That was my argument in the last discussion about the twin experiments. Schutstaffel scientists did a bunch of experiments on Jews and gained a lot of medical data; someone informed me that using such data would be unethical, as it is disrespectful to the victims and their survivors.
My response was that we should just take the results of the experiments, and burn the people who actually performed the experiments in a giant oven. Anyone who suppresses life-saving knowledge should have those same experiments performed on them, so that they can experience what they have made others experience: if you have medical knowledge useful to stop some horrible disease, and you suppress it, someone is going to suffer that horrible disease because you are an asshole, and so you should be punished for bringing harm and suffering and death upon the innocent.
It makes sense. Some people did bad things, and they should be executed for those bad things. We learned things from those bad things, but the things we learned are not the cause of those bad things.
So this dude fucked some schoolgirls. So what? Fire him. Did his course material fuck any schoolgirls? No? Then keep that.
Yes, that's like saying your little gang of 8-year-olds is going to just completely wipe out the Russian Mafia when all eight thousand of them come to stomp on your face.
We can't launch nukes. Some of these nations have nukes, and a war between nations would hopefully involve the mutual agreement to not use nukes. As they have useful nukes, they also have ICBMs, planes, tanks, guns, and such military assets. They're not all as backwater as Iraq.
If we can't obliterate them in the first 3 months, we won't be able to obliterate them in the next 3 years. If we don't immediately win the war against an angry middle-eastern uprising, we lose that war. We would have to stomp the whole region like we stomped Iraq; and some of them are quite capable of putting up a fight.
Personally we should have never gotten involved in the middle east those people all hate each other and supporting any one side pisses of at least 3 others. Why be a unifying beacon of hate.
This is the point I've been largely trying to make, although being mindful that we are blowing up civilian assets as the mode of making ourselves the obvious target of their ire.
Okay, sure. That's, practically, not a difference. There are 300 million Americans; if they can activate as much of their population as soldiers, they're still an order of magnitude bigger than us. They would crush us.
That's the danger of constantly blowing up civilian targets: we're teaching them that we are bad people, that we murder innocents, and that they should hate us. In a war, we won't have memories of constant attacks and deaths of friends and family; they'll have decades with dozens or hundreds of attacks yearly, a constant stream of innocent body parts. Guess who is going to feel like they're dominating the big bad aggressor five years into the war, and who is going to feel sick of all the fighting and economic strife and bombs landing in our yard?
The doomsday scenario isn't for torture; it's for constant missile strikes on populated civilian targets where civilians have congregated.
Again: Imagine you drive 2 miles from your house to the book store. Then, the book store blows up. You were meeting friends there, and they're now dead. That's what we do to Arabs.
and all the ones which succeed are ones which "clearly show the incompetence and futility of the security apparatus"
Not necessarily. I could bring a high explosive into the airport, or a chlorine gas bomb, and just set it off in the terminal. That would kill a bunch of people; so much for incompetence.
This is just uneducated white-guilt garbage. Yes, it's Americans who are walking into Arab coffee shops and detonating themselves.
Actually, we use drones. We've sent missiles from drones repeatedly over the past few years, racking up civilian casualties like pinball points. We don't walk into the coffee shops to detonate ourselves; we send a flying robot.
This has happened again, and again, and again. Americans have one event to remember, which was long ago; Arabs are constantly given reason to joint the fight against America, and have a whole slew of offenses over years to remember. A protracted war will favor the Arabs, who have much more to look to when seeking their moral right to vindication.
And this is just ignorant anti-American bullshit posing as open-minded progressive thought.
Well the liberal progressives at the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and other, along with piles of conservative bloggers, are all in agreement over this bit about Obama:
It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
Even the favorite president of the Liberal Media doesn't get a free pass on that one.
Yes, just go ahead and label an entire nation an "axis of evil", based on the demonstrably false claim that they're targeting "anyone over 18".
Do you think the Arabs aren't doing just that? Or are you sitting around thinking, "Gee, America is so great. I bet the Arabs we blew up last week, their friends and families, I bet they think America is so great, too. I bet when people tell them, hey yo, America just murdered your children, your parents, your friends and lovers, they're like, nah yo, America is straight dope, so great, wave flags!"
No, they're sitting around going, "Fucking Americans! Blew up coffee shop where my sister was! Again I have lost friends and loved ones! American evil machine is set on killing my countrymen!" It doesn't take that much effort to piss people off; look at Nidal Hasan for a good example.
You can live in your fantasy world where America's hands are clean, but reality will continue to ignore your delusions.
Our current solution is to send the police to their neighborhood with grenades, which the police toss into an open window in a house where the suspect believed to have robbed the store is attending a party with 30 other college students.
Should we just ignore people who rob convenience stores? I would love to hear your non-violent solutions.
but if we were suddenly stopped recognizing Israel, bombing Yemen/Iraq/Syria/Afganhistan, and left middle-east affairs completely, would ISIS/Al-Qaeda/Taliban call off their aggression?
No, but that's not the point. We're not bombing military targets; we're bombing civilian population centers, claiming there is a "suspected terrorist" there, and then writing off anyone caught in the blast as a "Militant". The word "militant" has been redefined to cover what historically would be termed "Civilian Casualty", and has nothing to do with people being of the persuasion to take up arms of any sort.
