The problem is, that Natural Selection requires, in theory, that there be some pretty strong limits on blending. The classic Mendelian model implies a code that is pretty reliably non-blending and that in turn is one of the things that makes NS count as science. That is, it had predictive power - Darwin's original work caused him to predict that when the code was discovered, it would allow, at most, only very limited blending. * "One DNA sequence yields one protein, now and forever" also works to make blending rare at best. The more there's something else there, the more the questions that follow can include "Does that something allow more blending than is good for the fundamental dogma of natural selection?" (which is not the same as the 'fundamental dogma of genetics'). Now personally, I doubt that whatever mechanisms we are looking at here have any strong influence on just how much 'blendability' is possible in genetic code transmission, one way or the other. But I wouldn't doubt either that some 'creation science' fan will seize upon this or that some geneticists would get premptive at the very possibility.
So why is this news? In part because it has an impact on the politicization of science, as well as on the actual science.
* It's amazing - scientists debated for decades whether height was a trait that blended or whether there were several genes controlling height to give a superficial appearance of blending, and so on. It was the 1970's before someone pointed out that Gender itself was a trait that almost never had any intermediate blended expression, even though that fact had been staring geneticists right in the face for about 100 years, since genetics itself began.
If strikes by 'stray' cosmic rays are a non-random phenominon, then you've just proved an intelligent super-powerful being deliberately interferes in evolution. I'm glad you think that wouldn't be amazing. Personally, if I'd just proved that, I wouldn't be so blasé. In fact, I'd be demanding the Nobel committee make me Pope and the Roman Catholic church give me a big gold prize, and probably hinting that Ms. Portman should climb out of those grits, towel herself off, and bear my children to get in good with the Shaper of our Genetic Destinies, while I was at it.
Just out of curiosity, what would you find amazing? I take it the new TV season isn't even in the running?
Except income taxes simply don't outweigh all the other taxes combined. They don't, even if you don't count inflation as a hidden tax, and if you do, which is actually fair, income tax isn't even close to second place. Except every single state has sales taxes - if they don't have a tax at the individual end, they still have companies passing on their sales taxes on everything they sell in the form of increased prices. You may be right that most people mean the income tax when they say 'taxes', but that's because those same most people don't seem to understand social security is funded from its own tax,and most of them have the mistaken idea Social Security is in trouble because it is 'socialist' and 'socialist' things 'always' fail, instead of being so successful that the government has repeatedly borrowed surpluses to prop up the general fund and now some people want to not pay them back and watch the program sink instead. So it doesn't matter if most people 'mean' that, any more than it matters if most people think a rocket can't fly in space because there's no air to push against.
I find your sig ironic (and not in an Alanis Morrisetteian sense). Personal responsibility means when you are wrong, you admit you are wrong, instead of claiming you are really right because the majority agrees with you and the majority is always right. I have mod points, and If I had modded you down, it would have been because you were hypocritical and ignorant. Instead I've answered you, which is probably better than you deserved. I figure it's worth it, because you probably hate being shown up a lot more than you hate being modded down. Have a nice day.
Just FYI, for the US, usually, when you abbreviate as DoE, you mean Dept. of Energy http://www.energy.gov/ The Federal Department of Education prefers to call themselves the education dept. (ED) http://www.ed.gov/ as you can see used many places on their website.
Both your thousand spent and your fifty thousand over the course of their life are very different from the real numbers, but your argument is actually made more valid by using reasonably current figures
Federal spending, per capita, for public primary and secondary education (2007 - most recent year data have been aggregated for public release): $ 9,683 Average contribution (per year) for a US worker to the US GDP (In 2007 standardized dollars, as used to apply a cost of living locally factor to all other countries figures - note that the cost of living in the US is always the base for reporting and so not adjusted). $46,436 Average contibution without even a high school diploma or GED: $6,283 Average contribution with a publicly derived High School diploma: $28,608 And just for a little more of the overall picture, average contribution with graduation from a four year college or better: 58,447
Average number of years working for a high school graduate: 42 years (Note this is less than the number from age 18.5 (typical graduation age) to normal retirement at age 67 (now the typical age to receive full social security benefits), mostly because of people who retire at less than full social security age or become disabled, plus the occasional death or criminal conviction or other such factor.) Total Time for primary and secondary education in US (K-12): 13 years.
Because we didn't all just pay for the President to take multiple jets, military equipment, and hundreds of personnel at the tune of millions of dollars per day over to India so he could... give a speech?
First, the people in America (including Glenn Beck), who started publicising how much was spent on this trip got numbers from the Indian press, from papers which had no actual knowledge and published figures pulled out of their hats. There's every reason to believe those papers did no fact checking before they just came up with a number - One of them included the cost of loading an aircraft carrier on a plane to fly it to the Indian ocean, for crying out loud! Until you know whether the cost is really in the millions per day range or not, and what it actually is, whether the person spinning it included operating costs that would be incurred anyway (like paying the airplane mechanics who would still draw the same salary stateside, or counting all the secret service personnel that would be guarding him wherever he went or stayed), and such, your question is just another unfounded accusation like the Birther BS.
