"Parents that truly care take the time to look at the back of the box"
Where does this time come from? We can say the same thing about umpteen hundred billion things parents *should do* where does that leave time for parents to have a personal life?
There are several things wrong with this:
1. If they have the time to complain to congress, perhaps they could have used that free block of time to check the back of the box.
2. Parents pay plenty of attention to the ratings of movies and TV. Checking the back of the box takes about the same amount of time. In fact, since movies and TV, at $0-$10, are purchased far more frequently than $60 games, checking the game ratings would take considerably less time overall.
3. Media is often lumped together in one category. If parents pay attention to "explicit lyrics" on CDs and R-ratings on movies, it's easy to understand that games fall into roughly the same category and therefore should also be checked for a rating. This simple association helps parents understand the need to check in a very short time.
4. Unlike the confusing instructions that it takes to operate the game consoles themselves, and unlike the pain in the ass it is to set up the V-chip, looking at the back of the game box is a breeze, and therefore is far less time consuming. Since the ratings are briefly explained on each box, there is very little extra effort necessary to get accustomed to understand the ratings.
Simply put, parents should have a blanket policy of giving a brief inspection to any media their kids will be accessing in the house. If you believe you would be a bad parent if you let our 10-year old kids watch Pulp-fiction or Fight Club, and you take the time to keep these away from your children, then you would be just as bad of a parent to not look at the back of the box and decide Grand Theft Auto or Manhunt, is just not right for little Billy. If you're too busy to do this simple thing then perhaps you should reconsider having children at all. Or maybe just decide that it's ok for Billy to do anything he damn well wants.
Without common sense, if you RTFA you would have noticed it is for people who already have an addiction. You are right that it would be ineffective as just a general vaccine. (that is what you were implying right?)
You are right that I was referring to the idea of a vaccine. I was referring to that because that's what the parent post had specifically asked about. It's not a good idea. However, I feel completely different about voluntary treatment, especially in conjunction with other proven treatment methods such as counseling and 12-step NA type programs.
People who want to quit are presumably not out there looking for a new drug to get them high. But people who don't want to quit will find alternatives for methods for escape, or whatever other reason they like drugs. A vaccine would be completely ineffective to these people if their underlying reason for taking drugs is not addressed.
Kids/teenagers, as the parent post was referring to, will simply start abusive behavior with other drugs if they're prone to such behavior and cocaine is ineffective. Where I grew up, teenagers were able to make just as much of a nuisance and damage both their person and society every bit as much with alcohol. Inoculating them against cocaine would not stop this behavior, but if they sought out treatment for cocaine addiction, their desire to clean up their lives is far more likely to extend to other drugs as well.
Yes, it's that government. If someone is a lier you'd be a fool to believe everything they say. But you'd be just a much of a fool to discount everything. You gotta read between the lines. If you're good at this, you can learn a whole lot, even from the Government.
These aren't checked thoroughly, but they do include two government sources, a respected newspaper, and some guy who wrote a book. Is it true? I don't know, but there does seem to be some belief that this can be an issue.
Of course. Obviously, breaking a treaty would have consequences. But nevertheless, it's still our decision whether to do so and accept those consequences, or not.
I would agree with this, but this is also true in your personal life. You can decide to pay your mortgage, or accept the consequences. You can decide to follow the speed limit, or accept the consequences. Everyone has a choice. We may play fast and loose with the speed limit, but the mortgage is almost never ignored unless there is a very serious reason. The consequences are just to great.
So the question is whether trade and intellectual property agreements are more like speeding or more like the home loan? Make no mistake, trade always goes hand and hand with IP. We could not negotiate trade agreements with first and second tier countries without talking copyright and we could not talk copyright outside of the context of trade. If we unilaterally pull out of all of our agreements that include copyright, would the consequences to our trade agreements be a very serious thing for our country? You betcha. It's the mortgage.
BTW, didn't mean to label you. I struggled with whether to add the "conservative" part, and only did so because all of the people I've personally heard talk about sovereignty in this way self-identified as conservative. I totally support a view of politics that doesn't force itself into our more typical political poles.
So what? Answer me this: In America, who has sovereignty? We the actual citizens, or foreigners?
I keep hearing this "sovereignty" thing bandied about by (usually conservative) people. They usually say it in the context of "we'll be giving up our sovereignty" with this treaty or that or "we should do [insert treaty-breaking thing we just feel like doing] because we have sovereignty!"
Here's the thing; Abiding by your agreements IS NOT some sort of weakness where you're somehow giving up your right of self-determination. It's simply keeping your end of a bargain. It's, you know, that honesty thing, where you make a contract, and then do the thing you said you were going to do in the contract.
But it gets better. We usually get something we want when we make these deals. You got that? It's not just give, give, give, give, give. We actually get something in return. I don't know about you, but it doesn't seem very nice to me when someone takes something from me, then doesn't give me the thing they promised in return. I try to avoid doing business with that guy in the future.
Sure, I understand that treaties sometimes need to be dissolved. It happens. But it gives me the willys when you sovereignty folks act like it should be done at the drop of a hat. It's serious damn business and should be treated as such. doing it simply "because we can" is not good enough. If it comes to exercising our sovereignty whenever we feel like it or being a good honest neighbor and only breaking treaties unilaterally when there's a very serious reason, well, I value good and honest a hell of a lot more. It just seems like the American way to do things. At least I hope so.