Imagine if France, in its pursuit of "eliminating global terrorism", were to blow up the Starbucks that your girlfriend was drinking at, because a Russian immigrant suspected of having connections to global terrorism had been drinking at that same Starbucks that day. What would be your position regarding taking up arms against the state of France? Would you join the Anti-Franco Republican Army and seek to destroy the seed of evil sitting in the crown of western Europe?
We do this every day. Every day, we blow shit up, and civilians die. Every day, we give someone a reminder that we are the bad guys. Every day, we give someone a reason. Do you think that's keeping America safe?
Tell that to the terrified people aboard the planes or in the buildings, or the ones who lost loved ones because of hateful religious zealot whacktards who took offense because we maintained bases in Saudi Arabia during the 90s to maintain the Iraqi no fly zone.
An event that took out a few thousand people, once. We lose more than that many to smoking, or alcohol poisoning, or driving. The amount of death from driving increased by more than the amount of death from 9/11 over the next few months, since people were spooked by planes.
Think about that: the events of September 11, 2001 itself caused slightly fewer deaths than the actions of people who elected to not get on planes because of the deaths caused by the events of Septmeber 11, 2001. People worrying about 9/11 caused more deaths than 9/11 itself.
Non-event.
BTW, your count of 3 billion muslims worldwide is about double the actual number (anti-hyperbole followed by hyperbole?) but that's neither here nor there really.
We're talking about the north part of Africa (Egypt and such) and the south part of Europe (Saudi, Pakistan, Turkey, etc.). It's actually dozens of countries and an immense region. It's like talking about China, except if China were the size of Russia, and less population-dense.
I didn't get that far. "Countless lives have been saved" that count is zero. 9/11 was a non-event.
We have some sort of war being waged against a faceless enemy that supposedly comes in, hijacks our shit, and attacks us from within. We haven't really stopped any such attacks; we've brought attention to attempts which were never going to succeed, but that's it. The PETN underwear bomber is one of the better examples: you can't blow up PETN that way; it needs compression, else it just burns.
The scenario we're worried about is untenable. We're not holding back an army; we're worried that people will cross our insecure borders, hide among our population, and then rise up as an army from within. They will blow shit up without warning, they will be everywhere, and they will destroy us. To combat this, we basically bomb other countries, call anyone over 18 a soldier ("militant"), and prove to the world that we're the axis of evil that must be removed.
This behavior is rattling the lion's cage of 3 billion muslims in Saudi and south-east Asia. We have 300 million Americans here. If an open theater of war comes in earnest, we will have Americans who can remember government prattling and a single attack, versus Arabs who can remember friends and family dying in bombings of coffee shops by Americans across decades. When we don't win immediately, we will lose our morale; while the muslims, remembering the constant bombings, knowing they are in the right, and still standing despite the onslaught of American military power, will recognize that they aren't *losing*, and will gain morale. The gaining of morale means more of that 3 billion become resources, soldiers to deploy to the fight; they will overwhelm us.
It's worse than providing no value for a great destruction of wealth. If we didn't win the war immediately, the protracted war would favor the abused muslims, and they would flatten America. A war machine that big would not simply push for its independence and then quiet; once it had crushed America, consumed it, taken the land for its own, the thirst for blood would spread across the globe. In the excitement, the blood of the oppressors would spill: some executions for vengeance would be carried out; this would be abandoned as soon as the international sphere was recognized, and the war would move to Canada, to South America, to Europe and Asia.
There are only two ways to stop it once it begins: either complete and total global annihilation, probably by nuclear war, such that communication and supply infrastructure is destroyed and pockets of survivors are too busy trying to survive to carry on a war; or the complete subjugation of the world as a whole by Arabs. We are fermenting an XK-class end-of-the-world scenario or a CK-class restructuring event.
They are, in fact. It's just that you can still gain access to your non-privileged X server, and have access as the user running X. You can then make it run any shellcode you want, or return to libc and run some shell commands (doesn't require writable/executable memory this way), thus allowing for injection of a local privilege escalation attack or some sort of information leak (e.g. concurrent brute forcing of passwords). In the most basic case, landing as the non-privileged X user allows you to inspect your own processes, i.e. the X server itself, and keylog and harvest passwords.
You don't get it. We've forked it 5 times; it's just old, bad code. We need to rewrite a completely new X system like Wayland or Mir so that all these old bugs are permanently gone.
My experience has been the opposite. MCSE, CCNA, and so on, the technical certifications, have been valueless. High-level technical certifications, such as the CCIE, are never asked for, but hold their respect... and can bill you as overqualified (a CCIE is like that CCNA you need, except made of solid gold and way more expensive and hefty than the paper mache model you wanted). They can bolster your CV if they're recent, but are quickly eclipsed by actual experience.
