The UK GDP is 5th in the world (nominal) or 6th in the world (purchasing power parity). If our best supercomputer is coming in at 17th, we aren't spending enough on research.
Not to belittle this project, of course, building the worlds 17th fastest supercomputer is an achievement in anyone's book - but it is a sign of where the UK government is weak.
I am just stunned someone who compared the NHS with the Nazi party got modded 'Insightful'.
Now its my turn to correct your laughably misguided information. I live in the UK, and I have been both a patient and an admin worker for the NHS. I thus have in depth knowledge of one of the largest 'socialised' healthcare systems in the world.
It works fine. When it does fuck up, its normally because they've been forced to use an outside contractor for something (MRSA wasn't really a problem until some genius in Whitehall suggested we get private contractors to clean hospitals). It hasn't ruined our economy or spawned a fascist regime as your inherited republican wisdom would suggest.
May I kindly suggest that until you can educate yourself beyond the editorial section of Soldier of Fortune you quit posting on slashdot and go back to sitting on your porch, cleaning your guns and chewing tobacco.
Soundbite? Yeah, I'm sure thats what Jean-Jaques Rousseau was thinking when he came up with the phrase in the 18th century. You can't throw around the term 'collectivism' at anybody who doesn't see private property as an institution ordained by nature itself, and at the same time condemn your fellow Paulists as being stuck on 'Objectivist bullshit'. You seem quite fluent yourself.
I wasn't advocating spending more, I was advocating the US joining the great mass of civilised countries in providing free healthcare at the point of delivery. My personal experience of the NHS (as a patient and a worker) and the experiences of my friends and family at the hands of the US healthcare system back up the assessment.
Wrong - his platform is personal liberty, one of the ideals that this country was founded upon. I happen to be a Ron Paul supporter, though I'm not convinced that all of his ideas will work as he thinks they will. Here's the thing though: I would rather have him championing my freedom, scaling back our massive government, and causing some problems with health care than have the same old shit go another round. We're not in great shape as a country, as any liberty-minded person will tell you. If Ron Paul can succeed only in tearing down a lot of what's been built up, leaving the possibly more difficult job of finding a better solution to someone else, I'm satisfied with that because something will finally be getting done.
The question that is rarely asked of self-proclaimed advocates of personal liberty, is what persons they want liberty for. The poor are so because they are forcibly denied access to material goods, by the institution of property. Why should they accept such a system? Many don't and millions of them are dragged through the 'justice' system because of it. So you create a social safety net, so that those who for whatever reason can't make it on their own, and thus treated more fairly the poor and needy are more likely to accept the system. Note the comparatively minuscule prison populations in Europe.
But libertarians like Ron Paul don't agree. They want to tear up this social contract because there is a financial cost to it, and this cost is being paid in taxes by wealthier members of society. Their liberty is being infringed a little, I grant you - but doing so provides greater liberty for the more numerous poor in that they are not forced to occupy all their time working to survive and queuing for food. Libertarians only support liberty for people who are rich or at least comfortable (as they invariably are).
Total free markets have been tried before - and they resulting in horrific poverty, famine and economic collapse.
You obviously don't know what you are talking about. The world produces enough to feed everyone but around 25,000 a day starve to death - its a distribution problem. And if you had troubled yourself to read the article I posted you would know there are millions who are food insecure across America.
The idea that life expectancy is a personal choice is one that could only be entertained by someone coddled by a privileged existence and having no concept of life outside such an upbringing. I notice you didn't have the nerve to mention the infant mortality I mentioned, so perhaps there is some hope for you taking off your middle-class blinkers and relating to the real world.
Ron Paul is a dangerous fad. He does not believe in evolution and he wants to scrap what little healthcare the poor in the US have access to (bear in mind that the US already has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than European countries that spend less per capita on healthcare). His platform is yanking away what little social protections exist in the US so that the middle classes can pay less tax, and considering that the US isn't nearly as far from mass famine as you would think a developed country would be - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/7148880.stm - its a recipe for a Katrina-like failure on a far bigger scale.
Titan has an atmosphere, and from what I understand it is very similar to that of a primodial Earth. Had Saturn been located within the Sun's habitable zone, I don't see any reason why complex life could've evolved there. Its not out of the question therefore for an exomoon to have an oxygen atmosphere.
Another possible location for life is on icy moons of a further away gas giant. In our solar system such moons emit water vapour from their surfaces. This may be an avenue for detection.
