Every $ spent on the SSC was a $ that could not be spent on other science, like finding out if dinosaurs had colors, for example. The problem was that four projects, the SSC, the ISS, ITER, and the Human Genome Project were contemplated at the same time and would have sucked up all of the funding that the US typically has on a year to year basis. IMHO, they canned the wrong program. The ISS is the one that should have been given the axe. But one or more of them had to go in order to keep funding thousands of small science research projects that are equally worthy of interest. Physicists are not entitled to every damn dollar of science funding the US has. Didn't your mothers try to teach you to share back in kindergarten?
I posit that you were too f'ing lazy to bother reading one complete paragraph on the front page which plainly stated that the state hasn't yet found the funds or resources, in 10 years of trying, to upgrade it.
If your understanding of how government works is so limited that you didn't know that the Controller can't spend the money to upgrade the system without Legislative budgetary approval signed off on by the Governor, do us all a favor and stay home next election day.
Hate to break it to you, but there is zero empirical support for the Laffer Curve and supply side economics. We have run two big experiments, one under Reagan and one under Bush II. Both have demonstrated that cutting taxes does increase growth somewhat, but not by nearly enough to make up for the initial loss in tax revenues. It never seems to occur to supporters of the Laffer Curve idea that the curve as drawn by Laffer is symmetrical like a bell curve and that maybe we were already on the left side where dropping taxes would drop revenue faster than the additional growth could compensate. In the case of Bush II, the results have also demonstrated that tax cuts directed at the upper income brackets are not very effective at generating long term employment growth. The employment growth rate under Bush II has been the worst since WWII.
Not important to who? You? Tough. It is of interest to me and I am quite happy to fund such studies. Curiosity is reason enough to spend money on this and similar research projects. Besides, such research spending is minuscule compared to spending on such frivolities (to me, anyway) as, say, the ISS. I can't imagine that most of the other Big Science projects that have sucked funding from everything small (CERN's Hadron Collider or the Human Genome Project) in the past decade or two would really miss the few $100K needed to study dinosaur coloration.
The FBI might not be the sharpest agency on the block, but your examples are almost completely bogus. Eliot Ness worked for the Treasury Dept, not the FBI. The nuclear spies such as Klaus Fuchs who gave the Soviets the A-Bomb were brought into the Manhattan Project when it was the military who had primary responsibility for security, not the FBI. The FBI actually did break the back of the Mob in the 1950s and 60s although this was due more to pressure from the Kefauver Committee than to J Edgar Hoover. It is the DEA that handles the war on drugs, not the FBI. Waco was kicked off by a BATF screwup which the FBI only later compunded (no pun intended). You need to understand that the job of the FBI wasn't, until after 9/11, the ex-ante prevention of crimes such as spying or terrorism, it was the ex-post investigation of crimes.
Exactly. If speculators were driving up the equilibrium spot price of oil, then there would have to be excess supply on the market. This implies that the excess supply has to be going into storage somewhere. The burden of proof is on those who blame speculators for the high price of oil to show where the excess supply is being stored. To date, noone has been able to show where this excess supply is being stored.
Don't know what state you hunt in, but in OH (see pg 35), the landowners written permission is required for hunting and trapping on private land, regardless of whether the land is posted. You must be able to produce the written permission upon request by a police officer, game warden, or landowner's rep. Ignoring this can cost you 60 days in jail and a $500 fine for the first offense.
but I'm still occupied fixing the numerous little annoyances that came with my last not-quite-ready-for-prime-time-alpha-version open source phone purchase. I hope they can make the beta version a little smaller since it doesn't quite fit into a pocket and it is too big to hold up to my ear for long.
Yes, I know many folks who have had first hand experience with the Feds knocking on their door for expressing peaceful dissent against gov't policies. Once upon a time (1969/1970) it was quite common to have your picture taken by undercover army intelligence officers on your local college campus if you happened to stop and chat for a moment with whoever was manning the anti-war booth in the student union. Stop by too often and they would open a file on you. 15 years earlier, the mere existence of that file might have meant that you couldn't get a job in your chosen profession (university professor, Hollywood screenwriter, etc).
It CAN happen here and we know this because it already HAS happened here in our own lifetimes.
Re:Is Linux kernel 2.6.26 == Linux 2.6.26 ?
on
Linux 2.6.26 Out
·
· Score: 1
I don't know where the defined point is where one ends and the other begins.
