Keeping extra domes around would have been another layer of protection - a relatively low cost "when all else fails" measure. Seems like they didn't do it because they had too much confidence that all else couldn't possibly fail.
I think Douglas Adams said it best:
"The difference between something that can go wrong and something that can't possibly go wrong is that when something that can't possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
Please tell me you aren't someone who is going to condemn an entire industry because of one accident.
You remind me of the BP CEO who was quoted in an article regarding the threat this poses to Obama's offshore drilling plans as saying (paraphrase, sorry): "We don't shut down the entire airline industry every time one falls out of the sky."
Well, actually, we probably would shut down the airline industry if every time a plane crashed, thousands of square miles of ocean and shoreline ecosystems were contaminated for many years. If every car accident took billions of dollars are twenty years to clean up, we'd probably strongly reconsider the automobile.
For better or worse human civilization can not exist without environmental impact.
That's absolutely right. And what a responsible, intelligent person realizes instinctively is that not every environmental impact is the same, and not every risk/reward ratio is the same. The fact that there is no such thing as "perfect" does not change the other fact that there is actually "better" and "worse".
But when your thinking ends with "Humans can't live without environmental impact!", ignoring nuance for a binary view, that is the opposite of intelligent and reasonable.
Offshore drilling carries a variety of costs and dangers that land-based drilling does not. First, any spilled oil will necessarily not be localized, but will be carried away to contaminate ecosystems many miles away. Second, fixing spills underwater, particularly in mile-deep water like this spill, is extremely challenging in comparison to dealing with issues on land.
When the fixes all go off without a hitch, and the environmental damage is all cleaned up and the total cost (both monetary and ecological) fully accounted for, then we can talk about whether it makes sense to expand off-shore drilling operations in an actual cost/benefit sense.
Twenty bucks says they started off with the concept and the label and then didn't bother to change the label when the engineers told them how difficult it would be to build and maneuver a dome around. So they ask the engineers to make it functional and they get an open-ended box with a pyramidal cap... all the while the managers are standing around watching while murmuring, "Yep... that dome is shaping up nicely..."
More likely the engineers described the solution as putting a dome over the well while never considering a structure that was literally a dome, then the managers came by and said, quote "this structure is in no way even close to a dome!" Then the engineers looked at the managers, rolled their eyes, and said "Who gives a shit?", or more deferential words to that effect.
"Who gives a shit" is what I'm saying.:)
This whole event has made me wonder how many times in ancient history that a sea floor fault has released spills like this (or worse) in the distant geological past. Seems like we should be ready for this type of event even if we aren't the ones punching the hole through the abyssal plain of the sea floor..
My understanding is that it does happen, but when the underground reservoir starts to leak, the oil still has to come up through a massive amounts of mud, silt, and other sediments on the ocean floor and thus tends to be largely contained naturally as pressure is released over a larger area. As opposed to in cases like this, where humans have deliberately bored a hole down through the sediments to maximize pressure and make it as easy as possible for the oil to get to the surface.
So yeah it's not a bad idea to be prepared for natural oil-based disasters, but human-originated disasters are clearly the more proximate problem.
Yeah, I find it really hilarious that they'd go to the trouble to quote the definition but not realize that one of them works.
Pedantry failure: Reboot semantic centers of brain and try again!
I think most people understood that the word was used in a non-literal sense to imply the intent of getting the oil from under the dome, not the actual mechanics.
Okay, I admit it, I don't know everything there is to know about cross-compiling toolchains.
Is there one that supports unknown alien instruction sets? Seems like a tall challenge even for GCC. Alternatively, are there microwaves that uses a microcontroller from the alien ship at Area 51 and would make porting netBSD a challenge?
I'm just trying to figure out your point. Throw me a bone here.
And numerous other similar comments by the scientists involved.
Yeah like "water seems to have flowed".
One cop-out sentence at the end of the article does not somehow make it okay when the basic thrust of the article was the exact opposite.
Some people love to put obscure modifiers in the small print and pretend that that justifies a dishonest main article/ad/whatever. It doesn't.
It wasn't at the end of the article, it wasn't small print, it was right in the middle of the article and you know it. And there's nothing obscure at all about saying further work needs to be done to confirm their observations. "Certain tasks remain... to prove that it is definitely water." What the fuck is obscure about that plain English? Nothing. What's dishonest about saying you have strong evidence for something, but more work remains to confirm it? Nothing. That's good science.
Your protests, on the other hand, are dishonest and have nothing to do with science or its proper execution.
