I remember when there were more gopher sites than websites. Gopher's licensing wasn't bad, but they reserved the right to change it, so HTTP took over because it was free.
Hyperlinking isn't rocket science; there would have been a free implementation, and it would have won.
ADSI is Analog Display Services Interface, an interface standard for extending the interface on analog phones. So there are phones that support a standard interface as mentioned in the first point above, they're just hard to find. With an ADSI phone and an Asterisk server, you oould just conceivably do this by bringing in your landline to Asterisk and then back out to your analog sets with whatever additional info you chose. Manufacturers don't really talk about whether their phones are ADSI compliant, and there's very little documentation on ADSI. I personally gave up on this project because of the difficulty of finding a cheap ADSI phone, and the cost of going analog-VoIP-analog.
I think the process of reading a lot of online forums has damaged my spelling. In order to read Slashdot, you have to be able to scan over random misspellings and typos. Consequently, they don't jump out at me in my own writing anymore. That's my excuse for my own deterioration, anyway.
I cold forged mine from a silver quarter. My wife asked me to leave it a little rough so you could tell it's hand made. I like to think of it as symbolizing putting myself and that same work into our relationship. The ring shows wear, but coin silver wears very well. It isn't perfect or indestructible, but it's strong and beautiful.
I think he glosses over the possibility that the great filter lies between the origin of life and our current state. Thus the closer any life we find on Mars to our own, the worse for us. But I have my own doomsday power hypothesis.
I think there is a final great filter, and that it is ahead of us. Technology increases power, and people use power. Ultimately it is likely that the power to destroy all life on earth, or at least all intelligent life, will exist, and someone will use that power. Will we leave earth before doomsday power exists, or is used? That seems vanishingly unlikely, since doomsday power looks a lot closer than meaningful space travel.
Perhaps I am wrong, and no madman could acquire such power.
I like your example, but I have known people to routinely purchase a newspaper from a rack, and then place the entire stack of papers on top of the rack as a gift to passersby. Check out Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman.
Perhaps some conscientous person who was going to purchase a paper might put in a quarter and replace the rest of the stack. I never saw that and I must admit that at the time, it didn't occur to me.
Two separate problems here. Some people are just scum. There are too many of these people in any group. Some people need rudimentary ethics education. These are the interesting ones.
It's hard to imagine that people just don't think about ethics, but from what I've seen, much of the problem is exactly that. I've seen people who act badly but later with a little education, they actually work hard to behave well. Working with High School students and junior IT staff I found them ethically naive (to be generous) but remarkably amenable to argument and explanation on the ethical problems we face.
I really don't think much of human nature so I'm not surprised much by simple dishonesty, but working with a few of these kids, I was surprised at how well they learned to behave. Of course, some folks just acted badly anyway. Some people are just born sh*ts.
While I believe the quoted (>1/3) figure, I also think that with just a little effort, those of us who are professionals can improve it substantially. Listen to your cow-orkers. Their stories will probably illuminate their attitude.
The other thing that I find interesting is that it is easier to identify the ethically naive than the fundamentally dishonest. That's why those personal stories are so telling.
This is the best Asterisk sales pitch I've ever seen. Nortel is afraid. The big equipment vendors can barely sell to their captive customers, and they know it.
We had millions in Avaya equipment. My migration plan was to introduce Asterisk servers to perform a few specialized functions, interfacing with our existing dozen Definity switches and use that to leverage our way towards Asterisk. We'd keep the Definity PBXs for running large offices, but use the Asterisk systems for VoIP integration and offload more & more functionality to Asterisk. The Lucent/Definity stuff is great but almost twice as much as Nortel.
I pissed off the new CIO though, so I was replaced by someone who wanted to buy a thousand VoIP adapters to use with consumer VoIP accounts. It all works out though. He's smart so he'll learn (at the company's expense) and I don't have to deal with that CIO anymore. Everybody gets what they deserve.
Typos look wron, but speech recognition errors are more supple.
Oh, and 1 in 20 words being wrong is astonishingly bad if you've ever actually tried to use SR.
This is an AI problem of exactly the sort that humans excel at, and we still screw it up regularly. It's hilarious that people seem to have so little respect for the difficulty of the problem.
Well, I did sumbmit it as funny. I didn't use the word poisoning in my original sumbission. The subject was originally "Yes I am trying to piss you off."
