Aye. My account was banned years ago from moderation for moderating up a post on slashdot critical of slashdot policies. The same happened to others.
I have been similarly blacklisted from mod points. That doesn't bother me as much as how sneaky the slashdot mafia are about it. If my account went around with a metric that showed I tend to get up and down modded I wouldn't mind. For example, it would be easy to record the average moderation and average deviation for each account from that value (a measure of opinion polarisation). But my account is listed to the public is if I were in good standing. We have "karma". What the hell is that? My guess is you will never see real metric because they will take power away from the self-appointed oligarchs.
Why do you conservatives think testing on animals(which have fully developed nervous systems and ergo can feel pain) is okay but doing absolutely anything with a human fetus(which has no nervous system, cannot feel pain, and is as human as a tumor) is a moral abomination?
This attitude is not unique to conservatives. Moral relativism doesn't sit well with a lot of people. I could just as easily ask you what your ghoulish fascination is with vivisecting infants.
Genetics is a perfectly fine mathematical foundation. The theory of evolution has undergone quite a few minor changes since Darwin's original work. The biggest one is genetics--that traits are not a continuum but discrete.
If you could point me to formulas governing these ideas I would be greatful. My complaint about Darwinian evolution is that their seems to be governing action principles that describe how and why generations of organisms respond to selective events. Genetics is an ok discipline, but it really doesn't explain the machinery of life
Most of Newton's equations only required minor changes(mostly multiplication or division of some quantities by a square root) to the formulae with Einstein's relativity.
The conceptual leap was large. The failure of the Galilian transformation of Newtons laws in moving coordinates was long known. The acceptance of the constancy of the speed was a pretty deep insight, especially for the time.
Evolution has been demonstrated many times already(why doesn't penicillin work as well anymore? Certainly the formula hasn't magically changed).
That is like saying, "when I throw a rock up in the air it always hits the ground." The observation is not very satisfying. I find that kind of intellectual laziness to be common in the debate of evolution. Perhaps the theory would be under less attack if it got a better defense.
Although GWB's response is nice and vague(and hard to combat), his intent was clear--get ID, which is pseudoscience
You are trying to demonize my buddy Dub for something he never said. What don't you pick on Jerry Falwell instead?
a dual-core processor system designed to let gamers simultaneously play three-dimensional games while encoding music or scanning for viruses.
This is the first time I have heard of virus protection as justification for using a dual core processor. That is almost as bad as marketing dual cores because they do fast DRM. Why have windows users come to expect so little?
I call opposing the ability to get the stem-cells of babies at all blocking our way to get cures for diseases anti-intellectual
The discussion is not about the utility of stem cells for the possible treatment of disease. It is whether it is ethical to harvest them from a proto human who has no say in the matter. It is a human rights discussion, which is highly intellectual. Also, I would hesitate to call crude experimentation with stem cells highly intellectual. It is more like tinkering. Biologists have very poor theoretical understanding of life's machinery.
I call putting pseudoscience(Intelligent Design) on the same level of science(Evolution) to be anti-intellectual(and yes, I have quotes from Bush saying he wants ID put on the same level as Evolution in science courses.
Evolution is a stale collection of 19th century principles that stiffle the biological sciences as much as they do advance it. The ideas of evolution are reasonably self evident, but they have no predictive power. The lack of a mathematical foundation is a severe limitation. It is puzzling that it has really become the rallying cry of the left and a sacred cow. The same used to be true of Newtonian mechanics. Mathematicians and physicists revered the results to such an extent that it took 100's of years until Einstein could advance the field again. Evolution needs to be similarly formulated to put biology on similar footing with other physical sciences.
It is not a good idea to pollute GPL code with proprietary drivers. It only helps to solidify the GPU oligopoly. The prices of top end GPU's have skyrocketed in the past few years even as the quality of proprietary drivers declined. Why wouldn't the oligarchs at nVidia and ATI want to keep the status quo? There is some hope in the statement FTA:
Intel has new plans for its open-source graphics driver work, though Hohndel wouldn't reveal details.