What kind of security system tells you if you're warm and helps you break in?
While it may not have been obvious during that scene, certainly by the time Nite Owl and Rorschach confront Ozy in Antarctica it should be clear that Ozy was expecting them, and that the trail of clues they were following was not an accident or oversight on Ozy's part because he wanted them to figure out that he was behind everything and come confront him, getting them out of New York before he set off his psychic squid bomb.
Oh, and giving him his chance to explain everything and gloat.
But much like Ozy's speech was an inversion of the stereotypical villain explaining everything -- "Do it? Dan, I'm not a Republic Serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago." -- so too was the password breaking an inversion of the stereotypical easily guessed password. In this case, the password was deliberately easy to guess.
I'm sure his normal system didn't tell you how many characters to use, and his password was probably pa4Le*,xlg or something.;)
This actually hits on one of my personal bugaboos - scientists that claim to know something "definitively" while the research or hypothesis is still warm from the metaphorical oven.
And one of my personal bugaboos is people getting their panties in a twist over scientists claiming something that they're not and never have actually claimed.
The word "definitive" appears nowhere except in this slashdot summary. It does not appear in the previous slashdot summary that the offending word links to, nor does it appear in the article that slashdot summary links to either, and certainly does not appear in the original statement by the scientists. In fact, the article says that more work needs to be done to determine if what they discovered was definitely water.
So basically your whole rant about "science by press release" is baseless slander because you assumed a word in a/. summary twice removed from the original source was the actual word used by scientists, rather than click a couple links and learn that you were wrong.
Far better engineering would have had these things come in at 40% of the cost and had them die on day 97. Then we could have flown more and more of them.
Ah, what a fanciful imagination you have of how engineering works.
Where engineers can guarantee operation in a highly variable, largely unknown environment for X days, yet also nail tolerances so tightly they can predict parts will fail in 1.1X days. And save lots of money in the process, somehow. Even though relative to your own imaginary number the rovers we actually got cost 2.5x, yet lasted more than 25x.
The rovers were engineered as robustly as possible within the weight budget, simply to ensure that they would work at all on the surface of Mars, and therefore had the potential to last for a very long time. This is obviously a win if you think the goal was to have the maximum number of operational rovers on Mars at any given time. But the reason they haven't launched more has nothing to do with rover cost. It's because they don't have the budget to expand operations to cover more; NASA is already busy with this already vastly expanded mission.
The only reason a 90 day mission plan came up was because that was their very rough estimate of how long the solar panels could supply sufficient power before they became too covered in dust. They had always hoped they could continue the mission past that and had contingency plans for the operations budget to that effect, and were very pleasantly surprised that their assumptions were wrong. When the Martian wind turned out to be much stronger than expected, enough to blow dust off of the rovers' solar panels, that constraint on the rovers' life span was removed and their robust engineering could pay off.
Executive summary: The only serious mistake made in the planning, research and design of the rover mission was in predicting a short lifespan for the rovers, and that mistake turned out to be in the mission's and the taxpayer's favor.
"In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly ONE NUCLEAR DISASTER!"
Hmm, not Armaggeddonist-y enough. Ah, here we go.
"In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly FIFTY RECORDED TYPE 1-A SUPERNOVAE, WHICH IS A FUSION REACTOR EXPLODING WITH THE POWER OF A STAR EXPLODING!"
I know this is INCONVENIENT to the Anti-corporate, anti-petroleum, liberal crowd. But unless you live a life apart from petroleum based products, you're complicit in the oil spill, because without your demands for their product, BP would not be in the ocean drilling.
It is inconvenient that modern society, including of course myself, requires so much assistance from petroleum products. But I deal with that fact, rather than take your implicit stance of "therefore being anti-corporate and anti-petroleum is stupid and wrong". I try to use less petroleum products. I drive a fuel-efficient car, I recycle plastic, and try to simply not use plastic where not necessary (e.g. bottled water).
Yet because I live in modern society, and because I really, really like modern society and the things it brings -- for example, the ability for us to have this discussion -- I recognize that I am contributing to the problem. Being intelligent and responsible, this means I try to mitigate the problem as much as possible. Not wave my hands and say "well since I'm part of the problem, I can't legitimately claim to be part of the solution and ergo should not try". That's nonsense.
So until you're completely removed from the benefits of petroleum based products (including many plastics), you're at least partially responsible for the problem.
