Yeah, the opportunistic infections have an opportunity because of HIVs effect on the human immune system. Reduce the spread of HIV, reduce the effect on the immune system, reduce the opportunities of opportunistic infections. Pretty simple if you ask me.
I don't think that a layman's article conflating HIV with AIDS -- not an unfair layman's conflation, considering that there is at least a causal relationship between them even if they are not the same thing -- should inspire such skepticism.
As a side note, I've always felt the precision vs accuracy thing was a bit odd. What good is one without the other?
Precision and accuracy are measures, not binary switches, and how much of each you need depends on the application.
For example, machine guns can get away with good accuracy and terrible precision, because by firing a large number of rounds you can ensure that some strike the target, and in fact the scattering effect of an imprecise weapon is an advantage. Whereas for a sniper rifle precision is of the utmost importance, while accuracy is less so since you can adjust the sights to account for the innacuracy, but only if the error is consistant as in precise.
So it goes with data analysis. If you're analyzing a large block of data and are interested in trends, you can get away with less precision if you are very accurate since the average value will be spot on (that being what accuracy means). If you are conducting smaller scale experiments, precision as in repeatability will be more important than accuracy.
Certainly you can't have neither at all, but you do need to measure them seperately and decide based on your application whether you have enough of both.
I don't really find this to be a disturbing trend. The only reason why such a trend would be disturbing is if we try and apply old ways of thinking to the new reality.
But old ways of thinking certainly would be applied to the new reality, which is why I find it distrubing. Do you really think the ones advocating new police-state surveilance subscribe to your Libertarian view of Utopia?
There are a lot of dumb laws out there that are tolerated because we fail to catch even a small fraction of the violators. If you could catch everyone who violated the law, many laws would have to be abolished or we would need set up prison states to dump all the guilty.
So yeah, I can imagine the evil horrible dystopia where everyone follows the massive piles of inane laws that exist to the letter and people get thrown in jail at random for violating obscure laws... but I can also envision a utopia where worthless laws have been tossed, corruption is close to non-existent, hippies don't get their heads busted in for smoking weed in the park, copyright is seriously reworked, and police find something more productive to do with their time then busting under aged parties.
No, it would simply result in selective enforcement just like we have today, and since virtually everyone would be violating some law that would justify their arrest and everyone could easily be caught, the police could exclusively select those they did not like and still appear to being an effective job.
For example your hippie toking in the park would get his head busted in, and preacher who smokes up on weekends or the wealthy business man who snorts never-ending lines of cocaine would get a pass. Corruption by low-level functionaries would be exposed immediately, proving that Internal Affairs was doing its job, while high-level corruption would be ignored. They might ignore the underage drinking parties, up until a drunk college student kills someone in a car accident and then they'd pick a hundred parties to raid to prove they're "doing something".
Perfect surveilance would simply allow the authorities to persecute the hippies, homosexuals, communists, muslims, ex-lovers, and whoever else they didn't like with impunity. Because, after all, the victims were caught commiting a crime.
At any rate I don't think it's really about oil; that's too simplistic. (It would have been cheaper just to buy the oil if that's what we had wanted; Saddam would have been more than happy to supply it to us and probably would have kept the Iranians in line.)
It's too simplistic to say that the war is just about oil, but certainly it is about oil. And to see how, just look at the price of gas these days. Consider if you own an oil field that isn't in Iraq, it isn't a single cent more expensive for you to pump that oil, but "Middle East instability" makes that oil worth much more when you sell it. The Iraq War has made many corporate friends of the Bush family extremely wealthy simply by that effect alone.
There's a strategic reason to want the oil too, basically being that if Peak Oil pans out, we don't want to have to buy the oil from Saddam because he may refuse, whereas with our largest permanent foreign military bases in Iraq it is quite simple for us to demand "preferred customer status" from whatever government exists in Iraq at the time. At least in theory. But this is secondary and certainly not as much a driving factor as the immediate profit motive.
I think the real cause has to do with the military-industrial-political complex in the U.S. and its desire to have a war every decade or so, and straightforward Machiavellian political maneuvering on the part of the Bush administration, when they realized that the war in Afghanistan wasn't going to occupy the nation's attention for the remainder of their (first) term in office.
I agree, especially since the Bushes' military-industrial buddies are also making a ridiculous profit off the war, getting the bulk of those $billions we're spending each year. Just like the rising price of oil, the whole thing is a transparent method of pulling $billions from the hands of tax payers and putting them in the hands of the defense contractors.
If they thought Afghanistan wouldn't occupy the public's attention for long, it's because just like in Iraq they thought that once the "major combat operations" were over, the war was basically over. An idea we now can easily recognize as stupidly naive. However, due to the fact that not just our country's but also our military's attention is divided and mostly focused on Iraq, Afghanistan too will be a target of national attention for many presidential terms to come.
