Juxtaposing two of our would-you-antiwar-morons-please-shut-up posts:
the childishness and lack of social development evident in the antiwar movement...
And:
...you miserable excuse for a baboon's aborted baby...I've got a black turtlehead coming on right now with more originality than you. It could probably fetch more on eBay, too...Stupid traitors like you should be shot with extreme prejudice once in the leg, then wheeled to the polling station to vote for Kerry, then shot in the eye on the way out and buried in a Zimbabwean mass grave. Jesus Christ. You also need to learn to shower.
Yes, it's another passel of high-minded supporters of our foreign policy, out trolling for a trash talking once again. By contrast, we have the incredible "childishness" and "lack of social development" shown by these comments in response:
The jokes won't be old until at least a month after Bush confesses that he was wrong about the WMD. Until then, it's fair game.
And we won't miss you when you the door slaps you on the ass... The hypocrisy, the closeminded stupidity, the corruption, the violation of basic standards of governance, and the hubris of the right pushes me further and further to the left every day.
As usual, the right wing is projecting its own failings on its opponents. Childishness? Lack of social development? Physicians, heal thyselves.
I'm not posting this AC, friends. That'd be so like you.
In general it seems like the major networks can't make miniseries float, ratings wise. The last network ones that made my radar were the Jesus one on CBS (long enough ago that Debra Messing played Mary Magdalene and it wasn't a weird casting) and the Dinotopia one that flopped badly.
Back in the day, Shogun and Roots and that kind of thing were big money makers for the three broadcast networks. Now it's the SciFi Channel and that kind of venue putting out new series, or first-time-in-the-US ones anyway. (A&E ran the [fantastic, literate, well-acted] BBC Pride and Prejudice, for example.)
How long ago did this happen? Personally I'm not so sure it's a bad thing. The production values are lower, okay, but CGI can fill in rough edges for this science fiction or fantasty stuff. A miniseries is much better, much much better, for most books, and for characters in general, than any film release. The Aubrey Maturin movie this spring was pretty good, really, but there's just no way to do that in two-plus hours.
Maybe in 25 years we'll get Harry Potter miniseries done by some sort of children's network, and the plots and characters won't feel like they're being crammed inside of three hours to cash in at the box office. That first HP movie in particular was way, way frenetic.
Is this vision you're having of the past real? What examples of the "pretty powerful" car that was "reasonably affordable to the majority of people" are you thinking of? GTOs? Mustangs? Something from the 50s? If we looked at car prices and people's incomes back then, would that really be true?
throw a monster engine into a decent body of a car...keep the interior minimalist...with real perfomance, and keep the price reasonable.
Sounds like a bare Camaro my friends' parents had around 1984. Reasonable power, looked low and angular, no real perks, lower in price than the posh sports cars were then. Unreliable as heck, too, which is maybe why they sold okay but not great. Next to the new cars, it was a money pit.
I shopped for cars a couple of years back. The Passat and the Maxima were two sides of what you're talking about, in a way. Passats were engineered nicer than the Maxima, they shared lots of Audi parts, but they started out with a 4-cylinder that was much less powerful. Nissan put a lot more engine in the Altima, and priced it a bit lower, but it was just less refined in almost every way -- an okay car with punch for less. Muscle types were getting the Nissan and "chipping" it. Sort of a new way to do the same thing.
Your nervier (brainier) mullosks have amazing nerve fibers. They get used for experiments all the time because they're just huge, big enough to place electrodes in the axons and measure voltage changes.
Guess flexible wiring is more pleasant to be strapped into than a squid or a cuttlefish, though I doubt it'd be as fast. Cephalopods have very fast nervous systems, they're lightning quick partly as a result.
A big share of what personal trainers do is help clients understand how to "get at" areas -- how the burn should feel if you're working your lateral obliques or whatever.
But, you know, it's you who feels that burn, brought to you by the human nervous system. And I'm not sure you wouldn't need the trainer to help you attach the wires from your DVD to your abs... So where's the gain?
