Well.... do we really need to review the differences between democracy and republic again? I thought everyone knew that this was a republic, which tends to be a form of aristocracy. It has its pros and cons over a direct democracy, and tends to be a bit better at some areas of protecting fundamental rights... at least the ones explicitly stated in the constitution end up having SOME protection (if not as much as we would like).
In a simple democracy, you could expect radical changes in policy after every news story. Most people really don't pay enough attention to have a really useful opinion. However, this obscures the fact that many issues are so complicated that nobody actually has a really useful opinion. I think this is a larger problem, since... well... thats the situation where the bureaucrats really flourish.
My thoughts tend to run like this.... the US has a good.... lets say.... first draft. There are some rights that have been well protected. I regularly spout off about overthrow of the government, and nobody has come knocking on my door yet (well this one democrat did, but she was just stumping for the governor... and boy did she leave unsatisfied)
Direct democracy could probably be implemented and work in very small scales. A community level, or a commune level, or household, or whatever you want to call it. However, its only democracy if its actually voluntary. If I can't effectively leave (lets face it "leave the country" is of big enough scope and has enough issues to be a ridiculous remedy to suggest, but, "move to another town or city", is way more reasonable). A captive democracy just degenerates into the tyranny of the 51%.
Democracy really works best when all of its participants are interested and involved. That ONLY works at a level that has a relatively small scope.
Republics work at a much larger scale and, with proper limits on their power, can do much better at protecting the minority rights. As someone said "the liberty to do what everyone approves of is not liberty". The problem that I see is that they were never limited enough, and have way overstepped their intended role to the point that they have become a sort of limited tyranny.
Actually.... it looks like he didn't know what it was at all, I am pretty sure that the battleship quote was just a snarky comment.
Though this reminds me of implementing a notification system. It was a web page that allowed notices to be posted, and also to have them be pushed out onto email and usenet (yah, it was a while ago). Lets never mind that my boss had me write the thing before he sent me (alone) to the design comittee with instructions "don't let them know its written already, try to resist any fundamental changes they might want to make"....
Anyway, they wanted an ability to "delete posts". I pushed back because well... you can't delete an email or usenet post. In the end, we settled on a "double secret" function that would allow an admin to make a post dissapear from the main site. Of course, the posting and email functionality was supposed to be "turned on later", and never got turned on (for reasons of organizational disorganization not a rational decision), so I guess it turned out to be enough:)
which leads me to ask, why the ISP offered unlimited access in the first place, if they are going to impose a limit. Certainly, I understand the economics of someone using the line constantly but... well... that is why he wanted unlimited service, which is what is probably what was advertised. A TOS is all nice and everything, but, someone who really wants their agreements honored should generally consider truth in advertising.
Not that having that argument with an ISP back when I had a modem pissed me off or anything but, I wouldn't have even considered using them as an ISP if they hadn't advertised "unlimited". From my perspective, a little truth up front could have avoided the whole issue.
It is very tempting to think the nodes "do all the work". The nodes work is just the minting cost. By making the cost of minting very high and distributed, they make analogs of counterfeiting hard. Thats really all it is... all that "work" is just the overhead required to make cheating hard.... it has nothing to do with the real value of the "coin".
Bitcoin, like all currency, derives value from its uses. It can currently be used to rent a server, get a domain, and perform several other transactions (including betting on poker and a lottery) You are right in that the real uses need to expand greatly.
The simple fact is, right now, you can't "mine" bitcoins. You can participate, and yes, you might get some bitcoins out of it. However, it takes so much computing power, and so much time, that its just not really worth it to do for most people. Its maybe, worth it to keep the system going, or for people who, for some reason, have spare GPUs to put at the task, but... the primary way of getting bitcoins is.... to exchange them for cash.
I can see that. Though there are two parts to the myth. First, yes, can it be done at all, I think the answer is clearly yes, since this sort of solar furnace is used. The bigger question is... can it be implemented.... using nothing more than ingenuity and tools available to Archimedes?
There are a couple of problems with it as a "Defensive Weapon". Aside from weather conditions, you need the ships to pass through the fixed focal point, or, you need the move the focal point to the ships.
