Actually, it is much easier to discriminate against a class of people if you can de-humanize them. The Nazi's pulled that off in the 1930's with the jews, gypsies and poles.
Something inside of most humans will allow for us to smash someone in the face if we can see that they are not "one of us".
It seems that at most times, there always needs to be a whipping boy. In the 30's it was jews, 50's communists, 60's blacks, 70's hippies, etc...
The article mentions that broadcasters would love to be able to stop recording and skipping commercials...
I will not watch the 20 minutes of commercials in a hour long show. Apparently the networks do not understand that this was a minor factor that led to the creation of the movie networks like Showtime, HBO, TMC, etc...
On the rare occasion when I do watch a program "real time" I mute the commercials and turn to the computer for the next 3-4 minutes or I change channels. Usually I find that/. , Wiki or something else on the internet holds my attention better and I forget to go back to the television program.
Maybe 10 minutes before the show ends (2 minutes of actual content) I un-mute, find out I lost the story thread, or it's stupid, or I figured out the "who-done-it" in the first 30 seconds and change channels again.
My viewing loyalties are around a few shows (BSG). Nearly everything else is tripe and maybe I will watch an episode of something if I am paralyzed in a hospital bed. I cannot even tell what networks things are on, I set the DVR and watch things at my convenience.
Gone are the days of ten million households sitting on the edge of their seats at 7 pm for the movie of the week. The networks are living in a 30 year old dream of our viewing habits and what we find interesting.
Many of the science payloads are put together by universities and private corporations. The shuttle fleet frequently flies with an experiment rack.
Experiments must fit within the constraints of the rack (power, size, cooling requirements). If you participated in any university based science programs you understand the limitations of funding. Creating a whiz-bang, cutting edge data storage technology is usually low on the list.
The Xeon gas experiment probably had most of the work done on measurement instrumentation and software. IT hardware is off the shelf as much as possible.
No one plans on the shuttle turning into a meteorite. I bet that the principal researcher was not going "gosh, I hope they can save my data" when they saw the pictures over central Texas.
Here in Alabama (yankees joke all you want) we use a paper ballot that you fill in with a black marker. They are tallied by machines but there is still that piece of paper to go back to.
Hanging chads, that was stupid, using IBM punchcards for ballots. The last time I used one of those was in Chicago (where the dead could vote).
Electronic 1's and 0's. Making it all virtual, making it all into a SQL database, eck... There is something fundamental about using a marker to fill in a inch square box next to a name.
So much of this is driven by the media's desire to have an instant tally. Elections should take hours to count. Election judges should sit in the basement of the county courthouse and each look at a ballot to certify the election.
We have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We willingly forfeit our right to a representative government when we make it so easy for any single person or group of people to pervert elections.
I have changed from one position to the other on the question of universal health care.
First let me say;
I am in favor of doctors being paid fairly for their talents. Compensation should be based upon your abilities.
I am not in favor of hospitals that do a wallet biopsy before providing treatment (sometimes, lifesaving emergency medicine in the ER). Insurance companies play the lottery with coverage. They pick and choose policy holders to maximize their profits (if you are never sick, never file a claim, they love you).
Unfortunately there is not much choice with health care coverage. For the most part, this is provided through employers and they are watching their spending as much as the insurance companies. The quality of health care that is covered by insurance is in decline. Look at the declining life expectancy statistics that were recently announced.
If I have to pay $250 a month for medical/dental/vision to an insurance carrier that is more concerned with their profit margin than my health I would rather put that money into universal care. That way, if I am sick or with a chronic condition I know that I will always be covered.
It has been said that the economy is driven by consumer confidence. Flip this over, how confident are you that an insurance carrier will stay with you, even when your health takes a major downturn.
The energies involved in moving a planetary body are staggering. It would entail moving the moon also as it is dragged about in an orbit around the earth. It would be much easier (in a few million years) to move the entire population of earth to moons in the jovian belt. We would need highly efficient energy conversion on a massive scale and a means of grappling the earth without touching it.
When the sun does balloon out to the red giant phase the spectrum of light is going to shift more to the infrared. All plant and animal life would have a hard time coping (in it's present form), photosynthesis would need to change (or a different method of cellular energy conversion will need to develop).