Seriously, maybe you'd like to interact with a fit young man or woman from the gym rather than the Magnavox repair guy? I know I could use that.
You want corporations setting policy? Take a nice long look at the Bush Administration and environmental policy. Steps at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention:
Committee is considering lowering the acceptable levels of lead in children's blood.
Bush adminstration revamps the committee, removing three members and adding three new ones who have ties to the paint industry. Example: William Banner, who's been an "expert witness" for Sherwin-Williams in court.
One of the new members suggests making the limit two-and-a-half times as high as it's been since the 1970s.
Committee tables the proposed change to the standards for now. They're being "considered."
That's in a case where the water isn't nearly as muddy as with the MPAA's shenanigans. There are legitimate reasons for which copyright laws exist, the MPAA is maneuvering behind those.
I have 10-year-old twins, one of whom once testing a little high for lead levels in my old apartment; gee, I guess there was no danger after all. Is there any cover at all for stacking a CDC board's medical decision with voices from the paint industry?
And the "Patriot" Act sure is preventing terrorist librarians and teachers' unions from blowing up the County Courthouse. I haven't read one story about that on Google. Must be working.
If they're so reputable, why's the job so clumsy?
on
Stop! Website Thief!
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Toro's one of the largest manufacturers of lawn equipment, hardly on the level of a nickel and dime webscraper.
I get your point -- you'd think Toro would at least have a department full of lawyers to prevent wholesale plagiarism. (Maybe all their lawyers deal with dismemberment cases, not IP law?)
But as far as the "nickel-and-dime webscraper" label, well, er, sure looks like one. Text copied without bothering to get the relative-links graphics in place? Doesn't look so big and reputable to me.
There's a tendency to read partisan maneuvering into stories like this -- that letter from the Nobel scientists recently about the Bush administration short-circuiting the process by which science gets applied to policy is another tempting example. Here we have a Democratic critic of the way Bush's NASA policy is being forwarded, right?
But NASA has always cut across party lines in ways that belie the stereotypes we have about our parties.
For example, Walter Mondale bitterly opposed the space shuttle program in the Senate -- back when Richard Nixon was engaged in OSP-style deceptions about the cost estimates per shuttle flight in order to "sell" the shuttle. Here's an article with some text from a letter he wrote outlining the reasons for his opposition. Key bits:
"...another example of perverse priorities and colossal waste in government spending. There is expert evidence that we can achieve the same scientific and utilitarian goals in space at only a fraction of the billions to be spent on the shuttle."
"...there are certainly more sensible ways to create new jobs than by an enormous federal boondoggle."
The author of that linked article, Joseph Rodota, wrote it as an indictment of "a long line of liberals opposed to space exploration."
Hmm. Does anything seem backward about this situation to you? Rodota's talking about "the importance of big ideas" over fiscal responsibilities? Mondale's decrying the senseless cost?
Basically the critic here is saying "Before we put the ax to programs like Hubble, we want to be sure we've made the right choice, and the public will want to see that decision-making process. Sean O'Keefe shouldn't make this one himself without us having access to the process."
Since before the west (and Japan) worked at divvying the country up in the 19th century, businesses have been salivating over how much money they'd make if only they could sell shoes, or a steak, or a sports shirt, or a Yugo, to every person in China. The calculations always amount to "if we could only sell to X percentage of the population, well, multiply that by our profit margin and... wow!"
This is the neocolonial version, embedded in internet bubble-think. You may as well insert that step that shows up in/. "profit" jokes all the time:
3....
4. Profit!
China's more than a bunch of feet to put shoes on, and people and cultures are more than "untapped markets." Life ain't quite that simple.
There's a correlation between smart people and non-salaried positions...
Only just happened back and saw this. Just can't keep yourself from insulting me, can you? What evidence are you basing this claim on, please? You use the word "correlation," plainly implying that there are data behind the assertion.
If you look back at my post, you'll see that I specifically pointed out the very point you're making -- that as a salaried employee I'm in a different spot than those who aren't. Gawrsh, did you think I didn't get the point when I made it myself? Shucks, I shore dew have trubble followin' stuff... Good thing you're here to set me straight.
