If that were true, wouldn't there be many, many more crimes in developed nations than there currently are?
Nope.
The grandparent is positing that exposure to violent media (whether it be games, movies, or stuff on the news) may have an influence on behaviour. Then grandparent is not (necessarily) suggesting that it is the sole influence.
Our behaviour as reasoning beings is shaped by our experiences. How we interpret, evaluate, and respond to the world around us is a complex (chaotic!) process. If someone spends several hours a day playing Counterstrike (for example) then it probably will have at least some influence on how they think. I'm sure there are FPS players on Slashdot who have caught themselves thinking about where the best cover is out in the real world, or choosing appropriate sniping locations in the back of their minds. I've seen comments from GTA players who have caught themselves driving more aggressively after a gaming session. Playing and FPS online, the chat that goes back and forth on some servers is blisteringly rude, bordering on the sociopathic.
Most people seem to do a pretty good job compartmentalizing their real and imagined worlds, and we generally don't let Counterstrike or anything else in a game heavily influence our perceptions or behaviour once we shut down the computer. Certainly blaming a psychotic act entirely on a game is a decidedly dubious claim.
People's behaviour is influenced by their parents, by their friends and family, by spouses, by coworkers. It is influenced by clergy, by the nightly news, by the editorials in the morning paper, by scenes of surgical airstrikes in Iraq, by photographs of bloody casualties in New York or Baghdad, by the partisan hacks on Crossfire. Our perception of the world--and consequently our interpretation of what is appropriate behaviour in a given situation--is influenced in small or large part by every other experience that we have. To state that exposure to violent movies and games has no influence whatsoever strikes me as naive, if not outright disingenuous.
Erm, why would a doctor or a nurse spend time fixing a PC that is provided as part of their job and no doubt supported by the NHS's internal IT department?
Because a neurosurgeon is the sort of person who would want to repair a bad trace on a defective motherboard while the computer is still running...and would take it as an affront to his professional dignity if he couldn't do it.
Less flippantly, more dollars spent on training and technical support--for applications that should just work--means fewer dollars for doing things like hiring nurses. Familiar, tested software also means that the staff in place are more productive, because they're not waiting on hold to talk to an overworked tech support guru.
...bviously, to do a proper audit, they'd need to start from individual ballots... all 110+ million of them, plus all the disqualified ballots, duplicate ballots, questionable ballots?
Nope. The most interesting audit would be of those places where there aren't any paper ballots. Blackboxvoting.org is requesting things like technical reports and trouble tickets related to counting equipment and electronic voting machines. Heck, part of the reason why this sort of audit is necessary is precisely because there aren't a hundred and ten million paper ballots out there to count--they've been replaced by insecure electronic or electromechanical devices.
From the standpoint of carrying out "better" elections in the future--more open processes, useful paper trails, etc.--it makes more sense to look at only those areas that have poor voting procedures. Auditable, recountable technologies like scantron sheets or Canadian-style put-an-X-in-the-circle-then-we'll-count-it-by-hand ballots are difficult to tamper with and easy to recheck.
From the standpoint of verifying the correctness of this election, it's only worthwhile to audit a few of the closest states, Ohio and a few others. (The fact that Ohio mostly uses voting machines that don't produce a useful paper trail means that it should probably be checked in the first case, too.)
In either case, the U.S. Presidential election isn't really one election. It's fifty state elections (plus one in D.C.). Since each state has its own rules regarding eligibilty to vote, voting methods, and so forth, the problem is easily broken down into parts that way. Look at only the most egregiously bad states, and you'll help a lot, perhaps even lead by example. For that matter, there are often procedural details that are left to individual counties--different parts of the same state will use different types of voting machines. It would be possible to look at the worst of the worst counties--a few thousands of votes--and perform a useful audit. Remember, not all of Florida had those horrific butterfly ballots in 2000, but it was just those few counties that screwed things up for the whole country.
Column 1 will be stories about government policy. Column 2 will be everything else. Every time there is a story about the government, make a mark in Column 1, etc. At the end of the week take note. Is the CBC the "official government news agency" or what?
My God! You're right! The CBC is reporting on what the governments of Canada (local, provincial, and federal) are doing!
Um...what else is news, precisely? Their international stuff is usually pretty good--less slanted than the U.S. outlets, close to the BBC's level of quality. Are you complaining that there's not enough emphasis on entertainers? Not enough sports coverage (hockey excepted)? Not enough saccharine 'human interest' stories?