The non-technical certs tend to hold up better. CAPM and PMP are known as the most valuable certifications, but they're project management; while these skills are helpful if you're a programmer or IT engineer, and the CAPM can be had with 6 months of deliberate study and $2000 of investment, I'm not sure you'd gain much from certification that you wouldn't get by just spending $150 on books (i.e. an RMCProject CAPM study guide and the PMBOK5e) and giving a casual read of the material. Likewise, BPM, data management, PHR, and so on all have immense value, but are useless if you're a technical person (unless you're looking for a job writing BPM software).
Go for the light certifications as a vehicle to expand your skills; leverage them to decorate your resume; but catalog your skills and collect your experience. In the technical fields, being active and current is more valuable than being certified.
Your line of thinking could be expanded: perhaps Uber should go around the entire country talking to every single individual. Perhaps they should interview every police officer. Perhaps they should subpoena all cell phone and e-mail records the person has, read all their personal stuff, and hire private investigators to infiltrate their office parties. 15 years and 36 million dollars later, they can decide if the person is safe.
To clear a person in a thousand jurisdictions would take man-hours. You'd need staffed agents in all those jurisdictions making $40k-$70k. In India, maybe you could pay them $20k; they might not do their job well, so you'd have to clear them in the same way. Also, India's police and court systems are notoriously easy to bribe, and your hired help might be bribed as well. In the end, it's going to cost you hundreds of millions of dollars to make tens of millions of dollars in profit, or you're going to charge people $15 per mile.
No matter what you do, you can't get a perfect record. At a point, you're putting in twice as much effort for half as much return; at a point, you're putting in a hundred times more effort for the barest fraction of return. The economic cost of such wasteful spending creates inefficiencies in the system, distorting and destroying wealth, leading to poverty, starvation, poor governments, weaker police forces, higher crime, disease, mental illness, and death; diving off the cliff of diminishing returns actually harms more people than it helps, but it abstracts that harm in the same way that belching toxic gasses into the air abstracts the cumulative health issues from the actions of coal and oil power plants.
It is foolish to complain constantly that more can be done, because we can always cite precisely what more could have been done in hindsight; but there are thousands of things which will not help the next time, and we will eventually create a great machine of ineffective and expensive countermeasures that each may prevent one incident somewhere every hundred years. Improvements are made by recognizing those things which are cheap to adjust for and have improved return, or have significant cost but have significant return. In some cases, those improvements are outside your capabilities: Uber is an international service, and there are no international crime databases; just national crime databases are a good approximation, but India doesn't have that. Even background checks in America are faulty, because a person may have been reportedly in south Asia but in fact had crossed the border undocumented into some third-world-country to produce, procure, or take part in the production of child pornography; this person could effectively evade a top-level investigation, and become a school teacher.
The world of economics is a complicated one in which certain kinds of harm are cut off by other kinds of harm; the least harm is done by trading those small losses for big gains. Every time a society finds a way to put in less effort for the same or greater productive output, wealth increases; every time a society puts in more effort (cost, money, time, resources, labor) for something that returns less value, wealth decreases, and poverty increases.
Due diligence can fail. Uber claims they did their background checks; apparently this is hard in India, as every police district has its own database: if you commit a crime in some other town, you're not on file locally. You have to physically walk to each precinct and request information about the person's criminal record--every city in India, every precinct--which could take years to verify the criminal history of one man.
You can cut this down by only looking into where he worked or lived before, which is less-accurate but faster. There's no way to verify that he isn't telling you about all the places he's lived or worked, so he can leave out places where he committed crimes.
Actually, it looks like Uber's accountability is so high you can't claim to not have been with the victim at the time of the alleged crime, and therefor you can't get away with this shit.
I know that I'm individual. I've learned foreign languages. I use my methods, which included grammar, pronunciation, and literature. But I don't generalize from myself to assume that anyone else should learn my way. Why do teachers? For control.
You are making a fundamental assumption that your mind is somehow different from all other minds in some fundamental way, and that the methods that work best for you won't work for other people.
That assumption is incorrect.
Within your mind, you have knowledge, from memories. Experiences are remembered, recalled, and applied to new experiences. You have behaviors that are built this way: when you study, your think about the information in the way you've learned.
If we present you with information in a manner you are unaccustomed to, you won't learn it as well. Your brain can't carry out the same processes, and doesn't know how to address the information as structured, so it won't handle it efficiently. We can, however, teach you how to regard the information as presented: how to organize it, how to interpret it, how to think about it, and thus how to learn it.
Two people taught in such a way will face two large factors: their experience with a learning method (i.e. how comfortable they are thinking about the presented information in the way prescribed) and the effectiveness of the method itself. The experience is the part that you call "individual", that you believe makes you special; but, like any skill, we can train anyone else to use any learning method effectively, albeit with some upfront investment. The effectiveness, on the other hand, is universal: a given learning method will be more or less effective in general than any other learning method.
The conclusion is simple: you may not be as comfortable with a more effective learning method, and so it may not work as well for you; however, by understanding the internal processes attached to that learning method, we can teach you to use that method effectively, and thus replace your current method with something that actually does work better for you. In short: learning itself is a skill, and can be taught and learned.
