I'd trust an encyclopedia before Google for general basic research
Of course you meant to say the information you found using Google, but point made.
I disagree to some extent. The problem with encyclopaedias is that they are written from a cultural viewpoint that introduces biases. These biases are often unrecognizd by readers and publishers alike. For example, I assume that the Napoleonic wars are described very differently in French encyclopaedias than in English encyclopaedias. I am sure that each of the publishers will assure us that theirs is the accurate description.
Using the information on the web you can get a lot of different viewpoints, and often some that make a lot of sense that have been ignored by traditional educational systems. A simple example is the handling of native American issues. Until recently very little space was devoted in encyclopaedias to the positions of those cultures even though those postions were just as valid as the positions of the encyclopaedia writers of the mid 20th century.
Although there is a lot of biased information on the web, the presence of so much obvious junk requires us to look very critically at the information. The ironic part is that this forces us to be more critical and may actually improve our chances of getting closer to the truth. On the other hand, the hidden biases of encyclopaedias are so subtle that they seldom force us to evaluate the validity of their underlying cultural assumptions.
Your opinion that we do little "REAL" social interacting is pretty much defined by your egocentric view of what the rest of the world should be doing. (I'm not insulting you - everyone has an egocentric view of the world.) I think you are only qualified to opine that *you* do very little real social interacting. Even then I think you would be wrong. In reality you do lots of real interacting - it just doesn't seem significant to you because your brain filters most of it out as unimportant to the business of surviving - just like it filters awareness of breathing. I think what you meant by "real" was that very little interaction is significant, but even then what you should have said is that very little interaction is noteworthy. That is a big difference.
It seems to me that every millisecond of social interacting that goes on is real - from paying for your gum to ignoring the street vendors to professing your undying love for another. The point could even be made that imagined or dreamed interactions with others are "real" because they change our behavior just as face-to-face interactions do.
Just because you have no interest in the world around you does not mean the rest of us don't. Frankly, I find it very interesting that people use earphones (and newspapers and books, etc) for purposes other than their designed-for purpose. That fact that humans can use things like earphones as props to accomplish an entirely different, unrelated and non-obvious goal such as personal safety strikes me as useful knowledge.
Some people just coast along in life seeing only the obvious, and others look for subtleties and interactions that make life more interesting. Clearly you are of the former type.
The study says it REQUIRES the materials. It does NOT say they are used up or consumed. A lot of people are dissing this study and they haven't even read it correctly.
I don't trust ecologists who rail against technology
Ecologists ARE technolgists. Ecology is a branch of science that is very science oriented - and hard science at that (chemistry, physics, math, etc). I think you mean "environmentalists" and even then you probably really mean just the lunatic fringe enironmentalists. You know - the people who think we should all live in teepees.
I just wish they would offer a solution too.
Understanding and recognizing the problem is the first step toward a solution.
I'm not really worried about normal levels of radiation and I don't sit around fretting about it, although I do periodically measure the radon levels in my basement. If I gave the impression of being an anti-radiation freak I did not mean to.
Is the young woman smart? Clearly yes, but she was also very foolish. Is she brave? Yes, but with the bravado of a 20 year old.
Re:Warning: Vaporware Company Detected
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The Universal Card
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And that says a lot about the quality of Wired News' information (aka hype-bullshit), doesn't it!
Your cells have mechanisms in place to repair DNA. In fact, every second of every day your cells are getting some small amount of DNA damage from chemical byproducts of your metabolism (free radicals), UV radiation, and natural background radiation.
That's true, but how does that change anything? DNA damage occurs from sunlight, and the vast majority are handled by the repair mechanisms, but not all - hence the probability of skin cancer increases. Radiation is NOT harmless in any amount because you don't know which of that damage is not going to be repaired. My "no threshold" coment isn't on shakey scientific ground at all. It is a an accepted fact by toxicologists that there is no dose-response curve for radiation exposure that extrapolates to zero.
Dose/mortality rates used in setting health standards are based on extrapolation from survivors of Horoshima and Nagasaki.
Now I have to call bullshit on you. Although that data has been incorporated in the body of knowledge, atomic bomb blasts have hardly been the sum of human radiation exposures over the years. To list a couple of examples, there have been many epidemiological studies of radiation exposure to industry workers and x-ray technicians. I'm not even mentioning the many, many accidental exposures. I'm surprised you think human exposure data only comes from A-bombs.. Additionally there have been numerous animal studies on the effects of all types of radiation on living organisms.
it is an assumption made by regulatory agencies who are trying to be conservative, not a scientific fact.
If anything, the agencies' exposure limits are high. Except for NIOSH, the government is required by law to take economic factors into considertion when setting occupational exposure limits. However I'm not talking about legal exposure limits, but real-life exposure effects.
That statement tells me that you are talking out your ass. There are NO neutrons anywhere except deep in the remainder of the core itself, where you still have fissile material.
Ok, you got me there - I made a wild uninformed guess on neutron count, although it is not true that there are NO neutrons. There just aren't billions per m3.
Becuase it is Communist? I THINK you mean that there is a lot of alpha-emitting dust around
Well, let's see, there's alpha, beta and gamma ionizing radiation. Relatively speaking, alpha, and to a lesser extent beta, are not that hazardous. Much of the radiation in Cherobyl is, however, gamma. Which is very very bad. I believe it is apolitical.
You are getting the exposure mechanisms confused. You can breath dust and that is a source of internal exposure or you can be exposed to background. Alpha, which is pretty harmless in the air, is dangerous when alpha emitters are inhaled as dust particles. These particles become lodged in the lungs, right against a cell and the radioactive material has a long enough half-life to do damage. Going into a structure has two risks - disturbing the dust and being exposed to the background radiation. The background is alpha, beta and gamma, the gamma being the important one since the alpha doesn't penetrate the skin.
Everyone is making the incorrect assuption that the only dangerous radiation in the area is ihnhaled alpha. More correctly, alpha is only dangerous WHEN inhaled. Do not make the assumption that dust particles floating around Chernobyl are only alpha emitters.
