the author is clear that this is all because of pressure from the United States.
I am a Norwegian, and I am saddened by the new religion that has Europe in it's grips. There are various sects in this religion, but they all have one thing in common, the big "Satan" is the US of effing A. Anything bad that goes on in the world is the fault of the US. This article, and the response to it, is an example of how fanatics suffering from this religion think.
The system they hacked was the BA frequent flyer system. This system has nothing to do with passenger security or US national security. This is a convenience system made so that BA passengers easily can buy tickets, earn miles, buy upgrades etc. This system shouldn't have information such as the passport number. The fact that it does is an internal matter for BA and has absolutely nothing to do with the USA.
I travel a lot for business and I am a member of most of the frequent flyer systems in Europe and the US, but not BA since I am already a member of one of their co-shares. None of the airlines have my passport number stored on the frequent flyer site. Not one of them.
This is an internal BA problem, BA should never have had the passport number stored on the FF site, they should never allow this to be accessed without a password etc.
Blaming the US for this is ridiculous in the extreme. The US has nothing to do with how an airline designs its Frequent Flyer website, and no, the US does not require that your passport number of other personal information is stored on the FF site or anywhere else for that matter. They only require the information be sent before you board the plane.
Sadly, the new European religion requires full frontal lobotomy prior to joining, something that has not reduced the number of Europeans who sign on.
People starving in Africa don't need laptops, they need basic infrastructure like clean water.
Actually, you are wrong. What Africa needs is a well educated population that can solve the problems that Africa has. There isn't a food shortage in Africa, there isn't an infrastructure problem. Africa has an education problem. Africa has a corruption problem. Africa has a problem with war. Possibly more than anything, Africa has a huge problem of receiving tons of aid from the first world, aid which makes Africa a victim ad infinitum. Aid that does very little good. Victims never solve their problems, and nobody else has the ability or inclination to solve Africas problem.
We can't solve Africas problems. We shouldn't try. People in Africa must solve their own problems. If we can help with education, that is the only thing we should try.
It might be good to start this program today, since getting it through appropriations could take the first thirty years
Nah, you can probably get it through appropriations in a few hours if you put your mind to it. What you do is you claim that moving the asteroid is part of the War on Terror, and voila, you have your cash. If you claim that you need to build 3 aircraft carriers to do the job, you will get Pentagon all worked up too, and you'll probably get three times as much money as you need.
You could probably even have the NSA put a wiretap on the thing within a week too. That might be the solution. They would have to get a wire up there, and then we can have one or two guys pulling on the wire a little, just a nudge here and there... Increasing the speed of the thing like that would change it's trajectory.
Won't work. People who live in areas where gambling is illegal can still play online poker for play-money. There is no way you can know if I am playing for real or play money based on where I connect from or to.
Better we just introduce capital punishment for trying to introduce stupid and unenforcable laws and fry the moron politicians who is pushing this. Fry them after a lengthy legal process of course, but fry them still.
The bill banning US citizens from using *all* net gambling sites does not violate WTO rules, as it treats all countries' sites equally.
Yes, the bill violates WTO rules, and probably also the constitution. It violates common sence and also the basis on which the Republican party (which really needs to change its name to The New Socialist Lunatic Party) was built on, namely the freedom of the individual.
The reason the bill violates the WTO rules is that it favors Brick and Mortar casinos over their online counter parts, thereby unfairly targeting foreign business.
The interesting thing is that the largest online gambling site has clearly said that they would incorporate in the US if they could since the US is a better capital market to operate in. Access to VC funding etc is better here than anywhere else in the world, and a whole bunch of other advantages. Sadly, due to near-sighted policy makers with big egos and little brains they can't, with the resulting loss of revenue for the US.
That is correct, and playing in on-line casinos for play-money is legal. It is easy to encrypt traffic betweeen my poker client and the poker server. Based on that, law enforcement has no realistic way of determining whether I am gambling or not. In theory they can ban credit card companies from dealing with online gambling sites, but Neteller is a genuine online payment system, they are not based in the US, so I can always trasfer money through neteller to a poker site.
Again the government who claims to be "for the people" is trying to restrict the freedom of the people. Why is it that the Republican party looks so much like Joseph Stalin and his goonies?
That argument is not supported by the article, or by any other resource available to me. You've set it up as a straw man so you can knock it down.
No, I didn't, and that should have been obvious from what I wrote. The style in which I wrote it however is, for reasons unknown to me, frequently misunderstood. The style is called Irony. Read what I said with the fact that I was being ironic in mind, and you may realize that I am saying something you haven't yet understood.
When you are being ironic it is highly unlikely that you are constructing straw-men. Straw-men are for the serious among us.
You are absolutely correct that the data they have only goes as far back as 1200 years, however that doesn't mean we do not have data that goes back further. We do, and no, the 20th century wasn't the warmest ever, not even close. Not even in the time-span of human history.