Second, There's already been a lot more than a speech. The President has toured several industrial areas where US investors are involved, and in one of his speeches he has indicated he saw a number of projects that were not what people in the US expect (i.e. Call Centers outsourcing American service industry jobs), but businesses that he expects already are bringing or soon will bring quite a bit of return on US investment. (I personally oppose giving US corporations tax breaks for such investment anyway, but that's not exactly a right wing position - the right ought to be publicly patting President Obama's back for him testifying he has conducted due oversight of how a tax break is working out and supports retaining it. (Instead, they're calling it more socialism.). There's also been a commitment to a new peace process between India and Pakistan, and to getting India made a permanent member of the UN security council. (Again, those are not necessarily good things as far as US treaties and promises of funding go, but they are certainly not just "a speech" either).
The creators don't agree in many cases with my right to sell my legally purchased copy, or to buy one that's been used by someone else who did buy from the creators agreed distribution channel. The creators sometimes use methods such as region encoding to try and keep me from buying some things at all (at least in the version I want), then complain that I didn't buy what they didn't want to sell me. Copyright was never intended by the constitution to let the creators have an unlimited right to control all aspects of distribution, just as patents were not intended to also let the producer rely on trade secrets for protection.
Of course it saves them money. For people making close to minimum wage, their time feels like it's worth trivial amounts, but so's their non-essentials spending. People making more, who have more disposable income, typically value their time more too. The extra time to seek out a copy by torrent is typically less than to find the item in a brick and mortar store, and sometimes less than to get a legitimate copy electronically. From various consumer perspectives, not just the cash cost but the time invested cost is high, often too high. There are ways to make the cash cost more reasonable (not just dropping the price either - the value added for a pressed DVD over a home burned one, with typical packaging extras, is real, but consumers need to be sold on it, and there are always going to be some who don't see why they would want a disk to play in 10 years, especially for a product like this.). These methods of retaining cash value to keep potential consumers interested may or may not help companies such as Vivid stay afloat, but they won't even possibly save the industry if they don't also recognise the problems with time related value.
By your definition, who IS a conservative? I see a few people, some of whom began the Tea Party movement and were/are focused on cutting spending, but they are a relative handful. They are heavily outnumbered by people who call themselves conservatives, claim that cutting spending is important, and then propose massive cuts for social spending and a blank check for war and police spending. To make it look like they are sincerely against big government and big spending programs, they flat out lie, by such methods as hiding such things as veterans related costs, military base expenditures and foreign aid that is earmarked only for buying US made weapons systems in the civilian side of the budget. (And that's not to mention Black Ops programs that are hidden everywhere). Others lie by talking as though Social Security comes from income taxes and is part of the general fund instead of having its own tax, or various other tricks that suggest they either failed high school civics or think their constituents all did. A conservative who supports that there are now seventeen civilian government agencies that have personnel carrying fully automatic assault weapons, grenade launchers, and machine guns isn't a conservative, he or she is a big socialist government statist, period. The right, at this point, is probably 90% made up of people who don't fit your definition.
You won't need the thorium if you just change line 128878443119 to read "If Bioage>25 assign Bioage=25"
Don't forget, Bioage has already been cast as a float. Don't change that. Integer Bioages would cause problems, particularly for Bioage less than 0.5 years.
Please feel free to set my Minbankacct variable to, say, 1.45 E10 while you're in there.
Why? Take a private citizen. There are, in some places, specific requirements for specific private citizens to report certain felonies, (i.e. a schoolteacher being required to report suspected child abuse) but they don't translate to those same entities having to report all misdemeanors, traffic violations and torts. So why should the standard for ISPs be so much all or nothing.
There are also other cases where specific knowledge limits are observed by law. Somewhat to my shame, I once participated in a program where local law enforcement dogs were trained to sniff out drugs. I personally planted drugs in various containers (i.e wrap the brick of dope in three layers of oil soaked plastic, and stick it in the middle of a half full coffee container, seal it, put it on the highest kitchen shelf, wipe down the area, then see if the dog can alert on it when the handler didn't know where I hid it either and couldn't give the dog subconsious cues.). This included attending a controlled burn and such, so if I were to testify that I smelled Cannabis, it would count as expert testimony, and that testimony could not be impeached with questions about how I happened to know for sure that what I smelled was pot, say from an opposing lawyer. Most citizens can't make that claim - they either have to admit they know what pot smells like from illegal use, or all they can say is they thought whatever they smelled might be pot. I could theoretically be compelled to testify if subpoenaed, but most people can't. That pesky 'truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth' bit means, in the US at least, you don't generally have a legal obligation to say what you don't know to be true, but only suspect.
In addition, most ISPs don't employ someone who could make a determination, say, whether a person in an erotic photo was of legal age or a year or two under, or whether those nuclear bomb diagrams have anything classified in them (or would even work) or not. Most ISPs don't employ anyone who is a recognized specialist in copyright law either. Yes, it can be argued that common knowledge should cause employees to suspect a current piece of popular music or TV show is copyrighted and a violation is likely taking place, but expecting that to translate to knowing the status of 30 year old TV shows or music is another story. There's also the normal limits of age and obscurity - a typical 20 year old may have no reason to know whether Woody Herman recorded that file in the 1990's or the 1930's, and a typical 50 year old may have no idea who A Flock of Seagulls or Front 242 was, let alone whatever's popular now. If a person has no idea if the music comes from a commercial source and not a garage band sharing its own files, how can the law demand that person follow up on suspicions they may simply not have?
