Europeans pillaged the planet for centuries and fought amongst themselves until they wiped courage out of their bloodlines. Now they can't even clean up their own messes, so the U.S. has to do it--then they whine about how hated the U.S. is until then next time we're needed. Whatever, I think it's cool we're hated by decadent Euros, islamofascists, and lotus-eating socialists, it means we're on the right side of history.
Canadians are proud they're "not as hated as the U.S." I guess that's a step up from their "We're #2 and proud of it!" national motto.
Yep, this probably is a troll. But if I was bashing the U.S. it would be modded "Insightful." So much for balance.
"No transmitter needed for an American to be recognized everywhere in the world..."
Ain't that the truth! It's that certain air, not of condescension, but the pride that comes from being a citizen of the world's only superpower. For those of us who aren't self-loathing liberals, it's a nice feeling.
Go ahead and mod me down, it doesn't change the facts.
Jeez, what's wrong with the geeks on/.?! In the last few years we've gotten death rays (laser & microwave) and now we're got defensive shields. Just give me an inertialess drive and it'll be the Galactic Overlord welcoming me as the new master! QX?
Speaking of aiming carefully, what modern spacesuits need as a backup system is a urine receptacle/emergency retro-rocket that can spray a stream compressed pee in times of emergency. You wouldn't have much time for the stream to run before it turned to ice crystals, but if you aimed right, it could be enough.
A methane gas collector probably wouldn't work, because while extreme emergencies scare the pi** out of us they also scare us shi*less.
No, that's not how science works. Not at all.
You make an observation: "Annual global average temperatures are rising more over the past hundred years than the previous several hundred years."
a. Somebody smacks you on the top of the head and says "what are you doing drawing conclusions on global climate from just a couple hundred years of data?!!" Over millennia, the Earth has been hotter and colder than the present temps (for ex: the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period), which likely means we're just passing from cold to hot in yet another cycle. None of the previous cycles appear to have been affected by CO2 levels, by the way.
b. Upon review of your data it turns out that you made one critical error in statistics after another so that your final observations are meaningless (yes Mann, I'm looking at you and your "hockeystick")
c. NASA publishes data that indicates: the Sun has been unusually active over the period you're measuring, Mars is also undergoing global warming and so is Pluto. Obviously AGW cannot be responsible for climate change on other planets.
These tend to screw up the whole mankind-is-responsible-for-global-warming meme. Not arguing that climate change isn't occurring you understand, just that we're not responsible for it.
So I take it you agree that Colbert showed no courage at all in his performance, which was my point.
I still think his behavior was rude, but then he works in Hollywood where they don't consider mouthing obscenities on live TV to be crass and vulgar--it's "edgy". By those standards, he was well behaved.
You want to see a brilliant comic display some real courage? Look no further. Enjoy the reaction shots, and Colbert's audition for Press Secretary job."
"Real courage"?! As in he wore a T-shirt with a Mohammed cartoon on it?
I didn't think so, he works for Comedy Central after all.
How much courage does it take to be rude to President Bush? Heck, gramps Mick Jagger dissed Bush out of a hotel room last week and so far nobody has shut off his defibrillator, so where's the stones in what Colbert did?
I didn't realize that it was "Left" to be conservative these days. Is that DoubleSpeak or plain old NewSpeak?
Conservatives are the people alarmed by this administration's willingness to disregard traditional values and re-interpret the constitution.
It's the biggest power grab since Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, and it offends real conservatives.
Liberals are just pissed off that they aren't the ones doing it, they've always been in favor of trying new ways - that's why we call 'em liberals.
I'm a rational anarchist so I don't care if you lean left or right. Although you sound like a paranoid leftie, I'll accept that you're a Conservative.
Now that we've addressed your point, are you going to answer mine from several posts ago?
Care to explain why Bush is acting in so dastardly a fashion? I mean, you liken him to Big Brother, stamping on the face of humanity, so when is he going to start taking advantage of his illegal behavior?
Getting a little late in his term to silence his political opposition, isn't it? Certainly the anti-war loonies in the Democratic party haven't been silenced, nor have the Dixie Chicks, Newsweek, and the New York Times been muzzled. Bush hasn't used the IRS to punish opponents like Clinton did, and he hasn't gone Waco or snatched little kids to send them back to Cuba. So how exactly is he benefitting from all his evildoing?