The dust in the air in the dead zone is not enough to register high levels on a dosimeter in the center of a road, but the dosimeter measures whole-body exposure. The danger is from dust that is breathed into the lungs which become point-sources of internal radiation. Going onto that area without respiratory protection to ride a motorcycle is just stupid. EIt is just common sense that any place where it is too dangerous to ride your motorcycle anywhere but down the CENTER of the road to avoid radiocative dust is a stupid place to ride a bike, and is doubly stupid without protective gear.
If you had read her article, you'd know that she wasn't being stupid. The radiation fallout didn't "stick" to the asphault, so it has become quite safe to enter the area as long as you stay outside the buildings and on the asphault/concrete.
Yeah, Uh huh. If the asphalt is so clean why doesn't she want a companion along to disturb dust on the asphalt in front of her? I read the article and I saw that the river was blocked off. How much dust do you think is in the river? Oops, a dumb theory blown to hell by an inconvenient fact. That the Russians totally blocked off a major shipping artery should indicate to you exactly how dangerous that place is.
You sound as if you are thinking that any radiation is bad or that radiation itself is bad.
It is. That is exactly what I am saying. In another example of me knowing more about this than you, there is NO safe level of exposure to ionizing radiation, natural or not. It isn't like a chemical or biological exposures where there are minimum affective doses. ANY radiation passing through your body has the potential to mutate that one single unlucky cell into a cancer cell.
...you can enter a radiated area and still be safe as long as you don't stay in the area long enough to accumulate a lethal dose of radiation
You've been watching too many movies. You may not get an immediately lethal dose where every cell in your body is damaged beyond operation, but every ionizing event in your body does damage. If one happens to damage a critical DNA segment you get a runaway cancer cell. Since there are trillions of neutrons per m3 in Chernobyl and billions of cells in your body the chances are actually pretty good you will live to regret being there.
[radiation] it is a natural occuring phenomenon, but just like many other things, too much of it can be a bad thing
Harr! That's a good one. Radiation and chocolate bars - too much of a good thing can hurt you! Don't let the Bush administration hear that one or he'll be saving the energy industry money on shipping containers next. But you are right - some radiation is natural. There are two problems with that rationalization: 1) all natural things are NOT good for you, and 2) there are different types of radiation and the type of radiation at Chernobyl is the really, really bad kind.
Its been 18 years since the disaster, the radioactivity is now in the ground and buildings but not in the air (and has also been washed clean from flat hard outside surfaces like concrete and asphault
But it is still in the plants and the seeds and the pollen and the insects. Did you ever look at the air in a shaft of sunlight? That's dust. And in Chernobyl that's radioactive dust.
In the dead zone you can get irradiated in three ways: 1) you can walk over to the reactor and get irradiated to death in a matter of minutes, 2) you can walk into an area that has enough radioactive material around to kill you in a few hours or days, or 3) you can breath radioactive dust that may kill you in a few years or decades from cancer. Seems pretty stupid to go in there without a respirator to me.
Her father is a Russian physicist. Russians have always been cavalier about radiation - it looks like Chernobyl hasn't changed a thing.
Also she's about 25 years old. At that age EVERYONE is brave because they are immortal. Its only when she gets older that she'll realize how stupid she was to drive an open motorcycle through the dead zone without protective gear. A dosimeter is no protection - it only tells you how much you have ALREADY BEEN irradiated.
Still - it does look like a vey interesting place to visit.
..and if the guy did the same thing to a local furniture store's data they'd hire a lawyer and sue in civil court to get their data back. They wouldn't go to the police and try to have him arrested for extortion or "using a computer to commit a crime". If they tried to the police would laugh at them and show them the door while saying "So sue the guy."
I am concerned that the police confiscated his computer. Was that his WEB SERVER? If so, they destroyed his business. Did they charge him with "using a computer to commit a crime" just so they could confiscate his server to get access to "their" data? If so that is a clear abuse of authority and nothing more than theft. You can't steal someone's car just because he won't return your fuzzy dice, and the police can't confiscate a person's business just because they want their web site back. If they have gone into his computers and extracted their data they have proved their bad faith. I suspect they have done just that.
What makes this different is that the police abused their authority and decided they were the law, not the courts. If the guy had a plan to make them reliant on his site and then send them big bills it is perfectly legal. How is that different from your local cable company? How is it any different from the phone companies who until recently owned your phone number so you couldn't change carriers without great hassle? No one tried to arrest THEM, so how is that different from this guy who owned their domain and wouldn't give it to them unless they paid for it?
And one final point: The site owner was a former deputy sheriff and as such I suspect he hates and loathes the ACLU - but this is exactly the kind of case the ACLU takes on. I wonder how he is going to feel about them when the ACLU asks him if he needs help now that he has first-hand experience with the abuse of police power?.
The problem is we don't know the facts. Did the sheriff tell him he COULDN"T take the site down when the owner asked for financial help and then threaten to arrest him unless he kept performing the free service? Did the site owner ask for a reasonable payment and then respond with a bill to make it formal when the sheriff told him to get stuffed? We simply do not know what precipitated the $300,000 bill.
It doesn't matter what the owners motives were - asking for payment for a service is not a crime, and taking down you own property (the web site) is also not a crime. Luckily for the sheriff, stupidity for not getting ownership of his own domain name is not a crime either.
Frankly, I don't trust any sheriff who would so clearly abuse his police power to punish the site owner. This is a civil case, not a criminal case, and from the article the sheriff doesn't have a leg to stand on - the site owner can do anytning he wants to with the site, including shut it down. If the sheriff didn't like the site being down there were civil remedies that could have created a court order to keep the site operational until the matter could be resolved. The sheriff didn't do that - he just abused his arrest power and decided to teach the guy a lesson by arresting him.
I hope the site owner sues the hell out of the sheriff just to teach him the difference between civil and criminal law.
