While high demand does cause blackouts, there's another way to phrase it:
Insufficient supply causes blackouts.
It's not the consumer's fault that they're asking for too much power, it's fundamentally more the producer's fault for not providing it. Or, at the very least, equally the producer's fault.
If supply is limited - which it is - then high demand comes at a high price.
Anyone want to pay double or quadruple for their electricity?
It has been well-known for ages that supply is limited, yet virtually no-one cares to save energy. This is because though limited, supply is sufficient for the most time. Only when it becomes insufficient will people start implementing such measures on a broader scale.
By the time Ratzinger was in the Nazi Youth, it was mandatory. He even had to man an anti aircraft gun, but couldn't because of an infected finger.
What a... fortunate coincidence.
Ratzinger has been a priest, devoted to serving God, for over a half century. If this doesn't prove his non-Nazi creds, nothing will.
In that case, nothing will, I guess.
The Catholic Church did not oppose Nazi (or fascist) ideology at that time, and from what I see from Croatian clergy, they are not too keen on opposing it today, either.
Point is, fascist ideologies (Nazism included) were not anti-Catholic, so Ratzinger's devotion to Church (I really wouldn't know about his devotion to any deity) doesn't prove a thing.
Once again, I wasn't trying to start a flamewar with my original comment, but I can't let this kind of faulty logic slide.
Actually, it's claimed that Ratzinger was pretty defiant and avoided going to meetings, but I suspect that's something made up by the Vatican's PR people.
I'm quite certain of it.
When Croatia proclaimed independence from Yugoslavia, many (if not all) of our new leaders were ex-members of the Communist Party. However, since communism became a snarl word much like in the USA some 50 years ago, they all started explaining how they had been defiant and subversive and always fought for a national state of Croats. Some even wrote books on the subject. Lengthy, boring ones.
I don't think I need to point out all the similarities.
Now, bullshitting is what politics seems to be all about, but I do have to marvel at the people who proclaim themselves traitors of the old system and then get the gullible masses to trust them with the new system.
Pure gold, that's what it is.
(Furthermore, this all meant that Croatian political rhetoric slid towards fascism and - would you look at that bugger - fervent catholicism. In these parts, the Catholic Church more or less openly sided with the pro-fascist forces back in the WW2, so the fascist-communist dichotomy pretty much overlapped with the Catholic-communist one.)
All in all, not only do I believe that this was invented as a PR move, but I consider it a bad one.
I would have thought that at least in Vatican someone would remember the repentant sinner, the lost sheep and the prodigal son. That would have gotten my respect; this only earned them disdain.
Listen; I'm an atheist, and I understand why people hate the pope. After all, he's probably responsible for a hell of a lot children being molested and teenagers giving birth to unwanted children.
That being said, the Nazi deal just doesn't stick. He was basically forced into the Hitler Youth, and he ran away when they tried to enlist him in the army.
So please, can we just stay on target and let this stupid argument die here?
Oh, my.
Really, I just wanted to add him to the list like the cherry on top of a sundae, with no real intent to troll.
Though OTOH, living in a very Catholic country, I despise the guy and the organization under his rule one iota more than the average Muslim terrorist.
This, however, has very little to do with Hitlerjugend.
ThinkGeek offers a stainless steel wallet, and IIRC there was something from NASA once upon a time with teflon-coated clothes.
Fabric can be spun from metal threads, and I'd bet something could be made that is relatively comfortable to wear, yet makes for acceptable protection against tasers.
The problem, of course, is that you trip metal detectors, which you probably encounter more often than tasers. And, of course, how often do you expect to get tasered anyway?
Just because a device can be used for torture does not make it a torture device.
While I do oppose unwarranted use of tasers as well as any kind of torture (outside a consensual BDSM relationship </tongueincheek>), calling a taser a torture device seems to me the first step on a slippery slope (or is it a slide then?) - you'd be amazed at what can be done with a bottle of water or a Britney Spears CD, yet they are not normally considered torture devices. With your logic, in time they might be.
Then again, I might back you up on Britney Spears.
Except that I really can't see the point of tasering the air first.