I am not clear whether Intel is getting into the GPU business. You would think they would want to given that they are the most costly components on your high end PC. The GPU business needs another competitor. Intel would be ideal.
It'll become your problem when half of the state of New Jersey moves to Minnesota because NJ is underwater. And we are bringing Tony Soprano with us. I hope you like calzones and AK47s.
You goombas won't cause culture shock up here. There is a fair bit of diversity here. You won't scare us with gunplay either. The woods are mayhem during hunting season. People drive around wasted drunk on the logging roads in their pickups shooting anything that moves.
It is absolutely not refutable that change is occuring. What is refuta ble is whether or not it is because of a natural cycle, or because of man-made change.
Climate is continuously variable, yes. It has always been like that. There are very many components: variablity in solar output, orbital obliquity cycles, volcanic, biogenic, and man-made components.
But the thing is, it does not matter what the cause is. If the cycle continues it will certainly, without a doubt, lead to the death of us as a civilization, whether we were the cause or not.
Why is that? Life has endured unfathomable climate change over 3.5Gyr. Hominids have endured great change in the past 5 million. Since the ice ages did not kill homo sapiens in the past 100,000 years, why do you think slight warming should? The climate has been warming for 12,000 years during which we have had the rise of civilization. Your argument is completely hollow. Change is good. Here in Minnesota I look forward to milder winters and a longer growing season.
Hence the concern. It doesn't matter if we are the root cause or not, we're the only species on the planet with the capability to reduce and possibly reverse the cycle.
Seems to me that plants have the greatest effect on atmospheric composition. You are overstating again.
MBA's aren't intellectuals. The intelligence required to get an MBA, even somewhere like Harvard, is a fraction of the intelligence required to get into Harvard as a technical major. Given that Gates has shown both far more intellectual capacity than Bush, technically, as well as having been orders of magnitude more successful as a businessman,
I am sure many "technical" people like you find great solice in such denial.
Do you have a good grasp on how the technology works? The stem cells come from disposed fetuses (which are about as human as a piece of steak), and it is the cells that are cultured, not the fetuses.
Well look at the two choices. Gates is an intellectual,
Gates, Harvard undergraduate dropout. GDub, Yale BA, Harvard MBA. Who is the intellectual?
one of the biggest philanthropists in history, and is spending billions of dollars helping to improve education around the world (especially in the US with his new project) and helping to cure real killer diseases like Malaria.
Like Andrew Carnegie before him, Gates will disgorge some of his ill-gotten wealth to whitewash his image for posterity. However, Andrew Carnegie is reviled by history in his brutal suppression of the Homestead strike, no matter how many buildings bear his name. Gates will be similarly hated for his 25+ years of distorting and terrorising the software industry.
Bush is the crowning achievement of the anti-intellectualism movement in America, couldn't imagine doing something good for another human being,
If you call opposing the creation of a race of subhumans bread only for their stem cells to be anti-intellectual then I hope we have more of it. You are intellectually dishonest.
Fault Gates as you will for his business practices (although they're tame compared to Balmer and nearly every other CEO or ex CEO in business), but I know which of the two I'd rather spend time with.
By all accounts President Bush is a genial fellow and Gates is an arrogant, abrasive, narcissist. After reading your post you choice makes perfect sense to me.
It's amazing the American economy has come to rely on something so...unreliable.
Like a lot of people on this forum I work for a big company with over 10,000 users. Imagine the checks that must get written to M$ for Windoze and Office. Millions! It is done willingly! Multiply that by 1000's of companies of similar size. In the cost cutting environment of corporate America how the heck has M$ defied gravity, especially when there are low cost alternatives? Everything else in our technology environment is bid competatively. You would think the cost factor of dealing with a monopolist would force the change.
That China is a sovereign country with its own set of rules & customs. It has the right to determine it's own destiny without need of approval from the West.