Talk about your reductive, stubbornly one-sided takes on an issue. I've pored over your post for any possible suggestions of ways to improve the court system, but found nothing but a sort of proud, indignant cynicism.
Juries aren't perfect. They're like a democratic republic -- only as good as the people who take part. You're undercutting the justice you'd claim to feel so strongly about, and congratulating yourself on being so danged knowing about it in the act. No thanks.
the Crab Nebula supernova... invoked as part of an ad campaign for Jerry Bruckheimer's "Armageddon".
Why am I not surprised that Jerry Bruckheimer would use a totally unrelated phenomena to plug his movie about an asteroid bearing down on earth? This is the guy whose Japanese fleet was sailing along with nuclear subs for escort before the attack in Pearl Harbor... Criminy.
Now when they confiscate "sharps" at the checkpoint, they'll also be stopping you from conducting industrial espionage.
If they'd put the USB drive in my shoe soles, at least I'd have gotten it back... The shoes probably wouldn't have worn out before the drive was obsolete anyway, right?
Are we talking about the plays or the characters? Either way there's a huge difference between Hamlet and Macbeth. The plots and the characters are plenty distinct. You had trouble confusing Ophelia with Lady Macbeth? How'd you manage that?
(If anything a diagram of social relationships would reduce them to something that looked more similar than they really are.)
Smart people get disqualified as soon as the lawyers realize they are smart. Lawyers don't want smart people on juries because smart people are not easily malleable in their hands.
Last time I looked, there was an entire subset of lawyers making a pretty decent living by helping with jury selection. (That's just the first google hit I got, among many.) Gee, if only the people who employed those folks knew your simple axiom -- only hire the stupid people -- is what everyone does!
some people believe serving on jury *duty* fulfills one of their obligations to society.
I feel that way, strongly. The good we derive is far greater than the trivial cost in my time. (I'm salaried and secure as anyone really is in today's economy, granted, so the inconvenience is more minor for me than it would be for a small business owner.)
Meanwhile the parent post you responded to is simultaneously deriding me as an idiot and railing against the legal system in general in ways that don't seem particularly more informed than today's "talking points." Perhaps I'll just take his or her sense of how justice works with a grain of salt, seeing as how he or she isn't a participant and feels contempt toward those who are.
(Not that this person can't still vote for a knee-jerk candidate who touts a)the death penalty and b)limitations to liability as the answer to all our problems... Let's hear it for the demagogues.)
What a freakin' article. This has got to be a low in sloppy technology journalism. It's also deeply ironic that the story itself seems to have been badly translated. I mean:
Papero is the first all-hearing, all-seeing robot to be able to talk in conversational colloquialisms.
All-seeing?? "Papero" is omniscient?!?
We have this 2-to-1 ratio of Japanese to English colloquial words, which immediately made me curious about why the japanese vocabulary would need to be twice as big... Nope, our reporter(s) don't seem to have been curious about that.
There are subtitles on the story -- "Lend me your brain?" and "Local challenges" -- that seem to have little to do with the text under them.
Neither our/. blurb nor the BBC article give examples of it working. You'd think they'd at least give us an example of sentences put in and out. Ask it where the bathroom is, and have your japanese-speaking reporter judge the results, at the very least.
I'm not so scared of being followed and tracked. One reason being that I don't do anything I have to hide.
Yes, you do. We know about you and those Sunday underwear ads. Oh, and are you familiar with the idea of voting booths, at all?...
The argument that only people who have something to hide will object to a given intrusion on our privacy has been made to justify basically every kind of civil rights-trashing fishing expedition out there. John Ashcroft used it to smirk at people's worries over his right to go through our library records, if you recall. (Paraphrased: "Pshaw! We don't care about what you're reading at the library. Unless, that is, you have something to hide..." Followed by ominous laughter, of course, as Ashcroft anointed himself with enough Crisco for another month's holy work.)
