When WW2 began, there were highly placed members in the imperial cabinet who made predictions. Predictions such as "Japan will win all naval engagements with the US for at least the first 2 1/2 years", or "It will take the US at least 18 months to take any location where they can base bombing runs against the Japanese mainland.". Both of these predictions, and many similar ones turned out to be directly, factually wrong. The Doolittle raid was a successful strategic bombing mission against the mainland, only four months and eleven days after the Pearl Harbor attack. The Battle of Midway was a Japanese loss six months after Pearl, a loss where the Japanese saw four of six carriers sunk to take down one US carrier. The people who made these erronious predictions were promoted and rewarded after they proved wrong. They enjoyed support sufficient that when some Japanese military personel pointed out that they had been wrong, they were able to have their critics disgraced, and in some cases summarily executed, in a few cases alongside their families. The war wasn't going to be "basically over" until they were removed from power, period.
No, no it's not. Your analogy is like saying any politician that assumes people who aren't actively complaining don't object (or they would be complaining), becomes a rapist. The people who modded you insightful are those people who really, literally believe all politicians are sub-human scumbags that deserve to be called rapists or worse, and probably believe as well that total anarchy is a good thing. Go ahead, keep feeding them red meat.
The whining about Gnome shouldn't really be lumped in with the whining about Unity. It's two seperate whinings even though Unity works as a shell of sorts for Gnome. Even though they sound inextricably linked, the thing to be whined about is different. It's "Whaaah, Unity doesn't do this!, and they say its because they are aming at a certain class of hardware - that is, netbooks and other places where the screen size is rather limited", vrs. "Whaaah, Gnome doesn't let me do this, says they could explain why but don't want to bother, and I'm a bad person for even asking!" (Then Gnome throws out a couple of phrases for the 'in the know', but those words seem to be haunted by the spirit of Inego Montoya).
I mostly use KDE Plasma on a rather large multiscreen desktop myself, but if I buy either a netbook or some types of tablet I will consider Unity with Gnome underneath as possibly a better option overall than some preinstalled alternatives, and if that happens, I expect to get serious about learning the depths of Unity and so giving it a better chance to be a long lasting default. For you car analogy folks, it's like I run my old Ford Tarus on 87 or 89 Octane, but if I ever happen to find myself driving a vintage original Firebird or Mustang, I'm prepared to give it 93 Octane gas. I literally don't know what sort of hardware might make Gnome by itself an objectively better choice, and the people recommending Gnome can't tell me, with my hardware, any situation where it reliably gives me something, such as better boot times, more stability, or something that can be objectively measured, but Unity introduces a more objective test for maybe installing Gnome - Unity might provide a way to get more use out of a netbook sized device, which is, after all, what it promises. Whining about Unity is sometimes like complaining that Premium gas costs more than Regular, before acknowleging that Premium is still the best choice for that hardware vehicle.
That's right, Twitter is a corporation. Taking sides on an international war on behalf of one party will be seen by the other side as becoming a part of the enemy. The more Twitter appears to Hamas to be just an arm of the US 'War on Terror, the more Twitter employees count in Hamas's eyes as legitimate targets, and nothing the entire US government can say will change Hamas's mind. The downside is, if a foreign nation, or terrorist group, or just a bunch of nuts with guns, decides to attack their enemy, they can try to shoot it out with a bunch of trained government agents who have heavy weapons support and top secret communications and other assets, or they can go after a bunch of civilians who don't really think they are on the front lines of the war. Companies have to balance giving the US government whatever it wants with becoming soft, soft targets. A responsible board of directors may not want to support their personal government, at least too enthusiastically, as it's their line employees who may end up most at risk. A responsible government may not want to demand to much of civilians or businesses for the same reasons. It's a fine line to walk, and it gives rise to terms such as plausable deniability.
Yes you did, but in an age where the internet really does interpret censorship as damage and at least attempts to route around it, inviable, or perhaps unviable might be the truest word of all. I thought for a second that was your point, that passing laws claiming a geographic limit exists on a right to speech is basically making either the right or the legal interpretation inviable in the modern age. Let's hope the right itself wins out in any such struggle.
The Palestinian people are a problem for Egypt, Syria and others. That's because they are viewed as a problem by those regimes. Many of the Arab nations have either very low immigration quotas for Palestinians or allow no immigration at all by them. They commonly speak of the Palestinians as shiftless bums and born criminals, both as an attitude the majority of people seem to hold and sometimes in official government statements. These nations track violent activites by Hamas and others and keep lists of Palestinians who are dangerous and will never be allowed to stay in those Arab nations or even travel through those countries except with close supervision as part of support for their actions against Israel. How severe this is varies - with Egypt usually being better than, say, Syria about it, but it's a real part of the problem, with Arab governments wanting to endorse 'freedom fighters' whom they don't trust all that much otherwise.
This relationship between the Arab states and Hamas, etc. is often in some ways like the US propping up banana republics and turning a blind eye towards torture and lack of free elections in them, or the former Soviet Union supporting proto-communist movements in Africa or South America while all the time saying 'those people' will never really understand true communism. There's always elements of paternalism and racism driving such relationships, and so they end up contributing to the very problems they hope to solve. All this is not to deny Israel's responsibilities for such things as barbed wire fences and armed checkpoints, and other actions such as allowing illegal settlements or not prosecuting soldiers who aim those rubber 'mercy' bullets at the face at short range.
The whole city where my parents live is surrounded by one big bird and animal sanctuary, and my mom lives in the suburbs and loves to feed things. I've stopped by after work to put feed out for her and had three does and a little two point buck literally nuzzling me to see what's in the pail. Any time I want one to come right up to me I just ignore it and avoid eye contact and it will come over to see what the silly human is doing with that funny leaf rake or garden hose. If look at them and move towards them, they try to keep about 20 feet distance. Mom's called me over to look at a black bear on the back porch before (basically mostly harmless if you give them room, as they average only about 100 lbs.). We have occasional bear that are dangerous, particularly if you appear to be any threat to the cubs, but we also get some so tame they will bring the babies up to beg for handouts (and the real risk is the ones right on the borderline, wanting to get snackies but not convinced they can trust you around the brats, and all baby bears are spoiled brats). Personally, I'm glad gray wolves are being reintroduced to keep the deer populations under control, since we don't seem to have enough hunting nearby.