Baloney. The site belonged to Richard, he paid for it, and he had provided it free to the sheriff for three years. It even said on the site that it was owned by Richard's company, NOT the sheriff's department. Richard is perfectly free to do whatever he wants with it. He can ask anything he wants for the site (even a ridiculous $100,000/year) and the sheriff can either pay it or not. If he decided to charge for the site after three years in violation of a verbal agreement it is a civil matter, not a criminal matter. The OJ Simpson comment by the prosecuter is absurd - he is clearly incompetent if he believes there is a correlation.
Just because the sheriff was stupid enough to rely on a free site that he did not own does not mean that the developer (Richard) was a criminal. This seems to be an abuse of police power to me. It is clearly a civil case and not a criminal case. If a business in town went to the sheriff's office with a similar claim of extortion they would tell him to sue the guy and then show him the door. Just because the Macomb sheriff has arrest powers doesn not mean he should abuse them.
Re:Zoning rocks
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· Score: 2, Insightful
...and electric was way too ineffecient to heat this house
Electric resistance heating is 100% efficient. What you really should say is the cost of electricity in your area makes electric heating too expensive.
We have on in the office, to collect all the random bits of paper and whatnot thats on the carpet. We thought it would be a great idea too, but it really isn't.
On a carpeted office floor it would not be a good choice, as you discovered. For a home it works fine. When I first used mine I thought the collection bin was way too small, but after the Roomba has cleaned a room once the amount of dirt drops way down (duh!). The more often you clean the less dirt there is to pick up so the bin never fills up any more - just run it every few days.
If you want to be useful, maybe you should tell me why I am wrong
Personally, I don't give a crap about being useful but I will be happy to tell everyone why you are wrong.
Does the "real" Roomba emit a buzzing sound when someone comes too close, so that one will not trip over it.
Pretty clear you don't have one and have never seen one work. Roombas aren't stealthy, they make noise the entire time they are running. You would have to be blind and deaf to trip over one.
Does the "real" Roomba(TM) carefully trace around furniture legs.
Yes, it does.
it just bounces around until it is outta [power] and then homes in on the power.
It wanders, yes, but not aimlessly. If you had ever watched one operate you would know that it uses a fairly sophisticated choreography to maximize its coverage. That you think it homes in on power is another indication you don't know what you are talking about - it doesn't have the slightest idea where power is.
Roomba's are not "crap" or "toys" and ARE useful appliances. I turn mine on as I leave my apartment and when I get back it has been vacuumed, even under the bed. Now I call that useful.
Another problem is that the unit has all the sucking power of a dustbuster.
It has what it needs, and mine does a terrific job for the most part. It will pick coins off the floor, and that's effective enough for most people.
Didn't say they were perfect. Did say they weren't always reckless.
If you are a driver in NYC you should know that taxis make frequent stops to pick up and discharge passengers and *you* should drive accordingly. A quick Google shows that the average NYC taxi picks up 30 fares per shift. That means every single taxi averages 60 stops per day. If you don't drive accordingly I would think you would be the reckless one.
Last time I heard, horn honking while stopped was not classified as reckless driving.
Every time you get in a taxi in NYC you think you will lose your lunch? Get real. You must have the weakest stomach on the planet.
You don't actually live in NYC do you? Cab drivers in NYC aren't "always reckless". I take NYC cabs all the time and although the drivers aren't little old ladies, they are seldom reckless. With taxi medallions costing $200,000 they have to maximize return from the vehicle. That is the reason taxi drivers seem impatient and in a hurry - time is money, literally, to taxi drivers. There are always exceptions, but taxi drivers in NYC are generally pretty good.
Most cabs in NYC are driven 24 hours per day. As one driver gets out the next one takes over. If one damages the cab TWO drivers are out of a job because New York rules are very strict - no taxi can operate with damaged body panels. Few drivers work for taxi companies where they get a replacement if they wreck the cab.
I ride a bicycle most days in Manhattan and I have very few problems with taxi drivers. The most reckless drivers in NYC are far and away Post Office trucks. Next worse are the the SUVs with Jersey plates. Of all the vehicles in Manhattan, taxis are probably the best driven.
Very cute. Pilot: "Our engines have quit so we're going to have to look for a landing splot".
Also on the site: The idea that an airplane can fly endlessly carrying heavy loads of passengers and cargo without burning any fuel,...
I don't know about you, but being born and living my entire life as a passenger on an airplane that is endlessly flying (and with that same old cargo to boot) isn't my idea of the good life.
Seriously, these kind of logical mistakes and spelling errors just show what a low-rent organization this is. They have about the same chance of building one of these as I do.
Georgia is not a police state. As a police officer, I am held to higher standards of conduct than ordinary citizens. I have no more right to use deadly force than anyone who does not wear a badge.
That may be true in theory, but in reality a police officer has a very high chance of being able to do anything he wants, legal or not. This is because of the law-and-order mentality that gives the police special privilege. Also the infamous blue wall of silence almost universally protects lawbreaking cops no matter what they've done. Do you remember the New Orleans police who were calling in hits over their police radios? And of course there is Abner Louima whose sodomy at the hands of police was the result of them mistaking him for another person who had talked back to them. According to the police involved no one did anything, no one saw a broomstick, no one ever went into that bathroom that night, and in fact the officers who were accused weren't even there. If none of the officers in those cases would turn them in for murder, assault or sodomy then what faith can we have that the police will ever be impartial or fair to the rest of us?
You tell us...you are posting anonymously...if you witnessed a group of police officers committing a crime would you turn them in or would you maintain the blue wall of silence? Let's make it not so serious - if you saw a fellow police officer getting into a car drunk would you arrest him or park his car by the side of the road and get him a ride home? Remember if you break the code you will be ostracized, threatened, probably lose your job, and maybe worse. Tell us, please. We have the rare opportunity to talk to an anonymous introspective police officer. If you say you would arrest them and testify against them I will believe you.
Like all professions, there are some police officers who behave better than others. The bad ones seem to make more of an impression than the good ones, unfortunately, and given the highly public nature of the job, that is not surprising.
