If the US manages to emplace enough population to let Luna qualify for immediate statehood, ahead of anyone else occupying the land, I'm not sure there's anything in the UN treaty excluding doing it. Claiming it as an annexed territory is one thing, having its permanent inhabitants petition for statehood is constitutionally very much another.
Many people have vision that is good enough it could be corrected beyond 20/20. Just think of the advantages of being able to see from 20 feet away what most people now can see from only 15 or 10 feet away. In practice, most people corrected this way as adults are uncomfortable with it. Many find the experience eerie or disturbing, and frequently, the persons this has been tested on develop symptoms such as headaches as they use their 'improved' vision. A substantial majority report the world looks seriously unpleasant in uniform sharp relief. Eye surgeons have become very reluctant to correct beyond average abilities until they at least test the patient for a few weeks with lenses because these reactions are so common, and sometimes opticians don't try to correct beyond 20/20 even for glasses.
if a program can overwrite the updater in general, it could probably overwrite selectively, so it claims to be an already installed higher version number or newer patch than the what the real software is likely to produce in the next few months. Six months, a year or so later, the real updates overlap the malware and replace it, which effectively erases the malware, but it's usually had enough time to do whatever the designer wanted in the interm. The more the target software adheres to a predictable update schedule, the more the malware can target a precise window, which in turn both minimizes early detection and cleans up the old boxes in preparation for the next exploit. It's kind of a script kiddie solution rather than a deep magic approach, but not totally without cleverness.
The first argument for dark matter was based on the cosmological constant, as a property of the whole universe. Unless these galaxies are so far away they are outside the universe and don't contribute to whether the whole universe is gravitationally open or closed, they have just invalidated that argument, period. Localised observations show something about non-baryonic matter, but the arguments based on the Hubble constant and universal closure are behind much of our even looking for this stuff. The article seems to be pretending that dark matter was theorized based on localized observations, when almost everybody who jumped on the bandwagon was attracted to the theory because of its implications for the origin problem. Like it or not, this does prove that initial estimates for the quantities of dark matter simply have to be wrong as well, or alternately SOMEONE DESERVES A NOBEL FOR PROVING THE UNIVERSE IS CLOSED. I don't see any proposal to award a Nobel here, do you?
By the way, I was third poster to this thread, after two people basically shouting FRIST PSOT! If anyone wants to mod me wrong, fine, but redundant is simply cowardly and a gross abuse of the system.
... is the same figure used to justify the initial claims for dark matter.
Several initial sources claimed that there had to be abundant non-baryonic matter making up much of the universe, as otherwise, there would have to be about ten times as much normal matter as we were observing, and that, of course was absurd. So quite possibly this is so long to dark matter! Next question is, is there still any reason to postulate dark energy with the new values for average density and so on this will produce? Don't say goodbye to dark energy just yet, but expect some significant revisions.
Evolution of speech seems to have required changes in several related areas, and this sets a minimum number of favorable mutations that had to have occurred.
Speech requires specialized centers in the higher brain. It also requires changes in what we normally call the primitive brain, so that speaking stays synced to breathing and swallowing. There are changes to the tongue and soft palate, and given the way all modern languages use some form of modifiers like adjectives or adverbs, there are probably hard wired rules for making speech more sophisticated built into those upper brain speech centers. There may even be changes to the diet, to accomodate teeth that have to also help with speech as well as chew.
The problem with deriving anything from that point is, one mutation can impact multiple areas of body formation, so until we know more about which genes do specifically what in humans. we don't know enough to make a detailed model of what changes came first, or decide just what the differences were between h. saps and the Neanderthals, or any of those neat interesting questions idle slash-dotters are bringing up.
I think moteyalpha gets this, and hope at least most of the rest of this thread's posters do - the speculations are answerable in principle, but just because we've mapped the genome doesn't mean we've figured out all the connections. In 20 to 40 years, the truth about at least half the speculations in this whole slashdot thread will be known science.
Better yet, if any of these people develop schizophrenia and try to chop off your head with a chainsaw, it was their responsibility to have the foresight not to go crazy. Of course, that also means it was your responsibility to pay for more cops, so we don't need to feel any sympathy for you either. That's why it's called freedom, it means freedom to be bat-shit insane if that's the kind of freedom you want. And every libertarian who steers by this radical definition of freedom turns dozens of people off to respecting real rights. That's their responsibility.
And of course, there aren't any people in the USA who get drunk and abuse emergency services, plus as soon as you 'socialize' health care, any fines and other legal consequences mysteriously vanish from the law books.
I suspect this is about the military definition of threats. (Warning: I've worn that particular hat, as a former MI assigned officer in an S2 shop for a cavalry regiment. I've never been a politician, so what you're getting here is definitely only one side of the argument).
The way Military Intelligence is supposed to work, reports consider capabilities, but they deliberately don't consider intentions. MI is never in command and NEVER makes command decisions, but reports to commanders, or at higher levels, to civilian overseers.
