper goes back and say Yea or Neh, on the project based on the science of information management, and he can gladly explain why if the execs are capable of understanding.
This will serve two purposes, 1. It will kill stupid ideas in the cradle where they need to die. 2. It will allow the creative minds the freedom to create, but also give the builders the right to say, that is a truly horrible idea, and it would behoove us all to walk away from it now with all due haste.
This could only improve the company and quality of lives for both the managers and the developers.
Welcome my friend to the land of the Pointy Haired Bosses... See, you can tell a person whose playing their first games of Chess, mate in 18 moves and that sounds like voodoo. But you've bothered to study openings, middle and end games, and you can see in those first 7 moves this is now a done deal. Telling the pointy haired boss, that an appreciation for consistent, tight code, that is syntactically succinct, clear, conforms to coding conventions, is well documented, but most of all, reflects that the coder understands abstraction, algorithms, reusable elements, and order of precedent to name but a few basic concepts, is the difference between an application that is quick, elegant and highly useable, and a reeking pile of digital sewage. If anyone could write software, it would pay $8 an hour and robust brown gentlemen you picked up a the day worker center would hustle you out an application after pulling your weeds. It actually takes years to learn enough to write proper programs and more years to hone that skill to a useful edge. Expecting people to just learn syntax who haven't the fundaments of logic or information management, to write code that isn't just a slow motion disaster, is at best deluded.
This is tantamount to saying, after working diligently for a decade, I've discovered that when I take my gorilla suit, leave off the monkey head and hands, slip the feet into dress shoes, brush it out real good and wear a cummerbund, I can go to a formal dress party and people don't point and scream any more. JS does useful work. A number of fair programmers have pounded a functional subset into operational submission. Its still a gorilla suit. Rather than spending vast amounts energy coding around, over or through JS insufficiencies, it is arguable that we should either fix JS, like from the ground up clean the pesky thing once and for all, or abandon it to better more elegant tools. Just a thought.
Hmmmm, let me see... You never have to wipe because every time you flush, 30 inches of balance sheet shoot up your Ass. The CEOs car explodes preventing the implementation of the next stupid idea. And finally, They find the bodies of would be industrial spies in a drain trap in the basement. Sounds like everything's working just fine to me.
I said "Just being in the fields of such things as radio and microwaves below a certain threshold have not been proven to cause illness". It seems you are agreeing with me in an argumentative fashion, I made no mention of any scientific study that suggests that microwaves cause cancer. The only known health issues regarding microwave is the increase chance of getting cataracts by standing too close to a old microwave over whose seals are no longer working properly. This is not a widespread problem.
As to my own parent comment I apologize, I may need new glasses, I originally read that as X-Rays are not EM, when in fact he said the reason they are dangerous is not because they are EM.but because they are ionizing which they indeed are.
There's the future this is all headed towards. The government will determine the best possible way to ID people is with a rectal scan. You'll go to the DMV, get in a long line of people bent over at the waste along a lengthy formica counter. A professionally dressed gentleman with rubber gloves holding an object that resembles a rubber drain snake will step behind each applicant (or supplicant as the case may be), and share with them the joy that comes from a 12 inch dose of national security. Pants will naturally come with a self sealing sphincter much like the meaty counter parts on the person wearing said pants. Everywhere you go in public, as soon as you sit down, a robotic device will plumb your identity and for this minor inconvenience we shall all be safe.
The irony being we will then all be known by our assholes, just like dogs, and the folks currently inhabiting D.C. these days.
I dunno, I think I'd be happy to trade a little national security for a wee bit more liberty... just a thought, don't wanna rock the boat or anything... sleep on it, eh?
Hmmmmmm, X-Rays are EM waves. Radio is an EM wave. X-Rays are carried by photons. Why look, Radio produces photons (though their incredibly low energy making it hard to see them individually above the background noise in the universe.) Therefore yes, X-Ray and Radio wave precisely the same phenomena, with the only difference being their wave length. The difference in their effects on physical matter is a function of their energy. X-Rays are highly energetic. Radio waves not so much.
