Who decides what "hatemongering" is? As far as I have been able to tell, at least in the Western world, it currently works like this: Mock a Christian and it's comedy, mock a Muslim and it's free speech, mock a Jew and it's hate. So you think speech should be "free" and yet it should totally be confined to whatever speech the powers-that-be decide is offensive or isn't offensive to different racial or religious groups through obvious application of double standards? What's free about that?
http://downwithjugears.blogspot.com/2008/10/heretical-two-denied-bail.html
The "Heretical Two" were convicted of eleven and five counts respectively of "hate speech" in the United Kingdom under acts passed in 1986 and 2000,for material they posted on the Internet which wasn't even hosted in the UK. They are currently awaiting a hearing on asylum in the United States. Apparently this UK "Human Rights Act" gives a positive right to "free speech" so long as the speech doesn't infringe on any number of other speech prohibitions - such as being against immigration or denying the Holocaust.
Was it on the mission "Shock and Awe," where you're in the building with the pinned down team you're trying to rescue, and you have to make it to the Sea Knight landing zone? You can stay in that building and kill enemies in the other buildings across the courtyard all day, but the minute you make it to the back of the building across from you the spawn stops.
Sometimes, in the original NES game Baseball, if your team's inning ended while the bases were loaded, when the computer came up to bat next the sprites of the runners on the bases would just change colors, so it would start the inning with bases loaded.
That aversion is definitely my experience. Take the 100,000 college students out of Boston, and it's just another townieville that would be indistinguishable from hunderds of other ordinary mid-sized American cities like Buffalo, New York or Youngstown, Ohio aside from the relative age of some of its architecture. Boston's businesses and city officials constantly try to market it as something unique, upscale, and on the same level as NYC or San Fran or Seattle, and as a long time resident I can assure anyone interested that it isn't. You'll definitely pay NYC or San Fran level living expenses and taxes for the privilege of freezing your ass off here for 6 months of the year, though. Oh well. Grab me a beaah, when's the PAWTS on?
I've never understood why there now seems to be so little interest in DIY in the New England area. It used to be at one time we were the "Silicon Valley of the East" - nowadays, unless one is enrolled at MIT and you tell someone you're into DIY electronics around here and you get looked at strangely and comments are made such as "DIY? Hmm. That sounds like something poor people do. Why don't you get a well paid job?" For all of Boston's talk of being a cosmopolitan, hip, trendy cutting-edge city, it's really not unless your definition of being cutting edge is having lots of overpriced bars and nightclubs. Once the college kids are out of town one realizes that this area has very little going for it anymore in regards to technology industries - even cities such as Salt Lake City and Albuquerque are way ahead. I'd love to see a Make event in the Boston area, but I won't hold my breath.
While I, as you, am preparing to welcome my new Chinese overlords, there is one area of weakness in China's global domination plan you may not considered in your post:
It took the Chinese only about 3 decades to become what U.S. government and corporations have been having wet dreams about for nearly a century - that is a largely autocratic and oligarchic corporate system that can count on socialist support from the federal government when it needs it, which is all the time. In the meantime the economists or the People's Worker's Party or whomever will dispense the priestly blessings of the socialist revolution or laissez-faire capitalism or whatever is in vogue at the time to the citizens, leaving the government and corporate entities to pursue the obvious and efficient solution for economic and national power. Capitalism vs. communism with regard to China is a false dichotomy. The US is probably on the way to whatever China is now, it's just taken us a lot longer to get there because we've had to spend an enormous amount of effort at keeping up the illusion of a representative democracy, while China has been autocratic pretty much all along.
Once Egypt was ceeded control of the Gaza Strip in the 1949 Armistice agreements, the 1947 UN partition plans you refer to as the "English" plans became of historical interest only as far as politics between Israel, Gaza, and Egypt are concerned. That a sound justification for the occupation of the Gaza Strip in 1967 was that the Arab League didn't agree to the UN partition plans originally conceived in 1947 is a pretty thin argument considering all the good reasons there were, if that's what you're getting at.
