You misread the Janis Ian link. Card is a card-carrying (nyuck nyuck) homophobe who is all about using state-sponsored violence to eradicate homosexuals. Janis is arguing that that should not dissuade people from reading and appreciating his work. I disagree even with that statement, as it would require that I financially support him.
As much as I want the post to be funny, I'm slowly thinking it might be truth. You just need to look at the esteemed leaders of the House Committee on Science.
Because being a space tourist means only that you have enough money to pay someone 7 figures to ferry you somewhere. There is no skill involved outside of remembering your bank account number. And nobody wants to read about that.
Now, if they would actually DO something in space? Well, that would be something to write about. Otherwise, it would be as fascinating a read as someone's exploits at the Sandals in Jamaica: "Laid on the beach. Had a drink. Went to eat and drink more. Slept. Got sunburned. Repeated this for 7 days."
Merely going somewhere cools is not the same thing as doing something cool.
Sorry - that was bad wording. I should have said "to build a reactor that reprocesses its own fuel", which is a breeder reactor. Reprocessing is definitely possible, but it means that you need other types of reactors to use the change in fuel. In general, reprocessing plants take spent uranium fuel rods, and then produce plutonium, MOX, or a variety of other fuels, based on the process used. In short, it doesn't solve the problem of nuclear waste, it just changes it.
Please point to a working commercial breeder/fast breeder reactor. The french project was abandoned because its costs had ballooned way beyond projections, with constant technical problems being the main reason. If it would have worked, the French would have accepted it. But it wasn't, and so the French closed it down.
You mean, like the French, who were TRYING to reprocess spent fuel, and abandoned the project? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix That was the closest that anyone came in making a commercial breeder reactor. All other programs are research programs, who are not scheduled to put out enough electricity to function as an actual commercial plant.
Breeder reactors are a bitch to work. As far as I know, there is no successful commercial program on the horizon.
It's redundant because this is the only thing noh8rz posts about. Note the ten at the end of the username? That's because he is on his tenth account, after the others all had posting limits imposed on them due to merciless - and completely justified - downvotes.
The only thing he posts about is how evil Google is, and how awesome MS is. So yes, it is redundant - if you follow Google stories for longer than a few weeks.
I doubt that the kid found a summation algorithm that somehow beats what everyone's been trying to achieve for the last 40 years in AI: give a computer the ability to understand text and transform/respond to it in an intelligent way. I'm pretty sure if anyone would have bothered to ask their engineers "hey, can you develop an algorithm that gives me a summary of an article that is approximately as good as this app?", they would have come up with something within a week or two. Three if they were merely average. If they can't, that leaves me with two thoughts: either Yahoo has epically craptacular developers, or it just got the biggest bargain of the last 40 years or so.
Personally, the only term I have a problem with is Private Cloud. A private cloud is the classic in-house data center, hosting third-party software accessed via a browser that comes with more or less support from the vendor. There is nothing special about it. I hear it constantly, but it still bugs me as the term that really is trying to put some lipstick on the old pig that is the in-house data center.
Read some of the other stories. There's been quite a lot of traffic around this stories on a lot of law stories. The Volokh conspiracy site doesn't like it either, and pretty much every article I've seen on it - whether its Time, Guardian or anyone else - thinks it's either bad or the worst thing ever. Definitely don't jump the gun, but in this case, the gun has been shot a while ago.
While I don't know law that well, submarine patents are a well-known concept. From your description, they seem impossible. So from your perspective, what are submarine patents, and how do they differ from continuations?
It's also worth pointing out that the rebels won in Libya only after Ghaddafi's heavy weaponry and air force was taken out by NATO flights. Before that, they were an inch away of being run out of the country. The other common thread in your examples is that the army decided to not fire on civilians - even if the civilians were completely unarmed.
1) My point here is that militarily, there is no comparison. This in turns means that victory rests on a single difference: they're fighting at home, we are fighting abroad. We're fighting until they don't shoot at us anymore, they're fighting until they don't see us anymore. The only thing they have to do is make the deployment uncomfortable enough so that we decide it isn't worth the cost. To do that, they don't need to win anything. They can lose every single engagement, and still achieve their goal. If we look at the original scenario, you're facing an entirely different problem: both the military and the rebels are fighting at home. At that point, you need operational victories to have the opponent leave the area.
