Communism by its nature produces an easily-exploited power vaccuum that can most easily be used by "totalitarian regimes", which correspondingly usually get there first. Add that to a doctrinal distaste for the easiest ways to popularize morality or ethics (religion-- it has its flaws, but it's a handy restraint on general social destructiveness, too) and the espousal of "ideal" behaviors which are only not ideal, but are nonideal in a manner that often directly contradicts the realities of human nature...
I'd say that, yes, communism is set up to get people killed. Basically, it's the same reason you'd call an untrained couch potato attempting a ladder balance, on a high wire, with no net self-destructive.
Also, socialism is not communism. Most countries with socialist programs aren't actually trying for communism at all; there's no drive to move past the stage of crappy government-owned services.
"when oh when are we going to see researchers publishing information in non-fee journals as a matter of course?"
Right after the peer review process magically no longer requires expensive lab time and resources. If only there were some way to fund peer review from the pocket of the people that use the data... oh, wait.
Indeed. Except then he'd backdate your reciept to indicate that you bought the cartridge when it was actually priced at 40000$, and charge that to your credit line instead.
Yeah, it's a low shot, but at this point the guy deserves it.
Did people that draw pretty pictures for a living grab the descriptor "creative" while the rest of us were busy actually creating things? As a member of a field that produces... you know, actual stuff, I feel a bit gypped.
I mean, sure, using publishing software (to hijack your example) is technically creating something, but taping the pretty red bow to the nose of the Saturn 5 does not a "Creative" make. I'm gonna reserve that term for the guys that advance the tech on which the human race's progress rides, thanks.
Ok, obligatory semantic gripe done now. Now, the technical gripe: "Creative users tend to replace software and hardware much more often" and "in order to be properly supported, require that their support personnel actually know something about their highly specialized field" go double for engineering, and "We're not talking Microsoft Office here. This is some serious shit with big money involved and little time to dick around" also applies to engineering applications to a much greater extent than pretty-picture drawing. A delay in the design process on a new plant is gonna cost a company on the order of several million a day at the least, several billion a day not being unheard of. Since I don't know any engineering design software with any Mac support whatsoever, I'm gonna have to say your argument, while perhaps good within the context of your own field, fails in mine, and therefore isn't really as general as you make it out to be.
If a slave stepped on a moth, conceivably that moth could have had descendants, over a period of several decades, build up to sufficient numbers that they ate holes in your shirt, causing you to patch it; this would bring the slavery thing under "interstate commerce" because you patched it yourself rather than buying a new shirt form someone in hawaii or whatever.
I honestly bet that would get the a-ok form the current supreme court. What do I win?
something like.06$US per scm, if I recall correctly. That was for purchases in oxidation-reactor quantities, though, so you might want to look it up yourself.
Also, most of the cost of bought oxygen comes from compressing/cooling it to a liquid and then shipping it, not producing the stuff itself.
Indeed. Progressive, and not a good idea in general.
You realize that the progressives were the crazy, impractical party absorbed by the democrats that correspond to the impractical overreacting Libertarians' relationship with the Republicans, right? What I'm telling you here is that you're right, but you're also being impractical in your basic goals.
It's called a 'tree'. It removes an oxygen molecule from every carbon dioxide molecule, then you burn it in low-oxygen conditions to get CO. It uses a series of light-activated enzymatic molecules to do this, as described in the article.
In the aliens' defense, if they're anything like us living on a planet without all their cool modern gadgets isn't something more than a tiny minority would do, and the ones that did would probably be the eco-nut conservationists who would flee as soon as it looked like the rest of the planet was taking notice of their gigantic stone refrigerator.
Well, yeah. Almost all bronzes are harder than cast iron or most steels. The reason for the switch was economic, primarily, not because iron was better for the contemporary applications for metal.
So, yeah, I agree with your point, but the argument shouldn't be 'bronze technology of the time was more advanced than anything known to victorian civilization', it's just 'bronze is harder than copper (or low-quality iron and steel)'. Maybe add a 'fool' to the end to take your feeling of superiority out on the appropriate target rather than the poor entirety of Victorian England.
The main bit, I understand, was not strength, but durability. Modern concrete was just as compressively strong as the Roman stuff, but thermal cycles and the resulting expansion/compression cycles would rip it up with tensile stresses.
