Except you have forgotten a crucial piece of his story. The ISP asked for evidence of spam, he got none. The IPS's TOS specify that sending of spam will violate them, so he can cancel the account if he gets evidence. From what I understand, Spamhaus will not send any, besides saying that the person with the account is on their BlackList. Which I take as a tad too extreme, once a spammer, you can never not be a spammer? And you'll hunt down every account the spammer has and block that ISP's IP blocks?
Anyhow, the whole thread seems to be about spamhaus and their legal problems, from what I have read, it really seems Spamhaus is trying these 'escalation' practises you mention on the US Legal system. "Oh so we fucked up in court, and our domain may be taken away, so we're going to martyr ourselves". The point being, SpamHaus fucked up, and continue to fuck up in their handling of the court case. Why they didn't try for an imeddiate dismissal and repayment of lawyer fees, plus a countersuit is beyond me.
Anyhow, let this be a lesson to all of us, don't tell a court to fuck off till after they rule in your favor.
A really good reason why King Kong failed (slightly, still grossed $200 million in the US), is that the spectre of sitting for 3 hours in a movie where you already knew what happened, you knew how it ended, drove off alot of people. Alot of people didn't know how (or had forgotten the particulars) of how the Lord of the Rings ended. Plus, the plot of that Trilogy is alot more complex then King Kong, (SPOILERS!! Go to Ape Island, Capture Ape, Display Ape, Ape Dies) Plus, 3 hour movies mean you can't be shown as many times as a 2 hour (or 90 minute) flick while you're buzz is hot.
I would say though, that the chances of a single irrational leader ordering his/her army to the mass suicide of all of its people would be the result of a large number of highly unlikely things happening.
I really think, the purpose of the missle sheild, given that the aims of creating one aren't just to waste money (a possibility), its to gain an advantage in the strategic thinking in small nuclear armed states.
Restated, its the US introducing into their opponents the thought that the US might think it can defeat an small nulcear missle attack upon its homeland.
Therefore, when the opponents think about what moves to make, they have to consider that their small arsonal doesn't invoke the thought of 'Mutual Assured Destruction' in the US's strategy.
The danger isn't that Iran or North Korea is going to suddenly sponaniously attack us with one or two missles. They would have to be suicidal to do that.
Never the less the system is being designed with North Korea/Iran in mind. That brings us to the question, why?
Its because if we are in the process of declaring war on Iran and/or North Korea and they have one or two nuclear missles, we can say "We have a shield that can defend against you". Thus their deterent to an attack against them is reduced.
Yes and you can take 8X10's, scan them in at around 200 mega pixels each and stitch them together the same way you can digital. You get to giga pixel very easily without having to resort to 100's of frames.
As well, LF cameras aren't only good for 'static' scenes, static I guess meaning that the subject is static. 4x5's and 8x10's are great for models where stitching is impossible. As well, my old graflex 4x5 press camera does a more then a half decent job with candids if you know what you're doing.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
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iTunes is Malware?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I once signed my real name and number on one of those, and I got zilch that I could tell was from filling it out. No mail, no phonecalls... nothing.
But as I've read more about the grocery store industry I'm thinking more and more that those 'club' cards aren't much about tracking consumers as in identifying the gross number of unique shoppers that use the club card.
The reason being, is that the way grocery stores work is a little counter-intuitive. You would think that some shopper for safeway goes out, finds some variety of products , then places them on the shelves in such a way that the more profitable are chest level.
The actual mechanics are much more complex. Food suppliers will actually pay money to have their products on the ends of the isles, in the best position on the space. I'm pretty sure there's a little buying and selling on the part of Safeway, but I suspect the real situation is more like the suppliers are renting the space out to put their products on.
The store brand then is the way the store makes money on the actual product not on just the shelf space.
Therefore, the club cards are something that safeway charges for. Products become club specials, not when safeway finds a crate going bad, or found a good deal, but when the supplier pays safeway to put them on the club. So, Safeway really doesn't care about the information behind the card, (My last couple of club cards I got, they just handed me a new card, I didn't have to fill out anything). All safeway cares about is how often the card is used, so they can tell their suppliers how great it would be if they put their products on the club card.
Its said to be impossible to prove a negative. I think they did do a great job in proving that it was impossible enough.
1) They tested with pitch and tar on wood
2-3) I read that invading ships would cover the sea for as far as the eye could see. Do you really think 300-500 soldiers could invade a city with perhaps 100,000+ people? I think you're off by 100x
Finally, MIT was only able to catch a ship on fire when it was 75 feet away using modern mirrors. Look at something 75 feet away. You honestly think Archimedies had 1000s of soldiers standing at the shore, aiming mirrors at ships 75 ft (22m) away (bobbing in the ocean) trying to start them on fire, while the people on the ship were firing arrows back at them?
When writing a method that will do_something. Ask yourself, is this really the place to do that? Maybe you're being a little too forceful to do it right there?
Perhaps you should create an interface (make it an inner interface to a public static inner class, yes its possible). Make sure you use a common naming convention so you can look up the class using Reflection. Then once you get your class, make sure you use another factory to get the class you feel comfortable to finally do something.
Finally, put your "do_something" code in the constructor of the class.
When your code base becomes 1,000,000 lines of this, you'll achieve the final Zen obfustication moment, when a new director of engineering asks you to document this and you can say, with a straight face, and in total honesty, "Its too complex to document"
Re:While panspermia is possible...
