Is this significance greater than the distinction between rocky planets and gas giants? Don't all three items (rocky cleared orbit, rocky non-cleared orbit, gas giant) all fit under the umbrella of "planet?"
For the purposes of celestial mechanics, a rocky object with a cleared orbit and a gas giant with a cleared orbit are going to behave the same. But a rocky object without a cleared orbit won't. The gas giant and rocky object with cleared orbit won't develop through accretion much more. The center of mass of the dynamical system they dominate will be inside the objects. This is not true of objects that haven't cleared their orbit.
I'm not completely unsympathetic to your point. But I think you're missing a larger issue. When you study the dynamics of an object without a cleared orbit, you must study the other objects in the orbit as well. Moreover, they are all equally parts of the same dynamical system. The system must be taken as a whole, and calling some components planets gives them undue primacy.
An additional attraction to proper design of your classifications is that we're not going to revisit what a planet is in another 10 years after we learn more. We're instead going to be arguing about sub-classes of asteroids, or families of comets. The lack of stupid planet-argument spectacles will be a GOOD thing for astronomy.
I wouldn't count this as progress. They would still be arguing over their ontology, not doing real science. But I agree. Establishing linguistic conventions is important.
The point is that distinctions without meaning are hardly what I'd call a clean ontology. The difference between a rocky planet and a gas giant is far far more significant than your orbit clearing mumbo-jumbo.
Not if you're studying the object's dynamics. If an object hasn't cleared its orbit, its trajectory, rotation, and development are dominated by interactions with other objects in the belt. This really is significant, despite your claims to the contrary.
Remember, we're not trying to come up with a clean ontology here, we're defining the word "planet" without restricting other classification schemes which are useful to people studying different things in the solar system.
You keep saying "we". I find it difficult to believe that you speak for the IAU in any respect. And in any case, people aren't contractually bound to use the IAU's nomenclature.
You're a member of the IAU? Otherwise, you must be using the Royal we.
In any event, the "dwarf planet" classification is informative. Dwarf planets have sufficiently low mass that they have no managed to clear their orbital path from other massive objects. Their properties are very different, despite orbiting the sun and being round.
Why use a cluttered ontology when a clean one can be designed?
I use privoxy. It's a browswer independent proxy server daemon with Ad Blocking built in. It also scrubs cookies and does other privacy enhancing things. It's very configurable, but comes with sane defaults. privoxy.org
This is an interesting comment. Apple is including RubyCocoa (Cocoa bindings for Ruby) in Leopard. And Apple has put a lot of work into the LLVM project. Perhaps they've worked on a just-in-time compiled Ruby interpreter for the iPhone.
That would be much nicer than using Java, with just slightly more overhead at run time. Ruby would certainly be fast enough for this application.
Microsoft had to play catch up with Vista. Once Leopard comes out, they'll have to do it again.
In any event, I was looking forward to using ZFS. But since Apple has been confirmed to be porting ZFS, it's either not ready yet or a Steve Jobs style secret. If not this release, probably the next.
The CIA is a very strange agency. Because of their policies regarding Secret and Top Secret information, no one knows what their role is except so far as is necessary for their performance. In effect, this makes the CIA a bunch of agencies kind of sort of working together toward the presidentially mandated goals.
This level of secrecy from each other makes pulling off a conspiracy a cinch, once a person has reached the sufficient level of influence. Even if thousands of people are needed to pull one off, only a handful of people in the right places have to know about it.
This is why conspiracy theorists love/hate the CIA. The Agency is designed to obfuscate their agenda while still reaching their goal.
(If they could make much money doing it, why is it hard to find places that will recycle computers for free?)
It's not.
pcdisposal.com freecomputerrecycling.com
Just fucking Google it. "free computer recycling" gave me a lot of hits.
Since it is so easy to find free recycling places, one has to wonder what's in it for Dell and HP. My guess is that their work supporting this law is actually to help the environment.