Shame on them for emphasizing the news that actually affects the lives of Canadians, rather than pandering to a desire for cheap thrills, vicarious living, and Kobe Bryant?
If the CBC were just a 'government news agency'--in the derisive sense that you meant the phrase--then they wouldn't include reaction from Opposition politicians, critics, and protestors.
I complained to them the day they switched (as i always do when someone picks a proprietary M$ format) but i didn't expect anything would come of it.
Now that they've switched, you're going to remember to congratulate them on it, right? Maybe even a little 'thank you'?
Still, it warms my heart to see that they have tested their streaming on Mplayer under FreeBSD and Gentoo (Linky.) They even tell you how to reduce buffering time in Mplayer by changing its.conf file.
For those with a penchant for other browsers, they provide a link to a patch for Windows Media in Mozilla, too. (Not all the streams are available in OGG...yet.)
Proud to be a Canadian, where at least I know I'm free...:)
It's a little over a year old, but this is still one of my favourite columns by an American looking at Canada. It's not just the weather that's cooler in Canada, by Samantha Bennett at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The best quote is probably
"The Canadians are so quiet that you may have forgotten they're up there, but they've been busy doing some surprising things. It's like discovering that the mice you are dimly aware of in your attic have been building an espresso machine."
Yeah, nicotine isn't GOOD for you, but neither is alcohol and people still do that. At least this isn't nearly as bad as inhaling all that tar and smoke!
I agree wholeheartedly--getting rid of the tar, particulates, and carcinogens produced by combustion definitely goes a long way towards harm reduction.
On the other hand, it should be noted that moderate consumption of alcohol isn't bad for most people. There is significant epidemiological data that indicates consumption of up to about one to two drinks per day is harmless and possibly beneficial. This is mostly due to reduced risk of cardiovascular problems, but moderate alcohol consumption is also associated with a reduced risk of some neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Consumption to excess, or doing stupid things after drinking (driving, swimming, becoming President) obviously are demonstrably bad for your health.
To my knowledge, there aren't any similar large-scale studies on the consumption of pure nicotine (in the absence of tobacco smoke). I'd be interested to know if long-term consumption of nicotine alone (again, in moderate doses) has any health effects, negative or positive.
t's been a while, but if I recall correctly, the last time I heard a study on it, it turned out that Marijuana smoke is much harder on your lungs than a comparable amount of cigarette smoke.
To the best of my knowledge, this is true--marijuana smoke tends to contain more particulates. Part of this is probably just due to different preparation. Also, joints tend not to be filter tipped. Marijuana users also tend to inhale more deeply (politicians excepted, of course) and hold the smoke in their lungs longer, allowing the maximum quantity of nasty stuff to settle deep in the lungs.
On the other hand, much of this can be offset through the use of a bong. Cooling the smoke also helps to reduce the harm that would otherwise be caused by repeated inhalation of hot gases. Some of the unpleasant chemicals and many of the particulates are removed by filtration through the water. The primary active ingredient (THC) is not water soluble, so it passes through unabsorbed. (Note that a similar filtration process will not work with tobacco smoke, because nicotine is highly soluble in water.)
On the other hand, as far as the rest of us non-smokers are concerned, nicotine is one of the less harmful components of cigarette smoke. For second-hand smokers, the nasty stuff (most likely to cause cancer or lung problems) are the small particulates (smoke) and the aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)--both are products of combustion. The carbon monoxide from incomplete combustion isn't good for anybody, either. To add insult to injury, passive smokers get a worse dose of PAHs and particulates because they don't get to inhale the smoke through a filter.
Nicotine is a highly toxic substance--it's sold over the counter as an insecticide--but it has a pretty low vapour pressure at room temperature. That's probably one of the reasons these nicotine sticks need to have a heater in them--cool air won't pick up enough nicotine in the time it spends passing through the filter. Nicotine is also highly water soluble. Consequently, I would expect that as soon as the nicotine vapour leaves the hot "cigarette" and enters a (relatively) cool, wet mouth, it should immediately condense out of the inhaled air and be deposited in the mouth, throat, and lungs.
Sure, it's not all going to be removed by the victim, but I expect it will be a pretty efficient process. Bystanders likely have more to worry about from the nasties in "new car smell".
For the record, I work in cancer research (molecular biology) though not specifically studying toxicology.
And with a 30 minute reaction cycle followed by a 150 minute dormant period, in a manner that I would guess is almost useless for power generation.
Being active for 30 minutes out of 150 isn't necessarily a dealbreaker. Just build six, and have them run sequentially. Actually, build a few more, so you can deal with outages for maintenance and so forth. No biggie.
