Why not give her something she'd actually get some use out of, instead of playing to her weakness? I'm sure that if she wanted isoprop, she'd apply it without the trickery.
Because she thinks that I'm giving her something expensive and nice and it costs me almost nothing. Buying her stuff she could use might actually cost some real dough.
Yes, if she wanted to apply isopropyl alcohol she'd do it herself.
No, I don't really do this. As a gag one year I bought a large bottle of ipa and pasted on a fake Chanel No. 5 label. She thought it was funny.
Poke holes in the cookies before serving. The cookies are now 20% healthier!
One Christmas I was at my Mom's house. She is a "low sodium" believer. She salts nothing at all, and has a shaker on the table for those who want some taste in their food. (She has also lost all sense of smell, which is a large component of food taste, so she doesn't notice the lack of salt at all. She's easy to buy for for Christmas presents; I go to Goodwill and get empty bottles of high-price perfume, fill them with isopropyl alcohol, and give them to her as the real stuff. She can't tell that it isn't.)
I went to refill the shaker. She had a box of "low sodium salt" on the shelf. "20% less sodium" it said. Wow. Perhaps this was a mix of table salt and potassium chloride?
It looked different. Table salt is usually sold in the cubic crystal form. Tiny cubes, just the way that salt will crystalize out of a concentrated solution of brine, which is part of the salt making process. This stuff was powdery.
I looked closer at the label. Contents: sodium chloride and iodine. Typical table salt.
To make a long story short, I realized that this company had done something to "fluff up" the normal salt crystals to make them larger and put only 13 ounces (by weight) of product in a box that normally contains 16. A "teaspoon" of this product actually contained 20% less sodium than "normal" salt, simply because it contained 20% less product by weight.
I considered that to be false advertising, but technically, the box did contain 20% less sodium than normal table salt boxes of the same size, and by volume, it was 20% less.
Any radioactivity associated with N.P. is inherently assumed to be bad and probably rightfully so. ( I don't know either )
Radioactivity from nuclear power is no different than radioactivity from any other source. Alpha, beta and gamma radiation is alpha, beta and gamma radiation. Radioactivity occurs naturally all around us. Every day. Trace amounts of radioactive materials are found everywhere. It used to be common to practice radiological monitoring skills using the mantles from Coleman (and other) gas lanterns (which have higher than background radioactivity). Some natural ores used in making ceramic glazes contain radioactive elements.
The only difference is that nuclear power plants use concentrated radioactive elements. So do many hospitals (ever hear of "radiation therapy" for cancer?) Food processing plants (irradiated foods). That smoke detector hanging on your wall.
What level of radiation is "safe"? Define "safe". There is an existing "background" level of radiation. That, at a minimum, better be "safe". If it isn't, well, we're already screwed. (And no, we really aren't "screwed" by there being a background level. In fact, it is credited with being the driving force for the random mutations that evolution requires to operate. It's also why the center of the earth is HOT instead of COLD.)
"How much will you get at ten feet from a rod?" It doesn't matter since you will probably never be that close. That rod will be shielded and you'll not experience anything more than background. "How much in the center of an operating reactor?" Big numbers. Again, you'll never be there. The levels drop as the inverse square of the distance (with no absorption), and much faster than that when absorption is considered. That means if you know the level of radiation at one foot, it will be half that at 1.4 ft. It will be 1/4 that at 2 feet. It will be 1/100 at ten feet.
There are regulations and rules about exposure limits, but I don't have any of them handy to quote from. The limits are cumulative, which means you integrate the exposure rates over time and have a sum that is considered "ok", but every radioactive exposure can be the source of a mutation that causes cancer. It's a statistical thing. (The exposure limit is not because the radiation collects in your body, it's because of the cumulative damage it has done to your DNA.)
Why is "nuclear" energy considered so dangerous? Badly designed reactors break and leak radioactive material. "Chernobyl". (Shudder.) That is the classic example of a style of reactor that is not manufactured in the US precisely because it has the ability to do what it did. "Three Mile Island" is the classic example of hysteria, because a small amount of radioactive gas was released and anti-nuke evangelists spread the word without spreading the knowledge to go with it. "The China Syndrome" is the classic disinformation campaign -- surely, if you see it in the movies it must be true!
There IS no debate on global warming. It exists...
There is debate on global warming, just not open debate. And while it may exist, there is still debate on the anthropogenic contribution.
You made up the part about "certain neighborhoods... had a high percentage of bad loans". Pure fiction. And you forgot to mention that borrowers were "ineligible" because of the color of their skin.
No, I did not. Redlining was based on zip codes, not skin color. It had to do with the neighborhood and not the person.
The CRA did not force any bank to make a bad loan; the CRA simply forced banks to stop discriminating based on race.
Nonsense. They were forced to make loans to riskier borrowers so they could stay in business and expand. I guess you could say they weren't forced, they could just have stagnated and then failed.
They were still completely free to use creditworthiness part of their decision to write a loan.
More nonsense. "Completely free" means could do so without repercussions. The CRA made sure there would be.
For whom? The people who provide the service and need to limit the use to limit their required investment in hardware, or the people who use the service who want things to go everywhere as fast as they can all the time?
Unfortunately, neutrality makes the net work better for the latter, and the latter don't provide the service or define the terms.
Or, more likely..... These very same banks were required, by regulation, to provide bad loans.
It was called the Community Reinvestment Act, enacted under Carter. It was intended to stop the practice of redlining. You know, redlining, where banks would refuse to make loans into certain neighborhoods that had a high percentage of bad loans and ineligible borrowers.
The CRA forced them to make bad loans so they could stay in business. Clinton increased the regulations so they had to make more. And Bush the Recent tried several times to re-regulate the system to reduce the requirement to make bad loans, every time opposed by Franks and Obama et.al. "We don't need regulation, there is no problem", sang the Dems.
...but the question is not whether or not the OLPC project can solve the educational problems of the world but whether it can be useful in certain situations. I think the answer is yes.
A better question is whether or not the money spent on the OLPC is the BEST use of the money.
