Right, because all those guys who pointed out that burning coal releases mercury that shows up in your can of tuna, or the Day the River Burned Down was due to water pollution, were heavily invested in windpower companies and alternative methods of manufacture. Actually, turns out they were like the 'agenda-driven climate alarmists' of today: mostly university professors.
Believing that science has an agenda is to believe that thousands of independently-working and independently-paid researchers are all part of a vast conspiracy. That's practically the DEFINITION of 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics', which is actually not inherently right-wing at all (think most Kennedy theories), and goes back for centuries (the original essay traced it back to Illuminati fears in the 1700s).
But the paranoid style has steadily taken over the right wing in recent decades, until fact-based, or at least fact-conceding, old conservatives can hardly be heard (or found) any more. It's the paranoids among them that are anti-science, not the whole group.
"High-definition television is clearly irrelevant. When you look at television, ask yourself: What's wrong with it? Picture resolution? Of course not. What's wrong is the programming. Why is this aspect of the big picture so unclear? "
That said, I've always like more resolution, more bandwidth in every way. I'm with Ebert that higher frame rates are more important than 3D or resolution - very pleased to hear James Cameron proselytizing it and The Hobbit using it. None of that changes that the ideal experience would be good content, in higher resolution at higher frame rates. And, yes, in 3D where it does something useful. (i.e. not at all in Captain America, Thor, or Transformers, where it added nothing but a headache.)
I'm like that guy's dad, posted above, who made his own 3D camera - never done anything that extreme, but I have collected 3D books and viewing devices and so on since the 3D ViewMaster I had as a kid. FWIW, I have seen a couple of movies where 3D was worthwhile. Not just Avatar and Hugo, where the 3D really did enhance the entertainment, but Herzog's "Cave of Forbidden Dreams" where it was truly crucial to the documentary of a place I'll never be allowed to see in person.
So, frankly, I'll buy all the TV capability that they can bring to market affordably. Hoping for good content after that to use it is a whole separate issue. Always a crapshoot.
Thanks, but Amazon doesn't sell them for that $5-$10 that fits my value on watching it once or twice; and no, Canada's NetFlix is strictly streaming now.
I do have hopes that "DVDplay" a company that basically rents Top-40 videos from vending machines in Safeway, will come out with Blu-Rays; they've already done it in some areas, just not mine. That would at least address the "new and popular" part of my watching, and perhaps the library can pick up the job of less-new and unpopular. But we aren't there yet.
All the video stores - I mean all but three in a city of 1.1M, none within many miles of my house - have closed. And I don't get streaming, in every sense of the word "get".
In Canada, at least, Netflix recently reduced it's bandwidth again, down below 1Mbps - sub DVD, much less Blu-Ray. Why bother having HDTV if you use it?
I've become a steady browser at the library, where they have more DVD titles than any video store - but for anything popular, put the disc on a hold and wait 3 months, and all Blu-Rays (about 5% of the collection) are out all the time. And, no, I'm not paying $29.99 for "Contagion" to watch it once, possibly twice ten years later.
The rental people had about the right number - $5 for an evening for something quite popular, a little less for the older ones. And there are few movies I'll watch twice, very, very few more than twice, so $10 as a purchase price is already high for most discs. For me.
So I do seem to be trapped in some kind of market failure here, where I've got the money, want the product, and the one market mechanism for meeting product with customer at an agreeable price has just collapsed, beaten out by "good enough"....and if 1Mbps is "good enough" (is it really that people are too damn lazy to go to the mall to browse instead of clicking from the sofa??), then maybe BR is doomed because nobody appreciates resolution. And not having freezes and artifacts and glitches.
I suppose the disappointment that so many feel about fusion comes from the fact that it was so darn easy to make it happen in a bomb. But every fusion bomb is first a fission bomb - diagrams for the public make it look like you just set off your basic Hiroshima-type inside a big tub of lithium deuteride (I think it was) and presto, let the megatonnes fly. The staggering heat/pressure numbers inside the tub for a microsecond are all you need to make a fair percentage of it fuse.
All of this happened by 1952, just a few years after we applied ourselves to the problem. The first transistorized radio was 3 years in the future. SIXTY years later, we can only make fusion happen if you have several square miles you wish to demolish in doing so. Talk about feast or famine.
And we have controlled fission. Is there even a ghost of an idea for controlling fission in some way that would touch off controlled fusion? If so, what barriers not only keep it from working, but even keep it off the list of ideas being researched?
Environment Canada takes readings every day, in hundreds of locations outside urban heat islands, and averages them across a whole season to get an average temperature. And then it graphs that number for every year since 1945. While even that graph swings wildly up and down from year to year and even has warmer and colder decades, the regression across almost 70 years shows a steady upward trend. It's most dramatic for our winter (2.8C) but all the seasons have shown statistically significant increases.
I was a huge skeptic until about 2004, but this and several papers I managed to puzzle my way through, plus the book "The Ice Chronicles", finally brought me around by about 2006.
Yes, there are Snowmaggedons. And there are these. And when you add them all up, the warmer spells are getting a little more frequent and the colder spells a little less so. Over decades. That's climate.
I like that, "in a war" like "in a rainstorm" or other event that had no human cause.