Just since the election, the Republicans (or at least John Boehner) have offered, as a supposed compromise, that if the government gets more income from better economic circumstances, tax reforms, and cutting waste, the republicans will allow the government to some of that money. Since he has absolutely no pwere to stop the government from recieveing any income that comes from such sources, this is like me offereing to allow gravity to work normally, and then claiming I've made a good offer of compromise and now the other side needs to give me something.
Really, that's a compromise only in Boenerspeak - cut the programs the Republicans say we can't afford, implement all the methods suposedly part of Mitt Romney's tax plan instead of the President's, fund every single defense and homeland security program the Republicans want, and then if revenues go up, he's willing to allow some of those revenues to be kept by the government, and maybe even spent on something besides the Republican priorities.
THAT's his first new 'compromise' offer since the election - give him and his party 100% control over existing funds and IF somehow the economy does better than he expects, he will let the government have the extra taxes this produces, and just maybe even let his opposition restart SOME of the programs for which he's demanding complete shutdowns. How does he propose to stop the government from accepting new tax revenues if they don't give him everything he demands? Does John Boehner actually have the power to unilaterally refuse new revenues and send them back to to the donors or spend them somewhere else? No? Then offering to give up that power is absolutely meaningless.
The whole metaphor of the Nation as Business stinks. You go telling people the President is a CEO, your next step is to say that USA Inc. can fire its underperforming citizens. Of course you favor disenfranchising the vast majority of voters - your metaphor justifies taking every single right they have away, not just the franchise. And, it justifies taking all yours away as well, which is probably not what you intended and not something I would wish on you. I'm giving you the benefit of a doubt and assuming you meant "nowhere in the constitution, PRE-AMENDMENTS" rather than including them in your analysis, and even with that limitation, there's nothing to say the founders opposed the individual ballot BECAUSE OF A CORPORATE ANALOGY. The founding fathers may have mostly opposed direct popular election of the president. At least some of them certainly wanted the EC as a check on democracy running roughtshod over the rights of the states. To turn that into claiming the US is intended to function as would a corporation, is sort of like claiming Teddy Rosevelt was a total pacifist because only a Ghandi clone would have started a national park system. You have to ignore a tremendous number of inconvenient facts to stretch the truth that far.
Hurricanes convert a more ordered form of energy (kenetic energy in winds) into heat. That's enthropy for you. The reason there are predictions that hurricanes will be affected by accellerated global warming is that there's a well known corrolated observation: As a tropical depression's center moves over warm water (specifically anything over 94 degreees F), the depression grows. Over slightly cooler water it doesn't, and when it passes over much cooler water, it shrinks. That's been a very reliable observation, most times. (There's occasional observed effects where another tropical depression has formed close by, and it's in a fast growing region, and it seems to grab all the growth from another depression that is technically also in a region hot enough to grow, but not as warm as where the first one is, etc. - so the rule is not quite 100%, but pretty close and pretty damned reliable.). Every time sombody from NOAA's stormwatch section says a tropical depression is expected to weaken, it's because they have looked at the temperature of the area it is drifting into for that 94 degree contour. When it's towards the end of the hurricane season and the meteorologists are saying that the last remaining depressions on their charts won't become storms and the season is technically over, it's that 94 degree rule they are applying, and again, it's been pretty reliable. So, if we observe more and larger cells where the temperature is over 94 F, we ought to observe more and/or larger storms. The 94 degree rule by itself doesn't show anything about AGW's existence, but if the 94 degree rule isn't telling us that there's some kind of connection between AGW (if it exists), and hurricane properties, it's hard to see how it could be useful for predicting anything else either.
The problem with the Anti-AGW arguement on this is that they seem to insist on it becoming a prediction of weather and not climate, or they say it isn't happening. If there are more warm water cells lasting later into the year, that might stretch out the tail of the hurricane season, giving us storms later than the usual cut off (this happened in 2005 - Katrina wasn't the only significant anomaly that year). Larger but isolated cells might form some stronger hurricanes and terminate some other tropical depressions forming close after the big ones, so we could have some more powerful storms, but not have higher numbers of depressions become full fledged storms. Warm cells that grow until they merge (so storm growth as a depression passes through them might be more continual) could work as a sort of pump to move growing depressions out of each other's way more rapidly, so strength and numbers could both increase in that scenario. The extra heat in the ocean doesn't predict by itself that cells will necessarily get larger and merge at their edges with other cells - that's greatly affected by existing currents, so a cell might stay the same size as typical sometimes and store more heat by climbing to water temperatures of 96, 97, 98 F. The anti-AGW argument on hurricanes seems to demand that the pro-AGW side predict just how the extra heat in the system will distribute itself in any given year so that they can be sure whether each possible effect is the one and only allowable consequence of global warming, and any possible effect that happens some years and not others becomes a non-consequence.
You put this together with the theft from Canada's Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve and it starts forming a pattern, a pattern that says, to the trained eye, that these are steps in some mad scheme, some mad scheme which will eventually show itself to the general public in the form of gigantic robotic myrmidons armed with razor edged walnut waffle of death dispensers on every street corner as some spurious "Doctor" or "Professor" hijacks the media to present his ultimatum to the good people of Apple-Pie-ville and the rest of the world. That's news for nerds in a nutshell, baby!
Cesium 135 has a long half-life, upwards of 2 Million years, but it's not produced much in nuclear reactions, It would be a real fluke if much of it had formed from this accident, because making it passes theough Xenon 135, and the Xenon is a great neutron capturer. Xenon 135 reaction poisoning, and its tendency to stop quickly as the resulting Xenon 136 decays (half-life less than 10 hours), made Chernoble really much worse on really dangerous decay products than otherwise, and if it had been present much at Fukashima, you would see lots of Cesium 135, but also the reactions would have died, flaired again and died back cyclicly for hours and hours in a distinctive pattern that's diagnostic for Xenon, and this cycling happens as people attempt to restart a damped reaction by pulling control rods, not continue shutting it down. (Yes, the Russians did that). I don't think anyone at Fukashima both had control of the rods and fought for hours to restart a damped reactor, from the existing accounts. There'd be a lot of other very hot decay products, much worse than what's being seen, to worry about. Right now, Cesium 137 is one of the most common products of many types of reactor criticalities, and it's a Gamma emitter, making it generally more worrysome than some alternatives. It has a half life of 30 years, so yes, 19 months is not enough to expect much difference, but by your 20,000 years, the stuff will be long, long gone.