I'm just cranky because I just got done spending a couple of years of my life with major contractors who made every single job difficult. These particular guys are an assholes, and I'm sorry to say, that seems to be the rule. I also understand that in that environment, it definitely helps to be pushy and confrontational, and I was trying to be funny.
What do they have in common with internet trolls? They both seem to enjoy pissing other people off for no good reason. If I have to explain it it isn't funny. Probably not funny in the first place.
I'm used to blowing off comments about my profession (geek/sysadm/IT) and didn't think contractors would be so thin skinned.
They use the word "paradigm" perfectly well. If you use the actual definition of the word, which is essentially synonymous with exemplar, it works fine.
Kuhn's definition isn't the primary definition, and Wikipedia is far from authoritative. There are authoritative sources, including a selection of dictionaries at onelook.com. This isn't a Kuhninan discussion. They don't mention him, and they aren't talking about change over time. Let's just assume they mean to use the primary definition of the word, say as described in the OED.
It's fun to redfine words to match your ideology, but be careful not to turn into the provincial fool who proves that reading one book doesn't make you literate. You need some perspective; a little respect for the complexity of language, please. Kuhn didn't suddenly erase over five hundred years of usage.
Of course, everyone else who prefers Kuhn's definition will claim his right to redfine the word, but the fact is that the old definition is still perfectly respectable, so you guys are welcome to have your ideological circle jerk. Just don't get any on me.
Why don't they mention the primary reasons the Semantic Web is uninteresting?
1. All the current meta-tag abusers will dilute the Semantic Web as soon as it is profitable to do so. Currently the Semantic Web is akin to the WWW prior to Mosaic. Neato. Not as useful as Gopher but cool.
1.1 Accurate and meaningful description is hard even if you want to do it right. Is writing documentation easy, or hard?
Finally, as described by Shirky, the idea of chaining these tags together for a larger insight is simply laughable.
It's misleading because when I'm searching, I have particular keywords in mind. Thus it appears that the pages I want should've been labeled by the author with that word. Unfortunately, If I'm searching instead of going directly to Wikipedia, I'm probably looking for information that isn't an obvious primary tag.
I wish there were more support, especially as my sons get older. I guess we have to do it ourselves.
The stigma and disbelief are strange. Nobody seems able to believe or even imagine that I was badly bullied. If I ever mention it (which I rarely do) it's to a good friend, and in a joking context, because nobody seems to know what to do with it. They either don't believe or won't admit that things could be that bad. Some friends have told me of their own experiences, and that's really the best they can do.
I wish survivors was too extreme. It isn't. My father's baby sister was killed at the age of three by older playmates. It was an accident, not that they hit her in the head with a rock, but that she died. I took on their fear, which was no help for me with bullying. I'm still terrified of physical violence, but fortunately, as an adult, I'm able to avoid it.
For those of you who are or were bullied, as bad as it is, there is hope. It is essential that you know that the bullying really won't last forever. Even if other people don't believe you, as you become an adult, you can take control of almost all of these things. You can learn to pretend to be extraverted when you need to, to find good people with similar experiences, and to realize that you aren't in school anymore, and those sadists can't hurt you anymore.
Ultimately, I don't know what really changed everything, either the beginning or the end, but I went from being a well-liked kid with a girlfriend in first grade, to the bottom of the food chain, finally to a place apart in high school where I finally got socialized to my peers.
Through most of school, I was really at the bottom of the food chain, where the other victims won't associate with you lest you imperil their tenuous hopes of status, or even pick on you to improve their own. Some of the teachers even despised me. One teacher told the whole class that it was my fault that I'd been literally tied up by my peers and was late back from recess. He liked to point out to the class that I was asking for trouble. I take little solace that he was eventually fired for throwing a chair at a student.
I was lucky. Things changed in high school. I started over in a new town, in a magnet school where there were people even stranger than me. I started hanging out with a lot of them and playing with swords and fencing at school. I also tried to figure out how not to act like a victim. At the same time, I hit 6' tall. I wish I knew exactly what made the difference, but I only know that things got better. There were still the normal conflicts one encounters, plenty of situations to be avoided, and no shortage of pain, but I had friends, and I wasn't beaten up anymore.