Just wanted to add that no matter what the posted speed may be on public roads, you may legally drive whatever speed you'd like on private property in the U.S.
For now, multi-platform release games have consistently looked better on the 360 than on the PS3. Oblivion is one of the rare exceptions to this, but it got a texture update for the PS3...can't really objectively compare the two.
The translation of this is that Oblivion looked better because the people who made it polished it specifically for the PS3. Madden undoubtedly looked better on the 360 for a similar reason. It's not a deficiency in the PS3 that gives it graphics headaches on multi-platform games, but developers who don't put in the effort to do the port correctly. Bethesda made that effort and EA Sports did not.
Sure, you could justifiably argue that consumers would be better off with a 360 because more developers are making better versions of their multi-platform games for it, but this does not translate into a deficiency in the PS3 itself. The Oblivion experience clearly shows the PS3 hardware is more than up to the task. And though it certainly signals a problem for Sony, that problem is not necessarily Sony's fault.
Developers are the ones who need to step it up. Yeah, the developers have a much bigger market with the 15 million or so 360 owners, but it's flat-out stupid to give a poor product to the 8 million or so PS3 customers. Pissing off a third of your potential customers has never been a good way to maximize profits.
Off Topic: Ranting about why any other aspect of the PS3 sucks
For the record, the new visualizer looks nice if you happen to be playing music, which the PS3 does fairly well. Please feel free to tear this comment to shreds if you'd like to get back on topic. In exchange, I promise not to rant about the red ring of death when responding to any article where Xbox hardware isn't specifically mentioned.
"They will if you also store the algorithm the codec uses. You can always re-write a codec in the future, so long as you know how it's algorithm and data structures work."
Similar logic fixes most of the other problems as well. Who cares if hard drive spindles freeze up. Are we really predicting they won't be able to make new electric motors in 50-100 years?
How about the idea that film merely "degrades" where digital files become "unreadable?" Well, not really. It only becomes "unreadable" to the average Joe who only knows how to click. For data retrieval experts, restoring files with some degradation to the media shouldn't be a terribly lot more difficult than trying to restore water-damaged film stock frame by frame. Both are difficult and expensive, but can certainly yield usable results. And for those damaged bits, it's very conceivable that in 50 to 100 years, the process will be easily automated, while film restoration will most likely remain a manual process.
And while we're talking about the miracle of film stock merely "degrading," digital will always have a "degraded" format that is readily available if the original gets damaged. Just grab DVDs/HD-DVDs or Blue-Ray disks. If the disks have degraded, grab the rips that have been passed from hard drive to hard drive over the years. No, these are not as good as the originals, but if we're comparing film to digital, these degraded forms are certainly no worse than what happens in many of the ways film can get damaged.
Finally, what about that cost? The article gave numbers, but gave absolutely nothing to back them up. Nothing. Sure, they showed potential problems, but didn't give us any information about why it costs so much to solve them. There's no way to determine if that's for equipment that will be half the cost in a year, if it's for data vault storage where they're getting significantly more value than they do in their film vaults, or if it's for manpower for processes that will be automated within the next five years.
I won't go as far as saying that this is a non-issue. There's some work that needs to be done. But these are most certainly solvable problems, and the solutions have the potential to yield far better results than film archiving could ever hope for.
I don't think that's what it said. I think it said the lithium was a replacement for control rods to absorb neutrons and keep the nuclear reaction under control. I don't think the article specified the fuel at all.
Now I am not a nuclear reactor engineer nor a physicist, so if you know more about how this works it would be great to get a better explanation than the one the very short article gave.
BTW, never trust anyone who says "nothing can go wrong with it." Something can always go wrong. If they say "these are the risks, but we've assessed them and their mitigating factors and we ultimately believe the ristks aren't big enough to cause concern," you can start paying attention again.
Current batteries take up mores space and weight than you may think. If you take your current cell phone and pull off the battery cover and take out the battery, you can feel, and in most cases kind of picture, what your phone might be like if it had a battery a tenth the size. With my phone it's a pretty significant difference.
I use this comparison because you don't have to change form factors to immediately see a benefit. I have a Cingular 8125. It's a couple of generations old, but the new AT&T Tilt has almost the same dimensions. These are bulky phones. Almost every day of the year I have enough battery power for what I do with the phone, but every single day I have to carry around that bulk. if it were a quarter inch thinner, it would be a very big improvement while still keeping a very useful form factor.
I doubt you'll have to worry about this for awhile. While everyone is looking at this as longer battery life, the more probable initial use will be to make smaller, lighter batteries with the same, or just a little more, power as you're currently used to.
This is going to be expensive in the beginning. Companies will be looking for a way to leverage the new tech without the battery becoming more expensive than all the other parts combined. But they might still have an advantage without breaking the bank too badly if they can offer smaller notebooks.
But what about your cell phone? Surely they'll want to give you 20 hours of talk time? Same thing here. Size is a really big deal in handheld devices. You can bet Apple will have more interest in making iphones 1/8 of an inch thinner than giving you a product you could use for a week straight without recharging. Of course, cost is likely to be a factor here as well.