Safari renders better than Firefox. It's more standards compliant. It still has a lot of smart syntax error handling. I haven't seen a web page that Safari can't render acceptably in months. It's faster. And it's a native OS X application, so it doesn't look like shit unlike Firefox. It uses OS X's standard shortcut key bindings. It is a much more usable application, and technically better too.
At the risk of sounding like that Mac troll, if you think Firefox is a good OS X application, GTFO.
If you have your laptop or iPod stolen, you should probably file a police report. In addition to informing the police, it will basically eliminate your civil liabilities.
Then again, if someone stole my POS G4 PowerBook with a broken screen, I probably wouldn't bother.
And I know it's a slot-loading drive, but I've never seen a brand name for that drive, so what's to tell me that it is a better drive? From the point of view of the Apple Store, it is a generic DVD drive.
The general case is just going to be impossible. Magnetic fields are in some ways similar to light. You can use magnets to focus the field, and increase the efficiency of power transmission. But these magnets are similar to lenses. You'd want to use permanent magnets, otherwise you'll be wasting a lot of energy focusing the transmitted field -- more than you'd gain in efficiency. And changing the configuration of complex arrays of permanent magnets is time consuming at best. The best place to use one of these things would be the very place you'd want to run a wire anyway -- a fixed installation.
Transformers have come a long way in terms of efficiency, basically by "braiding" both coils together around a low "reluctance" core.
It's been said a million times in this thread: gay rights, immigration, flag burning... I mean, what more do you want from mainstream television? Unless you're defining status quo to mean every opinion accepted by either liberals or conservatives.
I don't understand why so many people can't grasp that the failure of a protagonist often does not equate to the author dismissing or opposing their views. I just don't see why it's so difficult. What kind of show would it be if Lisa simply succeeded in her efforts - permanently?
It's hard to say what kind of show the Simpsons would be if Lisa succeeded. But Springfield would be a town that progresses. And it's not as if Lisa's failures motivate any plot elements anyway. What difference would Lisa succeeding make to Homer's antics? Or Bart's slow coming of age? Or Marge's failing marriage? And it's not as if the writers are going to run out of news stories to caricature or ways of making Homer act stupid.
And I think you misunderstand. I don't know the Simpson writers' stance on issues like gay marriage outside of what they've presented on the show. I suspect, considering Lisa's informed opinions, that the writers are rather progressive. And yet, the show functions to re-inforce the idea that working to solve social problems is futile.
HAVE YOU GONE INSANE? CARTMAN? INFALLIBLE AND PROVEN RIGHT? I think you just gave me an aneurysm! Cartman is all sins wrapped into one being - he's the personification of pure greed, ambition, sloth, anger, gluttony, and whatever else, plus a complete failure to learn from his mistakes, and totally warped social values, and he's utterly annoying to every other character, and whiny, and - why the hell am I even bothering to try to enumerate the faults that make it clear he is NOT the moral voice of the show?! On the rare occasions when Cartman is proven right, the circumstances aren't just fictitious, they're absolutely ludicrous, and obviously intentionally so.
Cartman is indeed evil. And he is not the show's moral voice. But I think you underestimate his role in the show. His outlandish actions spur Stan and Kyle into action. And by the end of the show, Stan or Kyle have learned something -- usually a compromise position between their original position and Cartman's. Note, however, that their original positions are still on the right, making the compromise even further right.
And Cartman gets "proven right" constantly, in at least half the episodes.
By the way, Libertarians are conservatives.
Distorting art to suit one's goals? Even if it's artificial and serves a political agenda, it can hardly be called distortion if it's done by the artist himself. Or if you're referring to your own interpretations of the shows, then I agree that it is easy to see a lot of connections and meanings that the creator did not necessarily intend.
I meant the latter, but I phrased it poorly. Though the producers' intentions are important to my argument, I am arguing about the role the shows play in society. The shows wouldn't be on the air if they didn't fit into the network's agenda, regardless of the producers' intentions.
I like the Boondocks too. It's entertaining and presents a lot of interesting ideas. But it has the same failing as the Simpsons with regards to Lisa.
How often do any of those shows tackle a serious social issue and end up with a result outside the status quo?