Of course, the power output of these natural plants is pretty low--the parent is right that they're probably ultimately useless for us.
Saved us from EvilDoers (does this sound like a bible term)...
Actually, I've always thought it rather sounded like a comic book term.
Seemed like he was talking down to Americans and the rest of the world. Perhaps he was trying to put it in terms simple enough that we--or he--could understand. Team America (fanfare) will protect the world from evildoers. Shades of meaning and nuance should never sully a good foreign policy, after all.
Oh, and what happened to the rest of the Axis of Evil? And where's bin Laden these days?
Creationism got dragged into it because the scientists went looking for proof of what they wanted to believe, that creationists are wrong.
That's like saying that heliocentricity got dragged into it because the scientists went looking for proof of what they wanted to believe--that heliocentrists were wrong.
Yep. Galileo was just interested in pissing off the Pope. It had nothing whatsoever to do with observing moons orbiting Jupiter, or developing a hypothesis that explained his observations of planetary motion better than masses of Ptolemaic epicycles.
What has prompted so many scientists to reject Creationism or Intelligent Design? Why have they chosen to attack that one particular dogma with such fervor? Is it just some curious obsession that scientists develop because they work with too many organic solvents? Maybe--just maybe--it has something to do with interpreting evidence. Scientists get dragged where the evidence takes them--not where they want to go.
...didn't you know that 5% of doctors are responsible for 50% of all malpractice claims?
What fraction of doctors are OBGYNs? Neurosurgeons?
Some medical specialties are more lawsuit-prone than others, because they--by their nature--perform procedures with a greater risk of negative outcome, or deal with patients who are more likely to receive large jury awards (new mothers and babies...), or both.
In the United States, a 2002 survey revealed that 76 percent of all obstetricians have been sued at least once. Forty percent have been sued three or more times. Does anyone seriously believe that nearly half of all obstetricians can be that incompetent?
Other risky specialties see similar problems. Unfortunately, malpractice lawsuits take place--and are often successful--in the event of any negative outcome, rather than one caused by actual incompetence or dereliction. About 1 in 5 suits are filed where there is no negative outcome whatsoever, but these are still settled for an average of nearly thirty thosuand dollars apiece (mostly legal bills.)
True--there are some problem doctors, but their numbers are decidedly few. As you say, the situation is not black and white.
The article states that 1.8 million internet bars have been inspected between February and August, of which 1600 where shut down.
That's a quite staggering number of inspections, and it leaves me wondering about the vast resources at hand for governmental control in China.
Staggering? Really? February through August--that's six or seven months; call it 130 working days, or fourteen thousand inspections per day. Making the not-unreasonable assumption of five or ten inspections per inspector per day, that's a force of two or three thousand inspectors. (Siblings of this post have come up with similar numbers by similar reasoning.) That's one in five hundred thousand Chinese working as Internet bar inspectors.
In the United States, that would be about six hundred to serve the entire country.
San Francisco (population: a shade under eight hundred thousand) would employ fewer than two Internet bar inspectors. The same city is supported by twenty-four full-time restaurant inspectors, and nearly four thousand public transit employees. If we assume that its incarceration rate is close the national average, more than five thousand San Franciscans are in jail.
China may not be as wealthy as the States, but hiring a couple inspectors per million population just doesn't take "vast resources".
On topic, I don't think such measures to be effective. Restrictive law cannot replace proper education, as people can always work around law.
On the other hand, the United States forbids the sale of some products to minors, too. Pornography, cigarettes (in some jurisdictions), alcohol, certain weapons, and so forth. Indeed, some states have attempted to ban the sale of violent or sexually explicit games to minors. We know that there are inspectors in the United States who are charged with checking for infractions of these laws, and we know that establishments can be shut down by the government for failing to comply with the law. Whether or not we happen to think such rules make sense, it's not only China that attempts such restriction.
Its a much tamer piece of legislation, and doesn't allow the government to superceed the entire Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
A minor point worthy of note: the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was only enshrined in the Constitution in 1982. Consequently, no legislation can now supercede it--it's part of the Constitution, not a conventional statute. In contrast, the earlier law (the Canadian Bill of Rights, 1960) was a regular statute, subject to amendment or repeal by Act of Parliament. It also only applied to the federal government, though many of the provinces had similar legislation in force.
The War Measure Act (enacted only in WWI, WWII, and--with questionable appropriateness--during the October Crisis) could not be used today, precisely because its provisions would now be unconstitutional.
