I just said that your post doesn't make sense. So either you are bad at communicating your thoughts (in which case you can have attempt at it) or you are talking nonsense (in which case it doesn't matter that you taught QM).
Please note that I am still willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and grant that there may have been a point in there somewhere. But please explain what it was, because the first time you hid it really well.
Not true, actually. In reality people can, should and usually do think about their plans. If they want to get drunk, they use a bus or a taxi. You don't just drive to a party if you are planning on drinking alcohol. And you don't drink alcohol if you are planning on driving back yourself.
There are a few cases like you describe (was planning to leave a car and pick it up later, drunk and thought "why the hell not"), but they should be a minority.
Nope. You are stupid after all.:) You second post didn't make any sense. Everyone told you that it doesn't and is inaccurate in the first place. But you just can't get it. Go ahead, insult everyone. But truth be told the olny people you should insult are your mother for giving you bad genes and your teacher for not beating you enough to learn something.:) Stupid.
How about link No3 for starters? A Taipei Times article titled "Few foreign insurgents seen in Iraq" (a year-old though).
This is a usage of the word "peace" of which I was not previously aware. Maybe you missed the Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait, Desert Storm, 10 years of the "no fly zone" with the resultant low-level constant warfare, and the recent unpleasantness?
Well, it's not peace in diplomatic term, but peace as in "peaceful life". Iraqis didn't have to suffer the disorder of the war, until their country was invaded by the US. During the 3 conflicts named by you above the majority of the population didn't risk death under bombs or from an angry military patrol on a power-trip. It was that peace, and also order and relative prosperity.
I would suggest you open your own eyes. Looking a few posts up thread will reveal that I am certainly no fan of the Bush administration. Fair enough.:( Talk about friendly fire.
I always envied people who can tell a blatant lie with a straight face, Mr Guy.
You make an outrageous claim about the brain, supporting it with false evidence about people being afraid of clowns and wax figures. Where is the evidence, do you have a reference handy showing that X% of the college students are afraid of clowns or something like this? Are you personally afraid of clowns? Do you cower and cry when you see one?
Next you make an absolutely unwarranted conclusion that since "many people are afraid of clowns and wax figures" (the statement of questionably validity to begin with), then certainly children must be scared by a Qrio robot. Of course, how could I not know it? It's the brain flagging function that is responsible for it. Thanks for telling us. BTW, do you have a handy reference (a scientific journal or a textbook) about this flagging?
Thanks for spreading pseudoscience here. And thanks the clueless mod who modded this particular clown up.
Which of course explains why the vast majority of those "Defenders of the homeland" are from other countries.
As far, as I am aware, this is simply not the case, and the US military in Iraq admits this is not the case. Of course, the administration is more interesting in encouraging fear of the international terrorism, that's why it constantly talks about the foreign fighters.
Seriously, do you know anything about these "foreign fighters"? What is the name of their leader, for example? When a group of foreign fighters was operating in Chechnya, everyone knew that it was led by Hattab. Who leads the foreign fighters in Iraq, what country are the fighters from? Don't tell me that they operate in secret and noone knows about them.:) We know these things about Iraqi insurgents, we know who are the leaders, where they have their "bases", what are their motives and their demands. Why don't we know anything about the foreign fighters?
I already said, I don't like those "defenders" (or their methods), but you can't deny it's their land (even though you do) and they have the right to fight the invaders (the US Army). But by some weird logic, everyone who opposes the invaders is labeled a "terrorist".
They are also not really Islamists (deep in their hearts), although many use the ideology to gain popularity. In fact, the best government the Iraqi had was the government of Saddam Hussein. Yes, he was a dictator, but at least the country lived in peace.
a laughable notion, given his relations with al-Qaeda. Zak3056, I love my fellow human beings, that's why I am not going to insult you, despite you having just insulted my intelligence. What sort of ties are there? Any objective observer now admits that there are no ties whatsoever. Please read anything other than White House press releases. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that there are ties. Open your eyes, Zak! Get your own brain, don't just retransmit everything that Bush's cronies tell you.
I mostly agree with you, but why did you have to badmouth Socialist Russia? People there din't have to carry the papers with them (and almost noone ever did) and the patrol militia (police) officers generally didn't carry guns (criminal investigators did when on a mission).
And there weren't any ghettos where it's dangerous to walk - you were safe and welcome pretty much anywhere in the country.
In other other words, because this information has leaked, the lives of the people, both Coalition and Iraqi, who man highway checkpoints in Iraq have been put in even greater danger.