Your google for today is "robert jackson kingpin", and search the top link for "kingpin". Jackson was a US Attorney general that thought (as official US policy) that plotting aggressive war was the greatest crime possible, which he prosecuted before, and as a greater crime than, the Holocaust. In the case of this war, the plotting of aggressive war was made possible by secrecy and lies. The secrecy and lies then continued to deepen and extend the war, and to cover up the thousands of smaller crimes it made possible.
As to your argument that "anyone with a half a mind knew it was going on anyways", clearly people have a remarkable capacity to fool themselves, as you can see years later right here on slashdot, with the link to the two bodyguards that were carrying weapons, and the CentCom "investigation" that exonerated, well, CentCom and all its loyal employees. But the huge majority of those present were NOT carrying weapons, which means to anybody who'd been on a street in Baghdad that year, that they were civilians with the indispensable bodyguards, not a militia where everybody would of course have been armed.
When people don't WANT to believe something, you have to pry their eyes open like Alex in Clockwork Orange and then you still have to rub their noses in it. Twice.
This war will be admitted for the crime it was only long after the last participant has died of old age.
And never mind your "troops in danger" crap, that was trashed using the Pentagon's own admissions about day 2.
Posting comments to political stories and blogs is my worst habit - a total time-suck I might as well have spent shouting into the wind. But then I read some stupid comment and feel compelled to "set him straight". Why, I have no idea, and I believe I'm slowly getting a grip on the neurosis.
However, I agree that slashdot's moderation system works very well, if you surf along at only 4 in full, 2 for the one-liners. Informed comments from experts on technical matters in particular.
The other that really works for me is the NYT, which combines editorial moderation of the real crappy stuff, and call-outs for the "best" ones (always with a couple of right-wing call-outs to prove their 'balance'), plus a user-moderation system. NYT comments that get recommended by many are invariably thoughtful and serious and well-informed; the top ten are generally as worth reading as the story or column commented upon.
Why others can't follow the slashdot or NYT models, I have no idea. I read a lot of Salon.com, but their comments are worthless, and a major new revamp allows "reply threads" that quickly become tiresome (or repulsive) arguments - and there's still no moderation or scoring that allows useful comments to rise to one's attention.
Ah, callow youth. Trust me, child, we heard all this about the Commies back in the day.
They were *fanatically*, *suicidally* dedicated to their evil ideology. Or the Top Bosses had deep bunkers and cared nothing for the survival of their zombiefied slaves. Or they were just so insane they actually believed they could simply win a nuclear war, get all our bombs before we could launch them...by smuggling in bombs and planting them on our open society. The same way they supported world-wide terrorism. (Yes, we had terrorism in the 20th century too, honest. Except for the 9/11 one-off, the worst years were actually the 80s, by event-count or body-count.)
And I think I missed a few scenarios, all of which required us to keep our powder dry, allow no missile gap, and, preferably, just do a first-strike...since we could win with "acceptable losses".
Fortunately, non-crazy people prevailed, and here we are, listening to you. Again. Same crap, different boogieman. This one has about 1% of the Soviet Union's military budget, so you can imagine how funny it sounds to those who've heard it before when it at least WAS a largish "empire" instead of one little barely-industrialized country.
Interesting dynamic here: guy goes a bit off-topic to staunchly defend capitalism (the whole thing) against those who follow "leftist propaganda" (really?), and everybody who chides him for it has been marked down to zero. I don't see anything trolling, otherwise offensive, or off-thread-topic of those replies. Kind of looks from first-blush to be a bunch of/. modders determined to turn/. into a kind of propaganda itself, only one view represented.
Well, mark me down to zero then, gang, because you can only hold capitalism blameless by considering it to be a mindless mechanism, and government the only human-operated entity that makes moral and professional choices.
The same blame allocation has been applied far more extensively to financial regulation recently: because the banks just do what's legal (and government is at fault if they break the law and are not caught for it), the concept of government bears all responsibility for new regulations the banks successfully "lobbied" (bribed) for. We have bad banking because government is bad, get rid of government.
We have bad textbooks because bad government ALLOWS the amoral process of capitalism get away with delivering them, so get rid of government.
Given the crap the publishers are now putting out, would we have better math textbooks from them, or from a government department of textbook-writing? Do we need less government here, or more? And indeed, the substance of the/. post was "do we now need to step outside the whole rotted system and produce textbooks by open-source, an extension of the hugely successful Wikipedia (which has destroyed the once-proud private encyclopedia industry by BEATING THEM, fair and square)?"
These questions are much more complex than doctrinaire left/right positions can solve.
$1.1 X 3.785 = $4.31 on my Western Canadian calculator. Maybe Eastern Canada uses different arithmetic.
(In the States, they use REALLY different arithmetic where tax cuts increase revenue - I believe that has something to do with the square root of minus one, because those revenue increases seem to be imaginary numbers.... so what's a 16% division error between friends).
Here's the funny bit - here in Calgary, that number is $1.14. Up in Ft. McMurray, sitting on top of all the oil sands, it's $1.169 this morning.
Seems like the closer you get to the oil, the more it costs to get the refined version.
Gas gets carbon kudos for power generation because it emits half the CO2 of coal plants (per kWh), but gasoline has less carbon, so NG is only 25% less CO2 than a gasoline engine.