I am wrong about what? Please point to the specifics of my comments that were wrong. Don't try to sound all un-educated and dumb, because people might believe you are.
12 is a few, isn't it? That was my intended meaning anyway. It was warmer 1200 years ago. The earth has been a lot warmer througout it's history. The fact that it is warmer now than it has been for a while doesn't signify anything at all until we know a lot more.
the present-day levels of CO2 are unprecedented during the past 420 thousand years
Good, and from this we can conclude that the present day temperature is the highest in 420 thousand years. Oh, no, that is not the case. In fact, it was significantly warmer just a few hundred years ago, and warmer again a few thousand years ago.
I don't think anyone seriously disputes the fact that it is getting warmer, but how much in relation to previous times is debatable. I also don't think anyone seriously disputes that our CO2 emissions have some impact on the global climate, but nobody can seriously say how much impact. The main problem with the global warming scare is the fact that we only started systematic measurements in the 1940s. Anything special about the 1940s? Oh yes, they were the coldes decade in a long time.
In other words, the temperature may be going up as part of a cycle, and we may have added slightly to the higher trend, but not a lot. This means that even significant reductions in CO2 emissions migt not matter much, or at all, in the bigger scheme of things. The cries for immediate action are premature and, quite frankly, a little hysterical. Not based in sound science.
The problem with the article is not that he requires that time be this or that, or even the other. The problem with the article is the definition of "motion". He defines motion as velocity in other words dx/dt. This is correct for motion in space, but it is absurd to apply the same definition of motion to motion in time.
In fact, should the discussion continue it would make more sense to use a different word than motion.
The article is quite apparently created for the fun of it, and I don't see how this should make people upset.
In my example the assumption was that all other factors (that is the severity of the crime) was identical. When it is someone elses child, nix him, when it is your own child, he is nice and deserves leniency.
Yes it is... problem with opinions. Everyone's got one, and yours is no better than anyone else's.
Actually, I disagree, for a number of reasons, but the main one is that people usually do not have one opinion. People with very strong opinions, both on the right and the left, but more so on the right these days, tend to have diametrically opposite viewpoints to their own depending on the situation. Let me use one non-related example, and then I'll use a related example. Imagine a nice California, middle-class, conservative family. Strongly in favor of capital punishment. Most of them are. Then one day their son kills his wife, premeditated (I am not using any particular family/son as an example). Do you think the family now are as strongly in favor of capital punishment? Of course not, not in this case.
I am sorry, that is just double standards. If you favor capital punishment you have to accept that the government kills your child too. In fact, you should cheer the governments action. That will of course never happen.
So, to the relevant example. Most people who are opposed to abortion and experiments on embryos have this convition because they reason that life starts at conception. Scientific experimentation on innocent human life is morally repugnant, and the stance seems rational.
The same people have no problem with fertility treatment it seems, particularly if they them selves need it to have children. This is a good example of absurd double standards held by people for whom thinking is a chore and for whom "intellectual" is a bad word. Sorry, if you accept petri-dish fertilization, you also (scilently) accept the destruction of fertilized eggs. Lots of them. That is part of the process. In otherwords, you can't rationally support fertility treatments of this kind and at the same time oppose experimentation on embryos or abortion.
If G. W. Bush is so against bad treatment of embryos, he should propose laws that ban fertility treatments like this. Do you think that would get support in this country? Absolutely not. The hippocrites on the religious right reserve the right to kill as many children (using their definition of "a child") as they like as long as it serves their purpose, but oppose it when it comes to furthering our knowledge and understanding of life.
This is sadly the norm on the religious right. They want access to all kinds of treatments, but they want to ban the search for any knowledge that can make them feel uncertain about their silly superstition. This has been the history of the religious extreme throughout history, they have always persecuted people who search for knowledge. The only difference is that (thankfully) today the religious right have far less power than they used to. Give the nuts more power and you will see stakes and fires all over this country again.
Re:People are Obese regarless of Income or Geograp
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Obesity Contagious?
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You are completely correct, but an even more important factor is the fact that our body was designed to move. Run after prey and run away from predators. Run after girls, run away from their fathers.
Even more than having abundant access to (at times horrible) food this is the main cause we are getting fat. It is interesting to watch the US, if the original article was correct, people in New York are to a degree immune to the "virus". They are half the size of people in the Mid-West. Is this because the "virus" hasn't hit New York yet, or may it have something to do with the fact that traffic in New York makes a car pretty useless, therefore you take public transportation, which forces you to walk a bit more.
Oh, and my pet peeve... The handicapped people. It is actually their fault. They have been lobbying for years and years that they need equal access to the 4th floor. Perhaps they do, but the lobbying means that all buildings now have elevators and no stairs. If I use the stairs to walk down from my office, the fire alarm goes off. The stairwell door can not be opened from the outside, so walking up three floors is not an option. The elevator is my only way up. It's all the fault of the handicapped people!