The whole concept that everyone is so individual as to not be capable of learning in the same way is nonsense. If that were true, people would not be able to learn at all: society would be dysfunctional because the human species would not have a standardized brain, and would not learn by experiences. Intentional learning is, itself, learned: the only thing that makes you different in that regard is you didn't go to class to learn how to learn. This is a flaw in our education system: we teach people what to think, but not how to think; we need to teach them how to think, but then we would have a dangerous society of people who think for themselves.
Larry, I'll take this opportunity to bring up this dilemma to you, then.
Wikinews seeks to be NPOV, like Wikipedia. In practice, both sites parrot whatever is said: there is a "No Original Research" philosophy which eliminates all forms of punditry in theory. Unfortunately, that means repeating the unfounded position of other pundits.
Ideally, your news source should reign in the pundits. For the PETN underwear bomber, CNN went berserk over him talking to well-dressed men during a flight transfer, and not having a coat despite having a one-way ticket to Chicago; they asserted these should be red flags, for whatever reason. Every news outlet shouted loudly about PETN's use as a high explosive. These things are frivolous: a one-way trip to Chicago suggests you would be best buying a coat upon landing; and PETN requires a complex detonator to get an explosion, meaning the guy's underwear "bomb" was only ever going to be a small, mostly-harmless fire. Nothing suspicious or potentially dangerous happened that day.
Such commentating, of course, just makes you a different kind of pundit; and, besides, the position tends to desensationalize the news, making it boring. It's hard to pitch boring news.
The problem with Capstone turbines is that the smallest one they have is 30kw, or 125A@250V. I don't need that large
They're made for commercial space; but the engineering is viable.
Actually it does. So long as the exhaust is still above ambient you're 'wasting' heat.
Modern furnaces exhaust cool air. They condense water in the flue. There isn't actually waste heat because they're cooled to ambient temperatures: you can grab onto the metal flue and it will feel cool; the air exhausting from the external vent feels room-temperature.
Why? I don't NEED 350-400F to keep my house warm. 90F might not do it, but 180F certainly does, as you drop the temperature it would just mean my heating system(including the generator) runs for longer periods of time.
Higher temperatures transfer more energy more efficiently. If you pass 400F air through a heat exchanger to 70F ambient air flow, it'll transfer a greater proportion of the temperature difference than if you pass 200F air through. Something extremely hot will drop 50% of its temperature differential with ambient a lot faster than something that is slightly warm.
Likewise, heat engines operate on temperature differential: internal combustion engines heat aspirated ambient air inside a chamber by ignition, while external combustion engines sink a heat source into contained working fluid (usually air) and sink that to an external heat sink (ground, cooling fins, etc.). A sterling engine running at 400C on one side and 10C on the other may operate at 40% efficiency; the same engine operating at 120C on one side and 10C on the other may operate at 25% efficiency. When you get down to near-ambient temperatures, there's so little energy and such low efficiency that you might charge a AAA battery in several months, if it doesn't bleed charge faster than you're charging it.
I think you're missing the point, you're trying to maximize electrical generation efficiency. I'm trying to minimize cost. A stirling engine can run with far less maintenance than most turbines and IC engines. In a co-generation mode where I'd be using the heat anyways, if it takes 5 gallons of heating oil to produce 1 unit of electricity, but I get 3.5 units of heat out of it, I'm still good
With an external-combustion engine like a sterling engine, the heat is lost. Theoretically, you could air-cool the engine; in practice, it'd have to be as big as your house, or else you wouldn't get any power out of it.
But I think education should strive to let each student learn in the way they think is best, for them. Education should be all things to all people.
This is the most vacant thing I've ever heard repeated by just about everyone.
The only opinion of students that actually matters in education is if the material is interesting. If it's interesting to the student, it's easier to learn: it's more meaningful, and attention is more focused. The kinesthetic, visual, and auditory learning thing is largely bunk, aside from people with crossed wires--synesthetes--whom memory techniques seek to emulate. Invariably, when some students learn something better with a different teaching method, it's because they have a repeatable internal approach that all students can apply.
Take foreign languages, for example. Some people learn best by studying grammar structures and sentence fragments; others learn best by spoken language immersion; and I suggest introduction by literature and arts. Those who learn best by technical study are interested in grammar, and are using it to supply meaning to the language structure, making it easier to understand and learn; those who learn by spoken language have more focus on pronunciation, and are putting in less effort and engaging themselves more in artificial conversation; and the technique I prescribe presents meaningful material (poetry, coherent story excerpts, etc.) to engage broad cognitive functions, triggering visualization and semantic processing to interpret a story. Each of these people are using a particular technique which any other person can employ, and so every student can enhance their learning by incorporating all of these--but it only helps if the student is taught how to use that learning method.
We can standardize education on a platform of teaching students how to think, rather than what to think. We can use that to teach them immense amounts of textbook knowledge. It's completely doable, and fairly universal. People aren't as individual as you want to believe.
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That was my argument in the last discussion about the twin experiments. Schutstaffel scientists did a bunch of experiments on Jews and gained a lot of medical data; someone informed me that using such data would be unethical, as it is disrespectful to the victims and their survivors.
My response was that we should just take the results of the experiments, and burn the people who actually performed the experiments in a giant oven. Anyone who suppresses life-saving knowledge should have those same experiments performed on them, so that they can experience what they have made others experience: if you have medical knowledge useful to stop some horrible disease, and you suppress it, someone is going to suffer that horrible disease because you are an asshole, and so you should be punished for bringing harm and suffering and death upon the innocent.
