but if you want to play the "strict definition" game
It's not that I want a series of strictly defined words that are locked in time and meaning. I don't care if we have this discussion in French, and start an entirely new, gloobishly wonderful set of words for use when talking about energy extraction, transformation, delivery, and use. What I DO care about, is when a large, complex body of issues is glibly reduced to a single word. It's lossy compression. It ceases to be useful because even given the context of a conversation, you can't necessarily divine from that word information that it no longer can convey. When "renewable" no longer actually means "able to be renewed," then... what word WOULD you use for that purpose? And when "renewable" DOES get used to mean "abundantly available" (as in solar, wind, or hydro - none of which require renewing!), what word WOULD you use to mean that in other contexts? Mom made a really big pot of pasta tonight, more than we can eat, so... the spaghetti dinner is renewable?
I don't care WHAT words are used. But when you have two very different concepts to convey, using one word to represent them both means that it ceases to represent EITHER of them, unless you're willing to settle for less or (much worse!) wrong information conveyed by that word.
Language will and should change. But clarity in discussing complex or nuanced things is essential, or the complexity and nuances cease to be communicated. Even simple complexity - like the difference between a distillable crop plant that you have to work to grow back and the tide, which is going to keep sloshing in and out of your city's harbor whether you use it or not. When (back to TFA), we talk about "renewable" energy when we may really mean "another way to get electricty from NON-renewable sources of heat" - how has your marketplace of ideas' use of that word actually conveyed useful information? It hasn't, and it can't, if it uses the same word to describe solar energy as it does better burning of coal.
And the editors of a tech/science site aimed at a brighter-than-usual audience shouldn't reflexively use, or support the use of words that erode meaning. It would be like using the phrase "*nix", permanently, instead of saying Linux or Unix. Sure - the marketplace of ideas will probably get what you mean in SOME contexts - but they are NOT the same thing in almost every context that they're talked about here.
Meaning is determined not by what one person thinks - not even by what the dictionary says - it is determined by how it is used in a particular context.
Right! So, consider my post and this thread to be an attempt to encourage people to use that word (and the others that are thus required) in a more meaningful way. If a single word is used to represent lots of substantially different things (in this case, "renewable" interchangeably meaning the same thing when referring to a marginally better way to burn coal and also using solar energy). I'm not complaining about the evolution of language. I'm complaining about the DE-evolution of language. The loss of precision. The inability to know, from the use word used, what is actually meant... or worse, to be MISLED by the choice of a particular word. That's fine for advertising, but not for science.
I would argue that the definitions you've cited are just examples of the cognitive battle already having been lost on this one. It doesn't make the word any more precise or actually meaningful.
Why not call gravity-powered electricity generation (say, the Hoover Dam) just that: gravity-powered. That means something, especially if you mention the hydro part of it in conjunction. As opposed to "tidal power" (also hydro, but a different beast).
It's not pedantic, though, to mention that there is NOTHING "renewable" about creating electricity from waste heat that, itself, is created while burning oil or coal. It's just a a more efficient energy extraction than was otherwise being performed. But there is NOTHING "renewable" about it when used in that way. Using that word (in that context) is almost as wrong as referring to hydrogen as a "new source of energy," as so many wannabe energy experts call it when getting fake-man-on-the-street interviewed by BP for a commercial. Simply choosing a more precise word isn't any HARDER than using the wrong one, but it allows an audience's vocabulary and longer-term understanding of the subject matter to actually grow. And that translates into things like how they vote, what they buy (or don't), and so on. Dumbing this down so that things that are simply more efficient than they have been are suddenly "renewable," even as they consume a finite supply of some fuel... that's not just dumbing it down, it's a major misrepresentation.
but I didn't see mention of the efficiency of this process
Never mind the hair splitting over "efficiency." How about the absurdity of using the word "renewable?" Where is the heat coming from? Is THAT source of energy renewable (meaning, something that grows back or becomes re-available after it's been used, with less energy required to make it that way than you get out of it? It's maddening to see presumably technical discussions about something as important as energy and its practical applications... and the main modifying word put in front of the work "energy" is... wrong. Solar energy isn't renewable... it's continually available from the sun. Logs for your fireplace could reasonably be said to be renewable, if you take the trouble (and other energy) and have the time to renew them and re-harvest them. Wind isn't renewable - it's just generally, mostly available... and it requires an ongoing expense and complex infrastructure to turn it into something handy like electricity.