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Space Lichens
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· Score: 1
My biggest problem with panspermia (esp with regards to earth being seeded from elsewhere), is that it smacks of the same logic of ID. It presumes that abiogenesis is too problematic here on earth and that somehow another planet is more favorable then ours.
There is no reason to think that any other planet (esp in our Solar System) is somehow more favorable to abiogenesis then the one that currently is the only one known to host life.
I can think of one very good (business) reason why game AI tends to have a static level of "reason" and doesn't learn. It is that if a game's AI dynamically adjusted to the end users actions in a someone thourough manner, the end product would have vastly different game expirences from user to user.
I cannot imagine how much of a pain that would be to QA, or support.
Terraserver, which msn owns, uses 1m per pix resolution USGS areal photos where were done before the apple building was constructed. These are black and white images, but they cover the whole US.
Google uses.25m per pix rez USGS or satelite 'WHERE AVAILABLE' as they exist only in selected areas, otherwise Google uses (I believe) 8m per pix landsat images, which are color not black and white.
If you look in areas where google uses landsat vrs the B&W images, the B&W images are FAR sharper.
If you use the FREE software from NASA, World Wind, you can select between the various sources of images. HEre is the link http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/
Another post stated that the data was already pulled from the 9 track tapes on to 128mb MO disks, writen to by a SCSI MO drive.
I used to work for a computer liquadator, we had around 4-5 of them lying around waiting for the dumpster. It shouldn't be too hard to transfer that data to cdrom's.
"This is a very VERY common marketing move, and I'm surprised nobody has seen through it yet. You publically announce that your product is being delayed, so your competitors relax a bit, then you announce some key feature of your product was dropped, etc. and your competition smirks and goes out and celebrates... and then you release the full product, WITH the "dropped" features on Monday."
I think the more common marketing ruse, the one MS perfected, is to pre-announce that they're going into a certain area to freeze all 3rd party development.
"Oh hey, why don't we add ordering to RSS? Oh, Microsoft is going to release their ordering mechanism in Longhorn, we'll just wait so we don't develop something that they'll trample right over"
I mean, how many Windows based, Free/OSS RSS-reader developers read this news and crumbled and cried in the corner? Now realizing that 96% of people will use the capability built into longhorn and which uses the spiffy new Longhorn graphics, while they retool their code after the release.
Nobody knew about those properties of radioactive materials in WWII.
Nonsense. If that were the case, there would have been no radiation safety precautions during the project, and all the scientists and workers at Los Alamos, Hanford, and other Manhattan sites would have rapidly died of acute radiation poisoning
Looking back at the thread perhaps I assumed you were still discussing the topic at hand. I belive, now, you pulled a quote out of context to nitpick.
So to reply to your statement. The knowledge of a select and small group of people as to the immediate dangers of radioactive exposure does not prove that these immediate effects were known to the government at large (those responsible for helping with a dirty bomb attack) or that those scientists that knew of the shortterm effects knew of 'those' effects. Which would be the long term effects of small dossage radioactivity.
There is indisputable evidence that the US Government in the early days of the cold war was very cavilier in exposing citizens and soliders to the radioactive effects of both nuclear weapons and their production. This includes having soldiers inflitrate an area just exposed to a nuclear explosion, conducting nulcear explosions where the fallout passed many small towns and finally the faulty procedures around which they disposed of the waste from the early WWII era efforts. Many people did die of the long term effects of radiation exposure at the production facilities and the areas around the nuclear tests.
Futhermore, even if these select group of scientists knew of the long term effects (I don't doubt they knew of the sortterm) given the secrecy around the Manhatten Project there is no way their knowledge would have spread beyond their immediate community.
So even given a generous benefit of doubt that the scientists involved with the nuclear effort DURING WWII knew 'those' effects. That did in no way reduce the GP's author on-topic argument that the physcological effects of a WWII dirty bomb would be in no way as great as the effects as one would have now. In my post I try to make the point that those presenet fears are not rational.
SO again, I applogize if i created an enormous straw man over your nitpick over the terms 'nobody', what 'those' effects were and my assumption that you were still discussusing the same topic as the post you were commenting on. I guess I figured your critique of his post mean that somehow you disagreed with his point rather then you just nitpicking one of his assumptions (and not really damaging the strength of that assumption either)
False. Just because success can be measured doesn't make it easy.
I think the asumption that tasks where sucess can be meansured are easier then tasks when successs can't be measured has some weight? I would go farther and say one of the key determining factors between something being "Easy" and something being "Impossbile" is whether you can determine success.
So you're saying a dirty bomb's physcological impact on the populace would be exactly the same as now, because a handful of people in top secret labs knew of the dangers back in WWII? Maybe I'm mistaken but I belive during the 50's the Government radiated people quite often without mass protest.
The GP post's point was that a dirty bomb during WWII would have been useless because the population would not know of the risk, or probably more accuratly, would not be hyper-sensitized to the risk of the dirty bomb.
Its only our late 20th century fear of radioactivity that causes this hypersensitized fear of a dirty bomb. Basically if you consider a dirty bomb against a chemical (nerve agent) or biological weapon (small pox etc), the dirty bomb is;
A) the easiest to detect (geiger counters can spot radioactive materical easily from a large comparative distance as apposed to more complex sampling mechanisms for chemical and biological)
B) the easiest to contain (because of the ease of detection, it is easier to prevent spread of the material. In a small pox case, you would have to quaratine large populations until tests could be performed. As well, as the GP post pointed out, Radioactive materials are very heavy and do not disperse well in the air)
c) the easiest to clean up (because of A, it would be far easier to know you've finished the job then with biological or chemical).