I read this and thought, "Why didn't The Doctor just use the TARDIS to get him out", and then 30 seconds later what is evidently the last unatrophied part of my liberal education finally whispered "Thoreau, dummy".
It's very, very much there, to the point where it surprises me when people don't spot it, but perhaps it helps to know the context: Dodgson also wrote a book called Euclid and His Modern Rivals, which was basically a lengthy criticism of people who were trying to develop alternative axioms of geometry and new theorems from them in Dodgson's day. It's fictionalized, in that he used Minos and Radamanthus, two of the three judges of Hades, he had the ghosts of famous dead mathematicians appear, and he actually used Lewis Carroll as a character, who chimed in with his opinions as though he weren't merely Dodgson's alter-ego.
By most accounts, it's a fair lynching. Except for Legendre and Peirce, the people Dodgson was criticising have been pretty well dismissed and are not considered at all relevant to modern non-Euclidian math. Dodgson wasn't particularly critical of those two. For example, he basically said Henrici was using a cheat called a Magician's Force" to present his arguments, which is pretty much saying Henrici wasn't just wrong but crooked. He granted that one of Henrici's arguments was probably intended to be a Reducto ad Absurdum, but then called it an abnormal and hideous one. In a genteel era, there are places where he's about as blunt with some remarks as could be, without shocking genteel folk, and probably if he had been speaking about businessmen or military figures, instead of mathematicians, would have provoked a real challenge to a duel or two, even though they were firmly illegal by then (about 1865 when the first snippets of it were published seperately, to 1885 for the whole volume). About the worst he said of Legendre was that he was better suited to readers who had already studied the subject in depth, and beginners would be confused by their own prejudices as to what words mean in common language instead of math.
I hope you can see where this is going, a bit. In the Alice books, we have a character saying when he uses a word it means precisely what he wants, people having to run as hard as they can just to stay in place, arguments about logical order (The Red Queen's "First the sentence, then the verdict"), and all sorts of bits which are not only about math, but are said by characters who are parodies of some of the specific mathematicians in 'Euclid and'. There's reasons why some characters in the two Alice books look like walruses and carpenters if you look at photos and illustrations of the people in 'Euclid and' who say the quaintly illogical things that match.
The second printing of this book came out in 1974, from Dover, and people might still be able to dig it up cheap. It's 'slightly dry reading' by modern standards.
The fundamental paradox of of commercial copyright: In dealing with the consumers, corporations expect to be treated as essentially trustworthy. They approach the courts as though they are decent, responsible, hard working business owners. They expect laws to be tilted toward a presumption that their company would never abuse them. Then in dealing with each other, they act like everyone else in the industry is a rabid shark.
The zero sum vrs positive sum outcome certainly makes a difference ethically. I'd add a few other differences between sports and 'real life' to the list. 1. It is possible to enforce a rule such as no doping in sports - organizations exist which have legal power to compel testing. What's the organization that could compel testing in all colleges worldwide, or similarly level the playing field? For example, if some organization were created in the US with the goal of testing all college students, is there any real chance they could get legal authority to test all private colleges? Would the US government revise H1B visa status so legal aliens only held employable status if the schools in their country of origin had let the organization test them too?. 2. In sports, there is a consensus that is, if not universal, at least pretty widely held, about just what is ethical. Not only are the people doing this speculation right that there isn't a similar consensus in the wider world (which they seem to admit), but look at the areas of lack of consensus. In particular, what about war? If we could get an actual consensus about what was ethical in the way of enhancing combat troops, why have we been unable to get everyone to sign onto a Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty, or the Geneva convention, and then abide by such rules? If we could get a consensus about medical ethics, why doesn't every nation in the world adopt the same rules about expiramental drug treatments or hospice care or assisted suicide? If we could get a consensus about economic ethics, why did practically the whole world have to fight a 60 year long cold war to a rather ambiguous conclusion (yeah, yeah, the ruskies gave up. And I suppose Vietnam was a US victory that helped that process along, the PRC is solidly capitalist now, and there's no problem (as the US usually sees it) with Chile, Cuba, or half of south and central America, and we can all be confident that the US economy will weather continued cold war spending practices, in the new perpetual war which isn't happening because once the Commies couldn't dominate the middle east, the whole ME turned solidly capitalist). People are going to apply drugs that may or may not enhance their abilties to war, health, and money if there aren't tremendous reasons not to.
Speculating about applying any sort of standard ethical code to this delemma is like speculating what would happen if about 8,000 years of human history didn't all seem to disagree with your basic premises and pigs came with built in turboprops. Unless you've invented a way to get the alerons to stick to the pig tail, no one should believe you can tackle giving the pig enough depth perception to use them, and the speculators are talking like the remaining obstacles are down to seat pricing algorythms and picking a nice color for the carpet in the pig's cabin.
My mother frequently uses a compounding pharmacy. The reason is twofold. First, she had an ongoing condition involving healing after surgery, that turned out to be heavily dependent on getting her blood thinned enough that it transported antibiotics properly into bony tissue with poor veinous access. It took a while to get a proper diagnosis on this, but by the time she did, she had found some good doctors, who very regularly monitored her blood viscosity while the treatments that finally cured the condition were applied. They tested her to get a good isea of her idiosyncratic responses to various blood thinners, and in the end, a custom mix of blood thinners was used for several months to keep her within a narrow range that was just thick enough to avoid some major risks and still do the job. Since that time, she has used the same pharmacy to get various drugs that are often made with shellfish or egg processes run up in other media, although she feels that's just being on the safe side with some old allergies.
Mom doesn't buy into the supposed Autism/Vaccine connection, but as she points out, If someone is worried about that, it's possible through some compounding sources to get vaccines that definitely were never preserved with Thimerosal, the chemical most often suspected by the anti-vaccine groups. The FDA allows quite a few vaccines to be manufactured in non-allergenic forms, particularly in 50%+ Glycerin bases, with either no or only microgram traces of Thimerosal. These are the sorts of uses that big chain pharmacies steer clear of, and while they may be right in not catering to the people who think autism and vaccines are connected, a lot of these other uses seem more solidly supported. (And, IMHO, it's really more important for a pharmacy to be sure they can do any of a wide range of procedures with full regard for safety, than to think they have to have a strong opinion on whether every single one of those procedures is the best bet medically or scientifically speaking - much of that should be left up to doctors, researchers, and, when needed, the government to make the final determination).
