OK, that goes half way, but you still need some way to know which child got what shot. Maybe you could come up with some pretext for having the nurse register that too, but it would certainly have the tin foil hat up in arms.
One could very easily see how a government could set it up so that everyone was tagged during this innoculation.
Actually, I can't see how. Assuming they would want to keep the tagging secret, that is.
You either have to rely on the silence of thousands of low level civilian nurses, or come up with a believable explanation for why military special forces handle child vaccinations.
Good: This avoids the by far most dangerous part of current Mars missions: The landing. Since the balloon doesn't have to hit the ground, it won't break when it hits the ground.
Bad: Mars' atmosphere is about 0.5% of our. In other words, it's 99.5% vacuum. How ginormogantuan must a balloon be to carry any serious weight there?? Gravity is just 1/3, but that hardly begins to compensate.
Actually the speed of electronic signals in a metal is the speed of light in that material. Light is fastest in a vacuum, so it's slower in all other materials, but it's still the speed of light. Or electromagnetic radiation, to be generic.
The speed of the electrons themselves is miniscule, we're talking about the signal.
The nation with a vision, not afraid to spend resources or even risk lives on new, unproven endeavours?
I don't want to be one of "those" posters, but the nations I can think of that most fit that description are the Soviet Union, Pol Pot's Cambodia and Nazi Germany.
I think we're doing pretty well as it is.
It's odd how many people who are all for taking "risks", but assume they will always pay off. By definition, if there isn't a significant risk of failure, it's not really a risk.
The way I see it, it can be a poor country that gets state aid, or it can be a wealthy country that competes with us, but it can't be both.
See it this way. India is a poor country that's competing with rich countries. As such, it's main competitive edge is its poverty, which makes it possible for it to do things cheaper. This is how all poor countries become wealthier, including whatever rich country you may read this from.
You seem to think half the population of India are writing software. It's really helping some small pockets of hi tech, but I doubt it even affects 0.1% of the population. Remember that India has more population than Europe, USA and Japan combined.
Don't you think that if having the government handing out money made everyone richer, we would have noticed by now? I mean, it is what governments do best. There is plenty of experience in the field.
Every Euro the government pumps into the Dresden economy is one that it has taken out of some other part of Germany. Any multiplying effects it may have when paid out will be matched by the opposite effect where it was taken from.
And thanks for the articles, but if you read the first one it clearly points out that this is a Keynesian concept, while other schools of economic thought disagree. And I don't think I've heard anyone bring up Keynes in earnest since the 80s. Thyere is too much real world experience...
In the context of German politics I suspect this is more of a "Marshall plan" to bring the former DDR parts of the country up to the level of the rest of the country than any attempt at general economic stimulus.
In my native Sweden absentee voting has to be done either in a post office or a foreign embassy or consulate. In either case there is a an enclosed private area to do your vote in, and an employee that makes sure anonymity procedures are followed.
I've lived in the US for 9 years, and it's fairly shocking how sloppy the voting system is here. It's not really hard to design a fool proof system, if you actually try. It costs a little more money, but come on, it is the entire power foundation for the society. So I have to wonder how much of the sloppiness is there by design. After all the people in power got there through the current system...
First of all, if you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
Secondly, there is a world history full of data on assymetric trade relations, where country A has much higher tariffs on goods than their trading partner B. And it overwhelmingly show that the country with te lower tariffs does much better economically.
I know this is against commonly accepted "wisdom", but it's nonetheless undeniable if you examine the data. And the theoretical explanation of it has been know since the 1830s.
One fundamental flaw with Internet voting is that there is no way to verify that the voter does not have a gun held to his head while voting, or is subject to some other pressure.
Only by having the voter go in alone in a booth to vote out of sight of everyone else can that be assured.
like eating at McDonalds, wearing nike and getting some bling-bling?
That's important to some people, sure. And writing leftist posts on Slashdot is important to others. Whatever floats your boat is OK with me.
It's conceivable that I'm brainwashed and programmed by the prevailing forces of society. I don't think I am, of course, but if I were, that is exactly what I'd think.
