Supposedly, there was an experiment done a long time ago where they wired up a mouse's brain - specifically, an area heavily involved with sexual pleasure and orgasm - to a button. Once the mouse found the button and pressed it, it continued pressing the button repeatedly until it died of dehydration.
This is socialist anti-American misinformational FUD, pure and simple. The blog article even admits as much by linking to the World Socialist Web Site.
Just remember, folks: the bullshit flows freely from both sides, not just from the Bush Administration.
So, I have no idea how he can sell his WoW character reliably. As an outsider, to me the WoW community looks like a den of thieves and scammers. How do other people sell their characters? How does the seller insure the buyer won't reverse the payment?
I'm not sure either, but if it's a choice between getting to continue doing what you love or going out of business, I'd at least have a long talk with my lawyer (and the lawyers of my fellow webcasters) about it before rolling over.
Some schools will replace your prior grades on your transcript with a denotation that the class was repeated if you retake the class within a certain time frame (usually the next available opportunity). However, this replacement happens whether your original grade was an F or a C, so if you're retaking mostly C grades, it may reflect more negatively if a recruiter looks through your transcript and sees a denotation for "we're not telling you what this grade was, but it was bad enough that s/he retook the course" than if they just see some Cs.
Regardless, your grades now won't matter much once you get one or two Real Jobs on your resume.
The UCC seems to say that, in a situation where a third party is supposed to set a price but fails to do so, the price is set by law as being a "reasonable price at the time for delivery". A price which obligates a reseller to shut down is hardly reasonable.
Since their true motivation is freedom of speech, you should have said, "But knowing that the TPB has opened with it being a haven for X in mind, where X is an element of the set of everything someone finds to be objectionable..." Even the article you linked to doesn't indicate that TPB are fans of child pron, but simply that they believe that it's not their place to censor other people's content.
Oh, so you'd prefer radon 220 that causes lung cancer, or what about radium 226 that causes bone cancers - it has a quite modest half life of only 1600 years, or thorium which cause birth defects, or what about the benign noble gases like xenon, argon or krypton that decay into something deadly or iodine 131 or ceasium. Did you know that pressurised water reactors are allowed too purge these gasses into the atmosphere 20 times a year as part of normal operations as officially permitted by the NRC or would you prefer to maintain your illusion that the ageing nuclear reactors in the U.S will be a squeaky clean source of electricity for your EV-2. That 's not fearmongering, thats understanding the operational issues.
No, it's FUD.
The longest-lived isotope of radon is 222Rn, with a half-life of 3.8 days. Gaseous emissions of nuclear power plants are sequestered and allowed to decay for some time before the result is emitted. Compared to the natural release of radon from the underground natural decay of uranium, the additional release of post-sequestration radon is negligible. The gas consists primarily of actual fission products (at least, those which are gaseous at atmospheric temperatures) and any gases which result from the coolant reacting with various particles. More radon is actually released during the mining of uranium than from nuclear power plants, but that release is still low compared to natural release (have you checked your basement for radon, just in case?), and the health risk to workers at uranium mines can be mitigated.
Radium is also a solid at atmospheric temperatures, and is a precursor to radon, meaning the emission of radium is minimized by the nuclear process. Any 226Ra produced by the nuclear reaction (though the concentration is known to be trace, if any at all) would be contained within the fuel rod or pellet. As with radon, most radium uncovered in the nuclear power process results from mining, not the operation of the power plant, and so the radium can be fully contained at the mine site.
you mean Yucca mountain that had a earthquake of 7.4 on the Richter scale in the early '90's.... That's not fearmongering, that's called understanding what a political solution looks like.
Still FUD. It's not even true. The 7.4 earthquake happened near Landers, California, more than 200 miles away. It triggered an aftershock of 5.6 centered about 8 miles from the site, an event considered to be of the greatest significance to the site in the past 20 years.
Yeah, like the way they had to cool down av reactor housing with garden sprinklers because the river levels were so low during the heatwave, such forward planning and preparation for an event that can induce a meltdown.
More FUD. Had the power plants' internal temperatures reached unacceptable levels, it would have (by law) been shut down, so there was never any danger of a radiological accident occurring. The plants were operating normally, and the concern was simply that the plants would have to be shut down in the midst of a tremendous heat wave that had already claimed the lives of a number of elderly and ill citizens. They were taking whatever measures they could think of to keep that particular plant operating, but they would have shut it down had conditions required it.