The trick to preventing this is to include air bubbles in the mix, which you do by sticking in a chemical surfactant to promote bubble formation. Nowadays, we have various soaps and such to do the job, but the only thing really available to the Romans was membrane-based biological matter, i.e. animal blood.
Given the inherent impracticality of a Christian-dominated society in... certain areas, it's not really a surprise that no one thought to sacrifice livestock into their concrete until we started doing it the manufactured chemical way, somebody worked it out from the back end, and it was verified how the Romans had done it now that it was known what ot look for.
In conclusion, the weakness of pre-50s concrete is the fault of the christian religion... again. Just kidding, you guys are great.
Since I have, since turning 18, had a 100% rate of maximum security procedure being enacted (Pulled aside for the extra search, bag search, occasionally detained briefly for questioning), and my race is white on a level several shades lighter than your average skinhead, I'm going to venture that it has more to do with age and sex than what country it looks like you're from.
(That's 100% of about 30, 40 flights, so there's still the outside chance that I really did pull 'random search' from the hat every time, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it seems it wasn't actually random.)
Because all machines are coded by a single person with no error-checking or internal oversight by other members of the machine's design team, yes, sir.
Aside from attacking the technical/business literacy of the publishing organization: The long and short of the issue is that the potential for corruption is identical for paper ballots and electronic ones. The issue with electronic machines is not increased political skullduggery, but increased potential for data loss (1 disk fried = a few thousand votes, one ballot fried = one lost vote). I guess if you sent the data over a public network, that'd be an issue, but that wasn't done in at least the last election in which I participated.
P.S. No, I have no idea why I felt compelled to comment on this.
Yes, because drawing massive amounts of kinetic energy out of the wind or covering innumerable miles of countryside with black panels isn't going to have any impact on the weather or environment...
Yeah, the thing about temperature data is that it's rather inconsistent. Consider
(a) Different methods used in different areas (tree rings in one area, ice cores in another)
(b) Using local temperatures to represent regional temperatures in ways which may or may not be accurate
(c) claims of a "global average temperature" for pre-1900s where there aren't really consistent, distributed data as in (a) and (b)
The atmosphere is (1)fluid flow around a spinning sphere and (2) turbulent flow, two things that have defied meaningful characterization in more than the most general sense (though we're getting closer, i'm told). I'd trust the data from the last fifty years or so, where the temperatures were all measured using calibrated instruments and there were enough of them to get something meaningful. Before that, while a climatologist's guess is better than pulling a number out of a hat, it's not all that much better. Or even really meaningful. Local fluctuations are often more important.
Also, "it was on a graph, therefore it's true" is probably the most hilarious argument I've heard in hours. Thanks for the laugh, eh.
Yes. As a scientist, the word 'know' has been appropriately excised from my vocabulary in every applicaiton but that of sarcasm. I can verify that things are consistent with my current total model of the nature of the universe-- anything more is hubris.
From historical experience and knowing some climatologists, I'd sum up the claims of Gore as 'not as firm as Gore'd want you to think they were'. However, having some experience in control design, I don't see why that should stop us from fiddling with the situation. Weather control is cool.
The thing is, your logic starts from the assumption of a universal code of morals. When you consider that we are not a monolithic society, but in our greatest political accumulation a confederation of fairly disparate states tied together by mutual cooperation, these attmepts to protect one's own citizens to the extent of one's own laws is not only to be expected, but entirely appropriate.
Previous reply pointed out that there's already some federal law involved in this, making attempts to negate border-hopping a bit redundant. I agree, in practice, it's a mess, with federal and state stepping all over each other, but the principle is valid, morally speaking.
If everyone agreed on these issues at least to the extent that the laws and penalties were uniform everywhere, then yes, there would be no need to tack on random extra laws to "get" criminals. However, they don't, so there is.
Science is faith in the axiom of repeatability. I believe that if I throw a ball into the air a billion times, and it comes back to earth every time, that the billion and first time I throw it it will also come back down. The rest is fiddling with the variables.
All logic has to start from somewhere... this, as scientists an engineers, is where we start. Seriously, try to find a principle more fundamental than repeatability in science. If you can do it without ending in "well, it has worked so far" (circularly supporting the empirical principle with itself), then I salute you, because I can't.