Indeed I am. And one of the ways I try to take responsibility for this fact is by voting for representatives who will regulate the oil companies to try to prevent this kind of ecological disaster, while pushing alternatives to oil for certain uses. The EPA et. al. are the mechanisms by which I try to have some agency in this situation. But many people, especially those financially invested, oppose these regulations vehemently. Some even argue that my stance is hypocritical because I argue against using massive amounts of oil yet use it myself, and therefore my position should be ignored and the status quo maintained.
Are you really arguing that we're equally culpable?
Of course, we can stop all off shore drilling completely and all drilling anywhere where we "care" about the "environment" but I think you'd be whining then about $100/gal gas prices and more of our money going to wacko religious nutjobs in the Middle East.
Actually, you won't find me whining. Prices won't reach that high overnight, and as they rise people, even those who don't give a rats ass about the environment and will use any argument to justify not caring, will suddenly find themselves with the same motivation to reduce their oil usage. Just like what happened when gas hit $5/gal and SUV sales plummeted.
We are switching off of oil eventually. The question is simply when, at what cost, under what terms (our own terms or fate's), and how many ecological disasters will occur as we try to delay the inevitable.
In the meantime, you're right -- I'm responsible, you're responsible. So let's join forces and actually take the reigns of responsibility and work to prevent this from happening again!
Hmm... I guess I don't have that since I don't know what it is. That's okay, I can find out with the help of my AI using the latest in voice recognition software! Computer, what is "poetry"?
Computer: "Poetry" is a form of literary art, frequently using an organized metric and rhyme scheme, that attempts to evoke an emotional response in the reader through the use of metaphor.
Huh, okay, that's interesting. But computer, what is a metaphor?
Computer: A "meta" is for people who lack the capabilities to contribute directly to a field or endeavor, but who still wish to sound educated and useful by discussing the nature of the field or endeavor itself. Example: "Physics has way too much math for me, but meta-physics is right up my alley!"
That misheard lyric is so common that there's a book about misheard lyrics with that as the title.
I know! A surprising number of people think Hendrix was talking about kissing the sky, rather than embracing the experimental, counter-culture, and free-love nature of the 60's, simply because they don't like to think of their testosterone-filled hero sucking face with another dude. Like, get over it! "Kiss the sky" doesn't even make any sense unless you're on some kind of mind-altering substance, and there's no way Jimmy would have put something like that in his body!
Because that wasn't the question. The question had to do with providing certain specific, special classes of people with extra protection, not whether everyone's civil rights should be protected equally, which is all the 14th amendment guarantees.
Yeah, the "extra" protection of not being discriminated against by a State-run institution, which is exactly what the 14th Amendment guarantees. The question was about the University of Virginia's Non-Discrimination Policy. As the Governor correctly pointed out, Virginia cannot not protect the civil rights and prevent discrimination against anyone, regardless of what classes of people the Virginia Human Rights Act explicitly mentions.
So if you want to read the VHRA as prohibiting a Virginia University from having a policy against discrimination against homosexuals, that's fine, but that means the VHRA is in conflict with the 14th Amendment and, as once again the Governor correctly observed, this means the VHRA loses.
The legal opinion was only correct if you ignore that.
Typical kid's park now has wussy plastic equipment with shredded tires on the ground. Bah!
Actually, I'm all for the shredded tires. The more padded the ground, the more risks you can take on the playground and still be able to come back to play the next day!
I mean, jumping off a swingset at it's very highest point is great fun, unless you break your ankle the very first time you do it. When I was a kid you had all the equipment but it was usually on sand. I was very glad it was sand and not asphalt when I would try to go down the slide standing up and invariably slip near the end!
It's the same reason today that I'm glad the floor of the rock gym is padded, and when I'm climbing real cliffs I use a rope (or a crash pad when bouldering)
It's cus climbing around -- and maybe getting scraped up in the process -- is fun. Road rash or broken limbs are not fun.:P
This person is a "heretic"? Only among people who value their privacy.
The only conclusion I can draw is that at the CIA most people don't want to get around privacy protections by re-educating the people out of caring for their privacy.
Doesn't mean that they don't find privacy-related restrictions on their activities inconvenient and don't try to get around them (the evidence is strongly to the contrary). But it does at least suggest they may understand why we don't like that idea.
Go figure.
Re:To everyone complaining about the positive revi
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The Laidoff Ninja
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· Score: 1
If every book that gets reviewed receives a 7 through 10, what is the point of having a 1-10 scale since you could just as easily express it via a 1-4 scale, or better yet a 0-3 scale and store it directly in a two bit integer.
