You're right there: it doesn't make Rush's comment substantially correct. I don't think that oil is the only thing entering anyone's equations about the war. But I do think it is more significant for every decision than is being allowed by some. I also think that France's policy is partly motivated by a will to power, a belief that France still is, or at least still should be, a power to reckon with on the world stage. And I think the policy is partly motivated by a commendable internationalism and hesistancy about the use of force.
Did you see the Frontline special about Wolfowitz and the anti-Iraq lobby? Very revealing. As is the *Threatening Storm* book (remembering title from top of head), though perhaps not in quite the way the author intended. The war is a kludge: we screwed up the end of the Gulf War, we screwed up sanctions, and now we've screwed up the diplomatic arrangements with regard to enforcing the UN mandate. If Hussein were the only one to suffer from the war, it would be one thing...
Read that more thoroughly. France has oil deals that will come into effect as soon as sanctions are lifted, regardless of the 2001 changes. And I'm saying this as a critic of the current administration. Rush's problem is that he's not looking our motivations as carefully as he's looking at France's motivations.
Well, yes, more or less. The recoverable vote was Bush's. Florida was in the wrong in the way it handled the election and the recount, all the way from the bottom (the individual precincts) to the top (the Florida Supreme Court). Then, the US Supreme Court showed a distinct failure of vision by voting against their stated positions on states' rights across the board, revealing that on this issue politics mattered more than legal theory.
If the Florida hadn't fouled up the election, it's possible that Al Gore would have won. On the other hand, if Al Gore hadn't fouled up his campaign in his home state, he might have won. There's no way of knowing for sure. The recoverable vote says Al lost according the the electoral college. And the fact that the electoral college disagreed with the popular vote tells us there wasn't much choice in the first place.
They haven't because the Indian Hindu culture is, in some ways, one of the most disfunctional in the world. When a U.S. company hires a Hindu worker, it usually gets someone who accepts the caste system, for example. The worker generally has a long history of accepting things the way they are and overlooking even major defects. (I spelled the word "disfunctional" because I don't like the original spelling.)
If only "dysfunctional" were the limit of your ignorance. Tell me, what do you actually know about the Hindu caste system? Where did you get your 3M number? Something like this:
But most are the followers that their culture requires them to be.
If you're working with data that can be meaningfully represented with columns, you're using the wrong damned tool. XML is for complex structured data, which it does fine. It is not for tables. Don't blame the tool, blame the idiot who thought that XML was a good way to do DBs.
1. Doctype is necessary. Perhaps you've never tried handling a very complex text (a big DOCBOOK text or a big TEI text). You need to know what kind of text you're dealing with, and there's no way to come up with one universal solution for all kinds of texts. The only character entities needed are the handful of named entities that are part of the standard: < > & etc. The rest can be handled by Unicode (including the PUA) and transcoding (if you are using a ISO 8859 encoding and you need a character outside that encoding, then you need to rethink the encoding you've chosen to use. UTF-8 is your friend). Entities really are good for more complex units (strings, etc.), rather than single characters. What character entities have to do with DOCTYPE is beyond me.
2. True
3. Standardize element IDs? Element IDs are part of the text, not part of the structure. They're simply a way of simplifying the difficulty of accessing random parts of text.
I believe that we really need a standard for arbitrary abstract data models, with XML as just one syntactic representation, but I would have to go into long details to justify this.
So you're saying we need a meta-meta-language? The *MLs are a standard for arbitrary abstract data (and text) models (because not all texts are hierarchical like DBs).
I think the problem here is that DB programmers (I'm excepting Bray from this) are overusing XML for very simple DB tasks that it wasn't intended for. If you're just doing a 40 field, 30,000 record flat DB, XML is NOT the solution. But it is the best solution for complex non-hierarchical data (i.e., books, etc.).
As for Bray, I don't think he's saying XML itself (the markup standard alone) is too hard, that it should be abandoned. I think he's saying we haven't come up with simple enough ways of accessing XML data through APIs. But of course that wouldn't be a spicy enough meatball for the Taco.
Naw, some of the excess liquid hydrogen being vaporized for use in the fusion power plant you'll need to run the thing will be diverted to your cooling system.
It's one thing to offer the money saying that his money can't be used to buy MS products. It's another to use the money to blackmail the school into NEVER buying ANY MS product with ANYONE's money. Tell your grandpa that the guy is a jerk.
