"Limits to Growth fallacy, a major intellectual blunder recycled from the 1970s"
Fallacy? - last time I checked even the Earth's crust is finite. Did it ever cross your mind that the reason people are contemplating nuclear reators is because fossil fuels are bumping against the limit to their growth in both supply (oil) and the side effects of consumption (coal & oil).
The pollyanna idea that the Earth's resources and the bioshpere's capacity to absorb waste are both essentially limitless has unfortunately been SOP for economists for a long time but it is starting to give way to a new fangled idea called "sustainability".
The fantasy your recommended book is selling is that God/technology will not only provide us with manna from heaven but will also wash the dishes. Naturally the book cannot supply us with any insights as to how this miracle will occur because the theory specifically states mankind has no idea how God/technology will do this in the future. We are simply too ignorant to understand the magic of unlimited growth, right?
Yes, and the CSIRO has been telling our government that the whole country could easily be run from renewables for at least the past decade.
The CSIRO also identified the base load issue as a red-herring - hint: in a geographically large country such as Australia, the US, or Canada, the wind is always blowing somewhere. Wind & Hydro provide the base load for other renewables (solar, tidal, wave, geothermal), just as Hydro currently provides a fast switch "base load" for coal fired plants (that require scheduled shutdowns for maintenance and even then they still break down from time to time).
However our politicians after doing their best to ingnore the issue (lest it affect our coal exports) have been busy colluding with the likes of GWB and GE for the last few years in an attempt to monopolise the nuclear fuel industry.
It seems to be working quite well if you consider the price hike in Uranium over the last 5yrs or so. IMHO the main reason for this state of affairs is not money but the fact that renewable energy can not (easily) be used as an international political lever in the way that fossil fuels have been since WW2.
There are two ways to travel the world while "rarely working"...
1. Be independently wealthy.
2. Leach from others.
"And a great deal of Western countries are welfare states, so there's few worries. At least Finland and Denmark give enough financial support to students monthly to travel and just come back for exams, and a good percentage of the population here are students."
In other words, the taxpayer is feeding the leaches.
I like the quotes and pictures, however my point was not how big the dam was but the fact that such a relatively small change in mass distribution has a measurable affect (we can acurately measure about one part in 10 billion). Given there is no known analytical solution to the three body problem ANY change may or may not be signifigant to the mechanics of the solar system over a long time period (ie: butterfly effect). Therefore the Earth is too massive unless you can say for certain that the change in mass distribution has NO affect.
It's also common knowledge that large dams change the local geography with their weight.
Thank you for that demonstration of ignorance about the role of international election observes, many of which are based in your own fucking country and have nothing to do with the UN you dimwitted slab of mutton! And if you really don't care for the UN then vote for R.Paul, give up your veto and withdraw your cock-sucking lobbyists.....which isn't exactly a bad idea. Mind you Ron will also get rid of the reserve bank and the US economy will be about par with that of 1990's Russia when you finnaly wake up to the fact you have voted for yet another raving lunatic to represent the free world.
I just flew half way round it in one day, it's not as big as you think. We have instruments that can detect a tide in a teacup, a large dam or open cut mine can be detected from orbit using mass distribution (ie: a gravimeter). But unless you have managed to solve the three body problem there is no way of knowing what affect(s) such a small change will have other than local tectonic movements. If an everyday goods train can make my house shake enough for the windows to rattle then 9.43 cubic miles of water will definitely have some impact on the surrounding geology.
Your missing the point, the public service is supposed to "speak truth to power without fear or favour". From the view point of an Aussie I would trust the (east) European public service more than I would trust the US or even my own government.
It's not as if it's an impossible task to be an honest and capable public servant in the US, but IMHO a large chunk of the population have come to accept the idea that the public service itself is corrupt, their neighbour is crazy, poor people are lazy criminals sucking their taxes, and there is nothing they (or anyone else) can do about it,...other than blame the media, join the NRA, keep a gun in the bedside draw, and a shotgun at the front door - you know, for people who walk on the front lawn.../rant
Take out the word "independent" - since IIRC independent observers were not invited to Putin's election. I also seem to recall that independent observers were given a hard time by the neocons in the US election, I even had US slashdotters telling me they "didn't want the UN running their elections" - whatever that means?
In a traditional manual system counting is ALWAYS adversarial, all sides count and watch - the winner is decided by CONSENSUS, if that can not be reached then the lawyers get their day in court.