2) I don't consider South Waziristan as a place where the US army operates. There might be occasional inroads, but it's not an operation theater. As for your other two examples - and I'm well aware of plenty other similar battles - they make my point: in both situations, Taliban fighters were ultimately forced to retreat, and lost at least as many fighters as they killed. There was no gain of area control, and there was no logistical gain. Militarily, the engagements were at best a wash.
3) We were in Afghanistan to kill or capture bin Laden. The rest was just a side show. It's very unfortunate that we forgot that goal within ten minutes of setting foot there. Yes, at some point, there was the idea that we can turn Afghanistan into a stable state, but even that was half-assed, and a pipe-dream anyway.
4) No, I'm actually arguing the opposite. The last time that a local rebellion won against a local military force was in Cuba, and even that is stretching the definition of local. In Libya, the local army was castrated by foreign air power. Until that happened, the rebels were getting crushed. In Syria, the fight has degenerated into a civil war, with a winner being uncertain and faced with foreign fighters and AQ affiliates in the country, a destroyed country to rebuild and foreign interests interfering right and left. That's not much of a win. As a matter of fact, Libya and Syria show that rifles are absolutely no match for the heavy weaponry that is deployed by a military force. Until the rebels acquire heavy weapons themselves, or until someone else removes the heavy weaponry from the field, rebels can only hope that enough of the military joins their side that the numbers are evened.
And that's the important part: what will preserve the US from turning into a tyranny is not JoeBob and friends with their AR-15s. It's soldiers and law enforcement refusing to shoot at their fellow Americans. And that is true whether the fellow Americans have flowers in their hair or guns in their hands.
It's not so much legal as it is a built-in calculation in the offer-sheet. Yes, someone will officially have to tender the full asking price for the company, but the billions that Dell has in cash aren't counted as risk in the loan. Instead, the new owner will immediately use the cash to pay off part of the loan, which of course would have been structured to have the company as collateral. Even if the company isn't collateral, you can't prevent the owner of a company to do whatever they want with the cash in accounting. Yes, it's soulless, but that just goes to show what kind of people engage in LBOs.
And rockets are nothing but fire directed into a special direction, so really, they're the same thing as the fires cavemen built to heat their caves. Seriously, at least try to pretend that you're interested in an actual discussion.
And the reason they're lasting for that long is because they do not engage the military in battle. Every time the Taliban have openly engaged the troops in anything resembling large-scale combat, they lost. They haven't won a single strategic or tactical battle, and the only reason we're getting out of there is because we have no reason to be there.
If the US military turns against its own population, it will be much more like Syria or Libya.
Yes, I'm sure the NRA is the place to turn when making sure that the KKK and the NAACP have the same right to march in peace. It's totally not the ACLU.
In case you didn't get the sarcasm: lawyers, judges, juries and an independent judiciary protect your amendments. This fantasy that everyone with a gun is what keeps the Constitution alive needs to stop.
I see you fail to see the difference between free speech (a concept) and a gun (a tool). In other words, technology, in the case of the first amendment, is merely a transportation mechanism for the concept discussed. Technology, in the case of the second amendment, is what the second amendment is all about. This means that the second amendment is defined by the technology present when it was passed. This does not apply to the first amendment.
A friendly reminder: an analogy is useful to explain a situation or a concept to someone who has no experience in that particular field. It is counter-productive when discussing the fine points of how to deal with a situation, as an analogy, by definition, is not the same as the topic discussed.
Those gun-nuts gave you your freedom to begin with.
Actually, that would be the French, whose navy, troops and money made the revolution successful. There were also some prussian drill sergeants who worked miracles with the american troops.
You know, if you're interested in actually giving credit where credit is due, and not elevating some rag-tag, undisciplined civilians into god's own army.