It makes sense. Some people did bad things, and they should be executed for those bad things. We learned things from those bad things, but the things we learned are not the cause of those bad things.
So this dude fucked some schoolgirls. So what? Fire him. Did his course material fuck any schoolgirls? No? Then keep that.
Do I have to explain the fallacy of whole body analogy to you?
It doesn't matter what's easier, or whatever. It matters what actually happens, and what the consequences are.
Yes, that's like saying your little gang of 8-year-olds is going to just completely wipe out the Russian Mafia when all eight thousand of them come to stomp on your face.
We can't launch nukes. Some of these nations have nukes, and a war between nations would hopefully involve the mutual agreement to not use nukes. As they have useful nukes, they also have ICBMs, planes, tanks, guns, and such military assets. They're not all as backwater as Iraq.
If we can't obliterate them in the first 3 months, we won't be able to obliterate them in the next 3 years. If we don't immediately win the war against an angry middle-eastern uprising, we lose that war. We would have to stomp the whole region like we stomped Iraq; and some of them are quite capable of putting up a fight.
Personally we should have never gotten involved in the middle east those people all hate each other and supporting any one side pisses of at least 3 others. Why be a unifying beacon of hate.
This is the point I've been largely trying to make, although being mindful that we are blowing up civilian assets as the mode of making ourselves the obvious target of their ire.
I dunno. I'm still holding out for a Xiph.org offering.
Okay, sure. That's, practically, not a difference. There are 300 million Americans; if they can activate as much of their population as soldiers, they're still an order of magnitude bigger than us. They would crush us.
That's the danger of constantly blowing up civilian targets: we're teaching them that we are bad people, that we murder innocents, and that they should hate us. In a war, we won't have memories of constant attacks and deaths of friends and family; they'll have decades with dozens or hundreds of attacks yearly, a constant stream of innocent body parts. Guess who is going to feel like they're dominating the big bad aggressor five years into the war, and who is going to feel sick of all the fighting and economic strife and bombs landing in our yard?
The doomsday scenario isn't for torture; it's for constant missile strikes on populated civilian targets where civilians have congregated.
Again: Imagine you drive 2 miles from your house to the book store. Then, the book store blows up. You were meeting friends there, and they're now dead. That's what we do to Arabs.
and all the ones which succeed are ones which "clearly show the incompetence and futility of the security apparatus"
Not necessarily. I could bring a high explosive into the airport, or a chlorine gas bomb, and just set it off in the terminal. That would kill a bunch of people; so much for incompetence.
This is just uneducated white-guilt garbage. Yes, it's Americans who are walking into Arab coffee shops and detonating themselves.
Actually, we use drones. We've sent missiles from drones repeatedly over the past few years, racking up civilian casualties like pinball points. We don't walk into the coffee shops to detonate ourselves; we send a flying robot.
This has happened again, and again, and again. Americans have one event to remember, which was long ago; Arabs are constantly given reason to joint the fight against America, and have a whole slew of offenses over years to remember. A protracted war will favor the Arabs, who have much more to look to when seeking their moral right to vindication.
And this is just ignorant anti-American bullshit posing as open-minded progressive thought.
Well the liberal progressives at the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and other, along with piles of conservative bloggers, are all in agreement over this bit about Obama:
It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
Even the favorite president of the Liberal Media doesn't get a free pass on that one.
Yes, just go ahead and label an entire nation an "axis of evil", based on the demonstrably false claim that they're targeting "anyone over 18".
Do you think the Arabs aren't doing just that? Or are you sitting around thinking, "Gee, America is so great. I bet the Arabs we blew up last week, their friends and families, I bet they think America is so great, too. I bet when people tell them, hey yo, America just murdered your children, your parents, your friends and lovers, they're like, nah yo, America is straight dope, so great, wave flags!"
No, they're sitting around going, "Fucking Americans! Blew up coffee shop where my sister was! Again I have lost friends and loved ones! American evil machine is set on killing my countrymen!" It doesn't take that much effort to piss people off; look at Nidal Hasan for a good example.
You can live in your fantasy world where America's hands are clean, but reality will continue to ignore your delusions.
I'd love to hear your non-violent solutions.
Let's say someone robs a convenience store.
Our current solution is to send the police to their neighborhood with grenades, which the police toss into an open window in a house where the suspect believed to have robbed the store is attending a party with 30 other college students.
Should we just ignore people who rob convenience stores? I would love to hear your non-violent solutions.
but if we were suddenly stopped recognizing Israel, bombing Yemen/Iraq/Syria/Afganhistan, and left middle-east affairs completely, would ISIS/Al-Qaeda/Taliban call off their aggression?
No, but that's not the point. We're not bombing military targets; we're bombing civilian population centers, claiming there is a "suspected terrorist" there, and then writing off anyone caught in the blast as a "Militant". The word "militant" has been redefined to cover what historically would be termed "Civilian Casualty", and has nothing to do with people being of the persuasion to take up arms of any sort.
