And during the Middle Ages, the rabbis talked about it, and there were two viewpoints on the subject:
1) 10 and 30 cubits are approximations of values that were truly fractional, and the problem was that there was no way to express exact fractions in the language used. It was "really" something like 9.6 cubits across and 30.159... cubits in compass, or somesuch.
2) The temple, sacred ground wherein God dwelt, had non-Euclidean geometry, and the numbers are exactly right. (Hey, if God can create black holes, why can't he distort geometry to the same degree that a large gravitational field can?)
Given that between GR and the quantum nature of matter it is literally impossible for any circle with a diameter of exactly pi*diameter to actually exist on Earth, pushing on the matter generally points out the ignorance of the "Bible debunkers" fairly effectively to those who are actually educated.
Well, sure, no politician is willing to cut. But the point is that it's the will to spend the money, not a lack of money, that's keeping us out of space.
The governemnts of the world cannot simply fund a continuing space progam to the fullest extent
Bullshit. They will not, but there is absolutely no reason why the United States cannot fund a space program far more ambitious than the one we used to. Give me fifteen minutes of dictatorship, and I can cut the U.S. Federal Budget 5% without touching anything important. That'll free up enough money to increase the NASA budget fifty times.
The same goes for the ESA member states, and Japan. Between tham I could at least match the U.S. expenditures. There could be a massive expansion of the International Space Station, simultaneous manned programs to both Mars and the Moon, plus a whole set of new unmanned probes to each and every planet and larger-than-Pluto object in the Solar System.
It isn't going to happen, but it's a lack of will, not a lack of means.
Re:Its funny our attitude about success...
on
Soviet Moon Rocket
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· Score: 2
As far as I'm concerned, there are only the following worthwhile standards:
First unmanned mission to leave Earth's atmosphere (USSR, Sputnik)
First manned mission to leave Earth's atmosphere (USSR, Vostok I)
First permanent manned station beyond Earth's atmosphere (unachieved)
First unmanned mission to leave Earth orbit (USSR, Luna 2)
First manned mission to leave Earth orbit (USA, Apollo 11)
First permanent manned station beyond Earth's orbit (unachieved)
First unmanned mission to leave Earth-Lunar space (USA, Mariner 2)
First manned mission to leave Earth-Lunar space (unachieved)
First permanent manned station beyond Earth-Lunar space (unachieved)
First unmanned mission to leave solar system (USA, Pioneer 10)
First manned mission to leave solar system (unachieved)
First permanent manned station beyond the Solar System (unachieved)
First unmanned mission to leave Milky Way (unachieved)
First manned mission to leave Milky Way (unachieved)
First permanent manned station beyond Milky Way (unachieved)
First unmanned mission to leave local supergroup of galaxies (unachieved)
First manned mission to leave local supergroup of galaxies (unachieved)
First permanent manned station beyond local supergroup of galaxies (unachieved)
Everything else is fluff. Temporary space stations mean as much as the Roanoke colony.
On the other hand, (and someone please correct me on this), doesn't the FTA basically allw laws to be applied universally?
Basically, no. The Canadian Government has been using NAFTA as an excuse to pass a lot of things that have absolutely nothing to do with NAFTA requirements, much like the DMCA in the U.S. was wrongly justified on WTO treaty grounds. It's all BS, designed to deflect criticism of bad legislation to treaties that won't ever get repealed since it would be economic suicide to do so.
While the Nazi Party initially used Christianity for its purposes, it later was explicitly and openly anti-Christian. And Hitler was himself anti-Christian in his personal beliefs. Read "Mein Kampf" if you don't believe me.
And the "literature about the Catholic Church's complicity in the the holocaust" does exist. And it bears the same relation to real history that Holocaust denial literature does, or the claims that Hitler was a vegetarian. Check the accolades that Pope Pius XII got for his efforts to save Jews from the men who went on to found the State of Israel if you don't believe me.
I'm an atheist myself, and I think religion has done more harm than good in the world. But misinformation about Christianity's role in WWII is not the way to make that point.
If you use an ordinary lead round, the lead is deformed by the impact, spreads the force over more area, and doesn't go through the hardened steel armor of the enemy tank. The DU round is much harder, does a much better job of keeping its shape, and thus does a much better job of going through the hardened steel armor. It is the exact same principle that causes a 8-oz Nerf ball that falls 20' to bounce harmlessly off a pane of glass, while an 8-oz lead weight dropped the same distance cracks it.
Re:Windows users give Mozilla another look
on
Mozilla 0.9.9 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
If technical merrit were all that mattated - we all would be running Be right now.
[snort]. BeOS? The OS that had an arbitrary 32MB add-on code limit for no reason than it was easier to write the OS that way than to write it to be robust? At least Windows has the excuse of having its 1.0 version limited by the crufty 8086 memory structure as an excuse for constricting resource limits. What's Be's excuse? It was too much work to design a robust add-on handler?
