As an additional note, your understanding of gravimetric motion leaves a lot to be desired. An object falling into the center of the earth won't sit there, it will act like a ball on a rubber band - bouncing back & forth through the center point as kinetic energy is transfered back & forth to potential energy.
And this does not take into account any momentum that the black hole may carry out of the collision that created it. The total effect of the Earth's gravity may simply be to bend its path as it fires off into space.
The main thing to keep in mind is, cosmic rays have energies vastly higher than the LHC. If the LHC could produce black holes, then there would be black holes floating around everywhere.
Maybe there are quantum black holes floating around everywhere. Wouldn't they be so small that interactions with other matter would be exceedingly rare? If the radius was equal to or less than the Planck length how could we ever detect them, aside from their gravity? (Of which we do seem to have a surplus.)
All we really have proof of from cosmic rays is that whether black holes are being created or not, they are not dangerous to us.
The obvious change in the new Windows Taskbar is that there are icons for non-running-applications. I don't care how you try to word it, that is the major difference between the OSX Dock and the Windows Taskbar. So Damn right it is copying it.
The taskbar in Windows XP on my work PC has a number of icons for non-running-applications. They are in the Quicklaunch area right next to the Start button. I put them there by dragging the icons, just like adding an app to the Dock in OS X on my Macbook Pro.
The big difference is that OS X mixes running and non-running app icons in a user-defined order, while the XP taskbar is segregated into distinct zones--the "quicklaunch" area, the "window tracking" area, the "clock-calendar-and-notifications" area, etc.
Personally I think Apple's way is much better, so I'm glad to see Windows moving that way too.
Unfortunately, the Creative Zen had a side scroll wheel years earlier that you'd scroll up and down to scroll through songs and click in to select etc. etc. The wheel on the iPod is different only in that you move your finger round the wheel straight on rather than having a physical wheel you scroll up and down- the concept is identical, only the implementation is different.
Yes, the "concept" of a wheel to scroll through lists is the same. But the physical experience of the interface is actually quite different. On an edge-contact scroll wheel, you can only move the list as far as the length of your thumb (or finger) pad before you have to pick up and reposition. This limits how fast you can move through the list. On a flat-contact scroll wheel, you can scroll through an infinite list continuously, which is faster. And (crucial detail) the iPod software actually scrolls the list faster the faster you move your finger (the relationship between fingertip speed and scroll speed is not linear).
The real predecessors to the iPod scroll wheel, at least physically, are the scroll wheels used in the video industry for fine frame scrolling. Like the iPod these were flat-contact wheels that allowed continuous smooth scrolling for as long as you wanted. They just were physically moving parts as opposed to a touch-sensitive surface like the iPod.
I won't claim that Apple is an amazing inventor for what they did with the iPod. I will say that they did a very good job tweaking and combining existing ideas to produce a very compelling product. Yvon Chouinard draws a difference between invention (the creation of new ideas) and innovation (the application of inventions to create a good product). By that definition I would say that Apple is an innovator.
China needs the U.S. more than vice-versa due to the relative size of the economies. The value of Chinese exports to the U.S. represents over 10% of China's GDP, but less than 3% of the U.S. GDP. The U.S. can easily afford Chinese manufactured goods...the whole reason that this import flow exists is that Chinese goods are so affordable. If China stopped trading with us, our prices would go up but we could manage. Meanwhile China would lose about 10% of their economy.
But it would not get to that point, because business interests hold a lot of sway in both societies. A Chinese leader who proposed cutting off all trade with the U.S. would face tremendous resistance. Likewise the U.S. business community puts a lot of pressure on Washington to maintain good relations with China. Neither was true during the Cold War with the U.S.S.R.
China holds somewhere around $1 trillion of U.S. Treasuries. That is a vote of confidence in our economy, as no one would put that much money into something they think is worthless. But in terms of the impact on the U.S., it is only about a day's worth of trading volume.
During the Cold War the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were competing economic systems that were largely isolated from each other. Thus we could "win" by bankrupting them.
