Man, that sucks. Sorry to hear it. My brother and I live in Denver. He rides all year around, has missed maybe a dozen days in the last nine years -- but he only has a 10 km commute. Mine's 40 km (each way), so I only manage it a couple times a week, but I ride in the middle of the winter pretty often. Considered finding a job somewhere more amenable to human habitation? -40C (or, for that matter, -40F, heh) isn't civilized.
Here's a table (that stupid POS slashdot won't let me post because of 'junk characters' so you get it all garbled up) that our company uses. incandescents: visible 7.5% IR 73% UV 0% total 80% heat 20% Fluoroescents: visible 21% IR 37% UV 0% total 58% heat 42% Metal halides: vis 27% IR 17% UV 19% total 63% heat 37% LED's: vis 20%, IR 0%, uv 0%, total 20%, heat 80%
I can tell you from personal experience that some of our proto LED's have a Socket A heatsink on the back, fan going flat out, and if you put a piece of paper over the LED to try and block the (blinding amounts of) light coming off it, the paper will burst into flame immediately.
In other words: the *emitted* IR from an LED is 0. The conducted IR from an LED is simply enormous. We model LED's as power resistors, with excellent accuracy.
I have to ditch a bunch of moderations to post this, but I can't not. If you're thinking about SUV's and safety, read Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker article about perception vs. performance. I quote a particularly choice section: "Fred J. Schaafsma, a top engineer for General Motors, says, "Sport-utility owners tend to be more like 'I wonder how people view me,' and are more willing to trade off flexibility or functionality to get that. " According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills."
That's why most people drive SUV's -- because they want to be the biggest, which makes them think they're the safest. As Gladwell has written elsewhere, as have many many other people paying attention to this, small cars are *vastly* safer in single-car accidents, which account for a large percentage of all accidents, and small-car-vs-small-car accidents result in much less harm to the passengers than small-vs-large *or* large-vs-large. SUV's make everyone, including the drivers of the SUV's, less safe.
Ya hunt bears during bear season, deer during deer season, tourists during tourist season... so when is politics season? Seems to be all year around, as far as I can see. That's fine: ammo is still cheap.
We found something sort of similar: if you didn't let the inner doors close completely -- jammed them with a 2x4 or the like -- both sets of doors would close and the elevator would start to move. Then two strong people yank the partly-open doors open further, and the elevator stops, between floors, and stays there. The elevator shaft had some beautiful graffiti. We spent a lot of time trying to see if we could get very tiny people, like, say, my then-girlfriend (145 cm high, weighed about 40 kilos) to carefully let a jammed elevator rise a bit by playing with the door jam, then creep out a 20cm slot at the bottom through the outside set of doors, leaving the elevator well and truly jammed. We couldn't get the outer doors to open easily, though, and then there was a flood that submerged the student center where the elevator lived, and the renovation involved a newer elevator that didn't work that way.
There are an awful lot of people who, y'know, travel. It's hell to take a laptop anywhere. When I was in Christchurch, New Zealand last year it would've been really nice to be able to crop pictures I'd taken with my digital camera so I could send them to friends. Oddly enough, the computer I was using in the nice internet cafe wouldn't let me download Picassa or install Adobe. Nor would the one in Wellington. I'll bet the internet cafes in Reykjavik, where I'll be next month, won't either.
>This strikes me as really funny. Like it or not, the reason that pop songs like this keep getting made is because people by them. It's actually relatively democratic. I mean, you might not like the music. I certainly don't care for it. But you can't argue with the fact that a lot of people like the music enough to pay money to get it.
But if there were no copyright, the teeny bopper whores would *still* make music, and people would *still* buy it. And, to make it even funnier, If this were the situation, in the vast majority of cases, the teeny bopper whores would make *exactly* the same amount off sales of their music that 90% of all musicians make off their music currently: nothing!
People have always made music. Drama queens have always whined about their lives. People have always been willing to listen to them whine. The presence or absence of copyright would have absolutely zero effect on that, unless the drama queen's name is Britney, and for those very few, loss of copyright would, indeed, suck. But for the vast majority of writers, musicians, and the like, it wouldn't actually make any difference. It would make a very large difference to their publishers, however, and that's why we have the system we have.
