Cyrillic is a script, not a language. There are several languages that use it, including Russian, which is probably the language of the article you've linked to. It is perfectly possible to be able to read a script, but not understand the language. For example, I can read Italian, because it is in the same script as English, but I can't understand it. The same would apply for those who speak a Cyrillic represented language other than Russian.
As trollish as your post is, I would wager that it is more than a little likely that LORAN is being turned off precisely because it is a beacon based system that selective availability cannot be implemented over. There is no way that LORAN could be used to provide positioning data to select parties.
Personally, I don't think this is a safe thing to do. Maritime equipment is notorious for being long lived. I would highly doubt that there are no boats that are still dependent on legacy systems. Well, I guess this is one way to ensure that they upgrade.
Feb 8: First Officer: Captain! We've lost navigational systems! Captain: Damn! That can mean only one thing. Arm photon torpedoes! First Officer: Err.... we're a 32 year old fishing trawler and we don't have any... Captain: Quiet! There's no time! Transfer engineering to the bridge and make sure we've got warp if we need it.
I have an alergy to sunlight, usually when emerging from a dark room into bright sunlight my eyes water, my nose goes ichy and I sneeze sometimes. It lasts a few minutes until my eyes adjust. I always thought this was a natural normal reaction and thought nothing of it, indeed it makes sense that your eyes water in bright light. But no, when I mentioned to a professional, apparently it's common but not normal and has been diagnosed as an alergy.
Bee Ess. Sensitivity to sunlight is NOT an allergy. An allergy is a disorder of the immune system. A physiological response to physical stimulation is not an immune reaction, it's a physiological reaction.
If we redefined allergy to include that, then it would lose all meaning. E.g., Everyone would be allergic to being punched in the nose because it made your eyes water. It may even make you cry like a girl.
"Indeed there are people who can die from an alergic reaction to UV light.
It's called "melanoma". It, too, is not an alergic reaction.
Yet it's plausible that people are alergic to EMF, it's certainly established that people can be alergic to parts of the EM spectrum.
I call bull. I'll put up $1,000 as a bet that you can't tell when xrays are passing through you in a true blind test. Find a hospital that will do the test, call me and I'll gladly put the money into an escrow. My email address is: mr naz at hot mail dot com If you're not BSing, then put your $1,000 where your mouth is.
We've been waiting for MS to submit to forced change to its product line coming from a patent troll? Dunno about you, but my breath was definitely not bated.
More the point: Just because people do it with his product and he wants them to do it more so he makes more money selling data to various interested parties (governments, marketing firms, think tanks, NGOs, lobby groups, industry insiders etc) doesn't make it right.
His bias towards having people use Facebook more is so obvious I don't know why he bothered. It'd be like Darl McBride saying "forget free software because fully commodified IP is the new norm" or something else equally transparent.
Fuck Zuckerberg and fuck his agenda to destroy the personal space.
Yea, if only software vendors could take a page out of Larry Singh's book and have an immaculate record of having never given code to anyone else that contained even the smallest bug.
Well, that's what I meant. "Earth' circumference" is a reasonable concept that is usable, despite the fact that Earth is not a regular sphere, nor is its surface smooth.
Modelling the Earth as a sphere is a better model than the flat Earth model, but not as good as modeling it as an integrated ellipse. Yet, this is still not a perfect model. (I actually don't know what the current "best" model is. I only know that Earth is slightly flattened due to centrifugal forces and other effects.)
I concede, however, your point that a model can't be proven to be correct if its accuracy has been demonstrated to the limit of our ability to measure it. That's what I was alluding to in mentioning Newtonian physics; the model was good enough to measure their physical universe to the accuracy that they had access to. I.e., relatively rudimentary experiments carried out on the ground.
I think you and I agree, I was just not clear in my earlier post what I meant. Apologies for that.
You're muddling the distinction between the concept of exact measurement with exact model.
When we say that Newtonian physics is "about" right, we're saying that, given the properties of the area of the physical world we inhabit (about sea level on an Earth sized planet), Newtonian physics is a model that can predict the behavior of bodies in motion pretty accurately. Relativity theory models those same bodies more accurately, and in a wider area of application. In this way, our models of the universe could be said to be asymptotically approaching "correctness".
When we say that the speed of light is "about" 3 x 10^8 m/s, everybody but the most retarded physics students know that it's not exactly that, but that that number is close enough that it's usable. Same as saying pi = 3.141 and g = 9.81 ms^-2 at sea level on Earth. Those are imprecise but "close enough" approximations of natural constants which do not have integer values, so we just truncate them to the desired level of accuracy for the current use. I don't need pi to a hundred places to be able to triangulate the hats on the sports oval for the experiment in 10th grade. Hell, pi to eleven places will calculate Earth's circumference to within a millimeter, which is "accurate enough" for pretty much all everyday uses.