Not a great defense of systematic oppression. You speak of the Maoists and the citizens they oppress as one unit. They are not. The Maoists dream of taking their place with other western nations in economic achievement and world influence. They wish to imitiate the material success of these societies while ignoring the values that achieved them. They deserve all of the critism that can be heaped on them.
The US economy is already in deep trouble; it's living on borrowed money, provided by China and other nations, while China, India, and other nations are already booming.
This provides an interesting counterpoint to your fanciful assertion. Eat my CO2!
The way things are going in America, what with the offshore prison camps, pervasive domestic surveillence, corporations trampling individual rights by suing their customers, and runaway executive power, maybe it should be stopped.
So instead of sending an army or terrorists to combat the Great Satan you send the unlikeliest warriors imaginable, climate scientists! That'll show us.
Not that the Chinese/Indian alternatives are necessarily better, but America is rapidly deteriorating.
Judging from the way Chinese and Indian nationals are falling all over each other to reside in the US one wonders if that statement is true.
I refer to Kyoto as economic Jonestown for the US. These climate fear mongers are nothing if not persistant. Seems to me higher temperature and CO2 levels would spur photosynthesis and expand crop yields. What is the predictive track record of these models?
unless we actually get some ethics back into the Hill and the West Wing.
Are you implying that the Clinton administration was more ethical than GDub's? Amusing! Lets see, at this point in his second term Clinton was running around the west wing seeing sexual favors from interns while Al Qaida grew to full strength attacking US embassies and the USS Cole. There were also Al Qaida cells operating and planning the big one in the US. No, history will remember President Bush's courageous confrontation of islamic terror and scorn the criminal inattention of Clinton.
Government seizing power after 9/11 is simply an overreaction by the agencies who failed to perform their duty to protect America from attack. They are entirely overseen by the congress and are subject to its will. Their "power" will last as long as the electorate lets them have it, which is what you expect in a democracy.
Good questions. The foreground war started on 9/11 will end when Bin Laden, Zawahiri, and Al Zarqawi are killed or captured. These are the most visible leadership figures. Many possible leadership replacements from Al Qaida's second tier have already been killed. It will not be easy for them to reconstitute. One wonders if the US is trying very hard to assassinate them. My guess is they are, but the big three are very good at hiding. That will empty Gitmo pretty well I think and the the troops pulling back. But the background stuggle of the west against Islamic fascism will continue with no end in sight. It is alive and well in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and much of the muslim world. You won't see large occupation forces in these countries but I think you will see constant conflict. The key for the United States is to not let cells take root within its borders. They seem to be pretty well dispersed at this point. Public suspicion is so high that the islamists would have to win non-Arab converts like Jose Padilla to operate freely within the US. The large Christian majority in the US is a deterent. It is still something to guard against. Uprooting cells from Europe and Canada will be more problematic as the populace and governments are more pacifist.
Here is a nice diagram that gives some context to the finds. "Missing Link" is hype and "Proof of Evolution" is very misleading. But the diagram is an amazing summary and speaks for itself.
It's one of the worst AMERICAN prisons in the world. According to Amnesty Intl, "Guantánamo Bay has become a symbol of injustice and abuse in the US administration's 'war on terror'. It must be closed down"
This is just a statement of political opinion and does not address prison conditions, which are quite good. The great majority of American disagree with this, as does the Supreme Court. AA doesn't speak to the conditions at Gitmo, because they are quite good. The symbolism of Gitmo is in their mind only. The people down there are given due process through a military tribunal. Many of these prisoners have been repatriated only encountered again on the battlefield. Remember that they are enemy combatants, not US citizens. When the war on terror is over and we have Osama on a spit, then they can go home.
The floods in central Europe broke records lasting hundreds of years. Repeatedly in 1998,1999, 2002 and now 2006. Just try searching for floods in Central Europe. Or prehaps for heavy snowfall this year. Or perhaps about the wild-fires in recent years. No. Never happened. In your basement.