That I am too lazy to go to the gym to compensate is not relevant, I shouldn't have to pay for my gym membership... even though I do, I shouldn't have to go. The fact that just about anything you can buy that is edible in the US has high fructose corn syrup in it is also not too relevant... I mean, if I eat a ton of sugar a year, I would have lost it all if it hadn't been for the handicapped people!
And to the people who had their humor glands zapped by sugar, the part about the handicapped people is intended as humor and should not be taken as a dig against people in wheelchairs.
Ultimately, body chemistry determines what percentage of calories are stored as fat, and what percentage are eliminated.
The difference between an adult male who is lying still, completely motionless, 24 hours a day, compared to a male who is in normally active, is actually just a few hundred calories. About 800 or so. Doubling the amount of calories you spend on top of just pure survival is therefore trivial.
I am about 5'8" and 18 months ago I was about 250, I didn't change my diet in any noticeable way, but I started exercising regularly and dropped to 215 in less than 4 months. Sadly I got off the workout, and jumped back up to 225, but I am fixing that right now.
The idea that a virus, genetic differences etc should have any significant effect on your weight is completely absurd. If you work out with any kind of vigour for 1 hour a day you can litterally double the amount of calories you spend above simply staying alive.
Semi-random example. An adult male may need about 1400 calories a day just to stay alive, assuming he lies completely still and tries to think as little as possible. Increasing this to having normal activity, moving to and from work etc, may mean that he spends 2200 calories a day. 800 more. To increase this from 800 to 1600 he needs to work out with some vigour for half an hour to fourtyfive minutes. A persons genes, a virus or any other factors have no bearing on whether he goes from 800 to 1600 calories. That is pure physics. If you do this without increasing your intake of food with 800 calories you will lose weight, no matter what. That is also pure physics.
I'm fat, and the reason I am fat is because I am too lazy to get off my fat ass and move. I am also fat because I stuff my face with far too much junk.
If you are fat the reason you are fat is because you are too lazy to get off your fat ass and move. You are also fat because you stuff your face with far too much junk.
Please do not go on Atkins or any other diet. Diets are very bad for you. They make your body slow down your metabolism. When your metabolism is low and you get off your diet, you will go back up, probably to a higher weight than you had before you got on the diet.
If you want to lose weight you need to work out. You should work out with a combination of cardio vascular activity and resistance work. Resistance work is the same as lifting weights. Heavy weights. When you do cardio work you burn calories for the duration of your workout. If you lift heavy weights you will build some muscle and you will burn extra calories from 48 to 72 hours after your work out.
PS: If you are a girl (not bloody likely on Slashdot I guess), you can safely lift weights. You will not "bulk up". Girls don't bulk up. Ever. Not without at least 2-3 hours of very heavy lifting every day and a goodly amount of drugs.
This is a good idea, but sadly, since both our politicians and our courts are unwilling to stand up to the teachers unions, this is going to take a long time to implement. Having the gov pay for, but the parents chose the school makes a lot of sense.
As for the "blacklist", it's a free country, and they can do what they want.
I agree that they should be allowed to do what they want. I also think it is very important that people who support freedom everywhere speak out against this kind of attempts to intimidate people with a different viewpoint than your own. If the site engaged in discussion on subject matter with which it disagreed with these professors, I would fully support it. As it stands it is meant as intimidation. The government is not the only entity that can run organized intimidation, private organizations can do the same. It doesn't make them less like Kim Jung Il. The creator of the blacklist in question would feel right at home in a party with Kim Jung and good old Josef Stalin. They have a lot more in common than separates them.
Creating a list of "dangerous" left-leaning people pulls us strongly towards the totalitarian ideals of the McCarthy era. McCarthy was, amusingly enough, a person with strong left-style ideals camouflaged as conservativism. Only totalitarian left-oriented regimes will try to legislate against a political idea. Unsurprisingly enough, when McCarthy found communism in his heart, he went after the other communists to eradicate them. An absurd notion. In a free country even communists are allowed to exist, speak and organize.
The problem with freedom is that you have to accept that people have an ideology that wants to remove that freedom. If you prevent them from advocating their ideology you have already given in to it and made it your own. Freedom of expression means you have to accept the expression of ideas you find repulsive, and you have to defend the person who expresses these repugnant ideas at all cost. Once you deny him the right to speak you have become him.
As a strong liberalist and proponent of freedom and the free market, I have to say that the current administration has the same problem. I frequently ask my self the following question: How did the extreme left manage to take over the leadership of the republican party? How did we manage to put a socialist in the White House?
To me the republican party once stood for small government, low taxes, no unneeded interference from the government in our personal life be it my wallet or my bedroom. Today the republican party is the party of big government spending. Ignoring the war-time spending, the current administration makes Clinton look like an extreme right-wing, fiscally conservative Republican, the current White House, Senate and Congress are spending more money that I thought possible, and far more money than anyone ever before. On crap like in-door rainforests in Ohio.