BUT - NG itself, basically methane, is acknowledged to be 20X as heat-retaining a GHG as CO2 is - so if even 1% leaks out, on the entire trip from wellhead to burning in the engine, it's about a wash. The gas industry claims it doesn't have anywhere near 1% leakage - but then, they would. Distribution to cars, and use in cars, can only add to the odds that leakage is 2% or more...and you're doing more environmental damage than with gasoline.
For those that scorn the global warming theory, though, it'll be a cheaper fuel for a few decades to come, courtesy of fracking.
>Probably quicker to drop a C-note out of your wallet than to dig in your pocket for change.
"Rich" people have been notoriously BAD TIPPERS for generations, that's a very old story. Not when they're showing off wealth in a fancy restaurant, but when they're just getting lunch in a diner. Ask any waitress.
Man, leave Slashdot alone for a day with a whimsical post and you find you're modded up to 5 and have this long thread trailing out behind with people ready to send you to Soviet Russia where the bikes pedal YOU.
My closest shaves, BY FAR, are when I crossed a street quite legally, expected some guy who was half-way down the block when I entered the intersection to stop, they way he obviously would if I were a car, who then blithely keeps going until I have to screech to a halt in mid-intersection to watch him go past my front tire with a metre or so to spare, not even glancing at me. He knew I'd stop. I can at worst cost him a dent, after all.
I never have had a close shave when going through a stop sign, because BIKES ARE SO SLOW you can scan the whole next block for cars in the two seconds it takes to go from being able to see down the street to actually entering the intersection. I *NEVER* enter an intersection with a car even ABLE to reach me if he hits the accelerator. "Defensive driving", indeed, I assume they are hostile to the point of homicidal. It's a prudent assumption, for some reason - maybe because some cyclist zapped his eyes the night before.
I was speaking strictly of the fact that even when nobody is in sight, I stop, in a car, at stop signs and lights anyway, to obey the law, even though there's no safety issue. On a bike, I disrespect the law alone, my own safety, not so much.
TFA, and the topic for today, was about respecting laws, not about turning your morning commute into an extreme sport.
But after 3 years of a close shave per week (I'd say 5% were my fault, 5% were driver error, and 90% were driver-dickishness), I found a new route entirely on bike paths, I only have to cross one major road now, and have a close shave only once a summer. Last summer's was a Winnebago that drove through my crosswalk, while I was walking the bike across dismounted, about one pace in front of me. I've learned that dismounting cuts those events by 80% - that's why I swear they are actively trying to kill cyclists.
In the book "Freakonomics", about how the statistical tools economists use can bring some light to other areas of social study, the tale is told of a guy who ran a business model of dropping off bagels at office coffee rooms around town, with a voluntary-contribution box, and kept meticulous records for many years of his repayment rate. Turns out the upper floors (as in, upper management) and near corner offices and so on, had the lowest rate.
The authors were careful about drawing conclusions, though they entertained by speculating - was it "have to run to my important meeting, that's more important than digging around for change, my time is worth $900/hour", or was it just a "sense of entitlement"?
This may tip the needle towards "self-entitled bastards", though it remains speculation, of course, not conclusion.
The Prius thing may indicate another reason for being a "self-entitled jerk", of course: environmental smugness. Now I'm just TOTALLY speculating, obviously, but I'd add a data point: my rotten self, and all the rotten cyclists like me. We disobey traffic laws with wild abandon, we're notorious for it. And bikes are vastly more environmental (and, better yet, non-road-space consuming) than Priuses. I am shamelessly anti-authoritarian on a bike the way I am not in a car.
I claim, in my own head (never had to try it on a cop, and don't plan to) that I coast through stop signs and so forth because of the vast importance of Conserving Momentum. And the roadway just "owes" me a little slack because I take up so little of it. And I'm only risking my own damfool neck, I can at most cause others a dent. Or something. If you can get self-entitled by contributing to the common weal that little, imagine how much you get from doing work others value at $900 per hour...
A lot of the rest was TL;DR once I saw that one, plus a few more bits that are characteristic of hand-wave-ism in arguments for our space-opera future:
"Thrive" != "Survive at all with imported food, clothing, and shelter". Explain the economic model for *making* food, clothing, and shelter in Antarctica and people would be interested in changing that treaty. NB: "Greenhouse food under lights powered by a nuclear reactor" is still not "thrive" unless the antarctic colony can build it's own next nuclear reactor. Anything that can't self-sustain is an expensive hobby of the parent nation (or world).
Self-sustainment is about a system, and "3000 human beings" is not a system, it's the population that depends on a system that involves millions of species (thousands in your own gut) that we absolutely have zero idea how to replicate off this planet - or even in a building on it. A self-sustaining colony would take thousands of years just to VET that it did not need periodic correction from Earth to keep from dying out for lack of some biological support system.