The ABM treaty was to prevent the deployment of anti-missile systems to protect land masses and cities. We had systems in place in the 50's and 60's that could do this (Nike, Zeus systems using small nuclear warheads to cook or disrupt incoming warheads).
The system that the navy has deployed is not a violation of the treaty as it is not land based and would do no good in protecting US cities from MIRV'ed warheads coming over the north pole, unless we wanted to stick a bunch of missile equipped ships in the great lakes.
By extension, stating that the Navy system violates the ABM treaty would also include the Patriot Block III system as an anti- ballistic missile system as it can (and has) intercepted and destroyed warheads during the re-entry phase.
Frankly the ABM treaty is unethical and ignorant. What nation would sign a treaty, allowing their own population to remain the hostage of a potential enemy? Do you really trust other countries to NOT fire a missile off? How about the ill paid armed forces of the former Soviet republics?
I really have liked Ron Paul's ideas. He speaks to ideas and concepts that we all have hold in our hearts...
Unfortunately Ron Paul is not going to be the candidate to beat Obama/Clinton. Those two loons are dangerous to our liberties.
McCain is closer to meeting my ideals. He is a straight shooter and does what he says.
I do not like people who want to hang themselves on the cross (Huckabee or Romney). This is not a theocracy.
To provide solar power to a cell site would require several hundred square feet of space to mount the panels. Sizing a solar power system for infrastructure requires planning for when the amount of sun is at the minimum (approx 2 hours during wintertime at northern latitudes). A aolar system must put a full charge on the battery system to account for charging losses, battery inefficiency, and the continual demand of the load.
To match up to a solar power system you need a very significant battery string (when I do system calculations I assume that the system can go for three days without sun).
Mounting a wind turbine on a cell tower is problematic too. An antenna structure has a loading (ANSI 222 (f or g)) that has to account for ice, maximum wind and the surface area of the tower, feedline, antennas, etc... A wind turbine adds ALOT of loading to a structure. I suspect that 90% of the cell towers out there right now could not pass the structural analysis under ANSI.
The original court document is quite interesting. Filled with the inconsistencies of our legal system;
1). If a polygraph may prove your innocence (or non-guilt) then the FBI and the prosecutor claims it's unreliable and that AL-QUEDA creates super-beings who can beat any lie detector. -yet- The Prosecutor and the FBI will use a lie detector to show the slightest signs of evasion.
2). You can have a fake confession coerced by an FBI agent with threats against your family. -yet- As long as it's not used in the court case against you, no-on is liable. The FBI agent didn't violate your rights (bullsheet)
Abuses of power, strongarm tactics, threats, coercion and zealotry all undermine our legal system and society.
We will have no-one to blame if we let behaviors like this continue.
That's an interesting question. There are many chronic pain disorders that still do not have a satisfactory treatment.
An example; Polyneuropathy- (burning sensations, tingling, pain), the primary treatment is a nerve block (no, not a vulcan neck pinch). A long needle shoved into a nerve bundle.
Who would have thought that cayenne pepper concentrate, applied topically, would have been a good pain management technique?
Certainly this condition has been known of since Captain Cook but there are plenty of conditions that we only know about in a superficial way. Basic science and research are how we discover new pharmaceuticals and treatment regimens.
The articulated connecting rod on the engine is brilliant. Goes to show where a design can go when someone takes a completely different approach to a problem. The old, solid connecting-rod design of engines worked fine for 100+ years until engineered materials have been developed to tackle the problem of how a reciprocating engine has a different requirement for when you create power during the combustion phase.
Venus looks really good from a distance
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Without some means of sending a probe will in advance of our colonization efforts we could find a system full of gas giants like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, dessicated balls of rock like Mars, acidic pressure cookers like Venus or sterilized, blasted hot rocks like Mercury.
Moving any body at near-relativistic velocities means that it won't turn worth a damn. Once you have completed most of your acceleration on the way to the target system you are pretty much committed to that destination. If it ends up being without planets friendly to our form of biological life you may end up with a space based colony, eking out it's existence among the asteroids or small moons of that system. This is not a viable, long term colony unless we have a mastery of living in space and in low gravity environments.