Oil (from the ground, anyway) will get used up (if we're talking in reasonable time windows, here) eventually. So, let's call that NOT renewable. An electricity-producing technology (as in TFA) that happens to produce some using waste heat from burning hydrocarbons like coil or oil is NOT "renewable". Honestly: people seem to think that "renewable" and "efficient" or "not wasteful" mean the same things. They do NOT. Why does this semantic fuss matter? Because we're going to raise an entire generation of science-less, witless consumers that bandy about terms like "green" and "renewable" and "hydrogen economy" without actually having the critical thinking skills to see how it all does (or does not) fit together. Taking the meaning away from words dumbs all communication down, and erodes our culture's ability to do intellectually challenging things.
What part of identity theft, bank fraud, wire fraud and illegally running malware on thousands of people's computers are you foggy on? Would you consider yourself merely irritated if everything sent from your domain was suddenly blacklisted? Irritated if one of his partners' phishing schemes netted a friend or family member's financial data, and their credit rating was completely trashed, and their bank account emptied? Are his ties to Russian mob operations (notoriously, those specialising in child pr0n) - people who actually KILL other rivals over things like botnet control - just somewhere below the irritant threshold for you? People who enable, finance, provide tech services to, and otherwise associate with murderers like that - and make their money while fraudulantly using others' network resources and lie about their identities while blasting out fraudulant comms - they deserve EXACTLY what they get for swimming in those waters. It's not like he sat down and just started sending out some e-mail, here. He's toxic, and willfully screwing with millions of people's lives. He should get long, hard time, and every penny he's stolen should go towards the cost of keeping him fed in lockup.
Anyone else feel like releasing a few million helium balloons right above Redmond, Washington, right about now?
Only on slashdot would someone stretch that hard to turn an astrophysics summary into an MS bashing troll. I mean, it takes WORK to do it that cravenly. Whew! You must be tired.
TFA's 'Check it out' link takes you right into a streetview-enabled map area. Interesting to just walk/drive along the enabled road, following the familiar Google-ish road markings, now projected in 3D into to the view.
It is co-operation. The human being is a social animal because if you don't watch each other's backs, the sabre tooth tiger will first eat the other guy and then eat you. (A simplistic example of why if we are all selfish, we will all just die out).
NO! Watching each other's back against a threat in a pack setting IS selfish. That's the whole point. It's selfish to act in your own self interest - that's the concept's MEANING. When a threat that's bigger than you requires teamwork for you to survive (large predators, seasonal weather, etc), then there is both cultural and biological evolutionary pressure to do the things that help keep that team (the family/clan/tribe/pack/herd) glued together and aware of the other members' status/condition. Each member of the pack can face vulnerable circumstances (pregnancy, injury, etc), so cultivating - at that small family/tribe level - some reciprocal ass-covering is entirely, productively, and rationally selfish.
That is a very good point - the building's "rings" structure does go a long way to mitigating certain types of problems in a classical bombing attack (as they might have feared from the Germans or Japanese)... multiple exterior-grade load-bearing walls/firebreaks, multiple exists to outside air - the design does a lot more than just give more people offices with windows (though that was important, too... in a power outage, much more of the building has daylight than if they had just built a big box.
Their governments suck, their religious behavior tends to be pretty bad, but damn is their God better... Promise of Virgin-Mart vs promise of burning in hell...
Oh, they've got Hell too! This is just one of the many aspects of their franchising offer that makes it so compelling to set up a local office, er, mosque. And, while you're waiting for your Virgin-Mart gift card, you still get to make sure that your actual wife is treated like property.
This little spectacle isn't even CLOSE to the "send money or I'll kill and eat this cute bunny" web site. Books? Pah! Warm and fuzzy -> Hassenpfeffer: true drama.
If they were rushed and didn't want to be "arty", they would have gone for the traditional 4 walls.
Unless, as explained in TFA, they were constrained by lack of steel from building UP, had to find office space for 40,000 people, and realized that a pentagonal building would provide for a LOT more floor space on a pentagonal plot of land than a square one would. As for design difficulties... you're kidding, right? That building is ENORMOUS. Little things, like how to cut masonry or joing roofing timbers (did you know it's timber?) based on 72-degree angles isn't exactly rocket science.
Were, essentially, a string of bunkers. But more to the point: the sort of hill-top fort in the round, which was modified into a pentagonal form so that rifles, cannons, etc could be best put to work... that started meaning A LOT less in face of attacks from the air. Certainly tank traps and other blockades/defenses meant to slow down or stop armour from rolling in could be considered "fortifications," but that's not the same as a "fort" in the classical sense... or in symbolic sense that might inspire a pentagonl office building absent a pentagonal plot of dirt to put it on. I'm SURE that the fort-like shape appealed, symbolically to many in the War Dept at the time... but the biggest factor was: put 40,000 people in office space on a small plot of land along the Potomac river.