The Simpsons and South Park are especially good examples. The Simpsons have made a franchise of giving "liberals" warm and happy feelings by "dealing" with issues in a leftist manner while using deus ex machina to ruin the leftist scheme. How many times has Lisa worked hard for social equity, only to have her efforts thrown in her face? How many times has Marge been portrayed as a "happy" housewife, in spite of her obvious disappointment with her life?
South Park has a decidedly right bent. Cartman has become an infallible conservative (dare I say -- Nazi. The comparison isn't faulty, considering the shit he's done), constantly sparring with Kyle about social issues, and always being proven right by mere fictional circumstance. Let alone the milder conservative conclusions Stan and Kyle reach. (Mind you, they seem almost progressive compared to Cartman's)
Family Guy is a bit different. It uses predictable formulas to "subvert" the mainstream media, to engross an audience. The constant use of self-reference makes audience members feel like they're a part of an inside joke, when they're in fact sharing it with millions of people. And it's not even funny. Moreover, they often use real leftist ideas as the basis for their "jokes", giving the cognescenti a chuckle and making everyone else think the idea is as dated as Alf.
Futurama might be an exception to all my negativity. I'm sure the producers had their hearts in the right place. The networks, however, use subversive shows to placate people like me.
Distorting art to suit one's goals is easy. And it's certainly possible I've done that. But I hope you read what I said with an open mind and decide for yourself if I've been unfair. If you don't think I have, I suggest reading "The Society of the Spectacle" by Guy Debord. Here's a link. Actually, I suggest it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
East of Columba and south of Venezuela.
Unfortunately, our passions often dictate which facts enter into consideration as evidence. Judicious lying can take care of the rest.
This isn't really a subjective issue. According to classical typographic theory, Apple's approach improves readability while Microsoft's hinders it.
Is this significance greater than the distinction between rocky planets and gas giants? Don't all three items (rocky cleared orbit, rocky non-cleared orbit, gas giant) all fit under the umbrella of "planet?"
For the purposes of celestial mechanics, a rocky object with a cleared orbit and a gas giant with a cleared orbit are going to behave the same. But a rocky object without a cleared orbit won't. The gas giant and rocky object with cleared orbit won't develop through accretion much more. The center of mass of the dynamical system they dominate will be inside the objects. This is not true of objects that haven't cleared their orbit.
I'm not completely unsympathetic to your point. But I think you're missing a larger issue. When you study the dynamics of an object without a cleared orbit, you must study the other objects in the orbit as well. Moreover, they are all equally parts of the same dynamical system. The system must be taken as a whole, and calling some components planets gives them undue primacy.
An additional attraction to proper design of your classifications is that we're not going to revisit what a planet is in another 10 years after we learn more. We're instead going to be arguing about sub-classes of asteroids, or families of comets. The lack of stupid planet-argument spectacles will be a GOOD thing for astronomy.
I wouldn't count this as progress. They would still be arguing over their ontology, not doing real science. But I agree. Establishing linguistic conventions is important.
The point is that distinctions without meaning are hardly what I'd call a clean ontology. The difference between a rocky planet and a gas giant is far far more significant than your orbit clearing mumbo-jumbo.
Not if you're studying the object's dynamics. If an object hasn't cleared its orbit, its trajectory, rotation, and development are dominated by interactions with other objects in the belt. This really is significant, despite your claims to the contrary.
Remember, we're not trying to come up with a clean ontology here, we're defining the word "planet" without restricting other classification schemes which are useful to people studying different things in the solar system.
You keep saying "we". I find it difficult to believe that you speak for the IAU in any respect. And in any case, people aren't contractually bound to use the IAU's nomenclature.
You're a member of the IAU? Otherwise, you must be using the Royal we.
In any event, the "dwarf planet" classification is informative. Dwarf planets have sufficiently low mass that they have no managed to clear their orbital path from other massive objects. Their properties are very different, despite orbiting the sun and being round.
Why use a cluttered ontology when a clean one can be designed?