You can warm a glass of water to 100 degrees and you now have bath water, you can also heat it to 1000 degrees and now you have live steam. Both made of identical water molecules, the same in every way save one. The impact that water has on your hand though will be impressively different, because one has a tremendously greater amount of kinetic energy to impart on the proteins in your flesh. EM is EM is EM, and what changes is the energy they to impart on you. The hard part is figuring out and comparing effects under different conditions. By the way, you Warfarin and Table Salt analogy is precisely valid here. Normally, you'd be absolutely correct, however there is a small population with a gene mutation that effects the way they metabolize salt. It results in making their mucous so thick that they have a hard time breathing. We can this condition Cystic Fibrosis. So these people are canaries in the mine for Salt contamination. There is almost certainly something like this for certain EM frequencies, people who are super sensitive. We need to show them compassion, their suffering is real, and gawd knows the average person now lives in a sea of artificial EM radiation. We just need to make certain that we balance that compassion with sanity regarding the benefit of all those waves are for the general populace.
Yes, but in large amounts H20 drowns you and wash away you village! In fact all chemicals are dangerous, the issue at hand is simply under what circumstances and what safety precautions need to be observed. Lead can poison you, pierce you as a bullet, or split your skull as a black-jack. Each expression of lead has its own safety considerations. There are plenty of chemicals far more scary than NaOH. Botulina Toxin is so toxic that a pound properly distributed could kill the entire human race several times, the same goes for Plutonium. There are innocuous organic compounds out there that can cause your cells to explode, or stop your DNA from replicating (Uracil). Seeing as virtually every single thing we enjoy in life exists at the business end of some kind of chemistry, it behooves us all to understand our relationship with the activities and processes of the physical universe.
Oh and not make silly comments, removing all doubt that someone doesn't know what they're talking about.
I see that physics isn't your strong suit. Here are the electromagnetic wave types that our science is familiar with;
Radio waves
Microwaves
Far - Near Infrared waves
Visible light
Ultraviolet - Hard Ultraviolet
X-rays
Gamma rays
Any light from mid visible through gamma rays can cause fluorescence, that is excite and electron to a higher state than well it drops have it emit a photon at a different wavelength. Ionization usually requires higher energies and demands light with wavelength from Ulraviolet to Gamma rays. The only difference between these forms of light are their wave length/frequency/source temperature. For instance we can now see the echo of the big bang as a microwave afterglow across the entire sky, and the static you see between channels on your TV or hear on your radio is part of the same phenomenon.
There are a number of EM waves that can harm or kill you. Microwaves tuned to the frequency of water can cook you, they are also known to cause cataracts and sterility. UV can damage your skin and cause sun burn and melanoma. X-rays can cause lethal radiation sickness and cancer as can gamma rays. Just being in the fields of such things as radio and microwaves below a certain threshold have not been proven to cause illness, though there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of possible cancer caused by radar emissions, and energy fields around high tension power lines. Sadly, anecdotal evidence is not proof, and we've built entire industries on these forms of radiation (every time you make a cell phone call you microwave your brain) so without hard evidence its very hard to justify costly industrial standards that might hurt cultural progress and innovation. That said, its seems very possible that there are human being with a prediliction to EM sensitivity, just as there are rare folks who can hear well about the normal 20 Khz. cut-off for most healthy, young people. Rather than demonizing them we need to study them and see if in fact that are canaries in the mine and may point to threat against the general public. As well, we have folks whose sensitivity lies more in the realm of hypochondria and irrational fear, for those folks we can show compassion (their suffering is real even if the cause isn't), but we need to enlighten them, that their fear is not based in any physical phenomenon and is more properly placed in the realm of the psychological.
Although, of course it devalues the textbook as well (IMO)... for no pictures or diagrams, the book should be less than $50 a pop.
Are you mad! An art appreciation book with no pictures... here let me frame this in a context you might better grasp. You go to an adult bookstore. You see a hot little DVD, the clerk says "Oh, great choice, this is so hot, that'll be $180." You say $180! How can this possibly be! Is it that good?" He assures you it is, so you put down your money, and go home, pop it in the player and every time someone is about to consummate the boom chicka wow wow, the image is replaced with the URL pointing you to a site where you can see people engaging in sexual acts. Now, tell me, how are you feeling? How much is that DVD worth? Would you say that DVD is now worth only $50? Would "Devalue" even be the first word that popped into your head?
This is education as rape. This is copyright gone bug fuck. This is student abuse in no uncertain terms and a dark cloud that threatens to extinguish education as we know it. What this is not is the devaluation of a text book. This is the devaluation of future society.