Don't mix these two concepts, a model can be 100% accurate even if we are incapable of measuring fully, and vice versa.
Therein lies your problem. You cannot give government the power to stop other citizens from encroaching your rights, without giving them the power to stop you encroaching the rights of others. Once you give them that right, you by necessity must give them the latitude to define what constitutes such an encroachment. They then define whatever they decide is in their interests as being in the interests of protecting citizens from each other. Hello, PATRIOT Act. Don't you see? You already have your minimal government; Everything the US federal government has done in the last decade has been in the interests of "protecting its citizens". The current situation is entirely within the parameters of what you suggest, that government only be allowed to prevent encroachment of its citizens' rights from internal and external threats.
One way or another, an authority must be given authority. Given that, I'd rather the authority be in some way elected. You can't vote for a corporation to do something or stop doing something. They are purely driven by profits, and if profits are counter to the greater good, then screw the greater good. It's the capitalist way.
A corporation will *never* do what is in the public interest, unless, coincidentally, that happens to parallel the path of greatest profit. If you give corporations power over inherently political matters, your social welfare becomes a commodity, to be bought and sold by whoever buys whatever license based on however best they can squeeze profit out of the public.
The problem is with the political system's corruption. To throw out politics as the primary means to regulate the body politic is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Government is not inherently evil, its just this implementation of it that is. E.g., heavily tied to the private sector, two party system etc. Fix the implementation, don't write off the approach.
I know, they could end up giving free t-shirts to the wrong people. Who knows where it could end?! Those t-shirts could end up in the hands of... terrorists! Then what?! The Ubuntu team must be warned! Their actions could destroy us all!
Why is government control necessarily "evil"? It's function* is to control social institutions and infrastructure that is otherwise unprofitable to run or should not be run in a for-profit manner. Furthermore, corporations come and go, as do their agendas. Would you want AT&T to be in charge of all IP addresses that were unused back in the 70s when it was the dominant player in telecommunications? In 20 years Google will (hopefully) be just another once-were-innovators.
If this same discussion were happening 10 years ago, the big name putting up their hand to administer it, and would probably have little competition, would be Microsoft. Who'd want that? Google will one day be what Microsoft is today; hated, feared and opposed by pretty much everyone, and all the Google fanboys today will claim then that they never really liked Google the way ex-MS lovers now claim they never liked MS.
Corporations should *never* be given permanent power over social infrastructure. I never understood the willingness of the US population to give fundamentally transient organizations power over social infrastructure. Imagine if SCO actually *did* have control over anything important in the Unix world?
Privatization is *not* the panacea that Americans hold it to be.
(Oh, and I know you're not saying it is, I'm agreeing with and taking further your point.)
* Current implementation of "government" is not what I'm talking about, I'm talking philosophically.
A big, bloated, borg-like entity swallowing up anything of value in its industry and shitting it out a devoured, broken lump of crap.
I don't know how to solve this problem, but EAs presence in the industry means that for the forseeable future, the vast majority of big games will be just rehashes of old games with $foo new graphics enhancement or perhaps a new multiplayer game rule variant. You don't see the term "Doom Clone" much any more, but the vast majority of even the most modern FPS games offer little real development over the seminal titles in the FPS genre; Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake.
Really groundbreaking titles just don't happen any more. Games that redefine gaming parameters the way titles like Syndicate, XCom and System Shock did are just not possible with the lumbering, knuckledragging EA dominating the scene.
"Frankly, doctors who hand out prescriptions to patients who don't need them should lose the right to practice medicine."
The problem is that doctors who do not do this are leaving themselves open to a lawsuit if the patient dies from some exotic heretofore unknown disease and then the family says "but the doctor refused treatment". Even if the doctor is totally faultless from a medical point of view, the circus that is the US legal system will pretty much mean that the doctor's career ends there.
So what you're saying is that doctors should lose their license if they do something that prevents them from losing their license.
It's a shit time to be a doctor. Fuck the legal system, and fuck the modern culture that bred us all into spoiled, demanding brats demanding instant gratification and medical treatment for every cough and cut.
"Just look at the US after the 11/9 attacks. The trick is to ensure that you have a leader who can listen to scientific advice and make the right decision based on that"
Err... WTF are you smoking? Just about every intelligence agency on the planet said before the Afghan campaign that invading Afghanistan would not yield a positive result vis a vis terrorism, and every intelligence agency AND the IAEA said that Iraq had no WMDs. Both have been proved true.
If going by the 9/11 reaction is how you measure the response by Earth's leaders, then I expect the US to respond to a potential asteroid hit on Earth by contracting some politically tied corporation to manufacture umbrellas.
Slashdot Mirror
Cyrillic is a script, not a language. There are several languages that use it, including Russian, which is probably the language of the article you've linked to. It is perfectly possible to be able to read a script, but not understand the language. For example, I can read Italian, because it is in the same script as English, but I can't understand it. The same would apply for those who speak a Cyrillic represented language other than Russian.