It's obvious that he's simply trying to wage a war on terrorism in spite of the radical Leftists who will do and say anything to bring down the President.
I've posted several politically conservative opinions on Slashdot and none of them have ever gotten above 0 whereas the left-leaning replies were all modded up. I've shrugged it off as proof that Left can't compete so they suppress debate.
That worldview was seriously challenged when my latest posting got a 1! But now things are back to normal as it just got modded back to 0 (100% overrated).
What with the Right running just about everything here in the U.S., I guess Slashdot is just about the last bastion remaining for the frustrated and intolerant Left.
Are you quite sure about that? Have you been paying attention to the comparative treatment at the hands of the IRS of more liberal California churches vs. conservative Ohio churches? If you haven't, you might not want to be so sure about that, although I'd be more inclined to attribute it to the kind of people appointed by the kind of people appointed by Bush (repitition intended), rather than thinking Bush directly ordered it. But that doesn't leave his hands totally clean in my book.
So I googled IRS California churches Ohio churches and got:
IRS Alleges Political Restraint Violations by 37 Churches
Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2006 Posted: 9:28:26PM EST
Among tax-exempt groups, charities, and other civic organizations nationwide, 37 churches engaged in alleged violations of restraints on political activity during the 2004 election, according to a report released last week by the Internal Revenue Service.
Regulations currently allow churches to endorse positions, including "values" they affirm, but they cannot endorse or campaign against candidates for political office. According to IRS officials, however, there has been an increase in complaints of violations, though the report did not specify specific instances due to tax privacy laws.
Christian churches with both liberal and conservative views have spoken publicly in recent months to voice their denials of allegations from the IRS and other churches.
"It's disturbing not because it's pervasive, but because it has the potential to really grow and have a very bad impact on the integrity of charities and churches,'' said IRS commissioner Mark Everson, according to the Associated Press.
Everson added that the nature of the conduct was weighed, whether it be willful or persistent.
"We're very careful," he said. "What we try to do, in most cases is to work to correct the behavior going forward."
...
In November, a liberal Episcopal Church in Southern California received a letter from the IRS stating that it was at risk of losing its tax-exempt status after the church's former Rector, the Rev. George F. Regas, preached an anti-war sermon two days before the 2004 presidential election.
...
A recent development separate from the 2004 election could also place a pair of Ohio churches under IRS scrutiny.
In January, more than 30 ministers in Ohio affiliated with moderate and liberal churches petitioned the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of two conservative evangelical churches. The signers indicated that they were not speaking for their churches.
Looks like the IRS is trying to be even-handed, so I don't understand your point.
Perhaps you're right that the administration's only goal is to fight terrorism. Sadly, that doesn't mean those will be the only effects. Precedents are being set down that will be available for use by future administrations.
Lincoln suspended habeus corpus, many presidents have abused the IRS, Clinton and The Wife had FBI files, and yet we're all still free to shoot off our mouths and read subversive lit, so I doubt anything that's been done in the name of fighting the GWoT will be harmful. If you're really worried about precedents, McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform has done more to silence political speech than the PATRIOT act could ever do!
Now add all that up: Any US President can say you are a terrorist, kidnap your whole family in the middle of the night, and have your kids raped to death in front of your wife to make her tell where you are hiding. And Gonzalez will say it's all legal, if anyone ever finds out about it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. More of the same from the permanently alarmed Left.
Care to explain why Bush is acting in so dastardly a fashion? I mean, you liken him to Big Brother, stamping on the face of humanity, so when is he going to start taking advantage of his illegal behavior?
Getting a little late in his term to silence his political opposition, isn't it? Certainly the anti-war loonies in the Democratic party haven't been silenced, nor have the Dixie Chicks, Newsweek, and the New York Times been muzzled. Bush hasn't used the IRS to punish opponents like Clinton did, and he hasn't gone Waco or snatched little kids to send them back to Cuba. So how exactly is he benefitting from all his evildoing?
It's obvious that he's simply trying to wage a war on terrorism in spite of the radical Leftists who will do and say anything to bring down the President.
We have already had a significant impact on the composition of the atmosphere in terms of CO2 concentration - the main source of warming.