What, exactly, do you think that the ETFs are investing in? Many, probably most, are using futures markets to match their target index rather than buying the physical commodities (see PCRIX, DBC, GSG, CRSAX, and GCC for example). Your $100 ETF investment gets levered up the same way a direct purchase of a futures contract would be. The ETF offers the advantage that since it is mimicking an index of commodities, you are able to spread your $100 investment across several commodities instead of just one, thus reducing your risk.
Have you not been paying attention to the financial news lately? These ETFs are at the center of the entire speculation vs. supply/demand controversy over why oil prices have become so high so fast. The ETFs are being bought by pension and endowment funds seeking to diversify their portfolios away from the usual stocks/bonds investments. Lots of individual investors have been doing the same thing in the past year or two.
an average investor doesn't have access to such markets
Actually, the average investor DOES have easy access to such markets. There are ETFs that you can buy like a stock that will do the investing for you. There are even ETFs that allow you to bet on declines in oil futures.
The authoritarian regimes that ran Eastern Europe after WWII began their final collapse less than 20 years ago. Remnants of these groups are still trying to retain control in the Balkan statelets and Russia seems to be seriously backsliding.
The Senate Majority Leader did vote against the bill although if he'd been any good as Senate Majority Leader, the bill with these provisions would never have been brought to the floor in the first place. I'm not convinced that this is necessarily spinelessness so much as ineptitude.
Those may not have been accurate, but just try and find one of them today.
Maybe that is because there were never any such reports. The flight path of Flight 93 was over PA, not MD. It made a turn near Cleveland, OH on its way to Washington, D.C. after it was hijacked and did not make it as far as MD (where Camp David is located) when the crash occurred.
Or perhaps you thought it went from Cleveland to MD and then turned around again to go back because their real target was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and they'd missed their exit the first time?
I agree. Lori Drew deserves some serious jail time. Whichever idiot marked you as a troll for expressing a similar opinion probably should be forced to spend some serious time reading some real trolls on usenet.
My father had to be able to read a language or two as part of his physics PhD. So he set about learning enough French to be able to read physics papers written in French. The test consisted of a professor opening a French physics textbook to a random page and asking Dad to translate. Unfortunately, the random page was not physics, but a detailed description of the scenery around CERN where the author worked. The vocabulary and the way the language was used was just enough different from the specialized vocabulary he had learned that he was not able to complete the translation correctly and flunked the test.
A more humane Mikado never
Did in Japan exist,
To nobody second,
I'm certainly reckoned
A true philanthropist.
It is my very humane endeavour
To make, to some extent,
Each evil liver
A running river
Of harmless merriment.
My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time,
To let the punishment fit the crime,
The punishment fit the crime,
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment!
Of innocent merriment!
The mullahs had been one of the wealthiest groups in Iran prior to the Shah's White Revolution. The mullahs usually came from the rural wealthy land owners. In 1962, the Shah began a land reform program as part of the White Revolution which redistributed much of this land. The land reform (along with imposed cultural changes similar to those of Ataturk next door), were among the reasons the mullahs were so adamantly anti-Shah.
I had to take one of those one time. For each question, I asked myself "How would a homicidal ax murderer answer this question" and picked that choice. I didn't get the job.
The Great Violin Mystery
A great secret lies locked inside the master violins created by Italian craftsmen like Antonio Stradivari in the 17th and 18th centuries. Now, a Wisconsin physicist, working alone in his cellar, may have solved the violin mystery.
Original broadcast date: 10/11/81
The physicist is William Frederick "Jack" Fry, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he established the Experimental High-Energy Physics Program in 1952. Fry was also instrumental in establishing the high-energy physics programs at Padova and Milan universities in Italy.
Fry's work on violin acoustics began in 1985. He has applied principles of acoustics and physics to the complex problems of string instrument construction. His work has been featured on PBS Nova ("The Great Violin Mystery") and he has presented 250 public lectures on his violin research, often in collaboration with violinist Rose Mary Harbison.
See also "The Physics of Violins," The Scientific American, 207 (November 1982) pages 76-94.
As a side note, it is unfortunate that even scientists who study violins have their anti-science counterparts.
Slashdot Mirror
Every $ spent on the SSC was a $ that could not be spent on other science, like finding out if dinosaurs had colors, for example. The problem was that four projects, the SSC, the ISS, ITER, and the Human Genome Project were contemplated at the same time and would have sucked up all of the funding that the US typically has on a year to year basis. IMHO, they canned the wrong program. The ISS is the one that should have been given the axe. But one or more of them had to go in order to keep funding thousands of small science research projects that are equally worthy of interest. Physicists are not entitled to every damn dollar of science funding the US has. Didn't your mothers try to teach you to share back in kindergarten?
