Interesting blanket assertion there. What's your proof?
The very people who make the current IQ tests don't entirely agree with you. For example, the WAIS (by far the most common test for adult intelligence, at least in the USA) defines three subcategorys of measurable intelligence which each get seperate index scores:
(a) Verbal Comprehension
(b) Spatial Perceptual
(c) Freedom from Distraction
So freedom from distraction over the typical two to four hour range of the test is 1/3 of the total score. Wechsler also predefines this short term measure to be extrapolatable to longer term behavior. This is presented essentially as a circular arguement - (c) is worth devoting a third of the questions/scoring to because it has long term predictive value, and it has long term predictive value because it makes up such a large part of the test. It's only after he essentially made that assertion spread over a series of paragraphs that Wechsler starts claiming that there's something called "drive", which is outside the range of the test to measure. He then remarks that "No amount of drive will make a dullard into a mathematician".
So, Dr. Wechsler's arguement is apparently that Freedom from Distraction has a great deal to do with Intelligence, but not with "Drive". (That's certainly counterintuitive to the way we normally define those words). He's also commenting on dullards, which I think we can safely assume means below scoring average people, and thus (by leaving the subject with only that remark, without further qualification) saying that what is irrelevant to predicting their success is equally irrelevant to the average or gifted individual - the chief point on which I disagree.
While it's not particularly relevant to the above points, it's interesting to note that the WAIS scoring manual remarks about one of the 11 subsections "It (Vocabulary) correlates very highly with Full Scale IQ". Presumably, the other 10 subsections don't have nearly such a high correlation. How can we justify claiming there's a strong correlation between IQ score and success if we can't even claim a strong correlation between 10 parts of the test and "Full Scale IQ"?
For just one example of a flaw in IQ test interpretation, how can a one or two hour test (or, often, an even shorter one), possibly measure the difference between two individuals who are not necessarily mentally quick, but where one will keep worrying at a problem for hours, days or even weeks until he gets it, and the other will just let the problem drop when success doesn't come quickly? This difference generally gets called by other names, such as mental endurance or tenacity, rather than intelligence, to avoid addressing its real significance. In reality, it certainly is a factor of overall intelligence and it certainly has a significant impact on success in the real world.
So, if I'm accused by the RIAA, they have a right to subpoena my credit card records and try to prove I didn't buy those CDs until after they filed? So, if I'm not a downloader, but am afraid the RIAA will someday file a suit, I'd better go find a timestamp equipped camera, photgraphy my entire CD collection, and put the photos, along with a notarized affidavit from three witnesses in a vault somewhere? Otherwise, I guess I'll just rely on presenting a reasonable defense - but what happens if I get a juror who has indicated he will bend over backwards to take the explanation of one party over another, more reasonable one, so long as that one party is a multi-billion dollar corporation?
If I'm ever accused of illegal downloading, I plan to ask the judge for a court order to determine if any member of my jury has posted on slashdot under the name tom 75.
(And yes, it was quite funny here on slashdot, but in court people normally have something called presumption of innocence, and that's already being obliterated by the current lawsuits. I hate to treat your post over seriously, but it's ammunition for idiots who won't get the real point).
1. (Older) customer bought works on LP, Cassette, 8 track tape, etc. and wants copies that will play on gear he has today. (Note: Customer also cares less about lossy formats, cause 8 track, etc. weren/t all that good to start with.) (That's about 5% of downloading by some admittedly not too formal estimates - that doesn't really explain why people who own CDs would download them, but it does explain why some people who own other copies would). 2. Customer owns CD player at home, none in car, nor a portable. (by some sources, that's 15-20% of downloaders who give that as one of their reasons, but admittedly, the number for which that is their real, primary reason is likely smaller). 3. Customer jogs, hikes, rockclimbs, etc. - CD players are bulky (in those situations), and customer would have to pay extra for anti-skip features, weather proofing, etc, if they bought one, or get something really not suitable. (I'd informally estimate 10% of downloaders fall in this category, but maybe the base couch potato to active ratio is steeper than that, although if it is, this country's doomed and we should quit worrying about little things like downloading). 4. Customer wants to be able to listen at home computer while using it for other tasks, does not have CD player in room, OR is using computer's CD drive for software that requires CD be kept in drive while running game, etc. Maybe the customer's only player IS the one in the PC. 5. Customer specifically has game (i.e. Doom or Quake series), that will use computer audio files as replacement soundtrack, and wants them for that purpose only. Why learn to rip CDs when you only want about 6 tracks ever? 6. Customer has 5 year old autistic daughter that loves to mess with in room CD player, watching the little drawer pop out 500 times an hour or so, and wants to put everything possible related to their music collection in a locked closet..MP3s on a hard drive look about 1,000% cheaper than massively air conditioning a small closet with a 500 disk CD changer and its remote, and about 1,000% more convenient than keeping the CDs in some other locked area (to keep them cool, they can't be left in a constantly powered up player in a small closed up area, whereas there are dirt cheap older PCs with low powered processors that will run quite stablely in those conditions) and unlocking the closet every change. (This is obviously 0.00001% or so of the world's downloaders, but I know of one real case just like this, and another who had to give her autistic son only home duped copies of Disney videotapes or watch him destroy the originals at the rate of about 2/week.).
I can't really explain all the medical reasons why standard CD players don't work well for some people, (as I'm not an MD or physio-therapist) but it seems pretty obvious that arthritus, spinal cord injuries, and Parkensons all might make handling CDs or using CD player style buttons impractical, and there are probably several dozen conditions I havent even mentioned you could add to those. As charity, I've personally fixed up over half a dozen medically impaired people's PCs to play their collections conveniently, with mostly mouse only operation, oversized or high contrast displays, simplified icons or other such support, and helped them copy their collections (I haven't helped them download, I've installed legal free software rippers, made copies from the CDs they definitely own, and usually showed a regular care giver how to do more of the same as needed). I'm not about to rewire that many CD players with oversized, soft touch buttons, equally free of charge. Some of this sort of problem can be fixed by such old fashioned ways if you have lots of money, but who has a major illness and lots of money? And how many people trying to help in such situations know enough about the current law AND about tech to come up with solutions that don't involve downloading the music?
Now in many of these cases, it can make more sense t
No demand normally doesn't equate to no extra benefits - sometimes, all it means is the potential buyers don't know about the benefits yet, even though the benefits are very real. (Of course, this is the Duke Nukem Forever of OS's we're talkng about here - I'll believe any part of it is real when it actually ships with that feature). Still, there was no demand for "Mr. Fusion" until Doc Brown amd Marty endorsed it.
Like it says at the bottom of a big page of information when I click on your name: "Subscribers can view entire comment history for all users" It doesn't appear all that hard to manually look for users with inactive histories. A good chunk of Friend and Foe listings for low numbered users are likely to be for other low numbered users, making it easy to look for whole blocks of possible inactives.
With ID and Nym generally linked, it's pretty easy to tell who else is a low numbered user, check on their activity, and get a preliminary list. Then it's likely some of those accounts will have easy to guess dictionary form passwords. User logs and what threads the user commented in may show areas of interest to make password guessing more feasable.
I have no idea whether it has actually happened. I find it likely that early members were somewhat more oriented to the political extremes than now, but that's more likely to include some who were extreme right wingsers than a mix of only moderates and traditional and non-traditional left only. Your 'rover boys' could be uber-geeks and 'low brow' republicans, the two aren't as exclusive as you may think.
After I get through with this speculative answer though, I'm running a few searches. First terms will be "Looking to purchase" and "low numbered slashdot accounts", with refinements from there. If your obviously crackpot idea has even a smidgen of anything to it, that just might reveal something. Not that I believe you in the slightest - next you'll be claiming Faux News isn't fair and unbiased, but just to show how unlikely it all is, I'd look at good old fashioned social engineering like this before assuming cracking.
There's an axiom in the military: Once may be just happenstance, twice may be coincidence, but three times is enemy action!
From the counts I'm seeing other places, Fox has made this same 'mistake' at least five times in two days, labeling not just Foley but Hastert as (D). The exact count is confused as some of these 'mistakes' were on repeating display bars and no one is evidently sure just how many times some of them cycled before they were corrected. Either Fox is crewed by people who couldn't get a job on a high school paper, or this is way, way past the bounds of 'accidental'. I'm sure when the Democrats mention this to the Dept. of Justice, Gonzales will order a full investigation into the matter. It will begin right after the Republican party wins every single one of of those disputed seats, unless it is delayed by a few whiners complaining about how the exit polls don't match the results.