Then there's you folks. If the cost were exactly the same, and you had to choose between long life and better portability, how would you choose? Laptop makers very often offer extended life batteries that happen to be kind of bulky. Sometimes they offer batteries that aren't bulky, but they take up your optical drive. I've seen a couple of people use these, but only a couple. Same thing with cell phones. Most cell phones let you swap batteries to your heart's content, but most people just don't buy spare batteries, and even fewer buy the bulky extended life batteries.
As much as they bitch about battery life, I think the truth is that what most people have is kind of ok with them most of the time. Sure, you might need better life, and I'm sure you'll be able to get it, much like you can get it now, but I think laptop manufacturers are going to tend to serve the masses for most of their products.
"But wait!" you say, "the whole idea is that you can have more power plus a smaller size." Well, not really. When this tech becomes available, the comparison won't be with lithium whatever batteries. The comparison will be with devices that have the new tech, but less of it. All of a sudden a battery the size of your current laptop battery will look like a huge, heavy beasts compared to the new ones. You'll gladly have only 5 hours of battery life instead of carrying around something so _heavy_(how did you ever manage it?).
Of course Butler had a hard time. Saddam kicked him out, violating UN resolutions in the process. While Butler was there, he was thwarted by Saddam every step of the way.
But we sent another guy in later. After we started threatening war in 2002, Bush agreed to have the UN send another inspector, and Saddam agreed to receive him and give him access. That inspector, Hans Blix, also wrote a book called Disarming Iraq (ISBN 0375423028). He details how he largely got what he needed and he concluded that though not 100% sure, he was reasonably certain Iraq did not have WMDs. After the invasion, of coarse, he was proved right.
You're right about the aborted nuke program. My bad. But they did abandon it pretty much like they said they did when they where all eager to come clean to avoid an invasion. We just didn't listen to what they had to say and what we did listen to we didn't believe.
Yes, we listened to the first weapons inspector who was constantly being jerked around and was given little access. But why didn't we listen to the other one later on who had far better access at a time when Saddam was much more open in an effort to avoid a war? Our stated intent of sending Hans was to gather information about whether Saddam had WMDs, but when he made his report we ignored it.
It's like sending someone that you believe to be reliable to go outside and see if it's raining. When he comes back to report that it is raining, you conclude that he's actually unreliable, largely because it conflicts with what you've already determined you want to do. As a result, you go outside without an umbrella and you get soaked. When you're shivering and you're trying to figure out who to blame, I can't help believing that it's your own damned fault.
Note that Kaddafi was able to show that he shut down his nuclear program because he had one to shut down and he documented that process. Saddam, on the other hand, didn't have a nuclear program. It's much, much more difficult to prove that you shut down your nuclear program if you don't, in fact, have one to shut down. How do you prove that you don't have yellow cake uranium or that all those aluminum tubes were not bought uranium enrichment?
Proving a negative is famously hard, but saying "prove it!" is very easy. We found no WMD programs when we showed up in Baghdad, and yet you're still acting like Saddam was somehow a liar when he told us he didn't have any. He showed quite a bit of evidence to the UN inspector and the inspector found it credible, but for some reason I'm still hearing you say that it was his fault for not showing evidence.
Bottom line: When you accuse someone, they offer an alibi with supporting documents, and yet they're still thrown in jail, when DNA evidence proves them innocent you don't get to continue to act like it's somehow their fault they didn't make it believable enough. In reality, it's kinda your fault for not making a good assessment of the evidence in the first place. In our case we had bad intelligence and we jumped to wrong conclusions while we consistently ignored the evidence that others, like the UN inspector, had to offer. Saying it's Saddam's fault for somehow not convincing us is highly foolish.
There are a lot of people that are happy that Saddam is gone. He was not a nice guy. Despite this, you'd have to search very hard to find an Iraqi that thinks the current situation in Iraq is an acceptable alternative. They may say, "it'll be great after we get through this mess," but even if some personal lives are improved (say, by being released from prison w/torture), none of those people are going to say that the current state of their country is an improvement.
Interesting. How's he supposed to do this? Is he supposed to take a picture of the process of destroying all the WMDs he had already destroyed? If he does produce pictures for say, 1000 chemical warheads and says, "see, we destroyed all of 'em," and it really is all of 'em, would the US have been satisfied if, say, the US erroneously believed he had 2000 warheads? Does he write down, "I solemnly swear we don't have WMDs" and sign it? Do we have him jump in a river and if he sinks and drowns then we know he's telling the truth, but if he floats we know he's a lier and we invade?
When the last UN inspectors showed up just before the invasion, the Iraqis took them all over the place and showed them lots of evidence of WMD destruction. They showed the UN inspector missiles that they thought were ok, but when the inspectors said they weren't they immediately started destroying them. The UN inspector told the United States that though there were some significant things that weren't accounted for, the evidence substantially showed that Iraq had gotten out of the WMD business.
You need to look back over the news clippings before believing the Bush line that "they didn't prove it!" If the Iraqis showed a bunch of evidence and the UN inspector says it's not great, but it's pretty good, I'm not sure that counts as "bluffing your way to the gallows." The fact is that we didn't find these WMDs, so we know that both Saddam and the inspectors were substantially accurate. Saddam was a dick and a lier, but he wasn't lying about it this time. Saying that his lack of documentation is somehow responsible for our bullshit intelligence and our inability to trust the pro that WE sent in to verify the situation is kind of fucked up.