There's a need for good compounding pharmacies, and it's a pity that there doesn't seem to be national resolve to regulate them in precisely the same way as other pharmacies or businesses that manufacture stock drugs. In the US in the wake of this tragedy, we increasingly have two groups, one calling for massive regulation or simply shutting down all compounding, and the other chanting their mantra that government is always the problem, and people who call for the same oversight of the same processes, in an even-handed manner across the board, are unlikely to be listened to in this political climate.
You've said quite a few interesting and even correct things in your post, but I want to add one point (or quibble if you wish). You are probably not in an ideal urban environment, and don't want to be. That's because an 'ideal' environment might have the broader spacing given by single family homes, but a very low average income, where there would be both fewer access points and fewer average clients per AP. In theory, parts of Detroit that are now full of more abandoned homes than inhabited ones sound 'ideal'. 26 points and 2.25 clients per sounds like you qualify as upper middle class (if anyone does these days). You would actually see less traffic in a wealthier neighborhood, as there would be more average distance between houses, and less in a poorer neighborhood, as there would be fewer people on wireless. In addition, there's a northern/southern states bias in the US, in that there's more brick and concrete block and less wood used in low to medium priced residential neighborhoods as you look at more northernly cities, and this tends to attenuate some traffic over shorter ranges.
I would like to know more about how you measured the number of associated clients though. I thought some of the mixed wired and wireless hubs reported the wired accesses mixed in with wireless, and/or indicated both active and non-active connections, but didn't give out the rest of the information needed to properly interpret what you can get. If you queried my parent's wireless router at their place, for example, and if you could get the info remotely, you might find 14 devices assigned an address, but those are for two Cat 5E wired desktop machines that are currently active, and the rest are for laptops and such the various kids, grandkids, nieces and nephews have brought over when staying for a visit, and are still on the router's lists months later. I've had five different laptop or tablet machines connected through that router at various times visiting, but never more than one on the same weekend or holiday.
You're the first post I've come to on this thread that has mentioned the sad relationship between microwave ovens and channel 6. Other people mentioned the noise floor early in the discussion, but I didn't notice any of them actually referencing that to Shannon's Law, either. You should be modded informative a couple of times, but I won't be surprised if the 'sociopathic answer' part gets you downmodded instead.
A bit hyperbolic, but it touches on several essentials. The causes of Martin's suspensions have been revealed repeatedly, and they are not violence related, but some people on Slashdot are willing to post speculations that there's something beyond that. When you keep looking for the thing that bolsters your opinion, and it's just not there, just maybe it's time to question your opinon instead of doubling down on it.
Beyond that, there was a point where the police locally knew a few things and only those things, for certain. At later times, other facts came to light, and the situation became more complex, but in the first few hours after the shooting, there was a definite point where all the police had to go on were these facts: 1. They knew they had a homicide, and who did it. 2. They knew that the person who did it was claiming it was justifiable self defense. 3. They knew there were major flaws in the shooter's story - changes in the range the encounter supposedly took place at, changes in what the suspect said to dispatch, what he claimed dispatch said to him, how the deceased person had attacked him, what blows were thrown, what blows landed where, and so on. They knew that their possible murderer had repeatedly changed his story.
So why didn't they charge him right there and then?
All debate about what has been revealed weeks or months later ignores this simple question. There was a definite point where George Zimmerman was a strong suspect for a charge of 1st degree murder. Most detectives would have been willing to insist on holding him for at least the standard 24, and go before a judge to apply for a warrent to search Mr. Zimmerman's home. Many would have been willing to get the judge up at 3 AM, if needed, on the strength of what they had at that particular point. Why not in the Martin case?
The law gives the TSA a lot of flexability, but that doesn't mean the real limits the public will tolerate will always match the law. Why would any police type agent want to demand that the public simply believe they are totally fair and unbiased just because the law says so, when they can simply say the dog made the decision so their potential bias doesn't enter into it? If I somehow got a law passed saying I had the authority to do X because I am totally fair and unbiased, would you start believing that about me? If the law said you couldn't even question my fairness, under penalty, would that actually make you think I was fair? Dogs, machines (particularly computers), and for that matter FBI profilers, sometimes make good excuses for deflecting charges of bias without having to just tell people the law forbids entertaining those charges of bias. The system wants the majority of citizens to think it is fair, and will go to great lengths to achieve that goal.
It's interesting to me that the right so frequently stresses how left Hollywood leans. yet it would be very difficult to find a 'left leaning' actor who has gone nearly as far as Chuck Norris has to the right. If a Charles Heston and a Barbara Streisand somehow offset each other, you would probably have to add ten 'left leaning' actors together to get to a position that counterbalanced Chuck, or Ted Nugent or several others. He's a leftist because he said something pro union or in support of the occupy movement, doesn't really balance he's a rightist because he's calling for a one party system. Someone counting as a leftist because they made a PETA advertisement doesn't begin to counterbalance the things Chuck has been saying lately.
I can think of a few leftist actors that went that far. Maybe when Alec Baldwin was so hacked off about the Clinton Impeachment that he said "if we were in another country, we would stone Henry Hyde to death, and we would go to their homes and would kill their wives and children....", that's getting to the same level, but a. Baldwin was venting over one particular days acts by the impeachment comittee when he'd just heard about it. b. he says he was taking it to the level of a parody so as to point out how making everything about scoring points for your party was a bad thing (and If Rush can say some of the things he says are jokes and get the benefit of a doubt, then so can other people). and c. It's at least technically true - there are plenty of nations, including western democracies, where if a lot of people thought an impeachment was turning into "score points for our party, and to hell with what it does to the whole country", they would have gone to mob violence. I hate to think of the US having that level of violence, but it follows just as much from what Chuck Norris is saying - if nobody is patriotic except Republicans, do you really think those Republicans can fix all that unpatriotism without puitting a few million people in deathcamps? Or that anyone who really believes that is planning to try and gently persuade the other side by good example. This is, in Norris's words about "a thousand years of darkness" - does anyone really think he supports peacefully discussing our differences?
