It seems to me that fusion research in the US is never going to get decent levels of funding all the time that the Whitehouse is full of people with millions of dollars invested in oil companies.
I expect distant prospects, like fusion, to get more funding from these people. What won't happen are things that would cut oil consumption here and now, like stopping tax breaks on SUVs.
72, actually. However, while some may be motivated by the desire of an afterlife, many may well not be. Did the Japanese kamikazis expect half a gross of virgins when they blew up a ship? There are undoubtedly times when people feel that the actions of a suicide bomber are a logical necessity.
Yes, you're right. But necessity is only one part of the equation.
There are the incentives of the afterlife: Japanese pilots were told that good things would happen to their souls if they did Kamikaze missions, but I don't think it involved virgins. A parent said that this was "blown out of all proportion" (I'm sure no pun was intended) by the media. A search for "72 virgins" on cnn.com and bbc.co.uk finds few mentions of the phrase, and some of those are from the mouths of terrorist apologists (like this guy). This is all redundant if the suicide act is a clear necessity, yet it still features in terrorist propaganda.
As well as the religious pull towards martyrdom, there is the psychological push to make sure that they don't back out. Hamas always has suicide bombers make a video before they die. Once you've gone on tape to pledge your love of Islam, your hatred of the enemy, and your determination to die, it's hard to back out without enduring public humiliation (and perhaps worse).
Some suicide bombers might feel that it is a necessary action. The Kamikaze pilots attacked the US military, as it advanced towards their homeland. I can understand how they thought that they were defending their country. Indeed, if they had not committed suicide, there would be nothing unusual about their actions. I can't extend the same empathy to people who blow up buses of schoolchildren or fly planes into civilian buildings. The 9/11 terrorists were trained as pilots and lived in the US. I don't buy for a minute that they had no alternative. They thought that their atrocities would produce a desirable result, for themselves and for their movement.
Their first major attacks against the US were those bombings in E Africa, killing around 270 of whom around 10% (?) were Americans.
Bin Laden was also indicted by the feds for the 1993 WTC bombing. It's not clear if he personally organized it, or if an allied group acted independently.
Interestingly, 1993 was also the year of the Oslo accords, for which Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres shared the Nobel peace prize. So anyone who thinks that Al-Qaeda are going to close down if we achieve peace between Israel and Palestine should think very hard about exactly what "peace" they have in mind. Chances are it's quite different to the "peace" envisioned by Al-Qaeda.
Yeah, well, this wonderful service they provide (cheap GNU/Linux boxes) may be great for all you Americans - but it ain't gonna take off in the same way throughout the rest of the World without a similar rock-bottom outlet doing the same. (/me mourns living in rip-off UK)
Maybe Asda (UK chain owned by Walmart) will start selling Linux, if it takes off in the US. They already imported the Walmart happy face.
He has already damaged the UN to the point where nothing is being done in Darfur
Yes, it's all Bush's fault. Before he came along, the UN would have taken decisive action to stop the genocide in Darfur. Just like the UN stopped the genocide in Rwanda and Yugoslavia.
Don't do illegal shit on our phones, because we can AND WILL call the cops on your dumb ass.
And not just the cops. Remember the civil liability.
You are comparing a phone company's ToS to fascist dictators that engaged in genocide.
I'm not. But the potential for fascist dictatorship is greatly increased if individual privacy is thrown away. If we create a culture where individual rights are not respected, we make it easier for government and corporate abuse to happen in the future. I don't believe that Vonage (or for that matter, the federal government under Bush) are genocidal dictators. But if we don't protect our privacy while we have good governments, we will be royally screwed by the bad ones. We can't rely on the good nature of governments and corporations (such that it is) to persist permanently.
1.3.1 Prohibited Uses
You agree to use the Service and Device only for lawful purposes. This means that you agree not to use them for transmitting or receiving any communication or material of any kind when in Vonage's sole judgment the transmission, receipt or possession of such communication or material (i) would constitute a criminal offense, give rise to a civil liability, or otherwise violate any applicable local, state, national or international law or (ii) encourages conduct that would constitute a criminal offense, give rise to a civil liability, or otherwise violate any applicable local, state, national or international law....If Vonage, in its sole discretion believes that you have violated the above restrictions etc etc.