In addition to this, every time republicans have supported a case it has been in support of the federal government overriding the control of the state or local government. The Terry Schiavo case was a good example. You can think whatever you want about how the case went, the reality was that it was a state vs federal issue, and the new "Republicans" sided with the Fed. Insane. The republican outcry over the State of Washington allowing assisted suicide is another. How can the three, supposedly the most "conservative", judges in the supreme court say that federal law trumps state law in such a case? Medical pot. Anyone, please tell me how it is the federal governments job to tell me what I can and can not eat, drink or smoke. I mean, if you are a socialist, you obviously think that the federal government can mandate what color jacket I can wear, but if you support the ideals of freedom and liberty... absurd.
Who let the socialists take over the republican party and who let an extreme left-winger move into the White House?
Just on this point, whether ID is right or wrong, it is not science. It has never been and it will never be. You can wish it to be science all you want, but there are inherent properties of ID that makes it non-science. Please note that I am not saying it is wrong, I can't scientifically state that, I am just saying that it is not science.
Scientific method deals with (scientific) theories. A theory has certain properties, one of them is that it is testable, another that it is falsifiable. If it is not testable nor falsifiable, no matter what it is, it is not science. A lot ideas floating around in the scientific community is also not science. The postulations of ID satisfies neither of the two requirements, and is therefore not science.
A problem is, as an example, one of vagueness. "There must be something smart behind all of this" is not a testable theory. Since ID doesn't say what this "something" is, and how I can find it, I can not test whether it is in fact there. There is no theoretical way I can prove that it isn't there. If there is no theoretical way I can disprove it (falsifiable, remember) it isn't science.
Again, for all we know (actually, I do know but that is another matter) ID may describe the world 100% accurately, that doesn't make it science.
Well, as I mentioned in my post. I currently run Fedora, not because I dislike Debian but because I work for a company that sells commercial software for Linux, and we have to standardize on a distribution. Company policy has decided that we standardize on Red Hat, and I use Fedora to see what is coming down the line... This means that from 7 in the morning until about 6pm I am mainly on Linux.
Now, as I also mentioned in my other post, I use Windows XP for movie editing. My editing software is Sony Vegas. Can you please point me to equivalent software for Linux please? You know what... don't even try to go looking, there isn't any. There is some professional rendering software etc out there, but no reasonable (user experience wise) editing software. Of course, I can spend a lot of time writing such a package, but I really don't want to, I just want to edit some movies. I have written enough code for fun in my life.
So I keep religion out of my OS choice and use whatever is appropriate for the situation. For some reason a lot of people think that this is always Open Source, which is absurd.
So, you think that M$ can and have put backdoors into your system but you still use it?
Just to do another follow-up to this one. Anyone who make closed-source, commercial or not, software can add malicious features to it by design. Going by your question above, do you use absolutely no closed-source software? If you don't, is that because you are afraid that They have put spyware in it? Is your tin-foil hat comfortable?
So, you think that M$ can and have put backdoors into your system
Did I say that? I can't remember saying that I think M$ has put backdoors in my system. I was just saying that they can, easily. Would they? Probably not. They would be stupid to. As with most conspiracy theories this doesn't take into the account the simple fact that in any sizable organization, CIA included, you simply cannot keep secrets for that long.
If M$ put backdoors in their systems employees leaving M$ for one reason or another, would sooner or later tell the world. Having as many employees coming and going as M$ has makes this every bit as safe as the checks you "automatically" have in Open Source.
but you still use it?
I am not, as seems to be the case with a lot of Linux advocates (to the strong detriment of Linux may I add) religious about what Operating System I use. I have two desktops, one for Windows XP and one for Linux (currently running Fedora, but that changes regularly). I also have a laptop that dual-boots into Linux. I use Linux for most of my work stuff, and I use Windows XP for most of my home stuff which mainly includes video editing.
I'd use Linux for video editing too if there was a decent "prosomer" editing app for it, but there isn't, not even close.
How would you notice? Please educate me. How would you notice, for example, that part of the explorer was doing stuff you didn't realize while you were browsing files on your PC? Collecting data say. Then the data collected was moved bits and pieces out to M$ using the windows update.
How would this be easier to notice than a flaw in the WMF?
So, why would M$ (or anyone there) need to create such an elaborate "back door" to Windows? I mean, they could put anything in anywhere they wanted to. If they wanted to download some stuff to my PC and execute it they could distribute it as an update. They could add the code to IE or the kernel.
This is one of the dumber conspiracy theories I have read.
Well, as I say in my post this is the solution. When AllPeers come to the market they need to include an additional feature, a "shared folder" kinda thing. I can set this up with a bunch of friends and family, and we drop our important stuff into that. AllPeers (or similar) should then make sure that a couple of the others grab this, and voila, all of our data is safe. Saved by P2P.