To be specific, WWII starts in around 1939. The US is eventually involved, and ends the war in 1945, at which time the UN is set up. In 1947 the US forms a plan to rebuild europe, which is completed by 1952. 7 years after the war ended and four year after the plan was implemented.
Um... it's worth mentioning that at the time we were rebuilding France, Germany, Italy, and every other spot in Europe that got economically and physically trashed during that war, we did NOT have religiously-driven suicidal crazies trying to kill pizza-shops full of their brothers and cousins in order to terrorize them out of wanting a democracy in which evil things like Women Reading Books, Music Being Played In Public, and Daughters Choosing Their Own Husbands might come about. There weren't well-financed groups of hidden Nazis willing to kill themselves and everyone in a vegetable market because a cave-dwelling extremist with buckets of cash has pursuaded them that Allah will open the doors to Virgin-Mart on their behalf if they can cause as much horrifying death as possible to scare people out of wanting a simple democratic, constitutional governement, and scare them back into settling for a brutal, theocratic, medieval-style thugocracy. With nukes.
It's not the same thing. Oh, and neither has it been 7 years since the end of hostilities or even close to it, because the people stoking the current conflict (the Iranians) are still busy DOING it.
It would be an amazing coincidence if The Pentagon was pentagonal for any reason but this.
Um... other than the fact that the Pentagon is NOT a fortified facility, and that fortifications of pretty much anything bigger than a bunker were already old news by the time the building was designed. It could be a bit of an homage to the old fort designs, but in the middle of WWII, they weren't feeling particularly arty at the time. Occam's Razor goes to the story in the article: the very rushed designs were drafted around a roughly pentagonal plot of land in Arlington, and construction was quickly moved a bit at the last minute, without time or inclination to redesign it. It's hard for people today to even begin to know what it felt like to be truly wrapped up in a period like WWII... we know nothing (as civilians) of that degree of nationwide effort and expense aimed at combatting forces intent on our subjugation/destruction and how much that tends to dimish things like architectural squabbles and design life cycles.
True! They get free mentions on Al Jazeera and worse on a dozen other channels, and whole free blocks of airtime courtesy of Iran by way of Hezbollah. Why pay for ads when you've got all those people working for you.
These are things he'd rather not discuss, because he actually supports them (as shown by his posting history) and he knows the only way to win that argument is to sidetrack the debate.
The reason we're not discussing them in this thread is because... that's not what we're talking about. The FIRST thing we should be talking about is the absurd use of the word "censorship" in TFA and the summary. But even if we provide for the most generous and hysterical use of that word, failing to care enough about something to assign reporters to it and burn up newsprint/airtime/homepage-area ABOUT it isn't "censorship." It's: "not caring." The notion that somehow coverage of tracking call patterns and monitoring those with an international end to them wasn't covered in the news is... laughable. It was all OVER the news. I think TFA's real subtext, here, is that "DESPITE the media talking about some of the things we think are important, stuff still didn't work out the way we liked, and our team, now running congress, isn't doing what we want, either."
Ugh, alright then. Suppose I agree with you. So what have the "democrats" done LAST YEAR(2006) on an internation/national scale that merits censorship?
You're still asking the wrong question! I THINK you mean to ask, what have the dems done (or not done) that we should consider newsworthy, but which is being glossed over or ignored? The word "censorship" is, by the way, completely incorrect in this context.
As for the dems: I think it's newsworthy that despite campaigning on the promise to rid the congress of corruption and the appearance of any unethical carrying-on, that Pelosi chose to put the congressman from Louisiana, freshly caught with $90k of marked bribe CASH in his freezer, on the homeland security oversight committee. On the same note, I think that it's appalling that right in the middle the fuss about how to try to pressure the administration to pull troops out of Iraq, that her granting of completely absurd add-on pork (spinach subsidies, peanut storage funding, etc) to buy more votes for the doomed-to-be-vetoed-but-still-posturing legislation (written just months after an election during which votes were solicited with promises that there would be no more pork) went widely unexamined in the media. Essentially: the press, which largely supports the dems, stays well away from pointing out the blatant lies and hypocrisy coming from the very party that just swore they'd do no such thing.
Hell, what was one of the biggest promises from Pelosi about the first actions she'd take? Following ALL of the Iraq Study Group's recommendations. Of course, what was the first recommendation they decided to completely ignore? The one that called for reorganizing the defense and intelligence oversight committes in congress... in a way that would loosen some democrat control in those areas. Where's the press coverage of that sort of thing? It's no more "censored" than the stuff that the article's rant is about - it's just about what the press either largely ignores, or finds that their audience will probably ignore.
which is a subdivision of the French company Pernod
On the other hand, the French just had one of their most rational elections in a long time. I'll lift a glass of gen-u-ine Baker's to them for getting it (more than usually) right. I can tolerate ownership of a US-based beverage company by a French business because: as hard as it is to run a business in France, I can sure understand why they'd want to invest in one that makes their products in the US... and, no question, the French know a thing or two about swell stuff to drink.