They're smuggled in, of course. No security can be 100% in an area the size of Gaza, and obviously people are risking death by trying to get in and out of the area by going around Israeli checkpoints. That doesn't mean it's an effective way for the vast majority of people to operate day to day, or in any way a worthwhile method of trying to move any other kind of economic good except contraband. You can get cigarettes, beer, drugs, weapons - whatever, in an American prison if you're willing to pay the right price. Does that mean you're free?
I dare you to claim that a SINGLE volley of rockets fired from Mexico to the United States wouldn't warrant a full military response.
I've seen this comparison made before, and unfortunately I feel it's a false one. The difference between Mexico and Gaza is that Gaza is a prison state. Unless one wishes to risk death, absolutely nothing moves in or out of Gaza without the Israeli's sayso, which goes without saying is difficult to obtain. Now, given the history of conflict I understand the reasons for doing so - however, when one decides that it is necessary to go into the business of operating a prison-state I would think it would behoove the operators to think carefully about what actions they intend to take when the inmates get uppity (which WILL happen), and how those actions will increase security and play out with the world community at large. When inmates riot and kill a guard or civilian in any other kind of prison, in general the authorities do not level an entire cell block, as very much as they might want to.
Another part where the analogy breaks down is that until just a few years ago Gaza was a completely occupied territory, conquered in pre-emptive strike. If you ignore the history of the United States and Mexico prior to 100 years or so ago, it would be as if the US Army drove into Mexico, then eventually pulled back, but decided for whatever reason that Tijuana was going to remain on lockdown indefinitely. That makes the analogy a bit more complicated.
It was lower at Best Buy because CC probably liquidated a huge volume of old games to that Best Buy for peanuts, and then Best Buy marked it down further from the CC price.
But I wonder whether authorities in those countries would be any more willing to pursue cyber crooks in their own countries if they were forced to confront just how deeply those groups have penetrated key government and private computer networks in those regions?
I don't come to Slashdot for these kind of thought-provoking rhetorical questions about ethical and legal gray areas! Just tell me who the goodies and the baddies are! Go USA hacker-hunters, wooo!
It's difficult for any doctor to be nice when they're overworked, and as a patient with a neurological illness that has not been conclusively diagnosed in the past 3 years who has seen 9 specialists in that time, I've seen my share of good and bad physicians. All of them have been overworked, it goes without saying. Interestingly, the physicians who have been able to shed the most light upon the possible causes for my suffering and do the most to relieve its symptoms all were physicians who had their own essentially private practices and answered to nobody but themselves. They always run an hour to two hours late in seeing their patients. Nobody in the waiting room cares, because they know they'll get at least a half hour of time with the physician to work through everything. The last time I was at Super Huge Specialist Head & Neck Neurological Hopsital That Advertises a Lot in Big Northeastern City I timed how long my appointment took - 8.5 minutes. How can one possibly hope to make it through all the issues that come up with neurological problems in that time?
I have to say that when the symptoms of this illness first came on after the "fever of unknown origin" I had in 2006 I thought to myself: "I'm screwed." Neurological symptoms aren't like a sucking chest wound - but I was still consistently amazed at the number of physicians who seemed incapable of believing that I was in excruciating pain because there was no physical evidence. However, being at one point a student of science myself, I understand the position that they're in - and in my circumstances the only physicians I would rate negatively were the ones (one) who said things such as "I'm not interested in your medical history, I've got a lot of people to see today, I just want to know symptoms." One physician I saw told me straight out - "I don't know what's wrong with you. There are a lot of things that can go wrong with people that medical science doesn't understand: you might get worse, you might eventually get better, you might stay the same the rest of your life, but I could help 20 people who have things wrong that I DO understand in the time that it would take to work on you and think up some treatment that may or may not have any effect." The latter would not get a negative review from me.
Television shows like House, M.D. always make me chuckle, having been too close to the subject matter for suspension of disbelief to work. When something serious goes wrong with one's body that cannot be diagnosed with first-line test results and (revenue-generating) treatment prescribed in 8.5 minutes, you are no longer an asset to the healthcare industry. You are a liability. There is no genius physician who will ponder over your case in his or her downtime. There are no attractive residents who will hold conferences in well-appointed conference rooms where they will discuss your case and argue over the possible diagnoses on whiteboards and through video teleconferencing. If you have something go terribly wrong with your body, hope that it's a chronic condition, because otherwise you'll die admiring the 1970s airport style furniture in the emergency room waiting area as the 2 physicians on staff at 3 AM chat up the nurses.
