Gimmicks to convince American students to be interested in science, mathematics, history, geography, etc. are never successful. We have been trying these gimmicks for several decades -- without successful.
The reason that American students lack interest in science (or any other subject) is that American culture does not value education. This lack of interest appears in the abysmal results in international assessments of students from various countries. American students consistently underperform their peers in the rest of the West.
The invention, by Norman Borlaug, of disease-resistant crops only delayed the symptoms of the core problem: overpopulation.
Without his contribution, one billion people would have died of famine, and one billion hectares of forest would have been cleared. In other words, the ecosystem could only sustain one billion fewer people, and the existing population would have cleared one billions hectares of forest.
With his contribution, the ecosystem now sustains that additional 1 billion: the total number of mouths is 6 billion. There is now not a need to clear that additional billion hectares of forest.
However, the population continues to grow. It will reach such a size that famine will kill one billion people and that hunger will force the clearing of an additional billion hectares of forest.
Overpopulation is the root cause of many problems: energy shortage, famine, global warming, etc. The 4 horsemen of the apocalypse are approaching. We can already hear the hooves of the horses.
In order for a microprocessor to be financially successfully, it must enjoy large economies of scale. That Intel can sell essentially the same design (of the x86) in multiple forms to hundreds of millions of customers means that Intel can afford the massive research and development that is necessary to design the typical x86 chip.
By contrast, though Sun Microsystems often boasted that it has -- actually, had -- the largest microprocessor team after Intel, the team could not design a chip that sold to hundreds of millions of customers. They numbered only several hundred thousand. That sell rate could not pay the salaries of the 2nd largest microprocessor team in the world.
Here is another example of Sun arrogance. In the 1990s, Sun could have easily built their company on the unglamorous ARM RISC processor, but Sun management wanted to exhibit the "pride" (and arrogance) of homegrown technology. So, the management spent billions of dollars on designing one of the worst microprocessors in the industry. The UltraSPARC III was overbudget, was late (to market), and underperformed its peers.
The Sun has set. Good riddance to arrogance.
P. S.
Yes. The UltraSPARC I and II were okay. However, they were not stellar. What helped their sales was mating them to the server box, E10000, that Sun luckily acquired from SGI/Cray. However, starting from the UltraSPARC III (an utter fiasco), the processors were so horribly underperforming that even an outstanding server design could not compensate for the mediocre performance of its processor.
During the last 30 years, the brands possessing the most value (for the money) for the typical customer has changed dramatically. In 1979, heaven for the consumer was Sony audio and visual appliances and Honda cars. Now, heaven for the consumer is Panasonic audio and visual appliances and Toyota cars.
30 years from now, what will be heaven for the consumer?
That Russia and Japan will now be the primary supporters of the International Space Station (ISS) is rife with symbolism. The superpower in the North-American continent declines, but 2 superpowers appear in Asia.
For decades, the typical American has exhibited an abysmal understanding of basic physics. This ignorance explains why he succumbs to scare stories about the horrors of nuclear power and why he has opposed it for those same decades. At the same time, the French and the Japanese -- with their outstanding understanding of basic science (as indicated by international comparisons of high-school students in France, Japan, and the USA) -- have generally supported nuclear power. It generates most of the electricity in France.
That Americans are suddenly interested in nuclear power is not due to a sudden awareness of the science behind it. Rather, economics has changed the equation. The rise of China and India has dramatically increased demand for fossil fuels and has driven their prices through the roof. This phenomenon directly hits the checkbooks of Americans.
Economics, not intellect, has now convinced Americans to join the nuclear-power club. Unfortunately, for the Americans, since they deserted nuclear power for 30+ years, the most advanced nuclear-power plants are designed by French and Japanese engineers. France and Japan will profit immensely when their companies build plants in the USA for the science-challenged Americans.
When you aim the Palantir tool at terrorists, you can easily identify useful patterns in disparate data. These patterns reveal information about the names and the plans of the culprits.
What happens when you aim the same tool at ordinary people like Slashdotters? You will discover sexual orientation, adultery, etc.
In other words, the same tool saving us from the terrorists can also defeat the last barriers protecting our privacy. If an intelligence officer in the government hated a particular SlashDotter (due to her articles in this forum), that officer could easily identify her address, her friends, her bank accounts, her adulterous lover, etc. Can you say, "blackmail"?