For example, an high ranking Army Intelligence officer might be supposed to give the US Congress a good answer to whether country X has missiles with enough range to reach the US. He or she can't give a good answer, and so shouldn't comment, on whether country x has intentions to use them on the US or on someone else (at least unless there's a real obvious 'smoking gun', like the officer has found a copy of the orders where all the missiles are suddenly being retargeted at country Y and the job has to be completed by 1300 hours when "Operation Obliterate Country Y" begins).
It's up to civilian oversight to determine whether a threat (potential) becomes an enemy (actual). The military is not supposed to decide when to go to war, that's the job of civilians. If you want congress or the president to be the ones to decide whether the US needs to go to war or not, you can't have the pentagon declaring in advance who is an enemy and who isn't.
Right now, Great Britain has pretty serious threat potential (They have weapons which could damage the US, and ways to transport them to us). They don't suddenly count as an enemy just because of that. Pakistan has less threat potential (not as many weapons or delivery systems). Imagine a coup puts militant Taliban related forces in charge of Pakistan's nuclear weapons. They might suddenly be classed as an enemy nation, but what happened to the threat assessment? Nothing! They are exactly the same threat, from a Military Intelligence assessment, as before. Same number of bombs and missiles and troops, same threat.
Put that way, a person who can figure out a good way to attack the US is a threat, or a small part of a threat. That he's shared his info with us should make the civilians who are supposed to decide what actions to take figure he's not an enemy, and that any potential threat here is not likely to become an actualized attack. Common sense tells normally rational people that if this person was part of a secret plan that would eventually use his information against us, he wouldn't have mentioned it all publicly. The people he was connected to in China would be unknown to us, not publicly accessible, and so on. But that means any intelligence system which discovered threat potential here probably reported it right, it's just civilian overseers acted like paranoid fools.
For another analogy. Let's say you have two people nearby who can both lift over 300 pounds. They both represent similar threats to you, in the most technical sense. One is there to help you move your furniture, the other is an escaped convict looking for a hiding place. Only one of them is at all likely to attempt to harm you, and it's quite possible he has no intentions against you either. You might classify the mover as an ally, and then it's a judgement call if the convict is an enemy at that point, but both technically have near identical threat potential from what you know. This whole matter sounds like a case where someone is conflating the facts and the conjectures, to try and make people be equally worried about 'moving men' and 'escaped convicts', and then assume the worst possible scenarios are inevitable and not just possible for the convicts as well.
I'm using a three months old version of a 'Linux OS', with Firefox 3.6. I know of several dozen websites that deal in financial transactions and related, and which will all check for software versioning and require downloading active x controls onto the user's machine for at least some functions. I have been informed by a large corporation's legal dept. that attempting to spoof those sites into thinking I was browsing with IE/Windows from a Nix box would not just be a TOS violation, but in at least some of those cases, securities fraud, a violation of Sarbanes-Oxley, or otherwise just not done, and all we can do is use a Microsoft product to visit those sites and perhaps ask them to broaden their website's support. Yeah, in some cases, there's probably a bunch of crooks easily defeating those sites version checking, they're being idiots, and some of them probably get ritually abused by 14 year old script kiddies every weekend, but these are not fly by nights, they are major financial partners in stock trading, banking, sale of treasury securities, and such, they pay a small fortune every year for VPN security and encryption, and everyone else in the financial industry has to occasionally deal with them. For my company, which has begun transitioning to FOSS by adopting Open Office, this is an impediment to completely dropping either Windows or IE completely.
So we will probably upgrade the machines that still run Windows in every office, yet again. While those are getting fewer, it's still vendor lock-in with bells on. Your comment about 10 year old OS versions isn't just a red herring, it shows a complete lack of understanding.
Society doesn't give you any authority to take away that 30 year old's car keys or tell him or her not to stay out past 10 pm. You go interfering with 30 year old people, you get charged with unlawful restraint or worse. You see the tiny little difference there don't you?
Now there may be 30 year olds where the courageous and caring thing to do is to tell them when you think they are taking a stupid risk, but you can't actually apply any controls to help them not make the dumb decision. You can't make the 16 year old listen to what you say, but you can at least make them sit down long enough to finish saying it. Beyond that, better have been right in the past often enough the 16 year old still thinks you just might have something to say worth hearing.
Condoms work pretty reliably if you use the latex kind, with a reservoir, properly pinch that reservoir tip to keep air out as you apply them, and don't think if one is good two should be better, and so on. Studies on kids that got sex ed where condoms were actually demonstrated seem to show about 10% of kids still get something major wrong in using them, and another 10% don't even bother to use them all the time (which usually means they are getting either the withdrawl or timing method wrong as well). 98% effectiveness doesn't take those very real numbers into account. Yeah, I support teaching a lot of alternatives besides abstinence, but I also support compiling real numbers and figuring out the exact mix of teachings based on those facts.
Lambskin condoms do not protect at all against HIV, and there's no reliable study that shows protection against any of the other viral STDs, and little demonstrated improvement for bacterial ones. Why is there still any market at all for them if people are making a rational assessment of risks here?