It's probably also worth noting that the Charter of Rights is better written than comparable U.S. law (spread out over various Amendments and Supreme Court rulings) because it was written so recently. Loose equivalents to the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments, the Miranda rights, plus other goodies are all in the same Legal Rights section of the Canadian Charter. Canada got it "right" because they had the chance to watch everybody else screw up.
To be fair, Amdocs provides consulting and billing services to a number of Canadian telephone companies. They make a dog's breakfast of it up in Canada, too.
Recent implementation of an Amdocs billing system by Bell Mobility (a major wireless provider) led to bills to many customers being delayed by a month or more--and the implementation had slipped at least two years behind schedule. It was a mess.
I can't speak to whether or not they're funneling information to Mossad--I'd tend to take that with a grain of salt.
While my french was good enough to tell me somthing about your version of the anthem was a little off I couldn't come up with anything more comprehensible then the babelfish translation (which wasn't:). Anyone who's fluent have a proper translation?
Actually, the French version provided was precisely correct. See, for example, the National Anthem Act. (Schedule 2 has the lyrics and score.)
However, the French and English versions of the Anthem don't actually say the same thing. Here is a translation of the French Anthem into English. Also available, a translation of the English Anthem into French.
From the parent's linked homepage and political commentary, I assume he's Canadian (Albertan, perhaps--correct me if I'm wrong.) I'm a little surprised that he didn't get exposed to our seperate but equal anthems at some point in school. I suppose bilingualism receives more attention in central and eastern Canada.
Cassini's data has already thrown scientists for loop.
It's interesting. Although several of the siblings to this post have commented on the missing article--it should be "thrown scientists for a loop"--nobody has said anything about the missed subject/verb agreement.
All geeks should know that "data" is the plural form of "datum". Hence, "Cassini's data have already thrown scientists for a loop."
m not sure I trust their error bars (they appear on the second plot). Since they're using 10-year averages, they should be removing the effects of the solar cycle. But their sunspot number curves drop below 0 sunspots in several places. A negative number of sunspots is, obviously, unphysical. Also, their data is pretty wildly varying over short timescales (again, solar cycle should be removed) and doesn't match the actual sunspot records from 1610 on very well, either.
Unfortunately, most people don't have online access to Nature for the full text of the original article. (For those who do, it's here. If you actually check the data--they have a plot of just the last thousand years comparing various methods--the match with the records from 1610 on is actually quite good.
They also comment that, "The slightly negative values of the reconstructed SN [sunspot number] during the grand minima are an artefact; they are compatible with SN = 0 within the uncertainty of these reconstructions as indicated by the error bars." I'm not surprised that their calibration might be a bit off when they've had to extrapolate sunspot numbers lower or higher than we've seen with firm data in the last four hundred years.
have a question for all of our fun Libertarian economists on/. If immigration to the US averages about 200,000 per month, and the Administration claims that 1.7 million jobs were created in the last four years, how many new jobs were available for the native population?
Minor nitpick--there are only about 800,000 legal immigrants to the U.S. each year, plus another 300,000 or so "unofficial" immigrants. That total is closer to 100,000 per month.
Also, not all of those people came to the United States and immediately took jobs. An immigrant who brings a non-working spouse or children fills one job, not four. The total number of employment-based immigrants (skilled workers, mostly) is only about 140,000 per year (a shade more than ten thousand per month).
It should be noted that Canada--a country a tenth the size of the United States--admits roughly the same number of skilled immigrants each year as the U.S. Curiously, there seems to be relatively little whinging up there about Indian immigrants "stealing" skilled jobs. Perhaps the problem in the States isn't immigration, but rather a massive mishandling of economic and trade policy...?
It states that there will be a solicitation/application process that will peer review project proposals. The intent is for NLR to be used both as a tool for other research, and also for research into networking technology (both protocols and hardware).
To answer your question, you need to convince their scientists that you have an interesting project proposal, and you probably need to be "affiliated with" a big chunk of grant money.
After all, "escorting" is perfectly legal, and it was in neither party's interest to admit that sex took place
Actually, exchanging money for sex is perfectly legal in Canada. The law forbids owning or operating a brothel, consequently a prostitute can't work in her own home. Pimping is right out. The law also forbids solicitation in any public place.
Here's the relevant law (from the Canadian Criminal Code) if you want all the details:
I think it's a tad unrealistic to compare the terrorism in the UK and Spain (ignoring, perhaps, the recent train bombing in Spain) to the effects of Sept 11th. The US culture weathered the Oklahoma City bombing and the first WTC bombing in a reasonable fashion. Having four planes, the twin towers, a portion of the Pentagon, and a few other sundry buildings fall out of the sky and/or collapse is, and I'm going out on limb here, a rather more disturbing event than what Britain and Spain experienced over a few decades.