So not only do you have to avoid criminal actions, you also have to avoid civil liability. And Vonage can, of course, use their "sole discretion" to decide what is and is not illegal / slanderous / whatever.
People will call this a tinfoil hat case, because in practice, Vonage will not have the resources to spy on people and turn them in if they say something bad. But that sounds very much like security through obscurity. The government and corporations are building a society where privacy can be violated at will. Sure, 99% of people will be unaffected, but then most Soviets weren't picked up by the KGB, and most Iraqis weren't arrested by Saddam Hussein's mob. The "if you've nothing to hid, you've nothing to fear" argument carries much weight with the general public -- as if no innocent people have ever been harmed by their government!
Intensity drops by r^3. When you're talking about r in light years, cube root(1e4 x small) = 21 x cube root(small) = small. You need all the help you can get.
Forgive me if I am talking nonsense (I've had no coffee this morning) but doesn't it drop by r^2 (the surface of a sphere being proportional to r^2)?
Either way, your point still stands, because r is very large.
Wow, I wonder if they ever sent out such letters to the gun industry..
Suits against gun manufacturers have been tried on many occasions (google on: gun lawsuit), without much success.
Hell, even McDonald's has been sued by some dorks who couldn't figure out that lots of Big Macs might make them fat, and wanted to blame McDonald's for their stupidity. That didn't work, either. So there is some justice.
Thanks to organized farm lobbies in the western countries (and probably concerns of strategic resources), there have been set up trade barriers that limit importing food from developing countries, while our subsidized produce is being exported to those countries. Not only do we refuse to buy their goods, but we export subsidized produce to them that thanks to those subsidies is cheaper than their domestic wares.
Quite. Organized farm lobbies in "western countries". Not just the USA. If this was the reason the USA is hated, then Europe would be hated equally.
It's tempting to wonder if Redner's paper conclusively proves Sturgeon's Law."
Which says, "90% of everything is crap". A good test would be to look at the citations of the famous papers. Do they just cite other top 100 papers? Or did the authors of the best papers learn from the work of their less famous colleagues?
I was just about to post the same thing. I've been thinking about this problem for a while now.
The only problem I see is the possibility for machine cheating. You could program your machine to put 1 in 1000 votes for A into B's total.
Of course, if anyone suspects cheating, then there could be a manual recount. Open software would also be very helpful in preventing cheating. So I think this system is actually pretty good.
You could design a machine that only counted votes as it sorted the papers into piles. A light dependent resistor records a vote for A when the machine passes a ballot through slot A. A human could pick up the pile from slot A and easily flick through them to look for mistakes.
I am perfectly aware that no nation can own space. However, why should we put flags all over it? Why not the UN flag, or some other symbol that this thing is from the third rock out? Why should we be so proud that we're from one corner of a speck instead of another?
Earlier you said "can't we have one spot in the solar system without our flag on it?" I thought that made you American.
Anyway, your argument scales quite nicely. If we shouldn't be proud that our corner of a speck put a probe on Mercury, then why should we be proud any part of our speck did it? It's just a speck, after all.
UN flag, bah. You narrow minded Terrans...I am a citizen of the universe!
It's just a marker that we went there, not that we own it. Sheesh, settle down.
Correct. According to article II of the Outer Space treaty (signed by the USA): "Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."
Report it to the authorities. Alternately, post the info here on/. and then don't worry about it. Somebody will do something, and it won't be you.
Report him for what? He doesn't seem to have committed any crime. His email isn't spam (under CAN-SPAM), because it's not commercial. He threatens to send spam, but while that may be in poor taste, it is pretty obviously not a serious threat. I know he tried to hide his identity, but that is probably to avoid the wrath of Spymac rather than his fellow users.
I know some people consider any unsolicited email to be spam, but IMO, if you have a public profile that reveals your email address, you should expect to get email from people who read that profile. If you don't like that, then your profile shouldn't reveal your email address. QED.
What incentive does Google have to seriously reduce this type of fraud? The more clickthru's, the more they get paid!
If Google just let this happen, they would be saying to advertisers "you're getting screwed, but we're profiting, so we're happy." This might tarnish Google's saintly image and make people not want to pay them money.
You might as well say that cellphone companies shouldn't stop phone cloning, because if someone steals my identity and starts making calls to Nigeria, the phone company can bill me big time! But if they didn't do their best to stop the fraud, they would soon lose my custom.
