Just did a quick search and it does appear that if, e.g., this is accurate, stressing bone causes them to increase in density.
Wearing a cellphone is restrictive on your range of movement, and you're more cautious about activities which could apply force to that area because you don't want to damage your expensive phone. Hence, the bone is less stressed, leading to less bone density.
Even if that isn't right, it still seems to me like the correct control for the experiment, if they want to say it's the radiation that's causing the bone loss, would be to have the control group wearing deactivated phones, not having them wearing no phone at all.
Re:Wow, just wow. The uncanny valley extends ....
on
Flying Robot Bird Unveiled
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Humanity's advances in certain areas (like robotics) are amazing. The sad part is that we are way ahead in certain areas, but way behind in other three key areas:
This is true, or not--it really is a matter of personal perspective. I myself think we are making fairly equitable process in terms of the limited resources we are splitting between all of our priorities:
We are still in diapers in weak AI, and not even started in strong AI.
Might as well be saying this in the year 1850 in respect to clockwork men. The human brain is not software so much as it is hardware, and modern transistor chips do not resemble it very well. I think our present level of AI is fairly suited to the sort of computers we are manufacturing. Get quantum computers (in which we are make quite excellent progress) up to where large chips are viable, and I think the code development of AI will be a few orders of magnitude more viable as well.
We still have to crack the energy issue. We lack both reliable ways to gather energy, and reliable ways to store it.
We can generate massive (nuclear) and store massive (dam) amounts of energy. Scaling it down becomes more troublesome. But the real issue is that it's easier to dream up ways to use energy than to produce it, due to troublesome and altogether uncircumventable laws of thermodynamics, which in one sense will always make us seem like we're lagging. Energy "does stuff," and we'll almost always want to "do as much stuff" as we can, which can always be translated into some kind of gain. Getting back to the AI issue: there are fundamental constraints on the the amount of computation that can be done per joule of energy expended. And will we ever be happy with the amount of computing we do? I don't think so. So, in that respect alone, we already have some desire for infinite energy, to say nothing of whatever finite supply we have at a given time.
We are still based on the stupid principle of scarcity. Until we realize that we can produce as much as we need of just about anything, and that we are limiting ourselves by creating artificial scarcity to keep alive a system that's been dead for a long time, we won't make that breakthrough into what we thought the year 2000 was going to be.
Humanity always produces as much as it needs. If not, people die and the equilibrium is re-established. It comes to producing as much as we want, and that, as given in one example, is pretty much limitless. Scarcity of resources in that respect is inevitable and the distribution of those resources is fairly well addressed by capitalism. I doubt there will be a better way to distribute them until our super-AI comes online to figure it all out for us. Until then, humans are provably terrible at guessing where resources should go by any means other than rational self-interest.
If it was an "ambush" you would probably try to have them surrounded anyway. And it takes how long to pivot 180 degrees? I know everyone wants to be the analytical spoilsport and think "how can we make this fail" but honestly making it fail is just not even a big deal. It's only even going to be a fraction of the soldiers who have these devices, so you are at best you are temporarily fooling one guy in the group you are attacking. I imagine the primary use of this is that, if bullets start flying and you take cover, you will be able to figure out where to return fire (or send backup, etc.) without needing to pop your head out first. It's not going to be that there is a loud noise and then suddenly everyone is scrambling to check their sensors on where to point their guns while the enemy parades in from the other direction.
Ha! Your love is feeble, my friend. For my wife I just stole roughly $1.2 million worth of intellectual property. (downloaded her a Beatle's album via torrent)
Credit card numbers are kind of terrible to begin with, though. Assuming these postal codes codes use both letters and numbers (not case sensitive) we have already eliminated 6 characters from the total number that have to be typed in to generate the same size namespace,* and greatly reduced the probability of confusing repeated characters.
The postman could just as easily check your code when he picks up the mail (thank you portable electronics) as at the post office.. In any case he should attempt to return it to the sender rather than the recipient if there is an invalid code as writing a code at all should indicate that the sender intended to pay the postage his or her self.
I admit, of course, that self-printed barcodes would be better, both for readability and efficiency. However, printers are notoriously unreliable and not everyone has one. If all the post office wants to do is force a seemless migration from everyone using stamps to everyone using something simple and 'digital', I think this fulfills the purpose.
My biggest complaint is the loss of the ability to send things anonymously.
*this is wholly unnecessary: you only need the name space to be an order of magnitude larger than the expected number of outbound parcels at a given moment, and you'll be golden by an order of magnitude. reusing numbers is fine. it doesn't even matter if you have multiple of the same number in circulation as long as you are aware of it and it is not so frequent that it becomes easy to count on. (keep in mind, too, that the sender incurs a certain cost to send a physical piece of mail and also has to physically transfer it at some point--can they get away with dropping off a hundred envelopes every day hoping one of them is correctly coded? even for high number of collisions... probably not. \)
I didn't say that everyone else in the western world was right and America is all wrong. What I said was that I don't think American's understand how foreign and odd American politics appears to others in the western world.