Before we send colonists on what is essentially a one way trip, we should try to establish a few long term, self supporting colonies in our asteroid belt. This would be an ideal place to perfect the colonization efforts that may greet our colonists in another system.
Absolutely correct. the additional latency really confuses modem based devices. One area that you really cannot get around is the problem where a PSTN connection is required for satellite desktop boxes. They just do not like Vonage as a faux PSTN connection.
Graverobbing started fairly soon after the decline of Egyptian society. Archeology is graverobbing where you get to put your treasures in a museum and write about it.
One of the most common items removed from sites has always been blocks and stones. These were reused for huts and even for the street paving stones in many cities. In the 1800's, the corpses of the dead (mummies) were even used as fuel for railroad trains as they were dessicated and burned with a good heat.
Unfortunately the treasures that we gawk at in the museums today are the gold gilded funerary items. Lost forever are the painted scenes of everyday life that covered the walls, the small grooming impliments like brushes and combs.
To see how ancient peoples led their everyday lives should be the lasting testament.
It makes me wonder what sort of species inferiority complex some folks suffer from. We are currently the top predator on our planet with a severe identity crisis. We are so successful as a species that we created leisure time to muse about the nature of our own morality. If some planet-wide calamity happened (KT Event) the idle fantasies that we explore would become less important and things like food, water, shelter and safety would come into demand. Maybe part of any species survival is how well members of that species can adapt back to the primitive states and take care of survival requirements. The Katrina hurricane may be a good example... how many survivors of the hurricane would have had good long-term survival rates if there wasn't a civilization to come in, give them food, water and television again.
It was the entire basis of the iron age. Most early tools made of iron were meteorite fragments melted down or hammered into tool shapes. The Vredefort Impact Structure in South Africa, The Cape York Meteorite of Greenland or the Saarenmaa Island impact in Estonia all became major ironmaking centers of their time.
With 78% of our planet's surface covered with water in one form or another it seems like a plentiful resource to us. On Mars, where the water content is a fraction of a percent it is a precious commodity that will make life possible.
I hold in sympathy those who live in drought stricken areas but our planet's climates are in a state of constant flux. We cannot "control" the nature of our environment on a macroscopic scale. Water is not going to be available everywhere and in many areas it will be naturally contaminated with salt, arsenic, alluminum, alkali or sulphurs.
That's sort of funny, that the average age of internet users is poorly represented in government. If you did an 80/20 rule on the internet most of the active users would be in their teens to their mid 30's. Most people in government are in their 30's to 50's. In fact, for many elected offices there is a minimum age requirement.
In polite society you do not verbally assult someone you disagree with. It was a common opinion that if the best you could do in a discussion was to insult or threaten it pointed to a weakness in your own intellect and that you were uncouth at best.
Amongst rational, intelligent people you may have a passionate discussion, make your point (or counterpoint) and still remain civil.
Maybe it is the belief that the Internet, email, chat rooms or IRC are anonymous and you can be as ignorant and belligerent as you can. There was a time when people put much thought into the written word. Eg, letters, newspaper articles and in public speaking. At the moment, personal communication through chat, email or blogs is the most base form of expression.
You can see "evolution in action" (thanks Larry Niven for that phrase) on the Jerry Springer Show. That is what is becoming of human discourse. Eventually we will devolve back into screaming apes, throwing twigs at each other across tree-tops.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it is much easier to discriminate against a class of people if you can de-humanize them. The Nazi's pulled that off in the 1930's with the jews, gypsies and poles.
Something inside of most humans will allow for us to smash someone in the face if we can see that they are not "one of us".
It seems that at most times, there always needs to be a whipping boy. In the 30's it was jews, 50's communists, 60's blacks, 70's hippies, etc...
Be careful, you may fit into that next class.
The article mentions that broadcasters would love to be able to stop recording and skipping commercials...
/. , Wiki or something else on the internet holds my attention better and I forget to go back to the television program.
I will not watch the 20 minutes of commercials in a hour long show. Apparently the networks do not understand that this was a minor factor that led to the creation of the movie networks like Showtime, HBO, TMC, etc...