The suicide rate in Japan is about 51 per 100,000 people. The rate is high but is less than the rate in some European countries. The rate in Lithuania is 92 per 100,000 people.
There is a curious pattern in the suicide rates. The rates among ethnic groups who built the most prosperous, high-quality societies (i. e., Western societies) are the highest in the world. The rate in Japan and Europe is much higher than the rate in, say, Nigeria. Most African nations do have shockingly high death rates, but that is due to murder. Suicide is quite uncommon in Africa.
What Richard Egan did is very Japanese. He concluded that his life would be a burden on his family, his friends, and himself. So, he chose to die by his own sword. He died with honor.
Though we may justifiably consider Lori Drew to be despicable, she did not violate any federal statute. The government's case was driven by public opinion, not the facts. In this case, public opinion is just a synonym for "tyranny of the masses".
The government chose to use the legal system to make her life a living hell. The government has infinitely deep pockets to fund a lawsuit against a private citizen, but the citizen does not have such pockets. Fighting the government in the courts could drive a private citizen into bankruptcy.
The right thing for Drew to do in this case is to sue the government and, specifically, the lead prosecuting attorney. Drew should sue them for mental distress and seek a multi-million dollar award.
IkeTo wrote, "There is no point for MS to create a 'WM' from scratch, if MS need one it simply disables the unneeded features from Vista. Because it costs essentially nothing to Microsoft to make a new copy of Vista. Making a 'WM', in contrast, means engineering efforts."
There are 2 problems that the "disable method" (DM) does not address. First, merely switching off the features does not reduce the size. Windows Vista still wastes 5 gigabytes of disk space.
Second, the advantage of the small size of Windows Minimum (WM) is that it is much easier to verify to be correct. Checking 500 megabytes of code is easier than checking 5 gigabytes. Small, light, and efficient is the advantage of a minimalist operating system.
The most well-known example of technology overkill is Windows XP and its successors. Think about it for a minute. How many of the functions in these operating systems do you actually use?
I myself use maybe 10%. There are parts (of Windows Vista) that I have never explored and will never explore. I just do not need all that functionality.
I bet that the majority of non-technical users are just like me. Suppose that Microsoft created a "good enough" operating system called "Windows Minimum" (WM). It has 10% of the functions of Windows Vista and 10% of its size. WM would also likely be 10 times more reliable since it is small and easy to verify to be correct. Best of it, WM would likely be 10% of the price of Windows Vista. $20 is just about right for most people.
Russia has outstanding scientists and engineers. Consider their achievements: Sputnik, the Mig 29, contributions to physics, etc.
However, the Russian system -- with its corruption and massive budget cuts (afte 1991) in government-funded research and development -- has hampered Russians scientists and engineers in their effort to produce breakthrough technology. NASA's collaboration with the Russian scientific community (and possible NASA funding for it) will help the Russians to achieve what they can not achieve in their own system.
If only President Dmitry Medvedev and Dictator Vladimir Putin created a Western society (with its intellectual freedom and clean government) in Russia and generously funded government research and development, then the Russians would likely dominate the winners of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences and of the Fields Medals in mathematics.
We should view this Mexican decriminalization of narcotics in light of the recent shockingly bloody drug war. "Ever since President Felipe Calderon began the war in 2006, more than 12,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence - most of them in fighting between competing cartels."
Calderon is a conservative politician who hates the drug business. He hates it so much that he actually unleashed the Mexican army against the drug cartel. Unfortunately for him, the cartel has tremendous firepower (smuggled from the United States) and fought the army in the streets. The army hurt the dominant cartels just enought to splinter them. Now, the splinters are fighting each other.
Calderon is probably rethinking whether he can actually win the drug war. This decriminalization may be the first sign that he is accepting the fact that narcotics is an integral part of Mexican culture.
emarkp wrote, "This is one reason [for] having an actual immigration policy and enforcing it. Most countries in the world do this, but for some reason the US doesn't."
The Americans cannot enforce an immigration policy because doing so is politically incorrect. So, essentially, the USA has open borders. Anyone can come whenever he wants.
Even the French, who supposedly are oh-so-liberal, strictly enforce the rules for an orderly welcoming of legal immigrants. After Nicolas Sarkozy became president of France, he toughened the rules and insisted that all immigrants must learn Western values and the French language.
