Lots of Weird Crap gets through one house and then dies. If Google doesn't have enough cash to buy^H^H^H lobby a sufficient number of Assembly Members to block this, they're in way worse financial straits than everyone thinks.
Personally, what I'm after is one that sounds as good as an iPod, or as good as my Rio Nitrus. For $50.00, how much storage do you get. Are we talking GB, MB, or KB?
I say we get on it right after we win the war on drugs. Oh, yeah, and the war on poverty, the war on terrorism, and the war on polyester clothing. Then we should start small; just go after he disco pirates.
Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there were lots of different kinds of micro-computers. There were Atari 800s and STs, Commodor 64s, 128s, and Amigas, TIs, Sinclairs, KayPros, the mighty TRS80, and lots of others including the Apple and the IBM PC. One of them had an open architecture that allowed other manufacturers to build things called "clones". The clone wars followed.
Now the dominant archtecture is the one that IBM pretty much gave away (yes, I remember there were lawsuits). Apple is hanging on, and the others are gone. The final blow to IBM dominance was when they tried a closed architecture with the self-administered nut-job of the PS/2 bus. (I owned a Model 50.) IBM is a lot of things, but hardware monopolist isn't it.
Unisex President, and began to wonder if someone had taken the knife to W or we had elected Michael Jackson. Gad, some Mondays it's hardly worth chewing through the straps to get out of bed.
I was involved in planning for insurance company response to a quake on the New Madrid fault in the early 90's. Living in California, I'm used to quakes and have lived through some bad ones. A quake on the New Madrid fault would be a monumental disaster on many levels. First, as the writer above points out, the building is not to earthquake standards. Damage would be horrific. Places like Memphis would simple cease to exist.
Second, not only are codes inadequate, but the geology of the area contributes to the problem. The solid parent material (bedrock) allows propagation of the energy over a much wider area than in California. The historic New Madrid quakes cause church bells to ring in Boston. This coupled with the fact that many cities and towns are built on alluvial surface material that undergoes liquifaction during a quake means that once the energy reaches a remote area, it will still do a lot of damage.
Third, the extremely high market penetration of earthquake insurance in the commercial and homeowners insurance markets in the midwest means this would be a world-wide financial disaster far exceeding that of the 9/11/01 World Trade Center loss. Earthquake insurance in most midwest states is dirt cheap and has relatively low deductibles. Everybody has it. Here in California, it is expensive and has very high deductibles. Most people don't have it. If you do the math here, you are better off putting the money you would spend on premiums into mitigation efforts like foundation bolts, masonry reinforcements, etc. Our calculations in the 90's on the dollar loss from a repeat of the New Madrid quakes indicated that a Great Depression style financial collapse was not just possible, but likely.
This is seriously scary shit. The New Madrid Earthquake scare has passed, and not too many people in the midwest are doing any real earthquake planning. The next quake on the New Madrid fault will happen, we just don't know when.
This seems counter-intuitive. However, it isn't that far-fetched. Imagine a laterally moving or strike-slip fault (the notorious San Andreas fault is an example). Obviously, motion of the plates on wither side of the fault releases energy. The thing to focus on is what is happening at the ends of the fault. There, the faults can get locked into other plates, and motion causes a build up of stress as motion of one plate is blocked by a stationary plate. Some geologists are concerned that this is happening at the southern end of the San Andreas fault in the San Gorgonio Pass area and at the northern end at the Mendocino Triple Junction.
>somebody had to cut the spinal cords of those rats in the first place for the experiments... and then they were killed to examine the results
Duh! They're RATS, not human beings. Without animal testing of drugs and surgical techniques, life would still be pretty damn medeival. If you want to go back to the days when people loved having hordes of rats in their dwellings and you got burned at the stake as a witch if you kept a cat, please do, but do it on some other continent from the one I live on.
>Please remember this and ponder if the ends justify the means.
It is good to keep this in mind, and I strongly oppose cruelty to animals, but in the case of biomedical research, the ends absolutely justify the means.
>If anything, the burden should be placed on the farmers using the licensed seeds to control their plants so that they don't endup allowing seeds to go "into the wild".
You have clearly stated the single most valid argument against GM food crops. I'm not worried about eating GM whatevers, but I also want to be able to have some control over my choices. "Canola" is a marketing term for the rapeseed plant, a member of the mustard family (Cruciferae). Several species of the genus Brassica are grown for animal feed and as oilseed crops. This is the same genus that contains the common food crops of cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, etc. They are insect pollinated annuals with bees being the most common pollinator.