Basically a 2oz envelope full of antrax quaratined whole buildings for weeks. how much damage could a 2oz dirty bomb do?
To go back to your example of "Battery Acid King", I think if some bonehead would buy battery acid and consume it because the container led them to believe it wasn't dangerous, then let them die. A little chlorine in the gene-pool.
Lets not talk about consuming it, lets talk if they spilt some on themselves or they walk out and its raining. The fact is, the public is going to assume your containers meet a certain set of requirements that makes them "safe" containers given its contents. They will infer that you as an expert on the product you are selling will inform them as to the dangers and safe keeping of your product.
But to digress from Battery acid, and talk about generalities, certainly every object has a degree to danger.
It becomes the liabilty for the manufacturer when...
a) The product, without any modification, can inflict great bodily harm with simple mishandling
b) The public generally doesn't perceive there there is this substantial danger
c) The manufacturer knows there is this substanital danger.
I would argue that all 3 are required for a company to be liable. Although c would probably be removed by the trail lawyers out there. The reason you see stupid warning signs is by negating b) you remove the liability. Therefore as to McDonalds coffee
a) The coffee at the specified temperature range causes 3rd degree burns in 2 to 7 seconds when exposed to flesh.
b) While people drink coffee at home, or in offices, it typically is colder then McDonalds specified tempurature. They also are sold this product in their cars, where there doesn't exist a reasonably safe way to add the commonly added sugar/cream besides putting it in your lap.
And even in C) McDonalds knows that their product, as sold and consumed, has caused great burns to their customers.
McFact No. 1: For years, McDonald's had known they had a problem with the way they make their coffee - that their coffee was served much hotter (at least 20 degrees more so) than at other restaurants.
I wasn't aware that there was a federal regulation that required coffee to be served below a specific temperature. Oh... there's not? If it's so damned dangerous, why not?!?!
The whole point of the civil courts is to allow regress of issues wihtout the need for endless federal regulation. Perhaps you'd like a federal regulation listing the maximum tempurature of all hot fuilds (itemized by distinct type of course, since coffee and Capachino would be different)? Maybe we should forbid starbucks from creating new drinks until the regulators have time to add it to the list? Or perhaps we should rely on the courts to punish stupid companies when their greed makes them create dangerous products?
McFact No. 4: The woman, an 81-year old former department store clerk who had never before filed suit against anyone, said she wouldn't have brought the lawsuit against McDonald's had the Corporation not dismissed her request for compensation for medical bills.
Again, it's a matter of liability. If they compensate, it opens the doors for further requests for compensation (yes, I understand that they'd settled other cases... still...)
SO your point is... they shouldn't settle with her, even though they often settle because settling with her would mean they would have to settle often?!?
Of course this makes perfect sense when you consider settlements are most often public and Court cases are most likely handled under NDA's... oops maybe i got that backwards...
McFact No. 5: A McDonald's quality assurance manager testified in the case that the Corporation was aware of the risk of serving dangerously hot coffee and had no plans to either turn down the heat or to post warning about the possibility of severe burns, even though most customers wouldn't think it was possible.
The risk of 7-11 selling hot dogs is that someone could choke on it and sue them. Should they stop selling dogs? No, that would be unreasonable.
Lets consider if 7-11 imbedded into their hotdogs large unchewable pieces of plastic that they expected customers to remove before eating so they could save on meat. That they provide no warning that you should remove the plastic or esle you could choke and die. Finally at 7-11 they served them in the bun, covered in condoments ready to eat.
Yet they state to the court that they expected and belived that everyone who bought one returned to their homes, dug out the plastic then ate them. Then you would have an analogy.
Hell, they sell 1 BILLION cups of hot ass coffee a year... obviously someone likes it that way.
Is the reason they buy coffee at McDonalds is that its 'hot ass', or is it because they like some other food product that McDonald's serves in the morning? As well, is the reason McDonalds serves its coffee 'hot ass' is because people like it that way or is it because they can use an extra cheap variety of grinds because no one will figure out it tastes like ass when its 'hot ass'? (What was admitted to by McDonalds in court)
But then, maybe I'm missing all the people who line up at McDonalds just for the coffee (while I'm in the rather long line at Pete's) or maybe you should work on your reasoning skills.
Correction: The woman in the suit wanted $20,000, McDonald's offered $800. The newspaper I used for this quote was wrong, further investigation in other site found this.... Back to work
I must comment about the ISG's report. It is fascinating in its use of the bold font attribute to highlight damning evidence and to diminish un-damning evidence (no thesaurus handy for the undamning part)..
Example.
Iraq initialy refused, as part of their efforts to deter the investigation, to provide any evidence regarding their secret attempt to build a nuclear device. But 12 hours later gave us a document that provided all the evidence we needed to comprehsively investigate all of Iraq's nuclear efforts.
Iraq routinely attempted to import massive quanities of yellowcake. But all of those attempts were unsuccesful or largly the works of agents of Saddam embezziling funds.
Iraq constructed and tested a dirty bomb built from used nuclear reactor fuel, intended to be smuggled into the United States. Or so the ISG team collectivly brainstormed as to what the ideal finding from our group would be, unfortunatly this wasn't the case.
