See, a big part of the problem is the Constitution is the highest law of the land and it is terribly vague in many areas. "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness"? That's the supreme law of the land, it's in the Constitution.
Actually, I believe that's in the DoI, which is not considered in any way a legally binding document.
Of course, the word "Creator" is also in the DoI, and that's used to justify attempts at making our country a Christian Theocracy, so by the same logic, the guarantee of "the pursuit of Happiness" should be sufficient justification to make "Steak and BJ day" an officially recognized, and legally enforced, holiday.
Back when the court was something, they are the ones who told the police they must read rights to people. Back then, the courts said that people could not be taken by government for no reason. That government could not look at your reading list and label you as a terrorist because you read Carol Marx.
Actually, I heard she stole most of her ideas from her husband.
Pardon me, but how is it activist to actually discuss the law in terms that the founding fathers intended? I'm not a Christian, never have been, but it's part and parcel of the Declaration of Independence (Creator anyone?) and the Constitution (God anyone?).
The Declaration of Independence is just that: a declaration. It carries no legal weight (at least, so has said the SCOTUS time and time again). Even if we set that aside, the word "Creator" is only mentioned in the preamble to the DoI -- and, finally, why did they use the nebulous term "Creator" if they wished to refer to the Christian God? Please don't pull that one out; it's one of the weakest legal arguments ever made.
As for the Constitution itself, nowhere is the word "God" used in it, so I'm a little perplexed by your "God anyone?" comment. The only way the Constitution does mention religion is to:
Limit what sort of laws can be made WRT religion, and
State, very explicitly, that no religious test can be made mandatory for admittance to a public office
Not exactly a ringing endorsement for a Christian Nation.
And, actually, wanting to crush competition is not what capitalism is all about. The idea that competitors need to be crushed instead of, well, competed with is largely what is wrong with capitalism today. It is also precisely what is wrong with Microsoft.
It goes much deeper than that. This perverse spin on capitalism seems to be only one symptom of a unique American pathology: the obsession with "first place". We see it in corporate boardrooms and in the media, where pundits actually try to convince us that this sort of behavior is a Good Thing; we've see it on Nike t-shirts with snotty comments like "Second place is the first loser" (because we all know how unbelievably horrible it would be to be the second best Quarterback in the NFL, or the second richest man in America), we see it in a business and political system that pushes people to reach for higher and higher positions, regardless of whether they're qualified for or interested in those positions.
Get over yourselves, people. Maybe if more of us would focus our ambition on getting ourselves where we want to be instead of where some adolescent Jock mentality tells us we're supposed to be, our society would be a little healthier and a little harder to make fun of.
One of the great problems with the Internet currently is that there are so many anonymous cowards, who troll, spam and lie.
Ironically, this is also one of its benefits. If people are exposed to all points of view, including the stupid ones, they learn to develop their BS filters. If not, those filters atrophy and you have a population with no critical thinking skills that is ripe for manipulation.
For this they rely on techies known as "rippers" or "crackers" who are adept at unscrambling the security codes that studios have embedded on DVD's to deter copycats.
For values of "adept" == "know how to click the 'backup' button on DVD Shrink"
Also, one of the reasons History gets boring is that it becomes bloated with facts you have to get memorized. My idea of history is NEVER, EVER separate it from politics. For example, we can study the history of muslim nations and how Islam became every time more "fundamentalist" to the point of having people like Bin Laden... you can go back as much as the crusades.
> there's a good chance that "life on Mars" is just "life on Earth that migrated to Mars"
There is also the possibility that life on Earth is just life that migrated from Mars.
Or there's the possibility that life exists on Earth and Mars and both arose and evolved entirely independently. That's the point; we just don't know. So far we only have one example to work from: life on Earth.
The failure to attend to or notice changes in your environment due to more traffic in cortical associative areas is not surprising really, and has long been known by cognitive scientists working with Air Force pilots. The more tasks required or stress induced upon a situation will degrade attentive performance and result in missing changes introduced into the environment.
I think that's a little different from what this study is about. They're not talking about information overload or having to perform a large number of complex tasks; this has to do with a strong emotional reaction to a specific stimulus. If you look at the three image sequences in the flash demo, they are all the same length and all consist of a series of small images; the only difference is that, in two of the sequences, one of the images has a strong emotional content. I don't know about anyone else, but when I viewed the demo, I found that the described effect was very real. Even when I tried it over and over again, knew exactly what the key image was, and was trying to defeat the test, I still could not see the image. I know that's not scientific corroboration, but it is interesting.