You're right, we can't avoid having collateral damage in a war. However, that doesn't mean that we should accept unlimited collateral damage. Sure, it's subjective, but who's making those subjective decisions? By what standard do they rate their performance?
Pretend we're in a war with two fronts. One front is in Los Angeles. The other front is in a similar sprawling city in our enemy's country. The armies on both fronts are the same size. The guy ruling our enemies is evil, while his people are comparable to US citizens in the good/evil department.
So my question is, is the same level of collateral damage acceptable on both fronts? Do we bomb the hell out of both regardless of consequences or do we do our damdest to precision strike on both fronts?
My guess is that as soon as we had to shoot at enemy soldiers in our own back yards, all of sudden we'd care about collateral damage about as much as we care when a policeman misses a bad guy and hits a civilian by mistake. In other words, a lot. "Sure, collateral damage will happen," we'd say, "but you better do everything in your power to keep that number as low as you possibly can. And here, we'll give you a bunch of extra money and training so you can do everything possible to help the situation and we'll send people to jail if it looks like they're not being really, really careful about our citizens." Blackwater type situations would result in prison sentences at best.
My sense is that we wouldn't push quite that hard on the second front. We'd shrug and shake our heads and say, "collateral damage is just unavoidable." The numbers would be higher and we just wouldn't care.
In America, we try to protect ourselves as much as possible. We try really hard to see that only "bad guys" suffer. If we just followed that damned "golden rule" then I don't think I'd have much to say about this.
I agree with your statement that we shouldn't spread propaganda, but sometimes truthful statements that are neither misleading nor inflammatory might be viewed as worse than they really are.
For example, I took great pains to not list a number of Iraqi civilians killed and I also took great pains not to list the number, or ratio of combatants to non-combatants I think would be acceptable. I simply said that there is a number that's too high and we should come up with targets to avoid hitting those numbers.
We may disagree about what those numbers should be, but I emphatically reject the notion that "everything we're doing is legal, so the number of non-combatant casualties we have right now is ok." In fact, it may (or may not) be legal and it may (or may not) be moral, but you won't really know that if you refuse to scrutinize the situation. It may be legal to drop a bomb that takes out an apartment building mostly filled with non-combatant in order to kill a handful of combatants, but if the same thing could be reasonably handled without killing most of those non-combatants, then it is immoral and indefensible to drop that bomb. In a war zone you cant study every bomb case-by-case, but you can make targets, and if those targets are exceeded, you can certainly ask "why?".
I don't think any of this has anything to do with propaganda. It's a call for an examination of our practices and for an definition of what we would like our practices to be. If someone wishes that this wasn't examined, a reasonable person should do what reasonable people always do when people around them avoid examination of the evidence. They should ask that person why they're avoiding the truth, and they should try all the harder to uncover it.
Boeing's Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) which is being developed for the Department of Defense, will destroy, damage or disable targets with little to no collateral damage, supporting missions on the battlefield and in urban operations.
More like, it becomes possible to destroy a missile launcher even when the Hamassholes have hidden them among their own civilians.
Isn't that great. Assuming widespread deployment of course, our military won't really have any excuse for killing large numbers of civilians in a war zone. Our military never should have gotten a free pass on this to begin with, but with this technology they should get even more scrutiny. As a society that feels we need the occasional war, we need to take a hard line on "collateral damage." We need to have target metrics for acceptable levels of collateral damage and we need to hold our military leaders accountable for exceeding them.
Do you think [insert number of civilians your favorite study thinks got killed by us in Iraq] is acceptable? Why? How about ten times that amount? Certainly there is some number that would make you feel nauseous and fearful that this was all being done in your name? Every business has target numbers for sales and losses and our military has goals for advancement and acceptable troop losses on the battlefield, so why would we let them not have targets for this? We must hold our military accountable, and if this laser makes it so much easier for us to only hit the enemy, then the number of civilians killed in future wars sure as hell better be a lot lower than we're seeing now.
We shouldn't need a private-sector solution. The government should be designing cites with far fewer left turns. Thank god for the Republicans. Their tireless efforts to turn our country to the right will not be forgotten.
Well, yes, but then there isn't really a viable infrastructure for micropayments.
McDonald's, Burger King and Taco Bell must not have gotten the word on micropayments not being viable. Sony must be ignorant of this as well, because they've always taken exact change on the PSN.
My understanding is that Visa charges between 1.5% and 2% plus a transaction fee of four cents on purchases under $15. My info is a couple of years old so it may be a little different now, but the basic gist of it is that if you buy a $5.00 Happy Meal, Visa will get something like $0.10 to $0.14. If you buy a $1.99 vehicle enhancement for MotorStorm Visa will get perhaps $.07.
The fast food chains like it so much they're actively promoting it. It's so fast (no signature required) that it often beats waiting for change. It's not perfect, but it's both viable and thriving.
In many cases, an unclassified Government job can interact with a classified project.
I think this is a little misleading. If you are working in an position that doesn't handle classified material and you're then asked to work with classified material, you must get a security clearance first. That is all true. But then it's not really correct to say you're still working in an "unclassified government job" because by definition it could not be an "unclassified government job" if you're required to work with classified material.
I fully support people having very intrusive investigations to attain a security clearance. However, if you're not working with any material that requires a security clearance, as applies to these scientists, then it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to require personal investigations. Simply put, if they need the clearance, have them go through the process and if they don't, then leave them alone.