I agree 100%, not all cops are bad and not all are good - but man o' man that bad part is really bad. I don't hate the police, but I fear them. We've all heard about the officer who shot the family's playful dog in Tennessee, and we've also heard about the innocent man in NYC shot to death by an aggressive NYC undercover agent who kept badgering him for drugs and became angry when the victim told him to get lost. Rudy Giuliani even attacked the *victim* after he was killed, and defended the officer before any investigation was conducted. Neither of those officers have been punished. The list goes on and on - and if the list of known abuses is so large, how large must the list be of abuses we never hear about?
Maybe you will try to take a bullet in place of a civilian, but I don't think that is the norm. About 12 years ago a robber was chased by police in NYC. He grabbed a woman hostage and used her as a shield. He turned to the police and pointed his gun. Both hostage and criminal died in a hail of gunfire from 10 cops.
A close friend's boyfriend was arrested in NYC when he refused to give his name to police. He was just sitting in a restaurant with friends and the police mistook him for a snitch. He was taken outside roughed up and arrested. My friend was arrested when she objected. Neither were violent (although he's a jerk, I admit). Of course the charges were dropped but they had spent the night in jail. When they talked to a lawyer he advised them if they wanted to file a complaint they should move out of Manhattan first.
I applaud your sentiments, but your reality just doesn't seem to be the world the rest of us live in.
I did not say Bush was Caligula, but that I understand how the Praeatorians felt when they put a horse in the throne in his place...and I do...really.
I "v e r y c a r e f u l l y" worded my caligula remarks to omit any reference to how he lost the throne. I do not advocate the tried and true Roman way of regime change. Please note I am not using certain words here in the hope I don't get flagged by the CIA and Echelon as a potential terrorist and put on the "cannot fly" list. Yes, I'm that paranoid with this administration and our Department of Fatherland Security.
Yes, FDR did trample rights, and he was wrong to do it, but you also have to consider the time. This country was on the verge of a real revolution in the 30's as opposed to the largely made-up "threat to democracy" the Wolfowitz/Cheney/Rumsfeld troika is pushing. Neither al Queda nor Saddam is/was a direct threat to our democracy. We can also point to great things FDR did. Now THERE was a wartime president for real. The only great thing GW Bush has done is to learn to speak English in under two years, run and hide when airplanes were falling out of the sky, and posing for a photo-op in a borrowed flight suit. At least FDR never put on a military uniform and posed for photos like a two-bit dictator.
I'm getting rather nasty to Bush here, aren't I. He deserves it.
Thank you for you lucid and insightful critique of the Bill of Rights.
Oh gee, I can think of one case where a citizen was detained without a trial...
The Bush administration is holding hundreds of people in indefinate secret detention without charge and without benefit of law by utilizing the Material Witness statutes in ways they were never intended to be used. The exact number is unknown because guess what - they are being held in secret.
guess what, under the Constitution habeas corpus can be suspended in times of invasion or rebellion. Is Jose Padilla a political prisoner?
The last time I looked there was no rebellion or invasion.
Is Jose Padilla a political prisoner?
I'm not talking about Padilla. I was specifically referring to a programmer in Washington state who was yanked off the street by Federal agents and held in secret for months without charge or access to an attorney. The authorities would not even admit they had him, leaving his family guessing where he was and by whom he was being held. I saw newsreel photos of his family standing outside the Federal detention center holding pictures of their son and begging the authorities to just tell them if he was there or not. Even today the government will not release the names, or even the number, of people it is detaining. I don't know if you are aware of the term "disappeareds", but the US has its own disappeareds now.
Oh yes those poor prisoners at Guantanamo. Boo hoo.
Many of the prisoners at Guantanamo were released after more than a year. Do you think the government would have released them if they had ANY evidence they were associated with terrorists? Yes they were poor prisoners. I live in Manhattan and I have no sympathy for terrorists, but if we are to be any different than Saddam Hussein we have to deal with our prisoners using the law - not by dictatorial decree. I am surprised that you, great Constitutional scholar that seem to think you are, fail to see that.
In terms of infiltrating lawful political opposition groups, hate to tell you but it's constitutional
Sorry, but you are stupidly wrong here. After the domestic spying abuses by the Hoover era FBI were discovered, such activity was specifically prohibited by law. Ashcroft is trying hard to have those laws changed, but as yet to no avail.
Sorry I called you stupid, but I thought it was better than dickhead.
A "fight/bust-up"? My reading of the descriptions led me to understand that his daughter hit him on the shoulder. If that was the extent of the riot I could easily see how Mr. Hiibel might not make the connection between what had happenend and an anonymous report of domestic abuse. Given the Hiibel's knowledge of the actual events it is understandable that neither would interpret the officer's statement of a "fight" to be anything other than a shouting match. It does not logically follow that they would have any idea the officer was talking about a specific domestic abuse report.
First and foremost I want to apologize for the pathetic and stupid reply to your post by "111 0110". Attitudes like that only make things worse and creates an "us v. them" attitude amnong all parties. But it is also true that acts like those by the officer in Wyoming go a long way to creating mistrust of the police by the public.
I will tell you that in the State of Georgia, we/do/ have the right to ask the name and information of any person in any public place (the roadway is considered a public place) at any time, for any reason
I assume that "right" has been upheld only in Georgia courts. I hope that the Hiibel case in the US Supreme Court will put a stop to that particular abuse of law. Remember, in Nazi Germany carting Jews off to the gas chambers was perfectly legal, but that clearly didn't make it right. And before the flames start - it was just an example.
I do know that Federal authorities have the ability to search bags at-will in airports and bus terminals without probable cause, and that may extend, unfortunately, to roads and police in general. I think it goes way too far if the police in Georgia have the right to demand my identity in any public place just because they want to know.
I once made the mistake of getting lost in a rural Virginia town late one night and calling the local police department to ask directions to the Interstate. I was young then and still naively thought "the police were my friends" as I had been taught by my parents. Five minutes later I was surrounded by police cars, stood by the side of the road, questioned, and given a sobriety test - just because the police decided they wanted to. I learned that night that I may have friends who are police, but the police are not my friends.
The next time you are in a group of people who are not law enforcement get a conversation going about police powers. Then ask for a show of hands by anyone who has ever been stopped for no reason by police and have had to undergo questioning when they had done nothing wrong. I think the number of hands will surprise you.