Its worse, even the original publisher will now have to pay for the authorized use of controlled content items otherwise in the public domain. Uses will conflict, law suits will fly like flocks of birds on the wing and ultimately every thought, every word, every idea will be locked down tighter than Lady Guinevere's chastity belt. You so much as hum more than 3 notes in public and a duly appointed officer of the court will pull you up so hard and so fast, you'll need to check to if your feet are still in the shoes. The stupid is accelerating people. It was fine a hundred years ago when your stupid only meant you'd have to learn to walk without the toe on your left foot anymore... damn farm machinery. Your neighbor couldn't even hear you scream curses, nobody was disturbed. Things worked just fine in spite of the stupid, because the percentage of stupid per unit mass was low.
Flash forward a century and now I can pay some imbecile to go to Washington, to have another imbecile pass a law that will require people have to drive with their children glued to the roof. And they'll do it, sure as Gawd made little green apples these crazy fucks will try to pass this law, and if I throw enough money around it'll pass, and the Supreme Court will find it Constitutional. We now live in a time where you can make people do anything if you just throw money around. You can remove consciousness from future generations by making it pay per view. You can put all our rights in little jars and show them in a museum. You can even turn flesh and blood people into "Human Resource Assets". Makes you want to throw up just a little, doesn't it? I don't know any more where to get off this bus, but I want off. Either someone please steer this thing in a sane direction or let me off at the next stop thanks.
Think about it, if your text book has 750 pictures in it, and you have to wrap a dollar bill around each image for licensing, your book in now $750 above your cost to publish it. Ergo an $850 test book. Which just goes to show you that the world is now officially Bat Fuck Crazy. Since the kids have to go to the web anyway to see the images, just turn the book into a webpage, with WORKING LINKS, and force each student to pay $180 to access the website for a semester. After the end of the semester, as a gift, they can have one of these image free door stops as a thank you for having taken this ridiculous class... or they can save the trees and waste of all other human resources and forgo dead tree version.
So now we need to beat the author, the School Administration, and perhaps kill all the lawyers involved in passing the laws resulting in the absurdity. Then as a fitting finale, we can bring all the people responsible for this body of legal atrocities and who've put their profit ahead of the future education of our society and launch them to the moon without benefit of a space capsule. When their collective bodies hit the lunar surface we can rename the region Mare Stultitia et Avaritia, The Sea of Stupidity and Greed. We can take a picture of it. Put in a book at no cost and show our children this is what happens to scum sucking pigs. Its a dream, I know, but its a good dream.
Actually friend, the Bush White house consisted of a virtual Rogues Gallery, and where George himself could be fully explained by ineptitude (with the possibility that his greatest crimes are simple complicity), and possibly Rummy as well (more than anything else, his greatest failure was his loyalty to Cheny.) The actions of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove can in no way be construed as simple lack of ability or ineptitude. They left the reservation for parts unknown in a cynical attempt line their own pockets or the pockets of their friends and partners and further their corporate and political ambitions to the detriment of the world at large and the United State in particular. The events in question are exquisitely documented and it doesn't take but the slightest investigation to see that there's a virtual ocean of misconduct here.
Indeed Halliburton had no-bid contracts before the war, Dick Cheney was its CEO and a Washington insider. The whole ridiculous points was the insane conflict of interest that occurred during the Bush years lead to hundreds of billions flooding into Halliburton with effectively zero over sight. You say it saved us money, but GAO records indicate that literally hundreds of billions of dollars just disappeared and nobody was held in any way accountable. Explain that to me please. This was not a savings to America, it was a fiscal rape and the fingerprints on the assault all belong to Dick.
The WMD was the thinnest of contrivances, a made up tale designed to justify a wild goose chase for oil and a strategic base in the middle east. You don't remember the ridiculous comment Dick Cheney made when we were actually pursuing Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, "That there are no good targets in Afghanistan." To which I can only assume he meant that there was no possible way he was going to throw his company a half trillion dollar bone fighting mountain people in a guerrilla war. The yellow cake was a scam perpetrated between friend in the British government and the Bush cabinet, even the originating source was a stooge working for British Intelligence, and when top CIA operatives went to vet the authenticity of the report, they were summarily attacked and discredited by none other than Karl Rove, up to and including the release of the name of an active CIA agents name to the public news media, An act which could easily be construed as an act treason (and in some places was.) Even Colin Powell spoke later about being mislead, that without the bogus yellow cake story, that there was NO SANE justification for going into Iraq... but perhaps you remember none of this, eh? Why would you spout the party line, when so much of it has been discredited, so many lies have been revealed, so many first hand accounts make it perfectly clear this was a power grab on a global scale.