They are the aggressors, they deserve everything bad that happens to them. The fight in Iraq is not carried out by terrorists, but by insurgents, guerilla warriors, defenders of the homeland, if you wish. Although I don't particularly like them, the war they wage on Americans is justified.
Guess what? Clinton's parting memo to GW specifically mentioned Al Queda as a major threat I am surprised to learn that the text of the memo released to the public? Any links?
You may be underestimating the horror of imprisoning the people there. Watch The Power of Nightmares by BBC. It looks weird, but it really seems that most of the terrorist threat was made up. It's very likely that 90-95% of all people in Guantanamo Bay are innocent. Do you know how flimsy the evidence was in those few cases of suspected terrorists caught on the US soil?
The whole thing is unjustified. If we ignore the US government propaganda for a second, the whole campaign was simply an act of unprovoked irrational aggression in violation of international laws. As Viggo Mortensen said about America commenting on parallels between war in Iraq and LOTR, "We are the evil guys".
With all the miraculous things he did for the world in the realm of science, one wonders what we'd have if he'd devoted his mind to politics, or computers.
Actually, you make a good point. From Einstein's "Why Socialism?":
"The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor--not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules...
The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists... Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights... This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.
You are talking about the principle of indeterminancy and about Plank time, but then you pretend you are talking within the Newtonian view. Pardon me, but it doesn't make any sense. You apparently have heard about all these concepts, but I don't think you have as good an understanding of them as you believe. It looks like you are rather ignorant in physics (or just very clumsy in discussions about it).
Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. My point was that there are only a few widgets that are genuinly useful to a large audience. Yes, there can be hundreds of widgets that serve a narrow niche, but if you look at the distribution of download numbers (at Konfabulator's site - apple's site doesn't seem to have visible download counters), you will realise that they aren't terribly important.
I mean, seriously, how many people need to know "the realtime distance between spacecraft Deep Impact and comet 9P/Tempel 1"?
I am not against small easy to write applications. I am also not against the Dashboard model of accessing them. I just don't think combining them is going to produce something terribly useful and the example of Konfabulator proves that it probably won't. Dashboard and its widgets are useful, but not very important and do not deserve the hype.
1) Soviet Union was not a colonialist state. It didn't "extract" resources from 3rd world countries, on the contrary, it poured resources into them. Ask any Egyptian, Cuban, Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese or a person from any other country friendly to the USSR. Soviet Union provided immeasurable resources - specialists, technologies, training, equipment, everything in order to help its friends build powerful societies. The United States, as you well realise, does exactly the opposite.
2) Yeah, sorry for forgetting about Afghanistan. That's one example where the Soviet Union did invade. It was much more complicated, however, and it was indeed done to remove a threat to the security of the Soviet Union (as you can easily see on any world map). Another example was Finland - again Soviet Union had no other choice and tried to resolve matters peacefully. There were no unprovoked attacks on countries on the other side of the world with extermination of civilian populace and stuff. Heck, Soviet soldiers and officers were summarily executed for pillage in 1945 in Germany. Soviet Union wasn't an aggressive country, despite the lies perpetrated by neocons in late 1980s (watch the brilliant BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares to see how it was carried out).
The general point is still valid - Soviet Union was usually a friend, while the United States generally acts as an enemy.
This is a lie. Soviet Union never planned on a world revolution after the WW2. And it always stuck to the agreements with the West, because peace was seen as more important than supporting communism. Soviet Union was no invading 3rd world countries, unlike the US (Vietnam, Korea, etc.), it was supporting democratically elected socialist governments. Unlike the US that for some reason supported authoritarian dictators (Pinochet, Noriega, Batista, etc.).
Soviet Union was not planning on attacking the US or European countries. But if you read now open documents from the Cold War planners (50 years has passed, they are available), you will realise that it was the US that was planning on destroying the Soviet Union. It was the Soviet Union that had to defend itself.
If you use some common sense, you will realise that Soviet Union had no reason to invade countries - after all, it was supporting the 3rd world countries, by building factories, hydroelectric dams, providing engineers, training local specialists, etc., while the US was milking the colonies for resources.
Capitalist countries are imperialistic. Soviet Union could not be and wasn't and the fact that you believe the American propaganda is very sad.