I probably count as having a pretty high sex drive - although at 52 I'm slowing down enough the Ex and I are now wonderfully in sync at about 3x a week. Daily sounded about right through my 30's. Still, most people don't seem to want sex that often, in fact the average for married people in their 20's is lower than my preferred as an old fart, once you get past the honeymoon stage. If people like me had been writing the laws we would have made conjugal visits for felons the only behavior control needed, as taking them away would surely be enough punishment (and cruel and unusual except for rape, arson, and murder).
I figured out I wasn't near the center of that particular bell curve about the same time I noticed we didn't have public orgyariums. So, yeah, I strongly suspect most people could be distracted by a hobby or two. If you all aren't really that way, why weren't there a hundred thousand letters to the editor denouncing Nancy Reagan as an obvious psycho when she proposed that 'just say no' should be extended from anti drug messages to sex ed? The people at my end of the bell curve know the nutcases at the other end, what we don't understand is why you so often let them set the agenda.
It's never about branding their own children. It's about the parents of 'perfect angel' Girl A demanding something be done to 'that pervert' Boy B, until Boy B's parents demand the same in reverse hoping that Girl A's parents will back down. Then the DA's office goes ahead and charges everybody they possibly can because:
A. They don't want to look soft on crime. B. They have decided the parents are all damned idiots and deserve all the consequences. C. It gets the damned idiots to finally shut up. D. There's just something satisfying in giving an idiot precisely what he just demanded, with a threat to have your badge if you don't, knowing that he will eventually regret it for literally the rest of his life.
Yeah, the parents haven't really thought it out well - instead, they end up with tens to hundreds of thousands in legal fees and their kid on a sex offender list, while the local public gossips abut the whole mess until they have to move to another state to get away from it, but can't because, well, their kid is on a sex offender list.
I'm pretty sure here were no libraries destroyed by Christian crusaders 5,000 years ago. In fact, I'd venture to say that Christians had no impact at all, for good or ill, on the state of medicine in the middle east 5,000 years ago.
It seems like a safe bet that some Muslim libraries in the region were destroyed by the Crusaders roughly 1,0000 to 1,100 years ago, and it's a well known historical fact that Christian Not-Crusaders destroyed the library of Alexandria about 700 years before that.
With enough digging, I was able to find historical references to a few Jewish libraries that were looted and/or burned by one or the other side during the crusades. The incidents are not very well known compared to the destruction of the great Alexandrian library or anything else like it. It's pretty doubtful they resulted in the complete loss of any major works on medicine, as most of those types of books were sold to rich people in Europe, who hoped to learn alchemical secrets for living forever, rather than being burned.
I'm not saying it's totally impossible that there were medical theories well in advance of what we think people in the region knew then, and they were somehow all lost. But, to make it even vaguely probable, you're conflating events that lie hundreds or thousands of years apart, and ignoring significant differences (i.e. most Muslim works on medicine existed as primary copies in parts of the empire no Christian looting ever reached, and there were dozens of copies known to have survived. While the crusaders did reach all parts of what was once the Jewish controlled portion, again dozens or hundreds of copies of the known works still existed after they left. There would have to be some mysterious book, and it and its author would have to not be mentioned in any of the books that survived to even hint at its existence, and the Crusaders would have had to do a much more thorough job of destruction than history suggests they did, and so on...). It's simply not at all likely.
The M-lab version also didn't work for me (Firefox, but on Kubuntu). Ookla seems to work (25 M down, 2.5 M up, 50 ms latency sounds about right). Go figure.
Wonder if the Beer Bottle research came about because of court cases? Maybe somebody claimed that if they had really meant to kill someone else, they wouldn't have made the bottle lighter by emptying it first, or alternately, that they thought leaving the liquid in would keep the bottle from becoming a jagged edged weapon. Defense lawyers have been known to introduce such claims on behalf of their clients - maybe some DAs wanted some better counterarguments. If both full and empty bottles definitely have a good probability of doing lethal damage, then a number of legal challenges to an assault with a deadly weapon charge presumably won't work in court.
Knowing if Wistar rats behave like people when it comes to binge drinking is useful if we use Wistar rats for all sorts of animal testing related to alcohol - i.e. someone finds a drug that shows some signs of treating alcoholism and wants to test it on animals before mass human testing. As you put it "It'd be kinda interesting to know..." some things. To find an answer to your question by animal testing, we first need to make sure the animals we use have the necessary similarities to humans in re. alcohol. Otherwise, the experiment won't support any conclusions about anything else except the animal subjects.
Incidentally, Wistars are an albino strain of the Norway rat, and are very commonly used in labs. They're not some really exotic rodent - rather they are exactly the typical creatures scientists would use for just an experiment such as you suggested.