Today the economic systems of China and the U.S. are incredibly intertwined. It is in China's best interest to keep the United States healthy as we are a major trading partner--and vice versa. Interdependent trade has a stabilizing effect on international relations. We're in competition with China but so long as we maintain our trade and other relations with them it is very unlikely to result in armed conflict or a cold war.
China does not need to "lose" for the U.S. to continue as a successful and important nation. In fact we'll be much better off in the U.S. if China continues to develop into a strong economy and responsible leader.
Have you ever noticed that in every plane crash, no matter how horrible, they're always able to recover the "black box"? And it's always intact?
Just what is that thing made of?? And maybe they should make the entire airplane out of the same stuff! Then after a crash they could just recover the entire airplane intact.
(note: not my jokes. not sure where I first heard this.)
I think you're failing to make a key distinction, which is the difference between what is true and what can be proved. Science is really only concerned with the latter. It's a practical discipline, so given two theories that match observed facts, the simpler theory will be easier to prove and thus is considered more useful. However when the theory fails to match facts, it's known to be wrong (or lacking) regardless of its simplicity. So Occam's Razor does not substitute or compensate for missing knowledge, it helps us sort the specific subset of what we think we currently know or understand.
You're right that the utility of Occam's Razor is limited by the assumptions and domain of our knowledge. But that's true for all scientific knowledge with or without Occam. The moon might fly away from the Earth tomorrow regardless of what Occam says, but scientists don't lose sleep over it because it is so far outside what can be predicted with the tools we have. It COULD happen, but since there doesn't seem to be any way to predict it right now, science doesn't care. "Call us if it happens and we'll discuss it then."
Anyway, Occam's Razor seems to have a physical analog in the principle of least action. Photons don't wander all over the place randomly, they take the simplest, shortest path. Same with gravity. Observed processes seem to be just as complex as they need to be, but no more complex. You can even make very precise quantitative predictions by integrating to predict the path with least action. Feynman won a Nobel prize for it.
AAJ uses the apostrophe (I'm looking right at it).
My Score: -1 Pedantic:-)
Congrats on the Moose's Tooth, that is far more hardcore than any climb I've done. But I've pretty much given up climbing for whitewater kayaking. The boating is way better in DC than the climbing.
I'll tell you what--when you climb the Devil's Thumb you can point out where his description was falsified. That ridge is now generally known as the Krakauer Route. See for example the Hoyt story in 2006 AAJ.
Not to be a big defender of Krakauer--I don't know him--but I think you're crossing a line. What climber doubts another climber just because he doesn't like his books? Grow up dude. They're just books.
The stronger the president gets, the more important he not be accountable to the people?
Yes. He is already far more directly tied to "the people" than the founding fathers ever intended. He's supposed to be the executive of a mixed state/national system, not a direct representative of the people. That's what the House of Representatives is for.
The EC doesn't provide any significant wisdom on top of the will of the people and the election of the president, assuming you think that would be a good thing. It adds random noise.
Noise and distance is the point. The president is not a mouthpiece for "the people"...that's what Congress is for.
The question at hand is how the use of the EC vs a straight popular vote changes the nature of the group they must appeal to. Does it require they appeal to a broader set than a popular vote would?
The U.S. representation scheme is fundamentally geographic and state-based, not ideological or individual. The electoral college enforces a broader geographic spread in state representation, which is its job. Even if the electoral college disenfranchises more individual people than its absence, it is not broken, because maximum individual enfranchisement is not an intended part of electing the president. Again--individual enfranchisement is what the House of Representatives is for.
The iPod allowed the navigation of very long lists better than any other MP3 product on the market. It's a combination of hardware and software. The scroll wheel allows you to continuously scroll without lifting your finger, while still controlling the rate. And, the software scrolls faster the faster you scroll (there is a non-linear relationship between the motion of your finger and the rate of scroll). This made it possible to quickly jump to what you want, even on a device holding thousands of songs.