First this article
from a coffee maker states the recomended serving temperature is 75 degrees C (167 fahrenheit). The correct Brewing temperature is 185-195. But rather then nit-pick about temperature. Here's why McDonalds lost: ( Mcfacts snipped from a site, others collected elsewhere)
1: The injured women initially wanted $800 from McDonalds to pay for extra medical bills, to which McDonald's dismissed.
2. Evidence showed that McDonalds served their coffee so hot to save money. This let them get away with a cheaper grade of coffee and cut down on the number of free refills they had to give away. McDonalds executives testified that they thought it would be cheaper to pay claims and worker's compensation benefits to people burned by their coffee versus making any of these changes. (source http://www.osmond-riba.org/lis/essay_mcdonalds.htm )
McFact No. 1: For years, McDonald's had known they had a problem with the way they make their coffee - that their coffee was served much hotter (at least 20 degrees more so) than at other restaurants.
McFact No. 2: McDonald's knew its coffee sometimes caused serious injuries - more than 700 incidents of scalding coffee burns in the past decade have been settled by the Corporation - and yet they never so much as consulted a burn expert regarding the issue.
McFact No. 3: The woman involved in this infamous case suffered very serious injuries - third degree burns on her groin, thighs and buttocks that required skin grafts and a seven-day hospital stay.
McFact No. 4: The woman, an 81-year old former department store clerk who had never before filed suit against anyone, said she wouldn't have brought the lawsuit against McDonald's had the Corporation not dismissed her request for compensation for medical bills.
McFact No. 5: A McDonald's quality assurance manager testified in the case that the Corporation was aware of the risk of serving dangerously hot coffee and had no plans to either turn down the heat or to post warning about the possibility of severe burns, even though most customers wouldn't think it was possible.
McFact No. 6: After careful deliberation, the jury found McDonald's was liable because the facts were overwhelmingly against the company. When it came to the punitive damages, the jury found that McDonald's had engaged in willful, reckless, malicious, or wanton conduct, and rendered a punitive damage award of 2.7 million dollars. (The equivalent of just two days of coffee sales, McDonalds Corporation generates revenues in excess of 1.3 million dollars daily from the sale of its coffee, selling 1 billion cups each year.)
McFact No. 7: On appeal, a judge lowered the award to $480,000, a fact not widely publicized in the media.
McFact No. 8: A report in Liability Week, September 29, 1997, indicated that Kathleen Gilliam, 73, suffered first degree burns when a cup of coffee spilled onto her lap. Reports also indicate that McDonald's consistently keeps its coffee at 185 degrees, still approximately 20 degrees hotter than at other restaurants. Third degree burns occur at this temperature in just two to seven seconds, requiring skin grafting, debridement and whirlpool treatments that cost tens of thousands of dollars and result in permanent disfigurement, extreme pain and disability to the victims for many months, and in some cases, years.
It all comes down to, if you are in the business of dealing with materials you know are hazerdous (as was proven in the case, McDonalds knew the coffee was hazerdous), you are responsible for selling such materials in a safe maner because the consumer expects you to do so. If you were "Battery Acid King" and sold sulphuric acid in open topped beverage glasses, people might assume you don't think its dangerous.
I think you're missing the point of the grandparents post.
The grandparents post about the parents being irrational is 100% valid. Let me explain.
You speak of the value of relationships and in particular the value that the parents of the students place on the relationship with god. You speak that the parents fear is that these students relationship with god is being altered and thus they won't share this bond with their parents. In effect converting them to value the pursuit of knowledge higher then their bond to God.
Fine, the parents fears would be perfectly valid if we weren't talking about students volintarial enrolled in a honors college course. If I'm not mistaken but Colleges and Univercities are the "churches" for the pursuit of knowledge. Just as your church shouldn't feel in any way obligated to change the core purpose behind its teaching to include a athesist member, colleges and universities shouldn't feel any need to change their teachings.
We live in a Secular society and we have deemed it nessesary to obligate our children to complete 12-13 years of pursuit of knowledge. In fact to function in our society in an advanced level, it is required to study well beyond those 12-13 years.
In order to cater to people who's fear that the pursuit of knowledge will infringe on their children's relationship to god, it has been permitted that children be home schooled or sent to a private institution if they feel they need to alter the balance of teachings their child receives.
There would be no problem and no slashdot article if people who feel an advanced level of education drastically alters their relationship with god would find alternatives to that rather then foister their ideas onto others.
Again, the framework of this contry (the USA) was made in opposition of state sponsered religion (the church of england). As such, public schools have had religious connontations cleansed from them so that any student regardless of relegion (from Judiasm, Hinduism, Budhism, Wican, native American, Christian) are welcome.
"How do Intelligent Design or Creationism meet the "hypothesis testing" portion of the new explanation?"
Simple,
Creationism and Intelligent design's hypothesis is that there exists a creator that made/designed everthing. So the classroom discussion would be about finding evidence to test or support this.
ID proponents would provide all the false proof they usually come up with.
The problem with the new phrase is that syntactically it doesn't limit, in teaching science, theories comprised of testable hypothesies (or whatever the plural is), only testing hypothesies.
ID and Creationist supporters aren't stupid, obviously this is just the next evolution of their attempts to introduce releadion into science.
"Once mainstream Americans applaude the denial of certain citizen's rights because of religion, how far off is murder? "
When abortion is a first degree murder punishable by death (already happening, for example how Laci Peterson's unborn ratcheted Scott Peterson's sentence to death), murder of those who disagree with the fundimentalist agenda will be here.