If you include water vapor as a greenhouse gas, humanity contributes 0.28% of the total greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, of which 0.117% is CO2. It's not likely that such a small amount is significant.
If you don't include water vapor, our contribution increases to 6%.
How do you know we've had a significant impact on climate change? The most recent climate reconstructions (Moberg and others) have dumped the "hockey stick" graph used in the IPCC for one that includes the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period. When you look at those new graphs, it's clear that there've been warming and cooling cycles before Mankind could have caused them.
You can't trust the models being used to determine policy on AGW, either. Recently, researchers have found "that living plants emit 10 to 100 times more methane than dead plants. Scientists had previously thought that plants could only emit methane in the absence of oxygen." None of the climate models currently account for the impact of living plants on GW.
Just last week, we learned that "the sun is getting brighter, increasing the pace of climate change and undermining claims that man alone is to blame."
"Sunshine levels had been decreasing by 2 per cent a decade between 1960 and 1980 - a total decline of about 6 per cent. Now they are going up again. Perhaps this is why our Swiss glaciers are melting," Professor Wild said.
Such rises could be disastrous for agriculture, wildlife and human settlements in many regions, especially the tropics.
But scientists warn they may have to revise these calculations sharply upwards if the impact of "global brightening" has to be factored in.
Atsumu Ohmura, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, has collated measurements from 400 sites worldwide and found an increase in sunshine at 300 of the sites studied.
The areas under scrutiny were mainly in Eurasia and the polar regions.
Some of the areas studied showed a decline in sunshine since 1990, largely in fast-developing countries such as China and India.
"A widespread brightening has been observed since the 1980s. This may substantially affect surface climate, the water cycle, glaciers and ecosystems," Professor Ohmura said.
String theory is in trouble because the only way scientists can make it work with reality is if we accept that there are a nearly infinite collection of alternate realities.
Now we get this proof that nothing works the way our vaunted intellects would expect.
I am now willing to believe that the world is only 8,000 years old and God thought the fossils were a real knee-slapper.
What a clever fellow you are. Wrong as can be of course.
Read this and get informed:
How many people overstay their temporary visas?
Lots. While most of the 30 million people who enter the United States on temporary visas each year return home, over the years an estimated 3 million people--including some 700,000 foreign students--have stayed beyond the limits of their visas. No one monitors their whereabouts, although the INS plans to establish a tracking system in 2003. In early 2002, the Justice Department announced a push to locate some 314,000 individuals who overstayed their visas and have been ordered deported by immigration authorities; priority has been given to locating those people from countries where al-Qaeda maintains a significant presence.
Let me get this straight: Bush authorizes the NSA to monitor as many as 500 people in the USA and that's news?! It would be newsworthy if the NSA had been monitoring every knucklehead who thought he was clever by combining Bush's name with Hitler (that would be, um, about two million adolescents (many posting on Slashdot today), but they weren't. Wanna bet when the facts come out that those 500 will turn out to be legitimate suspects (i.e., they overstayed their visa, or maybe they had ties to terrorist organizations like hamas)?
We'll see. The media has been trying to pin some crime on Bush for five years, they haven't laid a glove on him.
Merry Christmas!
--Chris
A well-considered piece, with thoughtful references to the works of Camille Paglia and Naomi Wolf. From the article: "He also highlights several games that, instead of focusing on the female form in its big-breasted glory, showcase women who are intelligent, strong, and powerful.
If you want to make money selling video games, give the customer what he wants. Otherwise you're just fighting human nature. Perfect example, take a look at this photo of Verena Vlaj, the only female out of the 700 contestants at the World Cyber Games in Singapore last week (and who in interviews appears to be intelligent and good-humored) and tell me that the photographer was framing the shot to put her intellectual assets in focus.
--Chris
Geez, here you've got a gigantic source of relatively clean water, so get a fleet of tugboats and drag it where it'll do some good. First spray it with a reflective overcoating to slow melting, then tow it to the Middle East or Africa. You can put it in a holding pen and slice off huge chunks with lasers. Instant irrigation!!
Here's what you do:
1. Open side door so all fans run at top speed.
2. Record sound of fans running.
3. Set up 3 speakers in a triangle around the G5, each positioned 120 degrees away from the other (with the G5 at the center of the triangle.
