Re:Does /. want endorsements from the NY Times?
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Buggy Voting Machines
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· Score: 1
If so please note Kerry also supported invasion on those grounds
Kerry did not vote for an invasion: he voted to authorize the use of force, if that's what it came to.
The WMD thing was bullshit from the beginning: Bush didn't invade Iraq because it was a threat to American security. He invaded Iraq because Saddam's defiance was a threat to America's global power. From day 1 in office and before they were planning on taking Hussein out. WMD was just how they rationalized their decision to the public and the world. When that fell apart, it was the terrorist connections. When that fell apart, it was that Saddam was a really bad guy.Which is bullshit too, because Charles Taylor was a nasty SOB, and the people were begging for a handful of U.S. troops to help get rid of him, but the Bush administration wasn't interested.
Re:Does /. want endorsements from the NY Times?
on
Buggy Voting Machines
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· Score: 1
But but but Bush is such a sweet Christian man! He saves our babies from abortion and gayness and taxation, so he can then send them into a war to save us from the terrorists! I just read all about it on the internets!
The war on Iraq was necessary. Well, OK the whole WMD justification fell through. And yeah, they've never found any credible evidence of links to Al Qaeda. BUT, new evidence has emerged which justifies the invasion! Apparently, before we invaded, Saddam was training men to sneak into the major cities of the United States and... PERFORM GAY MARRIAGES!!!
But do some research (I know, I should not use abusive phrases here) and it gets better. Googling for "NYT says that slashdot is credible" gets 330 hits. Do the same for "microsoft says that slashdot is credible" returns 1570 hits.
I tried "Saddam Hussein says that Slashdot is credible" and got 880. "George Bush says that slashdot is credible" returns a whopping 3200. "God says that Slashdot is credible" returns an incredible 3800 (God has spoken!)
Alas, "Natalie Portman says that Slashdot is credible" returns a measly 62....
but wow, all those realistic-looking cardboard boxes (and they are _everywhere_, real subtle guys) sure bounce nicely when tumbling. Progress?
Scoff now, but once games like "Unreal Tournament: Cardboard Box Arena" hit the shelves, along with titles like "Post Office Worker 3D" and "Attack of the Man-Eating Alien Cardboard Boxes", I think the video game industry will prove you wrong.
Re:I don't know about you...
on
NASA's Deep Impact
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· Score: 3, Insightful
In my opinion, Parisians are assholes. Maybe towards Americans in particular, but I was talking to a Spaniard who'd lived there for years and I got the impression from him that people there weren't particularly friendly towards anybody. However I've also been told that outside Paris, we're still remembered as those guys who got rid of the Germans. And from my very limited experience, they do seem to be much more welcoming towards Americans (or again, perhaps just towards anybody) outside Paris.
A couple years ago, right during the push for the Iraq invasion, I dislocated my shoulder on a train in Northern France(slept on it wrong) and ended up in the E.R. in Nancy-Ville or however the heck it's called. They were sort of amused by my hollering loudly in English ("Americain" one of the guys remarked to his buddy with a chuckle) but my brief stay there dealing with the E.R. doctors and nurses and people around town the next day, they didn't have a huge problem with me being an American who spoke three words of French, and impressed me as being pretty hospitable. Plus, I got a ride to the E.R. in an ambulance, an X-ray, some morphine(weird stuff... you still notice the pain sensations but it doesn't hurt), a relocated shoulder, and a few hours of sleep on a stretcher for, I shit you not, like 100 euros... this would cost easily a couple thousand in the states, without the ambulance ride (I know 'cause I've done this a lot). Socialized medicine, don't knock it till you've tried it.
In related news, the Bush administration today announced that they would start handing out permits for logging and oil drilling in Martian national parks...
Around 1% that of earth's; however, couldn't you just increase the length of the prop blades and/or increase their RPM? Lift is proportional to speed squared, so increasing the RPM tenfold should give you the same amount of thrust as in an Earth atmosphere.
In my considered opinion, the enormous potential benefits of human-animal chimera experimentation vastly outweigh any possible negative consequences (which I think have been vastly exaggerated by the more reactionary elements of society). The potential of such technologies to expand our knowledge of cellular biology, tissue function, and particularly the development of the nervous system is enormous. Why, the new understanding of the brain we could glean from such research techniques is so enormous, it positively sets my whiskers trembling in anticipation!
At the other end, any number of cell lines, derived from cancers, that are extant around the world right now are self-sustaining in the sense that provided with nutrients and an appropriate environment, they sustain themselves perfectly well.