On the iPhone and the iTouch the "flick scrolling" is not just a cool thing. It's essential because it provides the same capability of navigating long lists quickly and precisely. If you look back at the design patents filed during the development of the iPhone, you can see that they experimented with on-screen scroll wheels. Long scrolling is very important to the usability of handhelds.
I have co-workers that didn't know there were other candidates for president besides McCain and Obama...
That has far more to do with a corrupt and dishonest media than it does with democracy or our electoral system (or even the two parties). If the media actually covered the other candidates, or allowed them to participate in the media moderated and sponsored debates, people would know about them.
Really?? You guys have never heard of Hillary Clinton?
I think it's more likely that you're only thinking of the presidential election after the conventions. But in reality it started long before. How many major-party candidates were there for president this cycle? 2? No, it was actually over 15. It's just that most of them conceded their defeat well before November 5.
There were 3 televised debates between McCain and Obama. But, in the Democratic Primary alone there were 26 debates, 14 of which were televised on major networks, each with 5-8 participants. Just among the major party candidates there was a broad diversity of opinion from which the nation could choose, and the media covered it. I don't think it's the media's fault that most people ignore the primaries.
It's tempting to see everything the founding fathers did as wonderfully wise and perfect. But while they were quite amazingly far-sighted, they were also politicians cutting deals to get things done within the partisan realities of the day.
This is not far from the same thing. We just happen to view the deal-cutting through rose-colored glasses because those deals have resulted in one of the most durable and successful democratic nations in history.
And, it is always a good opportunity to review the principles behind those deals. The President was not intended to be a "direct representative of the people." That was the nightmare scenario for the founding fathers as they feared the "mob rule" of direct democracy.
The president today is very much the most powerful and direct representative of the people, but is this a reason to ditch the EC? No, quite the opposite--the stronger the office of the president gets, the more important it is to maintain some abstraction between that office and the mob of direct democracy.
It doesn't ensure the President is "representative of a diverse electorate" - it encourages the opposite; a President who can appeal to a few very narrow key demographics to push them over the top in a handful of states.
This is a common view of people who really only pay attention to the end of elections, where differences are magnified. But by the time a candidate has won a major party primary, all the truly niche or narrowly focused candidates have been weeded out. For example Ron Paul, for all his narrow fanatical support, did not even come close to winning his primary or the general election.
John McCain sought to distinguish himself from Obama by exploiting narrow issues, but that was AFTER he had already established himself as the Republican with the broadest national base of support.
He soloed the Devil's Thumb--nothing to sneeze at. He's not a climber anymore, but he was once.
Eiger Dreams is a collection of stories, not just about the Eiger. You should give it a chance; it's pretty good. And there's hardly any focus on death IIRC. FWIW I have not read Into the Wild or the Mormon book so I could be missing the jerkiest parts of his career.
The funny thing is that Cerro Torre, while a striking mountain, also has a relatively easy "standard route." That's because an Italian went up there with a compressor drill a few decades ago and installed a bolt ladder up the headwall. Also, it's much more of a straight "rock climb" and less of a "big mountain climb"...K2 is a much better comparison to Everest. Or Makalu. Or Gasherbrum IV. These are big Himalayan-style peaks that take much more technical prowess than Everest.
Everest should not be discounted though...much of what makes it easy is not the mountain itself, but the infrastructure that the guides install. Without them, summit day on Everest would require traversing a knife-edge ridge and then climbing a 20 foot vertical step, all above 27,000 feet and without a rope. There's a reason it took decades of trying to make the first ascent.
I think they're certified for more than one use. They're just heavy, and not needed for the (already very dangerous) descent. So climbers just leave them. It's not unknown for climbers to leave their tents either; if they've been up there any amount of time, the UV has cooked the nylon too much to be used again anyway.
Of all the various problems surrounding Everest, personally I put the left-behind bottles pretty low on my list. They are inert, frozen, and basically there is no ecosystem in the death zone for them to harm anyway. And the only people who are going to see them are other climbers, most of whom are carrying/leaving their own oxygen bottles.