Trivia: Thomas Edison created the first vote counting machine and tried to sell it to the US senate to count up/down votes. Most senators were quite justifiably offended by and suspisous of his machines.
Nothing has changed, a machine that counts your ballot cannot be trusted without implicitly trusting the people who supply and operate the machine. Manual counting does not have that problem, since trust in the elction system is critical to democracy - vote counting machines are far, far, worse than useless.
Them's fighting words, my first commercial encouter with z-modem was implementing it on a radio network back in 1992, it was for an operating system called penpoint that ran on a chip called the hobbit using a watcom cross compiler from Dos.
"Usage of these terms has become sloppy over time."
I agree and I appreciate the history lesson, but if you read back through the thread and think in the current vanacular then I stand by what I said.
I recognise you as one of the most informative posters on this subject and bow to your legal knowledge. It's also good news, IMHO "making available" was a weasle word phrase.
I did not intend to present an opinion on the legalities, I was attempting to clear up the use of the terms upload/download/push/pull from a technical perspective.
Probably the mention of the word "union", plus the fact that most mods around here were still in nappies when Murdoch was raiding Fleet street and Thatcher was implementing a centuries old joke by importing Australian coal to Newcastle.
Whatever you think of Murdoch and unions, one has to admit he knows how to make money and can spot a bargain owned by technophobes from the other side of the planet.
New fangled computerised print technology combined with old fashion union busting is how Murdoch turned his millions into billions way back in the 80's.
Halfway down the page before I find someone whose knee is not jerking.
The sort of moronic crap in TFA comes pretty much exclusively from these type of "family lobbyists". "Family lobbyists" like this are an extreme minority that every now and then find a way to make a loud noise. Not that far removed from the "chistians" who picket the funerals of gay teenagers with signs such as "god hates fags".
The piles of comments blaming parents and anyone else they don't like are absurd, they are buying into the strawman that parents actually agree with this sort of bullshit. Try taking an honest head count of the parents that are cheering the silencing of sesame street and you will find they are indeed a rare beast. How many people here actually know someone like Ned Flanders, I know they must exist somewhere otherwise there would be nothing to parody, but where are they?
BTW: For those who think it's NOT the parents job to sheild their child from parts of the "real world" they cannot handle - how the fuck did you learn to wipe your own arse without drowning in the toilet?
I'd like to hear what Achmed has to say rather than tell him what to do.
Unfortunately a lot of powerfull people want to silence Achmed the moment he gets up to speak (think of the ruckus over ImADinnerJacket's speech at princeton). Behaviour like this is embeded in those who seek power or revenge, it has been since our possum like ancestors first started forming territorial gangs. Belive it or not compared to just about any other time or place in history, post WW2 western society has been remarkably peacefull and prosperous.
The question is - did the rest of the world pay for our prosperity and peace? Now that we all realise we are all hurtling through space on the same over-crowded dirtball, are we the 4th riech and the rest of the world is our polluted concentration camp turning out transplantable kidneys and drinkable coffee? - It's sunset here going for a walk on the beach - sadly life is too short for me to REALLY care about Achmed.
Don't get me wrong, I realise Hicks is Australia's most famous political prisoner. He spent 5yrs in Gitmo before they created a law and applied it retrospectively. They cracked the poor bastard and got him to plead guilty, basically in order to "prove" our illustrious leaders never make mistakes. Iraq's foriegn minister was realeased before Hicks was for christ sake!!! Kudo's to his military appointed defence attorney, he tried his best to get Australian politicians to stand up for a citizen and has paid the price!
But that is the difference I am trying to emphasise, normal cops in a western democracy are a mixture of bullies and saints but there is a legal process that is followed to the letter most of the time. Achmed the Shepard probably has hundreds of relatives, one of whom may have been a real "terrorist". The people who have arrested Achmed are above the law (in fact here in Oz they 'are' the law since it's the federal AG & the PM who oversea (and IMHO organise) this sort of CRIMINAL behaviour. The more the politicans get away with it the more likely the practise will seep in to the domestic police, but it's a long way from that at the moment.