That's not much of an argument for your view though, since it applies equally much to you. Maybe you're brainwashed to think the things you say here? You don't think you are, of course, but etc...
We may even both be brainwashed, but in different ways since we live in different environments.
Ultimately this is a fruitless topic. If we're unable to think for ourselves, we'll never figure it out since we're unable to think for ourselves. So why bother?
That's not to say that we're not subject to "opinion pressure" from the surrounding society, but if we work at it we can rise above it.
I have an applet that would benefit a lot by being able to read and write some very simple cookies. If you can point me to any tutorial, sample code, or other resource explaining how to do that it would be appreciated!
The Soviet Union managed to combine all their resources towards acheiving just a few goals. Military power, a world class space program, and Olympic sports superiority. And they did those things pretty darn well.
Of course, with everything else neglected, life there was hell in more ways than I care to enumerate. I have to prefer the society where everyone does what they feel is important to get done, and only unite behind goals for their own purposes.
My DirecTivo tunes in channels I don't subscribe to all the time. For some strange reason, it doesn't know which channels I have, so when it sees that my favorite actor is on HBO or thinks I'd like some show there for other reasons, it will try to record it. It keeps trying for the full hour even though there is no signal there to record.
I mean, it must be much better for budget predictability purposes to make the probe able to go indefinitely, and then decide to shut it off at a certain date, exactly when the money runs out, than to build in some weakness that may make it fail after 100 days just as well as after 200 days.
The DirecTivo is by far the best deal in TV. The killer part is that it records the exact signal from the satellite to disk. It's already a digital signal, so it's very easy to just store it. A regular Tivo will take analog input and digitize it using a $20 encoder, while here you record what the DirecTV $10k (wild guess) encoder produces at uplink. The bottom line is that DirecTivo gives you perfect picutre quality with no compromise.
Dish has its own similar PVR system, but it's much more primitive than Tivo. You can find people saying it's just as good as Tivo, and the thing they all have in common is that they've actually never used one...
It can also record two shows at the same time. While you watch a third recorded one, if you so wish.
I'm part of that 49% Californian white minority, so I know first hand about much of that. Though no one has ever seemed to think I was an oppressor of any kind. And I hang out with every race god created, and some he didn't...
I guess there are different kinds of diversity. The pet peeve I have is when Americans say that Europe is more liberal on drugs, has higher taxes, smokes more, or many other things you hear, where invaraibly that is only true for some parts, and not at all for others, often including my oddball home country.
So in that kind of diversity, since Iowa and Idaho is much more alike than Ireland and Italy, Europe is far more diverse.
As for "local" diversity, how diverse the population is within a 20 km radius, I agree that the US is typically more diverse. But not by as much as you might think. Sweden has a 15% immigrant population, most of it from outside Europe, and there are plenty of areas where more than 100 languages are spoken. Many other countries are similar, especially in the big cities. Then again, to go back to the first point, Finland has barely any immigrants.
And don't confuse culture with race. I know plenty of Asian Americans who may look exotic but are culturally 100% mainstream American, just as most "African" Americans have been here a few generations more than the average white American. So they may look very different, but still be very similar culturally. And conversely, just looking around the Europeean cafe and seeing everyone is white, doesn't at all mean they share the same culture and values. Other than that they all probably like coffee.
I lived in Europe for 4 years, been to Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Each one of those places is fairly singular in their culture.
Anyone thinking of Europe as one place with one culture have no clue what they're talking about. I hear a lot of Americans say something about how Europeans are, and it's invariably exactly right about some parts, and completely wrong about others.
The continent is 50 different countries with vastly different cultures, and there is not a single thing you can say that is "typically European" that is not completely wrong regarding a few of them. Well, you can say things like "all Europeans enjoy soccer but not peanut butter", but that is really pointing out unique things about the US, not anything about Europe other than that it's not the US.
I shouldn't theorize, but I suspect you're a victim of the same phenomenon that makes people think all people of a different race than what you're used to seeing all look the same, while in your 'home race' every person looks distinctly individual. A very normal reaction that there's nothing wrong with, but it can help to be aware of it and try to compensate.
You're perfectly right about the huge diversity of the US population, but the European population, taken as a whole, is much more diverse.