Grow up. The sooner people stop taking sides, the faster the world would become a better place.
Such delicious (and I presume, unintentional) irony on your part. Can't you see that the GP is pointing out that the compilers of the list ARE taking a side? They are deliberately hyping things in a way to make them as divisive as possible. You're ragging on EXACTLY the wrong person. Grow up, indeed!
Why should businesses have the right to store information about me indefinitely?
Because you grant them that right. That's what terms of use are all about... it's part of the bargain you strike when you elect to do things like use their FREE EMAIL HOSTING, or make money by running ads they serve up on your web site.
[Personally, I like the fact that the franchise that changes my vehicle's engine fluids is already pulling up my service record when they see my license plate roll into their queue lane.]
Yes, but nothing in EU law prevents this. The data is directly relevent to their business. They don't keep data about absolutely everything I've ever done there.
Sure they are! Everything I do there: when I arrive what services I get while I'm there, when I leave. Do you mean... they don't record how many times I breath while I'm there? Neither does Google. Google isn't changing oil, they're serving up targeted ads, hosting communications services and other apps... and they're recording all sorts of things related to THAT.
If you have a friend who uses gmail, then whenever you send your friend an email, Google will keep *your* email for god knows how long. And they certainly didn't ask *you* about it. So your simplistic solution "don't patronize those kinds of companies" doesn't work.
Sure it does. Don't send e-mail to people who are supporting a business you don't trust. If you have actual, persuasive, sensible reasons to think that Google is Officially Evil, then you should have absolutely no trouble convincing an actual "friend" that they should switch to another provider... maybe even PAY for mail hosting so they can have it the way they (um... you, actually, in this case) want it. Google is doing it FOR FREE. What sort of person thinks they get free service from someone, and then also get to have it all on their own terms? Well, I mean, besides the EU? There is no free lunch. Pay for your own mail hosting with cash, or pay for Google's FREE service with your acceptance of their business model. It's not like it's complicated. And if you've got your Anti-Google speech down pretty well, it shouldn't be any harder to get a friend to switch than it would be to get them to change toothpaste once you've pointed out that their brand is poisonous. If it IS poisonous... and that's the issue, here, isn't it?
At no point did I give any description of a censor
And a good thing, too, since (one would have THOUGHT) it's not really necessary to point out that censoring is done by a censor. Coding is done by someone who writes code... gee, let's refer to them as a "coder," how about? Writing is performed by someone who writes... and we can shorten that a bit by calling them... say, a "writer." That sort of thing. One who censors is a censor. Are you really so anxious to twist the dictionary YOU brought into this discussion back out of being relevant that you're going to pretend there's no relationship between the noun and verb that's now tripping up your rant?
I quoted the entire definition. You quoted a different and irrelevant definition.
Just to be clear, here: the definition of a person's role is irrelevent to what that person does in that role? If you're that disconnected from simple, clear thinking and use of language, no wonder you're so deeply convinced that you're seeing the coordinated, conspiratorial actions of legions of your philosophical opponents in... discussion board mods. Wow. Makes more sense, now! Asserting an alternate reality is fine, as long as you're not too worried about whether or not the actual, real world is paying any attention to you.
Don't like a company's privacy policy? Don't patronize them. Don't like the lack of companies providing a particular service in a way that you DO like? You're probably not alone. Start one, using the money that you'll no doubt be able to attract, just like the Google guys were able to attract the money to start theirs. Think that some Evil US Corporation is operating on the internet in a way that you just can't stand? Unplug it from your country - your citizens surely won't mind.
Think "corporations" shouldn't retain data about their customers? What? How about when two guys incorporate to form a landscaping company. Or a flower shop specializing in deliveries to business clients. Or an IT service shop. Never mind their obligation to keep all sorts of records in case they get audited seven years after a transaction - what about the degree to which retaining detailed information about their customers is the very thing that allows them to be valuable to those customers? If the customers would rather get less service in exchange for more privacy, they can shop for vendors and service providers that have to ask them the same questions every time the interact so they'll... feel better? Personally, I like the fact that the franchise that changes my vehicle's engine fluids is already pulling up my service record when they see my license plate roll into their queue lane.