I'm more than fine now, with a healthy earned contempt for popular opinion. Since I just might be in a position to offer some support to someone else, I'll resist the temptation to post this as AC.
I also love that the truck dieseled (ran on) when he shut it off. Thanks to the incredibly cool MSG for pointing that out to me. Perhaps I didn't notice it at the time because it was a common bug in US made gasoline engines of the era.
Not enough to poison someone, almost impossible to extract, etc. Poor United Nuclear will probably be run out of business just like everyone else who helps amateur scientists.
1. Let it be forgotten. Read Borges short story Funes the Memorious to know why.
2. There will be enough data in most formats for archaeological purposes, since archaeologists are interested largely in daily life, and decrypting the data is essentially a linguistic and cryptographic problem, both of which become tractable with enough data.
3. Most of what needs preserving will be preserved one way or another.
3. Time capusules are almost always pointless and self serving. "We who dedicate this building want you to have this symbol of our best hopes and intentions."
What's not there? Real history. There are no extant copies of the city newspapers (Tulsa Tribune) that called for a lynching, and started the Tulsa race riots. All destroyed or thrown away.
It looks to me like that law delineates specific circumstances where the parent is responsible. Lacking other laws, the implication is that outside those specific circumstances the parent is not responsible.
Damned by ignorance. That's the atheist's lot. The faithful redefine both atheism and morality to suit their purposes and argue from that.
"Morality requires that there be things that are inherently good and things that are inherently bad. True atheism rejects these concepts, as they deny that there is a higher power than the natural state of the world."
No, and No.
Let's look to Wikipedia for a more reasonable definition of morality:
"Morality is a system of principles and judgments based on cultural, religious, and philosophical concepts and beliefs, by which humans determine whether given actions are right or wrong."
Nothing about inherent good and evil there. Atheists have values which are no less valid just because we didn't get those values from the authorized representative of God (even indirectly.) You complain that atheists don't explain their beliefs to you. It's no wonder, but I will try. Since atheists aren't a homogenous group, I can only explain my own beliefs, but I'm a pretty standard-issue humanist in these. Allow me to proceed from first principles.
My values originate in my experiences. My experiences include empathy, pleasure (inherently good) and pain (inherently bad.) Empathy allows me to realize that those around me have similar experiences of the world. My experience demonstrates that suffering pain may produce benefit in the future, and that pursuit of pleasure may produce pain, so in addition to considering the effect of my behavior upon those for whom I feel empathy, I need to consider the future effects of my immedeate behavior. You can pretty much derive all my morality from this. Golden rule, altruism, truthfulness, honor, etcetera.
Was my morality influenced by religion? Sure, and I can see Orion in the stars, but my ideas about those stars are more than the product of ancient religion. If our values often overlap, it only flatters those religious laws that actually are good ideas. Still, we don't correspond exactly. I'll never be OK with slavery or killing infidels, unlike most of the Gods in the world.
It's always odd when someone argues morality with me, claiming that it's impossible to be moral unless you accept your morality as received wisdom without question. To me, there is a moral imperative to take responsibility for your own behavior and beliefs. To call something bad, one should then be able to say why it is so, or else you're just calling names.
This is all stuff you would have gotten in an entry-level philosophy class, but you haven't bothered, since your absolute beliefs protect you from thought. Still, perhaps someone reading this will be inspired to take a philosophy class. I don't mean to change anyone's beliefs, but perhaps you might not treat us atheists so badly out of sheer ignorance.
Read some philosophy. Look into the difference between external and internal motivation.
Unfortunately, these are exactly the reasons people are prejudiced against atheists. Those absolute rules make religious people paint atheists as nihilists or worse. This is why I rarely argue religion. When the folks come to the door in their Sunday best, I wish them good weather and thank them for their kindness. Arguing will do neither of us any good. That's my morality. Treat people well, even if they are different from me.
PETA gets much of their support from people who are opposed to gratuitous cruelty to animals, but the vast majority of people who support PETA are misguided (cynically and intentionally by PETA.) PETA's reason for being is "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." PETA truly equates animals with people. They're evil. Equating the life of a rat with that of a child is simply wrong. Understand this: PETA are fighting against all "exploitation" of animals. In fact, their behavior implies that humans are less valuable to them than animals. Their views are simply sociopathic.