For example, it is proven that better fed students do better. Is it better to spend money feeding the students (something the parents should be doing) or to spend money on books and teachers? If all you ask is "can it be useful (to feed the students) in certain situations", I think the answer is yes. Are they better off well-fed and un-booked and un-teachered? I think not.
That's my point, not that this is some utopian cure-all, but that it will be useful for some communities and that this is the best way to help those communities.
You switch from "will it help" to "best way to help" in mid-point.
To be able to simply write it and have it show up on their computers allows them to have much more content available than if they were stuck hauling books into every school.
Wow, are you involved in any way with computers and networking? "simply write it and have it show up" is a grand goal, but it doesn't work that way here in the US with the schools wired with internet paid for by telephone taxes, why would it work in Nigeria or anyplace else the OLPC is being handed out?
As for the wireless network, that's been built into the computer as a mesh network, which means that one child, or a teacher, can connect to someone who has the latest version of a textbook, or even a text that was not available to them prior.
Wow. All the problems of networking solved with this magic "mesh". Unfortunately, the mesh only extends a short distance from the computer, and the archive.org servers are, ummm, a thousand miles or more away? Someone has to be able to get to the rest of the world from this little mesh in the classroom. That costs money, takes effort, and can be disabled by a single unhappy neighboring villager who cuts down the local tower.
And while you may want to pretend that civil war tears through every "third-world nation" on a regular basis, that simply isn't the case; and certainly not on a level that causes massive infrastructure damage.
Yeah, it's not like those wireless network towers are so hard to knock down when your neighboring village is unhappy that you are getting something that will make you smarter. Civil wars don't have to be country-wide to cause damage. All it takes is a tribe you aren't friendly with wanting what you have and you don't have it anymore.
There is no good way to get an education on how to use computers than by using them, especially at a young age. I imagine that is how most people here on slashdot learned to use the things.
There is more to life and education than how to use computers.
The problem with University books, and it is a problem, I know, I've been there, I'm bitter about it too, has nothing to do with this project.
I'm not talking about university books. I'm talking about basic elementary school books. Third grade. Fifth grade. Everything in between and below. Boxes and boxes and boxes of them. Pulled from classrooms and libraries around the county and taken to the university surplus department because they had the contracts with the recyclers and the facilities to handle it. Pulled from the shelves because they didn't have the space to keep them anymore while buying new, and they couldn't be sold to make money because the publisher wouldn't allow it. Chopped up into little bits and bleached and made into recycled toilet paper and whatever else.
And I don't care if you think "education theory" has changed so that these books would be useless in a classroom. That's just nonsense. They contain the information, let the teacher adapt it to the needs of her specific students.
Plenty of books on entry level courses of Algebra, English, Physics, etc. that should be free because their copyright should have expired.
As the new owner of a blue, shiny Sony PRS-505 ereader with 4Gb of flash storage, I've been on the prowl for anything like this free in pdf or text form. I'm a member of two professional societies that advertise free access to books as part of their membership. I have Project Gutenberg's URL burned on my forehead. The Internet archive is on my speed dial, figuratively.
They aren't that easy to find. When they are, they are often scanned PDFs (images, not text) that are VERY slow and VERY large to use, and sometimes the "color" pdfs don't work at all on the Sony. The "free" books from my memberships are all "one page at a time web-reader" access.
I thought maybe the MIT online courses would be a wealth of free stuff. Yes, just not in a format easy to use.
What's perhaps the most of a hoot is looking at the Sony site for ebooks. You'd think maybe ebooks would be cheaper? Try "The Physical Geography of South America." $1080. Not a typo.
I had almost exactly the same problem with OLPC G1G1. They kept claiming my address was invalid because they'd keep dropping the street address, but didn't bother sending an email telling me this, I had to call them, and then they started making promises of delivery they knew they could not keep, all after charging me for something they hadn't shipped.
The last straw was when the new promised delivery date was just past the six month limit for disputing a charge -- if I "stayed with the program" and waited for the delivery and it didn't happen, I'd lose my ability to contest the charge and have neither a laptop nor the money. I cancelled. They said they'd refund the "half" that was for my laptop. I said no, you refund it all and you do it by Friday at 4:59PM or I will contest the charge at 5PM on Friday. Period.
They did. The right way to deal with fraud is not to sit idly by while it happens to you, you become proactive. Yes, it is fraud to charge people money for things you have no intention of shipping to them. It is fraud to lie to them about when you are going to ship things to them after you've taken their money.
If OLPC couldn't ship 'em to donors, what makes anyone think they're shipping them to kids in the '2nd world'?
You have no reason to believe they are, and even less reason to believe that the politicians in the countries who are getting OLPCs are not managing to sell them on the black market and keeping the money instead of handing them out to children. You're right. If a company cannot put something in a box and hand it to one of the several shipping companies in the US, there is no reason to believe they can arrange delivery to anyplace outside the US.
This way the children in question aren't stuck with crappy out-of-date textbooks three, four, however many years down the line.
Elementary school textbooks rarely become obsolete other than they don't cover the latest discoveries -- and the latest discoveries are rarely important to the basic material. Three, four, five, ten years is not too old for the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. I've got texts from the fifties that are easier to understand than modern ones, and just as relevant to the basics. (Halliday and Resnick on Physics, e.g.)
Out-of-date textbooks are rarely wrong about the basics (or at least don't become out of date because they are wrong, they were wrong from the start.) Out of date elementary school textbooks become so for a limited number of reasons:
The author wrote a new one and wants the money.
The state school authorities demand a re-write.
The teacher unions come up with a new, "better" way of teaching.
History happens (for history books).
Boundaries change (for geography books).
Note that math and science books rarely change because there is a whole new way of thinking about math and science, and even history books are valid for the periods they cover.
Even an out-of-date textbook in an child's hand has more relevant information than a computer that doesn't have a working network connection because the third world country he lives in can't keep the networks running during the latest civil war. A ten-year-old reading primer doesn't require constant 110/220V to keep the system going, or replacing the hardline to the antenna, or upgrades to deal with bugs/exploits, or a microwave link to the nearest big city. An out of date textbook doesn't need a 12V charge to keep running.
