I disagree. Your friends aren't generally going to post "Hey! Here's my friend's home phone number, since he neglected to put it up on his own info page!"
Yeah, you'd never reply to a private message saying, "hey bud, what's your cell # again, i water damaged my phone and lost it...?" with anything except... "hey I'd tell you but I choose what to release on facebook. meet me at midnight in the graveyard and I'll tell you in person". right?
And even inoccuous stuff like..."My son had fun at Natalie's 8th birthday on Saturday!" -- was your daughters birthdate something you wanted to provide facebook?
Or "Hey, your Uncle Gord was a riot... check out this picture of him on the slip-n-slide at the party with the birthday girl"
Ok... so the pic your friend posted has your uncle tagged...I see he's got a different last name from you... decent odds that's your mothers maiden name.
Oh, and the pic contains your daughter too... along with a decent angle on your back yard. Couple that with the gps meta... and we know where your little girl lives, confirmed with google satellite view to help match the backyard.
Your uncles profile happens to mentions how he's taking care of his father (your grandfather) with a[genetic condition that skips a generation], and deduce that you are at elevated risk for this condition.
And that's just the start of the creepiness.
But it was quickly clear that their lives and mine had practically nothing in common.)
You could make that argument, but it'd be pretty clear that you were distant based on frequency and content of interaction, etc.
but you don't need a social networking web site to accomplish that. In the "good old days", this same info was culled by private detectives and investigators who simply went out and talked to people who knew you or about you
Correct. But someone had to hire a private detective to go out and talk to all these people, and follow you around.... one couldn't build profiles on more than a handful of people by hiring private detectives due to the cost.
Reduce the cost to next to nothing, and the they will build profiles on everyone.
Suppose you attended a party and elected not to say a single word. How much do you think I could find out about you simply by listening in on all your friends?
Facebook doesn't need you to post. Other people can fill in the blanks for them. You don't decide what information they release about you.
So how long before downloading a song in Canada is re-defined as an act of war, so you can invade if we don't turn the suspect over so he can be tried (er... disappeared into a secret prison and tortured).
I'm being facetious of course, but I genuinely do view "terrorists" as criminals, and terrorist suspects as criminal suspects with all the rights accorded to them.
Oh hurrah, lets celebrate because the great united states murdered somebody halfway around the world.
You do realize that the speed limit isn't 96km/h, and we don't go around estimating 30.5cm increments either.
The math is clean enough at long distance highway speeds. So a 400km trip...at 100km/h... 400km/100km/h = 4h yeah that was pretty painful. And for short distances at urban speed... stop signs, traffic, and street lights throw a such a huge wrench into any normal urban commute that estimating time by distance at 2 minutes per mile is absurd . A mere 3 1 minute stop lights in a 5 mile trip make a 2minute per mile estimate off by 30% making it pretty worthless as a "rule of thumb".
not to mention that common everyday occurrences that are approximately "one foot" long are then 30.5 centimeters
Things that are "approximately one foot long" are also "approximately 30 centimeters long" which factors nicely to 2x3x5. But when looking at things that are under a foot long, we don't bother dividing... we just directly estimate it at 10cm or 15cm or 25cm.
Its really a non issue. Even your assretion that a foot is easily divided into 2/3/4/6/12 while metric only divides into 5/10 is misleading. Metric divides evenly into 2/5/10. And 4 isn't hard either... unless you find dividing a dollar (100 cents) into 25 cents (aka quarters) complex. So in practice metric is good for 2/4/5/10. Which is about as versatile as imperial really... especially as I've never divided anything into 12ths in my entire life, and 6ths is pretty rare. 3rds would be useful to be sure, but so are 5ths and 10ths. And 10ths of course are utterly trivial... along with most unit conversions.
And there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn't just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!
"Surprised by X" is simply "I did not expect X". "Taken aback by X" is also surprise, but usually with a negative connotation. One doesn't usually say they were "taken aback" when something works out better than expected and everything is great.
"I was taken aback that my boss rejected my proposal" - surprised, with a negative connotation. The speaker worked hard on it, and expected its value to be recognized. He's perturbed that it wasn't.
