I saw a girl on the metro once with the symbol of the Sun tatooed at the bottom of the back of her neck. When I asked her about it, she said it was a project: to get all the symbols of the planets tatooed down her back. I asked whether she'd include Ceres or Pluto (it was during the debate on dwarf planets) and she didn't know yet. Still, were I female and if I wanted a tatoo, it would be that. Therefore, my good anonymous, that is my suggestion.
Maybe I'm just an idealistic capitalist, but having informed consumers is the (ostensible) basis upon which our economic system is built. If companies cannot be expected to provide the information required to make capitalism work properly, we have a much larger problem that cries for a regulatory intervention, much as I hate to say it.
There's always been feel-good news. And plane crashes certainly sell. My god man, just look at the Fox News website and count how many tragedies they can line up next to sexy photos.
Assuming that 21 1/3 firkins are in a barrel, and 121,000 seconds in a fortnight, you have approximately 25.8 million firkins of oil dumping into the sea. That's a lot of firkins. Oh, and the Library of Congress has 5,960 furlongs of shelf space.
WTF? The fuss makes no sense for a number of reasons:
1) A former high-level Google official has emailed other high-level Google officials through his Gmail account, and is probably friends with them.
2) High-level Google officials will be interested to see what the CTO of the Executive Branch is up to, no matter who that CTO is.
3) This needs to be kept an eye on, but is not indicative of endemic corruption by any stretch. Get a grip, folks!
Are we arguing philosophy or practice? In practice, any government will go against its principles, especially those without outward accountability (like a totalitarian regime). But fascism, as a political philosophy, upholds the rule of law, and that was the point I was trying to make. Saying that anyone non-fascist wants the President to remain within the confines of the law is ridiculous and an abuse of the term.
Ugh, no. That's not it, either. At the risk of being misinterpreted as defending fascism, let me just say this: the ONLY governments that ignore the rule of law are tyrannies. Julius Caesar's rise to power was illegal; Auschwitz, terrible though it was, was not. Fascism actually highly values the rule of law. The strict militarism, the demands for obedience, and extreme nationalism philosophically cannot allow for legal malleability, even at the top. Petty monarchs of ages past and dictators of today break their own laws with regularity, but such countries are no more fascist than someplace like Kyrgyzstan is democratic.
Except that then you get people like you saying it's a terrible thing, thereby rendering any argument resulting from the advice, whether it's valid or invalid, ineffective, dismissed as mere propaganda. The comments in this thread show that.
Yes? Strategic communications is something anybody that deals with media engages in. Coverups? Those are bad. Getting a positive story out? Not bad. If all anyone hears about is death, but not the reasons why, of course people will turn against whatever is causing the death. There is a complete story and Red Cell seems to simply be offering advice to governments on how to present the positive spin; the negative spin didn't need any more help.
Humbug. My complicated interests include philosophy, astronomy, and politics. My simple interests include mashing a keyboard sequentially to make a little man move on a screen (WoW), beer (a properly aged Gulden Draak is delicious), Canadian music and travel.
Non-nerds tend to be interested in complicated things, too: politics, guns, cars, and sports (yes, it's complicated). The difference between them is the esoteric nature of the interests. Not esoteric? Normal. Esoteric? Nerd. To say otherwise is to live with a sense of superiority to which you are not due, at least not for those reasons.
To list the problems: wrong "your" (should be "you're"), beginning a sentence with "but", misspelling "Slashdot[t]ers", change of number (either singular "Slashdot[t]ers/Geeks" or plural "yourself"), and comma splice at the end. As well, I don't believe "grammar" is a proper noun, but I'll overlook that and "Geek" in deference to style.
It's a saying that means, as was said above, "to detain someone in conversation against their wishes". It carries the imagery of forcing someone into a space the size of a buttonhole so you can have your conversational way with them, no butts required.
Wait, what? "If this becomes cheap enough for car travel..." What Londoner would want to drive a car around Beijing? Or Delhi? Still, I'd love to see Eurasia become a unified economic powerhouse! An analogous situation in the US would probably be if it decides to invest in North America. I can see the headlines now: "Washington bails out Mexican railway industry! Senators cry foul!"