One thing I hated about Point Blank was that some stages were totally predictable. The stages that had carboard baddies pop up for you to shoot at followed a pre-defined sequence. I loved that game for its variety, and it seemed such a waste to have predictable stages.
I don't think you can apply total randomness to FPS games, because level design is pretty difficult to do well. I guess with some effort, you could at least make some variation. I remember being impressed the first time I went back through some empty rooms in Dark Forces, and new stormtroopers showed up! Ah, memories.
The catch is badly-written websites that don't work properly without IE. Some sites won't let you do business unless you use IE. For me this is a sign that they don't know what they're doing (do you want an online credit card payment system from these guys?), but lots of people will assume that this means IE is better.
I am watching Mozilla with keen interest because it is an interesting test of the security through obscurity problem. If Mozilla takes a big market share it will attract the attention of the bad guys who currently target IE. Then we shall see if open source is a liability or an asset.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect distant prospects, like fusion, to get more funding from these people. What won't happen are things that would cut oil consumption here and now, like stopping tax breaks on SUVs.
Yes, you're right. But necessity is only one part of the equation.
There are the incentives of the afterlife: Japanese pilots were told that good things would happen to their souls if they did Kamikaze missions, but I don't think it involved virgins. A parent said that this was "blown out of all proportion" (I'm sure no pun was intended) by the media. A search for "72 virgins" on cnn.com and bbc.co.uk finds few mentions of the phrase, and some of those are from the mouths of terrorist apologists (like this guy). This is all redundant if the suicide act is a clear necessity, yet it still features in terrorist propaganda.
As well as the religious pull towards martyrdom, there is the psychological push to make sure that they don't back out. Hamas always has suicide bombers make a video before they die. Once you've gone on tape to pledge your love of Islam, your hatred of the enemy, and your determination to die, it's hard to back out without enduring public humiliation (and perhaps worse).
Some suicide bombers might feel that it is a necessary action. The Kamikaze pilots attacked the US military, as it advanced towards their homeland. I can understand how they thought that they were defending their country. Indeed, if they had not committed suicide, there would be nothing unusual about their actions. I can't extend the same empathy to people who blow up buses of schoolchildren or fly planes into civilian buildings. The 9/11 terrorists were trained as pilots and lived in the US. I don't buy for a minute that they had no alternative. They thought that their atrocities would produce a desirable result, for themselves and for their movement.
Bin Laden was also indicted by the feds for the 1993 WTC bombing. It's not clear if he personally organized it, or if an allied group acted independently.
Interestingly, 1993 was also the year of the Oslo accords, for which Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres shared the Nobel peace prize. So anyone who thinks that Al-Qaeda are going to close down if we achieve peace between Israel and Palestine should think very hard about exactly what "peace" they have in mind. Chances are it's quite different to the "peace" envisioned by Al-Qaeda.
If that were true, would they need the incentive of 70 virgins?
Maybe Asda (UK chain owned by Walmart) will start selling Linux, if it takes off in the US. They already imported the Walmart happy face.
Yes, it's all Bush's fault. Before he came along, the UN would have taken decisive action to stop the genocide in Darfur. Just like the UN stopped the genocide in Rwanda and Yugoslavia.
And not just the cops. Remember the civil liability.
You are comparing a phone company's ToS to fascist dictators that engaged in genocide.
I'm not. But the potential for fascist dictatorship is greatly increased if individual privacy is thrown away. If we create a culture where individual rights are not respected, we make it easier for government and corporate abuse to happen in the future. I don't believe that Vonage (or for that matter, the federal government under Bush) are genocidal dictators. But if we don't protect our privacy while we have good governments, we will be royally screwed by the bad ones. We can't rely on the good nature of governments and corporations (such that it is) to persist permanently.
1.3.1 Prohibited Uses You agree to use the Service and Device only for lawful purposes. This means that you agree not to use them for transmitting or receiving any communication or material of any kind when in Vonage's sole judgment the transmission, receipt or possession of such communication or material (i) would constitute a criminal offense, give rise to a civil liability, or otherwise violate any applicable local, state, national or international law or (ii) encourages conduct that would constitute a criminal offense, give rise to a civil liability, or otherwise violate any applicable local, state, national or international law....If Vonage, in its sole discretion believes that you have violated the above restrictions etc etc.