My problem with calling it busted is...it has been made to work. Clearly accounts of technical details, unless sketched and painstakingly documented by the principle inventor, tend to not get better over time. Was it soldiers with shields? Or was that a hasty description of some sort of mounted mirror device with a person working it. (for focus)
I could imagine devising some sort of aiming device to take the angle of the sun into account to aim each mirror individually, if the device could allow a man to line up the spot without burning his eyes, then it seems that a stationary ship isn't even needed.
However, if a ship can be set on fire in 10 minutes, then it can be set alight. The power of such a device increases with the number of mirrors, perhaps he just had a lot more of them setup than anyone has come to expect? Though, the observation that such a device could easily blind the crew of a ship is definite possibility too.
Seems pretty doable to me.... at least, if you have a whole town full of people who are scared of the Romans... and leaders who are willing to listen to the smart guy.
So you sympathize with the methods of the military folk? The ones who go around dropping bombs on people and using violence, but not the guy who releases information and has threatened nobody with violence. The military folk put themselves in danger when they signed up. I see no need to sympathize with them, they get paid.
Though who says DNS is THE name system? If people decide to stop using it, then those definitions don't matter anymore. This is enough to convince me that I am open to possible transitions.
Look at bitcoin. No crypto. As I said in a couple of other posts, a DNS system based on a proof of work chain would... be much easier to do without ANY central authority. It means giving up the ability to EVER revoke a domain. However, that is kind of the point. To reduce the any manner of physical coercion (legal or otherwise) as a useful tool.
Some crypto would be used in implementing such a scheme, but, the problem goes far beyond anything that crypto alone can solve.
Think about this... proof of work proofs can be made so hard as to require many systems working in parallel to solve. This is how bitcoin works now. There is a simple agreement that people adding to the block chain (the chain is basically a transaction log) gets some defined number of "coins" (its a function of the block number being added). This is how new money is "minted"... really... just a log entry added to the chain that comes from its position in the chain, rather than some existing "account".
So... all this scheme really needs is to tweak generation so it never decreases the number of coins (and in fact, may increase) and then agree on a time limit. So you transfer "coins" into an "account". Add a new block type that allows you to associate a name that is not currently already taken with an account, and say that all accounts lose coins at a defined rate, and names become available when their current account hits a zero balance.
Sure, there are going to be other details, but its not a bad idea, nor completely off the cuff, this is just my description of a protocol based on some bitcoin forum discussions. I think I like the idea alot, though, I wouldn't say that this variation is particularly fleshed out or perfect.
Might not be hard (and would probably be preferable) to front end it with plain old DNS protocol. Though, there would be something to be said for having everyone hold a copy of the block chain.
So what? Honestly, I am here in the US and, do have plenty of reason to enjoy the status quo, but this even pisses me off, and makes me think that it needs to be fixed. I think the best ideas that I have heard have been ideas like bitdns (which is nowhere near even being proof of concept implemented) which gets rid of the entire concept of governance and goes completely to decentralized P2P.
I tend to lean more towards those sorts of solutions. Why create another single point of failure?
It really is pretty bogus that the US has such control over non-.us domains.
This is a pretty good reason to argue for the removal of ALL US hosted servers from root zone files.
There was some interesting discussion in the bitcoin forums about setting up a system similar to bitcoin for DNS, which would assign domains based on proof of work problem solutions. Essentially, generating a block of new unbound domains every time someone processed a block of work, the same way bitcoins are now generated, and allowing the generator to then assign them names and transfer ownership to others.
Would be interesting since it essentially becomes a system of ownership based on consensus amongst working nodes, and there is no way to effect the network by fiat. It has drawbacks, no way to revoke any domain... for any reason. Probably not really workable like that... but given that its just a system of consensus rules built around a proof of work block chain, other agreements on the rules are possible...
Think drugs, and I don't mean pot or coke. I am sure that people of the future will have as big an appetite for them as we do, and will easily understand their appeal. If there ever was a product that sold itself... its not clear to me why drug dealers got the name "pushers", when most of the "pushing" that they typically have to do is of the "dude, don't call me at 3 am", or "How about you pay up front?" variety.
