IANAPhysicist, but my understanding is that while light speed is still an issue in physical space, the information sharing is truly instantaneous in this sort of quantum entanglement. It's not a short delay as light travels that distance, but instantaneous.
Well the waveform collapse is instantaneous, yes, but as the WP says, you can't actually use it to communicate information from one end to the other.
I really don't understand the physics of why you're not really sharing information when the waveform collapses. All I understand is that due to Relativity and time dilation, if you could communicate instantly, you could send messages backwards in time and violate causality.
All sources regarding quantum entanglement/teleportation are quite adamant that you can't use it to actually send information instantaneously. Despite there being "spooky action at a distance", any discernible information had to be transfered when you separated the photons themselves at sub-light speeds. In this case it would be atoms, but I assume it still applies? The article lists applications as super-fast quantum computers (I guess any functional quantum computer could be considered fast at what it does) and quantum encryption (a real application I've heard applied to quantum teleportation, though the encrypted data itself still has to travel at c or less).
So, am I right, and this is basically the same ol' non-instant-communication but still quite cool kinda teleportation, only using atoms instead of photons? I'm just checking.
I refuse to follow the line of "logic" that assumes that voting for a bill automatically means full support for every individual piece of that bill. I will not follow this logic because it assumes -- and would even mandate -- that legislators deliberately avoid exercising judgement and discernment, and that they do not weigh the pros and cons of a bill. If there's a con, they must vote against it. That's simply not how it works.
And voting to remove the immunity clause from the FISA bill doesn't indicate anything about where he stands? I personally assume that when he voted on the bill, he was voting on the bill as a whole and not solely based on the immunity provision. When he had a chance to vote on just that provision, he voted against it.
Also, voting present or abstain would have been used just the same as a 'no' vote by his opponents.
Personally, I'll consider something a meaningful representation of his stance on Bush's wiretapping when it comes from his DOJ, not the acting AAG who served under Gonzalez.
Actually, it just demonstrates that you believed the summary because it said what you wanted to hear and didn't actually read the document in question and thus don't know what his actions are.
I don't see how requesting a stay in a case involving the potential release of classified information and for which there were in-progress appeals at the moment his government took over is the same as endorsing Bush's wiretapping program...
Sounds to me more like they need more time to consider the case, and don't want state secrets released by default in the meantime. The only thing I see that is in agreement with Bush is that executive privilege exists.
And also a meaningless gesture. It doesn't matter what road he took to get to his final vote, his final vote is what counts. Get that straight, because if you don't, you'll be deceived left and right by politicians for the rest of your life, and they'll screw you over, while you blindly accept it because they took superficial action you supported before they bent you over.
Actually neither vote counted, both were meaningless gestures, as anyone connected to reality can see. You are picking the "final vote" as being the only true indication of what Obama believes regarding telco immunity, completely ignoring that this was not the only thing in the bill and thus cannot by any reasonable reality-connected person to represent his opinion regarding only that. But you are not reasonable, and cherry-pick whatever you like to show that you're being "bent over".
Even though, as is obvious, if his intent was to deceive with his first vote and then "bend you over", he could have gotten the same effect by voting no in the final vote since the bill still was guaranteed to pass. Which is why it's hilarious having you tell me I need to "get it straight", when you don't even realize that the final vote was equally "superficial".
If he'd voted against removing the immunity provision, and then voted against the final bill, what would you have concluded then? That despite his earlier vote, he was actually against telco immunity?
No, I set the bar at a reasonable level: I want the man to be honest with me, and protect my rights. He failed at both of these before he was even elected.
Yeah, I already know how reasonable a judge of honesty you are. Seriously, that bit about the grandmother was pathetic and sad of you and you should probably never bring it up again. Really, it was sad, and very telling.
And yes, he failed to protect your rights. Explain to me how Obama could have plausibly protected your rights in reality, as in actually stopped passage of the bill, or admit that your expectation here is unreasonable.
No, you don't understand a damn bit of what I'm saying.
