Thanks for playing, but that is not the definition of "winner". You either win, or you loose. Even if you are "narrowly defeated", you still have not won -- unless you can pay for the lawyers to make it so.
That's true at the end of the race, when you count up all the delegates and votes. In an ongoing race, perception is everything. If you win by a narrower margin than expected, that can be a "lose" and if you lose by a narrower margin than expected, that would be a "win". For instance, if Obama won by 51-49 in Illinois, or Clinton won by 51-49 in New York, that would show weakness on their home turf and be percieved as something of a loss, since it is an indicator of that nebulous idea of "momentum", whether a candidate is rising or falling in the polls.
That's the problem with federal funding...
At first, it's cool that you can get hold of some, then it becomes a godsend, then it's a desperately needed commodity that you must have more and more of, at any cost and damn the consequences...
Sorta like Cocaine in a way.
I'm always baffled to see people on Slashdot arguing we shouldn't fund basic research. Would we even be having this discussion without federally funded research? It was a federally funded research organization, DARPA, which invented the internet after all, not private industry. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, and government-funded projects like Colossus and ENIAC were vital to the development of the modern computer.
Even if we spend billions of dollars a year on basic research, the occasional runaway success like the internet does so much to benefit the economy that it more than pays for itself. You have to spend money to make money, and we've done pretty well by investing in technology and medicine over the past 50 years.
I didn't think there was such a thing as high-quality Microsoft software, pirated or otherwise...
Obviously, he modified the software extensively before selling it. The fact that it was high-quality is, of course, what tipped people off that it wasn't an authentic Microsoft product.
I too am too young to really appreciate not having to worry about Small Pox. I'm not even sure I was given the shot, as I was born after it was declared eradicated (1979).
The smallpox vaccine leaves a scar on your arm, so you'll know if you've been vaccinated. Vaccination against smallpox ended in the U.S. in 1972, although I've seen people born after that date, from other countries, with the scar.
That's because most under-30s are, in fact, a worthless demographic that doesn't vote.
Maybe that's a chicken-and-egg thing, but FFS most of my peers just can't be bothered to vote, let alone research candidates. I've voted in every election since I turned 18 (I'm 28) and try to be informed about candidates and issues. I think it would help if elections were held on weekends or if Election Day was a national holiday, but I still think that most people in their 20s just can't be bothered.
Slashdot pretty much proves your argument. Every time politics comes up, you get a bunch of cynical, apathetic comments to the effect of "Who cares? It doesn't matter, they're all the same, nothing will change". They've already conceded defeat and they've decided that they're never going to have any influence on the political process; they're dejected, self-involved, and self-pitying like a bunch of emos. So why the hell should anyone listen to anything they have to say? And how the hell will they change anything? It's frustrating, because it leaves a hell of a lot more work for the rest of us to do.
I'm not saying that changing the world for the better is easy, or even always possible, but what would have happened if the kids in Martin Luther King's generation had said, "Who cares? It doesn't matter, all politicians are the same, they'll never allow black people to have the same rights as white people. Nothing will change."
I agree that it looks mighty suspicious, but I have a hard time seeing how it could be a conspiracy. First, look at who's affected: Eygpt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Sri Lanka, even India. Don't get me wrong, I despise the White House and wouldn't trust anything Cheney said while his lips were moving, but I have trouble seeing why the United States would want to attack even one of these countries, particularly Saudi Arabia. Even if they do support and export terrorists, the Saudi leadership are close allies of the United States- we just sold them a shitload of JDAM satellite-guided bombs, after all, why would we then turn around and take out their internet access? And even assuming the U.S. or some other nation did want to attack one of these nations, why do it this way, which attacks the entire Middle East indiscriminately?
As suspicious as it looks, I think it's just really, really bad luck. But then again, maybe I need to get with the times and be a little more paranoid.
The fucking irony here is that Iran is a lot more of a real threat than iraq was.