Replying to myself as I can't edit posts: there's a much better write-up at Ars: http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/03/dells-game-of-thrones-icahn-blackstone-make-rival-bids-for-company/ The key part that's missing in the IB Times: how Icahn plans to finance the takeover. Here it is: "Icahn's group would put up a total of $5 billion in cash and equity in Dell as part of the deal, spend $7.4 billion of Dell's cash-on-hand, collect $1.7 billion by financing against Dell's outstanding accounts receivable, and add $5.2 billion in new debt to the company's ledgers."
In other words, Icahn gets a loan for $5B, spends over $7B of Dell's own cash and takes out two separate loans against Dell's assets for another $8B. In further other words, the only people who would benefit from the deal are current stockholders who think that making an extra 50 cent a share now is a good thing. Everyone else, including employees, will be handed a Dell that will be significantly worse off.
Warning - site serves ups MULTIPLE video ads that run concurrently. It also seems that they ignore the mute button. Access only with NoScript or other addons enabled.
You mean, the US trucking industry is largely still comprised of terribly inefficient and polluting engines. Modern diesel cars emit about as much particulates as gasoline engines. Now, this does mean that you need fancy catalytic converters, low-sulfur fuel and some good filters, but it is absolutely possible to run clean diesels. If you don't want to do the actual research (which you clearly haven't done recently) and just want some real-life examples, go to any major city in Europe. I'd wager that about 80% of all cars there are diesel. There's actually less smog now than there used to be, and the tailpipes and bumpers of diesel cars look as clean as gasoline cars. As a matter of fact, the only way you can tell you're looking at a gasoline car is because they sound very different from all the other cars around them. Kinda how you can tell a diesel car apart from other cars in the US.
RT IS the new version of Pravda. It's the officially sanctioned russian TV channel. As such, it provides great insight into how the Russian government is looking at the world. This also means though that it is a terrible source of news for anything that doesn't match the Kremlin's narrative, either inside or outside of Russia. I always laugh when I hear some people recommend RT as a great news alternative to something like CNN or New York Times.
Slashdot Mirror
You misread the Janis Ian link. Card is a card-carrying (nyuck nyuck) homophobe who is all about using state-sponsored violence to eradicate homosexuals. Janis is arguing that that should not dissuade people from reading and appreciating his work. I disagree even with that statement, as it would require that I financially support him.
As much as I want the post to be funny, I'm slowly thinking it might be truth. You just need to look at the esteemed leaders of the House Committee on Science.
Because being a space tourist means only that you have enough money to pay someone 7 figures to ferry you somewhere. There is no skill involved outside of remembering your bank account number. And nobody wants to read about that.
Now, if they would actually DO something in space? Well, that would be something to write about. Otherwise, it would be as fascinating a read as someone's exploits at the Sandals in Jamaica: "Laid on the beach. Had a drink. Went to eat and drink more. Slept. Got sunburned. Repeated this for 7 days."
Merely going somewhere cools is not the same thing as doing something cool.
Sorry - that was bad wording. I should have said "to build a reactor that reprocesses its own fuel", which is a breeder reactor. Reprocessing is definitely possible, but it means that you need other types of reactors to use the change in fuel. In general, reprocessing plants take spent uranium fuel rods, and then produce plutonium, MOX, or a variety of other fuels, based on the process used. In short, it doesn't solve the problem of nuclear waste, it just changes it.
Please point to a working commercial breeder/fast breeder reactor. The french project was abandoned because its costs had ballooned way beyond projections, with constant technical problems being the main reason. If it would have worked, the French would have accepted it. But it wasn't, and so the French closed it down.
You mean, like the French, who were TRYING to reprocess spent fuel, and abandoned the project? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix That was the closest that anyone came in making a commercial breeder reactor. All other programs are research programs, who are not scheduled to put out enough electricity to function as an actual commercial plant.
Breeder reactors are a bitch to work. As far as I know, there is no successful commercial program on the horizon.
It's redundant because this is the only thing noh8rz posts about. Note the ten at the end of the username? That's because he is on his tenth account, after the others all had posting limits imposed on them due to merciless - and completely justified - downvotes.
The only thing he posts about is how evil Google is, and how awesome MS is. So yes, it is redundant - if you follow Google stories for longer than a few weeks.