Oh, see, and I thought the point of your original post was that the observation that most every book reviewed gets a high score was silly, because generally terrible books aren't reviewed by a lot of people, because few people care or want to hear about those books; e.g. nobody on/. wants to hear about the latest Daniel Steele abomination. I thought that was your point. Guess not.
Okay. So the problem with adjusting the scale such that the book that receives a 7 in the 1-10 scale receives a 1 or 0 on the new scale is that everyone's expectation is that the lowest number on a scale means "awful", when that simply isn't the case for the book that receives a 7. The point of a review scale, while inherently subjective, is still to rate the book against all possible books, not simply those that have achieved popular recognition enough that many reviewers have written reviews. Basically, while 7 may be the lowest score books that are reviewed actually get, it is not the lowest score any hypothetical book could get, and that's the way it should be.
There are coarser-grained rating scales that make a lot of sense, because let's face it justifying a 7 vs an 8 vs 7.5 is pretty much impossible. I like Flickfilosopher.com's traffic light scale, Green for see it in theatres, Yellow for wait for rental, and Red for don't see it ever. But the equivalent of a '7' is probably a yellow light and changing that so it was red would mean denying the existence of some truly awful movies.
So yeah. 10 pt scale isn't perfect, but it's not an accident that most of the reviews we care about are for things on the higher end of the scale, and no that should not be changed.
You ask a lawyer for an opinion on the law, he's going to give you a legal opinion, not some tripe based on emotional biases.
Okay, a fair enough statement. The question then would be: Why did a lawyer -- not just any fly-by-night ambulance chaser the bar has yet to catch up with but the Attorney General representing the State of Virginia -- issue a legal opinion on civil rights which did not take into account the 14th fucking Amendment to the U.S. Constitution?
Was his opinion just that half-assed? Did the universities specifically ask him to base his opinion solely on state law and ignore the U.S. Constitution? Is it conceivable that he was simply unaware of the 14th Amendment and the impact it had on the States? I understand that the Virginia AG is elected; did the people of Virginia select a lawyer so incompetent that it took the Governor -- who unlike the A.G. is not explicitly in a lawyering position -- to step in and point out the obvious?
Or could it be that his oft-stated belief that homosexuality is wrong and should not be protected affected his opinion, such that he deliberately chose to frame his argument in a Constitution-less context so he could claim that anti-discrimination policies were not legal?
I'm just asking, because despite asking a lawyer his opinion on the law, it sure seems like "tripe based on emotional biases" is what the Universities got.
We can't even get most of the same diseases dogs get, much less germs that survive on frozen, irradiated asteroids.
Yeah, most. Just keep that in mind when you're on Arcturus. Lots of people have learned a painful lesson from telling themselves there's no way Space Clap is compatible with human hosts.
I'd lobby for it to be called the Garden of Eden Creation Kit, but there might be fallout from that decision...
Yeah, in particular it would be highly impractical for the astronauts to walk around the biodome wearing only fig leaves to cover their naughty bits, since fig trees would be highly impractical to grow at least at first!
Wouldn't the cost of returning the robot to earth far exceed the cost of simply building a new one? I thought the whole point of using automatons for exploration was that you could leave them there!
SSSHHHHH! Ixnay on the eavinglay!
We're just telling the robot that it will be coming back so it'll get on the rocket. After all it saw what we did with the last ones.
Re:Planetary visits are an obsolete idea
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Gardening On Mars
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· Score: 2, Insightful
My point is that what the human body is and isn't designed for is irrelevant, it's what we can design and build to support us.
While still agreeing with you, I might put it like this: The most distinguishing features of the human body are our upright posture, our dexterous hands for fine manipulation, and our large problem-solving abstract-thinking brains, which are all almost certainly interrelated features in our evolutionary history. Upright posture allowed our spines to support a much heavier head, and freed the hands to be used as tool-holders instead of for locomotion, while the benefits to adaptability given by intelligence and tool use made selection for upright posture stronger, etc.
In other words, I'd say this is exactly what human bodies were designed for.
Slashdot Mirror
Keeping extra domes around would have been another layer of protection - a relatively low cost "when all else fails" measure. Seems like they didn't do it because they had too much confidence that all else couldn't possibly fail.
I think Douglas Adams said it best:
"The difference between something that can go wrong and something that can't possibly go wrong is that when something that can't possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
Seems rather apt, in this case.