One Wednesday afternoon I was at the local university surplus sale. Surplus department also does recycling. They had PALLET LOADS of boxes of "obsolete" books that were going to the recyclers. Basic reading, math, science, school books, text books, and even some literature. I saw some that I wanted to own and offered them money. No, can't sell this. It must be recycled. The publisher had a contract with the schools that these came out of that old books must be recycled and never sold.
Can you imagine the effect of GIVING these books to children in countries where we are trying to get OLPC's delivered? A library of their own, they can trade with friends, sit and read under a tree (or whatever passes for one). Something that corrupt politicians are unlikely to redirect to the black market because they can't sell them for much. Wow.
If you are politically correct and environmentally conscious, you are probably now wiping your ass with the toilet paper made from these perfectly usable books.
... RAID doesn't stand for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, but rather "Independent Drives".
The name hasn't changed. RAID has never had anything to do with the price of the disks. You've always been able to make a RAID set out of expensive disks, and the biggest RAID packages usually are made up of expensive disks.
No javascript in pdf is an excellent solution. It's a DOCUMENT, not a video game or word processor or anything else. You don't get javascript on a paper printout; you don't need javascript in the electronic version of a paper printout.
Few people disable javascript in their browsers.
I do. Most javascript in web pages is useless and needless and a waste of computer cycles. If you want to calculate something, do it on YOUR SEVER and send me the result.
It's a crutch used by poor web designers to add glitz to content-less pages.
I caught a major cell-phone company using javascript to provide log-in security for their account access web pages. Since I had javascript turned off, I had access to anyone's account I wanted. I told them what I was doing and they didn't believe it,
until I started telling the account manager I was talking to what his minute balance and last payment was. THEN he got interested.
... scripting in PDF viewers needs to be hardened against unintended consequences.
Much better that pdf authors spend the time properly identifying their documents with title and author information. I have US Government produced pdfs where the "title" of the document is "Microsoft preview -- C:\some\file\name\that\is\meaningless.doc" and the author is even stupider. Leave out the fancy crap until you can properly identify your documents, ok?
You need evidence that javascript on web pages is useless? Try Yahoo. I go to my Yahoo mail page and a big, time-wasting page tells me that I have javascript turned off, click here for the OLD version of mail -- which is exactly where I was trying to get to in the first place, damn it!
(Actually, I suppose it's no more a stretch than using 'orange' in the first place).
The orange, the orange, a non-musical fruit,
Eat all you want, there will be no toot.
Drunk raw from the glass at each breakfast meal,
Not good with the cookies but great with some veal.
Add it to vodka and have a screwdriver,
A drink that will cost you more than a fiver.
But don't try to rhyme the name of the orange
'cause it will make your poem sound really odd and ruin the entire effect.
The next time you get angry, try to master that anger by thinking objective thoughts.
I tried that. I started by thinking "oranges are orange", but then that led to the question "why apples aren't apple", and from there I went to "why are there two ways to spell 'grey' (gray) that are both colors, but two ways to spell 'red' (read) and only one of them is?" and that made me really mad.
And THEN I thought about the guy who created the word "orange" specifically so you couldn't write a poem about oranges and THAT pushed me over the edge.
The only time MTV (and VH1) show music videos anymore is very early in the morning. It's really annoying. I wake up at 7AM after falling asleep watching bi's compete to french some nutcase or has-been real-worlders fighting about who's the toughest or crying about who doesn't like who, really compelling television drama, and all I see is stupid music.
Damn, if you want a stupid music video channel, why not create one instead of buying time on MTV?
I love Martha Quinn. If you are listening, will you marry me?
Or vote Obama, and hope that that guy has some intelligence, a more worldly view, and morals.
Of course he has intelligence.
Sucking up to foreigners isn't "worldly view", it's just pandering for an audience. We're electing the president of the US, not president of the world. I expect my president to look to the US first and then the world.
As for morals, well, we know the answer to that one, too. Nobody cares. He's the Obama. He's the one who we were all waiting for. The day he started campaigning is the day that the oceans stopped their rise and global warming turned around. He told us so.
He calls welfare "tax cuts" so that poor and middle class people will vote for him. He talks about a pig still being a pig after you put lipstick on it, after his VP opponent talks about being a hockey mom with lipstick. He calls his ideas "new" when they are straight out of the 60's playbook for radicals, and those came from Marx before that.
He won his first senate election by getting the courts to disqualify all of his opponents.
He claims he's a Christian, despite being a Muslim when he was young. He claims never to have heard his minister speak, at a church he attended for 20 years and was a member of.
He doesn't want to leave a deficit to the children, but doesn't care that his tax proposals will result in lowered federal revenues. It's ok because it makes the rich pay more (even though they pay the majority of the taxes already).
But nobody cares. He's not Bush. He's the one who can beat Bush (he said so).
(And I must say I've really grown to hate programmers whose idea of a helpful error message is "Failed, exiting." It's sad to see this user-hostile approach infecting the geeky linux universe.
Mplayer is pretty helpful in it's error message. Here's the relevant line:
[VO_XV] not help, see 'mplayer -vo help' for other (non-xv) video out drivers.
You probably don't have an Xvideo driver. Try "-vo x11". If that doesn't work, try one of the other real-time displays listed when you do "-vo help". You'll know when you get away from displays, it starts talking about files. When you find one that works, go to.mplayer and edit the file "config" to add the -vo line. (I.e., if you find that "-vo x11" works, put the line "-vo x11" in your.mplayer/config.
You may then run into a codec issue, depending on how your mplayer was compiled. I don't get video, either, because:
Requested video codec family [wmv9dmo] (vfm=dmo) not available.
Enable it at compilation.
Requested video codec family [wmvdmo] (vfm=dmo) not available.
Enable it at compilation.
Can you imagine someone in the President's seat who doesn't even know what the Bush Doctrine is without having to phone a friend?
If you are talking about her interview where the interviewer didn't know what the Bush Doctrine is and she asked him which of the four versions he was asking about, then you ought to be more unhappy that the press took such a cheap shot and impressed that she knows.