Let's assume, for the sake of argument you are right on both your claims. That is 1) Blacks vote as a bloc, and 2) they are the only racial group to do so. The great majority of Black voters once supported the Republican party, before switching towards the Democratic party. Do you really think that Blacks were overwhelmingly Republican and all switched in a single election cycle to stay in a bloc? It would seem pretty obvious from a little history that even if there is a strong, even monolithic Black voting bloc right now, that hasn't always been the case, since Blacks gained the right to vote. There have been times when the Black vote has been quite divided, and there are still elections and issues where it tends to divide more. There were specific circumstances (do a search for Richard M Nixon, Southern Strategy), that tended to create and then reinforce bloc voting for Blacks. On your second point, there have not been any situations that would tend to encourage similar bloc voting for, say, Hispanics and Asian Americans. You might note that there are non-racial groups (GLBT), that tend to also vote more as blocs than the other major group of the same sort criterion (Straight), again for similar reasons.
It's also stemming from sheer stubbornness and lack of contact with reality sometimes. I'm reminded of the bit in Douglas Hoffstadter's book "Godel, Escher, Bach", where the Tortoise character gets into an infinite regression: "So if I accept A, B, and C, then I have accepted your premise? Not so fast - lets call that statement D - don't I have to include A, B, C, and D to really accept your premise? Now lets call that claim statement E - Don't I now have to accept A, B, C, D, and E to accept your premise? We can see where this is going - How dare you demand I accept your infinite series of claims without inspection!".
Part of the frustration many of us feel over, say, the climate change or abortion debates seems to be the same sort of thing. There's always some person on the side we don't agree with, taking an 'obviously impossible, absurd' stance, and the possibly more reasonable people on that same side don't distance themselves from their own fanatics. One of the things I saw during my own involvement in the abortion debate was that on the Pro-Choice side, there were a few women who claimed all sex with males was rape, so the 'except in cases of rape and incest' clause always applied anyway. Some of these wanted to do away with all men and use cloning to copy human females only. There's an odd feeling when somebody casually advocates the genocide of 3 billion people and the use of a technology we don't actually have as the solution to all the world's problems, and nobody else in the room is willing to call them crazy. On the Pro-Life side I saw people (mostly Roman Catholic priests), who saw banning abortion as only the first step in passing laws banning all extramarital sex, then banning masturbation and all pornography including the bra section of the Sears catalog, bringing back the laws that required showing all married couples in movies as sleeping in twin beds, the ones dictating skirt lengths, and on and on.
I suspect many organisations would actually be stronger if they tossed out some people who claim to be part of their coalitions, even if their overall numbers of members dropped. Sometimes the smart thing to do is to say "He doesn't speak for me, even if he claims to.".
The real key is, whether somebody is lying (as you suggest), or insane (as I suggest here), doesn't really matter, and nobody ought to be given a free pass to disrupt discourse because we can't tell if they are one or the other. I don't know if Glenn Beck is insane or mendacious, and the people who say he is crazy like a fox may be the rightist of all, but what he does sheds more heat than light, either way. I don't have to decide if he is nuts or faking it to realise he isn't contributing anything useful. That goes in spades for the holocaust denialists. A specific statement of theirs may seem insane, or a deliberate lie, or sometimes a reasonable statement, but examining a whole series of statements they make, sooner or later you realise they are not adding anything constructive to any of the processes of debate, discussion or education.
In the US, there are tax rules about claiming mileage or actual expenses for vehicles, and if your business has a fleet of more than five vehicles, you have additional limits and extra documentation required. Maybe your uncle should have picked #4.
Supposedly, there was an underground fibre optic install running between several of the Las Vegas casinos back in the 1980's, where every box junction and repeater had a serial number that fit some zany formula, i.e. for anything that really belonged in the system, the sum of the first and fourth digits was always twice the absolute value of the difference of the third and eighth digits. The system was used for something like sending pictures of suspected card counters and other cheats back and forth, and particularly sending pics of anyone you had just booted out of your casino to the others in the chain. Hardware got swapped out or altered frequently, as new casinos and hotels were added to the system. Someone supposedly treked through the storm drains and such every few months and, depending on the story, either looked for serial numbers that didn't fit the checksum system, or alternately, the grunt workers just wrote down all the serial numbers and turned the list in to someone who knew that the system was in place, as they weren't told about the checksum part. Once you stop using random serial numbers, there are lots of things you can do with selected ones.
Since about the time Gygax and Arneson published first ed. D&D, in the dawn years before the net. Minimaxing set in pretty quick when you had to have ability scores that could only be rolled 1 in 1020 times to play certain classes to their max levels. A lot of players took the rules apart with a fine tooth comb, and it got to where 'math' meant "I'm going to start an hour long argument with the DM over whether his epic final villain exceeds the predicted frequency of non-skeletalform undead of that level, as predicted by a stochastic analysis of the charts on pages 42 and 87, and if I get overruled, I'm going to invoke the Navier-Stokes equations to prove I'm really right."