Leigh Van Valen actually named one of these lineages ( _Helacyton_), arguing that it was a distinct organism since it grew wild as a contaminant in the "environment" of laboratory cell cultures...
And, by the way, since you realize that DNA is stored in every cell of your body, you should realize that replacing 20% of those cells with lamb cells will lead you to be 20% lamb and 80% human.
I suspect that most people would react very differently to the resulting organisms depending on which cells are replaced with sheep cells. Is that 20% going to be an arm and a leg... or the head and neck? In one case, you could probably be a productive member of society, although probably not the highlight of mainstream social circles. In the other case, you're going to be caged in a lab... or a travelling show. Also, would cutting off 10% of your mass by removing an arm make you only 90% human?
Which suggests that "humannness" isn't an inherent property of cells but an emergent one which occurs when the cells start to do human things like thinking, talking, caring, remembering and suffering.
Of course, chimpanzees and our pets can do all of these things (if not always in so sophisticated a fashion... although you could argue that many mammals might easily have much richer emotional lives than we do if emotions like lust, fear, affection and hunger are really primitive).
Viruses jump species all of the time, they pick up genes as they go, they leave genes as they go. The environment is a genetic mixmaster anyways.
True, which is why the whole argument that gene splicing is "unnatural" is bullshit. It might be a bad idea to help this process along, but that's a separate issue. Probably the most infamous case of a virus jumping species, though, is when an immunodeficiency virus jumped from chimps to humans (perhaps after people at an infected chimp). That produced HIV. The other major strain of HIV, in West Africa, comes from the sooty mangabey monkey.
Perhaps an animal with a mix of human and animal organs would produce antigens that would be useful in treating the disease in humans.
Now, totally off the wall, consider cosmetics. Human female breast enhancement, these days, is done with synthetics. Imagine being able to grow custom '100% natural' hootage, right there on the farm!
Ewh... I guess we'll have to ask for clarification when somebody says, "Yeah, OK, my girlfriend's a cow... but she's got awesome tits."
No, the same people who claim Darwin was right and that there is no God, also feel some compelling need to try to prove Darwin wrong by protecting those who are not able to survive by natural means.
Speaking as an evolutionary biologist, I'd say the above post was the work of someone who has the higher brain functions of a chimp with a botched lobotomy. Lemme put that in small words so you can understand it: you're a fuckin' idiot. Plus, anyone who would "me too!" it is a moron.
Darwin did say life was tough, and that therefore those least fit to survive the struggle, tend not to survive. This is a statement about how the world is. It does not logically follow that the world oughtto be this way. It's simple, morals = how the world ought to be, science = how the world is, so the two do not have a lot to do with each other. Jesus fucking Christ. Read a philosophy book once in a while. For that matter, read a book once in a while.
It's such a strange debate, this "rights of the zygote" stuff. The rest of the western world got over this years ago, and continues to progress. The U.S., with its constant, energy-sapping moral debates fueled by religious irrationality, is so anachronistic.
You heartless bastard. What about the rights of the sperm? Are we just going to sit by idly as millions- billions of sperm are mercilessly slaughtered, as if somehow a single flagellated cell was worth less than an entire human being? We need a constitutional ban on masturbation! Masturbation is MURDER!
Jet propulsion is sort of inefficient as a means of producing thrust- since you accelerate a little bit of mass to a high velocity, that requires more energy than pushing a large mass (as a propeller does) to a lower velocity. So wouldn't using the CO2 to drive a propeller or fan be more efficient (KE = 1/2 MV^2)?
OR, we could reroute the contents of that forward compartment into the engine and create the world's first science-powered vehicle...
Combination devices rarely work. We have the technology to combine the functionality of cameras, PDAs, cell phones, MP3 players, etc. into a single unit. But people still buy the individual devices. Why? Because a camera designed to be a camera- nothing more and nothing less- will always be better (in terms of performance vs. price/ease of use/portability) than a camera which has to simultaneously try to be a cell phone/swiss army watch or whatever.
The trend is obvious: it's towards MORE single-function devices, not fewer, multifunctional devices. Personally, I own a digital SLR to use when I want to take photos, a cell phone for when I want to call people, a laptop for work, a desktop for gaming, a PDA for taking notes, a scanner for scanning documents, a watch for keeping time, an MP3 player for listening to music on the go (or I did until I lost it) a stereo for listening to music at home...