How about Luis Posada Carriles? He is wanted by Venezuela for a plane bombing where about 70 people died. He is wanted in connection with numours assassination attemts by Cuba. He has proven ties with CIA and he is in Florida right now, seeking asylum. Interestingly, the US media is silent on the issue, with only a few article by Miami Herald and several brief mentions in some minor papers.
The United States is questioned in the UN, Cuba and Venezuela demand a response, but the US government is silent. They know better. They understand that if the media is not allowed to raise a stink, the issue will die down and noone will be aware of the crimes committed by CIA. Noone will realise that US does support terrorists, real terrorists that blow planes. And if anyone will tell the US public, it will react with indignation, because "everybody knows that the United States doesn't get involved in terrorism".
If you disengage yourself from reality and just look at the concept of Dashboard, it looks amazingly cool. If you look at the examples, it's really stylish. But then you come back to Earth and realise that these examples are pretty much everything that will be done with Dashboard. Check the Konfabulator gallery. It is mostly filled with more clocks, more calendars and more RSS feeds.
Even the examples that Apple provides are nothing special. And there is no reason why they all should be integrated with Dashboard. A much more sensible approach would be to implement them as separate applications (even if using that XML/JS combination), and then create Dashboard as a universal way to engage any applications (and not just Dashboard widgets).
You seriously overestimate the ability of a random Slashdot user such as yourself to piss me off.:) The appearance of emotion does not necessarily signify their existence.
Feel free to share "the best lines" with your friends. of course. But as for "doing something right", that doesn't logically follow. The more likely possibility is that you are idiots (to a certain degree) and I am just pointing out the flaws in your reasoning...
My former girlfriend told me I do, but I don't really care. You see, unlike many other people, I have other things to be proud of, such as intelligence, erudition and creativity. I wouldn't have that if I spent 3+ hours every day in front of the idiot box.
Why is that? When you don't waste all your free time watching TV, you can learn so much more with books and Internet. It is only natural to feel the need to share that experience with others. Your moral relativism is wrong. You imply that any choice is equally valid - watch TV, not watch TV. Obviously this can't be true - since the lifestyle changes are so significant, one option must be better than the other. And that makes it OK to claim moral superiority, IMNSHO.
Slashdot Mirror
How about copy-pasting that or at least linking to where you explain your point?
I just said that your post doesn't make sense. So either you are bad at communicating your thoughts (in which case you can have attempt at it) or you are talking nonsense (in which case it doesn't matter that you taught QM).
Please note that I am still willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and grant that there may have been a point in there somewhere. But please explain what it was, because the first time you hid it really well.
Not true, actually. In reality people can, should and usually do think about their plans. If they want to get drunk, they use a bus or a taxi. You don't just drive to a party if you are planning on drinking alcohol. And you don't drink alcohol if you are planning on driving back yourself.
There are a few cases like you describe (was planning to leave a car and pick it up later, drunk and thought "why the hell not"), but they should be a minority.
I don't get it. Do you mean some site or a discussion board? Could you just give me the Straight Dope on that.
Nope. You are stupid after all. :) You second post didn't make any sense. Everyone told you that it doesn't and is inaccurate in the first place. But you just can't get it. Go ahead, insult everyone. But truth be told the olny people you should insult are your mother for giving you bad genes and your teacher for not beating you enough to learn something. :) Stupid.
Then may be you can explain again this post? I absolutely fail to see your point and it looks like you don't know what you are talking about.
How about link No3 for starters? A Taipei Times article titled "Few foreign insurgents seen in Iraq" (a year-old though).
:( Talk about friendly fire.
This is a usage of the word "peace" of which I was not previously aware. Maybe you missed the Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait, Desert Storm, 10 years of the "no fly zone" with the resultant low-level constant warfare, and the recent unpleasantness?
Well, it's not peace in diplomatic term, but peace as in "peaceful life". Iraqis didn't have to suffer the disorder of the war, until their country was invaded by the US. During the 3 conflicts named by you above the majority of the population didn't risk death under bombs or from an angry military patrol on a power-trip. It was that peace, and also order and relative prosperity.
I would suggest you open your own eyes. Looking a few posts up thread will reveal that I am certainly no fan of the Bush administration.
Fair enough.
I always envied people who can tell a blatant lie with a straight face, Mr Guy.
You make an outrageous claim about the brain, supporting it with false evidence about people being afraid of clowns and wax figures. Where is the evidence, do you have a reference handy showing that X% of the college students are afraid of clowns or something like this? Are you personally afraid of clowns? Do you cower and cry when you see one?
