Anarchy is itself a form of democracy, or, democracy is a form of anarchy. If every person decides what to do, then what will happen in a large group of people is decided by the strongest (in violence, persuasion, whatever) group of people. My point is, there does not exist any mode of interaction of a large group of people in which you can be guaranteed to be able to do whatever you want, except for a totalitarian government that you are at the head of.
Actually, in anarchy, you would probably be a lot less likely to hear fuck on the radio. There is (probably) a sufficiently large number of people who desire the word fuck _not_ to be on the radio that as soon as somebody said it there, the people who didn't want to hear it would do whatever they wanted about it (ie, the whole point of anarchy), and probably lynch whoever was responsible.
Why should anyone else decide what you do? Because deciding what you do is what _they_ have decided to do. And after all, why should you decide what they do?
One Unified Country, please. Not "most of us" and "the prudes in the south and Utah".
Sorry, bud, but "most of us" is precisely what being a democracy means. Nothing about being a democracy (or a republic, which is really more descriptive of the US) says that we will be unified. And I value that democratic-ness over nationwide unity any day. Only totalitarian governments ever even get close to "unity"...
In the end, it seems that you don't like states' rights, and I do. I think that states' rights are a very important factor in our country, not only in terms of it reducing the cost to run the nation's government, but also in terms of being able to get things done. If we had to wait for a majority of people to agree to anything before the government could do it, we'd never get anywhere. If state and municipal governments exist, then they can get things done, because they have a much smaller base of people to get to agree to something. I have a suspicion that the US would be in a much worse position today, with regard to the rest of the world, if we did not have states' rights.
Then go found a totalitarian government somewhere. Fact is, in a democratic country, the community (including you) decides everything (well, in a republic, that's everything with a rather large grain of salt, of course). If most decide that they want to hang you for having a mole on the side of your neck, then, unless you can a) convince them otherwise or b) stage a successful revolution (that is, resist them by force), you will be hanged. If most vote that they want smaller divisions of the entire country (ie, towns and cities) to decide on their own how obscenity will be handled within their jurisdiction, and you don't like that, then try to convince enough people to change their minds that the vote would swing the other way, or defend your obscenity by force (that is, stage a revolution). Realistically, those are your options. Getting pissed about it is merely a waste of time and energy, unless it helps you to achieve either of the above (which seems doubtful).
I suppose that you could stage just a city-sized revolution, but there is a quite good chance that if you did that, the larger community (the whole nation) would decide to put a stop to it. Then, in order to succeed, you'd have to either defend yourself well enough to secede or else expand your revolution to the whole country.
The Supreme Court just handed the federal government a big permission slip to overrule community standards in New York or LA or any other big city by applying some small town's standards everywhere.
Or a big permission slip to overrule community standards in any small town by applying some big city's standards everywhere.
If I lived in the UK, I'd definitely be writing my (UK equivalent) senator and representatives about now... I really can't quite imagine something like that actually getting passed, but governments are, unfortunately, not limited by my imagination.
One question is: who would actually be writing these laws that would go through without parliamentary approval, if not parliament?
I just went to digg to look at it. I don't think it is pretty at all... The design makes it more difficult to very quickly and without hunting find the interesting part of the text. Slashdot, while it is not pretty, is elegant.
And so, once again, those users who actually do care about such things like the kernel, the init scripts, etc. get fucked with a chainsaw. Precisely the reason why I use linux is because it is allows me to be concerned with these things, without jumping through 13 hoops and paying out the nose. Don't take that away from me, or the hordes of other users who want the same thing.
True. Of course, one, this is only in a very few places (they have some in France, too, I believe), and two, I don't like it. I don't like it because it potentially takes police cars off the streets. If they are not out there looking to catch speeders, then they won't see the {drunks, reckless drivers, redlight runners, etc.} that they happen to also catch while looking for speeders. OTOH, you could say that if they are not so concentrated on speeders, they have more time and attention for the other things.
and why you can be pulled over and ticketed for driving with faulty equipment, or arrested and jailed for driving under the influence or even just recklessly.