Please tell me you aren't someone who is going to condemn an entire industry because of one accident.
You remind me of the BP CEO who was quoted in an article regarding the threat this poses to Obama's offshore drilling plans as saying (paraphrase, sorry): "We don't shut down the entire airline industry every time one falls out of the sky."
Well, actually, we probably would shut down the airline industry if every time a plane crashed, thousands of square miles of ocean and shoreline ecosystems were contaminated for many years. If every car accident took billions of dollars are twenty years to clean up, we'd probably strongly reconsider the automobile.
For better or worse human civilization can not exist without environmental impact.
That's absolutely right. And what a responsible, intelligent person realizes instinctively is that not every environmental impact is the same, and not every risk/reward ratio is the same. The fact that there is no such thing as "perfect" does not change the other fact that there is actually "better" and "worse".
But when your thinking ends with "Humans can't live without environmental impact!", ignoring nuance for a binary view, that is the opposite of intelligent and reasonable.
Offshore drilling carries a variety of costs and dangers that land-based drilling does not. First, any spilled oil will necessarily not be localized, but will be carried away to contaminate ecosystems many miles away. Second, fixing spills underwater, particularly in mile-deep water like this spill, is extremely challenging in comparison to dealing with issues on land.
When the fixes all go off without a hitch, and the environmental damage is all cleaned up and the total cost (both monetary and ecological) fully accounted for, then we can talk about whether it makes sense to expand off-shore drilling operations in an actual cost/benefit sense.
Twenty bucks says they started off with the concept and the label and then didn't bother to change the label when the engineers told them how difficult it would be to build and maneuver a dome around. So they ask the engineers to make it functional and they get an open-ended box with a pyramidal cap... all the while the managers are standing around watching while murmuring, "Yep... that dome is shaping up nicely..."
More likely the engineers described the solution as putting a dome over the well while never considering a structure that was literally a dome, then the managers came by and said, quote "this structure is in no way even close to a dome!" Then the engineers looked at the managers, rolled their eyes, and said "Who gives a shit?", or more deferential words to that effect.
"Who gives a shit" is what I'm saying. :)
This whole event has made me wonder how many times in ancient history that a sea floor fault has released spills like this (or worse) in the distant geological past. Seems like we should be ready for this type of event even if we aren't the ones punching the hole through the abyssal plain of the sea floor..
My understanding is that it does happen, but when the underground reservoir starts to leak, the oil still has to come up through a massive amounts of mud, silt, and other sediments on the ocean floor and thus tends to be largely contained naturally as pressure is released over a larger area. As opposed to in cases like this, where humans have deliberately bored a hole down through the sediments to maximize pressure and make it as easy as possible for the oil to get to the surface.
So yeah it's not a bad idea to be prepared for natural oil-based disasters, but human-originated disasters are clearly the more proximate problem.
Yeah, I find it really hilarious that they'd go to the trouble to quote the definition but not realize that one of them works.
Pedantry failure: Reboot semantic centers of brain and try again!
I think most people understood that the word was used in a non-literal sense to imply the intent of getting the oil from under the dome, not the actual mechanics.
Okay, I admit it, I don't know everything there is to know about cross-compiling toolchains.
Is there one that supports unknown alien instruction sets? Seems like a tall challenge even for GCC. Alternatively, are there microwaves that uses a microcontroller from the alien ship at Area 51 and would make porting netBSD a challenge?
I'm just trying to figure out your point. Throw me a bone here.
And numerous other similar comments by the scientists involved.
Yeah like "water seems to have flowed".
One cop-out sentence at the end of the article does not somehow make it okay when the basic thrust of the article was the exact opposite.
Some people love to put obscure modifiers in the small print and pretend that that justifies a dishonest main article/ad/whatever. It doesn't.
It wasn't at the end of the article, it wasn't small print, it was right in the middle of the article and you know it. And there's nothing obscure at all about saying further work needs to be done to confirm their observations. "Certain tasks remain... to prove that it is definitely water." What the fuck is obscure about that plain English? Nothing. What's dishonest about saying you have strong evidence for something, but more work remains to confirm it? Nothing. That's good science.
Your protests, on the other hand, are dishonest and have nothing to do with science or its proper execution.
What kind of security system tells you if you're warm and helps you break in?
While it may not have been obvious during that scene, certainly by the time Nite Owl and Rorschach confront Ozy in Antarctica it should be clear that Ozy was expecting them, and that the trail of clues they were following was not an accident or oversight on Ozy's part because he wanted them to figure out that he was behind everything and come confront him, getting them out of New York before he set off his psychic squid bomb.