Jupiter is the Anglicization of Juppiter, which is a Latin form deriving from the much older Dios Pater/Dius Pater, to be exact. Yes, there is a reconstuctable "IOU," which in English became "Jove" (via the Latin inflected forms, such as the genitive "Iouis"), but I've never seen "IOU" outside an inflected form, and I've never seen a nominative other than "JUPPITER." Can you back that up with an OLD etymology? What is your source for Tellus = Terra and the feast date, the Fasti (Ovid)?
If you want a real reference, see Heath, Aristarchus of Samos: The Ancient Copernicus (out of date, but still good) or GER Lloyd, Early Greek Science. If you can provide a cite from either of those, or from a reliable classicist, I'll believe you.
I believe MA is was one of the dissenting states in the MS trial. On the other hand, that would have been the Attorney General's office, and the AG in Massachusetts is elected, and is a Democrat (Tom Reilly of the Nanny Murder case fame), while Mitt "Olympics" Romney is a Republican.
Nerdling Trivia: Gaia is the mother of Thor. Odin got to know all her secret, stinky places, like her Marianas Trench.
Huh? No, Gaia is the mother of Kronos and the other Titans by Ouranos. You're thinking of Eir (I imagine that's cognate with "Earth," but I think by the time the English form was developed there was no Earth worship among the Saxons, though I coudl be wrong on this last point. But the Gaia people think of (Gaia hypothesis, or Gaia in Foundation's Edge) is the Greek goddess, not the Norse.
b) traditionally, you only had the naked-eye planets: Mercury, venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. What do you call the other gas giants? Not to mention, Mercury was thought to be two planets by some (the morning and evening star).
Nope, it was Venus that were traditionally thought of as Hesperos and Phosphoros, the main evening and morning star. If you've ever seen Venus, you know why: bright sucker.
The Ptolemaic planets were (in order of "spheres") Earth (Gaia), Moon (Selene), Venus (Aphrodite), Mercury (Hermes), Sun (Helios), Mars (Ares), Jupiter (Zeus), Saturn (Kronos), sphere of the fixed stars (all the stars). The division of Venus into Hesperos and Phosphoros goes a few hundred years further back than Ptolemy. It is also worth noting that Ptolemy, whose cosmology held sway in the west until Galileo proved in the Siderius Nuntius that Copernicus had been right, was later than Aristarchus, who believed that the Sun was the center of the solar system, suspected that the stars were other suns, and that the universe was effectively infinite.
To the Greeks, by the way, Ouranos was the basic word for "heaven" and could be thought of as their word for "space." The god Ouranos was the father of Kronos (the Roman analogs being Uranus and Saturn). Poseidon is the name of the god of the sea; the Greeks would have thought it quite odd to name a planet that (the Roman analog to Poseidon is Neptune), as Poseidon's realm was the ocean and the seas around them. And Hades (Roman analog would be Pluto) would have been right out, as he was the god of the underground and underworld.
Re:Any Definition Will Be Arbitrary
on
Defining "Planet"
·
· Score: 1
Comet -- any item that forms a tail when passing close to the star.
Problem: that would include Pluto, Charon, Varuna, Quaoar, and Triton if they got as close as Chiron gets.
But personally, I would exclude anything that didn't
have a certain minimum atmospheric pressure.
Problem: I believe that would exlucde Mercury, which has less atmosphere (IIRC) than Titan, Triton, Europa, Ganymede, Io, maybe even the Moon.
Because the definition he provided is a shorthand. A formal scientific version would include a few other points:
1. By orbit a star, we mean that its primary revolutionary motion must be one in which a star is in one of the foci.
2. It must be a natural object.
By the way, Uranus' and Neptune's orbits DO NOT CROSS. The ellipse that Uranus' orbit inscribes upon the plane of the ecliptic is entirely included within the ellipse that Neptune's orbit inscribes upon the plane of the ecliptic. (I'm getting the terminology wrong, I know, as my celestial mechanics classes are very far behind me). You're thinking of the orbit of Pluto, which is both highly inclined to the ecliptic (37 deg???) and is skewed to Neptune's orbit, bringing
Pluto closer to the Sun than Neptune for a few years every revolution. That is one of the problems calling Pluto's status into question.
I believe that the foci of the earth's secondary revolution in its system with the moon are closer to the center of the earth than they are to the center of the moon, but I am willing to be corrected on that.
Yes it can happen - because as the moon gets further away, the earth's rotation slows (IIRC), and the geosynchronous point gradually moves away from the earth's surface.
