he is actually the result of a MIXED black-white marriage
You would never know that from hearing him talk. He calls him self "black" not "bi-racia" or "multi-racial". Nor does he sometimes call himself "black" and other times "white".
I mean, "mono-racial"? Caucasian mother and grand-parents, African father? Indonesian step-father? Indonesian/Caucasian half-brothers and sisters? "Mono"-racial?
Then why does Obama keep calling himself "black" instead of "bi-racial" or "multi-racial" or sometimes saying "black" and sometimes saying "white". It seems to me he purposefully chose a mono-racial identity.
As for McCain, I don't know what he calls his family. While Obama made an issue of his race, McCain never made an issue of his opponent's race or tried to score points with his family's race. McCain really followed Dr. King's dream and left race out of the picture.
McCain has a multi-racial family. Obama is yet another example in our long line of presidents with mono-racial families. McCain followed Dr. King's dream and didn't asked to be judge on the color of his skin or of his children's skin color. Obama race-baited early in the campaign and talked about how he didn't look like previous presidents - as if his color were something you should consider while voting.
McCain was the real follower of Dr. King's dream. To bad we're still not ready for it.
I remember earlier articles that gave me the impression that the voting machine manufacturers were resisting paper ballot print-outs for recounts because they didn't want any mistakes being caught that would make them look bad. It seems that strategy may have backfired on them as people won't trust the machines without the print-outs.
Good for people. It's not often they have sense.
Of course, I suppose the good sense in rejecting these machines will be balanced by the the number of people who vote for Obama Tuesday. We're still trying to recover from the Carter years and we already want to elect another naive liberal socialist with a solid far left congress to back him up. Sigh, I'm going to bed. Wake me up in 20 years if anyone is still alive.
Obama ran an ad about McCain not using email. A little bit of Googling on Obama's part (does he know about Google) would have informed him that McCain has trouble typing because of his war injuries. Perhaps McCain will be more sensitive to the needs of physically challenged Americans than Obama.
As for McCain's ability to handle technology. Before becoming a Senator he operated in real time some of the most sophisticated machines on the planet. As senator he has been called the "Senate's savviest technologist" by Forbes magazine. According to Jacob Weisber of the liberal Slate magazine, McCain, as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, was "forced him to learn about the Internet early on, and young Web entrepreneurs such as Jerry Yang and Jeff Bezos fascinate him."
Wikipedia may have "verifiability" as policy, but that is not necessarily followed in practice. Many articles are full of information without verifiable sources backing them up. A reference and or verifiability become more important when the information is challenged. Then "verifiability" becomes a dispute resolution mechanism, often of last resort.
I suspect that one of the reasons Wikipedia tends to be so accurate is that it doesn't rely solely on verifiability. It relies on a democracy of knowledge, confirmed by verifiability when needed.
Of course, sometimes verifiability is absurd. I can find many verifiable sources telling me that Taiwan is a province of the People's Republic of China. But try traveling there with your PRC visa or your PRC passport. Sometimes the verifiable sources just can't be trusted. If I could read Chinese I could probably find verifiable sources telling me wonderful Mao was and how none of the problems that afflicted China during his benevolent were in any way his fault.
I pay a lot of attention to the Taiwan issue, and this is a real problem because of the political and increasing economic weight China can throw around in persuading verifiable sources to write things in a way the PRC approves of.
80miles per hour is plenty fast to kill a lot of people... yup, awesome safety feature right there.
I'm not sure how many teens die in accidents where the speed is over 80. Most of my accidents and near accidents occurred on windy roads rather than fast interstates. The time I ran off the road after topping the tiniest little hill (just enough to loosen traction) on wet pavement, I was probably going less than 50 mph.
Fortunately God was looking out for me. On a long stretch of road I went off in the only spot without fences, trees, telephone poles, or other obstacles that would have done a lot of damage.
Now if the device could somehow determine the hilliness and curvature of the road ahead, a car-enforce speed-limit might do more good.
Today's conservatives conserve the values of yesterday's revolutionaries. Today's progressives fight for what tomorrow's conservatives will fight to conserve.
You mean like the communism movement that was so popular amoung revolutionaries in the 1920s and 1930s? The eugenics programs that were similarly popular?
Some of the progress of revolutionaries does eventually become protected by conservatives. But an awful lot (and I do mean "awful") fails to ever come to pass because the conservatives stop it from happening.
Fascism was considered "revolutionary" and "progressive" for a season too.
Taiwan is a big chip maker. I wonder how much of this is an attempt to undermine one of Taiwan's important sources of economic strength. Also, this has a double bonus for imperialism in that making the world less dependent on Taiwan's chip production will make other countries less concerned about Taiwan's fate.