There's probably some real value in most of these. Take one of the most ridiculous sounding - the bat fellatio paper:
If there's a natural selection based reason why some bats reproduce better if the males can last longer, that's evidence for sex based selection being able to possibly produce complex secondary behaviors that may not be fully explainable by 'regular' natural selection. The ongoing argument about whether only sexually based selection can account for the rapid increase in pre-human/human brain size is a genuinely significant research area, and this could help craft new studies on that question. Maybe it just looks significant because human sex matters more to most humans than bat sex, but then, that argument fits most biological science.
Or maybe the bats are exhibiting a learned behavior, found only in some populations of the species. I'd say it's valuable information that creatures with such small brains might have non-instinctive sexual behaviors, and ones that suggest they are motivated by enjoyment rather than reproductive instincts.
Of course, the study is flawed in that it apparently hasn't addressed the known interspecies Bat-fellatio dynamics involving robins...
Sure, just one lil' ole' M1 isn't all that big a deal, but just try being the ranking soldier in an advance party at deployment. When newly commissioned, I signed for the TO&E of an entire Armored Cavalry Regiment once. Show me the Navy Ensign that's held more paper than that.
Woah! - if you start with a Kabalist (who would generally be either a male Jew of age 40+ and stable mind, or else a ditzy pop musician, but statistically the vast majority are Jewish males 40+),
AND
That Jew invokes his particular holy guardian angel, who takes the form of a famous Rabbi of legend, such as Shimon bar Yocha.
THEN
Any Theosophist would tell you that HGA was really a visualized evocation whose image came from the material plane and so took its form, (if not necessarily its essence) from the Akashic record, and so would really be an Akashic Jew.
I like your point about liberalism and taxation - to put it simply, nobody gets to vote for spending just other people's money on a cause, they have to include raising their own taxes with everyone else's.
However, I have to take exception to this:
Basically, if you don't count donations to churches, the gap disappears. And why should you? Even when a church does charitable work, it comes with a sermon which is basically a sales pitch to join something very like an MLM scheme. It isn't charity, it's marketing.
I'm on the outreach committee of a church. This involves donating specifically to non-members and non-member causes. We have other charitable funding earmarked for our own members who become destitute or ill, but this money all goes outside the church, and much of it outside the local community. First, about $32,000 a year goes to Haiti (and that will go up this year for obvious reasons). Other money goes to various medical flight providers, some people doing experimental plant breeding three states away from our location, some middle east peace initiatives, and other such causes.
Then there's money going to northern Ireland to promote peace there. You could argue we're preaching a bit on that, because we have about 25-50 kids of mixed Protestant and Catholic backgrounds we bring to the US for a couple of weeks each year as part of this. Since they already are mostly Christians,and their parents want them to practice, they mostly attend services with us or our local R.C. 'competition' when they are in the US, although that's optional. I don't know of any offhand who has ever moved to our area, but some have immigrated to the US as adults, so they could conceivably become members, and make enough to donate more than they once got. That sounds like lousy odds, or an incredibly poor rate of return if you prefer.
None of that money seems to be actually getting us members in our locale, so far. Then we feed some more local families. They are selected for us by people who work for the local school systems as counselors. The conditions to put them on or take them off the list are thus agreed to with secular government officials, and are basically that the kids in those families stay in school and get decent grades. We have completely relinquished any right to vet these people based on their religion, if any. If we're preaching to them, it's pretty well limited to wishing them a Merry Christmas or Happy thanksgiving as they leave.
There's a local ecumenical storehouse, which provides free, mostly used furniture and fixtures to the poor. The quickest way on their list is for a local fire department official to put a family on there after they have a burnout, rather than to listen to any sermons. Certainly nobody is making anyone sit and listen to anything spiritual or promise themselves to Jesus before they will load a kid's mattress and springs on a truck and tie it down, although I have made a few people promise to not drive over 45 with the load.
The idea that we can help people enough that they start being able to give and help others actually doesn't sound so bad. I wish what we do could be a multi level marketing scheme, where the various people we help, get rich enough to take up the load and help others in the same way. That's simply, absurdly far from reality, where most people who start off poor stay poor, and never get to the point whey they can pay anything forward. We are accomplishing a lot more survival than real leg ups,
The 10 commandments aren't specifically Christian. Christ gave only two - to love the Lord with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself.
It's an odd sort of Christianity that says what some other person said about God trumps what God himself supposedly said. If you don't believe in the primacy of Jesus, you shouldn't call yourself a Christian. If Jesus is just some other mortal guy in a bunch of books full of other people, then what's the point of calling it Christianity? We could call it Ezekielism, or Esteranity, or something.
It's a pretty warped idea some of you have:
If the Bible is just the word of men, then it doesn't prove any one view of God is right - in fact it doesn't prove much of anything.
But if the Bible IS even in part divinely inspired, then it says one guy's words trump all the rest, Period.
There is no possible 'Jesus is God, but his opinions don't matter more than the author of the book of Tobit' position. It simply makes no sense.
Slashdot Mirror
If the US manages to emplace enough population to let Luna qualify for immediate statehood, ahead of anyone else occupying the land, I'm not sure there's anything in the UN treaty excluding doing it. Claiming it as an annexed territory is one thing, having its permanent inhabitants petition for statehood is constitutionally very much another.