Bees can pick up pollen from one field and carry it to anonther. For the botanically challenged, pollen == sperm, male genetic package for reproduction. So, the patented genes can get picked up by a bee from a field planted with the patented seeds under license, carried across a fenceline to Farmer Smith's field where they get incorporated into seeds form Farmer B's field, and this is Farmer Smith's fault! It should also be noted that the genus Brassica is notorious for having fairly fuzzy lines between species. Things hybridize easily (think broccoflower), and it doesn't take much energy to think of several ways that this patented gene could wind up in some poor bastard's cabbage crop. This is important, because then the farmer would be breaking the law if he gathered seeds from his own crop and used them formt he next planting. (Unless he paid a license fee.)
>However, you can (and I believe it's happened) pitch a no-hitter and lose
Yes it has, and more than once. Usually it involves a walk or two followed by an error. I don't see how you could throw a perfect game and lose. You could retire 27 straight batters and lose in extra innings. You could retire 27 straight, get relieved at the start of the tenth (injury?) and get no decision. Both of those would suck. I don't think there has ever been a perfect game of more than 9 innings in MLB.
I dunno. The guy has only thrown 26 pitches. I'm looking for his best pitch down but still a strike or close. He's going to give me something I can hit, cause he wants the 27 pitch game. I just need to get it between the infielders. A single wrecks the whole thing and I'm giving him a legitimate shot at it. OTOH, in a 0-0 tie in a game that matters, I'm taking all the way.
> I bet I could write the other side of the equation: a program to create nonsensical gibberish that always gets A's.
I'll bet half the people here thought this as soon as they read the headline. The normal/. response is to spend 10 hours at the computer coding up something to do a task you can do in 1 hour with a pencil.:-) Of course the high school geek who does this will make piles of money selling the output to the football players, buy a nice ride, and get a prom date with a cheerleader. Isn't that the way it works?
> Perfect game means no one reached base. You could actually pitch a perfect game in 27 pitches, all first pitch hits.
Quite right. And, you could also have a non-perfect game known as "facing the minimum" with 27 pitches. On the first pitch to a batter, the ball hits the batter, and he gets first base. Next pitch is grounded into a double play. This is also a no hitter. You could also face the minimum throwing 27 pitches without it being a no hitter if one or more first pitches are hit for singles followed by first pitch double plays.
Imagine being the 27th batter. Do you swing at the first pitch no matter what?
Which sucks, because Pac Bell Park is easy to say and has a rhythm to it. SBC Park doesn't, and every nickname I come up with using SBC starts with Sucks, and it's really a nice ballpark.
Re:And we will be able to notice what difference?
on
SBC CWA Strike Imminent
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· Score: 2, Interesting
> I mean, honestly. Having no technicians to fix things will mean what exactly?
Dan beat me to this one, so I'll second his opinion. The only thing I can't figure out is who's left in the union. Techs, what techs? All they seem to have telemarketers and sales droids. Any technical issues are Your Problem.
>everything it states about ratios and measurements involves assumptions. This isn't science.
Yes, it is science. There are observations made that are attempting to confirm or disprove predicitons made consistent with their hypotesis. As for your distaste for the choice of language, particularly the weasle words; that's the way scientists write.
"Recent observations of a massive shockwave, intense gamma, beta, and alpha radiation, together with so far unrepeated visual observations of what is thought to be a very large smoking crater located at what appears to be the former site of the City of Los Angeles are not inconsistent with the suggestion that a large thermonuclear device or some similarly destructive object may possibly have detonated in Southern California. Our research group is meeting to design further field tests of this hypothesis and it is anticipated that a team of sacrificial graduate students will be sent to the site in the reasonably near future for purposes of further data collection."
This is very, very common in Italy. 60 Minutes (I think) did a piece on it a few years ago. Profiled a 40ish executive, single, who lived with the parents. Goes home for lunch, mom does his laundry, etc. This in a guy making serious bucks (well, Lira, anyway). The article pointed out that this is a common way of life until they get married.
We have your neighbor (you wouldn't do this of course) watching streaming video of Shelly Vixen and her three boyfriends, three girlfriends and a Poland-China sow ghosting in over the Disney channel. Definitely educational television.
>To be precise, they did place their satellite into an orbit, just a highly eccentric one with a path that happens to intersect the Earth.
The orbital calculations probably just simplified the Earth's mass and gravity to a point source. It makes the math lots easier. Unfortunately, Planet Bloat (tm MS) spoiled an otherwise excellent orbital launch.
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- It has to pass the Assembly
- It has to be signed by the Governator.
Lots of Weird Crap gets through one house and then dies. If Google doesn't have enough cash to buy^H^H^H lobby a sufficient number of Assembly Members to block this, they're in way worse financial straits than everyone thinks.Personally, what I'm after is one that sounds as good as an iPod, or as good as my Rio Nitrus. For $50.00, how much storage do you get. Are we talking GB, MB, or KB?