Slashdot Mirror
but if you want to play the "strict definition" game
It's not that I want a series of strictly defined words that are locked in time and meaning. I don't care if we have this discussion in French, and start an entirely new, gloobishly wonderful set of words for use when talking about energy extraction, transformation, delivery, and use. What I DO care about, is when a large, complex body of issues is glibly reduced to a single word. It's lossy compression. It ceases to be useful because even given the context of a conversation, you can't necessarily divine from that word information that it no longer can convey. When "renewable" no longer actually means "able to be renewed," then... what word WOULD you use for that purpose? And when "renewable" DOES get used to mean "abundantly available" (as in solar, wind, or hydro - none of which require renewing!), what word WOULD you use to mean that in other contexts? Mom made a really big pot of pasta tonight, more than we can eat, so... the spaghetti dinner is renewable?
I don't care WHAT words are used. But when you have two very different concepts to convey, using one word to represent them both means that it ceases to represent EITHER of them, unless you're willing to settle for less or (much worse!) wrong information conveyed by that word.
Language will and should change. But clarity in discussing complex or nuanced things is essential, or the complexity and nuances cease to be communicated. Even simple complexity - like the difference between a distillable crop plant that you have to work to grow back and the tide, which is going to keep sloshing in and out of your city's harbor whether you use it or not. When (back to TFA), we talk about "renewable" energy when we may really mean "another way to get electricty from NON-renewable sources of heat" - how has your marketplace of ideas' use of that word actually conveyed useful information? It hasn't, and it can't, if it uses the same word to describe solar energy as it does better burning of coal.
And the editors of a tech/science site aimed at a brighter-than-usual audience shouldn't reflexively use, or support the use of words that erode meaning. It would be like using the phrase "*nix", permanently, instead of saying Linux or Unix. Sure - the marketplace of ideas will probably get what you mean in SOME contexts - but they are NOT the same thing in almost every context that they're talked about here.
Meaning is determined not by what one person thinks - not even by what the dictionary says - it is determined by how it is used in a particular context.
Right! So, consider my post and this thread to be an attempt to encourage people to use that word (and the others that are thus required) in a more meaningful way. If a single word is used to represent lots of substantially different things (in this case, "renewable" interchangeably meaning the same thing when referring to a marginally better way to burn coal and also using solar energy). I'm not complaining about the evolution of language. I'm complaining about the DE-evolution of language. The loss of precision. The inability to know, from the use word used, what is actually meant... or worse, to be MISLED by the choice of a particular word. That's fine for advertising, but not for science.
I would argue that the definitions you've cited are just examples of the cognitive battle already having been lost on this one. It doesn't make the word any more precise or actually meaningful.
... that's not just dumbing it down, it's a major misrepresentation.
Why not call gravity-powered electricity generation (say, the Hoover Dam) just that: gravity-powered. That means something, especially if you mention the hydro part of it in conjunction. As opposed to "tidal power" (also hydro, but a different beast).
It's not pedantic, though, to mention that there is NOTHING "renewable" about creating electricity from waste heat that, itself, is created while burning oil or coal. It's just a a more efficient energy extraction than was otherwise being performed. But there is NOTHING "renewable" about it when used in that way. Using that word (in that context) is almost as wrong as referring to hydrogen as a "new source of energy," as so many wannabe energy experts call it when getting fake-man-on-the-street interviewed by BP for a commercial. Simply choosing a more precise word isn't any HARDER than using the wrong one, but it allows an audience's vocabulary and longer-term understanding of the subject matter to actually grow. And that translates into things like how they vote, what they buy (or don't), and so on. Dumbing this down so that things that are simply more efficient than they have been are suddenly "renewable," even as they consume a finite supply of some fuel
but I didn't see mention of the efficiency of this process
Never mind the hair splitting over "efficiency." How about the absurdity of using the word "renewable?" Where is the heat coming from? Is THAT source of energy renewable (meaning, something that grows back or becomes re-available after it's been used, with less energy required to make it that way than you get out of it? It's maddening to see presumably technical discussions about something as important as energy and its practical applications... and the main modifying word put in front of the work "energy" is... wrong. Solar energy isn't renewable... it's continually available from the sun. Logs for your fireplace could reasonably be said to be renewable, if you take the trouble (and other energy) and have the time to renew them and re-harvest them. Wind isn't renewable - it's just generally, mostly available... and it requires an ongoing expense and complex infrastructure to turn it into something handy like electricity.