Read Adam Smith, 1776. If a system (say, a worker, or a device, an organism, or whatever) is specialized to do only X it will do it better than if it has to do X, Y, Z, and Q simultaneously. In general, the technological trend is towards functional specialization, not multifunctionality. Sure, there are exceptions (Swiss Army Knives and Leatherman tools) but my money is on specialization, not generalization. That, and I'm incredibly skeptical of whenever someone predicts the death of some technology. I remember in the nineties when everyone was predicting the imminent demise of the desktop computer...
My favorite was the Monster Bait you could throw out to distract the monsters. So when he's baiting the monsters, you know, he's monsterbaiting (insert Beavis Laugh Here).
That's why serial killers are smart. It's not that dumb people don't have similar tendencies, it's just that they get caught before murdering 37 people.
The Owl: You'll have to get someone here who is in his late prime and muscular/fat AND geeky to pull that off. Can't think of someone for this guy.
Jason Alexander ("George Costanza")? He's got the pudgy/geeky thing down. (Kidding.)
Roushank (sp it's been years) is a kind of mixed bad good and bad guy he does allot of shit that most people would find vile but he still goes through with it. Bruce willis comes to mind.
John Malkovich? Ooh, I get chills thinking of that.
A fun thing about how cool compact flourescents are is that you can make paper lampshades (I like to use a good drawing paper, Japanese rice paper, parchment, whatever) and they don't get hot enough to be dangerous. A bit of origami skill and you can make some stylin' lampshades which look weird either lit internally or with the light off.
Slashdot Mirror
Kerry did not vote for an invasion: he voted to authorize the use of force, if that's what it came to.
The WMD thing was bullshit from the beginning: Bush didn't invade Iraq because it was a threat to American security. He invaded Iraq because Saddam's defiance was a threat to America's global power. From day 1 in office and before they were planning on taking Hussein out. WMD was just how they rationalized their decision to the public and the world. When that fell apart, it was the terrorist connections. When that fell apart, it was that Saddam was a really bad guy.Which is bullshit too, because Charles Taylor was a nasty SOB, and the people were begging for a handful of U.S. troops to help get rid of him, but the Bush administration wasn't interested.
The war on Iraq was necessary. Well, OK the whole WMD justification fell through. And yeah, they've never found any credible evidence of links to Al Qaeda. BUT, new evidence has emerged which justifies the invasion! Apparently, before we invaded, Saddam was training men to sneak into the major cities of the United States and... PERFORM GAY MARRIAGES!!!
I tried "Saddam Hussein says that Slashdot is credible" and got 880. "George Bush says that slashdot is credible" returns a whopping 3200. "God says that Slashdot is credible" returns an incredible 3800 (God has spoken!)
Alas, "Natalie Portman says that Slashdot is credible" returns a measly 62....
Scoff now, but once games like "Unreal Tournament: Cardboard Box Arena" hit the shelves, along with titles like "Post Office Worker 3D" and "Attack of the Man-Eating Alien Cardboard Boxes", I think the video game industry will prove you wrong.
A couple years ago, right during the push for the Iraq invasion, I dislocated my shoulder on a train in Northern France(slept on it wrong) and ended up in the E.R. in Nancy-Ville or however the heck it's called. They were sort of amused by my hollering loudly in English ("Americain" one of the guys remarked to his buddy with a chuckle) but my brief stay there dealing with the E.R. doctors and nurses and people around town the next day, they didn't have a huge problem with me being an American who spoke three words of French, and impressed me as being pretty hospitable. Plus, I got a ride to the E.R. in an ambulance, an X-ray, some morphine(weird stuff... you still notice the pain sensations but it doesn't hurt), a relocated shoulder, and a few hours of sleep on a stretcher for, I shit you not, like 100 euros... this would cost easily a couple thousand in the states, without the ambulance ride (I know 'cause I've done this a lot). Socialized medicine, don't knock it till you've tried it.
I wonder if Microsoft will "accidentally" include a bug that causes the B-52s to drop bombs on top of desktops running Linux...
In related news, the Bush administration today announced that they would start handing out permits for logging and oil drilling in Martian national parks...
Around 1% that of earth's; however, couldn't you just increase the length of the prop blades and/or increase their RPM? Lift is proportional to speed squared, so increasing the RPM tenfold should give you the same amount of thrust as in an Earth atmosphere.
-Nibbles the Mouse
Leigh Van Valen actually named one of these lineages ( _Helacyton_), arguing that it was a distinct organism since it grew wild as a contaminant in the "environment" of laboratory cell cultures...