The person who was responsible for coining the term "Bush Doctrine" wrote following that interview that there were four different "doctrines". Distinctly different. He ought to know. And he supported Palin for knowing enough to ask. Smarter than Obama, who claimed he was a better candidate for the democrats because he had a better shot at defeating Bush, who can't run.
We had a retard in the oval office for 8 years
Yes, and fortunately Clinton couldn't run for another 4. Can we stop this ridiculous name calling and vitriol? You don't agree with the man, but that doesn't excuse this.
and it has been an unmitigated disaster.
The term you are looking for is "hyperbole". It's also called "gross exaggeration."
Lord help us if the American voters once again show disdain for educated people as 'elitists.'
Yes, it's not as if Obama wasn't putting himself up as the next saviour or anything. "We are the one who we have been waiting for".
If you want to talk policies, fine. Let's talk about socialism and income redistribution and universal health care and how they are all VERY OLD ideas that have been tried and failed every time. They aren't new ideas. Let's talk about how unfair it is for rich people to get tax cuts, when the fact is that rich people pay the most in taxes and the poor people mostly already pay nothing at all. Let's talk about tax cuts that force jobs offshore, when the fact is that tax INCREASES are what increases costs and drives jobs offshore. Let's talk about exactly how you cut the taxes of someone who already pays nothing -- let's call it welfare, which is the real name for it.
If you want to talk experience, ok, let's talk about a presidential candidate who has to resort to comparing his experience to the opposing VICE presidential candidate in order to look like he has any at all, and he still loses. He can't compare his experience to the opposing presidential candidate. A presidential candidate who has never had an executive position and had to hire and fire and make a budget. A presidential candidate who thinks that visiting his grandmother in Africa is "foreign policy experience".
If you want to talk about who will lead the US, ok, let's talk about a presidential candidate who sucks up to and thinks that support from the Germans and the French is a good thing, compared to a candidate that will put the US first.
But how about we all stop this insulting name calling and deal with the issues and not invective?
That woman puts the fear of God in me,
And democrats have the audacity to claim that Republicans are the party of hate and fear? Yes, people who lack backbone and moral fiber are often scared of those who have convictions and stick to them even when things aren't going their way.
Let's be more explicit. It isn't Bush's fault to start with.
Bush has been trying to get Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac regulated with respect to poor risk loans for the last 8 years. He's been prevented by congressmen who are getting money from both organizations. Obama is just one of them. Frank is another.
The PROBLEM started back in Carter's presidency, with the CRA -- forcing banks to make loans to less qualified borrowers so they could continue to make loans to qualified ones. The problem got worse under Clinton, who strengthened the requirements for minority loans. This was supposed to be a good thing. Look up the word "redlining".
The recent democratic controlled congress has stood in the way of solving the problem. They were denying there was a problem. Now it's a catastrophe. Every one of the congressmen who denied there was a problem and refused to act to prevent it from getting worse is now pointing their finger at Bush, whose attempts they stopped.
Raising taxes on the people who create the jobs and pay most of the taxes already isn't going to solve it.
He suggested that it was the erroneous claim from Fox that Bush had beat Gore,
Pssst. Here's a free clue: Bush did beat Gore. Even after all of Gore's judicial attempts at getting pro-Bush absentee ballots thrown out. Yeah, all anyone seems to remember is the SCOTUS decision overturning the Fla. Supremes for judicial activisism, but forget that it was Gore who was behind all the other court cases that lost.
But you are right in the long run, listening to the mainstream coverage will not help anything. They do what they can to mislead people and create "news". If Obama wins in the east, they will fall all over themselves issuing checkmarks to O', just to try to keep Reps from turning out in the west. If McCain is ahead anywhere, they'll delay calling the result until after all the polls close.
Don't bother listening that night. Wait until the morning. You won't miss anything.
A list doesn't tell you everything about the items on the list, but it does tell you SOME things about the items. This is MUCH DIFFERENT than a hash, which tells you NOTHING about the contents of the file it is computed from.
Can you tell me ANYTHING about the file from the hash I posted? No. You can't even tell me it was a file, or where it was. You know "file" because I told you. It could have been the serial input from my mouse port for thirty seconds.
But this is a red herring. It is not just the hash that is the issue, but making a LIST of the hashes and comparing them to another list of known hashes of known files. THAT makes it different.
The difference is that your "list of items in the room" gives you information about the specific items in the room. An MD5 hash tells you nothing about the contents of the room.
Here's an MD5 of a file I happen to have: 401b30e3b8b5d629635a5c613cdb7919.
How big is the file?
Does it contain the letter 'y'?
Does it contain the word "bomb"?
Here's a list of a room: 1) lamp. 2) table. 3) Book with title "how to blow up anything at any time". 4) 1/4 pound of C4.
Does the room have a table?
Does the room contain explosives?
A true hash is one-way. You can't answer the questions I asked about a room from a hash; you can from a list. You also don't get different "hashes" by just writing the list of items in the room down in a different order, you do get a different list order.
What exactly is the point of a rule such as votes will only count if their are two intersecting line segments within the box?
Because that is the way they were instructed to unambiguously indicate the vote they were casting. It is a very simple rule, understood by almost all people instinctively, and very simple to count.
You can't say "here is a piece of paper with names and boxes on it, do what you want" because people will do all kinds of things. They will cross out the people they don't want. They will circle the ones they do. They will mark in one box, then cross that out and mark in another. They will draw a line down the column through all the boxes. They will put a check mark somewhere on the paper. They will put checkmarks next to the names of the candidates they recognize, and then put a checkmark IN the box of the other candidate. They will put checkmarks next to names they DON'T recognize. They will tap the paper with their pencil as they think, which can leave marks -- in a box. As they move the paper and pencil around, they may make a line on the paper by accident -- in a box.