Among the climbers I know, Krakauer made his name with Eiger Dreams, which to my recollection did not overly focus on death. And, keep in mind that Krakauer did not go to Everest to cover a tragedy. He went to write an article on what's it's like to be on a guided climb of Everest.
The partial pressure of oxygen depends on altitude, weather...and latitude, since the Earth's atmosphere is not evenly thick. It thins toward the poles. I've heard the partial pressure of oxygen on the summit of Denali (~20,000 ft, but near the Arctic Circle) is about the same as the partial pressure of oxygen on the summit of a 24,000 ft peak in the Himalaya (near the equator).
Even if you do consider them victims, just how is throwing said victim in jail and permanently screwing up their life with a felony record going to help?
The purpose of a law is not to help the victim, it is to provide a deterring consequence. Putting a reckless driver in jail does not undo an accident, but we still do it. The point is to deter the activity in the first place.
Putting a heroin addict in jail does not remove the pain or trouble they caused their friends and family members (not to mention themselves). But the point of possession laws is to make life hard for dealers, and perhaps to walk up the chain to them. The point of putting dealers in jail is to make it hard for children to get heroin.
This is why I am happy to include alcohol and smoking as drugs. Like most addicts, most alcoholics and tobacco addicts begin their use as children. They have ready access to alcohol and cigarettes because their parents have societally condoned possession and access to them.
Despite the hype about the ineffectiveness of the drug war, it is still way, way easier for teens to get alcohol or cigarettes than it is for them to get heroin. That is because it is way harder for their parents and friends to get heroin.
I have little problem with a 40 year old man deciding one day that he wants to try pot. It's just that it rarely happens that way.
I don't mean to pick on you especially, as many people hold this view, but it's just wrong.
"The government makes BILLIONS on the WOD, the get it from the taxpayers and they get it from confiscations."
This is 100% incorrect. The government makes no money whatsoever from the war on drugs. The government makes money by taxing the citizens, and it does not lack for reasons/excuses to do so. In case you hadn't heard, the U.S. is looking at nearly a $1 trillion deficit next year.
If the war on drugs went away tomorrow your tax bill would not change one cent. There may be a lot of reasons to oppose our current drug laws, but lowering taxes is not one of them.
Your comment makes me question whether you've had a friend or family become addicted to drugs. There is most definitely a victim. And yes, I am including alcohol.
Three-column layouts are harder, but it can be done in any of those configurations, and without sacrificing semantically correct code or scalability.
What is the semantic meaning of a DIV tag? I don't think it has any. It's just a tag we stick in the code to make layout easier. Well, TR and TD can serve the same purpose sometimes. It always cracks me up when people talk about "semantic code" and then their page source has DIVs wrapped in DIVs wrapped in DIVs so they can get the CSS layout just right. Web pages mix layout and content--that's just the way it is in HTML. There are only two real ways to separate the two:
1. A template or CMS system. Your template code is 100% layout, and the placeholder code is 100% semantic. Note that the template can be DIV- or table-based and this is equally true.
2. A full AJAX interface where the browser loads the interface code first then asynchronously calls for the content. Again--the HTML your javascript engine writes can be DIVs or tables and this is still true.
People talk about how easy it is to redesign with CSS layout, but the fact is that any real redesign starts back in Photoshop and produces new assets and new code--HTML, CSS, Javascript, and (if you're so inclined) Flash. Then you use your template system to install the new code. I don't know any professionally run Web sites that do redesigns by just uploading a new CSS file. At most a good CSS file lets you tweak paddings, margins, fonts, and colors--but again, that works just as well for tables as it does for divs.
The U.S. has the largest economy and most powerful military on the planet. Let's just say that the U.S. president's decisions are a lot more likely to affect the Dutch population, than the decisions of the Dutch prime minister are to affect the U.S. population. Ditto for almost every nation on earth.