For example, HyperWRT has managed to find the setting on a WRT54G to double the output power. You can also modify the hardware to add an LCD display, two serial ports (to use as console, our you could connect a modem and setup a backup PPP dial-up connection in case of broadband outage) and a smart card slot.
The hard part is explaining to your wife why you had to do it.
I've always felt the issue of "bad" information (or "bad stuff" in general) on the web was not as terrible a thing as people make it out to be. As Berners-Lee says, that is just the result of people communicating. For every good idea out there, there are a thousand or a million that are pure crap. That's the way it always has been and always will be, no matter what the medium. And attempts to filter and/or censor the crap can possibly even be harmful, because it will produce a generation of people with no critical thinking skills and non-functioning B.S. detectors -- people who expect "good" information to be nicely packaged and channeled to them by Those Who Know Better. Which, of course, is exactly the kind of populace that any authority structure wants to have.
Intelligent Design is both an argument from evidence and falsifiable in principle.
Unfortunately, no. There could be an Intelligent Design theory that is falsifiable and based on evidence, but the one being advocated isn't it. ID "theory" essentially amounts to "we can't explain how evolution and chemistry created everything we see, so therefore we must postulate something even more complex to account for it". That's like saying "we can't completely explain gravity, so I theorize that it is being controlled by an intelligent entity".
Now, if someone said something like "5 billion years ago an alien species from another star system visited our planet and started the chemical reactions leading to life", that might be a scientific ID theory -- if it actually claimed the existence of some verifiable evidence (such as pieces of advanced technological material embedded in 5-billion-year-old rock), and had a clear way to be falsified. But "something intelligent did it" isn't a theory; it's a wild-assed speculation.
As you vote for files, it stores your votes and discovers the set of peers with whom your votes are correlated. It also communicates with peers to find out about other peers with whom they in turn are correlated. The outcome of this computation is a numerical value computed for each file appearing in query results that reflects the probability that the given file is trustworthy. If you vote thumbs-up for good files and thumbs-down for bad files, you will be grouped with the vast majority of people who also vote honestly.
Oh, great. It's the high-school cafeteria all over again.
While I am pro-choice, I do have sympathy and understanding for many people in the pro-life camp (with the exception of those who think it's OK to harrass, shoot, and blow up those on the other side). But when it comes to opposition to stem-cell research, I think it's pretty clear that this is a case of a moral abstract taken to an unhealthy extreme, ignoring the reality of real, living people who are suffering.
Jon Stewart once said that a moderate conservative is "a conservative who has gotten sick, or knows someone who is", and that really seems to be the case. Nova ScienceNOW recently had a story of a mother whose 13-year old daughter suffers from Type I diabetes; she needs constant vigilance and state-of-the-art medical technology just to stay alive from day to day. Doctors believe that stem cell research could ultimately lead to a cure for this condition. This mother is a devout Catholic, but she believes in stem cell research. It's easy for those who have no need for this kind of research to lecture about how we're "creating life to destroy it", but in fact, the researchers involved in embryo cloning and stem-cell research are creating life in order to save life. Embryos are alive, and have the potential to become human beings, but there are millions of actual human beings alive right now who desperately need the help that can be given to them from this kind of research.
I think it was best explained by one of the scientists interviewed on the show I watched. "Say I'm sitting with my son in an IBF clinic and the fire alarm goes off. I have time to either save my son, or save a freezer full of cloned embryos. Which would I save?" Or, to make the example even better, say it's not your son but some child you don't even know. Would you let him (a real, living human being) die in order to save hundreds of thousands of potential human beings? Of course not. Even the most devout, pro-life, anti-stem-cell Catholic would not make that choice. That says a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
See, a big part of the problem is the Constitution is the highest law of the land and it is terribly vague in many areas. "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness"? That's the supreme law of the land, it's in the Constitution.
Actually, I believe that's in the DoI, which is not considered in any way a legally binding document.
Of course, the word "Creator" is also in the DoI, and that's used to justify attempts at making our country a Christian Theocracy, so by the same logic, the guarantee of "the pursuit of Happiness" should be sufficient justification to make "Steak and BJ day" an officially recognized, and legally enforced, holiday.