Oil (from the ground, anyway) will get used up (if we're talking in reasonable time windows, here) eventually. So, let's call that NOT renewable. An electricity-producing technology (as in TFA) that happens to produce some using waste heat from burning hydrocarbons like coil or oil is NOT "renewable". Honestly: people seem to think that "renewable" and "efficient" or "not wasteful" mean the same things. They do NOT. Why does this semantic fuss matter? Because we're going to raise an entire generation of science-less, witless consumers that bandy about terms like "green" and "renewable" and "hydrogen economy" without actually having the critical thinking skills to see how it all does (or does not) fit together. Taking the meaning away from words dumbs all communication down, and erodes our culture's ability to do intellectually challenging things.
electronic irritants
What part of identity theft, bank fraud, wire fraud and illegally running malware on thousands of people's computers are you foggy on? Would you consider yourself merely irritated if everything sent from your domain was suddenly blacklisted? Irritated if one of his partners' phishing schemes netted a friend or family member's financial data, and their credit rating was completely trashed, and their bank account emptied? Are his ties to Russian mob operations (notoriously, those specialising in child pr0n) - people who actually KILL other rivals over things like botnet control - just somewhere below the irritant threshold for you? People who enable, finance, provide tech services to, and otherwise associate with murderers like that - and make their money while fraudulantly using others' network resources and lie about their identities while blasting out fraudulant comms - they deserve EXACTLY what they get for swimming in those waters. It's not like he sat down and just started sending out some e-mail, here. He's toxic, and willfully screwing with millions of people's lives. He should get long, hard time, and every penny he's stolen should go towards the cost of keeping him fed in lockup.
Anyone else feel like releasing a few million helium balloons right above Redmond, Washington, right about now?
Only on slashdot would someone stretch that hard to turn an astrophysics summary into an MS bashing troll. I mean, it takes WORK to do it that cravenly. Whew! You must be tired.
TFA's 'Check it out' link takes you right into a streetview-enabled map area. Interesting to just walk/drive along the enabled road, following the familiar Google-ish road markings, now projected in 3D into to the view.
It is co-operation. The human being is a social animal because if you don't watch each other's backs, the sabre tooth tiger will first eat the other guy and then eat you. (A simplistic example of why if we are all selfish, we will all just die out).
NO! Watching each other's back against a threat in a pack setting IS selfish. That's the whole point. It's selfish to act in your own self interest - that's the concept's MEANING. When a threat that's bigger than you requires teamwork for you to survive (large predators, seasonal weather, etc), then there is both cultural and biological evolutionary pressure to do the things that help keep that team (the family/clan/tribe/pack/herd) glued together and aware of the other members' status/condition. Each member of the pack can face vulnerable circumstances (pregnancy, injury, etc), so cultivating - at that small family/tribe level - some reciprocal ass-covering is entirely, productively, and rationally selfish.
That is a very good point - the building's "rings" structure does go a long way to mitigating certain types of problems in a classical bombing attack (as they might have feared from the Germans or Japanese)... multiple exterior-grade load-bearing walls/firebreaks, multiple exists to outside air - the design does a lot more than just give more people offices with windows (though that was important, too... in a power outage, much more of the building has daylight than if they had just built a big box.
Their governments suck, their religious behavior tends to be pretty bad, but damn is their God better... Promise of Virgin-Mart vs promise of burning in hell...
Oh, they've got Hell too! This is just one of the many aspects of their franchising offer that makes it so compelling to set up a local office, er, mosque. And, while you're waiting for your Virgin-Mart gift card, you still get to make sure that your actual wife is treated like property.
But: for one of the very best articles on this subject, I highly recommend a quick read at this highly reputable news source .
This little spectacle isn't even CLOSE to the "send money or I'll kill and eat this cute bunny" web site. Books? Pah! Warm and fuzzy -> Hassenpfeffer: true drama.
If they were rushed and didn't want to be "arty", they would have gone for the traditional 4 walls.
Unless, as explained in TFA, they were constrained by lack of steel from building UP, had to find office space for 40,000 people, and realized that a pentagonal building would provide for a LOT more floor space on a pentagonal plot of land than a square one would. As for design difficulties... you're kidding, right? That building is ENORMOUS. Little things, like how to cut masonry or joing roofing timbers (did you know it's timber?) based on 72-degree angles isn't exactly rocket science.
The German fortifications of the Normandy beaches
Were, essentially, a string of bunkers. But more to the point: the sort of hill-top fort in the round, which was modified into a pentagonal form so that rifles, cannons, etc could be best put to work... that started meaning A LOT less in face of attacks from the air. Certainly tank traps and other blockades/defenses meant to slow down or stop armour from rolling in could be considered "fortifications," but that's not the same as a "fort" in the classical sense... or in symbolic sense that might inspire a pentagonl office building absent a pentagonal plot of dirt to put it on. I'm SURE that the fort-like shape appealed, symbolically to many in the War Dept at the time... but the biggest factor was: put 40,000 people in office space on a small plot of land along the Potomac river.