As for Obama, you got me, he was warned and he should have been on his toes instead of running for office. Of course when Clinton left the White House, he provided the new Bush cabinet with a document of CRITICAL importance describing the danger presented by Osama Bin Laden, and that he was plotting to perform a major act of terrorism on American soil. The First 9 months of the Bush Presidency was given to Cheney trying to revive the Missile Defense program from the 80s so he could throw Halliburton that half trillion dollar bone previously mentioned. That was also the summer that George took the longest presidential vacation in history, making his ranch look real nice. The deaths in the embassies in Libya were the result of smoke inhalation in the safe room the embassy personnel retired to. When they were found the mob on the street actually passed them out the embassy window, bucket brigade style to an awaiting ambulance. This is tragic, but just as the Muslims have blown the silly movie all out of proportion, we've turned a tragic accident into a reason for declaring war. Obama certainly could have handled this better, but compared to letting terrorists blow up the twin towers, again, I have to say you're comparing firecrac
Not thought through hard enough? Where were you when Colin Powell said "You break it, you buy it.." And Rummy decided to go in with half the force needed to actually accomplish the job. There was plenty of thought. It just involved privateers in the Cabinet raping both Iraq and the U.S. simultaneously while they got their econo-political nut off. Dubyah, said he was going to succeed where his Father failed PUBLICALLY. He Dad, the exhead of the CIA understood one strongman was better than 50 all shooting at one another with collateral damage out the wazoo.
The whole thing was a bunch of guy each with their own personal agenda lying like rugs to get what the wanted and screwing everyone else over in the process. What part of this is unclear?
I'd pay good cash money to see Captain Jack Sparrow played by "mini-me" Verne Troyer. Have it be about a shrinking curse... that would certainly be having me blowing my favorite beverage outta my nose... hairy feet would be optional.
Whacha be sayin bout dem lil men wit de hairy feet!!! Eh, Monn?
"The Hobbit" without Smaug, would be like L.A, without smog... unnatural and strangely surreal.
Thank you for a George Carlin moment...
Wow... you know this whole mindset that has been creeping in since the 80s is simply shocking. Okay everyone gather around, because Momma Mary is going to tell you a little bit about history. In the 40s and 50s the top tax bracket was over 90%, that's right, if you made $10,000,000 you only took home, $1,000,000, but wealthy people did just fine anyway. On the other side, businesses believed in loyalty to their workers, people often worked for the same business all their livers, Chairmen were taught they had a civic trust to protect their businesses and the people that worked in them. People got pensions paid for by their employers. The middle class was strong. A man could work a 40 hour week and make enough money to buy a car, buy a house, keep his wife at home, and put his kids through college. In this time the economy boomed, and the nations infrastructure blossomed making it even more capable of competing on a global scale.
Fast forward. We live in a time where labor is a commodity, their not even people any more. You don't hire them, you contract them so you don't have to give them benefits. We live in a corporate state of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation. A person is either highly skilled and make over $100,000 a year or he's flipping burgers for $10 an hour, a wage no human being can live on any more so this person needs 2 or three jobs to stay alive. Both parents work. They run up an average of $20,000 in credit debt and the only college these kids are gonna see is a a 2 year City School, and tuitions there are rising faster than the national debt. So the next generation is almost virtually doomed as the imbalance of wealth begins to create the implosion of the American Middle class.
And you says it's because Teachers, Firemen, and Policemen are being greedy? I think not. There was a time when we all had pensions and that was the norm. The unions have done their jobs on behalf of the labor to preserve these benefits. It is the society that sold out the common man that is the culprit here. It is the government of the corporation that has tilted the society in favor of the highest bidder. Yes those union contracts were made when the economy looked red hot, but that was the mistake of the state governments. They made poor or even no contingencies for economic downturn. By all means, renegotiate the union contracts in the light of dire economic shortfalls. Just remember that automation is going to eventually replace all our jobs. If we don't come up with some way to have all people benefit from the coming technological transformation, we will end up with a society where a half dozen people own everything, and the rest of us own nothing. You need to notice the way things are already pulling, the trajectory is clear. The ass you save may well be your own.