I don't see how anyone can claim he hasn't defended his territory. Has anybody successfully attacked it? No? Then his defenses seem to be working.
Many people have vision that is good enough it could be corrected beyond 20/20. Just think of the advantages of being able to see from 20 feet away what most people now can see from only 15 or 10 feet away. In practice, most people corrected this way as adults are uncomfortable with it. Many find the experience eerie or disturbing, and frequently, the persons this has been tested on develop symptoms such as headaches as they use their 'improved' vision. A substantial majority report the world looks seriously unpleasant in uniform sharp relief. Eye surgeons have become very reluctant to correct beyond average abilities until they at least test the patient for a few weeks with lenses because these reactions are so common, and sometimes opticians don't try to correct beyond 20/20 even for glasses.
if a program can overwrite the updater in general, it could probably overwrite selectively, so it claims to be an already installed higher version number or newer patch than the what the real software is likely to produce in the next few months. Six months, a year or so later, the real updates overlap the malware and replace it, which effectively erases the malware, but it's usually had enough time to do whatever the designer wanted in the interm. The more the target software adheres to a predictable update schedule, the more the malware can target a precise window, which in turn both minimizes early detection and cleans up the old boxes in preparation for the next exploit. It's kind of a script kiddie solution rather than a deep magic approach, but not totally without cleverness.
The first argument for dark matter was based on the cosmological constant, as a property of the whole universe. Unless these galaxies are so far away they are outside the universe and don't contribute to whether the whole universe is gravitationally open or closed, they have just invalidated that argument, period. Localised observations show something about non-baryonic matter, but the arguments based on the Hubble constant and universal closure are behind much of our even looking for this stuff. The article seems to be pretending that dark matter was theorized based on localized observations, when almost everybody who jumped on the bandwagon was attracted to the theory because of its implications for the origin problem. Like it or not, this does prove that initial estimates for the quantities of dark matter simply have to be wrong as well, or alternately SOMEONE DESERVES A NOBEL FOR PROVING THE UNIVERSE IS CLOSED. I don't see any proposal to award a Nobel here, do you?
By the way, I was third poster to this thread, after two people basically shouting FRIST PSOT! If anyone wants to mod me wrong, fine, but redundant is simply cowardly and a gross abuse of the system.
... is the same figure used to justify the initial claims for dark matter.
Several initial sources claimed that there had to be abundant non-baryonic matter making up much of the universe, as otherwise, there would have to be about ten times as much normal matter as we were observing, and that, of course was absurd. So quite possibly this is so long to dark matter! Next question is, is there still any reason to postulate dark energy with the new values for average density and so on this will produce? Don't say goodbye to dark energy just yet, but expect some significant revisions.
Evolution of speech seems to have required changes in several related areas, and this sets a minimum number of favorable mutations that had to have occurred.
Speech requires specialized centers in the higher brain. It also requires changes in what we normally call the primitive brain, so that speaking stays synced to breathing and swallowing. There are changes to the tongue and soft palate, and given the way all modern languages use some form of modifiers like adjectives or adverbs, there are probably hard wired rules for making speech more sophisticated built into those upper brain speech centers. There may even be changes to the diet, to accomodate teeth that have to also help with speech as well as chew.
The problem with deriving anything from that point is, one mutation can impact multiple areas of body formation, so until we know more about which genes do specifically what in humans. we don't know enough to make a detailed model of what changes came first, or decide just what the differences were between h. saps and the Neanderthals, or any of those neat interesting questions idle slash-dotters are bringing up.
I think moteyalpha gets this, and hope at least most of the rest of this thread's posters do - the speculations are answerable in principle, but just because we've mapped the genome doesn't mean we've figured out all the connections. In 20 to 40 years, the truth about at least half the speculations in this whole slashdot thread will be known science.
Better yet, if any of these people develop schizophrenia and try to chop off your head with a chainsaw, it was their responsibility to have the foresight not to go crazy. Of course, that also means it was your responsibility to pay for more cops, so we don't need to feel any sympathy for you either. That's why it's called freedom, it means freedom to be bat-shit insane if that's the kind of freedom you want. And every libertarian who steers by this radical definition of freedom turns dozens of people off to respecting real rights. That's their responsibility.
And of course, there aren't any people in the USA who get drunk and abuse emergency services, plus as soon as you 'socialize' health care, any fines and other legal consequences mysteriously vanish from the law books.
I suspect this is about the military definition of threats.
(Warning: I've worn that particular hat, as a former MI assigned officer in an S2 shop for a cavalry regiment. I've never been a politician, so what you're getting here is definitely only one side of the argument).
The way Military Intelligence is supposed to work, reports consider capabilities, but they deliberately don't consider intentions. MI is never in command and NEVER makes command decisions, but reports to commanders, or at higher levels, to civilian overseers.