A free trade agreement with Taiwan would sure be a big help for democracy and against modern day imperialism.
And strangely enough, Palin's record is eerily like Quayle's. Looks great on paper, but rather innocuous. Nothing jumps out. And alas, that's what's needed in a VP. She votes firmly with the party line. Nary a rebellious thought in her head. Just like Quayle.
You can write good code in pretty much any language, and you can write bad code in pretty much any language. Perl makes it hard to write good code and easy to write bad code.
Worse, Perl has so many syntactical features and shortcuts that aside from the experts, no two people know the same Perl language. People know enough of a subset of Perl to write what they need to, but when they have to read other people's code the syntax is tough to decipher. In a simpler language like Java were the tricks are in the libraries rather than the syntax. This makes some behaviors less elegant to program, but the new person can easily look up the class or function name. Syntax can be much harder to look up, particularly when it is one of the "assumed" values like $_ which you can't look up because it doesn't even appear!
Perl is a great tool for short scripts, particularly if the script will be thrown away after use. It's not a good choice for a large project. If you get the right mix of people, you could make the project succeed with Perl - that's true of most languages - but that doesn't make it a good choice in general.
I would love to see a game that accurately and obviously incorporates time-dialation and other weird stuff from the theory of relativity in such a way that after playing one gets an intuitive feel for how the stuff works. How would two space ships fighting each other look to each other, and from a third POV, if both were moving at 0.8c? How would your tactics be forced to change?
Or what if had a trading game involving beings with very long lives (so that interstellar space travel is useful) and very slow technological changes (yeah, I know, how would they get space travel with slow technologiy changes, just suspend your disbelief for a minute)?
Such a game would be very educational. The normal physics stuff from most video games is easily replicated just by walking outside and bouncing a ball.
Password reset questions don't work for me because I refuse to give out the kind of personal information they ask for. If they force me to pick a password with so many restrictions that I can't pick one I'll remember, then if they want me to have access they'll just have to reset my password manually.
So if you allow athletes to use whatever drugs they can find to make them perform well NOW, regardless of any future health problems, how many will accept early death in exchange for short-term glory? I'm guessing quite a lot of them. Young people, which most athletes are, aren't the best at thinking long term. How different is this different than the old Roman gladiators? Ok, they were slaves. Should we allow fights to the death as sport so long as the contestants aren't forced into it?
Will most people be able to enjoy sports if watching them reminds them of a terrible price the athletes are paying in health and longevity?
The drug tests may not catch all drugs well, but I would guess that in general the more impact a drug makes on performance, the easier it is to catch. Also the drugs with the most dangerous side effects are probably easier to catch too simply because of those side effects. So the drug testing can't prevent all cheating, but it does help limit the damage done by them.
Americans who are aware they don't know enough about science are balanced out by those who think they understand science but don't. Watch slashdot next time the subjects of evolution or religion come up.
I live in the Northern Virginia area. Not too long ago we started using the computer voting system where we don't get any kind of paper confirmation of how we voted nor is there a paper trail to assist in recounts.
And coincidentally(?) there have been a lot of news reports recently about how the Northern Virginia area is voting more Democratic and could swing the whole state in the upcoming election.
Did they patent the idea that someone might want to put such a marker on a card, or did they patent the technology for doing so?
It seems the patent office has confused necessity with invention, or perhaps more accurately - perception of demand has been confused with invention.
Recognizing that people might want to put a marker on a card to indicate a preference for paper or plastic was insightful. But it wasn't an invention. Before an invention you must have a need. And then you must have an original way to address that need.
Need: An easy way for customers to indicate their preference for paper or plastic without having to go through the laborious process of the bagger asking "paper or plastic" and the customer responding with either "paper" or "plastic".
Solution: Store that information on a card using electronic or paper-and-glue methods.
Now, if no one has ever managed to store information on a durable card before, then you might have a pretty neat invention! Otherwise, all you're doing is using an well known invention for its intended purpose. This should be no more patentable than saying driving an SUV into a particular spot in the rainforest no one has ever driven on. Just because you're the first one to have a need to do it doesn't mean you can patent it.
Midori Ito: I'll never forget when she ran into the cameraman. She was so polite afterwards, bowing and apologizing before continuing her performance. One of the best sports moments ever. I believe she was also the first female to perform the triple-axle.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking of Obama, his wife, and his kids.
he is actually the result of a MIXED black-white marriage
You would never know that from hearing him talk. He calls him self "black" not "bi-racia" or "multi-racial". Nor does he sometimes call himself "black" and other times "white".
I was thinking of Obama, his wife, and his kids.