So not only do you have to avoid criminal actions, you also have to avoid civil liability. And Vonage can, of course, use their "sole discretion" to decide what is and is not illegal / slanderous / whatever.
People will call this a tinfoil hat case, because in practice, Vonage will not have the resources to spy on people and turn them in if they say something bad. But that sounds very much like security through obscurity. The government and corporations are building a society where privacy can be violated at will. Sure, 99% of people will be unaffected, but then most Soviets weren't picked up by the KGB, and most Iraqis weren't arrested by Saddam Hussein's mob. The "if you've nothing to hid, you've nothing to fear" argument carries much weight with the general public -- as if no innocent people have ever been harmed by their government!
Forgive me if I am talking nonsense (I've had no coffee this morning) but doesn't it drop by r^2 (the surface of a sphere being proportional to r^2)?
Either way, your point still stands, because r is very large.
Suits against gun manufacturers have been tried on many occasions (google on: gun lawsuit), without much success.
Hell, even McDonald's has been sued by some dorks who couldn't figure out that lots of Big Macs might make them fat, and wanted to blame McDonald's for their stupidity. That didn't work, either. So there is some justice.
Quite. Organized farm lobbies in "western countries". Not just the USA. If this was the reason the USA is hated, then Europe would be hated equally.
Which says, "90% of everything is crap". A good test would be to look at the citations of the famous papers. Do they just cite other top 100 papers? Or did the authors of the best papers learn from the work of their less famous colleagues?
The only problem I see is the possibility for machine cheating. You could program your machine to put 1 in 1000 votes for A into B's total.
Of course, if anyone suspects cheating, then there could be a manual recount. Open software would also be very helpful in preventing cheating. So I think this system is actually pretty good.
You could design a machine that only counted votes as it sorted the papers into piles. A light dependent resistor records a vote for A when the machine passes a ballot through slot A. A human could pick up the pile from slot A and easily flick through them to look for mistakes.
What's the downside?
Earlier you said "can't we have one spot in the solar system without our flag on it?" I thought that made you American.
Anyway, your argument scales quite nicely. If we shouldn't be proud that our corner of a speck put a probe on Mercury, then why should we be proud any part of our speck did it? It's just a speck, after all.
UN flag, bah. You narrow minded Terrans...I am a citizen of the universe!
Correct. According to article II of the Outer Space treaty (signed by the USA): "Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."
Report him for what? He doesn't seem to have committed any crime. His email isn't spam (under CAN-SPAM), because it's not commercial. He threatens to send spam, but while that may be in poor taste, it is pretty obviously not a serious threat. I know he tried to hide his identity, but that is probably to avoid the wrath of Spymac rather than his fellow users.
I know some people consider any unsolicited email to be spam, but IMO, if you have a public profile that reveals your email address, you should expect to get email from people who read that profile. If you don't like that, then your profile shouldn't reveal your email address. QED.
But make sure it's eBay's official escrow, and not a fake escrow a-la p-p-p-powerbook!
Isn't there something in patent law that says you have to sue in a timely manner? These things have been going for years.
If Google just let this happen, they would be saying to advertisers "you're getting screwed, but we're profiting, so we're happy." This might tarnish Google's saintly image and make people not want to pay them money.
You might as well say that cellphone companies shouldn't stop phone cloning, because if someone steals my identity and starts making calls to Nigeria, the phone company can bill me big time! But if they didn't do their best to stop the fraud, they would soon lose my custom.
Does this mean we can get Windows removed from public schools?
I don't think you can apply total randomness to FPS games, because level design is pretty difficult to do well. I guess with some effort, you could at least make some variation. I remember being impressed the first time I went back through some empty rooms in Dark Forces, and new stormtroopers showed up! Ah, memories.
Oops, should have been a link in there.
I am watching Mozilla with keen interest because it is an interesting test of the security through obscurity problem. If Mozilla takes a big market share it will attract the attention of the bad guys who currently target IE. Then we shall see if open source is a liability or an asset.
The WTO has never ruled against the US? Maybe they favour the USA over Mexico, but they sure don't give the USA a free pass in disputes with Europe.
Combined with the fact that mexican politicians would never do anything to upset Uncle Sam...
Are you sure?
Has cynicism become the new naivety?
Yes, I'm sure that someone with a phobia of Mexicans will vote for Bush. The right wing are really happy with his policies on immigration.