4. Play back sound so it is 180 degrees out of phase with the sound emanating from the G5. If everything works properly, the sound from the speakers should cancel out the G5's fan noise.
Course if you don't get it just right, if you create a harmonic vibration it could rattle your G5 to pieces;)
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, a trash-talking message from--wait for it--an "Anonymous Coward". Kinda reinforces the point of my earlier posting.
Europeans pillaged the planet for centuries and fought amongst themselves until they wiped courage out of their bloodlines. Now they can't even clean up their own messes, so the U.S. has to do it--then they whine about how hated the U.S. is until then next time we're needed. Whatever, I think it's cool we're hated by decadent Euros, islamofascists, and lotus-eating socialists, it means we're on the right side of history.
Canadians are proud they're "not as hated as the U.S." I guess that's a step up from their "We're #2 and proud of it!" national motto.
Yep, this probably is a troll. But if I was bashing the U.S. it would be modded "Insightful." So much for balance.
"No transmitter needed for an American to be recognized everywhere in the world..." Ain't that the truth! It's that certain air, not of condescension, but the pride that comes from being a citizen of the world's only superpower. For those of us who aren't self-loathing liberals, it's a nice feeling. Go ahead and mod me down, it doesn't change the facts.
Jeez, what's wrong with the geeks on /.?! In the last few years we've gotten death rays (laser & microwave) and now we're got defensive shields. Just give me an inertialess drive and it'll be the Galactic Overlord welcoming me as the new master! QX?
Actually, a high-powered flashbulb with special reflectors was used to blind the pilots, not coherent light.
"Yo, threepeeoh, the answer to number 7 or it's the hammer!"
Speaking of aiming carefully, what modern spacesuits need as a backup system is a urine receptacle/emergency retro-rocket that can spray a stream compressed pee in times of emergency. You wouldn't have much time for the stream to run before it turned to ice crystals, but if you aimed right, it could be enough. A methane gas collector probably wouldn't work, because while extreme emergencies scare the pi** out of us they also scare us shi*less.
a. Somebody smacks you on the top of the head and says "what are you doing drawing conclusions on global climate from just a couple hundred years of data?!!" Over millennia, the Earth has been hotter and colder than the present temps (for ex: the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period), which likely means we're just passing from cold to hot in yet another cycle. None of the previous cycles appear to have been affected by CO2 levels, by the way.
b. Upon review of your data it turns out that you made one critical error in statistics after another so that your final observations are meaningless (yes Mann, I'm looking at you and your "hockeystick")
c. NASA publishes data that indicates: the Sun has been unusually active over the period you're measuring, Mars is also undergoing global warming and so is Pluto. Obviously AGW cannot be responsible for climate change on other planets.
These tend to screw up the whole mankind-is-responsible-for-global-warming meme. Not arguing that climate change isn't occurring you understand, just that we're not responsible for it.
I still think his behavior was rude, but then he works in Hollywood where they don't consider mouthing obscenities on live TV to be crass and vulgar--it's "edgy". By those standards, he was well behaved.
It's actually a pretty good and obscure (depending on how old you are) reference to the X-Files "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" episode.
"Real courage"?! As in he wore a T-shirt with a Mohammed cartoon on it?
I didn't think so, he works for Comedy Central after all.
How much courage does it take to be rude to President Bush? Heck, gramps Mick Jagger dissed Bush out of a hotel room last week and so far nobody has shut off his defibrillator, so where's the stones in what Colbert did?
I'm a rational anarchist so I don't care if you lean left or right. Although you sound like a paranoid leftie, I'll accept that you're a Conservative.
Now that we've addressed your point, are you going to answer mine from several posts ago?
I've posted several politically conservative opinions on Slashdot and none of them have ever gotten above 0 whereas the left-leaning replies were all modded up. I've shrugged it off as proof that Left can't compete so they suppress debate.
That worldview was seriously challenged when my latest posting got a 1! But now things are back to normal as it just got modded back to 0 (100% overrated).
What with the Right running just about everything here in the U.S., I guess Slashdot is just about the last bastion remaining for the frustrated and intolerant Left.
So I googled IRS California churches Ohio churches and got:
Looks like the IRS is trying to be even-handed, so I don't understand your point.