You don't usually hear someone say, "I was taken aback that my boss accepted my proposal"... unless they are being ironic and they thought the proposal was junk, and that their boss should have rejected it.")
I have several (6) monitors, and being able to spread stuff out is nice.
You do, of course, realize the vast majority of people using the software have a single monitor, right. A tiny fraction have 2. The number of people on the planet with 6 monitors using gimp regularly would probably fit in my garage.
So although you are happy with your setup, and the way you organize windows works for you, its not an option for most people.
Now imagine an economy in which the 10 workers each make 10 widgets a year, a total of 100. At the end of the year, they all get paid and they will all end up with an average of 10 widgets each.
So the workers collectively own the capital that enables production in the 2nd example? How cute. In the real world one guy gets 100 widgets and the workers get paid their arbitrary scrip.
They all just got 100 times richer.
One guy got 100 times richer. The economy as a whole expanded due to the real productivity increase. The workers are still fucked.
Inflation is what happens when you have extra money chasing the same amount of goods and services around. It does *not* apply when you have increased goods and services. If you could double the output of all factories on the earth, our real per capita wealth would double.
Only if "we" collectively owned the output of production would it actually affect "us". We don't. If we double the output of all the factories on earth, the small handful of factory owners would be vastly wealthier, while the rest of us would be in about the same place we are now.
It's so infuriating to hear people like you try to make excuses for your greed and jealousy instead of just doing more with your life and earning as much money as you wish you had.
Its infuriating to hear people like you suggesting things that simply are NOT POSSIBLE.
An individual can work harder, and accrue more purchasing power relative to his peers. But it only works on an individual level.
As a "system" it falls flat on its face. What happens if EVERYONE who was poor jumped on your bandwagon and started "doing more with their lives and earning as much money as they wish they had"? I mean EVERYONE.
Simple: money is devalued and their buying power stays the same; aka price inflation.
Better still, as their collective production and value increases your own relative wealth and buying power decreases; as you are already "doing more with your life" and cannot "work even harder" by the same relative amount to maintain your relative advantage.
So your solution to the problem, if everybody got on board not only wouldn't solve the problem, but would more then likely take you down a notch in the process.
I prefer solutions that address the realtity that in any sort of capitalism the majority of the people will be at the bottom. If you move everyone out of the bottom, you just establish a new bottom, and everyone ends up in the same relative place.
So instead of vainly trying to suggest poverty is a problem that can be eliminated if only everyone worked harder its better to spend your time figuring out how to make the bottom livable, with as much opportunity for motivated individuals to escape it as possible.
IIRC, every math or science test I had in college was open notes/open book, and most were take-home tests. Memorization was not rewarded; ability to apply techniques was.
There are dozens of websites where you submit your question, and you get the answer back. A few of them are free, others charge. Is that the technique you were being tested on with your take home tests?
That's about the only technique you'd be reliably testing today.
but it raises the question: 'Why are we teaching a generation of students to use crippled technology?'"
And the proposed alternative? Raise a generation of kids who can't do calculus by hand? Derivatives and Integrals and limits just come out of the magic computer box?
As it is, kids get no technology to learn elementary mathematics / arithmetic.
They get basic calculators in high school while they are learning algebra and trig and pre-calculus to do the grunt arithmetic. They get basic calculators once they know how to do what the calculators can do.
They get graphing calculators in college/university while they are learning calculus, differential equations and beyond to do the grunt algebra, trig, and arithmetic. They get graphing calculators once they know how to do what the graphing calculators can do.
Then they get computers, and they can use them to tackle advanced mathematics. And the math the computer does for them isn't magic box. They could do it themselves in principle, although they recognize that it would take man-lifetimes to do some of what they are asking it to do.
I think understanding what the tool is doing is crucial. A child being raised to farm should know how the earth should look when its turned properly, how much seed to distribute to an area, how much water is needed, what to harvest, when to harvest it, and how etc. He doesn't need wander around the yard with a scythe, or push a plow with oxen but he if you want to test that he knows these things you you can't give him a push button FarmingComputer9000 either with a buttons for "plow field", "plant seed", "irrigate", "harvest". That child may be able to operate the FarmingComputer9000... but he hasn't got a clue how to farm.