For example, an high ranking Army Intelligence officer might be supposed to give the US Congress a good answer to whether country X has missiles with enough range to reach the US. He or she can't give a good answer, and so shouldn't comment, on whether country x has intentions to use them on the US or on someone else (at least unless there's a real obvious 'smoking gun', like the officer has found a copy of the orders where all the missiles are suddenly being retargeted at country Y and the job has to be completed by 1300 hours when "Operation Obliterate Country Y" begins).
It's up to civilian oversight to determine whether a threat (potential) becomes an enemy (actual). The military is not supposed to decide when to go to war, that's the job of civilians. If you want congress or the president to be the ones to decide whether the US needs to go to war or not, you can't have the pentagon declaring in advance who is an enemy and who isn't.
Right now, Great Britain has pretty serious threat potential (They have weapons which could damage the US, and ways to transport them to us). They don't suddenly count as an enemy just because of that. Pakistan has less threat potential (not as many weapons or delivery systems). Imagine a coup puts militant Taliban related forces in charge of Pakistan's nuclear weapons. They might suddenly be classed as an enemy nation, but what happened to the threat assessment? Nothing! They are exactly the same threat, from a Military Intelligence assessment, as before. Same number of bombs and missiles and troops, same threat.
Put that way, a person who can figure out a good way to attack the US is a threat, or a small part of a threat. That he's shared his info with us should make the civilians who are supposed to decide what actions to take figure he's not an enemy, and that any potential threat here is not likely to become an actualized attack. Common sense tells normally rational people that if this person was part of a secret plan that would eventually use his information against us, he wouldn't have mentioned it all publicly. The people he was connected to in China would be unknown to us, not publicly accessible, and so on. But that means any intelligence system which discovered threat potential here probably reported it right, it's just civilian overseers acted like paranoid fools.
For another analogy. Let's say you have two people nearby who can both lift over 300 pounds. They both represent similar threats to you, in the most technical sense. One is there to help you move your furniture, the other is an escaped convict looking for a hiding place. Only one of them is at all likely to attempt to harm you, and it's quite possible he has no intentions against you either. You might classify the mover as an ally, and then it's a judgement call if the convict is an enemy at that point, but both technically have near identical threat potential from what you know. This whole matter sounds like a case where someone is conflating the facts and the conjectures, to try and make people be equally worried about 'moving men' and 'escaped convicts', and then assume the worst possible scenarios are inevitable and not just possible for the convicts as well.
I'm using a three months old version of a 'Linux OS', with Firefox 3.6. I know of several dozen websites that deal in financial transactions and related, and which will all check for software versioning and require downloading active x controls onto the user's machine for at least some functions. I have been informed by a large corporation's legal dept. that attempting to spoof those sites into thinking I was browsing with IE/Windows from a Nix box would not just be a TOS violation, but in at least some of those cases, securities fraud, a violation of Sarbanes-Oxley, or otherwise just not done, and all we can do is use a Microsoft product to visit those sites and perhaps ask them to broaden their website's support. Yeah, in some cases, there's probably a bunch of crooks easily defeating those sites version checking, they're being idiots, and some of them probably get ritually abused by 14 year old script kiddies every weekend, but these are not fly by nights, they are major financial partners in stock trading, banking, sale of treasury securities, and such, they pay a small fortune every year for VPN security and encryption, and everyone else in the financial industry has to occasionally deal with them. For my company, which has begun transitioning to FOSS by adopting Open Office, this is an impediment to completely dropping either Windows or IE completely.
So we will probably upgrade the machines that still run Windows in every office, yet again. While those are getting fewer, it's still vendor lock-in with bells on. Your comment about 10 year old OS versions isn't just a red herring, it shows a complete lack of understanding.
Society doesn't give you any authority to take away that 30 year old's car keys or tell him or her not to stay out past 10 pm. You go interfering with 30 year old people, you get charged with unlawful restraint or worse. You see the tiny little difference there don't you?
Now there may be 30 year olds where the courageous and caring thing to do is to tell them when you think they are taking a stupid risk, but you can't actually apply any controls to help them not make the dumb decision. You can't make the 16 year old listen to what you say, but you can at least make them sit down long enough to finish saying it. Beyond that, better have been right in the past often enough the 16 year old still thinks you just might have something to say worth hearing.
Condoms work pretty reliably if you use the latex kind, with a reservoir, properly pinch that reservoir tip to keep air out as you apply them, and don't think if one is good two should be better, and so on. Studies on kids that got sex ed where condoms were actually demonstrated seem to show about 10% of kids still get something major wrong in using them, and another 10% don't even bother to use them all the time (which usually means they are getting either the withdrawl or timing method wrong as well). 98% effectiveness doesn't take those very real numbers into account. Yeah, I support teaching a lot of alternatives besides abstinence, but I also support compiling real numbers and figuring out the exact mix of teachings based on those facts.
Lambskin condoms do not protect at all against HIV, and there's no reliable study that shows protection against any of the other viral STDs, and little demonstrated improvement for bacterial ones. Why is there still any market at all for them if people are making a rational assessment of risks here?