On the rare occasion when I do watch a program "real time" I mute the commercials and turn to the computer for the next 3-4 minutes or I change channels. Usually I find that
Maybe 10 minutes before the show ends (2 minutes of actual content) I un-mute, find out I lost the story thread, or it's stupid, or I figured out the "who-done-it" in the first 30 seconds and change channels again.
My viewing loyalties are around a few shows (BSG). Nearly everything else is tripe and maybe I will watch an episode of something if I am paralyzed in a hospital bed. I cannot even tell what networks things are on, I set the DVR and watch things at my convenience.
Gone are the days of ten million households sitting on the edge of their seats at 7 pm for the movie of the week. The networks are living in a 30 year old dream of our viewing habits and what we find interesting.
There is an advocacy group for space exploration.
http://www.planetary.org/home/
The Planetary Society has excellent programs and pushes for further exploration of space.
If you are really interested, join. I really had an interest in the solar sail to propel probes into deep space.
This is interesting... $126.6 million dollars to remove 1 million T of carbon through sequestration.
A forest removes about 2 T a year of carbon from the atmosphere.
http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/catalyst/fa04-catalyst-forest-carbon-sequestration.html
It would take 500,000 acres to remove 1 MT of carbon from the atmosphere. (follow me so far?)
It costs approximately $68/ acre to plant forest.
www.alliancechesbay.org/pubs/projects/deliverables-77-7-2004.ppt
For $126,600,000, you could plant 1,861,764 acres.
This would remove 3,723,528 tons/ year of carbon. Roughly 3.7 times more carbon sequestration annually.
This DOE project removes one million tons once. Forests would remove 3.7 times more each year.
Many of the science payloads are put together by universities and private corporations. The shuttle fleet frequently flies with an experiment rack.
Experiments must fit within the constraints of the rack (power, size, cooling requirements). If you participated in any university based science programs you understand the limitations of funding. Creating a whiz-bang, cutting edge data storage technology is usually low on the list.
The Xeon gas experiment probably had most of the work done on measurement instrumentation and software. IT hardware is off the shelf as much as possible.
No one plans on the shuttle turning into a meteorite. I bet that the principal researcher was not going "gosh, I hope they can save my data" when they saw the pictures over central Texas.
How about Ashton Kutcher, playing the role as Michael Kelso from "That 70's Show".
It would make the Rube Goldberg-esque inventions even more improbable.
Sure he shacks up with Demi, that just shows he has good taste.
You've been Punked!
What if you are an offline criminal?
You know, some of those still exist.
Turn on, tune in, drop out.
Here in Alabama (yankees joke all you want) we use a paper ballot that you fill in with a black marker. They are tallied by machines but there is still that piece of paper to go back to. Hanging chads, that was stupid, using IBM punchcards for ballots. The last time I used one of those was in Chicago (where the dead could vote). Electronic 1's and 0's. Making it all virtual, making it all into a SQL database, eck... There is something fundamental about using a marker to fill in a inch square box next to a name. So much of this is driven by the media's desire to have an instant tally. Elections should take hours to count. Election judges should sit in the basement of the county courthouse and each look at a ballot to certify the election. We have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We willingly forfeit our right to a representative government when we make it so easy for any single person or group of people to pervert elections.
I have changed from one position to the other on the question of universal health care. First let me say; I am in favor of doctors being paid fairly for their talents. Compensation should be based upon your abilities. I am not in favor of hospitals that do a wallet biopsy before providing treatment (sometimes, lifesaving emergency medicine in the ER). Insurance companies play the lottery with coverage. They pick and choose policy holders to maximize their profits (if you are never sick, never file a claim, they love you). Unfortunately there is not much choice with health care coverage. For the most part, this is provided through employers and they are watching their spending as much as the insurance companies. The quality of health care that is covered by insurance is in decline. Look at the declining life expectancy statistics that were recently announced. If I have to pay $250 a month for medical/dental/vision to an insurance carrier that is more concerned with their profit margin than my health I would rather put that money into universal care. That way, if I am sick or with a chronic condition I know that I will always be covered. It has been said that the economy is driven by consumer confidence. Flip this over, how confident are you that an insurance carrier will stay with you, even when your health takes a major downturn.