>7 years is the maximum for identity theft? That actually seems a little light.
How about seven years and the victims get to pick his cellmate?>Much like the war on drugs...
I say we get on it right after we win the war on drugs. Oh, yeah, and the war on poverty, the war on terrorism, and the war on polyester clothing. Then we should start small; just go after he disco pirates.Perhaps you underestimate the nerd factor. It's still smaller than a TI-89. Sheesh, real nerds used to hang log-log slide rules from their belts.
on an earlier blimp story, you look up at the giant blimp passing overhead. A voice from the sky intones, "Spawn More Overlords."
Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there were lots of different kinds of micro-computers. There were Atari 800s and STs, Commodor 64s, 128s, and Amigas, TIs, Sinclairs, KayPros, the mighty TRS80, and lots of others including the Apple and the IBM PC. One of them had an open architecture that allowed other manufacturers to build things called "clones". The clone wars followed.
Now the dominant archtecture is the one that IBM pretty much gave away (yes, I remember there were lawsuits). Apple is hanging on, and the others are gone. The final blow to IBM dominance was when they tried a closed architecture with the self-administered nut-job of the PS/2 bus. (I owned a Model 50.) IBM is a lot of things, but hardware monopolist isn't it.
Unisex President, and began to wonder if someone had taken the knife to W or we had elected Michael Jackson. Gad, some Mondays it's hardly worth chewing through the straps to get out of bed.
I was involved in planning for insurance company response to a quake on the New Madrid fault in the early 90's. Living in California, I'm used to quakes and have lived through some bad ones. A quake on the New Madrid fault would be a monumental disaster on many levels. First, as the writer above points out, the building is not to earthquake standards. Damage would be horrific. Places like Memphis would simple cease to exist.
Second, not only are codes inadequate, but the geology of the area contributes to the problem. The solid parent material (bedrock) allows propagation of the energy over a much wider area than in California. The historic New Madrid quakes cause church bells to ring in Boston. This coupled with the fact that many cities and towns are built on alluvial surface material that undergoes liquifaction during a quake means that once the energy reaches a remote area, it will still do a lot of damage.
Third, the extremely high market penetration of earthquake insurance in the commercial and homeowners insurance markets in the midwest means this would be a world-wide financial disaster far exceeding that of the 9/11/01 World Trade Center loss. Earthquake insurance in most midwest states is dirt cheap and has relatively low deductibles. Everybody has it. Here in California, it is expensive and has very high deductibles. Most people don't have it. If you do the math here, you are better off putting the money you would spend on premiums into mitigation efforts like foundation bolts, masonry reinforcements, etc. Our calculations in the 90's on the dollar loss from a repeat of the New Madrid quakes indicated that a Great Depression style financial collapse was not just possible, but likely.
This is seriously scary shit. The New Madrid Earthquake scare has passed, and not too many people in the midwest are doing any real earthquake planning. The next quake on the New Madrid fault will happen, we just don't know when.
This seems counter-intuitive. However, it isn't that far-fetched. Imagine a laterally moving or strike-slip fault (the notorious San Andreas fault is an example). Obviously, motion of the plates on wither side of the fault releases energy. The thing to focus on is what is happening at the ends of the fault. There, the faults can get locked into other plates, and motion causes a build up of stress as motion of one plate is blocked by a stationary plate. Some geologists are concerned that this is happening at the southern end of the San Andreas fault in the San Gorgonio Pass area and at the northern end at the Mendocino Triple Junction.
>somebody had to cut the spinal cords of those rats in the first place for the experiments... and then they were killed to examine the results
Duh! They're RATS, not human beings. Without animal testing of drugs and surgical techniques, life would still be pretty damn medeival. If you want to go back to the days when people loved having hordes of rats in their dwellings and you got burned at the stake as a witch if you kept a cat, please do, but do it on some other continent from the one I live on.>Please remember this and ponder if the ends justify the means.
It is good to keep this in mind, and I strongly oppose cruelty to animals, but in the case of biomedical research, the ends absolutely justify the means.>If anything, the burden should be placed on the farmers using the licensed seeds to control their plants so that they don't endup allowing seeds to go "into the wild".