But why spend money on GameCube games? You'll never have enough time to to play them all. You're being manipulated into thinking this will make your life complete. you should look beyond material possessions to what's really important. Why not put the money in a 401k for retirement or donate to a homeless shelter?
Sometimes the sheeple (probably the same people that camp outside stores for an iPhone) need to step beyond material possessions some time and think about how they are ultimately just being manipulated by big fat corporations.
Seriously, you can buy all the GC games you want. You should spend your money however you see fit. But you might want to think twice about calling other people names for their materialism in the breath that you brag about yours.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several things wrong with this:
1. If they have the time to complain to congress, perhaps they could have used that free block of time to check the back of the box.
2. Parents pay plenty of attention to the ratings of movies and TV. Checking the back of the box takes about the same amount of time. In fact, since movies and TV, at $0-$10, are purchased far more frequently than $60 games, checking the game ratings would take considerably less time overall.
3. Media is often lumped together in one category. If parents pay attention to "explicit lyrics" on CDs and R-ratings on movies, it's easy to understand that games fall into roughly the same category and therefore should also be checked for a rating. This simple association helps parents understand the need to check in a very short time.
4. Unlike the confusing instructions that it takes to operate the game consoles themselves, and unlike the pain in the ass it is to set up the V-chip, looking at the back of the game box is a breeze, and therefore is far less time consuming. Since the ratings are briefly explained on each box, there is very little extra effort necessary to get accustomed to understand the ratings.
Simply put, parents should have a blanket policy of giving a brief inspection to any media their kids will be accessing in the house. If you believe you would be a bad parent if you let our 10-year old kids watch Pulp-fiction or Fight Club, and you take the time to keep these away from your children, then you would be just as bad of a parent to not look at the back of the box and decide Grand Theft Auto or Manhunt, is just not right for little Billy. If you're too busy to do this simple thing then perhaps you should reconsider having children at all. Or maybe just decide that it's ok for Billy to do anything he damn well wants.
You are right that I was referring to the idea of a vaccine. I was referring to that because that's what the parent post had specifically asked about. It's not a good idea. However, I feel completely different about voluntary treatment, especially in conjunction with other proven treatment methods such as counseling and 12-step NA type programs.
People who want to quit are presumably not out there looking for a new drug to get them high. But people who don't want to quit will find alternatives for methods for escape, or whatever other reason they like drugs. A vaccine would be completely ineffective to these people if their underlying reason for taking drugs is not addressed.
Kids/teenagers, as the parent post was referring to, will simply start abusive behavior with other drugs if they're prone to such behavior and cocaine is ineffective. Where I grew up, teenagers were able to make just as much of a nuisance and damage both their person and society every bit as much with alcohol. Inoculating them against cocaine would not stop this behavior, but if they sought out treatment for cocaine addiction, their desire to clean up their lives is far more likely to extend to other drugs as well.
Yes, it's that government. If someone is a lier you'd be a fool to believe everything they say. But you'd be just a much of a fool to discount everything. You gotta read between the lines. If you're good at this, you can learn a whole lot, even from the Government.
Here are a few sources grabbed randomely
from Google.
These aren't checked thoroughly, but they do include two government sources, a respected newspaper, and some guy who wrote a book. Is it true? I don't know, but there does seem to be some belief that this can be an issue.
I doubt it would matter much. There's a lot of evidence that drug abusers will simply switch drugs when their drug of choice becomes unavailable.
It's a real comfort to know that meth, oxy and alcohol abuse will still be available to our children after we save them from the scourge of cocaine.
I would agree with this, but this is also true in your personal life. You can decide to pay your mortgage, or accept the consequences. You can decide to follow the speed limit, or accept the consequences. Everyone has a choice. We may play fast and loose with the speed limit, but the mortgage is almost never ignored unless there is a very serious reason. The consequences are just to great.
So the question is whether trade and intellectual property agreements are more like speeding or more like the home loan? Make no mistake, trade always goes hand and hand with IP. We could not negotiate trade agreements with first and second tier countries without talking copyright and we could not talk copyright outside of the context of trade. If we unilaterally pull out of all of our agreements that include copyright, would the consequences to our trade agreements be a very serious thing for our country? You betcha. It's the mortgage.
BTW, didn't mean to label you. I struggled with whether to add the "conservative" part, and only did so because all of the people I've personally heard talk about sovereignty in this way self-identified as conservative. I totally support a view of politics that doesn't force itself into our more typical political poles.
I keep hearing this "sovereignty" thing bandied about by (usually conservative) people. They usually say it in the context of "we'll be giving up our sovereignty" with this treaty or that or "we should do [insert treaty-breaking thing we just feel like doing] because we have sovereignty!"
Here's the thing; Abiding by your agreements IS NOT some sort of weakness where you're somehow giving up your right of self-determination. It's simply keeping your end of a bargain. It's, you know, that honesty thing, where you make a contract, and then do the thing you said you were going to do in the contract.
But it gets better. We usually get something we want when we make these deals. You got that? It's not just give, give, give, give, give. We actually get something in return. I don't know about you, but it doesn't seem very nice to me when someone takes something from me, then doesn't give me the thing they promised in return. I try to avoid doing business with that guy in the future.