Since tasers are usually not lethal, I see no good reason to prevent their use in subduing fleeing suspects, for instance. You would not normally shoot someone fleeing from the police, but tasering them shouldn't do them any lasting harm (if you have a medical condition which would warrant against taser use on your person, you are also most probably unable to run far in the first place).
Anyway, since a taser is normally not a lethal weapon, the protocol for its use should not be as restrictive as the protocol for lethal weapons. The taser does enable you to stun them all and sort them out later, unlike lethal weapons, where the sorting out is done by $DIVINITY.
Finally, for the obligatory SF reference, I would like to point you to Bujold's argument on stunners as weapons of little authority. It seems very applicable in this case.
>neooffice sucks balls
Good thing the Aqua port of the selfsame free office suite is now in beta, and NeoOffice will soon be history.
This is welcome news.
I don't like OO.o too much, though I guess it is the best open office (heh) suite. NeoOffice, however, takes all the bad sides of OO.o and adds total lack of integration on Macs, including the keyboard shortcuts for Home, End, PgUp and PgDn.
What I want is a simple, modular office suite with good desktop integration.
But I'll be quite satisfied with better integration alone.
Besides which, I cannot agree with your statement one bit - Microsoft makes damn good mice and joysticks!
Microsoft used to make damn good mice and keyboards. I don't know about joysticks.
However, the new Microsoft mice and keyboards that I've tried out are not that good, really.
Thank you for helping to drive the Internet to a subscription based system.
Assuming pay-per-click instead of pay-per-view (which is really pay-per-load), there is really no difference, except for some bandwidth saved.
I don't look at ads, I don't click on ads... really, they only get in my way.
I don't mind light advertising, but when I'm first annoyed at a site, I block everything.
To be optimistic, I actually like to think of it the other way around:
CAPTCHAs are providing a valuable evolutionary pressure on machine vision/artificial intelligence development!
... so when the machines decide to exterminate us, camouflage clothing will be of no use to us.
Welcoming our seeing and intelligent machine overlords seems futile. We will be exterminated.
Thanks. Now I'm depressed.
/me goes off to his Computational Linguistics class. Guess the overlords will understand language as well.
""It's so antithetical to the way scientists are trained," one Duke University geneticist said, though he eventually became a convert."
"I won't publish my data anywhere in any form but an article in a peer reviewed journal thank you. I worked hard to get my data and work out all the difficulties and I want the credit for it."
Intriguing.
I live and study in Croatia, where it is not that uncommon that a professor takes his student's work, puts his name on it and doesn't even credit the student for any work whatsoever. Publishing whatever you've done on the internet seems one of the easiest ways to defend against plagiarism, and some people actually do that.
Anyway, I think this is a great idea.
.. widescreen of "equivalent" sizes to non-widescreen was actually more expensive. I could never figure out why people were willing to pay for *less* overall viewing area. It's really not a question of whether vertical or horizontal space is more important. Just multiply the height byt he width. Non-widescreen is bigger. Fewer pixels == cheaper to manufacture.
I don't much care for the pixels I'm not actively using: widescreen fits my field of vision better.
It takes less effort to move your eyes side to side than up or down, and your field of vision is broader than it is high.
Thus widescreen monitors are easier to look at; not to mention that the extra space on the side can prove to be quite useful.
"yet rarely have I actually seen them making any attempt to join in"
This is absolutely untrue.
Even without seeing the movie, scientists like Michael Behe are viciously attacked even when they try to have a rational, evidence-based discussion. Stein only uncovers many other cases (of which Behe is not even mentioned) where even worse attacks have taken place.
Oh, wait.
You mean the very same Michael Behe who was, among other things, discredited in court?
By the way, I tried to post a comment on that video.
Hah. How naive of me.
My comment, which was rather negatively intoned, is waiting for approval. Which, of course, it will not get.
The film is obviously full of empty rhetoric, muddying the waters of scientific truth with fake free speech activism and other strategies of swaying the dumb and/or insufficiently educated.
It is pathetic, and the comment approval procedure is just another sign of the bias. And guess what: if they censor my opinion, they act exactly the same as the people they criticize.
Therefore, if nothing else, I can accuse them of hypocrisy and dishonesty. Which is proof enough for me.