CO2 sucks for euthanasia. There are lots of other things out there. My dad worked in a neuropsych lab. The chemical cocktail they used for Euthanasia included barbiturates and a local anaesthetic. He wanted some for himself in case he was ever terminal and in inescapable pain. That's as humane as it gets.
Still, the animal rights folks got lab animal medicine at that major research institution shut down. I know too many people who'd be dead if it weren't for the use of animals in medicine to have any respect for PETA.
Do you want to be a college or a university? Websense made perfect sense at the primary - grade 12 level where I contracted. While traffic shaping may be a neccessary evil, WebSense for a university is asinine.
I don't mean to be insulting, but is this a religious institution or military college? Seriously, unless your education merely serves an ideology, this makes no sense. If academics are primary, restrictions like this are silly. Sorry, but there is important information at the periphery, besides the terrible collateral damage these services incur. Like anatomy, breast cancer still exists even if you can't see any breasts.
If your CIO's peers are at places like Oral Roberts University (where boys are not allowed to have long hair) or military institutions (where boys are not allowed to have long hair) then he's probably right. That paternalistic world is the exception, not the rule.
forced landings are dangerous
on
Rocket Men
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· Score: 1
I always thought the worst danger was that you had less than 40 seconds of fuel. That's barely enough time to pick a safe landing spot. It's essentially a forced landing every time. Not safe.
So, what do you do besides fly around a stadium for less than a minute before the device becomes dead weight? Well, that's dull, and useless except for advertising or Bond flicks.
You have to land, somewhere appropriate before you run out of fuel. It shouldn't be hard, but then again, imagine a helicopter with the same constraints. Would you fly it? I wouldn't, and helis can even autogyro a little, unlike a rocket belt which will drop like a stone. That is inherently unsafe. Get in your car with about 40 seconds of gas. Now drive somewhere, stop and get out, before you run out of fuel.
Maybe there are other dangers, but a forced landing is not something I'd ever ask for.
Are there other dangers worse than the forced landing problem? Wow. I'm in no hurry to try a rocket belt. Urban base jumping sounds safer and more fun. Jumping off a tall building in a city with a chute/parasail isn't exactly safe, and it pisses the cops off, but I'd rather be in jail than pancaked with a rocket pack through me like a stake in the ground.
I used to support Point of Sale systems at a local sporting goods chain, and often would be at the store working with the manager hanging around learning what they could (always appreciated.) I had a great boss, and she gave me a graceful technique for avoiding shoulder surfing in that situation. You have to be able to touch type your passwords.
Talk to the person, and look them in the eye while you type your password.
Not gonna work for all situations (ATM Pin) but incredibly effective where there is only one person who really presents a risk, and really, how often are you working in a crowd?
OK, Classrooms just suck, so you have to rely on flying fingers sometimes, but I did find it to be useful when "that kid" was hanging around the same way. "That kid" could be a proto-geek, or a hacker wannabe, but I always did what I could to educate and make conversation. Hey, you're interested? Cool! Kids (even teens) respond really well to being treated like people. And, the conversation made it easy to type my password without _him_ seeing it. No need to tempt 'em.
OK, so it's offtopic, but wind isn't the only backyard power source. Wind is fairly impractical for me (geography, maintenance, impact on my neighbors on a small lot in a development) but living in a part of California that is essentially irrigated desert I'm very curious about solar panels to take the edge off of the energy bills and use the energy that's heating my roof. Solar hot water preheating could be fun, but I just don't use that much hot water, so let's stick with the extremely useful electricity.
I'm very interested in where the smart buys are in solar electric panels, but comparison info isn't exactly easy to find. I'm just interested in how we could start out small with solar electric. Any good surplus buys out there? Where can I start? I find companies that want to sell b2b or bid on jobs but not post prices, and I see single panels on Amazon for $1000/130watts. Is this what you get? Are the better buys in amorphous, polycrystalline, or monocrystalline?
For those of you who are constitutionally incapable of the question as asked: Yes, we're pursuing any number of conservation measures, e.g. house is quite well insulated, mostly high efficency flourescent fixtures, use fans, wear sweaters when it's cold, etc. No we can't move to wherever else you think I should live, because good schools and proximity to family is important for our children, as is stability.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you got a citation for this? I had heard that Matthew Brady was famous for traveling with the armies. I'd love to read more about it.