New Zealand? On the pro-capitalist 2002 Index of Economic Freedom, by the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal countries are ranked like so:
1. Hong Kong 2. Singapore 3. New Zealand 4. Tie: Estonia, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United States. 9. Tie: Australia, Chile, and the United Kingdom 12. Tie: Denmark and Sweeden 14. Finland 15. Tie: Bahrain and Canada
NZ is, according to capitalists, more capitalist than the U.S.
Hmm. Isn't trying to develop a defense against weaponized anthrax rather difficult if you don't research it? Kinda like making bulletproof vests without ever testing them by shooting them . ..
Who are you to impose a global ethical standard on anyone? Ethics is a totally subjective ideal and there is no act that can alone be considered wrong or right,
Who are you to object to his imposing a global ethical standard on anyone? If ethics are a totally subjective ideal, then how can his act of imposition be considered wrong or right?
Now, if the US does not even use its *own* laws equitably between citizens and non-citizens
The Al Qaeda prisoners are being held on non-U.S. soil (i.e., territory leased from Cuba) at the request of the internationally-recognized government of the country (Afghanistan) in which they were previous to detention. U.S. law, except as it governs the conduct of U.S. military personnel, is utterly irrelevant. Since Al Qaeda does not, under the Geneva Conventions, qualify as a military organization, they do not qualify as lawful combatants, and thus are not POWs, but merely persons who committed crimes in Afghanistan. Their future disposition is up to the government of Afghanistan, which has jurisdiction; objections to their detention can be made in an Afghani court.
The sole member of Al Qaeda with U.S. citizenship has been extradited to the U.S. to face charges under U.S. law regarding his interactions with other U.S. citizens. He is accordingly being handled by U.S. law. Afghanistan, of course, can request his subsequent return to face charges in Afghanistan; as there was no extradition treaty between the U.S. and Afghanistan at the operative time, it is entirely up to the discretion of the United States as to whether or not it will allow that, just as it was up to Afghanistan to choose whether or not he could be extradited in the first place.
The Taliban prisoners are being treated as POWs, in accordance with their status as lawful combatants, even if the U.S. government isn't officially calling them POWs. Under international law, when the combat is over in Afghanistan (and it isn't, check your newspaper), they should be returned to Afghanistan -- at which point they will be under the jurisdiction of the government of Afghanistan.
Now, yes, because of the circumstances surrounding the reestablishment of an internationally-recognized Afghani government, there may be questions as to whether the Afghani government was acting of its own free will. If it was not, the U.S. arguably violated Afghan soverignty, and the U.N. Charter, and Afghanistan can sue the U.S. under U.S. law.
Hmm. An OS originally developed by a company now bankrupt (BeOS), an OS originally developed by a company now bankrupt (Amiga), and an OS . ..
. . . that is currently available, that is under active development, and is currently worth millions in current contracts with large financial institutions (OS/2).
Calling OS/2 dead is like calling Solaris dead; it may not be on your desktop, but that doesn't mean it ain't still around.
Even the strictest "original intent"er gives judges more power than that!
Damn straight. I think the Sherman Act should be overturned as unconstitutional, but even I think MS's argument is basically bullshit; there's plenty of common-law precedent for a judge intervening in settlements, even preceeding the Founding. Or does MS think a judge never acted to directly mediate between parties in pre-Revolutionary England?
(No, I'm not a lawyer. But the idea that Constitutional law should be left to professionals is a relatively recent one promulgated by professional lawyers in the name of their own self-interest.)
"you grant Google a worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, non-exclusive license to make, sell, or use the technology related thereto, including but not limited to the software, algorithms, techniques, concepts, etc"
It's pretty similar to standard "open submissions" writing contests. Note the "non-exclusive" -- it means that the coder retains the right to sell the code to somebody else, like Infoseek, or even to release it publicly under the GPL. (Wouldn't that be a kick?)
Google gets some tech for a relatively small cost, and gets to evaluate potential hierees. Coders get a chance at prize money and to get their name and their ability to work in front of a potential employer. I'd certainly expect Google to be interested in hiring anybody who wrote something worth using.
The marginal cost of switching search engines is minimal. The marginal costs of starting up a Google competitor are minimal. And now it's been proven that the Google model can kick the ass of the AltaVista model.
Greed therefore dictates that Google not change its proven successful model in favor of a proven less successful model; if it does, it'll get crushed by the next Google.
OS/2: I can pay $$$ for an OS/2 license AND $$$ for a Windows license (whether directly or through IBM)
Windows: I can pay for a Windows license for what the OS/2-alone license costs! And the Windows programs run faster, since I'm not running OS/2 in the background!