Just as ironic is the fact that even though they didn't fight in Gulf War II, Iran won the war.
The U.S. has lost because we have failed to achieve our major strategic objectives -to create a stable, Western-style democracy in Iraq and beat back Islamic terrorism- and instead we have been left weaker in every single way. We have no credibility and no allies, so we're weak on the diplomatic front. Our military is overextended and its readiness to fight another war has been reduced. We're poorer, by about a trillion dollars.
Iran wins because two of their major strategic objectives have been achieved: the threat of Iraq and the threat of the U.S. have both been neutralized. Iraq is no longer a threat, because Saddam has been deposed, the military is destroyed, and the new government is Shiite, and too weak to stand up to Iran. The United States is no longer a threat: we can't use diplomacy against Iran, because even if we had proof they were up to something, no one will believe us, and few of our allies will back us up because we're so unpopular abroad. We can't use military force, because we don't have the troops to spare, and again it's unlikely we could get any other countries to assist in a military effort. We do have aircraft and cruise missiles, so in theory we could use airstrikes. But if we try anything, they can use the Shiite militias to attack our forces in Iraq and stir up the civil war there, so even a limited air war with Iran would be tough. Finally, any major conflict with Iran would threaten the oil supply, and with it, the world economy.
So we won't attack Iran, because we can't. And Iran knows it. Their president is a belligerent idiot, they harass our destroyers with their gunboats, they kidnap British seamen, and they send arms to Iraqi insurgents, and they continue to pursue nuclear weapons, all because they know there's not a god damn thing the U.S. can do about it. These are not the actions of a country that is afraid of imminent invasion.
You guys are such a bunch of pussies. You spend years arguing that private industry can do everything better than the government. Then Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld put exactly this into practice in Iraq, by letting private industry do the rebuilding, and things go to hell, and then you guys deny all responsibility. Libertarian ideology -your idiotic, simplistic and mentally retarded "government bad! industry good!" philosophy helped this happen- but you won't own up.
what era had the most inhuman weapons, the worst of all wars, businesses controlling governments to wage war for resources, the worst dictators with the largest body count and count of maimed for life?
I think it's an interesting concept for an article, but sloppily executed. The Mechanical Turk doesn't really qualify as a "gadget" in the sense of being a portable, high-tech tool. First, it's a fraud, not a device to solve a practical problem, and second it was sufficiently large that you could hide a person inside it, so it wasn't exactly portable. And the Ark of the Covenant? Give me a break. It's not a gadget. It's a box. A decorated box.
They also miss some pretty obvious gadgets. The abacus, the slide rule, and the telescope were all high tech, portable pieces of technology.
Unfortunately, if you give a bunch of religous zealots democracy they will vote to stone you to death and revert to a dictatorship.
Actually, this case is about political censorship; it isn't about religion, or even about the journalism student at all. The student's brother is a journalist who has written pieces critical of one of Afghanistan's political factions, they haven't been able to get him, so they resorted to arresting the journalism student and trumped up some charges. This is about suppressing political dissent; there was a story about this on NPR a few days ago. It's unlikely that the student is in real danger of execution: apparently Karzai has to OK any executions. He doesn't strike me as that kind of a guy, but even assuming he was completely lacking in moral fiber, it's doubtful he would: doing so would cede power to his rivals and piss off his international allies. But I agree that Sharia is an idea whose time came and went in the Dark Ages, along with burning witches and trial by duel. When your court claims to execute God's Will, that gives it power that is difficult to check, and as seen here, that leads to abuses.
Libertarianism is the new Communism: it sounds good in theory, but in practice just doesn't work.