Back when the court was something, they are the ones who told the police they must read rights to people. Back then, the courts said that people could not be taken by government for no reason. That government could not look at your reading list and label you as a terrorist because you read Carol Marx.
Actually, I heard she stole most of her ideas from her husband.
Pardon me, but how is it activist to actually discuss the law in terms that the founding fathers intended? I'm not a Christian, never have been, but it's part and parcel of the Declaration of Independence (Creator anyone?) and the Constitution (God anyone?).
The Declaration of Independence is just that: a declaration. It carries no legal weight (at least, so has said the SCOTUS time and time again). Even if we set that aside, the word "Creator" is only mentioned in the preamble to the DoI -- and, finally, why did they use the nebulous term "Creator" if they wished to refer to the Christian God? Please don't pull that one out; it's one of the weakest legal arguments ever made.
As for the Constitution itself, nowhere is the word "God" used in it, so I'm a little perplexed by your "God anyone?" comment. The only way the Constitution does mention religion is to:
Not exactly a ringing endorsement for a Christian Nation.
And, actually, wanting to crush competition is not what capitalism is all about. The idea that competitors need to be crushed instead of, well, competed with is largely what is wrong with capitalism today. It is also precisely what is wrong with Microsoft.
It goes much deeper than that. This perverse spin on capitalism seems to be only one symptom of a unique American pathology: the obsession with "first place". We see it in corporate boardrooms and in the media, where pundits actually try to convince us that this sort of behavior is a Good Thing; we've see it on Nike t-shirts with snotty comments like "Second place is the first loser" (because we all know how unbelievably horrible it would be to be the second best Quarterback in the NFL, or the second richest man in America), we see it in a business and political system that pushes people to reach for higher and higher positions, regardless of whether they're qualified for or interested in those positions.
Get over yourselves, people. Maybe if more of us would focus our ambition on getting ourselves where we want to be instead of where some adolescent Jock mentality tells us we're supposed to be, our society would be a little healthier and a little harder to make fun of.
Ok, so I've had it with the musicians who have sold their souls to the corporations. With the advert of the Internet,
Freudian slip?
One of the great problems with the Internet currently is that there are so many anonymous cowards, who troll, spam and lie.
Ironically, this is also one of its benefits. If people are exposed to all points of view, including the stupid ones, they learn to develop their BS filters. If not, those filters atrophy and you have a population with no critical thinking skills that is ripe for manipulation.
My favorite quote:
For values of "adept" == "know how to click the 'backup' button on DVD Shrink"
Well, that was a dangerous joke.
I can't use the new Flash Player? No more bandwidth-hogging Absolute Vodka ads and badly written Web games?
I might as well give up my Internet connection.
Mod this post redundant too. I hate to feel left out.
What people need to do is just go back to the cave man diet
You explain that to my next-door neighbor who won't stop bitching at me about killing and eating her cat.
Also, one of the reasons History gets boring is that it becomes bloated with facts you have to get memorized. My idea of history is NEVER, EVER separate it from politics. For example, we can study the history of muslim nations and how Islam became every time more "fundamentalist" to the point of having people like Bin Laden... you can go back as much as the crusades.
Sorry, that's anti-American.
> there's a good chance that "life on Mars" is just "life on Earth that migrated to Mars"
There is also the possibility that life on Earth is just life that migrated from Mars.
Or there's the possibility that life exists on Earth and Mars and both arose and evolved entirely independently. That's the point; we just don't know. So far we only have one example to work from: life on Earth.
He should have called Morgan Spurlock and offered to try it for 30 days. Would have made for an entertaining episode.
Imagine watching a football game on a TV that not only shows the players in three dimensions but also lets you experience the smells of the stadium
Thereby eliminating the primary advantage of watching a football game on TV.
The failure to attend to or notice changes in your environment due to more traffic in cortical associative areas is not surprising really, and has long been known by cognitive scientists working with Air Force pilots. The more tasks required or stress induced upon a situation will degrade attentive performance and result in missing changes introduced into the environment.
I think that's a little different from what this study is about. They're not talking about information overload or having to perform a large number of complex tasks; this has to do with a strong emotional reaction to a specific stimulus. If you look at the three image sequences in the flash demo, they are all the same length and all consist of a series of small images; the only difference is that, in two of the sequences, one of the images has a strong emotional content. I don't know about anyone else, but when I viewed the demo, I found that the described effect was very real. Even when I tried it over and over again, knew exactly what the key image was, and was trying to defeat the test, I still could not see the image. I know that's not scientific corroboration, but it is interesting.