If the universe is actually patternless, and the observed patterns of behavior observed to this point are mere coincidence, the whole thing falls apart.
That said, I'm fond of science more than the invisible-sky-monkey theories. I'm not going to waste my time pretending it's more than a personal preference and that I know T3H TR00t|-|!, though. Ironically, that's because I'm not very religious (for a human, anyway. I'm still pretty religious compared to, say, and aardvark, I'd imagine).
Geeze, racist much? The cloners, if that's what you're referring to, were mostly Korean (and one American, I gather). Not very effective censure if you're incapable of even noticing what country they were from, you know.
Damn, there goes my argument that RPGs are cool and that dude Tom is a bit of a hack. How am I supposed to prove anything without referring to scientific consensus?
The ozone layer? What? I thought the movie was about globabl warming.
It took a long time to convince me that 99% of global-warming pushers being overzealous idiots didn't necessarily make them wrong (even if they were only right by accident). Are you trying to make me go back?
If you posted a warning and required age verification (claim of birth date), then a judge will not likely convict you and the minor is more likely to be in trouble (falsification of a contract, or whatever it's called these days) than you are. And yes, if you use the rss to solicit sex from them, that's covered, i'd think. That'd be kinda stupid, though, as all your other subscribers would see it.
Except that IM is a text-format message delivered via a computer network. Thus making it e-mail. Wether the protocol (or whatever, not a network engineer) is also called "e-mail" is irrelevant.
Remember that the courts don't use the formal jargon to refer to technologies, they use fuctional definitions wherever possible; to do otherwise would be stupid as tech moves at least twice the speed of law. What you're proposing is the equivalent of me saying "you can't convict me for holding those donated organs in an unrefrigerated vessel! It wasn't actually a vessel, it was a flash drum (steady-state flow system, for those of you in the other engineerings)! Ha! Acquitted!" Seriously. Technical jargon != legal definition.
Slashdot Mirror
Communism by its nature produces an easily-exploited power vaccuum that can most easily be used by "totalitarian regimes", which correspondingly usually get there first. Add that to a doctrinal distaste for the easiest ways to popularize morality or ethics (religion-- it has its flaws, but it's a handy restraint on general social destructiveness, too) and the espousal of "ideal" behaviors which are only not ideal, but are nonideal in a manner that often directly contradicts the realities of human nature...
I'd say that, yes, communism is set up to get people killed. Basically, it's the same reason you'd call an untrained couch potato attempting a ladder balance, on a high wire, with no net self-destructive.
Also, socialism is not communism. Most countries with socialist programs aren't actually trying for communism at all; there's no drive to move past the stage of crappy government-owned services.
"when oh when are we going to see researchers publishing information in non-fee journals as a matter of course?"
Right after the peer review process magically no longer requires expensive lab time and resources. If only there were some way to fund peer review from the pocket of the people that use the data... oh, wait.
Indeed. Except then he'd backdate your reciept to indicate that you bought the cartridge when it was actually priced at 40000$, and charge that to your credit line instead.
Yeah, it's a low shot, but at this point the guy deserves it.
Did people that draw pretty pictures for a living grab the descriptor "creative" while the rest of us were busy actually creating things? As a member of a field that produces... you know, actual stuff, I feel a bit gypped.
I mean, sure, using publishing software (to hijack your example) is technically creating something, but taping the pretty red bow to the nose of the Saturn 5 does not a "Creative" make. I'm gonna reserve that term for the guys that advance the tech on which the human race's progress rides, thanks.
Ok, obligatory semantic gripe done now. Now, the technical gripe: "Creative users tend to replace software and hardware much more often" and "in order to be properly supported, require that their support personnel actually know something about their highly specialized field" go double for engineering, and "We're not talking Microsoft Office here. This is some serious shit with big money involved and little time to dick around" also applies to engineering applications to a much greater extent than pretty-picture drawing. A delay in the design process on a new plant is gonna cost a company on the order of several million a day at the least, several billion a day not being unheard of. Since I don't know any engineering design software with any Mac support whatsoever, I'm gonna have to say your argument, while perhaps good within the context of your own field, fails in mine, and therefore isn't really as general as you make it out to be.