Slashdot Mirror
Except you have forgotten a crucial piece of his story. The ISP asked for evidence of spam, he got none. The IPS's TOS specify that sending of spam will violate them, so he can cancel the account if he gets evidence. From what I understand, Spamhaus will not send any, besides saying that the person with the account is on their BlackList. Which I take as a tad too extreme, once a spammer, you can never not be a spammer? And you'll hunt down every account the spammer has and block that ISP's IP blocks?
Anyhow, the whole thread seems to be about spamhaus and their legal problems, from what I have read, it really seems Spamhaus is trying these 'escalation' practises you mention on the US Legal system. "Oh so we fucked up in court, and our domain may be taken away, so we're going to martyr ourselves". The point being, SpamHaus fucked up, and continue to fuck up in their handling of the court case. Why they didn't try for an imeddiate dismissal and repayment of lawyer fees, plus a countersuit is beyond me.
Anyhow, let this be a lesson to all of us, don't tell a court to fuck off till after they rule in your favor.
A really good reason why King Kong failed (slightly, still grossed $200 million in the US), is that the spectre of sitting for 3 hours in a movie where you already knew what happened, you knew how it ended, drove off alot of people. Alot of people didn't know how (or had forgotten the particulars)
of how the Lord of the Rings ended. Plus, the plot of that Trilogy is alot more complex then King Kong, (SPOILERS!! Go to Ape Island, Capture Ape, Display Ape, Ape Dies)
Plus, 3 hour movies mean you can't be shown as many times as a 2 hour (or 90 minute) flick while you're buzz is hot.
I would say though, that the chances of a single irrational leader ordering his/her army to the mass suicide of all of its people would be the result of a large number of highly unlikely things happening.
I really think, the purpose of the missle sheild, given that the aims of creating one aren't just to waste money (a possibility), its to gain an advantage in the strategic thinking in small nuclear armed states.
Restated, its the US introducing into their opponents the thought that the US might think it can defeat an small nulcear missle attack upon its homeland.
Therefore, when the opponents think about what moves to make, they have to consider that their small arsonal doesn't invoke the thought of 'Mutual Assured Destruction' in the US's strategy.
The danger isn't that Iran or North Korea is going to suddenly sponaniously attack us with one or two missles. They would have to be suicidal to do that.
Never the less the system is being designed with North Korea/Iran in mind. That brings us to the question, why?
Its because if we are in the process of declaring war on Iran and/or North Korea and they have one or two nuclear missles, we can say "We have a shield that can defend against you". Thus their deterent to an attack against them is reduced.
Why not just jump right to amphetamine? I mean its why figher pilots use to stay up?
As a side bonus, depending where you live, its probably easier to get then bawls.
Yes and you can take 8X10's, scan them in at around 200 mega pixels each and stitch them together the same way you can digital. You get to giga pixel very easily without having to resort to 100's of frames.
As well, LF cameras aren't only good for 'static' scenes, static I guess meaning that the subject is static. 4x5's and 8x10's are great for models where stitching is impossible. As well, my old graflex 4x5 press camera does a more then a half decent job with candids if you know what you're doing.
I once signed my real name and number on one of those, and I got zilch that I could tell was from filling it out. No mail, no phonecalls ... nothing.
But as I've read more about the grocery store industry I'm thinking more and more that those 'club' cards aren't much about tracking consumers as in identifying the gross number of unique shoppers that use the club card.
The reason being, is that the way grocery stores work is a little counter-intuitive. You would think that some shopper for safeway goes out, finds some variety of products , then places them on the shelves in such a way that the more profitable are chest level.
The actual mechanics are much more complex. Food suppliers will actually pay money to have their products on the ends of the isles, in the best position on the space. I'm pretty sure there's a little buying and selling on the part of Safeway, but I suspect the real situation is more like the suppliers are renting the space out to put their products on.
The store brand then is the way the store makes money on the actual product not on just the shelf space.
Therefore, the club cards are something that safeway charges for. Products become club specials, not when safeway finds a crate going bad, or found a good deal, but when the supplier pays safeway to put them on the club. So, Safeway really doesn't care about the information behind the card, (My last couple of club cards I got, they just handed me a new card, I didn't have to fill out anything). All safeway cares about is how often the card is used, so they can tell their suppliers how great it would be if they put their products on the club card.
Its said to be impossible to prove a negative. I think they did do a great job in proving that it was impossible enough.
1) They tested with pitch and tar on wood
2-3) I read that invading ships would cover the sea for as far as the eye could see. Do you really think 300-500 soldiers could invade a city with perhaps 100,000+ people? I think you're off by 100x
Finally, MIT was only able to catch a ship on fire when it was 75 feet away using modern mirrors. Look at something 75 feet away. You honestly think Archimedies had 1000s of soldiers standing at the shore, aiming mirrors at ships 75 ft (22m) away (bobbing in the ocean) trying to start them on fire, while the people on the ship were firing arrows back at them?
When writing a method that will do_something. Ask yourself, is this really the place to do that? Maybe you're being a little too forceful to do it right there?
Perhaps you should create an interface (make it an inner interface to a public static inner class, yes its possible).
Make sure you use a common naming convention so you can look up the class using Reflection.
Then once you get your class, make sure you use another factory to get the class you feel comfortable to finally do something.
Finally, put your "do_something" code in the constructor of the class.