But anyway, the last line sums it up: We've been on an exponential improvement curve for centuries, therefore that will continue and we are headed for a Singularity. Alas, in real life, most exponential growth curves hit limiting factors and become S-shaped. Including the Earth's population curve, ending the motivation for very expensive expansion. When it was just two-thirds of a century from Kitty Hawk to Tranquility Base, it seemed logical to extend that curve ahead, giving us the Pan-Am Space Clipper and the Jupiter mission by 2001. And that prediction was Not Even Remotely Close. The aerospace technology improvement curve flattened out. A Saturn V today would be only a little lighter and have a little higher thrust. Still billions of dollars per astronaut day on the moon (Apollo was about $5B/astronaut-day on the surface. And no, they did not "thrive" there, either.)
I repeat, phone me when you have zero-point energy and reactionless drives. It's that whole fuel and mass-ratio thing that's holding up progress. Umm, also, I could use some gray goo that turns Mars dust into filet mignon.
I only read those after I realized it myself - we were enjoying a review of all the episodes of "Firefly" and while I love the show, I was griping about the utter silliness of space travelers in cowboy hats saying "ain't" when it hit me that all my favourite Heinlein novels were pretty much the same deal. Between Planets (Venus), Red Planet (Mars), Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Farmer in the Sky (Ganymede) all made colonizing the solar system sound exactly like being a pioneer on the American frontier.
Don't crap on us, we're broken up about it, too. But science is also about accepting reality and attempting to imagine what world technology is likely to put us in - and a replay of the colonization of earthly continents is very unlikely, unless you have Larry Niven's Reactionless Drive powered by zero-point energy about to come out of your home lab.
Our fine Conservative party is working as designed, nothing new to report. It's funny the crap that people will put up with - obvious lies about war, torture, electoral fraud - once they've decided one party is 'tough' and well-organized and the other are hapless fools. As Hunter Thompson said in '72, there are only two real parties, the Winners and Losers. And people would rather go with a Winner than with Honest. (Also, the Liberals have been spiraling downwards since they were clearly convicted - in the public mind and indeed in a few court cases - with brazen corruption about using public money for their own adverts. They haven't done their time in exile yet, so we're kind of stuck with the Conservatives.)
But my Not Utterly Off-Topic factoid is that "riding" is not the only thing that has vanished in England but survives in Canada. I was looking up the "Sheriff of Nottingham" once and wondered how "Sheriff" had translated from the 1100's to a western lawman. Turns out it's a slurring of "Shire Reeve", where "Reeve" was the commoner that kept order, provided public services, and collected taxes on behalf of the nobleman that owned the shire. It mentioned that "Reeve" survives today only in small Canadian municipalities that aren't big enough to call the head a "Mayor".
Had to look up Heartland, then was annoyed I'd forgotten. Columnist George Monbiot wanted to do his journalistic due-diligence before touting an opinion on climate change and tracked down the sources of all the anti-GW statements he could find. He kept coming back to a small number of institutes that received money from the oil and coal industries -and many of them already had a record of touting that tobacco doesn't cause cancer, going back decades. Heartland, as the wikipedia reminded me, was one of them.
I noted the term "The AGW crowd" in comments here. Well said. I couldn't believe climate change stuff for years, until about 2004 - because by then, the "AGW crowd" was such a very, very LARGE crowd of very eminent, earnest people who were NOT getting money from large industries. Yup, I accepted "argument from authority", because I didn't have time to do my own climatology research...just like I accept argument from authority about medicine from research physicians that are not getting paid by large companies. (Which many are.)
Where I work, Access is forbidden. Not a copy in the corporation (8000 seats) except where they could not (yet) replace it with an Oracle app. The problem is that people muck up a user-controllable database in painful ways.
But full-blown corporate Oracle apps take this many hours of meetings of the user's time: 10 + analyst_hours * 0.2 + programmer_hours * 0.1.
That is, an app that takes four hours to explain to a programmer by the analyst and six hours for the programmer to write, test, debug and document, will take about 12 hours of meetings for the user. For a small database (say, two tables of information with several hundred records total, and a few more of column values containing 5-50 values each), that has 1-4 users, you will never, Never, NEVER reach the top of the "to do" pile.
So these needed apps pile up until somebody somewhat savvy person does something with a spreadsheet and maybe some VBA. I ended up doing our whole budget system ($200M spent per year, across about 230 line-items) with three Oracle tables hit on by an Excel pivot table and couple of spreadsheet pages that was a database entry forms in all but name.
It's in it's third year and we haven't lost any of the money yet.
So I went to cnn.com and searched on "canada killing trial" and the top story is titled "Bomb threat delays 'honor' murder trial in Canada", so, yup, the media got the bomb threat story out once it was confirmed.
In the story:
"In taking the stand, Shafia swore to tell the truth on the Quran and he again invoked the holy book to say Islam does not condone killing people to preserve a family's honor."
I admit the word "Muslim" does not appear. Just Islam. And Quran. And all their names and country of origin.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, because all those guys who pointed out that burning coal releases mercury that shows up in your can of tuna, or the Day the River Burned Down was due to water pollution, were heavily invested in windpower companies and alternative methods of manufacture. Actually, turns out they were like the 'agenda-driven climate alarmists' of today: mostly university professors.
Believing that science has an agenda is to believe that thousands of independently-working and independently-paid researchers are all part of a vast conspiracy. That's practically the DEFINITION of 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics', which is actually not inherently right-wing at all (think most Kennedy theories), and goes back for centuries (the original essay traced it back to Illuminati fears in the 1700s).