But I do, your failure to admit the consequences of what you're saying is leading you to think this. But those consequences exist, admit it or not. You have a completely unreasonable and irrational expectations that are completely divorced from reality.
I never said he didn't do something that would be impossible to do. He had a vote. He chose to vote against the people on the FISA issue, rather than for them. Would the bill have passed without his vote? Probably, but that's irrelevant. By voting like he did, at the very least, he shows that he's willing to harm us as long as it furthers his political career. Well, fuck him, then. I want a representative who puts my interests ahead of his.
Saying it's irrelevant that the bill would have passed anyway shows just how divorced from reality you are. You're saying you would actually be happier with a candidate who deliberately ignored anything in the bill except the one thing you care about, and then made a pointless grandstanding gesture of voting against it even though it would certainly pass anyway, resulting in the same outcome, and causing that person political harm for zero actual benefit to the people.
That's what's so funny. On the one hand you don't count meaningless gestures like the vote against telco immunity, but on the other hand your whole beef with Obama is that he didn't make the meaningless gesture you wanted him to, even though it would have meant no more than the first vote did. In fact if you think his first vote was somehow duplicitous, then obviously (to the reality-connected) so could have been a 'no' vote on the final bill. That you think there's a difference is just proving my point.
What's not so funny is that if the candidate you want was actually running, the kind of candidate who deliberately ignores political reality for the sake of staying "pure" through pointless gestures that
A "fact" which exists purely in your imagination. If he had tried, he wouldn't have used his power to our detriment. That's it. End of story.
Ah, so voting for the amendment to remove telco immunity is my imagination. Got it.
No, wait, that was reality. Imagination is where you pretend that the vote on the funding bill was solely a vote on telco immunity and an indication of how he stands on that issue and that issue alone. Deliberately ignoring 1) how he voted on that particular issue and 2) ignoring everything else in the final bill and the reality surrounding the vote.
And now we reach new, idiotic, heights of presumption. No, I will be ecstatic if I turn out to be wrong.
Yes, if Obama turned out to actually be Jesus, I'm sure you'd be happy. If I made a trillion dollars on the stock market tomorrow and found out I was Superman, I'd be happy too. Yet since obviously that's not going to happen, and you and I both know it, any reasonable person would realize that you and I are deliberately setting ourselves up for disappointment by setting the bar impossibly high.
No, I'll be wrong if he's a good president who restores liberties which we have lost in the past 8 years. I'll be wrong if he works to reduce the abuses of power we saw under Bush. If you think I want him to be perfect, you've managed to read what I said without actually understanding a word. I don't want him to be perfect. I expect to disagree with people on things. What I do want is for him to have the fundamentals right, which he's shown he doesn't (so far).
Ah but see, I do understand what you are saying, at a level that goes deeper than just blindly accepting when you say "I don't want him to be perfect". You can't say "I don't want him to be perfect" in one sentence, and then say "He has failed because he didn't do something that would be impossible to do" in the next, and not have the deeper truth come out. Just because you don't want to admit it, doesn't mean I don't understand what you're saying. I understand quite well.
After all, if what you said here was true, then you'd already be admitting you are at least partially wrong, since Obama began rolling back Bush abuses on day one. But, again, you deliberately ignore reality, and people only do that when they have already decided they don't want that reality to be true. You don't want to be wrong about Obama, and you're making it impossible for you personally to ever believe that you were.
So make whatever superficial claim otherwise you wish. The deeper meaning is clear. You want the impossible. I'm sick of people who will only settle for the impossible.
No. I did not say that. You're assuming I accept the explanation that Obama made a mistake. I do not. I believe he lied.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. You think he deliberately crafted that response in order to mislead, even though the statement itself contained information that trivially disproved the misleading claim. And for what? Because having a grandmother who lived through two World Wars, instead of World War II, means... what exactly? What on earth do you imagine he intended to gain?
You know Bush made plenty of factual gaffs regarding history. I never assumed his intent was to lie, because how could getting a date from a hundred years ago wrong actually help him? Lying is what he did about the evidence for WMD in Iraq, and the danger posed by the insurgency. Lies that actually benefited him. Why would he "lie" and say there's an old Texas saying that ends "fool me twice... you can't get fooled again"?
Obama has failed both of these tests (lied to us, and failed to protect our right to privacy), which is why I anticipate a bad presidency from him. I will be ecstatic, of course, if I'm wrong, but that's my belief based on what is known of him at this time.
He only failed those tests based on your ludicrous and deliberate, calculated attempts to view them in a way where failure is the only option. The lie thing is just ridiculous. And yes, he failed to protect our privacy, but you know that he tried and choose to deliberately ignore the fact.
So no, you would not be ecstatic to be wrong, or you'd have made being wrong a possibility. You can never be wrong. The only way you could be wrong was if Obama was, in fact, perfect in a way that not only meant he never made a mistake, but could also accomplish things well beyond the power of his office with ease.
Is there anyone who thinks that market cap is a good metric to judge a company's overall success by at this particular moment in time? Pretty much every stock has been hit and hit hard, and the degree to which the size of that hit has anything to do with the company itself is highly questionable. The relationship between stock price and a company's success is ephemeral in the best of times, but now?
Oh yeah? Well I agree that being biased towards low UID numbers is incredibly stupid, and my UID is lower than yours so that means I'm... wait... Damnit.
Still lying about the new law having stricter protections for US Persons, I see. I like that you've also bolded the completely irrelevant "pen register" section. You don't need to tap into the hubs of the telcos to get a pen register.
Good point, and not only that, but if the ugly isn't out in the open, eventually people will forget.
Forget? How about fucking knowing something in the first place!
There are plenty of Americans who still think that the entire abu Ghraib situation involved nothing more severe than barking dogs, panty-hats, and naked man-piles.
They don't know about the detainees being beaten with table legs, repeatedly kicked in the groin, asphyxiations, male prisoners raped with broomsticks, female prisoners simply raped, and so on.
Probably because to know about these things, you'd have to have actually read one of the various military reports which by their own admission cover only a portion of the abuses that went on. The TV news just focused on the pictures, particularly the one of the guy covered in a hood standing on a box, and a lot of the viewing public went "So what? That doesn't look so bad to me." A callous view to begin with, but tempered by the fact that they simply haven't seen or heard about the things that anyone would call torture.
In a way I almost agree with the poster before who said that these other images shouldn't be released. I don't see any need to subject U.S. soldiers and victims to the judgement of the mob. But also, as far as repairing our image goes, I'm not sure it would do much good. We've already released many prisoners in Iraq, so all their family and friends around the country already know what went on, they don't need to be reminded with more pictures. Repairing our image means repudiating the policies that lead to the scandal, with action.
On the other hand, releasing the videos and getting them on the news may at least inform more Americans as to why exactly we should feel we have to make up for this.
My understanding is that the maintenance staff at the Whitehouse are currently working 24/7 to secure any chairs that can be picked up by a single person.
Uh oh, I smell trouble. They'll follow the spec and use screws that are only strong enough to keep the chair from being lifted by a person, not realizing that the person in question is actually a gorilla!
Are you sure that we haven't already had an African American president? Is the color of the skin what truly defines being African American or is it ancestry?
With regards to the social prejudices and obstacles that make the election of Barack Obama a historic event? Skin color, absolutely. Hell, there are plenty of dark-skinned people from places other than Africa that get lumped in with African Americans.
To quote a slashdot post from some time back, answering the question "Are we so racist that skin color is all that matters?" -- "Yes. What part of 'black' didn't you understand?"
While Obama may be the first dark skinned African American, applying the "first African American president" to him could be seen as discounting the heritage of past presidents.
That's may be true from a historical perspective. However it is at least as significant that he is the first president who is considered African American, and who self-identifies as such. In those other President's times the social cost of being considered black would have prevented them from being President, to say the absolute least. There's a vast difference between now and then, and this particular turning point is a historic demonstration of that progress.
Good luck with that! I was going to say that the only way to make a visitor to DC's visit less fun would be to shoot then rob them, but that's pretty much already on the itinerary, isn't it?
When the DeLorean becomes unstuck from time, it does not actually also become unstuck from space. Since it does not experience time, that means it can't interact with physical objects, but the interactions before and after must be consistent. For example if the DeLorean didn't "move" at all, so the earth moved away from it, that would mean a massive change in its potential energy without any change in time, which requires infinite energy. Thus the point in space where the DeLorean becomes unstuck serves as a reference point, and that reference point is dragged along with earth's gravity well, and the electrostatic fields that were holding the DeLorean up, etc. In a way it as though the Delorean is sitting there, motionless, the entire time but simply not visible, until it appears again and of course has the same amplitude of momentum that it had when it became unstuck (88 mph).
Obviously this works just the same if you're traveling forward or backward in time.
That's all ludicrous made-up BS, but so is the Flux Capacitor. I mean it doesn't make much sense to me to accept time travel just to poke holes at the "but you always end up in the same place" part. Since it's made up physics anyway, it can work however the author wants it to. This isn't the same as when you have say a super-hero with magical powers, but he behaves in a completely illogical way (like forgetting he has certain powers when it would short-circuit the plot). This is like accepting that the hero can fly, but rejecting the laser eye vision. That's just silly.
1. Was a poor leader 2. Did not consider opinions other than her own on making decisions. 3. Was really not very knowledgeable 4. Was only out for her own advancement
Perhaps these are the attributes of many successful executives, but don't strike me as qualities you want in a civil servant.
Well, I know nothing about the woman, but I do know that unfortunately it is often the case that people with these attributes are able to make themselves appear exactly the opposite during job interviews. So while I doubt many employers including the Obama administration consider those to be strengths that may not mean anything as these traits would only show once she got the job.
How many times have you had trouble with your drive accidentally reading previous data from it? You know, with a drive head that was designed, redesigned, and improved over 50 years to read data from that disk.
Uh, well yeah, because the control logic in the hard drive is designed specifically around making sure it reads the most recent version of the data, because it doesn't want to read old data. That's kinda the whole benefit of binary, that the analog values are being driven towards one of two extremes, so as long as the value approaches that extreme past some threshold it can easily and reliably be determined to be one of the two values. A '1' written over a '0' might only have an analog value of 0.9, but that's more than good enough to give you the correct value.
Now if you wanted to get at the old value, then you could alter the control logic and actually distinguish between a value of 1 and 0.9, and determine that the 0.9 value used to be a 0.
So yeah, doing this on "accident" doesn't happen. Doing it on purpose can be done. It was probably much easier back when the policy was first implemented.
I don't get why people often think that the US government has super awesome technology that borders on magic in the field of computer science. In my experience they were 30+ years behind the times in some areas. Some better, some worse.
You can get data recovered from surprisingly borked disk drives, including overwritten data, from mom-and-pop data recovery services. I can see not believing that the Feds have super-quantum-microscopes or whatever for data recovery, but why assume they don't have access to what everyone else does?
That's all not intended to say that bureaucracy doesn't have a lot to do with the policy. Just that there are valid reasons to be worried.
Finally, use a high-powered electromagnet to lift and drop the resulting brick into the hot part of an active volcano, then push the planet it's on into the nearest star.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAPhysicist, but my understanding is that while light speed is still an issue in physical space, the information sharing is truly instantaneous in this sort of quantum entanglement. It's not a short delay as light travels that distance, but instantaneous.
Well the waveform collapse is instantaneous, yes, but as the WP says, you can't actually use it to communicate information from one end to the other.
I really don't understand the physics of why you're not really sharing information when the waveform collapses. All I understand is that due to Relativity and time dilation, if you could communicate instantly, you could send messages backwards in time and violate causality.
All sources regarding quantum entanglement/teleportation are quite adamant that you can't use it to actually send information instantaneously. Despite there being "spooky action at a distance", any discernible information had to be transfered when you separated the photons themselves at sub-light speeds. In this case it would be atoms, but I assume it still applies? The article lists applications as super-fast quantum computers (I guess any functional quantum computer could be considered fast at what it does) and quantum encryption (a real application I've heard applied to quantum teleportation, though the encrypted data itself still has to travel at c or less).
So, am I right, and this is basically the same ol' non-instant-communication but still quite cool kinda teleportation, only using atoms instead of photons? I'm just checking.
I refuse to follow the line of "logic" that assumes that voting for a bill automatically means full support for every individual piece of that bill. I will not follow this logic because it assumes -- and would even mandate -- that legislators deliberately avoid exercising judgement and discernment, and that they do not weigh the pros and cons of a bill. If there's a con, they must vote against it. That's simply not how it works.
The US government didn't magically transform itself at the stroke of noon on Tuesday.
I know and believe me I'm disappointed!
What does "Change You Can Believe In" mean, if not that simply by believing in said change, it will spring into existence?
Well I believed with all my heart, and now you're telling me there was no magical transformation? Bah!
And voting to remove the immunity clause from the FISA bill doesn't indicate anything about where he stands? I personally assume that when he voted on the bill, he was voting on the bill as a whole and not solely based on the immunity provision. When he had a chance to vote on just that provision, he voted against it.
Also, voting present or abstain would have been used just the same as a 'no' vote by his opponents.
Personally, I'll consider something a meaningful representation of his stance on Bush's wiretapping when it comes from his DOJ, not the acting AAG who served under Gonzalez.
Here's hoping it's the right one. :/
Actually, it just demonstrates that you believed the summary because it said what you wanted to hear and didn't actually read the document in question and thus don't know what his actions are.
Yeah I'm surprised too.
I don't see how requesting a stay in a case involving the potential release of classified information and for which there were in-progress appeals at the moment his government took over is the same as endorsing Bush's wiretapping program...
Sounds to me more like they need more time to consider the case, and don't want state secrets released by default in the meantime. The only thing I see that is in agreement with Bush is that executive privilege exists.
And also a meaningless gesture. It doesn't matter what road he took to get to his final vote, his final vote is what counts. Get that straight, because if you don't, you'll be deceived left and right by politicians for the rest of your life, and they'll screw you over, while you blindly accept it because they took superficial action you supported before they bent you over.
Actually neither vote counted, both were meaningless gestures, as anyone connected to reality can see. You are picking the "final vote" as being the only true indication of what Obama believes regarding telco immunity, completely ignoring that this was not the only thing in the bill and thus cannot by any reasonable reality-connected person to represent his opinion regarding only that. But you are not reasonable, and cherry-pick whatever you like to show that you're being "bent over".
Even though, as is obvious, if his intent was to deceive with his first vote and then "bend you over", he could have gotten the same effect by voting no in the final vote since the bill still was guaranteed to pass. Which is why it's hilarious having you tell me I need to "get it straight", when you don't even realize that the final vote was equally "superficial".
If he'd voted against removing the immunity provision, and then voted against the final bill, what would you have concluded then? That despite his earlier vote, he was actually against telco immunity?
No, I set the bar at a reasonable level: I want the man to be honest with me, and protect my rights. He failed at both of these before he was even elected.
Yeah, I already know how reasonable a judge of honesty you are. Seriously, that bit about the grandmother was pathetic and sad of you and you should probably never bring it up again. Really, it was sad, and very telling.
And yes, he failed to protect your rights. Explain to me how Obama could have plausibly protected your rights in reality, as in actually stopped passage of the bill, or admit that your expectation here is unreasonable.
No, you don't understand a damn bit of what I'm saying.
But I do, your failure to admit the consequences of what you're saying is leading you to think this. But those consequences exist, admit it or not. You have a completely unreasonable and irrational expectations that are completely divorced from reality.
I never said he didn't do something that would be impossible to do. He had a vote. He chose to vote against the people on the FISA issue, rather than for them. Would the bill have passed without his vote? Probably, but that's irrelevant. By voting like he did, at the very least, he shows that he's willing to harm us as long as it furthers his political career. Well, fuck him, then. I want a representative who puts my interests ahead of his.
Saying it's irrelevant that the bill would have passed anyway shows just how divorced from reality you are. You're saying you would actually be happier with a candidate who deliberately ignored anything in the bill except the one thing you care about, and then made a pointless grandstanding gesture of voting against it even though it would certainly pass anyway, resulting in the same outcome, and causing that person political harm for zero actual benefit to the people.
That's what's so funny. On the one hand you don't count meaningless gestures like the vote against telco immunity, but on the other hand your whole beef with Obama is that he didn't make the meaningless gesture you wanted him to, even though it would have meant no more than the first vote did. In fact if you think his first vote was somehow duplicitous, then obviously (to the reality-connected) so could have been a 'no' vote on the final bill. That you think there's a difference is just proving my point.
What's not so funny is that if the candidate you want was actually running, the kind of candidate who deliberately ignores political reality for the sake of staying "pure" through pointless gestures that
A "fact" which exists purely in your imagination. If he had tried, he wouldn't have used his power to our detriment. That's it. End of story.
Ah, so voting for the amendment to remove telco immunity is my imagination. Got it.
No, wait, that was reality. Imagination is where you pretend that the vote on the funding bill was solely a vote on telco immunity and an indication of how he stands on that issue and that issue alone. Deliberately ignoring 1) how he voted on that particular issue and 2) ignoring everything else in the final bill and the reality surrounding the vote.
And now we reach new, idiotic, heights of presumption. No, I will be ecstatic if I turn out to be wrong.
Yes, if Obama turned out to actually be Jesus, I'm sure you'd be happy. If I made a trillion dollars on the stock market tomorrow and found out I was Superman, I'd be happy too. Yet since obviously that's not going to happen, and you and I both know it, any reasonable person would realize that you and I are deliberately setting ourselves up for disappointment by setting the bar impossibly high.
No, I'll be wrong if he's a good president who restores liberties which we have lost in the past 8 years. I'll be wrong if he works to reduce the abuses of power we saw under Bush. If you think I want him to be perfect, you've managed to read what I said without actually understanding a word. I don't want him to be perfect. I expect to disagree with people on things. What I do want is for him to have the fundamentals right, which he's shown he doesn't (so far).
Ah but see, I do understand what you are saying, at a level that goes deeper than just blindly accepting when you say "I don't want him to be perfect". You can't say "I don't want him to be perfect" in one sentence, and then say "He has failed because he didn't do something that would be impossible to do" in the next, and not have the deeper truth come out. Just because you don't want to admit it, doesn't mean I don't understand what you're saying. I understand quite well.
After all, if what you said here was true, then you'd already be admitting you are at least partially wrong, since Obama began rolling back Bush abuses on day one. But, again, you deliberately ignore reality, and people only do that when they have already decided they don't want that reality to be true. You don't want to be wrong about Obama, and you're making it impossible for you personally to ever believe that you were.
So make whatever superficial claim otherwise you wish. The deeper meaning is clear. You want the impossible. I'm sick of people who will only settle for the impossible.
No. I did not say that. You're assuming I accept the explanation that Obama made a mistake. I do not. I believe he lied.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. You think he deliberately crafted that response in order to mislead, even though the statement itself contained information that trivially disproved the misleading claim. And for what? Because having a grandmother who lived through two World Wars, instead of World War II, means... what exactly? What on earth do you imagine he intended to gain?
You know Bush made plenty of factual gaffs regarding history. I never assumed his intent was to lie, because how could getting a date from a hundred years ago wrong actually help him? Lying is what he did about the evidence for WMD in Iraq, and the danger posed by the insurgency. Lies that actually benefited him. Why would he "lie" and say there's an old Texas saying that ends "fool me twice... you can't get fooled again"?
Obama has failed both of these tests (lied to us, and failed to protect our right to privacy), which is why I anticipate a bad presidency from him. I will be ecstatic, of course, if I'm wrong, but that's my belief based on what is known of him at this time.
He only failed those tests based on your ludicrous and deliberate, calculated attempts to view them in a way where failure is the only option. The lie thing is just ridiculous. And yes, he failed to protect our privacy, but you know that he tried and choose to deliberately ignore the fact.
So no, you would not be ecstatic to be wrong, or you'd have made being wrong a possibility. You can never be wrong. The only way you could be wrong was if Obama was, in fact, perfect in a way that not only meant he never made a mistake, but could also accomplish things well beyond the power of his office with ease.
Is there anyone who thinks that market cap is a good metric to judge a company's overall success by at this particular moment in time? Pretty much every stock has been hit and hit hard, and the degree to which the size of that hit has anything to do with the company itself is highly questionable. The relationship between stock price and a company's success is ephemeral in the best of times, but now?
Oh yeah? Well I agree that being biased towards low UID numbers is incredibly stupid, and my UID is lower than yours so that means I'm... wait... Damnit.
Still lying about the new law having stricter protections for US Persons, I see. I like that you've also bolded the completely irrelevant "pen register" section. You don't need to tap into the hubs of the telcos to get a pen register.
Good point, and not only that, but if the ugly isn't out in the open, eventually people will forget.
Forget? How about fucking knowing something in the first place!
There are plenty of Americans who still think that the entire abu Ghraib situation involved nothing more severe than barking dogs, panty-hats, and naked man-piles.
They don't know about the detainees being beaten with table legs, repeatedly kicked in the groin, asphyxiations, male prisoners raped with broomsticks, female prisoners simply raped, and so on.
Probably because to know about these things, you'd have to have actually read one of the various military reports which by their own admission cover only a portion of the abuses that went on. The TV news just focused on the pictures, particularly the one of the guy covered in a hood standing on a box, and a lot of the viewing public went "So what? That doesn't look so bad to me." A callous view to begin with, but tempered by the fact that they simply haven't seen or heard about the things that anyone would call torture.
In a way I almost agree with the poster before who said that these other images shouldn't be released. I don't see any need to subject U.S. soldiers and victims to the judgement of the mob. But also, as far as repairing our image goes, I'm not sure it would do much good. We've already released many prisoners in Iraq, so all their family and friends around the country already know what went on, they don't need to be reminded with more pictures. Repairing our image means repudiating the policies that lead to the scandal, with action.
On the other hand, releasing the videos and getting them on the news may at least inform more Americans as to why exactly we should feel we have to make up for this.
My understanding is that the maintenance staff at the Whitehouse are currently working 24/7 to secure any chairs that can be picked up by a single person.
Uh oh, I smell trouble. They'll follow the spec and use screws that are only strong enough to keep the chair from being lifted by a person, not realizing that the person in question is actually a gorilla!
frags, literally speaking, refer to killings of superior officers.
I do believe sir, that you should use different terminology when marketing it to the military.
Good point!
Instead, we should call them High Energy Promotion Reassessments. Or HEPR for short. The military loves acronyms.
Are you sure that we haven't already had an African American president? Is the color of the skin what truly defines being African American or is it ancestry?
With regards to the social prejudices and obstacles that make the election of Barack Obama a historic event? Skin color, absolutely. Hell, there are plenty of dark-skinned people from places other than Africa that get lumped in with African Americans.
To quote a slashdot post from some time back, answering the question "Are we so racist that skin color is all that matters?" -- "Yes. What part of 'black' didn't you understand?"
While Obama may be the first dark skinned African American, applying the "first African American president" to him could be seen as discounting the heritage of past presidents.
