We dialed up to AOL, we chatted in the Town Square chat rooms, we visited Geocities, and then got/con/con punted or crapflooded until our modems disconnected. And then dialed up again. And we liked it!
s. Maybe if they couldn't afford them, they might take extra effort to make up for not getting an education the first time around, and try to better themselves to get better paying jobs so they can have these luxuries.
It seems the "They're uneducated" argument is the standard argument in the Slashdot community for why the poor are poor in the United States. I would suggest that a high school level education is perfectly sufficient for a wide variety of skilled work that at one time provided a comfortable standard of living for many Americans. The problem is that these skilled jobs do not exist anymore, so one is left in the position of having to make an enormous and often unfeasible economic investment in higher education if one wants the possibility of being employed in any position higher than the service industry. It is totally presumptuous for the "elites" of the system to have completely changed the rules of the game by dismantling domestic industry (which was the lifeblood of the middle class economy) in the name of free trade (the rules of which apparently only the U.S. are required to obey) - and then accuse those affected of being inadequate because they could not or would not adapt to the new way of things.
And what will we do if suddenly all these people do decide to better themselves, and manage to obtain the betterment that everyone seems to want them to have? We'll end up in a situation that China is running into, but for somewhat different reasons: Ten million highly educated people leaving universities each year with business degrees, IT degrees, law degrees, arts and humanities degrees, science degrees - all competing for a tenth that many jobs. It will quickly be realized that the "Idea Economy" is a load of crap. Ideas don't make economies, energy and products do - and the US hasn't worked very hard at either discipline for a long time. So at that point, what will the upper-class excuse be for why someone with a secondary education is still at the poverty line?
I should add that the one bit of clinical history that almost no physician took into account was spending huge amounts of time growing up hiking in the woods of New England.
One has to speculate on whether Hawking was diagnosed correctly with ALS. There have been cases of patients diagnosed with ALS recovering when treated for Lyme disease with large doses of antibiotics - the testing for the Lyme spirochete is notoriously inaccurate.
I know this because I suffered from all the symptoms of MS except I had no evidence of autoimmune disease and no lesions in my central nervous system. Spent years trying to get answers from physicians with no luck - until I had some Western blots done at a quality lab which showed band after band of pathogen-specific antibodies. I improved greatly on antibiotics. It could all of course be some coincidence, but from my perspective it's hard to imagine that's the case. There may be a close link between autoimmune diseases and infectious diseases that we're not seeing.
There is a serious problem in economics called "the war puzzle" or "the war problem" that tries to figure out why the hell people ever go to war, because it is never economically rational for either side to do so, regardless of outcome.
That classical economic theory can't account for war should be a pretty good indicator that classical economic theory is fundamentally incorrect - I would suggest that the main problem is that classical economic theory treats individuals as striving to maximize their utility when there is ample evidence that humans often don't act that way.
I regretted that part of the comment immediately after I posted it. Let me try to clarify what I meant - I got the sense that the parent poster was suggesting that in looking at nuclear power as total replacement for fossil fuel that one look at all of the historical liabilities of nuclear vs. coal and the cost per watt of the same. I was trying to suggest that investors are not interested in that kind of big picture thinking, but only "How much money can this one investment make me vs. investing in something else." On the small scale, of course cost per watt is important, but I don't think they spend a lot of time looking at the grand historical perspective. I would be pretty surprised, however, if nuclear power companies and private investors didn't give a flying fuck about plant disasters, even taking any potential human and environmental costs out of the equation it still means that a plant (like Three Mile Island) is shut down for years not earning a dime.
I remember a talk given by a Shuttle engineer at MIT (I wasn't a student there, unfortunately) where he stated essentially that "All disasters are fundamentally caused by human errors, nature doesn't make mistakes." Even so called "acts-of-god" can be considered human errors: if a plane crashes in bad weather, it was perhaps a bad decision to try to fly in that area, or if people are killed by an earthquake it's because of humans who built buildings not designed to withstand the earthquake, not the earthquake itself.