Iraq isn't just a huge clusterfuck of an idiotic war and a failed policy, it is also a torpedo that is sinking the war that actually had a chance of being resolved to our advantage.
"If we think we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free, they come and attack us because we're over there."
File that quote under "Reasons Ron Paul will not win the Republican nomination despite clearly deserving it".
The Republicans may be increasingly tolerant of their members vocalizing the opinion that Bush has mismanaged the Iraq war and that it should be ended, but that doesn't mean they are any more tolerant of someone admitting that terrorist attacks on the U.S. may have something to do with U.S. actions instead of fanatical jealousy of how awesome the U.S. is.
A) Wow! Okay, I was looking for N's p/e ratio but didn't find it. While 31 is pretty high, I had assumed it would be higher that Sony's simply due to Sony being a much larger company with more revenue streams. That's not a good thing for Sony. I think both are headed for some stock readjustment.
B) Not a big deal until Christmas, at least as far as N's prospects, revunues and share price are concerned. Personally I'm struggling to find enough time to play the games I have (Zelda, Trauma Center, Godfather, Paper Mario, and of course Wii Sports), so by the time I'm actually worried about new games all the 3rd parties who have suddenly jumped on board the wii bandwagon should have something to show. If not, I'll survive until Mario Galaxies and Metroid. *involuntary shudder of pleasure*
I agree that Nintendo is probably overvalued, but I don't think it's because of the games. Yes the games are just trickling out, but that's fairly normal in the first year of a console's life, and we know that a lot of studios were caught off guard by the Wii's success at launch and thus will be late bringing games to the Wii. The time to worry about a lack of games will be Christmas, when having the AAA titles out will be important.
The reason I think N is probably overvalued is simply because the company's real-life size and sales are not high enough to bear out the growth that their high market cap suggests investors are speculating on. Call me old-fashioned or a dot-bomb survivor, but I just don't like seeing a company's stock riding on hype and dreams of unrestricted growth when the actual sales, while fantastic in terms of N's quarterly profit making, simply don't support that idea.
Now I don't have a lot of facts to back that up. I tried looking up Nitendo's P/E ratio (basically the metric I'm talking about) but couldn't find it. Sony has a P/E ratio of 53 according to yahoo finance, which is higher than I expected. But my post is predicated on the idea that Nintendo, being solely a games company instead of an industry behemoth like Sony (as opposed to Sony's game devision by itself), has much lower earnings and therefore an even higher p/e ratio.
Women were never literally property in America, they were socially very close though in the sense that marriages were still frequently arranged for economic reasons. Yet they could themselves own property, hold a paying job, and were afforded the constitutional protection of for example the 1st, 4th, 5th, 8th ammendments. If a law was written that was supposed to apply only to women, or was suposed to exclude women, it said so, not implying it with the definiton of "people".
It's not "romanticizing" to think that someone could write "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal", mean it, but then go out to purchase more slaves for their plantation. It would be an impossible contradiction for us, today, but that wasn't the case then. And many of the founders' writing, in particular of Jefferson, show them vascilating on the issue of slavery, from trying to justifying it to pondering that it may in fact be wrong. But from this modern viewpoint, you're saying that racism and sexism didn't just affect how laws were interpreted, they affected what the words meant. I do not see how that follows.
Yet if I accept that all at face value, that if the founders had written a dictionary of every word in the Constitution, the entry for "person" would say "human being who is not black or female", then the only thing that would say about the 2nd Ammendment is that the did not intend for blacks or women to own guns. I don't see how that opens the door to any possible re-interpretation of the word "people", when in every other usage the "every person, just not blacks or women" definition fits how the law was actually carried out.
I understand you're merely saying that some ambiguity exists, but that's just too narrow a focus because the ACLU argument uses that as a brief stepping stone to say that "people" doesn't mean "people" at all but rather "state-run militia", and that a personal right to firearms does not exist. They're saying there is a specific ambiguity whose nature your argument does not support at all, and parlaying that immediately into resolving the ambiguity in their favor.
St. Gall being in Switzerland, yes, that makes sense. It also makes sense that a monk would be more interested in intellectual pursuits than most. I don't see how the rest of Europe could have failed to record it due to lack of interest, though. This wasn't just astronomy, it was a suddenly appearing day-time-visible star, and surely had to be taken as a portent of some kind.
It's not my theory, it's a theory I've heard from several other people and which, as I noted, could easily be aprocryphal.
What's the relevence of Copernicus and Lemaitre when they came over 4 and 9 centuries later, by the way? If you thought the underlying thesis of my post was "the Catholic church has hated astronomy at all points in history with no change" then you were wrong.