When your code base becomes 1,000,000 lines of this, you'll achieve the final Zen obfustication moment, when a new director of engineering asks you to document this and you can say, with a straight face, and in total honesty, "Its too complex to document"
My biggest problem with panspermia (esp with regards to earth being seeded from elsewhere), is that it smacks of the same logic of ID. It presumes that abiogenesis is too problematic here on earth and that somehow another planet is more favorable then ours.
There is no reason to think that any other planet (esp in our Solar System) is somehow more favorable to abiogenesis then the one that currently is the only one known to host life.
I can think of one very good (business) reason why game AI tends to have a static level of "reason" and doesn't learn. It is that if a game's AI dynamically adjusted to the end users actions in a someone thourough manner, the end product would have vastly different game expirences from user to user.
I cannot imagine how much of a pain that would be to QA, or support.
As in another post,
.25m per pix rez USGS or satelite 'WHERE AVAILABLE' as they exist only in selected areas, otherwise Google uses (I believe) 8m per pix landsat images, which are color not black and white.
Terraserver, which msn owns, uses 1m per pix resolution USGS areal photos where were done before the apple building was constructed. These are black and white images, but they cover the whole US.
Google uses
If you look in areas where google uses landsat vrs the B&W images, the B&W images are FAR sharper.
If you use the FREE software from NASA, World Wind, you can select between the various sources of images. HEre is the link http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/
Another post stated that the data was already pulled from the 9 track tapes on to 128mb MO disks, writen to by a SCSI MO drive.
I used to work for a computer liquadator, we had around 4-5 of them lying around waiting for the dumpster. It shouldn't be too hard to transfer that data to cdrom's.
"This is a very VERY common marketing move, and I'm surprised nobody has seen through it yet. You publically announce that your product is being delayed, so your competitors relax a bit, then you announce some key feature of your product was dropped, etc. and your competition smirks and goes out and celebrates... and then you release the full product, WITH the "dropped" features on Monday."
I think the more common marketing ruse, the one MS perfected, is to pre-announce that they're going into a certain area to freeze all 3rd party development.
"Oh hey, why don't we add ordering to RSS? Oh, Microsoft is going to release their ordering mechanism in Longhorn, we'll just wait so we don't develop something that they'll trample right over"
I mean, how many Windows based, Free/OSS RSS-reader developers read this news and crumbled and cried in the corner? Now realizing that 96% of people will use the capability built into longhorn and which uses the spiffy new Longhorn graphics, while they retool their code after the release.
Nobody knew about those properties of radioactive materials in WWII.
Nonsense. If that were the case, there would have been no radiation safety precautions during the project, and all the scientists and workers at Los Alamos, Hanford, and other Manhattan sites would have rapidly died of acute radiation poisoning
Looking back at the thread perhaps I assumed you were still discussing the topic at hand. I belive, now, you pulled a quote out of context to nitpick.
So to reply to your statement. The knowledge of a select and small group of people as to the immediate dangers of radioactive exposure does not prove that these immediate effects were known to the government at large (those responsible for helping with a dirty bomb attack) or that those scientists that knew of the shortterm effects knew of 'those' effects. Which would be the long term effects of small dossage radioactivity.
There is indisputable evidence that the US Government in the early days of the cold war was very cavilier in exposing citizens and soliders to the radioactive effects of both nuclear weapons and their production. This includes having soldiers inflitrate an area just exposed to a nuclear explosion, conducting nulcear explosions where the fallout passed many small towns and finally the faulty procedures around which they disposed of the waste from the early WWII era efforts. Many people did die of the long term effects of radiation exposure at the production facilities and the areas around the nuclear tests.
Futhermore, even if these select group of scientists knew of the long term effects (I don't doubt they knew of the sortterm) given the secrecy around the Manhatten Project there is no way their knowledge would have spread beyond their immediate community.
So even given a generous benefit of doubt that the scientists involved with the nuclear effort DURING WWII knew 'those' effects. That did in no way reduce the GP's author on-topic argument that the physcological effects of a WWII dirty bomb would be in no way as great as the effects as one would have now. In my post I try to make the point that those presenet fears are not rational.
SO again, I applogize if i created an enormous straw man over your nitpick over the terms 'nobody', what 'those' effects were and my assumption that you were still discussusing the same topic as the post you were commenting on. I guess I figured your critique of his post mean that somehow you disagreed with his point rather then you just nitpicking one of his assumptions (and not really damaging the strength of that assumption either)
False. Just because success can be measured doesn't make it easy.
I think the asumption that tasks where sucess can be meansured are easier then tasks when successs can't be measured has some weight?
I would go farther and say one of the key determining factors between something being "Easy" and something being "Impossbile" is whether you can determine success.
So you're saying a dirty bomb's physcological impact on the populace would be exactly the same as now, because a handful of people in top secret labs knew of the dangers back in WWII? Maybe I'm mistaken but I belive during the 50's the Government radiated people quite often without mass protest.
;
The GP post's point was that a dirty bomb during WWII would have been useless because the population would not know of the risk, or probably more accuratly, would not be hyper-sensitized to the risk of the dirty bomb.
Its only our late 20th century fear of radioactivity that causes this hypersensitized fear of a dirty bomb. Basically if you consider a dirty bomb against a chemical (nerve agent) or biological weapon (small pox etc), the dirty bomb is
A) the easiest to detect (geiger counters can spot radioactive materical easily from a large comparative distance as apposed to more complex sampling mechanisms for chemical and biological)
B) the easiest to contain (because of the ease of detection, it is easier to prevent spread of the material. In a small pox case, you would have to quaratine large populations until tests could be performed. As well, as the GP post pointed out, Radioactive materials are very heavy and do not disperse well in the air)
c) the easiest to clean up (because of A, it would be far easier to know you've finished the job then with biological or chemical).