Next you make an absolutely unwarranted conclusion that since "many people are afraid of clowns and wax figures" (the statement of questionably validity to begin with), then certainly children must be scared by a Qrio robot. Of course, how could I not know it? It's the brain flagging function that is responsible for it. Thanks for telling us. BTW, do you have a handy reference (a scientific journal or a textbook) about this flagging?
Thanks for spreading pseudoscience here. And thanks the clueless mod who modded this particular clown up.
Which of course explains why the vast majority of those "Defenders of the homeland" are from other countries.
:) We know these things about Iraqi insurgents, we know who are the leaders, where they have their "bases", what are their motives and their demands. Why don't we know anything about the foreign fighters?
As far, as I am aware, this is simply not the case, and the US military in Iraq admits this is not the case. Of course, the administration is more interesting in encouraging fear of the international terrorism, that's why it constantly talks about the foreign fighters.
Seriously, do you know anything about these "foreign fighters"? What is the name of their leader, for example? When a group of foreign fighters was operating in Chechnya, everyone knew that it was led by Hattab. Who leads the foreign fighters in Iraq, what country are the fighters from? Don't tell me that they operate in secret and noone knows about them.
I already said, I don't like those "defenders" (or their methods), but you can't deny it's their land (even though you do) and they have the right to fight the invaders (the US Army). But by some weird logic, everyone who opposes the invaders is labeled a "terrorist".
They are also not really Islamists (deep in their hearts), although many use the ideology to gain popularity. In fact, the best government the Iraqi had was the government of Saddam Hussein. Yes, he was a dictator, but at least the country lived in peace.
a laughable notion, given his relations with al-Qaeda.
Zak3056, I love my fellow human beings, that's why I am not going to insult you, despite you having just insulted my intelligence. What sort of ties are there? Any objective observer now admits that there are no ties whatsoever. Please read anything other than White House press releases. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that there are ties. Open your eyes, Zak! Get your own brain, don't just retransmit everything that Bush's cronies tell you.
I mostly agree with you, but why did you have to badmouth Socialist Russia? People there din't have to carry the papers with them (and almost noone ever did) and the patrol militia (police) officers generally didn't carry guns (criminal investigators did when on a mission).
And there weren't any ghettos where it's dangerous to walk - you were safe and welcome pretty much anywhere in the country.
In other other words, because this information has leaked, the lives of the people, both Coalition and Iraqi, who man highway checkpoints in Iraq have been put in even greater danger.
They are the aggressors, they deserve everything bad that happens to them. The fight in Iraq is not carried out by terrorists, but by insurgents, guerilla warriors, defenders of the homeland, if you wish. Although I don't particularly like them, the war they wage on Americans is justified.
Guess what? Clinton's parting memo to GW specifically mentioned Al Queda as a major threat
I am surprised to learn that the text of the memo released to the public? Any links?
You may be underestimating the horror of imprisoning the people there. Watch The Power of Nightmares by BBC. It looks weird, but it really seems that most of the terrorist threat was made up. It's very likely that 90-95% of all people in Guantanamo Bay are innocent. Do you know how flimsy the evidence was in those few cases of suspected terrorists caught on the US soil?
The whole thing is unjustified. If we ignore the US government propaganda for a second, the whole campaign was simply an act of unprovoked irrational aggression in violation of international laws. As Viggo Mortensen said about America commenting on parallels between war in Iraq and LOTR, "We are the evil guys".
Actually, you make a good point. From Einstein's "Why Socialism?":
You are talking about the principle of indeterminancy and about Plank time, but then you pretend you are talking within the Newtonian view. Pardon me, but it doesn't make any sense. You apparently have heard about all these concepts, but I don't think you have as good an understanding of them as you believe. It looks like you are rather ignorant in physics (or just very clumsy in discussions about it).
Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. My point was that there are only a few widgets that are genuinly useful to a large audience. Yes, there can be hundreds of widgets that serve a narrow niche, but if you look at the distribution of download numbers (at Konfabulator's site - apple's site doesn't seem to have visible download counters), you will realise that they aren't terribly important.
I mean, seriously, how many people need to know "the realtime distance between spacecraft Deep Impact and comet 9P/Tempel 1"?
I am not against small easy to write applications. I am also not against the Dashboard model of accessing them. I just don't think combining them is going to produce something terribly useful and the example of Konfabulator proves that it probably won't. Dashboard and its widgets are useful, but not very important and do not deserve the hype.