So apparently you could not think of anything at all positive you could include in your neutral list of American oddities ("right wing, conservative, pretty, ill-educated, reactionary, selfish, jingoistic, partisan, anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-reason"), you phrase your observations in terminology that indicates a problem ("I really don't understand how a country that purports to be a democracy has allowed its political discourse to be so railroaded into one tiny spectrum of ideas."), and you even offer your proposed solution to the problem ("You guys really need to ditch first past the post elections - most of the rest of the world has already figured this out.") But this was all just disinterested fact finding intended to present the presently stated point (which I have difficulty extracting as the conclusion of your previous post).
"However, if you just want to snobbishly compare cultures and declare yours superior" Ummm..... never mentioned culture. Again, reread what I wrote, it seems to have escaped you.
You never mentioned "human beings" either. Perhaps I should infer, therefore, that you only intend to discuss some vacuous abstract entities which have the appearance of being American?
Politics is a manifestation of culture particularly in a democracy (which is free to change politics to match its sentiment) as well as being a direct part of it. If you don't like my terminology you can feel free to substitute the word 'politics' and find the same point being made. Attacking the word choice is childish. Acting as if the problem lies in my comprehension is even more childish.
Did I say that America was antiscience? I said American POLITICS. I was pretty clear about that. You really need to read things more slowly and think a little more before responding - your brain's not keeping up. If you didn't get that my post was about the US political system then I despair for you.
The previous point, I think, applies. You might also observe that 2/3 of those examples I gave are referring to government projects, so even if you absolutely require me to conform the phrasing to reflect the entire that America as a country is utterly distinct from America as a political entity (which makes phrases like "America invaded Iraq" rather interesting to interpret...) you will still find yourself at the target of essentially the same point.
For the record, I believe words to the effect of "I don't think you are correctly understanding me" would reflect a bit more maturity than "your brain's not keeping up" and "I despair for you."
Write down one number of the address wrong and your letter is also "invalid" in the sense of going to someone else. If anything I would imagine less error for copying down numbers (which you will presumably double-check) rather than sloppily dumping something out of your personal memory. The code doesn't need to be any more "complex" than a credit card number, which is basically the function it's serving (except more secure since it is one-time use). I am not sure how much effort the criminal industry is going to expend in sniffing out postal codes at $0.50 value... they might be better off jumping kids' for their lunch money.
You know what? We have a Communist Party (and plenty of other likeminded organizations). It has members. It has a newspaper. They can meet publicly or privately and disseminate their ideas the same as anyone else. I don't see where you get off criticizing our democracy for being "railroaded into one tiny spectrum of ideas." As if it's necessary for a bunch of us to veer wildly left to match the New Zealand political demographics.
I admit I like the irony of calling us "jingoistic" simply because our culture does not fit your own political conceptions. You happily rattle off other Western European countries (and one former colony of the same) to support your framing of the ideal way to be. The vast majority of the world does not fit into your narrow framework, but with your handpicked few you have magically defined a cultural ideal for.all of us to strive for. Btw, did you know that if you sum up the populations for every country that you mentioned, you get about 3/4 the sum population of the United States? You don't even have a democratic majority and you still want to lay out how the culture should be on another continent.
Yes we have a culture that is more conservative than yours. Most of the world does. There is a whole multitude of reasons the U.S. has the politics it does: if I wanted to be simplistic I might say that we are simply much more individualistic. This has its problems but it also has its benefits. Unlike Germany we have freedom of religion. Unlike France we have complete freedom of speech. Unlike the UK we have a right to defend ourselves, and much more privacy. Unlike Australia we do not criminalize/censor publications.
Now, I'm sure there are tonnes of things we get utterly wrong. I'm sure there are plenty of things you get utterly wrong as well (and are completely blind to because of your cultural heritage, just as we are). If you want to engage things we get wrong at the level of logically debating their individual merits, fine. However, if you just want to snobbishly compare cultures and declare yours superior, well, at least tone down the irony. And maybe read up a bit on where your iPad, Internet, and space age materials come from before you decide our whole country is anti-science.
Hi. I live in Wisconsin. Maybe you've heard of the protests we've been having these last few weeks. Care to tell me how exactly the Republicans and Democrats are the same because it's pretty obvious here that they're not.
They are the same for the equivalence class of "corruptly and exploitatively serves the interests of {corporations | unions | lawyers | *AA }." As there is a budget crisis it is only natural that they should be fighting over which group of persons presently receiving > $100,000 in benefits will be specially protected from the fallout.
The sound you are hearing is not a diesel generator, it is the background "melody" of your songs. You need to stop letting your grandchildren (whose existence I infer from your five-digit UID) upload the music which is on your mp3 player.