I remember when there were more gopher sites than websites. Gopher's licensing wasn't bad, but they reserved the right to change it, so HTTP took over because it was free.
Hyperlinking isn't rocket science; there would have been a free implementation, and it would have won.
ADSI is Analog Display Services Interface, an interface standard for extending the interface on analog phones. So there are phones that support a standard interface as mentioned in the first point above, they're just hard to find. With an ADSI phone and an Asterisk server, you oould just conceivably do this by bringing in your landline to Asterisk and then back out to your analog sets with whatever additional info you chose. Manufacturers don't really talk about whether their phones are ADSI compliant, and there's very little documentation on ADSI. I personally gave up on this project because of the difficulty of finding a cheap ADSI phone, and the cost of going analog-VoIP-analog.
I think the process of reading a lot of online forums has damaged my spelling. In order to read Slashdot, you have to be able to scan over random misspellings and typos. Consequently, they don't jump out at me in my own writing anymore. That's my excuse for my own deterioration, anyway.
I cold forged mine from a silver quarter. My wife asked me to leave it a little rough so you could tell it's hand made. I like to think of it as symbolizing putting myself and that same work into our relationship. The ring shows wear, but coin silver wears very well. It isn't perfect or indestructible, but it's strong and beautiful.
I think he glosses over the possibility that the great filter lies between the origin of life and our current state. Thus the closer any life we find on Mars to our own, the worse for us. But I have my own doomsday power hypothesis.
I think there is a final great filter, and that it is ahead of us. Technology increases power, and people use power. Ultimately it is likely that the power to destroy all life on earth, or at least all intelligent life, will exist, and someone will use that power. Will we leave earth before doomsday power exists, or is used? That seems vanishingly unlikely, since doomsday power looks a lot closer than meaningful space travel.
Perhaps I am wrong, and no madman could acquire such power.
I like your example, but I have known people to routinely purchase a newspaper from a rack, and then place the entire stack of papers on top of the rack as a gift to passersby. Check out Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman.
Perhaps some conscientous person who was going to purchase a paper might put in a quarter and replace the rest of the stack. I never saw that and I must admit that at the time, it didn't occur to me.
I call it the catbird seat, Brian Pinhead.
Break it and you shall pay dearly valet person.
http://home.jps.net/~lsnyder/9_tick.html
Two separate problems here.
Some people are just scum. There are too many of these people in any group.
Some people need rudimentary ethics education. These are the interesting ones.
It's hard to imagine that people just don't think about ethics, but from what I've seen, much of the problem is exactly that. I've seen people who act badly but later with a little education, they actually work hard to behave well. Working with High School students and junior IT staff I found them ethically naive (to be generous) but remarkably amenable to argument and explanation on the ethical problems we face.
I really don't think much of human nature so I'm not surprised much by simple dishonesty, but working with a few of these kids, I was surprised at how well they learned to behave. Of course, some folks just acted badly anyway. Some people are just born sh*ts.
While I believe the quoted (>1/3) figure, I also think that with just a little effort, those of us who are professionals can improve it substantially. Listen to your cow-orkers. Their stories will probably illuminate their attitude.
The other thing that I find interesting is that it is easier to identify the ethically naive than the fundamentally dishonest. That's why those personal stories are so telling.
This is the best Asterisk sales pitch I've ever seen. Nortel is afraid. The big equipment vendors can barely sell to their captive customers, and they know it.
We had millions in Avaya equipment. My migration plan was to introduce Asterisk servers to perform a few specialized functions, interfacing with our existing dozen Definity switches and use that to leverage our way towards Asterisk. We'd keep the Definity PBXs for running large offices, but use the Asterisk systems for VoIP integration and offload more & more functionality to Asterisk. The Lucent/Definity stuff is great but almost twice as much as Nortel.
I pissed off the new CIO though, so I was replaced by someone who wanted to buy a thousand VoIP adapters to use with consumer VoIP accounts. It all works out though. He's smart so he'll learn (at the company's expense) and I don't have to deal with that CIO anymore. Everybody gets what they deserve.
Need a telecom manager in the IE? Try me.
Typos look wron, but speech recognition errors are more supple.
Oh, and 1 in 20 words being wrong is astonishingly bad if you've ever actually tried to use SR.
This is an AI problem of exactly the sort that humans excel at, and we still screw it up regularly. It's hilarious that people seem to have so little respect for the difficulty of the problem.