Should someone tell Bill Frist that HIV can't be transmitted by crocodile tears?
This insurance gig seems to be working out well for them, but their coffee has really gone downhill in the last few centuries.
For example, HyperWRT has managed to find the setting on a WRT54G to double the output power. You can also modify the hardware to add an LCD display, two serial ports (to use as console, our you could connect a modem and setup a backup PPP dial-up connection in case of broadband outage) and a smart card slot.
The hard part is explaining to your wife why you had to do it.
I've always felt the issue of "bad" information (or "bad stuff" in general) on the web was not as terrible a thing as people make it out to be. As Berners-Lee says, that is just the result of people communicating. For every good idea out there, there are a thousand or a million that are pure crap. That's the way it always has been and always will be, no matter what the medium. And attempts to filter and/or censor the crap can possibly even be harmful, because it will produce a generation of people with no critical thinking skills and non-functioning B.S. detectors -- people who expect "good" information to be nicely packaged and channeled to them by Those Who Know Better. Which, of course, is exactly the kind of populace that any authority structure wants to have.
Intelligent Design is both an argument from evidence and falsifiable in principle.
Unfortunately, no. There could be an Intelligent Design theory that is falsifiable and based on evidence, but the one being advocated isn't it. ID "theory" essentially amounts to "we can't explain how evolution and chemistry created everything we see, so therefore we must postulate something even more complex to account for it". That's like saying "we can't completely explain gravity, so I theorize that it is being controlled by an intelligent entity".
Now, if someone said something like "5 billion years ago an alien species from another star system visited our planet and started the chemical reactions leading to life", that might be a scientific ID theory -- if it actually claimed the existence of some verifiable evidence (such as pieces of advanced technological material embedded in 5-billion-year-old rock), and had a clear way to be falsified. But "something intelligent did it" isn't a theory; it's a wild-assed speculation.
As you vote for files, it stores your votes and discovers the set of peers with whom your votes are correlated. It also communicates with peers to find out about other peers with whom they in turn are correlated. The outcome of this computation is a numerical value computed for each file appearing in query results that reflects the probability that the given file is trustworthy. If you vote thumbs-up for good files and thumbs-down for bad files, you will be grouped with the vast majority of people who also vote honestly.
Oh, great. It's the high-school cafeteria all over again.
If they've invented monopoles there truly is no stopping them.
While I am pro-choice, I do have sympathy and understanding for many people in the pro-life camp (with the exception of those who think it's OK to harrass, shoot, and blow up those on the other side). But when it comes to opposition to stem-cell research, I think it's pretty clear that this is a case of a moral abstract taken to an unhealthy extreme, ignoring the reality of real, living people who are suffering.
Jon Stewart once said that a moderate conservative is "a conservative who has gotten sick, or knows someone who is", and that really seems to be the case. Nova ScienceNOW recently had a story of a mother whose 13-year old daughter suffers from Type I diabetes; she needs constant vigilance and state-of-the-art medical technology just to stay alive from day to day. Doctors believe that stem cell research could ultimately lead to a cure for this condition. This mother is a devout Catholic, but she believes in stem cell research. It's easy for those who have no need for this kind of research to lecture about how we're "creating life to destroy it", but in fact, the researchers involved in embryo cloning and stem-cell research are creating life in order to save life. Embryos are alive, and have the potential to become human beings, but there are millions of actual human beings alive right now who desperately need the help that can be given to them from this kind of research.
I think it was best explained by one of the scientists interviewed on the show I watched. "Say I'm sitting with my son in an IBF clinic and the fire alarm goes off. I have time to either save my son, or save a freezer full of cloned embryos. Which would I save?" Or, to make the example even better, say it's not your son but some child you don't even know. Would you let him (a real, living human being) die in order to save hundreds of thousands of potential human beings? Of course not. Even the most devout, pro-life, anti-stem-cell Catholic would not make that choice. That says a lot.
-Paid wifi: kind of dumb business model. Great if you need it and mainly work at the same place, but #'s of users are usually pretty few.
If those users spend all their time sitting in front of a computer, I'd bet their #s are pretty high.