Sure, I understand that treaties sometimes need to be dissolved. It happens. But it gives me the willys when you sovereignty folks act like it should be done at the drop of a hat. It's serious damn business and should be treated as such. doing it simply "because we can" is not good enough. If it comes to exercising our sovereignty whenever we feel like it or being a good honest neighbor and only breaking treaties unilaterally when there's a very serious reason, well, I value good and honest a hell of a lot more. It just seems like the American way to do things. At least I hope so.
Just wanted to add that no matter what the posted speed may be on public roads, you may legally drive whatever speed you'd like on private property in the U.S.
The translation of this is that Oblivion looked better because the people who made it polished it specifically for the PS3. Madden undoubtedly looked better on the 360 for a similar reason. It's not a deficiency in the PS3 that gives it graphics headaches on multi-platform games, but developers who don't put in the effort to do the port correctly. Bethesda made that effort and EA Sports did not.
Sure, you could justifiably argue that consumers would be better off with a 360 because more developers are making better versions of their multi-platform games for it, but this does not translate into a deficiency in the PS3 itself. The Oblivion experience clearly shows the PS3 hardware is more than up to the task. And though it certainly signals a problem for Sony, that problem is not necessarily Sony's fault.
Developers are the ones who need to step it up. Yeah, the developers have a much bigger market with the 15 million or so 360 owners, but it's flat-out stupid to give a poor product to the 8 million or so PS3 customers. Pissing off a third of your potential customers has never been a good way to maximize profits.
Topic: The new visualizer for the PS3
Off Topic: Ranting about why any other aspect of the PS3 sucks
For the record, the new visualizer looks nice if you happen to be playing music, which the PS3 does fairly well. Please feel free to tear this comment to shreds if you'd like to get back on topic. In exchange, I promise not to rant about the red ring of death when responding to any article where Xbox hardware isn't specifically mentioned.
Cheers,
TW
"They will if you also store the algorithm the codec uses. You can always re-write a codec in the future, so long as you know how it's algorithm and data structures work."
Similar logic fixes most of the other problems as well. Who cares if hard drive spindles freeze up. Are we really predicting they won't be able to make new electric motors in 50-100 years?
How about the idea that film merely "degrades" where digital files become "unreadable?" Well, not really. It only becomes "unreadable" to the average Joe who only knows how to click. For data retrieval experts, restoring files with some degradation to the media shouldn't be a terribly lot more difficult than trying to restore water-damaged film stock frame by frame. Both are difficult and expensive, but can certainly yield usable results. And for those damaged bits, it's very conceivable that in 50 to 100 years, the process will be easily automated, while film restoration will most likely remain a manual process.
And while we're talking about the miracle of film stock merely "degrading," digital will always have a "degraded" format that is readily available if the original gets damaged. Just grab DVDs/HD-DVDs or Blue-Ray disks. If the disks have degraded, grab the rips that have been passed from hard drive to hard drive over the years. No, these are not as good as the originals, but if we're comparing film to digital, these degraded forms are certainly no worse than what happens in many of the ways film can get damaged.
Finally, what about that cost? The article gave numbers, but gave absolutely nothing to back them up. Nothing. Sure, they showed potential problems, but didn't give us any information about why it costs so much to solve them. There's no way to determine if that's for equipment that will be half the cost in a year, if it's for data vault storage where they're getting significantly more value than they do in their film vaults, or if it's for manpower for processes that will be automated within the next five years.
I won't go as far as saying that this is a non-issue. There's some work that needs to be done. But these are most certainly solvable problems, and the solutions have the potential to yield far better results than film archiving could ever hope for.
"TFA says it'll use lithium-6."
I don't think that's what it said. I think it said the lithium was a replacement for control rods to absorb neutrons and keep the nuclear reaction under control. I don't think the article specified the fuel at all.
Now I am not a nuclear reactor engineer nor a physicist, so if you know more about how this works it would be great to get a better explanation than the one the very short article gave.
BTW, never trust anyone who says "nothing can go wrong with it." Something can always go wrong. If they say "these are the risks, but we've assessed them and their mitigating factors and we ultimately believe the ristks aren't big enough to cause concern," you can start paying attention again.
Current batteries take up mores space and weight than you may think. If you take your current cell phone and pull off the battery cover and take out the battery, you can feel, and in most cases kind of picture, what your phone might be like if it had a battery a tenth the size. With my phone it's a pretty significant difference.
I use this comparison because you don't have to change form factors to immediately see a benefit. I have a Cingular 8125. It's a couple of generations old, but the new AT&T Tilt has almost the same dimensions. These are bulky phones. Almost every day of the year I have enough battery power for what I do with the phone, but every single day I have to carry around that bulk. if it were a quarter inch thinner, it would be a very big improvement while still keeping a very useful form factor.
I doubt you'll have to worry about this for awhile. While everyone is looking at this as longer battery life, the more probable initial use will be to make smaller, lighter batteries with the same, or just a little more, power as you're currently used to.
This is going to be expensive in the beginning. Companies will be looking for a way to leverage the new tech without the battery becoming more expensive than all the other parts combined. But they might still have an advantage without breaking the bank too badly if they can offer smaller notebooks.
But what about your cell phone? Surely they'll want to give you 20 hours of talk time? Same thing here. Size is a really big deal in handheld devices. You can bet Apple will have more interest in making iphones 1/8 of an inch thinner than giving you a product you could use for a week straight without recharging. Of course, cost is likely to be a factor here as well.