Uh, all that WP article says is that digital zoom means software interpolation, which is obvious. The definition of zoom when saying 1000x would be the same as when he said 35x optical zoom -- a 35x increase in the apparent size of object is the image. In that context your "math" makes zero sense at all. If you were trying to "inform" you did exactly the opposite.
It would have been low in the southern sky, but it was visible from Switzerland for certain because they have recorded observations, so it should have been visible from most of Europe. Certainly from the Vatican. Which, if the story is true that the lack of recorded observations is due to Church doctrine, would have made for some awkward services with people piously refraining from looking to the south.
Heh. I also like the part about "The positions are based on HyperSpace coordinates, which may be unsettling to some students of TrueSpace astronomy". All in all a humorous way to account for taking our section of the galaxy and making it 2D, and a joke I didn't appreciate having only played the Ur-Quan Masters OSS version of SC2.
You may be thinking of SN 1006, the brightest supernova in recorded history. It was significantly brighter than Venus, though not as bright as the moon. It was bright enough to be easily seen during the day, and was bright enough to read by at night. This event was documented in Chinese, Egyptian, Middle Eastern, Swiss, and even North Americans records, as one would expect of something so amazing. Yet it is conspicuously absent from any other European writings, and the common story (i.e. i can't coroborate at all, may be apocryphal) is that the Church and their "perfect unchanging universe" doctrine made it heresy to even acknowledge that the thing was even there.
Or, maybe you're thinking of SN 1054, which according to Wikipedia may have been described by Irish monastic monks, but was later corrupted into a story of the Antichrist.
But, from the founding father's standpoint, that is not clear. The founding fathers didn't allow women or blacks equal rights, but they still said "people", right?
There's a really significant difference between not allowing equal rights, and writing the document so as to not grant equal rights. Just because the powers that be deny a right to someone does not mean the right does not exist -- e.g. Bush's unlawful detainments and wire taps do not mean that the 4th Ammendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure do not exist, it means he's violating those rights.
Our country violated the rights of women and blacks for many years. That doesn't mean the word "people" in the Constitution did not include them.
For a hundred years after the passage of the 14th Ammendment, despite being written with the clear intent of "people" including blacks, they were not granted equal protection under the law. Does this mean the Constitution did not refer to blacks as "people"? Or did society not respect the Constitution? Clearly the case is the latter.
In fact, in the only reference to slaves in the Constitution, they use the term "person held to service or labour": in other words, black slaves were "people" according to the Constitution. So should they have been allowed to posess firearms, or be freed because they were deprived of their liberty without due process? Well, yes. Was society going to allow that to happen? No.
One of the great things about the founding fathers is their ability to author a legal document that went beyond their own prejudices. The word 'people' is not ambiguous in their usage at all. It was the practial effect of racism and sexism that the rights given to "people" were not granted to women and blacks. It was not a problem of definition.
It's well reasoned, sure, and in general I have nothing against the ACLU because they do great work protecting civil liberties.
But there's nothing ambiguous about the word "people" in the 2nd Ammendment, just like there's nothing ambiguous about the word "people" in the 14th Ammendment. The ACLU and racists/homophobes respectively may not like the fact, but people means people.
Arguments about what "milita" and "well-regulated" and "necessary mean completely miss the point that no definition of those words makes "people" not mean "people".
George W. Bush, who created the mandate for the manned mission to mars, but provided no additional funding to NASA, meaning to do what he wanted NASA would have to stop most other programs. And the NASA director at the time, who actually cancelled other science programs to free up funds for the Mars mission.
This article is about NASA now saying the opposite -- screw a Mars mission until additional funding is provided for it. And that, in the long run, is more likely to get us to Mars than Bush's unfunded mandate.
Sure it's a long way in the future before a colony on the moon could repopulate the earth - but if we never start, we will never get there.
You're missing the point Rei was making. A manned mission to Mars is not the first baby step towards having a full-fledged off-planet colony. It might seem like a rational progression from sending a few people for a short stay, to a few people for a long time, to many people for a long time, to a complete self-sustaining off-planet colony. But it isn't. The Mars Mission would basically solve none of the major problems that make a colony completely out of our league any time in the future.
We should be working on cheaper reusable vehicles to reduce launch costs. Any Mars colony is going to require a lot of material to get it started, and to sustain it until it can become self-sufficient.
We should be working on robotics and fully automated construction/industry. We will want to build as much infrastructure on Mars as possible before any people actually arrive.
We should be working on ecology and hydroponics because right now the smallest self-sustaining ecosystem we have is arguably between the size of a country and a planet, and we have never succeeded in boot-strapping an ecosystem from nothing. The whole point is that the colony can't depend on Earth, and we have no ability to do anything in space that doesn't depend 100% on Earth support.
By the time we actually solve these problems, the minor task of actually getting a human's feet to touch the ground on another planet will be considered trivial.