Don't forget, Senators and Congressmen kids get to be drafted too, Add the kids of billionaires and business magnates as well as the kids of bureaucrats and judges and I think we could pretty much put an end to American wars as we now know them. We have no business forcing anything on the world and its about time we got out of the war business. Its screwed up our karma.
I'm not at all certain that this isn't planned. I'm not certain that Obama isn't being given this 8 years of "Spear Catching" Because the Republican party is smart enough to know that the party that get's stuck with the decade following Dubya, is going to be steeped in his stank. I would pick a candidate that would lose so four more years of viscous nasty will potentially so undermine the Democratic party that the Reps will have 2 decades to play as they will. Look what happened to Jimmy Carter. They gutted him. Then 12 years of Republican domination. Guys the machine is broken, and its paying out to the guys who own the house, they are going to stay broken. This isn't gambling... This is "Head I win, Tails you lose..."
Dude, I'd be the first to say Big O is scoring about a C- right now, but you've left out so many fact, your comments simply don't hold water. Baby Bush got us into Iraq to prove something to his DAD. He was put up to it by Dick Cheney who saw endless no competition contracts for Halliburton, and Rove who had wet dreams about building a military base in a country flush with Oil and managed with a puppet government installed by the U.S. Did I miss anything... Oh yeah, the "Yellow Cake" cluster fuck they dreamed up and the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" that we never found. Lies and more lies. Are we clear yet? There is NOTHING in the Obama administration to compare, not even vaguely. Even a cursory revue of the Bush Presidency would certainly turn up events that would justifiably end with a firing squad. Obama's a jerk, but he's no traitor. Nearly everything he's done, has been dancing between getting us unstuck from the disasters that Dubya impaled us on, and trying to keep all the moving part inside the bus... (ie. Working inside the disaster that is re Democratic Party) not an easy dance, especially with folks from the right side of aisle taking frequent pot shots at you. The real problem is he should have let go of trying to get people to like him, and pressed on kicking ass and getting jobs done. Of course, it is D.C. and you have to play the game or they make you go away. Strange place we live in.
Actually, I'd love to see what Obama can do as a lame duck, when he no longer has to fellate Hollywood to get reelected. That and he now is clear that trying to build consensus with the Republicans is as pointless as inviting Ted Nugent to a vegan Barbeque. This isn't to say that I haven't been sorely disappointed with Mr. O to date. He has done some excellent things, but the real jobs that need to be performed... putting Glass Steagall back, giving both Israel and Palestine a pair of twisty nipples until they square their collective crap up, Tell Britain to rein their greedy bastards in and give the Platinum miners in South Africa an 'F'ing subsistence wage with basic human benefits... my gawd people, you're mining platinum, jeeze!, Explain to China, LEAD is not a food additive, stocking stuffer, ingredient to anything a child might put in their mouth, or Pet Supplement of any kind and that we're getting a wee bit put out by being poisoned repeatedly. Call us picky that way.
So Mr. Obama, now that you have no illusions to what this job entails, should you be reelected, would you please stop doing all the stupid stuff and actually accomplish the things we need getting done now... eh?
You know, we should just say, listen, we've tried to do this in as civil a manner as possible. We are now going to eliminate your reactor facility. You have exactly 2 hours to evacuate the facility, at which point anyone within a mile of the enrichment facility and the reactors is committing suicide.
Then you converge a constellation of high altitude laser platforms just outside of Iranian air space, and proceed to slag the entire operation. Melt it down to scrap metal. Nobody is dead. Nothing was damaged outside of a site that was involved in making weapons grade fissionable material. They've been warned and warned and warned again. This is a resolution showing that we mean what we say, we are peace loving and committed to avoiding unnecessary brutality, and that in the same breath we'll brook no bullshit from an upstart nation of nerf herfers attempting get ahead by waving threats of mass murder at the world.
There fixed that for ya!
"If ya move, I'm gonna shootcha!" -- Frances McDormand "Fargo"
That would have to do with the fact that her fawning is directly proportional to the size of your trust fund, not your penis.