As the only group willing to insure the nuclear industry is the nuclear industry, that's not surprising - I assume the majority of the full ~$1 billion cleanup cost was finally footed by the US taxpayer. Regardless of what limits to indemnity there were, however, I doubt investors viewed a nuclear plant that's completely shut down for the better part of 6 years for cleanup as a sound investment.
1.21 Jigawatts is equal to approximately 47,000 mega ExplodingIpodBatteries, which is about 7.8 Burning Libraries Of Congress. These units of energy are of course in the US standard micro-10-fully-loaded-18-wheelers^2*milli-footballfield^2*deci-time-it-takes-you-to-fix-a-cup-of-coffee^-2.
Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island. That's the only one you have to know, because it's the name that's been repeating in the minds of potential private investors in US nuclear power for over 30 years. Investors don't give a crap about cost savings or net power generation - at least directly, what they want to know first and foremost is what their chances are of making guaranteed bank over the life of the plant are. Investing in coal and oil is a sure-fire 100% money maker. Nuclear might be an even bigger money maker, 99% of the time, but...
Three Mile Island, Three Mile Island, Three Mile Island...
I've wondered recently if, with a sufficiently large LED array under microprocessor control that simulates a "double humped" brightness curve, one could point it up at the sky and start triggering these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_satellite
.
I wonder what kind of new government friends I could make?
I'd certainly like to visit Germany, Russia, The UK, any number of other countries. The problem is that living in the United States, going to Germany for say, only two weeks (and attempting to be as frugal as possible) would probably cost a quarter of my annual income. Europeans can probably get a Eurorail pass for a hundred dollars equivalent or so and hit up 17 countries with their own languages and culture in a weekend, if they were so inclined. I think you're correct though in pointing out that larger countries tend to be more insular - in the United States you can drive the equivalent distance from Paris to Moscow from say, New York to Portland and when you arrive at your destination everything appears precisely the same as the place you left - right down to the arrangement of the aisles at the local Home Depot. No wonder people think that "This is the way it is, and the way it always has been."
The reason people who spew stuff like that exist is because Western society has gone on too long without 50-million-person killing world wars. Society has gotten too comfortable, and firebombing whole cities helps keep a damper on the bullshit.
Reminds me of the first time I used a unisex bathroom at college, when I decided to investigate what the small aluminum boxes mounted on the sides of the stalls were for. They weren't for dispensing after dinner mints, I'll tell you that much.
Don't forget the enormous pressure put on the U.S. by the Neocon/Israeli lobby (essentially one and the same) to finally finish Saddam, Israel's largest threat in the region. Given the preponderance of those of the Jewish religion/ethnicity/race/whatever it is today in Hollywood, that there should be people excited to receive such a trophy should not be surprising.
So far a perfectly typical thread of/. know-nothingism.
Yeah. Thanks for being so magnanimous to drop in on it and impart your knowledge to the unwashed masses. I don't think anyone in the thread claimed to be a linguistics expert, and throwing insults right off the bat makes people inspired to learn more I'm sure.
I could approach it in more detail from a phonological perspective, but I've already wasted more time than/. deserves these years.
Then stop typing and haul your ass out. However, I bet we'll see you again, as it probably gets lonely sitting by yourself knowing everything there is to know about everything.
The big boys play this game all the time. They play with imaginary money, to make real money. It just burns them sometimes too.
In the case of the "big boys", they were able to privatize the profits and socialize the costs to their hearts content after they had the Glass-Stiegel act pulled. They profited enormously off of trading imaginary money for tangible wealth, and burned us.
North Korea's entire ballistic missile program has essentially based on cobbling together different variations of Soviet Scud missiles, a design which the essentials of are approaching 60 years old. The major advance for the Taepodong-2 would be the use of the R-27 first stage, which I believe actually has gimbaled main engines instead of graphite fins for thrust vectoring. If it's true that the failure occurred at second stage ignition instead of with the first stage only a few seconds after launch (as has been the case in the past) then they've overcome a major hurdle, as a gimbaled first stage is essential to get good efficiency for long ranges. The Nodong based second stage appears to be a proven design, so if the problem is just the interfacing my somewhat-educated guess is that they're 90% of the way there. Of course the second stage probably is still using fins for thrust vectoring so the CEP of the unholy combination would probably something laughable by modern standards like 10 miles, but obviously one gets the feeling that range is their big concern right now, not accuracy.