I probably count as having a pretty high sex drive - although at 52 I'm slowing down enough the Ex and I are now wonderfully in sync at about 3x a week. Daily sounded about right through my 30's. Still, most people don't seem to want sex that often, in fact the average for married people in their 20's is lower than my preferred as an old fart, once you get past the honeymoon stage. If people like me had been writing the laws we would have made conjugal visits for felons the only behavior control needed, as taking them away would surely be enough punishment (and cruel and unusual except for rape, arson, and murder).
I figured out I wasn't near the center of that particular bell curve about the same time I noticed we didn't have public orgyariums. So, yeah, I strongly suspect most people could be distracted by a hobby or two. If you all aren't really that way, why weren't there a hundred thousand letters to the editor denouncing Nancy Reagan as an obvious psycho when she proposed that 'just say no' should be extended from anti drug messages to sex ed? The people at my end of the bell curve know the nutcases at the other end, what we don't understand is why you so often let them set the agenda.
It's never about branding their own children. It's about the parents of 'perfect angel' Girl A demanding something be done to 'that pervert' Boy B, until Boy B's parents demand the same in reverse hoping that Girl A's parents will back down. Then the DA's office goes ahead and charges everybody they possibly can because:
A. They don't want to look soft on crime.
B. They have decided the parents are all damned idiots and deserve all the consequences.
C. It gets the damned idiots to finally shut up.
D. There's just something satisfying in giving an idiot precisely what he just demanded, with a threat to have your badge if you don't, knowing that he will eventually regret it for literally the rest of his life.
Yeah, the parents haven't really thought it out well - instead, they end up with tens to hundreds of thousands in legal fees and their kid on a sex offender list, while the local public gossips abut the whole mess until they have to move to another state to get away from it, but can't because, well, their kid is on a sex offender list.
I'm pretty sure here were no libraries destroyed by Christian crusaders 5,000 years ago. In fact, I'd venture to say that Christians had no impact at all, for good or ill, on the state of medicine in the middle east 5,000 years ago.
It seems like a safe bet that some Muslim libraries in the region were destroyed by the Crusaders roughly 1,0000 to 1,100 years ago, and it's a well known historical fact that Christian Not-Crusaders destroyed the library of Alexandria about 700 years before that.
With enough digging, I was able to find historical references to a few Jewish libraries that were looted and/or burned by one or the other side during the crusades. The incidents are not very well known compared to the destruction of the great Alexandrian library or anything else like it. It's pretty doubtful they resulted in the complete loss of any major works on medicine, as most of those types of books were sold to rich people in Europe, who hoped to learn alchemical secrets for living forever, rather than being burned.
I'm not saying it's totally impossible that there were medical theories well in advance of what we think people in the region knew then, and they were somehow all lost. But, to make it even vaguely probable, you're conflating events that lie hundreds or thousands of years apart, and ignoring significant differences (i.e. most Muslim works on medicine existed as primary copies in parts of the empire no Christian looting ever reached, and there were dozens of copies known to have survived. While the crusaders did reach all parts of what was once the Jewish controlled portion, again dozens or hundreds of copies of the known works still existed after they left. There would have to be some mysterious book, and it and its author would have to not be mentioned in any of the books that survived to even hint at its existence, and the Crusaders would have had to do a much more thorough job of destruction than history suggests they did, and so on...). It's simply not at all likely.
The M-lab version also didn't work for me (Firefox, but on Kubuntu). Ookla seems to work (25 M down, 2.5 M up, 50 ms latency sounds about right). Go figure.
Wonder if the Beer Bottle research came about because of court cases? Maybe somebody claimed that if they had really meant to kill someone else, they wouldn't have made the bottle lighter by emptying it first, or alternately, that they thought leaving the liquid in would keep the bottle from becoming a jagged edged weapon. Defense lawyers have been known to introduce such claims on behalf of their clients - maybe some DAs wanted some better counterarguments. If both full and empty bottles definitely have a good probability of doing lethal damage, then a number of legal challenges to an assault with a deadly weapon charge presumably won't work in court.
Knowing if Wistar rats behave like people when it comes to binge drinking is useful if we use Wistar rats for all sorts of animal testing related to alcohol - i.e. someone finds a drug that shows some signs of treating alcoholism and wants to test it on animals before mass human testing. As you put it "It'd be kinda interesting to know..." some things. To find an answer to your question by animal testing, we first need to make sure the animals we use have the necessary similarities to humans in re. alcohol. Otherwise, the experiment won't support any conclusions about anything else except the animal subjects.
Incidentally, Wistars are an albino strain of the Norway rat, and are very commonly used in labs. They're not some really exotic rodent - rather they are exactly the typical creatures scientists would use for just an experiment such as you suggested.