Yes, various things are probably not all equally bad. For that matter, some TV shows are probably less stimulating than others, some games require more use of one particular brain area than other games, and so on. Studies such as this one have to chunk some results together, and so any differences between playing Civilizaton and GTA aren't shown in the final report. If watching CSI - Bugtussle is worse than watching the McNieeble-Flenor Hour, a study such as this can't particularly prove it. So the question is, what should you do, assuming you have children and care significantly that is. Disregard the whole study? Embrace it totally, even if common sense tells you differently? You already know the answer, don't you? Keep it in mind as possibly significant. look for evidence to prove or disprove it in your child's specific case, and if it starts looking true for your kid, try following its reccomendations and see if they work - Oh, and keep enough of an eye on your kid that you catch problems while they are little and have some room to try alternative solutions.
I really doubt that's a vast majority any more. Those jobs that don't actually require learning time off the job are either total dead ends, or ones where it's hard to get enough halfway decent people without training them on the clock. Even for the latter, you mostly have some opportunites for advancement and promotion, where additional effort on your own will increase your success. You'ld better hope it's not a vast majority either, as you're describing the kind of jobs that will soon be replaced by machines. I certainly hope your own job doesn't feel like that, even one hour in forty.
Plus, if the kids see mommy and daddy (or whatever) bothering to learn things on their own, whether for the existing job, a new one, as insurance against being trapped in a moribund industry, or just from curiosity, they won't give you nearly as much arguement about studying, and they will earn your good study habits naturally. Even a little good example goes a long way here. Just letting your children see you read matters more than most people think.
Frankly, a lot of the objections I'm reading here sound like people who don't have any good study habits to pass on, don't much like learning or encouraging their children, and are content to let a dead end job become a dead end life. Sometimes I still come here clinging to a tiny, forlorn, dusty hope that Slashdot averages better than that - way to crush my hope guys! (And no, I'm not new here.)
The common result of String Theory models is a totally untestable prediction - that there are an infinite number of 'parellel' universes besides our own.* The only to avoid this prediction is to claim that the fundamental constants are all non-randomly selected **. ID makes only one untestable prediction, one God (OK, so some advanced forms of ID predict a few thousand gods with various numbers of arms and three aspects of an Uber-God at the top, or one God, his kid, a ghost, and X number of angels of seven different types assisting, but even these elaborations make a finite number of predictions). Applying Occam's Razor, any finite number of untestable predictions is greatly to be preferred over an infinite number of untestable predictions, and applying My Razor, we should throw out the theory that makes an infinite number of untestable predictions first, way before we reject any of the others (Artifakt's Razor - nothing makes a situation more absurd, more quickly than dragging unnecessary infinites into it). Now we just have to test all the deistic religions and see which one is the simplest theory that encompasses all observations. This should be very simple. Of course we should leave the door open for new models, just ones that don't veer towards such unnecessary complexities as infinities imply. Still, I'm confident that once we are not wasting time on the totally untestable, we should be able to settle the remaining questions in a few years, without the delays and even the potential for bloodshead*** that infinite models impose.
* Some String theory models require an infinite number of parallels formed at the same time as our own, a very, very big finite number of ever branching quantum divergences, an either very big or infinite number of scale repetitions of the observable part in the greater universe, and possibly a fourth either very, very big or infinite number of universes formed at different times than our own. A few predict an unobservable multi-cosmic evolutionary trend or two as well.
More seriously, "unobservable" is the cosmologists own choice of words there - If you are one of those people who holds string theory is science because not immediately observable does not equal not observable, the actual practitioners of String Theory are the ones saying Nope, Nada, Never! (In other words, ST scientists aren't trying, in that they are, at least in part, making what they themselves claim are forever untestable predictions. This hasn't stopped a few of them from seeking more funding to not prove the unprovable).
I'm only half being facetious there - there are some real con games going on in this field, by people only one step removed from the "Infinite free energy from the Zero Point" crowd of patent scammers.
** Anyone wishing to is certainly allowed to propose non-deistic entities that can non-randomly select the fundamental physical constants, if they so desire. It sounds like "midget NBA player" to me, but at least it's not infinite and untestable.
*** Rumors have come to my attention that proponents of rival theorys have apparently stooped to such unscientific methods of testing as fisticuffs and possibly worse - All I can say is what do you expect when people propose such poppycock as infinite unobservable parellel universes in an effort to muddy the watters of Cosmology.
There are basically two kinds of people when it comes to wanting household robots (plus the third kind, people who just don't want them or see any point in them). Some people envision relatively non-humanoid (R2D2 variant) robots, talored to do jobs such as raking leaves or cooking, and some people want the C3PO look. I'd submit that what the latter class really wants is what you halfway address in your post, human slaves and better sex toys.
The more those things look like humans, the more they will encourage destructive illusions. I'm thinking of both the more minor illusion that the human looking ones are automagically smarter than the mechanical looking ones, and the dreadful illusion that real humans can safely be stripped of free will. The society that survives will be the one that bans making any being that is not genuinely sapient in a human image - those that don't will fall when the average citizen becomes someone with a two year old's tolerance for frustration, and simultaniously regards his fellows as objects that are suddenly acting inconveniently.
Sex-bot, meet assassin upgrade hack.
All the departments that are under the Homeland Security Czar can (and I argue should) be counted as "basically national defense". When the people doing the "War on Drugs" or catching illegal aliens are also spending much of their time gathering and reporting terrorism related intelligence to the CIA, they're really part of defense. Defense spending should include at the very least, about 20%-25% of FEMA spending, and over a third of the DEA budget (DEA agents operating military radar stations, and extra 'border patrol' flights which are specifically not scheduled to coincide with drug related intel, ain't cheap), plus maybe 30%-40% of BATF, at least 15%-20% of FCC, etc.
What about the secret 'black' projects that exist? Anyone who knows the exact numbers on these projects can't say anything without violating a NDA or worse, but consider, is it more likely the government always borrows money from a non-secret defense project budget for a secret one, or that they conceal at least some of the black projects in parts of the budget ostensibly entirely seperate from defense? And there's nothing corresponding for non-defense - the NEA doesnt have black projects.
Weather and Climate are two very different things. No one close to responsible is claiming they can predict the weather 20 years out, that's a straw man. Some people are claiming they can predict Climate trends. They may not have done this successfully, but there's nothing "absurd" about the idea itself.
I can't predict accurately when any given person will die. I can stlll show that various diseases have various mortality rates, or make money if I own an insurance company, or state that the population explosion is a fact.
You might also notice that, by your arguement, we not only can't prove global warming exists, we can't prove there is such a thing as a hurricane season, a tornado season, forest fire season, or that 'indian summer' or 'el-nino' are meaningful terms.
Incidentally, some weather is very predictable, often for a lot more than 3 days. Just this last late summer, there was a hot, dry cell that moved across the entire USA, from west to east. Weathermen predicted it would go all the way to the east coast at near constant speed, that temperatures would be well above normal, rain would be low, and that offshore storms would be deflected by the high pressure for the first week or so of the Atlantic hurricane season, and called a lot of events accurately two and three weeks or even more out (unless you want to define accurately as "precise to the last mm of fainfall and 1/10th of a degree). Weather is usually the combination of a lot of interlaced different trends - whenever one trend is measured in current time as big enough to predominate, predictability goes up quite a bit.
How about Rodger Dean's first artbook, "Views"? There's two kids (painted) in the back coverart for Yes's "Yesterdays" album. Not only do we have both a boy and a girl nekkid, but the boy is urinating on some rocks. Why isn't someone prosecutionizing both Dean and Atlantic records?
I just got divorced recently. Several people who had been through one advised me to get rid of anything like that, ASAP, before the Ex mentioned it to her lawyer in an attempt to win a better settlement or something. One friend asked if I had any underground comix, and said it was common knowledge that old Zaps or Furry Freak Bros could get you in trouble in a divorce - I don't know if he had any personal experience of that or not.
My Ex's a lot better person than that. We had an amicable enough divorce over irreconcilable differences, no real financial issues, the kid's 23 and didn't really figure into it, we still get along well, and nobody in the legal profession gave either of us the third degree, or even the first, over anything at all.