Basically a 2oz envelope full of antrax quaratined whole buildings for weeks. how much damage could a 2oz dirty bomb do?
To go back to your example of "Battery Acid King", I think if some bonehead would buy battery acid and consume it because the container led them to believe it wasn't dangerous, then let them die. A little chlorine in the gene-pool.
Lets not talk about consuming it, lets talk if they spilt some on themselves or they walk out and its raining. The fact is, the public is going to assume your containers meet a certain set of requirements that makes them "safe" containers given its contents. They will infer that you as an expert on the product you are selling will inform them as to the dangers and safe keeping of your product.
But to digress from Battery acid, and talk about generalities, certainly every object has a degree to danger.
It becomes the liabilty for the manufacturer when...
a) The product, without any modification, can inflict great bodily harm with simple mishandling
b) The public generally doesn't perceive there there is this substantial danger
c) The manufacturer knows there is this substanital danger.
I would argue that all 3 are required for a company to be liable. Although c would probably be removed by the trail lawyers out there. The reason you see stupid warning signs is by negating b) you remove the liability. Therefore as to McDonalds coffee
a) The coffee at the specified temperature range causes 3rd degree burns in 2 to 7 seconds when exposed to flesh.
b) While people drink coffee at home, or in offices, it typically is colder then McDonalds specified tempurature. They also are sold this product in their cars, where there doesn't exist a reasonably safe way to add the commonly added sugar/cream besides putting it in your lap.
And even in C) McDonalds knows that their product, as sold and consumed, has caused great burns to their customers.
Therefore they are liable for the injuries.
McFact No. 1: For years, McDonald's had known they had a problem with the way they make their coffee - that their coffee was served much hotter (at least 20 degrees more so) than at other restaurants.
... they shouldn't settle with her, even though they often settle because settling with her would mean they would have to settle often?!?
I wasn't aware that there was a federal regulation that required coffee to be served below a specific temperature. Oh... there's not? If it's so damned dangerous, why not?!?!
The whole point of the civil courts is to allow regress of issues wihtout the need for endless federal regulation. Perhaps you'd like a federal regulation listing the maximum tempurature of all hot fuilds (itemized by distinct type of course, since coffee and Capachino would be different)? Maybe we should forbid starbucks from creating new drinks until the regulators have time to add it to the list? Or perhaps we should rely on the courts to punish stupid companies when their greed makes them create dangerous products?
McFact No. 4: The woman, an 81-year old former department store clerk who had never before filed suit against anyone, said she wouldn't have brought the lawsuit against McDonald's had the Corporation not dismissed her request for compensation for medical bills.
Again, it's a matter of liability. If they compensate, it opens the doors for further requests for compensation (yes, I understand that they'd settled other cases... still...)
SO your point is
Of course this makes perfect sense when you consider settlements are most often public and Court cases are most likely handled under NDA's... oops maybe i got that backwards...
McFact No. 5: A McDonald's quality assurance manager testified in the case that the Corporation was aware of the risk of serving dangerously hot coffee and had no plans to either turn down the heat or to post warning about the possibility of severe burns, even though most customers wouldn't think it was possible.
The risk of 7-11 selling hot dogs is that someone could choke on it and sue them. Should they stop selling dogs? No, that would be unreasonable.
Lets consider if 7-11 imbedded into their hotdogs large unchewable pieces of plastic that they expected customers to remove before eating so they could save on meat. That they provide no warning that you should remove the plastic or esle you could choke and die. Finally at 7-11 they served them in the bun, covered in condoments ready to eat.
Yet they state to the court that they expected and belived that everyone who bought one returned to their homes, dug out the plastic then ate them. Then you would have an analogy.
Hell, they sell 1 BILLION cups of hot ass coffee a year... obviously someone likes it that way.
Is the reason they buy coffee at McDonalds is that its 'hot ass', or is it because they like some other food product that McDonald's serves in the morning? As well, is the reason McDonalds serves its coffee 'hot ass' is because people like it that way or is it because they can use an extra cheap variety of grinds because no one will figure out it tastes like ass when its 'hot ass'? (What was admitted to by McDonalds in court)
But then, maybe I'm missing all the people who line up at McDonalds just for the coffee (while I'm in the rather long line at Pete's) or maybe you should work on your reasoning skills.
Correction: The woman in the suit wanted $20,000, McDonald's offered $800. The newspaper I used for this quote was wrong, further investigation in other site found this. ... Back to work
I must comment about the ISG's report. It is fascinating in its use of the bold font attribute to highlight damning evidence and to diminish un-damning evidence (no thesaurus handy for the undamning part)..
Example.
Iraq initialy refused, as part of their efforts to deter the investigation, to provide any evidence regarding their secret attempt to build a nuclear device . But 12 hours later gave us a document that provided all the evidence we needed to comprehsively investigate all of Iraq's nuclear efforts.
Iraq routinely attempted to import massive quanities of yellowcake. But all of those attempts were unsuccesful or largly the works of agents of Saddam embezziling funds.
Iraq constructed and tested a dirty bomb built from used nuclear reactor fuel, intended to be smuggled into the United States. Or so the ISG team collectivly brainstormed as to what the ideal finding from our group would be, unfortunatly this wasn't the case.