Admittedly, the French did not always treat immigrants in this way. During the 1970s and the 1980s, the French took a lax attitude to immigrantion. As a result, France swelled with illegal and legal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa. About 20% of the people living in France today trace their ancestry to the Middle East and Africa, and this 20% vehemently rejects assimilation into French society. These folks periodically riot, destroying property and killing French bystanders.
There is nothing wrong with opposing uncontrolled immigration.
The people living in a nation have the right to determine the criteria for admitting immigrants. The French think so. The Germans think so. The Japanese think so.
In fact, Japan is the perfect example of a country that attained tremendous wealth without massive uncontrolled immigration. Note the Japan is nearly devoid of the natural resources with which the USA is blessed. Yet, the Japanese transformed a barren rock into the 2nd richest nation in the world.
The American claim that the USA needs illegal immigrants to pick the vegetables and to perform other unskilled labor is simply incorrect. Japanese society works quite well without illegal immigrants.
Unlike the Americans, the Japanese do require the immigrants (i. e., the few immigrants that Tokyo admits) to be screened for diseases.
girlintraining wrote, "People are surprised by this? Our inner cities are rotting. Our economy is in shambles. People are living squallor and poverty on an unprecidented scale in this country. We're a breeding ground now for all manners of disease, both social and medical."
You have omitted an important aspect of the problem. Uncontrolled immigration is precisely hurting those American citizens who are living in "squalor and poverty". Illegal immigrants are suppressing the wages of such Americans by about 8%.
Worse, according to the report by the "Wall Street Journal", illegal immigrants inject disease into neighborhoods of impoverished Americans.
The Americans living in the upper/middle class simply do not experience the pain and suffering that Americans in the lower class endure due to illegal immigration. So, naturally the
Americans in the upper/middle class favor uncontrolled immigration. They want the cheap vegetables that illegal-immigrant labor provides even if it means hurting the Americans in the lower class.
What is the purpose of the Olympic Games? Originally, the Olympics was a religious event. In modern times, the Olympics is a celebration of the beauty -- the perfection and stamina -- of the human body.
In my opinion, people with flaws -- like genetic anomalies -- should be disqualified from participating. If you think that they should be allowed to participate, then would you allow a 3-armed man to participate in the boxing tournament? Do you think that having 3 arms would give the participant an unfair advantage?
The Olympics is not about helping people with genetic flaws to feel good about themselves. The Olympics is a sports competition that celebrates the beauty of the human form.
So, if Caster Semenya is proven to possess a genetic abnormality, then she should be disqualified. However, "should" does not mean "will". Chances are good that if she is disqualified, she and her African-American/African supporters will accuse the Olympic officials of exhibiting "racism" against Africans. So, the final outcome is likely that she will be proven to possess the genetic abnormality, that she will not be disqualified, and that the Olympic officials will suddenly become mute.
This so-called Internet addition is really pornography addition.
After reading the previous statement, most Slashdotters just uttered a "heh" in cynical agreement. Pornographic images and video have the largest percentage (although it may not necessarily exceed 50%) of Internet bandwidth.
The interesting question to ask is whether the Internet-addiction clinic charges more than a sex-addiction clinic. The addict should attend the clinic that costs less -- assuming that the addict even acknowledges a problem.
Note that the American clinic is addressing an issue differing from that addressed by the Chinese clinic. The Chinese clinic is addressing a non-sex issue since, in theory, pornography is not allowed on the Chinese Internet.
If the researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute want to create an artifical intelligence (AI) that exhibits pure evil, then they should first read the article just published by "The Economist". With the tacit approval of Vladimir Putin, the de-facto dictator of Russia, killers with connections to the Kremlin-backed government of Chechnya murdered the couple who were running a charity helping innocent children who had been emotionally and physically traumatized by war. This is couple is Zarema Sadulayeva and Alik Djabrailov. They were not political. They wanted only to help innocent children maimed by war.
The cold-blooded killers of this couple locked their bullet-riddled bodies in the trunk of a car.
If that murder is not pure evil, then what is pure evil?
The researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute need only to interview Putin and to download his thoughts into their AI computer. It will instantly exhibit pure evil.
Where is James Bond when you need him? A problem in the Kremlin needs to be fixed. Pronto.
If General Motors (GM) were allowed to enter bankruptcy without a government bailout, then GM would likely have been purchased in whole, or in parts, by a European or Japanese auto company. The purchaser would have assumed all of GM's liabilities. Of course, the sale price would have been set to reflect the costs of these liabilities.