Since you wonder: I'm a Swede living in California.
Hobbies. I've listed one of my hobbies on all my resumes, and more than one employer has told me later that was a main reason for hiring me. That doesn't mean you should list any hobby, but if you love to do something that requires lots of skill, intelligence and dedication, do mention it. It tells a lot about who you are.
Lies. I don't lie on my resumes, but I have the feeling I probably should. The norm in the US seems to be that you embellish by about 50%. Employers know this and adjust for it. And that means that 67% of my skills are compared with 100% of other peoples.
OK, sending people to Mars orbit is a bit easier than landing them, but it's also less useful. They can control equipment in almost real time, not the 20 minute turnaround time of Spirit. But they still can't repair them when they break, get them loose when they are stuck etc, or go out and poke around at the environment. They'll essentially do exactly the same thing the NASA people are doing now.
There already are a few satellites orbitting Mars that can and do act as radio relays for Spirit. You don't need people there for that. But they still include an antenna that can talk directly to Earth. It's not a big part of the system at all. Radios are small and simple.
Imagine being able to drop a simple probe...
We can do that now, at the same cost. I mean, that probe will have to be sent from Earth either way, so I don't see what difference it does to have some guys orbiting the planet.
And since there is no water, building material, fuel components in orbit etc, everything will have to be sent to them from earth, at immense expense. One cool thing with landing on the surface is that you can sent little "factory" probes ahead that will condense water and fuel from the atmosphere, a few years ahead of the crew, thus dramatically lowering the cost.
An interesting variation would be to send people to build a base one one of Mars' moons. There at least there is building material, and you can provide some reasonable shelter from the radioation.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, that goes half way, but you still need some way to know which child got what shot. Maybe you could come up with some pretext for having the nurse register that too, but it would certainly have the tin foil hat up in arms.
One could very easily see how a government could set it up so that everyone was tagged during this innoculation.
Actually, I can't see how. Assuming they would want to keep the tagging secret, that is.
You either have to rely on the silence of thousands of low level civilian nurses, or come up with a believable explanation for why military special forces handle child vaccinations.
So if this is real, I want to see evidence of all the dirty tricks code that allegedly is in Windows.
I mean the code that supposedly makes competitors products break, and god knows what other bad stuff I've heard about over the years.
Anyone working on this?
Good: This avoids the by far most dangerous part of current Mars missions: The landing. Since the balloon doesn't have to hit the ground, it won't break when it hits the ground.
Bad: Mars' atmosphere is about 0.5% of our. In other words, it's 99.5% vacuum. How ginormogantuan must a balloon be to carry any serious weight there?? Gravity is just 1/3, but that hardly begins to compensate.
Actually the speed of electronic signals in a metal is the speed of light in that material. Light is fastest in a vacuum, so it's slower in all other materials, but it's still the speed of light. Or electromagnetic radiation, to be generic.
The speed of the electrons themselves is miniscule, we're talking about the signal.
The nation with a vision, not afraid to spend resources or even risk lives on new, unproven endeavours?
I don't want to be one of "those" posters, but the nations I can think of that most fit that description are the Soviet Union, Pol Pot's Cambodia and Nazi Germany.
I think we're doing pretty well as it is.
It's odd how many people who are all for taking "risks", but assume they will always pay off. By definition, if there isn't a significant risk of failure, it's not really a risk.
The way I see it, it can be a poor country that gets state aid, or it can be a wealthy country that competes with us, but it can't be both.
See it this way. India is a poor country that's competing with rich countries. As such, it's main competitive edge is its poverty, which makes it possible for it to do things cheaper. This is how all poor countries become wealthier, including whatever rich country you may read this from.
You seem to think half the population of India are writing software. It's really helping some small pockets of hi tech, but I doubt it even affects 0.1% of the population. Remember that India has more population than Europe, USA and Japan combined.
Don't you think that if having the government handing out money made everyone richer, we would have noticed by now? I mean, it is what governments do best. There is plenty of experience in the field.
Every Euro the government pumps into the Dresden economy is one that it has taken out of some other part of Germany. Any multiplying effects it may have when paid out will be matched by the opposite effect where it was taken from.