If you are so out of touch with what your kid does online that you need this.. then you forgot to sacrifice something somewhere along the way.
You *are* that out of touch with what your kid does, and it's not because of a lack of parenting. It's because they are free and sovereign creatures. The child you see and interact with everyday is not the full expanse of your kid--it is the expression of words and actions your kid has learned avoids your ire and keeps the allowance money flowing. You hope there is a good correspondence, but it's not guaranteed. If your kid is up against some dark inclinations, he or she will realize that telling you could have negative results, and that not telling you keeps the situation fully under their control. Will they approach you if you try to always be open and loving? *Maybe.* Who even knows how to raise a kid properly? A kid could have a terrible abusive alcoholic father and follow the same pattern that he sees; he could have a terrible alcoholic father and realize how much he loathes selfishness and violence, becoming the kindest person you would ever meet.
Besides that, kids are curious. You can teach them something is bad, and have them fully 100% believe you, and they will still wind up seeking it out.
What it comes down to is teaching your kids to live life in the proper pattern and hope that when they're older the "don't hit your sister because you'll get a spanking" placeholder transmutes into "don't hit your sister because that is fundamentally wrong." Otherwise, all you can do is exemplify those values in a way you think will give them a desire to emulate you.
On this basis, I think it is entirely appropriate to keep tabs on them: or at least let them know the possibility is there. It's not a matter of questioning their judgment: their judgment is stupid and will continue to be stupid long after they leave the nest. It's about keeping them in the habit of third person perspective (how does my deed look when viewed outside my personal selfishness?) and strongly ingraining good habits so that when they go out and flop (the final lessons always have to be learned by experience) they have a nice deep groove to fall back into.
1) Alert people their communication is insecure 2) Let them know the government is concerned about their ability to organize 3) Piss them off
All without actually causing them much inconvenience. Last I checked, Facebook made it easy to restore an account, and even if they've changed that, Facebook almost certainly has retained the data and made it clear in Tunisia they were willing to fix the problem for those affected by sabotage.
Yes but would the story be appearing on slashdot if they had gotten it wrong? Or would slashdot have simply run with the story of a different simulator which happened to get it right?
With "7 out of 8" picks they may be on to something (depending on how many teams are actually viable and how many independent simulations are being run). But, then again, the fact that the simulation predicted Steelers would win the actual match, and that extrapolating backwards the system only becomes more chaotic, makes you wonder if they are just lucky.
How will you know if it's the ark if you don't look in it?
You won't, it will just remain both the ark and not the ark. But you can still sell it on ebay as a 50% superposition of the greatest archaeological find of all time.
It wasn't too long ago Obama spent a couple hundred mill toward getting people to check the box next to his name. I don't find it inordinately surprising that they're still doing it.
No you're supposed to do it for a share of a dinette set plus the personal satisfaction you get from solving problems and the prestige and recognition of being the guy who beat everyone else at doing it.
Fyi, people actually pay for the opportunity to compete in triathlons, and most of them aren't even expecting to win. The ones who do don't receive much in the way of compensation for the time they've invested in it. And yet hundreds of people still show up to do it.
If you're not in the spirit of the game then it may not seem very equitable to you, but good news! It's 100% voluntary, so no need for you to worry about it.
Please try to grasp that two alternatives were presented.
One being that Walmart is doing what you claim. In this case, I asked for corroborating evidence. You seem to have conveniently overlooked the opportunity to present any. I am more than willing to accept that Walmart is guilty of operating via wrong doing and should be taken to task. All I ask is to have something a bit more substantial to go off of than the word of some guy on the internet. Lacking any convincing evidence, I'm afraid I am forced to assume you are just a self-deluding conspiracy theorist.
The alternative theory is indeed one of technological advance. Consider that the development of the assembly line was key to the eventual success of the automobile industry. In this case, computer tracking, analysis, and modeling, improved packing and sorting facilities, etc., is what Walmart is using in order to undercut the competition. The old style of having mom and pop try their best to guess the needs and desires of thousands of people, price things by 'what seems reasonable to them', and inefficiently source a bunch of different outlets to ship things, is simply ceasing to be a competitive model in light of the 21st century technology.
if this is your counter argument to what your parent posted, then shut the hell up next time something comes to your mind, until you formulate a VALID argument.
Yes, yes, accusing someone's argument of not being VALID (the use of all caps is, I can only assume, vitally important to the underlying thesis) is certainly a crushing blow, much more so than it would be to give any empirical justification to your accusations of their being a conspiracy by Walmart to violate federal monopoly laws.
by selling at close to zero margin until the competition went under.
>
You seem to be implying that Walmart was artificially lowering their prices to drive out competition, and then jacking them up to take advantage of their monopoly domination of the market. If so, that is a quite unethical and illegal practice. Would you care to present your evidence that this occurred? It should probably be forwarded to federal investigators as well.