But the paranoid style has steadily taken over the right wing in recent decades, until fact-based, or at least fact-conceding, old conservatives can hardly be heard (or found) any more. It's the paranoids among them that are anti-science, not the whole group.
NINETEEN years ago, no less - March 1993, Wired's very first numbered issue, 1.01. His back-page column starts off:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/negroponte.html
"High-definition television is clearly irrelevant.
When you look at television, ask yourself: What's wrong with it? Picture resolution? Of course not. What's wrong is the programming.
Why is this aspect of the big picture so unclear? "
That said, I've always like more resolution, more bandwidth in every way. I'm with Ebert that higher frame rates are more important than 3D or resolution - very pleased to hear James Cameron proselytizing it and The Hobbit using it. None of that changes that the ideal experience would be good content, in higher resolution at higher frame rates. And, yes, in 3D where it does something useful. (i.e. not at all in Captain America, Thor, or Transformers, where it added nothing but a headache.)
I'm like that guy's dad, posted above, who made his own 3D camera - never done anything that extreme, but I have collected 3D books and viewing devices and so on since the 3D ViewMaster I had as a kid. FWIW, I have seen a couple of movies where 3D was worthwhile. Not just Avatar and Hugo, where the 3D really did enhance the entertainment, but Herzog's "Cave of Forbidden Dreams" where it was truly crucial to the documentary of a place I'll never be allowed to see in person.
So, frankly, I'll buy all the TV capability that they can bring to market affordably. Hoping for good content after that to use it is a whole separate issue. Always a crapshoot.
Thanks, but Amazon doesn't sell them for that $5-$10 that fits my value on watching it once or twice; and no, Canada's NetFlix is strictly streaming now.
I do have hopes that "DVDplay" a company that basically rents Top-40 videos from vending machines in Safeway, will come out with Blu-Rays; they've already done it in some areas, just not mine. That would at least address the "new and popular" part of my watching, and perhaps the library can pick up the job of less-new and unpopular. But we aren't there yet.
All the video stores - I mean all but three in a city of 1.1M, none within many miles of my house - have closed. And I don't get streaming, in every sense of the word "get".
In Canada, at least, Netflix recently reduced it's bandwidth again, down below 1Mbps - sub DVD, much less Blu-Ray. Why bother having HDTV if you use it?
I've become a steady browser at the library, where they have more DVD titles than any video store - but for anything popular, put the disc on a hold and wait 3 months, and all Blu-Rays (about 5% of the collection) are out all the time. And, no, I'm not paying $29.99 for "Contagion" to watch it once, possibly twice ten years later.
The rental people had about the right number - $5 for an evening for something quite popular, a little less for the older ones. And there are few movies I'll watch twice, very, very few more than twice, so $10 as a purchase price is already high for most discs. For me.
So I do seem to be trapped in some kind of market failure here, where I've got the money, want the product, and the one market mechanism for meeting product with customer at an agreeable price has just collapsed, beaten out by "good enough"....and if 1Mbps is "good enough" (is it really that people are too damn lazy to go to the mall to browse instead of clicking from the sofa??), then maybe BR is doomed because nobody appreciates resolution. And not having freezes and artifacts and glitches.
I suppose the disappointment that so many feel about fusion comes from the fact that it was so darn easy to make it happen in a bomb. But every fusion bomb is first a fission bomb - diagrams for the public make it look like you just set off your basic Hiroshima-type inside a big tub of lithium deuteride (I think it was) and presto, let the megatonnes fly. The staggering heat/pressure numbers inside the tub for a microsecond are all you need to make a fair percentage of it fuse.
All of this happened by 1952, just a few years after we applied ourselves to the problem. The first transistorized radio was 3 years in the future. SIXTY years later, we can only make fusion happen if you have several square miles you wish to demolish in doing so. Talk about feast or famine.
And we have controlled fission. Is there even a ghost of an idea for controlling fission in some way that would touch off controlled fusion? If so, what barriers not only keep it from working, but even keep it off the list of ideas being researched?
By definition, this is "weather", not "climate", it only lasts a week.
Climate change is defined by decades at a very minimum. Climate change is this:
http://www.ec.gc.ca/adsc-cmda/default.asp?lang=en&n=8C03D32A-1
Environment Canada takes readings every day, in hundreds of locations outside urban heat islands, and averages them across a whole season to get an average temperature. And then it graphs that number for every year since 1945. While even that graph swings wildly up and down from year to year and even has warmer and colder decades, the regression across almost 70 years shows a steady upward trend. It's most dramatic for our winter (2.8C) but all the seasons have shown statistically significant increases.
I was a huge skeptic until about 2004, but this and several papers I managed to puzzle my way through, plus the book "The Ice Chronicles", finally brought me around by about 2006.
Yes, there are Snowmaggedons. And there are these. And when you add them all up, the warmer spells are getting a little more frequent and the colder spells a little less so. Over decades. That's climate.
>in a war that innocent people die
I like that, "in a war" like "in a rainstorm" or other event that had no human cause.