Why do you think some of the most major computer game companies try hard to block mathematically analysing their games too much?
Why did Blizzard deliberately build so many unique monsters and items in Diablo 1 and 2 that had properties such as being, say, an animal or a demon class being or a hammer class weapon, but not falling within the normal range of properties associated with that class? In Diablo 1, Diablo himself was particularly vulnerable to several attack forms that worked on undead. The flavor text and the rules booklet both made it clear that Diablo had taken physical form by possessing a mortal, and so was a kind of undead, but he was described more explicitly as a demon and many people never tried any of the anti- undead attack forms. The key to having a good chance of killing Diablo wasn't math, it was actually figuring out the implications of the various books and NPC sayings.
Why did Id games build Cthon and Shub-Nuggarath in Quake 1 to be unkillable by any normal weapons, if not so the players couldn't just figure out some sort of optimal pattern for conserving various power ups and ammo to bring the boss monsters down to size?
And these examples are mostly philosophically simple games, where everything can be shot/hacked, and you seldom/never have to relate to an NPC as anything but an enemy, or a source of E.P. and loot. If anything, the games with more nuance, sophistication, and depth try to do more to break the player of blindly relying too much on math.
They really are Romantic Interferometers now. We started with Baroque Interferometers, but since those didn't work, next came Classical. The dark energy interferometers will be Serialist.
Just reprogram the orbital death ray lasers to burn it all to something appropriately sized, i.e. the surface of Uluru (Ayres rock), before you get there, like any normal Slashdotter.
What happens if you draw the line by some other standard? If you test by whether the animal is undergoing pain or distress, three things will happen: 1. People who have sex with non-mammals will claim that their species has less awareness of suffering, or doesn't really feel pain as 'higher' species do, and courts will have to rule repeatedly on that issue. Do you think such rulings will take any real science into account? 2. Women will win a selective right to have sex with male animals, whose behavior more typically appears consensual, and then men will sue for unequal treatment under the law and the courts will have to rule on that. Do you think such rulings will take reason itself into account? 3. Every accused will claim that the animal gave consent, and the court will have to infer the facts from... Well what exactly? The animal's testimony? Indirect behavioral cues that can be explained in many other ways? A dowsing rod and Oueja board?
I replaced the 18" oval dish that normally comes with DirecTV installs now with an older 1 meter K band dish. I used the LNBF and cables from my current install - just replaced the cheap metal dish and mounting arm itself. Why did I bother? I used to lose signal whenever the rain got to over about one inch per hour. The service terms actually warned of possible losses for any rate above 1/2 an inch per hour, so we can safely assume the old dish was an above average install. I had a spare 1 meter dish that I acquired doing a free to air steerable install, and so it cost me nothing except time sighting the system in. The new version has never lost signal during severe weather. Now ask yourself one more question and the point should be clear - Is it more likely to be raining less than 1/2 inch per hour when they broadcast a killer F-5 tornado warning, or more than that?
See, it's your statement about "small dishes now do similar things that the old big ones did" - the design specs for the original 1 meter disk specify two inches of rain an hour, and the new ones specify 1/2 an inch. The people who sell them don't claim the new design does everything the old one does, they promise only 1/4 of the performance in that one particular respect. 1/2 an inch of rain an hour is now that extreme end of the broadcast range you thought was only about talking to the Mars Observer. (And that's measured well south of, say, New York City or Toronto or Boston, where the line of sight is passing through much more thick air. See, we are operating on the fringes of the feasible much more than most people recognise).
Incidentally, you can get cheap K frequency transparent plastic domes to fit the concave face of a full meter dish, so it offers less wind response than an unshielded smaller dish, further improving your reliability. I found out about those because the NOAA lab and the local police and fire stations all put them up at the same time and there was a piece in the local paper about it. I don't think anyone bothers to make those for the little dishes.
This is still a neat technology though. If I lived in an apartment where a full meter object on the roof was awkward, I'd be looking into it more.
The other half of that quote is where he endorsed prison rape for file sharers. I'm not saying we should resort to vigilante justice over the disagreement, but let's be clear just what was said - what many of us don't necessarily agree with is a claim that file sharers deserve to be made some HIV infected murderer's bitch. Gee, I wonder why some people moved from polite disagreement to vigilante justice over a little thing such as that.