If you don't say "X in the box" as the rule, just how DO you count a vote that has a checkmark next to one candidate's name and a checkmark in the box for another? Do you ASSUME "any mark in the box" means a vote? What about people who have poor motor skills and tend to drag their pencil across the paper; they may have a sort-of checkmark in one box and a line through the box for the other candidate, too? Or do you say right up front, from the very beginning, printed on every ballot "here is how you indicate your intention"?
Remember, I got to see this first hand. This was a small rural township, a few hundred voters max. And yet, every election, people did it wrong. It was also a long time before scanned ballots, so people were not likely to fill in the whole box.
This ignores, of course, the reason I already gave, which was election fraud. It is trivial to make a "mark in a box" as you smooth out the paper. You simply have a bit of pencil lead in a bandaid on your finger. You make a line through the box for Obama, e.g., on half the ballots you open. If the person hadn't voted, they would be counted as Obama. If they had voted for Obama, no change. If they voted for McCain, the ballot would be voided. An X is harder to fake than a line.
How is it reasonable when ballots with one candidate unambiguously selected are thrown out because the boxes are filled in instead of checked.
Well, I already admitted that those ballots were probably counted. I don't recall. It's the rest of the cases where it IS NOT unambiguous that require a rule, and rules are best that are created BEFORE the voter votes and not after. This nonsense of "is the chad dimpled or not" as a means of creating a rule after the fact for determining "voter intent" is just that. Nonsense. It turns a change of mind into a vote. (I may have started to vote for X but decided not to. My pointer dimpled the chad. The RULE is that a hole counts. After the fact, the dimple counts, too. Had that rule been in effect when I voted, I would have gotten a replacement ballot. Counting the dimple stole my vote.)
Slashdot Mirror
Because she thinks that I'm giving her something expensive and nice and it costs me almost nothing. Buying her stuff she could use might actually cost some real dough.
Yes, if she wanted to apply isopropyl alcohol she'd do it herself.
No, I don't really do this. As a gag one year I bought a large bottle of ipa and pasted on a fake Chanel No. 5 label. She thought it was funny.
One Christmas I was at my Mom's house. She is a "low sodium" believer. She salts nothing at all, and has a shaker on the table for those who want some taste in their food. (She has also lost all sense of smell, which is a large component of food taste, so she doesn't notice the lack of salt at all. She's easy to buy for for Christmas presents; I go to Goodwill and get empty bottles of high-price perfume, fill them with isopropyl alcohol, and give them to her as the real stuff. She can't tell that it isn't.)
I went to refill the shaker. She had a box of "low sodium salt" on the shelf. "20% less sodium" it said. Wow. Perhaps this was a mix of table salt and potassium chloride?
It looked different. Table salt is usually sold in the cubic crystal form. Tiny cubes, just the way that salt will crystalize out of a concentrated solution of brine, which is part of the salt making process. This stuff was powdery.
I looked closer at the label. Contents: sodium chloride and iodine. Typical table salt.
To make a long story short, I realized that this company had done something to "fluff up" the normal salt crystals to make them larger and put only 13 ounces (by weight) of product in a box that normally contains 16. A "teaspoon" of this product actually contained 20% less sodium than "normal" salt, simply because it contained 20% less product by weight.
I considered that to be false advertising, but technically, the box did contain 20% less sodium than normal table salt boxes of the same size, and by volume, it was 20% less.
Radioactivity from nuclear power is no different than radioactivity from any other source. Alpha, beta and gamma radiation is alpha, beta and gamma radiation. Radioactivity occurs naturally all around us. Every day. Trace amounts of radioactive materials are found everywhere. It used to be common to practice radiological monitoring skills using the mantles from Coleman (and other) gas lanterns (which have higher than background radioactivity). Some natural ores used in making ceramic glazes contain radioactive elements.
The only difference is that nuclear power plants use concentrated radioactive elements. So do many hospitals (ever hear of "radiation therapy" for cancer?) Food processing plants (irradiated foods). That smoke detector hanging on your wall.
What level of radiation is "safe"? Define "safe". There is an existing "background" level of radiation. That, at a minimum, better be "safe". If it isn't, well, we're already screwed. (And no, we really aren't "screwed" by there being a background level. In fact, it is credited with being the driving force for the random mutations that evolution requires to operate. It's also why the center of the earth is HOT instead of COLD.)
"How much will you get at ten feet from a rod?" It doesn't matter since you will probably never be that close. That rod will be shielded and you'll not experience anything more than background. "How much in the center of an operating reactor?" Big numbers. Again, you'll never be there. The levels drop as the inverse square of the distance (with no absorption), and much faster than that when absorption is considered. That means if you know the level of radiation at one foot, it will be half that at 1.4 ft. It will be 1/4 that at 2 feet. It will be 1/100 at ten feet.
There are regulations and rules about exposure limits, but I don't have any of them handy to quote from. The limits are cumulative, which means you integrate the exposure rates over time and have a sum that is considered "ok", but every radioactive exposure can be the source of a mutation that causes cancer. It's a statistical thing. (The exposure limit is not because the radiation collects in your body, it's because of the cumulative damage it has done to your DNA.)
Why is "nuclear" energy considered so dangerous? Badly designed reactors break and leak radioactive material. "Chernobyl". (Shudder.) That is the classic example of a style of reactor that is not manufactured in the US precisely because it has the ability to do what it did. "Three Mile Island" is the classic example of hysteria, because a small amount of radioactive gas was released and anti-nuke evangelists spread the word without spreading the knowledge to go with it. "The China Syndrome" is the classic disinformation campaign -- surely, if you see it in the movies it must be true!
There IS no debate on global warming. It exists ...
There is debate on global warming, just not open debate. And while it may exist, there is still debate on the anthropogenic contribution.
No, I did not. Redlining was based on zip codes, not skin color. It had to do with the neighborhood and not the person.
The CRA did not force any bank to make a bad loan; the CRA simply forced banks to stop discriminating based on race.
Nonsense. They were forced to make loans to riskier borrowers so they could stay in business and expand. I guess you could say they weren't forced, they could just have stagnated and then failed.
They were still completely free to use creditworthiness part of their decision to write a loan.
More nonsense. "Completely free" means could do so without repercussions. The CRA made sure there would be.