First, it was Kay Bailey Hutchison (no "n" in Hutchison). Second, the bill can be found here, on THOMAS. Although the text of the bill isn't up yet, the introducing language is up. It's bill S. 3068, if anyone cares.
Third, this is not a good idea. If there was ever a time to grow our spaceflight industry it's now, at the inflection point. Saying that it will lose us space is just silly: who do they think we will contract with after Soyuz? Arianne? This is exactly how you win space, by spurring private sector investment in space transportation for its own purposes. Rocketry is mature enough for the start-ups, so get NASA to do things others cannot: major spaceflight research. Look at what Bigelow is doing with inflatable modules and is planning on doing going forward. If we can get such major tech in the hands of industry and provide a guaranteed market, I think we're well on our way to owning spaceflight.
You're right: the government doing its twin jobs of saving taxpayer money while implementing public programs and protecting the populace from hucksters is pretty great!
I will admit, I don't really know what you're talking about. First, you trust the Sudanese Copenhagen ambassador to speak with a level, measured tone, something nobody in Sudanese officialdom is capable of doing. He is to speak without hyperbole regarding the possibility of trimming the funding to the 77 governments it represents. In addition, it's an oil-dependent state so would have a vested interest in keeping the energy status quo. He is correct that cutting foreign aid will bring about hardships (although he does it in a profoundly stupid way), but those that trust that climate change is real believe that climatic shifts will be significantly worse for the developing world that a proposed reduction in aid. Besides, the vast majority of consumers were not represented in the G77 anyway, residing instead in the G20 countries that provide the aid he doesn't want cut.
I also have no idea who Phil is, nor do I particularly care about any specific scientist or lab. What I do care about is that the overwhelming majority of climatologists and planetologists believe that human-made GHGs are having a significant effect on the climate. I trust that.
$1.5 quadrillion? Where does that number come from? And who would be owed the money, anyway? Even if it is a legit number, no serious scheme I have heard of says we will go from present emmission levels to zero immediately. Indeed, no scheme I've heard of says we'll ever go to zero emmissions.
Regarding global cooling, there was actually no real scientific consensus that this was the case, as there is with climate change now. It's a false comparison, and digging into the research on both will show that.
Close! The deflector field is specially tuned to deflect anything except for a certain number of hydrogen atoms per second, adjusting itself based on the ship's needs and with safeties in place. The ramscoop would divert hydrogen atoms that are allowed through the field to the engines and storage tanks.
What creates the climate cycle? And over what timeframe, and in what quantities, would greenhouse gases alter the climate?
As for energy: that's where the climate debate goes. Most GHGs are released by burning things for energy, either in power plants or in vehicles. Transferring all energy sources worldwide from fossil fuels to other things would probably solve our problem, full stop. I'm all for nuclear, but my opinion on that isn't pertinent to the question at hand, which is whether climate change exists and whether its proposed solution is excessively detrimental to global society.
As for taking over industry, well, now you just sound like you're accusing environmentalists of a totalitarian Luddite conspiracy. European implementation of the Kyoto treaty involved created a carbon trading market to allow markets to set the price of carbon, then to incrementally make it more expensive. Yet, its economies didn't go into recession because of it; indeed, they continued to grow. The elimination of industry would be a massive economic contraction, on a scale not seen history, and regulating pollution of any sort has not led to anything approaching such a contraction. A market-based solution such as a carbon market necessitates that government only get involved in issuing the carbon permits, not in any sort of takeover of the industries interested in buying the permits. Indeed, such a takeover would be counterproductive to the process.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw a girl on the metro once with the symbol of the Sun tatooed at the bottom of the back of her neck. When I asked her about it, she said it was a project: to get all the symbols of the planets tatooed down her back. I asked whether she'd include Ceres or Pluto (it was during the debate on dwarf planets) and she didn't know yet. Still, were I female and if I wanted a tatoo, it would be that. Therefore, my good anonymous, that is my suggestion.