You may have noticed that UPS verifies that you're not just fishing for shipping numbers, in a few different ways. They're working to prevent abuse of that online system. Industrial espionage, anyone? Ford won't use "Brown" if they think Toyota can watch their packages moving around.
Personally I wasn't eager to combine our "bouncing with airbags" landing approach with nuclear power -- until I googled a little and found the RHUs (Radioisotope Heater Units) on Sojourner. The Viking missions also used nuclear reactors in some capacity. As of a year ago, there also seemed to be specific plans for a long-term Mars rover with a reactor, to be launched in 2009.
...being cold blooded they are less resistant to climactic change. A period of dynamic weather, with patterns changing faster than migration could handle, would tend to be very bad for anything cold blooded.
Turtles and crocodiles seem to have survived the mass extinction(s) of the dinosaur age quite well. Both are ectotherms, neither migrates especially far. The general "coldbloodedness = vulnerability to the extinction" correlation just plain isn't there. The major case we're talking about, the dinos, is an open question to start with -- cold-blooded? Endotherms? Somewhere in between? Varying by species?
Something on the scale of the impact we're talking about would have all sorts of indirect effects. Mass extinctions, too, are going to be complex events, which is one big reason to be skeptical of any single-impact idea. For my money, what we have is a correlation -- not a causal link we can describe in concrete ways.
The model I always think of is Krakatoa's eruption in 535 AD. Global climate change kicked in just after that -- years without any harvest in Europe, extreme volatility. There are people who think that eruption changed human history: ushered in the "dark ages," partly caused or influenced the rise of Islam, destabilized governments, and so on. Maybe so -- but this is an event well within recorded human history, and it's still pretty doubtful trying to connect all the causes with their effects. That's if we accept the volcano -> weather changes link to start with.
Simple biological example: take ammonites and nautiloids. Similar chambered-shell mollusc floaters, right? Why did ammonites die out after the crateceous event, while at least a few nautiloids didn't? Ammonites were by far the more dominant critters before the extinction. Were there differences in their reproductive strategies, so that Nautiloids could "wait out" a bad phase better? What? It just ain't that simple.
(As far as mammals eating sleeping dinos at night, there were early mammals for a long time during the age of the dinosaurs. The jurassic, at least.)
Yeah, I posted something under the title "Nationalism is a bad joke on all of us" back when Beagle went down -- saying basically that there'd be no way NASA was crowing over Beagle's disappearance as compared with their own rovers' survival.
When a campaign is making a big deal about someone being a war hero, it's a bit suspect when that war hero became part of the faction that spit on soldiers when they got home...
You're repeating one of those convenient myths the right wing has constructed to project its own demons on others. The notion that anyone who opposes a war is insulting the military is ludicrously confused, if you want confusion, so I guess you've done yourself proud in expressing that -- But with respect to the specific "spitting" lie you're repeating:
"...In February 1991, I was asked to speak at a college teach-in on the Persian Gulf War. My presentation focused on the image then being popularized in the press of Vietnam-era anti-war activists treating Vietnam veterans abusively. Drawing on my own experience as a Vietnam veteran who came home from the war and joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), I called the image of spat-upon Vietnam veterans a myth. The historical fact, I pointed out, is that the peace movement reached out to veterans as potential allies in a struggle against an unpopular war, while many veterans were joining the anti-war movement by the late 1960s.
My talk was published as an opinion piece in the Hartford Courant and the response to it encouraged me to look further into the truth and origin of the spat-upon veteran stories. My research focused on three sets questions: the evidence for and against the claims that the alleged acts of spitting ever occurred; the political and cultural roles played by the stories; and the way in which the stories were constructed and popularized..."
You could read on if you have any sense of curiosity about this at all. Suffice it to say: There are several newspaper stories about pro-war advocates spitting on veterans demonstrating for peace at the 1968 Republican Convention. Perhaps that's what you're thinking of. Otherwise during the war this particular story wasn't around. It was created afterward as a political tactic-- much like the deliberately misleading "POW/MIA" category. Spirow Agnew had something to do with it playing quite the way it did.