I am thinking, antibiotic overuse, psychiatric medicines. Putting developing kids on amphetamines to make them sit still and pay attention in school?
Now, if you will excuse me, my coffee cup is empty and needs a refill.
Heh funny what people will put up with for humor. My wife and I love this diner up the road and like to go there on weekends so much that we address the wait staff by name. One day we sat down at the counter, and one of the owners was serving... she kind of forgot about us.. never took our order.
Anywhere else, we would have said something, and my wife would have been pissy and making comments by this point. However, instead we were giggling about, and joking about how we should take bets on how long it will be before she notices us.
After a while, one of the cooks realized that we were still sitting there and people that came after us go ttheir food, and he didn't see an order.... so he said something to her. We had a good laugh about it.
He unpacks his kit, and then expects to do something in/var/spool/samba
My assumption would be that he has some kit that is intended to be put onto a samba server, and then used to exploit windows machines that use that server. That might pan out, if he happened to make his way onto an actual samba server.... or one with perl installed.
Not conclusive, you could be right but, given his hard-on for samba, it seems plausible to me.
These things are not mutually exclusive. Old plants need upkeep, new demand needs to be met, research that you start now is not going to pay off in energy savings for many years, and you will need pretty significant savings (while the population grows, which, I think is out of scope here....) to see overall demand go down.
It seems that if the question is "Do we look to save energy, or make more" the answer is yes.
When I was a kid, I was on some drugs that the doctors had to occasionally monitor. Its been a long time, but, still to this day I have the occasional flobotomist who tells me "Don't you want to look away?", or is a little taken aback by the fact that I just sit there and watch the needle go in, and the blood come out. It really doesn't hurt that much (unless they fuck it up...)
Then again, I am also told that I am a flobotomists dream "You don't have veins, you have hoses" one told me, as she drew the 6th vial of blood, without having to switch veins.
Well... its about more than IP. The major, military rival of the chineese is the US (whether any war scenarios are actually realistic is besides the point. Military might is generally mostly symbolic anyway).
So they were caught, using footage of a movie that was intended to... be a story of a number of US pilots, and what bad asses they are.
Having been caught using movie footage, much less of a movie intended to make their rivals look like badassess, could be pretty embarrassing, "IP Rights" aside.
No shit. I heard Obama talking about how more and more jobs will "require an associates degree".
Now, I can understand requiring some sort of special degree, and/or some sort of very specialized experience for some jobs.
What I can't imagine, is how any job would require an associates degree. Is it just a statement about how abysmal some high schools are that a generic "HS Diploma" doesn't cut it? Because, from any reasonable school, I don't see where an associates is anything more to brag about.
Oh nice, you, took all those pre-req classes that basically exist to even out the gaps between different peoples high school experiences, great.
Honestly, that recent survey of math scores really scared me more about the future of the society I live in than anything else. Its sad what our educational system has become in some places.
Not true at all, I have several plants that will detect fertilizer. In the presence of sun and water, it makes them grow like crazy.
Now, where is my TSA money? I am pretty sure that come late spring I will be able to outfit half their facilities with fertilizer detecting vines. I would happily do it for... $20 million. A bargain really.
There aren't any. Someone qualified to teach middle or high school is qualified to teach, not in any specific subject. It boils my blood every time my wife tells the story of her HS chemistry class. The teacher had been teaching history, and the school needed a chemistry teacher so, he got told to do it.
What did their class consist of? He would print out a page of paragraphs from the text book, and blank out certain words, the class period would be spent reading the text book and filling in the missing words. No labs, no lecture. Just word find in the text book.
Martyrs? There are already plenty to choose from if you ask me. Hell I have known people that I can expect to not see for a while because the thugs in blue found out that they had dried flowers at his house. The entire war on human appetite has left a trail of human destruction in its wake that rivals any real wars.
You misunderstand me if you think I want to be on the top. Leadership is not my bag at all. Really, I just want to play video games and work on projects that amuse me, and I don't mind going to work most days to make that happen. However, while I do it, a portion of my money is taken.... to ransack the houses of my neighbors and to occupy foreign lands.