This has been around for several years. http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/originals/Weber-Toba/ch5_bottleneck/textr5.htm
The energies involved in moving a planetary body are staggering. It would entail moving the moon also as it is dragged about in an orbit around the earth. It would be much easier (in a few million years) to move the entire population of earth to moons in the jovian belt. We would need highly efficient energy conversion on a massive scale and a means of grappling the earth without touching it.
When the sun does balloon out to the red giant phase the spectrum of light is going to shift more to the infrared. All plant and animal life would have a hard time coping (in it's present form), photosynthesis would need to change (or a different method of cellular energy conversion will need to develop).
The ABM treaty was to prevent the deployment of anti-missile systems to protect land masses and cities. We had systems in place in the 50's and 60's that could do this (Nike, Zeus systems using small nuclear warheads to cook or disrupt incoming warheads).
The system that the navy has deployed is not a violation of the treaty as it is not land based and would do no good in protecting US cities from MIRV'ed warheads coming over the north pole, unless we wanted to stick a bunch of missile equipped ships in the great lakes.
By extension, stating that the Navy system violates the ABM treaty would also include the Patriot Block III system as an anti- ballistic missile system as it can (and has) intercepted and destroyed warheads during the re-entry phase.
Frankly the ABM treaty is unethical and ignorant. What nation would sign a treaty, allowing their own population to remain the hostage of a potential enemy? Do you really trust other countries to NOT fire a missile off? How about the ill paid armed forces of the former Soviet republics?
I really have liked Ron Paul's ideas. He speaks to ideas and concepts that we all have hold in our hearts... Unfortunately Ron Paul is not going to be the candidate to beat Obama/Clinton. Those two loons are dangerous to our liberties. McCain is closer to meeting my ideals. He is a straight shooter and does what he says. I do not like people who want to hang themselves on the cross (Huckabee or Romney). This is not a theocracy.
To provide solar power to a cell site would require several hundred square feet of space to mount the panels. Sizing a solar power system for infrastructure requires planning for when the amount of sun is at the minimum (approx 2 hours during wintertime at northern latitudes). A aolar system must put a full charge on the battery system to account for charging losses, battery inefficiency, and the continual demand of the load. To match up to a solar power system you need a very significant battery string (when I do system calculations I assume that the system can go for three days without sun). Mounting a wind turbine on a cell tower is problematic too. An antenna structure has a loading (ANSI 222 (f or g)) that has to account for ice, maximum wind and the surface area of the tower, feedline, antennas, etc... A wind turbine adds ALOT of loading to a structure. I suspect that 90% of the cell towers out there right now could not pass the structural analysis under ANSI.
The original court document is quite interesting. Filled with the inconsistencies of our legal system;
1). If a polygraph may prove your innocence (or non-guilt) then the FBI and the prosecutor claims it's unreliable and that AL-QUEDA creates super-beings who can beat any lie detector.
-yet-
The Prosecutor and the FBI will use a lie detector to show the slightest signs of evasion.
2). You can have a fake confession coerced by an FBI agent with threats against your family.
-yet-
As long as it's not used in the court case against you, no-on is liable. The FBI agent didn't violate your rights (bullsheet)
Abuses of power, strongarm tactics, threats, coercion and zealotry all undermine our legal system and society.
We will have no-one to blame if we let behaviors like this continue.
I am not envious of the sysadmin's job of cleaning out the system.
This is where you need a PFY (thanks BOFH) to give the scut work to.
I wonder if he was getting off on ASCII art nudies.
That's an interesting question. There are many chronic pain disorders that still do not have a satisfactory treatment.
An example;
Polyneuropathy- (burning sensations, tingling, pain), the primary treatment is a nerve block (no, not a vulcan neck pinch). A long needle shoved into a nerve bundle.
Who would have thought that cayenne pepper concentrate, applied topically, would have been a good pain management technique?
Certainly this condition has been known of since Captain Cook but there are plenty of conditions that we only know about in a superficial way. Basic science and research are how we discover new pharmaceuticals and treatment regimens.