Slashdot Mirror
As an additional note, your understanding of gravimetric motion leaves a lot to be desired. An object falling into the center of the earth won't sit there, it will act like a ball on a rubber band - bouncing back & forth through the center point as kinetic energy is transfered back & forth to potential energy.
And this does not take into account any momentum that the black hole may carry out of the collision that created it. The total effect of the Earth's gravity may simply be to bend its path as it fires off into space.
The main thing to keep in mind is, cosmic rays have energies vastly higher than the LHC. If the LHC could produce black holes, then there would be black holes floating around everywhere.
Maybe there are quantum black holes floating around everywhere. Wouldn't they be so small that interactions with other matter would be exceedingly rare? If the radius was equal to or less than the Planck length how could we ever detect them, aside from their gravity? (Of which we do seem to have a surplus.)
All we really have proof of from cosmic rays is that whether black holes are being created or not, they are not dangerous to us.
The obvious change in the new Windows Taskbar is that there are icons for non-running-applications. I don't care how you try to word it, that is the major difference between the OSX Dock and the Windows Taskbar. So Damn right it is copying it.
The taskbar in Windows XP on my work PC has a number of icons for non-running-applications. They are in the Quicklaunch area right next to the Start button. I put them there by dragging the icons, just like adding an app to the Dock in OS X on my Macbook Pro.
The big difference is that OS X mixes running and non-running app icons in a user-defined order, while the XP taskbar is segregated into distinct zones--the "quicklaunch" area, the "window tracking" area, the "clock-calendar-and-notifications" area, etc.
Personally I think Apple's way is much better, so I'm glad to see Windows moving that way too.
Unfortunately, the Creative Zen had a side scroll wheel years earlier that you'd scroll up and down to scroll through songs and click in to select etc. etc. The wheel on the iPod is different only in that you move your finger round the wheel straight on rather than having a physical wheel you scroll up and down- the concept is identical, only the implementation is different.
Yes, the "concept" of a wheel to scroll through lists is the same. But the physical experience of the interface is actually quite different. On an edge-contact scroll wheel, you can only move the list as far as the length of your thumb (or finger) pad before you have to pick up and reposition. This limits how fast you can move through the list. On a flat-contact scroll wheel, you can scroll through an infinite list continuously, which is faster. And (crucial detail) the iPod software actually scrolls the list faster the faster you move your finger (the relationship between fingertip speed and scroll speed is not linear).
The real predecessors to the iPod scroll wheel, at least physically, are the scroll wheels used in the video industry for fine frame scrolling. Like the iPod these were flat-contact wheels that allowed continuous smooth scrolling for as long as you wanted. They just were physically moving parts as opposed to a touch-sensitive surface like the iPod.
I won't claim that Apple is an amazing inventor for what they did with the iPod. I will say that they did a very good job tweaking and combining existing ideas to produce a very compelling product. Yvon Chouinard draws a difference between invention (the creation of new ideas) and innovation (the application of inventions to create a good product). By that definition I would say that Apple is an innovator.
China needs the U.S. more than vice-versa due to the relative size of the economies. The value of Chinese exports to the U.S. represents over 10% of China's GDP, but less than 3% of the U.S. GDP. The U.S. can easily afford Chinese manufactured goods...the whole reason that this import flow exists is that Chinese goods are so affordable. If China stopped trading with us, our prices would go up but we could manage. Meanwhile China would lose about 10% of their economy.
But it would not get to that point, because business interests hold a lot of sway in both societies. A Chinese leader who proposed cutting off all trade with the U.S. would face tremendous resistance. Likewise the U.S. business community puts a lot of pressure on Washington to maintain good relations with China. Neither was true during the Cold War with the U.S.S.R.
China holds somewhere around $1 trillion of U.S. Treasuries. That is a vote of confidence in our economy, as no one would put that much money into something they think is worthless. But in terms of the impact on the U.S., it is only about a day's worth of trading volume.
During the Cold War the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were competing economic systems that were largely isolated from each other. Thus we could "win" by bankrupting them.