There's probably some real value in most of these. Take one of the most ridiculous sounding - the bat fellatio paper:
If there's a natural selection based reason why some bats reproduce better if the males can last longer, that's evidence for sex based selection being able to possibly produce complex secondary behaviors that may not be fully explainable by 'regular' natural selection. The ongoing argument about whether only sexually based selection can account for the rapid increase in pre-human/human brain size is a genuinely significant research area, and this could help craft new studies on that question. Maybe it just looks significant because human sex matters more to most humans than bat sex, but then, that argument fits most biological science.
Or maybe the bats are exhibiting a learned behavior, found only in some populations of the species. I'd say it's valuable information that creatures with such small brains might have non-instinctive sexual behaviors, and ones that suggest they are motivated by enjoyment rather than reproductive instincts.
Of course, the study is flawed in that it apparently hasn't addressed the known interspecies Bat-fellatio dynamics involving robins...
Sure, just one lil' ole' M1 isn't all that big a deal, but just try being the ranking soldier in an advance party at deployment. When newly commissioned, I signed for the TO&E of an entire Armored Cavalry Regiment once. Show me the Navy Ensign that's held more paper than that.
Is Sulphur 1548251's 'between' meant chronologically or philosophically?
There is no such thing as an Akashic Jew
Woah! - if you start with a Kabalist (who would generally be either a male Jew of age 40+ and stable mind, or else a ditzy pop musician, but statistically the vast majority are Jewish males 40+),
AND
That Jew invokes his particular holy guardian angel, who takes the form of a famous Rabbi of legend, such as Shimon bar Yocha.
THEN
Any Theosophist would tell you that HGA was really a visualized evocation whose image came from the material plane and so took its form, (if not necessarily its essence) from the Akashic record, and so would really be an Akashic Jew.
(I don't think the original poster meant that...)
I like your point about liberalism and taxation - to put it simply, nobody gets to vote for spending just other people's money on a cause, they have to include raising their own taxes with everyone else's.
However, I have to take exception to this:
Basically, if you don't count donations to churches, the gap disappears. And why should you? Even when a church does charitable work, it comes with a sermon which is basically a sales pitch to join something very like an MLM scheme. It isn't charity, it's marketing.
I'm on the outreach committee of a church. This involves donating specifically to non-members and non-member causes. We have other charitable funding earmarked for our own members who become destitute or ill, but this money all goes outside the church, and much of it outside the local community. First, about $32,000 a year goes to Haiti (and that will go up this year for obvious reasons). Other money goes to various medical flight providers, some people doing experimental plant breeding three states away from our location, some middle east peace initiatives, and other such causes.
Then there's money going to northern Ireland to promote peace there. You could argue we're preaching a bit on that, because we have about 25-50 kids of mixed Protestant and Catholic backgrounds we bring to the US for a couple of weeks each year as part of this. Since they already are mostly Christians,and their parents want them to practice, they mostly attend services with us or our local R.C. 'competition' when they are in the US, although that's optional. I don't know of any offhand who has ever moved to our area, but some have immigrated to the US as adults, so they could conceivably become members, and make enough to donate more than they once got. That sounds like lousy odds, or an incredibly poor rate of return if you prefer.
None of that money seems to be actually getting us members in our locale, so far. Then we feed some more local families. They are selected for us by people who work for the local school systems as counselors. The conditions to put them on or take them off the list are thus agreed to with secular government officials, and are basically that the kids in those families stay in school and get decent grades. We have completely relinquished any right to vet these people based on their religion, if any. If we're preaching to them, it's pretty well limited to wishing them a Merry Christmas or Happy thanksgiving as they leave.
There's a local ecumenical storehouse, which provides free, mostly used furniture and fixtures to the poor. The quickest way on their list is for a local fire department official to put a family on there after they have a burnout, rather than to listen to any sermons. Certainly nobody is making anyone sit and listen to anything spiritual or promise themselves to Jesus before they will load a kid's mattress and springs on a truck and tie it down, although I have made a few people promise to not drive over 45 with the load.
The idea that we can help people enough that they start being able to give and help others actually doesn't sound so bad. I wish what we do could be a multi level marketing scheme, where the various people we help, get rich enough to take up the load and help others in the same way. That's simply, absurdly far from reality, where most people who start off poor stay poor, and never get to the point whey they can pay anything forward. We are accomplishing a lot more survival than real leg ups,
The 10 commandments aren't specifically Christian. Christ gave only two - to love the Lord with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself.
It's an odd sort of Christianity that says what some other person said about God trumps what God himself supposedly said. If you don't believe in the primacy of Jesus, you shouldn't call yourself a Christian. If Jesus is just some other mortal guy in a bunch of books full of other people, then what's the point of calling it Christianity? We could call it Ezekielism, or Esteranity, or something.
It's a pretty warped idea some of you have:
If the Bible is just the word of men, then it doesn't prove any one view of God is right - in fact it doesn't prove much of anything.
But if the Bible IS even in part divinely inspired, then it says one guy's words trump all the rest, Period.
There is no possible 'Jesus is God, but his opinions don't matter more than the author of the book of Tobit' position. It simply makes no sense.