I posit that you were too f'ing lazy to bother reading one complete paragraph on the front page which plainly stated that the state hasn't yet found the funds or resources, in 10 years of trying, to upgrade it.
If your understanding of how government works is so limited that you didn't know that the Controller can't spend the money to upgrade the system without Legislative budgetary approval signed off on by the Governor, do us all a favor and stay home next election day.
Hate to break it to you, but there is zero empirical support for the Laffer Curve and supply side economics. We have run two big experiments, one under Reagan and one under Bush II. Both have demonstrated that cutting taxes does increase growth somewhat, but not by nearly enough to make up for the initial loss in tax revenues. It never seems to occur to supporters of the Laffer Curve idea that the curve as drawn by Laffer is symmetrical like a bell curve and that maybe we were already on the left side where dropping taxes would drop revenue faster than the additional growth could compensate. In the case of Bush II, the results have also demonstrated that tax cuts directed at the upper income brackets are not very effective at generating long term employment growth. The employment growth rate under Bush II has been the worst since WWII.
Why 50%? Most AmerIndian tribes have a much lower threshold for determining the right to claim membership.
Joke found in a book of Native American Jokes sold at a school on a South Dakota Sioux reservation:
Q: What would you get if you were to line up 64 Cherokees?
A: A full blooded Indian.
Not important to who? You? Tough. It is of interest to me and I am quite happy to fund such studies. Curiosity is reason enough to spend money on this and similar research projects. Besides, such research spending is minuscule compared to spending on such frivolities (to me, anyway) as, say, the ISS. I can't imagine that most of the other Big Science projects that have sucked funding from everything small (CERN's Hadron Collider or the Human Genome Project) in the past decade or two would really miss the few $100K needed to study dinosaur coloration.
The FBI might not be the sharpest agency on the block, but your examples are almost completely bogus. Eliot Ness worked for the Treasury Dept, not the FBI. The nuclear spies such as Klaus Fuchs who gave the Soviets the A-Bomb were brought into the Manhattan Project when it was the military who had primary responsibility for security, not the FBI. The FBI actually did break the back of the Mob in the 1950s and 60s although this was due more to pressure from the Kefauver Committee than to J Edgar Hoover. It is the DEA that handles the war on drugs, not the FBI. Waco was kicked off by a BATF screwup which the FBI only later compunded (no pun intended). You need to understand that the job of the FBI wasn't, until after 9/11, the ex-ante prevention of crimes such as spying or terrorism, it was the ex-post investigation of crimes.
BTW, Have you ever tried to catch a serial killer? What makes you think it is an easy job for any police agency?
Exactly. If speculators were driving up the equilibrium spot price of oil, then there would have to be excess supply on the market. This implies that the excess supply has to be going into storage somewhere. The burden of proof is on those who blame speculators for the high price of oil to show where the excess supply is being stored. To date, noone has been able to show where this excess supply is being stored.
Paul Krugman and James Hamilton have discussed this in some detail recently.
Don't know what state you hunt in, but in OH (see pg 35), the landowners written permission is required for hunting and trapping on private land, regardless of whether the land is posted. You must be able to produce the written permission upon request by a police officer, game warden, or landowner's rep. Ignoring this can cost you 60 days in jail and a $500 fine for the first offense.
IIRC, ISPs have never had common carrier status.
but I'm still occupied fixing the numerous little annoyances that came with my last not-quite-ready-for-prime-time-alpha-version open source phone purchase. I hope they can make the beta version a little smaller since it doesn't quite fit into a pocket and it is too big to hold up to my ear for long.
Yes, I know many folks who have had first hand experience with the Feds knocking on their door for expressing peaceful dissent against gov't policies. Once upon a time (1969/1970) it was quite common to have your picture taken by undercover army intelligence officers on your local college campus if you happened to stop and chat for a moment with whoever was manning the anti-war booth in the student union. Stop by too often and they would open a file on you. 15 years earlier, the mere existence of that file might have meant that you couldn't get a job in your chosen profession (university professor, Hollywood screenwriter, etc).
It CAN happen here and we know this because it already HAS happened here in our own lifetimes.
I don't know where the defined point is where one ends and the other begins.
If it isn't in Emacs, it is part of the kernel.