Oh, and giving him his chance to explain everything and gloat.
But much like Ozy's speech was an inversion of the stereotypical villain explaining everything -- "Do it? Dan, I'm not a Republic Serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago." -- so too was the password breaking an inversion of the stereotypical easily guessed password. In this case, the password was deliberately easy to guess.
I'm sure his normal system didn't tell you how many characters to use, and his password was probably pa4Le*,xlg or something. ;)
This actually hits on one of my personal bugaboos - scientists that claim to know something "definitively" while the research or hypothesis is still warm from the metaphorical oven.
And one of my personal bugaboos is people getting their panties in a twist over scientists claiming something that they're not and never have actually claimed.
The word "definitive" appears nowhere except in this slashdot summary. It does not appear in the previous slashdot summary that the offending word links to, nor does it appear in the article that slashdot summary links to either, and certainly does not appear in the original statement by the scientists. In fact, the article says that more work needs to be done to determine if what they discovered was definitely water.
So basically your whole rant about "science by press release" is baseless slander because you assumed a word in a /. summary twice removed from the original source was the actual word used by scientists, rather than click a couple links and learn that you were wrong.
Good job.
As an aside, a trait doesn't have to be beneficial to stay in the gene pool, it just has to not be (sufficiently) harmful.
"Survival of the sufficiently fit" I like to say to those who don't really get "survival of the fittest". :)
Far better engineering would have had these things come in at 40% of the cost and had them die on day 97. Then we could have flown more and more of them.
Ah, what a fanciful imagination you have of how engineering works.
Where engineers can guarantee operation in a highly variable, largely unknown environment for X days, yet also nail tolerances so tightly they can predict parts will fail in 1.1X days. And save lots of money in the process, somehow. Even though relative to your own imaginary number the rovers we actually got cost 2.5x, yet lasted more than 25x.
The rovers were engineered as robustly as possible within the weight budget, simply to ensure that they would work at all on the surface of Mars, and therefore had the potential to last for a very long time. This is obviously a win if you think the goal was to have the maximum number of operational rovers on Mars at any given time. But the reason they haven't launched more has nothing to do with rover cost. It's because they don't have the budget to expand operations to cover more; NASA is already busy with this already vastly expanded mission.
The only reason a 90 day mission plan came up was because that was their very rough estimate of how long the solar panels could supply sufficient power before they became too covered in dust. They had always hoped they could continue the mission past that and had contingency plans for the operations budget to that effect, and were very pleasantly surprised that their assumptions were wrong. When the Martian wind turned out to be much stronger than expected, enough to blow dust off of the rovers' solar panels, that constraint on the rovers' life span was removed and their robust engineering could pay off.
Executive summary: The only serious mistake made in the planning, research and design of the rover mission was in predicting a short lifespan for the rovers, and that mistake turned out to be in the mission's and the taxpayer's favor.
I'm still a supporter of offshore drilling. Ask me again in a year, when this whole episode has concluded (or not), and I may change my mind.
A year?
It's been 20 years and the Exxon Valdez spill hasn't "concluded". The environmental damage continues.
Ooh, Greenpeace Mad-Libs! I love it!
"In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly ONE NUCLEAR DISASTER!"
Hmm, not Armaggeddonist-y enough. Ah, here we go.
"In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly FIFTY RECORDED TYPE 1-A SUPERNOVAE, WHICH IS A FUSION REACTOR EXPLODING WITH THE POWER OF A STAR EXPLODING!"
Still think nuclear power is safe? Huh?!
I know this is INCONVENIENT to the Anti-corporate, anti-petroleum, liberal crowd. But unless you live a life apart from petroleum based products, you're complicit in the oil spill, because without your demands for their product, BP would not be in the ocean drilling.
It is inconvenient that modern society, including of course myself, requires so much assistance from petroleum products. But I deal with that fact, rather than take your implicit stance of "therefore being anti-corporate and anti-petroleum is stupid and wrong". I try to use less petroleum products. I drive a fuel-efficient car, I recycle plastic, and try to simply not use plastic where not necessary (e.g. bottled water).
Yet because I live in modern society, and because I really, really like modern society and the things it brings -- for example, the ability for us to have this discussion -- I recognize that I am contributing to the problem. Being intelligent and responsible, this means I try to mitigate the problem as much as possible. Not wave my hands and say "well since I'm part of the problem, I can't legitimately claim to be part of the solution and ergo should not try". That's nonsense.