The tendency of many natives of the Boston, Massachusetts area to substitute "ah" for "r"s is a well known stereotype. It's often possible to fairly accurately determine someone's birthplace (North Shore, South Shore, etc) just by the particular way they mangle their "r"s. Not being much of a linguist, I've often wondered if the reason places like New Zealand have somewhat similar quirks to their speech is because the settlers of New England and New Zealand came from related parts of British society.
Without the option to escalate to nuclear weapons, the West had NO chance of stopping a conventional Soviet attack.
There is hardly universal agreement between scholars on that point. The Soviet army had quality in quantity, to be sure, but their organizational doctrine and command structure was considered to be rigid and not able to quickly adapt to changing battlefield situations. The Soviet soldiers suffered from poor training, particularly in the declining years of the Union. Also, the events of the first Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein had the 4th or 5th largest army in the world and some of the best Soviet equipment money could buy, indicated that even the best Soviet-State-Made equipment wasn't much to write home about. It's probably the case that the elite pilots or tank drivers of Saddam's force were not any better or worse than the average Soviet soldier, and the Coalition forces pasted them on any occasion that they happened to encounter each other, with the Soviet-equipped forces suffering horrendous losses. Reports of a single Collation tank knocking out 10 or 20 Iraqi tanks right in a row were common - Republican Guard manned tanks that is, not the cannon fodder. The entire Iraqi air force, including quite a few state-of-the-art Soviet-made Mig-29s, were knocked out in the first night with only a couple Coalition losses.
Sure, the Red Army may have had a 10:1 numerical advantage in Europe, but how well does that play out if they start suffering 20:1 losses?
Slashdot Mirror
We dialed up to AOL, we chatted in the Town Square chat rooms, we visited Geocities, and then got /con/con punted or crapflooded until our modems disconnected. And then dialed up again. And we liked it!
s. Maybe if they couldn't afford them, they might take extra effort to make up for not getting an education the first time around, and try to better themselves to get better paying jobs so they can have these luxuries.
It seems the "They're uneducated" argument is the standard argument in the Slashdot community for why the poor are poor in the United States. I would suggest that a high school level education is perfectly sufficient for a wide variety of skilled work that at one time provided a comfortable standard of living for many Americans. The problem is that these skilled jobs do not exist anymore, so one is left in the position of having to make an enormous and often unfeasible economic investment in higher education if one wants the possibility of being employed in any position higher than the service industry. It is totally presumptuous for the "elites" of the system to have completely changed the rules of the game by dismantling domestic industry (which was the lifeblood of the middle class economy) in the name of free trade (the rules of which apparently only the U.S. are required to obey) - and then accuse those affected of being inadequate because they could not or would not adapt to the new way of things.
And what will we do if suddenly all these people do decide to better themselves, and manage to obtain the betterment that everyone seems to want them to have? We'll end up in a situation that China is running into, but for somewhat different reasons: Ten million highly educated people leaving universities each year with business degrees, IT degrees, law degrees, arts and humanities degrees, science degrees - all competing for a tenth that many jobs. It will quickly be realized that the "Idea Economy" is a load of crap. Ideas don't make economies, energy and products do - and the US hasn't worked very hard at either discipline for a long time. So at that point, what will the upper-class excuse be for why someone with a secondary education is still at the poverty line?
I should add that the one bit of clinical history that almost no physician took into account was spending huge amounts of time growing up hiking in the woods of New England.
One has to speculate on whether Hawking was diagnosed correctly with ALS. There have been cases of patients diagnosed with ALS recovering when treated for Lyme disease with large doses of antibiotics - the testing for the Lyme spirochete is notoriously inaccurate. I know this because I suffered from all the symptoms of MS except I had no evidence of autoimmune disease and no lesions in my central nervous system. Spent years trying to get answers from physicians with no luck - until I had some Western blots done at a quality lab which showed band after band of pathogen-specific antibodies. I improved greatly on antibiotics. It could all of course be some coincidence, but from my perspective it's hard to imagine that's the case. There may be a close link between autoimmune diseases and infectious diseases that we're not seeing.