My point is parents know about what is shown in various TV shows, but there is not as much awareness about the content of the games.
I'm a single (widowed) parent of ten-year-old twins. I have trouble with figuring out what's in games, just as I do with other forms of media. Ratings services are inherently flawed, and I can tell you from experience that they're flawed in different ways, depending on what industry group's making the choices.
Movies are particularly ridiculous. The MPAA seems to live on a completely different planet; they think nothing of oceans of desensitizing violence in PG or PG-13 movies, but let a character say "the f-word" twice and it's an automatic R rating. This is a group that rated "Waiting for Guffman," a gently zany little Christopher Guest thing with no violence OR sex, as an "R": one of the characters is gay (though that's never really said), and there's a spoken reference to genitalia. Pretty hard core. I don't remember much swearing, even...
Games are difficult because there really is something different about the player being able to actively cause something to happen. Sometimes even if that something is seemingly minor, I get weirded out that my kids are doing it. Personally I find them a little easier to predict, though, because the genres are so danged set-in-stone. Once in a while, though, the cut scenes in Myth will creep up on me. Those weren't innocent cartoons.
With TV, I'm astonished at the meanness of basically everything, and I'm awestruck at people's ability to mistake what they're seeing. The Simpsons is practically a sermon on "family values" every last week, but it earns disdain from the usual scolds. I let the kids watch it -- not Itchy and Scratchy, but the rest. Meanwhile reality TV is about as degrading as anything ever thrust on kids, and I won't have that for them. Television news is shockingly evil, really actively evil, on balance, and I protect us all from learning that world view. The ratings involved are totally without any merit.
(TV commercials are hard to anticipate with kids. Lately the Simpsons has been running ads for several movies "by the makers of Old School" locally. Those ads are borderline explicit, and I try to skip away. Because the commercials tend to go hand-in-hand with the bogus ratings, it's hard to remember to look for them on shows I think are okay.)
Haven't fatigue studies consistently shown that it isn't during the height of action that tiredness takes, say, fighter pilots down? Isn't it when the pilot's over the crisis and flying back home that he misses some commonplace detail?
Seems like trying to somehow "juice" someone to keep them alert and undistracted by hunger during periods of inactivity is going to get similar results. Would you rely on checkpoint guards to be as ready for ambush as if they'd eaten their Halliburger? When someone's in combat, maybe, but over five days of varying activity?
Slashdot Mirror
the childishness and lack of social development evident in the antiwar movement...
And:
Yes, it's another passel of high-minded supporters of our foreign policy, out trolling for a trash talking once again. By contrast, we have the incredible "childishness" and "lack of social development" shown by these comments in response:
As usual, the right wing is projecting its own failings on its opponents. Childishness? Lack of social development? Physicians, heal thyselves.
I'm not posting this AC, friends. That'd be so like you.
Back in the day, Shogun and Roots and that kind of thing were big money makers for the three broadcast networks. Now it's the SciFi Channel and that kind of venue putting out new series, or first-time-in-the-US ones anyway. (A&E ran the [fantastic, literate, well-acted] BBC Pride and Prejudice, for example.)
How long ago did this happen? Personally I'm not so sure it's a bad thing. The production values are lower, okay, but CGI can fill in rough edges for this science fiction or fantasty stuff. A miniseries is much better, much much better, for most books, and for characters in general, than any film release. The Aubrey Maturin movie this spring was pretty good, really, but there's just no way to do that in two-plus hours.
Maybe in 25 years we'll get Harry Potter miniseries done by some sort of children's network, and the plots and characters won't feel like they're being crammed inside of three hours to cash in at the box office. That first HP movie in particular was way, way frenetic.
throw a monster engine into a decent body of a car...keep the interior minimalist...with real perfomance, and keep the price reasonable.
Sounds like a bare Camaro my friends' parents had around 1984. Reasonable power, looked low and angular, no real perks, lower in price than the posh sports cars were then. Unreliable as heck, too, which is maybe why they sold okay but not great. Next to the new cars, it was a money pit.