I mean, "mono-racial"? Caucasian mother and grand-parents, African father? Indonesian step-father? Indonesian/Caucasian half-brothers and sisters? "Mono"-racial?
Then why does Obama keep calling himself "black" instead of "bi-racial" or "multi-racial" or sometimes saying "black" and sometimes saying "white". It seems to me he purposefully chose a mono-racial identity.
As for McCain, I don't know what he calls his family. While Obama made an issue of his race, McCain never made an issue of his opponent's race or tried to score points with his family's race. McCain really followed Dr. King's dream and left race out of the picture.
McCain has a multi-racial family. Obama is yet another example in our long line of presidents with mono-racial families. McCain followed Dr. King's dream and didn't asked to be judge on the color of his skin or of his children's skin color. Obama race-baited early in the campaign and talked about how he didn't look like previous presidents - as if his color were something you should consider while voting. McCain was the real follower of Dr. King's dream. To bad we're still not ready for it.
What does it say about our country when so many Americans are unwilling to vote for a physically-challenged candidate with a multi-racial family?
What does it say about our country when so many Americans are unwilling to vote for a physically challenged candidate with a multi-racial family?
I remember earlier articles that gave me the impression that the voting machine manufacturers were resisting paper ballot print-outs for recounts because they didn't want any mistakes being caught that would make them look bad. It seems that strategy may have backfired on them as people won't trust the machines without the print-outs. Good for people. It's not often they have sense. Of course, I suppose the good sense in rejecting these machines will be balanced by the the number of people who vote for Obama Tuesday. We're still trying to recover from the Carter years and we already want to elect another naive liberal socialist with a solid far left congress to back him up. Sigh, I'm going to bed. Wake me up in 20 years if anyone is still alive.
Obama ran an ad about McCain not using email. A little bit of Googling on Obama's part (does he know about Google) would have informed him that McCain has trouble typing because of his war injuries. Perhaps McCain will be more sensitive to the needs of physically challenged Americans than Obama.
As for McCain's ability to handle technology. Before becoming a Senator he operated in real time some of the most sophisticated machines on the planet. As senator he has been called the "Senate's savviest technologist" by Forbes magazine. According to Jacob Weisber of the liberal Slate magazine, McCain, as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, was "forced him to learn about the Internet early on, and young Web entrepreneurs such as Jerry Yang and Jeff Bezos fascinate him."
Wikipedia may have "verifiability" as policy, but that is not necessarily followed in practice. Many articles are full of information without verifiable sources backing them up. A reference and or verifiability become more important when the information is challenged. Then "verifiability" becomes a dispute resolution mechanism, often of last resort. I suspect that one of the reasons Wikipedia tends to be so accurate is that it doesn't rely solely on verifiability. It relies on a democracy of knowledge, confirmed by verifiability when needed. Of course, sometimes verifiability is absurd. I can find many verifiable sources telling me that Taiwan is a province of the People's Republic of China. But try traveling there with your PRC visa or your PRC passport. Sometimes the verifiable sources just can't be trusted. If I could read Chinese I could probably find verifiable sources telling me wonderful Mao was and how none of the problems that afflicted China during his benevolent were in any way his fault. I pay a lot of attention to the Taiwan issue, and this is a real problem because of the political and increasing economic weight China can throw around in persuading verifiable sources to write things in a way the PRC approves of.
The big deal is that she is required by law, the very same law she has sworn to uphold as governor, to follow ...
Did you miss the Clinton years? That whole "swearing under oath" and "upholding the law" is so passe for people in executive office.
80miles per hour is plenty fast to kill a lot of people... yup, awesome safety feature right there. I'm not sure how many teens die in accidents where the speed is over 80. Most of my accidents and near accidents occurred on windy roads rather than fast interstates. The time I ran off the road after topping the tiniest little hill (just enough to loosen traction) on wet pavement, I was probably going less than 50 mph. Fortunately God was looking out for me. On a long stretch of road I went off in the only spot without fences, trees, telephone poles, or other obstacles that would have done a lot of damage. Now if the device could somehow determine the hilliness and curvature of the road ahead, a car-enforce speed-limit might do more good.
Sources please! We need links!
Today's conservatives conserve the values of yesterday's revolutionaries. Today's progressives fight for what tomorrow's conservatives will fight to conserve.
You mean like the communism movement that was so popular amoung revolutionaries in the 1920s and 1930s? The eugenics programs that were similarly popular?
Some of the progress of revolutionaries does eventually become protected by conservatives. But an awful lot (and I do mean "awful") fails to ever come to pass because the conservatives stop it from happening.
Fascism was considered "revolutionary" and "progressive" for a season too.
This fits well with political observation I once read about: Liberals are the builders; Conservatives are the defenders.