Re:A simple rule of thumb:
on
Defining "Planet"
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The most common Latin word for "Earth" is Terra, the name of the goddess of the Earth. That's right, Terra. She is I believe almost exactly analogous to Gaia.
Gaia is Greek; another Greek form of the name is "Ge." She is a major early goddess (early meaning pre-Olympian).
"Tellus" is Latin for "land" or "earth," including the concept of Earth as a planet. The name is used for a goddess; that -us ending is not the same one you know from "alumnus," but is feminine 3d declension, and forms its plural as "Tellures." I don't know how it relates to "Terra" or "Gaia" (most educated Romans knew Greek as a second language).
Quaoar, Ceres, and Varuna are all the names of gods or goddesses. Varuna is a Hindu god, of rain, I believe, and so a type of creator god; Quaoar, a native American creator god (IIRC); Ceres is the goddess of agriculture in Roman mythology (she is called Demeter in Greek; the long Homeric poem Hymn to Demeter is the centerpiece of her myth; her daughter Persephone might be familiar to SF fans).
Ceres is also the patron goddess of Sicily, and her discoverer was G. Piazzi, a Sicilian scientist. It was given such an important name (Ceres was a major goddess) because it was assumed, from the application of Bode's "Law," that there must be a planet between Jupiter and Mars, and when Ceres was found, it was at first trumpeted as a planet. However, when the asteroids named after Juno (=Hera, the queen of the Gods), Pallas (=Athena, the goddess of wisdom, warfare, etc.), and Vesta (~Hestia, the goddess of the hearth and home, more important to the Romans than to the Greeks - you've probably heard of the Vestal Virgins, the priestesses of Vesta who kept the eternal flame going in her temple and took an oath of chastity they were executed for violating) were all found in roughly similar orbits, they were reclassified as not "planets" but "asteroids."
Slashdot Mirror
You're right there: it doesn't make Rush's comment substantially correct. I don't think that oil is the only thing entering anyone's equations about the war. But I do think it is more significant for every decision than is being allowed by some. I also think that France's policy is partly motivated by a will to power, a belief that France still is, or at least still should be, a power to reckon with on the world stage. And I think the policy is partly motivated by a commendable internationalism and hesistancy about the use of force.
Did you see the Frontline special about Wolfowitz and the anti-Iraq lobby? Very revealing. As is the *Threatening Storm* book (remembering title from top of head), though perhaps not in quite the way the author intended. The war is a kludge: we screwed up the end of the Gulf War, we screwed up sanctions, and now we've screwed up the diplomatic arrangements with regard to enforcing the UN mandate. If Hussein were the only one to suffer from the war, it would be one thing...
Read that more thoroughly. France has oil deals that will come into effect as soon as sanctions are lifted, regardless of the 2001 changes. And I'm saying this as a critic of the current administration. Rush's problem is that he's not looking our motivations as carefully as he's looking at France's motivations.
Wow. And you proudly proclaim this?
Yup. What's your point?
Not a problem, Genghis.
Well, yes, more or less. The recoverable vote was Bush's. Florida was in the wrong in the way it handled the election and the recount, all the way from the bottom (the individual precincts) to the top (the Florida Supreme Court). Then, the US Supreme Court showed a distinct failure of vision by voting against their stated positions on states' rights across the board, revealing that on this issue politics mattered more than legal theory.
If the Florida hadn't fouled up the election, it's possible that Al Gore would have won. On the other hand, if Al Gore hadn't fouled up his campaign in his home state, he might have won. There's no way of knowing for sure. The recoverable vote says Al lost according the the electoral college. And the fact that the electoral college disagreed with the popular vote tells us there wasn't much choice in the first place.
They haven't because the Indian Hindu culture is, in some ways, one of the most disfunctional in the world. When a U.S. company hires a Hindu worker, it usually gets someone who accepts the caste system, for example. The worker generally has a long history of accepting things the way they are and overlooking even major defects. (I spelled the word "disfunctional" because I don't like the original spelling.)
If only "dysfunctional" were the limit of your ignorance. Tell me, what do you actually know about the Hindu caste system? Where did you get your 3M number? Something like this:
But most are the followers that their culture requires them to be.
is racism, pure and simple.
evoke Godwin's Law
Yeah, it goes back to the days when DOS was a floppy-based OS. When fixed drives were rare on PCs, using an abstract like "A:" made sense.