If a slave stepped on a moth, conceivably that moth could have had descendants, over a period of several decades, build up to sufficient numbers that they ate holes in your shirt, causing you to patch it; this would bring the slavery thing under "interstate commerce" because you patched it yourself rather than buying a new shirt form someone in hawaii or whatever.
I honestly bet that would get the a-ok form the current supreme court. What do I win?
something like .06$US per scm, if I recall correctly. That was for purchases in oxidation-reactor quantities, though, so you might want to look it up yourself.
Also, most of the cost of bought oxygen comes from compressing/cooling it to a liquid and then shipping it, not producing the stuff itself.
Indeed. Progressive, and not a good idea in general.
You realize that the progressives were the crazy, impractical party absorbed by the democrats that correspond to the impractical overreacting Libertarians' relationship with the Republicans, right? What I'm telling you here is that you're right, but you're also being impractical in your basic goals.
It's called a 'tree'. It removes an oxygen molecule from every carbon dioxide molecule, then you burn it in low-oxygen conditions to get CO. It uses a series of light-activated enzymatic molecules to do this, as described in the article.
Merry christmas.
In the aliens' defense, if they're anything like us living on a planet without all their cool modern gadgets isn't something more than a tiny minority would do, and the ones that did would probably be the eco-nut conservationists who would flee as soon as it looked like the rest of the planet was taking notice of their gigantic stone refrigerator.
Dude, you got like 5 replies taking you seriously without even trying to troll... you're like a troll-ey GOD.
/wish for mod points
/salute,
Well, yeah. Almost all bronzes are harder than cast iron or most steels. The reason for the switch was economic, primarily, not because iron was better for the contemporary applications for metal.
So, yeah, I agree with your point, but the argument shouldn't be 'bronze technology of the time was more advanced than anything known to victorian civilization', it's just 'bronze is harder than copper (or low-quality iron and steel)'. Maybe add a 'fool' to the end to take your feeling of superiority out on the appropriate target rather than the poor entirety of Victorian England.
The main bit, I understand, was not strength, but durability. Modern concrete was just as compressively strong as the Roman stuff, but thermal cycles and the resulting expansion/compression cycles would rip it up with tensile stresses.
The trick to preventing this is to include air bubbles in the mix, which you do by sticking in a chemical surfactant to promote bubble formation. Nowadays, we have various soaps and such to do the job, but the only thing really available to the Romans was membrane-based biological matter, i.e. animal blood.
Given the inherent impracticality of a Christian-dominated society in... certain areas, it's not really a surprise that no one thought to sacrifice livestock into their concrete until we started doing it the manufactured chemical way, somebody worked it out from the back end, and it was verified how the Romans had done it now that it was known what ot look for.
In conclusion, the weakness of pre-50s concrete is the fault of the christian religion... again. Just kidding, you guys are great.
Since I have, since turning 18, had a 100% rate of maximum security procedure being enacted (Pulled aside for the extra search, bag search, occasionally detained briefly for questioning), and my race is white on a level several shades lighter than your average skinhead, I'm going to venture that it has more to do with age and sex than what country it looks like you're from.
(That's 100% of about 30, 40 flights, so there's still the outside chance that I really did pull 'random search' from the hat every time, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it seems it wasn't actually random.)
"A single programmer could rig a major election."
Because all machines are coded by a single person with no error-checking or internal oversight by other members of the machine's design team, yes, sir.
Aside from attacking the technical/business literacy of the publishing organization: The long and short of the issue is that the potential for corruption is identical for paper ballots and electronic ones. The issue with electronic machines is not increased political skullduggery, but increased potential for data loss (1 disk fried = a few thousand votes, one ballot fried = one lost vote). I guess if you sent the data over a public network, that'd be an issue, but that wasn't done in at least the last election in which I participated.
P.S. No, I have no idea why I felt compelled to comment on this.
"We've dealt with radical socialists before -- at least they can be argued with in something approaching rational discussion."
Never met a union boss, then? Unless you meant rational extortion.
Yes, because drawing massive amounts of kinetic energy out of the wind or covering innumerable miles of countryside with black panels isn't going to have any impact on the weather or environment...