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I'd trust an encyclopedia before Google for general basic research
Of course you meant to say the information you found using Google, but point made.
I disagree to some extent. The problem with encyclopaedias is that they are written from a cultural viewpoint that introduces biases. These biases are often unrecognizd by readers and publishers alike. For example, I assume that the Napoleonic wars are described very differently in French encyclopaedias than in English encyclopaedias. I am sure that each of the publishers will assure us that theirs is the accurate description.
Using the information on the web you can get a lot of different viewpoints, and often some that make a lot of sense that have been ignored by traditional educational systems. A simple example is the handling of native American issues. Until recently very little space was devoted in encyclopaedias to the positions of those cultures even though those postions were just as valid as the positions of the encyclopaedia writers of the mid 20th century.
Although there is a lot of biased information on the web, the presence of so much obvious junk requires us to look very critically at the information. The ironic part is that this forces us to be more critical and may actually improve our chances of getting closer to the truth. On the other hand, the hidden biases of encyclopaedias are so subtle that they seldom force us to evaluate the validity of their underlying cultural assumptions.
Your opinion that we do little "REAL" social interacting is pretty much defined by your egocentric view of what the rest of the world should be doing. (I'm not insulting you - everyone has an egocentric view of the world.) I think you are only qualified to opine that *you* do very little real social interacting. Even then I think you would be wrong. In reality you do lots of real interacting - it just doesn't seem significant to you because your brain filters most of it out as unimportant to the business of surviving - just like it filters awareness of breathing. I think what you meant by "real" was that very little interaction is significant, but even then what you should have said is that very little interaction is noteworthy. That is a big difference.
It seems to me that every millisecond of social interacting that goes on is real - from paying for your gum to ignoring the street vendors to professing your undying love for another. The point could even be made that imagined or dreamed interactions with others are "real" because they change our behavior just as face-to-face interactions do.
Just because you have no interest in the world around you does not mean the rest of us don't. Frankly, I find it very interesting that people use earphones (and newspapers and books, etc) for purposes other than their designed-for purpose. That fact that humans can use things like earphones as props to accomplish an entirely different, unrelated and non-obvious goal such as personal safety strikes me as useful knowledge.
Some people just coast along in life seeing only the obvious, and others look for subtleties and interactions that make life more interesting. Clearly you are of the former type.
The study says it REQUIRES the materials. It does NOT say they are used up or consumed. A lot of people are dissing this study and they haven't even read it correctly.
I don't trust ecologists who rail against technology
Ecologists ARE technolgists. Ecology is a branch of science that is very science oriented - and hard science at that (chemistry, physics, math, etc). I think you mean "environmentalists" and even then you probably really mean just the lunatic fringe enironmentalists. You know - the people who think we should all live in teepees.
I just wish they would offer a solution too.
Understanding and recognizing the problem is the first step toward a solution.
If you intend to worry that much...
I'm not really worried about normal levels of radiation and I don't sit around fretting about it, although I do periodically measure the radon levels in my basement. If I gave the impression of being an anti-radiation freak I did not mean to.
Is the young woman smart? Clearly yes, but she was also very foolish. Is she brave? Yes, but with the bravado of a 20 year old.
And that says a lot about the quality of Wired News' information (aka hype-bullshit), doesn't it!
Your cells have mechanisms in place to repair DNA. In fact, every second of every day your cells are getting some small amount of DNA damage from chemical byproducts of your metabolism (free radicals), UV radiation, and natural background radiation.
That's true, but how does that change anything? DNA damage occurs from sunlight, and the vast majority are handled by the repair mechanisms, but not all - hence the probability of skin cancer increases. Radiation is NOT harmless in any amount because you don't know which of that damage is not going to be repaired. My "no threshold" coment isn't on shakey scientific ground at all. It is a an accepted fact by toxicologists that there is no dose-response curve for radiation exposure that extrapolates to zero.
Dose/mortality rates used in setting health standards are based on extrapolation from survivors of Horoshima and Nagasaki.
Now I have to call bullshit on you. Although that data has been incorporated in the body of knowledge, atomic bomb blasts have hardly been the sum of human radiation exposures over the years. To list a couple of examples, there have been many epidemiological studies of radiation exposure to industry workers and x-ray technicians. I'm not even mentioning the many, many accidental exposures. I'm surprised you think human exposure data only comes from A-bombs.. Additionally there have been numerous animal studies on the effects of all types of radiation on living organisms.
it is an assumption made by regulatory agencies who are trying to be conservative, not a scientific fact.
If anything, the agencies' exposure limits are high. Except for NIOSH, the government is required by law to take economic factors into considertion when setting occupational exposure limits. However I'm not talking about legal exposure limits, but real-life exposure effects.
That statement tells me that you are talking out your ass. There are NO neutrons anywhere except deep in the remainder of the core itself, where you still have fissile material.
Ok, you got me there - I made a wild uninformed guess on neutron count, although it is not true that there are NO neutrons. There just aren't billions per m3.
Becuase it is Communist? I THINK you mean that there is a lot of alpha-emitting dust around
Well, let's see, there's alpha, beta and gamma ionizing radiation. Relatively speaking, alpha, and to a lesser extent beta, are not that hazardous. Much of the radiation in Cherobyl is, however, gamma. Which is very very bad. I believe it is apolitical.
You are getting the exposure mechanisms confused. You can breath dust and that is a source of internal exposure or you can be exposed to background. Alpha, which is pretty harmless in the air, is dangerous when alpha emitters are inhaled as dust particles. These particles become lodged in the lungs, right against a cell and the radioactive material has a long enough half-life to do damage. Going into a structure has two risks - disturbing the dust and being exposed to the background radiation. The background is alpha, beta and gamma, the gamma being the important one since the alpha doesn't penetrate the skin.
Everyone is making the incorrect assuption that the only dangerous radiation in the area is ihnhaled alpha. More correctly, alpha is only dangerous WHEN inhaled. Do not make the assumption that dust particles floating around Chernobyl are only alpha emitters.