Unfortunately, neutrality makes the net work better for the latter, and the latter don't provide the service or define the terms.
It was called the Community Reinvestment Act, enacted under Carter. It was intended to stop the practice of redlining. You know, redlining, where banks would refuse to make loans into certain neighborhoods that had a high percentage of bad loans and ineligible borrowers.
The CRA forced them to make bad loans so they could stay in business. Clinton increased the regulations so they had to make more. And Bush the Recent tried several times to re-regulate the system to reduce the requirement to make bad loans, every time opposed by Franks and Obama et.al. "We don't need regulation, there is no problem", sang the Dems.
A better question is whether or not the money spent on the OLPC is the BEST use of the money.
For example, it is proven that better fed students do better. Is it better to spend money feeding the students (something the parents should be doing) or to spend money on books and teachers? If all you ask is "can it be useful (to feed the students) in certain situations", I think the answer is yes. Are they better off well-fed and un-booked and un-teachered? I think not.
That's my point, not that this is some utopian cure-all, but that it will be useful for some communities and that this is the best way to help those communities.
You switch from "will it help" to "best way to help" in mid-point.
Wow, are you involved in any way with computers and networking? "simply write it and have it show up" is a grand goal, but it doesn't work that way here in the US with the schools wired with internet paid for by telephone taxes, why would it work in Nigeria or anyplace else the OLPC is being handed out?
As for the wireless network, that's been built into the computer as a mesh network, which means that one child, or a teacher, can connect to someone who has the latest version of a textbook, or even a text that was not available to them prior.
Wow. All the problems of networking solved with this magic "mesh". Unfortunately, the mesh only extends a short distance from the computer, and the archive.org servers are, ummm, a thousand miles or more away? Someone has to be able to get to the rest of the world from this little mesh in the classroom. That costs money, takes effort, and can be disabled by a single unhappy neighboring villager who cuts down the local tower.
And while you may want to pretend that civil war tears through every "third-world nation" on a regular basis, that simply isn't the case; and certainly not on a level that causes massive infrastructure damage.
Yeah, it's not like those wireless network towers are so hard to knock down when your neighboring village is unhappy that you are getting something that will make you smarter. Civil wars don't have to be country-wide to cause damage. All it takes is a tribe you aren't friendly with wanting what you have and you don't have it anymore.
There is no good way to get an education on how to use computers than by using them, especially at a young age. I imagine that is how most people here on slashdot learned to use the things.
There is more to life and education than how to use computers.
The problem with University books, and it is a problem, I know, I've been there, I'm bitter about it too, has nothing to do with this project.
I'm not talking about university books. I'm talking about basic elementary school books. Third grade. Fifth grade. Everything in between and below. Boxes and boxes and boxes of them. Pulled from classrooms and libraries around the county and taken to the university surplus department because they had the contracts with the recyclers and the facilities to handle it. Pulled from the shelves because they didn't have the space to keep them anymore while buying new, and they couldn't be sold to make money because the publisher wouldn't allow it. Chopped up into little bits and bleached and made into recycled toilet paper and whatever else.
And I don't care if you think "education theory" has changed so that these books would be useless in a classroom. That's just nonsense. They contain the information, let the teacher adapt it to the needs of her specific students.
As the new owner of a blue, shiny Sony PRS-505 ereader with 4Gb of flash storage, I've been on the prowl for anything like this free in pdf or text form. I'm a member of two professional societies that advertise free access to books as part of their membership. I have Project Gutenberg's URL burned on my forehead. The Internet archive is on my speed dial, figuratively.
They aren't that easy to find. When they are, they are often scanned PDFs (images, not text) that are VERY slow and VERY large to use, and sometimes the "color" pdfs don't work at all on the Sony. The "free" books from my memberships are all "one page at a time web-reader" access.
I thought maybe the MIT online courses would be a wealth of free stuff. Yes, just not in a format easy to use.
What's perhaps the most of a hoot is looking at the Sony site for ebooks. You'd think maybe ebooks would be cheaper? Try "The Physical Geography of South America." $1080. Not a typo.
The last straw was when the new promised delivery date was just past the six month limit for disputing a charge -- if I "stayed with the program" and waited for the delivery and it didn't happen, I'd lose my ability to contest the charge and have neither a laptop nor the money. I cancelled. They said they'd refund the "half" that was for my laptop. I said no, you refund it all and you do it by Friday at 4:59PM or I will contest the charge at 5PM on Friday. Period.
They did. The right way to deal with fraud is not to sit idly by while it happens to you, you become proactive. Yes, it is fraud to charge people money for things you have no intention of shipping to them. It is fraud to lie to them about when you are going to ship things to them after you've taken their money.
If OLPC couldn't ship 'em to donors, what makes anyone think they're shipping them to kids in the '2nd world'?
You have no reason to believe they are, and even less reason to believe that the politicians in the countries who are getting OLPCs are not managing to sell them on the black market and keeping the money instead of handing them out to children. You're right. If a company cannot put something in a box and hand it to one of the several shipping companies in the US, there is no reason to believe they can arrange delivery to anyplace outside the US.
Elementary school textbooks rarely become obsolete other than they don't cover the latest discoveries -- and the latest discoveries are rarely important to the basic material. Three, four, five, ten years is not too old for the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. I've got texts from the fifties that are easier to understand than modern ones, and just as relevant to the basics. (Halliday and Resnick on Physics, e.g.)
Out-of-date textbooks are rarely wrong about the basics (or at least don't become out of date because they are wrong, they were wrong from the start.) Out of date elementary school textbooks become so for a limited number of reasons:
Note that math and science books rarely change because there is a whole new way of thinking about math and science, and even history books are valid for the periods they cover.
Even an out-of-date textbook in an child's hand has more relevant information than a computer that doesn't have a working network connection because the third world country he lives in can't keep the networks running during the latest civil war. A ten-year-old reading primer doesn't require constant 110/220V to keep the system going, or replacing the hardline to the antenna, or upgrades to deal with bugs/exploits, or a microwave link to the nearest big city. An out of date textbook doesn't need a 12V charge to keep running.
