Ummm, You probably haven't noticed because the US media doesn't tend to mention it much, but the Iraqi's (Since Saddam Hussein's removal) have been engaged in a civil war between the Suni and Shi'ite muslims. We're just kind of in the way, and thus, both sides pretty frequently lob a grenade, or fire an AK47 at American troops.
It's all really perfectly comprehensible. The US military removed the dominant power in the area, who had maintained order through military strength. The two largest sides are now getting down to the business of fighting a war of genocide to see who gets to control the area, and as one side (does it really even matter which?) outnumbers the other by about 3:1, its going to get pretty bad.
Note that this is one of the things the Anti-War democrats had been saying during the build up to the invasion. Along with, "This is a horrible mistake," "It's going to be another Vietnam," and "We don't have enough troops to do it anyway."
Shut UP! Jackass! Do you want the world to find out? If everybody starts using Usenet again, it'll suck just as much as the rest of the internet, nevermind making the powers that be aware. Good Grief! Are you trying to destroy our whole system?
What you miss is that frequently Rules exist to protect the public interest. Society has an interest in there being vaccines for diseases. Society has an interest in companies not dumping toxic waste in the water supply. Society has an interest in maintaining competition in the marketplace. All of these things run counter to the interests of Corporations, but I would argue that the interests of society at large trump those of Corporations. If Corporations do not benefit society, why should we let them exist? The Corporate veil, Intellectual property, etc all exist at the mercy and forbearance of Society because we all benefit as a whole, if they cease to provide, there is no reason whatsoever to maintain them.
Anybody have any actual thoughts, comments or critiques? That's what I'd like to hear. What I've just described is essentially my dream for what an Internet Tablet ought to be. Those specs are in addition to whats already in the new Nokia 800 BTW. Dual SD card slots is awesome, and it is expected that those can be made SDHC capable via a software upgrade. 8-16+GB of flash storage with a large, 800x480 display? Heck yeah! Nokia just needs to release a device with sufficient CPU/graphics power to make use of all the inherent possibilities (Movies, Games, Emulation of everything up to and including the Playstation WITH storage for tons of music/video/roms/isos)
Yet so far. The N-gage is a dead end, drop it. It's never going to succeed, because you're never going to get development on it. Unless you're willing to start up a top tier development studio and market some AAA titles, which would be hugely expensive and would still probably fail. You're not Microsoft, you can't bull your way into a market running billion dollar losses.
Now, what should you do? The Internet Tablets. These things are hot. However, they need some major tweaks. Stop trying to use your current smartphone batteries for them, their restricting your battery life and your power budget WAY too much. You need something beefier, around a 2200-2500mAH battery. What to do with the extra power? More CPU for Crissakes. The 300MHz arm is not doing what you need. You need either a much faster chip, or one of the hot new dual core ARM SOC. Also a media accelerator. Let's see some 2D acceleration on that bad boy. THIS is your game machine. It'll do everything. Wi-fi internet, SKYPE, media playback. Its potentially an iPhone AND PSP killer. Put some money into bluetooth gamepads and its suddenly a far cooler game machine than the PSP and GP2X combined.
The Check against this kind of Bullshit has long since been outlawed. That being, you receive the notice, and politely call them up and invite them over to discuss the matter. When the agents arrive, You execute them on the spot, disembowel them, and send the entrails and severed heads back to their bosses in a sack. The correct, considered, measured response to thuggery is agressive self defense.
It gives people a false sense of security, that's why its dangerous and a bad idea. Also certain kinds of defense systems are inherently dangerous. For example, there was a joke about a "miss to kill" targeting system. You could actually do that, using airburst nukes to try and take out your opponents missiles in the upper atmosphere, however it should be obvious what the inherent dangers with such a system would be.
But back to my original point. Missile defense systems encourage the use of Nuclear Weapons by giving nations the false sense that they can go ahead and utilize nuclear weapons, because any return strike will be mitigated by their own defense system. In reality, that would probably only "work" if used as a strategy by the United States or the former USSR, as they are the only countries with sufficient stockpiles of weapons to make such a strategy "viable." After all, who cares if 90% of the planet is rendered dead and uninhabitable in a full on nuclear exchange, a few million of your side survived! Treaties like the one described were entered into because both sides (in their calmer moments) realized that they really, really didn't want to get into a full on Global Thermonuclear War.