Maybe I'm just an idealistic capitalist, but having informed consumers is the (ostensible) basis upon which our economic system is built. If companies cannot be expected to provide the information required to make capitalism work properly, we have a much larger problem that cries for a regulatory intervention, much as I hate to say it.
Bush had his moments. Not many, but they were there.
And to us fans of "classic" metrics, we have:
5.34 x 10^14 olympic sized swimming pools (534 trillion)
1.24 x 10^13 Libraries of Congress (12 trillion)
4.475 x 10^19 firkins (45 quintillion)
And the depth is equivalent to 18.32 furlongs or 8.2 Empire State Buildings. You're welcome.
There's always been feel-good news. And plane crashes certainly sell. My god man, just look at the Fox News website and count how many tragedies they can line up next to sexy photos.
Assuming that 21 1/3 firkins are in a barrel, and 121,000 seconds in a fortnight, you have approximately 25.8 million firkins of oil dumping into the sea. That's a lot of firkins. Oh, and the Library of Congress has 5,960 furlongs of shelf space.
According to Wikipedia, it's about 10^9 Libraries of Congress, not including images.
WTF? The fuss makes no sense for a number of reasons: 1) A former high-level Google official has emailed other high-level Google officials through his Gmail account, and is probably friends with them.
2) High-level Google officials will be interested to see what the CTO of the Executive Branch is up to, no matter who that CTO is.
3) This needs to be kept an eye on, but is not indicative of endemic corruption by any stretch. Get a grip, folks!
Are we arguing philosophy or practice? In practice, any government will go against its principles, especially those without outward accountability (like a totalitarian regime). But fascism, as a political philosophy, upholds the rule of law, and that was the point I was trying to make. Saying that anyone non-fascist wants the President to remain within the confines of the law is ridiculous and an abuse of the term.
Ugh, no. That's not it, either. At the risk of being misinterpreted as defending fascism, let me just say this: the ONLY governments that ignore the rule of law are tyrannies. Julius Caesar's rise to power was illegal; Auschwitz, terrible though it was, was not. Fascism actually highly values the rule of law. The strict militarism, the demands for obedience, and extreme nationalism philosophically cannot allow for legal malleability, even at the top. Petty monarchs of ages past and dictators of today break their own laws with regularity, but such countries are no more fascist than someplace like Kyrgyzstan is democratic.
Except that then you get people like you saying it's a terrible thing, thereby rendering any argument resulting from the advice, whether it's valid or invalid, ineffective, dismissed as mere propaganda. The comments in this thread show that.
Yes? Strategic communications is something anybody that deals with media engages in. Coverups? Those are bad. Getting a positive story out? Not bad. If all anyone hears about is death, but not the reasons why, of course people will turn against whatever is causing the death. There is a complete story and Red Cell seems to simply be offering advice to governments on how to present the positive spin; the negative spin didn't need any more help.
Humbug. My complicated interests include philosophy, astronomy, and politics. My simple interests include mashing a keyboard sequentially to make a little man move on a screen (WoW), beer (a properly aged Gulden Draak is delicious), Canadian music and travel.
Non-nerds tend to be interested in complicated things, too: politics, guns, cars, and sports (yes, it's complicated). The difference between them is the esoteric nature of the interests. Not esoteric? Normal. Esoteric? Nerd. To say otherwise is to live with a sense of superiority to which you are not due, at least not for those reasons.
To list the problems: wrong "your" (should be "you're"), beginning a sentence with "but", misspelling "Slashdot[t]ers", change of number (either singular "Slashdot[t]ers/Geeks" or plural "yourself"), and comma splice at the end. As well, I don't believe "grammar" is a proper noun, but I'll overlook that and "Geek" in deference to style.
It's a saying that means, as was said above, "to detain someone in conversation against their wishes". It carries the imagery of forcing someone into a space the size of a buttonhole so you can have your conversational way with them, no butts required.
Props! And shooting in non-script order.