And thanks for the articles, but if you read the first one it clearly points out that this is a Keynesian concept, while other schools of economic thought disagree. And I don't think I've heard anyone bring up Keynes in earnest since the 80s. Thyere is too much real world experience...
In the context of German politics I suspect this is more of a "Marshall plan" to bring the former DDR parts of the country up to the level of the rest of the country than any attempt at general economic stimulus.
That's a problem in that case.
In my native Sweden absentee voting has to be done either in a post office or a foreign embassy or consulate. In either case there is a an enclosed private area to do your vote in, and an employee that makes sure anonymity procedures are followed.
I've lived in the US for 9 years, and it's fairly shocking how sloppy the voting system is here. It's not really hard to design a fool proof system, if you actually try. It costs a little more money, but come on, it is the entire power foundation for the society. So I have to wonder how much of the sloppiness is there by design. After all the people in power got there through the current system...
First of all, if you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
Secondly, there is a world history full of data on assymetric trade relations, where country A has much higher tariffs on goods than their trading partner B. And it overwhelmingly show that the country with te lower tariffs does much better economically.
I know this is against commonly accepted "wisdom", but it's nonetheless undeniable if you examine the data. And the theoretical explanation of it has been know since the 1830s.
The concept of math isn't even spread very far on this planet.
One fundamental flaw with Internet voting is that there is no way to verify that the voter does not have a gun held to his head while voting, or is subject to some other pressure.
Only by having the voter go in alone in a booth to vote out of sight of everyone else can that be assured.
like eating at McDonalds, wearing nike and getting some bling-bling?
That's important to some people, sure. And writing leftist posts on Slashdot is important to others. Whatever floats your boat is OK with me.
It's conceivable that I'm brainwashed and programmed by the prevailing forces of society. I don't think I am, of course, but if I were, that is exactly what I'd think.
That's not much of an argument for your view though, since it applies equally much to you. Maybe you're brainwashed to think the things you say here? You don't think you are, of course, but etc...
We may even both be brainwashed, but in different ways since we live in different environments.
Ultimately this is a fruitless topic. If we're unable to think for ourselves, we'll never figure it out since we're unable to think for ourselves. So why bother?
That's not to say that we're not subject to "opinion pressure" from the surrounding society, but if we work at it we can rise above it.
I have an applet that would benefit a lot by being able to read and write some very simple cookies. If you can point me to any tutorial, sample code, or other resource explaining how to do that it would be appreciated!
The Soviet Union managed to combine all their resources towards acheiving just a few goals. Military power, a world class space program, and Olympic sports superiority. And they did those things pretty darn well.
Of course, with everything else neglected, life there was hell in more ways than I care to enumerate. I have to prefer the society where everyone does what they feel is important to get done, and only unite behind goals for their own purposes.
My DirecTivo tunes in channels I don't subscribe to all the time. For some strange reason, it doesn't know which channels I have, so when it sees that my favorite actor is on HBO or thinks I'd like some show there for other reasons, it will try to record it. It keeps trying for the full hour even though there is no signal there to record.
So. I wouldn't worry about it...
That makes no sense!
I mean, it must be much better for budget predictability purposes to make the probe able to go indefinitely, and then decide to shut it off at a certain date, exactly when the money runs out, than to build in some weakness that may make it fail after 100 days just as well as after 200 days.
The DirecTivo is by far the best deal in TV. The killer part is that it records the exact signal from the satellite to disk. It's already a digital signal, so it's very easy to just store it. A regular Tivo will take analog input and digitize it using a $20 encoder, while here you record what the DirecTV $10k (wild guess) encoder produces at uplink. The bottom line is that DirecTivo gives you perfect picutre quality with no compromise.
Dish has its own similar PVR system, but it's much more primitive than Tivo. You can find people saying it's just as good as Tivo, and the thing they all have in common is that they've actually never used one...
It can also record two shows at the same time. While you watch a third recorded one, if you so wish.
they technically have a cash value of 1/20 cents,/I>
I don't understand. What does this mean exactly?