That's about what I expected. Lethal Doses are data points on a normal distribution in the population. There are probably otherwise healthy people who would/could die from a 1g dose of Caffeine. We generally call people like that "allergic." Generally, one shouldn't go around taking doses on the order of magnitude of the LD50 of a substance, it just isn't a good idea (as you won't know before hand which end of the normal distribution you're on). But normal doses of Caffeine, between 1mg and 200mg, generally isn't at all dangerous. Note the definition of what LD50 is, its the amount of a substance that when administered will kill 50% of the subjects.
Estimating from the LD50 of Caffeine in Rats, that would be pretty freaking hard. Assuming no major underlying cardiac conditions, it would take around 10g of pure Caffeine to kill the average person. Double that for the average Slashdotter (who is both noticably more massive than average, AND likely to be quite Caffeine resistant, rather like trying to kill a Heroine addict with other, lesser depressants with similar Modes of Action). As for how much it takes to makes the average person start tripping balls and THINK they're dying, well that IS a lot lower.
Speculators of all sorts are just leeches on the ass of society. Sometimes they get burned, but not nearly enough. Trading on Artificial Scarcity also falls into this camp Exhibit A: card for "Magic: The Gathering."
Geothermal for home heating/AC is worth it ANYWHERE where there is significant yearly temperature variation, and the ground is stable enough to support it.
Unencrypted AAC? Almost everything, except perhaps Windows Media Player. Examples of programs that handle unencrypted AAC just fine include: MPlayer, VLC, and Cog. Many others, if you want to dig, those are just my favorites. Although I don't use AAC anyway, I configured iTunes to rip to high bit-rate mp3. Although, generally, now I'm going back (thanks to the growth of Hard Drive sizes) and reripping to FLAC.
provision did. It wouldn't have required all bloggers (or even all political bloggers) to register. It would have required Corporate shills to register. It was intended by Democrats to defeat another way the republicans could control the media, by forcing transparency. It was quite a good idea actually. I guarantee you the Democrats who voted against it are the standard Corporate whores who are Democrats in Name Only. People like Hillary Clinton (who is actually very conservative and pro-business, She's a member of the DLC), Joe Leiberman (frequently sides with Republicans, founding DLC member), and many Southern "Democrats."
There are really two different Democratic parties in the United States, The Democratic party, the socially liberal group (pro-choice, pro-health care, pro-civil rights), and the socially conservative one, or the "Dixiecrats" as most of them are from the South(who are anti-choice, and against any spending on social issues at all).
Similarly, I am aghast by Slashdot's lambasting of the "Fairness Doctrine" an age old standard of the non-corporate controlled press, that helped to maintain the political balance of the United States for most of the 20th century, (with the result being the fostering of FDR's New Deal, and LBJ's civil rights reforms. Note that the Fairness Doctrine was destroyed under Ronald Reagan, and if you think he was any friend of the common man, you're a fool.
The United States (and most of the rest of the world actually) has been sliding to right quite steadily since the mid-1970's. The exact causes of this are multitudinous, but many of the spring from the death of FDR in 1944 and the subsequent failure of Harry Truman to force the old European powers to dismantle their empires. The result was the incredibly numerous revolutionary conflicts throughout the third world in the second half of the 20th century, and the placement of incredible strain on the military-industrial bases of both the United States and the Soviet Union.
I tend to think that an absolute age based franchise is a really poor solution. Certainly I think there exist 14 year olds who possess the capacity to make the kind of decisions necessary for full legal rights, however, I don't think they all do (and for that matter neither do all 18 year olds, or hell even 30 year olds). I am unsure as to how to solve the problem, quite possibly it might be as simple as letting anyone who can prove American citizenship vote, if they want to, however I don't really like this solution, and any others I can think of are clearly subject to potential abuse.