Otherwise this surveillance would appear to be basically random (targetting some people who make payments like this but not others), in which case they may as well just close their eyes, open a phone book and point to get their latest victim.
Speeding ticket surveillance (and accordingly, pretty much all other moving violation surveillance) has always been basically random. It is perfectly plausible to drive 110 mph all the way from, say, Dallas to Austin without seeing a single police car, and then when you get into town, you hit 5mph over the posted limit (the sign for which happens not to be terribly obvious and visible), and you get a ticket. Or vice versa, drive wildly in town, and 5 over on the highway, ticket. Or some people speed all the time all their lives, and practically never get a ticket.
If speeding surveillance is that random, why should we think that homeland security would not be so?
My high school building did a quite good job of blocking cell phone signals. It makes me wonder what was in the walls... copper-filled asbestos anyone?
Ah, if only I could remember where I left my mod points, I'd give you some. Forget my own head I will... Anyway, I guess I can scribble an IOU on an old receipt or something...
I think that for the suits, it might not be that they can be held legally accountable, but there is someone to blame, even if only internally. ie, Word doesn't work, suit thinks "Curse that Gates character!", but say Abiword doesn't work, they don't know who to hate. Or, when I go work on my grandmother's win98 box, I sit there and think "Gates, you're to blame for all of this." I'm holding MS accountable, but not in a legal sense.
Hmmm... this post doesn't make all that much sense... I hope it gets the point across anyway. I'm sick, and I just woke up after dreaming about flying cars and dorm rooms that were underwater, and heat detectors orbiting the earth and glowing red...
The problem is that we have no way of doing an experiment to determine whether the climate change is caused by humans, or would have occured more or less identically had we not dumped CO2 into the atmosphere. This is because we have no way of observing what the climate would be today had we not polluted. That is, we have no control for our experiment. Any 3rd grader doing a science fair project can tell you that you have to have a control in an experiment. Thus, simply saying "this is warmest century on record" etc. does not amount to a scientific statement that humans are at fault in the slightest. Neither does it acquit us, of course. In order to make some sort of scientific statement, we would more or less have to model the earth's climate over the last n hundred (or even thousand) years, both with and without human pollution. The modelling with human pollution is necessary as a check on the quality of the simulation. If it gets the right results (ie, predicts what we have observed), then we might be able to trust the no pollution modelling.
Until and unless we can do some sort of legitimate comparison between 2006 with a couple centuries of human pollution and 2006 without a couple centuries of human pollution, claiming that humans have caused "global warming" is not science. That is not to say that it is wrong, but merely that it is not science.
No, I actually don't think that the tevatron will be shut down for a good long while after the LHC starts. I could be wrong, but there is certainly useful physics that can be done at Fermilab, even when LHC is running. I mean, there are lots of perfectly fine and useful accelerators other than tevatron currently running, DESY, SLAC, CESR, RHIC, etc.
Yeah, nobody goes in the collision hall or tunnel when we have beam. The issue is occasional, but unpredictable, beam scraping, on collimators and such. When that occurs, for only a few nanoseconds generally, the dose (I don't recall the actual exact dose at the moment) is high enough that 50% of people receiving that radiation dose will die within 30 days. Or so I was told at radiological worker training. Speaking of which... I'll have to renew that sometime soon... garrrrr....
Yeah, the big shutdown (weeks and weeks long)... I want to say that is coming up in March perhaps... I just woke up though, and I'm late for class, so I'm not going to look it up just now.
or "gosh, I really want to play with this"
on any level ( in language or out ) should, generally, be
disallowed.
Except that "Gosh, I really want to play with this" is, especially among hacker types, probably the single most powerful motivator there is. Disallow that, and not only do you lose out on the drive that hackers have to play with something cool, but they get annoyed and disgusted, and probably wind up working less hard on the things that they are told to work on.