(One of the very useful ways of teaching students what "primitive" languages are like is to include a few exercises on the syntax of some of the remaining Australian aborigines' languages. Students who survive this with the idea that "primitive" means "simple" are dismissed as hopeless. Unless you've looked at some of those languages, you have no idea how complex a human language can be.;-)
I've had some contact with quite a number of languages — then again, I'm a linguistics student. Though I must say, both my English syntax teachers went out of their way to give all students of English a short introduction into different grammars, including several ergative languages.
While none of those were necessary for understanding the intricacies of English syntax, to most people not studying linguistics that was the first contact with any kind of grammar different from English and Croatian.
BTW, I've learned most about the complexity of language in my computational linguistics classes, and a whole lot about our innate error-correction ability in my translation classes, neither of which seem the correct places to learn those things.
That was my first thought:
tests subjects first dream where the wrestle a bear, upon waking discovers his robotic arms have torn his pillows to shreds!
And this is why our brain produces chemicals to actually inhibit our body's muscles during sleep.
Despite those chemicals, I tend to twitch: if I dream of running, my legs twitch; if I do something with my arms, my arms twitch — I start the movement, but then stop it.
I only noticed it a few times when half asleep, but my gf says it happens quite a lot when I sleep.
Modern sign languages are grammatical. I think the sign languages of ancient humans were probably grammatical as well. In other words, I'm speculating that grammar might have evolved before speech did.
And I'd say your speculation is very likely wrong.
Unless, of course, by "speech" you mean parole, i.e. a verbal realization of the language system.
If we apply the good old ontogeny/philogeny comparison method, you'll notice that infants start giving verbal signals long before they learn to apply any kind of grammar to them. They learn individual words long before they start conecting them into phrases/clauses/sentences.
Now, what kind of a phonetic system Neanderthals might have had is one thing; that can be deduced by the way their vocal tract was built. What their language might have looked like we cannot say, though I've heard hypotheses claiming it must have been inferior to the language of the Homo sapiens, which is not very unlikely.
The main difference between our language and more common forms of animal communication is the level of abstraction, and hence all the nice features of the human language like abstraction, creativity and so on.
(As for accents, you can identify the region a cat or dog is from by the vocalizations. There is consistant regional variation. I'm not certain if it's true of all mammals, but it is true for quite a number. And I would not advise calling a cat simple, at least not to its face. Most cats are fully aware that they are the true masters of Earth and that humans are mere slaves to their whims. Most cat owners become aware of this after the first week of training from their cat.)
As for regional variation, it is not only true for mammals in general, but for birds as well. Communication evolves in much the same way life does; any relatively isolated form of communication will likely evolve in a different direction than another isolated form of communication.
As for cats... I cannot speak, as my cat might read/.
Slashdot Mirror
If supply is limited - which it is - then high demand comes at a high price.
Anyone want to pay double or quadruple for their electricity?
It has been well-known for ages that supply is limited, yet virtually no-one cares to save energy. This is because though limited, supply is sufficient for the most time. Only when it becomes insufficient will people start implementing such measures on a broader scale.
What a... fortunate coincidence.
Ratzinger has been a priest, devoted to serving God, for over a half century. If this doesn't prove his non-Nazi creds, nothing will.In that case, nothing will, I guess.
The Catholic Church did not oppose Nazi (or fascist) ideology at that time, and from what I see from Croatian clergy, they are not too keen on opposing it today, either.
Point is, fascist ideologies (Nazism included) were not anti-Catholic, so Ratzinger's devotion to Church (I really wouldn't know about his devotion to any deity) doesn't prove a thing.
Once again, I wasn't trying to start a flamewar with my original comment, but I can't let this kind of faulty logic slide.
I'm quite certain of it.
When Croatia proclaimed independence from Yugoslavia, many (if not all) of our new leaders were ex-members of the Communist Party. However, since communism became a snarl word much like in the USA some 50 years ago, they all started explaining how they had been defiant and subversive and always fought for a national state of Croats. Some even wrote books on the subject. Lengthy, boring ones.
I don't think I need to point out all the similarities.