But since you asked, I doubt that retrofitting any additional safeguards into the current reactors would be cost effective, and you still end up with a 30 year old reactor that's a bit safer.
If it were up to me, I'd say scrap the current reactors and replace them with a more modern design that is more intrinsically safe
For sure. I'd said refit, but I'd be even happier with replace too.
The odds of any aliens considering it worthwhile to travel all the way to our planet, except for the purpose of exterminating us, are extremely small. We're still here, so obviously they haven't been here.
And yet we're plumbing the depths of the oceans, the insides of volcanoes, and the surface of mars... and we get excited when we find evidence bacteria might have been there at some point...... just saying.
Between insuring my car for pleasure instead of to/from work, and not driving to and from work 5 days a week ($100+/week in gas), not to mention extra maintenance.
One could easily take modest pay cut and end up further ahead at the end of the day.
The extra couple hours a day of time not behind the wheel are just an added bonus.
I telecommute. Because I telecommute I only need "after school care", which saves me about 50% right there; I drop the kids off at school, and then return home and get to work.
Telecommuting also gets me and the kids a couple extra hours of sleep in the morning.
How about simply don't give them a license to drive?
The urge to drive isn't quite the same as the urge to have sex. People are going to do it whether you give them a license to or not.
We already have mechanism where families that shouldn't have kids, don't have kids. It's called Social Services, or Family Services, or whatever you want to call them in your area. These organizations have the power to take the kids away for their own safety, in some circumstances.
Social services is already straining to find better homes for the kids they are taking out of their homes.
If you substantially raised the bar on what constituted a "qualifed parent"... the flood of kids who would need to be relocated and raised by "qualified parents" would overwhelm them like a tsunami against sand castle.
There would be nowhere to place hordes of children.
We don't need to go down the route of Eugenics and forced abortions. Even China, the policy of forced sterilization is currently only used in extreme circumstances (eg. drug addicts, prisoners, etc.).. Yes, I know it was used more liberally in the past.
I've heard and read otherwise. That forced abortions and forced sterilization was commonly inflicted on people who violated the birth rules.
I suppose that if they refused or were unable to pay the fines then they would qualify as "criminals" and "prisoners" though.
However, the number of children who would get such a message[...] are few in number I think
Exactly. "You think"!
And that right there is why its worthy of study. Lets actually find out how few in number it is.
Then those families shouldn't have children.
And the only way you get to enforce that is a policy of eugenics, forced abortions, and sterilization.
I may well agree that many people shouldn't have children, but I have no desire whatsoever to live in a society that actually tries to decide who and then enforces it.
Even if this self-pitying myth about "Satan's war on the church" were actual truth, the Church should embrace it. Because it's "god's plan" to offer us temptation for us to refuse. The Internet is doing god's work.
You just said that God's plan was for them to "refuse". So here they are "refusing"... they are doing precisely what you said the plan was.
So why are you saying they should "embrace" it? Or are you saying they should embrace it because its an opportunity to refuse? In which case, that's idiotic.
Just as its idiotic to suggest that the police should be embracing criminals, and should probably celebrate when a new organized crime syndicate moves into town, because then they have more criminals to track down.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. Your friends aren't generally going to post "Hey! Here's my friend's home phone number, since he neglected to put it up on his own info page!"
Yeah, you'd never reply to a private message saying, "hey bud, what's your cell # again, i water damaged my phone and lost it...?" with anything except... "hey I'd tell you but I choose what to release on facebook. meet me at midnight in the graveyard and I'll tell you in person". right?
And even inoccuous stuff like..."My son had fun at Natalie's 8th birthday on Saturday!" -- was your daughters birthdate something you wanted to provide facebook?
Or "Hey, your Uncle Gord was a riot... check out this picture of him on the slip-n-slide at the party with the birthday girl"
Ok... so the pic your friend posted has your uncle tagged...I see he's got a different last name from you... decent odds that's your mothers maiden name.
Oh, and the pic contains your daughter too... along with a decent angle on your back yard. Couple that with the gps meta... and we know where your little girl lives, confirmed with google satellite view to help match the backyard.