It doesn't make sense because it isn't a reasoned position, just an emotional one. Gene Simmons has gone as far as endorsing prison rape for file sharers. That's, simply put, psychotic. It used to be I didn't buy Kiss merchandise because I didn't particularly like Kiss (and I didn't and still don't infringe their copyright either). Now, the way Mr. Simmons is talking, I don't buy Kiss merchandise because I'm concerned he's so far over the edge he'll use the money to try and get draconian revenge, far beyond any proportionate concept of justice, on some kid he elects to make an example of.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, that Natural Selection requires, in theory, that there be some pretty strong limits on blending. The classic Mendelian model implies a code that is pretty reliably non-blending and that in turn is one of the things that makes NS count as science. That is, it had predictive power - Darwin's original work caused him to predict that when the code was discovered, it would allow, at most, only very limited blending. * "One DNA sequence yields one protein, now and forever" also works to make blending rare at best. The more there's something else there, the more the questions that follow can include "Does that something allow more blending than is good for the fundamental dogma of natural selection?" (which is not the same as the 'fundamental dogma of genetics'). Now personally, I doubt that whatever mechanisms we are looking at here have any strong influence on just how much 'blendability' is possible in genetic code transmission, one way or the other. But I wouldn't doubt either that some 'creation science' fan will seize upon this or that some geneticists would get premptive at the very possibility.
So why is this news? In part because it has an impact on the politicization of science, as well as on the actual science.
* It's amazing - scientists debated for decades whether height was a trait that blended or whether there were several genes controlling height to give a superficial appearance of blending, and so on. It was the 1970's before someone pointed out that Gender itself was a trait that almost never had any intermediate blended expression, even though that fact had been staring geneticists right in the face for about 100 years, since genetics itself began.
If strikes by 'stray' cosmic rays are a non-random phenominon, then you've just proved an intelligent super-powerful being deliberately interferes in evolution. I'm glad you think that wouldn't be amazing. Personally, if I'd just proved that, I wouldn't be so blasé. In fact, I'd be demanding the Nobel committee make me Pope and the Roman Catholic church give me a big gold prize, and probably hinting that Ms. Portman should climb out of those grits, towel herself off, and bear my children to get in good with the Shaper of our Genetic Destinies, while I was at it.
Just out of curiosity, what would you find amazing? I take it the new TV season isn't even in the running?
Except income taxes simply don't outweigh all the other taxes combined. They don't, even if you don't count inflation as a hidden tax, and if you do, which is actually fair, income tax isn't even close to second place. Except every single state has sales taxes - if they don't have a tax at the individual end, they still have companies passing on their sales taxes on everything they sell in the form of increased prices.
You may be right that most people mean the income tax when they say 'taxes', but that's because those same most people don't seem to understand social security is funded from its own tax,and most of them have the mistaken idea Social Security is in trouble because it is 'socialist' and 'socialist' things 'always' fail, instead of being so successful that the government has repeatedly borrowed surpluses to prop up the general fund and now some people want to not pay them back and watch the program sink instead. So it doesn't matter if most people 'mean' that, any more than it matters if most people think a rocket can't fly in space because there's no air to push against.
I find your sig ironic (and not in an Alanis Morrisetteian sense). Personal responsibility means when you are wrong, you admit you are wrong, instead of claiming you are really right because the majority agrees with you and the majority is always right. I have mod points, and If I had modded you down, it would have been because you were hypocritical and ignorant. Instead I've answered you, which is probably better than you deserved. I figure it's worth it, because you probably hate being shown up a lot more than you hate being modded down. Have a nice day.
Just FYI, for the US, usually, when you abbreviate as DoE, you mean Dept. of Energy
http://www.energy.gov/
The Federal Department of Education prefers to call themselves the education dept. (ED)
http://www.ed.gov/
as you can see used many places on their website.
Both your thousand spent and your fifty thousand over the course of their life are very different from the real numbers, but your argument is actually made more valid by using reasonably current figures
Federal spending, per capita, for public primary and secondary education (2007 - most recent year data have been aggregated for public release):
$ 9,683
Average contribution (per year) for a US worker to the US GDP (In 2007 standardized dollars, as used to apply a cost of living locally factor to all other countries figures - note that the cost of living in the US is always the base for reporting and so not adjusted).
$46,436
Average contibution without even a high school diploma or GED:
$6,283
Average contribution with a publicly derived High School diploma:
$28,608
And just for a little more of the overall picture, average contribution with graduation from a four year college or better:
58,447
Average number of years working for a high school graduate: 42 years
(Note this is less than the number from age 18.5 (typical graduation age) to normal retirement at age 67 (now the typical age to receive full social security benefits), mostly because of people who retire at less than full social security age or become disabled, plus the occasional death or criminal conviction or other such factor.)
Total Time for primary and secondary education in US (K-12): 13 years.
Because we didn't all just pay for the President to take multiple jets, military equipment, and hundreds of personnel at the tune of millions of dollars per day over to India so he could... give a speech?
First, the people in America (including Glenn Beck), who started publicising how much was spent on this trip got numbers from the Indian press, from papers which had no actual knowledge and published figures pulled out of their hats. There's every reason to believe those papers did no fact checking before they just came up with a number - One of them included the cost of loading an aircraft carrier on a plane to fly it to the Indian ocean, for crying out loud! Until you know whether the cost is really in the millions per day range or not, and what it actually is, whether the person spinning it included operating costs that would be incurred anyway (like paying the airplane mechanics who would still draw the same salary stateside, or counting all the secret service personnel that would be guarding him wherever he went or stayed), and such, your question is just another unfounded accusation like the Birther BS.