Libertarian philosophy is in large part responsible for the failure in Iraq. After all, if the solution to bad government is no government, all we have to do is get rid of Saddam and the economy will take off and society will flourish, right? And we can have Halliburton coordinate the rebuilding instead of the State Department and have Blackwater mercenaries do jobs in place of the U.S. Army. But it didn't work out that way. Halliburton overcharged and underperformed. And the Blackwater guys stumbled into an ambush in Fallujah and got strung up from a bridge, which led to two major battles in the city. And as awful as Saddam's Stalinist regime was, the power vacuum that followed was filled by militias, organized crime, religious zealots, and terrorists, so that life is, unbelievably, worse than it was under Saddam. Bush and his Neocon buddies thought that Iraq would be the perfect little place to test out their neat Libertarian ideas and show how well they worked; instead they got thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and have left the place a wreck.
What Iraq shows is that a functioning free market needs good government. You need security so you and your customers don't get killed, infrastructure so you can run your store, courts so that you can resolve disputes. Without an effective police force, reliable power and water, and a functioning justice system, it's hard to run your shop at a profit.
Perhaps the OP could consider that not all robots are human killing machines, and this kind of swarming/flocking behavior could be applied to something like vehicular safety. I've often pondered the idea of lateral lines on fish, and how quickly a school of fish can become aware of the motions of surrounding fish and other obstacles, remaining in formation but moving as seemingly one unit. How great would it be if robotic cars could react thousands of times faster than a human, and in concert, to flow seamlessly around a tire blowout, or debris that fell off a truck onto the highway?
Yeah, sure, like THAT will make a cool premise for a sci-fi movie...
it's been my experience that the vast majority of the men and women joining the combat arms end up as much better human beings because of their training and indoctrination. For every soldier who becomes a "problem" because of PTSD, there's probably a dozen more who would have ended up as gang members, drug dealers, or petty criminals if it weren't for the opportunity which they found in the military. If you eliminate those opportunities by replacing them with robots, do you really think the result will be good for our society?
But what happen if we don't give robots any opportunities in our armed forces? The robots will all go off and become robot gang members, robot drug dealers, and robot petty criminals.
At least Romney hasn't advertised he'll put Steve Ballmer on his cabinet [wsj.com] like McCain has.
Personally, I think it would look better to have Steve Ballmer mounted over the fireplace, but if McCain feels that a stuffed Steve Ballmer would look attractive placed on top of one of the cabinets, fine by me. I assume the man knows what kind of decoration scheme works best in his own house.
As a devil's advocate, I'm going to echo the original post in saying that we aren't likely to have a woman or a black man in the white house just yet so you might as well pick an alternative that you can live with and support them. And BTW, the politics in New Hampshire and South Carolina show why this won't happen. It isn't a racist or sexist thing to point out reality.
The Democratic race and the Republican race are undecided for different reasons. The Republicans are divided because all of the candidates are weak. None of the candidates can unite the various factions- the Republican Party establishment, small-government conservatives, evangelicals- the way George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan did. All the candidates have some serious issues: Romney is about as authentic as Pamela Anderson's breasts, McCain is too centrist for the far right (hell, the New York Times endorsed him!) and Giuliani... well, he's just a jerk.
A Democratic frontrunner has failed to emerge for the opposite reason: you have two strong, electable candidates with broad party support. Republicans can't make up their mind because they can't figure out who they dislike least, but Democrats can't make up their mind because they can't figure out who they like more. If Clinton takes the nomination, she'll pick up Obama's supporters, and if he wins the nomination, he'll pick up her supporters. Whether the nominee is Obama or Clinton, that person will have broad, strong support across the Democratic Party. As for electability, Obama generates more enthusiasm among Republicans than a lot of Republican candidates. And Clinton may piss off the right, but that's because she's Hillary Clinton, not because she's a woman.
Either way, the smart money is on a Democratic victory: eight years of disastrous mismanagement and a crop of uninspiring candidates have left the Republican party base unenthusiastic, which won't help turnout. Democrats are energized, which is going to help their turnout. But as they say, it's a bad idea to make predictions, especially about the future.
The Apple fanboys don't actually use them. They just stare, doe-eyed and utterly enraptured, at the sleek lucite and brushed aluminum, totally lost in the beauty of its industrial design. Occasionally they caress the device or whisper sweet nothings to it.