Your google for today is "robert jackson kingpin", and search the top link for "kingpin". Jackson was a US Attorney general that thought (as official US policy) that plotting aggressive war was the greatest crime possible, which he prosecuted before, and as a greater crime than, the Holocaust. In the case of this war, the plotting of aggressive war was made possible by secrecy and lies. The secrecy and lies then continued to deepen and extend the war, and to cover up the thousands of smaller crimes it made possible.
As to your argument that "anyone with a half a mind knew it was going on anyways", clearly people have a remarkable capacity to fool themselves, as you can see years later right here on slashdot, with the link to the two bodyguards that were carrying weapons, and the CentCom "investigation" that exonerated, well, CentCom and all its loyal employees. But the huge majority of those present were NOT carrying weapons, which means to anybody who'd been on a street in Baghdad that year, that they were civilians with the indispensable bodyguards, not a militia where everybody would of course have been armed.
When people don't WANT to believe something, you have to pry their eyes open like Alex in Clockwork Orange and then you still have to rub their noses in it. Twice.
This war will be admitted for the crime it was only long after the last participant has died of old age.
And never mind your "troops in danger" crap, that was trashed using the Pentagon's own admissions about day 2.
Posting comments to political stories and blogs is my worst habit - a total time-suck I might as well have spent shouting into the wind. But then I read some stupid comment and feel compelled to "set him straight". Why, I have no idea, and I believe I'm slowly getting a grip on the neurosis.
However, I agree that slashdot's moderation system works very well, if you surf along at only 4 in full, 2 for the one-liners. Informed comments from experts on technical matters in particular.
The other that really works for me is the NYT, which combines editorial moderation of the real crappy stuff, and call-outs for the "best" ones (always with a couple of right-wing call-outs to prove their 'balance'), plus a user-moderation system. NYT comments that get recommended by many are invariably thoughtful and serious and well-informed; the top ten are generally as worth reading as the story or column commented upon.
Why others can't follow the slashdot or NYT models, I have no idea. I read a lot of Salon.com, but their comments are worthless, and a major new revamp allows "reply threads" that quickly become tiresome (or repulsive) arguments - and there's still no moderation or scoring that allows useful comments to rise to one's attention.
Ah, callow youth. Trust me, child, we heard all this about the Commies back in the day.
They were *fanatically*, *suicidally* dedicated to their evil ideology. Or the Top Bosses had deep bunkers and cared nothing for the survival of their zombiefied slaves. Or they were just so insane they actually believed they could simply win a nuclear war, get all our bombs before we could launch them...by smuggling in bombs and planting them on our open society. The same way they supported world-wide terrorism. (Yes, we had terrorism in the 20th century too, honest. Except for the 9/11 one-off, the worst years were actually the 80s, by event-count or body-count.)
And I think I missed a few scenarios, all of which required us to keep our powder dry, allow no missile gap, and, preferably, just do a first-strike...since we could win with "acceptable losses".
Fortunately, non-crazy people prevailed, and here we are, listening to you. Again. Same crap, different boogieman. This one has about 1% of the Soviet Union's military budget, so you can imagine how funny it sounds to those who've heard it before when it at least WAS a largish "empire" instead of one little barely-industrialized country.
You fool. Now the 82nd Airborne will be showing up at your house, to defend us from your smart, weaponized toothbrush.
Interesting dynamic here: guy goes a bit off-topic to staunchly defend capitalism (the whole thing) against those who follow "leftist propaganda" (really?), and everybody who chides him for it has been marked down to zero. I don't see anything trolling, otherwise offensive, or off-thread-topic of those replies. Kind of looks from first-blush to be a bunch of /. modders determined to turn /. into a kind of propaganda itself, only one view represented.
Well, mark me down to zero then, gang, because you can only hold capitalism blameless by considering it to be a mindless mechanism, and government the only human-operated entity that makes moral and professional choices.
The same blame allocation has been applied far more extensively to financial regulation recently: because the banks just do what's legal (and government is at fault if they break the law and are not caught for it), the concept of government bears all responsibility for new regulations the banks successfully "lobbied" (bribed) for. We have bad banking because government is bad, get rid of government.
We have bad textbooks because bad government ALLOWS the amoral process of capitalism get away with delivering them, so get rid of government.
Given the crap the publishers are now putting out, would we have better math textbooks from them, or from a government department of textbook-writing? Do we need less government here, or more? And indeed, the substance of the /. post was "do we now need to step outside the whole rotted system and produce textbooks by open-source, an extension of the hugely successful Wikipedia (which has destroyed the once-proud private encyclopedia industry by BEATING THEM, fair and square)?"
These questions are much more complex than doctrinaire left/right positions can solve.
Typical of a certain mindset that sufficient force will stop a demonstration.
And it will, of course. ONE demonstration. But if you don't want another twice as big, you can't stop it with force.
Ghaddafi used anti-aircraft ammunition on human bodies. That tidied up the whole street in jig time. But where is he now?
$1.1 X 3.785 = $4.31 on my Western Canadian calculator. Maybe Eastern Canada uses different arithmetic.
(In the States, they use REALLY different arithmetic where tax cuts increase revenue - I believe that has something to do with the square root of minus one, because those revenue increases seem to be imaginary numbers.... so what's a 16% division error between friends).
Here's the funny bit - here in Calgary, that number is $1.14. Up in Ft. McMurray, sitting on top of all the oil sands, it's $1.169 this morning.