There's some good statistics on the UK's conflict with the IRA here. In all, more than 3500 were killed by military and paramilitary groups between 1969 and 2001. The peak death toll was in 1972, with 479 killed--that's about three Oklahoma City bombings (168 deaths in that incident). In six consecutive years (1971 to 1976) there were more deaths due to terrorism than were killed in Oklahoma city; four additional years had terrorism-related death tolls above a hundred. Between 1969 and 2001 there were no years in which there were no IRA-related deaths in the UK.
Two members of Parliament and two British Ambassadors have been killed by the IRA, and in 1984 there was a bombing attempt directed at the Prime Minister and her cabinet.
There is evidence that the IRA received funding, weapons, and other support from Libya and from the PLO at times in its history.
That's three decades of terrorism, with hundreds of people killed in some of those years. Tens of thousands of people injured, above and beyond the thousands of deaths I've listed here. Targeted bombings of politicians and judges. Yeah, it's different from what the States experienced--but I wouldn't be so quick to say one or the other was 'less disturbing'.
How many terrorist attacks did the United States have in 2003? In 2004? The British had bombings--multiple bombings--each year, every year, for decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope.
The grandparent is positing that exposure to violent media (whether it be games, movies, or stuff on the news) may have an influence on behaviour. Then grandparent is not (necessarily) suggesting that it is the sole influence.
Our behaviour as reasoning beings is shaped by our experiences. How we interpret, evaluate, and respond to the world around us is a complex (chaotic!) process. If someone spends several hours a day playing Counterstrike (for example) then it probably will have at least some influence on how they think. I'm sure there are FPS players on Slashdot who have caught themselves thinking about where the best cover is out in the real world, or choosing appropriate sniping locations in the back of their minds. I've seen comments from GTA players who have caught themselves driving more aggressively after a gaming session. Playing and FPS online, the chat that goes back and forth on some servers is blisteringly rude, bordering on the sociopathic.
Most people seem to do a pretty good job compartmentalizing their real and imagined worlds, and we generally don't let Counterstrike or anything else in a game heavily influence our perceptions or behaviour once we shut down the computer. Certainly blaming a psychotic act entirely on a game is a decidedly dubious claim.
People's behaviour is influenced by their parents, by their friends and family, by spouses, by coworkers. It is influenced by clergy, by the nightly news, by the editorials in the morning paper, by scenes of surgical airstrikes in Iraq, by photographs of bloody casualties in New York or Baghdad, by the partisan hacks on Crossfire. Our perception of the world--and consequently our interpretation of what is appropriate behaviour in a given situation--is influenced in small or large part by every other experience that we have. To state that exposure to violent movies and games has no influence whatsoever strikes me as naive, if not outright disingenuous.
Because a neurosurgeon is the sort of person who would want to repair a bad trace on a defective motherboard while the computer is still running...and would take it as an affront to his professional dignity if he couldn't do it.
Less flippantly, more dollars spent on training and technical support--for applications that should just work--means fewer dollars for doing things like hiring nurses. Familiar, tested software also means that the staff in place are more productive, because they're not waiting on hold to talk to an overworked tech support guru.
Nope. The most interesting audit would be of those places where there aren't any paper ballots. Blackboxvoting.org is requesting things like technical reports and trouble tickets related to counting equipment and electronic voting machines. Heck, part of the reason why this sort of audit is necessary is precisely because there aren't a hundred and ten million paper ballots out there to count--they've been replaced by insecure electronic or electromechanical devices.
From the standpoint of carrying out "better" elections in the future--more open processes, useful paper trails, etc.--it makes more sense to look at only those areas that have poor voting procedures. Auditable, recountable technologies like scantron sheets or Canadian-style put-an-X-in-the-circle-then-we'll-count-it-by-hand ballots are difficult to tamper with and easy to recheck.
From the standpoint of verifying the correctness of this election, it's only worthwhile to audit a few of the closest states, Ohio and a few others. (The fact that Ohio mostly uses voting machines that don't produce a useful paper trail means that it should probably be checked in the first case, too.)