Since the MIDI standard runs is clocked at 31250 bits per second, and any MIDI device needs to receive at least 3 bytes minimum to form a complete MIDI message, all MIDI messages have a 1 millisecond delay at least. Then there's the output delay on how long it takes for the processor to recognize that it's received a message and spit out the appropriate note. This could be up to 15 milliseconds on some older synthesizers, which is pretty bad. The worst situation is when the latency is not even constant, but is varying all over the place. Fortunately, the situation with MIDI gear has improved a lot since the Pet Shop Boy's heyday, with gear now using microprocessors clocked at much faster speeds and using priority interrupt levels and delay-compensation schemes.
Thank you for reminding me of "Threads"! Don't forget, there's a lot of water in your hot water heater. But you are correct - "civilization" is defined as the method by which we convert petroleum into food. Without the ability to convert petroleum into food, we perish.
Your first concern if you're a renewable energy skeptic shouldn't be climate change. It should be how we support a 6 billion person population that is growing exponentially on non-renewable resources which are finite. Imagine the volume of the earth were completely filled with petroleum, and the population of the earth grows at 1.7% per year. The world consumes 4.8 cubic kilometers of petroleum per year. How long before this hypothetical sphere would be depleted? How long before 0.5% of this hypothetical sphere, which is a generous estimate of world petroleum supplies, can't keep up? It's a first year calculus problem, and the results aren't pretty.
I have no idea what you're trying to prove with your second statement. That because plants evolved in an environment half a billion years ago where the concentration of CO2 in the air was high means that if you release all that CO2 back into the atmosphere it's somehow OK for humans? Yeah! Plant life may have formed under conditions where it was tropical at the Arctic Circle. Is that good for humans? Doesn't follow.
The problem is that while America is now swinging more socialistic, we don't have the national unity to care about the fate of America any longer. Maybe we could try some kind of combination of nationalism and socialism? I've heard that this was tried before and that they had a pretty good rocket program.
I'm pretty sure there was a changing of the guard at some point. Because of the length of the Shuttle program, the list of manufacturers for various components reads like a big corporate obituary list - Grumman, North American, Rocketdyne, Philco Ford(!), Rockwell. They've all been spun off and absorbed into other companies. IBM is still around, but at the time the Shuttle was constructed the AP-101 wasn't a legacy system, so it makes sense that at the time (late 70s-80s) they would probably be the most skilled at programming it. At some point I'm sure it was no longer financially viable to keep supporting the codebase and the support was spun off. I bet one might have trouble finding someone at IBM now who is familiar with the System/360 and can program it in HAL/S!
Shuttle GNC engineer Phil Hattis stated that it cost NASA around $1 million in 198x dollars for each line of code they wanted changed by IBM in the Shuttle's AP-101 programs after the codebase was set (coding wasn't done in house, but done by IBM based on specifications). After a line of code was changed, the entire program had to be hand verified to make sure that no bugs were introduced.
I was thinking earlier today "I may now be unemployed and unable to afford my housing - but at least I can't think of a way the economy could get much worse." Then I thought "Unless further defaults on ARMs through the summer is followed by a global flu pandemic in the winter of 2009-2010." Not only would the economy grind to a halt as many wouldn't want to risk infection by heading off to work, it could also bankrupt the healthcare industry through millions needing coverage for vaccines and lengthy hospitalizations. Now that would be a perfect storm worthy of Murphy.
All you have to do is use a Higgs reactor as the power source - use a fusion reaction as a primary energy source to drive ablation plates within an inertial confinement field that then compresses yttrium arsenide into a Grand Unified Theory quark-gluon plasma, and store the radiative energy from the breaking of the supersymmetry during the cooling process in superconducting inductors. God, why do I have to spell things out for everyone.