I use privoxy. It's a browswer independent proxy server daemon with Ad Blocking built in. It also scrubs cookies and does other privacy enhancing things. It's very configurable, but comes with sane defaults. privoxy.org
ClearType really looks like shit. They modify the typefaces to fit the rendering technology? WTF, this isn't the 80s.
You're better off selling them, especially since they don't depreciate anywhere near as fast as generic PCs.
This is an interesting comment. Apple is including RubyCocoa (Cocoa bindings for Ruby) in Leopard. And Apple has put a lot of work into the LLVM project. Perhaps they've worked on a just-in-time compiled Ruby interpreter for the iPhone.
That would be much nicer than using Java, with just slightly more overhead at run time. Ruby would certainly be fast enough for this application.
Microsoft had to play catch up with Vista. Once Leopard comes out, they'll have to do it again.
In any event, I was looking forward to using ZFS. But since Apple has been confirmed to be porting ZFS, it's either not ready yet or a Steve Jobs style secret. If not this release, probably the next.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-51
The CIA is a very strange agency. Because of their policies regarding Secret and Top Secret information, no one knows what their role is except so far as is necessary for their performance. In effect, this makes the CIA a bunch of agencies kind of sort of working together toward the presidentially mandated goals.
This level of secrecy from each other makes pulling off a conspiracy a cinch, once a person has reached the sufficient level of influence. Even if thousands of people are needed to pull one off, only a handful of people in the right places have to know about it.
This is why conspiracy theorists love/hate the CIA. The Agency is designed to obfuscate their agenda while still reaching their goal.
How is being in the UK bogus?
At any rate, http://www.ynotrecycle.com/ and http://www.recyclingelectronics.com/ are free and in the US.
(If they could make much money doing it, why is it hard to find places that will recycle computers for free?)
It's not.
pcdisposal.com
freecomputerrecycling.com
Just fucking Google it. "free computer recycling" gave me a lot of hits.
Since it is so easy to find free recycling places, one has to wonder what's in it for Dell and HP. My guess is that their work supporting this law is actually to help the environment.
HULK SMASH
Safari renders better than Firefox. It's more standards compliant. It still has a lot of smart syntax error handling. I haven't seen a web page that Safari can't render acceptably in months. It's faster. And it's a native OS X application, so it doesn't look like shit unlike Firefox. It uses OS X's standard shortcut key bindings. It is a much more usable application, and technically better too.
At the risk of sounding like that Mac troll, if you think Firefox is a good OS X application, GTFO.
If you have your laptop or iPod stolen, you should probably file a police report. In addition to informing the police, it will basically eliminate your civil liabilities.
Then again, if someone stole my POS G4 PowerBook with a broken screen, I probably wouldn't bother.
Speaking of sigs, I finally figured yours out. I know a little Latin, but I was stumped on wtf devo/deuo could be.
And I know it's a slot-loading drive, but I've never seen a brand name for that drive, so what's to tell me that it is a better drive? From the point of view of the Apple Store, it is a generic DVD drive.
Pioneer.
I've got an Apple keyboard in front of me, and I don't see a section sign. Is this a localization issue? Or did old Apple keyboards have them?
Well, yes. And no.
The general case is just going to be impossible. Magnetic fields are in some ways similar to light. You can use magnets to focus the field, and increase the efficiency of power transmission. But these magnets are similar to lenses. You'd want to use permanent magnets, otherwise you'll be wasting a lot of energy focusing the transmitted field -- more than you'd gain in efficiency. And changing the configuration of complex arrays of permanent magnets is time consuming at best. The best place to use one of these things would be the very place you'd want to run a wire anyway -- a fixed installation.
Transformers have come a long way in terms of efficiency, basically by "braiding" both coils together around a low "reluctance" core.
It's been said a million times in this thread: gay rights, immigration, flag burning... I mean, what more do you want from mainstream television? Unless you're defining status quo to mean every opinion accepted by either liberals or conservatives.
I don't understand why so many people can't grasp that the failure of a protagonist often does not equate to the author dismissing or opposing their views. I just don't see why it's so difficult. What kind of show would it be if Lisa simply succeeded in her efforts - permanently?