I find it more than a little insulting that you think that jealousy of power could be the only reason to have no faith whatsoever in the current incarnation of government around me. I haven't even mentioned yet how incompetently the current system has been run, fix the civil rights issues, and you still have to ask, how far in debt? Why are some IOUs refered to as the "Social Security Trust Fund". It is bad enough that its a bit of a pyramid scam, but, isn't the IOU thing getting a little blatant?
Yes but, we can totally win the drug war. All we have to do is respond in Kind. We have much better ammo to load into our drug trebuches! We lob over a few bales of the sticky icky from Humbolt county, Vermont, or even some of that canadian shit, and I garauntee, the battle will be over quickly...even quicker if we slip some papers in.
I think I agree here.... even more so with revelations that it was a trebuchet.
Hmmm you know, it is a siege weapon. Actually, I think they should be charged with waging war on the United States. Why? Because that way they could go down in History as the most recent use of a trebuchet in a battle.
And that... that would almost be worth the time.
I, for one, welcome the invasion of our trebuchet weilding enemies, and tell them to bring it on! We should meet them on the field of battle... and... twist up a doober.
However, that said, they are a large company, so to say they don't care at all about research is probably as true as to say the opposite. Frankly, I think the decisions are probably orthogonal to each other. Clearly, as a whole, there are some things that they care about more than research (whether they are things that they should care about, or are absolutely atrocious on a number of levels... well... we probably agree on those points). However, publicity is easy to get and Sony isn't exactly a small unknown company.
It is too bad too, the PS3 is a nice little piece of hardware. Shit, if they were not being such pricks about it, I have been thinking about setting up a media PC and ditching cable, maybe get some manner of netflix or something. A PS3 might be a nice platform for display. But if they are going to be pricks about it, I gues I am going to spend my money elsewhere.
Not be a big loss for them, but, I am not sure how this attitude actually benefits them either.
Slashdot Mirror
Well.... do we really need to review the differences between democracy and republic again? I thought everyone knew that this was a republic, which tends to be a form of aristocracy. It has its pros and cons over a direct democracy, and tends to be a bit better at some areas of protecting fundamental rights... at least the ones explicitly stated in the constitution end up having SOME protection (if not as much as we would like).
In a simple democracy, you could expect radical changes in policy after every news story. Most people really don't pay enough attention to have a really useful opinion. However, this obscures the fact that many issues are so complicated that nobody actually has a really useful opinion. I think this is a larger problem, since... well... thats the situation where the bureaucrats really flourish.
My thoughts tend to run like this.... the US has a good.... lets say.... first draft. There are some rights that have been well protected. I regularly spout off about overthrow of the government, and nobody has come knocking on my door yet (well this one democrat did, but she was just stumping for the governor... and boy did she leave unsatisfied)
Direct democracy could probably be implemented and work in very small scales. A community level, or a commune level, or household, or whatever you want to call it. However, its only democracy if its actually voluntary. If I can't effectively leave (lets face it "leave the country" is of big enough scope and has enough issues to be a ridiculous remedy to suggest, but, "move to another town or city", is way more reasonable). A captive democracy just degenerates into the tyranny of the 51%.
Democracy really works best when all of its participants are interested and involved. That ONLY works at a level that has a relatively small scope.
Republics work at a much larger scale and, with proper limits on their power, can do much better at protecting the minority rights. As someone said "the liberty to do what everyone approves of is not liberty". The problem that I see is that they were never limited enough, and have way overstepped their intended role to the point that they have become a sort of limited tyranny.
Actually.... it looks like he didn't know what it was at all, I am pretty sure that the battleship quote was just a snarky comment.
Though this reminds me of implementing a notification system. It was a web page that allowed notices to be posted, and also to have them be pushed out onto email and usenet (yah, it was a while ago). Lets never mind that my boss had me write the thing before he sent me (alone) to the design comittee with instructions "don't let them know its written already, try to resist any fundamental changes they might want to make"....