Imagine if France, in its pursuit of "eliminating global terrorism", were to blow up the Starbucks that your girlfriend was drinking at, because a Russian immigrant suspected of having connections to global terrorism had been drinking at that same Starbucks that day. What would be your position regarding taking up arms against the state of France? Would you join the Anti-Franco Republican Army and seek to destroy the seed of evil sitting in the crown of western Europe?
We do this every day. Every day, we blow shit up, and civilians die. Every day, we give someone a reminder that we are the bad guys. Every day, we give someone a reason. Do you think that's keeping America safe?
Tell that to the terrified people aboard the planes or in the buildings, or the ones who lost loved ones because of hateful religious zealot whacktards who took offense because we maintained bases in Saudi Arabia during the 90s to maintain the Iraqi no fly zone.
An event that took out a few thousand people, once. We lose more than that many to smoking, or alcohol poisoning, or driving. The amount of death from driving increased by more than the amount of death from 9/11 over the next few months, since people were spooked by planes.
Think about that: the events of September 11, 2001 itself caused slightly fewer deaths than the actions of people who elected to not get on planes because of the deaths caused by the events of Septmeber 11, 2001. People worrying about 9/11 caused more deaths than 9/11 itself.
Non-event.
BTW, your count of 3 billion muslims worldwide is about double the actual number (anti-hyperbole followed by hyperbole?) but that's neither here nor there really.
We're talking about the north part of Africa (Egypt and such) and the south part of Europe (Saudi, Pakistan, Turkey, etc.). It's actually dozens of countries and an immense region. It's like talking about China, except if China were the size of Russia, and less population-dense.
The region is bigger than the US.
I didn't get that far. "Countless lives have been saved" that count is zero. 9/11 was a non-event.
We have some sort of war being waged against a faceless enemy that supposedly comes in, hijacks our shit, and attacks us from within. We haven't really stopped any such attacks; we've brought attention to attempts which were never going to succeed, but that's it. The PETN underwear bomber is one of the better examples: you can't blow up PETN that way; it needs compression, else it just burns.
The scenario we're worried about is untenable. We're not holding back an army; we're worried that people will cross our insecure borders, hide among our population, and then rise up as an army from within. They will blow shit up without warning, they will be everywhere, and they will destroy us. To combat this, we basically bomb other countries, call anyone over 18 a soldier ("militant"), and prove to the world that we're the axis of evil that must be removed.
This behavior is rattling the lion's cage of 3 billion muslims in Saudi and south-east Asia. We have 300 million Americans here. If an open theater of war comes in earnest, we will have Americans who can remember government prattling and a single attack, versus Arabs who can remember friends and family dying in bombings of coffee shops by Americans across decades. When we don't win immediately, we will lose our morale; while the muslims, remembering the constant bombings, knowing they are in the right, and still standing despite the onslaught of American military power, will recognize that they aren't *losing*, and will gain morale. The gaining of morale means more of that 3 billion become resources, soldiers to deploy to the fight; they will overwhelm us.
It's worse than providing no value for a great destruction of wealth. If we didn't win the war immediately, the protracted war would favor the abused muslims, and they would flatten America. A war machine that big would not simply push for its independence and then quiet; once it had crushed America, consumed it, taken the land for its own, the thirst for blood would spread across the globe. In the excitement, the blood of the oppressors would spill: some executions for vengeance would be carried out; this would be abandoned as soon as the international sphere was recognized, and the war would move to Canada, to South America, to Europe and Asia.
There are only two ways to stop it once it begins: either complete and total global annihilation, probably by nuclear war, such that communication and supply infrastructure is destroyed and pockets of survivors are too busy trying to survive to carry on a war; or the complete subjugation of the world as a whole by Arabs. We are fermenting an XK-class end-of-the-world scenario or a CK-class restructuring event.
That is the danger of this political warfare.
They are, in fact. It's just that you can still gain access to your non-privileged X server, and have access as the user running X. You can then make it run any shellcode you want, or return to libc and run some shell commands (doesn't require writable/executable memory this way), thus allowing for injection of a local privilege escalation attack or some sort of information leak (e.g. concurrent brute forcing of passwords). In the most basic case, landing as the non-privileged X user allows you to inspect your own processes, i.e. the X server itself, and keylog and harvest passwords.
You don't get it. We've forked it 5 times; it's just old, bad code. We need to rewrite a completely new X system like Wayland or Mir so that all these old bugs are permanently gone.
My experience has been the opposite. MCSE, CCNA, and so on, the technical certifications, have been valueless. High-level technical certifications, such as the CCIE, are never asked for, but hold their respect... and can bill you as overqualified (a CCIE is like that CCNA you need, except made of solid gold and way more expensive and hefty than the paper mache model you wanted). They can bolster your CV if they're recent, but are quickly eclipsed by actual experience.
The non-technical certs tend to hold up better. CAPM and PMP are known as the most valuable certifications, but they're project management; while these skills are helpful if you're a programmer or IT engineer, and the CAPM can be had with 6 months of deliberate study and $2000 of investment, I'm not sure you'd gain much from certification that you wouldn't get by just spending $150 on books (i.e. an RMCProject CAPM study guide and the PMBOK5e) and giving a casual read of the material. Likewise, BPM, data management, PHR, and so on all have immense value, but are useless if you're a technical person (unless you're looking for a job writing BPM software).