Well, I did sumbmit it as funny. I didn't use the word poisoning in my original sumbission. The subject was originally "Yes I am trying to piss you off."
I'm just cranky because I just got done spending a couple of years of my life with major contractors who made every single job difficult. These particular guys are an assholes, and I'm sorry to say, that seems to be the rule. I also understand that in that environment, it definitely helps to be pushy and confrontational, and I was trying to be funny.
What do they have in common with internet trolls? They both seem to enjoy pissing other people off for no good reason. If I have to explain it it isn't funny. Probably not funny in the first place.
I'm used to blowing off comments about my profession (geek/sysadm/IT) and didn't think contractors would be so thin skinned.
They use the word "paradigm" perfectly well. If you use the actual definition of the word, which is essentially synonymous with exemplar, it works fine.
Kuhn's definition isn't the primary definition, and Wikipedia is far from authoritative. There are authoritative sources, including a selection of dictionaries at onelook.com. This isn't a Kuhninan discussion. They don't mention him, and they aren't talking about change over time. Let's just assume they mean to use the primary definition of the word, say as described in the OED.
It's fun to redfine words to match your ideology, but be careful not to turn into the provincial fool who proves that reading one book doesn't make you literate. You need some perspective; a little respect for the complexity of language, please. Kuhn didn't suddenly erase over five hundred years of usage.
Of course, everyone else who prefers Kuhn's definition will claim his right to redfine the word, but the fact is that the old definition is still perfectly respectable, so you guys are welcome to have your ideological circle jerk. Just don't get any on me.
Why don't they mention the primary reasons the Semantic Web is uninteresting?
1. All the current meta-tag abusers will dilute the Semantic Web as soon as it is profitable to do so. Currently the Semantic Web is akin to the WWW prior to Mosaic. Neato. Not as useful as Gopher but cool.
1.1 Accurate and meaningful description is hard even if you want to do it right. Is writing documentation easy, or hard?
Finally, as described by Shirky, the idea of chaining these tags together for a larger insight is simply laughable.
It's misleading because when I'm searching, I have particular keywords in mind. Thus it appears that the pages I want should've been labeled by the author with that word. Unfortunately, If I'm searching instead of going directly to Wikipedia, I'm probably looking for information that isn't an obvious primary tag.
I wish there were more support, especially as my sons get older. I guess we have to do it ourselves.
The stigma and disbelief are strange. Nobody seems able to believe or even imagine that I was badly bullied. If I ever mention it (which I rarely do) it's to a good friend, and in a joking context, because nobody seems to know what to do with it. They either don't believe or won't admit that things could be that bad. Some friends have told me of their own experiences, and that's really the best they can do.
I wish survivors was too extreme. It isn't. My father's baby sister was killed at the age of three by older playmates. It was an accident, not that they hit her in the head with a rock, but that she died. I took on their fear, which was no help for me with bullying. I'm still terrified of physical violence, but fortunately, as an adult, I'm able to avoid it.
For those of you who are or were bullied, as bad as it is, there is hope. It is essential that you know that the bullying really won't last forever. Even if other people don't believe you, as you become an adult, you can take control of almost all of these things. You can learn to pretend to be extraverted when you need to, to find good people with similar experiences, and to realize that you aren't in school anymore, and those sadists can't hurt you anymore.
Ultimately, I don't know what really changed everything, either the beginning or the end, but I went from being a well-liked kid with a girlfriend in first grade, to the bottom of the food chain, finally to a place apart in high school where I finally got socialized to my peers.
Through most of school, I was really at the bottom of the food chain, where the other victims won't associate with you lest you imperil their tenuous hopes of status, or even pick on you to improve their own. Some of the teachers even despised me. One teacher told the whole class that it was my fault that I'd been literally tied up by my peers and was late back from recess. He liked to point out to the class that I was asking for trouble. I take little solace that he was eventually fired for throwing a chair at a student.
I was lucky. Things changed in high school. I started over in a new town, in a magnet school where there were people even stranger than me. I started hanging out with a lot of them and playing with swords and fencing at school. I also tried to figure out how not to act like a victim. At the same time, I hit 6' tall. I wish I knew exactly what made the difference, but I only know that things got better. There were still the normal conflicts one encounters, plenty of situations to be avoided, and no shortage of pain, but I had friends, and I wasn't beaten up anymore.