I agree with you about felons though, largely because there are large groups of convicted felons that are perfectly decent human beings. At the same time I think there are lots of slimy fuckers out there (many of them running around in business suits) that are pretty reprehensible.
If'd you actually bothered to read the article on Wikipedia on Insulin, you'd have learned that Frederick Banting was in fact the first person to extract the active agent from the islets of langerhans in the pancreas. He didn't know what it was (insulin was identified as the active ingredient of the extract some time later) but Banting was responsible for developing the first effective treatment for diabetes mellitus and he shared the 1923 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the Discovery of insulin with J. R. Macleod (who identified the insulin molecule as the active ingredient).
Ummm, Subtle...Yeah. Like blasting Heavy Metal music in order to shake some fake barf off a ceiling.
Look, I love the Lucas Arts classics as much as anybody, but Subtle or High Art they were not. They had about the same intellectual content as a 1940's Bugs Bunny cartoon, which is admittedly very entertaining, even witty and charming, but thats still a far cry from the ivory towers of literature and haute cinema.
Although alternatively this does raise an interesting question, at what point does Pop art, like "Superman" or "Bugs Bunny" become legitimate art in the same fashion that Shakespeare did, or even as pulp novels like the works E. R. Burroughs are in the process of doing? Keep in mind that Shakespeare, when he was writing, was writing pretty low-brow trashy stuff, and was decried by moral authorities of the day for "corrupting the youth."
I could make a snide comment about how this kind of hysterical politics is what happens when you let women vote, but
...Shit too late.
Just in case anyone thinks otherwise, I do not actually think Women's suffrage is to blame for the current state of "Talking Point" divisive issue politics. I'm just making a crude joke, that I think some may find funny. In reality, I think that men are at the very least just as responsible for the status quo, if not more so.
No, he's not an adult. But the situation you described, if occurring in the real world (a 15 year old boy, and a 17 year old girl fooling around) may or may not be legal depending on Jurisdiction. In most of the USA, most of the time, if nobody is complaining, most District Attorneys won't prosecute (although if the age of consent is 18, which it is in some states, BOTH the boy AND the girl would be guilty of statutory rape{note the repeated "most" plenty of people get prosecuted for just such situations every year}). That most DA's don't prosecute makes it somewhat "de jure" legal, although that is dependent on the Mercy of a DA, and if either of the kid's parent's want to prosecute, well all hell can break loose.
However, if either makes pictures or video of the event, they are absolutely at risk of being prosecuted under Child Pornography laws. Hell, that can be true even if BOTH parties can legally consent to have sex within the Jurisdiction (for example, in several states in the US, 16 is the legal age of consent).
I'm not saying any of this is sane or logical. It's just how crazy things have gotten.
Oh come on! My original post is at +3 right now, so people have got to have seen it! So tell me I'm wrong, tell me it doesn't work that way. Tell me that Democracy works because the electorate will make informed choices leading to social and economic progress. Tell me the American Dream isn't a lie.
That's what really scares and depresses me. My snarky cynicism is nearly dead on. It's just how the world works.
I wrote the original post while full of Vitriol over reading all the posts about how all alternative/hybrid vehicles are terrible. Transportation in the USA is a subject of such frustration to me, I probably shouldn't write about it all.
Yes, Absolutely! In fact, according to one study cited on Wikipedia, the age group most charged for Child Pornography offenses is young males aged 15-20. Note that the law makes absolutely no distinction between pictures depicting an 8 year old, and pictures depicting a 16 year old. Both are "Child" Porn, both get you convictions resulting in registered sex offender list for life. Which, yes indeed, means that two 16 year olds (who may very well be consenting depending on jurisdiction) can have sex with each other, and thats fine, but if they videotape it, or take pictures, they can end up with felony Child pornography convictions.
What, you mean corporations in the rest of world are figuring out what those in the USA have known for decades? Buying elections is CHEAP. If I was a Multinational Corporation with revenues in the Billions, I could buy an American Congress for as little as a couple hundred million dollars, which realistically is nothing. I'd guess that other, smaller and/or poorer democracies would be even cheaper. I'm not sure what it would cost to buy the Mexican government, but it can't be more than $50 million.