Totally. Kim Jong Il got one, and now Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Osama Bin Laden are really jealous, to the point that it's threatening to completely disrupt the Axis of Evil. It doesn't help that Osama got a brown Zune for Christmas and now Kim Jong Il and Ahmadinejad are teasing him mercilessly about it.
Yes, it's all about responsible parenting. It's not that hard, though. To give you an example, just yesterday my two-and-a-half year old son went up behind his mother and tried to hit her in the back of the head with a banana.
When I asked Junior what he was doing, he explained that he was trying to use his.45 to "pwn mommy for being a nOOb" because she was making him go to bed early.
Naturally, being responsible parents, my wife and I have decided that junior has been playing a bit too much Halo 3. Tonight, he will only get to play Halo for four hours, instead of the usual five. See, parenting is all about employing that kind of responsible judgment.
By the way -- I'm not sure the analogy with early aircraft is the one you're going for. Just ignoring how little capital it took to build an airplane versus what it takes to make an orbital spacecraft, you should realize that early airplanes suffered major crashes at very regular intervals. The pilots typically survived because the performance of said aircraft was so low. The first cross-country flight took weeks and involved dozens of crashes.
OK, I'm a little skeptical here. When one of the later Wright Brothers models crashed in 1908, plummeting from a non-spectacular height of 150 feet, Orville broke his leg and several ribs, and his passenger, an Army leutenant, cracked his skull open and died. The Wright aircraft were not exactly high performance. And let's not forget Otto Lilienthal, another aviation pioneer. In 1896, he nose-dived his glider from about 60 feet up and ended up breaking his spine, which killed him the next day.
So I find it difficult to believe that both a pilot and an aircraft could cross the country and survive more than 24 crashes (as the word "dozens" implies). Any citations?
Slashdot Mirror
That's true at the end of the race, when you count up all the delegates and votes. In an ongoing race, perception is everything. If you win by a narrower margin than expected, that can be a "lose" and if you lose by a narrower margin than expected, that would be a "win". For instance, if Obama won by 51-49 in Illinois, or Clinton won by 51-49 in New York, that would show weakness on their home turf and be percieved as something of a loss, since it is an indicator of that nebulous idea of "momentum", whether a candidate is rising or falling in the polls.
I'm always baffled to see people on Slashdot arguing we shouldn't fund basic research. Would we even be having this discussion without federally funded research? It was a federally funded research organization, DARPA, which invented the internet after all, not private industry. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, and government-funded projects like Colossus and ENIAC were vital to the development of the modern computer.
Even if we spend billions of dollars a year on basic research, the occasional runaway success like the internet does so much to benefit the economy that it more than pays for itself. You have to spend money to make money, and we've done pretty well by investing in technology and medicine over the past 50 years.
Obviously, he modified the software extensively before selling it. The fact that it was high-quality is, of course, what tipped people off that it wasn't an authentic Microsoft product.
How much is that in gold pieces?
The smallpox vaccine leaves a scar on your arm, so you'll know if you've been vaccinated. Vaccination against smallpox ended in the U.S. in 1972, although I've seen people born after that date, from other countries, with the scar.
Also, it's not called the DMCA in Canada, it's called the DMCEH.
Slashdot pretty much proves your argument. Every time politics comes up, you get a bunch of cynical, apathetic comments to the effect of "Who cares? It doesn't matter, they're all the same, nothing will change". They've already conceded defeat and they've decided that they're never going to have any influence on the political process; they're dejected, self-involved, and self-pitying like a bunch of emos. So why the hell should anyone listen to anything they have to say? And how the hell will they change anything? It's frustrating, because it leaves a hell of a lot more work for the rest of us to do.
I'm not saying that changing the world for the better is easy, or even always possible, but what would have happened if the kids in Martin Luther King's generation had said, "Who cares? It doesn't matter, all politicians are the same, they'll never allow black people to have the same rights as white people. Nothing will change."