To be specific, WWII starts in around 1939. The US is eventually involved, and ends the war in 1945, at which time the UN is set up. In 1947 the US forms a plan to rebuild europe, which is completed by 1952. 7 years after the war ended and four year after the plan was implemented.
Um... it's worth mentioning that at the time we were rebuilding France, Germany, Italy, and every other spot in Europe that got economically and physically trashed during that war, we did NOT have religiously-driven suicidal crazies trying to kill pizza-shops full of their brothers and cousins in order to terrorize them out of wanting a democracy in which evil things like Women Reading Books, Music Being Played In Public, and Daughters Choosing Their Own Husbands might come about. There weren't well-financed groups of hidden Nazis willing to kill themselves and everyone in a vegetable market because a cave-dwelling extremist with buckets of cash has pursuaded them that Allah will open the doors to Virgin-Mart on their behalf if they can cause as much horrifying death as possible to scare people out of wanting a simple democratic, constitutional governement, and scare them back into settling for a brutal, theocratic, medieval-style thugocracy. With nukes.
It's not the same thing. Oh, and neither has it been 7 years since the end of hostilities or even close to it, because the people stoking the current conflict (the Iranians) are still busy DOING it.
It would be an amazing coincidence if The Pentagon was pentagonal for any reason but this.
Um... other than the fact that the Pentagon is NOT a fortified facility, and that fortifications of pretty much anything bigger than a bunker were already old news by the time the building was designed. It could be a bit of an homage to the old fort designs, but in the middle of WWII, they weren't feeling particularly arty at the time. Occam's Razor goes to the story in the article: the very rushed designs were drafted around a roughly pentagonal plot of land in Arlington, and construction was quickly moved a bit at the last minute, without time or inclination to redesign it. It's hard for people today to even begin to know what it felt like to be truly wrapped up in a period like WWII... we know nothing (as civilians) of that degree of nationwide effort and expense aimed at combatting forces intent on our subjugation/destruction and how much that tends to dimish things like architectural squabbles and design life cycles.
Terrorists don't pay for advertising
True! They get free mentions on Al Jazeera and worse on a dozen other channels, and whole free blocks of airtime courtesy of Iran by way of Hezbollah. Why pay for ads when you've got all those people working for you.
These are things he'd rather not discuss, because he actually supports them (as shown by his posting history) and he knows the only way to win that argument is to sidetrack the debate.
The reason we're not discussing them in this thread is because... that's not what we're talking about. The FIRST thing we should be talking about is the absurd use of the word "censorship" in TFA and the summary. But even if we provide for the most generous and hysterical use of that word, failing to care enough about something to assign reporters to it and burn up newsprint/airtime/homepage-area ABOUT it isn't "censorship." It's: "not caring." The notion that somehow coverage of tracking call patterns and monitoring those with an international end to them wasn't covered in the news is... laughable. It was all OVER the news. I think TFA's real subtext, here, is that "DESPITE the media talking about some of the things we think are important, stuff still didn't work out the way we liked, and our team, now running congress, isn't doing what we want, either."
Ugh, alright then. Suppose I agree with you. So what have the "democrats" done LAST YEAR(2006) on an internation/national scale that merits censorship?
You're still asking the wrong question! I THINK you mean to ask, what have the dems done (or not done) that we should consider newsworthy, but which is being glossed over or ignored? The word "censorship" is, by the way, completely incorrect in this context.
As for the dems: I think it's newsworthy that despite campaigning on the promise to rid the congress of corruption and the appearance of any unethical carrying-on, that Pelosi chose to put the congressman from Louisiana, freshly caught with $90k of marked bribe CASH in his freezer, on the homeland security oversight committee. On the same note, I think that it's appalling that right in the middle the fuss about how to try to pressure the administration to pull troops out of Iraq, that her granting of completely absurd add-on pork (spinach subsidies, peanut storage funding, etc) to buy more votes for the doomed-to-be-vetoed-but-still-posturing legislation (written just months after an election during which votes were solicited with promises that there would be no more pork) went widely unexamined in the media. Essentially: the press, which largely supports the dems, stays well away from pointing out the blatant lies and hypocrisy coming from the very party that just swore they'd do no such thing.