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When WW2 began, there were highly placed members in the imperial cabinet who made predictions. Predictions such as "Japan will win all naval engagements with the US for at least the first 2 1/2 years", or "It will take the US at least 18 months to take any location where they can base bombing runs against the Japanese mainland.". Both of these predictions, and many similar ones turned out to be directly, factually wrong. The Doolittle raid was a successful strategic bombing mission against the mainland, only four months and eleven days after the Pearl Harbor attack. The Battle of Midway was a Japanese loss six months after Pearl, a loss where the Japanese saw four of six carriers sunk to take down one US carrier. The people who made these erronious predictions were promoted and rewarded after they proved wrong. They enjoyed support sufficient that when some Japanese military personel pointed out that they had been wrong, they were able to have their critics disgraced, and in some cases summarily executed, in a few cases alongside their families. The war wasn't going to be "basically over" until they were removed from power, period.
No, no it's not. Your analogy is like saying any politician that assumes people who aren't actively complaining don't object (or they would be complaining), becomes a rapist. The people who modded you insightful are those people who really, literally believe all politicians are sub-human scumbags that deserve to be called rapists or worse, and probably believe as well that total anarchy is a good thing. Go ahead, keep feeding them red meat.
Thinkpad R32 - 11 years old - 512 M of RAM
Now running Kubuntu 12.4 (with KDE). 30 second boot time if I type the password fast.
And I appologise for writing the contraction of "it is" without a "'".
The whining about Gnome shouldn't really be lumped in with the whining about Unity. It's two seperate whinings even though Unity works as a shell of sorts for Gnome. Even though they sound inextricably linked, the thing to be whined about is different. It's "Whaaah, Unity doesn't do this!, and they say its because they are aming at a certain class of hardware - that is, netbooks and other places where the screen size is rather limited", vrs. "Whaaah, Gnome doesn't let me do this, says they could explain why but don't want to bother, and I'm a bad person for even asking!" (Then Gnome throws out a couple of phrases for the 'in the know', but those words seem to be haunted by the spirit of Inego Montoya).
I mostly use KDE Plasma on a rather large multiscreen desktop myself, but if I buy either a netbook or some types of tablet I will consider Unity with Gnome underneath as possibly a better option overall than some preinstalled alternatives, and if that happens, I expect to get serious about learning the depths of Unity and so giving it a better chance to be a long lasting default. For you car analogy folks, it's like I run my old Ford Tarus on 87 or 89 Octane, but if I ever happen to find myself driving a vintage original Firebird or Mustang, I'm prepared to give it 93 Octane gas. I literally don't know what sort of hardware might make Gnome by itself an objectively better choice, and the people recommending Gnome can't tell me, with my hardware, any situation where it reliably gives me something, such as better boot times, more stability, or something that can be objectively measured, but Unity introduces a more objective test for maybe installing Gnome - Unity might provide a way to get more use out of a netbook sized device, which is, after all, what it promises. Whining about Unity is sometimes like complaining that Premium gas costs more than Regular, before acknowleging that Premium is still the best choice for that hardware vehicle.
That's right, Twitter is a corporation. Taking sides on an international war on behalf of one party will be seen by the other side as becoming a part of the enemy. The more Twitter appears to Hamas to be just an arm of the US 'War on Terror, the more Twitter employees count in Hamas's eyes as legitimate targets, and nothing the entire US government can say will change Hamas's mind. The downside is, if a foreign nation, or terrorist group, or just a bunch of nuts with guns, decides to attack their enemy, they can try to shoot it out with a bunch of trained government agents who have heavy weapons support and top secret communications and other assets, or they can go after a bunch of civilians who don't really think they are on the front lines of the war. Companies have to balance giving the US government whatever it wants with becoming soft, soft targets. A responsible board of directors may not want to support their personal government, at least too enthusiastically, as it's their line employees who may end up most at risk. A responsible government may not want to demand to much of civilians or businesses for the same reasons. It's a fine line to walk, and it gives rise to terms such as plausable deniability.
Yes you did, but in an age where the internet really does interpret censorship as damage and at least attempts to route around it, inviable, or perhaps unviable might be the truest word of all. I thought for a second that was your point, that passing laws claiming a geographic limit exists on a right to speech is basically making either the right or the legal interpretation inviable in the modern age. Let's hope the right itself wins out in any such struggle.
The Palestinian people are a problem for Egypt, Syria and others. That's because they are viewed as a problem by those regimes. Many of the Arab nations have either very low immigration quotas for Palestinians or allow no immigration at all by them. They commonly speak of the Palestinians as shiftless bums and born criminals, both as an attitude the majority of people seem to hold and sometimes in official government statements. These nations track violent activites by Hamas and others and keep lists of Palestinians who are dangerous and will never be allowed to stay in those Arab nations or even travel through those countries except with close supervision as part of support for their actions against Israel. How severe this is varies - with Egypt usually being better than, say, Syria about it, but it's a real part of the problem, with Arab governments wanting to endorse 'freedom fighters' whom they don't trust all that much otherwise.
This relationship between the Arab states and Hamas, etc. is often in some ways like the US propping up banana republics and turning a blind eye towards torture and lack of free elections in them, or the former Soviet Union supporting proto-communist movements in Africa or South America while all the time saying 'those people' will never really understand true communism. There's always elements of paternalism and racism driving such relationships, and so they end up contributing to the very problems they hope to solve. All this is not to deny Israel's responsibilities for such things as barbed wire fences and armed checkpoints, and other actions such as allowing illegal settlements or not prosecuting soldiers who aim those rubber 'mercy' bullets at the face at short range.
The whole city where my parents live is surrounded by one big bird and animal sanctuary, and my mom lives in the suburbs and loves to feed things. I've stopped by after work to put feed out for her and had three does and a little two point buck literally nuzzling me to see what's in the pail. Any time I want one to come right up to me I just ignore it and avoid eye contact and it will come over to see what the silly human is doing with that funny leaf rake or garden hose. If look at them and move towards them, they try to keep about 20 feet distance. Mom's called me over to look at a black bear on the back porch before (basically mostly harmless if you give them room, as they average only about 100 lbs.). We have occasional bear that are dangerous, particularly if you appear to be any threat to the cubs, but we also get some so tame they will bring the babies up to beg for handouts (and the real risk is the ones right on the borderline, wanting to get snackies but not convinced they can trust you around the brats, and all baby bears are spoiled brats). Personally, I'm glad gray wolves are being reintroduced to keep the deer populations under control, since we don't seem to have enough hunting nearby.
