Well, it's sad that this seems to be quite often the problem with psychological and sociological research. The researchers present groundbreaking results about the human nature and when you look at their methods you find the results are based one nothing more than random results from a much to small sample...
And I thought the guys who claimed to work for the railway company and started removing the rails of an abandoned line not far from where I livedhad been something!
The hired local companies for transport and even distributed leaflets to the people in the neighbarhood informing them of the upcomming works! They made some money from the scrap iron before anybody noticed!
Of course the kids and grandkids of the Hiroshima victims don't show signs of exposure! They have not been exposed to any strong radiation. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki regions were not contaminated by radioactive outfall, as the bombs exploded quite high above ground.
That there are less and less kids born with defects from the exposure 60 years ago is not astonishing, as people with genetic defects often enough don't can't have children. That's not a matter of addaption and resistance, it's just a matter of good luck!
The situation in the Chernobyl is quite different, as there are still radiaoactive substances in the soil and the water, so the Hiroshima/Nagasaki knowledge has not been much help to the scientists so far!
Actually, one could argue that technology could have, atleast temporarily, forstalled the inevitable loss of the war for Hitler.
Whatever the reason, I am truly gratefull Hitler and his Nazis lost the war!
As far as your comment on comparing politicians to Hitler, personally, I think this really debases just about any debate since a) most people really don't fully grasp what Hitler did when he was in power, so any metaphor they make is incomplete and quite likely bears no resemblence to what happened under Hitler, and b) theres tons of more moderate and applicable examples than Hitler to be used as reference that do not carry a fuckload of emotional baggage like Hitler & the Nazis do.
Very true! Be it Hussein or Bush or Milosevic, alway the comparison with Hitler and Nazi Germany creeps up from somewhere. However bad the dictators of the present are, not one comes close to the horror and madness the was Germany 33-45!
Second that. I had the pleasure of helping to teach databases in theory and praxis to a bunch of kids with some expierence as web developpers!
They were totally sure they were DB experts, some of them hadn't grasped what DB integrity *is* at the end of the semester, and the less said about the practical homework I had to correct, the better!
My favorite part about books, it that you can put them on your bookshelf. That way people think that you're deep and intuitive because you read pretty, leather-bound books. It also creates an ambience that ebooks just can't.
If pretty leather bound books make you seem deep and intuitive, what impression is created by my bookshelves crammed two rows deep with SF&F paperbacks?
Even though this company has nothing to do with the real Atari from my home computer days, the news still makes me feel sad.
I start remembering the god old days when I got my first computer, the Atari 1040STFM! I think I'll take it down from the wardrobe and cuddle it a litte...
I remember reading about someone working for one of the big record labels in Germany letting something slip about the RIAA's tactics.
He hinted that it was in their interessed to create such absurd cases so their "hunt for pirates" stayed in the news. If nothing like that happens, people will forget the whole thing and start downloading again, as the papers will not print headlines "RIAA still hunting!" a few month after the first anouncements.
Same here (here being Germany), while I found some people at the university with who I could talk about books (not HP!), the number of students who just couldn't believe that reading could be considered to be something entertaining kept astonishing me!
The usual excuse was often that they didn't have the time to read something outside the university stuff, which made me laugh when the conversation switched to the hours of tv shows they had watched over the week!;-)
I read a lot and have been doing this since I was seven or so, and while most of my library consists of "purly enternaining" books, I noticed that I read scientific texts in about half the time than my fellow students, mostly getting a clearer meaning of the contents than them!
Well, Windows feels to me like a girl you just met. You don't know what she will be doing the next minute, you are to nervous to try anything in case the result will be desastrous, there is one misunderstanding after another and you're quite sure you don't get her into bed this evening.
Breeder reactors, however, can be dangerous and also politically sensitive because of military applications potential. Not many countries built them due to these concerns.
Is there even one built anywhere?
And to write it out: The fuel a breeder reactor produces is plutonium! That's the military applitcation potential.
Except that Uranium comes if far, far smaller quantities than oil, last far longer, and also comes from more stable regions of the world.
Stable regions like... Nigeria?;-)
At the moment the supply of uranium seems secure, as the supply of oil for the US was no problem as long as Texas had enough of it. But how long will it take till uranium gets scarce or political trouble will get in the way?
I find it rather funny, when after the recent gas troubles German politicians proposed nuclear power as a means to make Germany independent from resource imports.