Slashdot Mirror
the author is clear that this is all because of pressure from the United States.
I am a Norwegian, and I am saddened by the new religion that has Europe in it's grips. There are various sects in this religion, but they all have one thing in common, the big "Satan" is the US of effing A. Anything bad that goes on in the world is the fault of the US. This article, and the response to it, is an example of how fanatics suffering from this religion think.
The system they hacked was the BA frequent flyer system. This system has nothing to do with passenger security or US national security. This is a convenience system made so that BA passengers easily can buy tickets, earn miles, buy upgrades etc. This system shouldn't have information such as the passport number. The fact that it does is an internal matter for BA and has absolutely nothing to do with the USA.
I travel a lot for business and I am a member of most of the frequent flyer systems in Europe and the US, but not BA since I am already a member of one of their co-shares. None of the airlines have my passport number stored on the frequent flyer site. Not one of them.
This is an internal BA problem, BA should never have had the passport number stored on the FF site, they should never allow this to be accessed without a password etc.
Blaming the US for this is ridiculous in the extreme. The US has nothing to do with how an airline designs its Frequent Flyer website, and no, the US does not require that your passport number of other personal information is stored on the FF site or anywhere else for that matter. They only require the information be sent before you board the plane.
Sadly, the new European religion requires full frontal lobotomy prior to joining, something that has not reduced the number of Europeans who sign on.
People starving in Africa don't need laptops, they need basic infrastructure like clean water.
Actually, you are wrong. What Africa needs is a well educated population that can solve the problems that Africa has. There isn't a food shortage in Africa, there isn't an infrastructure problem. Africa has an education problem. Africa has a corruption problem. Africa has a problem with war. Possibly more than anything, Africa has a huge problem of receiving tons of aid from the first world, aid which makes Africa a victim ad infinitum. Aid that does very little good. Victims never solve their problems, and nobody else has the ability or inclination to solve Africas problem.
We can't solve Africas problems. We shouldn't try. People in Africa must solve their own problems. If we can help with education, that is the only thing we should try.
Too young to remember the Berlin Wall?
It might be good to start this program today, since getting it through appropriations could take the first thirty years
Nah, you can probably get it through appropriations in a few hours if you put your mind to it. What you do is you claim that moving the asteroid is part of the War on Terror, and voila, you have your cash. If you claim that you need to build 3 aircraft carriers to do the job, you will get Pentagon all worked up too, and you'll probably get three times as much money as you need.
You could probably even have the NSA put a wiretap on the thing within a week too. That might be the solution. They would have to get a wire up there, and then we can have one or two guys pulling on the wire a little, just a nudge here and there... Increasing the speed of the thing like that would change it's trajectory.
Won't work. People who live in areas where gambling is illegal can still play online poker for play-money. There is no way you can know if I am playing for real or play money based on where I connect from or to.
Better we just introduce capital punishment for trying to introduce stupid and unenforcable laws and fry the moron politicians who is pushing this. Fry them after a lengthy legal process of course, but fry them still.
The bill banning US citizens from using *all* net gambling sites does not violate WTO rules, as it treats all countries' sites equally.
Yes, the bill violates WTO rules, and probably also the constitution. It violates common sence and also the basis on which the Republican party (which really needs to change its name to The New Socialist Lunatic Party) was built on, namely the freedom of the individual.
The reason the bill violates the WTO rules is that it favors Brick and Mortar casinos over their online counter parts, thereby unfairly targeting foreign business.
The interesting thing is that the largest online gambling site has clearly said that they would incorporate in the US if they could since the US is a better capital market to operate in. Access to VC funding etc is better here than anywhere else in the world, and a whole bunch of other advantages. Sadly, due to near-sighted policy makers with big egos and little brains they can't, with the resulting loss of revenue for the US.
Drugs don't have an IP address
That is correct, and playing in on-line casinos for play-money is legal. It is easy to encrypt traffic betweeen my poker client and the poker server. Based on that, law enforcement has no realistic way of determining whether I am gambling or not. In theory they can ban credit card companies from dealing with online gambling sites, but Neteller is a genuine online payment system, they are not based in the US, so I can always trasfer money through neteller to a poker site.
Again the government who claims to be "for the people" is trying to restrict the freedom of the people. Why is it that the Republican party looks so much like Joseph Stalin and his goonies?
That argument is not supported by the article, or by any other resource available to me. You've set it up as a straw man so you can knock it down.
No, I didn't, and that should have been obvious from what I wrote. The style in which I wrote it however is, for reasons unknown to me, frequently misunderstood. The style is called Irony . Read what I said with the fact that I was being ironic in mind, and you may realize that I am saying something you haven't yet understood.
When you are being ironic it is highly unlikely that you are constructing straw-men. Straw-men are for the serious among us.
You are absolutely correct that the data they have only goes as far back as 1200 years, however that doesn't mean we do not have data that goes back further. We do, and no, the 20th century wasn't the warmest ever, not even close. Not even in the time-span of human history.