First this article
from a coffee maker states the recomended serving temperature is 75 degrees C (167 fahrenheit). The correct Brewing temperature is 185-195. But rather then nit-pick about temperature. Here's why McDonalds lost: ( Mcfacts snipped from a site, others collected elsewhere)
1: The injured women initially wanted $800 from McDonalds to pay for extra medical bills, to which McDonald's dismissed.
2. Evidence showed that McDonalds served their coffee so hot to save money. This let them get away with a cheaper grade of coffee and cut down on the number of free refills they had to give away. McDonalds executives testified that they thought it would be cheaper to pay claims and worker's compensation benefits to people burned by their coffee versus making any of these changes. (source http://www.osmond-riba.org/lis/essay_mcdonalds.htm )
McFact No. 1: For years, McDonald's had known they had a problem with the way they make their coffee - that their coffee was served much hotter (at least 20 degrees more so) than at other restaurants.
McFact No. 2: McDonald's knew its coffee sometimes caused serious injuries - more than 700 incidents of scalding coffee burns in the past decade have been settled by the Corporation - and yet they never so much as consulted a burn expert regarding the issue.
McFact No. 3: The woman involved in this infamous case suffered very serious injuries - third degree burns on her groin, thighs and buttocks that required skin grafts and a seven-day hospital stay.
McFact No. 4: The woman, an 81-year old former department store clerk who had never before filed suit against anyone, said she wouldn't have brought the lawsuit against McDonald's had the Corporation not dismissed her request for compensation for medical bills.
McFact No. 5: A McDonald's quality assurance manager testified in the case that the Corporation was aware of the risk of serving dangerously hot coffee and had no plans to either turn down the heat or to post warning about the possibility of severe burns, even though most customers wouldn't think it was possible.
McFact No. 6: After careful deliberation, the jury found McDonald's was liable because the facts were overwhelmingly against the company. When it came to the punitive damages, the jury found that McDonald's had engaged in willful, reckless, malicious, or wanton conduct, and rendered a punitive damage award of 2.7 million dollars. (The equivalent of just two days of coffee sales, McDonalds Corporation generates revenues in excess of 1.3 million dollars daily from the sale of its coffee, selling 1 billion cups each year.)
McFact No. 7: On appeal, a judge lowered the award to $480,000, a fact not widely publicized in the media.
McFact No. 8: A report in Liability Week, September 29, 1997, indicated that Kathleen Gilliam, 73, suffered first degree burns when a cup of coffee spilled onto her lap. Reports also indicate that McDonald's consistently keeps its coffee at 185 degrees, still approximately 20 degrees hotter than at other restaurants. Third degree burns occur at this temperature in just two to seven seconds, requiring skin grafting, debridement and whirlpool treatments that cost tens of thousands of dollars and result in permanent disfigurement, extreme pain and disability to the victims for many months, and in some cases, years.
It all comes down to, if you are in the business of dealing with materials you know are hazerdous (as was proven in the case, McDonalds knew the coffee was hazerdous), you are responsible for selling such materials in a safe maner because the consumer expects you to do so. If you were "Battery Acid King" and sold sulphuric acid in open topped beverage glasses, people might assume you don't think its dangerous.
I think you're missing the point of the grandparents post.
The grandparents post about the parents being irrational is 100% valid. Let me explain.
You speak of the value of relationships and in particular the value that the parents of the students place on the relationship with god. You speak that the parents fear is that these students relationship with god is being altered and thus they won't share this bond with their parents. In effect converting them to value the pursuit of knowledge higher then their bond to God.
Fine, the parents fears would be perfectly valid if we weren't talking about students volintarial enrolled in a honors college course. If I'm not mistaken but Colleges and Univercities are the "churches" for the pursuit of knowledge. Just as your church shouldn't feel in any way obligated to change the core purpose behind its teaching to include a athesist member, colleges and universities shouldn't feel any need to change their teachings.
We live in a Secular society and we have deemed it nessesary to obligate our children to complete 12-13 years of pursuit of knowledge. In fact to function in our society in an advanced level, it is required to study well beyond those 12-13 years.
In order to cater to people who's fear that the pursuit of knowledge will infringe on their children's relationship to god, it has been permitted that children be home schooled or sent to a private institution if they feel they need to alter the balance of teachings their child receives.
There would be no problem and no slashdot article if people who feel an advanced level of education drastically alters their relationship with god would find alternatives to that rather then foister their ideas onto others.
Again, the framework of this contry (the USA) was made in opposition of state sponsered religion (the church of england). As such, public schools have had religious connontations cleansed from them so that any student regardless of relegion (from Judiasm, Hinduism, Budhism, Wican, native American, Christian) are welcome.
"How do Intelligent Design or Creationism meet the "hypothesis testing" portion of the new explanation?"
Simple,
Creationism and Intelligent design's hypothesis is that there exists a creator that made/designed everthing. So the classroom discussion would be about finding evidence to test or support this.
ID proponents would provide all the false proof they usually come up with.
The problem with the new phrase is that syntactically it doesn't limit, in teaching science, theories comprised of testable hypothesies (or whatever the plural is), only testing hypothesies.
ID and Creationist supporters aren't stupid, obviously this is just the next evolution of their attempts to introduce releadion into science.
"Once mainstream Americans applaude the denial of certain citizen's rights because of religion, how far off is murder? "
When abortion is a first degree murder punishable by death (already happening, for example how Laci Peterson's unborn ratcheted Scott Peterson's sentence to death), murder of those who disagree with the fundimentalist agenda will be here.