But... I saw half a dozen divorce settlements in the court that day which were simultaniously getting nasty, with couples argueing and fighting before they even got called forward (the judge actually bumped us up in line and had us go back to chambers and handle it all privately, and remarked that there wasn't another couple on the docket that day where he felt comfortable with being in the same room without an armed ballif present). Later, we hung around to watch for a bit and wait on paperwork. In two of those six divorces, the spouse brought up something that basically played a surprise "Won't somebody think of the children" card. One of them made a big fuss over a Traci Lords video - not an adult video made when she was underage, but an PG-13 rated video made when she was in her late 20's or so. Her lawyer talked like Traci was the perp in some kiddy stuff, not the victim, but fortunately, the judge wasn't ignorant on that point and essentially cut counsel off at the knees. The other of the two really bad cases tried to convince the judge that her 15 year old girl might be in danger if he allowed visitation, because her ex had an unmarried older brother (who was presumably 'queer', or so I inferred by her repeatedly emphasizing how he was unmarried at such an age), (and 'everyone knows' gay males like to molest female children, right?), and as she put it "kids that young don't know anything about good touching vrs. bad touching yet". Based on that, I won't be surprised if someone does get arrested over "Houses of the Holy", or less.
Actually, the "magic carburetor" has been invented at least 5 times. All such designs will get at least 80 MPG or better straight off the assembly line. Then a week after install, they are out of spec enough that they are getting 40 MPG, and by the end of the first month, only 20 or so. This is why car companies went to computerized fuel injection over a decade ago.
Some of the major auto makers still build carburetor based designs in their labs now and then, looking for one that a controler chip package can keep tuned at better than fuel injector levels for at least a year or so. It is theoretically possible for an ultra-large surface area carb, such as some of the dual ram's horn designs, to beat injectors long term, but making it practical is not as easy as theorizing. So, you are right, magic carburetors don't exist (given a few adjectives such as "commercially viable" or "decently durable").
And the American prosecuters at Nuremburg referred to the "troublesome priest" phrase repeatedly in trying the Nazi war criminals, and so people should encounter it not just in lit or ancient history but in modern history, philosophy or ethics. It's actually pretty common, and if you didn't hear it in such classes, you can safely assume you didn't get your money's worth on college. (If you didn't have to take ANY of those classes, congratulations on your Engineering/CS degree, and I hope you got some of this sort of thing on your own.). Many people know that "I was just following orders" is considered a pretty crappy excuse, but many of them don't understand the other half of that is "My underlings misinterpreted my orders.", and it is equally inexcusable.
Note: I have not compared HP's management to the Nazis, except in that some people seem to be adopting the same "They misinterpreted me/I was just following orders" BS when they got caught at something. Anyone who thinks I just Godwinned the thread does not understand Godwin, but if you want to mod me down anyway, go right ahead.
But re. your question. To claim the right to look at any, let alone all of the RIAA's comunications with the parent companies, you'ld have to first make some sort of counterclaim. Until someone is willing to claim barratry or fraud or something on the part of the RIAA, there's no way to simply defend against the RIAA's claims and seek any such records. Note there's no such charge as "conspiracy to bash the consumer into submission", it would have to be something roughly like 'conspiracy to defraud under color of law".
Please note the IANAL denial extra-carefully on the following opinion: It may take first filing criminal charges under RICO to get hold of such records. A civil countersuit would most probably never justify seeking records of third party communications, as those third parties have their own rights of privacy that can't be given up by the RIAA's entering into a suit, even if the RIAA's own entering into action quite possibly gives up some rights to hold their internal communications private.
There's also a lot of precident regarding some methods of 'bashing into submission', for example, it's established both that multi-year delays do not violate the "fair and speedy" clause of the Constitution, and that civil suits aren't as well protected in this as criminal trials anyway. Think of precident as something that raises the bar for the defendent in an RIAA case, if they seek to claim access to any RIAA documents is 'reasonable'.
One possibilty is to seek internal documents of the RIAA first, and hope to find enough there to make a subsequent request for third party related documents more reasonable. There is prior practice for this. Lay parties in a civil suit have certainly successfully asked judges to read through subpoenaed documents and strike out clauses referring to third parties or otherwise exceeding the scope of the counterclaim before the defense is allowed to use the rest as evidence.
How to get modded +3 insightful on slashdot. 1. Have no actual, verifiable facts in your post. (Claiming you can't rememember someone else's state of mind is not a fact, all you can ever factually claim is they didn't give you an indication that that was their state of mind (, unless the poster is also claiming to be a telepath).) 2. Make either a mistake or a deliberate mistatement (the article site is not a gaming site in any conventional sense, period, whatever another "straw grasping" gaming site is. You can call it a gaming site only if any site that ever writes anything about games is a gaming site, i.e. if you're the sort who claims Senator Orin Hatch has written about legislation affecting RPGs, so the senator's relection campaign site is now a gaming site. To me, gaming site sounds like a site that reviews games, passes on industry news or rumors, or distributes games or add ons or support files. The typical gaming site sounds to me like gamespy, in other words. But that issue's secondary. More primarily, whatever you call the site, they obviously don't want more hits when they have been slashdotted by them. They have even posted the article that started this, without the rest of the page, with no links and no advertising, in an effort to get the slashdotting over with asap, while cutting their excess bandwidth bill as much as possible. "It" only "worked" if it was "a cunning plan to frag their own website"). 3. Stoop regularly to insult, rhetorical flourishes and invective ("grasping at straws", "complete and utter BS", "just to get hits"). 4. Imply you are an industry insider with LOTS of experience. Don't address whether this also means you might have an inherent bias when it comes to criticism of the people who presumably pay you. Don't be specific about what you worked on, who the other designers you knew were, or whether you have either breadth or depth behind your statements.
I had mod points when I came here. The only reasons this post didn't draw a -1 Overrated from me, is I have never given one out before, and they feel like dirty tricks even for a case like this.
Now for some facts: In Quake 1, both the first big boss and the last one must be defeated by using special methods rather than normal weapons. Fragging the second boss involves finding an extremely narrow path that leads to a hidden teleporter, and timing that teleportation to coincide with an odd floating object's passing inside the boss, The whole path to the teleporter is hidden from the view of all other locations in the level, and will only normally be noticed if the character stands in one exact spot and jumps straight up while looking down at just the right angle. There were other exceptionally involved secrets, such as the fourth section having a secret level that could only be reached if the character didn't use the silver key to raise a bridge, but jumped from bridge support to support and saved the key for later. Quake 1 also had a real super secret, the Dopefish. This took blind leaps, walking an incredibly narrow ledge and jumping down a hole to see, but the first clue to it was only activated if your POV shot an apparently inoccuous object, way back in the opening difficulty selection section, before any monsters at all were present to draw fire. Since Id releases its cheat codes easily, clues to all the other secrets could admittedly be discovered by noclipping through the walls, but even that would be of little help for this last puzzle.
In Quake 2, Id improved on having secrets that could easily be found by using their cheat codes or even by a little luck. Instead of just one more complex secret, they had many. For example, in the first series of levels, there is a very useful secret that can only be reached by first finding a larger secret area, then riding a gondola car type system around a loop no less than 13 times, to trigger it. Throughout the 2nd game, there are special secrets that include timing tricks and timed triggers so they cannot be detected even
Re:"Income" might not be the best metric
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Steal This Film
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This is one point that is entirely factual, but half the people argueing for ANY side on copyright, DRM, and piracy don't take it into account.
People buy entertainment from their disposable income.
There are spin off rules that are also (at least approximately) true:
People who buy more than trivial amounts of entertainment with non-disposable income soon take themselves out of the market.
People who spend less on one form of entertainment use the remainder of their disposable income largely on other entertainment.
'Spare' money that a person has already characterized as disposable very seldom gets applied to non-disposable areas just because it's freed up.
I sort of disagree about your "exact same thing". People who understand what's meant by the 'Tragedy of the Commons' may see downloading and such as not giving the exact same thing, as it doesn't ensure money supports the artist, so the downloader isn't getting the same chance to buy future works their puchase would give them. Therefore, the RIAA's real solution is obvious - they merely have to educate the typical Brittany fan until they are the sort of person who would actually read one of those books that 95% of them never heard of, and the rest all gave up and just read the synopsis (which is what I did).
So it's not really the exact same thing, but it looks like it to most consumers, and what they do next is an opportunity cost calculation, just as you've said.
I currently live about 7 miles from the lab. It bugs me sometimes to be along a pretty decent technology corridor running from a bit east of Alcoa through Knoxville and west to Oak Ridge, and have people assume there's nothing here in East Tennessee but hillbillys. There are about a thousand people with PhDs in chemistry, physics, or math related fields living or working within 10 miles of me, dozens of very cutting edge tech related businesses, at least 3 high speed providers for residential use in my neighborhood, OCRs and really fast fiber buried all over the place, and the fastest growing business in the area is focused on keeping outsourced tech support in the USA for roughly half of NASDAC instead of letting it go to India. It's so techish, people throw old PDP-11's in the metal only bin at the waste treatment plant around here, and nobody bats an eye.
