I personally agree with Augustine of Hippo- that wars should not only be limited to self defense- but should be limited to fighting on your own territory against an invasion.
My personal opinion is that the best place to defend your country is on somebody else's territory.
I'm still calling it AGW for one simple reason: no matter what they call it, it's still substantially the same theory. As long as that's true, I see no reason to keep changing the name except to hide the fact that nothing's really changed.
Such as? I've been making it a point for several years now to ask all "skeptics": What evidence is missing? What piece(s) of evidence would convince you were it to become well documented?
You ask a very good question and deserve a thoughtful answer. And, if I were a climate scientist instead of simply an interested layman, I could probably give you a good answer. As it is, I can only deal in generalities, but there's one thing I'd like done if it hasn't been. We've all read the stories about weather stations that were originally sited out in the country, in the middle of a bean field, but are now in an airport, a parking lot or something similar. AFAIK, not only has nothing been done about this, we don't even know for sure which ones. By government standards, it wouldn't cost very much to find out which ones are now sitting in artificial heat islands and work out how to compensate the the change. Once we've done that, we'll have much cleaner, more accurate data to work with.
I'd suggest that we could do some small scale tests of some of the proposed solutions, but it's hard to see how you could do that; most of them are pretty much all or nothing by the nature of the issue.
Have you ever heard a skeptic explain why all the world's glaciers are melting, if its not getting warmer? Neither have I. I suspect it is because their ideology forces them into skepticism rather than being able to make the observations they need to see the reality that confronts them.
Unlike the deniers, skeptics don't claim that the Earth isn't getting warmer, nor do they insist that the glaciers aren't melting, which pretty much knocks down your strawman argument.
I'm sorry but the only attribute of a skeptic that these AGW "skeptics" have is using the word "skeptic". They sure sound like 911 truthers or alien conspiracy theorists.
The correct term for the people you're describing is "denier," not "skeptic." Deniers are doing their best to pretend that the climate isn't changing, that everything's wonderful and that we don't need to do anything. Skeptics understand that the climate is changing and that it's always changing; sometimes it's getting warmer, sometimes cooler and so on. Skeptics doubt, however, the AGW claim that all or most of the current warming trend is man made or that there's anything we can do to change what's happening.
(now there is a new problem: if they can't do any research why are the skeptics so sure of their claims?)
The only claims that skeptics are making is that they don't find the evidence for AGW persuasive enough to convince them. Many of them have suggested fairly simple, inexpensive experiments that might help settle the question but the AGW people aren't willing to take their suggestions, possibly because they might not like the results. I must admit that I wonder why they'd act like that if they were really as certain as they claim to be.
Before you actually start coding, discuss this with your boss and find out if he/she wants something like this badly enough to pay you for it. If so, negotiate the terms under which you'll be working just like you would if you were an outside consultant. Once you have an agreement, get it in writing and make sure it's signed by somebody with the authority to sign things like that so there's no chance of misunderstandings later, or room for them to wiggle out of paying you properly later on. If they're not interested in paying you, or in putting the agreement in writing, you shouldn't be interested in doing the work.
Back when I did phone tech support for an ISP their metric was the number of calls per day. It's been a long time since I worked there, but if memory serves, techs were expected to handle at least 20 calls each shift. I don't know what the average tech thought of the idea, but I never could see how anybody could judge our performance simply by counting calls. Every now and then we'd hear talk about judging us by how many customers had their issues completely resolved in one call (Not a bad idea, as we kept track of our calls in a database that included whether or not the issue was resolved.) but if anything ever came of it, it didn't last very long. I'd guess that the managers quickly figured out that techs could game that too easily by closing cases even when they'd not resolve the issue easier than they could game the number of calls especially when we all knew that our calls were sometimes recorded for exactly that reason.
No, I'm not skipping that part, I'm agreeing with it. The only thing I object to is his rude way of referring to religious beliefs.
The fact that you're getting insulted over an insult to murderers is rather sad.
As it so happens, I'm not in the least bit insulted by his rudeness. I'm not the type of person he was talking about and I don't take offence from generic slurs that aren't directed at me. I commented on it both because I find that type of off-hand rudeness tiresome and because I thought that a word to the wise might, in this case, be sufficient.
I think you're missing my point, here. I have no objection to your rejection of sectarian violence, in fact, I agree with it. I do, however, suggest that you might want to express yourself in less rude terms. Your fairy tale is somebody else's Universal Truth, and your calling it a "fairy tale," or referring to an "invisible friend" is only going to antagonize them, making them even less likely to pay attention to your ideas.