Seems like the closer you get to the oil, the more it costs to get the refined version.
Gas gets carbon kudos for power generation because it emits half the CO2 of coal plants (per kWh), but gasoline has less carbon, so NG is only 25% less CO2 than a gasoline engine.
BUT - NG itself, basically methane, is acknowledged to be 20X as heat-retaining a GHG as CO2 is - so if even 1% leaks out, on the entire trip from wellhead to burning in the engine, it's about a wash. The gas industry claims it doesn't have anywhere near 1% leakage - but then, they would. Distribution to cars, and use in cars, can only add to the odds that leakage is 2% or more...and you're doing more environmental damage than with gasoline.
For those that scorn the global warming theory, though, it'll be a cheaper fuel for a few decades to come, courtesy of fracking.
>Probably quicker to drop a C-note out of your wallet than to dig in your pocket for change.
"Rich" people have been notoriously BAD TIPPERS for generations, that's a very old story. Not when they're showing off wealth in a fancy restaurant, but when they're just getting lunch in a diner. Ask any waitress.
Man, leave Slashdot alone for a day with a whimsical post and you find you're modded up to 5 and have this long thread trailing out behind with people ready to send you to Soviet Russia where the bikes pedal YOU.
My closest shaves, BY FAR, are when I crossed a street quite legally, expected some guy who was half-way down the block when I entered the intersection to stop, they way he obviously would if I were a car, who then blithely keeps going until I have to screech to a halt in mid-intersection to watch him go past my front tire with a metre or so to spare, not even glancing at me. He knew I'd stop. I can at worst cost him a dent, after all.
I never have had a close shave when going through a stop sign, because BIKES ARE SO SLOW you can scan the whole next block for cars in the two seconds it takes to go from being able to see down the street to actually entering the intersection. I *NEVER* enter an intersection with a car even ABLE to reach me if he hits the accelerator. "Defensive driving", indeed, I assume they are hostile to the point of homicidal. It's a prudent assumption, for some reason - maybe because some cyclist zapped his eyes the night before.
I was speaking strictly of the fact that even when nobody is in sight, I stop, in a car, at stop signs and lights anyway, to obey the law, even though there's no safety issue. On a bike, I disrespect the law alone, my own safety, not so much.
TFA, and the topic for today, was about respecting laws, not about turning your morning commute into an extreme sport.
But after 3 years of a close shave per week (I'd say 5% were my fault, 5% were driver error, and 90% were driver-dickishness), I found a new route entirely on bike paths, I only have to cross one major road now, and have a close shave only once a summer. Last summer's was a Winnebago that drove through my crosswalk, while I was walking the bike across dismounted, about one pace in front of me. I've learned that dismounting cuts those events by 80% - that's why I swear they are actively trying to kill cyclists.
In the book "Freakonomics", about how the statistical tools economists use can bring some light to other areas of social study, the tale is told of a guy who ran a business model of dropping off bagels at office coffee rooms around town, with a voluntary-contribution box, and kept meticulous records for many years of his repayment rate. Turns out the upper floors (as in, upper management) and near corner offices and so on, had the lowest rate.
The authors were careful about drawing conclusions, though they entertained by speculating - was it "have to run to my important meeting, that's more important than digging around for change, my time is worth $900/hour", or was it just a "sense of entitlement"?
This may tip the needle towards "self-entitled bastards", though it remains speculation, of course, not conclusion.
The Prius thing may indicate another reason for being a "self-entitled jerk", of course: environmental smugness. Now I'm just TOTALLY speculating, obviously, but I'd add a data point: my rotten self, and all the rotten cyclists like me. We disobey traffic laws with wild abandon, we're notorious for it. And bikes are vastly more environmental (and, better yet, non-road-space consuming) than Priuses. I am shamelessly anti-authoritarian on a bike the way I am not in a car.
I claim, in my own head (never had to try it on a cop, and don't plan to) that I coast through stop signs and so forth because of the vast importance of Conserving Momentum. And the roadway just "owes" me a little slack because I take up so little of it. And I'm only risking my own damfool neck, I can at most cause others a dent. Or something. If you can get self-entitled by contributing to the common weal that little, imagine how much you get from doing work others value at $900 per hour...
Thanks. That's where he lost me, too.
A lot of the rest was TL;DR once I saw that one, plus a few more bits that are characteristic of hand-wave-ism in arguments for our space-opera future:
"Thrive" != "Survive at all with imported food, clothing, and shelter". Explain the economic model for *making* food, clothing, and shelter in Antarctica and people would be interested in changing that treaty. NB: "Greenhouse food under lights powered by a nuclear reactor" is still not "thrive" unless the antarctic colony can build it's own next nuclear reactor. Anything that can't self-sustain is an expensive hobby of the parent nation (or world).
Self-sustainment is about a system, and "3000 human beings" is not a system, it's the population that depends on a system that involves millions of species (thousands in your own gut) that we absolutely have zero idea how to replicate off this planet - or even in a building on it. A self-sustaining colony would take thousands of years just to VET that it did not need periodic correction from Earth to keep from dying out for lack of some biological support system.