The tallest buildings in the Oak Ridge area are only about 10 stories, but then thare's no pressure to build higher. The biggest particle accelerator out at the national lab is one of those tall objects, with supposedly another 10 stories or so underground. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spallation_Neutron_So urce will get you the wiki, although the project is much more finished than it shows.
Problem is, you can't tour a lot of this casually. Since 9-11, the most weapons related facility (locally called Y-12 for the odd, old map coordinates used when it was built) has closed all access roads to general traffic, including these neat metal barriers labeled "Caution, road may spring up in face" and guards with 50 cal's and rocket launchers. Well before 9-11, it was open enough that I took drafting classes in a spare building on site, although even then it was a wear an ID and get your bag searched at the gate for recording devices type environment.
The national labs (often called X-10 locally), may still allow some tours, but under much more control now (If they are still doing any, you'll probably have to call ahead to get on a list, and ride out on a tour bus from town instead of being able to drive yourself like you used to be able to do). You may still be able to see some modern research projects such as both the Spallation Neutron and Hollofield Ion accelerators, and there's a historic swiming pool design research reactor, but the web site I give below shows that even the reactor tour is currently closed, and I don't know how permanent this is. There are supposed to be some arrangements for students and such, but you definitely can't just show up at the gate.
There's a train ride based tour of the older Gaseous Diffusion plant (locally called K-25). You can also still easily drive right past it and can stop at an overlook with a viewing station for free. http://oakridgevisitor.com/attractions.html
At one era in the 40's-50's the central building there was literally the largest building in the world, in terms of floor space. Possibly you can even still get the ferret tour somewhere (The techs tied a string around a ferret's waist, and the ferret dragged the string to the other end of miles of really long ductwork. The ferret then got a treat while the string was then used to pull a bigger rope, the rope pulled a chain of pipe cleaning brushs, and so on. Imagine a building so big they kept a dozen ferrets on call just to clean ducts and pipes. (and No, the ferrets weren't used to sop up radiation or anything like that, but there's probably little or no demand for them now, and I don't know if there's any chance you can get a tour that shows that particular part anymore)).
Around town, there are a few historic plaques - "Oppenheimer slept here" sort of stuff. (I know of a dozen houses that could legitimately brag that somebo
It's not quite simple. It's admittedly very simple in the abstract, for a model star where you're only looking at what combinations of temperature and core density allow standard stellar fusion at a break even rate (All normal stars run at break even, in the short enough run, in the sense that the total energy produced is equal to the light pressure keeping interior layers from collapsing, plus the light emmitted to space). Physicists such as Hoyle and Gamow pretty much wrote the math for this at least forty years ago, and much of this was known well before the US designed the "Super" in 1949-50, where it turned out to be applicable (although some of it was so classified then that even the best professional Astrophysicists couldn't assume they had seen nearly all the relevant literature).
Here's just some of what makes it more complex for the real world though, and I'm probably missing plenty of other complexifying factors:
Spinning Star? What range of rotation rates occurs in low-mass stars, How much pressure does it relieve at the core at a minimum? (Is there any real occurance of a low mass star with absolutely no rotation?)
Which Population (I or II). Low mass stars can be very old, as they burn their fuel so slowly. This affects how much of the heavier elements are found in their cores. Just where newer generation stars formed makes a big difference in how much of what heavier elements are in them, but there's not much of a difference theoretically possible for the first generation. Are their faint stars can we observe, but not get enough of a spectrum on to be confident of their composition?
Are there any convection currents in low mass stars? Do such, as yet unproved, currents include the full range of modalities found in a star the size of our Sun, or fewer? (or maybe even something truly novel, completely different than in bigger stars?). We're not even real sure how typical current patterns within our Sun are for stars of its general type, last I looked.
Can having a large, close companion star significantly reduce the minimum mass threshold, or would any such received radiation effects be trivial?
Unfortunately, Darwin himself frequently did write in terms of perfectability. Yes, it's "patently untrue", and most good modern Biologists will be very quick to point out that Natural Selection tends only towards a local environmental optimum, never some abstract goal of perfection, but Darwin himself didn't always write that way. Far from it. Modern science has cleaned up Darwin's original arguements here. A well taught course will make the point clear, but I've seen many high school and even some college courses that get this wrong, not just the general media as you put it. There are plenty of "pro-evolution" writers who would claim something like your quote above even though it's detremental to real understanding.
I have previously seen a quote attributed to Darwin where he supposedly specifically criticized Christianity (as opposed to criticizing religion in general). The arguement was that any religion that specifically claimed God was going to bring about a new Heaven and a new Earth, free of sin and death, was a false religion, because the world was naturally evolving towards perfection without having to first have the slate wiped clean.
Unfortunately, I have been unable to trace the actual quote to Darwin either on the net or in my own library, and so am coming to doubt that what I once read was really something Darwin himself said. It strikes me as quite possible that this arguement comes from someone else, i.e. T. H. Huxley or (more likely) one of the early social Darwinists of the 1890-1900's, or maybe a distortion of one of Musolini's early "Homo Faschisti" speeches of the 1910's, but I can certainly see how it provoked a lot of opposition from some Christians, whatever its exact source. A little searching for other things Darwin wrote about religion does turn up a number of quotes, particularly in "Descent of Man" that could be taken as anti-religious in a more general sense, but not that specific arguement. I can only hope some slashdotter can give an authoritative source one way or the other.
The modern, formal definitions of Evolution's "goals", as taught in a good college level course, don't seem to make any competing religious claims. Your pastor (Yes, I understand he's not really yours, just one you met.) probably ran across something from an older source, perhaps a science popularizer or euginicist rather than a real pro. The pastor is indeed argueing against a straw man, but it's one that the "other side" largely created, which is what makes the whole debate so full of sound and fury.
The biggest thing that keeps me from being a Libertarian, is that if they ever get in at the national level, they'd have just enough popular support to start cutting individual oriented welfare programs. That would use up their mandate from the general public, so they would never have the additional support needed to cut corporate welfare programs, even if, in theory, they claim to intend to do that too. We'd end up with no safety net for the 'average Joe', but still subsidising wasteful and inept companies, and that combination would be bad enough to not only total the economy, but probably throw us into a Marxist counter-revolution four years later.
Any libertarians who can suggest a balanced plan, where we all get more freedom, without making things worse if the initial changes can't be extended without a counter-reaction slowing the transition down or reversing it, I'd be interested in hearing. So far the national leadership doesn't seem to have an answer to this question: "What happens if the Libertarians gain the presidency with only 42% of the popular vote, just 15 libertarians in congress, and both houses still predominantly for either of the two major parties?" Because, if the Libertarians ever get in, it's a lot more likely to be that way than with an overwhelming groundswell of support that will let them make sweeping changes all at once.
I know you're being humorous, but for those who don't know how these things work, organized crime very seldom breaks arms, or worse yet kills, over loansharking. Instead, they get the debtor to pay back, even if it looks like the debtor doesn't have the money.
For example, the borrower parks his car where it can be conveniently stolen, and waits to report it missing until the chop shop has had 48 hours to strip it. He then collects $20,000 in insurance, but somehow, he ends up driving an old beater. The rest of that payout goes to the loanshark. (The victim usually gets to keep a junker so he can keep working, to get those paychecks that will serve as part of the "renegotiated" payments).
Or, the debtor sells his house for $30,000 less than the going rate to a buyer his loan shark refers. The homebuyer gives an agent connected to the mob a fee of about $15,000 on that 30, for a sweet deal from his point of view. Under lots of pressure, the debtor passes on information that lets the mob rob his workplace, maybe leaves a door conveniently unlocked or even does the pilferage himself. Organized crime squeezes him like a sponge until they don't see anything left to bother with, and then he still gose on their bad list, and they will never loan him money again because they had to go to the trouble of squeezing.
If they can't get a good profit, THEN they get physical, but just like legitimate lenders, loansharks can run background checks and pre-inspect collateral, and they do. After all, it's far better to get the cash than vengance and a short envelope to pass uphill to the boss. Victims almost invariably have some way to give the loanshark at least 50% total profit.
"Getting closer to back on topic, "the mafia gives better rates" is the point. Organized crime still makes lots of money from illegal gambling, because they pay out 80% or better, and State lotteries pay only about 50% on average. Of course lots of Americans will work exceptionally hard for less chance of moving up with the company than in Canada (and parts of Western Europe, which the earlier poster didn't mention). Of course, the USA is where a company can offer people a chance to take a serious drop in salary to join management and get volunteers. Of course some companies can avoid union problems by co-opting employees to become pseudo-management. The same people who go along with all this are the ones who don't see how stupid state lotteries are. They're also the ones who could have saved enough for retirement, but never got around to it, etc.
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Interesting blanket assertion there. What's your proof?