What you're talking about is a great idea, and has been done (experimentally) with disc or pancake motors that serve as the wheels themselves. One advantage that the dual-engine system has, where there's a single central electric motor and a gas engine, both attached to the wheels by conventional driveshafts, is that by using the two propulsion systems working against each other (so to speak) driving inputs to a planetary gearset or differential, you get, without trying, a continuously variable transmission (run engine at one speed, run motor at variable speed to control vehicle speed) and an easy system to deal with variable operating requirements. Need to accellerate? Run engine and motor. Need to slow down? Run motor backwards to soak up power and recharge batteries. Engine running above ideal RPM? Soak up extra power into batteries through motor. Engine running below ideal RPM? Give it help with the motor. It's really nice to have two variables for one equation: it allows you a continuum of solutions, for which you can always have the engine running at its (horsepower/torque/efficiency) peak performance.
With per-wheel electric motors, A: you have four motors. B: you have to run heavy wires to each. C: you have to have a generator capable of supplying all four motors (which is one big-ass generator) hooked to your power-producing engine. You can still derive something that looks like a continuously variable transmission, but it involves switching massive, massive amperages, which is hard, or frightening voltages, which is easier but more potentially dangerous. That's not to say there aren't some amazingly good things about four-wheel motors: automatic antilock braking and traction control (and active steering, by careful over/underdriving of the individual motors) are easy. What we need is lighter electric motors (which is going well: magnets are getting stronger per unit volume or unit weight at an amazing rate) and cabling with very low resistance, ideally superconductors, to haul current to the wheel motors.
I thought I had some Cherokee 6 time, but I can't remember. I'd have to check my logs. All those weird low-wings are practically indistinguishable to me. But, yeah, looking at some online images, that sure doesn't have much in the way of rear windows so I must be thinking of some other plane.
>Since when did being in Vietnam make you presidential material?
Like being in a fraternity, having served in the military is very, very strongly correlated with being elected president. There's a public perception that if you haven't served in the military you shouldn't be running it. To the best of my knowledge, the only President this century who wasn't in the military was Bill Clinton, although I'm not sure about Franklin Roosevelt and I'm spotty on my history of presidents before 1920. (And I think it's fair to strongly question Dubya's military experience, as being nominal and on-paper, at best.)
I'm not saying it's right or reasonable, I'm just saying that's the way things are in the US.
Y'know, I'm not sure I agree with you on this. He's a war hero and blah blah blah, but he wants to get more exposure, particularly to people who weren't alive during that war. Right now, MySpace is by far the best way to get a message out to young people. If you talk to a lot of seventeen-year-olds, it's not always clear that they differentiate between "myspace" and "the internet" -- much the same way that fifty-year-olds don't really differentiate between "the web" and "the internet". To a lot of young people, myspace and similar services are the only reason they get online. So, if you accept the premise that by far the most cost-effective way of getting a message to lots of young people is via myspace, well, McCain sure isn't going to be setting up his own myspace, anymore than Britney Spears would. (Thomas Dolby, however, did indeed set up his own myspace page, because he understands technology.) So, a flunky does it. I think that's not only a reasonable course of action, it might be the *only* reasonable course of action. I haven't looked, but I assume that Barak Obama has one. At this point, it would be stupid to neglect that demographic.
What sort of planes have you been flying? Every Cessna 152 I've ever flown had an original-equipment-manufacture rear-view mirror in the top of the instrument panel (most missing, but the impression for it was still there.) *EVERY* plane I've ever flown in: Cessna 152, Cessna 170, Cessna 172, Cessna 182, Cessna 206, Piper Comanche, Mooney 20F, the first thing you do when you run up the engine is look over your shoulder to see the rudder and elevators to make sure the flight controls are correctly rigged before taking off. I have seriously never, ever seen a small plane that didn't have as good or better rear visibility than most cars.