In either case, the U.S. Presidential election isn't really one election. It's fifty state elections (plus one in D.C.). Since each state has its own rules regarding eligibilty to vote, voting methods, and so forth, the problem is easily broken down into parts that way. Look at only the most egregiously bad states, and you'll help a lot, perhaps even lead by example. For that matter, there are often procedural details that are left to individual counties--different parts of the same state will use different types of voting machines. It would be possible to look at the worst of the worst counties--a few thousands of votes--and perform a useful audit. Remember, not all of Florida had those horrific butterfly ballots in 2000, but it was just those few counties that screwed things up for the whole country.
My God! You're right! The CBC is reporting on what the governments of Canada (local, provincial, and federal) are doing!
Um...what else is news, precisely? Their international stuff is usually pretty good--less slanted than the U.S. outlets, close to the BBC's level of quality. Are you complaining that there's not enough emphasis on entertainers? Not enough sports coverage (hockey excepted)? Not enough saccharine 'human interest' stories?
Shame on them for emphasizing the news that actually affects the lives of Canadians, rather than pandering to a desire for cheap thrills, vicarious living, and Kobe Bryant?
If the CBC were just a 'government news agency'--in the derisive sense that you meant the phrase--then they wouldn't include reaction from Opposition politicians, critics, and protestors.
Now that they've switched, you're going to remember to congratulate them on it, right? Maybe even a little 'thank you'?
Still, it warms my heart to see that they have tested their streaming on Mplayer under FreeBSD and Gentoo (Linky.) They even tell you how to reduce buffering time in Mplayer by changing its .conf file.
For those with a penchant for other browsers, they provide a link to a patch for Windows Media in Mozilla, too. (Not all the streams are available in OGG...yet.)
Proud to be a Canadian, where at least I know I'm free... :)
It's a little over a year old, but this is still one of my favourite columns by an American looking at Canada. It's not just the weather that's cooler in Canada, by Samantha Bennett at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The best quote is probably
Enjoy.I agree wholeheartedly--getting rid of the tar, particulates, and carcinogens produced by combustion definitely goes a long way towards harm reduction.
On the other hand, it should be noted that moderate consumption of alcohol isn't bad for most people. There is significant epidemiological data that indicates consumption of up to about one to two drinks per day is harmless and possibly beneficial. This is mostly due to reduced risk of cardiovascular problems, but moderate alcohol consumption is also associated with a reduced risk of some neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Consumption to excess, or doing stupid things after drinking (driving, swimming, becoming President) obviously are demonstrably bad for your health.
To my knowledge, there aren't any similar large-scale studies on the consumption of pure nicotine (in the absence of tobacco smoke). I'd be interested to know if long-term consumption of nicotine alone (again, in moderate doses) has any health effects, negative or positive.
To the best of my knowledge, this is true--marijuana smoke tends to contain more particulates. Part of this is probably just due to different preparation. Also, joints tend not to be filter tipped. Marijuana users also tend to inhale more deeply (politicians excepted, of course) and hold the smoke in their lungs longer, allowing the maximum quantity of nasty stuff to settle deep in the lungs.
On the other hand, much of this can be offset through the use of a bong. Cooling the smoke also helps to reduce the harm that would otherwise be caused by repeated inhalation of hot gases. Some of the unpleasant chemicals and many of the particulates are removed by filtration through the water. The primary active ingredient (THC) is not water soluble, so it passes through unabsorbed. (Note that a similar filtration process will not work with tobacco smoke, because nicotine is highly soluble in water.)
On the other hand, as far as the rest of us non-smokers are concerned, nicotine is one of the less harmful components of cigarette smoke. For second-hand smokers, the nasty stuff (most likely to cause cancer or lung problems) are the small particulates (smoke) and the aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)--both are products of combustion. The carbon monoxide from incomplete combustion isn't good for anybody, either. To add insult to injury, passive smokers get a worse dose of PAHs and particulates because they don't get to inhale the smoke through a filter.
Nicotine is a highly toxic substance--it's sold over the counter as an insecticide--but it has a pretty low vapour pressure at room temperature. That's probably one of the reasons these nicotine sticks need to have a heater in them--cool air won't pick up enough nicotine in the time it spends passing through the filter. Nicotine is also highly water soluble. Consequently, I would expect that as soon as the nicotine vapour leaves the hot "cigarette" and enters a (relatively) cool, wet mouth, it should immediately condense out of the inhaled air and be deposited in the mouth, throat, and lungs.
Sure, it's not all going to be removed by the victim, but I expect it will be a pretty efficient process. Bystanders likely have more to worry about from the nasties in "new car smell".
For the record, I work in cancer research (molecular biology) though not specifically studying toxicology.
They can.