Hmmm... The radioactivity generally does not pose a serious problem... I think that when we do cause parts of the detector to become radioactive (eg by beam scraping) that it dissipates fairly quickly. It is intense while it lasts, but brief. However, I am not an expert on this. Also, it is generally not too difficult, at least in the tracking chambers, to tell whether a particle originated at the collision vertex or somewhere else. Now, in the calorimeters and the muon chambers, you could get spurious bits of energy deposited and not know whether it was from cosmic rays, local radioactivity, or interesting particles.
The tevatron gets shut down quite often. We had a long (2-week or so) shutdown a couple of weeks ago. Some o-ring seal got old and leaked, and so an access had to be made to repair it. Thing is, large parts of the tevatron are kept at liquid helium temp (for superconductivity) during running, and so warming the thing up and then later cooling it back down are often the longest parts of a shutdown.
And of course, the tevatron and supporting accelerators go through a regular cycle of building up a store of protons and antiprotons, and then using them until the luminosity gets too low to be worthwhile to keep running it. Then, we kick that bunch of ps and pbars off (basically redirect them into a large chunk of metal, I believe) (this is called a quench), and start a new store.
I'm currently working on a similar project at Fermilab. The eXtremely Fast Tracker (XFT) is a set of electronics which decides, once every 396 nanoseconds, whether or not the particle tracks that we see represent an interesting event that we want to keep, or a boring one that we don't want to bother putting on disk (well, actually tape). We are in the process of upgrading it, because the collision rate has been increasing (technically, the luminosity has been increasing), and the old XFT is not up to handling the now much higher track density. My job is writing software to test the system as it is installed.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious, how exactly can one's head be decapitated?
Anarchy is itself a form of democracy, or, democracy is a form of anarchy. If every person decides what to do, then what will happen in a large group of people is decided by the strongest (in violence, persuasion, whatever) group of people. My point is, there does not exist any mode of interaction of a large group of people in which you can be guaranteed to be able to do whatever you want, except for a totalitarian government that you are at the head of.
Actually, in anarchy, you would probably be a lot less likely to hear fuck on the radio. There is (probably) a sufficiently large number of people who desire the word fuck _not_ to be on the radio that as soon as somebody said it there, the people who didn't want to hear it would do whatever they wanted about it (ie, the whole point of anarchy), and probably lynch whoever was responsible.
Why should anyone else decide what you do? Because deciding what you do is what _they_ have decided to do. And after all, why should you decide what they do?
One Unified Country, please. Not "most of us" and "the prudes in the south and Utah".
Sorry, bud, but "most of us" is precisely what being a democracy means. Nothing about being a democracy (or a republic, which is really more descriptive of the US) says that we will be unified. And I value that democratic-ness over nationwide unity any day. Only totalitarian governments ever even get close to "unity"...
In the end, it seems that you don't like states' rights, and I do. I think that states' rights are a very important factor in our country, not only in terms of it reducing the cost to run the nation's government, but also in terms of being able to get things done. If we had to wait for a majority of people to agree to anything before the government could do it, we'd never get anywhere. If state and municipal governments exist, then they can get things done, because they have a much smaller base of people to get to agree to something. I have a suspicion that the US would be in a much worse position today, with regard to the rest of the world, if we did not have states' rights.
Then go found a totalitarian government somewhere. Fact is, in a democratic country, the community (including you) decides everything (well, in a republic, that's everything with a rather large grain of salt, of course). If most decide that they want to hang you for having a mole on the side of your neck, then, unless you can a) convince them otherwise or b) stage a successful revolution (that is, resist them by force), you will be hanged. If most vote that they want smaller divisions of the entire country (ie, towns and cities) to decide on their own how obscenity will be handled within their jurisdiction, and you don't like that, then try to convince enough people to change their minds that the vote would swing the other way, or defend your obscenity by force (that is, stage a revolution). Realistically, those are your options. Getting pissed about it is merely a waste of time and energy, unless it helps you to achieve either of the above (which seems doubtful).