This is one of my huge objections to the way Democracies are run today. Any random multinational can install their very own Mussolini for less than a decent ad campaign. Democracy gets you the cheapest governments money can buy.
Not exactly my point. I wasn't trying to say everybody should be lining up to buy one of these monstrocities. How about a Toyota Prius or Honda Insight instead? I also think the Tesla roadster is pretty groovy, albeit way, way, way out of my price range.
To be honest, the technology I think would be about ideal would be a fusion of Direct Methanol Fuel Cells, and Direct Ethanol Fuel Cells (which unfortunately are still a bit too early in development) into a single device. I see no reason why that would be even terribly difficult, and it would allow a vehicle to a) run on a liquid fuel, easily pumped from gas stations much like the ones we have today b) be able to run on any arbitrary Methanol/Ethanol mixture and c) run on simple alcohols which are easily produced on an industrial scale from Biomass.
To replies of "well, you still need petroleum products to make fertilizers for your biomass." No, you don't. That's the way its done today, but there are many ways around that. One would be to simply move away from Ag monocultures that drive soil depletion. Another would be to start Algal farms as a source for Biomass, which don't require very much at all. Ideally I think a mixture of a variety of techniques is ideal, utilizing whatever is most viable by location. Although algal farms do have the definite advantage of being able to provide chemical feedstocks for the traditional petrochemical industry that can replace petroleum, which is a clear bonus for plastics production, among other things.
Blah..Blah, Yes, this concept is slap your mother ugly. Detroit is fucked, because they can't design a car to save their literal livelihoods. On the other hand, the American people are just as much to blame for being a bunch of homophobic, phallo-centric, self conscious, self proclaimed "manly" men, that won't drive anything with less than 200HP lest people find out they have small penises. Get the fuck over yourselves.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all really perfectly comprehensible. The US military removed the dominant power in the area, who had maintained order through military strength. The two largest sides are now getting down to the business of fighting a war of genocide to see who gets to control the area, and as one side (does it really even matter which?) outnumbers the other by about 3:1, its going to get pretty bad.
Note that this is one of the things the Anti-War democrats had been saying during the build up to the invasion. Along with, "This is a horrible mistake," "It's going to be another Vietnam," and "We don't have enough troops to do it anyway."
Shut UP! Jackass! Do you want the world to find out? If everybody starts using Usenet again, it'll suck just as much as the rest of the internet, nevermind making the powers that be aware. Good Grief! Are you trying to destroy our whole system?
What you miss is that frequently Rules exist to protect the public interest. Society has an interest in there being vaccines for diseases. Society has an interest in companies not dumping toxic waste in the water supply. Society has an interest in maintaining competition in the marketplace. All of these things run counter to the interests of Corporations, but I would argue that the interests of society at large trump those of Corporations. If Corporations do not benefit society, why should we let them exist? The Corporate veil, Intellectual property, etc all exist at the mercy and forbearance of Society because we all benefit as a whole, if they cease to provide, there is no reason whatsoever to maintain them.
Anybody have any actual thoughts, comments or critiques? That's what I'd like to hear. What I've just described is essentially my dream for what an Internet Tablet ought to be. Those specs are in addition to whats already in the new Nokia 800 BTW. Dual SD card slots is awesome, and it is expected that those can be made SDHC capable via a software upgrade. 8-16+GB of flash storage with a large, 800x480 display? Heck yeah! Nokia just needs to release a device with sufficient CPU/graphics power to make use of all the inherent possibilities (Movies, Games, Emulation of everything up to and including the Playstation WITH storage for tons of music/video/roms/isos)
Now, what should you do? The Internet Tablets. These things are hot. However, they need some major tweaks. Stop trying to use your current smartphone batteries for them, their restricting your battery life and your power budget WAY too much. You need something beefier, around a 2200-2500mAH battery. What to do with the extra power? More CPU for Crissakes. The 300MHz arm is not doing what you need. You need either a much faster chip, or one of the hot new dual core ARM SOC. Also a media accelerator. Let's see some 2D acceleration on that bad boy. THIS is your game machine. It'll do everything. Wi-fi internet, SKYPE, media playback. Its potentially an iPhone AND PSP killer. Put some money into bluetooth gamepads and its suddenly a far cooler game machine than the PSP and GP2X combined.