Anyway, they wanted an ability to "delete posts". I pushed back because well... you can't delete an email or usenet post. In the end, we settled on a "double secret" function that would allow an admin to make a post dissapear from the main site. Of course, the posting and email functionality was supposed to be "turned on later", and never got turned on (for reasons of organizational disorganization not a rational decision), so I guess it turned out to be enough :)
"Nah, I just rearranged the controls on the helm, you just sunk your battleship"
Isn't that where they are now?
which leads me to ask, why the ISP offered unlimited access in the first place, if they are going to impose a limit. Certainly, I understand the economics of someone using the line constantly but... well... that is why he wanted unlimited service, which is what is probably what was advertised. A TOS is all nice and everything, but, someone who really wants their agreements honored should generally consider truth in advertising.
Not that having that argument with an ISP back when I had a modem pissed me off or anything but, I wouldn't have even considered using them as an ISP if they hadn't advertised "unlimited". From my perspective, a little truth up front could have avoided the whole issue.
It is very tempting to think the nodes "do all the work". The nodes work is just the minting cost. By making the cost of minting very high and distributed, they make analogs of counterfeiting hard. Thats really all it is... all that "work" is just the overhead required to make cheating hard.... it has nothing to do with the real value of the "coin".
Bitcoin, like all currency, derives value from its uses. It can currently be used to rent a server, get a domain, and perform several other transactions (including betting on poker and a lottery) You are right in that the real uses need to expand greatly.
The simple fact is, right now, you can't "mine" bitcoins. You can participate, and yes, you might get some bitcoins out of it. However, it takes so much computing power, and so much time, that its just not really worth it to do for most people. Its maybe, worth it to keep the system going, or for people who, for some reason, have spare GPUs to put at the task, but... the primary way of getting bitcoins is.... to exchange them for cash.
I can see that. Though there are two parts to the myth. First, yes, can it be done at all, I think the answer is clearly yes, since this sort of solar furnace is used. The bigger question is... can it be implemented.... using nothing more than ingenuity and tools available to Archimedes?
There are a couple of problems with it as a "Defensive Weapon". Aside from weather conditions, you need the ships to pass through the fixed focal point, or, you need the move the focal point to the ships.
My problem with calling it busted is...it has been made to work. Clearly accounts of technical details, unless sketched and painstakingly documented by the principle inventor, tend to not get better over time. Was it soldiers with shields? Or was that a hasty description of some sort of mounted mirror device with a person working it. (for focus)
I could imagine devising some sort of aiming device to take the angle of the sun into account to aim each mirror individually, if the device could allow a man to line up the spot without burning his eyes, then it seems that a stationary ship isn't even needed.
However, if a ship can be set on fire in 10 minutes, then it can be set alight. The power of such a device increases with the number of mirrors, perhaps he just had a lot more of them setup than anyone has come to expect? Though, the observation that such a device could easily blind the crew of a ship is definite possibility too.
Seems pretty doable to me.... at least, if you have a whole town full of people who are scared of the Romans... and leaders who are willing to listen to the smart guy.
So you sympathize with the methods of the military folk? The ones who go around dropping bombs on people and using violence, but not the guy who releases information and has threatened nobody with violence. The military folk put themselves in danger when they signed up. I see no need to sympathize with them, they get paid.
Though who says DNS is THE name system? If people decide to stop using it, then those definitions don't matter anymore. This is enough to convince me that I am open to possible transitions.
encryption? I don't see how that helps.
Look at bitcoin. No crypto. As I said in a couple of other posts, a DNS system based on a proof of work chain would... be much easier to do without ANY central authority. It means giving up the ability to EVER revoke a domain. However, that is kind of the point. To reduce the any manner of physical coercion (legal or otherwise) as a useful tool.
Some crypto would be used in implementing such a scheme, but, the problem goes far beyond anything that crypto alone can solve.
Think about this... proof of work proofs can be made so hard as to require many systems working in parallel to solve. This is how bitcoin works now. There is a simple agreement that people adding to the block chain (the chain is basically a transaction log) gets some defined number of "coins" (its a function of the block number being added). This is how new money is "minted"... really... just a log entry added to the chain that comes from its position in the chain, rather than some existing "account".