However, because Americans allowed Washington (and Barack Hussein Obama) to effectively nationalize GM, Americans received the worst of all worlds. Washington poured billions of dollars into the company, and that money comes from future taxpayers. GM retains its rotten management although some talking heads at the very top of the pyramid were replaced: that management misread the market and failed to steer research and development toward highly efficiently small cars when gas prices were skyrocketing. Unions with their gold-plated medical insurance (now paid by the government) retain a stranglehold on the company, now literally owning part of GM.
Worst of all, we discover that the "new" GM will not be paying the costs of cleaning up the environmental pollution that the "old" GM caused.
We could have avoided all these problems if either Toyota or Renault had purchased the relevant bits of GM. Why do Americans "fear" working for a Japanese or French boss so much they are willing to nationalize a car company?
Together with Iran and Turkey, Malaysia will soon be filtering its Internet content. The common thread among all 3 countries is that the majority of their citizens are Muslims.
Approaching this matter from another angle, we see that Vietnam, China, and North Korea censor the Internet. The common thread among all 3 countries is that the majority of their citizens subscribes to Confucianism. Confucianism is a quasi-religion. In it, you are told how and what to think.
Is there a causal relation? Do the governments of countries inhabitated by strongly, religious people tend to filter Internet content?
Note that Russia, despite its brutal form of government, does not filter the Internet. You can write whatever you want in an Internet forum. The Kremlin censors mainly television.
According to a report by the "Times Online" and another report by "guardian.co.uk", today is the 1-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Georgia. Russian troops has not exited the territory of Georgia though Vladimir Putin signed an agreement to do so. Further, the Kremlin has recognized the occupied territory -- Abkhazia and South Ossetia -- as independent nations although the entire family of Western nations has not.
The coordinated Internet attack against a computer account owned by a Georgian is likely not a coincidence as the attack occurred precisely on the day marking the 1-year anniversary of this show of Russian military force. For that same reason, that a pair of Russian submarines loaded with nuclear missiles were recently patrolling off the East Coast of the United States is not a coincidence.
The article by "Technology Review" mentions that significant parts of the power-generation device remain to be researched and developed. That is a bad sign.
Startups, by their very nature, do not succeed on a bet that the technology will be invented. Venture capitalists do not support fairytale wishes.
Startups use existing, proven technology and package it in new ways to serve a need of the consumer. Startups are about commercializing a technology, not inventing it.
What startup does breakthrough research? None.
Research is the luxury of universities (with infinite time horizons) and monopolists like Microsoft .
That the Kremlin (and the thugs who run the place) fear Skype is not a surprise. The Kremlin fears even unarmed middle-aged women who try to protect Chechen children.
According to a shocking report just published by "The Economist", "it was the kind of scene she had described many times. On July 15th at 8.30am, as she left her flat in Grozny, Natalia Estemirova was forced into a white Lada. She shouted that she was being kidnapped, but those who heard were too scared to report it. By the time her colleagues had found out, she was dead, murdered by three bullets in her chest and a control shot in the head.
There was a mark from a man's hand on her shoulder, where she was grabbed, and a bruise on her face, where she had been hit. Her wrists bore the marks of bindings. Ramzan Kadyrov, the authoritarian Chechen president, considered her an enemy. And she died as one. She documented hundreds of similar cases in Chechnya, supplying witness statements and photographs, forcing prosecutors to investigate and the media to write about kidnappings, torture and killings, often conducted by people in official uniforms. Much of what the world knew about Chechnya came from her and her colleagues at Memorial, a heroic group which started by documenting Stalinist crimes but continued to trace their modern-day consequences, especially in the Caucasus."
Natalia Estemirova was born to a Chechen father and a Russian mother. She was a history teacher. One day, upon seeing the dying bodies of Chechen victims killed by Kremlin-backed militia, she swore to help the victims of gross human-rights violations in Chechnya.
She did indeed help the victims by documenting their tragic lives and condemning the Kremlin and the Kremlin-backed government in Chechnya. Allied with Anna Politkovskaya, Estemirova obtained the only conviction of a Russian thug for brutalizing and killing a Chechen.
When the Kremlin-backed government of Chechnya killed Estmirova, it killed the soul of Russia. The evil in the Kremlin rivals the worst evils of Chinese society.