The Mars Mission is not the start of a Mars Colony. It's a boondoggle that was threatening to get in the way of the actual science that could, in time, lead to an actual off-planet population.
Okay, you're talking about foundries, but not high-end microprocessors, which have demands all their own.
For one, it requires both design and production competency. AMD is very competent at both, as they have to be in order to be in the same ball park as Intel. Without AMD-owned equipment with AMD engineers tweaking the knobs, the already existant gap between AMD's and Intel's manufacturing would widen. As you say, the foundry companies don't care who runs through its lines, they have many other designs, so they can't go in and tweak every aspect of the fabrication process for a single customer. But AMD requires such tweaking in order to get as much performance out of their chips as possible and be competetive with Intel.
For two, talking about enourmous capital expenditures, AMD just finished building Fab 36 and is in the process of retooling Fab 30 into Fab 38. It would be very foolish to simply throw those investments away, selling the fabs would not come close to recouping the costs of building them. The only way to recoup those investments is to make parts and sell them.
Before their most recent slump, AMD was capacity limited. Getting rid of their fabs and going to foundries for whom AMD would be nothing more than another favored customer would not fix this problem. Bringing Fab 38 online will.
It might make short-term (as in the next few years) financial sense and might make short-term investors happy. But it would only happen on the condition that AMD is permanently abandoning any aspiration of being the #1 cpu maker. It could work if they decided they wanted to be an also-ran chip maker like Via or Cyrix, and it would only be a matter of time before Intel finished eating up what remained of their marketshare and they got out of cpus entirely. Since they already sold off their flash business, that would leave only ATI, and what we know today as AMD would cease to exist.
But if that's what they want to do to make analysts and investors happy, then its a great idea.
No, it would not be a good idea, it would be a terrible idea, and it would basically mean AMD intended to get out of the CPU business if not completely liquidate.
Outside of the last couple quarters, AMD's biggest problem has been production capacity. As in, they can't make enough chips, their market share is artificially capped, and as big players like Dell sell more AMD chips others are having a hard time buying enough.
That is NOT a problem you solve by becoming fabless. The already have foundry deals with e.g. Chartered, simply to provide some flexible extra capacity. It CAN NOT replace their current capacity with foundry deals, much less expand it. Being Yet Another TSMC Customer is not how you maintain your position as a top cpu maker.
The way you solve a capacity problem is by building another fab, which is what AMD just did. They built a whole new fab abutting the existing fab in Dresden, to the tune of $billions. $Billions that comes largely in the form of debt. You can't undo that by selling the fab because like a car the equipment begins to depreciate immediately. The only way to recoup that investment is to build parts in that fab and sell them. Now some analyst is saying that AMD is going to dump the fab, abandon that investment as a wash, and essentially give up the ability to have more than a pitance of marketshare while still carrying all the debt for building the fab? That's a great way to shore up the financials!
Someone a bit more cynical might point out how the lack of action by the Democrats makes this look less like a two-party system and more like one controlled by something larger than the parties.
See, when I was young I thought 1984 was cynical. The Party maintains power by manipulating people with doublethink, shifting enemies without ever shifting at all, and basically convincing people that things were happening for the better while really nothing was changing but the Party getting more entrenched.
Then I saw true cynicism in the form of Brazil. There's no over-arching conspiracy, there is no Party, certainly not one as intelligent and well-organized and deliberate as the one in 1984. It's just a society of people who are apathetic, greedy, frequently incompetent, and trying to hold onto their piece of the pie above all else.
The two parties do have a "higher power" they answer to: Corporate dollars. But they just want those dollars, and they whore themselves to get it from whoever is offering. There's no secret agency of business muckety-mucks manipulating things, just lots of corporate interests and free-flowing pork. The Dems aren't backing down from the fight because the Freemasons told them to, they're backing down because they honestly lack the spine to threaten their gravy train.
It's not a pleasant picture, really. The appeal of 1984 is that there is an Evil Party that you can at least imagine fighting against. Here, there is no real enemy, nobody to expose or to vanquish. Just a system set up so greedy spineless corporate whores are our only choices.
Not that I believe any of this nonsense. The Democrats are for Blacks, Hispanics, labor unions, trees, and welfare. The Republicans are for rich people, guns, and pollution. And the parties hate each other. Everyone knows this.
Which is exactly why I'm independent. I love minorities, guns, unions, and pollution, but I hate rich people and trees. Where is the party for me?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm always skeptical of people who classify Spain as "third world".
Yeah, the opportunistic infections have an opportunity because of HIVs effect on the human immune system. Reduce the spread of HIV, reduce the effect on the immune system, reduce the opportunities of opportunistic infections. Pretty simple if you ask me.
I don't think that a layman's article conflating HIV with AIDS -- not an unfair layman's conflation, considering that there is at least a causal relationship between them even if they are not the same thing -- should inspire such skepticism.