Like First Energy "safe" who persuaded the NRC to delay inspection of safety components past the due date only to find that a pressure vessel had corroded through 6 of it's 6 1/2 inch thickness. If you are going to operate these devices safely into thier old age then you have to increase the safety inspections, and that is not profitable for the operator. profit vs safety what a great tradeoff. That is not fearmongering, that is called considering yourself lucky if you were in Toledo on new years day 2002.
Option 1: Implement carbon emission limitations without carbon credits. Given no other option, leading economies will be forced to devote significant resources to inventing and installing technologies and infrastructure which limit emissions. Those leading nations then sell their technology with industrializing nations such as China and India whose emissions are getting out of control.
Option 2: Implement carbon emission limitations with carbon credits. Leading economies can then choose (a) to develop new technology or (b) to buy carbon credits from agrarian economies. They will do so based on relative cost, that is, if it's cheaper to develop the new technology, they'll do that; if it's cheaper to buy carbon credits, they'll do that. Agrarian economies will not want to be left holding carbon credits while leading economies develop new technology, so they will price those credits to make them an offer that leading economies can't refuse. Therefore, leading economies will always buy all the available credits first and develop new technology later, which is why I said that the development of pollution-reducing technology would be delayed.
Once the leading economies finally do develop new technology, industrializing nations will be even slower to adopt that technology. The leading economies will eventually adopt the technology, and due to economies of scale, the price of adoption will drop below the price of carbon credits from agrarian nations. However, industrializing nations will continue buying the credits, because the leading economies will want some amount of profit from their ingenuity, so agrarian nations will price their credits between the cost to produce the technology and the price at which the leading economies will want to sell the technology. Agrarian nations will always be able to do this and still profit from the deal, because the cost to produce carbon credits is zero. This delays adoption of carbon credits among industrializing nations even further.
Thus, the only reason that some people want to implement carbon credits isn't because it will help the environment, because it won't. Rather, it's intended solely as a hidden form of wealth transfer from leading economies to agrarian economies.
Actually, he (and Congress, by the way) said no to Kyoto because China and India got a free pass. Now they're at least seriously discussing going forward with a plan to include the US, China, and India all in a global effort to reduce emissions. Hopefully they'll do it without carbon credits, too, because all carbon credits will do is delay the adoption of pollution-reducing technologies while redistributing wealth to agricultural nations.
It's that sort of fearmongering that has kept us burning coal for the past twenty years. I'd much rather have nuclear waste buried in Yucca Mountain than have all the hydrogen sulfide, nitrogen oxides, and carbon oxides floating around in the atmosphere. The French derive most of their electricity from nuclear power, and they haven't had a mutation-causing earth-scorching nuclear catastrophe because they pay attention to safety, just as we do with our plants in the US. And with the advent of pebble bed reactors, runaway nuclear reactions become physically impossible.
Renewable energy, unlike coal or nuclear, will likely come from thousands or tens of thousands of different locations.
That's great and all, and I'm all in favor of utilizing the zillions of acres of rooftop in the US and around the world to accommodate solar cells. But if you're going to move the automobile infrastructure to electricity and away from petroleum, you're going to have to build more nuclear power plants.
I'm similarly mystified by most cable companies' attitudes toward DRM. Most of them turn off access to the firewire ports on their cable boxes, or at the very least encumber them with 5C/DTCP, and CableLabs also refuses to license manufacturers to be able to produce PCI-based CableCARD devices. In part, they want you to rent their DVRs, but they also have rolled over to the pressure of the content cabal. Same thing with Intel and AMD - they both know that no consumer wants "trusted computing", but they're falling all over each other trying to implement it, to the detriment of their customers.
To my thinking, the solution is simple: mandate convexity of the districts, with an exception for irregular district borders at state boundaries. Districting would then become a sort of Voronoi diagram over a non-uniform space due to population density. This would reduce the problem to one of choosing the centroids of each district, which would be much harder to manipulate inappropriately due to the complexity of the problem. Still, you could define the locations of the centroids based on some metric such as maximization of distance between the centroids.
Digital cable is a crock anyway. It's wrapped up tight in DRM, and not just the DRM that the cable company needs to ensure you're not stealing from them. There's no chance of being able to use a custom-built PVR, for example, to record digital cable, which means you're either at the whim of TiVo or your cable company, neither of which has a stellar track record when it comes to not interfering with your rights as a consumer. They charge you extra money to get you on board a service that is a net benefit for them due to the reduced bandwidth, and then they charge you even more any chance they get.