As trollish as your post is, I would wager that it is more than a little likely that LORAN is being turned off precisely because it is a beacon based system that selective availability cannot be implemented over. There is no way that LORAN could be used to provide positioning data to select parties.
Personally, I don't think this is a safe thing to do. Maritime equipment is notorious for being long lived. I would highly doubt that there are no boats that are still dependent on legacy systems. Well, I guess this is one way to ensure that they upgrade.
Feb 8:
First Officer: Captain! We've lost navigational systems!
Captain: Damn! That can mean only one thing. Arm photon torpedoes!
First Officer: Err.... we're a 32 year old fishing trawler and we don't have any...
Captain: Quiet! There's no time! Transfer engineering to the bridge and make sure we've got warp if we need it.
Bee Ess.
Sensitivity to sunlight is NOT an allergy. An allergy is a disorder of the immune system. A physiological response to physical stimulation is not an immune reaction, it's a physiological reaction.
If we redefined allergy to include that, then it would lose all meaning. E.g., Everyone would be allergic to being punched in the nose because it made your eyes water. It may even make you cry like a girl.
It's called "melanoma". It, too, is not an alergic reaction.
No. QED.
I call bull.
I'll put up $1,000 as a bet that you can't tell when xrays are passing through you in a true blind test. Find a hospital that will do the test, call me and I'll gladly put the money into an escrow. My email address is:
mr naz at hot mail dot com
If you're not BSing, then put your $1,000 where your mouth is.
40% less work != 40% less billable hours. I envy you, you've obviously never met a lawyer.
We've been waiting for MS to submit to forced change to its product line coming from a patent troll? Dunno about you, but my breath was definitely not bated.
More the point:
Just because people do it with his product and he wants them to do it more so he makes more money selling data to various interested parties (governments, marketing firms, think tanks, NGOs, lobby groups, industry insiders etc) doesn't make it right.
His bias towards having people use Facebook more is so obvious I don't know why he bothered. It'd be like Darl McBride saying "forget free software because fully commodified IP is the new norm" or something else equally transparent.
Fuck Zuckerberg and fuck his agenda to destroy the personal space.
I think you're confusing him with CmdrTbls.
Yea, if only software vendors could take a page out of Larry Singh's book and have an immaculate record of having never given code to anyone else that contained even the smallest bug.
Well, that's what I meant. "Earth' circumference" is a reasonable concept that is usable, despite the fact that Earth is not a regular sphere, nor is its surface smooth.
Modelling the Earth as a sphere is a better model than the flat Earth model, but not as good as modeling it as an integrated ellipse. Yet, this is still not a perfect model. (I actually don't know what the current "best" model is. I only know that Earth is slightly flattened due to centrifugal forces and other effects.)
I concede, however, your point that a model can't be proven to be correct if its accuracy has been demonstrated to the limit of our ability to measure it. That's what I was alluding to in mentioning Newtonian physics; the model was good enough to measure their physical universe to the accuracy that they had access to. I.e., relatively rudimentary experiments carried out on the ground.
I think you and I agree, I was just not clear in my earlier post what I meant. Apologies for that.
"appropriate suction"
For once, that's a Freudian slip that's still funny due to relevance without the third grade euphemism.
You're muddling the distinction between the concept of exact measurement with exact model.
When we say that Newtonian physics is "about" right, we're saying that, given the properties of the area of the physical world we inhabit (about sea level on an Earth sized planet), Newtonian physics is a model that can predict the behavior of bodies in motion pretty accurately. Relativity theory models those same bodies more accurately, and in a wider area of application. In this way, our models of the universe could be said to be asymptotically approaching "correctness".
When we say that the speed of light is "about" 3 x 10^8 m/s, everybody but the most retarded physics students know that it's not exactly that, but that that number is close enough that it's usable. Same as saying pi = 3.141 and g = 9.81 ms^-2 at sea level on Earth. Those are imprecise but "close enough" approximations of natural constants which do not have integer values, so we just truncate them to the desired level of accuracy for the current use. I don't need pi to a hundred places to be able to triangulate the hats on the sports oval for the experiment in 10th grade. Hell, pi to eleven places will calculate Earth's circumference to within a millimeter, which is "accurate enough" for pretty much all everyday uses.
Don't mix these two concepts, a model can be 100% accurate even if we are incapable of measuring fully, and vice versa.
I also propose that anyone who receives more than a certain number of down mods be killed. That ought to fix Slashdot conversations on the double.
The RIAA's behavior demonstrates that copyright has nothing to do with remunerating the original authors.