No, it isn't. Most of these widgets existed for Konfabulator. I don't see anything special.
1) Soviet Union was not a colonialist state. It didn't "extract" resources from 3rd world countries, on the contrary, it poured resources into them. Ask any Egyptian, Cuban, Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese or a person from any other country friendly to the USSR. Soviet Union provided immeasurable resources - specialists, technologies, training, equipment, everything in order to help its friends build powerful societies. The United States, as you well realise, does exactly the opposite.
2) Yeah, sorry for forgetting about Afghanistan. That's one example where the Soviet Union did invade. It was much more complicated, however, and it was indeed done to remove a threat to the security of the Soviet Union (as you can easily see on any world map). Another example was Finland - again Soviet Union had no other choice and tried to resolve matters peacefully. There were no unprovoked attacks on countries on the other side of the world with extermination of civilian populace and stuff. Heck, Soviet soldiers and officers were summarily executed for pillage in 1945 in Germany. Soviet Union wasn't an aggressive country, despite the lies perpetrated by neocons in late 1980s (watch the brilliant BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares to see how it was carried out).
The general point is still valid - Soviet Union was usually a friend, while the United States generally acts as an enemy.
This is a lie. Soviet Union never planned on a world revolution after the WW2. And it always stuck to the agreements with the West, because peace was seen as more important than supporting communism. Soviet Union was no invading 3rd world countries, unlike the US (Vietnam, Korea, etc.), it was supporting democratically elected socialist governments. Unlike the US that for some reason supported authoritarian dictators (Pinochet, Noriega, Batista, etc.).
Soviet Union was not planning on attacking the US or European countries. But if you read now open documents from the Cold War planners (50 years has passed, they are available), you will realise that it was the US that was planning on destroying the Soviet Union. It was the Soviet Union that had to defend itself.
If you use some common sense, you will realise that Soviet Union had no reason to invade countries - after all, it was supporting the 3rd world countries, by building factories, hydroelectric dams, providing engineers, training local specialists, etc., while the US was milking the colonies for resources.
Capitalist countries are imperialistic. Soviet Union could not be and wasn't and the fact that you believe the American propaganda is very sad.
How about Luis Posada Carriles? He is wanted by Venezuela for a plane bombing where about 70 people died. He is wanted in connection with numours assassination attemts by Cuba. He has proven ties with CIA and he is in Florida right now, seeking asylum. Interestingly, the US media is silent on the issue, with only a few article by Miami Herald and several brief mentions in some minor papers.
The United States is questioned in the UN, Cuba and Venezuela demand a response, but the US government is silent. They know better. They understand that if the media is not allowed to raise a stink, the issue will die down and noone will be aware of the crimes committed by CIA. Noone will realise that US does support terrorists, real terrorists that blow planes. And if anyone will tell the US public, it will react with indignation, because "everybody knows that the United States doesn't get involved in terrorism".
If you disengage yourself from reality and just look at the concept of Dashboard, it looks amazingly cool. If you look at the examples, it's really stylish. But then you come back to Earth and realise that these examples are pretty much everything that will be done with Dashboard. Check the Konfabulator gallery. It is mostly filled with more clocks, more calendars and more RSS feeds.
Even the examples that Apple provides are nothing special. And there is no reason why they all should be integrated with Dashboard. A much more sensible approach would be to implement them as separate applications (even if using that XML/JS combination), and then create Dashboard as a universal way to engage any applications (and not just Dashboard widgets).
You seriously overestimate the ability of a random Slashdot user such as yourself to piss me off. :) The appearance of emotion does not necessarily signify their existence.
Feel free to share "the best lines" with your friends. of course. But as for "doing something right", that doesn't logically follow. The more likely possibility is that you are idiots (to a certain degree) and I am just pointing out the flaws in your reasoning...
My former girlfriend told me I do, but I don't really care. You see, unlike many other people, I have other things to be proud of, such as intelligence, erudition and creativity. I wouldn't have that if I spent 3+ hours every day in front of the idiot box.
Why is that? When you don't waste all your free time watching TV, you can learn so much more with books and Internet. It is only natural to feel the need to share that experience with others. Your moral relativism is wrong. You imply that any choice is equally valid - watch TV, not watch TV. Obviously this can't be true - since the lifestyle changes are so significant, one option must be better than the other. And that makes it OK to claim moral superiority, IMNSHO.
Well, nobody said that the ship had to stand perfectly still while the guy was sleeping, eating, reading and stuff. :)