Are you registered?
As suspicious as it looks, I think it's just really, really bad luck. But then again, maybe I need to get with the times and be a little more paranoid.
Just as ironic is the fact that even though they didn't fight in Gulf War II, Iran won the war.
The U.S. has lost because we have failed to achieve our major strategic objectives -to create a stable, Western-style democracy in Iraq and beat back Islamic terrorism- and instead we have been left weaker in every single way. We have no credibility and no allies, so we're weak on the diplomatic front. Our military is overextended and its readiness to fight another war has been reduced. We're poorer, by about a trillion dollars.
Iran wins because two of their major strategic objectives have been achieved: the threat of Iraq and the threat of the U.S. have both been neutralized. Iraq is no longer a threat, because Saddam has been deposed, the military is destroyed, and the new government is Shiite, and too weak to stand up to Iran. The United States is no longer a threat: we can't use diplomacy against Iran, because even if we had proof they were up to something, no one will believe us, and few of our allies will back us up because we're so unpopular abroad. We can't use military force, because we don't have the troops to spare, and again it's unlikely we could get any other countries to assist in a military effort. We do have aircraft and cruise missiles, so in theory we could use airstrikes. But if we try anything, they can use the Shiite militias to attack our forces in Iraq and stir up the civil war there, so even a limited air war with Iran would be tough. Finally, any major conflict with Iran would threaten the oil supply, and with it, the world economy.
So we won't attack Iran, because we can't. And Iran knows it. Their president is a belligerent idiot, they harass our destroyers with their gunboats, they kidnap British seamen, and they send arms to Iraqi insurgents, and they continue to pursue nuclear weapons, all because they know there's not a god damn thing the U.S. can do about it. These are not the actions of a country that is afraid of imminent invasion.
You guys are such a bunch of pussies. You spend years arguing that private industry can do everything better than the government. Then Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld put exactly this into practice in Iraq, by letting private industry do the rebuilding, and things go to hell, and then you guys deny all responsibility. Libertarian ideology -your idiotic, simplistic and mentally retarded "government bad! industry good!" philosophy helped this happen- but you won't own up.
This is a trick question, isn't it?
I think it's an interesting concept for an article, but sloppily executed. The Mechanical Turk doesn't really qualify as a "gadget" in the sense of being a portable, high-tech tool. First, it's a fraud, not a device to solve a practical problem, and second it was sufficiently large that you could hide a person inside it, so it wasn't exactly portable. And the Ark of the Covenant? Give me a break. It's not a gadget. It's a box. A decorated box. They also miss some pretty obvious gadgets. The abacus, the slide rule, and the telescope were all high tech, portable pieces of technology.
Actually, this case is about political censorship; it isn't about religion, or even about the journalism student at all. The student's brother is a journalist who has written pieces critical of one of Afghanistan's political factions, they haven't been able to get him, so they resorted to arresting the journalism student and trumped up some charges. This is about suppressing political dissent; there was a story about this on NPR a few days ago. It's unlikely that the student is in real danger of execution: apparently Karzai has to OK any executions. He doesn't strike me as that kind of a guy, but even assuming he was completely lacking in moral fiber, it's doubtful he would: doing so would cede power to his rivals and piss off his international allies. But I agree that Sharia is an idea whose time came and went in the Dark Ages, along with burning witches and trial by duel. When your court claims to execute God's Will, that gives it power that is difficult to check, and as seen here, that leads to abuses.
Libertarian philosophy is in large part responsible for the failure in Iraq. After all, if the solution to bad government is no government, all we have to do is get rid of Saddam and the economy will take off and society will flourish, right? And we can have Halliburton coordinate the rebuilding instead of the State Department and have Blackwater mercenaries do jobs in place of the U.S. Army. But it didn't work out that way. Halliburton overcharged and underperformed. And the Blackwater guys stumbled into an ambush in Fallujah and got strung up from a bridge, which led to two major battles in the city. And as awful as Saddam's Stalinist regime was, the power vacuum that followed was filled by militias, organized crime, religious zealots, and terrorists, so that life is, unbelievably, worse than it was under Saddam. Bush and his Neocon buddies thought that Iraq would be the perfect little place to test out their neat Libertarian ideas and show how well they worked; instead they got thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and have left the place a wreck.