And now the various states are passing legislation to take away regulatory power from municipalities. They're pretty much the only thing that stands between us and monopolistic abuse in many cases, because the states sure don't care.
And some people actually think that net neutrality is a bad thing. What's going on with cable TV should be proof enough that without net neutrality, we're screwed. Lack of enforcement of net neutrality is the same as subtle deregulation of the cable TV industry - it lets the cable companies use their monopoly (or duopoly, if there's a DSL-providing phone company in the area) to abuse their customers.
I really liked MirrorMask, actually. Of course, I haven't read the story, so perhaps I'm missing the point you're getting at, but I thought it was beautifully done. In particular, it had an appropriate level of darkness for kids around age 10-13 who could really learn something from it (and in some cases, desperately need to learn the lesson contained therein), but at the same time avoided being boring for adults.
No, not FUD. Young, healthy people are great for insurance companies because they rarely make claims against their policy. That's pure profit that goes to offset unexpected losses that older, sicker patients - or any patients who suffer a catastrophic injury - create through new claims.
Michael Moore movies are like Wikipedia articles with one editor. Tons of links to questionable articles from all over the Internet, filled with POV content and unverifiable original research, and generally achieving no community consensus on anything. But be sure to cite it early and often in every term paper you write on the subject!
That said, I haven't seen Sicko, but I do agree with Moore that health insurance is essentially legalized gambling. It's also essentially a redistribution of wealth from the healthy to the unhealthy, with lots of middle men taking their cut along the way. The big question, though, is how do you fix it without making the average quality of health care worse?
Slashdot Mirror
Supposedly, there was an experiment done a long time ago where they wired up a mouse's brain - specifically, an area heavily involved with sexual pleasure and orgasm - to a button. Once the mouse found the button and pressed it, it continued pressing the button repeatedly until it died of dehydration.
;)
As I recall, the experiment was called "Diablo"
Now strip naked and get on the Probulator!
This is socialist anti-American misinformational FUD, pure and simple. The blog article even admits as much by linking to the World Socialist Web Site.
Just remember, folks: the bullshit flows freely from both sides, not just from the Bush Administration.
How is a country that makes it illegal to speak favorably about Nazis a "bastion of freedom"?
(Not that I have anything favorable to say about the Nazis, mind you.)
So, I have no idea how he can sell his WoW character reliably. As an outsider, to me the WoW community looks like a den of thieves and scammers. How do other people sell their characters? How does the seller insure the buyer won't reverse the payment?
One word: Cash.
I'm not sure either, but if it's a choice between getting to continue doing what you love or going out of business, I'd at least have a long talk with my lawyer (and the lawyers of my fellow webcasters) about it before rolling over.
Some schools will replace your prior grades on your transcript with a denotation that the class was repeated if you retake the class within a certain time frame (usually the next available opportunity). However, this replacement happens whether your original grade was an F or a C, so if you're retaking mostly C grades, it may reflect more negatively if a recruiter looks through your transcript and sees a denotation for "we're not telling you what this grade was, but it was bad enough that s/he retook the course" than if they just see some Cs.
Regardless, your grades now won't matter much once you get one or two Real Jobs on your resume.
The UCC seems to say that, in a situation where a third party is supposed to set a price but fails to do so, the price is set by law as being a "reasonable price at the time for delivery". A price which obligates a reseller to shut down is hardly reasonable.
While this is an improvement, it is not peer review. Allowing public comments is different than requesting recommendations from experts in the field.
Dr. Quinn: I've got five Ph.D.'s and a genius grant. I don't have any peers here.
Since their true motivation is freedom of speech, you should have said, "But knowing that the TPB has opened with it being a haven for X in mind, where X is an element of the set of everything someone finds to be objectionable..." Even the article you linked to doesn't indicate that TPB are fans of child pron, but simply that they believe that it's not their place to censor other people's content.
Oh, so you'd prefer radon 220 that causes lung cancer, or what about radium 226 that causes bone cancers - it has a quite modest half life of only 1600 years, or thorium which cause birth defects, or what about the benign noble gases like xenon, argon or krypton that decay into something deadly or iodine 131 or ceasium. Did you know that pressurised water reactors are allowed too purge these gasses into the atmosphere 20 times a year as part of normal operations as officially permitted by the NRC or would you prefer to maintain your illusion that the ageing nuclear reactors in the U.S will be a squeaky clean source of electricity for your EV-2. That 's not fearmongering, thats understanding the operational issues.