As a side note, I've always felt the precision vs accuracy thing was a bit odd. What good is one without the other?
Precision and accuracy are measures, not binary switches, and how much of each you need depends on the application.
For example, machine guns can get away with good accuracy and terrible precision, because by firing a large number of rounds you can ensure that some strike the target, and in fact the scattering effect of an imprecise weapon is an advantage. Whereas for a sniper rifle precision is of the utmost importance, while accuracy is less so since you can adjust the sights to account for the innacuracy, but only if the error is consistant as in precise.
So it goes with data analysis. If you're analyzing a large block of data and are interested in trends, you can get away with less precision if you are very accurate since the average value will be spot on (that being what accuracy means). If you are conducting smaller scale experiments, precision as in repeatability will be more important than accuracy.
Certainly you can't have neither at all, but you do need to measure them seperately and decide based on your application whether you have enough of both.
I don't really find this to be a disturbing trend. The only reason why such a trend would be disturbing is if we try and apply old ways of thinking to the new reality.
But old ways of thinking certainly would be applied to the new reality, which is why I find it distrubing. Do you really think the ones advocating new police-state surveilance subscribe to your Libertarian view of Utopia?
There are a lot of dumb laws out there that are tolerated because we fail to catch even a small fraction of the violators. If you could catch everyone who violated the law, many laws would have to be abolished or we would need set up prison states to dump all the guilty.
So yeah, I can imagine the evil horrible dystopia where everyone follows the massive piles of inane laws that exist to the letter and people get thrown in jail at random for violating obscure laws... but I can also envision a utopia where worthless laws have been tossed, corruption is close to non-existent, hippies don't get their heads busted in for smoking weed in the park, copyright is seriously reworked, and police find something more productive to do with their time then busting under aged parties.
No, it would simply result in selective enforcement just like we have today, and since virtually everyone would be violating some law that would justify their arrest and everyone could easily be caught, the police could exclusively select those they did not like and still appear to being an effective job.
For example your hippie toking in the park would get his head busted in, and preacher who smokes up on weekends or the wealthy business man who snorts never-ending lines of cocaine would get a pass. Corruption by low-level functionaries would be exposed immediately, proving that Internal Affairs was doing its job, while high-level corruption would be ignored. They might ignore the underage drinking parties, up until a drunk college student kills someone in a car accident and then they'd pick a hundred parties to raid to prove they're "doing something".
Perfect surveilance would simply allow the authorities to persecute the hippies, homosexuals, communists, muslims, ex-lovers, and whoever else they didn't like with impunity. Because, after all, the victims were caught commiting a crime.
At any rate I don't think it's really about oil; that's too simplistic. (It would have been cheaper just to buy the oil if that's what we had wanted; Saddam would have been more than happy to supply it to us and probably would have kept the Iranians in line.)
It's too simplistic to say that the war is just about oil, but certainly it is about oil. And to see how, just look at the price of gas these days. Consider if you own an oil field that isn't in Iraq, it isn't a single cent more expensive for you to pump that oil, but "Middle East instability" makes that oil worth much more when you sell it. The Iraq War has made many corporate friends of the Bush family extremely wealthy simply by that effect alone.
There's a strategic reason to want the oil too, basically being that if Peak Oil pans out, we don't want to have to buy the oil from Saddam because he may refuse, whereas with our largest permanent foreign military bases in Iraq it is quite simple for us to demand "preferred customer status" from whatever government exists in Iraq at the time. At least in theory. But this is secondary and certainly not as much a driving factor as the immediate profit motive.
I think the real cause has to do with the military-industrial-political complex in the U.S. and its desire to have a war every decade or so, and straightforward Machiavellian political maneuvering on the part of the Bush administration, when they realized that the war in Afghanistan wasn't going to occupy the nation's attention for the remainder of their (first) term in office.
I agree, especially since the Bushes' military-industrial buddies are also making a ridiculous profit off the war, getting the bulk of those $billions we're spending each year. Just like the rising price of oil, the whole thing is a transparent method of pulling $billions from the hands of tax payers and putting them in the hands of the defense contractors.
If they thought Afghanistan wouldn't occupy the public's attention for long, it's because just like in Iraq they thought that once the "major combat operations" were over, the war was basically over. An idea we now can easily recognize as stupidly naive. However, due to the fact that not just our country's but also our military's attention is divided and mostly focused on Iraq, Afghanistan too will be a target of national attention for many presidential terms to come.
Iraq isn't just a huge clusterfuck of an idiotic war and a failed policy, it is also a torpedo that is sinking the war that actually had a chance of being resolved to our advantage.
"If we think we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free, they come and attack us because we're over there."
File that quote under "Reasons Ron Paul will not win the Republican nomination despite clearly deserving it".