Who decides what "hatemongering" is? As far as I have been able to tell, at least in the Western world, it currently works like this: Mock a Christian and it's comedy, mock a Muslim and it's free speech, mock a Jew and it's hate. So you think speech should be "free" and yet it should totally be confined to whatever speech the powers-that-be decide is offensive or isn't offensive to different racial or religious groups through obvious application of double standards? What's free about that?
http://downwithjugears.blogspot.com/2008/10/heretical-two-denied-bail.html The "Heretical Two" were convicted of eleven and five counts respectively of "hate speech" in the United Kingdom under acts passed in 1986 and 2000,for material they posted on the Internet which wasn't even hosted in the UK. They are currently awaiting a hearing on asylum in the United States. Apparently this UK "Human Rights Act" gives a positive right to "free speech" so long as the speech doesn't infringe on any number of other speech prohibitions - such as being against immigration or denying the Holocaust.
Was it on the mission "Shock and Awe," where you're in the building with the pinned down team you're trying to rescue, and you have to make it to the Sea Knight landing zone? You can stay in that building and kill enemies in the other buildings across the courtyard all day, but the minute you make it to the back of the building across from you the spawn stops.
Sometimes, in the original NES game Baseball, if your team's inning ended while the bases were loaded, when the computer came up to bat next the sprites of the runners on the bases would just change colors, so it would start the inning with bases loaded.
That aversion is definitely my experience. Take the 100,000 college students out of Boston, and it's just another townieville that would be indistinguishable from hunderds of other ordinary mid-sized American cities like Buffalo, New York or Youngstown, Ohio aside from the relative age of some of its architecture. Boston's businesses and city officials constantly try to market it as something unique, upscale, and on the same level as NYC or San Fran or Seattle, and as a long time resident I can assure anyone interested that it isn't. You'll definitely pay NYC or San Fran level living expenses and taxes for the privilege of freezing your ass off here for 6 months of the year, though. Oh well. Grab me a beaah, when's the PAWTS on?
I've never understood why there now seems to be so little interest in DIY in the New England area. It used to be at one time we were the "Silicon Valley of the East" - nowadays, unless one is enrolled at MIT and you tell someone you're into DIY electronics around here and you get looked at strangely and comments are made such as "DIY? Hmm. That sounds like something poor people do. Why don't you get a well paid job?" For all of Boston's talk of being a cosmopolitan, hip, trendy cutting-edge city, it's really not unless your definition of being cutting edge is having lots of overpriced bars and nightclubs. Once the college kids are out of town one realizes that this area has very little going for it anymore in regards to technology industries - even cities such as Salt Lake City and Albuquerque are way ahead. I'd love to see a Make event in the Boston area, but I won't hold my breath.
While I, as you, am preparing to welcome my new Chinese overlords, there is one area of weakness in China's global domination plan you may not considered in your post:
China's arable land barely above critical minimum
Shrinking Arable Lands Jeopardizing China's Food Security
China not to Sacrifice Arable Land for Infrastructure Construction
It took the Chinese only about 3 decades to become what U.S. government and corporations have been having wet dreams about for nearly a century - that is a largely autocratic and oligarchic corporate system that can count on socialist support from the federal government when it needs it, which is all the time. In the meantime the economists or the People's Worker's Party or whomever will dispense the priestly blessings of the socialist revolution or laissez-faire capitalism or whatever is in vogue at the time to the citizens, leaving the government and corporate entities to pursue the obvious and efficient solution for economic and national power. Capitalism vs. communism with regard to China is a false dichotomy. The US is probably on the way to whatever China is now, it's just taken us a lot longer to get there because we've had to spend an enormous amount of effort at keeping up the illusion of a representative democracy, while China has been autocratic pretty much all along.
Once Egypt was ceeded control of the Gaza Strip in the 1949 Armistice agreements, the 1947 UN partition plans you refer to as the "English" plans became of historical interest only as far as politics between Israel, Gaza, and Egypt are concerned. That a sound justification for the occupation of the Gaza Strip in 1967 was that the Arab League didn't agree to the UN partition plans originally conceived in 1947 is a pretty thin argument considering all the good reasons there were, if that's what you're getting at.
They're smuggled in, of course. No security can be 100% in an area the size of Gaza, and obviously people are risking death by trying to get in and out of the area by going around Israeli checkpoints. That doesn't mean it's an effective way for the vast majority of people to operate day to day, or in any way a worthwhile method of trying to move any other kind of economic good except contraband. You can get cigarettes, beer, drugs, weapons - whatever, in an American prison if you're willing to pay the right price. Does that mean you're free?