--
AMD: I can pay for a top-of-the-line x86 processor that also does 64 bits!
Sun: I can pay for a top-of-the-line 64-bit processor!
Intel: I can pay for a rather mediocre 64-bit processor that runs x86 code slower than my current computer, or I can pay for a x86 processor that only does 32 bits.
It's very simple. If 99% of the desktop machines in the world do it one way, and 1% do it the other way, that 1% is wrong from a usability design standpoint. No matter how much better in theory. It's the equivalent of sending out Dvorak keyboards as the standard keyboard for a computer because it's a better design, or giving people foot-operated mice so they can keep both hands on the keyboard. I don't care what logical arguments you make, it it's still wrong.
The Windows and Mac clipboards work one way. The X clipboard works another. X is, therefore, wrong.
P2P without Napster-like registries, because of inherent scalability problems, is never going to successfully distribute more than a tiny fraction of commercially available works. Maybe you'll be able to grab a few dozen popular movies and a few hundred tunes; that's a subset of what a generalist store like Best Buy has in stock at any moment.
Slashdot Mirror
1) 10 and 30 cubits are approximations of values that were truly fractional, and the problem was that there was no way to express exact fractions in the language used. It was "really" something like 9.6 cubits across and 30.159... cubits in compass, or somesuch.
2) The temple, sacred ground wherein God dwelt, had non-Euclidean geometry, and the numbers are exactly right. (Hey, if God can create black holes, why can't he distort geometry to the same degree that a large gravitational field can?)
Given that between GR and the quantum nature of matter it is literally impossible for any circle with a diameter of exactly pi*diameter to actually exist on Earth, pushing on the matter generally points out the ignorance of the "Bible debunkers" fairly effectively to those who are actually educated.
Well, sure, no politician is willing to cut. But the point is that it's the will to spend the money, not a lack of money, that's keeping us out of space.
Bullshit. They will not, but there is absolutely no reason why the United States cannot fund a space program far more ambitious than the one we used to. Give me fifteen minutes of dictatorship, and I can cut the U.S. Federal Budget 5% without touching anything important. That'll free up enough money to increase the NASA budget fifty times.
The same goes for the ESA member states, and Japan. Between tham I could at least match the U.S. expenditures. There could be a massive expansion of the International Space Station, simultaneous manned programs to both Mars and the Moon, plus a whole set of new unmanned probes to each and every planet and larger-than-Pluto object in the Solar System.
It isn't going to happen, but it's a lack of will, not a lack of means.
- First unmanned mission to leave Earth's atmosphere (USSR, Sputnik)
- First manned mission to leave Earth's atmosphere (USSR, Vostok I)
- First permanent manned station beyond Earth's atmosphere (unachieved)
- First unmanned mission to leave Earth orbit (USSR, Luna 2)
- First manned mission to leave Earth orbit (USA, Apollo 11)
- First permanent manned station beyond Earth's orbit (unachieved)
- First unmanned mission to leave Earth-Lunar space (USA, Mariner 2)
- First manned mission to leave Earth-Lunar space (unachieved)
- First permanent manned station beyond Earth-Lunar space (unachieved)
- First unmanned mission to leave solar system (USA, Pioneer 10)
- First manned mission to leave solar system (unachieved)
- First permanent manned station beyond the Solar System (unachieved)
- First unmanned mission to leave Milky Way (unachieved)
- First manned mission to leave Milky Way (unachieved)
- First permanent manned station beyond Milky Way (unachieved)
- First unmanned mission to leave local supergroup of galaxies (unachieved)
- First manned mission to leave local supergroup of galaxies (unachieved)
- First permanent manned station beyond local supergroup of galaxies (unachieved)
Everything else is fluff. Temporary space stations mean as much as the Roanoke colony.Basically, no. The Canadian Government has been using NAFTA as an excuse to pass a lot of things that have absolutely nothing to do with NAFTA requirements, much like the DMCA in the U.S. was wrongly justified on WTO treaty grounds. It's all BS, designed to deflect criticism of bad legislation to treaties that won't ever get repealed since it would be economic suicide to do so.
And the "literature about the Catholic Church's complicity in the the holocaust" does exist. And it bears the same relation to real history that Holocaust denial literature does, or the claims that Hitler was a vegetarian. Check the accolades that Pope Pius XII got for his efforts to save Jews from the men who went on to found the State of Israel if you don't believe me.
I'm an atheist myself, and I think religion has done more harm than good in the world. But misinformation about Christianity's role in WWII is not the way to make that point.
[snort]. BeOS? The OS that had an arbitrary 32MB add-on code limit for no reason than it was easier to write the OS that way than to write it to be robust? At least Windows has the excuse of having its 1.0 version limited by the crufty 8086 memory structure as an excuse for constricting resource limits. What's Be's excuse? It was too much work to design a robust add-on handler?