Now, bullshitting is what politics seems to be all about, but I do have to marvel at the people who proclaim themselves traitors of the old system and then get the gullible masses to trust them with the new system.
Pure gold, that's what it is.
(Furthermore, this all meant that Croatian political rhetoric slid towards fascism and - would you look at that bugger - fervent catholicism. In these parts, the Catholic Church more or less openly sided with the pro-fascist forces back in the WW2, so the fascist-communist dichotomy pretty much overlapped with the Catholic-communist one.)
All in all, not only do I believe that this was invented as a PR move, but I consider it a bad one.
I would have thought that at least in Vatican someone would remember the repentant sinner, the lost sheep and the prodigal son.
That would have gotten my respect; this only earned them disdain.
Oh, my.
Really, I just wanted to add him to the list like the cherry on top of a sundae, with no real intent to troll.
Though OTOH, living in a very Catholic country, I despise the guy and the organization under his rule one iota more than the average Muslim terrorist.
This, however, has very little to do with Hitlerjugend.
... including, apparently, the Pope.
Go figure.
If a protest escalates or is violently suppressed, you do not want to engage in the fight anyway. Falling quickly is the safest option.
Alternately, you may want to wire some explosive and use the electric charge from the taser as trigger. Go with a bang, so to say.
I think it should be doable.
ThinkGeek offers a stainless steel wallet, and IIRC there was something from NASA once upon a time with teflon-coated clothes.
Fabric can be spun from metal threads, and I'd bet something could be made that is relatively comfortable to wear, yet makes for acceptable protection against tasers.
The problem, of course, is that you trip metal detectors, which you probably encounter more often than tasers. And, of course, how often do you expect to get tasered anyway?
Just because a device can be used for torture does not make it a torture device.
While I do oppose unwarranted use of tasers as well as any kind of torture (outside a consensual BDSM relationship </tongueincheek>), calling a taser a torture device seems to me the first step on a slippery slope (or is it a slide then?) - you'd be amazed at what can be done with a bottle of water or a Britney Spears CD, yet they are not normally considered torture devices. With your logic, in time they might be.
Then again, I might back you up on Britney Spears.
Except that I really can't see the point of tasering the air first.
Since tasers are usually not lethal, I see no good reason to prevent their use in subduing fleeing suspects, for instance. You would not normally shoot someone fleeing from the police, but tasering them shouldn't do them any lasting harm (if you have a medical condition which would warrant against taser use on your person, you are also most probably unable to run far in the first place).
Anyway, since a taser is normally not a lethal weapon, the protocol for its use should not be as restrictive as the protocol for lethal weapons. The taser does enable you to stun them all and sort them out later, unlike lethal weapons, where the sorting out is done by $DIVINITY.
Finally, for the obligatory SF reference, I would like to point you to Bujold's argument on stunners as weapons of little authority. It seems very applicable in this case.
That Opera lady... it ain't over 'til she sings, right?
Actually, a herd.
Though obviously a small one.
This is welcome news.
I don't like OO.o too much, though I guess it is the best open office (heh) suite. NeoOffice, however, takes all the bad sides of OO.o and adds total lack of integration on Macs, including the keyboard shortcuts for Home, End, PgUp and PgDn.
What I want is a simple, modular office suite with good desktop integration.
But I'll be quite satisfied with better integration alone.
Now, my MX-1000 died on me last year. Middle click stopped working, to be more exact.
So the nice people from Logitech sent me an MX Revolution.
As you can imagine, there are no hard feelings whatsoever.
Microsoft used to make damn good mice and keyboards. I don't know about joysticks.
However, the new Microsoft mice and keyboards that I've tried out are not that good, really.
Assuming pay-per-click instead of pay-per-view (which is really pay-per-load), there is really no difference, except for some bandwidth saved.
I don't look at ads, I don't click on ads... really, they only get in my way.
I don't mind light advertising, but when I'm first annoyed at a site, I block everything.
OK, that's why you hang around on /.
What's my excuse?
... so when the machines decide to exterminate us, camouflage clothing will be of no use to us.
Welcoming our seeing and intelligent machine overlords seems futile. We will be exterminated.