I suppose that you could stage just a city-sized revolution, but there is a quite good chance that if you did that, the larger community (the whole nation) would decide to put a stop to it. Then, in order to succeed, you'd have to either defend yourself well enough to secede or else expand your revolution to the whole country.
The Supreme Court just handed the federal government a big permission slip to overrule community standards in New York or LA or any other big city by applying some small town's standards everywhere.
Or a big permission slip to overrule community standards in any small town by applying some big city's standards everywhere.
If I lived in the UK, I'd definitely be writing my (UK equivalent) senator and representatives about now... I really can't quite imagine something like that actually getting passed, but governments are, unfortunately, not limited by my imagination.
One question is: who would actually be writing these laws that would go through without parliamentary approval, if not parliament?
I just went to digg to look at it. I don't think it is pretty at all... The design makes it more difficult to very quickly and without hunting find the interesting part of the text. Slashdot, while it is not pretty, is elegant.
Z-machine? You mean like Zork?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine
</pun>
And so, once again, those users who actually do care about such things like the kernel, the init scripts, etc. get fucked with a chainsaw. Precisely the reason why I use linux is because it is allows me to be concerned with these things, without jumping through 13 hoops and paying out the nose. Don't take that away from me, or the hordes of other users who want the same thing.
I hate when people make statements sound like questions and vice versa?
True. Of course, one, this is only in a very few places (they have some in France, too, I believe), and two, I don't like it. I don't like it because it potentially takes police cars off the streets. If they are not out there looking to catch speeders, then they won't see the {drunks, reckless drivers, redlight runners, etc.} that they happen to also catch while looking for speeders. OTOH, you could say that if they are not so concentrated on speeders, they have more time and attention for the other things.
You must be new here.
and why you can be pulled over and ticketed for driving with faulty equipment, or arrested and jailed for driving under the influence or even just recklessly.
Otherwise this surveillance would appear to be basically random (targetting some people who make payments like this but not others), in which case they may as well just close their eyes, open a phone book and point to get their latest victim.
Speeding ticket surveillance (and accordingly, pretty much all other moving violation surveillance) has always been basically random. It is perfectly plausible to drive 110 mph all the way from, say, Dallas to Austin without seeing a single police car, and then when you get into town, you hit 5mph over the posted limit (the sign for which happens not to be terribly obvious and visible), and you get a ticket. Or vice versa, drive wildly in town, and 5 over on the highway, ticket. Or some people speed all the time all their lives, and practically never get a ticket.
If speeding surveillance is that random, why should we think that homeland security would not be so?
My high school building did a quite good job of blocking cell phone signals. It makes me wonder what was in the walls... copper-filled asbestos anyone?
I'm on a scavenger hunt for rhetorical fallacies, and now I can check off "ad hominem"! Thanks!
It sounds to me like they've reinvented the so-called "electrical connector" and/or "wireless adapter".
Ah, if only I could remember where I left my mod points, I'd give you some. Forget my own head I will... Anyway, I guess I can scribble an IOU on an old receipt or something...
CURE-alpha is an MP3 player that supposedly emits alpha waves which calm and rejuvinate the brain.
Sounds like AutoZen
I think that for the suits, it might not be that they can be held legally accountable, but there is someone to blame, even if only internally. ie, Word doesn't work, suit thinks "Curse that Gates character!", but say Abiword doesn't work, they don't know who to hate. Or, when I go work on my grandmother's win98 box, I sit there and think "Gates, you're to blame for all of this." I'm holding MS accountable, but not in a legal sense.
Hmmm... this post doesn't make all that much sense... I hope it gets the point across anyway. I'm sick, and I just woke up after dreaming about flying cars and dorm rooms that were underwater, and heat detectors orbiting the earth and glowing red...