Buddha may forgive Vladimir Putin, but I cannot. God damn him.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason that American students lack interest in science (or any other subject) is that American culture does not value education. This lack of interest appears in the abysmal results in international assessments of students from various countries. American students consistently underperform their peers in the rest of the West.
Without his contribution, one billion people would have died of famine, and one billion hectares of forest would have been cleared. In other words, the ecosystem could only sustain one billion fewer people, and the existing population would have cleared one billions hectares of forest.
With his contribution, the ecosystem now sustains that additional 1 billion: the total number of mouths is 6 billion. There is now not a need to clear that additional billion hectares of forest.
However, the population continues to grow. It will reach such a size that famine will kill one billion people and that hunger will force the clearing of an additional billion hectares of forest.
Overpopulation is the root cause of many problems: energy shortage, famine, global warming, etc. The 4 horsemen of the apocalypse are approaching. We can already hear the hooves of the horses.
By contrast, though Sun Microsystems often boasted that it has -- actually, had -- the largest microprocessor team after Intel, the team could not design a chip that sold to hundreds of millions of customers. They numbered only several hundred thousand. That sell rate could not pay the salaries of the 2nd largest microprocessor team in the world.
Here is another example of Sun arrogance. In the 1990s, Sun could have easily built their company on the unglamorous ARM RISC processor, but Sun management wanted to exhibit the "pride" (and arrogance) of homegrown technology. So, the management spent billions of dollars on designing one of the worst microprocessors in the industry. The UltraSPARC III was overbudget, was late (to market), and underperformed its peers.
The Sun has set. Good riddance to arrogance.
P. S.
Yes. The UltraSPARC I and II were okay. However, they were not stellar. What helped their sales was mating them to the server box, E10000, that Sun luckily acquired from SGI/Cray. However, starting from the UltraSPARC III (an utter fiasco), the processors were so horribly underperforming that even an outstanding server design could not compensate for the mediocre performance of its processor.
30 years from now, what will be heaven for the consumer?
What could explain the phenomenon?
That Americans are suddenly interested in nuclear power is not due to a sudden awareness of the science behind it. Rather, economics has changed the equation. The rise of China and India has dramatically increased demand for fossil fuels and has driven their prices through the roof. This phenomenon directly hits the checkbooks of Americans.
Economics, not intellect, has now convinced Americans to join the nuclear-power club. Unfortunately, for the Americans, since they deserted nuclear power for 30+ years, the most advanced nuclear-power plants are designed by French and Japanese engineers. France and Japan will profit immensely when their companies build plants in the USA for the science-challenged Americans.
What happens when you aim the same tool at ordinary people like Slashdotters? You will discover sexual orientation, adultery, etc.
In other words, the same tool saving us from the terrorists can also defeat the last barriers protecting our privacy. If an intelligence officer in the government hated a particular SlashDotter (due to her articles in this forum), that officer could easily identify her address, her friends, her bank accounts, her adulterous lover, etc. Can you say, "blackmail"?
There is a curious pattern in the suicide rates. The rates among ethnic groups who built the most prosperous, high-quality societies (i. e., Western societies) are the highest in the world. The rate in Japan and Europe is much higher than the rate in, say, Nigeria. Most African nations do have shockingly high death rates, but that is due to murder. Suicide is quite uncommon in Africa.
What Richard Egan did is very Japanese. He concluded that his life would be a burden on his family, his friends, and himself. So, he chose to die by his own sword. He died with honor.
The government chose to use the legal system to make her life a living hell. The government has infinitely deep pockets to fund a lawsuit against a private citizen, but the citizen does not have such pockets. Fighting the government in the courts could drive a private citizen into bankruptcy.
The right thing for Drew to do in this case is to sue the government and, specifically, the lead prosecuting attorney. Drew should sue them for mental distress and seek a multi-million dollar award.
There are 2 problems that the "disable method" (DM) does not address. First, merely switching off the features does not reduce the size. Windows Vista still wastes 5 gigabytes of disk space.
Second, the advantage of the small size of Windows Minimum (WM) is that it is much easier to verify to be correct. Checking 500 megabytes of code is easier than checking 5 gigabytes. Small, light, and efficient is the advantage of a minimalist operating system.
I myself use maybe 10%. There are parts (of Windows Vista) that I have never explored and will never explore. I just do not need all that functionality.