The dust in the air in the dead zone is not enough to register high levels on a dosimeter in the center of a road, but the dosimeter measures whole-body exposure. The danger is from dust that is breathed into the lungs which become point-sources of internal radiation. Going onto that area without respiratory protection to ride a motorcycle is just stupid. EIt is just common sense that any place where it is too dangerous to ride your motorcycle anywhere but down the CENTER of the road to avoid radiocative dust is a stupid place to ride a bike, and is doubly stupid without protective gear.
Yeah, Uh huh. If the asphalt is so clean why doesn't she want a companion along to disturb dust on the asphalt in front of her? I read the article and I saw that the river was blocked off. How much dust do you think is in the river? Oops, a dumb theory blown to hell by an inconvenient fact. That the Russians totally blocked off a major shipping artery should indicate to you exactly how dangerous that place is.
You sound as if you are thinking that any radiation is bad or that radiation itself is bad.
It is. That is exactly what I am saying. In another example of me knowing more about this than you, there is NO safe level of exposure to ionizing radiation, natural or not. It isn't like a chemical or biological exposures where there are minimum affective doses. ANY radiation passing through your body has the potential to mutate that one single unlucky cell into a cancer cell.
You've been watching too many movies. You may not get an immediately lethal dose where every cell in your body is damaged beyond operation, but every ionizing event in your body does damage. If one happens to damage a critical DNA segment you get a runaway cancer cell. Since there are trillions of neutrons per m3 in Chernobyl and billions of cells in your body the chances are actually pretty good you will live to regret being there.
[radiation] it is a natural occuring phenomenon, but just like many other things, too much of it can be a bad thing
Harr! That's a good one. Radiation and chocolate bars - too much of a good thing can hurt you! Don't let the Bush administration hear that one or he'll be saving the energy industry money on shipping containers next. But you are right - some radiation is natural. There are two problems with that rationalization: 1) all natural things are NOT good for you, and 2) there are different types of radiation and the type of radiation at Chernobyl is the really, really bad kind.
Its been 18 years since the disaster, the radioactivity is now in the ground and buildings but not in the air (and has also been washed clean from flat hard outside surfaces like concrete and asphault
But it is still in the plants and the seeds and the pollen and the insects. Did you ever look at the air in a shaft of sunlight? That's dust. And in Chernobyl that's radioactive dust.
In the dead zone you can get irradiated in three ways: 1) you can walk over to the reactor and get irradiated to death in a matter of minutes, 2) you can walk into an area that has enough radioactive material around to kill you in a few hours or days, or 3) you can breath radioactive dust that may kill you in a few years or decades from cancer. Seems pretty stupid to go in there without a respirator to me.
Her father is a Russian physicist. Russians have always been cavalier about radiation - it looks like Chernobyl hasn't changed a thing.
Also she's about 25 years old. At that age EVERYONE is brave because they are immortal. Its only when she gets older that she'll realize how stupid she was to drive an open motorcycle through the dead zone without protective gear. A dosimeter is no protection - it only tells you how much you have ALREADY BEEN irradiated.
Still - it does look like a vey interesting place to visit.
..and if the guy did the same thing to a local furniture store's data they'd hire a lawyer and sue in civil court to get their data back. They wouldn't go to the police and try to have him arrested for extortion or "using a computer to commit a crime". If they tried to the police would laugh at them and show them the door while saying "So sue the guy."
I am concerned that the police confiscated his computer. Was that his WEB SERVER? If so, they destroyed his business. Did they charge him with "using a computer to commit a crime" just so they could confiscate his server to get access to "their" data? If so that is a clear abuse of authority and nothing more than theft. You can't steal someone's car just because he won't return your fuzzy dice, and the police can't confiscate a person's business just because they want their web site back. If they have gone into his computers and extracted their data they have proved their bad faith. I suspect they have done just that.
What makes this different is that the police abused their authority and decided they were the law, not the courts. If the guy had a plan to make them reliant on his site and then send them big bills it is perfectly legal. How is that different from your local cable company? How is it any different from the phone companies who until recently owned your phone number so you couldn't change carriers without great hassle? No one tried to arrest THEM, so how is that different from this guy who owned their domain and wouldn't give it to them unless they paid for it?
And one final point: The site owner was a former deputy sheriff and as such I suspect he hates and loathes the ACLU - but this is exactly the kind of case the ACLU takes on. I wonder how he is going to feel about them when the ACLU asks him if he needs help now that he has first-hand experience with the abuse of police power?.
The problem is we don't know the facts. Did the sheriff tell him he COULDN"T take the site down when the owner asked for financial help and then threaten to arrest him unless he kept performing the free service? Did the site owner ask for a reasonable payment and then respond with a bill to make it formal when the sheriff told him to get stuffed? We simply do not know what precipitated the $300,000 bill.
It doesn't matter what the owners motives were - asking for payment for a service is not a crime, and taking down you own property (the web site) is also not a crime. Luckily for the sheriff, stupidity for not getting ownership of his own domain name is not a crime either.
Frankly, I don't trust any sheriff who would so clearly abuse his police power to punish the site owner. This is a civil case, not a criminal case, and from the article the sheriff doesn't have a leg to stand on - the site owner can do anytning he wants to with the site, including shut it down. If the sheriff didn't like the site being down there were civil remedies that could have created a court order to keep the site operational until the matter could be resolved. The sheriff didn't do that - he just abused his arrest power and decided to teach the guy a lesson by arresting him.
I hope the site owner sues the hell out of the sheriff just to teach him the difference between civil and criminal law.
Baloney. The site belonged to Richard, he paid for it, and he had provided it free to the sheriff for three years. It even said on the site that it was owned by Richard's company, NOT the sheriff's department. Richard is perfectly free to do whatever he wants with it. He can ask anything he wants for the site (even a ridiculous $100,000/year) and the sheriff can either pay it or not. If he decided to charge for the site after three years in violation of a verbal agreement it is a civil matter, not a criminal matter. The OJ Simpson comment by the prosecuter is absurd - he is clearly incompetent if he believes there is a correlation.