I realy would like to know where in Germany the uranium mines are located! The European countries have to import uranium as they have to import oil!
And even for those countries who have there own uranium sources, uranium is as finite as oil and gas, estimates range from twenty to sixty years. Considering the price for the development and building of new power stations and the waste problem (including the old plants!) I realy wonder if it is worth it!
Ah yes, but religion is so CONVENIENT. It means that often the believer needs to make no personal moral decisions (your religion makes absolute moral decisions for you), and everyone's split into two camps: People that are going to Heaven (usually believers) and people that are going to Hell (usually everyone else). Often the sheer convenience and lifelong training in a religion overrides a personal quest for scientific truth.
Please, call it what it is: Christianity! There are other religions with quite different outlooks, even if you, living in a christian country, have never heard about them.
And for religion staying in churches: I tend to think one of the christan religion's problems was exactly this, it's members liver their religion in the church and don't let the rest of the world intrude on their thinking;-)
I once read about some german historican who claimed the whole "medival people believed the earth to be flat" was a myth.
I'm not an expert in that field, but considering, as other already stated, the curvature of earth's surface is quite obvious to a seafaring people, I think it's possible. He claims (IIRC) there was only one author who realy read the passages in the bible as stating the earth was flat and he was not even taken seriously in the church.
True, but:
You will to that, I will do that, most people here at/. will do that, but will the majority of costumers?
If the ISPs give them cheap access, fast pron download, what will Otto Normalverbraucher (Joe Normal in Germany) care about some blocked ports and other (to him) fairly esoteric stuff?
And when some big enough ISPs have made the web their playground, how will it look for those with small, fair ISPs?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's sad that this seems to be quite often the problem with psychological and sociological research. The researchers present groundbreaking results about the human nature and when you look at their methods you find the results are based one nothing more than random results from a much to small sample...
The good old Cargo Cult Science
And I thought the guys who claimed to work for the railway company and started removing the rails of an abandoned line not far from where I livedhad been something!
The hired local companies for transport and even distributed leaflets to the people in the neighbarhood informing them of the upcomming works! They made some money from the scrap iron before anybody noticed!
Of course the kids and grandkids of the Hiroshima victims don't show signs of exposure! They have not been exposed to any strong radiation. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki regions were not contaminated by radioactive outfall, as the bombs exploded quite high above ground.
That there are less and less kids born with defects from the exposure 60 years ago is not astonishing, as people with genetic defects often enough don't can't have children.
That's not a matter of addaption and resistance, it's just a matter of good luck!
The situation in the Chernobyl is quite different, as there are still radiaoactive substances in the soil and the water, so the Hiroshima/Nagasaki knowledge has not been much help to the scientists so far!
Whatever the reason, I am truly gratefull Hitler and his Nazis lost the war!
As far as your comment on comparing politicians to Hitler, personally, I think this really debases just about any debate since a) most people really don't fully grasp what Hitler did when he was in power, so any metaphor they make is incomplete and quite likely bears no resemblence to what happened under Hitler, and b) theres tons of more moderate and applicable examples than Hitler to be used as reference that do not carry a fuckload of emotional baggage like Hitler & the Nazis do.
Very true! Be it Hussein or Bush or Milosevic, alway the comparison with Hitler and Nazi Germany creeps up from somewhere. However bad the dictators of the present are, not one comes close to the horror and madness the was Germany 33-45!
Well, lucky for me, the girl I'm totaly besotted with right now asks me to do the web research whenever she needs some internet info!
Only problem is, so does her boyfriend!
He even asked me to build a page for his shop project - tempting...
Second that. I had the pleasure of helping to teach databases in theory and praxis to a bunch of kids with some expierence as web developpers!
They were totally sure they were DB experts, some of them hadn't grasped what DB integrity *is* at the end of the semester, and the less said about the practical homework I had to correct, the better!
Space challenged, I suppose, every available space is already used up!
My sister always sends me gpg-encrypted emails and she is no techy at all!
I just configured her mailclient to always use encryption when possible and put my key into her keyring...
My favorite part about books, it that you can put them on your bookshelf. That way people think that you're deep and intuitive because you read pretty, leather-bound books. It also creates an ambience that ebooks just can't.
If pretty leather bound books make you seem deep and intuitive, what impression is created by my bookshelves crammed two rows deep with SF&F paperbacks?