Lincoln suspended habeus corpus, many presidents have abused the IRS, Clinton and The Wife had FBI files, and yet we're all still free to shoot off our mouths and read subversive lit, so I doubt anything that's been done in the name of fighting the GWoT will be harmful. If you're really worried about precedents, McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform has done more to silence political speech than the PATRIOT act could ever do!
Yeah, yeah, yeah. More of the same from the permanently alarmed Left.
Care to explain why Bush is acting in so dastardly a fashion? I mean, you liken him to Big Brother, stamping on the face of humanity, so when is he going to start taking advantage of his illegal behavior?
Getting a little late in his term to silence his political opposition, isn't it? Certainly the anti-war loonies in the Democratic party haven't been silenced, nor have the Dixie Chicks, Newsweek, and the New York Times been muzzled. Bush hasn't used the IRS to punish opponents like Clinton did, and he hasn't gone Waco or snatched little kids to send them back to Cuba. So how exactly is he benefitting from all his evildoing?
It's obvious that he's simply trying to wage a war on terrorism in spite of the radical Leftists who will do and say anything to bring down the President.Decaff posted:
If you include water vapor as a greenhouse gas, humanity contributes 0.28% of the total greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, of which 0.117% is CO2. It's not likely that such a small amount is significant.
http://www.toptechwriter.us/weblog/index.php/2006If you don't include water vapor, our contribution increases to 6%.
How do you know we've had a significant impact on climate change? The most recent climate reconstructions (Moberg and others) have dumped the "hockey stick" graph used in the IPCC for one that includes the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period. When you look at those new graphs, it's clear that there've been warming and cooling cycles before Mankind could have caused them.
You can't trust the models being used to determine policy on AGW, either. Recently, researchers have found "that living plants emit 10 to 100 times more methane than dead plants. Scientists had previously thought that plants could only emit methane in the absence of oxygen." None of the climate models currently account for the impact of living plants on GW.
http://www.toptechwriter.us/weblog/index.php/2006Just last week, we learned that "the sun is getting brighter, increasing the pace of climate change and undermining claims that man alone is to blame."
http://www.toptechwriter.us/weblog/index.php/2006OK,
String theory is in trouble because the only way scientists can make it work with reality is if we accept that there are a nearly infinite collection of alternate realities.
Now we get this proof that nothing works the way our vaunted intellects would expect.
I am now willing to believe that the world is only 8,000 years old and God thought the fossils were a real knee-slapper.
Very funny God.
What a clever fellow you are. Wrong as can be of course. Read this and get informed: How many people overstay their temporary visas? Lots. While most of the 30 million people who enter the United States on temporary visas each year return home, over the years an estimated 3 million people--including some 700,000 foreign students--have stayed beyond the limits of their visas. No one monitors their whereabouts, although the INS plans to establish a tracking system in 2003. In early 2002, the Justice Department announced a push to locate some 314,000 individuals who overstayed their visas and have been ordered deported by immigration authorities; priority has been given to locating those people from countries where al-Qaeda maintains a significant presence.
Let me get this straight: Bush authorizes the NSA to monitor as many as 500 people in the USA and that's news?! It would be newsworthy if the NSA had been monitoring every knucklehead who thought he was clever by combining Bush's name with Hitler (that would be, um, about two million adolescents (many posting on Slashdot today), but they weren't. Wanna bet when the facts come out that those 500 will turn out to be legitimate suspects (i.e., they overstayed their visa, or maybe they had ties to terrorist organizations like hamas)? We'll see. The media has been trying to pin some crime on Bush for five years, they haven't laid a glove on him. Merry Christmas! --Chris
Geez, here you've got a gigantic source of relatively clean water, so get a fleet of tugboats and drag it where it'll do some good. First spray it with a reflective overcoating to slow melting, then tow it to the Middle East or Africa. You can put it in a holding pen and slice off huge chunks with lasers. Instant irrigation!!
Here's what you do: 1. Open side door so all fans run at top speed. 2. Record sound of fans running. 3. Set up 3 speakers in a triangle around the G5, each positioned 120 degrees away from the other (with the G5 at the center of the triangle. 4. Play back sound so it is 180 degrees out of phase with the sound emanating from the G5. If everything works properly, the sound from the speakers should cancel out the G5's fan noise. Course if you don't get it just right, if you create a harmonic vibration it could rattle your G5 to pieces ;)