Go for the light certifications as a vehicle to expand your skills; leverage them to decorate your resume; but catalog your skills and collect your experience. In the technical fields, being active and current is more valuable than being certified.
Legitimate companies have a high volume of stable charges, and so can show a culpable minimized percentage of bad faith.
Niche companies light up like a fucking christmas tree when you start sending chargebacks.
No, it's not.
Your line of thinking could be expanded: perhaps Uber should go around the entire country talking to every single individual. Perhaps they should interview every police officer. Perhaps they should subpoena all cell phone and e-mail records the person has, read all their personal stuff, and hire private investigators to infiltrate their office parties. 15 years and 36 million dollars later, they can decide if the person is safe.
To clear a person in a thousand jurisdictions would take man-hours. You'd need staffed agents in all those jurisdictions making $40k-$70k. In India, maybe you could pay them $20k; they might not do their job well, so you'd have to clear them in the same way. Also, India's police and court systems are notoriously easy to bribe, and your hired help might be bribed as well. In the end, it's going to cost you hundreds of millions of dollars to make tens of millions of dollars in profit, or you're going to charge people $15 per mile.
No matter what you do, you can't get a perfect record. At a point, you're putting in twice as much effort for half as much return; at a point, you're putting in a hundred times more effort for the barest fraction of return. The economic cost of such wasteful spending creates inefficiencies in the system, distorting and destroying wealth, leading to poverty, starvation, poor governments, weaker police forces, higher crime, disease, mental illness, and death; diving off the cliff of diminishing returns actually harms more people than it helps, but it abstracts that harm in the same way that belching toxic gasses into the air abstracts the cumulative health issues from the actions of coal and oil power plants.
It is foolish to complain constantly that more can be done, because we can always cite precisely what more could have been done in hindsight; but there are thousands of things which will not help the next time, and we will eventually create a great machine of ineffective and expensive countermeasures that each may prevent one incident somewhere every hundred years. Improvements are made by recognizing those things which are cheap to adjust for and have improved return, or have significant cost but have significant return. In some cases, those improvements are outside your capabilities: Uber is an international service, and there are no international crime databases; just national crime databases are a good approximation, but India doesn't have that. Even background checks in America are faulty, because a person may have been reportedly in south Asia but in fact had crossed the border undocumented into some third-world-country to produce, procure, or take part in the production of child pornography; this person could effectively evade a top-level investigation, and become a school teacher.
The world of economics is a complicated one in which certain kinds of harm are cut off by other kinds of harm; the least harm is done by trading those small losses for big gains. Every time a society finds a way to put in less effort for the same or greater productive output, wealth increases; every time a society puts in more effort (cost, money, time, resources, labor) for something that returns less value, wealth decreases, and poverty increases.
Due diligence can fail. Uber claims they did their background checks; apparently this is hard in India, as every police district has its own database: if you commit a crime in some other town, you're not on file locally. You have to physically walk to each precinct and request information about the person's criminal record--every city in India, every precinct--which could take years to verify the criminal history of one man.
You can cut this down by only looking into where he worked or lived before, which is less-accurate but faster. There's no way to verify that he isn't telling you about all the places he's lived or worked, so he can leave out places where he committed crimes.
Criminal liability lies with criminals.
Actually, it looks like Uber's accountability is so high you can't claim to not have been with the victim at the time of the alleged crime, and therefor you can't get away with this shit.
They hacked the Gibson and downloaded the garbage file. 99.999% of it is garbage.
Furnace is going to run longer and use more fuel to heat your house more. Get back to me with your cost figures and fuel usage when you're done.
I know that I'm individual. I've learned foreign languages. I use my methods, which included grammar, pronunciation, and literature. But I don't generalize from myself to assume that anyone else should learn my way. Why do teachers? For control.
You are making a fundamental assumption that your mind is somehow different from all other minds in some fundamental way, and that the methods that work best for you won't work for other people.
That assumption is incorrect.
Within your mind, you have knowledge, from memories. Experiences are remembered, recalled, and applied to new experiences. You have behaviors that are built this way: when you study, your think about the information in the way you've learned.
If we present you with information in a manner you are unaccustomed to, you won't learn it as well. Your brain can't carry out the same processes, and doesn't know how to address the information as structured, so it won't handle it efficiently. We can, however, teach you how to regard the information as presented: how to organize it, how to interpret it, how to think about it, and thus how to learn it.
Two people taught in such a way will face two large factors: their experience with a learning method (i.e. how comfortable they are thinking about the presented information in the way prescribed) and the effectiveness of the method itself. The experience is the part that you call "individual", that you believe makes you special; but, like any skill, we can train anyone else to use any learning method effectively, albeit with some upfront investment. The effectiveness, on the other hand, is universal: a given learning method will be more or less effective in general than any other learning method.
The conclusion is simple: you may not be as comfortable with a more effective learning method, and so it may not work as well for you; however, by understanding the internal processes attached to that learning method, we can teach you to use that method effectively, and thus replace your current method with something that actually does work better for you. In short: learning itself is a skill, and can be taught and learned.