The problem is that nobody uses the new languages, because nobody else knows them. It's even harder than getting people to change operating systems.
Being active for 30 minutes out of 150 isn't necessarily a dealbreaker. Just build six, and have them run sequentially. Actually, build a few more, so you can deal with outages for maintenance and so forth. No biggie.
Of course, the power output of these natural plants is pretty low--the parent is right that they're probably ultimately useless for us.
Actually, I've always thought it rather sounded like a comic book term.
Seemed like he was talking down to Americans and the rest of the world. Perhaps he was trying to put it in terms simple enough that we--or he--could understand. Team America (fanfare) will protect the world from evildoers. Shades of meaning and nuance should never sully a good foreign policy, after all.
Oh, and what happened to the rest of the Axis of Evil? And where's bin Laden these days?
That's like saying that heliocentricity got dragged into it because the scientists went looking for proof of what they wanted to believe--that heliocentrists were wrong.
Yep. Galileo was just interested in pissing off the Pope. It had nothing whatsoever to do with observing moons orbiting Jupiter, or developing a hypothesis that explained his observations of planetary motion better than masses of Ptolemaic epicycles.
What has prompted so many scientists to reject Creationism or Intelligent Design? Why have they chosen to attack that one particular dogma with such fervor? Is it just some curious obsession that scientists develop because they work with too many organic solvents? Maybe--just maybe--it has something to do with interpreting evidence. Scientists get dragged where the evidence takes them--not where they want to go.
What fraction of doctors are OBGYNs? Neurosurgeons?
Some medical specialties are more lawsuit-prone than others, because they--by their nature--perform procedures with a greater risk of negative outcome, or deal with patients who are more likely to receive large jury awards (new mothers and babies...), or both.
In the United States, a 2002 survey revealed that 76 percent of all obstetricians have been sued at least once. Forty percent have been sued three or more times. Does anyone seriously believe that nearly half of all obstetricians can be that incompetent?
Other risky specialties see similar problems. Unfortunately, malpractice lawsuits take place--and are often successful--in the event of any negative outcome, rather than one caused by actual incompetence or dereliction. About 1 in 5 suits are filed where there is no negative outcome whatsoever, but these are still settled for an average of nearly thirty thosuand dollars apiece (mostly legal bills.)
True--there are some problem doctors, but their numbers are decidedly few. As you say, the situation is not black and white.
That's a quite staggering number of inspections, and it leaves me wondering about the vast resources at hand for governmental control in China.
Staggering? Really? February through August--that's six or seven months; call it 130 working days, or fourteen thousand inspections per day. Making the not-unreasonable assumption of five or ten inspections per inspector per day, that's a force of two or three thousand inspectors. (Siblings of this post have come up with similar numbers by similar reasoning.) That's one in five hundred thousand Chinese working as Internet bar inspectors.
In the United States, that would be about six hundred to serve the entire country.
San Francisco (population: a shade under eight hundred thousand) would employ fewer than two Internet bar inspectors. The same city is supported by twenty-four full-time restaurant inspectors, and nearly four thousand public transit employees. If we assume that its incarceration rate is close the national average, more than five thousand San Franciscans are in jail.
China may not be as wealthy as the States, but hiring a couple inspectors per million population just doesn't take "vast resources".
On topic, I don't think such measures to be effective. Restrictive law cannot replace proper education, as people can always work around law.
On the other hand, the United States forbids the sale of some products to minors, too. Pornography, cigarettes (in some jurisdictions), alcohol, certain weapons, and so forth. Indeed, some states have attempted to ban the sale of violent or sexually explicit games to minors. We know that there are inspectors in the United States who are charged with checking for infractions of these laws, and we know that establishments can be shut down by the government for failing to comply with the law. Whether or not we happen to think such rules make sense, it's not only China that attempts such restriction.
A minor point worthy of note: the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was only enshrined in the Constitution in 1982. Consequently, no legislation can now supercede it--it's part of the Constitution, not a conventional statute. In contrast, the earlier law (the Canadian Bill of Rights, 1960) was a regular statute, subject to amendment or repeal by Act of Parliament. It also only applied to the federal government, though many of the provinces had similar legislation in force.
The War Measure Act (enacted only in WWI, WWII, and--with questionable appropriateness--during the October Crisis) could not be used today, precisely because its provisions would now be unconstitutional.
It's probably also worth noting that the Charter of Rights is better written than comparable U.S. law (spread out over various Amendments and Supreme Court rulings) because it was written so recently. Loose equivalents to the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments, the Miranda rights, plus other goodies are all in the same Legal Rights section of the Canadian Charter. Canada got it "right" because they had the chance to watch everybody else screw up.