There is a serious problem in economics called "the war puzzle" or "the war problem" that tries to figure out why the hell people ever go to war, because it is never economically rational for either side to do so, regardless of outcome.
That classical economic theory can't account for war should be a pretty good indicator that classical economic theory is fundamentally incorrect - I would suggest that the main problem is that classical economic theory treats individuals as striving to maximize their utility when there is ample evidence that humans often don't act that way.
I regretted that part of the comment immediately after I posted it. Let me try to clarify what I meant - I got the sense that the parent poster was suggesting that in looking at nuclear power as total replacement for fossil fuel that one look at all of the historical liabilities of nuclear vs. coal and the cost per watt of the same. I was trying to suggest that investors are not interested in that kind of big picture thinking, but only "How much money can this one investment make me vs. investing in something else." On the small scale, of course cost per watt is important, but I don't think they spend a lot of time looking at the grand historical perspective. I would be pretty surprised, however, if nuclear power companies and private investors didn't give a flying fuck about plant disasters, even taking any potential human and environmental costs out of the equation it still means that a plant (like Three Mile Island) is shut down for years not earning a dime.
I remember a talk given by a Shuttle engineer at MIT (I wasn't a student there, unfortunately) where he stated essentially that "All disasters are fundamentally caused by human errors, nature doesn't make mistakes." Even so called "acts-of-god" can be considered human errors: if a plane crashes in bad weather, it was perhaps a bad decision to try to fly in that area, or if people are killed by an earthquake it's because of humans who built buildings not designed to withstand the earthquake, not the earthquake itself.
As the only group willing to insure the nuclear industry is the nuclear industry, that's not surprising - I assume the majority of the full ~$1 billion cleanup cost was finally footed by the US taxpayer. Regardless of what limits to indemnity there were, however, I doubt investors viewed a nuclear plant that's completely shut down for the better part of 6 years for cleanup as a sound investment.
1.21 Jigawatts is equal to approximately 47,000 mega ExplodingIpodBatteries, which is about 7.8 Burning Libraries Of Congress. These units of energy are of course in the US standard micro-10-fully-loaded-18-wheelers^2*milli-footballfield^2*deci-time-it-takes-you-to-fix-a-cup-of-coffee^-2.
Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island. That's the only one you have to know, because it's the name that's been repeating in the minds of potential private investors in US nuclear power for over 30 years. Investors don't give a crap about cost savings or net power generation - at least directly, what they want to know first and foremost is what their chances are of making guaranteed bank over the life of the plant are. Investing in coal and oil is a sure-fire 100% money maker. Nuclear might be an even bigger money maker, 99% of the time, but... Three Mile Island, Three Mile Island, Three Mile Island...
I've wondered recently if, with a sufficiently large LED array under microprocessor control that simulates a "double humped" brightness curve, one could point it up at the sky and start triggering these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_satellite . I wonder what kind of new government friends I could make?
I'd certainly like to visit Germany, Russia, The UK, any number of other countries. The problem is that living in the United States, going to Germany for say, only two weeks (and attempting to be as frugal as possible) would probably cost a quarter of my annual income. Europeans can probably get a Eurorail pass for a hundred dollars equivalent or so and hit up 17 countries with their own languages and culture in a weekend, if they were so inclined. I think you're correct though in pointing out that larger countries tend to be more insular - in the United States you can drive the equivalent distance from Paris to Moscow from say, New York to Portland and when you arrive at your destination everything appears precisely the same as the place you left - right down to the arrangement of the aisles at the local Home Depot. No wonder people think that "This is the way it is, and the way it always has been."
The reason people who spew stuff like that exist is because Western society has gone on too long without 50-million-person killing world wars. Society has gotten too comfortable, and firebombing whole cities helps keep a damper on the bullshit.
Reminds me of the first time I used a unisex bathroom at college, when I decided to investigate what the small aluminum boxes mounted on the sides of the stalls were for. They weren't for dispensing after dinner mints, I'll tell you that much.