I'm more than fine now, with a healthy earned contempt for popular opinion. Since I just might be in a position to offer some support to someone else, I'll resist the temptation to post this as AC.
I also love that the truck dieseled (ran on) when he shut it off. Thanks to the incredibly cool MSG for pointing that out to me.
Perhaps I didn't notice it at the time because it was a common bug in US made gasoline engines of the era.
http://www.unitednuclear.com/isotopes.htm Here's their explanation.
Not enough to poison someone, almost impossible to extract, etc. Poor United Nuclear will probably be run out of business just like everyone else who helps amateur scientists.
1. Let it be forgotten. Read Borges short story Funes the Memorious to know why.
2. There will be enough data in most formats for archaeological purposes, since archaeologists are interested largely in daily life, and decrypting the data is essentially a linguistic and cryptographic problem, both of which become tractable with enough data.
3. Most of what needs preserving will be preserved one way or another.
3. Time capusules are almost always pointless and self serving. "We who dedicate this building want you to have this symbol of our best hopes and intentions."
What's not there? Real history. There are no extant copies of the city newspapers (Tulsa Tribune) that called for a lynching, and started the Tulsa race riots. All destroyed or thrown away.
It looks to me like that law delineates specific circumstances where the parent is responsible. Lacking other laws, the implication is that outside those specific circumstances the parent is not responsible.
Damned by ignorance. That's the atheist's lot. The faithful redefine both atheism and morality to suit their purposes and argue from that.
"Morality requires that there be things that are inherently good and things that are inherently bad. True atheism rejects these concepts, as they deny that there is a higher power than the natural state of the world."
No, and No.
Let's look to Wikipedia for a more reasonable definition of morality:
"Morality is a system of principles and judgments based on cultural, religious, and philosophical concepts and beliefs, by which humans determine whether given actions are right or wrong."
Nothing about inherent good and evil there. Atheists have values which are no less valid just because we didn't get those values from the authorized representative of God (even indirectly.) You complain that atheists don't explain their beliefs to you. It's no wonder, but I will try. Since atheists aren't a homogenous group, I can only explain my own beliefs, but I'm a pretty standard-issue humanist in these. Allow me to proceed from first principles.
My values originate in my experiences. My experiences include empathy, pleasure (inherently good) and pain (inherently bad.) Empathy allows me to realize that those around me have similar experiences of the world. My experience demonstrates that suffering pain may produce benefit in the future, and that pursuit of pleasure may produce pain, so in addition to considering the effect of my behavior upon those for whom I feel empathy, I need to consider the future effects of my immedeate behavior. You can pretty much derive all my morality from this. Golden rule, altruism, truthfulness, honor, etcetera.
Was my morality influenced by religion? Sure, and I can see Orion in the stars, but my ideas about those stars are more than the product of ancient religion. If our values often overlap, it only flatters those religious laws that actually are good ideas. Still, we don't correspond exactly. I'll never be OK with slavery or killing infidels, unlike most of the Gods in the world.
It's always odd when someone argues morality with me, claiming that it's impossible to be moral unless you accept your morality as received wisdom without question. To me, there is a moral imperative to take responsibility for your own behavior and beliefs. To call something bad, one should then be able to say why it is so, or else you're just calling names.
This is all stuff you would have gotten in an entry-level philosophy class, but you haven't bothered, since your absolute beliefs protect you from thought. Still, perhaps someone reading this will be inspired to take a philosophy class. I don't mean to change anyone's beliefs, but perhaps you might not treat us atheists so badly out of sheer ignorance.
Read some philosophy. Look into the difference between external and internal motivation.
Unfortunately, these are exactly the reasons people are prejudiced against atheists. Those absolute rules make religious people paint atheists as nihilists or worse. This is why I rarely argue religion. When the folks come to the door in their Sunday best, I wish them good weather and thank them for their kindness. Arguing will do neither of us any good. That's my morality. Treat people well, even if they are different from me.
PETA gets much of their support from people who are opposed to gratuitous cruelty to animals, but the vast majority of people who support PETA are misguided (cynically and intentionally by PETA.) PETA's reason for being is "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." PETA truly equates animals with people. They're evil. Equating the life of a rat with that of a child is simply wrong. Understand this: PETA are fighting against all "exploitation" of animals. In fact, their behavior implies that humans are less valuable to them than animals. Their views are simply sociopathic.