It's hard to say what kind of show the Simpsons would be if Lisa succeeded. But Springfield would be a town that progresses. And it's not as if Lisa's failures motivate any plot elements anyway. What difference would Lisa succeeding make to Homer's antics? Or Bart's slow coming of age? Or Marge's failing marriage? And it's not as if the writers are going to run out of news stories to caricature or ways of making Homer act stupid.
And I think you misunderstand. I don't know the Simpson writers' stance on issues like gay marriage outside of what they've presented on the show. I suspect, considering Lisa's informed opinions, that the writers are rather progressive. And yet, the show functions to re-inforce the idea that working to solve social problems is futile.
HAVE YOU GONE INSANE? CARTMAN? INFALLIBLE AND PROVEN RIGHT? I think you just gave me an aneurysm! Cartman is all sins wrapped into one being - he's the personification of pure greed, ambition, sloth, anger, gluttony, and whatever else, plus a complete failure to learn from his mistakes, and totally warped social values, and he's utterly annoying to every other character, and whiny, and - why the hell am I even bothering to try to enumerate the faults that make it clear he is NOT the moral voice of the show?! On the rare occasions when Cartman is proven right, the circumstances aren't just fictitious, they're absolutely ludicrous, and obviously intentionally so.
Cartman is indeed evil. And he is not the show's moral voice. But I think you underestimate his role in the show. His outlandish actions spur Stan and Kyle into action. And by the end of the show, Stan or Kyle have learned something -- usually a compromise position between their original position and Cartman's. Note, however, that their original positions are still on the right, making the compromise even further right.
And Cartman gets "proven right" constantly, in at least half the episodes.
By the way, Libertarians are conservatives.
Distorting art to suit one's goals? Even if it's artificial and serves a political agenda, it can hardly be called distortion if it's done by the artist himself. Or if you're referring to your own interpretations of the shows, then I agree that it is easy to see a lot of connections and meanings that the creator did not necessarily intend.
I meant the latter, but I phrased it poorly. Though the producers' intentions are important to my argument, I am arguing about the role the shows play in society. The shows wouldn't be on the air if they didn't fit into the network's agenda, regardless of the producers' intentions.
I like the Boondocks too. It's entertaining and presents a lot of interesting ideas. But it has the same failing as the Simpsons with regards to Lisa.
How often do any of those shows tackle a serious social issue and end up with a result outside the status quo?
The Simpsons and South Park are especially good examples. The Simpsons have made a franchise of giving "liberals" warm and happy feelings by "dealing" with issues in a leftist manner while using deus ex machina to ruin the leftist scheme. How many times has Lisa worked hard for social equity, only to have her efforts thrown in her face? How many times has Marge been portrayed as a "happy" housewife, in spite of her obvious disappointment with her life?
South Park has a decidedly right bent. Cartman has become an infallible conservative (dare I say -- Nazi. The comparison isn't faulty, considering the shit he's done), constantly sparring with Kyle about social issues, and always being proven right by mere fictional circumstance. Let alone the milder conservative conclusions Stan and Kyle reach. (Mind you, they seem almost progressive compared to Cartman's)
Family Guy is a bit different. It uses predictable formulas to "subvert" the mainstream media, to engross an audience. The constant use of self-reference makes audience members feel like they're a part of an inside joke, when they're in fact sharing it with millions of people. And it's not even funny. Moreover, they often use real leftist ideas as the basis for their "jokes", giving the cognescenti a chuckle and making everyone else think the idea is as dated as Alf.
Futurama might be an exception to all my negativity. I'm sure the producers had their hearts in the right place. The networks, however, use subversive shows to placate people like me.
Distorting art to suit one's goals is easy. And it's certainly possible I've done that. But I hope you read what I said with an open mind and decide for yourself if I've been unfair. If you don't think I have, I suggest reading "The Society of the Spectacle" by Guy Debord. Here's a link. Actually, I suggest it anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santorum_(sexual_slan g)