Then there's you folks. If the cost were exactly the same, and you had to choose between long life and better portability, how would you choose? Laptop makers very often offer extended life batteries that happen to be kind of bulky. Sometimes they offer batteries that aren't bulky, but they take up your optical drive. I've seen a couple of people use these, but only a couple. Same thing with cell phones. Most cell phones let you swap batteries to your heart's content, but most people just don't buy spare batteries, and even fewer buy the bulky extended life batteries.
As much as they bitch about battery life, I think the truth is that what most people have is kind of ok with them most of the time. Sure, you might need better life, and I'm sure you'll be able to get it, much like you can get it now, but I think laptop manufacturers are going to tend to serve the masses for most of their products.
"But wait!" you say, "the whole idea is that you can have more power plus a smaller size." Well, not really. When this tech becomes available, the comparison won't be with lithium whatever batteries. The comparison will be with devices that have the new tech, but less of it. All of a sudden a battery the size of your current laptop battery will look like a huge, heavy beasts compared to the new ones. You'll gladly have only 5 hours of battery life instead of carrying around something so _heavy_(how did you ever manage it?).
Of course Butler had a hard time. Saddam kicked him out, violating UN resolutions in the process. While Butler was there, he was thwarted by Saddam every step of the way.
But we sent another guy in later. After we started threatening war in 2002, Bush agreed to have the UN send another inspector, and Saddam agreed to receive him and give him access. That inspector, Hans Blix, also wrote a book called Disarming Iraq (ISBN 0375423028). He details how he largely got what he needed and he concluded that though not 100% sure, he was reasonably certain Iraq did not have WMDs. After the invasion, of coarse, he was proved right.
You're right about the aborted nuke program. My bad. But they did abandon it pretty much like they said they did when they where all eager to come clean to avoid an invasion. We just didn't listen to what they had to say and what we did listen to we didn't believe.
Yes, we listened to the first weapons inspector who was constantly being jerked around and was given little access. But why didn't we listen to the other one later on who had far better access at a time when Saddam was much more open in an effort to avoid a war? Our stated intent of sending Hans was to gather information about whether Saddam had WMDs, but when he made his report we ignored it.
It's like sending someone that you believe to be reliable to go outside and see if it's raining. When he comes back to report that it is raining, you conclude that he's actually unreliable, largely because it conflicts with what you've already determined you want to do. As a result, you go outside without an umbrella and you get soaked. When you're shivering and you're trying to figure out who to blame, I can't help believing that it's your own damned fault.
Note that Kaddafi was able to show that he shut down his nuclear program because he had one to shut down and he documented that process. Saddam, on the other hand, didn't have a nuclear program. It's much, much more difficult to prove that you shut down your nuclear program if you don't, in fact, have one to shut down. How do you prove that you don't have yellow cake uranium or that all those aluminum tubes were not bought uranium enrichment?
Proving a negative is famously hard, but saying "prove it!" is very easy. We found no WMD programs when we showed up in Baghdad, and yet you're still acting like Saddam was somehow a liar when he told us he didn't have any. He showed quite a bit of evidence to the UN inspector and the inspector found it credible, but for some reason I'm still hearing you say that it was his fault for not showing evidence.
Bottom line: When you accuse someone, they offer an alibi with supporting documents, and yet they're still thrown in jail, when DNA evidence proves them innocent you don't get to continue to act like it's somehow their fault they didn't make it believable enough. In reality, it's kinda your fault for not making a good assessment of the evidence in the first place. In our case we had bad intelligence and we jumped to wrong conclusions while we consistently ignored the evidence that others, like the UN inspector, had to offer. Saying it's Saddam's fault for somehow not convincing us is highly foolish.
There are a lot of people that are happy that Saddam is gone. He was not a nice guy. Despite this, you'd have to search very hard to find an Iraqi that thinks the current situation in Iraq is an acceptable alternative. They may say, "it'll be great after we get through this mess," but even if some personal lives are improved (say, by being released from prison w/torture), none of those people are going to say that the current state of their country is an improvement.
Interesting. How's he supposed to do this? Is he supposed to take a picture of the process of destroying all the WMDs he had already destroyed? If he does produce pictures for say, 1000 chemical warheads and says, "see, we destroyed all of 'em," and it really is all of 'em, would the US have been satisfied if, say, the US erroneously believed he had 2000 warheads? Does he write down, "I solemnly swear we don't have WMDs" and sign it? Do we have him jump in a river and if he sinks and drowns then we know he's telling the truth, but if he floats we know he's a lier and we invade?
When the last UN inspectors showed up just before the invasion, the Iraqis took them all over the place and showed them lots of evidence of WMD destruction. They showed the UN inspector missiles that they thought were ok, but when the inspectors said they weren't they immediately started destroying them. The UN inspector told the United States that though there were some significant things that weren't accounted for, the evidence substantially showed that Iraq had gotten out of the WMD business.
You need to look back over the news clippings before believing the Bush line that "they didn't prove it!" If the Iraqis showed a bunch of evidence and the UN inspector says it's not great, but it's pretty good, I'm not sure that counts as "bluffing your way to the gallows." The fact is that we didn't find these WMDs, so we know that both Saddam and the inspectors were substantially accurate. Saddam was a dick and a lier, but he wasn't lying about it this time. Saying that his lack of documentation is somehow responsible for our bullshit intelligence and our inability to trust the pro that WE sent in to verify the situation is kind of fucked up.