How do you correlate floods and heavy snowfall (last year it was snow drought in Europe) with an increase of atmospheric CO2 of a few parts per million? Total madness. Flood damage occurs in Europe like in the US because people live in flood zones. Rivers flood. Shock! What calamity to you blame the floods 100's of years ago, the Ottomans? Think clearly!
...and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse.
You mean just like people who challenge the global warming hysteria on slashdot. Hopefully now global warming can take its place next to DDT, killer bees, and acid rain on the list of scientific catastrophies that never materialized.
Still, you've got to admit that this would be a huge psychological deterant. I mean, if I fired RPGs at a tank, and the RPGs (seemingly without cause) pre-detontated before they ever reached the tank, I'd be looking to get the hell out of there and warn all my friends!
How would you like to be an insurgent trying to sneak up on an M1 and suddenly find yourself looking like a marshmellow in a microwave oven? I am not surprised that the army has showcased this stuff as a defensive weapon but think of the potential of replacing fragmentation weapons.
Something tells me this is one of those Chinese Government edicts that will be largely ignored once Mr. Bush leaves China.
Hu Jintao is coming here. Addressing software sharing is one of the few visible things he can do that will cost him nothing. Currency revaluation is what he is desperate to avoid. Why the US sees fit to give this guy a victory lap I'll never know.
Hm. Is there a reason why the United States is just letting the Chinese practice their blatantly economic-nationalist trade policy, all the while sitting under the pretenses of free trade?
Because they make shit cheap and spend their profits on our treasury notes. Your home mortgage rate is 3% less than it might otherwise be. (Thanks fellas!). Having said that running a $200 billion trade deficit simply cannot be tolerated. The reds are gonna need to seriously revalue their currency or the US will slap a hefty tariff on them. Currency manipulation is a no no. If they revalue their currency a billion people will suddenly have a lot more money to spend. Not an easy situation if you are a commie control freak who wants to keep peasants from rioting.
Slashdot Mirror
Aye. My account was banned years ago from moderation for moderating up a post on slashdot critical of slashdot policies. The same happened to others.
I have been similarly blacklisted from mod points. That doesn't bother me as much as how sneaky the slashdot mafia are about it. If my account went around with a metric that showed I tend to get up and down modded I wouldn't mind. For example, it would be easy to record the average moderation and average deviation for each account from that value (a measure of opinion polarisation). But my account is listed to the public is if I were in good standing. We have "karma". What the hell is that? My guess is you will never see real metric because they will take power away from the self-appointed oligarchs.
Why do you conservatives think testing on animals(which have fully developed nervous systems and ergo can feel pain) is okay but doing absolutely anything with a human fetus(which has no nervous system, cannot feel pain, and is as human as a tumor) is a moral abomination?
This attitude is not unique to conservatives. Moral relativism doesn't sit well with a lot of people. I could just as easily ask you what your ghoulish fascination is with vivisecting infants.
Genetics is a perfectly fine mathematical foundation. The theory of evolution has undergone quite a few minor changes since Darwin's original work. The biggest one is genetics--that traits are not a continuum but discrete.
If you could point me to formulas governing these ideas I would be greatful. My complaint about Darwinian evolution is that their seems to be governing action principles that describe how and why generations of organisms respond to selective events. Genetics is an ok discipline, but it really doesn't explain the machinery of life
Most of Newton's equations only required minor changes(mostly multiplication or division of some quantities by a square root) to the formulae with Einstein's relativity.
The conceptual leap was large. The failure of the Galilian transformation of Newtons laws in moving coordinates was long known. The acceptance of the constancy of the speed was a pretty deep insight, especially for the time.
Evolution has been demonstrated many times already(why doesn't penicillin work as well anymore? Certainly the formula hasn't magically changed).
That is like saying, "when I throw a rock up in the air it always hits the ground." The observation is not very satisfying. I find that kind of intellectual laziness to be common in the debate of evolution. Perhaps the theory would be under less attack if it got a better defense.