The very people who make the current IQ tests don't entirely agree with you. For example, the WAIS (by far the most common test for adult intelligence, at least in the USA) defines three subcategorys of measurable intelligence which each get seperate index scores:
(a) Verbal Comprehension
(b) Spatial Perceptual
(c) Freedom from Distraction
So freedom from distraction over the typical two to four hour range of the test is 1/3 of the total score. Wechsler also predefines this short term measure to be extrapolatable to longer term behavior. This is presented essentially as a circular arguement - (c) is worth devoting a third of the questions/scoring to because it has long term predictive value, and it has long term predictive value because it makes up such a large part of the test. It's only after he essentially made that assertion spread over a series of paragraphs that Wechsler starts claiming that there's something called "drive", which is outside the range of the test to measure. He then remarks that "No amount of drive will make a dullard into a mathematician".
So, Dr. Wechsler's arguement is apparently that Freedom from Distraction has a great deal to do with Intelligence, but not with "Drive". (That's certainly counterintuitive to the way we normally define those words). He's also commenting on dullards, which I think we can safely assume means below scoring average people, and thus (by leaving the subject with only that remark, without further qualification) saying that what is irrelevant to predicting their success is equally irrelevant to the average or gifted individual - the chief point on which I disagree.
While it's not particularly relevant to the above points, it's interesting to note that the WAIS scoring manual remarks about one of the 11 subsections "It (Vocabulary) correlates very highly with Full Scale IQ". Presumably, the other 10 subsections don't have nearly such a high correlation. How can we justify claiming there's a strong correlation between IQ score and success if we can't even claim a strong correlation between 10 parts of the test and "Full Scale IQ"?
For just one example of a flaw in IQ test interpretation, how can a one or two hour test (or, often, an even shorter one), possibly measure the difference between two individuals who are not necessarily mentally quick, but where one will keep worrying at a problem for hours, days or even weeks until he gets it, and the other will just let the problem drop when success doesn't come quickly? This difference generally gets called by other names, such as mental endurance or tenacity, rather than intelligence, to avoid addressing its real significance. In reality, it certainly is a factor of overall intelligence and it certainly has a significant impact on success in the real world.
So, if I'm accused by the RIAA, they have a right to subpoena my credit card records and try to prove I didn't buy those CDs until after they filed? So, if I'm not a downloader, but am afraid the RIAA will someday file a suit, I'd better go find a timestamp equipped camera, photgraphy my entire CD collection, and put the photos, along with a notarized affidavit from three witnesses in a vault somewhere? Otherwise, I guess I'll just rely on presenting a reasonable defense - but what happens if I get a juror who has indicated he will bend over backwards to take the explanation of one party over another, more reasonable one, so long as that one party is a multi-billion dollar corporation?
If I'm ever accused of illegal downloading, I plan to ask the judge for a court order to determine if any member of my jury has posted on slashdot under the name tom 75.
(And yes, it was quite funny here on slashdot, but in court people normally have something called presumption of innocence, and that's already being obliterated by the current lawsuits. I hate to treat your post over seriously, but it's ammunition for idiots who won't get the real point).
1. (Older) customer bought works on LP, Cassette, 8 track tape, etc. and wants copies that will play on gear he has today. (Note: Customer also cares less about lossy formats, cause 8 track, etc. weren/t all that good to start with.) (That's about 5% of downloading by some admittedly not too formal estimates - that doesn't really explain why people who own CDs would download them, but it does explain why some people who own other copies would). .MP3s on a hard drive look about 1,000% cheaper than massively air conditioning a small closet with a 500 disk CD changer and its remote, and about 1,000% more convenient than keeping the CDs in some other locked area (to keep them cool, they can't be left in a constantly powered up player in a small closed up area, whereas there are dirt cheap older PCs with low powered processors that will run quite stablely in those conditions) and unlocking the closet every change. (This is obviously 0.00001% or so of the world's downloaders, but I know of one real case just like this, and another who had to give her autistic son only home duped copies of Disney videotapes or watch him destroy the originals at the rate of about 2/week.).
2. Customer owns CD player at home, none in car, nor a portable. (by some sources, that's 15-20% of downloaders who give that as one of their reasons, but admittedly, the number for which that is their real, primary reason is likely smaller).
3. Customer jogs, hikes, rockclimbs, etc. - CD players are bulky (in those situations), and customer would have to pay extra for anti-skip features, weather proofing, etc, if they bought one, or get something really not suitable. (I'd informally estimate 10% of downloaders fall in this category, but maybe the base couch potato to active ratio is steeper than that, although if it is, this country's doomed and we should quit worrying about little things like downloading).
4. Customer wants to be able to listen at home computer while using it for other tasks, does not have CD player in room, OR is using computer's CD drive for software that requires CD be kept in drive while running game, etc. Maybe the customer's only player IS the one in the PC.
5. Customer specifically has game (i.e. Doom or Quake series), that will use computer audio files as replacement soundtrack, and wants them for that purpose only. Why learn to rip CDs when you only want about 6 tracks ever?
6. Customer has 5 year old autistic daughter that loves to mess with in room CD player, watching the little drawer pop out 500 times an hour or so, and wants to put everything possible related to their music collection in a locked closet.
I can't really explain all the medical reasons why standard CD players don't work well for some people, (as I'm not an MD or physio-therapist) but it seems pretty obvious that arthritus, spinal cord injuries, and Parkensons all might make handling CDs or using CD player style buttons impractical, and there are probably several dozen conditions I havent even mentioned you could add to those. As charity, I've personally fixed up over half a dozen medically impaired people's PCs to play their collections conveniently, with mostly mouse only operation, oversized or high contrast displays, simplified icons or other such support, and helped them copy their collections (I haven't helped them download, I've installed legal free software rippers, made copies from the CDs they definitely own, and usually showed a regular care giver how to do more of the same as needed). I'm not about to rewire that many CD players with oversized, soft touch buttons, equally free of charge. Some of this sort of problem can be fixed by such old fashioned ways if you have lots of money, but who has a major illness and lots of money? And how many people trying to help in such situations know enough about the current law AND about tech to come up with solutions that don't involve downloading the music?
Now in many of these cases, it can make more sense t
No demand normally doesn't equate to no extra benefits - sometimes, all it means is the potential buyers don't know about the benefits yet, even though the benefits are very real. (Of course, this is the Duke Nukem Forever of OS's we're talkng about here - I'll believe any part of it is real when it actually ships with that feature). Still, there was no demand for "Mr. Fusion" until Doc Brown amd Marty endorsed it.
Like it says at the bottom of a big page of information when I click on your name: "Subscribers can view entire comment history for all users"
It doesn't appear all that hard to manually look for users with inactive histories. A good chunk of Friend and Foe listings for low numbered users are likely to be for other low numbered users, making it easy to look for whole blocks of possible inactives.
With ID and Nym generally linked, it's pretty easy to tell who else is a low numbered user, check on their activity, and get a preliminary list. Then it's likely some of those accounts will have easy to guess dictionary form passwords. User logs and what threads the user commented in may show areas of interest to make password guessing more feasable.
I have no idea whether it has actually happened. I find it likely that early members were somewhat more oriented to the political extremes than now, but that's more likely to include some who were extreme right wingsers than a mix of only moderates and traditional and non-traditional left only. Your 'rover boys' could be uber-geeks and 'low brow' republicans, the two aren't as exclusive as you may think.
After I get through with this speculative answer though, I'm running a few searches. First terms will be "Looking to purchase" and "low numbered slashdot accounts", with refinements from there. If your obviously crackpot idea has even a smidgen of anything to it, that just might reveal something. Not that I believe you in the slightest - next you'll be claiming Faux News isn't fair and unbiased, but just to show how unlikely it all is, I'd look at good old fashioned social engineering like this before assuming cracking.
There's an axiom in the military: Once may be just happenstance, twice may be coincidence, but three times is enemy action!
From the counts I'm seeing other places, Fox has made this same 'mistake' at least five times in two days, labeling not just Foley but Hastert as (D). The exact count is confused as some of these 'mistakes' were on repeating display bars and no one is evidently sure just how many times some of them cycled before they were corrected. Either Fox is crewed by people who couldn't get a job on a high school paper, or this is way, way past the bounds of 'accidental'. I'm sure when the Democrats mention this to the Dept. of Justice, Gonzales will order a full investigation into the matter. It will begin right after the Republican party wins every single one of of those disputed seats, unless it is delayed by a few whiners complaining about how the exit polls don't match the results.