I shopped for cars a couple of years back. The Passat and the Maxima were two sides of what you're talking about, in a way. Passats were engineered nicer than the Maxima, they shared lots of Audi parts, but they started out with a 4-cylinder that was much less powerful. Nissan put a lot more engine in the Altima, and priced it a bit lower, but it was just less refined in almost every way -- an okay car with punch for less. Muscle types were getting the Nissan and "chipping" it. Sort of a new way to do the same thing.
Guess flexible wiring is more pleasant to be strapped into than a squid or a cuttlefish, though I doubt it'd be as fast. Cephalopods have very fast nervous systems, they're lightning quick partly as a result.
But, you know, it's you who feels that burn, brought to you by the human nervous system. And I'm not sure you wouldn't need the trainer to help you attach the wires from your DVD to your abs... So where's the gain?
Seriously, maybe you'd like to interact with a fit young man or woman from the gym rather than the Magnavox repair guy? I know I could use that.
That's in a case where the water isn't nearly as muddy as with the MPAA's shenanigans. There are legitimate reasons for which copyright laws exist, the MPAA is maneuvering behind those.
I have 10-year-old twins, one of whom once testing a little high for lead levels in my old apartment; gee, I guess there was no danger after all. Is there any cover at all for stacking a CDC board's medical decision with voices from the paint industry?
And the "Patriot" Act sure is preventing terrorist librarians and teachers' unions from blowing up the County Courthouse. I haven't read one story about that on Google. Must be working.
I get your point -- you'd think Toro would at least have a department full of lawyers to prevent wholesale plagiarism. (Maybe all their lawyers deal with dismemberment cases, not IP law?)
But as far as the "nickel-and-dime webscraper" label, well, er, sure looks like one. Text copied without bothering to get the relative-links graphics in place? Doesn't look so big and reputable to me.
But NASA has always cut across party lines in ways that belie the stereotypes we have about our parties.
For example, Walter Mondale bitterly opposed the space shuttle program in the Senate -- back when Richard Nixon was engaged in OSP-style deceptions about the cost estimates per shuttle flight in order to "sell" the shuttle. Here's an article with some text from a letter he wrote outlining the reasons for his opposition. Key bits:
The author of that linked article, Joseph Rodota, wrote it as an indictment of "a long line of liberals opposed to space exploration."
Hmm. Does anything seem backward about this situation to you? Rodota's talking about "the importance of big ideas" over fiscal responsibilities? Mondale's decrying the senseless cost?
Basically the critic here is saying "Before we put the ax to programs like Hubble, we want to be sure we've made the right choice, and the public will want to see that decision-making process. Sean O'Keefe shouldn't make this one himself without us having access to the process."
Since before the west (and Japan) worked at divvying the country up in the 19th century, businesses have been salivating over how much money they'd make if only they could sell shoes, or a steak, or a sports shirt, or a Yugo, to every person in China. The calculations always amount to "if we could only sell to X percentage of the population, well, multiply that by our profit margin and... wow!"
This is the neocolonial version, embedded in internet bubble-think. You may as well insert that step that shows up in /. "profit" jokes all the time:
China's more than a bunch of feet to put shoes on, and people and cultures are more than "untapped markets." Life ain't quite that simple.
It'd be funnier if my Oklahoma relations weren't so into that last one. These people are still living out McCarthyism, one way or another.
Only just happened back and saw this. Just can't keep yourself from insulting me, can you? What evidence are you basing this claim on, please? You use the word "correlation," plainly implying that there are data behind the assertion.
If you look back at my post, you'll see that I specifically pointed out the very point you're making -- that as a salaried employee I'm in a different spot than those who aren't. Gawrsh, did you think I didn't get the point when I made it myself? Shucks, I shore dew have trubble followin' stuff... Good thing you're here to set me straight.
Talk about your reductive, stubbornly one-sided takes on an issue. I've pored over your post for any possible suggestions of ways to improve the court system, but found nothing but a sort of proud, indignant cynicism.