On the one hand, it doesn't bother me at all. I don't care where the icons are. On the other hand, I'm ambidexterous.
If you're working with data that can be meaningfully represented with columns, you're using the wrong damned tool. XML is for complex structured data, which it does fine. It is not for tables. Don't blame the tool, blame the idiot who thought that XML was a good way to do DBs.
1. Doctype is necessary. Perhaps you've never tried handling a very complex text (a big DOCBOOK text or a big TEI text). You need to know what kind of text you're dealing with, and there's no way to come up with one universal solution for all kinds of texts. The only character entities needed are the handful of named entities that are part of the standard: < > & etc. The rest can be handled by Unicode (including the PUA) and transcoding (if you are using a ISO 8859 encoding and you need a character outside that encoding, then you need to rethink the encoding you've chosen to use. UTF-8 is your friend). Entities really are good for more complex units (strings, etc.), rather than single characters. What character entities have to do with DOCTYPE is beyond me.
2. True
3. Standardize element IDs? Element IDs are part of the text, not part of the structure. They're simply a way of simplifying the difficulty of accessing random parts of text.
I believe that we really need a standard for arbitrary abstract data models, with XML as just one syntactic representation, but I would have to go into long details to justify this.
So you're saying we need a meta-meta-language? The *MLs are a standard for arbitrary abstract data (and text) models (because not all texts are hierarchical like DBs).
I think the problem here is that DB programmers (I'm excepting Bray from this) are overusing XML for very simple DB tasks that it wasn't intended for. If you're just doing a 40 field, 30,000 record flat DB, XML is NOT the solution. But it is the best solution for complex non-hierarchical data (i.e., books, etc.).
As for Bray, I don't think he's saying XML itself (the markup standard alone) is too hard, that it should be abandoned. I think he's saying we haven't come up with simple enough ways of accessing XML data through APIs. But of course that wouldn't be a spicy enough meatball for the Taco.
You'll all be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
(Another gratuitous Sirius Cybernetics Corp. allusion).
Naw, some of the excess liquid hydrogen being vaporized for use in the fusion power plant you'll need to run the thing will be diverted to your cooling system.
Damn, thanks, PineHall. That is a great idea.
It's one thing to offer the money saying that his money can't be used to buy MS products. It's another to use the money to blackmail the school into NEVER buying ANY MS product with ANYONE's money. Tell your grandpa that the guy is a jerk.
Test: a Python story is a troll if it mentions Perl. Likewise, a Perl story is a troll if it mentions Python.
Substitute "vi" and "emacs" for "python" and "perl" and rerun.
Jupiter is the Anglicization of Juppiter, which is a Latin form deriving from the much older Dios Pater/Dius Pater, to be exact. Yes, there is a reconstuctable "IOU," which in English became "Jove" (via the Latin inflected forms, such as the genitive "Iouis"), but I've never seen "IOU" outside an inflected form, and I've never seen a nominative other than "JUPPITER." Can you back that up with an OLD etymology? What is your source for Tellus = Terra and the feast date, the Fasti (Ovid)?
If you want a real reference, see Heath, Aristarchus of Samos: The Ancient Copernicus (out of date, but still good) or GER Lloyd, Early Greek Science. If you can provide a cite from either of those, or from a reliable classicist, I'll believe you.
I believe MA is was one of the dissenting states in the MS trial. On the other hand, that would have been the Attorney General's office, and the AG in Massachusetts is elected, and is a Democrat (Tom Reilly of the Nanny Murder case fame), while Mitt "Olympics" Romney is a Republican.
Nerdling Trivia: Gaia is the mother of Thor. Odin got to know all her secret, stinky places, like her Marianas Trench.
Huh? No, Gaia is the mother of Kronos and the other Titans by Ouranos. You're thinking of Eir (I imagine that's cognate with "Earth," but I think by the time the English form was developed there was no Earth worship among the Saxons, though I coudl be wrong on this last point. But the Gaia people think of (Gaia hypothesis, or Gaia in Foundation's Edge) is the Greek goddess, not the Norse.
b) traditionally, you only had the naked-eye planets: Mercury, venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. What do you call the other gas giants? Not to mention, Mercury was thought to be two planets by some (the morning and evening star).
Nope, it was Venus that were traditionally thought of as Hesperos and Phosphoros, the main evening and morning star. If you've ever seen Venus, you know why: bright sucker.