Thanks. Now I'm depressed.
/me goes off to his Computational Linguistics class. Guess the overlords will understand language as well.
Intriguing.
I live and study in Croatia, where it is not that uncommon that a professor takes his student's work, puts his name on it and doesn't even credit the student for any work whatsoever. Publishing whatever you've done on the internet seems one of the easiest ways to defend against plagiarism, and some people actually do that.
Anyway, I think this is a great idea.
.. widescreen of "equivalent" sizes to non-widescreen was actually more expensive. I could never figure out why people were willing to pay for *less* overall viewing area. It's really not a question of whether vertical or horizontal space is more important. Just multiply the height byt he width. Non-widescreen is bigger. Fewer pixels == cheaper to manufacture.I don't much care for the pixels I'm not actively using: widescreen fits my field of vision better.
It takes less effort to move your eyes side to side than up or down, and your field of vision is broader than it is high.
Thus widescreen monitors are easier to look at; not to mention that the extra space on the side can prove to be quite useful.
All in all, I like widescreen better.
This is absolutely untrue.
Even without seeing the movie, scientists like Michael Behe are viciously attacked even when they try to have a rational, evidence-based discussion. Stein only uncovers many other cases (of which Behe is not even mentioned) where even worse attacks have taken place.
Oh, wait.
You mean the very same Michael Behe who was, among other things, discredited in court?
By the way, I tried to post a comment on that video.
Hah. How naive of me.
My comment, which was rather negatively intoned, is waiting for approval. Which, of course, it will not get.
The film is obviously full of empty rhetoric, muddying the waters of scientific truth with fake free speech activism and other strategies of swaying the dumb and/or insufficiently educated.
It is pathetic, and the comment approval procedure is just another sign of the bias. And guess what: if they censor my opinion, they act exactly the same as the people they criticize.
Therefore, if nothing else, I can accuse them of hypocrisy and dishonesty. Which is proof enough for me.
I've had some contact with quite a number of languages — then again, I'm a linguistics student. Though I must say, both my English syntax teachers went out of their way to give all students of English a short introduction into different grammars, including several ergative languages.
While none of those were necessary for understanding the intricacies of English syntax, to most people not studying linguistics that was the first contact with any kind of grammar different from English and Croatian.
BTW, I've learned most about the complexity of language in my computational linguistics classes, and a whole lot about our innate error-correction ability in my translation classes, neither of which seem the correct places to learn those things.
Despite those chemicals, I tend to twitch: if I dream of running, my legs twitch; if I do something with my arms, my arms twitch — I start the movement, but then stop it.
I only noticed it a few times when half asleep, but my gf says it happens quite a lot when I sleep.
Modern sign languages are grammatical. I think the sign languages of ancient humans were probably grammatical as well. In other words, I'm speculating that grammar might have evolved before speech did.
And I'd say your speculation is very likely wrong.
Unless, of course, by "speech" you mean parole, i.e. a verbal realization of the language system.
If we apply the good old ontogeny/philogeny comparison method, you'll notice that infants start giving verbal signals long before they learn to apply any kind of grammar to them. They learn individual words long before they start conecting them into phrases/clauses/sentences.
Now, what kind of a phonetic system Neanderthals might have had is one thing; that can be deduced by the way their vocal tract was built. What their language might have looked like we cannot say, though I've heard hypotheses claiming it must have been inferior to the language of the Homo sapiens, which is not very unlikely.
The main difference between our language and more common forms of animal communication is the level of abstraction, and hence all the nice features of the human language like abstraction, creativity and so on.
(As for accents, you can identify the region a cat or dog is from by the vocalizations. There is consistant regional variation. I'm not certain if it's true of all mammals, but it is true for quite a number. And I would not advise calling a cat simple, at least not to its face. Most cats are fully aware that they are the true masters of Earth and that humans are mere slaves to their whims. Most cat owners become aware of this after the first week of training from their cat.)
As for regional variation, it is not only true for mammals in general, but for birds as well. Communication evolves in much the same way life does; any relatively isolated form of communication will likely evolve in a different direction than another isolated form of communication.
As for cats... I cannot speak, as my cat might read /.