Second, There's already been a lot more than a speech. The President has toured several industrial areas where US investors are involved, and in one of his speeches he has indicated he saw a number of projects that were not what people in the US expect (i.e. Call Centers outsourcing American service industry jobs), but businesses that he expects already are bringing or soon will bring quite a bit of return on US investment. (I personally oppose giving US corporations tax breaks for such investment anyway, but that's not exactly a right wing position - the right ought to be publicly patting President Obama's back for him testifying he has conducted due oversight of how a tax break is working out and supports retaining it. (Instead, they're calling it more socialism.). There's also been a commitment to a new peace process between India and Pakistan, and to getting India made a permanent member of the UN security council. (Again, those are not necessarily good things as far as US treaties and promises of funding go, but they are certainly not just "a speech" either).
The creators don't agree in many cases with my right to sell my legally purchased copy, or to buy one that's been used by someone else who did buy from the creators agreed distribution channel. The creators sometimes use methods such as region encoding to try and keep me from buying some things at all (at least in the version I want), then complain that I didn't buy what they didn't want to sell me. Copyright was never intended by the constitution to let the creators have an unlimited right to control all aspects of distribution, just as patents were not intended to also let the producer rely on trade secrets for protection.
Of course it saves them money. For people making close to minimum wage, their time feels like it's worth trivial amounts, but so's their non-essentials spending. People making more, who have more disposable income, typically value their time more too. The extra time to seek out a copy by torrent is typically less than to find the item in a brick and mortar store, and sometimes less than to get a legitimate copy electronically. From various consumer perspectives, not just the cash cost but the time invested cost is high, often too high. There are ways to make the cash cost more reasonable (not just dropping the price either - the value added for a pressed DVD over a home burned one, with typical packaging extras, is real, but consumers need to be sold on it, and there are always going to be some who don't see why they would want a disk to play in 10 years, especially for a product like this.). These methods of retaining cash value to keep potential consumers interested may or may not help companies such as Vivid stay afloat, but they won't even possibly save the industry if they don't also recognise the problems with time related value.
It's a science, since by definition it has reproducible results.
By your definition, who IS a conservative? I see a few people, some of whom began the Tea Party movement and were/are focused on cutting spending, but they are a relative handful. They are heavily outnumbered by people who call themselves conservatives, claim that cutting spending is important, and then propose massive cuts for social spending and a blank check for war and police spending. To make it look like they are sincerely against big government and big spending programs, they flat out lie, by such methods as hiding such things as veterans related costs, military base expenditures and foreign aid that is earmarked only for buying US made weapons systems in the civilian side of the budget. (And that's not to mention Black Ops programs that are hidden everywhere). Others lie by talking as though Social Security comes from income taxes and is part of the general fund instead of having its own tax, or various other tricks that suggest they either failed high school civics or think their constituents all did. A conservative who supports that there are now seventeen civilian government agencies that have personnel carrying fully automatic assault weapons, grenade launchers, and machine guns isn't a conservative, he or she is a big socialist government statist, period. The right, at this point, is probably 90% made up of people who don't fit your definition.
You won't need the thorium if you just change line 128878443119 to read "If Bioage>25 assign Bioage=25"
Don't forget, Bioage has already been cast as a float. Don't change that. Integer Bioages would cause problems, particularly for Bioage less than 0.5 years.
Please feel free to set my Minbankacct variable to, say, 1.45 E10 while you're in there.
Why?
Take a private citizen. There are, in some places, specific requirements for specific private citizens to report certain felonies, (i.e. a schoolteacher being required to report suspected child abuse) but they don't translate to those same entities having to report all misdemeanors, traffic violations and torts. So why should the standard for ISPs be so much all or nothing.
There are also other cases where specific knowledge limits are observed by law. Somewhat to my shame, I once participated in a program where local law enforcement dogs were trained to sniff out drugs. I personally planted drugs in various containers (i.e wrap the brick of dope in three layers of oil soaked plastic, and stick it in the middle of a half full coffee container, seal it, put it on the highest kitchen shelf, wipe down the area, then see if the dog can alert on it when the handler didn't know where I hid it either and couldn't give the dog subconsious cues.). This included attending a controlled burn and such, so if I were to testify that I smelled Cannabis, it would count as expert testimony, and that testimony could not be impeached with questions about how I happened to know for sure that what I smelled was pot, say from an opposing lawyer. Most citizens can't make that claim - they either have to admit they know what pot smells like from illegal use, or all they can say is they thought whatever they smelled might be pot. I could theoretically be compelled to testify if subpoenaed, but most people can't. That pesky 'truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth' bit means, in the US at least, you don't generally have a legal obligation to say what you don't know to be true, but only suspect.
In addition, most ISPs don't employ someone who could make a determination, say, whether a person in an erotic photo was of legal age or a year or two under, or whether those nuclear bomb diagrams have anything classified in them (or would even work) or not. Most ISPs don't employ anyone who is a recognized specialist in copyright law either. Yes, it can be argued that common knowledge should cause employees to suspect a current piece of popular music or TV show is copyrighted and a violation is likely taking place, but expecting that to translate to knowing the status of 30 year old TV shows or music is another story. There's also the normal limits of age and obscurity - a typical 20 year old may have no reason to know whether Woody Herman recorded that file in the 1990's or the 1930's, and a typical 50 year old may have no idea who A Flock of Seagulls or Front 242 was, let alone whatever's popular now. If a person has no idea if the music comes from a commercial source and not a garage band sharing its own files, how can the law demand that person follow up on suspicions they may simply not have?