... That's not fearmongering, that's called understanding what a political solution looks like.
No, it's FUD.
The longest-lived isotope of radon is 222Rn, with a half-life of 3.8 days. Gaseous emissions of nuclear power plants are sequestered and allowed to decay for some time before the result is emitted. Compared to the natural release of radon from the underground natural decay of uranium, the additional release of post-sequestration radon is negligible. The gas consists primarily of actual fission products (at least, those which are gaseous at atmospheric temperatures) and any gases which result from the coolant reacting with various particles. More radon is actually released during the mining of uranium than from nuclear power plants, but that release is still low compared to natural release (have you checked your basement for radon, just in case?), and the health risk to workers at uranium mines can be mitigated.
Radium is also a solid at atmospheric temperatures, and is a precursor to radon, meaning the emission of radium is minimized by the nuclear process. Any 226Ra produced by the nuclear reaction (though the concentration is known to be trace, if any at all) would be contained within the fuel rod or pellet. As with radon, most radium uncovered in the nuclear power process results from mining, not the operation of the power plant, and so the radium can be fully contained at the mine site.
you mean Yucca mountain that had a earthquake of 7.4 on the Richter scale in the early '90's.
Still FUD. It's not even true. The 7.4 earthquake happened near Landers, California, more than 200 miles away. It triggered an aftershock of 5.6 centered about 8 miles from the site, an event considered to be of the greatest significance to the site in the past 20 years.
Yeah, like the way they had to cool down av reactor housing with garden sprinklers because the river levels were so low during the heatwave, such forward planning and preparation for an event that can induce a meltdown.
More FUD. Had the power plants' internal temperatures reached unacceptable levels, it would have (by law) been shut down, so there was never any danger of a radiological accident occurring. The plants were operating normally, and the concern was simply that the plants would have to be shut down in the midst of a tremendous heat wave that had already claimed the lives of a number of elderly and ill citizens. They were taking whatever measures they could think of to keep that particular plant operating, but they would have shut it down had conditions required it.
Like First Energy "safe" who persuaded the NRC to delay inspection of safety components past the due date only to find that a pressure vessel had corroded through 6 of it's 6 1/2 inch thickness. If you are going to operate these devices safely into thier old age then you have to increase the safety inspections, and that is not profitable for the operator. profit vs safety what a great tradeoff. That is not fearmongering, that is called considering yourself lucky if you were in Toledo on new years day 2002.
FirstEnergy
Sentence near the end should be, "This delays adoption of emissions-reducing technology among industrializing nations even further." Sorry :/
Option 1: Implement carbon emission limitations without carbon credits. Given no other option, leading economies will be forced to devote significant resources to inventing and installing technologies and infrastructure which limit emissions. Those leading nations then sell their technology with industrializing nations such as China and India whose emissions are getting out of control.
Option 2: Implement carbon emission limitations with carbon credits. Leading economies can then choose (a) to develop new technology or (b) to buy carbon credits from agrarian economies. They will do so based on relative cost, that is, if it's cheaper to develop the new technology, they'll do that; if it's cheaper to buy carbon credits, they'll do that. Agrarian economies will not want to be left holding carbon credits while leading economies develop new technology, so they will price those credits to make them an offer that leading economies can't refuse. Therefore, leading economies will always buy all the available credits first and develop new technology later, which is why I said that the development of pollution-reducing technology would be delayed.
Once the leading economies finally do develop new technology, industrializing nations will be even slower to adopt that technology. The leading economies will eventually adopt the technology, and due to economies of scale, the price of adoption will drop below the price of carbon credits from agrarian nations. However, industrializing nations will continue buying the credits, because the leading economies will want some amount of profit from their ingenuity, so agrarian nations will price their credits between the cost to produce the technology and the price at which the leading economies will want to sell the technology. Agrarian nations will always be able to do this and still profit from the deal, because the cost to produce carbon credits is zero. This delays adoption of carbon credits among industrializing nations even further.
Thus, the only reason that some people want to implement carbon credits isn't because it will help the environment, because it won't. Rather, it's intended solely as a hidden form of wealth transfer from leading economies to agrarian economies.