Achmed the Shepard's rocket making cousin: What I don't understand is why does the west sweep Isreal's atrocities under the carpet and empasise the (smaller scale) atrocities of their vastly weaker opponents? Why does the west refuse to talk to the democratically elected government of the palestinians (ie: Hamas)? How can Hezzbolla[sic] be considered terrorists when the vast majority of Lebbanon support them? - I'm too old for jewish conspiracy theories, my best guess is it's because of the 200 odd nukes Isreal has stashed away somewhere.
"The military fires rockets and microwaves into him, just making him mad"
We all know that governments can't do anything right. Sun is a corporation, when they fire missles and microwaves Godzilla will pull his socks up and dig harder.
OTOH: It is not your average cop that is doing that sort of thing, for the most part terrorist (such as Hicks) are political prisoners being used by exjudicial forces to "send a message". Your average cop recives a "bomb threat", he calls the bomb squad and clears the area, seems like (inconvienient) common sense to me.
The rest of the bullshit is simply paper-work and politics to cover the fact that "dob in a terrorist" schemes do nothing except scare the shit out the general population, granted there may be good reason to be scared of the spooks living in legal shadows but IMHO it's recognised by the general population as the politics of fear, meaning the western world is a long way from becoming a police state.
Sure these things happen from time to time but cops and judges are simply paid control freaks that are obstensibly hired to stop us from living in anarchy, worst case senario is something like Blackwater or the SS (best case is a fantasy world where we are all just nice to each other).
From 50yrs of life experience I know that cops make all sorts of threats but the actions you describe are not a routine occurence here in Australia. If you want to to be treated with respect then be as polite and firm with them about your rights as you expect them to be when doing their job. Of course this assumes you know your rights and are smart enough to have a lawyer back you up.
"Maybe early on the RIAA could have sold them a false bill of goods"
Or maybe the labels got greedy and coluded with each other to fend off an industry wide "threat", now that the "punks" at google are winning the pissing competition their collective "head in the sand" strategy is exploding in their face. The big money will adapt and survive, after all they have a ready made scapegoat for their greed in the form of an industry association.
Slashdot Mirror
"Limits to Growth fallacy, a major intellectual blunder recycled from the 1970s"
Fallacy? - last time I checked even the Earth's crust is finite. Did it ever cross your mind that the reason people are contemplating nuclear reators is because fossil fuels are bumping against the limit to their growth in both supply (oil) and the side effects of consumption (coal & oil).
The pollyanna idea that the Earth's resources and the bioshpere's capacity to absorb waste are both essentially limitless has unfortunately been SOP for economists for a long time but it is starting to give way to a new fangled idea called "sustainability".
The fantasy your recommended book is selling is that God/technology will not only provide us with manna from heaven but will also wash the dishes. Naturally the book cannot supply us with any insights as to how this miracle will occur because the theory specifically states mankind has no idea how God/technology will do this in the future. We are simply too ignorant to understand the magic of unlimited growth, right?
Yes, and the CSIRO has been telling our government that the whole country could easily be run from renewables for at least the past decade.
The CSIRO also identified the base load issue as a red-herring - hint: in a geographically large country such as Australia, the US, or Canada, the wind is always blowing somewhere. Wind & Hydro provide the base load for other renewables (solar, tidal, wave, geothermal), just as Hydro currently provides a fast switch "base load" for coal fired plants (that require scheduled shutdowns for maintenance and even then they still break down from time to time).
However our politicians after doing their best to ingnore the issue (lest it affect our coal exports) have been busy colluding with the likes of GWB and GE for the last few years in an attempt to monopolise the nuclear fuel industry.
It seems to be working quite well if you consider the price hike in Uranium over the last 5yrs or so. IMHO the main reason for this state of affairs is not money but the fact that renewable energy can not (easily) be used as an international political lever in the way that fossil fuels have been since WW2.
Yeah right, a free bowl of rice a day keeps motivation at bay.
There are two ways to travel the world while "rarely working"...
1. Be independently wealthy.
2. Leach from others.
"And a great deal of Western countries are welfare states, so there's few worries. At least Finland and Denmark give enough financial support to students monthly to travel and just come back for exams, and a good percentage of the population here are students."
In other words, the taxpayer is feeding the leaches.
I like the quotes and pictures, however my point was not how big the dam was but the fact that such a relatively small change in mass distribution has a measurable affect (we can acurately measure about one part in 10 billion). Given there is no known analytical solution to the three body problem ANY change may or may not be signifigant to the mechanics of the solar system over a long time period (ie: butterfly effect). Therefore the Earth is too massive unless you can say for certain that the change in mass distribution has NO affect.