Although GWB's response is nice and vague(and hard to combat), his intent was clear--get ID, which is pseudoscience
You are trying to demonize my buddy Dub for something he never said. What don't you pick on Jerry Falwell instead?
a dual-core processor system designed to let gamers simultaneously play three-dimensional games while encoding music or scanning for viruses.
This is the first time I have heard of virus protection as justification for using a dual core processor. That is almost as bad as marketing dual cores because they do fast DRM. Why have windows users come to expect so little?
I call opposing the ability to get the stem-cells of babies at all blocking our way to get cures for diseases anti-intellectual
The discussion is not about the utility of stem cells for the possible treatment of disease. It is whether it is ethical to harvest them from a proto human who has no say in the matter. It is a human rights discussion, which is highly intellectual. Also, I would hesitate to call crude experimentation with stem cells highly intellectual. It is more like tinkering. Biologists have very poor theoretical understanding of life's machinery.
I call putting pseudoscience(Intelligent Design) on the same level of science(Evolution) to be anti-intellectual(and yes, I have quotes from Bush saying he wants ID put on the same level as Evolution in science courses.
Evolution is a stale collection of 19th century principles that stiffle the biological sciences as much as they do advance it. The ideas of evolution are reasonably self evident, but they have no predictive power. The lack of a mathematical foundation is a severe limitation. It is puzzling that it has really become the rallying cry of the left and a sacred cow. The same used to be true of Newtonian mechanics. Mathematicians and physicists revered the results to such an extent that it took 100's of years until Einstein could advance the field again. Evolution needs to be similarly formulated to put biology on similar footing with other physical sciences.
Mr. Bush is not a proponent of ID. Neither am I.
It is not a good idea to pollute GPL code with proprietary drivers. It only helps to solidify the GPU oligopoly. The prices of top end GPU's have skyrocketed in the past few years even as the quality of proprietary drivers declined. Why wouldn't the oligarchs at nVidia and ATI want to keep the status quo? There is some hope in the statement FTA:
Intel has new plans for its open-source graphics driver work, though Hohndel wouldn't reveal details.
I am not clear whether Intel is getting into the GPU business. You would think they would want to given that they are the most costly components on your high end PC. The GPU business needs another competitor. Intel would be ideal.
Compared with those of previous millennia, the changes in GSL occurring today are tiny.
It'll become your problem when half of the state of New Jersey moves to Minnesota because NJ is underwater. And we are bringing Tony Soprano with us. I hope you like calzones and AK47s.
You goombas won't cause culture shock up here. There is a fair bit of diversity here. You won't scare us with gunplay either. The woods are mayhem during hunting season. People drive around wasted drunk on the logging roads in their pickups shooting anything that moves.
It is absolutely not refutable that change is occuring. What is refuta ble is whether or not it is because of a natural cycle, or because of man-made change.
Climate is continuously variable, yes. It has always been like that. There are very many components: variablity in solar output, orbital obliquity cycles, volcanic, biogenic, and man-made components.
But the thing is, it does not matter what the cause is. If the cycle continues it will certainly, without a doubt, lead to the death of us as a civilization, whether we were the cause or not.
Why is that? Life has endured unfathomable climate change over 3.5Gyr. Hominids have endured great change in the past 5 million. Since the ice ages did not kill homo sapiens in the past 100,000 years, why do you think slight warming should? The climate has been warming for 12,000 years during which we have had the rise of civilization. Your argument is completely hollow. Change is good. Here in Minnesota I look forward to milder winters and a longer growing season.
Hence the concern. It doesn't matter if we are the root cause or not, we're the only species on the planet with the capability to reduce and possibly reverse the cycle.
Seems to me that plants have the greatest effect on atmospheric composition. You are overstating again.
MBA's aren't intellectuals. The intelligence required to get an MBA, even somewhere like Harvard, is a fraction of the intelligence required to get into Harvard as a technical major. Given that Gates has shown both far more intellectual capacity than Bush, technically, as well as having been orders of magnitude more successful as a businessman,
I am sure many "technical" people like you find great solice in such denial.