What, exactly, do you think that the ETFs are investing in? Many, probably most, are using futures markets to match their target index rather than buying the physical commodities (see PCRIX, DBC, GSG, CRSAX, and GCC for example). Your $100 ETF investment gets levered up the same way a direct purchase of a futures contract would be. The ETF offers the advantage that since it is mimicking an index of commodities, you are able to spread your $100 investment across several commodities instead of just one, thus reducing your risk.
Have you not been paying attention to the financial news lately? These ETFs are at the center of the entire speculation vs. supply/demand controversy over why oil prices have become so high so fast. The ETFs are being bought by pension and endowment funds seeking to diversify their portfolios away from the usual stocks/bonds investments. Lots of individual investors have been doing the same thing in the past year or two.
an average investor doesn't have access to such markets
Actually, the average investor DOES have easy access to such markets. There are ETFs that you can buy like a stock that will do the investing for you. There are even ETFs that allow you to bet on declines in oil futures.
Great, that's just what we need: another POMPOUS political party.
The Austrians elected a former Nazi Wehrmacht intelligence officer as President from 1986-1992 only 22 years ago.
The authoritarian regimes that ran Eastern Europe after WWII began their final collapse less than 20 years ago. Remnants of these groups are still trying to retain control in the Balkan statelets and Russia seems to be seriously backsliding.
Europe is not quite there yet.
Reid (D-NV), Nay
The Senate Majority Leader did vote against the bill although if he'd been any good as Senate Majority Leader, the bill with these provisions would never have been brought to the floor in the first place. I'm not convinced that this is necessarily spinelessness so much as ineptitude.
Those may not have been accurate, but just try and find one of them today.
Maybe that is because there were never any such reports. The flight path of Flight 93 was over PA, not MD. It made a turn near Cleveland, OH on its way to Washington, D.C. after it was hijacked and did not make it as far as MD (where Camp David is located) when the crash occurred. Or perhaps you thought it went from Cleveland to MD and then turned around again to go back because their real target was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and they'd missed their exit the first time?
I agree. Lori Drew deserves some serious jail time. Whichever idiot marked you as a troll for expressing a similar opinion probably should be forced to spend some serious time reading some real trolls on usenet.
My father had to be able to read a language or two as part of his physics PhD. So he set about learning enough French to be able to read physics papers written in French. The test consisted of a professor opening a French physics textbook to a random page and asking Dad to translate. Unfortunately, the random page was not physics, but a detailed description of the scenery around CERN where the author worked. The vocabulary and the way the language was used was just enough different from the specialized vocabulary he had learned that he was not able to complete the translation correctly and flunked the test.
A more humane Mikado never
Did in Japan exist,
To nobody second,
I'm certainly reckoned
A true philanthropist.
It is my very humane endeavour
To make, to some extent,
Each evil liver
A running river
Of harmless merriment.
My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time,
To let the punishment fit the crime,
The punishment fit the crime,
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment!
Of innocent merriment!
The mullahs had been one of the wealthiest groups in Iran prior to the Shah's White Revolution. The mullahs usually came from the rural wealthy land owners. In 1962, the Shah began a land reform program as part of the White Revolution which redistributed much of this land. The land reform (along with imposed cultural changes similar to those of Ataturk next door), were among the reasons the mullahs were so adamantly anti-Shah.
I had to take one of those one time. For each question, I asked myself "How would a homicidal ax murderer answer this question" and picked that choice. I didn't get the job.
fire him, reprimand him, let him go
You ax him, of course.
It was a PBS NOVA episode:
The Great Violin Mystery
A great secret lies locked inside the master violins created by Italian craftsmen like Antonio Stradivari in the 17th and 18th centuries. Now, a Wisconsin physicist, working alone in his cellar, may have solved the violin mystery.
Original broadcast date: 10/11/81
The physicist is William Frederick "Jack" Fry, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he established the Experimental High-Energy Physics Program in 1952. Fry was also instrumental in establishing the high-energy physics programs at Padova and Milan universities in Italy.
Fry's work on violin acoustics began in 1985. He has applied principles of acoustics and physics to the complex problems of string instrument construction. His work has been featured on PBS Nova ("The Great Violin Mystery") and he has presented 250 public lectures on his violin research, often in collaboration with violinist Rose Mary Harbison.
See also "The Physics of Violins," The Scientific American, 207 (November 1982) pages 76-94.
As a side note, it is unfortunate that even scientists who study violins have their anti-science counterparts.
;) Yeah, that was one of those where you realize you've mucked it up right after you've hit the submit button.
Errata:
Hal: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.