Yes, various things are probably not all equally bad. For that matter, some TV shows are probably less stimulating than others, some games require more use of one particular brain area than other games, and so on. Studies such as this one have to chunk some results together, and so any differences between playing Civilizaton and GTA aren't shown in the final report. If watching CSI - Bugtussle is worse than watching the McNieeble-Flenor Hour, a study such as this can't particularly prove it.
So the question is, what should you do, assuming you have children and care significantly that is. Disregard the whole study? Embrace it totally, even if common sense tells you differently? You already know the answer, don't you? Keep it in mind as possibly significant. look for evidence to prove or disprove it in your child's specific case, and if it starts looking true for your kid, try following its reccomendations and see if they work - Oh, and keep enough of an eye on your kid that you catch problems while they are little and have some room to try alternative solutions.
I really doubt that's a vast majority any more. Those jobs that don't actually require learning time off the job are either total dead ends, or ones where it's hard to get enough halfway decent people without training them on the clock. Even for the latter, you mostly have some opportunites for advancement and promotion, where additional effort on your own will increase your success. You'ld better hope it's not a vast majority either, as you're describing the kind of jobs that will soon be replaced by machines. I certainly hope your own job doesn't feel like that, even one hour in forty.
Plus, if the kids see mommy and daddy (or whatever) bothering to learn things on their own, whether for the existing job, a new one, as insurance against being trapped in a moribund industry, or just from curiosity, they won't give you nearly as much arguement about studying, and they will earn your good study habits naturally. Even a little good example goes a long way here. Just letting your children see you read matters more than most people think.
Frankly, a lot of the objections I'm reading here sound like people who don't have any good study habits to pass on, don't much like learning or encouraging their children, and are content to let a dead end job become a dead end life. Sometimes I still come here clinging to a tiny, forlorn, dusty hope that Slashdot averages better than that - way to crush my hope guys! (And no, I'm not new here.)
String Theory proves Intelligent Design!
The common result of String Theory models is a totally untestable prediction - that there are an infinite number of 'parellel' universes besides our own.* The only to avoid this prediction is to claim that the fundamental constants are all non-randomly selected **. ID makes only one untestable prediction, one God (OK, so some advanced forms of ID predict a few thousand gods with various numbers of arms and three aspects of an Uber-God at the top, or one God, his kid, a ghost, and X number of angels of seven different types assisting, but even these elaborations make a finite number of predictions). Applying Occam's Razor, any finite number of untestable predictions is greatly to be preferred over an infinite number of untestable predictions, and applying My Razor, we should throw out the theory that makes an infinite number of untestable predictions first, way before we reject any of the others (Artifakt's Razor - nothing makes a situation more absurd, more quickly than dragging unnecessary infinites into it). Now we just have to test all the deistic religions and see which one is the simplest theory that encompasses all observations. This should be very simple. Of course we should leave the door open for new models, just ones that don't veer towards such unnecessary complexities as infinities imply. Still, I'm confident that once we are not wasting time on the totally untestable, we should be able to settle the remaining questions in a few years, without the delays and even the potential for bloodshead*** that infinite models impose.
* Some String theory models require an infinite number of parallels formed at the same time as our own, a very, very big finite number of ever branching quantum divergences, an either very big or infinite number of scale repetitions of the observable part in the greater universe, and possibly a fourth either very, very big or infinite number of universes formed at different times than our own. A few predict an unobservable multi-cosmic evolutionary trend or two as well.
More seriously, "unobservable" is the cosmologists own choice of words there - If you are one of those people who holds string theory is science because not immediately observable does not equal not observable, the actual practitioners of String Theory are the ones saying Nope, Nada, Never! (In other words, ST scientists aren't trying, in that they are, at least in part, making what they themselves claim are forever untestable predictions. This hasn't stopped a few of them from seeking more funding to not prove the unprovable).
I'm only half being facetious there - there are some real con games going on in this field, by people only one step removed from the "Infinite free energy from the Zero Point" crowd of patent scammers.
** Anyone wishing to is certainly allowed to propose non-deistic entities that can non-randomly select the fundamental physical constants, if they so desire. It sounds like "midget NBA player" to me, but at least it's not infinite and untestable.
*** Rumors have come to my attention that proponents of rival theorys have apparently stooped to such unscientific methods of testing as fisticuffs and possibly worse - All I can say is what do you expect when people propose such poppycock as infinite unobservable parellel universes in an effort to muddy the watters of Cosmology.
There are basically two kinds of people when it comes to wanting household robots (plus the third kind, people who just don't want them or see any point in them). Some people envision relatively non-humanoid (R2D2 variant) robots, talored to do jobs such as raking leaves or cooking, and some people want the C3PO look. I'd submit that what the latter class really wants is what you halfway address in your post, human slaves and better sex toys.
The more those things look like humans, the more they will encourage destructive illusions. I'm thinking of both the more minor illusion that the human looking ones are automagically smarter than the mechanical looking ones, and the dreadful illusion that real humans can safely be stripped of free will. The society that survives will be the one that bans making any being that is not genuinely sapient in a human image - those that don't will fall when the average citizen becomes someone with a two year old's tolerance for frustration, and simultaniously regards his fellows as objects that are suddenly acting inconveniently.
Sex-bot, meet assassin upgrade hack.
All the departments that are under the Homeland Security Czar can (and I argue should) be counted as "basically national defense". When the people doing the "War on Drugs" or catching illegal aliens are also spending much of their time gathering and reporting terrorism related intelligence to the CIA, they're really part of defense. Defense spending should include at the very least, about 20%-25% of FEMA spending, and over a third of the DEA budget (DEA agents operating military radar stations, and extra 'border patrol' flights which are specifically not scheduled to coincide with drug related intel, ain't cheap), plus maybe 30%-40% of BATF, at least 15%-20% of FCC, etc.
What about the secret 'black' projects that exist? Anyone who knows the exact numbers on these projects can't say anything without violating a NDA or worse, but consider, is it more likely the government always borrows money from a non-secret defense project budget for a secret one, or that they conceal at least some of the black projects in parts of the budget ostensibly entirely seperate from defense? And there's nothing corresponding for non-defense - the NEA doesnt have black projects.
So if my Uncle Ben is already dead, I can use all this stuff from Google, right?
Weather and Climate are two very different things. No one close to responsible is claiming they can predict the weather 20 years out, that's a straw man. Some people are claiming they can predict Climate trends. They may not have done this successfully, but there's nothing "absurd" about the idea itself.
I can't predict accurately when any given person will die. I can stlll show that various diseases have various mortality rates, or make money if I own an insurance company, or state that the population explosion is a fact.
You might also notice that, by your arguement, we not only can't prove global warming exists, we can't prove there is such a thing as a hurricane season, a tornado season, forest fire season, or that 'indian summer' or 'el-nino' are meaningful terms.
Incidentally, some weather is very predictable, often for a lot more than 3 days. Just this last late summer, there was a hot, dry cell that moved across the entire USA, from west to east. Weathermen predicted it would go all the way to the east coast at near constant speed, that temperatures would be well above normal, rain would be low, and that offshore storms would be deflected by the high pressure for the first week or so of the Atlantic hurricane season, and called a lot of events accurately two and three weeks or even more out (unless you want to define accurately as "precise to the last mm of fainfall and 1/10th of a degree). Weather is usually the combination of a lot of interlaced different trends - whenever one trend is measured in current time as big enough to predominate, predictability goes up quite a bit.
How about Rodger Dean's first artbook, "Views"? There's two kids (painted) in the back coverart for Yes's "Yesterdays" album. Not only do we have both a boy and a girl nekkid, but the boy is urinating on some rocks. Why isn't someone prosecutionizing both Dean and Atlantic records?
I just got divorced recently. Several people who had been through one advised me to get rid of anything like that, ASAP, before the Ex mentioned it to her lawyer in an attempt to win a better settlement or something. One friend asked if I had any underground comix, and said it was common knowledge that old Zaps or Furry Freak Bros could get you in trouble in a divorce - I don't know if he had any personal experience of that or not.
My Ex's a lot better person than that. We had an amicable enough divorce over irreconcilable differences, no real financial issues, the kid's 23 and didn't really figure into it, we still get along well, and nobody in the legal profession gave either of us the third degree, or even the first, over anything at all.
But... I saw half a dozen divorce settlements in the court that day which were simultaniously getting nasty, with couples argueing and fighting before they even got called forward (the judge actually bumped us up in line and had us go back to chambers and handle it all privately, and remarked that there wasn't another couple on the docket that day where he felt comfortable with being in the same room without an armed ballif present). Later, we hung around to watch for a bit and wait on paperwork. In two of those six divorces, the spouse brought up something that basically played a surprise "Won't somebody think of the children" card. One of them made a big fuss over a Traci Lords video - not an adult video made when she was underage, but an PG-13 rated video made when she was in her late 20's or so. Her lawyer talked like Traci was the perp in some kiddy stuff, not the victim, but fortunately, the judge wasn't ignorant on that point and essentially cut counsel off at the knees.