The Check against this kind of Bullshit has long since been outlawed. That being, you receive the notice, and politely call them up and invite them over to discuss the matter. When the agents arrive, You execute them on the spot, disembowel them, and send the entrails and severed heads back to their bosses in a sack. The correct, considered, measured response to thuggery is agressive self defense.
But back to my original point. Missile defense systems encourage the use of Nuclear Weapons by giving nations the false sense that they can go ahead and utilize nuclear weapons, because any return strike will be mitigated by their own defense system. In reality, that would probably only "work" if used as a strategy by the United States or the former USSR, as they are the only countries with sufficient stockpiles of weapons to make such a strategy "viable." After all, who cares if 90% of the planet is rendered dead and uninhabitable in a full on nuclear exchange, a few million of your side survived! Treaties like the one described were entered into because both sides (in their calmer moments) realized that they really, really didn't want to get into a full on Global Thermonuclear War.
That's about what I expected. Lethal Doses are data points on a normal distribution in the population. There are probably otherwise healthy people who would/could die from a 1g dose of Caffeine. We generally call people like that "allergic." Generally, one shouldn't go around taking doses on the order of magnitude of the LD50 of a substance, it just isn't a good idea (as you won't know before hand which end of the normal distribution you're on). But normal doses of Caffeine, between 1mg and 200mg, generally isn't at all dangerous. Note the definition of what LD50 is, its the amount of a substance that when administered will kill 50% of the subjects.
Estimating from the LD50 of Caffeine in Rats, that would be pretty freaking hard. Assuming no major underlying cardiac conditions, it would take around 10g of pure Caffeine to kill the average person. Double that for the average Slashdotter (who is both noticably more massive than average, AND likely to be quite Caffeine resistant, rather like trying to kill a Heroine addict with other, lesser depressants with similar Modes of Action). As for how much it takes to makes the average person start tripping balls and THINK they're dying, well that IS a lot lower.
Speculators of all sorts are just leeches on the ass of society. Sometimes they get burned, but not nearly enough. Trading on Artificial Scarcity also falls into this camp Exhibit A: card for "Magic: The Gathering."
Geothermal for home heating/AC is worth it ANYWHERE where there is significant yearly temperature variation, and the ground is stable enough to support it.
Unencrypted AAC? Almost everything, except perhaps Windows Media Player. Examples of programs that handle unencrypted AAC just fine include: MPlayer, VLC, and Cog. Many others, if you want to dig, those are just my favorites. Although I don't use AAC anyway, I configured iTunes to rip to high bit-rate mp3. Although, generally, now I'm going back (thanks to the growth of Hard Drive sizes) and reripping to FLAC.
There are really two different Democratic parties in the United States, The Democratic party, the socially liberal group (pro-choice, pro-health care, pro-civil rights), and the socially conservative one, or the "Dixiecrats" as most of them are from the South(who are anti-choice, and against any spending on social issues at all).
Similarly, I am aghast by Slashdot's lambasting of the "Fairness Doctrine" an age old standard of the non-corporate controlled press, that helped to maintain the political balance of the United States for most of the 20th century, (with the result being the fostering of FDR's New Deal, and LBJ's civil rights reforms. Note that the Fairness Doctrine was destroyed under Ronald Reagan, and if you think he was any friend of the common man, you're a fool.
The United States (and most of the rest of the world actually) has been sliding to right quite steadily since the mid-1970's. The exact causes of this are multitudinous, but many of the spring from the death of FDR in 1944 and the subsequent failure of Harry Truman to force the old European powers to dismantle their empires. The result was the incredibly numerous revolutionary conflicts throughout the third world in the second half of the 20th century, and the placement of incredible strain on the military-industrial bases of both the United States and the Soviet Union.
I agree with you about felons though, largely because there are large groups of convicted felons that are perfectly decent human beings. At the same time I think there are lots of slimy fuckers out there (many of them running around in business suits) that are pretty reprehensible.