From a Doctor's perspective, it may point to the right - from THE Doctor's perspective, time points anywhere he wants (unless it goes wibbly-wobbly).
You're being trolled. Please don't feed the Trolls.
Just since the election, the Republicans (or at least John Boehner) have offered, as a supposed compromise, that if the government gets more income from better economic circumstances, tax reforms, and cutting waste, the republicans will allow the government to some of that money. Since he has absolutely no pwere to stop the government from recieveing any income that comes from such sources, this is like me offereing to allow gravity to work normally, and then claiming I've made a good offer of compromise and now the other side needs to give me something.
Really, that's a compromise only in Boenerspeak - cut the programs the Republicans say we can't afford, implement all the methods suposedly part of Mitt Romney's tax plan instead of the President's, fund every single defense and homeland security program the Republicans want, and then if revenues go up, he's willing to allow some of those revenues to be kept by the government, and maybe even spent on something besides the Republican priorities.
THAT's his first new 'compromise' offer since the election - give him and his party 100% control over existing funds and IF somehow the economy does better than he expects, he will let the government have the extra taxes this produces, and just maybe even let his opposition restart SOME of the programs for which he's demanding complete shutdowns. How does he propose to stop the government from accepting new tax revenues if they don't give him everything he demands? Does John Boehner actually have the power to unilaterally refuse new revenues and send them back to to the donors or spend them somewhere else? No? Then offering to give up that power is absolutely meaningless.
The whole metaphor of the Nation as Business stinks. You go telling people the President is a CEO, your next step is to say that USA Inc. can fire its underperforming citizens. Of course you favor disenfranchising the vast majority of voters - your metaphor justifies taking every single right they have away, not just the franchise. And, it justifies taking all yours away as well, which is probably not what you intended and not something I would wish on you. I'm giving you the benefit of a doubt and assuming you meant "nowhere in the constitution, PRE-AMENDMENTS" rather than including them in your analysis, and even with that limitation, there's nothing to say the founders opposed the individual ballot BECAUSE OF A CORPORATE ANALOGY. The founding fathers may have mostly opposed direct popular election of the president. At least some of them certainly wanted the EC as a check on democracy running roughtshod over the rights of the states. To turn that into claiming the US is intended to function as would a corporation, is sort of like claiming Teddy Rosevelt was a total pacifist because only a Ghandi clone would have started a national park system. You have to ignore a tremendous number of inconvenient facts to stretch the truth that far.
Hurricanes convert a more ordered form of energy (kenetic energy in winds) into heat. That's enthropy for you.
The reason there are predictions that hurricanes will be affected by accellerated global warming is that there's a well known corrolated observation: As a tropical depression's center moves over warm water (specifically anything over 94 degreees F), the depression grows. Over slightly cooler water it doesn't, and when it passes over much cooler water, it shrinks. That's been a very reliable observation, most times. (There's occasional observed effects where another tropical depression has formed close by, and it's in a fast growing region, and it seems to grab all the growth from another depression that is technically also in a region hot enough to grow, but not as warm as where the first one is, etc. - so the rule is not quite 100%, but pretty close and pretty damned reliable.). Every time sombody from NOAA's stormwatch section says a tropical depression is expected to weaken, it's because they have looked at the temperature of the area it is drifting into for that 94 degree contour. When it's towards the end of the hurricane season and the meteorologists are saying that the last remaining depressions on their charts won't become storms and the season is technically over, it's that 94 degree rule they are applying, and again, it's been pretty reliable. So, if we observe more and larger cells where the temperature is over 94 F, we ought to observe more and/or larger storms. The 94 degree rule by itself doesn't show anything about AGW's existence, but if the 94 degree rule isn't telling us that there's some kind of connection between AGW (if it exists), and hurricane properties, it's hard to see how it could be useful for predicting anything else either.
The problem with the Anti-AGW arguement on this is that they seem to insist on it becoming a prediction of weather and not climate, or they say it isn't happening. If there are more warm water cells lasting later into the year, that might stretch out the tail of the hurricane season, giving us storms later than the usual cut off (this happened in 2005 - Katrina wasn't the only significant anomaly that year). Larger but isolated cells might form some stronger hurricanes and terminate some other tropical depressions forming close after the big ones, so we could have some more powerful storms, but not have higher numbers of depressions become full fledged storms. Warm cells that grow until they merge (so storm growth as a depression passes through them might be more continual) could work as a sort of pump to move growing depressions out of each other's way more rapidly, so strength and numbers could both increase in that scenario. The extra heat in the ocean doesn't predict by itself that cells will necessarily get larger and merge at their edges with other cells - that's greatly affected by existing currents, so a cell might stay the same size as typical sometimes and store more heat by climbing to water temperatures of 96, 97, 98 F. The anti-AGW argument on hurricanes seems to demand that the pro-AGW side predict just how the extra heat in the system will distribute itself in any given year so that they can be sure whether each possible effect is the one and only allowable consequence of global warming, and any possible effect that happens some years and not others becomes a non-consequence.
You put this together with the theft from Canada's Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve and it starts forming a pattern, a pattern that says, to the trained eye, that these are steps in some mad scheme, some mad scheme which will eventually show itself to the general public in the form of gigantic robotic myrmidons armed with razor edged walnut waffle of death dispensers on every street corner as some spurious "Doctor" or "Professor" hijacks the media to present his ultimatum to the good people of Apple-Pie-ville and the rest of the world. That's news for nerds in a nutshell, baby!
Cesium 135 has a long half-life, upwards of 2 Million years, but it's not produced much in nuclear reactions, It would be a real fluke if much of it had formed from this accident, because making it passes theough Xenon 135, and the Xenon is a great neutron capturer. Xenon 135 reaction poisoning, and its tendency to stop quickly as the resulting Xenon 136 decays (half-life less than 10 hours), made Chernoble really much worse on really dangerous decay products than otherwise, and if it had been present much at Fukashima, you would see lots of Cesium 135, but also the reactions would have died, flaired again and died back cyclicly for hours and hours in a distinctive pattern that's diagnostic for Xenon, and this cycling happens as people attempt to restart a damped reaction by pulling control rods, not continue shutting it down. (Yes, the Russians did that). I don't think anyone at Fukashima both had control of the rods and fought for hours to restart a damped reactor, from the existing accounts. There'd be a lot of other very hot decay products, much worse than what's being seen, to worry about. Right now, Cesium 137 is one of the most common products of many types of reactor criticalities, and it's a Gamma emitter, making it generally more worrysome than some alternatives. It has a half life of 30 years, so yes, 19 months is not enough to expect much difference, but by your 20,000 years, the stuff will be long, long gone.