Your uncles profile happens to mentions how he's taking care of his father (your grandfather) with a[genetic condition that skips a generation], and deduce that you are at elevated risk for this condition.
And that's just the start of the creepiness.
But it was quickly clear that their lives and mine had practically nothing in common.)
You could make that argument, but it'd be pretty clear that you were distant based on frequency and content of interaction, etc.
but you don't need a social networking web site to accomplish that. In the "good old days", this same info was culled by private detectives and investigators who simply went out and talked to people who knew you or about you
Correct. But someone had to hire a private detective to go out and talk to all these people, and follow you around.... one couldn't build profiles on more than a handful of people by hiring private detectives due to the cost.
Reduce the cost to next to nothing, and the they will build profiles on everyone.
I choose what to release...
Suppose you attended a party and elected not to say a single word. How much do you think I could find out about you simply by listening in on all your friends?
Facebook doesn't need you to post. Other people can fill in the blanks for them. You don't decide what information they release about you.
if someone commits an act of war
So how long before downloading a song in Canada is re-defined as an act of war, so you can invade if we don't turn the suspect over so he can be tried (er... disappeared into a secret prison and tortured).
I'm being facetious of course, but I genuinely do view "terrorists" as criminals, and terrorist suspects as criminal suspects with all the rights accorded to them.
Oh hurrah, lets celebrate because the great united states murdered somebody halfway around the world.
This whole fiasco just martyrs the guy.
96 km/h? Ah fuck.
You do realize that the speed limit isn't 96km/h, and we don't go around estimating 30.5cm increments either.
The math is clean enough at long distance highway speeds. So a 400km trip...at 100km/h... 400km/100km/h = 4h yeah that was pretty painful. And for short distances at urban speed... stop signs, traffic, and street lights throw a such a huge wrench into any normal urban commute that estimating time by distance at 2 minutes per mile is absurd . A mere 3 1 minute stop lights in a 5 mile trip make a 2minute per mile estimate off by 30% making it pretty worthless as a "rule of thumb".
not to mention that common everyday occurrences that are approximately "one foot" long are then 30.5 centimeters
Things that are "approximately one foot long" are also "approximately 30 centimeters long" which factors nicely to 2x3x5. But when looking at things that are under a foot long, we don't bother dividing... we just directly estimate it at 10cm or 15cm or 25cm.
Its really a non issue. Even your assretion that a foot is easily divided into 2/3/4/6/12 while metric only divides into 5/10 is misleading. Metric divides evenly into 2/5/10. And 4 isn't hard either... unless you find dividing a dollar (100 cents) into 25 cents (aka quarters) complex. So in practice metric is good for 2/4/5/10. Which is about as versatile as imperial really... especially as I've never divided anything into 12ths in my entire life, and 6ths is pretty rare. 3rds would be useful to be sure, but so are 5ths and 10ths. And 10ths of course are utterly trivial... along with most unit conversions.
And there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn't just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!
If games are indeed art, as many have argued in recent times, then moral ambiguity is an important component.
Monet's world famous landscape paintings are definitely art, and not remotely "morally ambiguous". Just one example, of countless...
Taken aback = surprised
Few words are really ever exactly equal.
"Surprised by X" is simply "I did not expect X".
"Taken aback by X" is also surprise, but usually with a negative connotation. One doesn't usually say they were "taken aback" when something works out better than expected and everything is great.
"I was taken aback that my boss rejected my proposal" - surprised, with a negative connotation. The speaker worked hard on it, and expected its value to be recognized. He's perturbed that it wasn't.
You don't usually hear someone say, "I was taken aback that my boss accepted my proposal"... unless they are being ironic and they thought the proposal was junk, and that their boss should have rejected it.")
Everyone using a modern OS can have virtual desktops of some sort.
And almost nobody uses them.
I have several (6) monitors, and being able to spread stuff out is nice.
You do, of course, realize the vast majority of people using the software have a single monitor, right. A tiny fraction have 2. The number of people on the planet with 6 monitors using gimp regularly would probably fit in my garage.
So although you are happy with your setup, and the way you organize windows works for you, its not an option for most people.