If, however, you are simply complaining that Walmart is driving out competition by universally offering the lowest prices it can, then I also have some bad news for you about handmade candles and the horse-drawn carriage.
P.S. Gonna take the money I saved and go buy some more Christmas presents. I hope this doesn't create too many extra jobs!
If I were the Taliban, I would target these things, they would stick out like a sore thumb. Its not like 'not shooting medics' has ever really been respected lately (by both sides).
I'm sure it can be made more discrete (more in the vein of a typical soldier, albeit identifiable by its weird movement). The Taliban can shoot at it all they want: it's ideal to have them shooting at the robot rather than anyone else. (Honestly that is a silly priority for them to have given that the 'anyone else' is likely to be trying to kill them.) Doubtless you can put a lot of armor on it. Even if they're making a point of trying to kill the wounded individual (again, a bad priority on their part) the robot is still serving the invaluable function of eliminating the "do we risk injuring more guys to save our wounded guy" dilemma. That's a major tactical boon even if the robot's effectiveness is somewhere between poor and mediocre.
As for its versatility, it actually looks quite capable. You can see two sets of treads connected on an arm. I'd imagine it could even go up stairs.
Even if it is a replacement, we're still years behind where we would be if the hicks didn't insist that we throw out the unused embryos.
First sentence: bigoted language. Sounds like we're off to a good start.
As near as I can gather you are intending this post toward the 'life-begins-at-conception' branch of the American pro life movement. In which case you are a bit confused in saying they "insist we throw out the unused embryos" given that they fight tooth and nail specifically to prevent unused embryos from being discarded. They often oppose IVF itself precisely because excess embryos are thrown out.
As it stands we're destroying the extra stem cells from IVF instead of using them because the right won't allow scientists to use them.
That's quite an uninformed statement. There really is no restriction on what can or cannot be done with embryos (apart from I believe in the state of Indiana). They are thrown out largely because there is no use from them. The restrictions which have existed (until Obama overturned them) regard limiting federally funded research to certain pre-existent lines.
The reality is that we've got plenty of embryonic stem cells available without creating any more. Which really ought to be where the morals come into it.
Where, exactly? At the point you align morals with "doing what's convenient and what we would have done anyway" I don't think you've really addressed a moral question at all.
First of all, absolutely none of that is relevant to the preceding discussion, as I still was not making any comments at all about whether the government reaction was moral or justified, merely observing that the distinction you drew between their Cold War and present behavior was not correct.
But if you read the article summary you will see that the U.S. was not going after the banks of Wikileaks (which it is pretty generous to call a 'foreign news organization'; I suppose The Pirate Bay is one as well?). The account was put on a watchlist and the internet payment company responsible for collecting their donations decided on their own initiative to close the related account due to the blackisting and publicity after it had been suspended for other reasons. Basically they just did not want to be associated with him.
I think it's pretty reasonable that the American government would want to watch an account associated with someone disclosing American secrets, if not for legal reasons (catching Americans committing treason) then certainly for intelligence reasons (identifying the sources). This would happen regardless of how they felt about him personally, so there's really no need to invoke conspiracy theories to explain this.
Of course it's true; you seem to have quite ignored the point that this was not done for non-communist oppressive regimes.
US government was smart enough to realize that exposing "bad" information is a powerful weapon.
Wait, so you admit the U.S. used these stations as a weapon at the same time you claim my observation about it being used as propaganda isn't true? I think you're being a bit dissonant.
In any case I was never intending to criticize the radio towers, so there is really no need to defend them. For my part I'm glad they existed. But it's simply incorrect to think they were not put there for strategic reasons, and the relevance of that to this discussion is that they are not a useful barometer of American views on "free information," and certainly not something you can rationally compare to the Pentagon reacting to Wikileaks.
They ought to be smart enough to realize that trying to stomp bad news out will work as well for them, as it worked for the evil communists.
The U.S. isn't trying to stamp out "bad news" they are trying to protect classified details of ongoing military involvement, the leaking of which has and will continue to result in the death of informants, soldiers, and general damage to operations.
More to the point the U.S. has *always* safeguarded strategic information for its whole existence, certainly during the Cold War and no differently now.
It may be that the U.S. is more or less open (I would argue more) but your anecdote isn't really serving the purpose of illustrating this one way or the other.
The radio stations of which you speak were a propaganda tool meant to weaken the communism regimes and recruit internal supporters. I wouldn't really call them good indicators of America's true motives (although I would submit that Americans did then and continue now to value and promote freedom). How many were set up in the backyard of non-communist oppressors?
I'm also pretty sure if anything you would have found the U.S. more reactive to those releasing confidential military documents during the Cold War. As regards Wikileaks the difference between then and now is mostly the existence of the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Just did a quick search and it does appear that if, e.g., this is accurate, stressing bone causes them to increase in density.