How about you work on the "brutal violence in response to hurt feelings about whose invisible friend is better" problem and then worry about scary things on the internet?
I know that it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling inside to sneer at people who believe something you don't, but making fun of people who don't think the same way as you do simply makes you look childish, shallow and boorish. Now, I happen to agree with your basic premise that India should spend more time teaching people that violence isn't the right way to work out their religious differences, but I do think that you could be a little more polite about it.
India, of all places, should understand the problem of religious violence. After all, the term Thug originated there, and started out referring to members of a cult who robbed and murdered travellers partly for religious reasons.
Either he's naive, or knows the engineers he's dealing with well enough to trust that nothing will happen.
If the people he's dealing with are smart enough to do their jobs, they'll understand without being told that the only reason they're getting all of that good stuff is because management doesn't know about it. The moment anybody spills the beans, the source of old documentation dries up, forever. Unless one of them's an idiot, none of them are going to risk that, meaning that he doesn't have anything to worry about.
Stanley Kubrick made good use of Polaroids when he was making 2001: A Space Odyssey because taking test shots and waiting for them to be developed took up lots of time. He had his photographers make up charts with Polaroid pictures on one side and Technicolor shots on the other so that he could get colours right faster. (You'll find this in the book on the making of the film.)
I've no objection to having to sign up there before signing petitions. My point was that clicking on the WHY button simply repeated the statement that you have to have an account there instead of explaining why you need an account. In other words, the button was completely redundant.
In order to sign that petition, you have to have an account at whitehouse.gov. If you click on the "WHY," it tells you that you have to have an account there in order to sign petitions. So much for a "transparent administration."
I like not having my file menu potentially hundreds of pixels away when I could normally access it a very short distance away.
My main menu is never farther away than the nearest open piece of desktop. One right-click, and there it is. Of course, I'm using neither Unity or Ubuntu; I'm using XFCE on Fedora.
Ron Paul would pretty well gut the civil emergency response systems...
Too late. President Carter did that years ago when he replaced local Civil Defence organizations with FEMA.
What I want to know is how thorough are they going to be in this simulation? Are they just going to have regular zombies, or are some of them going to wear traffic cones or buckets on their heads as armour? Are some of them going to pole vault or use pogo sticks? If so, I hope they're going to provide us with Crazy Dave to sell us the rakes and other things we'll need to fight them off!
Higher pitches do not always come through better. I have significant hearing loss caused by exposure to gunfire (a 5"/54 naval rifle) back in '72. My audiographs show a distinct notch in them, often called an "Artillery Notch." I find it hard to understand women with high-pitched voices, even if they speak louder, partly because when they raise their voice, they also raise the pitch, making it even harder for me to understand them. I need them to speak clearly and pitch their voice somewhat lower, which is hard enough when you're talking with a real person, much harder with a computer generated voice that's not customizable.
The moon is fairly pointless...
No it isn't. The Moon is an excellent place for our first colony. It's close enough that supplies could be sent out on short notice if there's an emergency during or after construction and it's a much better place to build and launch expeditions to other planets because its gravity well is so much smaller. And, of course, by the time we're ready to try colonizing Mars, we'll be able to use what we learned on the Moon to good advantage.
And the only place we can actually send people to is the ISS. i.e. nowhere.
That's true today, but I can remember when we were sending people to the Moon. The only reason we stopped is that the Administration looked at our space effort as nothing more than a way to get bragging rights over the Soviets, and once they'd succeeded, they saw no reason to continue. The Moon has all the raw materials needed to build a colony, and the Sun could provide us with all the power we need, as long as we have two power stations, positioned so that at least one if them is always active. And, once we're there, we're half way to anyplace else in the Solar System, because most of the energy you need is simply to get out of the Earth's gravity well.
You do not have to spend money on software to be productive in Windows (well, beyond paying for Windows itself). There is plenty of F/OSS and free-as-in-beer proprietary software to make you very productive.
True, but there's an awful lot of Windows users out there who either don't know it or don't believe it. Their motto is, "If you get it for nothing, it's good for nothing." And, of course, there are an awful lot of Windows shops out there that won't let anybody use anything that doesn't come from Redmond because of sweetheart licensing deals. If all you've ever used at work is proprietary programs, you're not going to be thinking in terms of F/OSS for home use even if you know about it.
I don't really know. However, the natural lens blocks UV, so it's reasonable to guess that the retina wouldn't have any resistance to it. I remember hearing, once, that before they developed UV blocking lenses anybody who had cataract surgery had to wear sunglasses outdoors for the rest of their life, no matter how dim the sunlight was.