I bet that the majority of non-technical users are just like me. Suppose that Microsoft created a "good enough" operating system called "Windows Minimum" (WM). It has 10% of the functions of Windows Vista and 10% of its size. WM would also likely be 10 times more reliable since it is small and easy to verify to be correct. Best of it, WM would likely be 10% of the price of Windows Vista. $20 is just about right for most people.
However, the Russian system -- with its corruption and massive budget cuts (afte 1991) in government-funded research and development -- has hampered Russians scientists and engineers in their effort to produce breakthrough technology. NASA's collaboration with the Russian scientific community (and possible NASA funding for it) will help the Russians to achieve what they can not achieve in their own system.
If only President Dmitry Medvedev and Dictator Vladimir Putin created a Western society (with its intellectual freedom and clean government) in Russia and generously funded government research and development, then the Russians would likely dominate the winners of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences and of the Fields Medals in mathematics.
Calderon is a conservative politician who hates the drug business. He hates it so much that he actually unleashed the Mexican army against the drug cartel. Unfortunately for him, the cartel has tremendous firepower (smuggled from the United States) and fought the army in the streets. The army hurt the dominant cartels just enought to splinter them. Now, the splinters are fighting each other.
Calderon is probably rethinking whether he can actually win the drug war. This decriminalization may be the first sign that he is accepting the fact that narcotics is an integral part of Mexican culture.
The Americans cannot enforce an immigration policy because doing so is politically incorrect. So, essentially, the USA has open borders. Anyone can come whenever he wants.
Even the French, who supposedly are oh-so-liberal, strictly enforce the rules for an orderly welcoming of legal immigrants. After Nicolas Sarkozy became president of France, he toughened the rules and insisted that all immigrants must learn Western values and the French language.
Admittedly, the French did not always treat immigrants in this way. During the 1970s and the 1980s, the French took a lax attitude to immigrantion. As a result, France swelled with illegal and legal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa. About 20% of the people living in France today trace their ancestry to the Middle East and Africa, and this 20% vehemently rejects assimilation into French society. These folks periodically riot, destroying property and killing French bystanders.
The people living in a nation have the right to determine the criteria for admitting immigrants. The French think so. The Germans think so. The Japanese think so.
In fact, Japan is the perfect example of a country that attained tremendous wealth without massive uncontrolled immigration. Note the Japan is nearly devoid of the natural resources with which the USA is blessed. Yet, the Japanese transformed a barren rock into the 2nd richest nation in the world.
The American claim that the USA needs illegal immigrants to pick the vegetables and to perform other unskilled labor is simply incorrect. Japanese society works quite well without illegal immigrants.
Unlike the Americans, the Japanese do require the immigrants (i. e., the few immigrants that Tokyo admits) to be screened for diseases.
You have omitted an important aspect of the problem. Uncontrolled immigration is precisely hurting those American citizens who are living in "squalor and poverty". Illegal immigrants are suppressing the wages of such Americans by about 8%.
Worse, according to the report by the "Wall Street Journal", illegal immigrants inject disease into neighborhoods of impoverished Americans.
The Americans living in the upper/middle class simply do not experience the pain and suffering that Americans in the lower class endure due to illegal immigration. So, naturally the Americans in the upper/middle class favor uncontrolled immigration. They want the cheap vegetables that illegal-immigrant labor provides even if it means hurting the Americans in the lower class.
That is the ugly truth.
Does anyone know how I can contact "kdawson"?
In my opinion, people with flaws -- like genetic anomalies -- should be disqualified from participating. If you think that they should be allowed to participate, then would you allow a 3-armed man to participate in the boxing tournament? Do you think that having 3 arms would give the participant an unfair advantage?
The Olympics is not about helping people with genetic flaws to feel good about themselves. The Olympics is a sports competition that celebrates the beauty of the human form.
So, if Caster Semenya is proven to possess a genetic abnormality, then she should be disqualified. However, "should" does not mean "will". Chances are good that if she is disqualified, she and her African-American/African supporters will accuse the Olympic officials of exhibiting "racism" against Africans. So, the final outcome is likely that she will be proven to possess the genetic abnormality, that she will not be disqualified, and that the Olympic officials will suddenly become mute.
After reading the previous statement, most Slashdotters just uttered a "heh" in cynical agreement. Pornographic images and video have the largest percentage (although it may not necessarily exceed 50%) of Internet bandwidth.