But anyway, the last line sums it up: We've been on an exponential improvement curve for centuries, therefore that will continue and we are headed for a Singularity. Alas, in real life, most exponential growth curves hit limiting factors and become S-shaped. Including the Earth's population curve, ending the motivation for very expensive expansion. When it was just two-thirds of a century from Kitty Hawk to Tranquility Base, it seemed logical to extend that curve ahead, giving us the Pan-Am Space Clipper and the Jupiter mission by 2001. And that prediction was Not Even Remotely Close. The aerospace technology improvement curve flattened out. A Saturn V today would be only a little lighter and have a little higher thrust. Still billions of dollars per astronaut day on the moon (Apollo was about $5B/astronaut-day on the surface. And no, they did not "thrive" there, either.)
I repeat, phone me when you have zero-point energy and reactionless drives. It's that whole fuel and mass-ratio thing that's holding up progress. Umm, also, I could use some gray goo that turns Mars dust into filet mignon.
I believe his point was that those dreams are economically unachievable, not technically.
Charlie Stross has made that point more clearly than either of us could:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/space-cadets.html
I only read those after I realized it myself - we were enjoying a review of all the episodes of "Firefly" and while I love the show, I was griping about the utter silliness of space travelers in cowboy hats saying "ain't" when it hit me that all my favourite Heinlein novels were pretty much the same deal. Between Planets (Venus), Red Planet (Mars), Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Farmer in the Sky (Ganymede) all made colonizing the solar system sound exactly like being a pioneer on the American frontier.
Don't crap on us, we're broken up about it, too. But science is also about accepting reality and attempting to imagine what world technology is likely to put us in - and a replay of the colonization of earthly continents is very unlikely, unless you have Larry Niven's Reactionless Drive powered by zero-point energy about to come out of your home lab.
Our fine Conservative party is working as designed, nothing new to report. It's funny the crap that people will put up with - obvious lies about war, torture, electoral fraud - once they've decided one party is 'tough' and well-organized and the other are hapless fools. As Hunter Thompson said in '72, there are only two real parties, the Winners and Losers. And people would rather go with a Winner than with Honest. (Also, the Liberals have been spiraling downwards since they were clearly convicted - in the public mind and indeed in a few court cases - with brazen corruption about using public money for their own adverts. They haven't done their time in exile yet, so we're kind of stuck with the Conservatives.)
But my Not Utterly Off-Topic factoid is that "riding" is not the only thing that has vanished in England but survives in Canada. I was looking up the "Sheriff of Nottingham" once and wondered how "Sheriff" had translated from the 1100's to a western lawman. Turns out it's a slurring of "Shire Reeve", where "Reeve" was the commoner that kept order, provided public services, and collected taxes on behalf of the nobleman that owned the shire. It mentioned that "Reeve" survives today only in small Canadian municipalities that aren't big enough to call the head a "Mayor".
Had to look up Heartland, then was annoyed I'd forgotten. Columnist George Monbiot wanted to do his journalistic due-diligence before touting an opinion on climate change and tracked down the sources of all the anti-GW statements he could find. He kept coming back to a small number of institutes that received money from the oil and coal industries -and many of them already had a record of touting that tobacco doesn't cause cancer, going back decades. Heartland, as the wikipedia reminded me, was one of them.
I noted the term "The AGW crowd" in comments here. Well said. I couldn't believe climate change stuff for years, until about 2004 - because by then, the "AGW crowd" was such a very, very LARGE crowd of very eminent, earnest people who were NOT getting money from large industries. Yup, I accepted "argument from authority", because I didn't have time to do my own climatology research...just like I accept argument from authority about medicine from research physicians that are not getting paid by large companies. (Which many are.)
Where I work, Access is forbidden. Not a copy in the corporation (8000 seats) except where they could not (yet) replace it with an Oracle app. The problem is that people muck up a user-controllable database in painful ways.
But full-blown corporate Oracle apps take this many hours of meetings of the user's time: 10 + analyst_hours * 0.2 + programmer_hours * 0.1.
That is, an app that takes four hours to explain to a programmer by the analyst and six hours for the programmer to write, test, debug and document, will take about 12 hours of meetings for the user. For a small database (say, two tables of information with several hundred records total, and a few more of column values containing 5-50 values each), that has 1-4 users, you will never, Never, NEVER reach the top of the "to do" pile.
So these needed apps pile up until somebody somewhat savvy person does something with a spreadsheet and maybe some VBA. I ended up doing our whole budget system ($200M spent per year, across about 230 line-items) with three Oracle tables hit on by an Excel pivot table and couple of spreadsheet pages that was a database entry forms in all but name.
It's in it's third year and we haven't lost any of the money yet.
I thought the US was trying to make elections LESS accessible out of concerns of voter fraud. Voter ID stuff and all that?
Wow. I wonder if that ever happened before.
So I went to cnn.com and searched on "canada killing trial" and the top story is titled "Bomb threat delays 'honor' murder trial in Canada", so, yup, the media got the bomb threat story out once it was confirmed.
In the story:
"In taking the stand, Shafia swore to tell the truth on the Quran and he again invoked the holy book to say Islam does not condone killing people to preserve a family's honor."
I admit the word "Muslim" does not appear. Just Islam. And Quran. And all their names and country of origin.