/snicker
Yeah, the thing about temperature data is that it's rather inconsistent. Consider
(a) Different methods used in different areas (tree rings in one area, ice cores in another)
(b) Using local temperatures to represent regional temperatures in ways which may or may not be accurate
(c) claims of a "global average temperature" for pre-1900s where there aren't really consistent, distributed data as in (a) and (b)
The atmosphere is (1)fluid flow around a spinning sphere and (2) turbulent flow, two things that have defied meaningful characterization in more than the most general sense (though we're getting closer, i'm told). I'd trust the data from the last fifty years or so, where the temperatures were all measured using calibrated instruments and there were enough of them to get something meaningful. Before that, while a climatologist's guess is better than pulling a number out of a hat, it's not all that much better. Or even really meaningful. Local fluctuations are often more important.
Also, "it was on a graph, therefore it's true" is probably the most hilarious argument I've heard in hours. Thanks for the laugh, eh.
Yes. As a scientist, the word 'know' has been appropriately excised from my vocabulary in every applicaiton but that of sarcasm. I can verify that things are consistent with my current total model of the nature of the universe-- anything more is hubris.
From historical experience and knowing some climatologists, I'd sum up the claims of Gore as 'not as firm as Gore'd want you to think they were'. However, having some experience in control design, I don't see why that should stop us from fiddling with the situation. Weather control is cool.
The thing is, your logic starts from the assumption of a universal code of morals. When you consider that we are not a monolithic society, but in our greatest political accumulation a confederation of fairly disparate states tied together by mutual cooperation, these attmepts to protect one's own citizens to the extent of one's own laws is not only to be expected, but entirely appropriate.
Previous reply pointed out that there's already some federal law involved in this, making attempts to negate border-hopping a bit redundant. I agree, in practice, it's a mess, with federal and state stepping all over each other, but the principle is valid, morally speaking.
If everyone agreed on these issues at least to the extent that the laws and penalties were uniform everywhere, then yes, there would be no need to tack on random extra laws to "get" criminals. However, they don't, so there is.
Science is faith in the axiom of repeatability. I believe that if I throw a ball into the air a billion times, and it comes back to earth every time, that the billion and first time I throw it it will also come back down. The rest is fiddling with the variables.
All logic has to start from somewhere... this, as scientists an engineers, is where we start. Seriously, try to find a principle more fundamental than repeatability in science. If you can do it without ending in "well, it has worked so far" (circularly supporting the empirical principle with itself), then I salute you, because I can't.
If the universe is actually patternless, and the observed patterns of behavior observed to this point are mere coincidence, the whole thing falls apart.
That said, I'm fond of science more than the invisible-sky-monkey theories. I'm not going to waste my time pretending it's more than a personal preference and that I know T3H TR00t|-|!, though. Ironically, that's because I'm not very religious (for a human, anyway. I'm still pretty religious compared to, say, and aardvark, I'd imagine).
Geeze, racist much? The cloners, if that's what you're referring to, were mostly Korean (and one American, I gather). Not very effective censure if you're incapable of even noticing what country they were from, you know.
Damn, there goes my argument that RPGs are cool and that dude Tom is a bit of a hack. How am I supposed to prove anything without referring to scientific consensus?
The ozone layer? What? I thought the movie was about globabl warming.
It took a long time to convince me that 99% of global-warming pushers being overzealous idiots didn't necessarily make them wrong (even if they were only right by accident). Are you trying to make me go back?
If you posted a warning and required age verification (claim of birth date), then a judge will not likely convict you and the minor is more likely to be in trouble (falsification of a contract, or whatever it's called these days) than you are. And yes, if you use the rss to solicit sex from them, that's covered, i'd think. That'd be kinda stupid, though, as all your other subscribers would see it.
Except that IM is a text-format message delivered via a computer network. Thus making it e-mail. Wether the protocol (or whatever, not a network engineer) is also called "e-mail" is irrelevant.
Remember that the courts don't use the formal jargon to refer to technologies, they use fuctional definitions wherever possible; to do otherwise would be stupid as tech moves at least twice the speed of law. What you're proposing is the equivalent of me saying "you can't convict me for holding those donated organs in an unrefrigerated vessel! It wasn't actually a vessel, it was a flash drum (steady-state flow system, for those of you in the other engineerings)! Ha! Acquitted!" Seriously. Technical jargon != legal definition.