The interesting question to ask is whether the Internet-addiction clinic charges more than a sex-addiction clinic. The addict should attend the clinic that costs less -- assuming that the addict even acknowledges a problem.
Note that the American clinic is addressing an issue differing from that addressed by the Chinese clinic. The Chinese clinic is addressing a non-sex issue since, in theory, pornography is not allowed on the Chinese Internet.
The cold-blooded killers of this couple locked their bullet-riddled bodies in the trunk of a car.
If that murder is not pure evil, then what is pure evil?
The researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute need only to interview Putin and to download his thoughts into their AI computer. It will instantly exhibit pure evil.
Where is James Bond when you need him? A problem in the Kremlin needs to be fixed. Pronto.
However, because Americans allowed Washington (and Barack Hussein Obama) to effectively nationalize GM, Americans received the worst of all worlds. Washington poured billions of dollars into the company, and that money comes from future taxpayers. GM retains its rotten management although some talking heads at the very top of the pyramid were replaced: that management misread the market and failed to steer research and development toward highly efficiently small cars when gas prices were skyrocketing. Unions with their gold-plated medical insurance (now paid by the government) retain a stranglehold on the company, now literally owning part of GM.
Worst of all, we discover that the "new" GM will not be paying the costs of cleaning up the environmental pollution that the "old" GM caused.
We could have avoided all these problems if either Toyota or Renault had purchased the relevant bits of GM. Why do Americans "fear" working for a Japanese or French boss so much they are willing to nationalize a car company?
Approaching this matter from another angle, we see that Vietnam, China, and North Korea censor the Internet. The common thread among all 3 countries is that the majority of their citizens subscribes to Confucianism. Confucianism is a quasi-religion. In it, you are told how and what to think.
Is there a causal relation? Do the governments of countries inhabitated by strongly, religious people tend to filter Internet content?
Note that Russia, despite its brutal form of government, does not filter the Internet. You can write whatever you want in an Internet forum. The Kremlin censors mainly television.
The coordinated Internet attack against a computer account owned by a Georgian is likely not a coincidence as the attack occurred precisely on the day marking the 1-year anniversary of this show of Russian military force. For that same reason, that a pair of Russian submarines loaded with nuclear missiles were recently patrolling off the East Coast of the United States is not a coincidence.
Startups, by their very nature, do not succeed on a bet that the technology will be invented. Venture capitalists do not support fairytale wishes.
Startups use existing, proven technology and package it in new ways to serve a need of the consumer. Startups are about commercializing a technology, not inventing it.
What startup does breakthrough research? None.
Research is the luxury of universities (with infinite time horizons) and monopolists like Microsoft .
According to a shocking report just published by "The Economist", "it was the kind of scene she had described many times. On July 15th at 8.30am, as she left her flat in Grozny, Natalia Estemirova was forced into a white Lada. She shouted that she was being kidnapped, but those who heard were too scared to report it. By the time her colleagues had found out, she was dead, murdered by three bullets in her chest and a control shot in the head.
There was a mark from a man's hand on her shoulder, where she was grabbed, and a bruise on her face, where she had been hit. Her wrists bore the marks of bindings. Ramzan Kadyrov, the authoritarian Chechen president, considered her an enemy. And she died as one. She documented hundreds of similar cases in Chechnya, supplying witness statements and photographs, forcing prosecutors to investigate and the media to write about kidnappings, torture and killings, often conducted by people in official uniforms. Much of what the world knew about Chechnya came from her and her colleagues at Memorial, a heroic group which started by documenting Stalinist crimes but continued to trace their modern-day consequences, especially in the Caucasus."
Natalia Estemirova was born to a Chechen father and a Russian mother. She was a history teacher. One day, upon seeing the dying bodies of Chechen victims killed by Kremlin-backed militia, she swore to help the victims of gross human-rights violations in Chechnya.
She did indeed help the victims by documenting their tragic lives and condemning the Kremlin and the Kremlin-backed government in Chechnya. Allied with Anna Politkovskaya, Estemirova obtained the only conviction of a Russian thug for brutalizing and killing a Chechen.
When the Kremlin-backed government of Chechnya killed Estmirova, it killed the soul of Russia. The evil in the Kremlin rivals the worst evils of Chinese society.
Buddha may forgive Vladimir Putin, but I cannot. God damn him.