What Iraq shows is that a functioning free market needs good government. You need security so you and your customers don't get killed, infrastructure so you can run your store, courts so that you can resolve disputes. Without an effective police force, reliable power and water, and a functioning justice system, it's hard to run your shop at a profit.
They stole the data from a graduate student's thesis.
Yeah, sure, like THAT will make a cool premise for a sci-fi movie...
But what happen if we don't give robots any opportunities in our armed forces? The robots will all go off and become robot gang members, robot drug dealers, and robot petty criminals.
Personally, I think it would look better to have Steve Ballmer mounted over the fireplace, but if McCain feels that a stuffed Steve Ballmer would look attractive placed on top of one of the cabinets, fine by me. I assume the man knows what kind of decoration scheme works best in his own house.
The Democratic race and the Republican race are undecided for different reasons. The Republicans are divided because all of the candidates are weak. None of the candidates can unite the various factions- the Republican Party establishment, small-government conservatives, evangelicals- the way George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan did. All the candidates have some serious issues: Romney is about as authentic as Pamela Anderson's breasts, McCain is too centrist for the far right (hell, the New York Times endorsed him!) and Giuliani... well, he's just a jerk.
A Democratic frontrunner has failed to emerge for the opposite reason: you have two strong, electable candidates with broad party support. Republicans can't make up their mind because they can't figure out who they dislike least, but Democrats can't make up their mind because they can't figure out who they like more. If Clinton takes the nomination, she'll pick up Obama's supporters, and if he wins the nomination, he'll pick up her supporters. Whether the nominee is Obama or Clinton, that person will have broad, strong support across the Democratic Party. As for electability, Obama generates more enthusiasm among Republicans than a lot of Republican candidates. And Clinton may piss off the right, but that's because she's Hillary Clinton, not because she's a woman.
Either way, the smart money is on a Democratic victory: eight years of disastrous mismanagement and a crop of uninspiring candidates have left the Republican party base unenthusiastic, which won't help turnout. Democrats are energized, which is going to help their turnout. But as they say, it's a bad idea to make predictions, especially about the future.
So they put liquid sodium on the fissile material as a coolant? Man, is there anything the Japanese *won't* put soy sauce on?
The Apple fanboys don't actually use them. They just stare, doe-eyed and utterly enraptured, at the sleek lucite and brushed aluminum, totally lost in the beauty of its industrial design. Occasionally they caress the device or whisper sweet nothings to it.
Totally. Kim Jong Il got one, and now Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Osama Bin Laden are really jealous, to the point that it's threatening to completely disrupt the Axis of Evil. It doesn't help that Osama got a brown Zune for Christmas and now Kim Jong Il and Ahmadinejad are teasing him mercilessly about it.
Naturally, being responsible parents, my wife and I have decided that junior has been playing a bit too much Halo 3. Tonight, he will only get to play Halo for four hours, instead of the usual five. See, parenting is all about employing that kind of responsible judgment.
OK, I'm a little skeptical here. When one of the later Wright Brothers models crashed in 1908, plummeting from a non-spectacular height of 150 feet, Orville broke his leg and several ribs, and his passenger, an Army leutenant, cracked his skull open and died. The Wright aircraft were not exactly high performance. And let's not forget Otto Lilienthal, another aviation pioneer. In 1896, he nose-dived his glider from about 60 feet up and ended up breaking his spine, which killed him the next day.
So I find it difficult to believe that both a pilot and an aircraft could cross the country and survive more than 24 crashes (as the word "dozens" implies). Any citations?