Do you have a good grasp on how the technology works? The stem cells come from disposed fetuses (which are about as human as a piece of steak), and it is the cells that are cultured, not the fetuses.
Have more moronic words ever been written?
Well look at the two choices. Gates is an intellectual,
Gates, Harvard undergraduate dropout. GDub, Yale BA, Harvard MBA. Who is the intellectual?
one of the biggest philanthropists in history, and is spending billions of dollars helping to improve education around the world (especially in the US with his new project) and helping to cure real killer diseases like Malaria.
Like Andrew Carnegie before him, Gates will disgorge some of his ill-gotten wealth to whitewash his image for posterity. However, Andrew Carnegie is reviled by history in his brutal suppression of the Homestead strike, no matter how many buildings bear his name. Gates will be similarly hated for his 25+ years of distorting and terrorising the software industry.
Bush is the crowning achievement of the anti-intellectualism movement in America, couldn't imagine doing something good for another human being,
If you call opposing the creation of a race of subhumans bread only for their stem cells to be anti-intellectual then I hope we have more of it. You are intellectually dishonest.
Fault Gates as you will for his business practices (although they're tame compared to Balmer and nearly every other CEO or ex CEO in business), but I know which of the two I'd rather spend time with.
By all accounts President Bush is a genial fellow and Gates is an arrogant, abrasive, narcissist. After reading your post you choice makes perfect sense to me.
It's amazing the American economy has come to rely on something so...unreliable.
Like a lot of people on this forum I work for a big company with over 10,000 users. Imagine the checks that must get written to M$ for Windoze and Office. Millions! It is done willingly! Multiply that by 1000's of companies of similar size. In the cost cutting environment of corporate America how the heck has M$ defied gravity, especially when there are low cost alternatives? Everything else in our technology environment is bid competatively. You would think the cost factor of dealing with a monopolist would force the change.
That China is a sovereign country with its own set of rules & customs. It has the right to determine it's own destiny without need of approval from the West.
Not a great defense of systematic oppression. You speak of the Maoists and the citizens they oppress as one unit. They are not. The Maoists dream of taking their place with other western nations in economic achievement and world influence. They wish to imitiate the material success of these societies while ignoring the values that achieved them. They deserve all of the critism that can be heaped on them.
Thanks for the advice. I found this without much difficulty. I didn't find any credible sources for your doomsday rice scenario.
The US economy is already in deep trouble; it's living on borrowed money, provided by China and other nations, while China, India, and other nations are already booming.
This provides an interesting counterpoint to your fanciful assertion. Eat my CO2!
The way things are going in America, what with the offshore prison camps, pervasive domestic surveillence, corporations trampling individual rights by suing their customers, and runaway executive power, maybe it should be stopped.
So instead of sending an army or terrorists to combat the Great Satan you send the unlikeliest warriors imaginable, climate scientists! That'll show us.
Not that the Chinese/Indian alternatives are necessarily better, but America is rapidly deteriorating.
Judging from the way Chinese and Indian nationals are falling all over each other to reside in the US one wonders if that statement is true.
I refer to Kyoto as economic Jonestown for the US. These climate fear mongers are nothing if not persistant. Seems to me higher temperature and CO2 levels would spur photosynthesis and expand crop yields. What is the predictive track record of these models?
unless we actually get some ethics back into the Hill and the West Wing.
Are you implying that the Clinton administration was more ethical than GDub's? Amusing! Lets see, at this point in his second term Clinton was running around the west wing seeing sexual favors from interns while Al Qaida grew to full strength attacking US embassies and the USS Cole. There were also Al Qaida cells operating and planning the big one in the US. No, history will remember President Bush's courageous confrontation of islamic terror and scorn the criminal inattention of Clinton.
Government seizing power after 9/11 is simply an overreaction by the agencies who failed to perform their duty to protect America from attack. They are entirely overseen by the congress and are subject to its will. Their "power" will last as long as the electorate lets them have it, which is what you expect in a democracy.