If'd you actually bothered to read the article on Wikipedia on Insulin, you'd have learned that Frederick Banting was in fact the first person to extract the active agent from the islets of langerhans in the pancreas. He didn't know what it was (insulin was identified as the active ingredient of the extract some time later) but Banting was responsible for developing the first effective treatment for diabetes mellitus and he shared the 1923 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the Discovery of insulin with J. R. Macleod (who identified the insulin molecule as the active ingredient).
Whatever people think is legitimate.
Look, I love the Lucas Arts classics as much as anybody, but Subtle or High Art they were not. They had about the same intellectual content as a 1940's Bugs Bunny cartoon, which is admittedly very entertaining, even witty and charming, but thats still a far cry from the ivory towers of literature and haute cinema.
Although alternatively this does raise an interesting question, at what point does Pop art, like "Superman" or "Bugs Bunny" become legitimate art in the same fashion that Shakespeare did, or even as pulp novels like the works E. R. Burroughs are in the process of doing? Keep in mind that Shakespeare, when he was writing, was writing pretty low-brow trashy stuff, and was decried by moral authorities of the day for "corrupting the youth."
Just in case anyone thinks otherwise, I do not actually think Women's suffrage is to blame for the current state of "Talking Point" divisive issue politics. I'm just making a crude joke, that I think some may find funny. In reality, I think that men are at the very least just as responsible for the status quo, if not more so.
However, if either makes pictures or video of the event, they are absolutely at risk of being prosecuted under Child Pornography laws. Hell, that can be true even if BOTH parties can legally consent to have sex within the Jurisdiction (for example, in several states in the US, 16 is the legal age of consent).
I'm not saying any of this is sane or logical. It's just how crazy things have gotten.
That's what really scares and depresses me. My snarky cynicism is nearly dead on. It's just how the world works.
I wrote the original post while full of Vitriol over reading all the posts about how all alternative/hybrid vehicles are terrible. Transportation in the USA is a subject of such frustration to me, I probably shouldn't write about it all.
Yes, Absolutely! In fact, according to one study cited on Wikipedia, the age group most charged for Child Pornography offenses is young males aged 15-20. Note that the law makes absolutely no distinction between pictures depicting an 8 year old, and pictures depicting a 16 year old. Both are "Child" Porn, both get you convictions resulting in registered sex offender list for life. Which, yes indeed, means that two 16 year olds (who may very well be consenting depending on jurisdiction) can have sex with each other, and thats fine, but if they videotape it, or take pictures, they can end up with felony Child pornography convictions.
This is one of my huge objections to the way Democracies are run today. Any random multinational can install their very own Mussolini for less than a decent ad campaign. Democracy gets you the cheapest governments money can buy.
To be honest, the technology I think would be about ideal would be a fusion of Direct Methanol Fuel Cells, and Direct Ethanol Fuel Cells (which unfortunately are still a bit too early in development) into a single device. I see no reason why that would be even terribly difficult, and it would allow a vehicle to a) run on a liquid fuel, easily pumped from gas stations much like the ones we have today b) be able to run on any arbitrary Methanol/Ethanol mixture and c) run on simple alcohols which are easily produced on an industrial scale from Biomass.
To replies of "well, you still need petroleum products to make fertilizers for your biomass." No, you don't. That's the way its done today, but there are many ways around that. One would be to simply move away from Ag monocultures that drive soil depletion. Another would be to start Algal farms as a source for Biomass, which don't require very much at all. Ideally I think a mixture of a variety of techniques is ideal, utilizing whatever is most viable by location. Although algal farms do have the definite advantage of being able to provide chemical feedstocks for the traditional petrochemical industry that can replace petroleum, which is a clear bonus for plastics production, among other things.
Blah..Blah, Yes, this concept is slap your mother ugly. Detroit is fucked, because they can't design a car to save their literal livelihoods. On the other hand, the American people are just as much to blame for being a bunch of homophobic, phallo-centric, self conscious, self proclaimed "manly" men, that won't drive anything with less than 200HP lest people find out they have small penises. Get the fuck over yourselves.