I am wrong about what? Please point to the specifics of my comments that were wrong. Don't try to sound all un-educated and dumb, because people might believe you are.
12 is a few, isn't it? That was my intended meaning anyway. It was warmer 1200 years ago. The earth has been a lot warmer througout it's history. The fact that it is warmer now than it has been for a while doesn't signify anything at all until we know a lot more.
the present-day levels of CO2 are unprecedented during the past 420 thousand years
Good, and from this we can conclude that the present day temperature is the highest in 420 thousand years. Oh, no, that is not the case. In fact, it was significantly warmer just a few hundred years ago, and warmer again a few thousand years ago.
I don't think anyone seriously disputes the fact that it is getting warmer, but how much in relation to previous times is debatable. I also don't think anyone seriously disputes that our CO2 emissions have some impact on the global climate, but nobody can seriously say how much impact. The main problem with the global warming scare is the fact that we only started systematic measurements in the 1940s. Anything special about the 1940s? Oh yes, they were the coldes decade in a long time.
In other words, the temperature may be going up as part of a cycle, and we may have added slightly to the higher trend, but not a lot. This means that even significant reductions in CO2 emissions migt not matter much, or at all, in the bigger scheme of things. The cries for immediate action are premature and, quite frankly, a little hysterical. Not based in sound science.
The problem with the article is not that he requires that time be this or that, or even the other. The problem with the article is the definition of "motion". He defines motion as velocity in other words dx/dt. This is correct for motion in space, but it is absurd to apply the same definition of motion to motion in time. In fact, should the discussion continue it would make more sense to use a different word than motion. The article is quite apparently created for the fun of it, and I don't see how this should make people upset.
In my example the assumption was that all other factors (that is the severity of the crime) was identical. When it is someone elses child, nix him, when it is your own child, he is nice and deserves leniency.
Yes it is ... problem with opinions. Everyone's got one, and yours is no better than anyone else's.
Actually, I disagree, for a number of reasons, but the main one is that people usually do not have one opinion. People with very strong opinions, both on the right and the left, but more so on the right these days, tend to have diametrically opposite viewpoints to their own depending on the situation. Let me use one non-related example, and then I'll use a related example. Imagine a nice California, middle-class, conservative family. Strongly in favor of capital punishment. Most of them are. Then one day their son kills his wife, premeditated (I am not using any particular family/son as an example). Do you think the family now are as strongly in favor of capital punishment? Of course not, not in this case.
I am sorry, that is just double standards. If you favor capital punishment you have to accept that the government kills your child too. In fact, you should cheer the governments action. That will of course never happen.
So, to the relevant example. Most people who are opposed to abortion and experiments on embryos have this convition because they reason that life starts at conception. Scientific experimentation on innocent human life is morally repugnant, and the stance seems rational.
The same people have no problem with fertility treatment it seems, particularly if they them selves need it to have children. This is a good example of absurd double standards held by people for whom thinking is a chore and for whom "intellectual" is a bad word. Sorry, if you accept petri-dish fertilization, you also (scilently) accept the destruction of fertilized eggs. Lots of them. That is part of the process. In otherwords, you can't rationally support fertility treatments of this kind and at the same time oppose experimentation on embryos or abortion.
If G. W. Bush is so against bad treatment of embryos, he should propose laws that ban fertility treatments like this. Do you think that would get support in this country? Absolutely not. The hippocrites on the religious right reserve the right to kill as many children (using their definition of "a child") as they like as long as it serves their purpose, but oppose it when it comes to furthering our knowledge and understanding of life.
This is sadly the norm on the religious right. They want access to all kinds of treatments, but they want to ban the search for any knowledge that can make them feel uncertain about their silly superstition. This has been the history of the religious extreme throughout history, they have always persecuted people who search for knowledge. The only difference is that (thankfully) today the religious right have far less power than they used to. Give the nuts more power and you will see stakes and fires all over this country again.
You are completely correct, but an even more important factor is the fact that our body was designed to move. Run after prey and run away from predators. Run after girls, run away from their fathers.
Even more than having abundant access to (at times horrible) food this is the main cause we are getting fat. It is interesting to watch the US, if the original article was correct, people in New York are to a degree immune to the "virus". They are half the size of people in the Mid-West. Is this because the "virus" hasn't hit New York yet, or may it have something to do with the fact that traffic in New York makes a car pretty useless, therefore you take public transportation, which forces you to walk a bit more.
Oh, and my pet peeve... The handicapped people. It is actually their fault. They have been lobbying for years and years that they need equal access to the 4th floor. Perhaps they do, but the lobbying means that all buildings now have elevators and no stairs. If I use the stairs to walk down from my office, the fire alarm goes off. The stairwell door can not be opened from the outside, so walking up three floors is not an option. The elevator is my only way up. It's all the fault of the handicapped people!