Now imagine an economy in which the 10 workers each make 10 widgets a year, a total of 100. At the end of the year, they all get paid and they will all end up with an average of 10 widgets each.
So the workers collectively own the capital that enables production in the 2nd example? How cute. In the real world one guy gets 100 widgets and the workers get paid their arbitrary scrip.
They all just got 100 times richer.
One guy got 100 times richer. The economy as a whole expanded due to the real productivity increase. The workers are still fucked.
Inflation is what happens when you have extra money chasing the same amount of goods and services around. It does *not* apply when you have increased goods and services. If you could double the output of all factories on the earth, our real per capita wealth would double.
Only if "we" collectively owned the output of production would it actually affect "us". We don't. If we double the output of all the factories on earth, the small handful of factory owners would be vastly wealthier, while the rest of us would be in about the same place we are now.
It's so infuriating to hear people like you try to make excuses for your greed and jealousy instead of just doing more with your life and earning as much money as you wish you had.
Its infuriating to hear people like you suggesting things that simply are NOT POSSIBLE.
An individual can work harder, and accrue more purchasing power relative to his peers. But it only works on an individual level.
As a "system" it falls flat on its face. What happens if EVERYONE who was poor jumped on your bandwagon and started "doing more with their lives and earning as much money as they wish they had"? I mean EVERYONE.
Simple: money is devalued and their buying power stays the same; aka price inflation.
Better still, as their collective production and value increases your own relative wealth and buying power decreases; as you are already "doing more with your life" and cannot "work even harder" by the same relative amount to maintain your relative advantage.
So your solution to the problem, if everybody got on board not only wouldn't solve the problem, but would more then likely take you down a notch in the process.
I prefer solutions that address the realtity that in any sort of capitalism the majority of the people will be at the bottom. If you move everyone out of the bottom, you just establish a new bottom, and everyone ends up in the same relative place.
So instead of vainly trying to suggest poverty is a problem that can be eliminated if only everyone worked harder its better to spend your time figuring out how to make the bottom livable, with as much opportunity for motivated individuals to escape it as possible.
Anyone fighting the US could use this information to help formulate their strategies should they chose to engage.
Meanwhile the US is actively teaching tactics to a variety of foreign entities. Soldiers for hire are all over the place; most of them ex-military.
I think you over estimate the real value of this information. Its not all that hard to come by.
IIRC, every math or science test I had in college was open notes/open book, and most were take-home tests. Memorization was not rewarded; ability to apply techniques was.
There are dozens of websites where you submit your question, and you get the answer back. A few of them are free, others charge. Is that the technique you were being tested on with your take home tests?
That's about the only technique you'd be reliably testing today.
but it raises the question: 'Why are we teaching a generation of students to use crippled technology?'"
And the proposed alternative? Raise a generation of kids who can't do calculus by hand? Derivatives and Integrals and limits just come out of the magic computer box?
As it is, kids get no technology to learn elementary mathematics / arithmetic.
They get basic calculators in high school while they are learning algebra and trig and pre-calculus to do the grunt arithmetic. They get basic calculators once they know how to do what the calculators can do.
They get graphing calculators in college/university while they are learning calculus, differential equations and beyond to do the grunt algebra, trig, and arithmetic. They get graphing calculators once they know how to do what the graphing calculators can do.
Then they get computers, and they can use them to tackle advanced mathematics. And the math the computer does for them isn't magic box. They could do it themselves in principle, although they recognize that it would take man-lifetimes to do some of what they are asking it to do.
I think understanding what the tool is doing is crucial. A child being raised to farm should know how the earth should look when its turned properly, how much seed to distribute to an area, how much water is needed, what to harvest, when to harvest it, and how etc. He doesn't need wander around the yard with a scythe, or push a plow with oxen but he if you want to test that he knows these things you you can't give him a push button FarmingComputer9000 either with a buttons for "plow field", "plant seed", "irrigate", "harvest". That child may be able to operate the FarmingComputer9000... but he hasn't got a clue how to farm.
But since you asked, I doubt that retrofitting any additional safeguards into the current reactors would be cost effective, and you still end up with a 30 year old reactor that's a bit safer.