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My personal opinion is that the best place to defend your country is on somebody else's territory.
I'm still calling it AGW for one simple reason: no matter what they call it, it's still substantially the same theory. As long as that's true, I see no reason to keep changing the name except to hide the fact that nothing's really changed.
You ask a very good question and deserve a thoughtful answer. And, if I were a climate scientist instead of simply an interested layman, I could probably give you a good answer. As it is, I can only deal in generalities, but there's one thing I'd like done if it hasn't been. We've all read the stories about weather stations that were originally sited out in the country, in the middle of a bean field, but are now in an airport, a parking lot or something similar. AFAIK, not only has nothing been done about this, we don't even know for sure which ones. By government standards, it wouldn't cost very much to find out which ones are now sitting in artificial heat islands and work out how to compensate the the change. Once we've done that, we'll have much cleaner, more accurate data to work with.
I'd suggest that we could do some small scale tests of some of the proposed solutions, but it's hard to see how you could do that; most of them are pretty much all or nothing by the nature of the issue.
Have you ever heard a skeptic explain why all the world's glaciers are melting, if its not getting warmer? Neither have I. I suspect it is because their ideology forces them into skepticism rather than being able to make the observations they need to see the reality that confronts them.
Unlike the deniers, skeptics don't claim that the Earth isn't getting warmer, nor do they insist that the glaciers aren't melting, which pretty much knocks down your strawman argument.
I'm sorry but the only attribute of a skeptic that these AGW "skeptics" have is using the word "skeptic". They sure sound like 911 truthers or alien conspiracy theorists.
The correct term for the people you're describing is "denier," not "skeptic." Deniers are doing their best to pretend that the climate isn't changing, that everything's wonderful and that we don't need to do anything. Skeptics understand that the climate is changing and that it's always changing; sometimes it's getting warmer, sometimes cooler and so on. Skeptics doubt, however, the AGW claim that all or most of the current warming trend is man made or that there's anything we can do to change what's happening.
(now there is a new problem: if they can't do any research why are the skeptics so sure of their claims?)
The only claims that skeptics are making is that they don't find the evidence for AGW persuasive enough to convince them. Many of them have suggested fairly simple, inexpensive experiments that might help settle the question but the AGW people aren't willing to take their suggestions, possibly because they might not like the results. I must admit that I wonder why they'd act like that if they were really as certain as they claim to be.
Before you actually start coding, discuss this with your boss and find out if he/she wants something like this badly enough to pay you for it. If so, negotiate the terms under which you'll be working just like you would if you were an outside consultant. Once you have an agreement, get it in writing and make sure it's signed by somebody with the authority to sign things like that so there's no chance of misunderstandings later, or room for them to wiggle out of paying you properly later on. If they're not interested in paying you, or in putting the agreement in writing, you shouldn't be interested in doing the work.
Back when I did phone tech support for an ISP their metric was the number of calls per day. It's been a long time since I worked there, but if memory serves, techs were expected to handle at least 20 calls each shift. I don't know what the average tech thought of the idea, but I never could see how anybody could judge our performance simply by counting calls. Every now and then we'd hear talk about judging us by how many customers had their issues completely resolved in one call (Not a bad idea, as we kept track of our calls in a database that included whether or not the issue was resolved.) but if anything ever came of it, it didn't last very long. I'd guess that the managers quickly figured out that techs could game that too easily by closing cases even when they'd not resolve the issue easier than they could game the number of calls especially when we all knew that our calls were sometimes recorded for exactly that reason.
So do what I do, ignore them. Or, if they're persistent, I tell them that my rabbi won't let me. Besides, why sink to their level?
No, I'm not skipping that part, I'm agreeing with it. The only thing I object to is his rude way of referring to religious beliefs.
The fact that you're getting insulted over an insult to murderers is rather sad.
As it so happens, I'm not in the least bit insulted by his rudeness. I'm not the type of person he was talking about and I don't take offence from generic slurs that aren't directed at me. I commented on it both because I find that type of off-hand rudeness tiresome and because I thought that a word to the wise might, in this case, be sufficient.
I think you're missing my point, here. I have no objection to your rejection of sectarian violence, in fact, I agree with it. I do, however, suggest that you might want to express yourself in less rude terms. Your fairy tale is somebody else's Universal Truth, and your calling it a "fairy tale," or referring to an "invisible friend" is only going to antagonize them, making them even less likely to pay attention to your ideas.
How about you work on the "brutal violence in response to hurt feelings about whose invisible friend is better" problem and then worry about scary things on the internet?