In the Cessna 152's, the rear-view mirror is used as a training aid, so the student can ensure a good centerline-holding skill on takeoff. Bad idea to drift off to the left when departing 24R with a slight crosswind, and someone is departing in a Citation X on 24L.
Pfft. I first heard the term 'phrenotherapy' in the early 1970's, before (I believe) Pratchett was even publishing. I'm betting some goofy person thought it up back in the heyday of phrenology in the late 1800's.
You are so right. I have (apparently) a hobby of dating hyperintelligent women -- I'm talking PhD at age 23, perfect SAT, Harvard grad, those types. Routinely, they've made some simply appallingly bad decisions. While I'm at it, my dad, perfect SAT, engineering degree from CalTech, plus Master's, in four years: same thing, so it's not just a superintelligent *woman* thing. 49 times in a row they'd have disagreements with someone else and be right, so that 50th time, when they were wrong, they seemed to actually be incapable of realizing they were wrong, so the opposition from friends and coworkers didn't have the limiting effect it has on most more normal people. What's weird is that this kind of behavior is usually associated with people who aren't very bright at all. Typically, brighter-than-average people are better at self-analysis, self-doubt, and anticipating (and, more crucially, planning for) failure. I'm three-sigma on the intelligence tests, but I screw up ALL the time. I sometimes think I'm flat-out wrong as often as I'm right. So, I never *trust* anything I decide: I spend a lot of time verifying and making sure I have back-up plans. But the five-sigma people I've known? dude. Like riding an express train to hell. So, I'd add to your statement that part of wisdom is self-doubt and self-evaluation: the ability to analyze your analysis and be open to criticism even if it's almost always wrong.
>Both are just places for teenage self-indulgent attention whores to whine about how hard life is, shake their asses and lipsynch on video as if the rest of the world cares.
And the difference between that and 'cool' is...? Sorry to rain on the slashdot parade, but very, very few of us are cool. We make decisions based on a wholly different set of criteria than the people who are on MySpace -- and that's exactly why they're on MySpace, and why we're here. And, guess which one has, what, freaking 200 million users, including every rock star under the sun, madly posting all day long? A website where you can add Kevin Federline as a friend, and he'll add you back, is cool, even if the very idea makes me want to throw up.
Aside from that, I entirely agree with your post. YouTube is somewhat like Microsoft: startup that had the capital to crank through the gap between early adopter and mainstream. This'll be about as exciting as the aborted WalMart kid-safe imitation of MySpace (whose name, mercifully, I have forgotten.)
I've read about duels fought over romances that sprung up between Morse-code operators in the 1860's. Dunno about Indian smoke-signal messengers, though...
>The Internet used to be a university. Then it became a shopping mall. But now, it's a war zone.
It's *ALWAYS* been a war zone. There were flame wars escalating into death threats on usenet in the '80's. My college suspended a kid for posting violent rape fantasies to email lists in 1986. The only difference is that now enough people know about the internet that stories about it sell newspapers. Anyone who thinks it used to be all nice and safe is either delusional or wasn't paying attention. If you have a forum where governments can't track down and kill political opponents, you have a forum where nice people can't track down and hold liable nogoodniks who froth hate. That sucks for the nice people, but I think our need for widespread, anonymous communication outweighs their discomfort.
If phrenology is the forecasting of someone's personality by looking at the bumps on the person's head, how about phrenotherapy: behavior modification by adding bumps to someone's head. I think the people authorizing this sort of wide-spread spying are obvious candidates for phrenotheraputic treatments.
I wonder how they'll classify me, given that I have an irrational aversion to stepping on cracks (which means I often don't have a regular pace.) Probably 'loser geek' but I might get 'hiding something: investigate!'
My first thought was "wait, I thought humans and sheep were already 95% the same!" or whatever (misleading) statistic people come up with.
But, more seriously, the species-crossing virus is a problem, but it also is a good thing. Right now we have lousy animal models for AIDS and leprosy. If we could get animal models for these, it could be a great help in finding a treatment for them. On a purely creepy level, you can give a 90% human sheep drug-resistant tuberculosis and treat it, while you can't do that to a 100% human -- but of course that raises the question of where a 90% human sheep stands as regards rights, compared to, say, a human with Down's Syndrome or some other disorder with profound effects on behavior and development.