You're right, we can't avoid having collateral damage in a war. However, that doesn't mean that we should accept unlimited collateral damage. Sure, it's subjective, but who's making those subjective decisions? By what standard do they rate their performance?
Pretend we're in a war with two fronts. One front is in Los Angeles. The other front is in a similar sprawling city in our enemy's country. The armies on both fronts are the same size. The guy ruling our enemies is evil, while his people are comparable to US citizens in the good/evil department.
So my question is, is the same level of collateral damage acceptable on both fronts? Do we bomb the hell out of both regardless of consequences or do we do our damdest to precision strike on both fronts?
My guess is that as soon as we had to shoot at enemy soldiers in our own back yards, all of sudden we'd care about collateral damage about as much as we care when a policeman misses a bad guy and hits a civilian by mistake. In other words, a lot. "Sure, collateral damage will happen," we'd say, "but you better do everything in your power to keep that number as low as you possibly can. And here, we'll give you a bunch of extra money and training so you can do everything possible to help the situation and we'll send people to jail if it looks like they're not being really, really careful about our citizens." Blackwater type situations would result in prison sentences at best.
My sense is that we wouldn't push quite that hard on the second front. We'd shrug and shake our heads and say, "collateral damage is just unavoidable." The numbers would be higher and we just wouldn't care.
In America, we try to protect ourselves as much as possible. We try really hard to see that only "bad guys" suffer. If we just followed that damned "golden rule" then I don't think I'd have much to say about this.
I agree with your statement that we shouldn't spread propaganda, but sometimes truthful statements that are neither misleading nor inflammatory might be viewed as worse than they really are.
For example, I took great pains to not list a number of Iraqi civilians killed and I also took great pains not to list the number, or ratio of combatants to non-combatants I think would be acceptable. I simply said that there is a number that's too high and we should come up with targets to avoid hitting those numbers.
We may disagree about what those numbers should be, but I emphatically reject the notion that "everything we're doing is legal, so the number of non-combatant casualties we have right now is ok." In fact, it may (or may not) be legal and it may (or may not) be moral, but you won't really know that if you refuse to scrutinize the situation. It may be legal to drop a bomb that takes out an apartment building mostly filled with non-combatant in order to kill a handful of combatants, but if the same thing could be reasonably handled without killing most of those non-combatants, then it is immoral and indefensible to drop that bomb. In a war zone you cant study every bomb case-by-case, but you can make targets, and if those targets are exceeded, you can certainly ask "why?".
I don't think any of this has anything to do with propaganda. It's a call for an examination of our practices and for an definition of what we would like our practices to be. If someone wishes that this wasn't examined, a reasonable person should do what reasonable people always do when people around them avoid examination of the evidence. They should ask that person why they're avoiding the truth, and they should try all the harder to uncover it.
Isn't that great. Assuming widespread deployment of course, our military won't really have any excuse for killing large numbers of civilians in a war zone. Our military never should have gotten a free pass on this to begin with, but with this technology they should get even more scrutiny. As a society that feels we need the occasional war, we need to take a hard line on "collateral damage." We need to have target metrics for acceptable levels of collateral damage and we need to hold our military leaders accountable for exceeding them.
Do you think [insert number of civilians your favorite study thinks got killed by us in Iraq] is acceptable? Why? How about ten times that amount? Certainly there is some number that would make you feel nauseous and fearful that this was all being done in your name? Every business has target numbers for sales and losses and our military has goals for advancement and acceptable troop losses on the battlefield, so why would we let them not have targets for this? We must hold our military accountable, and if this laser makes it so much easier for us to only hit the enemy, then the number of civilians killed in future wars sure as hell better be a lot lower than we're seeing now.
We shouldn't need a private-sector solution. The government should be designing cites with far fewer left turns. Thank god for the Republicans. Their tireless efforts to turn our country to the right will not be forgotten.
McDonald's, Burger King and Taco Bell must not have gotten the word on micropayments not being viable. Sony must be ignorant of this as well, because they've always taken exact change on the PSN.
My understanding is that Visa charges between 1.5% and 2% plus a transaction fee of four cents on purchases under $15. My info is a couple of years old so it may be a little different now, but the basic gist of it is that if you buy a $5.00 Happy Meal, Visa will get something like $0.10 to $0.14. If you buy a $1.99 vehicle enhancement for MotorStorm Visa will get perhaps $.07.
The fast food chains like it so much they're actively promoting it. It's so fast (no signature required) that it often beats waiting for change. It's not perfect, but it's both viable and thriving.
I think this is a little misleading. If you are working in an position that doesn't handle classified material and you're then asked to work with classified material, you must get a security clearance first. That is all true. But then it's not really correct to say you're still working in an "unclassified government job" because by definition it could not be an "unclassified government job" if you're required to work with classified material.
I fully support people having very intrusive investigations to attain a security clearance. However, if you're not working with any material that requires a security clearance, as applies to these scientists, then it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to require personal investigations. Simply put, if they need the clearance, have them go through the process and if they don't, then leave them alone.
Seriously, you can buy all the GC games you want. You should spend your money however you see fit. But you might want to think twice about calling other people names for their materialism in the breath that you brag about yours.
TW