Today the economic systems of China and the U.S. are incredibly intertwined. It is in China's best interest to keep the United States healthy as we are a major trading partner--and vice versa. Interdependent trade has a stabilizing effect on international relations. We're in competition with China but so long as we maintain our trade and other relations with them it is very unlikely to result in armed conflict or a cold war.
China does not need to "lose" for the U.S. to continue as a successful and important nation. In fact we'll be much better off in the U.S. if China continues to develop into a strong economy and responsible leader.
Have you ever noticed that in every plane crash, no matter how horrible, they're always able to recover the "black box"? And it's always intact?
Just what is that thing made of?? And maybe they should make the entire airplane out of the same stuff! Then after a crash they could just recover the entire airplane intact.
(note: not my jokes. not sure where I first heard this.)
I think you're failing to make a key distinction, which is the difference between what is true and what can be proved. Science is really only concerned with the latter. It's a practical discipline, so given two theories that match observed facts, the simpler theory will be easier to prove and thus is considered more useful. However when the theory fails to match facts, it's known to be wrong (or lacking) regardless of its simplicity. So Occam's Razor does not substitute or compensate for missing knowledge, it helps us sort the specific subset of what we think we currently know or understand.
You're right that the utility of Occam's Razor is limited by the assumptions and domain of our knowledge. But that's true for all scientific knowledge with or without Occam. The moon might fly away from the Earth tomorrow regardless of what Occam says, but scientists don't lose sleep over it because it is so far outside what can be predicted with the tools we have. It COULD happen, but since there doesn't seem to be any way to predict it right now, science doesn't care. "Call us if it happens and we'll discuss it then."
Anyway, Occam's Razor seems to have a physical analog in the principle of least action. Photons don't wander all over the place randomly, they take the simplest, shortest path. Same with gravity. Observed processes seem to be just as complex as they need to be, but no more complex. You can even make very precise quantitative predictions by integrating to predict the path with least action. Feynman won a Nobel prize for it.
AAJ uses the apostrophe (I'm looking right at it).
My Score: -1 Pedantic :-)
Congrats on the Moose's Tooth, that is far more hardcore than any climb I've done. But I've pretty much given up climbing for whitewater kayaking. The boating is way better in DC than the climbing.
cheers
I'll tell you what--when you climb the Devil's Thumb you can point out where his description was falsified. That ridge is now generally known as the Krakauer Route. See for example the Hoyt story in 2006 AAJ.
Not to be a big defender of Krakauer--I don't know him--but I think you're crossing a line. What climber doubts another climber just because he doesn't like his books? Grow up dude. They're just books.
The stronger the president gets, the more important he not be accountable to the people?
Yes. He is already far more directly tied to "the people" than the founding fathers ever intended. He's supposed to be the executive of a mixed state/national system, not a direct representative of the people. That's what the House of Representatives is for.
The EC doesn't provide any significant wisdom on top of the will of the people and the election of the president, assuming you think that would be a good thing. It adds random noise.
Noise and distance is the point. The president is not a mouthpiece for "the people"...that's what Congress is for.
The question at hand is how the use of the EC vs a straight popular vote changes the nature of the group they must appeal to. Does it require they appeal to a broader set than a popular vote would?
The U.S. representation scheme is fundamentally geographic and state-based, not ideological or individual. The electoral college enforces a broader geographic spread in state representation, which is its job. Even if the electoral college disenfranchises more individual people than its absence, it is not broken, because maximum individual enfranchisement is not an intended part of electing the president. Again--individual enfranchisement is what the House of Representatives is for.
The iPod allowed the navigation of very long lists better than any other MP3 product on the market. It's a combination of hardware and software. The scroll wheel allows you to continuously scroll without lifting your finger, while still controlling the rate. And, the software scrolls faster the faster you scroll (there is a non-linear relationship between the motion of your finger and the rate of scroll). This made it possible to quickly jump to what you want, even on a device holding thousands of songs.