So its acceptable if they miss?
I dare you to claim that a SINGLE volley of rockets fired from Mexico to the United States wouldn't warrant a full military response.
I've seen this comparison made before, and unfortunately I feel it's a false one. The difference between Mexico and Gaza is that Gaza is a prison state. Unless one wishes to risk death, absolutely nothing moves in or out of Gaza without the Israeli's sayso, which goes without saying is difficult to obtain. Now, given the history of conflict I understand the reasons for doing so - however, when one decides that it is necessary to go into the business of operating a prison-state I would think it would behoove the operators to think carefully about what actions they intend to take when the inmates get uppity (which WILL happen), and how those actions will increase security and play out with the world community at large. When inmates riot and kill a guard or civilian in any other kind of prison, in general the authorities do not level an entire cell block, as very much as they might want to.
Another part where the analogy breaks down is that until just a few years ago Gaza was a completely occupied territory, conquered in pre-emptive strike. If you ignore the history of the United States and Mexico prior to 100 years or so ago, it would be as if the US Army drove into Mexico, then eventually pulled back, but decided for whatever reason that Tijuana was going to remain on lockdown indefinitely. That makes the analogy a bit more complicated.
It was lower at Best Buy because CC probably liquidated a huge volume of old games to that Best Buy for peanuts, and then Best Buy marked it down further from the CC price.
But I wonder whether authorities in those countries would be any more willing to pursue cyber crooks in their own countries if they were forced to confront just how deeply those groups have penetrated key government and private computer networks in those regions?
I don't come to Slashdot for these kind of thought-provoking rhetorical questions about ethical and legal gray areas! Just tell me who the goodies and the baddies are! Go USA hacker-hunters, wooo!
It's difficult for any doctor to be nice when they're overworked, and as a patient with a neurological illness that has not been conclusively diagnosed in the past 3 years who has seen 9 specialists in that time, I've seen my share of good and bad physicians. All of them have been overworked, it goes without saying. Interestingly, the physicians who have been able to shed the most light upon the possible causes for my suffering and do the most to relieve its symptoms all were physicians who had their own essentially private practices and answered to nobody but themselves. They always run an hour to two hours late in seeing their patients. Nobody in the waiting room cares, because they know they'll get at least a half hour of time with the physician to work through everything. The last time I was at Super Huge Specialist Head & Neck Neurological Hopsital That Advertises a Lot in Big Northeastern City I timed how long my appointment took - 8.5 minutes. How can one possibly hope to make it through all the issues that come up with neurological problems in that time?
I have to say that when the symptoms of this illness first came on after the "fever of unknown origin" I had in 2006 I thought to myself: "I'm screwed." Neurological symptoms aren't like a sucking chest wound - but I was still consistently amazed at the number of physicians who seemed incapable of believing that I was in excruciating pain because there was no physical evidence. However, being at one point a student of science myself, I understand the position that they're in - and in my circumstances the only physicians I would rate negatively were the ones (one) who said things such as "I'm not interested in your medical history, I've got a lot of people to see today, I just want to know symptoms." One physician I saw told me straight out - "I don't know what's wrong with you. There are a lot of things that can go wrong with people that medical science doesn't understand: you might get worse, you might eventually get better, you might stay the same the rest of your life, but I could help 20 people who have things wrong that I DO understand in the time that it would take to work on you and think up some treatment that may or may not have any effect." The latter would not get a negative review from me.
Television shows like House, M.D. always make me chuckle, having been too close to the subject matter for suspension of disbelief to work. When something serious goes wrong with one's body that cannot be diagnosed with first-line test results and (revenue-generating) treatment prescribed in 8.5 minutes, you are no longer an asset to the healthcare industry. You are a liability. There is no genius physician who will ponder over your case in his or her downtime. There are no attractive residents who will hold conferences in well-appointed conference rooms where they will discuss your case and argue over the possible diagnoses on whiteboards and through video teleconferencing. If you have something go terribly wrong with your body, hope that it's a chronic condition, because otherwise you'll die admiring the 1970s airport style furniture in the emergency room waiting area as the 2 physicians on staff at 3 AM chat up the nurses.
which use vacuum tubes of several kilometers and reach sensitivities at the 1e-22 level over a broad bandwidth.