I read this and thought, "Why didn't The Doctor just use the TARDIS to get him out", and then 30 seconds later what is evidently the last unatrophied part of my liberal education finally whispered "Thoreau, dummy".
It's very, very much there, to the point where it surprises me when people don't spot it, but perhaps it helps to know the context:
Dodgson also wrote a book called Euclid and His Modern Rivals, which was basically a lengthy criticism of people who were trying to develop alternative axioms of geometry and new theorems from them in Dodgson's day. It's fictionalized, in that he used Minos and Radamanthus, two of the three judges of Hades, he had the ghosts of famous dead mathematicians appear, and he actually used Lewis Carroll as a character, who chimed in with his opinions as though he weren't merely Dodgson's alter-ego.
By most accounts, it's a fair lynching. Except for Legendre and Peirce, the people Dodgson was criticising have been pretty well dismissed and are not considered at all relevant to modern non-Euclidian math. Dodgson wasn't particularly critical of those two. For example, he basically said Henrici was using a cheat called a Magician's Force" to present his arguments, which is pretty much saying Henrici wasn't just wrong but crooked. He granted that one of Henrici's arguments was probably intended to be a Reducto ad Absurdum, but then called it an abnormal and hideous one. In a genteel era, there are places where he's about as blunt with some remarks as could be, without shocking genteel folk, and probably if he had been speaking about businessmen or military figures, instead of mathematicians, would have provoked a real challenge to a duel or two, even though they were firmly illegal by then (about 1865 when the first snippets of it were published seperately, to 1885 for the whole volume). About the worst he said of Legendre was that he was better suited to readers who had already studied the subject in depth, and beginners would be confused by their own prejudices as to what words mean in common language instead of math.
I hope you can see where this is going, a bit. In the Alice books, we have a character saying when he uses a word it means precisely what he wants, people having to run as hard as they can just to stay in place, arguments about logical order (The Red Queen's "First the sentence, then the verdict"), and all sorts of bits which are not only about math, but are said by characters who are parodies of some of the specific mathematicians in 'Euclid and'. There's reasons why some characters in the two Alice books look like walruses and carpenters if you look at photos and illustrations of the people in 'Euclid and' who say the quaintly illogical things that match.
The second printing of this book came out in 1974, from Dover, and people might still be able to dig it up cheap. It's 'slightly dry reading' by modern standards.
The fundamental paradox of of commercial copyright: In dealing with the consumers, corporations expect to be treated as essentially trustworthy. They approach the courts as though they are decent, responsible, hard working business owners. They expect laws to be tilted toward a presumption that their company would never abuse them. Then in dealing with each other, they act like everyone else in the industry is a rabid shark.
The zero sum vrs positive sum outcome certainly makes a difference ethically. I'd add a few other differences between sports and 'real life' to the list.
1. It is possible to enforce a rule such as no doping in sports - organizations exist which have legal power to compel testing. What's the organization that could compel testing in all colleges worldwide, or similarly level the playing field? For example, if some organization were created in the US with the goal of testing all college students, is there any real chance they could get legal authority to test all private colleges? Would the US government revise H1B visa status so legal aliens only held employable status if the schools in their country of origin had let the organization test them too?.
2. In sports, there is a consensus that is, if not universal, at least pretty widely held, about just what is ethical. Not only are the people doing this speculation right that there isn't a similar consensus in the wider world (which they seem to admit), but look at the areas of lack of consensus. In particular, what about war? If we could get an actual consensus about what was ethical in the way of enhancing combat troops, why have we been unable to get everyone to sign onto a Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty, or the Geneva convention, and then abide by such rules? If we could get a consensus about medical ethics, why doesn't every nation in the world adopt the same rules about expiramental drug treatments or hospice care or assisted suicide? If we could get a consensus about economic ethics, why did practically the whole world have to fight a 60 year long cold war to a rather ambiguous conclusion (yeah, yeah, the ruskies gave up. And I suppose Vietnam was a US victory that helped that process along, the PRC is solidly capitalist now, and there's no problem (as the US usually sees it) with Chile, Cuba, or half of south and central America, and we can all be confident that the US economy will weather continued cold war spending practices, in the new perpetual war which isn't happening because once the Commies couldn't dominate the middle east, the whole ME turned solidly capitalist). People are going to apply drugs that may or may not enhance their abilties to war, health, and money if there aren't tremendous reasons not to.
Speculating about applying any sort of standard ethical code to this delemma is like speculating what would happen if about 8,000 years of human history didn't all seem to disagree with your basic premises and pigs came with built in turboprops. Unless you've invented a way to get the alerons to stick to the pig tail, no one should believe you can tackle giving the pig enough depth perception to use them, and the speculators are talking like the remaining obstacles are down to seat pricing algorythms and picking a nice color for the carpet in the pig's cabin.
My mother frequently uses a compounding pharmacy. The reason is twofold. First, she had an ongoing condition involving healing after surgery, that turned out to be heavily dependent on getting her blood thinned enough that it transported antibiotics properly into bony tissue with poor veinous access. It took a while to get a proper diagnosis on this, but by the time she did, she had found some good doctors, who very regularly monitored her blood viscosity while the treatments that finally cured the condition were applied. They tested her to get a good isea of her idiosyncratic responses to various blood thinners, and in the end, a custom mix of blood thinners was used for several months to keep her within a narrow range that was just thick enough to avoid some major risks and still do the job. Since that time, she has used the same pharmacy to get various drugs that are often made with shellfish or egg processes run up in other media, although she feels that's just being on the safe side with some old allergies.
Mom doesn't buy into the supposed Autism/Vaccine connection, but as she points out, If someone is worried about that, it's possible through some compounding sources to get vaccines that definitely were never preserved with Thimerosal, the chemical most often suspected by the anti-vaccine groups. The FDA allows quite a few vaccines to be manufactured in non-allergenic forms, particularly in 50%+ Glycerin bases, with either no or only microgram traces of Thimerosal. These are the sorts of uses that big chain pharmacies steer clear of, and while they may be right in not catering to the people who think autism and vaccines are connected, a lot of these other uses seem more solidly supported. (And, IMHO, it's really more important for a pharmacy to be sure they can do any of a wide range of procedures with full regard for safety, than to think they have to have a strong opinion on whether every single one of those procedures is the best bet medically or scientifically speaking - much of that should be left up to doctors, researchers, and, when needed, the government to make the final determination).