Just because the sheriff was stupid enough to rely on a free site that he did not own does not mean that the developer (Richard) was a criminal. This seems to be an abuse of police power to me. It is clearly a civil case and not a criminal case. If a business in town went to the sheriff's office with a similar claim of extortion they would tell him to sue the guy and then show him the door. Just because the Macomb sheriff has arrest powers doesn not mean he should abuse them.
...and electric was way too ineffecient to heat this house
Electric resistance heating is 100% efficient. What you really should say is the cost of electricity in your area makes electric heating too expensive.
We have on in the office, to collect all the random bits of paper and whatnot thats on the carpet. We thought it would be a great idea too, but it really isn't.
On a carpeted office floor it would not be a good choice, as you discovered. For a home it works fine. When I first used mine I thought the collection bin was way too small, but after the Roomba has cleaned a room once the amount of dirt drops way down (duh!). The more often you clean the less dirt there is to pick up so the bin never fills up any more - just run it every few days.
If you want to be useful, maybe you should tell me why I am wrong
Personally, I don't give a crap about being useful but I will be happy to tell everyone why you are wrong.
Does the "real" Roomba emit a buzzing sound when someone comes too close, so that one will not trip over it.
Pretty clear you don't have one and have never seen one work. Roombas aren't stealthy, they make noise the entire time they are running. You would have to be blind and deaf to trip over one.
Does the "real" Roomba(TM) carefully trace around furniture legs.
Yes, it does.
it just bounces around until it is outta [power] and then homes in on the power.
It wanders, yes, but not aimlessly. If you had ever watched one operate you would know that it uses a fairly sophisticated choreography to maximize its coverage. That you think it homes in on power is another indication you don't know what you are talking about - it doesn't have the slightest idea where power is.
Roomba's are not "crap" or "toys" and ARE useful appliances. I turn mine on as I leave my apartment and when I get back it has been vacuumed, even under the bed. Now I call that useful.
Another problem is that the unit has all the sucking power of a dustbuster.
It has what it needs, and mine does a terrific job for the most part. It will pick coins off the floor, and that's effective enough for most people.
Didn't say they were perfect. Did say they weren't always reckless.
If you are a driver in NYC you should know that taxis make frequent stops to pick up and discharge passengers and *you* should drive accordingly. A quick Google shows that the average NYC taxi picks up 30 fares per shift. That means every single taxi averages 60 stops per day. If you don't drive accordingly I would think you would be the reckless one.
Last time I heard, horn honking while stopped was not classified as reckless driving.
Every time you get in a taxi in NYC you think you will lose your lunch? Get real. You must have the weakest stomach on the planet.
You don't actually live in NYC do you? Cab drivers in NYC aren't "always reckless". I take NYC cabs all the time and although the drivers aren't little old ladies, they are seldom reckless. With taxi medallions costing $200,000 they have to maximize return from the vehicle. That is the reason taxi drivers seem impatient and in a hurry - time is money, literally, to taxi drivers. There are always exceptions, but taxi drivers in NYC are generally pretty good.
Most cabs in NYC are driven 24 hours per day. As one driver gets out the next one takes over. If one damages the cab TWO drivers are out of a job because New York rules are very strict - no taxi can operate with damaged body panels. Few drivers work for taxi companies where they get a replacement if they wreck the cab.
I ride a bicycle most days in Manhattan and I have very few problems with taxi drivers. The most reckless drivers in NYC are far and away Post Office trucks. Next worse are the the SUVs with Jersey plates. Of all the vehicles in Manhattan, taxis are probably the best driven.
This isn't a typo, but just a plain old mistake by our illustrious Dr. Hunt:
"A conventional glider is towed to fairly high altitude by an airplane or is launched by a tow wench."
That must be one really big mama. The "Attack of the Forty Foot Woman" comes to mind.
Oh, maybe he meant "winch".
Very cute. Pilot: "Our engines have quit so we're going to have to look for a landing splot".
Also on the site:
The idea that an airplane can fly endlessly carrying heavy loads of passengers and cargo without burning any fuel,...
I don't know about you, but being born and living my entire life as a passenger on an airplane that is endlessly flying (and with that same old cargo to boot) isn't my idea of the good life.
Seriously, these kind of logical mistakes and spelling errors just show what a low-rent organization this is. They have about the same chance of building one of these as I do.
Georgia is not a police state. As a police officer, I am held to higher standards of conduct than ordinary citizens. I have no more right to use deadly force than anyone who does not wear a badge.
That may be true in theory, but in reality a police officer has a very high chance of being able to do anything he wants, legal or not. This is because of the law-and-order mentality that gives the police special privilege. Also the infamous blue wall of silence almost universally protects lawbreaking cops no matter what they've done. Do you remember the New Orleans police who were calling in hits over their police radios? And of course there is Abner Louima whose sodomy at the hands of police was the result of them mistaking him for another person who had talked back to them. According to the police involved no one did anything, no one saw a broomstick, no one ever went into that bathroom that night, and in fact the officers who were accused weren't even there. If none of the officers in those cases would turn them in for murder, assault or sodomy then what faith can we have that the police will ever be impartial or fair to the rest of us?
You tell us...you are posting anonymously...if you witnessed a group of police officers committing a crime would you turn them in or would you maintain the blue wall of silence? Let's make it not so serious - if you saw a fellow police officer getting into a car drunk would you arrest him or park his car by the side of the road and get him a ride home? Remember if you break the code you will be ostracized, threatened, probably lose your job, and maybe worse. Tell us, please. We have the rare opportunity to talk to an anonymous introspective police officer. If you say you would arrest them and testify against them I will believe you.
Like all professions, there are some police officers who behave better than others. The bad ones seem to make more of an impression than the good ones, unfortunately, and given the highly public nature of the job, that is not surprising.
I agree 100%, not all cops are bad and not all are good - but man o' man that bad part is really bad. I don't hate the police, but I fear them. We've all heard about the officer who shot the family's playful dog in Tennessee, and we've also heard about the innocent man in NYC shot to death by an aggressive NYC undercover agent who kept badgering him for drugs and became angry when the victim told him to get lost. Rudy Giuliani even attacked the *victim* after he was killed, and defended the officer before any investigation was conducted. Neither of those officers have been punished. The list goes on and on - and if the list of known abuses is so large, how large must the list be of abuses we never hear about?