One Wednesday afternoon I was at the local university surplus sale. Surplus department also does recycling. They had PALLET LOADS of boxes of "obsolete" books that were going to the recyclers. Basic reading, math, science, school books, text books, and even some literature. I saw some that I wanted to own and offered them money. No, can't sell this. It must be recycled. The publisher had a contract with the schools that these came out of that old books must be recycled and never sold.
Can you imagine the effect of GIVING these books to children in countries where we are trying to get OLPC's delivered? A library of their own, they can trade with friends, sit and read under a tree (or whatever passes for one). Something that corrupt politicians are unlikely to redirect to the black market because they can't sell them for much. Wow.
If you are politically correct and environmentally conscious, you are probably now wiping your ass with the toilet paper made from these perfectly usable books.
The name hasn't changed. RAID has never had anything to do with the price of the disks. You've always been able to make a RAID set out of expensive disks, and the biggest RAID packages usually are made up of expensive disks.
I remember the day we got the 'vi' macros for teco. Woot woot. Hot stuff.
Actually, when I was young it was called an IBM keypunch. Those were the days.
No javascript in pdf is an excellent solution. It's a DOCUMENT, not a video game or word processor or anything else. You don't get javascript on a paper printout; you don't need javascript in the electronic version of a paper printout.
Few people disable javascript in their browsers.
I do. Most javascript in web pages is useless and needless and a waste of computer cycles. If you want to calculate something, do it on YOUR SEVER and send me the result.
It's a crutch used by poor web designers to add glitz to content-less pages.
I caught a major cell-phone company using javascript to provide log-in security for their account access web pages. Since I had javascript turned off, I had access to anyone's account I wanted. I told them what I was doing and they didn't believe it, until I started telling the account manager I was talking to what his minute balance and last payment was. THEN he got interested.
Much better that pdf authors spend the time properly identifying their documents with title and author information. I have US Government produced pdfs where the "title" of the document is "Microsoft preview -- C:\some\file\name\that\is\meaningless.doc" and the author is even stupider. Leave out the fancy crap until you can properly identify your documents, ok?
You need evidence that javascript on web pages is useless? Try Yahoo. I go to my Yahoo mail page and a big, time-wasting page tells me that I have javascript turned off, click here for the OLD version of mail -- which is exactly where I was trying to get to in the first place, damn it!
And get off my lawn...
The orange, the orange, a non-musical fruit,
Eat all you want, there will be no toot.
Drunk raw from the glass at each breakfast meal,
Not good with the cookies but great with some veal.
Add it to vodka and have a screwdriver,
A drink that will cost you more than a fiver.
But don't try to rhyme the name of the orange
'cause it will make your poem sound really odd and ruin the entire effect.
I tried that. I started by thinking "oranges are orange", but then that led to the question "why apples aren't apple", and from there I went to "why are there two ways to spell 'grey' (gray) that are both colors, but two ways to spell 'red' (read) and only one of them is?" and that made me really mad.
And THEN I thought about the guy who created the word "orange" specifically so you couldn't write a poem about oranges and THAT pushed me over the edge.
Damn, if you want a stupid music video channel, why not create one instead of buying time on MTV?
I love Martha Quinn. If you are listening, will you marry me?
Of course he has intelligence.
Sucking up to foreigners isn't "worldly view", it's just pandering for an audience. We're electing the president of the US, not president of the world. I expect my president to look to the US first and then the world.
As for morals, well, we know the answer to that one, too. Nobody cares. He's the Obama. He's the one who we were all waiting for. The day he started campaigning is the day that the oceans stopped their rise and global warming turned around. He told us so.
He calls welfare "tax cuts" so that poor and middle class people will vote for him. He talks about a pig still being a pig after you put lipstick on it, after his VP opponent talks about being a hockey mom with lipstick. He calls his ideas "new" when they are straight out of the 60's playbook for radicals, and those came from Marx before that.
He won his first senate election by getting the courts to disqualify all of his opponents.
He claims he's a Christian, despite being a Muslim when he was young. He claims never to have heard his minister speak, at a church he attended for 20 years and was a member of.
He doesn't want to leave a deficit to the children, but doesn't care that his tax proposals will result in lowered federal revenues. It's ok because it makes the rich pay more (even though they pay the majority of the taxes already).
But nobody cares. He's not Bush. He's the one who can beat Bush (he said so).
Mplayer is pretty helpful in it's error message. Here's the relevant line:
You probably don't have an Xvideo driver. Try "-vo x11". If that doesn't work, try one of the other real-time displays listed when you do "-vo help". You'll know when you get away from displays, it starts talking about files. When you find one that works, go to .mplayer and edit the file "config" to add the -vo line. (I.e., if you find that "-vo x11" works, put the line "-vo x11" in your .mplayer/config.
You may then run into a codec issue, depending on how your mplayer was compiled. I don't get video, either, because:
If you are talking about her interview where the interviewer didn't know what the Bush Doctrine is and she asked him which of the four versions he was asking about, then you ought to be more unhappy that the press took such a cheap shot and impressed that she knows.
The person who was responsible for coining the term "Bush Doctrine" wrote following that interview that there were four different "doctrines". Distinctly different. He ought to know. And he supported Palin for knowing enough to ask. Smarter than Obama, who claimed he was a better candidate for the democrats because he had a better shot at defeating Bush, who can't run.
We had a retard in the oval office for 8 years
Yes, and fortunately Clinton couldn't run for another 4. Can we stop this ridiculous name calling and vitriol? You don't agree with the man, but that doesn't excuse this.
and it has been an unmitigated disaster.
The term you are looking for is "hyperbole". It's also called "gross exaggeration."
Lord help us if the American voters once again show disdain for educated people as 'elitists.'
Yes, it's not as if Obama wasn't putting himself up as the next saviour or anything. "We are the one who we have been waiting for".