I know that it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling inside to sneer at people who believe something you don't, but making fun of people who don't think the same way as you do simply makes you look childish, shallow and boorish. Now, I happen to agree with your basic premise that India should spend more time teaching people that violence isn't the right way to work out their religious differences, but I do think that you could be a little more polite about it.
India, of all places, should understand the problem of religious violence. After all, the term Thug originated there, and started out referring to members of a cult who robbed and murdered travellers partly for religious reasons.
Now, now, don't be too hard on him. He's only doing what the AGW people have spent years training him to do.
Either he's naive, or knows the engineers he's dealing with well enough to trust that nothing will happen.
If the people he's dealing with are smart enough to do their jobs, they'll understand without being told that the only reason they're getting all of that good stuff is because management doesn't know about it. The moment anybody spills the beans, the source of old documentation dries up, forever. Unless one of them's an idiot, none of them are going to risk that, meaning that he doesn't have anything to worry about.
Stanley Kubrick made good use of Polaroids when he was making 2001: A Space Odyssey because taking test shots and waiting for them to be developed took up lots of time. He had his photographers make up charts with Polaroid pictures on one side and Technicolor shots on the other so that he could get colours right faster. (You'll find this in the book on the making of the film.)
I've no objection to having to sign up there before signing petitions. My point was that clicking on the WHY button simply repeated the statement that you have to have an account there instead of explaining why you need an account. In other words, the button was completely redundant.
So you could sign it the same way you sign a paper petition: by giving your name, address and email address.
In order to sign that petition, you have to have an account at whitehouse.gov. If you click on the "WHY," it tells you that you have to have an account there in order to sign petitions. So much for a "transparent administration."
My main menu is never farther away than the nearest open piece of desktop. One right-click, and there it is. Of course, I'm using neither Unity or Ubuntu; I'm using XFCE on Fedora.
Ron Paul would pretty well gut the civil emergency response systems...
Too late. President Carter did that years ago when he replaced local Civil Defence organizations with FEMA.
What I want to know is how thorough are they going to be in this simulation? Are they just going to have regular zombies, or are some of them going to wear traffic cones or buckets on their heads as armour? Are some of them going to pole vault or use pogo sticks? If so, I hope they're going to provide us with Crazy Dave to sell us the rakes and other things we'll need to fight them off!
Higher pitches do not always come through better. I have significant hearing loss caused by exposure to gunfire (a 5"/54 naval rifle) back in '72. My audiographs show a distinct notch in them, often called an "Artillery Notch." I find it hard to understand women with high-pitched voices, even if they speak louder, partly because when they raise their voice, they also raise the pitch, making it even harder for me to understand them. I need them to speak clearly and pitch their voice somewhat lower, which is hard enough when you're talking with a real person, much harder with a computer generated voice that's not customizable.
The moon is fairly pointless...
No it isn't. The Moon is an excellent place for our first colony. It's close enough that supplies could be sent out on short notice if there's an emergency during or after construction and it's a much better place to build and launch expeditions to other planets because its gravity well is so much smaller. And, of course, by the time we're ready to try colonizing Mars, we'll be able to use what we learned on the Moon to good advantage.
And the only place we can actually send people to is the ISS. i.e. nowhere.
That's true today, but I can remember when we were sending people to the Moon. The only reason we stopped is that the Administration looked at our space effort as nothing more than a way to get bragging rights over the Soviets, and once they'd succeeded, they saw no reason to continue. The Moon has all the raw materials needed to build a colony, and the Sun could provide us with all the power we need, as long as we have two power stations, positioned so that at least one if them is always active. And, once we're there, we're half way to anyplace else in the Solar System, because most of the energy you need is simply to get out of the Earth's gravity well.
You do not have to spend money on software to be productive in Windows (well, beyond paying for Windows itself). There is plenty of F/OSS and free-as-in-beer proprietary software to make you very productive.
True, but there's an awful lot of Windows users out there who either don't know it or don't believe it. Their motto is, "If you get it for nothing, it's good for nothing." And, of course, there are an awful lot of Windows shops out there that won't let anybody use anything that doesn't come from Redmond because of sweetheart licensing deals. If all you've ever used at work is proprietary programs, you're not going to be thinking in terms of F/OSS for home use even if you know about it.
I don't really know. However, the natural lens blocks UV, so it's reasonable to guess that the retina wouldn't have any resistance to it. I remember hearing, once, that before they developed UV blocking lenses anybody who had cataract surgery had to wear sunglasses outdoors for the rest of their life, no matter how dim the sunlight was.