The Republicans may be increasingly tolerant of their members vocalizing the opinion that Bush has mismanaged the Iraq war and that it should be ended, but that doesn't mean they are any more tolerant of someone admitting that terrorist attacks on the U.S. may have something to do with U.S. actions instead of fanatical jealousy of how awesome the U.S. is.
A) Wow! Okay, I was looking for N's p/e ratio but didn't find it. While 31 is pretty high, I had assumed it would be higher that Sony's simply due to Sony being a much larger company with more revenue streams. That's not a good thing for Sony. I think both are headed for some stock readjustment.
B) Not a big deal until Christmas, at least as far as N's prospects, revunues and share price are concerned. Personally I'm struggling to find enough time to play the games I have (Zelda, Trauma Center, Godfather, Paper Mario, and of course Wii Sports), so by the time I'm actually worried about new games all the 3rd parties who have suddenly jumped on board the wii bandwagon should have something to show. If not, I'll survive until Mario Galaxies and Metroid. *involuntary shudder of pleasure*
I agree that Nintendo is probably overvalued, but I don't think it's because of the games. Yes the games are just trickling out, but that's fairly normal in the first year of a console's life, and we know that a lot of studios were caught off guard by the Wii's success at launch and thus will be late bringing games to the Wii. The time to worry about a lack of games will be Christmas, when having the AAA titles out will be important.
The reason I think N is probably overvalued is simply because the company's real-life size and sales are not high enough to bear out the growth that their high market cap suggests investors are speculating on. Call me old-fashioned or a dot-bomb survivor, but I just don't like seeing a company's stock riding on hype and dreams of unrestricted growth when the actual sales, while fantastic in terms of N's quarterly profit making, simply don't support that idea.
Now I don't have a lot of facts to back that up. I tried looking up Nitendo's P/E ratio (basically the metric I'm talking about) but couldn't find it. Sony has a P/E ratio of 53 according to yahoo finance, which is higher than I expected. But my post is predicated on the idea that Nintendo, being solely a games company instead of an industry behemoth like Sony (as opposed to Sony's game devision by itself), has much lower earnings and therefore an even higher p/e ratio.
Women were never literally property in America, they were socially very close though in the sense that marriages were still frequently arranged for economic reasons. Yet they could themselves own property, hold a paying job, and were afforded the constitutional protection of for example the 1st, 4th, 5th, 8th ammendments. If a law was written that was supposed to apply only to women, or was suposed to exclude women, it said so, not implying it with the definiton of "people".
It's not "romanticizing" to think that someone could write "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal", mean it, but then go out to purchase more slaves for their plantation. It would be an impossible contradiction for us, today, but that wasn't the case then. And many of the founders' writing, in particular of Jefferson, show them vascilating on the issue of slavery, from trying to justifying it to pondering that it may in fact be wrong. But from this modern viewpoint, you're saying that racism and sexism didn't just affect how laws were interpreted, they affected what the words meant. I do not see how that follows.
Yet if I accept that all at face value, that if the founders had written a dictionary of every word in the Constitution, the entry for "person" would say "human being who is not black or female", then the only thing that would say about the 2nd Ammendment is that the did not intend for blacks or women to own guns. I don't see how that opens the door to any possible re-interpretation of the word "people", when in every other usage the "every person, just not blacks or women" definition fits how the law was actually carried out.
I understand you're merely saying that some ambiguity exists, but that's just too narrow a focus because the ACLU argument uses that as a brief stepping stone to say that "people" doesn't mean "people" at all but rather "state-run militia", and that a personal right to firearms does not exist. They're saying there is a specific ambiguity whose nature your argument does not support at all, and parlaying that immediately into resolving the ambiguity in their favor.
St. Gall being in Switzerland, yes, that makes sense. It also makes sense that a monk would be more interested in intellectual pursuits than most. I don't see how the rest of Europe could have failed to record it due to lack of interest, though. This wasn't just astronomy, it was a suddenly appearing day-time-visible star, and surely had to be taken as a portent of some kind.
It's not my theory, it's a theory I've heard from several other people and which, as I noted, could easily be aprocryphal.
What's the relevence of Copernicus and Lemaitre when they came over 4 and 9 centuries later, by the way? If you thought the underlying thesis of my post was "the Catholic church has hated astronomy at all points in history with no change" then you were wrong.
Uh, all that WP article says is that digital zoom means software interpolation, which is obvious. The definition of zoom when saying 1000x would be the same as when he said 35x optical zoom -- a 35x increase in the apparent size of object is the image. In that context your "math" makes zero sense at all. If you were trying to "inform" you did exactly the opposite.
It would have been low in the southern sky, but it was visible from Switzerland for certain because they have recorded observations, so it should have been visible from most of Europe. Certainly from the Vatican. Which, if the story is true that the lack of recorded observations is due to Church doctrine, would have made for some awkward services with people piously refraining from looking to the south.