I doubt that the kid found a summation algorithm that somehow beats what everyone's been trying to achieve for the last 40 years in AI: give a computer the ability to understand text and transform/respond to it in an intelligent way. I'm pretty sure if anyone would have bothered to ask their engineers "hey, can you develop an algorithm that gives me a summary of an article that is approximately as good as this app?", they would have come up with something within a week or two. Three if they were merely average. If they can't, that leaves me with two thoughts: either Yahoo has epically craptacular developers, or it just got the biggest bargain of the last 40 years or so.
Thanks - much appreciated. Learned something new today.
Personally, the only term I have a problem with is Private Cloud. A private cloud is the classic in-house data center, hosting third-party software accessed via a browser that comes with more or less support from the vendor. There is nothing special about it. I hear it constantly, but it still bugs me as the term that really is trying to put some lipstick on the old pig that is the in-house data center.
Read some of the other stories. There's been quite a lot of traffic around this stories on a lot of law stories. The Volokh conspiracy site doesn't like it either, and pretty much every article I've seen on it - whether its Time, Guardian or anyone else - thinks it's either bad or the worst thing ever. Definitely don't jump the gun, but in this case, the gun has been shot a while ago.
Yep, it would have been much easier and cheaper. However, JC (hah!) wanted to go himself. So he built a submarine that could take him there.
Never underestimate how much progress comes from a rich bastard wanting to see the stars, or see his name in the stars.
While I don't know law that well, submarine patents are a well-known concept. From your description, they seem impossible. So from your perspective, what are submarine patents, and how do they differ from continuations?
It's also worth pointing out that the rebels won in Libya only after Ghaddafi's heavy weaponry and air force was taken out by NATO flights. Before that, they were an inch away of being run out of the country. The other common thread in your examples is that the army decided to not fire on civilians - even if the civilians were completely unarmed.
1) My point here is that militarily, there is no comparison. This in turns means that victory rests on a single difference: they're fighting at home, we are fighting abroad. We're fighting until they don't shoot at us anymore, they're fighting until they don't see us anymore. The only thing they have to do is make the deployment uncomfortable enough so that we decide it isn't worth the cost. To do that, they don't need to win anything. They can lose every single engagement, and still achieve their goal. If we look at the original scenario, you're facing an entirely different problem: both the military and the rebels are fighting at home. At that point, you need operational victories to have the opponent leave the area.
2) I don't consider South Waziristan as a place where the US army operates. There might be occasional inroads, but it's not an operation theater. As for your other two examples - and I'm well aware of plenty other similar battles - they make my point: in both situations, Taliban fighters were ultimately forced to retreat, and lost at least as many fighters as they killed. There was no gain of area control, and there was no logistical gain. Militarily, the engagements were at best a wash.
3) We were in Afghanistan to kill or capture bin Laden. The rest was just a side show. It's very unfortunate that we forgot that goal within ten minutes of setting foot there. Yes, at some point, there was the idea that we can turn Afghanistan into a stable state, but even that was half-assed, and a pipe-dream anyway.
4) No, I'm actually arguing the opposite. The last time that a local rebellion won against a local military force was in Cuba, and even that is stretching the definition of local. In Libya, the local army was castrated by foreign air power. Until that happened, the rebels were getting crushed. In Syria, the fight has degenerated into a civil war, with a winner being uncertain and faced with foreign fighters and AQ affiliates in the country, a destroyed country to rebuild and foreign interests interfering right and left. That's not much of a win.
As a matter of fact, Libya and Syria show that rifles are absolutely no match for the heavy weaponry that is deployed by a military force. Until the rebels acquire heavy weapons themselves, or until someone else removes the heavy weaponry from the field, rebels can only hope that enough of the military joins their side that the numbers are evened.
And that's the important part: what will preserve the US from turning into a tyranny is not JoeBob and friends with their AR-15s. It's soldiers and law enforcement refusing to shoot at their fellow Americans. And that is true whether the fellow Americans have flowers in their hair or guns in their hands.