Innocent men are languishing in Gitmo and CIA secret prisons without any hope of trial or release. Women and children are being subject to aerial bombardment in the name of fighting terrorists who died 6 years ago. Democratic elections are overturned around the world when they don't financially benefit the west. Calling speed cameras 'tyranny' in a world like this is disgusting hyperbole. Grow up.
Cyclists and pedestrians may not be taxed monetarily, but they are taxed by having their public spaces crisscrossed with roads and cars which make it more difficult for them to get around. And regardless of what you believe, I have presented evidence that the agencies in charge of speed cameras don't profit from them. You are disproven.
You probably think of yourself as an individualist, but you are in fact just being selfish.
If an exoplanet can be directly imaged in this manner, does that mean some of the techniques used on stars for inferring the existence of exoplanets (wobbling, dimming etc) can be used to detect exomoons?
This would be a great breakthrough if it were possible, seeing as most of the exoplanets we know about are gas giants and if they host life it is likely to be on their moons.
Indeed. Hot Jupiters aren't that interesting in this department as they aren't likely to be habitable though - so I will be more impressed if they can do the same with a presumed terrestrial planet like Gliese 581c
If that were true, people wouldn't be (quite) so upset. But the fact is that many of the cameras violate the official guidelines, and are posted in highly revenue-generating but statistically very safe areas. Similarly, if the locations were reported accurately and completely, then that would be one thing, but not all police forces and "safety camera partnerships" respect this.
I hardly think its blindly kowtowing to authority to think that the government agency in charge of road safety knows better where speed cameras are needed than some random vandals who have just decided that a speed camera isn't necessary.
The whole its-a-ploy-to-make-money thing is bullshit as well because, as you would know if you actually had any knowledge on the subject, the SCPs don't keep the money from fines - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatso#UK_Deployment
That's one side of it. On the flip side, I believe restricting people's freedom (in this case, their freedom to travel quickly) without a good reason is unethical. If driving at a certain speed is not dangerous or inconsiderate, making it illegal as a means of conveniently taxing the motorist is inappropriate, and if cameras are used as the instrument of that inappropriate behaviour then they are inappropriate too.
The roads are a public utility, and I've as much a right to their use as anyone else who pays their taxes. The 'right' to drive fast doesn't exist, because you've contributed to the upkeep of the roads no more than anyone else and other road users (especially cyclists, pedestrians and those with children) don't want you bombing down what is equally their road at 95mph.
This really is non-issue though. Whilst the government is thrusting ID cards on us and losing our personal data, its utterly asinine to bring up speed cameras as a civil liberties issue.
Yep, its a misleading article headline - these are not surveillance cameras. They take a static photo when a car passes above the speed limit by a certain margin (5-10% IIRC).
The UK government places these in accident-prone areas, and makes their locations available to the public. If you have satellite navigation in your car it will warn you as you approach one. They are not in any way a violation of civil liberties because doing 80 through a residential area is not any kind of right. Petrolheads claiming they are fighting back against a police state are doing nothing more than trivialising the actual civil liberty violations committed by the UK government.
1. Stones is one of the few imperial measurements that have hung on, but its on the way out. I and many my age know my weight in kilograms but not in stones.
2. BBC Weather doesn't give the temperature in Fahrenheit (unless it does so when you connect from an American IP)
OK, some imperial measurements survive in Britain but they are on the way out. Miles are used on road signs (probably because of the cost of a changeover, although I imagine it is coming) but speedometers have both mph and km/h on them. Bottled and canned beer is sold in millilitres these days, and I think the only thing keeping draught beer from being sold in half-litres is the inevitable protests that would result in losing 84ml from every round.
The purpose of a popular science programme is surely to educate - and thus they should be encouraging Americans to us the same (sensible) units the rest of the world does. Clinging onto ancient and arbitrary units (yes, I know Celsius is arbitrary too, but its less arbitrary because the degree increments fit in with all the other SI units) makes it harder to collaborate with the rest of the civilised world. It just seems like juvenile bloody mindedness.
In any case, your right to call British people and things 'quaint' is suspended until such a time as you stop measuring temperature in Fahrenheit
The opening sentence of the article kind of ruined it for me as a science article because of the use of such a ridiculously archaic unit. I can understand the stubbornly conservative US population rejecting these new-fangled SI units, but I would've thought the scientific community, and the scientific media, would have more sense. Didn't you guys trash a Mars probe because of some idiot using PSI when he should've been using Pascals?
I made it in reference to a BP advert which had a random woman-in-the-street saying "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we make a car that doesn't (polute)"
Notice how Chuck and his lawyers haven't made a peep about this until someone tried to cash in on an Internet phenomenon. Someone is trying to make a quick buck out of Chuck Norris' fame (i.e. his likeness) without his permission.