Is there some scenario where I can collect 20 of these and be paid 1 cent for them by someone?
I'm part of that 49% Californian white minority, so I know first hand about much of that. Though no one has ever seemed to think I was an oppressor of any kind. And I hang out with every race god created, and some he didn't...
I guess there are different kinds of diversity. The pet peeve I have is when Americans say that Europe is more liberal on drugs, has higher taxes, smokes more, or many other things you hear, where invaraibly that is only true for some parts, and not at all for others, often including my oddball home country.
So in that kind of diversity, since Iowa and Idaho is much more alike than Ireland and Italy, Europe is far more diverse.
As for "local" diversity, how diverse the population is within a 20 km radius, I agree that the US is typically more diverse. But not by as much as you might think. Sweden has a 15% immigrant population, most of it from outside Europe, and there are plenty of areas where more than 100 languages are spoken. Many other countries are similar, especially in the big cities. Then again, to go back to the first point, Finland has barely any immigrants.
And don't confuse culture with race. I know plenty of Asian Americans who may look exotic but are culturally 100% mainstream American, just as most "African" Americans have been here a few generations more than the average white American. So they may look very different, but still be very similar culturally. And conversely, just looking around the Europeean cafe and seeing everyone is white, doesn't at all mean they share the same culture and values. Other than that they all probably like coffee.
The one that bothers me the most is how Gimli is turned into this goofy one dimensional comic reief character, instead of being, well..., Gimli!
I lived in Europe for 4 years, been to Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Each one of those places is fairly singular in their culture.
Anyone thinking of Europe as one place with one culture have no clue what they're talking about. I hear a lot of Americans say something about how Europeans are, and it's invariably exactly right about some parts, and completely wrong about others.
The continent is 50 different countries with vastly different cultures, and there is not a single thing you can say that is "typically European" that is not completely wrong regarding a few of them. Well, you can say things like "all Europeans enjoy soccer but not peanut butter", but that is really pointing out unique things about the US, not anything about Europe other than that it's not the US.
I shouldn't theorize, but I suspect you're a victim of the same phenomenon that makes people think all people of a different race than what you're used to seeing all look the same, while in your 'home race' every person looks distinctly individual. A very normal reaction that there's nothing wrong with, but it can help to be aware of it and try to compensate.
You're perfectly right about the huge diversity of the US population, but the European population, taken as a whole, is much more diverse.
Since you wonder: I'm a Swede living in California.
This will tie up the crazy anti GM activist with fighting the crazy anti mine activists, and leave sane people free to go about their lives.
Love it!
Hobbies. I've listed one of my hobbies on all my resumes, and more than one employer has told me later that was a main reason for hiring me. That doesn't mean you should list any hobby, but if you love to do something that requires lots of skill, intelligence and dedication, do mention it. It tells a lot about who you are.
Lies. I don't lie on my resumes, but I have the feeling I probably should. The norm in the US seems to be that you embellish by about 50%. Employers know this and adjust for it. And that means that 67% of my skills are compared with 100% of other peoples.
OK, sending people to Mars orbit is a bit easier than landing them, but it's also less useful. They can control equipment in almost real time, not the 20 minute turnaround time of Spirit. But they still can't repair them when they break, get them loose when they are stuck etc, or go out and poke around at the environment. They'll essentially do exactly the same thing the NASA people are doing now.
There already are a few satellites orbitting Mars that can and do act as radio relays for Spirit. You don't need people there for that. But they still include an antenna that can talk directly to Earth. It's not a big part of the system at all. Radios are small and simple.
Imagine being able to drop a simple probe...
We can do that now, at the same cost. I mean, that probe will have to be sent from Earth either way, so I don't see what difference it does to have some guys orbiting the planet.
And since there is no water, building material, fuel components in orbit etc, everything will have to be sent to them from earth, at immense expense. One cool thing with landing on the surface is that you can sent little "factory" probes ahead that will condense water and fuel from the atmosphere, a few years ahead of the crew, thus dramatically lowering the cost.
An interesting variation would be to send people to build a base one one of Mars' moons. There at least there is building material, and you can provide some reasonable shelter from the radioation.