So... all this scheme really needs is to tweak generation so it never decreases the number of coins (and in fact, may increase) and then agree on a time limit. So you transfer "coins" into an "account". Add a new block type that allows you to associate a name that is not currently already taken with an account, and say that all accounts lose coins at a defined rate, and names become available when their current account hits a zero balance.
Sure, there are going to be other details, but its not a bad idea, nor completely off the cuff, this is just my description of a protocol based on some bitcoin forum discussions. I think I like the idea alot, though, I wouldn't say that this variation is particularly fleshed out or perfect.
Might not be hard (and would probably be preferable) to front end it with plain old DNS protocol. Though, there would be something to be said for having everyone hold a copy of the block chain.
So what? Honestly, I am here in the US and, do have plenty of reason to enjoy the status quo, but this even pisses me off, and makes me think that it needs to be fixed. I think the best ideas that I have heard have been ideas like bitdns (which is nowhere near even being proof of concept implemented) which gets rid of the entire concept of governance and goes completely to decentralized P2P.
I tend to lean more towards those sorts of solutions. Why create another single point of failure?
It really is pretty bogus that the US has such control over non-.us domains.
This is a pretty good reason to argue for the removal of ALL US hosted servers from root zone files.
There was some interesting discussion in the bitcoin forums about setting up a system similar to bitcoin for DNS, which would assign domains based on proof of work problem solutions. Essentially, generating a block of new unbound domains every time someone processed a block of work, the same way bitcoins are now generated, and allowing the generator to then assign them names and transfer ownership to others.
Would be interesting since it essentially becomes a system of ownership based on consensus amongst working nodes, and there is no way to effect the network by fiat. It has drawbacks, no way to revoke any domain... for any reason. Probably not really workable like that... but given that its just a system of consensus rules built around a proof of work block chain, other agreements on the rules are possible...
Some thoughts anyway,
Think drugs, and I don't mean pot or coke. I am sure that people of the future will have as big an appetite for them as we do, and will easily understand their appeal. If there ever was a product that sold itself... its not clear to me why drug dealers got the name "pushers", when most of the "pushing" that they typically have to do is of the "dude, don't call me at 3 am", or "How about you pay up front?" variety.
I am thinking, antibiotic overuse, psychiatric medicines. Putting developing kids on amphetamines to make them sit still and pay attention in school?
Now, if you will excuse me, my coffee cup is empty and needs a refill.
Heh funny what people will put up with for humor. My wife and I love this diner up the road and like to go there on weekends so much that we address the wait staff by name. One day we sat down at the counter, and one of the owners was serving... she kind of forgot about us.. never took our order.
Anywhere else, we would have said something, and my wife would have been pissy and making comments by this point. However, instead we were giggling about, and joking about how we should take bets on how long it will be before she notices us.
After a while, one of the cooks realized that we were still sitting there and people that came after us go ttheir food, and he didn't see an order.... so he said something to her. We had a good laugh about it.
Look again....
He unpacks his kit, and then expects to do something in /var/spool/samba
My assumption would be that he has some kit that is intended to be put onto a samba server, and then used to exploit windows machines that use that server. That might pan out, if he happened to make his way onto an actual samba server.... or one with perl installed.
Not conclusive, you could be right but, given his hard-on for samba, it seems plausible to me.
Embrace the power of "and".
These things are not mutually exclusive. Old plants need upkeep, new demand needs to be met, research that you start now is not going to pay off in energy savings for many years, and you will need pretty significant savings (while the population grows, which, I think is out of scope here....) to see overall demand go down.
It seems that if the question is "Do we look to save energy, or make more" the answer is yes.
When I was a kid, I was on some drugs that the doctors had to occasionally monitor. Its been a long time, but, still to this day I have the occasional flobotomist who tells me "Don't you want to look away?", or is a little taken aback by the fact that I just sit there and watch the needle go in, and the blood come out. It really doesn't hurt that much (unless they fuck it up...)
Then again, I am also told that I am a flobotomists dream "You don't have veins, you have hoses" one told me, as she drew the 6th vial of blood, without having to switch veins.