Hell, what was one of the biggest promises from Pelosi about the first actions she'd take? Following ALL of the Iraq Study Group's recommendations. Of course, what was the first recommendation they decided to completely ignore? The one that called for reorganizing the defense and intelligence oversight committes in congress... in a way that would loosen some democrat control in those areas. Where's the press coverage of that sort of thing? It's no more "censored" than the stuff that the article's rant is about - it's just about what the press either largely ignores, or finds that their audience will probably ignore.
which is a subdivision of the French company Pernod
On the other hand, the French just had one of their most rational elections in a long time. I'll lift a glass of gen-u-ine Baker's to them for getting it (more than usually) right. I can tolerate ownership of a US-based beverage company by a French business because: as hard as it is to run a business in France, I can sure understand why they'd want to invest in one that makes their products in the US... and, no question, the French know a thing or two about swell stuff to drink.
Grow up. The sooner people stop taking sides, the faster the world would become a better place.
Such delicious (and I presume, unintentional) irony on your part. Can't you see that the GP is pointing out that the compilers of the list ARE taking a side? They are deliberately hyping things in a way to make them as divisive as possible. You're ragging on EXACTLY the wrong person. Grow up, indeed!
I mean, the whiskey has to count for SOMETHING, right?
Why should businesses have the right to store information about me indefinitely?
Because you grant them that right. That's what terms of use are all about... it's part of the bargain you strike when you elect to do things like use their FREE EMAIL HOSTING, or make money by running ads they serve up on your web site.
[Personally, I like the fact that the franchise that changes my vehicle's engine fluids is already pulling up my service record when they see my license plate roll into their queue lane.]
Yes, but nothing in EU law prevents this. The data is directly relevent to their business. They don't keep data about absolutely everything I've ever done there.
Sure they are! Everything I do there: when I arrive what services I get while I'm there, when I leave. Do you mean... they don't record how many times I breath while I'm there? Neither does Google. Google isn't changing oil, they're serving up targeted ads, hosting communications services and other apps... and they're recording all sorts of things related to THAT.
If you have a friend who uses gmail, then whenever you send your friend an email, Google will keep *your* email for god knows how long. And they certainly didn't ask *you* about it. So your simplistic solution "don't patronize those kinds of companies" doesn't work.
Sure it does. Don't send e-mail to people who are supporting a business you don't trust. If you have actual, persuasive, sensible reasons to think that Google is Officially Evil, then you should have absolutely no trouble convincing an actual "friend" that they should switch to another provider... maybe even PAY for mail hosting so they can have it the way they (um... you, actually, in this case) want it. Google is doing it FOR FREE. What sort of person thinks they get free service from someone, and then also get to have it all on their own terms? Well, I mean, besides the EU? There is no free lunch. Pay for your own mail hosting with cash, or pay for Google's FREE service with your acceptance of their business model. It's not like it's complicated. And if you've got your Anti-Google speech down pretty well, it shouldn't be any harder to get a friend to switch than it would be to get them to change toothpaste once you've pointed out that their brand is poisonous. If it IS poisonous... and that's the issue, here, isn't it?
At no point did I give any description of a censor
And a good thing, too, since (one would have THOUGHT) it's not really necessary to point out that censoring is done by a censor. Coding is done by someone who writes code... gee, let's refer to them as a "coder," how about? Writing is performed by someone who writes... and we can shorten that a bit by calling them... say, a "writer." That sort of thing. One who censors is a censor. Are you really so anxious to twist the dictionary YOU brought into this discussion back out of being relevant that you're going to pretend there's no relationship between the noun and verb that's now tripping up your rant?
I quoted the entire definition. You quoted a different and irrelevant definition.
Just to be clear, here: the definition of a person's role is irrelevent to what that person does in that role? If you're that disconnected from simple, clear thinking and use of language, no wonder you're so deeply convinced that you're seeing the coordinated, conspiratorial actions of legions of your philosophical opponents in... discussion board mods. Wow. Makes more sense, now! Asserting an alternate reality is fine, as long as you're not too worried about whether or not the actual, real world is paying any attention to you.
Don't like a company's privacy policy? Don't patronize them. Don't like the lack of companies providing a particular service in a way that you DO like? You're probably not alone. Start one, using the money that you'll no doubt be able to attract, just like the Google guys were able to attract the money to start theirs. Think that some Evil US Corporation is operating on the internet in a way that you just can't stand? Unplug it from your country - your citizens surely won't mind.
Think "corporations" shouldn't retain data about their customers? What? How about when two guys incorporate to form a landscaping company. Or a flower shop specializing in deliveries to business clients. Or an IT service shop. Never mind their obligation to keep all sorts of records in case they get audited seven years after a transaction - what about the degree to which retaining detailed information about their customers is the very thing that allows them to be valuable to those customers? If the customers would rather get less service in exchange for more privacy, they can shop for vendors and service providers that have to ask them the same questions every time the interact so they'll... feel better? Personally, I like the fact that the franchise that changes my vehicle's engine fluids is already pulling up my service record when they see my license plate roll into their queue lane.