Wait, what? "If this becomes cheap enough for car travel..." What Londoner would want to drive a car around Beijing? Or Delhi? Still, I'd love to see Eurasia become a unified economic powerhouse! An analogous situation in the US would probably be if it decides to invest in North America. I can see the headlines now: "Washington bails out Mexican railway industry! Senators cry foul!"
First, it was Kay Bailey Hutchison (no "n" in Hutchison). Second, the bill can be found here, on THOMAS. Although the text of the bill isn't up yet, the introducing language is up. It's bill S. 3068, if anyone cares.
Third, this is not a good idea. If there was ever a time to grow our spaceflight industry it's now, at the inflection point. Saying that it will lose us space is just silly: who do they think we will contract with after Soyuz? Arianne? This is exactly how you win space, by spurring private sector investment in space transportation for its own purposes. Rocketry is mature enough for the start-ups, so get NASA to do things others cannot: major spaceflight research. Look at what Bigelow is doing with inflatable modules and is planning on doing going forward. If we can get such major tech in the hands of industry and provide a guaranteed market, I think we're well on our way to owning spaceflight.
Well, a 1967 VW Beetle weighs 840kg, or 0.84 tons. 6*10^8*0.84 = 714,285,714.3 VW Beetles.
You're right: the government doing its twin jobs of saving taxpayer money while implementing public programs and protecting the populace from hucksters is pretty great!
I believe Delta and Atlas were made to government order. Falcon, however, was not.
It's a poll. So, the women actually do know what they want; they just won't admit it to anyone except a pollster.
I will admit, I don't really know what you're talking about. First, you trust the Sudanese Copenhagen ambassador to speak with a level, measured tone, something nobody in Sudanese officialdom is capable of doing. He is to speak without hyperbole regarding the possibility of trimming the funding to the 77 governments it represents. In addition, it's an oil-dependent state so would have a vested interest in keeping the energy status quo. He is correct that cutting foreign aid will bring about hardships (although he does it in a profoundly stupid way), but those that trust that climate change is real believe that climatic shifts will be significantly worse for the developing world that a proposed reduction in aid. Besides, the vast majority of consumers were not represented in the G77 anyway, residing instead in the G20 countries that provide the aid he doesn't want cut.
I also have no idea who Phil is, nor do I particularly care about any specific scientist or lab. What I do care about is that the overwhelming majority of climatologists and planetologists believe that human-made GHGs are having a significant effect on the climate. I trust that.
$1.5 quadrillion? Where does that number come from? And who would be owed the money, anyway? Even if it is a legit number, no serious scheme I have heard of says we will go from present emmission levels to zero immediately. Indeed, no scheme I've heard of says we'll ever go to zero emmissions.
Regarding global cooling, there was actually no real scientific consensus that this was the case, as there is with climate change now. It's a false comparison, and digging into the research on both will show that.
Close! The deflector field is specially tuned to deflect anything except for a certain number of hydrogen atoms per second, adjusting itself based on the ship's needs and with safeties in place. The ramscoop would divert hydrogen atoms that are allowed through the field to the engines and storage tanks.
What creates the climate cycle? And over what timeframe, and in what quantities, would greenhouse gases alter the climate?
As for energy: that's where the climate debate goes. Most GHGs are released by burning things for energy, either in power plants or in vehicles. Transferring all energy sources worldwide from fossil fuels to other things would probably solve our problem, full stop. I'm all for nuclear, but my opinion on that isn't pertinent to the question at hand, which is whether climate change exists and whether its proposed solution is excessively detrimental to global society.
As for taking over industry, well, now you just sound like you're accusing environmentalists of a totalitarian Luddite conspiracy. European implementation of the Kyoto treaty involved created a carbon trading market to allow markets to set the price of carbon, then to incrementally make it more expensive. Yet, its economies didn't go into recession because of it; indeed, they continued to grow. The elimination of industry would be a massive economic contraction, on a scale not seen history, and regulating pollution of any sort has not led to anything approaching such a contraction. A market-based solution such as a carbon market necessitates that government only get involved in issuing the carbon permits, not in any sort of takeover of the industries interested in buying the permits. Indeed, such a takeover would be counterproductive to the process.