CO2 sucks for euthanasia. There are lots of other things out there. My dad worked in a neuropsych lab. The chemical cocktail they used for Euthanasia included barbiturates and a local anaesthetic. He wanted some for himself in case he was ever terminal and in inescapable pain. That's as humane as it gets.
Still, the animal rights folks got lab animal medicine at that major research institution shut down. I know too many people who'd be dead if it weren't for the use of animals in medicine to have any respect for PETA.
Do you want to be a college or a university? Websense made perfect sense at the primary - grade 12 level where I contracted. While traffic shaping may be a neccessary evil, WebSense for a university is asinine.
I don't mean to be insulting, but is this a religious institution or military college? Seriously, unless your education merely serves an ideology, this makes no sense. If academics are primary, restrictions like this are silly. Sorry, but there is important information at the periphery, besides the terrible collateral damage these services incur. Like anatomy, breast cancer still exists even if you can't see any breasts.
If your CIO's peers are at places like Oral Roberts University (where boys are not allowed to have long hair) or military institutions (where boys are not allowed to have long hair) then he's probably right. That paternalistic world is the exception, not the rule.
I always thought the worst danger was that you had less than 40 seconds of fuel. That's barely enough time to pick a safe landing spot. It's essentially a forced landing every time. Not safe.
So, what do you do besides fly around a stadium for less than a minute before the device becomes dead weight? Well, that's dull, and useless except for advertising or Bond flicks.
You have to land, somewhere appropriate before you run out of fuel. It shouldn't be hard, but then again, imagine a helicopter with the same constraints. Would you fly it? I wouldn't, and helis can even autogyro a little, unlike a rocket belt which will drop like a stone. That is inherently unsafe. Get in your car with about 40 seconds of gas. Now drive somewhere, stop and get out, before you run out of fuel.
Maybe there are other dangers, but a forced landing is not something I'd ever ask for.
Are there other dangers worse than the forced landing problem? Wow. I'm in no hurry to try a rocket belt. Urban base jumping sounds safer and more fun. Jumping off a tall building in a city with a chute/parasail isn't exactly safe, and it pisses the cops off, but I'd rather be in jail than pancaked with a rocket pack through me like a stake in the ground.
I used to support Point of Sale systems at a local sporting goods chain, and often would be at the store working with the manager hanging around learning what they could (always appreciated.) I had a great boss, and she gave me a graceful technique for avoiding shoulder surfing in that situation. You have to be able to touch type your passwords.
Talk to the person, and look them in the eye while you type your password.
Not gonna work for all situations (ATM Pin) but incredibly effective where there is only one person who really presents a risk, and really, how often are you working in a crowd?
OK, Classrooms just suck, so you have to rely on flying fingers sometimes, but I did find it to be useful when "that kid" was hanging around the same way. "That kid" could be a proto-geek, or a hacker wannabe, but I always did what I could to educate and make conversation. Hey, you're interested? Cool! Kids (even teens) respond really well to being treated like people. And, the conversation made it easy to type my password without _him_ seeing it. No need to tempt 'em.
OK, so it's offtopic, but wind isn't the only backyard power source. Wind is fairly impractical for me (geography, maintenance, impact on my neighbors on a small lot in a development) but living in a part of California that is essentially irrigated desert I'm very curious about solar panels to take the edge off of the energy bills and use the energy that's heating my roof. Solar hot water preheating could be fun, but I just don't use that much hot water, so let's stick with the extremely useful electricity.
I'm very interested in where the smart buys are in solar electric panels, but comparison info isn't exactly easy to find. I'm just interested in how we could start out small with solar electric. Any good surplus buys out there? Where can I start? I find companies that want to sell b2b or bid on jobs but not post prices, and I see single panels on Amazon for $1000/130watts. Is this what you get? Are the better buys in amorphous, polycrystalline, or monocrystalline?
For those of you who are constitutionally incapable of the question as asked: Yes, we're pursuing any number of conservation measures, e.g. house is quite well insulated, mostly high efficency flourescent fixtures, use fans, wear sweaters when it's cold, etc. No we can't move to wherever else you think I should live, because good schools and proximity to family is important for our children, as is stability.