It also fits well with a study I read about that found that pessimists were more accurate in their appraisals of situations.
O'Reilly books and Google.
Taiwan is a big chip maker. I wonder how much of this is an attempt to undermine one of Taiwan's important sources of economic strength. Also, this has a double bonus for imperialism in that making the world less dependent on Taiwan's chip production will make other countries less concerned about Taiwan's fate. A free trade agreement with Taiwan would sure be a big help for democracy and against modern day imperialism.
And strangely enough, Palin's record is eerily like Quayle's. Looks great on paper, but rather innocuous. Nothing jumps out. And alas, that's what's needed in a VP. She votes firmly with the party line. Nary a rebellious thought in her head. Just like Quayle.
Actually it sounds a lot like Obama's record.
You can write good code in pretty much any language, and you can write bad code in pretty much any language. Perl makes it hard to write good code and easy to write bad code.
Worse, Perl has so many syntactical features and shortcuts that aside from the experts, no two people know the same Perl language. People know enough of a subset of Perl to write what they need to, but when they have to read other people's code the syntax is tough to decipher. In a simpler language like Java were the tricks are in the libraries rather than the syntax. This makes some behaviors less elegant to program, but the new person can easily look up the class or function name. Syntax can be much harder to look up, particularly when it is one of the "assumed" values like $_ which you can't look up because it doesn't even appear!
Perl is a great tool for short scripts, particularly if the script will be thrown away after use. It's not a good choice for a large project. If you get the right mix of people, you could make the project succeed with Perl - that's true of most languages - but that doesn't make it a good choice in general.
I would love to see a game that accurately and obviously incorporates time-dialation and other weird stuff from the theory of relativity in such a way that after playing one gets an intuitive feel for how the stuff works. How would two space ships fighting each other look to each other, and from a third POV, if both were moving at 0.8c? How would your tactics be forced to change? Or what if had a trading game involving beings with very long lives (so that interstellar space travel is useful) and very slow technological changes (yeah, I know, how would they get space travel with slow technologiy changes, just suspend your disbelief for a minute)? Such a game would be very educational. The normal physics stuff from most video games is easily replicated just by walking outside and bouncing a ball.
Password reset questions don't work for me because I refuse to give out the kind of personal information they ask for. If they force me to pick a password with so many restrictions that I can't pick one I'll remember, then if they want me to have access they'll just have to reset my password manually.
So if you allow athletes to use whatever drugs they can find to make them perform well NOW, regardless of any future health problems, how many will accept early death in exchange for short-term glory? I'm guessing quite a lot of them. Young people, which most athletes are, aren't the best at thinking long term. How different is this different than the old Roman gladiators? Ok, they were slaves. Should we allow fights to the death as sport so long as the contestants aren't forced into it? Will most people be able to enjoy sports if watching them reminds them of a terrible price the athletes are paying in health and longevity? The drug tests may not catch all drugs well, but I would guess that in general the more impact a drug makes on performance, the easier it is to catch. Also the drugs with the most dangerous side effects are probably easier to catch too simply because of those side effects. So the drug testing can't prevent all cheating, but it does help limit the damage done by them.
Americans who are aware they don't know enough about science are balanced out by those who think they understand science but don't. Watch slashdot next time the subjects of evolution or religion come up.
I live in the Northern Virginia area. Not too long ago we started using the computer voting system where we don't get any kind of paper confirmation of how we voted nor is there a paper trail to assist in recounts.
And coincidentally(?) there have been a lot of news reports recently about how the Northern Virginia area is voting more Democratic and could swing the whole state in the upcoming election.
Makes you think...
Did they patent the idea that someone might want to put such a marker on a card, or did they patent the technology for doing so?
It seems the patent office has confused necessity with invention, or perhaps more accurately - perception of demand has been confused with invention.
Recognizing that people might want to put a marker on a card to indicate a preference for paper or plastic was insightful. But it wasn't an invention. Before an invention you must have a need. And then you must have an original way to address that need.
Need: An easy way for customers to indicate their preference for paper or plastic without having to go through the laborious process of the bagger asking "paper or plastic" and the customer responding with either "paper" or "plastic". Solution: Store that information on a card using electronic or paper-and-glue methods.
Now, if no one has ever managed to store information on a durable card before, then you might have a pretty neat invention! Otherwise, all you're doing is using an well known invention for its intended purpose. This should be no more patentable than saying driving an SUV into a particular spot in the rainforest no one has ever driven on. Just because you're the first one to have a need to do it doesn't mean you can patent it.
Midori Ito: I'll never forget when she ran into the cameraman. She was so polite afterwards, bowing and apologizing before continuing her performance. One of the best sports moments ever. I believe she was also the first female to perform the triple-axle.