The Ptolemaic planets were (in order of "spheres") Earth (Gaia), Moon (Selene), Venus (Aphrodite), Mercury (Hermes), Sun (Helios), Mars (Ares), Jupiter (Zeus), Saturn (Kronos), sphere of the fixed stars (all the stars). The division of Venus into Hesperos and Phosphoros goes a few hundred years further back than Ptolemy. It is also worth noting that Ptolemy, whose cosmology held sway in the west until Galileo proved in the Siderius Nuntius that Copernicus had been right, was later than Aristarchus, who believed that the Sun was the center of the solar system, suspected that the stars were other suns, and that the universe was effectively infinite.
To the Greeks, by the way, Ouranos was the basic word for "heaven" and could be thought of as their word for "space." The god Ouranos was the father of Kronos (the Roman analogs being Uranus and Saturn). Poseidon is the name of the god of the sea; the Greeks would have thought it quite odd to name a planet that (the Roman analog to Poseidon is Neptune), as Poseidon's realm was the ocean and the seas around them. And Hades (Roman analog would be Pluto) would have been right out, as he was the god of the underground and underworld.
Comet -- any item that forms a tail when passing close to the star.
Problem: that would include Pluto, Charon, Varuna, Quaoar, and Triton if they got as close as Chiron gets.
But personally, I would exclude anything that didn't have a certain minimum atmospheric pressure.
Problem: I believe that would exlucde Mercury, which has less atmosphere (IIRC) than Titan, Triton, Europa, Ganymede, Io, maybe even the Moon.
Because the definition he provided is a shorthand. A formal scientific version would include a few other points:
1. By orbit a star, we mean that its primary revolutionary motion must be one in which a star is in one of the foci.
2. It must be a natural object.
By the way, Uranus' and Neptune's orbits DO NOT CROSS. The ellipse that Uranus' orbit inscribes upon the plane of the ecliptic is entirely included within the ellipse that Neptune's orbit inscribes upon the plane of the ecliptic. (I'm getting the terminology wrong, I know, as my celestial mechanics classes are very far behind me). You're thinking of the orbit of Pluto, which is both highly inclined to the ecliptic (37 deg???) and is skewed to Neptune's orbit, bringing Pluto closer to the Sun than Neptune for a few years every revolution. That is one of the problems calling Pluto's status into question.
I believe that the foci of the earth's secondary revolution in its system with the moon are closer to the center of the earth than they are to the center of the moon, but I am willing to be corrected on that.
Yes it can happen - because as the moon gets further away, the earth's rotation slows (IIRC), and the geosynchronous point gradually moves away from the earth's surface.
The most common Latin word for "Earth" is Terra, the name of the goddess of the Earth. That's right, Terra. She is I believe almost exactly analogous to Gaia.
Gaia is Greek; another Greek form of the name is "Ge." She is a major early goddess (early meaning pre-Olympian).
"Tellus" is Latin for "land" or "earth," including the concept of Earth as a planet. The name is used for a goddess; that -us ending is not the same one you know from "alumnus," but is feminine 3d declension, and forms its plural as "Tellures." I don't know how it relates to "Terra" or "Gaia" (most educated Romans knew Greek as a second language).
Quaoar, Ceres, and Varuna are all the names of gods or goddesses. Varuna is a Hindu god, of rain, I believe, and so a type of creator god; Quaoar, a native American creator god (IIRC); Ceres is the goddess of agriculture in Roman mythology (she is called Demeter in Greek; the long Homeric poem Hymn to Demeter is the centerpiece of her myth; her daughter Persephone might be familiar to SF fans).
Ceres is also the patron goddess of Sicily, and her discoverer was G. Piazzi, a Sicilian scientist. It was given such an important name (Ceres was a major goddess) because it was assumed, from the application of Bode's "Law," that there must be a planet between Jupiter and Mars, and when Ceres was found, it was at first trumpeted as a planet. However, when the asteroids named after Juno (=Hera, the queen of the Gods), Pallas (=Athena, the goddess of wisdom, warfare, etc.), and Vesta (~Hestia, the goddess of the hearth and home, more important to the Romans than to the Greeks - you've probably heard of the Vestal Virgins, the priestesses of Vesta who kept the eternal flame going in her temple and took an oath of chastity they were executed for violating) were all found in roughly similar orbits, they were reclassified as not "planets" but "asteroids."
Don't blame the intel guy for the decisions made by the CIC.
Buy the iBook. They're much sturdier, in my opinion, than the TiBook was, and they're no slower than your Wallstreet.