Recent implementation of an Amdocs billing system by Bell Mobility (a major wireless provider) led to bills to many customers being delayed by a month or more--and the implementation had slipped at least two years behind schedule. It was a mess.
I can't speak to whether or not they're funneling information to Mossad--I'd tend to take that with a grain of salt.
Actually, the French version provided was precisely correct. See, for example, the National Anthem Act. (Schedule 2 has the lyrics and score.)
However, the French and English versions of the Anthem don't actually say the same thing. Here is a translation of the French Anthem into English. Also available, a translation of the English Anthem into French.
From the parent's linked homepage and political commentary, I assume he's Canadian (Albertan, perhaps--correct me if I'm wrong.) I'm a little surprised that he didn't get exposed to our seperate but equal anthems at some point in school. I suppose bilingualism receives more attention in central and eastern Canada.
It's interesting. Although several of the siblings to this post have commented on the missing article--it should be "thrown scientists for a loop"--nobody has said anything about the missed subject/verb agreement.
All geeks should know that "data" is the plural form of "datum". Hence, "Cassini's data have already thrown scientists for a loop."
Unfortunately, most people don't have online access to Nature for the full text of the original article. (For those who do, it's here. If you actually check the data--they have a plot of just the last thousand years comparing various methods--the match with the records from 1610 on is actually quite good.
They also comment that, "The slightly negative values of the reconstructed SN [sunspot number] during the grand minima are an artefact; they are compatible with SN = 0 within the uncertainty of these reconstructions as indicated by the error bars." I'm not surprised that their calibration might be a bit off when they've had to extrapolate sunspot numbers lower or higher than we've seen with firm data in the last four hundred years.
Minor nitpick--there are only about 800,000 legal immigrants to the U.S. each year, plus another 300,000 or so "unofficial" immigrants. That total is closer to 100,000 per month.
Also, not all of those people came to the United States and immediately took jobs. An immigrant who brings a non-working spouse or children fills one job, not four. The total number of employment-based immigrants (skilled workers, mostly) is only about 140,000 per year (a shade more than ten thousand per month).
It should be noted that Canada--a country a tenth the size of the United States--admits roughly the same number of skilled immigrants each year as the U.S. Curiously, there seems to be relatively little whinging up there about Indian immigrants "stealing" skilled jobs. Perhaps the problem in the States isn't immigration, but rather a massive mishandling of economic and trade policy...?
Well, there's a useful pamphlet (PDF, 830 kB) on the National LambdaRail website.
It states that there will be a solicitation/application process that will peer review project proposals. The intent is for NLR to be used both as a tool for other research, and also for research into networking technology (both protocols and hardware).
To answer your question, you need to convince their scientists that you have an interesting project proposal, and you probably need to be "affiliated with" a big chunk of grant money.
Actually, exchanging money for sex is perfectly legal in Canada. The law forbids owning or operating a brothel, consequently a prostitute can't work in her own home. Pimping is right out. The law also forbids solicitation in any public place.
Here's the relevant law (from the Canadian Criminal Code) if you want all the details:
I'm afraid I don't have any references for the lawsuit itself, but I can well believe it took place.There's some good statistics on the UK's conflict with the IRA here. In all, more than 3500 were killed by military and paramilitary groups between 1969 and 2001. The peak death toll was in 1972, with 479 killed--that's about three Oklahoma City bombings (168 deaths in that incident). In six consecutive years (1971 to 1976) there were more deaths due to terrorism than were killed in Oklahoma city; four additional years had terrorism-related death tolls above a hundred. Between 1969 and 2001 there were no years in which there were no IRA-related deaths in the UK.
Two members of Parliament and two British Ambassadors have been killed by the IRA, and in 1984 there was a bombing attempt directed at the Prime Minister and her cabinet.
There is evidence that the IRA received funding, weapons, and other support from Libya and from the PLO at times in its history.
That's three decades of terrorism, with hundreds of people killed in some of those years. Tens of thousands of people injured, above and beyond the thousands of deaths I've listed here. Targeted bombings of politicians and judges. Yeah, it's different from what the States experienced--but I wouldn't be so quick to say one or the other was 'less disturbing'.
How many terrorist attacks did the United States have in 2003? In 2004? The British had bombings--multiple bombings--each year, every year, for decades.
Though to be fair, I have to agree--the McWhatsit family of breakfast products are pretty gross....