A factory in some third world country, where the workers make scale models of factories.
And available in nanosize for your anatomy!
Fortunately, nature has probably created a workaround so that we will never run into the ennui that would result from knowing everything there is to know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godel's_Incompleteness_Theorem#Theories_of_everything_and_physics
1000kbps? HAH! I live in wyoming, and I can tell you, unless you live right in town there's a 75% chance your phone system's switchbox is mechanical.
Any chance blue boxes still work out there, too?
Don't forget the enormous pressure put on the U.S. by the Neocon/Israeli lobby (essentially one and the same) to finally finish Saddam, Israel's largest threat in the region. Given the preponderance of those of the Jewish religion/ethnicity/race/whatever it is today in Hollywood, that there should be people excited to receive such a trophy should not be surprising.
So far a perfectly typical thread of /. know-nothingism.
Yeah. Thanks for being so magnanimous to drop in on it and impart your knowledge to the unwashed masses. I don't think anyone in the thread claimed to be a linguistics expert, and throwing insults right off the bat makes people inspired to learn more I'm sure.
I could approach it in more detail from a phonological perspective, but I've already wasted more time than /. deserves these years.
Then stop typing and haul your ass out. However, I bet we'll see you again, as it probably gets lonely sitting by yourself knowing everything there is to know about everything.
The big boys play this game all the time. They play with imaginary money, to make real money. It just burns them sometimes too.
In the case of the "big boys", they were able to privatize the profits and socialize the costs to their hearts content after they had the Glass-Stiegel act pulled. They profited enormously off of trading imaginary money for tangible wealth, and burned us.
North Korea's entire ballistic missile program has essentially based on cobbling together different variations of Soviet Scud missiles, a design which the essentials of are approaching 60 years old. The major advance for the Taepodong-2 would be the use of the R-27 first stage, which I believe actually has gimbaled main engines instead of graphite fins for thrust vectoring. If it's true that the failure occurred at second stage ignition instead of with the first stage only a few seconds after launch (as has been the case in the past) then they've overcome a major hurdle, as a gimbaled first stage is essential to get good efficiency for long ranges. The Nodong based second stage appears to be a proven design, so if the problem is just the interfacing my somewhat-educated guess is that they're 90% of the way there. Of course the second stage probably is still using fins for thrust vectoring so the CEP of the unholy combination would probably something laughable by modern standards like 10 miles, but obviously one gets the feeling that range is their big concern right now, not accuracy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodong
The tendency of many natives of the Boston, Massachusetts area to substitute "ah" for "r"s is a well known stereotype. It's often possible to fairly accurately determine someone's birthplace (North Shore, South Shore, etc) just by the particular way they mangle their "r"s. Not being much of a linguist, I've often wondered if the reason places like New Zealand have somewhat similar quirks to their speech is because the settlers of New England and New Zealand came from related parts of British society.
Without the option to escalate to nuclear weapons, the West had NO chance of stopping a conventional Soviet attack.
There is hardly universal agreement between scholars on that point. The Soviet army had quality in quantity, to be sure, but their organizational doctrine and command structure was considered to be rigid and not able to quickly adapt to changing battlefield situations. The Soviet soldiers suffered from poor training, particularly in the declining years of the Union. Also, the events of the first Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein had the 4th or 5th largest army in the world and some of the best Soviet equipment money could buy, indicated that even the best Soviet-State-Made equipment wasn't much to write home about. It's probably the case that the elite pilots or tank drivers of Saddam's force were not any better or worse than the average Soviet soldier, and the Coalition forces pasted them on any occasion that they happened to encounter each other, with the Soviet-equipped forces suffering horrendous losses. Reports of a single Collation tank knocking out 10 or 20 Iraqi tanks right in a row were common - Republican Guard manned tanks that is, not the cannon fodder. The entire Iraqi air force, including quite a few state-of-the-art Soviet-made Mig-29s, were knocked out in the first night with only a couple Coalition losses.
Sure, the Red Army may have had a 10:1 numerical advantage in Europe, but how well does that play out if they start suffering 20:1 losses?