The article doesn't appear to mention at what distance they could detect us with a Hubble-like device, and so it doesn't really tell us anything seeing as we don't know how many sun-like stars are in that range.
The original KITT had at least some style. The new one is just the chaviest car I can imagine. I suppose its going to have one of those noisy exhaust pipes and a subwoofer?
Because Linux is for European communist queers who pirate music. Macs are all-american and manly (sort of).
Seriously though, its probably to do with letting Apple join in at the endless corporate trough that is the US military, in order to expand their domestic support. Geeks will be more likely to be in favour of an idiotic war if it generates tech jobs.
Also, the international, share-everything ethos associated with Linux is unlikely to be popular with the people who came up with ITAR.
Pretending to be omniscient is bad teaching. The only point of giving such a detention is to try and instil in the child an aversion to questioning authority figures. Where is the educational value in that? Idiotic teachers who can't properly handle a teenager with an opinion play right into the stereotype of schools as place of indoctrination and intellectual repression.
I hope for his sake the kid has some teachers who can actually justify themselves to a child without reverting to "I'm an adult, listen to me or else"
Exactly. I didn't want to be seen doing an overt plug, but OpenOffice is what I use to avoid placing my trust in either closed-source or an evil document overlord. The good news on this front, is that frankly Google Docs sucks balls as an office package, and the new MS Office interface has alienated a lot of long time users. Its a good time for the free alternative to shine.
Slashdot Mirror
The UK GDP is 5th in the world (nominal) or 6th in the world (purchasing power parity). If our best supercomputer is coming in at 17th, we aren't spending enough on research.
Not to belittle this project, of course, building the worlds 17th fastest supercomputer is an achievement in anyone's book - but it is a sign of where the UK government is weak.
I am just stunned someone who compared the NHS with the Nazi party got modded 'Insightful'.
Now its my turn to correct your laughably misguided information. I live in the UK, and I have been both a patient and an admin worker for the NHS. I thus have in depth knowledge of one of the largest 'socialised' healthcare systems in the world.
It works fine. When it does fuck up, its normally because they've been forced to use an outside contractor for something (MRSA wasn't really a problem until some genius in Whitehall suggested we get private contractors to clean hospitals). It hasn't ruined our economy or spawned a fascist regime as your inherited republican wisdom would suggest.
May I kindly suggest that until you can educate yourself beyond the editorial section of Soldier of Fortune you quit posting on slashdot and go back to sitting on your porch, cleaning your guns and chewing tobacco.
Soundbite? Yeah, I'm sure thats what Jean-Jaques Rousseau was thinking when he came up with the phrase in the 18th century. You can't throw around the term 'collectivism' at anybody who doesn't see private property as an institution ordained by nature itself, and at the same time condemn your fellow Paulists as being stuck on 'Objectivist bullshit'. You seem quite fluent yourself.
I wasn't advocating spending more, I was advocating the US joining the great mass of civilised countries in providing free healthcare at the point of delivery. My personal experience of the NHS (as a patient and a worker) and the experiences of my friends and family at the hands of the US healthcare system back up the assessment.
The question that is rarely asked of self-proclaimed advocates of personal liberty, is what persons they want liberty for. The poor are so because they are forcibly denied access to material goods, by the institution of property. Why should they accept such a system? Many don't and millions of them are dragged through the 'justice' system because of it. So you create a social safety net, so that those who for whatever reason can't make it on their own, and thus treated more fairly the poor and needy are more likely to accept the system. Note the comparatively minuscule prison populations in Europe.
But libertarians like Ron Paul don't agree. They want to tear up this social contract because there is a financial cost to it, and this cost is being paid in taxes by wealthier members of society. Their liberty is being infringed a little, I grant you - but doing so provides greater liberty for the more numerous poor in that they are not forced to occupy all their time working to survive and queuing for food. Libertarians only support liberty for people who are rich or at least comfortable (as they invariably are).
Total free markets have been tried before - and they resulting in horrific poverty, famine and economic collapse.
You obviously don't know what you are talking about. The world produces enough to feed everyone but around 25,000 a day starve to death - its a distribution problem. And if you had troubled yourself to read the article I posted you would know there are millions who are food insecure across America.
The idea that life expectancy is a personal choice is one that could only be entertained by someone coddled by a privileged existence and having no concept of life outside such an upbringing. I notice you didn't have the nerve to mention the infant mortality I mentioned, so perhaps there is some hope for you taking off your middle-class blinkers and relating to the real world.