I can't wait to put those in my next DIY phono preamp project! Are they available with gold plated pins and cryogenic treatment?!
The website http://www.deadact.com/ is devoted to showing videos of "performances" where the entire set is pre-recorded.
Since the MIDI standard runs is clocked at 31250 bits per second, and any MIDI device needs to receive at least 3 bytes minimum to form a complete MIDI message, all MIDI messages have a 1 millisecond delay at least. Then there's the output delay on how long it takes for the processor to recognize that it's received a message and spit out the appropriate note. This could be up to 15 milliseconds on some older synthesizers, which is pretty bad. The worst situation is when the latency is not even constant, but is varying all over the place. Fortunately, the situation with MIDI gear has improved a lot since the Pet Shop Boy's heyday, with gear now using microprocessors clocked at much faster speeds and using priority interrupt levels and delay-compensation schemes.
Thank you for reminding me of "Threads"! Don't forget, there's a lot of water in your hot water heater. But you are correct - "civilization" is defined as the method by which we convert petroleum into food. Without the ability to convert petroleum into food, we perish.
Your first concern if you're a renewable energy skeptic shouldn't be climate change. It should be how we support a 6 billion person population that is growing exponentially on non-renewable resources which are finite. Imagine the volume of the earth were completely filled with petroleum, and the population of the earth grows at 1.7% per year. The world consumes 4.8 cubic kilometers of petroleum per year. How long before this hypothetical sphere would be depleted? How long before 0.5% of this hypothetical sphere, which is a generous estimate of world petroleum supplies, can't keep up? It's a first year calculus problem, and the results aren't pretty.
I have no idea what you're trying to prove with your second statement. That because plants evolved in an environment half a billion years ago where the concentration of CO2 in the air was high means that if you release all that CO2 back into the atmosphere it's somehow OK for humans? Yeah! Plant life may have formed under conditions where it was tropical at the Arctic Circle. Is that good for humans? Doesn't follow.
The problem is that while America is now swinging more socialistic, we don't have the national unity to care about the fate of America any longer. Maybe we could try some kind of combination of nationalism and socialism? I've heard that this was tried before and that they had a pretty good rocket program.
I'm pretty sure there was a changing of the guard at some point. Because of the length of the Shuttle program, the list of manufacturers for various components reads like a big corporate obituary list - Grumman, North American, Rocketdyne, Philco Ford(!), Rockwell. They've all been spun off and absorbed into other companies. IBM is still around, but at the time the Shuttle was constructed the AP-101 wasn't a legacy system, so it makes sense that at the time (late 70s-80s) they would probably be the most skilled at programming it. At some point I'm sure it was no longer financially viable to keep supporting the codebase and the support was spun off. I bet one might have trouble finding someone at IBM now who is familiar with the System/360 and can program it in HAL/S!
Shuttle GNC engineer Phil Hattis stated that it cost NASA around $1 million in 198x dollars for each line of code they wanted changed by IBM in the Shuttle's AP-101 programs after the codebase was set (coding wasn't done in house, but done by IBM based on specifications). After a line of code was changed, the entire program had to be hand verified to make sure that no bugs were introduced.
I was thinking earlier today "I may now be unemployed and unable to afford my housing - but at least I can't think of a way the economy could get much worse." Then I thought "Unless further defaults on ARMs through the summer is followed by a global flu pandemic in the winter of 2009-2010." Not only would the economy grind to a halt as many wouldn't want to risk infection by heading off to work, it could also bankrupt the healthcare industry through millions needing coverage for vaccines and lengthy hospitalizations. Now that would be a perfect storm worthy of Murphy.
All you have to do is use a Higgs reactor as the power source - use a fusion reaction as a primary energy source to drive ablation plates within an inertial confinement field that then compresses yttrium arsenide into a Grand Unified Theory quark-gluon plasma, and store the radiative energy from the breaking of the supersymmetry during the cooling process in superconducting inductors. God, why do I have to spell things out for everyone.