That I am too lazy to go to the gym to compensate is not relevant, I shouldn't have to pay for my gym membership... even though I do, I shouldn't have to go. The fact that just about anything you can buy that is edible in the US has high fructose corn syrup in it is also not too relevant... I mean, if I eat a ton of sugar a year, I would have lost it all if it hadn't been for the handicapped people!
And to the people who had their humor glands zapped by sugar, the part about the handicapped people is intended as humor and should not be taken as a dig against people in wheelchairs.
Ultimately, body chemistry determines what percentage of calories are stored as fat, and what percentage are eliminated.
The difference between an adult male who is lying still, completely motionless, 24 hours a day, compared to a male who is in normally active, is actually just a few hundred calories. About 800 or so. Doubling the amount of calories you spend on top of just pure survival is therefore trivial.
I am about 5'8" and 18 months ago I was about 250, I didn't change my diet in any noticeable way, but I started exercising regularly and dropped to 215 in less than 4 months. Sadly I got off the workout, and jumped back up to 225, but I am fixing that right now.
The idea that a virus, genetic differences etc should have any significant effect on your weight is completely absurd. If you work out with any kind of vigour for 1 hour a day you can litterally double the amount of calories you spend above simply staying alive.
Semi-random example. An adult male may need about 1400 calories a day just to stay alive, assuming he lies completely still and tries to think as little as possible. Increasing this to having normal activity, moving to and from work etc, may mean that he spends 2200 calories a day. 800 more. To increase this from 800 to 1600 he needs to work out with some vigour for half an hour to fourtyfive minutes. A persons genes, a virus or any other factors have no bearing on whether he goes from 800 to 1600 calories. That is pure physics. If you do this without increasing your intake of food with 800 calories you will lose weight, no matter what. That is also pure physics.
I'm fat, and the reason I am fat is because I am too lazy to get off my fat ass and move. I am also fat because I stuff my face with far too much junk.
If you are fat the reason you are fat is because you are too lazy to get off your fat ass and move. You are also fat because you stuff your face with far too much junk.
Please do not go on Atkins or any other diet. Diets are very bad for you. They make your body slow down your metabolism. When your metabolism is low and you get off your diet, you will go back up, probably to a higher weight than you had before you got on the diet.
If you want to lose weight you need to work out. You should work out with a combination of cardio vascular activity and resistance work. Resistance work is the same as lifting weights. Heavy weights. When you do cardio work you burn calories for the duration of your workout. If you lift heavy weights you will build some muscle and you will burn extra calories from 48 to 72 hours after your work out.
PS: If you are a girl (not bloody likely on Slashdot I guess), you can safely lift weights. You will not "bulk up". Girls don't bulk up. Ever. Not without at least 2-3 hours of very heavy lifting every day and a goodly amount of drugs.
Just start supporting vouchers.
This is a good idea, but sadly, since both our politicians and our courts are unwilling to stand up to the teachers unions, this is going to take a long time to implement. Having the gov pay for, but the parents chose the school makes a lot of sense.
As for the "blacklist", it's a free country, and they can do what they want.
I agree that they should be allowed to do what they want. I also think it is very important that people who support freedom everywhere speak out against this kind of attempts to intimidate people with a different viewpoint than your own. If the site engaged in discussion on subject matter with which it disagreed with these professors, I would fully support it. As it stands it is meant as intimidation. The government is not the only entity that can run organized intimidation, private organizations can do the same. It doesn't make them less like Kim Jung Il. The creator of the blacklist in question would feel right at home in a party with Kim Jung and good old Josef Stalin. They have a lot more in common than separates them.
Creating a list of "dangerous" left-leaning people pulls us strongly towards the totalitarian ideals of the McCarthy era. McCarthy was, amusingly enough, a person with strong left-style ideals camouflaged as conservativism. Only totalitarian left-oriented regimes will try to legislate against a political idea. Unsurprisingly enough, when McCarthy found communism in his heart, he went after the other communists to eradicate them. An absurd notion. In a free country even communists are allowed to exist, speak and organize.
The problem with freedom is that you have to accept that people have an ideology that wants to remove that freedom. If you prevent them from advocating their ideology you have already given in to it and made it your own. Freedom of expression means you have to accept the expression of ideas you find repulsive, and you have to defend the person who expresses these repugnant ideas at all cost. Once you deny him the right to speak you have become him.
As a strong liberalist and proponent of freedom and the free market, I have to say that the current administration has the same problem. I frequently ask my self the following question: How did the extreme left manage to take over the leadership of the republican party? How did we manage to put a socialist in the White House?
To me the republican party once stood for small government, low taxes, no unneeded interference from the government in our personal life be it my wallet or my bedroom. Today the republican party is the party of big government spending. Ignoring the war-time spending, the current administration makes Clinton look like an extreme right-wing, fiscally conservative Republican, the current White House, Senate and Congress are spending more money that I thought possible, and far more money than anyone ever before. On crap like in-door rainforests in Ohio.