Wearing a cellphone is restrictive on your range of movement, and you're more cautious about activities which could apply force to that area because you don't want to damage your expensive phone. Hence, the bone is less stressed, leading to less bone density.
Even if that isn't right, it still seems to me like the correct control for the experiment, if they want to say it's the radiation that's causing the bone loss, would be to have the control group wearing deactivated phones, not having them wearing no phone at all.
Humanity's advances in certain areas (like robotics) are amazing. The sad part is that we are way ahead in certain areas, but way behind in other three key areas:
This is true, or not--it really is a matter of personal perspective. I myself think we are making fairly equitable process in terms of the limited resources we are splitting between all of our priorities:
We are still in diapers in weak AI, and not even started in strong AI.
Might as well be saying this in the year 1850 in respect to clockwork men. The human brain is not software so much as it is hardware, and modern transistor chips do not resemble it very well. I think our present level of AI is fairly suited to the sort of computers we are manufacturing. Get quantum computers (in which we are make quite excellent progress) up to where large chips are viable, and I think the code development of AI will be a few orders of magnitude more viable as well.
We still have to crack the energy issue. We lack both reliable ways to gather energy, and reliable ways to store it.
We can generate massive (nuclear) and store massive (dam) amounts of energy. Scaling it down becomes more troublesome. But the real issue is that it's easier to dream up ways to use energy than to produce it, due to troublesome and altogether uncircumventable laws of thermodynamics, which in one sense will always make us seem like we're lagging. Energy "does stuff," and we'll almost always want to "do as much stuff" as we can, which can always be translated into some kind of gain. Getting back to the AI issue: there are fundamental constraints on the the amount of computation that can be done per joule of energy expended. And will we ever be happy with the amount of computing we do? I don't think so. So, in that respect alone, we already have some desire for infinite energy, to say nothing of whatever finite supply we have at a given time.
We are still based on the stupid principle of scarcity. Until we realize that we can produce as much as we need of just about anything, and that we are limiting ourselves by creating artificial scarcity to keep alive a system that's been dead for a long time, we won't make that breakthrough into what we thought the year 2000 was going to be.
Humanity always produces as much as it needs. If not, people die and the equilibrium is re-established. It comes to producing as much as we want, and that, as given in one example, is pretty much limitless. Scarcity of resources in that respect is inevitable and the distribution of those resources is fairly well addressed by capitalism. I doubt there will be a better way to distribute them until our super-AI comes online to figure it all out for us. Until then, humans are provably terrible at guessing where resources should go by any means other than rational self-interest.
If it was an "ambush" you would probably try to have them surrounded anyway. And it takes how long to pivot 180 degrees? I know everyone wants to be the analytical spoilsport and think "how can we make this fail" but honestly making it fail is just not even a big deal. It's only even going to be a fraction of the soldiers who have these devices, so you are at best you are temporarily fooling one guy in the group you are attacking. I imagine the primary use of this is that, if bullets start flying and you take cover, you will be able to figure out where to return fire (or send backup, etc.) without needing to pop your head out first. It's not going to be that there is a loud noise and then suddenly everyone is scrambling to check their sensors on where to point their guns while the enemy parades in from the other direction.
Ha! Your love is feeble, my friend. For my wife I just stole roughly $1.2 million worth of intellectual property. (downloaded her a Beatle's album via torrent)
Credit card numbers are kind of terrible to begin with, though. Assuming these postal codes codes use both letters and numbers (not case sensitive) we have already eliminated 6 characters from the total number that have to be typed in to generate the same size namespace,* and greatly reduced the probability of confusing repeated characters.
The postman could just as easily check your code when he picks up the mail (thank you portable electronics) as at the post office.. In any case he should attempt to return it to the sender rather than the recipient if there is an invalid code as writing a code at all should indicate that the sender intended to pay the postage his or her self.
I admit, of course, that self-printed barcodes would be better, both for readability and efficiency. However, printers are notoriously unreliable and not everyone has one. If all the post office wants to do is force a seemless migration from everyone using stamps to everyone using something simple and 'digital', I think this fulfills the purpose.
My biggest complaint is the loss of the ability to send things anonymously.
*this is wholly unnecessary: you only need the name space to be an order of magnitude larger than the expected number of outbound parcels at a given moment, and you'll be golden by an order of magnitude. reusing numbers is fine. it doesn't even matter if you have multiple of the same number in circulation as long as you are aware of it and it is not so frequent that it becomes easy to count on. (keep in mind, too, that the sender incurs a certain cost to send a physical piece of mail and also has to physically transfer it at some point--can they get away with dropping off a hundred envelopes every day hoping one of them is correctly coded? even for high number of collisions... probably not. \)
I didn't say that everyone else in the western world was right and America is all wrong. What I said was that I don't think American's understand how foreign and odd American politics appears to others in the western world.