Heh. I also like the part about "The positions are based on HyperSpace coordinates, which may be unsettling to some students of TrueSpace astronomy". All in all a humorous way to account for taking our section of the galaxy and making it 2D, and a joke I didn't appreciate having only played the Ur-Quan Masters OSS version of SC2.
I'm not sure, but I think that according to Star Control II that Eta Carinae did have planets, and at least some of them hosted alien life forms.
You may be thinking of SN 1006, the brightest supernova in recorded history. It was significantly brighter than Venus, though not as bright as the moon. It was bright enough to be easily seen during the day, and was bright enough to read by at night. This event was documented in Chinese, Egyptian, Middle Eastern, Swiss, and even North Americans records, as one would expect of something so amazing. Yet it is conspicuously absent from any other European writings, and the common story (i.e. i can't coroborate at all, may be apocryphal) is that the Church and their "perfect unchanging universe" doctrine made it heresy to even acknowledge that the thing was even there.
Or, maybe you're thinking of SN 1054, which according to Wikipedia may have been described by Irish monastic monks, but was later corrupted into a story of the Antichrist.
But, from the founding father's standpoint, that is not clear. The founding fathers didn't allow women or blacks equal rights, but they still said "people", right?
There's a really significant difference between not allowing equal rights, and writing the document so as to not grant equal rights. Just because the powers that be deny a right to someone does not mean the right does not exist -- e.g. Bush's unlawful detainments and wire taps do not mean that the 4th Ammendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure do not exist, it means he's violating those rights.
Our country violated the rights of women and blacks for many years. That doesn't mean the word "people" in the Constitution did not include them.
For a hundred years after the passage of the 14th Ammendment, despite being written with the clear intent of "people" including blacks, they were not granted equal protection under the law. Does this mean the Constitution did not refer to blacks as "people"? Or did society not respect the Constitution? Clearly the case is the latter.
In fact, in the only reference to slaves in the Constitution, they use the term "person held to service or labour": in other words, black slaves were "people" according to the Constitution. So should they have been allowed to posess firearms, or be freed because they were deprived of their liberty without due process? Well, yes. Was society going to allow that to happen? No.
One of the great things about the founding fathers is their ability to author a legal document that went beyond their own prejudices. The word 'people' is not ambiguous in their usage at all. It was the practial effect of racism and sexism that the rights given to "people" were not granted to women and blacks. It was not a problem of definition.
It's well reasoned, sure, and in general I have nothing against the ACLU because they do great work protecting civil liberties.
But there's nothing ambiguous about the word "people" in the 2nd Ammendment, just like there's nothing ambiguous about the word "people" in the 14th Ammendment. The ACLU and racists/homophobes respectively may not like the fact, but people means people.
Arguments about what "milita" and "well-regulated" and "necessary mean completely miss the point that no definition of those words makes "people" not mean "people".
Inky: Pac-Man was resisting arrest! He kept going for the power pellet, so I had to subdue him for my own safety!
Who said we should stop everything to go to Mars?
George W. Bush, who created the mandate for the manned mission to mars, but provided no additional funding to NASA, meaning to do what he wanted NASA would have to stop most other programs. And the NASA director at the time, who actually cancelled other science programs to free up funds for the Mars mission.
This article is about NASA now saying the opposite -- screw a Mars mission until additional funding is provided for it. And that, in the long run, is more likely to get us to Mars than Bush's unfunded mandate.
I thought we weren't generalizing.
I'm pretty sure you and you alone confusing Spanish and Italian and girls for boys says more about you and you alone than it does about anything else.
Sure it's a long way in the future before a colony on the moon could repopulate the earth - but if we never start, we will never get there.
You're missing the point Rei was making. A manned mission to Mars is not the first baby step towards having a full-fledged off-planet colony. It might seem like a rational progression from sending a few people for a short stay, to a few people for a long time, to many people for a long time, to a complete self-sustaining off-planet colony. But it isn't. The Mars Mission would basically solve none of the major problems that make a colony completely out of our league any time in the future.
We should be working on cheaper reusable vehicles to reduce launch costs. Any Mars colony is going to require a lot of material to get it started, and to sustain it until it can become self-sufficient.
We should be working on robotics and fully automated construction/industry. We will want to build as much infrastructure on Mars as possible before any people actually arrive.
We should be working on ecology and hydroponics because right now the smallest self-sustaining ecosystem we have is arguably between the size of a country and a planet, and we have never succeeded in boot-strapping an ecosystem from nothing. The whole point is that the colony can't depend on Earth, and we have no ability to do anything in space that doesn't depend 100% on Earth support.