The other of the two really bad cases tried to convince the judge that her 15 year old girl might be in danger if he allowed visitation, because her ex had an unmarried older brother (who was presumably 'queer', or so I inferred by her repeatedly emphasizing how he was unmarried at such an age), (and 'everyone knows' gay males like to molest female children, right?), and as she put it "kids that young don't know anything about good touching vrs. bad touching yet". Based on that, I won't be surprised if someone does get arrested over "Houses of the Holy", or less.
Actually, the "magic carburetor" has been invented at least 5 times. All such designs will get at least 80 MPG or better straight off the assembly line. Then a week after install, they are out of spec enough that they are getting 40 MPG, and by the end of the first month, only 20 or so. This is why car companies went to computerized fuel injection over a decade ago.
Some of the major auto makers still build carburetor based designs in their labs now and then, looking for one that a controler chip package can keep tuned at better than fuel injector levels for at least a year or so. It is theoretically possible for an ultra-large surface area carb, such as some of the dual ram's horn designs, to beat injectors long term, but making it practical is not as easy as theorizing. So, you are right, magic carburetors don't exist (given a few adjectives such as "commercially viable" or "decently durable").
And the American prosecuters at Nuremburg referred to the "troublesome priest" phrase repeatedly in trying the Nazi war criminals, and so people should encounter it not just in lit or ancient history but in modern history, philosophy or ethics. It's actually pretty common, and if you didn't hear it in such classes, you can safely assume you didn't get your money's worth on college. (If you didn't have to take ANY of those classes, congratulations on your Engineering/CS degree, and I hope you got some of this sort of thing on your own.). Many people know that "I was just following orders" is considered a pretty crappy excuse, but many of them don't understand the other half of that is "My underlings misinterpreted my orders.", and it is equally inexcusable.
Note: I have not compared HP's management to the Nazis, except in that some people seem to be adopting the same "They misinterpreted me/I was just following orders" BS when they got caught at something. Anyone who thinks I just Godwinned the thread does not understand Godwin, but if you want to mod me down anyway, go right ahead.
IANAL - IANAL - IANAL
But re. your question. To claim the right to look at any, let alone all of the RIAA's comunications with the parent companies, you'ld have to first make some sort of counterclaim. Until someone is willing to claim barratry or fraud or something on the part of the RIAA, there's no way to simply defend against the RIAA's claims and seek any such records. Note there's no such charge as "conspiracy to bash the consumer into submission", it would have to be something roughly like 'conspiracy to defraud under color of law".
Please note the IANAL denial extra-carefully on the following opinion: It may take first filing criminal charges under RICO to get hold of such records. A civil countersuit would most probably never justify seeking records of third party communications, as those third parties have their own rights of privacy that can't be given up by the RIAA's entering into a suit, even if the RIAA's own entering into action quite possibly gives up some rights to hold their internal communications private.
There's also a lot of precident regarding some methods of 'bashing into submission', for example, it's established both that multi-year delays do not violate the "fair and speedy" clause of the Constitution, and that civil suits aren't as well protected in this as criminal trials anyway. Think of precident as something that raises the bar for the defendent in an RIAA case, if they seek to claim access to any RIAA documents is 'reasonable'.
One possibilty is to seek internal documents of the RIAA first, and hope to find enough there to make a subsequent request for third party related documents more reasonable. There is prior practice for this. Lay parties in a civil suit have certainly successfully asked judges to read through subpoenaed documents and strike out clauses referring to third parties or otherwise exceeding the scope of the counterclaim before the defense is allowed to use the rest as evidence.
How to get modded +3 insightful on slashdot.
1. Have no actual, verifiable facts in your post. (Claiming you can't rememember someone else's state of mind is not a fact, all you can ever factually claim is they didn't give you an indication that that was their state of mind (, unless the poster is also claiming to be a telepath).)
2. Make either a mistake or a deliberate mistatement (the article site is not a gaming site in any conventional sense, period, whatever another "straw grasping" gaming site is. You can call it a gaming site only if any site that ever writes anything about games is a gaming site, i.e. if you're the sort who claims Senator Orin Hatch has written about legislation affecting RPGs, so the senator's relection campaign site is now a gaming site. To me, gaming site sounds like a site that reviews games, passes on industry news or rumors, or distributes games or add ons or support files. The typical gaming site sounds to me like gamespy, in other words. But that issue's secondary. More primarily, whatever you call the site, they obviously don't want more hits when they have been slashdotted by them. They have even posted the article that started this, without the rest of the page, with no links and no advertising, in an effort to get the slashdotting over with asap, while cutting their excess bandwidth bill as much as possible. "It" only "worked" if it was "a cunning plan to frag their own website").
3. Stoop regularly to insult, rhetorical flourishes and invective ("grasping at straws", "complete and utter BS", "just to get hits").
4. Imply you are an industry insider with LOTS of experience. Don't address whether this also means you might have an inherent bias when it comes to criticism of the people who presumably pay you. Don't be specific about what you worked on, who the other designers you knew were, or whether you have either breadth or depth behind your statements.
I had mod points when I came here. The only reasons this post didn't draw a -1 Overrated from me, is I have never given one out before, and they feel like dirty tricks even for a case like this.
Now for some facts: In Quake 1, both the first big boss and the last one must be defeated by using special methods rather than normal weapons. Fragging the second boss involves finding an extremely narrow path that leads to a hidden teleporter, and timing that teleportation to coincide with an odd floating object's passing inside the boss, The whole path to the teleporter is hidden from the view of all other locations in the level, and will only normally be noticed if the character stands in one exact spot and jumps straight up while looking down at just the right angle. There were other exceptionally involved secrets, such as the fourth section having a secret level that could only be reached if the character didn't use the silver key to raise a bridge, but jumped from bridge support to support and saved the key for later. Quake 1 also had a real super secret, the Dopefish. This took blind leaps, walking an incredibly narrow ledge and jumping down a hole to see, but the first clue to it was only activated if your POV shot an apparently inoccuous object, way back in the opening difficulty selection section, before any monsters at all were present to draw fire. Since Id releases its cheat codes easily, clues to all the other secrets could admittedly be discovered by noclipping through the walls, but even that would be of little help for this last puzzle.
In Quake 2, Id improved on having secrets that could easily be found by using their cheat codes or even by a little luck. Instead of just one more complex secret, they had many. For example, in the first series of levels, there is a very useful secret that can only be reached by first finding a larger secret area, then riding a gondola car type system around a loop no less than 13 times, to trigger it. Throughout the 2nd game, there are special secrets that include timing tricks and timed triggers so they cannot be detected even
This is one point that is entirely factual, but half the people argueing for ANY side on copyright, DRM, and piracy don't take it into account.
People buy entertainment from their disposable income.
There are spin off rules that are also (at least approximately) true:
People who buy more than trivial amounts of entertainment with non-disposable income soon take themselves out of the market.
People who spend less on one form of entertainment use the remainder of their disposable income largely on other entertainment.
'Spare' money that a person has already characterized as disposable very seldom gets applied to non-disposable areas just because it's freed up.
I sort of disagree about your "exact same thing". People who understand what's meant by the 'Tragedy of the Commons' may see downloading and such as not giving the exact same thing, as it doesn't ensure money supports the artist, so the downloader isn't getting the same chance to buy future works their puchase would give them. Therefore, the RIAA's real solution is obvious - they merely have to educate the typical Brittany fan until they are the sort of person who would actually read one of those books that 95% of them never heard of, and the rest all gave up and just read the synopsis (which is what I did).
So it's not really the exact same thing, but it looks like it to most consumers, and what they do next is an opportunity cost calculation, just as you've said.
I currently live about 7 miles from the lab. It bugs me sometimes to be along a pretty decent technology corridor running from a bit east of Alcoa through Knoxville and west to Oak Ridge, and have people assume there's nothing here in East Tennessee but hillbillys. There are about a thousand people with PhDs in chemistry, physics, or math related fields living or working within 10 miles of me, dozens of very cutting edge tech related businesses, at least 3 high speed providers for residential use in my neighborhood, OCRs and really fast fiber buried all over the place, and the fastest growing business in the area is focused on keeping outsourced tech support in the USA for roughly half of NASDAC instead of letting it go to India. It's so techish, people throw old PDP-11's in the metal only bin at the waste treatment plant around here, and nobody bats an eye.