I'm kind of confused by the whole idea. I think they just used lead because people subconsciously associate it with lead shielding used for reactors, but lead paint, in and of itself, is literally thousands of years old. (One current theory about the fall of the roman empire is that everyone got lead poisoning from putting wine in vases that were painted, on the inside, with lead-based paints, and my whole garage is covered in 20 layers of lead-based paint.) Titanium dioxide is very commonly used as the primary colorant for white paints, and most silvery spray and cheap paint-on paints are just filled with powdered aluminum metal. I use silver-metal-containing paint to fix broken traces on the resistive heater on the rear window of my car, and copper-based equivalents for gold-tone effects are cheaply available.
>When people started losing everything, they started wanting their great leader dead and were happy when we invaded
The problem being: who is going to come in from the outside and fix the problems, when countries all over the world are all going down the same nasty route? The few countries that aren't busy passing security-over-freedom laws, if they all got together, couldn't take over *England*, much less the US or China.
Serious totalitarian regimes usually have to be toppled from outside, because by the time they get there, their populations are too scared to make waves from inside. We don't *have* an outside to come in and fix things anymore. It's just scared people everywhere. And the damned part is they're mostly scared of each other, and that's exactly what many governments want.
>Yeah, I don't see why the RIAA is bragging about this. It seems more like a great example of their rampant abuse of the legal system and young people.
Which is exactly why they're bragging about it. They don't want to be liked. They don't sell anything to consumers. They want to be feared, because their product is profitability for companies that think they're losing money to piracy. It's like Guido and Enzio. They don't want you to like them: they want you to reach for your checkbook every time you see them. So, if they have to stomp on puppies in the middle of the street, they're perfectly willing to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, that sucks. Sorry to hear it.
My brother and I live in Denver. He rides all year around, has missed maybe a dozen days in the last nine years -- but he only has a 10 km commute. Mine's 40 km (each way), so I only manage it a couple times a week, but I ride in the middle of the winter pretty often. Considered finding a job somewhere more amenable to human habitation? -40C (or, for that matter, -40F, heh) isn't civilized.
Here's a table (that stupid POS slashdot won't let me post because of 'junk characters' so you get it all garbled up) that our company uses.
incandescents: visible 7.5% IR 73% UV 0% total 80% heat 20%
Fluoroescents: visible 21% IR 37% UV 0% total 58% heat 42%
Metal halides: vis 27% IR 17% UV 19% total 63% heat 37%
LED's: vis 20%, IR 0%, uv 0%, total 20%, heat 80%
I can tell you from personal experience that some of our proto LED's have a Socket A heatsink on the back, fan going flat out, and if you put a piece of paper over the LED to try and block the (blinding amounts of) light coming off it, the paper will burst into flame immediately.
In other words: the *emitted* IR from an LED is 0. The conducted IR from an LED is simply enormous. We model LED's as power resistors, with excellent accuracy.
I have to ditch a bunch of moderations to post this, but I can't not.
If you're thinking about SUV's and safety, read Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker article about perception vs. performance.
I quote a particularly choice section:
"Fred J. Schaafsma, a top engineer for General Motors, says, "Sport-utility owners tend to be more like 'I wonder how people view me,' and are more willing to trade off flexibility or functionality to get that. " According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills."
That's why most people drive SUV's -- because they want to be the biggest, which makes them think they're the safest.
As Gladwell has written elsewhere, as have many many other people paying attention to this, small cars are *vastly* safer in single-car accidents, which account for a large percentage of all accidents, and small-car-vs-small-car accidents result in much less harm to the passengers than small-vs-large *or* large-vs-large. SUV's make everyone, including the drivers of the SUV's, less safe.
Ya hunt bears during bear season, deer during deer season, tourists during tourist season... so when is politics season? Seems to be all year around, as far as I can see. That's fine: ammo is still cheap.