In addition to this, every time republicans have supported a case it has been in support of the federal government overriding the control of the state or local government. The Terry Schiavo case was a good example. You can think whatever you want about how the case went, the reality was that it was a state vs federal issue, and the new "Republicans" sided with the Fed. Insane. The republican outcry over the State of Washington allowing assisted suicide is another. How can the three, supposedly the most "conservative", judges in the supreme court say that federal law trumps state law in such a case? Medical pot. Anyone, please tell me how it is the federal governments job to tell me what I can and can not eat, drink or smoke. I mean, if you are a socialist, you obviously think that the federal government can mandate what color jacket I can wear, but if you support the ideals of freedom and liberty... absurd.
Who let the socialists take over the republican party and who let an extreme left-winger move into the White House?
and for your information ID IS a science
Just on this point, whether ID is right or wrong, it is not science. It has never been and it will never be. You can wish it to be science all you want, but there are inherent properties of ID that makes it non-science. Please note that I am not saying it is wrong, I can't scientifically state that, I am just saying that it is not science.
Scientific method deals with (scientific) theories. A theory has certain properties, one of them is that it is testable, another that it is falsifiable. If it is not testable nor falsifiable, no matter what it is, it is not science. A lot ideas floating around in the scientific community is also not science. The postulations of ID satisfies neither of the two requirements, and is therefore not science.
A problem is, as an example, one of vagueness. "There must be something smart behind all of this" is not a testable theory. Since ID doesn't say what this "something" is, and how I can find it, I can not test whether it is in fact there. There is no theoretical way I can prove that it isn't there. If there is no theoretical way I can disprove it (falsifiable, remember) it isn't science.
Again, for all we know (actually, I do know but that is another matter) ID may describe the world 100% accurately, that doesn't make it science.
Well, as I mentioned in my post. I currently run Fedora, not because I dislike Debian but because I work for a company that sells commercial software for Linux, and we have to standardize on a distribution. Company policy has decided that we standardize on Red Hat, and I use Fedora to see what is coming down the line... This means that from 7 in the morning until about 6pm I am mainly on Linux.
Now, as I also mentioned in my other post, I use Windows XP for movie editing. My editing software is Sony Vegas. Can you please point me to equivalent software for Linux please? You know what ... don't even try to go looking, there isn't any. There is some professional rendering software etc out there, but no reasonable (user experience wise) editing software. Of course, I can spend a lot of time writing such a package, but I really don't want to, I just want to edit some movies. I have written enough code for fun in my life.
So I keep religion out of my OS choice and use whatever is appropriate for the situation. For some reason a lot of people think that this is always Open Source, which is absurd.
So, you think that M$ can and have put backdoors into your system but you still use it?
Just to do another follow-up to this one. Anyone who make closed-source, commercial or not, software can add malicious features to it by design. Going by your question above, do you use absolutely no closed-source software? If you don't, is that because you are afraid that They have put spyware in it? Is your tin-foil hat comfortable?
So, you think that M$ can and have put backdoors into your system
Did I say that? I can't remember saying that I think M$ has put backdoors in my system. I was just saying that they can, easily. Would they? Probably not. They would be stupid to. As with most conspiracy theories this doesn't take into the account the simple fact that in any sizable organization, CIA included, you simply cannot keep secrets for that long.
If M$ put backdoors in their systems employees leaving M$ for one reason or another, would sooner or later tell the world. Having as many employees coming and going as M$ has makes this every bit as safe as the checks you "automatically" have in Open Source.
but you still use it?
I am not, as seems to be the case with a lot of Linux advocates (to the strong detriment of Linux may I add) religious about what Operating System I use. I have two desktops, one for Windows XP and one for Linux (currently running Fedora, but that changes regularly). I also have a laptop that dual-boots into Linux. I use Linux for most of my work stuff, and I use Windows XP for most of my home stuff which mainly includes video editing.
I'd use Linux for video editing too if there was a decent "prosomer" editing app for it, but there isn't, not even close.
How would you notice? Please educate me. How would you notice, for example, that part of the explorer was doing stuff you didn't realize while you were browsing files on your PC? Collecting data say. Then the data collected was moved bits and pieces out to M$ using the windows update. How would this be easier to notice than a flaw in the WMF?
So, why would M$ (or anyone there) need to create such an elaborate "back door" to Windows? I mean, they could put anything in anywhere they wanted to. If they wanted to download some stuff to my PC and execute it they could distribute it as an update. They could add the code to IE or the kernel. This is one of the dumber conspiracy theories I have read.
Well, as I say in my post this is the solution. When AllPeers come to the market they need to include an additional feature, a "shared folder" kinda thing. I can set this up with a bunch of friends and family, and we drop our important stuff into that. AllPeers (or similar) should then make sure that a couple of the others grab this, and voila, all of our data is safe. Saved by P2P.