The whole concept that everyone is so individual as to not be capable of learning in the same way is nonsense. If that were true, people would not be able to learn at all: society would be dysfunctional because the human species would not have a standardized brain, and would not learn by experiences. Intentional learning is, itself, learned: the only thing that makes you different in that regard is you didn't go to class to learn how to learn. This is a flaw in our education system: we teach people what to think, but not how to think; we need to teach them how to think, but then we would have a dangerous society of people who think for themselves.
Someone gave me a TF account once. Regular Fark is better; TF is full of garbage stories.
Larry, I'll take this opportunity to bring up this dilemma to you, then.
Wikinews seeks to be NPOV, like Wikipedia. In practice, both sites parrot whatever is said: there is a "No Original Research" philosophy which eliminates all forms of punditry in theory. Unfortunately, that means repeating the unfounded position of other pundits.
Ideally, your news source should reign in the pundits. For the PETN underwear bomber, CNN went berserk over him talking to well-dressed men during a flight transfer, and not having a coat despite having a one-way ticket to Chicago; they asserted these should be red flags, for whatever reason. Every news outlet shouted loudly about PETN's use as a high explosive. These things are frivolous: a one-way trip to Chicago suggests you would be best buying a coat upon landing; and PETN requires a complex detonator to get an explosion, meaning the guy's underwear "bomb" was only ever going to be a small, mostly-harmless fire. Nothing suspicious or potentially dangerous happened that day.
Such commentating, of course, just makes you a different kind of pundit; and, besides, the position tends to desensationalize the news, making it boring. It's hard to pitch boring news.
What are your thoughts?
The problem with Capstone turbines is that the smallest one they have is 30kw, or 125A@250V. I don't need that large
They're made for commercial space; but the engineering is viable.
Actually it does. So long as the exhaust is still above ambient you're 'wasting' heat.
Modern furnaces exhaust cool air. They condense water in the flue. There isn't actually waste heat because they're cooled to ambient temperatures: you can grab onto the metal flue and it will feel cool; the air exhausting from the external vent feels room-temperature.
Why? I don't NEED 350-400F to keep my house warm. 90F might not do it, but 180F certainly does, as you drop the temperature it would just mean my heating system(including the generator) runs for longer periods of time.
Higher temperatures transfer more energy more efficiently. If you pass 400F air through a heat exchanger to 70F ambient air flow, it'll transfer a greater proportion of the temperature difference than if you pass 200F air through. Something extremely hot will drop 50% of its temperature differential with ambient a lot faster than something that is slightly warm.
Likewise, heat engines operate on temperature differential: internal combustion engines heat aspirated ambient air inside a chamber by ignition, while external combustion engines sink a heat source into contained working fluid (usually air) and sink that to an external heat sink (ground, cooling fins, etc.). A sterling engine running at 400C on one side and 10C on the other may operate at 40% efficiency; the same engine operating at 120C on one side and 10C on the other may operate at 25% efficiency. When you get down to near-ambient temperatures, there's so little energy and such low efficiency that you might charge a AAA battery in several months, if it doesn't bleed charge faster than you're charging it.
I think you're missing the point, you're trying to maximize electrical generation efficiency. I'm trying to minimize cost. A stirling engine can run with far less maintenance than most turbines and IC engines. In a co-generation mode where I'd be using the heat anyways, if it takes 5 gallons of heating oil to produce 1 unit of electricity, but I get 3.5 units of heat out of it, I'm still good
With an external-combustion engine like a sterling engine, the heat is lost. Theoretically, you could air-cool the engine; in practice, it'd have to be as big as your house, or else you wouldn't get any power out of it.
But I think education should strive to let each student learn in the way they think is best, for them. Education should be all things to all people.
This is the most vacant thing I've ever heard repeated by just about everyone.
The only opinion of students that actually matters in education is if the material is interesting. If it's interesting to the student, it's easier to learn: it's more meaningful, and attention is more focused. The kinesthetic, visual, and auditory learning thing is largely bunk, aside from people with crossed wires--synesthetes--whom memory techniques seek to emulate. Invariably, when some students learn something better with a different teaching method, it's because they have a repeatable internal approach that all students can apply.
Take foreign languages, for example. Some people learn best by studying grammar structures and sentence fragments; others learn best by spoken language immersion; and I suggest introduction by literature and arts. Those who learn best by technical study are interested in grammar, and are using it to supply meaning to the language structure, making it easier to understand and learn; those who learn by spoken language have more focus on pronunciation, and are putting in less effort and engaging themselves more in artificial conversation; and the technique I prescribe presents meaningful material (poetry, coherent story excerpts, etc.) to engage broad cognitive functions, triggering visualization and semantic processing to interpret a story. Each of these people are using a particular technique which any other person can employ, and so every student can enhance their learning by incorporating all of these--but it only helps if the student is taught how to use that learning method.
We can standardize education on a platform of teaching students how to think, rather than what to think. We can use that to teach them immense amounts of textbook knowledge. It's completely doable, and fairly universal. People aren't as individual as you want to believe.