There's a need for good compounding pharmacies, and it's a pity that there doesn't seem to be national resolve to regulate them in precisely the same way as other pharmacies or businesses that manufacture stock drugs. In the US in the wake of this tragedy, we increasingly have two groups, one calling for massive regulation or simply shutting down all compounding, and the other chanting their mantra that government is always the problem, and people who call for the same oversight of the same processes, in an even-handed manner across the board, are unlikely to be listened to in this political climate.
You've said quite a few interesting and even correct things in your post, but I want to add one point (or quibble if you wish). You are probably not in an ideal urban environment, and don't want to be. That's because an 'ideal' environment might have the broader spacing given by single family homes, but a very low average income, where there would be both fewer access points and fewer average clients per AP. In theory, parts of Detroit that are now full of more abandoned homes than inhabited ones sound 'ideal'. 26 points and 2.25 clients per sounds like you qualify as upper middle class (if anyone does these days). You would actually see less traffic in a wealthier neighborhood, as there would be more average distance between houses, and less in a poorer neighborhood, as there would be fewer people on wireless. In addition, there's a northern/southern states bias in the US, in that there's more brick and concrete block and less wood used in low to medium priced residential neighborhoods as you look at more northernly cities, and this tends to attenuate some traffic over shorter ranges.
I would like to know more about how you measured the number of associated clients though. I thought some of the mixed wired and wireless hubs reported the wired accesses mixed in with wireless, and/or indicated both active and non-active connections, but didn't give out the rest of the information needed to properly interpret what you can get. If you queried my parent's wireless router at their place, for example, and if you could get the info remotely, you might find 14 devices assigned an address, but those are for two Cat 5E wired desktop machines that are currently active, and the rest are for laptops and such the various kids, grandkids, nieces and nephews have brought over when staying for a visit, and are still on the router's lists months later. I've had five different laptop or tablet machines connected through that router at various times visiting, but never more than one on the same weekend or holiday.
You're the first post I've come to on this thread that has mentioned the sad relationship between microwave ovens and channel 6. Other people mentioned the noise floor early in the discussion, but I didn't notice any of them actually referencing that to Shannon's Law, either. You should be modded informative a couple of times, but I won't be surprised if the 'sociopathic answer' part gets you downmodded instead.
A bit hyperbolic, but it touches on several essentials. The causes of Martin's suspensions have been revealed repeatedly, and they are not violence related, but some people on Slashdot are willing to post speculations that there's something beyond that. When you keep looking for the thing that bolsters your opinion, and it's just not there, just maybe it's time to question your opinon instead of doubling down on it.
Beyond that, there was a point where the police locally knew a few things and only those things, for certain. At later times, other facts came to light, and the situation became more complex, but in the first few hours after the shooting, there was a definite point where all the police had to go on were these facts:
1. They knew they had a homicide, and who did it.
2. They knew that the person who did it was claiming it was justifiable self defense.
3. They knew there were major flaws in the shooter's story - changes in the range the encounter supposedly took place at, changes in what the suspect said to dispatch, what he claimed dispatch said to him, how the deceased person had attacked him, what blows were thrown, what blows landed where, and so on. They knew that their possible murderer had repeatedly changed his story.
So why didn't they charge him right there and then?
All debate about what has been revealed weeks or months later ignores this simple question. There was a definite point where George Zimmerman was a strong suspect for a charge of 1st degree murder. Most detectives would have been willing to insist on holding him for at least the standard 24, and go before a judge to apply for a warrent to search Mr. Zimmerman's home. Many would have been willing to get the judge up at 3 AM, if needed, on the strength of what they had at that particular point. Why not in the Martin case?
The law gives the TSA a lot of flexability, but that doesn't mean the real limits the public will tolerate will always match the law. Why would any police type agent want to demand that the public simply believe they are totally fair and unbiased just because the law says so, when they can simply say the dog made the decision so their potential bias doesn't enter into it? If I somehow got a law passed saying I had the authority to do X because I am totally fair and unbiased, would you start believing that about me? If the law said you couldn't even question my fairness, under penalty, would that actually make you think I was fair? Dogs, machines (particularly computers), and for that matter FBI profilers, sometimes make good excuses for deflecting charges of bias without having to just tell people the law forbids entertaining those charges of bias. The system wants the majority of citizens to think it is fair, and will go to great lengths to achieve that goal.
It's interesting to me that the right so frequently stresses how left Hollywood leans. yet it would be very difficult to find a 'left leaning' actor who has gone nearly as far as Chuck Norris has to the right. If a Charles Heston and a Barbara Streisand somehow offset each other, you would probably have to add ten 'left leaning' actors together to get to a position that counterbalanced Chuck, or Ted Nugent or several others. He's a leftist because he said something pro union or in support of the occupy movement, doesn't really balance he's a rightist because he's calling for a one party system. Someone counting as a leftist because they made a PETA advertisement doesn't begin to counterbalance the things Chuck has been saying lately.
I can think of a few leftist actors that went that far. Maybe when Alec Baldwin was so hacked off about the Clinton Impeachment that he said "if we were in another country, we would stone Henry Hyde to death, and we would go to their homes and would kill their wives and children....", that's getting to the same level, but a. Baldwin was venting over one particular days acts by the impeachment comittee when he'd just heard about it. b. he says he was taking it to the level of a parody so as to point out how making everything about scoring points for your party was a bad thing (and If Rush can say some of the things he says are jokes and get the benefit of a doubt, then so can other people). and c. It's at least technically true - there are plenty of nations, including western democracies, where if a lot of people thought an impeachment was turning into "score points for our party, and to hell with what it does to the whole country", they would have gone to mob violence. I hate to think of the US having that level of violence, but it follows just as much from what Chuck Norris is saying - if nobody is patriotic except Republicans, do you really think those Republicans can fix all that unpatriotism without puitting a few million people in deathcamps? Or that anyone who really believes that is planning to try and gently persuade the other side by good example. This is, in Norris's words about "a thousand years of darkness" - does anyone really think he supports peacefully discussing our differences?