We found something sort of similar: if you didn't let the inner doors close completely -- jammed them with a 2x4 or the like -- both sets of doors would close and the elevator would start to move. Then two strong people yank the partly-open doors open further, and the elevator stops, between floors, and stays there. The elevator shaft had some beautiful graffiti. We spent a lot of time trying to see if we could get very tiny people, like, say, my then-girlfriend (145 cm high, weighed about 40 kilos) to carefully let a jammed elevator rise a bit by playing with the door jam, then creep out a 20cm slot at the bottom through the outside set of doors, leaving the elevator well and truly jammed. We couldn't get the outer doors to open easily, though, and then there was a flood that submerged the student center where the elevator lived, and the renovation involved a newer elevator that didn't work that way.
There are an awful lot of people who, y'know, travel.
It's hell to take a laptop anywhere.
When I was in Christchurch, New Zealand last year it would've been really nice to be able to crop pictures I'd taken with my digital camera so I could send them to friends. Oddly enough, the computer I was using in the nice internet cafe wouldn't let me download Picassa or install Adobe. Nor would the one in Wellington. I'll bet the internet cafes in Reykjavik, where I'll be next month, won't either.
>This strikes me as really funny. Like it or not, the reason that pop songs like this keep getting made is because people by them. It's actually relatively democratic. I mean, you might not like the music. I certainly don't care for it. But you can't argue with the fact that a lot of people like the music enough to pay money to get it.
But if there were no copyright, the teeny bopper whores would *still* make music, and people would *still* buy it. And, to make it even funnier, If this were the situation, in the vast majority of cases, the teeny bopper whores would make *exactly* the same amount off sales of their music that 90% of all musicians make off their music currently: nothing!
People have always made music. Drama queens have always whined about their lives. People have always been willing to listen to them whine. The presence or absence of copyright would have absolutely zero effect on that, unless the drama queen's name is Britney, and for those very few, loss of copyright would, indeed, suck. But for the vast majority of writers, musicians, and the like, it wouldn't actually make any difference. It would make a very large difference to their publishers, however, and that's why we have the system we have.
What you're talking about is a great idea, and has been done (experimentally) with disc or pancake motors that serve as the wheels themselves.
One advantage that the dual-engine system has, where there's a single central electric motor and a gas engine, both attached to the wheels by conventional driveshafts, is that by using the two propulsion systems working against each other (so to speak) driving inputs to a planetary gearset or differential, you get, without trying, a continuously variable transmission (run engine at one speed, run motor at variable speed to control vehicle speed) and an easy system to deal with variable operating requirements. Need to accellerate? Run engine and motor. Need to slow down? Run motor backwards to soak up power and recharge batteries. Engine running above ideal RPM? Soak up extra power into batteries through motor. Engine running below ideal RPM? Give it help with the motor. It's really nice to have two variables for one equation: it allows you a continuum of solutions, for which you can always have the engine running at its (horsepower/torque/efficiency) peak performance.
With per-wheel electric motors, A: you have four motors. B: you have to run heavy wires to each. C: you have to have a generator capable of supplying all four motors (which is one big-ass generator) hooked to your power-producing engine. You can still derive something that looks like a continuously variable transmission, but it involves switching massive, massive amperages, which is hard, or frightening voltages, which is easier but more potentially dangerous. That's not to say there aren't some amazingly good things about four-wheel motors: automatic antilock braking and traction control (and active steering, by careful over/underdriving of the individual motors) are easy. What we need is lighter electric motors (which is going well: magnets are getting stronger per unit volume or unit weight at an amazing rate) and cabling with very low resistance, ideally superconductors, to haul current to the wheel motors.
I thought I had some Cherokee 6 time, but I can't remember. I'd have to check my logs. All those weird low-wings are practically indistinguishable to me. But, yeah, looking at some online images, that sure doesn't have much in the way of rear windows so I must be thinking of some other plane.
We do little skiers on the chips we crank out. Sometimes, we even work in recognizeable (from the right vantage point) mountain silhouettes. Whee!
>Since when did being in Vietnam make you presidential material?