The tallest buildings in the Oak Ridge area are only about 10 stories, but then thare's no pressure to build higher. The biggest particle accelerator out at the national lab is one of those tall objects, with supposedly another 10 stories or so underground.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spallation_Neutron_So urce will get you the wiki, although the project is much more finished than it shows.
Problem is, you can't tour a lot of this casually. Since 9-11, the most weapons related facility (locally called Y-12 for the odd, old map coordinates used when it was built) has closed all access roads to general traffic, including these neat metal barriers labeled "Caution, road may spring up in face" and guards with 50 cal's and rocket launchers. Well before 9-11, it was open enough that I took drafting classes in a spare building on site, although even then it was a wear an ID and get your bag searched at the gate for recording devices type environment.
The national labs (often called X-10 locally), may still allow some tours, but under much more control now (If they are still doing any, you'll probably have to call ahead to get on a list, and ride out on a tour bus from town instead of being able to drive yourself like you used to be able to do). You may still be able to see some modern research projects such as both the Spallation Neutron and Hollofield Ion accelerators, and there's a historic swiming pool design research reactor, but the web site I give below shows that even the reactor tour is currently closed, and I don't know how permanent this is. There are supposed to be some arrangements for students and such, but you definitely can't just show up at the gate.
There's a train ride based tour of the older Gaseous Diffusion plant (locally called K-25). You can also still easily drive right past it and can stop at an overlook with a viewing station for free.
http://oakridgevisitor.com/attractions.html
At one era in the 40's-50's the central building there was literally the largest building in the world, in terms of floor space. Possibly you can even still get the ferret tour somewhere (The techs tied a string around a ferret's waist, and the ferret dragged the string to the other end of miles of really long ductwork. The ferret then got a treat while the string was then used to pull a bigger rope, the rope pulled a chain of pipe cleaning brushs, and so on. Imagine a building so big they kept a dozen ferrets on call just to clean ducts and pipes. (and No, the ferrets weren't used to sop up radiation or anything like that, but there's probably little or no demand for them now, and I don't know if there's any chance you can get a tour that shows that particular part anymore)).
Around town, there are a few historic plaques - "Oppenheimer slept here" sort of stuff. (I know of a dozen houses that could legitimately brag that somebo
It's not quite simple. It's admittedly very simple in the abstract, for a model star where you're only looking at what combinations of temperature and core density allow standard stellar fusion at a break even rate (All normal stars run at break even, in the short enough run, in the sense that the total energy produced is equal to the light pressure keeping interior layers from collapsing, plus the light emmitted to space). Physicists such as Hoyle and Gamow pretty much wrote the math for this at least forty years ago, and much of this was known well before the US designed the "Super" in 1949-50, where it turned out to be applicable (although some of it was so classified then that even the best professional Astrophysicists couldn't assume they had seen nearly all the relevant literature).
Here's just some of what makes it more complex for the real world though, and I'm probably missing plenty of other complexifying factors:
Spinning Star? What range of rotation rates occurs in low-mass stars, How much pressure does it relieve at the core at a minimum? (Is there any real occurance of a low mass star with absolutely no rotation?)
Which Population (I or II). Low mass stars can be very old, as they burn their fuel so slowly. This affects how much of the heavier elements are found in their cores. Just where newer generation stars formed makes a big difference in how much of what heavier elements are in them, but there's not much of a difference theoretically possible for the first generation. Are their faint stars can we observe, but not get enough of a spectrum on to be confident of their composition?
Are there any convection currents in low mass stars? Do such, as yet unproved, currents include the full range of modalities found in a star the size of our Sun, or fewer? (or maybe even something truly novel, completely different than in bigger stars?). We're not even real sure how typical current patterns within our Sun are for stars of its general type, last I looked.
Can having a large, close companion star significantly reduce the minimum mass threshold, or would any such received radiation effects be trivial?
Unfortunately, Darwin himself frequently did write in terms of perfectability. Yes, it's "patently untrue", and most good modern Biologists will be very quick to point out that Natural Selection tends only towards a local environmental optimum, never some abstract goal of perfection, but Darwin himself didn't always write that way. Far from it. Modern science has cleaned up Darwin's original arguements here. A well taught course will make the point clear, but I've seen many high school and even some college courses that get this wrong, not just the general media as you put it. There are plenty of "pro-evolution" writers who would claim something like your quote above even though it's detremental to real understanding.
I have previously seen a quote attributed to Darwin where he supposedly specifically criticized Christianity (as opposed to criticizing religion in general). The arguement was that any religion that specifically claimed God was going to bring about a new Heaven and a new Earth, free of sin and death, was a false religion, because the world was naturally evolving towards perfection without having to first have the slate wiped clean.
Unfortunately, I have been unable to trace the actual quote to Darwin either on the net or in my own library, and so am coming to doubt that what I once read was really something Darwin himself said. It strikes me as quite possible that this arguement comes from someone else, i.e. T. H. Huxley or (more likely) one of the early social Darwinists of the 1890-1900's, or maybe a distortion of one of Musolini's early "Homo Faschisti" speeches of the 1910's, but I can certainly see how it provoked a lot of opposition from some Christians, whatever its exact source. A little searching for other things Darwin wrote about religion does turn up a number of quotes, particularly in "Descent of Man" that could be taken as anti-religious in a more general sense, but not that specific arguement. I can only hope some slashdotter can give an authoritative source one way or the other.
The modern, formal definitions of Evolution's "goals", as taught in a good college level course, don't seem to make any competing religious claims. Your pastor (Yes, I understand he's not really yours, just one you met.) probably ran across something from an older source, perhaps a science popularizer or euginicist rather than a real pro. The pastor is indeed argueing against a straw man, but it's one that the "other side" largely created, which is what makes the whole debate so full of sound and fury.
The biggest thing that keeps me from being a Libertarian, is that if they ever get in at the national level, they'd have just enough popular support to start cutting individual oriented welfare programs. That would use up their mandate from the general public, so they would never have the additional support needed to cut corporate welfare programs, even if, in theory, they claim to intend to do that too. We'd end up with no safety net for the 'average Joe', but still subsidising wasteful and inept companies, and that combination would be bad enough to not only total the economy, but probably throw us into a Marxist counter-revolution four years later.
Any libertarians who can suggest a balanced plan, where we all get more freedom, without making things worse if the initial changes can't be extended without a counter-reaction slowing the transition down or reversing it, I'd be interested in hearing. So far the national leadership doesn't seem to have an answer to this question: "What happens if the Libertarians gain the presidency with only 42% of the popular vote, just 15 libertarians in congress, and both houses still predominantly for either of the two major parties?" Because, if the Libertarians ever get in, it's a lot more likely to be that way than with an overwhelming groundswell of support that will let them make sweeping changes all at once.
I know you're being humorous, but for those who don't know how these things work, organized crime very seldom breaks arms, or worse yet kills, over loansharking. Instead, they get the debtor to pay back, even if it looks like the debtor doesn't have the money.
For example, the borrower parks his car where it can be conveniently stolen, and waits to report it missing until the chop shop has had 48 hours to strip it. He then collects $20,000 in insurance, but somehow, he ends up driving an old beater. The rest of that payout goes to the loanshark. (The victim usually gets to keep a junker so he can keep working, to get those paychecks that will serve as part of the "renegotiated" payments).
Or, the debtor sells his house for $30,000 less than the going rate to a buyer his loan shark refers. The homebuyer gives an agent connected to the mob a fee of about $15,000 on that 30, for a sweet deal from his point of view. Under lots of pressure, the debtor passes on information that lets the mob rob his workplace, maybe leaves a door conveniently unlocked or even does the pilferage himself. Organized crime squeezes him like a sponge until they don't see anything left to bother with, and then he still gose on their bad list, and they will never loan him money again because they had to go to the trouble of squeezing.
If they can't get a good profit, THEN they get physical, but just like legitimate lenders, loansharks can run background checks and pre-inspect collateral, and they do. After all, it's far better to get the cash than vengance and a short envelope to pass uphill to the boss. Victims almost invariably have some way to give the loanshark at least 50% total profit.
"Getting closer to back on topic, "the mafia gives better rates" is the point. Organized crime still makes lots of money from illegal gambling, because they pay out 80% or better, and State lotteries pay only about 50% on average. Of course lots of Americans will work exceptionally hard for less chance of moving up with the company than in Canada (and parts of Western Europe, which the earlier poster didn't mention). Of course, the USA is where a company can offer people a chance to take a serious drop in salary to join management and get volunteers. Of course some companies can avoid union problems by co-opting employees to become pseudo-management. The same people who go along with all this are the ones who don't see how stupid state lotteries are. They're also the ones who could have saved enough for retirement, but never got around to it, etc.