If it were up to me, I'd say scrap the current reactors and replace them with a more modern design that is more intrinsically safe
For sure. I'd said refit, but I'd be even happier with replace too.
Ok... so you are saying we need to fix and/or refit two reactors to ensure they are more robust than they currently are.
I don't think you'll find anyone here who will argue with you on that, except maybe whoever has to foot the bill of course.
And little green men in flying saucers seems a little too -- how should I put it --- mundane?
That's what the little green men say too...
Giant pale men to full on mocha-men in flying wiener shaped spacecraft? Tee hee,...
The odds of any aliens considering it worthwhile to travel all the way to our planet, except for the purpose of exterminating us, are extremely small. We're still here, so obviously they haven't been here.
And yet we're plumbing the depths of the oceans, the insides of volcanoes, and the surface of mars... and we get excited when we find evidence bacteria might have been there at some point... ... just saying.
They aren't necessarily "paying for it".
Commuting is easily $6000 year out of my pocket.
Between insuring my car for pleasure instead of to/from work, and not driving to and from work 5 days a week ($100+/week in gas), not to mention extra maintenance.
One could easily take modest pay cut and end up further ahead at the end of the day.
The extra couple hours a day of time not behind the wheel are just an added bonus.
I telecommute. Because I telecommute I only need "after school care", which saves me about 50% right there; I drop the kids off at school, and then return home and get to work.
Telecommuting also gets me and the kids a couple extra hours of sleep in the morning.
And? Are you suggesting that I am "for" any of those? Or would like to live in a society that did this?
That other societies have done this is just as reprehensible...
How about simply don't give them a license to drive?
The urge to drive isn't quite the same as the urge to have sex. People are going to do it whether you give them a license to or not.
We already have mechanism where families that shouldn't have kids, don't have kids. It's called Social Services, or Family Services, or whatever you want to call them in your area. These organizations have the power to take the kids away for their own safety, in some circumstances.
Social services is already straining to find better homes for the kids they are taking out of their homes.
If you substantially raised the bar on what constituted a "qualifed parent"... the flood of kids who would need to be relocated and raised by "qualified parents" would overwhelm them like a tsunami against sand castle.
There would be nowhere to place hordes of children.
We don't need to go down the route of Eugenics and forced abortions. Even China, the policy of forced sterilization is currently only used in extreme circumstances (eg. drug addicts, prisoners, etc.).. Yes, I know it was used more liberally in the past.
I've heard and read otherwise. That forced abortions and forced sterilization was commonly inflicted on people who violated the birth rules.
I suppose that if they refused or were unable to pay the fines then they would qualify as "criminals" and "prisoners" though.
Man! Maybe now we'll find out what color Bruce Willis' hair is.
http://www.davidandmaddie.com/chemistry-newsweek86.htm
Bruce Willis, 1986
http://photos.telestrekoza.com/var/albums/Classic_shows/Moonlighting/Cast/Moonlighting_Bruce_Willis_001.jpg
http://photos.telestrekoza.com/var/albums/Classic_shows/Moonlighting/Cast/Moonlighting_Bruce_Willis_002.jpg
However, the number of children who would get such a message[...] are few in number I think
Exactly. "You think"!
And that right there is why its worthy of study. Lets actually find out how few in number it is.
Then those families shouldn't have children.
And the only way you get to enforce that is a policy of eugenics, forced abortions, and sterilization.
I may well agree that many people shouldn't have children, but I have no desire whatsoever to live in a society that actually tries to decide who and then enforces it.
Even if this self-pitying myth about "Satan's war on the church" were actual truth, the Church should embrace it. Because it's "god's plan" to offer us temptation for us to refuse. The Internet is doing god's work.
You just said that God's plan was for them to "refuse". So here they are "refusing"... they are doing precisely what you said the plan was.
So why are you saying they should "embrace" it? Or are you saying they should embrace it because its an opportunity to refuse? In which case, that's idiotic.
Just as its idiotic to suggest that the police should be embracing criminals, and should probably celebrate when a new organized crime syndicate moves into town, because then they have more criminals to track down.