Actually, he (and Congress, by the way) said no to Kyoto because China and India got a free pass. Now they're at least seriously discussing going forward with a plan to include the US, China, and India all in a global effort to reduce emissions. Hopefully they'll do it without carbon credits, too, because all carbon credits will do is delay the adoption of pollution-reducing technologies while redistributing wealth to agricultural nations.
It's that sort of fearmongering that has kept us burning coal for the past twenty years. I'd much rather have nuclear waste buried in Yucca Mountain than have all the hydrogen sulfide, nitrogen oxides, and carbon oxides floating around in the atmosphere. The French derive most of their electricity from nuclear power, and they haven't had a mutation-causing earth-scorching nuclear catastrophe because they pay attention to safety, just as we do with our plants in the US. And with the advent of pebble bed reactors, runaway nuclear reactions become physically impossible.
Some people may be waiting for compatibility fixes or Service Pack 1 before they upgrade to Vista.
Others, including myself, are simply waiting for Hell to freeze over.
Renewable energy, unlike coal or nuclear, will likely come from thousands or tens of thousands of different locations.
That's great and all, and I'm all in favor of utilizing the zillions of acres of rooftop in the US and around the world to accommodate solar cells. But if you're going to move the automobile infrastructure to electricity and away from petroleum, you're going to have to build more nuclear power plants.
I'm similarly mystified by most cable companies' attitudes toward DRM. Most of them turn off access to the firewire ports on their cable boxes, or at the very least encumber them with 5C/DTCP, and CableLabs also refuses to license manufacturers to be able to produce PCI-based CableCARD devices. In part, they want you to rent their DVRs, but they also have rolled over to the pressure of the content cabal. Same thing with Intel and AMD - they both know that no consumer wants "trusted computing", but they're falling all over each other trying to implement it, to the detriment of their customers.
To my thinking, the solution is simple: mandate convexity of the districts, with an exception for irregular district borders at state boundaries. Districting would then become a sort of Voronoi diagram over a non-uniform space due to population density. This would reduce the problem to one of choosing the centroids of each district, which would be much harder to manipulate inappropriately due to the complexity of the problem. Still, you could define the locations of the centroids based on some metric such as maximization of distance between the centroids.
Digital cable is a crock anyway. It's wrapped up tight in DRM, and not just the DRM that the cable company needs to ensure you're not stealing from them. There's no chance of being able to use a custom-built PVR, for example, to record digital cable, which means you're either at the whim of TiVo or your cable company, neither of which has a stellar track record when it comes to not interfering with your rights as a consumer. They charge you extra money to get you on board a service that is a net benefit for them due to the reduced bandwidth, and then they charge you even more any chance they get.
And now the various states are passing legislation to take away regulatory power from municipalities. They're pretty much the only thing that stands between us and monopolistic abuse in many cases, because the states sure don't care.
And some people actually think that net neutrality is a bad thing. What's going on with cable TV should be proof enough that without net neutrality, we're screwed. Lack of enforcement of net neutrality is the same as subtle deregulation of the cable TV industry - it lets the cable companies use their monopoly (or duopoly, if there's a DSL-providing phone company in the area) to abuse their customers.
I really liked MirrorMask, actually. Of course, I haven't read the story, so perhaps I'm missing the point you're getting at, but I thought it was beautifully done. In particular, it had an appropriate level of darkness for kids around age 10-13 who could really learn something from it (and in some cases, desperately need to learn the lesson contained therein), but at the same time avoided being boring for adults.
No, not FUD. Young, healthy people are great for insurance companies because they rarely make claims against their policy. That's pure profit that goes to offset unexpected losses that older, sicker patients - or any patients who suffer a catastrophic injury - create through new claims.
Maybe they'll finally explain how tiny little Rakanishu can hide two magical halberds and a pile of gold coins under his loincloth.
Hey, now, Wrath of the Dragon God (aka D&D 2) wasn't bad, especially compared to the abomination that preceded it.
Michael Moore movies are like Wikipedia articles with one editor. Tons of links to questionable articles from all over the Internet, filled with POV content and unverifiable original research, and generally achieving no community consensus on anything. But be sure to cite it early and often in every term paper you write on the subject!
That said, I haven't seen Sicko, but I do agree with Moore that health insurance is essentially legalized gambling. It's also essentially a redistribution of wealth from the healthy to the unhealthy, with lots of middle men taking their cut along the way. The big question, though, is how do you fix it without making the average quality of health care worse?