So until you're completely removed from the benefits of petroleum based products (including many plastics), you're at least partially responsible for the problem.
Indeed I am. And one of the ways I try to take responsibility for this fact is by voting for representatives who will regulate the oil companies to try to prevent this kind of ecological disaster, while pushing alternatives to oil for certain uses. The EPA et. al. are the mechanisms by which I try to have some agency in this situation. But many people, especially those financially invested, oppose these regulations vehemently. Some even argue that my stance is hypocritical because I argue against using massive amounts of oil yet use it myself, and therefore my position should be ignored and the status quo maintained.
Are you really arguing that we're equally culpable?
Of course, we can stop all off shore drilling completely and all drilling anywhere where we "care" about the "environment" but I think you'd be whining then about $100/gal gas prices and more of our money going to wacko religious nutjobs in the Middle East.
Actually, you won't find me whining. Prices won't reach that high overnight, and as they rise people, even those who don't give a rats ass about the environment and will use any argument to justify not caring, will suddenly find themselves with the same motivation to reduce their oil usage. Just like what happened when gas hit $5/gal and SUV sales plummeted.
We are switching off of oil eventually. The question is simply when, at what cost, under what terms (our own terms or fate's), and how many ecological disasters will occur as we try to delay the inevitable.
In the meantime, you're right -- I'm responsible, you're responsible. So let's join forces and actually take the reigns of responsibility and work to prevent this from happening again!
Oh but that wasn't your point now was it?
Or have an ounce of poetry in you... ;)
Hmm... I guess I don't have that since I don't know what it is. That's okay, I can find out with the help of my AI using the latest in voice recognition software! Computer, what is "poetry"?
Computer: "Poetry" is a form of literary art, frequently using an organized metric and rhyme scheme, that attempts to evoke an emotional response in the reader through the use of metaphor.
Huh, okay, that's interesting. But computer, what is a metaphor?
Computer: A "meta" is for people who lack the capabilities to contribute directly to a field or endeavor, but who still wish to sound educated and useful by discussing the nature of the field or endeavor itself. Example: "Physics has way too much math for me, but meta-physics is right up my alley!"
Yeah, now I'm just confused.
That misheard lyric is so common that there's a book about misheard lyrics with that as the title.
I know! A surprising number of people think Hendrix was talking about kissing the sky, rather than embracing the experimental, counter-culture, and free-love nature of the 60's, simply because they don't like to think of their testosterone-filled hero sucking face with another dude. Like, get over it! "Kiss the sky" doesn't even make any sense unless you're on some kind of mind-altering substance, and there's no way Jimmy would have put something like that in his body!
Because that wasn't the question. The question had to do with providing certain specific, special classes of people with extra protection, not whether everyone's civil rights should be protected equally, which is all the 14th amendment guarantees.
Yeah, the "extra" protection of not being discriminated against by a State-run institution, which is exactly what the 14th Amendment guarantees. The question was about the University of Virginia's Non-Discrimination Policy. As the Governor correctly pointed out, Virginia cannot not protect the civil rights and prevent discrimination against anyone, regardless of what classes of people the Virginia Human Rights Act explicitly mentions.
So if you want to read the VHRA as prohibiting a Virginia University from having a policy against discrimination against homosexuals, that's fine, but that means the VHRA is in conflict with the 14th Amendment and, as once again the Governor correctly observed, this means the VHRA loses.
The legal opinion was only correct if you ignore that.
Typical kid's park now has wussy plastic equipment with shredded tires on the ground. Bah!
Actually, I'm all for the shredded tires. The more padded the ground, the more risks you can take on the playground and still be able to come back to play the next day!
I mean, jumping off a swingset at it's very highest point is great fun, unless you break your ankle the very first time you do it. When I was a kid you had all the equipment but it was usually on sand. I was very glad it was sand and not asphalt when I would try to go down the slide standing up and invariably slip near the end!
It's the same reason today that I'm glad the floor of the rock gym is padded, and when I'm climbing real cliffs I use a rope (or a crash pad when bouldering)
It's cus climbing around -- and maybe getting scraped up in the process -- is fun. Road rash or broken limbs are not fun. :P
This person is a "heretic"? Only among people who value their privacy.
The only conclusion I can draw is that at the CIA most people don't want to get around privacy protections by re-educating the people out of caring for their privacy.