Under a Life+50 copyright term, of course, it would not have been in the public domain until 1986.
Under a Life+70 copyright term, it would still be under copyright today.
1. Hong Kong
2. Singapore
3. New Zealand
4. Tie: Estonia, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United States.
9. Tie: Australia, Chile, and the United Kingdom
12. Tie: Denmark and Sweeden
14. Finland
15. Tie: Bahrain and Canada
NZ is, according to capitalists, more capitalist than the U.S.
Who are you to object to his imposing a global ethical standard on anyone? If ethics are a totally subjective ideal, then how can his act of imposition be considered wrong or right?
The Al Qaeda prisoners are being held on non-U.S. soil (i.e., territory leased from Cuba) at the request of the internationally-recognized government of the country (Afghanistan) in which they were previous to detention. U.S. law, except as it governs the conduct of U.S. military personnel, is utterly irrelevant. Since Al Qaeda does not, under the Geneva Conventions, qualify as a military organization, they do not qualify as lawful combatants, and thus are not POWs, but merely persons who committed crimes in Afghanistan. Their future disposition is up to the government of Afghanistan, which has jurisdiction; objections to their detention can be made in an Afghani court.
The sole member of Al Qaeda with U.S. citizenship has been extradited to the U.S. to face charges under U.S. law regarding his interactions with other U.S. citizens. He is accordingly being handled by U.S. law. Afghanistan, of course, can request his subsequent return to face charges in Afghanistan; as there was no extradition treaty between the U.S. and Afghanistan at the operative time, it is entirely up to the discretion of the United States as to whether or not it will allow that, just as it was up to Afghanistan to choose whether or not he could be extradited in the first place.
The Taliban prisoners are being treated as POWs, in accordance with their status as lawful combatants, even if the U.S. government isn't officially calling them POWs. Under international law, when the combat is over in Afghanistan (and it isn't, check your newspaper), they should be returned to Afghanistan -- at which point they will be under the jurisdiction of the government of Afghanistan.
Now, yes, because of the circumstances surrounding the reestablishment of an internationally-recognized Afghani government, there may be questions as to whether the Afghani government was acting of its own free will. If it was not, the U.S. arguably violated Afghan soverignty, and the U.N. Charter, and Afghanistan can sue the U.S. under U.S. law.
. . . that is currently available, that is under active development, and is currently worth millions in current contracts with large financial institutions (OS/2).
Calling OS/2 dead is like calling Solaris dead; it may not be on your desktop, but that doesn't mean it ain't still around.
Now that I like. But, as an option, let them pay a lot of the taxes in-kind --
-- by releasing their film and music libraries to the public domain and the trusteeship of the Library of Congress.
Damn straight. I think the Sherman Act should be overturned as unconstitutional, but even I think MS's argument is basically bullshit; there's plenty of common-law precedent for a judge intervening in settlements, even preceeding the Founding. Or does MS think a judge never acted to directly mediate between parties in pre-Revolutionary England?
(No, I'm not a lawyer. But the idea that Constitutional law should be left to professionals is a relatively recent one promulgated by professional lawyers in the name of their own self-interest.)
"you grant Google a worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, non-exclusive license to make, sell, or use the technology related thereto, including but not limited to the software, algorithms, techniques, concepts, etc"
It's pretty similar to standard "open submissions" writing contests. Note the "non-exclusive" -- it means that the coder retains the right to sell the code to somebody else, like Infoseek, or even to release it publicly under the GPL. (Wouldn't that be a kick?)
Google gets some tech for a relatively small cost, and gets to evaluate potential hierees. Coders get a chance at prize money and to get their name and their ability to work in front of a potential employer. I'd certainly expect Google to be interested in hiring anybody who wrote something worth using.
Greed therefore dictates that Google not change its proven successful model in favor of a proven less successful model; if it does, it'll get crushed by the next Google.
Windows: I can pay for a Windows license for what the OS/2-alone license costs! And the Windows programs run faster, since I'm not running OS/2 in the background!
--
AMD: I can pay for a top-of-the-line x86 processor that also does 64 bits!
Sun: I can pay for a top-of-the-line 64-bit processor!
Intel: I can pay for a rather mediocre 64-bit processor that runs x86 code slower than my current computer, or I can pay for a x86 processor that only does 32 bits.
--
The Windows and Mac clipboards work one way. The X clipboard works another. X is, therefore, wrong.
P2P without Napster-like registries, because of inherent scalability problems, is never going to successfully distribute more than a tiny fraction of commercially available works. Maybe you'll be able to grab a few dozen popular movies and a few hundred tunes; that's a subset of what a generalist store like Best Buy has in stock at any moment.