Admiral Halsey, you should drink your warm milk and take your nap now, Sir.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument you are right on both your claims. That is 1) Blacks vote as a bloc, and 2) they are the only racial group to do so.
The great majority of Black voters once supported the Republican party, before switching towards the Democratic party. Do you really think that Blacks were overwhelmingly Republican and all switched in a single election cycle to stay in a bloc? It would seem pretty obvious from a little history that even if there is a strong, even monolithic Black voting bloc right now, that hasn't always been the case, since Blacks gained the right to vote. There have been times when the Black vote has been quite divided, and there are still elections and issues where it tends to divide more. There were specific circumstances (do a search for Richard M Nixon, Southern Strategy), that tended to create and then reinforce bloc voting for Blacks. On your second point, there have not been any situations that would tend to encourage similar bloc voting for, say, Hispanics and Asian Americans. You might note that there are non-racial groups (GLBT), that tend to also vote more as blocs than the other major group of the same sort criterion (Straight), again for similar reasons.
It's also stemming from sheer stubbornness and lack of contact with reality sometimes. I'm reminded of the bit in Douglas Hoffstadter's book "Godel, Escher, Bach", where the Tortoise character gets into an infinite regression: "So if I accept A, B, and C, then I have accepted your premise? Not so fast - lets call that statement D - don't I have to include A, B, C, and D to really accept your premise? Now lets call that claim statement E - Don't I now have to accept A, B, C, D, and E to accept your premise? We can see where this is going - How dare you demand I accept your infinite series of claims without inspection!".
Part of the frustration many of us feel over, say, the climate change or abortion debates seems to be the same sort of thing. There's always some person on the side we don't agree with, taking an 'obviously impossible, absurd' stance, and the possibly more reasonable people on that same side don't distance themselves from their own fanatics. One of the things I saw during my own involvement in the abortion debate was that on the Pro-Choice side, there were a few women who claimed all sex with males was rape, so the 'except in cases of rape and incest' clause always applied anyway. Some of these wanted to do away with all men and use cloning to copy human females only. There's an odd feeling when somebody casually advocates the genocide of 3 billion people and the use of a technology we don't actually have as the solution to all the world's problems, and nobody else in the room is willing to call them crazy. On the Pro-Life side I saw people (mostly Roman Catholic priests), who saw banning abortion as only the first step in passing laws banning all extramarital sex, then banning masturbation and all pornography including the bra section of the Sears catalog, bringing back the laws that required showing all married couples in movies as sleeping in twin beds, the ones dictating skirt lengths, and on and on.
I suspect many organisations would actually be stronger if they tossed out some people who claim to be part of their coalitions, even if their overall numbers of members dropped. Sometimes the smart thing to do is to say "He doesn't speak for me, even if he claims to.".
The real key is, whether somebody is lying (as you suggest), or insane (as I suggest here), doesn't really matter, and nobody ought to be given a free pass to disrupt discourse because we can't tell if they are one or the other. I don't know if Glenn Beck is insane or mendacious, and the people who say he is crazy like a fox may be the rightist of all, but what he does sheds more heat than light, either way. I don't have to decide if he is nuts or faking it to realise he isn't contributing anything useful. That goes in spades for the holocaust denialists. A specific statement of theirs may seem insane, or a deliberate lie, or sometimes a reasonable statement, but examining a whole series of statements they make, sooner or later you realise they are not adding anything constructive to any of the processes of debate, discussion or education.
It's not judicial activism unless one of the two major parties gives a damn.
No, that's the first rule of U... No wait, you're right, it's the first rule of Frostwire, sorry!
In the US, there are tax rules about claiming mileage or actual expenses for vehicles, and if your business has a fleet of more than five vehicles, you have additional limits and extra documentation required. Maybe your uncle should have picked #4.
Supposedly, there was an underground fibre optic install running between several of the Las Vegas casinos back in the 1980's, where every box junction and repeater had a serial number that fit some zany formula, i.e. for anything that really belonged in the system, the sum of the first and fourth digits was always twice the absolute value of the difference of the third and eighth digits. The system was used for something like sending pictures of suspected card counters and other cheats back and forth, and particularly sending pics of anyone you had just booted out of your casino to the others in the chain. Hardware got swapped out or altered frequently, as new casinos and hotels were added to the system. Someone supposedly treked through the storm drains and such every few months and, depending on the story, either looked for serial numbers that didn't fit the checksum system, or alternately, the grunt workers just wrote down all the serial numbers and turned the list in to someone who knew that the system was in place, as they weren't told about the checksum part. Once you stop using random serial numbers, there are lots of things you can do with selected ones.