On the iPhone and the iTouch the "flick scrolling" is not just a cool thing. It's essential because it provides the same capability of navigating long lists quickly and precisely. If you look back at the design patents filed during the development of the iPhone, you can see that they experimented with on-screen scroll wheels. Long scrolling is very important to the usability of handhelds.
The funny thing is Obama DID appoint a Bush administration official, and it was a big one--Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense.
I have co-workers that didn't know there were other candidates for president besides McCain and Obama...
That has far more to do with a corrupt and dishonest media than it does with democracy or our electoral system (or even the two parties). If the media actually covered the other candidates, or allowed them to participate in the media moderated and sponsored debates, people would know about them.
Really?? You guys have never heard of Hillary Clinton?
I think it's more likely that you're only thinking of the presidential election after the conventions. But in reality it started long before. How many major-party candidates were there for president this cycle? 2? No, it was actually over 15. It's just that most of them conceded their defeat well before November 5.
There were 3 televised debates between McCain and Obama. But, in the Democratic Primary alone there were 26 debates, 14 of which were televised on major networks, each with 5-8 participants. Just among the major party candidates there was a broad diversity of opinion from which the nation could choose, and the media covered it. I don't think it's the media's fault that most people ignore the primaries.
It's tempting to see everything the founding fathers did as wonderfully wise and perfect. But while they were quite amazingly far-sighted, they were also politicians cutting deals to get things done within the partisan realities of the day.
This is not far from the same thing. We just happen to view the deal-cutting through rose-colored glasses because those deals have resulted in one of the most durable and successful democratic nations in history.
And, it is always a good opportunity to review the principles behind those deals. The President was not intended to be a "direct representative of the people." That was the nightmare scenario for the founding fathers as they feared the "mob rule" of direct democracy.
The president today is very much the most powerful and direct representative of the people, but is this a reason to ditch the EC? No, quite the opposite--the stronger the office of the president gets, the more important it is to maintain some abstraction between that office and the mob of direct democracy.
It doesn't ensure the President is "representative of a diverse electorate" - it encourages the opposite; a President who can appeal to a few very narrow key demographics to push them over the top in a handful of states.
This is a common view of people who really only pay attention to the end of elections, where differences are magnified. But by the time a candidate has won a major party primary, all the truly niche or narrowly focused candidates have been weeded out. For example Ron Paul, for all his narrow fanatical support, did not even come close to winning his primary or the general election.
John McCain sought to distinguish himself from Obama by exploiting narrow issues, but that was AFTER he had already established himself as the Republican with the broadest national base of support.
He soloed the Devil's Thumb--nothing to sneeze at. He's not a climber anymore, but he was once.
Eiger Dreams is a collection of stories, not just about the Eiger. You should give it a chance; it's pretty good. And there's hardly any focus on death IIRC. FWIW I have not read Into the Wild or the Mormon book so I could be missing the jerkiest parts of his career.
The funny thing is that Cerro Torre, while a striking mountain, also has a relatively easy "standard route." That's because an Italian went up there with a compressor drill a few decades ago and installed a bolt ladder up the headwall. Also, it's much more of a straight "rock climb" and less of a "big mountain climb"...K2 is a much better comparison to Everest. Or Makalu. Or Gasherbrum IV. These are big Himalayan-style peaks that take much more technical prowess than Everest.
Everest should not be discounted though...much of what makes it easy is not the mountain itself, but the infrastructure that the guides install. Without them, summit day on Everest would require traversing a knife-edge ridge and then climbing a 20 foot vertical step, all above 27,000 feet and without a rope. There's a reason it took decades of trying to make the first ascent.
I think they're certified for more than one use. They're just heavy, and not needed for the (already very dangerous) descent. So climbers just leave them. It's not unknown for climbers to leave their tents either; if they've been up there any amount of time, the UV has cooked the nylon too much to be used again anyway.
Of all the various problems surrounding Everest, personally I put the left-behind bottles pretty low on my list. They are inert, frozen, and basically there is no ecosystem in the death zone for them to harm anyway. And the only people who are going to see them are other climbers, most of whom are carrying/leaving their own oxygen bottles.