If you want to talk policies, fine. Let's talk about socialism and income redistribution and universal health care and how they are all VERY OLD ideas that have been tried and failed every time. They aren't new ideas. Let's talk about how unfair it is for rich people to get tax cuts, when the fact is that rich people pay the most in taxes and the poor people mostly already pay nothing at all. Let's talk about tax cuts that force jobs offshore, when the fact is that tax INCREASES are what increases costs and drives jobs offshore. Let's talk about exactly how you cut the taxes of someone who already pays nothing -- let's call it welfare, which is the real name for it.
If you want to talk experience, ok, let's talk about a presidential candidate who has to resort to comparing his experience to the opposing VICE presidential candidate in order to look like he has any at all, and he still loses. He can't compare his experience to the opposing presidential candidate. A presidential candidate who has never had an executive position and had to hire and fire and make a budget. A presidential candidate who thinks that visiting his grandmother in Africa is "foreign policy experience".
If you want to talk about who will lead the US, ok, let's talk about a presidential candidate who sucks up to and thinks that support from the Germans and the French is a good thing, compared to a candidate that will put the US first.
But how about we all stop this insulting name calling and deal with the issues and not invective?
That woman puts the fear of God in me,
And democrats have the audacity to claim that Republicans are the party of hate and fear? Yes, people who lack backbone and moral fiber are often scared of those who have convictions and stick to them even when things aren't going their way.
Let's be more explicit. It isn't Bush's fault to start with.
Bush has been trying to get Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac regulated with respect to poor risk loans for the last 8 years. He's been prevented by congressmen who are getting money from both organizations. Obama is just one of them. Frank is another.
The PROBLEM started back in Carter's presidency, with the CRA -- forcing banks to make loans to less qualified borrowers so they could continue to make loans to qualified ones. The problem got worse under Clinton, who strengthened the requirements for minority loans. This was supposed to be a good thing. Look up the word "redlining".
The recent democratic controlled congress has stood in the way of solving the problem. They were denying there was a problem. Now it's a catastrophe. Every one of the congressmen who denied there was a problem and refused to act to prevent it from getting worse is now pointing their finger at Bush, whose attempts they stopped.
Raising taxes on the people who create the jobs and pay most of the taxes already isn't going to solve it.
Pssst. Here's a free clue: Bush did beat Gore. Even after all of Gore's judicial attempts at getting pro-Bush absentee ballots thrown out. Yeah, all anyone seems to remember is the SCOTUS decision overturning the Fla. Supremes for judicial activisism, but forget that it was Gore who was behind all the other court cases that lost.
But you are right in the long run, listening to the mainstream coverage will not help anything. They do what they can to mislead people and create "news". If Obama wins in the east, they will fall all over themselves issuing checkmarks to O', just to try to keep Reps from turning out in the west. If McCain is ahead anywhere, they'll delay calling the result until after all the polls close.
Don't bother listening that night. Wait until the morning. You won't miss anything.
A list doesn't tell you everything about the items on the list, but it does tell you SOME things about the items. This is MUCH DIFFERENT than a hash, which tells you NOTHING about the contents of the file it is computed from.
Can you tell me ANYTHING about the file from the hash I posted? No. You can't even tell me it was a file, or where it was. You know "file" because I told you. It could have been the serial input from my mouse port for thirty seconds.
But this is a red herring. It is not just the hash that is the issue, but making a LIST of the hashes and comparing them to another list of known hashes of known files. THAT makes it different.
Here's an MD5 of a file I happen to have: 401b30e3b8b5d629635a5c613cdb7919.
Here's a list of a room: 1) lamp. 2) table. 3) Book with title "how to blow up anything at any time". 4) 1/4 pound of C4.
A true hash is one-way. You can't answer the questions I asked about a room from a hash; you can from a list. You also don't get different "hashes" by just writing the list of items in the room down in a different order, you do get a different list order.
Because that is the way they were instructed to unambiguously indicate the vote they were casting. It is a very simple rule, understood by almost all people instinctively, and very simple to count.
You can't say "here is a piece of paper with names and boxes on it, do what you want" because people will do all kinds of things. They will cross out the people they don't want. They will circle the ones they do. They will mark in one box, then cross that out and mark in another. They will draw a line down the column through all the boxes. They will put a check mark somewhere on the paper. They will put checkmarks next to the names of the candidates they recognize, and then put a checkmark IN the box of the other candidate. They will put checkmarks next to names they DON'T recognize. They will tap the paper with their pencil as they think, which can leave marks -- in a box. As they move the paper and pencil around, they may make a line on the paper by accident -- in a box.
If you don't say "X in the box" as the rule, just how DO you count a vote that has a checkmark next to one candidate's name and a checkmark in the box for another? Do you ASSUME "any mark in the box" means a vote? What about people who have poor motor skills and tend to drag their pencil across the paper; they may have a sort-of checkmark in one box and a line through the box for the other candidate, too? Or do you say right up front, from the very beginning, printed on every ballot "here is how you indicate your intention"?
Remember, I got to see this first hand. This was a small rural township, a few hundred voters max. And yet, every election, people did it wrong. It was also a long time before scanned ballots, so people were not likely to fill in the whole box.
This ignores, of course, the reason I already gave, which was election fraud. It is trivial to make a "mark in a box" as you smooth out the paper. You simply have a bit of pencil lead in a bandaid on your finger. You make a line through the box for Obama, e.g., on half the ballots you open. If the person hadn't voted, they would be counted as Obama. If they had voted for Obama, no change. If they voted for McCain, the ballot would be voided. An X is harder to fake than a line.
How is it reasonable when ballots with one candidate unambiguously selected are thrown out because the boxes are filled in instead of checked.
Well, I already admitted that those ballots were probably counted. I don't recall. It's the rest of the cases where it IS NOT unambiguous that require a rule, and rules are best that are created BEFORE the voter votes and not after. This nonsense of "is the chad dimpled or not" as a means of creating a rule after the fact for determining "voter intent" is just that. Nonsense. It turns a change of mind into a vote. (I may have started to vote for X but decided not to. My pointer dimpled the chad. The RULE is that a hole counts. After the fact, the dimple counts, too. Had that rule been in effect when I voted, I would have gotten a replacement ballot. Counting the dimple stole my vote.)