I suspect that most people would react very differently to the resulting organisms depending on which cells are replaced with sheep cells. Is that 20% going to be an arm and a leg... or the head and neck? In one case, you could probably be a productive member of society, although probably not the highlight of mainstream social circles. In the other case, you're going to be caged in a lab... or a travelling show. Also, would cutting off 10% of your mass by removing an arm make you only 90% human?
Which suggests that "humannness" isn't an inherent property of cells but an emergent one which occurs when the cells start to do human things like thinking, talking, caring, remembering and suffering.
Of course, chimpanzees and our pets can do all of these things (if not always in so sophisticated a fashion... although you could argue that many mammals might easily have much richer emotional lives than we do if emotions like lust, fear, affection and hunger are really primitive).
Aw, shit... all that effort collecting a huge pile of dead skin cells, and NOW you tell me this is a waste of time?
True, which is why the whole argument that gene splicing is "unnatural" is bullshit. It might be a bad idea to help this process along, but that's a separate issue. Probably the most infamous case of a virus jumping species, though, is when an immunodeficiency virus jumped from chimps to humans (perhaps after people at an infected chimp). That produced HIV. The other major strain of HIV, in West Africa, comes from the sooty mangabey monkey.
Ewh... I guess we'll have to ask for clarification when somebody says, "Yeah, OK, my girlfriend's a cow... but she's got awesome tits."
Speaking as an evolutionary biologist, I'd say the above post was the work of someone who has the higher brain functions of a chimp with a botched lobotomy. Lemme put that in small words so you can understand it: you're a fuckin' idiot. Plus, anyone who would "me too!" it is a moron.
Darwin did say life was tough, and that therefore those least fit to survive the struggle, tend not to survive. This is a statement about how the world is. It does not logically follow that the world oughtto be this way. It's simple, morals = how the world ought to be, science = how the world is, so the two do not have a lot to do with each other. Jesus fucking Christ. Read a philosophy book once in a while. For that matter, read a book once in a while.
You heartless bastard. What about the rights of the sperm? Are we just going to sit by idly as millions- billions of sperm are mercilessly slaughtered, as if somehow a single flagellated cell was worth less than an entire human being? We need a constitutional ban on masturbation! Masturbation is MURDER!
OR, we could reroute the contents of that forward compartment into the engine and create the world's first science-powered vehicle...
The trend is obvious: it's towards MORE single-function devices, not fewer, multifunctional devices. Personally, I own a digital SLR to use when I want to take photos, a cell phone for when I want to call people, a laptop for work, a desktop for gaming, a PDA for taking notes, a scanner for scanning documents, a watch for keeping time, an MP3 player for listening to music on the go (or I did until I lost it) a stereo for listening to music at home...
Read Adam Smith, 1776. If a system (say, a worker, or a device, an organism, or whatever) is specialized to do only X it will do it better than if it has to do X, Y, Z, and Q simultaneously. In general, the technological trend is towards functional specialization, not multifunctionality. Sure, there are exceptions (Swiss Army Knives and Leatherman tools) but my money is on specialization, not generalization. That, and I'm incredibly skeptical of whenever someone predicts the death of some technology. I remember in the nineties when everyone was predicting the imminent demise of the desktop computer...
My favorite was the Monster Bait you could throw out to distract the monsters. So when he's baiting the monsters, you know, he's monsterbaiting (insert Beavis Laugh Here).
Link had better watch it, or he's gonna go blind.
That's why serial killers are smart. It's not that dumb people don't have similar tendencies, it's just that they get caught before murdering 37 people.
Yeah, these guys are no better than the Dems and Republicans, I mean they are clearly just a tool of the Ostrich special interest groups...
Jason Alexander ("George Costanza")? He's got the pudgy/geeky thing down. (Kidding.)
Roushank (sp it's been years) is a kind of mixed bad good and bad guy he does allot of shit that most people would find vile but he still goes through with it. Bruce willis comes to mind.
John Malkovich? Ooh, I get chills thinking of that.
Tasteless, sure. But how this could be more disgusting than what we've got going on in the White House and Iraq right now, I don't know.
Of course, it's not an either-or thing. Maybe morals are flexible AND my morals are bad.
A fun thing about how cool compact flourescents are is that you can make paper lampshades (I like to use a good drawing paper, Japanese rice paper, parchment, whatever) and they don't get hot enough to be dangerous. A bit of origami skill and you can make some stylin' lampshades which look weird either lit internally or with the light off.