Maybe you will try to take a bullet in place of a civilian, but I don't think that is the norm. About 12 years ago a robber was chased by police in NYC. He grabbed a woman hostage and used her as a shield. He turned to the police and pointed his gun. Both hostage and criminal died in a hail of gunfire from 10 cops.
A close friend's boyfriend was arrested in NYC when he refused to give his name to police. He was just sitting in a restaurant with friends and the police mistook him for a snitch. He was taken outside roughed up and arrested. My friend was arrested when she objected. Neither were violent (although he's a jerk, I admit). Of course the charges were dropped but they had spent the night in jail. When they talked to a lawyer he advised them if they wanted to file a complaint they should move out of Manhattan first.
I applaud your sentiments, but your reality just doesn't seem to be the world the rest of us live in.
I did not say Bush was Caligula, but that I understand how the Praeatorians felt when they put a horse in the throne in his place...and I do...really.
I "v e r y c a r e f u l l y" worded my caligula remarks to omit any reference to how he lost the throne. I do not advocate the tried and true Roman way of regime change. Please note I am not using certain words here in the hope I don't get flagged by the CIA and Echelon as a potential terrorist and put on the "cannot fly" list. Yes, I'm that paranoid with this administration and our Department of Fatherland Security.
Yes, FDR did trample rights, and he was wrong to do it, but you also have to consider the time. This country was on the verge of a real revolution in the 30's as opposed to the largely made-up "threat to democracy" the Wolfowitz/Cheney/Rumsfeld troika is pushing. Neither al Queda nor Saddam is/was a direct threat to our democracy. We can also point to great things FDR did. Now THERE was a wartime president for real. The only great thing GW Bush has done is to learn to speak English in under two years, run and hide when airplanes were falling out of the sky, and posing for a photo-op in a borrowed flight suit. At least FDR never put on a military uniform and posed for photos like a two-bit dictator.
I'm getting rather nasty to Bush here, aren't I. He deserves it.
Thank you for you lucid and insightful critique of the Bill of Rights.
Oh gee, I can think of one case where a citizen was detained without a trial...
The Bush administration is holding hundreds of people in indefinate secret detention without charge and without benefit of law by utilizing the Material Witness statutes in ways they were never intended to be used. The exact number is unknown because guess what - they are being held in secret.
guess what, under the Constitution habeas corpus can be suspended in times of invasion or rebellion. Is Jose Padilla a political prisoner?
The last time I looked there was no rebellion or invasion.
Is Jose Padilla a political prisoner?
I'm not talking about Padilla. I was specifically referring to a programmer in Washington state who was yanked off the street by Federal agents and held in secret for months without charge or access to an attorney. The authorities would not even admit they had him, leaving his family guessing where he was and by whom he was being held. I saw newsreel photos of his family standing outside the Federal detention center holding pictures of their son and begging the authorities to just tell them if he was there or not. Even today the government will not release the names, or even the number, of people it is detaining. I don't know if you are aware of the term "disappeareds", but the US has its own disappeareds now.
Oh yes those poor prisoners at Guantanamo. Boo hoo.
Many of the prisoners at Guantanamo were released after more than a year. Do you think the government would have released them if they had ANY evidence they were associated with terrorists? Yes they were poor prisoners. I live in Manhattan and I have no sympathy for terrorists, but if we are to be any different than Saddam Hussein we have to deal with our prisoners using the law - not by dictatorial decree. I am surprised that you, great Constitutional scholar that seem to think you are, fail to see that.
In terms of infiltrating lawful political opposition groups, hate to tell you but it's constitutional
Sorry, but you are stupidly wrong here. After the domestic spying abuses by the Hoover era FBI were discovered, such activity was specifically prohibited by law. Ashcroft is trying hard to have those laws changed, but as yet to no avail.
Sorry I called you stupid, but I thought it was better than dickhead.
A "fight/bust-up"? My reading of the descriptions led me to understand that his daughter hit him on the shoulder. If that was the extent of the riot I could easily see how Mr. Hiibel might not make the connection between what had happenend and an anonymous report of domestic abuse. Given the Hiibel's knowledge of the actual events it is understandable that neither would interpret the officer's statement of a "fight" to be anything other than a shouting match. It does not logically follow that they would have any idea the officer was talking about a specific domestic abuse report.
First and foremost I want to apologize for the pathetic and stupid reply to your post by "111 0110". Attitudes like that only make things worse and creates an "us v. them" attitude amnong all parties. But it is also true that acts like those by the officer in Wyoming go a long way to creating mistrust of the police by the public.
/do/ have the right to ask the name and information of any person in any public place (the roadway is considered a public place) at any time, for any reason
I will tell you that in the State of Georgia, we
I assume that "right" has been upheld only in Georgia courts. I hope that the Hiibel case in the US Supreme Court will put a stop to that particular abuse of law. Remember, in Nazi Germany carting Jews off to the gas chambers was perfectly legal, but that clearly didn't make it right. And before the flames start - it was just an example.
I do know that Federal authorities have the ability to search bags at-will in airports and bus terminals without probable cause, and that may extend, unfortunately, to roads and police in general. I think it goes way too far if the police in Georgia have the right to demand my identity in any public place just because they want to know.
I once made the mistake of getting lost in a rural Virginia town late one night and calling the local police department to ask directions to the Interstate. I was young then and still naively thought "the police were my friends" as I had been taught by my parents. Five minutes later I was surrounded by police cars, stood by the side of the road, questioned, and given a sobriety test - just because the police decided they wanted to. I learned that night that I may have friends who are police, but the police are not my friends.
The next time you are in a group of people who are not law enforcement get a conversation going about police powers. Then ask for a show of hands by anyone who has ever been stopped for no reason by police and have had to undergo questioning when they had done nothing wrong. I think the number of hands will surprise you.