Ron Paul is a dangerous fad. He does not believe in evolution and he wants to scrap what little healthcare the poor in the US have access to (bear in mind that the US already has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than European countries that spend less per capita on healthcare). His platform is yanking away what little social protections exist in the US so that the middle classes can pay less tax, and considering that the US isn't nearly as far from mass famine as you would think a developed country would be - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/7148880.stm - its a recipe for a Katrina-like failure on a far bigger scale.
They are in fact cousins.
Titan has an atmosphere, and from what I understand it is very similar to that of a primodial Earth. Had Saturn been located within the Sun's habitable zone, I don't see any reason why complex life could've evolved there. Its not out of the question therefore for an exomoon to have an oxygen atmosphere.
Another possible location for life is on icy moons of a further away gas giant. In our solar system such moons emit water vapour from their surfaces. This may be an avenue for detection.
Tyranny? Don't be so fucking pathetic.
Innocent men are languishing in Gitmo and CIA secret prisons without any hope of trial or release. Women and children are being subject to aerial bombardment in the name of fighting terrorists who died 6 years ago. Democratic elections are overturned around the world when they don't financially benefit the west. Calling speed cameras 'tyranny' in a world like this is disgusting hyperbole. Grow up.
Cyclists and pedestrians may not be taxed monetarily, but they are taxed by having their public spaces crisscrossed with roads and cars which make it more difficult for them to get around. And regardless of what you believe, I have presented evidence that the agencies in charge of speed cameras don't profit from them. You are disproven.
You probably think of yourself as an individualist, but you are in fact just being selfish.
If an exoplanet can be directly imaged in this manner, does that mean some of the techniques used on stars for inferring the existence of exoplanets (wobbling, dimming etc) can be used to detect exomoons?
This would be a great breakthrough if it were possible, seeing as most of the exoplanets we know about are gas giants and if they host life it is likely to be on their moons.
Indeed. Hot Jupiters aren't that interesting in this department as they aren't likely to be habitable though - so I will be more impressed if they can do the same with a presumed terrestrial planet like Gliese 581c
The whole its-a-ploy-to-make-money thing is bullshit as well because, as you would know if you actually had any knowledge on the subject, the SCPs don't keep the money from fines - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatso#UK_Deployment
The roads are a public utility, and I've as much a right to their use as anyone else who pays their taxes. The 'right' to drive fast doesn't exist, because you've contributed to the upkeep of the roads no more than anyone else and other road users (especially cyclists, pedestrians and those with children) don't want you bombing down what is equally their road at 95mph.
This really is non-issue though. Whilst the government is thrusting ID cards on us and losing our personal data, its utterly asinine to bring up speed cameras as a civil liberties issue.
Yep, its a misleading article headline - these are not surveillance cameras. They take a static photo when a car passes above the speed limit by a certain margin (5-10% IIRC).
The UK government places these in accident-prone areas, and makes their locations available to the public. If you have satellite navigation in your car it will warn you as you approach one. They are not in any way a violation of civil liberties because doing 80 through a residential area is not any kind of right. Petrolheads claiming they are fighting back against a police state are doing nothing more than trivialising the actual civil liberty violations committed by the UK government.
1. Stones is one of the few imperial measurements that have hung on, but its on the way out. I and many my age know my weight in kilograms but not in stones. 2. BBC Weather doesn't give the temperature in Fahrenheit (unless it does so when you connect from an American IP) OK, some imperial measurements survive in Britain but they are on the way out. Miles are used on road signs (probably because of the cost of a changeover, although I imagine it is coming) but speedometers have both mph and km/h on them. Bottled and canned beer is sold in millilitres these days, and I think the only thing keeping draught beer from being sold in half-litres is the inevitable protests that would result in losing 84ml from every round.
The purpose of a popular science programme is surely to educate - and thus they should be encouraging Americans to us the same (sensible) units the rest of the world does. Clinging onto ancient and arbitrary units (yes, I know Celsius is arbitrary too, but its less arbitrary because the degree increments fit in with all the other SI units) makes it harder to collaborate with the rest of the civilised world. It just seems like juvenile bloody mindedness.
In any case, your right to call British people and things 'quaint' is suspended until such a time as you stop measuring temperature in Fahrenheit
The opening sentence of the article kind of ruined it for me as a science article because of the use of such a ridiculously archaic unit. I can understand the stubbornly conservative US population rejecting these new-fangled SI units, but I would've thought the scientific community, and the scientific media, would have more sense. