Oh I thought the leakage power component still could be approximated as a resistive circuit, but like I know anything about sub-threshold circuits. What's the scaling factor?
Everything 'likes' super-threshold, the question is will they work.
True enough, there's certainly a different degree of "like" between dynamic and static in that respect.
I admit I am an analog person and my digital design classes were a long time ago (in internet years). Sorry if my information is out of date.
Well a long time ago in Internet years might put that right around the time of the Alpha? It was one chip that I know made heavy use of dynamic logic in order to reach such high frequencies before others did. It seemed to fall out of favor mostly for complexity and manufacturability reasons. And what is compared to that the minor problem that it makes silicon debug harder when you can't down-clock the chip too much because then the dynamic logic stops working.:P
I also think these small super low power chips are far and away more interesting, and more important to our future lifestyles, than speed demon behemoths.
That's clearly where everything is headed. It is an interesting design problem for sure, but in my heart I like making chips that go fast.:)
Your current multigigahertz processor relies on dynamic logic. Dynamic logic does not work at subthreshold (roughly below 1V). This chip almost certainly uses static logic and will not be as fast as a modern CPU no matter what the voltage.
Gigahertz speeds are not impossible for static logic, in fact most modern processors are in their vast majority (and perhaps entirety, though I couldn't prove it) static logic, and perform quite a bit of logic in a single clock using static circuits. 45nm transistors are really fast, they don't necessarily need the tricks (and design complexity, and manufacturing risk) of dynamic logic to get to high speeds. Maybe the double-clocked ALUs in the Intel P4 series used it for example, but otherwise static logic rules the day.
Certainly you're right that it's unlikely that this chip would clock that high regardless of voltage. Static logic likes super-threshold voltages too.:P
The electrical characteristics of a CPU are somewhat more complicated than those of a resistor. True, but in fact a chip's power does scale with the square of the voltage. At a gross level you can approximate the chip as a certain constant resistance for static power, aka leakage, and as an RC circuit with a given constant for dynamic power, which scales linearly with frequency as well. Nobody actually does that, they just measure the power consumption and know that they the number is proportional to voltage squared and frequency.
Of course I just knew some jackass was going to use this fact to try to downplay the achievement. Okay, yeah, every computer engineer knows that to reduce power by four you drop the voltage by half, but the trick is actually making this work. That's why not every chip runs on 1E-20 Volts, Mr. Anonymous Idiot.
3. The drive up politicians: Don't you see how this is hurting the very business you work for by requring man power for a job the costumer could do themselves. (My reply: dude I'm just here for the beer money)
Lol, that's hilarious! What the fuck did they think you were going to say? "You're right, sir. I will happily volunteer for unemployment in order to aid the financial prosperity of a business I wouldn't give the tiniest flying fuck about except that they pay me to work here."
I lived in Oregon as a non native, and I thought it was weird at first, then kinda funny. I referred to it as the "Oregon Stoner Permanent Employment Act".
the 9-11 satire in "Starship Troopers" (four years before 9-11),
I assume you're referring to the destruction of Buenos Aires by the "bugs". That was just satire of the politically-fueled patriotic hysteria following any such event, of which 9/11 was just one example of. If it reminded you of 9/11 in hindsight, that's because history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.
Also, that event was in the original book by Heinlein, published in 1959. I doubt he predicted 9/11 over 40 years in advance, unless you mean in the most non-specific "a thing like this could probably happen sometime" kind of way.
Sounds like something that benefits the few rather than the many, which is better done in the private sector.
Uh, no, it doesn't benefit "the few", because if it did then "the few", who are rich, would fund it themselves. But they don't exactly because it doesn't benefit them.
We're talking about research that benefits "the many" by expanding our general knowledge of science, and thus allowing "the many" to find unexpected applications.
That's the difference. Pure research vs applied research. Applied research is what the private sector is good at, because they have a goal to which they wish to "apply" science. Science for the sake of science, for the sake of knowledge, doesn't fit in with the profit motive. However none of the things you see around you today would exist without pure science. In the long term, pure research is essential.
And what, exactly, is a bona fide military purpose?
You realize that "military" means a hell of a lot more than just weapons and armor? It's logistics, it's intelligence, it's planning, it's food, it's weather, it's clothing, it's medicine, it's pretty much everything we want on a day to day basis but in a life-or-death situation.
You realize that it isn't obvious at all what inventions may and may not pan out to have military uses? On the subject of logistics, do you think refrigeration has a bona fide military use? Do you think they knew that when refrigerants were discovered in the 1700s? Or how about the military applications of nuclear fission? The fact is that in order for the military to maintain its edge technologically, it needs the broadest possible base of pure and applied sciences, regardless of apparent military use, from which to draw. Climatology, material science, medicine, physics, chemistry, all contribute in critical ways to keeping our military top of the line.
Frankly if you were to compare the research funded by DARPA to that of NFS or NIH, it isn't clear to me at all that DARPA is any more bona fide, or productive for that matter.
Oh, and those areas of pure sciences that give military technology its foundation are also areas that the obvious alternative to goverment funds, private industry, is notoriously bad at funding due to the lack of apparent payoff. To the extent that DARPA can run off on a hypothetically useful tangent, with industry it's all cost-benefit analysis and pie-in-the-sky research is risky. However, when one of these discoveries pans out they still benefit.
So not only does the research done in our government-funded universities using government research grants ultimately provide the foundation with which we build our military superiority, it's also the foundation for our high-tech corporate economy. Which is also related to the "common defense", since no country can maintain a defense if it's broke.
Heavens Above is also wonderful for predicting so-called Iridium flares.
I was on an astronomy trip once and one of the people there was a satellite geek who came equipped with info about the flares. The coolest part was that he could predict it so accurately that he could do a countdown of "3... 2... 1..." then *fwoosh* it appeared in the sky -- no laser needed to point out where it was. It was near dusk, not a bright sky but still light enough that Venus wasn't visible. The flare sure as hell was visible; very bright, very awesome.:)
Because, hey, if three guys with a $500 telescope, some lawn chairs, a six-pack of beer and nothing else to do on a Friday night don't do it, maybe hostile foreign governments won't either! Riiiiight.
Well, maybe they're hoping all the hostile foreign government agents have plans for Friday night.
Is that Microsoft Office blows OO.org away. Completely. Microsoft could go with ODF and still compete very well against OO.
But Microsoft doesn't want to compete with OO. They would much rather have a monopoly based on a de-facto document standard that is incompatible with other software. After all, you make more money with monopoly sales and monopoly markup than you do in a competitive market, even if you're the market leader.
If Microsoft fully supported ODF, then it may happen that a great deal of people who would not consider anything but MS Office today due to requiring Office compatibility would decide that OO does what they need well enough and has the right price. Already many people who don't require perfect MS Office compatibility have made the same decision.
And if you don't need MS Office, then maybe you don't need MS Windows. The entirety of the Microsoft business model is built upon these two monopolies reinforcing each other by being incompatible with anything else. If either of these monopolies is broken, if software compatibility means that MS Office or MS Windows are merely choices rather than requirements for the majority of people, then MS' days of dominance are over.
This is absolutely bog-standard MS thinking, it's how they've operated for the last twenty-plus years. They always prefer to monopolize over compete, and only compete when absolutely necessary (with very mixed results).
So that's all there is to understand -- competition is anathema to MS, and they will protect their monopolies at all costs. ODF, an actual standard juxtaposed with their de-facto standard, threatens their monopolies. They will fight against supporting it tooth-and-nail.
Actually I think most of the American population was thinking that, not just the Green Party. I mean the votes were practically 50-50. There was a reason.
True enough, that's a good observation, though at least those people thought they were different enough to pick one of the two.
I personally like to think we wouldn't be fighting in Iraq if Al Gore had been elected, but that in the end is just conjecture. We do not know.
Uh, well, I guess technically we don't know, in the same way we don't know that Al Gore wouldn't have put on a monkey suit and declared himself Chimperor For Life, but I feel pretty safe in my conjecture.
The Iraq endeavor was a creation of the neo-cons, nobody else. Without Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Cheney in office there would have been no initial impetus, much less momentum, behind invading Iraq. In an Al Gore administration, they would have listened to Richard Clark not whatever bonehead thought they needed to implement PNAC. Without the chief neo-cons to push the idea, what reason would Gore have had for invading?
We'd almost certainly be in Afghanistan, but almost certainly not in Iraq. Looking at how much better Afghanistan was and is than Iraq, and how much it is suffering due to our lack of attention, it's really tragic how much better off we'd be. But that's the past, can't do anything about it. Whoever takes the office next year is going to have to deal with Iraq, regardless of what they would have done in Bush's shoes. But hey, we can at least hope it's to refocus on the 'good' war and shift away from the 'bad'.
My problem with McCain, besides the constant barrage of "Veteran" status that he's played dry, is that he's talked about putting Ballmer in his cabinet. Now... I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but you have to wonder what the CEO of a monopolistic company would do to help support his cause. AMERICANS! AMERICANS! AMERICANS!
Yeah, I see a Secretary of State position in his future.
I'm saying, if we decide to go the route of making everyone buy health insurance (as car insurance is mandatory in much of the U.S., for example), I'd consider it acceptable for my taxes to pay that mandatory health insurance cost in some cases. The people that it didn't pay for would buy health insurance as normal.
Ah, okay. Well that's pretty reasonable, but then again I really don't understand how "mandatory" insurance is going to work anyway -- like there's a huge class of people who can afford health coverage for their families, but just don't want to buy it? From my experience any struggling family has health insurance as one of their #1 things to buy if they can pull in more money. If someone honestly can't afford it, how are they going to comply with the "mandatory" scheme?
I'm not convinced that approach is better than a socialized system. It's a 'what if?'
Well I'm unabashedly for a socialized system, but I also think that these half-assed "universal" health care systems are even worse than the current scheme. It just sounds like a way to hand even more money to the insurers, and reduce competition.
The thing that always sticks with me about socialized medicine (and note, as I say this, that it still may very well be the best available choice) is that to my understanding it doesn't reward preventative measures, and in most implementations the greatest need is always served first. That is to say, if I take great care of my body and am generally in good health but develop a very painful but not life-threatening condition, surgery for me is a lower priority than life-saving lung removal surgery on a lifetime chain smoker with lung cancer.
Well the first observation I'll make is that in general a government-run program has the opposite problem as a private one with regards to spending: Your private company doesn't want to spend your money on health care, because that means they get to keep it, whereas a government program wants to spend as much as possible because that's how you get more money when budget time rolls around again.
The second observation I'll make is that as far as using available medical resources goes, it's a greatest-need-first system today, and this is fine with me. The thing is that you're generally waiting just to get a surgeon, and one of my main points is that this need not change because if we eliminate the for-profit middle man, we'll actually be spending more money on actual health care and health care professionals, so at least in theory we could have more doctors and surgeons. To the extent that wait lists are a problem in Canada I believe it is due to them spending far less per-capita on health care.
So you're unlikely to find yourself wanting for surgeons regardless of your need, in particular because the government is going to be more than happy to hire an extra surgeon and secure more funds in the next round of budgets.
But how do you create incentives for preventative measures in this system? For a lot of the patients I think this is largely moot, as availability of preventative measures will encourage them to go. It's not like my personal insurance premiums go up if I wait on a problem, my company buys the policy for me so I'm largely sheltered from that. No, I go to the doctor earlier rather than later because I don't have to worry about costs, and I'd rather that they detect the cancer or whatever sooner. It's the people without any health care who are most likely to wait until the problem is acute before going to the doctor.
From the doctor's end, it's less clear how that works. The only obvious solution is to tie it into the legislation that creates the system, which immediately turns into a byzantine mess as messed up as the current insurance tables.
Hospital treatment isn't free. The money has to come from somewhere.
The money is there, we're already spending it on our current health care system. We're already paying more for our healthcare than just about anyone else on earth. However we have inserted a for-profit middle man into the picture resulting in only a fraction of that money ending up getting spent on actual treatment. And then there's the fact that as of today most emergency rooms will not turn away a patient who can't pay, and thus the uninsured end up having the most expensive treatment which is still payed for by the insured.
The most expensive care, with the least efficient method of paying for it. But people arguing against changing it always ask "Where will the money come from?" How about from the billions we're already spending?
Is it really that hard to believe that a socialist system like in the UK can actually be cheaper than the for-profit capitalist system?
A system in which the public decides to cover the health care expenses of some worthy cases, to my mind, beats the status quo where the public essentially covers everyone by default.
In my mind a system that only concerns itself with the health of its people in "worthy cases" is worse than the status quo of profiting from suffering but allowing everyone to get care.
I really can't see how a system which gives health care to fewer people is in any way an improvement. If you don't want to pay for the expensive emergency care of uninsured persons, find a way to make it cheaper, not shut them out in the cold to die.
The worst part is that the die-hards in the Green Party actually do believe this. "There's no difference between Democrats and Republicans". Yeah, well, stop drinking the kool-aid long enough to realize that if Al Gore had won in 2000 we wouldn't fucking be in Iraq right now.
It's funny you should mention that, because I was one of those Greenies who, at least in 2000, believed Gore and Bush to be close enough to each other that the differences didn't matter. I preferred Gore largely because of his environmental policies, but not enough to vote for him instead of my true choice of Ralph Nader. Because really, how much worse could Bush be?
Well then Iraq happened and every day since I've been looking at the sky and begging forgiveness for ever saying "how could he be worse?" I was a fool, I admit it, so please stop making the point!
I think they had a reasonable expectation that the tiger would not be able to escape its enclosure and rend them limb from limb.
Of course they did. That's the only reason they were confident enough to irritate a huge toothy predator. I'm sure that if there was no barrier at all they would have had to drink a lot more before thinking tiger-taunting was a good idea.
Which has happened, actually... at a zoo in Alaska some young adults got extremely drunk and decided it was a good idea to climb into the polar bear enclosure. Polar bears btw consider *anything* smaller than them, including other bears, to be potential food.
So while I think these guys are dumb, there are certainly dumber.
If anybody is at fault, it's the zoo for not designing proper enclosures, or enforcing some kind of don't-taunt-the-tigers-because-our-walls-are-too-low rule.
I reject outright the idea that only one party can be at fault, and that if one party was negligent then anyone else's behavior isn't their fault. Blame is not a zero-sum game.
The zoo is clearly at fault. Exactly how much we'll find out, but at the very least we know the enclosure didn't meet standards.
Yet these morons were also at fault. There shouldn't have to be a "because-our-walls-are-too-low" part of the "rule" that shouldn't even have to be stated or enforced.
One can be standing 30 yards away and still look someone or something directly in the eyes. Your vision must not be that great.
There's more too it than just distance, and that's why I said "in their enclosure". If there wasn't, this and many other tigers would have attacked people long before. So what are you even saying here? I do think it's funny though that in your picture that "proves" this, you can't in fact see the tiger's eyes.
I'm not going to say or even imply (like you have) that I understand all wild animal behavior, but I understand cats and feral cats.
No, you don't, because you don't comprehend how controlling a predator's food supply could make them not like you. You think that means I "live in a very dark world". So really, don't even try to make this laughable statement again.
Your assertion about predators normally just picking people at random shows you have little understanding of just how a predator works. It doesn't charge in willy-nilly and maul the closest person. It selects its target(s), stalks, and picks them off. It's a much more efficient strategy than simply going after the closest, because that one could also be stronger and faster.
You don't understand what I was saying at all -- big surprise. I'm saying, of all the hundreds of thousands of visitors who visited the tiger's enclosure, of all the ones who looked right at the tiger, made noises or whatever, the tiger attacked only these three. Nobody else. Not once. Even though it clearly could, it never even tried to escape. Something must have made it want to, and it wasn't hunger, it was anger.
Based on your incomprehension of the relationship between food and dominance, you want to portray this tiger as a likely man-killer who attacks without provocation. Well the facts simply disagree. The tiger had ample opportunity to attack, if it was going to go off over nothing then it would have already. The fact is that the tiger had never before attacked without provocation, and it's nigh inconceivable that it did this time.
A tiger who has mauled someone before might not even think twice about human prey of this size.
A tiger who is a man-killer would not think twice about any human prey. Do you have any idea of what kind of prey a tiger can bring down in the wild? The only thing that stops a tiger from being a man-eater is that it doesn't associate humans with prey. But having taken a swipe at a handler does not create a human-food relationship in the tiger. The whole point is that the tiger is reacting to the handler as though they were another tiger who is exerting dominance over them. It's a social relationship, not predator-prey, and thus does not in fact make the tiger more likely to attack other random humans.
But since you don't understand that, try asking yourself this: If the tiger wouldn't think twice about attacking three 5'6" adults, what about all the "prey" of lesser size that traipsed before it for so many years? What you honestly think no child ever walked unattended up to the tiger's enclosure and stared at it? No ten year old ever hopped the fence to get a closer look? This animal has had so much opportunity to attack if it was going to that it's ridiculous, the very fact that it hadn't shows that it was not likely to.
But we know very little except this:
1) No evidence of taunting. No witnesses. No confessions. No weapons. No nothing.
We also know they made conflicting statements. But it's not illegal to change your story unless you're under oath.
In the meantime, OJ is still searching for the real killers. *smirk*
2) Tatiana has mauled before.
We know Tatiana had mauled before in a situation in which it is perfectly understandable. You're deliberately using an absence of context and understanding of animal behavior to make this seem like more than it was.
Oh cool! Another person who has proof the boys were taunting the tiger! Boy oh boy, the SFPD would love to see your evidence.
My proof is that the tiger attacked them and only them, tracking two of them hundreds of yards past plenty of other zoo visitors to attack only them, and not any of the literally hundreds of thousands of other visitors who have been to the tiger's cage.
SFPD would love to see some evidence because despite taunting having almost certainly occurred, they don't have the physical evidence to stand up in a court of law, and thus must (and should) let them go. So the survivors finally got their story straight, and were smart enough to either not video themselves in the first place or delete the video later, and since SFPD can't prove they are lying, they have no choice but to let them go. They hate having to let people they think are guilty go. So yes, I'm sure they'd love to see evidence.
Clearly this means they were innocent. So why did the tiger choose them, and only them, to attack? If it was random aggression, why was the target not random?
So, feeding it is a degree of provocation?
If you understood anything at all about animal behavior, you would know that it is. Feeding is about food control. In the wild, the one who gives food, who decides how much and when, is dominant, and the one who receives food is submissive. And in the wild, how do you think such dominance is challenged?
This isn't a puppy dog, it's a tiger. A naturally solitary, self-sufficient apex predator who does not like to be submissive to anyone. Any tiger keeper should know this, and any tiger keeper who forgets this and lets the tiger swipe at them screwed up.
If a tiger is provoked by a feeding, then maybe standing there and looking the tiger in the eyes is a degree of provocation?
If you are close enough to be literally looking the tiger in the eye (i.e. within its enclosure) then you damn well for your own sorry ass better believe that's a provocation. I mean, did you really have to ask this?
Again, this shows that you live in a very dark world. A tiger that is known for attacking people (and not for self-defense), and an enclosure wall that is known to be too short is a common-sense recipe for disaster.
It's a tiger, not a person! It doesn't have to be "self-defense" for it to be perfectly normal tiger behavior, not a sign that the tiger will attack randomly and without provocation. A tiger that would take a swipe at a handler is not any kind of surprise at all, it's just a tiger like any other.
Oh hey! It happened. The cat attacked one person and wasn't punished. Who in their right mind would think the mental barrier for attacking again isn't lowered?
People who know things about animals. Even mentioning punishing the tiger shows that this is not you.
Then you are agreeing with me that this tiger is capable of attacking without provocation.
No, because as he quite correctly pointed out much earlier, the tiger-handler relationship inherently involves a degree of "provocation".
That wasn't a case of the tiger taking a swipe at some random person, it took a swipe at her.
Just like this wasn't a case of the tiger escaping its enclosure on a whim and attacking a random person, it attacked the jackasses who were tormenting it. Nobody else.
I do think the zoo seriously dropped the ball on this one. However neither of these incidents in any way show that the tiger was prone to "unprovoked" attacks, and thus should have been considered an escape risk.
Well at the very least the one who was killed was the youngest of the three (ages 17, 19, and 23), and thus presumably the one most likely to go along with jackassery in order to fit in. Can't say whether that means he was the least sadistic or not, but it does in a way seem unfair.
Actually, the Church teaches that there will be a bodily resurrection, so in that case you would be getting a (much improved) "meat-suit" again. Having a body is an important part of being human, anyway -- a human soul is disembodied by death, but it's not a comfortable or natural way for a human being to be.
Ah. Aside from the fact that I was just dicking around with a troll, I also wasn't speaking from a Catholic perspective. All the Protestant churches I've went to haven't taught anything specific about how life in heaven will actually be (Jesus seems fairly vague on the subject anyway), other than that it will be awesome.
Heaven won't have sex as we experience it now, but something better which is not available to us in our current state.
Like... Sex, video games, and pizza combined into one act in a way that won't get you into trouble with your partner? I really can't wait. =D
Slashdot Mirror
Oh I thought the leakage power component still could be approximated as a resistive circuit, but like I know anything about sub-threshold circuits. What's the scaling factor?
Everything 'likes' super-threshold, the question is will they work.
:P
:)
True enough, there's certainly a different degree of "like" between dynamic and static in that respect.
I admit I am an analog person and my digital design classes were a long time ago (in internet years). Sorry if my information is out of date.
Well a long time ago in Internet years might put that right around the time of the Alpha? It was one chip that I know made heavy use of dynamic logic in order to reach such high frequencies before others did. It seemed to fall out of favor mostly for complexity and manufacturability reasons. And what is compared to that the minor problem that it makes silicon debug harder when you can't down-clock the chip too much because then the dynamic logic stops working.
I also think these small super low power chips are far and away more interesting, and more important to our future lifestyles, than speed demon behemoths.
That's clearly where everything is headed. It is an interesting design problem for sure, but in my heart I like making chips that go fast.
Your current multigigahertz processor relies on dynamic logic. Dynamic logic does not work at subthreshold (roughly below 1V). This chip almost certainly uses static logic and will not be as fast as a modern CPU no matter what the voltage.
:P
Gigahertz speeds are not impossible for static logic, in fact most modern processors are in their vast majority (and perhaps entirety, though I couldn't prove it) static logic, and perform quite a bit of logic in a single clock using static circuits. 45nm transistors are really fast, they don't necessarily need the tricks (and design complexity, and manufacturing risk) of dynamic logic to get to high speeds. Maybe the double-clocked ALUs in the Intel P4 series used it for example, but otherwise static logic rules the day.
Certainly you're right that it's unlikely that this chip would clock that high regardless of voltage. Static logic likes super-threshold voltages too.
Of course I just knew some jackass was going to use this fact to try to downplay the achievement. Okay, yeah, every computer engineer knows that to reduce power by four you drop the voltage by half, but the trick is actually making this work. That's why not every chip runs on 1E-20 Volts, Mr. Anonymous Idiot.
3. The drive up politicians: Don't you see how this is hurting the very business you work for by requring man power for a job the costumer could do themselves. (My reply: dude I'm just here for the beer money)
Lol, that's hilarious! What the fuck did they think you were going to say? "You're right, sir. I will happily volunteer for unemployment in order to aid the financial prosperity of a business I wouldn't give the tiniest flying fuck about except that they pay me to work here."
I lived in Oregon as a non native, and I thought it was weird at first, then kinda funny. I referred to it as the "Oregon Stoner Permanent Employment Act".
2) You're amazed by the fact that he saw a lazerdisc shrunk it down for his robocop movie? Sorry, I'm not impressed.
I'll tell you what doesn't amaze me -- that the OP has never seen a laser disc.
So... basically Skynet is going to be able to take over just by refusing to refuel our SUVs?
the 9-11 satire in "Starship Troopers" (four years before 9-11),
I assume you're referring to the destruction of Buenos Aires by the "bugs". That was just satire of the politically-fueled patriotic hysteria following any such event, of which 9/11 was just one example of. If it reminded you of 9/11 in hindsight, that's because history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.
Also, that event was in the original book by Heinlein, published in 1959. I doubt he predicted 9/11 over 40 years in advance, unless you mean in the most non-specific "a thing like this could probably happen sometime" kind of way.
Sounds like something that benefits the few rather than the many, which is better done in the private sector.
Uh, no, it doesn't benefit "the few", because if it did then "the few", who are rich, would fund it themselves. But they don't exactly because it doesn't benefit them.
We're talking about research that benefits "the many" by expanding our general knowledge of science, and thus allowing "the many" to find unexpected applications.
That's the difference. Pure research vs applied research. Applied research is what the private sector is good at, because they have a goal to which they wish to "apply" science. Science for the sake of science, for the sake of knowledge, doesn't fit in with the profit motive. However none of the things you see around you today would exist without pure science. In the long term, pure research is essential.
And what, exactly, is a bona fide military purpose?
You realize that "military" means a hell of a lot more than just weapons and armor? It's logistics, it's intelligence, it's planning, it's food, it's weather, it's clothing, it's medicine, it's pretty much everything we want on a day to day basis but in a life-or-death situation.
You realize that it isn't obvious at all what inventions may and may not pan out to have military uses? On the subject of logistics, do you think refrigeration has a bona fide military use? Do you think they knew that when refrigerants were discovered in the 1700s? Or how about the military applications of nuclear fission? The fact is that in order for the military to maintain its edge technologically, it needs the broadest possible base of pure and applied sciences, regardless of apparent military use, from which to draw. Climatology, material science, medicine, physics, chemistry, all contribute in critical ways to keeping our military top of the line.
Frankly if you were to compare the research funded by DARPA to that of NFS or NIH, it isn't clear to me at all that DARPA is any more bona fide, or productive for that matter.
Oh, and those areas of pure sciences that give military technology its foundation are also areas that the obvious alternative to goverment funds, private industry, is notoriously bad at funding due to the lack of apparent payoff. To the extent that DARPA can run off on a hypothetically useful tangent, with industry it's all cost-benefit analysis and pie-in-the-sky research is risky. However, when one of these discoveries pans out they still benefit.
So not only does the research done in our government-funded universities using government research grants ultimately provide the foundation with which we build our military superiority, it's also the foundation for our high-tech corporate economy. Which is also related to the "common defense", since no country can maintain a defense if it's broke.
Heavens Above is also wonderful for predicting so-called Iridium flares.
:)
I was on an astronomy trip once and one of the people there was a satellite geek who came equipped with info about the flares. The coolest part was that he could predict it so accurately that he could do a countdown of "3... 2... 1..." then *fwoosh* it appeared in the sky -- no laser needed to point out where it was. It was near dusk, not a bright sky but still light enough that Venus wasn't visible. The flare sure as hell was visible; very bright, very awesome.
Because, hey, if three guys with a $500 telescope, some lawn chairs, a six-pack of beer and nothing else to do on a Friday night don't do it, maybe hostile foreign governments won't either! Riiiiight.
Well, maybe they're hoping all the hostile foreign government agents have plans for Friday night.
Is that Microsoft Office blows OO.org away. Completely. Microsoft could go with ODF and still compete very well against OO.
But Microsoft doesn't want to compete with OO. They would much rather have a monopoly based on a de-facto document standard that is incompatible with other software. After all, you make more money with monopoly sales and monopoly markup than you do in a competitive market, even if you're the market leader.
If Microsoft fully supported ODF, then it may happen that a great deal of people who would not consider anything but MS Office today due to requiring Office compatibility would decide that OO does what they need well enough and has the right price. Already many people who don't require perfect MS Office compatibility have made the same decision.
And if you don't need MS Office, then maybe you don't need MS Windows. The entirety of the Microsoft business model is built upon these two monopolies reinforcing each other by being incompatible with anything else. If either of these monopolies is broken, if software compatibility means that MS Office or MS Windows are merely choices rather than requirements for the majority of people, then MS' days of dominance are over.
This is absolutely bog-standard MS thinking, it's how they've operated for the last twenty-plus years. They always prefer to monopolize over compete, and only compete when absolutely necessary (with very mixed results).
So that's all there is to understand -- competition is anathema to MS, and they will protect their monopolies at all costs. ODF, an actual standard juxtaposed with their de-facto standard, threatens their monopolies. They will fight against supporting it tooth-and-nail.
Actually I think most of the American population was thinking that, not just the Green Party. I mean the votes were practically 50-50. There was a reason.
True enough, that's a good observation, though at least those people thought they were different enough to pick one of the two.
I personally like to think we wouldn't be fighting in Iraq if Al Gore had been elected, but that in the end is just conjecture. We do not know.
Uh, well, I guess technically we don't know, in the same way we don't know that Al Gore wouldn't have put on a monkey suit and declared himself Chimperor For Life, but I feel pretty safe in my conjecture.
The Iraq endeavor was a creation of the neo-cons, nobody else. Without Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Cheney in office there would have been no initial impetus, much less momentum, behind invading Iraq. In an Al Gore administration, they would have listened to Richard Clark not whatever bonehead thought they needed to implement PNAC. Without the chief neo-cons to push the idea, what reason would Gore have had for invading?
We'd almost certainly be in Afghanistan, but almost certainly not in Iraq. Looking at how much better Afghanistan was and is than Iraq, and how much it is suffering due to our lack of attention, it's really tragic how much better off we'd be. But that's the past, can't do anything about it. Whoever takes the office next year is going to have to deal with Iraq, regardless of what they would have done in Bush's shoes. But hey, we can at least hope it's to refocus on the 'good' war and shift away from the 'bad'.
Yeah, I see a Secretary of State position in his future.
I'm saying, if we decide to go the route of making everyone buy health insurance (as car insurance is mandatory in much of the U.S., for example), I'd consider it acceptable for my taxes to pay that mandatory health insurance cost in some cases. The people that it didn't pay for would buy health insurance as normal.
Ah, okay. Well that's pretty reasonable, but then again I really don't understand how "mandatory" insurance is going to work anyway -- like there's a huge class of people who can afford health coverage for their families, but just don't want to buy it? From my experience any struggling family has health insurance as one of their #1 things to buy if they can pull in more money. If someone honestly can't afford it, how are they going to comply with the "mandatory" scheme?
I'm not convinced that approach is better than a socialized system. It's a 'what if?'
Well I'm unabashedly for a socialized system, but I also think that these half-assed "universal" health care systems are even worse than the current scheme. It just sounds like a way to hand even more money to the insurers, and reduce competition.
The thing that always sticks with me about socialized medicine (and note, as I say this, that it still may very well be the best available choice) is that to my understanding it doesn't reward preventative measures, and in most implementations the greatest need is always served first. That is to say, if I take great care of my body and am generally in good health but develop a very painful but not life-threatening condition, surgery for me is a lower priority than life-saving lung removal surgery on a lifetime chain smoker with lung cancer.
Well the first observation I'll make is that in general a government-run program has the opposite problem as a private one with regards to spending: Your private company doesn't want to spend your money on health care, because that means they get to keep it, whereas a government program wants to spend as much as possible because that's how you get more money when budget time rolls around again.
The second observation I'll make is that as far as using available medical resources goes, it's a greatest-need-first system today, and this is fine with me. The thing is that you're generally waiting just to get a surgeon, and one of my main points is that this need not change because if we eliminate the for-profit middle man, we'll actually be spending more money on actual health care and health care professionals, so at least in theory we could have more doctors and surgeons. To the extent that wait lists are a problem in Canada I believe it is due to them spending far less per-capita on health care.
So you're unlikely to find yourself wanting for surgeons regardless of your need, in particular because the government is going to be more than happy to hire an extra surgeon and secure more funds in the next round of budgets.
But how do you create incentives for preventative measures in this system? For a lot of the patients I think this is largely moot, as availability of preventative measures will encourage them to go. It's not like my personal insurance premiums go up if I wait on a problem, my company buys the policy for me so I'm largely sheltered from that. No, I go to the doctor earlier rather than later because I don't have to worry about costs, and I'd rather that they detect the cancer or whatever sooner. It's the people without any health care who are most likely to wait until the problem is acute before going to the doctor.
From the doctor's end, it's less clear how that works. The only obvious solution is to tie it into the legislation that creates the system, which immediately turns into a byzantine mess as messed up as the current insurance tables.
Hospital treatment isn't free. The money has to come from somewhere.
The money is there, we're already spending it on our current health care system. We're already paying more for our healthcare than just about anyone else on earth. However we have inserted a for-profit middle man into the picture resulting in only a fraction of that money ending up getting spent on actual treatment. And then there's the fact that as of today most emergency rooms will not turn away a patient who can't pay, and thus the uninsured end up having the most expensive treatment which is still payed for by the insured.
The most expensive care, with the least efficient method of paying for it. But people arguing against changing it always ask "Where will the money come from?" How about from the billions we're already spending?
Is it really that hard to believe that a socialist system like in the UK can actually be cheaper than the for-profit capitalist system?
A system in which the public decides to cover the health care expenses of some worthy cases, to my mind, beats the status quo where the public essentially covers everyone by default.
In my mind a system that only concerns itself with the health of its people in "worthy cases" is worse than the status quo of profiting from suffering but allowing everyone to get care.
I really can't see how a system which gives health care to fewer people is in any way an improvement. If you don't want to pay for the expensive emergency care of uninsured persons, find a way to make it cheaper, not shut them out in the cold to die.
The worst part is that the die-hards in the Green Party actually do believe this. "There's no difference between Democrats and Republicans". Yeah, well, stop drinking the kool-aid long enough to realize that if Al Gore had won in 2000 we wouldn't fucking be in Iraq right now.
It's funny you should mention that, because I was one of those Greenies who, at least in 2000, believed Gore and Bush to be close enough to each other that the differences didn't matter. I preferred Gore largely because of his environmental policies, but not enough to vote for him instead of my true choice of Ralph Nader. Because really, how much worse could Bush be?
Well then Iraq happened and every day since I've been looking at the sky and begging forgiveness for ever saying "how could he be worse?" I was a fool, I admit it, so please stop making the point!
I think they had a reasonable expectation that the tiger would not be able to escape its enclosure and rend them limb from limb.
Of course they did. That's the only reason they were confident enough to irritate a huge toothy predator. I'm sure that if there was no barrier at all they would have had to drink a lot more before thinking tiger-taunting was a good idea.
Which has happened, actually... at a zoo in Alaska some young adults got extremely drunk and decided it was a good idea to climb into the polar bear enclosure. Polar bears btw consider *anything* smaller than them, including other bears, to be potential food.
So while I think these guys are dumb, there are certainly dumber.
If anybody is at fault, it's the zoo for not designing proper enclosures, or enforcing some kind of don't-taunt-the-tigers-because-our-walls-are-too-low rule.
I reject outright the idea that only one party can be at fault, and that if one party was negligent then anyone else's behavior isn't their fault. Blame is not a zero-sum game.
The zoo is clearly at fault. Exactly how much we'll find out, but at the very least we know the enclosure didn't meet standards.
Yet these morons were also at fault. There shouldn't have to be a "because-our-walls-are-too-low" part of the "rule" that shouldn't even have to be stated or enforced.
One can be standing 30 yards away and still look someone or something directly in the eyes. Your vision must not be that great.
There's more too it than just distance, and that's why I said "in their enclosure". If there wasn't, this and many other tigers would have attacked people long before. So what are you even saying here? I do think it's funny though that in your picture that "proves" this, you can't in fact see the tiger's eyes.
I'm not going to say or even imply (like you have) that I understand all wild animal behavior, but I understand cats and feral cats.
No, you don't, because you don't comprehend how controlling a predator's food supply could make them not like you. You think that means I "live in a very dark world". So really, don't even try to make this laughable statement again.
Your assertion about predators normally just picking people at random shows you have little understanding of just how a predator works. It doesn't charge in willy-nilly and maul the closest person. It selects its target(s), stalks, and picks them off. It's a much more efficient strategy than simply going after the closest, because that one could also be stronger and faster.
You don't understand what I was saying at all -- big surprise. I'm saying, of all the hundreds of thousands of visitors who visited the tiger's enclosure, of all the ones who looked right at the tiger, made noises or whatever, the tiger attacked only these three. Nobody else. Not once. Even though it clearly could, it never even tried to escape. Something must have made it want to, and it wasn't hunger, it was anger.
Based on your incomprehension of the relationship between food and dominance, you want to portray this tiger as a likely man-killer who attacks without provocation. Well the facts simply disagree. The tiger had ample opportunity to attack, if it was going to go off over nothing then it would have already. The fact is that the tiger had never before attacked without provocation, and it's nigh inconceivable that it did this time.
A tiger who has mauled someone before might not even think twice about human prey of this size.
A tiger who is a man-killer would not think twice about any human prey. Do you have any idea of what kind of prey a tiger can bring down in the wild? The only thing that stops a tiger from being a man-eater is that it doesn't associate humans with prey. But having taken a swipe at a handler does not create a human-food relationship in the tiger. The whole point is that the tiger is reacting to the handler as though they were another tiger who is exerting dominance over them. It's a social relationship, not predator-prey, and thus does not in fact make the tiger more likely to attack other random humans.
But since you don't understand that, try asking yourself this: If the tiger wouldn't think twice about attacking three 5'6" adults, what about all the "prey" of lesser size that traipsed before it for so many years? What you honestly think no child ever walked unattended up to the tiger's enclosure and stared at it? No ten year old ever hopped the fence to get a closer look? This animal has had so much opportunity to attack if it was going to that it's ridiculous, the very fact that it hadn't shows that it was not likely to.
But we know very little except this:
1) No evidence of taunting. No witnesses. No confessions. No weapons. No nothing.
We also know they made conflicting statements. But it's not illegal to change your story unless you're under oath.
In the meantime, OJ is still searching for the real killers. *smirk*
2) Tatiana has mauled before.
We know Tatiana had mauled before in a situation in which it is perfectly understandable. You're deliberately using an absence of context and understanding of animal behavior to make this seem like more than it was.
Well maybe you know very little
Oh cool! Another person who has proof the boys were taunting the tiger! Boy oh boy, the SFPD would love to see your evidence.
My proof is that the tiger attacked them and only them, tracking two of them hundreds of yards past plenty of other zoo visitors to attack only them, and not any of the literally hundreds of thousands of other visitors who have been to the tiger's cage.
SFPD would love to see some evidence because despite taunting having almost certainly occurred, they don't have the physical evidence to stand up in a court of law, and thus must (and should) let them go. So the survivors finally got their story straight, and were smart enough to either not video themselves in the first place or delete the video later, and since SFPD can't prove they are lying, they have no choice but to let them go. They hate having to let people they think are guilty go. So yes, I'm sure they'd love to see evidence.
Clearly this means they were innocent. So why did the tiger choose them, and only them, to attack? If it was random aggression, why was the target not random?
So, feeding it is a degree of provocation?
If you understood anything at all about animal behavior, you would know that it is. Feeding is about food control. In the wild, the one who gives food, who decides how much and when, is dominant, and the one who receives food is submissive. And in the wild, how do you think such dominance is challenged?
This isn't a puppy dog, it's a tiger. A naturally solitary, self-sufficient apex predator who does not like to be submissive to anyone. Any tiger keeper should know this, and any tiger keeper who forgets this and lets the tiger swipe at them screwed up.
If a tiger is provoked by a feeding, then maybe standing there and looking the tiger in the eyes is a degree of provocation?
If you are close enough to be literally looking the tiger in the eye (i.e. within its enclosure) then you damn well for your own sorry ass better believe that's a provocation. I mean, did you really have to ask this?
Again, this shows that you live in a very dark world. A tiger that is known for attacking people (and not for self-defense), and an enclosure wall that is known to be too short is a common-sense recipe for disaster.
It's a tiger, not a person! It doesn't have to be "self-defense" for it to be perfectly normal tiger behavior, not a sign that the tiger will attack randomly and without provocation. A tiger that would take a swipe at a handler is not any kind of surprise at all, it's just a tiger like any other.
Oh hey! It happened. The cat attacked one person and wasn't punished. Who in their right mind would think the mental barrier for attacking again isn't lowered?
People who know things about animals. Even mentioning punishing the tiger shows that this is not you.
You live in a world that is dark with ignorance.
You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
:)
True, but as he clearly established using Science, the horse wanted it.
Then you are agreeing with me that this tiger is capable of attacking without provocation.
No, because as he quite correctly pointed out much earlier, the tiger-handler relationship inherently involves a degree of "provocation".
That wasn't a case of the tiger taking a swipe at some random person, it took a swipe at her.
Just like this wasn't a case of the tiger escaping its enclosure on a whim and attacking a random person, it attacked the jackasses who were tormenting it. Nobody else.
I do think the zoo seriously dropped the ball on this one. However neither of these incidents in any way show that the tiger was prone to "unprovoked" attacks, and thus should have been considered an escape risk.
Well at the very least the one who was killed was the youngest of the three (ages 17, 19, and 23), and thus presumably the one most likely to go along with jackassery in order to fit in. Can't say whether that means he was the least sadistic or not, but it does in a way seem unfair.
Actually, the Church teaches that there will be a bodily resurrection, so in that case you would be getting a (much improved) "meat-suit" again. Having a body is an important part of being human, anyway -- a human soul is disembodied by death, but it's not a comfortable or natural way for a human being to be.
Ah. Aside from the fact that I was just dicking around with a troll, I also wasn't speaking from a Catholic perspective. All the Protestant churches I've went to haven't taught anything specific about how life in heaven will actually be (Jesus seems fairly vague on the subject anyway), other than that it will be awesome.
Heaven won't have sex as we experience it now, but something better which is not available to us in our current state.
Like... Sex, video games, and pizza combined into one act in a way that won't get you into trouble with your partner? I really can't wait. =D