The problem is that we have no way of doing an experiment to determine whether the climate change is caused by humans, or would have occured more or less identically had we not dumped CO2 into the atmosphere. This is because we have no way of observing what the climate would be today had we not polluted. That is, we have no control for our experiment. Any 3rd grader doing a science fair project can tell you that you have to have a control in an experiment. Thus, simply saying "this is warmest century on record" etc. does not amount to a scientific statement that humans are at fault in the slightest. Neither does it acquit us, of course. In order to make some sort of scientific statement, we would more or less have to model the earth's climate over the last n hundred (or even thousand) years, both with and without human pollution. The modelling with human pollution is necessary as a check on the quality of the simulation. If it gets the right results (ie, predicts what we have observed), then we might be able to trust the no pollution modelling.
Until and unless we can do some sort of legitimate comparison between 2006 with a couple centuries of human pollution and 2006 without a couple centuries of human pollution, claiming that humans have caused "global warming" is not science. That is not to say that it is wrong, but merely that it is not science.
No, I actually don't think that the tevatron will be shut down for a good long while after the LHC starts. I could be wrong, but there is certainly useful physics that can be done at Fermilab, even when LHC is running. I mean, there are lots of perfectly fine and useful accelerators other than tevatron currently running, DESY, SLAC, CESR, RHIC, etc.
Yeah, nobody goes in the collision hall or tunnel when we have beam. The issue is occasional, but unpredictable, beam scraping, on collimators and such. When that occurs, for only a few nanoseconds generally, the dose (I don't recall the actual exact dose at the moment) is high enough that 50% of people receiving that radiation dose will die within 30 days. Or so I was told at radiological worker training. Speaking of which... I'll have to renew that sometime soon... garrrrr....
Yeah, the big shutdown (weeks and weeks long)... I want to say that is coming up in March perhaps... I just woke up though, and I'm late for class, so I'm not going to look it up just now.
or "gosh, I really want to play with this" on any level ( in language or out ) should, generally, be disallowed.
Except that "Gosh, I really want to play with this" is, especially among hacker types, probably the single most powerful motivator there is. Disallow that, and not only do you lose out on the drive that hackers have to play with something cool, but they get annoyed and disgusted, and probably wind up working less hard on the things that they are told to work on.
Hmmm... The radioactivity generally does not pose a serious problem... I think that when we do cause parts of the detector to become radioactive (eg by beam scraping) that it dissipates fairly quickly. It is intense while it lasts, but brief. However, I am not an expert on this. Also, it is generally not too difficult, at least in the tracking chambers, to tell whether a particle originated at the collision vertex or somewhere else. Now, in the calorimeters and the muon chambers, you could get spurious bits of energy deposited and not know whether it was from cosmic rays, local radioactivity, or interesting particles.
o utside for live information, or at this page: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/news06/update.html for a log of recent activity.
The tevatron gets shut down quite often. We had a long (2-week or so) shutdown a couple of weeks ago. Some o-ring seal got old and leaked, and so an access had to be made to repair it. Thing is, large parts of the tevatron are kept at liquid helium temp (for superconductivity) during running, and so warming the thing up and then later cooling it back down are often the longest parts of a shutdown.
And of course, the tevatron and supporting accelerators go through a regular cycle of building up a store of protons and antiprotons, and then using them until the luminosity gets too low to be worthwhile to keep running it. Then, we kick that bunch of ps and pbars off (basically redirect them into a large chunk of metal, I believe) (this is called a quench), and start a new store.
You can look at this page: http://www-bd.fnal.gov/notifyservlet/www?project=
I'm currently working on a similar project at Fermilab. The eXtremely Fast Tracker (XFT) is a set of electronics which decides, once every 396 nanoseconds, whether or not the particle tracks that we see represent an interesting event that we want to keep, or a boring one that we don't want to bother putting on disk (well, actually tape). We are in the process of upgrading it, because the collision rate has been increasing (technically, the luminosity has been increasing), and the old XFT is not up to handling the now much higher track density. My job is writing software to test the system as it is installed.