Like being in a fraternity, having served in the military is very, very strongly correlated with being elected president. There's a public perception that if you haven't served in the military you shouldn't be running it. To the best of my knowledge, the only President this century who wasn't in the military was Bill Clinton, although I'm not sure about Franklin Roosevelt and I'm spotty on my history of presidents before 1920. (And I think it's fair to strongly question Dubya's military experience, as being nominal and on-paper, at best.)
I'm not saying it's right or reasonable, I'm just saying that's the way things are in the US.
Y'know, I'm not sure I agree with you on this. He's a war hero and blah blah blah, but he wants to get more exposure, particularly to people who weren't alive during that war.
Right now, MySpace is by far the best way to get a message out to young people. If you talk to a lot of seventeen-year-olds, it's not always clear that they differentiate between "myspace" and "the internet" -- much the same way that fifty-year-olds don't really differentiate between "the web" and "the internet". To a lot of young people, myspace and similar services are the only reason they get online.
So, if you accept the premise that by far the most cost-effective way of getting a message to lots of young people is via myspace, well, McCain sure isn't going to be setting up his own myspace, anymore than Britney Spears would. (Thomas Dolby, however, did indeed set up his own myspace page, because he understands technology.) So, a flunky does it.
I think that's not only a reasonable course of action, it might be the *only* reasonable course of action. I haven't looked, but I assume that Barak Obama has one. At this point, it would be stupid to neglect that demographic.
What sort of planes have you been flying? Every Cessna 152 I've ever flown had an original-equipment-manufacture rear-view mirror in the top of the instrument panel (most missing, but the impression for it was still there.) *EVERY* plane I've ever flown in: Cessna 152, Cessna 170, Cessna 172, Cessna 182, Cessna 206, Piper Comanche, Mooney 20F, the first thing you do when you run up the engine is look over your shoulder to see the rudder and elevators to make sure the flight controls are correctly rigged before taking off. I have seriously never, ever seen a small plane that didn't have as good or better rear visibility than most cars.
In the Cessna 152's, the rear-view mirror is used as a training aid, so the student can ensure a good centerline-holding skill on takeoff. Bad idea to drift off to the left when departing 24R with a slight crosswind, and someone is departing in a Citation X on 24L.
Pfft. I first heard the term 'phrenotherapy' in the early 1970's, before (I believe) Pratchett was even publishing. I'm betting some goofy person thought it up back in the heyday of phrenology in the late 1800's.
You are so right. I have (apparently) a hobby of dating hyperintelligent women -- I'm talking PhD at age 23, perfect SAT, Harvard grad, those types. Routinely, they've made some simply appallingly bad decisions. While I'm at it, my dad, perfect SAT, engineering degree from CalTech, plus Master's, in four years: same thing, so it's not just a superintelligent *woman* thing.
49 times in a row they'd have disagreements with someone else and be right, so that 50th time, when they were wrong, they seemed to actually be incapable of realizing they were wrong, so the opposition from friends and coworkers didn't have the limiting effect it has on most more normal people.
What's weird is that this kind of behavior is usually associated with people who aren't very bright at all. Typically, brighter-than-average people are better at self-analysis, self-doubt, and anticipating (and, more crucially, planning for) failure. I'm three-sigma on the intelligence tests, but I screw up ALL the time. I sometimes think I'm flat-out wrong as often as I'm right. So, I never *trust* anything I decide: I spend a lot of time verifying and making sure I have back-up plans. But the five-sigma people I've known? dude. Like riding an express train to hell.
So, I'd add to your statement that part of wisdom is self-doubt and self-evaluation: the ability to analyze your analysis and be open to criticism even if it's almost always wrong.
>Both are just places for teenage self-indulgent attention whores to whine about how hard life is, shake their asses and lipsynch on video as if the rest of the world cares.
And the difference between that and 'cool' is...?
Sorry to rain on the slashdot parade, but very, very few of us are cool. We make decisions based on a wholly different set of criteria than the people who are on MySpace -- and that's exactly why they're on MySpace, and why we're here. And, guess which one has, what, freaking 200 million users, including every rock star under the sun, madly posting all day long? A website where you can add Kevin Federline as a friend, and he'll add you back, is cool, even if the very idea makes me want to throw up.