So apparently you could not think of anything at all positive you could include in your neutral list of American oddities ("right wing, conservative, pretty, ill-educated, reactionary, selfish, jingoistic, partisan, anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-reason"), you phrase your observations in terminology that indicates a problem ("I really don't understand how a country that purports to be a democracy has allowed its political discourse to be so railroaded into one tiny spectrum of ideas."), and you even offer your proposed solution to the problem ("You guys really need to ditch first past the post elections - most of the rest of the world has already figured this out.") But this was all just disinterested fact finding intended to present the presently stated point (which I have difficulty extracting as the conclusion of your previous post).
"However, if you just want to snobbishly compare cultures and declare yours superior" Ummm..... never mentioned culture. Again, reread what I wrote, it seems to have escaped you.
You never mentioned "human beings" either. Perhaps I should infer, therefore, that you only intend to discuss some vacuous abstract entities which have the appearance of being American?
Politics is a manifestation of culture particularly in a democracy (which is free to change politics to match its sentiment) as well as being a direct part of it. If you don't like my terminology you can feel free to substitute the word 'politics' and find the same point being made. Attacking the word choice is childish. Acting as if the problem lies in my comprehension is even more childish.
Did I say that America was antiscience? I said American POLITICS. I was pretty clear about that. You really need to read things more slowly and think a little more before responding - your brain's not keeping up. If you didn't get that my post was about the US political system then I despair for you.
The previous point, I think, applies. You might also observe that 2/3 of those examples I gave are referring to government projects, so even if you absolutely require me to conform the phrasing to reflect the entire that America as a country is utterly distinct from America as a political entity (which makes phrases like "America invaded Iraq" rather interesting to interpret...) you will still find yourself at the target of essentially the same point.
For the record, I believe words to the effect of "I don't think you are correctly understanding me" would reflect a bit more maturity than "your brain's not keeping up" and "I despair for you."
Write down one number of the address wrong and your letter is also "invalid" in the sense of going to someone else. If anything I would imagine less error for copying down numbers (which you will presumably double-check) rather than sloppily dumping something out of your personal memory. The code doesn't need to be any more "complex" than a credit card number, which is basically the function it's serving (except more secure since it is one-time use). I am not sure how much effort the criminal industry is going to expend in sniffing out postal codes at $0.50 value... they might be better off jumping kids' for their lunch money.
You know what? We have a Communist Party (and plenty of other likeminded organizations). It has members. It has a newspaper. They can meet publicly or privately and disseminate their ideas the same as anyone else. I don't see where you get off criticizing our democracy for being "railroaded into one tiny spectrum of ideas." As if it's necessary for a bunch of us to veer wildly left to match the New Zealand political demographics.
I admit I like the irony of calling us "jingoistic" simply because our culture does not fit your own political conceptions. You happily rattle off other Western European countries (and one former colony of the same) to support your framing of the ideal way to be. The vast majority of the world does not fit into your narrow framework, but with your handpicked few you have magically defined a cultural ideal for .all of us to strive for. Btw, did you know that if you sum up the populations for every country that you mentioned, you get about 3/4 the sum population of the United States? You don't even have a democratic majority and you still want to lay out how the culture should be on another continent.
Yes we have a culture that is more conservative than yours. Most of the world does. There is a whole multitude of reasons the U.S. has the politics it does: if I wanted to be simplistic I might say that we are simply much more individualistic. This has its problems but it also has its benefits. Unlike Germany we have freedom of religion. Unlike France we have complete freedom of speech. Unlike the UK we have a right to defend ourselves, and much more privacy. Unlike Australia we do not criminalize/censor publications.
Now, I'm sure there are tonnes of things we get utterly wrong. I'm sure there are plenty of things you get utterly wrong as well (and are completely blind to because of your cultural heritage, just as we are). If you want to engage things we get wrong at the level of logically debating their individual merits, fine. However, if you just want to snobbishly compare cultures and declare yours superior, well, at least tone down the irony. And maybe read up a bit on where your iPad, Internet, and space age materials come from before you decide our whole country is anti-science.
Hi. I live in Wisconsin. Maybe you've heard of the protests we've been having these last few weeks. Care to tell me how exactly the Republicans and Democrats are the same because it's pretty obvious here that they're not.
They are the same for the equivalence class of "corruptly and exploitatively serves the interests of {corporations | unions | lawyers | *AA }." As there is a budget crisis it is only natural that they should be fighting over which group of persons presently receiving > $100,000 in benefits will be specially protected from the fallout.
The sound you are hearing is not a diesel generator, it is the background "melody" of your songs. You need to stop letting your grandchildren (whose existence I infer from your five-digit UID) upload the music which is on your mp3 player.
If you are so out of touch with what your kid does online that you need this.. then you forgot to sacrifice something somewhere along the way.