Doesn't mean that they don't find privacy-related restrictions on their activities inconvenient and don't try to get around them (the evidence is strongly to the contrary). But it does at least suggest they may understand why we don't like that idea.
Go figure.
If every book that gets reviewed receives a 7 through 10, what is the point of having a 1-10 scale since you could just as easily express it via a 1-4 scale, or better yet a 0-3 scale and store it directly in a two bit integer.
Oh, see, and I thought the point of your original post was that the observation that most every book reviewed gets a high score was silly, because generally terrible books aren't reviewed by a lot of people, because few people care or want to hear about those books; e.g. nobody on /. wants to hear about the latest Daniel Steele abomination. I thought that was your point. Guess not.
Okay. So the problem with adjusting the scale such that the book that receives a 7 in the 1-10 scale receives a 1 or 0 on the new scale is that everyone's expectation is that the lowest number on a scale means "awful", when that simply isn't the case for the book that receives a 7. The point of a review scale, while inherently subjective, is still to rate the book against all possible books, not simply those that have achieved popular recognition enough that many reviewers have written reviews. Basically, while 7 may be the lowest score books that are reviewed actually get, it is not the lowest score any hypothetical book could get, and that's the way it should be.
There are coarser-grained rating scales that make a lot of sense, because let's face it justifying a 7 vs an 8 vs 7.5 is pretty much impossible. I like Flickfilosopher.com's traffic light scale, Green for see it in theatres, Yellow for wait for rental, and Red for don't see it ever. But the equivalent of a '7' is probably a yellow light and changing that so it was red would mean denying the existence of some truly awful movies.
So yeah. 10 pt scale isn't perfect, but it's not an accident that most of the reviews we care about are for things on the higher end of the scale, and no that should not be changed.
You ask a lawyer for an opinion on the law, he's going to give you a legal opinion, not some tripe based on emotional biases.
Okay, a fair enough statement. The question then would be: Why did a lawyer -- not just any fly-by-night ambulance chaser the bar has yet to catch up with but the Attorney General representing the State of Virginia -- issue a legal opinion on civil rights which did not take into account the 14th fucking Amendment to the U.S. Constitution?
Was his opinion just that half-assed? Did the universities specifically ask him to base his opinion solely on state law and ignore the U.S. Constitution? Is it conceivable that he was simply unaware of the 14th Amendment and the impact it had on the States? I understand that the Virginia AG is elected; did the people of Virginia select a lawyer so incompetent that it took the Governor -- who unlike the A.G. is not explicitly in a lawyering position -- to step in and point out the obvious?
Or could it be that his oft-stated belief that homosexuality is wrong and should not be protected affected his opinion, such that he deliberately chose to frame his argument in a Constitution-less context so he could claim that anti-discrimination policies were not legal?
I'm just asking, because despite asking a lawyer his opinion on the law, it sure seems like "tripe based on emotional biases" is what the Universities got.
We can't even get most of the same diseases dogs get, much less germs that survive on frozen, irradiated asteroids.
Yeah, most. Just keep that in mind when you're on Arcturus. Lots of people have learned a painful lesson from telling themselves there's no way Space Clap is compatible with human hosts.
Oh yeah, cus nothing says "down to earth" like meta-analysis.
Not that it wasn't funny. Or that xkcd isn't smug. Or that it isn't funny despite being smug.
I'd lobby for it to be called the Garden of Eden Creation Kit, but there might be fallout from that decision...
Yeah, in particular it would be highly impractical for the astronauts to walk around the biodome wearing only fig leaves to cover their naughty bits, since fig trees would be highly impractical to grow at least at first!
Wouldn't the cost of returning the robot to earth far exceed the cost of simply building a new one? I thought the whole point of using automatons for exploration was that you could leave them there!
SSSHHHHH! Ixnay on the eavinglay!
We're just telling the robot that it will be coming back so it'll get on the rocket. After all it saw what we did with the last ones.
My point is that what the human body is and isn't designed for is irrelevant, it's what we can design and build to support us.
While still agreeing with you, I might put it like this: The most distinguishing features of the human body are our upright posture, our dexterous hands for fine manipulation, and our large problem-solving abstract-thinking brains, which are all almost certainly interrelated features in our evolutionary history. Upright posture allowed our spines to support a much heavier head, and freed the hands to be used as tool-holders instead of for locomotion, while the benefits to adaptability given by intelligence and tool use made selection for upright posture stronger, etc.
In other words, I'd say this is exactly what human bodies were designed for.