It's not so much legal as it is a built-in calculation in the offer-sheet. Yes, someone will officially have to tender the full asking price for the company, but the billions that Dell has in cash aren't counted as risk in the loan. Instead, the new owner will immediately use the cash to pay off part of the loan, which of course would have been structured to have the company as collateral. Even if the company isn't collateral, you can't prevent the owner of a company to do whatever they want with the cash in accounting. Yes, it's soulless, but that just goes to show what kind of people engage in LBOs.
And rockets are nothing but fire directed into a special direction, so really, they're the same thing as the fires cavemen built to heat their caves. Seriously, at least try to pretend that you're interested in an actual discussion.
And the reason they're lasting for that long is because they do not engage the military in battle. Every time the Taliban have openly engaged the troops in anything resembling large-scale combat, they lost. They haven't won a single strategic or tactical battle, and the only reason we're getting out of there is because we have no reason to be there.
If the US military turns against its own population, it will be much more like Syria or Libya.
Yes, I'm sure the NRA is the place to turn when making sure that the KKK and the NAACP have the same right to march in peace. It's totally not the ACLU.
In case you didn't get the sarcasm: lawyers, judges, juries and an independent judiciary protect your amendments. This fantasy that everyone with a gun is what keeps the Constitution alive needs to stop.
I see you fail to see the difference between free speech (a concept) and a gun (a tool). In other words, technology, in the case of the first amendment, is merely a transportation mechanism for the concept discussed. Technology, in the case of the second amendment, is what the second amendment is all about. This means that the second amendment is defined by the technology present when it was passed. This does not apply to the first amendment.
A friendly reminder: an analogy is useful to explain a situation or a concept to someone who has no experience in that particular field. It is counter-productive when discussing the fine points of how to deal with a situation, as an analogy, by definition, is not the same as the topic discussed.
Those gun-nuts gave you your freedom to begin with.
Actually, that would be the French, whose navy, troops and money made the revolution successful. There were also some prussian drill sergeants who worked miracles with the american troops.
You know, if you're interested in actually giving credit where credit is due, and not elevating some rag-tag, undisciplined civilians into god's own army.
Replying to myself as I can't edit posts: there's a much better write-up at Ars: http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/03/dells-game-of-thrones-icahn-blackstone-make-rival-bids-for-company/ The key part that's missing in the IB Times: how Icahn plans to finance the takeover. Here it is: "Icahn's group would put up a total of $5 billion in cash and equity in Dell as part of the deal, spend $7.4 billion of Dell's cash-on-hand, collect $1.7 billion by financing against Dell's outstanding accounts receivable, and add $5.2 billion in new debt to the company's ledgers."
In other words, Icahn gets a loan for $5B, spends over $7B of Dell's own cash and takes out two separate loans against Dell's assets for another $8B. In further other words, the only people who would benefit from the deal are current stockholders who think that making an extra 50 cent a share now is a good thing. Everyone else, including employees, will be handed a Dell that will be significantly worse off.
Warning - site serves ups MULTIPLE video ads that run concurrently. It also seems that they ignore the mute button. Access only with NoScript or other addons enabled.
You mean, the US trucking industry is largely still comprised of terribly inefficient and polluting engines. Modern diesel cars emit about as much particulates as gasoline engines. Now, this does mean that you need fancy catalytic converters, low-sulfur fuel and some good filters, but it is absolutely possible to run clean diesels. If you don't want to do the actual research (which you clearly haven't done recently) and just want some real-life examples, go to any major city in Europe. I'd wager that about 80% of all cars there are diesel. There's actually less smog now than there used to be, and the tailpipes and bumpers of diesel cars look as clean as gasoline cars. As a matter of fact, the only way you can tell you're looking at a gasoline car is because they sound very different from all the other cars around them. Kinda how you can tell a diesel car apart from other cars in the US.
RT IS the new version of Pravda. It's the officially sanctioned russian TV channel. As such, it provides great insight into how the Russian government is looking at the world. This also means though that it is a terrible source of news for anything that doesn't match the Kremlin's narrative, either inside or outside of Russia. I always laugh when I hear some people recommend RT as a great news alternative to something like CNN or New York Times.