Juries aren't perfect. They're like a democratic republic -- only as good as the people who take part. You're undercutting the justice you'd claim to feel so strongly about, and congratulating yourself on being so danged knowing about it in the act. No thanks.
Why am I not surprised that Jerry Bruckheimer would use a totally unrelated phenomena to plug his movie about an asteroid bearing down on earth? This is the guy whose Japanese fleet was sailing along with nuclear subs for escort before the attack in Pearl Harbor... Criminy.
If they'd put the USB drive in my shoe soles, at least I'd have gotten it back... The shoes probably wouldn't have worn out before the drive was obsolete anyway, right?
(If anything a diagram of social relationships would reduce them to something that looked more similar than they really are.)
Last time I looked, there was an entire subset of lawyers making a pretty decent living by helping with jury selection. (That's just the first google hit I got, among many.) Gee, if only the people who employed those folks knew your simple axiom -- only hire the stupid people -- is what everyone does!
Maybe you could start a consulting firm on the side, and compete with seminars like this "Mastering Voir Dire" one. Best of luck with that.
Life ain't simple.
I feel that way, strongly. The good we derive is far greater than the trivial cost in my time. (I'm salaried and secure as anyone really is in today's economy, granted, so the inconvenience is more minor for me than it would be for a small business owner.)
Meanwhile the parent post you responded to is simultaneously deriding me as an idiot and railing against the legal system in general in ways that don't seem particularly more informed than today's "talking points." Perhaps I'll just take his or her sense of how justice works with a grain of salt, seeing as how he or she isn't a participant and feels contempt toward those who are.
(Not that this person can't still vote for a knee-jerk candidate who touts a)the death penalty and b)limitations to liability as the answer to all our problems... Let's hear it for the demagogues.)
All-seeing?? "Papero" is omniscient?!?
We have this 2-to-1 ratio of Japanese to English colloquial words, which immediately made me curious about why the japanese vocabulary would need to be twice as big... Nope, our reporter(s) don't seem to have been curious about that.
There are subtitles on the story -- "Lend me your brain?" and "Local challenges" -- that seem to have little to do with the text under them.
Neither our /. blurb nor the BBC article give examples of it working. You'd think they'd at least give us an example of sentences put in and out. Ask it where the bathroom is, and have your japanese-speaking reporter judge the results, at the very least.
Yes, you do. We know about you and those Sunday underwear ads. Oh, and are you familiar with the idea of voting booths, at all?...
The argument that only people who have something to hide will object to a given intrusion on our privacy has been made to justify basically every kind of civil rights-trashing fishing expedition out there. John Ashcroft used it to smirk at people's worries over his right to go through our library records, if you recall. (Paraphrased: "Pshaw! We don't care about what you're reading at the library. Unless, that is, you have something to hide..." Followed by ominous laughter, of course, as Ashcroft anointed himself with enough Crisco for another month's holy work.)
You may have noticed that UPS verifies that you're not just fishing for shipping numbers, in a few different ways. They're working to prevent abuse of that online system. Industrial espionage, anyone? Ford won't use "Brown" if they think Toyota can watch their packages moving around.
Personally I wasn't eager to combine our "bouncing with airbags" landing approach with nuclear power -- until I googled a little and found the RHUs (Radioisotope Heater Units) on Sojourner. The Viking missions also used nuclear reactors in some capacity. As of a year ago, there also seemed to be specific plans for a long-term Mars rover with a reactor, to be launched in 2009.
They've worked some on the idea, anyway: Design Concept for a Nuclear Reactor-Powered Mars Rover.
Turtles and crocodiles seem to have survived the mass extinction(s) of the dinosaur age quite well. Both are ectotherms, neither migrates especially far. The general "coldbloodedness = vulnerability to the extinction" correlation just plain isn't there. The major case we're talking about, the dinos, is an open question to start with -- cold-blooded? Endotherms? Somewhere in between? Varying by species?