Aside from that, I entirely agree with your post. YouTube is somewhat like Microsoft: startup that had the capital to crank through the gap between early adopter and mainstream. This'll be about as exciting as the aborted WalMart kid-safe imitation of MySpace (whose name, mercifully, I have forgotten.)
I've read about duels fought over romances that sprung up between Morse-code operators in the 1860's. Dunno about Indian smoke-signal messengers, though...
>The Internet used to be a university. Then it became a shopping mall. But now, it's a war zone.
It's *ALWAYS* been a war zone. There were flame wars escalating into death threats on usenet in the '80's. My college suspended a kid for posting violent rape fantasies to email lists in 1986. The only difference is that now enough people know about the internet that stories about it sell newspapers. Anyone who thinks it used to be all nice and safe is either delusional or wasn't paying attention. If you have a forum where governments can't track down and kill political opponents, you have a forum where nice people can't track down and hold liable nogoodniks who froth hate. That sucks for the nice people, but I think our need for widespread, anonymous communication outweighs their discomfort.
"No, ossi... ossi... sir, I'm not drunk: I was just trying to poison their filtering software!"
If phrenology is the forecasting of someone's personality by looking at the bumps on the person's head, how about phrenotherapy: behavior modification by adding bumps to someone's head. I think the people authorizing this sort of wide-spread spying are obvious candidates for phrenotheraputic treatments.
I wonder how they'll classify me, given that I have an irrational aversion to stepping on cracks (which means I often don't have a regular pace.) Probably 'loser geek' but I might get 'hiding something: investigate!'
My first thought was "wait, I thought humans and sheep were already 95% the same!" or whatever (misleading) statistic people come up with.
But, more seriously, the species-crossing virus is a problem, but it also is a good thing. Right now we have lousy animal models for AIDS and leprosy. If we could get animal models for these, it could be a great help in finding a treatment for them. On a purely creepy level, you can give a 90% human sheep drug-resistant tuberculosis and treat it, while you can't do that to a 100% human -- but of course that raises the question of where a 90% human sheep stands as regards rights, compared to, say, a human with Down's Syndrome or some other disorder with profound effects on behavior and development.
If you live in the US, you can say "have more dollars than sense" for added piquancy.
I'm kind of confused by the whole idea. I think they just used lead because people subconsciously associate it with lead shielding used for reactors, but lead paint, in and of itself, is literally thousands of years old. (One current theory about the fall of the roman empire is that everyone got lead poisoning from putting wine in vases that were painted, on the inside, with lead-based paints, and my whole garage is covered in 20 layers of lead-based paint.)
Titanium dioxide is very commonly used as the primary colorant for white paints, and most silvery spray and cheap paint-on paints are just filled with powdered aluminum metal. I use silver-metal-containing paint to fix broken traces on the resistive heater on the rear window of my car, and copper-based equivalents for gold-tone effects are cheaply available.
>When people started losing everything, they started wanting their great leader dead and were happy when we invaded
The problem being: who is going to come in from the outside and fix the problems, when countries all over the world are all going down the same nasty route? The few countries that aren't busy passing security-over-freedom laws, if they all got together, couldn't take over *England*, much less the US or China.
Serious totalitarian regimes usually have to be toppled from outside, because by the time they get there, their populations are too scared to make waves from inside. We don't *have* an outside to come in and fix things anymore. It's just scared people everywhere. And the damned part is they're mostly scared of each other, and that's exactly what many governments want.
>Yeah, I don't see why the RIAA is bragging about this. It seems more like a great example of their rampant abuse of the legal system and young people.
Which is exactly why they're bragging about it.
They don't want to be liked. They don't sell anything to consumers. They want to be feared, because their product is profitability for companies that think they're losing money to piracy. It's like Guido and Enzio. They don't want you to like them: they want you to reach for your checkbook every time you see them. So, if they have to stomp on puppies in the middle of the street, they're perfectly willing to do that.