By the time we actually solve these problems, the minor task of actually getting a human's feet to touch the ground on another planet will be considered trivial.
The Mars Mission is not the start of a Mars Colony. It's a boondoggle that was threatening to get in the way of the actual science that could, in time, lead to an actual off-planet population.
You thought a movie set in the Spanish Civil War was in Italian, and you thought that beautiful little girl in a dress was a boy.
Yes, you are right, it is completely unfair to generalize Americans, Canadians, North Americans, English speakers, or anyone else as being like you.
Okay, you're talking about foundries, but not high-end microprocessors, which have demands all their own.
For one, it requires both design and production competency. AMD is very competent at both, as they have to be in order to be in the same ball park as Intel. Without AMD-owned equipment with AMD engineers tweaking the knobs, the already existant gap between AMD's and Intel's manufacturing would widen. As you say, the foundry companies don't care who runs through its lines, they have many other designs, so they can't go in and tweak every aspect of the fabrication process for a single customer. But AMD requires such tweaking in order to get as much performance out of their chips as possible and be competetive with Intel.
For two, talking about enourmous capital expenditures, AMD just finished building Fab 36 and is in the process of retooling Fab 30 into Fab 38. It would be very foolish to simply throw those investments away, selling the fabs would not come close to recouping the costs of building them. The only way to recoup those investments is to make parts and sell them.
Before their most recent slump, AMD was capacity limited. Getting rid of their fabs and going to foundries for whom AMD would be nothing more than another favored customer would not fix this problem. Bringing Fab 38 online will.
It might make short-term (as in the next few years) financial sense and might make short-term investors happy. But it would only happen on the condition that AMD is permanently abandoning any aspiration of being the #1 cpu maker. It could work if they decided they wanted to be an also-ran chip maker like Via or Cyrix, and it would only be a matter of time before Intel finished eating up what remained of their marketshare and they got out of cpus entirely. Since they already sold off their flash business, that would leave only ATI, and what we know today as AMD would cease to exist.
But if that's what they want to do to make analysts and investors happy, then its a great idea.
No, it would not be a good idea, it would be a terrible idea, and it would basically mean AMD intended to get out of the CPU business if not completely liquidate.
Outside of the last couple quarters, AMD's biggest problem has been production capacity. As in, they can't make enough chips, their market share is artificially capped, and as big players like Dell sell more AMD chips others are having a hard time buying enough.
That is NOT a problem you solve by becoming fabless. The already have foundry deals with e.g. Chartered, simply to provide some flexible extra capacity. It CAN NOT replace their current capacity with foundry deals, much less expand it. Being Yet Another TSMC Customer is not how you maintain your position as a top cpu maker.
The way you solve a capacity problem is by building another fab, which is what AMD just did. They built a whole new fab abutting the existing fab in Dresden, to the tune of $billions. $Billions that comes largely in the form of debt. You can't undo that by selling the fab because like a car the equipment begins to depreciate immediately. The only way to recoup that investment is to build parts in that fab and sell them. Now some analyst is saying that AMD is going to dump the fab, abandon that investment as a wash, and essentially give up the ability to have more than a pitance of marketshare while still carrying all the debt for building the fab? That's a great way to shore up the financials!
Utterly. Retarded. Analyst.
But I repeat myself.
Someone a bit more cynical might point out how the lack of action by the Democrats makes this look less like a two-party system and more like one controlled by something larger than the parties.
See, when I was young I thought 1984 was cynical. The Party maintains power by manipulating people with doublethink, shifting enemies without ever shifting at all, and basically convincing people that things were happening for the better while really nothing was changing but the Party getting more entrenched.
Then I saw true cynicism in the form of Brazil. There's no over-arching conspiracy, there is no Party, certainly not one as intelligent and well-organized and deliberate as the one in 1984. It's just a society of people who are apathetic, greedy, frequently incompetent, and trying to hold onto their piece of the pie above all else.
The two parties do have a "higher power" they answer to: Corporate dollars. But they just want those dollars, and they whore themselves to get it from whoever is offering. There's no secret agency of business muckety-mucks manipulating things, just lots of corporate interests and free-flowing pork. The Dems aren't backing down from the fight because the Freemasons told them to, they're backing down because they honestly lack the spine to threaten their gravy train.
It's not a pleasant picture, really. The appeal of 1984 is that there is an Evil Party that you can at least imagine fighting against. Here, there is no real enemy, nobody to expose or to vanquish. Just a system set up so greedy spineless corporate whores are our only choices.
Not that I believe any of this nonsense. The Democrats are for Blacks, Hispanics, labor unions, trees, and welfare. The Republicans are for rich people, guns, and pollution. And the parties hate each other. Everyone knows this.
Which is exactly why I'm independent. I love minorities, guns, unions, and pollution, but I hate rich people and trees. Where is the party for me?