Therein lies your problem. You cannot give government the power to stop other citizens from encroaching your rights, without giving them the power to stop you encroaching the rights of others. Once you give them that right, you by necessity must give them the latitude to define what constitutes such an encroachment. They then define whatever they decide is in their interests as being in the interests of protecting citizens from each other. Hello, PATRIOT Act. Don't you see? You already have your minimal government; Everything the US federal government has done in the last decade has been in the interests of "protecting its citizens". The current situation is entirely within the parameters of what you suggest, that government only be allowed to prevent encroachment of its citizens' rights from internal and external threats.
One way or another, an authority must be given authority. Given that, I'd rather the authority be in some way elected. You can't vote for a corporation to do something or stop doing something. They are purely driven by profits, and if profits are counter to the greater good, then screw the greater good. It's the capitalist way.
A corporation will *never* do what is in the public interest, unless, coincidentally, that happens to parallel the path of greatest profit. If you give corporations power over inherently political matters, your social welfare becomes a commodity, to be bought and sold by whoever buys whatever license based on however best they can squeeze profit out of the public.
The problem is with the political system's corruption. To throw out politics as the primary means to regulate the body politic is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Government is not inherently evil, its just this implementation of it that is. E.g., heavily tied to the private sector, two party system etc. Fix the implementation, don't write off the approach.
I know, they could end up giving free t-shirts to the wrong people. Who knows where it could end?! Those t-shirts could end up in the hands of... terrorists! Then what?! The Ubuntu team must be warned! Their actions could destroy us all!
Why is government control necessarily "evil"? It's function* is to control social institutions and infrastructure that is otherwise unprofitable to run or should not be run in a for-profit manner. Furthermore, corporations come and go, as do their agendas. Would you want AT&T to be in charge of all IP addresses that were unused back in the 70s when it was the dominant player in telecommunications? In 20 years Google will (hopefully) be just another once-were-innovators.
If this same discussion were happening 10 years ago, the big name putting up their hand to administer it, and would probably have little competition, would be Microsoft. Who'd want that? Google will one day be what Microsoft is today; hated, feared and opposed by pretty much everyone, and all the Google fanboys today will claim then that they never really liked Google the way ex-MS lovers now claim they never liked MS.
Corporations should *never* be given permanent power over social infrastructure. I never understood the willingness of the US population to give fundamentally transient organizations power over social infrastructure. Imagine if SCO actually *did* have control over anything important in the Unix world?
Privatization is *not* the panacea that Americans hold it to be.
(Oh, and I know you're not saying it is, I'm agreeing with and taking further your point.)
* Current implementation of "government" is not what I'm talking about, I'm talking philosophically.
EA is to video games as Microsoft is to Software.
A big, bloated, borg-like entity swallowing up anything of value in its industry and shitting it out a devoured, broken lump of crap.
I don't know how to solve this problem, but EAs presence in the industry means that for the forseeable future, the vast majority of big games will be just rehashes of old games with $foo new graphics enhancement or perhaps a new multiplayer game rule variant. You don't see the term "Doom Clone" much any more, but the vast majority of even the most modern FPS games offer little real development over the seminal titles in the FPS genre; Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake.
Really groundbreaking titles just don't happen any more. Games that redefine gaming parameters the way titles like Syndicate, XCom and System Shock did are just not possible with the lumbering, knuckledragging EA dominating the scene.
You'll find it in the section with all the physics text books.
"Frankly, doctors who hand out prescriptions to patients who don't need them should lose the right to practice medicine."
The problem is that doctors who do not do this are leaving themselves open to a lawsuit if the patient dies from some exotic heretofore unknown disease and then the family says "but the doctor refused treatment". Even if the doctor is totally faultless from a medical point of view, the circus that is the US legal system will pretty much mean that the doctor's career ends there.
So what you're saying is that doctors should lose their license if they do something that prevents them from losing their license.
It's a shit time to be a doctor. Fuck the legal system, and fuck the modern culture that bred us all into spoiled, demanding brats demanding instant gratification and medical treatment for every cough and cut.
Go easy on him. He's related to Schrodinger.
Better yet, take congress to Phobos. At least that way the little imps will be with friends.
"with their expectation of incoming Rupture"
Yea, you wouldn't want to burst their bubble now would you?
Thanks, I'll be here all week. Try the roast.
I found that part of TFA to be a little ridiculous. The way they were talking you'd think they could control the asteroid with a Wiimote.
"Just look at the US after the 11/9 attacks. The trick is to ensure that you have a leader who can listen to scientific advice and make the right decision based on that"
Err... WTF are you smoking? Just about every intelligence agency on the planet said before the Afghan campaign that invading Afghanistan would not yield a positive result vis a vis terrorism, and every intelligence agency AND the IAEA said that Iraq had no WMDs. Both have been proved true.
If going by the 9/11 reaction is how you measure the response by Earth's leaders, then I expect the US to respond to a potential asteroid hit on Earth by contracting some politically tied corporation to manufacture umbrellas.