The articulated connecting rod on the engine is brilliant. Goes to show where a design can go when someone takes a completely different approach to a problem. The old, solid connecting-rod design of engines worked fine for 100+ years until engineered materials have been developed to tackle the problem of how a reciprocating engine has a different requirement for when you create power during the combustion phase.
Without some means of sending a probe will in advance of our colonization efforts we could find a system full of gas giants like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, dessicated balls of rock like Mars, acidic pressure cookers like Venus or sterilized, blasted hot rocks like Mercury. Moving any body at near-relativistic velocities means that it won't turn worth a damn. Once you have completed most of your acceleration on the way to the target system you are pretty much committed to that destination. If it ends up being without planets friendly to our form of biological life you may end up with a space based colony, eking out it's existence among the asteroids or small moons of that system. This is not a viable, long term colony unless we have a mastery of living in space and in low gravity environments. Before we send colonists on what is essentially a one way trip, we should try to establish a few long term, self supporting colonies in our asteroid belt. This would be an ideal place to perfect the colonization efforts that may greet our colonists in another system.
Absolutely correct. the additional latency really confuses modem based devices. One area that you really cannot get around is the problem where a PSTN connection is required for satellite desktop boxes. They just do not like Vonage as a faux PSTN connection.
Graverobbing started fairly soon after the decline of Egyptian society. Archeology is graverobbing where you get to put your treasures in a museum and write about it. One of the most common items removed from sites has always been blocks and stones. These were reused for huts and even for the street paving stones in many cities. In the 1800's, the corpses of the dead (mummies) were even used as fuel for railroad trains as they were dessicated and burned with a good heat. Unfortunately the treasures that we gawk at in the museums today are the gold gilded funerary items. Lost forever are the painted scenes of everyday life that covered the walls, the small grooming impliments like brushes and combs. To see how ancient peoples led their everyday lives should be the lasting testament.
It makes me wonder what sort of species inferiority complex some folks suffer from. We are currently the top predator on our planet with a severe identity crisis. We are so successful as a species that we created leisure time to muse about the nature of our own morality. If some planet-wide calamity happened (KT Event) the idle fantasies that we explore would become less important and things like food, water, shelter and safety would come into demand. Maybe part of any species survival is how well members of that species can adapt back to the primitive states and take care of survival requirements. The Katrina hurricane may be a good example... how many survivors of the hurricane would have had good long-term survival rates if there wasn't a civilization to come in, give them food, water and television again.
It was the entire basis of the iron age. Most early tools made of iron were meteorite fragments melted down or hammered into tool shapes. The Vredefort Impact Structure in South Africa, The Cape York Meteorite of Greenland or the Saarenmaa Island impact in Estonia all became major ironmaking centers of their time. With 78% of our planet's surface covered with water in one form or another it seems like a plentiful resource to us. On Mars, where the water content is a fraction of a percent it is a precious commodity that will make life possible. I hold in sympathy those who live in drought stricken areas but our planet's climates are in a state of constant flux. We cannot "control" the nature of our environment on a macroscopic scale. Water is not going to be available everywhere and in many areas it will be naturally contaminated with salt, arsenic, alluminum, alkali or sulphurs.
That's sort of funny, that the average age of internet users is poorly represented in government. If you did an 80/20 rule on the internet most of the active users would be in their teens to their mid 30's. Most people in government are in their 30's to 50's. In fact, for many elected offices there is a minimum age requirement.
In polite society you do not verbally assult someone you disagree with. It was a common opinion that if the best you could do in a discussion was to insult or threaten it pointed to a weakness in your own intellect and that you were uncouth at best. Amongst rational, intelligent people you may have a passionate discussion, make your point (or counterpoint) and still remain civil. Maybe it is the belief that the Internet, email, chat rooms or IRC are anonymous and you can be as ignorant and belligerent as you can. There was a time when people put much thought into the written word. Eg, letters, newspaper articles and in public speaking. At the moment, personal communication through chat, email or blogs is the most base form of expression. You can see "evolution in action" (thanks Larry Niven for that phrase) on the Jerry Springer Show. That is what is becoming of human discourse. Eventually we will devolve back into screaming apes, throwing twigs at each other across tree-tops.