Good questions. The foreground war started on 9/11 will end when Bin Laden, Zawahiri, and Al Zarqawi are killed or captured. These are the most visible leadership figures. Many possible leadership replacements from Al Qaida's second tier have already been killed. It will not be easy for them to reconstitute. One wonders if the US is trying very hard to assassinate them. My guess is they are, but the big three are very good at hiding. That will empty Gitmo pretty well I think and the the troops pulling back. But the background stuggle of the west against Islamic fascism will continue with no end in sight. It is alive and well in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and much of the muslim world. You won't see large occupation forces in these countries but I think you will see constant conflict. The key for the United States is to not let cells take root within its borders. They seem to be pretty well dispersed at this point. Public suspicion is so high that the islamists would have to win non-Arab converts like Jose Padilla to operate freely within the US. The large Christian majority in the US is a deterent. It is still something to guard against. Uprooting cells from Europe and Canada will be more problematic as the populace and governments are more pacifist.
Here is a nice diagram that gives some context to the finds. "Missing Link" is hype and "Proof of Evolution" is very misleading. But the diagram is an amazing summary and speaks for itself.
It's one of the worst AMERICAN prisons in the world. According to Amnesty Intl, "Guantánamo Bay has become a symbol of injustice and abuse in the US administration's 'war on terror'. It must be closed down"
This is just a statement of political opinion and does not address prison conditions, which are quite good. The great majority of American disagree with this, as does the Supreme Court. AA doesn't speak to the conditions at Gitmo, because they are quite good. The symbolism of Gitmo is in their mind only. The people down there are given due process through a military tribunal. Many of these prisoners have been repatriated only encountered again on the battlefield. Remember that they are enemy combatants, not US citizens. When the war on terror is over and we have Osama on a spit, then they can go home.
The Al Qaidas down at Gitmo are gonna make this guy their girlfriend.
The floods in central Europe broke records lasting hundreds of years. Repeatedly in 1998,1999, 2002 and now 2006. Just try searching for floods in Central Europe. Or prehaps for heavy snowfall this year. Or perhaps about the wild-fires in recent years. No. Never happened. In your basement.
How do you correlate floods and heavy snowfall (last year it was snow drought in Europe) with an increase of atmospheric CO2 of a few parts per million? Total madness. Flood damage occurs in Europe like in the US because people live in flood zones. Rivers flood. Shock! What calamity to you blame the floods 100's of years ago, the Ottomans? Think clearly!
You mean just like people who challenge the global warming hysteria on slashdot. Hopefully now global warming can take its place next to DDT, killer bees, and acid rain on the list of scientific catastrophies that never materialized.
Still, you've got to admit that this would be a huge psychological deterant. I mean, if I fired RPGs at a tank, and the RPGs (seemingly without cause) pre-detontated before they ever reached the tank, I'd be looking to get the hell out of there and warn all my friends!
How would you like to be an insurgent trying to sneak up on an M1 and suddenly find yourself looking like a marshmellow in a microwave oven? I am not surprised that the army has showcased this stuff as a defensive weapon but think of the potential of replacing fragmentation weapons.
Something tells me this is one of those Chinese Government edicts that will be largely ignored once Mr. Bush leaves China.
Hu Jintao is coming here. Addressing software sharing is one of the few visible things he can do that will cost him nothing. Currency revaluation is what he is desperate to avoid. Why the US sees fit to give this guy a victory lap I'll never know.
Hm. Is there a reason why the United States is just letting the Chinese practice their blatantly economic-nationalist trade policy, all the while sitting under the pretenses of free trade?
Because they make shit cheap and spend their profits on our treasury notes. Your home mortgage rate is 3% less than it might otherwise be. (Thanks fellas!). Having said that running a $200 billion trade deficit simply cannot be tolerated. The reds are gonna need to seriously revalue their currency or the US will slap a hefty tariff on them. Currency manipulation is a no no. If they revalue their currency a billion people will suddenly have a lot more money to spend. Not an easy situation if you are a commie control freak who wants to keep peasants from rioting.