Among the climbers I know, Krakauer made his name with Eiger Dreams, which to my recollection did not overly focus on death. And, keep in mind that Krakauer did not go to Everest to cover a tragedy. He went to write an article on what's it's like to be on a guided climb of Everest.
The partial pressure of oxygen depends on altitude, weather...and latitude, since the Earth's atmosphere is not evenly thick. It thins toward the poles. I've heard the partial pressure of oxygen on the summit of Denali (~20,000 ft, but near the Arctic Circle) is about the same as the partial pressure of oxygen on the summit of a 24,000 ft peak in the Himalaya (near the equator).
Even if you do consider them victims, just how is throwing said victim in jail and permanently screwing up their life with a felony record going to help?
The purpose of a law is not to help the victim, it is to provide a deterring consequence. Putting a reckless driver in jail does not undo an accident, but we still do it. The point is to deter the activity in the first place.
Putting a heroin addict in jail does not remove the pain or trouble they caused their friends and family members (not to mention themselves). But the point of possession laws is to make life hard for dealers, and perhaps to walk up the chain to them. The point of putting dealers in jail is to make it hard for children to get heroin.
This is why I am happy to include alcohol and smoking as drugs. Like most addicts, most alcoholics and tobacco addicts begin their use as children. They have ready access to alcohol and cigarettes because their parents have societally condoned possession and access to them.
Despite the hype about the ineffectiveness of the drug war, it is still way, way easier for teens to get alcohol or cigarettes than it is for them to get heroin. That is because it is way harder for their parents and friends to get heroin.
I have little problem with a 40 year old man deciding one day that he wants to try pot. It's just that it rarely happens that way.
I don't mean to pick on you especially, as many people hold this view, but it's just wrong.
"The government makes BILLIONS on the WOD, the get it from the taxpayers and they get it from confiscations."
This is 100% incorrect. The government makes no money whatsoever from the war on drugs. The government makes money by taxing the citizens, and it does not lack for reasons/excuses to do so. In case you hadn't heard, the U.S. is looking at nearly a $1 trillion deficit next year.
If the war on drugs went away tomorrow your tax bill would not change one cent. There may be a lot of reasons to oppose our current drug laws, but lowering taxes is not one of them.
Your comment makes me question whether you've had a friend or family become addicted to drugs. There is most definitely a victim. And yes, I am including alcohol.
Three-column layouts are harder, but it can be done in any of those configurations, and without sacrificing semantically correct code or scalability.
What is the semantic meaning of a DIV tag? I don't think it has any. It's just a tag we stick in the code to make layout easier. Well, TR and TD can serve the same purpose sometimes. It always cracks me up when people talk about "semantic code" and then their page source has DIVs wrapped in DIVs wrapped in DIVs so they can get the CSS layout just right. Web pages mix layout and content--that's just the way it is in HTML. There are only two real ways to separate the two:
1. A template or CMS system. Your template code is 100% layout, and the placeholder code is 100% semantic. Note that the template can be DIV- or table-based and this is equally true.
2. A full AJAX interface where the browser loads the interface code first then asynchronously calls for the content. Again--the HTML your javascript engine writes can be DIVs or tables and this is still true.
People talk about how easy it is to redesign with CSS layout, but the fact is that any real redesign starts back in Photoshop and produces new assets and new code--HTML, CSS, Javascript, and (if you're so inclined) Flash. Then you use your template system to install the new code. I don't know any professionally run Web sites that do redesigns by just uploading a new CSS file. At most a good CSS file lets you tweak paddings, margins, fonts, and colors--but again, that works just as well for tables as it does for divs.
The U.S. has the largest economy and most powerful military on the planet. Let's just say that the U.S. president's decisions are a lot more likely to affect the Dutch population, than the decisions of the Dutch prime minister are to affect the U.S. population. Ditto for almost every nation on earth.