Since about the time Gygax and Arneson published first ed. D&D, in the dawn years before the net. Minimaxing set in pretty quick when you had to have ability scores that could only be rolled 1 in 1020 times to play certain classes to their max levels. A lot of players took the rules apart with a fine tooth comb, and it got to where 'math' meant "I'm going to start an hour long argument with the DM over whether his epic final villain exceeds the predicted frequency of non-skeletalform undead of that level, as predicted by a stochastic analysis of the charts on pages 42 and 87, and if I get overruled, I'm going to invoke the Navier-Stokes equations to prove I'm really right."
Why do you think some of the most major computer game companies try hard to block mathematically analysing their games too much?
Why did Blizzard deliberately build so many unique monsters and items in Diablo 1 and 2 that had properties such as being, say, an animal or a demon class being or a hammer class weapon, but not falling within the normal range of properties associated with that class? In Diablo 1, Diablo himself was particularly vulnerable to several attack forms that worked on undead. The flavor text and the rules booklet both made it clear that Diablo had taken physical form by possessing a mortal, and so was a kind of undead, but he was described more explicitly as a demon and many people never tried any of the anti- undead attack forms. The key to having a good chance of killing Diablo wasn't math, it was actually figuring out the implications of the various books and NPC sayings.
Why did Id games build Cthon and Shub-Nuggarath in Quake 1 to be unkillable by any normal weapons, if not so the players couldn't just figure out some sort of optimal pattern for conserving various power ups and ammo to bring the boss monsters down to size?
And these examples are mostly philosophically simple games, where everything can be shot/hacked, and you seldom/never have to relate to an NPC as anything but an enemy, or a source of E.P. and loot. If anything, the games with more nuance, sophistication, and depth try to do more to break the player of blindly relying too much on math.
They really are Romantic Interferometers now. We started with Baroque Interferometers, but since those didn't work, next came Classical. The dark energy interferometers will be Serialist.
Just reprogram the orbital death ray lasers to burn it all to something appropriately sized, i.e. the surface of Uluru (Ayres rock), before you get there, like any normal Slashdotter.
What happens if you draw the line by some other standard? If you test by whether the animal is undergoing pain or distress, three things will happen: ... Well what exactly? The animal's testimony? Indirect behavioral cues that can be explained in many other ways? A dowsing rod and Oueja board?
1. People who have sex with non-mammals will claim that their species has less awareness of suffering, or doesn't really feel pain as 'higher' species do, and courts will have to rule repeatedly on that issue. Do you think such rulings will take any real science into account?
2. Women will win a selective right to have sex with male animals, whose behavior more typically appears consensual, and then men will sue for unequal treatment under the law and the courts will have to rule on that. Do you think such rulings will take reason itself into account?
3. Every accused will claim that the animal gave consent, and the court will have to infer the facts from
I replaced the 18" oval dish that normally comes with DirecTV installs now with an older 1 meter K band dish. I used the LNBF and cables from my current install - just replaced the cheap metal dish and mounting arm itself. Why did I bother? I used to lose signal whenever the rain got to over about one inch per hour. The service terms actually warned of possible losses for any rate above 1/2 an inch per hour, so we can safely assume the old dish was an above average install. I had a spare 1 meter dish that I acquired doing a free to air steerable install, and so it cost me nothing except time sighting the system in. The new version has never lost signal during severe weather. Now ask yourself one more question and the point should be clear - Is it more likely to be raining less than 1/2 inch per hour when they broadcast a killer F-5 tornado warning, or more than that?
See, it's your statement about "small dishes now do similar things that the old big ones did" - the design specs for the original 1 meter disk specify two inches of rain an hour, and the new ones specify 1/2 an inch. The people who sell them don't claim the new design does everything the old one does, they promise only 1/4 of the performance in that one particular respect. 1/2 an inch of rain an hour is now that extreme end of the broadcast range you thought was only about talking to the Mars Observer. (And that's measured well south of, say, New York City or Toronto or Boston, where the line of sight is passing through much more thick air. See, we are operating on the fringes of the feasible much more than most people recognise).
Incidentally, you can get cheap K frequency transparent plastic domes to fit the concave face of a full meter dish, so it offers less wind response than an unshielded smaller dish, further improving your reliability. I found out about those because the NOAA lab and the local police and fire stations all put them up at the same time and there was a piece in the local paper about it. I don't think anyone bothers to make those for the little dishes.
This is still a neat technology though. If I lived in an apartment where a full meter object on the roof was awkward, I'd be looking into it more.
The other half of that quote is where he endorsed prison rape for file sharers. I'm not saying we should resort to vigilante justice over the disagreement, but let's be clear just what was said - what many of us don't necessarily agree with is a claim that file sharers deserve to be made some HIV infected murderer's bitch. Gee, I wonder why some people moved from polite disagreement to vigilante justice over a little thing such as that.
It doesn't make sense because it isn't a reasoned position, just an emotional one. Gene Simmons has gone as far as endorsing prison rape for file sharers. That's, simply put, psychotic. It used to be I didn't buy Kiss merchandise because I didn't particularly like Kiss (and I didn't and still don't infringe their copyright either). Now, the way Mr. Simmons is talking, I don't buy Kiss merchandise because I'm concerned he's so far over the edge he'll use the money to try and get draconian revenge, far beyond any proportionate concept of justice, on some kid he elects to make an example of.