It's also common knowledge that large dams change the local geography with their weight.
Thank you for that demonstration of ignorance about the role of international election observes, many of which are based in your own fucking country and have nothing to do with the UN you dimwitted slab of mutton! And if you really don't care for the UN then vote for R.Paul, give up your veto and withdraw your cock-sucking lobbyists.....which isn't exactly a bad idea. Mind you Ron will also get rid of the reserve bank and the US economy will be about par with that of 1990's Russia when you finnaly wake up to the fact you have voted for yet another raving lunatic to represent the free world.
"The earth is just too massive."
I just flew half way round it in one day, it's not as big as you think. We have instruments that can detect a tide in a teacup, a large dam or open cut mine can be detected from orbit using mass distribution (ie: a gravimeter). But unless you have managed to solve the three body problem there is no way of knowing what affect(s) such a small change will have other than local tectonic movements. If an everyday goods train can make my house shake enough for the windows to rattle then 9.43 cubic miles of water will definitely have some impact on the surrounding geology.
Your missing the point, the public service is supposed to "speak truth to power without fear or favour". From the view point of an Aussie I would trust the (east) European public service more than I would trust the US or even my own government.
...other than blame the media, join the NRA, keep a gun in the bedside draw, and a shotgun at the front door - you know, for people who walk on the front lawn... /rant
It's not as if it's an impossible task to be an honest and capable public servant in the US, but IMHO a large chunk of the population have come to accept the idea that the public service itself is corrupt, their neighbour is crazy, poor people are lazy criminals sucking their taxes, and there is nothing they (or anyone else) can do about it,
Take out the word "independent" - since IIRC independent observers were not invited to Putin's election. I also seem to recall that independent observers were given a hard time by the neocons in the US election, I even had US slashdotters telling me they "didn't want the UN running their elections" - whatever that means?
"a control group -- a landslide victory election that was generally agreed to be free of tampering"
Hamas?
"counting OFTEN up to human judgement"
In a traditional manual system counting is ALWAYS adversarial, all sides count and watch - the winner is decided by CONSENSUS, if that can not be reached then the lawyers get their day in court.
Trivia: Thomas Edison created the first vote counting machine and tried to sell it to the US senate to count up/down votes. Most senators were quite justifiably offended by and suspisous of his machines.
Nothing has changed, a machine that counts your ballot cannot be trusted without implicitly trusting the people who supply and operate the machine. Manual counting does not have that problem, since trust in the elction system is critical to democracy - vote counting machines are far, far, worse than useless.
"And you're wrong."
Them's fighting words, my first commercial encouter with z-modem was implementing it on a radio network back in 1992, it was for an operating system called penpoint that ran on a chip called the hobbit using a watcom cross compiler from Dos.
"Usage of these terms has become sloppy over time."
I agree and I appreciate the history lesson, but if you read back through the thread and think in the current vanacular then I stand by what I said.
I recognise you as one of the most informative posters on this subject and bow to your legal knowledge. It's also good news, IMHO "making available" was a weasle word phrase.
I did not intend to present an opinion on the legalities, I was attempting to clear up the use of the terms upload/download/push/pull from a technical perspective.
Probably the mention of the word "union", plus the fact that most mods around here were still in nappies when Murdoch was raiding Fleet street and Thatcher was implementing a centuries old joke by importing Australian coal to Newcastle.
Whatever you think of Murdoch and unions, one has to admit he knows how to make money and can spot a bargain owned by technophobes from the other side of the planet.
The GP has a valid point, although I think the legal terminology is "making available".
Up/Downloading describe file movement relative to the machine you are talking about, push and pull describe distribution strategies.
New fangled computerised print technology combined with old fashion union busting is how Murdoch turned his millions into billions way back in the 80's.
Halfway down the page before I find someone whose knee is not jerking.
The sort of moronic crap in TFA comes pretty much exclusively from these type of "family lobbyists". "Family lobbyists" like this are an extreme minority that every now and then find a way to make a loud noise. Not that far removed from the "chistians" who picket the funerals of gay teenagers with signs such as "god hates fags".
The piles of comments blaming parents and anyone else they don't like are absurd, they are buying into the strawman that parents actually agree with this sort of bullshit. Try taking an honest head count of the parents that are cheering the silencing of sesame street and you will find they are indeed a rare beast. How many people here actually know someone like Ned Flanders, I know they must exist somewhere otherwise there would be nothing to parody, but where are they?