You *are* that out of touch with what your kid does, and it's not because of a lack of parenting. It's because they are free and sovereign creatures. The child you see and interact with everyday is not the full expanse of your kid--it is the expression of words and actions your kid has learned avoids your ire and keeps the allowance money flowing. You hope there is a good correspondence, but it's not guaranteed. If your kid is up against some dark inclinations, he or she will realize that telling you could have negative results, and that not telling you keeps the situation fully under their control. Will they approach you if you try to always be open and loving? *Maybe.* Who even knows how to raise a kid properly? A kid could have a terrible abusive alcoholic father and follow the same pattern that he sees; he could have a terrible alcoholic father and realize how much he loathes selfishness and violence, becoming the kindest person you would ever meet.
Besides that, kids are curious. You can teach them something is bad, and have them fully 100% believe you, and they will still wind up seeking it out.
What it comes down to is teaching your kids to live life in the proper pattern and hope that when they're older the "don't hit your sister because you'll get a spanking" placeholder transmutes into "don't hit your sister because that is fundamentally wrong." Otherwise, all you can do is exemplify those values in a way you think will give them a desire to emulate you.
On this basis, I think it is entirely appropriate to keep tabs on them: or at least let them know the possibility is there. It's not a matter of questioning their judgment: their judgment is stupid and will continue to be stupid long after they leave the nest. It's about keeping them in the habit of third person perspective (how does my deed look when viewed outside my personal selfishness?) and strongly ingraining good habits so that when they go out and flop (the final lessons always have to be learned by experience) they have a nice deep groove to fall back into.
1) Alert people their communication is insecure
2) Let them know the government is concerned about their ability to organize
3) Piss them off
All without actually causing them much inconvenience. Last I checked, Facebook made it easy to restore an account, and even if they've changed that, Facebook almost certainly has retained the data and made it clear in Tunisia they were willing to fix the problem for those affected by sabotage.
Yes but would the story be appearing on slashdot if they had gotten it wrong? Or would slashdot have simply run with the story of a different simulator which happened to get it right?
With "7 out of 8" picks they may be on to something (depending on how many teams are actually viable and how many independent simulations are being run). But, then again, the fact that the simulation predicted Steelers would win the actual match, and that extrapolating backwards the system only becomes more chaotic, makes you wonder if they are just lucky.
I think you need to buy a subscription to slightly more prestigious journal of science than The Daily Mail.
Behold the formation of the InterNAT!
How will you know if it's the ark if you don't look in it?
You won't, it will just remain both the ark and not the ark. But you can still sell it on ebay as a 50% superposition of the greatest archaeological find of all time.
It wasn't too long ago Obama spent a couple hundred mill toward getting people to check the box next to his name. I don't find it inordinately surprising that they're still doing it.
No you're supposed to do it for a share of a dinette set plus the personal satisfaction you get from solving problems and the prestige and recognition of being the guy who beat everyone else at doing it.
Fyi, people actually pay for the opportunity to compete in triathlons, and most of them aren't even expecting to win. The ones who do don't receive much in the way of compensation for the time they've invested in it. And yet hundreds of people still show up to do it.
If you're not in the spirit of the game then it may not seem very equitable to you, but good news! It's 100% voluntary, so no need for you to worry about it.
Please try to grasp that two alternatives were presented.
One being that Walmart is doing what you claim. In this case, I asked for corroborating evidence. You seem to have conveniently overlooked the opportunity to present any. I am more than willing to accept that Walmart is guilty of operating via wrong doing and should be taken to task. All I ask is to have something a bit more substantial to go off of than the word of some guy on the internet. Lacking any convincing evidence, I'm afraid I am forced to assume you are just a self-deluding conspiracy theorist.
The alternative theory is indeed one of technological advance. Consider that the development of the assembly line was key to the eventual success of the automobile industry. In this case, computer tracking, analysis, and modeling, improved packing and sorting facilities, etc., is what Walmart is using in order to undercut the competition. The old style of having mom and pop try their best to guess the needs and desires of thousands of people, price things by 'what seems reasonable to them', and inefficiently source a bunch of different outlets to ship things, is simply ceasing to be a competitive model in light of the 21st century technology.
if this is your counter argument to what your parent posted, then shut the hell up next time something comes to your mind, until you formulate a VALID argument.
Yes, yes, accusing someone's argument of not being VALID (the use of all caps is, I can only assume, vitally important to the underlying thesis) is certainly a crushing blow, much more so than it would be to give any empirical justification to your accusations of their being a conspiracy by Walmart to violate federal monopoly laws.
by selling at close to zero margin until the competition went under.
>
You seem to be implying that Walmart was artificially lowering their prices to drive out competition, and then jacking them up to take advantage of their monopoly domination of the market. If so, that is a quite unethical and illegal practice. Would you care to present your evidence that this occurred? It should probably be forwarded to federal investigators as well.