You have clearly stated the single most valid argument against GM food crops. I'm not worried about eating GM whatevers, but I also want to be able to have some control over my choices. "Canola" is a marketing term for the rapeseed plant, a member of the mustard family (Cruciferae). Several species of the genus Brassica are grown for animal feed and as oilseed crops. This is the same genus that contains the common food crops of cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, etc. They are insect pollinated annuals with bees being the most common pollinator.Bees can pick up pollen from one field and carry it to anonther. For the botanically challenged, pollen == sperm, male genetic package for reproduction. So, the patented genes can get picked up by a bee from a field planted with the patented seeds under license, carried across a fenceline to Farmer Smith's field where they get incorporated into seeds form Farmer B's field, and this is Farmer Smith's fault! It should also be noted that the genus Brassica is notorious for having fairly fuzzy lines between species. Things hybridize easily (think broccoflower), and it doesn't take much energy to think of several ways that this patented gene could wind up in some poor bastard's cabbage crop. This is important, because then the farmer would be breaking the law if he gathered seeds from his own crop and used them formt he next planting. (Unless he paid a license fee.)
All mail from .biz domains goes straight into the dumpster 'round here.
>However, you can (and I believe it's happened) pitch a no-hitter and lose
Yes it has, and more than once. Usually it involves a walk or two followed by an error. I don't see how you could throw a perfect game and lose. You could retire 27 straight batters and lose in extra innings. You could retire 27 straight, get relieved at the start of the tenth (injury?) and get no decision. Both of those would suck. I don't think there has ever been a perfect game of more than 9 innings in MLB.I dunno. The guy has only thrown 26 pitches. I'm looking for his best pitch down but still a strike or close. He's going to give me something I can hit, cause he wants the 27 pitch game. I just need to get it between the infielders. A single wrecks the whole thing and I'm giving him a legitimate shot at it. OTOH, in a 0-0 tie in a game that matters, I'm taking all the way.
> The fewest pitches you can through and still pitch a complete game is 25
Hadn't thought of that. You can face the minimum and not only not have a no-hitter but be the losing pitcher. Bummer. Still helps out the ERA though.> I bet I could write the other side of the equation: a program to create nonsensical gibberish that always gets A's.
I'll bet half the people here thought this as soon as they read the headline. The normal> Perfect game means no one reached base. You could actually pitch a perfect game in 27 pitches, all first pitch hits.
Quite right. And, you could also have a non-perfect game known as "facing the minimum" with 27 pitches. On the first pitch to a batter, the ball hits the batter, and he gets first base. Next pitch is grounded into a double play. This is also a no hitter. You could also face the minimum throwing 27 pitches without it being a no hitter if one or more first pitches are hit for singles followed by first pitch double plays.Imagine being the 27th batter. Do you swing at the first pitch no matter what?
Which sucks, because Pac Bell Park is easy to say and has a rhythm to it. SBC Park doesn't, and every nickname I come up with using SBC starts with Sucks, and it's really a nice ballpark.
> I mean, honestly. Having no technicians to fix things will mean what exactly?
Dan beat me to this one, so I'll second his opinion. The only thing I can't figure out is who's left in the union. Techs, what techs? All they seem to have telemarketers and sales droids. Any technical issues are Your Problem.With only 1GB of RAM, my machine can't run both Outlook and Windows Indexing. The constant whirring sound from the hard drives is soothing though.
>everything it states about ratios and measurements involves assumptions. This isn't science.
Yes, it is science. There are observations made that are attempting to confirm or disprove predicitons made consistent with their hypotesis. As for your distaste for the choice of language, particularly the weasle words; that's the way scientists write."Recent observations of a massive shockwave, intense gamma, beta, and alpha radiation, together with so far unrepeated visual observations of what is thought to be a very large smoking crater located at what appears to be the former site of the City of Los Angeles are not inconsistent with the suggestion that a large thermonuclear device or some similarly destructive object may possibly have detonated in Southern California. Our research group is meeting to design further field tests of this hypothesis and it is anticipated that a team of sacrificial graduate students will be sent to the site in the reasonably near future for purposes of further data collection."
>Age 27 : lives with in parents house.
This is very, very common in Italy. 60 Minutes (I think) did a piece on it a few years ago. Profiled a 40ish executive, single, who lived with the parents. Goes home for lunch, mom does his laundry, etc. This in a guy making serious bucks (well, Lira, anyway). The article pointed out that this is a common way of life until they get married.We have your neighbor (you wouldn't do this of course) watching streaming video of Shelly Vixen and her three boyfriends, three girlfriends and a Poland-China sow ghosting in over the Disney channel. Definitely educational television.
>To be precise, they did place their satellite into an orbit, just a highly eccentric one with a path that happens to intersect the Earth.
The orbital calculations probably just simplified the Earth's mass and gravity to a point source. It makes the math lots easier. Unfortunately, Planet Bloat (tm MS) spoiled an otherwise excellent orbital launch.