BTW: For those who think it's NOT the parents job to sheild their child from parts of the "real world" they cannot handle - how the fuck did you learn to wipe your own arse without drowning in the toilet?
With all that ranting I forgot the question :o
I'd like to hear what Achmed has to say rather than tell him what to do.
Unfortunately a lot of powerfull people want to silence Achmed the moment he gets up to speak (think of the ruckus over ImADinnerJacket's speech at princeton). Behaviour like this is embeded in those who seek power or revenge, it has been since our possum like ancestors first started forming territorial gangs. Belive it or not compared to just about any other time or place in history, post WW2 western society has been remarkably peacefull and prosperous.
The question is - did the rest of the world pay for our prosperity and peace? Now that we all realise we are all hurtling through space on the same over-crowded dirtball, are we the 4th riech and the rest of the world is our polluted concentration camp turning out transplantable kidneys and drinkable coffee? - It's sunset here going for a walk on the beach - sadly life is too short for me to REALLY care about Achmed.
Don't get me wrong, I realise Hicks is Australia's most famous political prisoner. He spent 5yrs in Gitmo before they created a law and applied it retrospectively. They cracked the poor bastard and got him to plead guilty, basically in order to "prove" our illustrious leaders never make mistakes. Iraq's foriegn minister was realeased before Hicks was for christ sake!!! Kudo's to his military appointed defence attorney, he tried his best to get Australian politicians to stand up for a citizen and has paid the price!
But that is the difference I am trying to emphasise, normal cops in a western democracy are a mixture of bullies and saints but there is a legal process that is followed to the letter most of the time. Achmed the Shepard probably has hundreds of relatives, one of whom may have been a real "terrorist". The people who have arrested Achmed are above the law (in fact here in Oz they 'are' the law since it's the federal AG & the PM who oversea (and IMHO organise) this sort of CRIMINAL behaviour. The more the politicans get away with it the more likely the practise will seep in to the domestic police, but it's a long way from that at the moment.
Achmed the Shepard's rocket making cousin: What I don't understand is why does the west sweep Isreal's atrocities under the carpet and empasise the (smaller scale) atrocities of their vastly weaker opponents? Why does the west refuse to talk to the democratically elected government of the palestinians (ie: Hamas)? How can Hezzbolla[sic] be considered terrorists when the vast majority of Lebbanon support them? - I'm too old for jewish conspiracy theories, my best guess is it's because of the 200 odd nukes Isreal has stashed away somewhere.
"The military fires rockets and microwaves into him, just making him mad"
We all know that governments can't do anything right. Sun is a corporation, when they fire missles and microwaves Godzilla will pull his socks up and dig harder.
"Firefox has a spell checker"
Truth from poster different, he break rules firefox wise - not.
OTOH: It is not your average cop that is doing that sort of thing, for the most part terrorist (such as Hicks) are political prisoners being used by exjudicial forces to "send a message". Your average cop recives a "bomb threat", he calls the bomb squad and clears the area, seems like (inconvienient) common sense to me.
The rest of the bullshit is simply paper-work and politics to cover the fact that "dob in a terrorist" schemes do nothing except scare the shit out the general population, granted there may be good reason to be scared of the spooks living in legal shadows but IMHO it's recognised by the general population as the politics of fear, meaning the western world is a long way from becoming a police state.
Sure these things happen from time to time but cops and judges are simply paid control freaks that are obstensibly hired to stop us from living in anarchy, worst case senario is something like Blackwater or the SS (best case is a fantasy world where we are all just nice to each other).
From 50yrs of life experience I know that cops make all sorts of threats but the actions you describe are not a routine occurence here in Australia. If you want to to be treated with respect then be as polite and firm with them about your rights as you expect them to be when doing their job. Of course this assumes you know your rights and are smart enough to have a lawyer back you up.
So what police state are you living in?
Any ideas what the writing says?
"Maybe early on the RIAA could have sold them a false bill of goods"
Or maybe the labels got greedy and coluded with each other to fend off an industry wide "threat", now that the "punks" at google are winning the pissing competition their collective "head in the sand" strategy is exploding in their face. The big money will adapt and survive, after all they have a ready made scapegoat for their greed in the form of an industry association.