If, however, you are simply complaining that Walmart is driving out competition by universally offering the lowest prices it can, then I also have some bad news for you about handmade candles and the horse-drawn carriage.
P.S. Gonna take the money I saved and go buy some more Christmas presents. I hope this doesn't create too many extra jobs!
If I were the Taliban, I would target these things, they would stick out like a sore thumb. Its not like 'not shooting medics' has ever really been respected lately (by both sides).
I'm sure it can be made more discrete (more in the vein of a typical soldier, albeit identifiable by its weird movement). The Taliban can shoot at it all they want: it's ideal to have them shooting at the robot rather than anyone else. (Honestly that is a silly priority for them to have given that the 'anyone else' is likely to be trying to kill them.) Doubtless you can put a lot of armor on it. Even if they're making a point of trying to kill the wounded individual (again, a bad priority on their part) the robot is still serving the invaluable function of eliminating the "do we risk injuring more guys to save our wounded guy" dilemma. That's a major tactical boon even if the robot's effectiveness is somewhere between poor and mediocre.
As for its versatility, it actually looks quite capable. You can see two sets of treads connected on an arm. I'd imagine it could even go up stairs.
Even if it is a replacement, we're still years behind where we would be if the hicks didn't insist that we throw out the unused embryos.
First sentence: bigoted language. Sounds like we're off to a good start.
As near as I can gather you are intending this post toward the 'life-begins-at-conception' branch of the American pro life movement. In which case you are a bit confused in saying they "insist we throw out the unused embryos" given that they fight tooth and nail specifically to prevent unused embryos from being discarded. They often oppose IVF itself precisely because excess embryos are thrown out.
As it stands we're destroying the extra stem cells from IVF instead of using them because the right won't allow scientists to use them.
That's quite an uninformed statement. There really is no restriction on what can or cannot be done with embryos (apart from I believe in the state of Indiana). They are thrown out largely because there is no use from them. The restrictions which have existed (until Obama overturned them) regard limiting federally funded research to certain pre-existent lines.
The reality is that we've got plenty of embryonic stem cells available without creating any more. Which really ought to be where the morals come into it.
Where, exactly? At the point you align morals with "doing what's convenient and what we would have done anyway" I don't think you've really addressed a moral question at all.
First of all, absolutely none of that is relevant to the preceding discussion, as I still was not making any comments at all about whether the government reaction was moral or justified, merely observing that the distinction you drew between their Cold War and present behavior was not correct.
But if you read the article summary you will see that the U.S. was not going after the banks of Wikileaks (which it is pretty generous to call a 'foreign news organization'; I suppose The Pirate Bay is one as well?). The account was put on a watchlist and the internet payment company responsible for collecting their donations decided on their own initiative to close the related account due to the blackisting and publicity after it had been suspended for other reasons. Basically they just did not want to be associated with him.
I think it's pretty reasonable that the American government would want to watch an account associated with someone disclosing American secrets, if not for legal reasons (catching Americans committing treason) then certainly for intelligence reasons (identifying the sources). This would happen regardless of how they felt about him personally, so there's really no need to invoke conspiracy theories to explain this.
. It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now.
Of course it's true; you seem to have quite ignored the point that this was not done for non-communist oppressive regimes.
US government was smart enough to realize that exposing "bad" information is a powerful weapon.
Wait, so you admit the U.S. used these stations as a weapon at the same time you claim my observation about it being used as propaganda isn't true? I think you're being a bit dissonant.
In any case I was never intending to criticize the radio towers, so there is really no need to defend them. For my part I'm glad they existed. But it's simply incorrect to think they were not put there for strategic reasons, and the relevance of that to this discussion is that they are not a useful barometer of American views on "free information," and certainly not something you can rationally compare to the Pentagon reacting to Wikileaks.
They ought to be smart enough to realize that trying to stomp bad news out will work as well for them, as it worked for the evil communists.
The U.S. isn't trying to stamp out "bad news" they are trying to protect classified details of ongoing military involvement, the leaking of which has and will continue to result in the death of informants, soldiers, and general damage to operations.
More to the point the U.S. has *always* safeguarded strategic information for its whole existence, certainly during the Cold War and no differently now.
It may be that the U.S. is more or less open (I would argue more) but your anecdote isn't really serving the purpose of illustrating this one way or the other.
The radio stations of which you speak were a propaganda tool meant to weaken the communism regimes and recruit internal supporters. I wouldn't really call them good indicators of America's true motives (although I would submit that Americans did then and continue now to value and promote freedom). How many were set up in the backyard of non-communist oppressors?
I'm also pretty sure if anything you would have found the U.S. more reactive to those releasing confidential military documents during the Cold War. As regards Wikileaks the difference between then and now is mostly the existence of the internet.