Let alone my manga collection...
That would be a gangbang with a massive male majority ...
Argh! Need mental erasor!!!!
...when you transplant Hitler's brain into one of the (giant) sharks!
You're hanging out with the wrong crowd, pal! ;-)
And another one starting with this awesome 1MB-RAM machine! Floppies only in my case, hardly credible today, that this was possible...
Although the first computer I spend time on was a C64 which belonged to a friend. Ah, I feel all nostalgic reading this thread!
Even though this company has nothing to do with the real Atari from my home computer days, the news still makes me feel sad.
I start remembering the god old days when I got my first computer, the Atari 1040STFM! I think I'll take it down from the wardrobe and cuddle it a litte...
For those of you who can read German (or don't fear babelfish):
http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/16/16269/1.htmlI remember reading about someone working for one of the big record labels in Germany letting something slip about the RIAA's tactics.
He hinted that it was in their interessed to create such absurd cases so their "hunt for pirates" stayed in the news. If nothing like that happens, people will forget the whole thing and start downloading again, as the papers will not print headlines "RIAA still hunting!" a few month after the first anouncements.
Same here (here being Germany), while I found some people at the university with who I could talk about books (not HP!), the number of students who just couldn't believe that reading could be considered to be something entertaining kept astonishing me!
The usual excuse was often that they didn't have the time to read something outside the university stuff, which made me laugh when the conversation switched to the hours of tv shows they had watched over the week! ;-)
I read a lot and have been doing this since I was seven or so, and while most of my library consists of "purly enternaining" books, I noticed that I read scientific texts in about half the time than my fellow students, mostly getting a clearer meaning of the contents than them!
Well I'd love finaly to manage being in an elevator with an atractive woman when the power fails!
The only elevator I ever was stuck in was at the university, CS building... ;-)
Well, Windows feels to me like a girl you just met. You don't know what she will be doing the next minute, you are to nervous to try anything in case the result will be desastrous, there is one misunderstanding after another and you're quite sure you don't get her into bed this evening.
Breeder reactors, however, can be dangerous and also politically sensitive because of military applications potential. Not many countries built them due to these concerns. Is there even one built anywhere?
And to write it out: The fuel a breeder reactor produces is plutonium! That's the military applitcation potential.
Except that Uranium comes if far, far smaller quantities than oil, last far longer, and also comes from more stable regions of the world.
Stable regions likeAt the moment the supply of uranium seems secure, as the supply of oil for the US was no problem as long as Texas had enough of it. But how long will it take till uranium gets scarce or political trouble will get in the way?
A point I haven't read in this discussion yet:
I find it rather funny, when after the recent gas troubles German politicians proposed nuclear power as a means to make Germany independent from resource imports.
I realy would like to know where in Germany the uranium mines are located! The European countries have to import uranium as they have to import oil!
And even for those countries who have there own uranium sources, uranium is as finite as oil and gas, estimates range from twenty to sixty years. Considering the price for the development and building of new power stations and the waste problem (including the old plants!) I realy wonder if it is worth it!
Ah yes, but religion is so CONVENIENT. It means that often the believer needs to make no personal moral decisions (your religion makes absolute moral decisions for you), and everyone's split into two camps: People that are going to Heaven (usually believers) and people that are going to Hell (usually everyone else). Often the sheer convenience and lifelong training in a religion overrides a personal quest for scientific truth.
Please, call it what it is: Christianity! There are other religions with quite different outlooks, even if you, living in a christian country, have never heard about them.And for religion staying in churches: I tend to think one of the christan religion's problems was exactly this, it's members liver their religion in the church and don't let the rest of the world intrude on their thinking
I once read about some german historican who claimed the whole "medival people believed the earth to be flat" was a myth.
I'm not an expert in that field, but considering, as other already stated, the curvature of earth's surface is quite obvious to a seafaring people, I think it's possible. He claims (IIRC) there was only one author who realy read the passages in the bible as stating the earth was flat and he was not even taken seriously in the church.
True, but: /. will do that, but will the majority of costumers?
You will to that, I will do that, most people here at
If the ISPs give them cheap access, fast pron download, what will Otto Normalverbraucher (Joe Normal in Germany) care about some blocked ports and other (to him) fairly esoteric stuff?
And when some big enough ISPs have made the web their playground, how will it look for those with small, fair ISPs?