That's may be true from a historical perspective. However it is at least as significant that he is the first president who is considered African American, and who self-identifies as such. In those other President's times the social cost of being considered black would have prevented them from being President, to say the absolute least. There's a vast difference between now and then, and this particular turning point is a historic demonstration of that progress.
Good luck with that! I was going to say that the only way to make a visitor to DC's visit less fun would be to shoot then rob them, but that's pretty much already on the itinerary, isn't it?
Which is redundant when talking about the works of Heinlein.
When the DeLorean becomes unstuck from time, it does not actually also become unstuck from space. Since it does not experience time, that means it can't interact with physical objects, but the interactions before and after must be consistent. For example if the DeLorean didn't "move" at all, so the earth moved away from it, that would mean a massive change in its potential energy without any change in time, which requires infinite energy. Thus the point in space where the DeLorean becomes unstuck serves as a reference point, and that reference point is dragged along with earth's gravity well, and the electrostatic fields that were holding the DeLorean up, etc. In a way it as though the Delorean is sitting there, motionless, the entire time but simply not visible, until it appears again and of course has the same amplitude of momentum that it had when it became unstuck (88 mph).
Obviously this works just the same if you're traveling forward or backward in time.
That's all ludicrous made-up BS, but so is the Flux Capacitor. I mean it doesn't make much sense to me to accept time travel just to poke holes at the "but you always end up in the same place" part. Since it's made up physics anyway, it can work however the author wants it to. This isn't the same as when you have say a super-hero with magical powers, but he behaves in a completely illogical way (like forgetting he has certain powers when it would short-circuit the plot). This is like accepting that the hero can fly, but rejecting the laser eye vision. That's just silly.
1. Was a poor leader
2. Did not consider opinions other than her own on making decisions.
3. Was really not very knowledgeable
4. Was only out for her own advancement
Perhaps these are the attributes of many successful executives, but don't strike me as qualities you want in a civil servant.
Well, I know nothing about the woman, but I do know that unfortunately it is often the case that people with these attributes are able to make themselves appear exactly the opposite during job interviews. So while I doubt many employers including the Obama administration consider those to be strengths that may not mean anything as these traits would only show once she got the job.
Seriously, does the man just exist to make the rest of us feel like we're idiots who can't get anything accomplished in life?
According to his latest paper, still waiting peer review before being published in the Journal of Physics, the answer is yes.
seriously? I worked at Motorola when Padmasree was there and I have seen more tech success in that period watching my lawn grow.
In her defense, the materials science and chemical engineering going on in your lawn is actually rather sophisticated. ;)
How many times have you had trouble with your drive accidentally reading previous data from it? You know, with a drive head that was designed, redesigned, and improved over 50 years to read data from that disk.
Uh, well yeah, because the control logic in the hard drive is designed specifically around making sure it reads the most recent version of the data, because it doesn't want to read old data. That's kinda the whole benefit of binary, that the analog values are being driven towards one of two extremes, so as long as the value approaches that extreme past some threshold it can easily and reliably be determined to be one of the two values. A '1' written over a '0' might only have an analog value of 0.9, but that's more than good enough to give you the correct value.
Now if you wanted to get at the old value, then you could alter the control logic and actually distinguish between a value of 1 and 0.9, and determine that the 0.9 value used to be a 0.
So yeah, doing this on "accident" doesn't happen. Doing it on purpose can be done. It was probably much easier back when the policy was first implemented.
I don't get why people often think that the US government has super awesome technology that borders on magic in the field of computer science. In my experience they were 30+ years behind the times in some areas. Some better, some worse.
You can get data recovered from surprisingly borked disk drives, including overwritten data, from mom-and-pop data recovery services. I can see not believing that the Feds have super-quantum-microscopes or whatever for data recovery, but why assume they don't have access to what everyone else does?
That's all not intended to say that bureaucracy doesn't have a lot to do with the policy. Just that there are valid reasons to be worried.
Finally, use a high-powered electromagnet to lift and drop the resulting brick into the hot part of an active volcano, then push the planet it's on into the nearest star.
But... that's where I keep all my stuff!