Well... its about more than IP. The major, military rival of the chineese is the US (whether any war scenarios are actually realistic is besides the point. Military might is generally mostly symbolic anyway).
So they were caught, using footage of a movie that was intended to... be a story of a number of US pilots, and what bad asses they are.
Having been caught using movie footage, much less of a movie intended to make their rivals look like badassess, could be pretty embarrassing, "IP Rights" aside.
No shit. I heard Obama talking about how more and more jobs will "require an associates degree".
Now, I can understand requiring some sort of special degree, and/or some sort of very specialized experience for some jobs.
What I can't imagine, is how any job would require an associates degree. Is it just a statement about how abysmal some high schools are that a generic "HS Diploma" doesn't cut it? Because, from any reasonable school, I don't see where an associates is anything more to brag about.
Oh nice, you, took all those pre-req classes that basically exist to even out the gaps between different peoples high school experiences, great.
Honestly, that recent survey of math scores really scared me more about the future of the society I live in than anything else. Its sad what our educational system has become in some places.
Not true at all, I have several plants that will detect fertilizer. In the presence of sun and water, it makes them grow like crazy.
Now, where is my TSA money? I am pretty sure that come late spring I will be able to outfit half their facilities with fertilizer detecting vines. I would happily do it for... $20 million. A bargain really.
There aren't any. Someone qualified to teach middle or high school is qualified to teach, not in any specific subject. It boils my blood every time my wife tells the story of her HS chemistry class. The teacher had been teaching history, and the school needed a chemistry teacher so, he got told to do it.
What did their class consist of? He would print out a page of paragraphs from the text book, and blank out certain words, the class period would be spent reading the text book and filling in the missing words. No labs, no lecture. Just word find in the text book.
Martyrs? There are already plenty to choose from if you ask me. Hell I have known people that I can expect to not see for a while because the thugs in blue found out that they had dried flowers at his house. The entire war on human appetite has left a trail of human destruction in its wake that rivals any real wars.
You misunderstand me if you think I want to be on the top. Leadership is not my bag at all. Really, I just want to play video games and work on projects that amuse me, and I don't mind going to work most days to make that happen. However, while I do it, a portion of my money is taken.... to ransack the houses of my neighbors and to occupy foreign lands.
I find it more than a little insulting that you think that jealousy of power could be the only reason to have no faith whatsoever in the current incarnation of government around me. I haven't even mentioned yet how incompetently the current system has been run, fix the civil rights issues, and you still have to ask, how far in debt? Why are some IOUs refered to as the "Social Security Trust Fund". It is bad enough that its a bit of a pyramid scam, but, isn't the IOU thing getting a little blatant?
Yes but, we can totally win the drug war. All we have to do is respond in Kind. We have much better ammo to load into our drug trebuches! We lob over a few bales of the sticky icky from Humbolt county, Vermont, or even some of that canadian shit, and I garauntee, the battle will be over quickly...even quicker if we slip some papers in.
This battle is totally winnable.
I think I agree here.... even more so with revelations that it was a trebuchet.
Hmmm you know, it is a siege weapon. Actually, I think they should be charged with waging war on the United States. Why? Because that way they could go down in History as the most recent use of a trebuchet in a battle.
And that... that would almost be worth the time.
I, for one, welcome the invasion of our trebuchet weilding enemies, and tell them to bring it on! We should meet them on the field of battle... and... twist up a doober.
Point. Very true.
However, that said, they are a large company, so to say they don't care at all about research is probably as true as to say the opposite. Frankly, I think the decisions are probably orthogonal to each other. Clearly, as a whole, there are some things that they care about more than research (whether they are things that they should care about, or are absolutely atrocious on a number of levels... well... we probably agree on those points). However, publicity is easy to get and Sony isn't exactly a small unknown company.
It is too bad too, the PS3 is a nice little piece of hardware. Shit, if they were not being such pricks about it, I have been thinking about setting up a media PC and ditching cable, maybe get some manner of netflix or something. A PS3 might be a nice platform for display. But if they are going to be pricks about it, I gues I am going to spend my money elsewhere.
Not be a big loss for them, but, I am not sure how this attitude actually benefits them either.