Something on the scale of the impact we're talking about would have all sorts of indirect effects. Mass extinctions, too, are going to be complex events, which is one big reason to be skeptical of any single-impact idea. For my money, what we have is a correlation -- not a causal link we can describe in concrete ways.
The model I always think of is Krakatoa's eruption in 535 AD. Global climate change kicked in just after that -- years without any harvest in Europe, extreme volatility. There are people who think that eruption changed human history: ushered in the "dark ages," partly caused or influenced the rise of Islam, destabilized governments, and so on. Maybe so -- but this is an event well within recorded human history, and it's still pretty doubtful trying to connect all the causes with their effects. That's if we accept the volcano -> weather changes link to start with.
Simple biological example: take ammonites and nautiloids. Similar chambered-shell mollusc floaters, right? Why did ammonites die out after the crateceous event, while at least a few nautiloids didn't? Ammonites were by far the more dominant critters before the extinction. Were there differences in their reproductive strategies, so that Nautiloids could "wait out" a bad phase better? What? It just ain't that simple.
(As far as mammals eating sleeping dinos at night, there were early mammals for a long time during the age of the dinosaurs. The jurassic, at least.)
Got modded down for "trolling."
You're repeating one of those convenient myths the right wing has constructed to project its own demons on others. The notion that anyone who opposes a war is insulting the military is ludicrously confused, if you want confusion, so I guess you've done yourself proud in expressing that -- But with respect to the specific "spitting" lie you're repeating:
You could read on if you have any sense of curiosity about this at all. Suffice it to say: There are several newspaper stories about pro-war advocates spitting on veterans demonstrating for peace at the 1968 Republican Convention. Perhaps that's what you're thinking of. Otherwise during the war this particular story wasn't around. It was created afterward as a political tactic-- much like the deliberately misleading "POW/MIA" category. Spirow Agnew had something to do with it playing quite the way it did.
I'm a single (widowed) parent of ten-year-old twins. I have trouble with figuring out what's in games, just as I do with other forms of media. Ratings services are inherently flawed, and I can tell you from experience that they're flawed in different ways, depending on what industry group's making the choices.
Movies are particularly ridiculous. The MPAA seems to live on a completely different planet; they think nothing of oceans of desensitizing violence in PG or PG-13 movies, but let a character say "the f-word" twice and it's an automatic R rating. This is a group that rated "Waiting for Guffman," a gently zany little Christopher Guest thing with no violence OR sex, as an "R": one of the characters is gay (though that's never really said), and there's a spoken reference to genitalia. Pretty hard core. I don't remember much swearing, even...
Games are difficult because there really is something different about the player being able to actively cause something to happen. Sometimes even if that something is seemingly minor, I get weirded out that my kids are doing it. Personally I find them a little easier to predict, though, because the genres are so danged set-in-stone. Once in a while, though, the cut scenes in Myth will creep up on me. Those weren't innocent cartoons.
With TV, I'm astonished at the meanness of basically everything, and I'm awestruck at people's ability to mistake what they're seeing. The Simpsons is practically a sermon on "family values" every last week, but it earns disdain from the usual scolds. I let the kids watch it -- not Itchy and Scratchy, but the rest. Meanwhile reality TV is about as degrading as anything ever thrust on kids, and I won't have that for them. Television news is shockingly evil, really actively evil, on balance, and I protect us all from learning that world view. The ratings involved are totally without any merit.
(TV commercials are hard to anticipate with kids. Lately the Simpsons has been running ads for several movies "by the makers of Old School" locally. Those ads are borderline explicit, and I try to skip away. Because the commercials tend to go hand-in-hand with the bogus ratings, it's hard to remember to look for them on shows I think are okay.)
Seems like trying to somehow "juice" someone to keep them alert and undistracted by hunger during periods of inactivity is going to get similar results. Would you rely on checkpoint guards to be as ready for ambush as if they'd eaten their Halliburger? When someone's in combat, maybe, but over five days of varying activity?
(All joking about amphetamines aside, the military does use amphetamines for pilots already. They came up in that friendly fire case where the Canadians were killed in Afghanistan.)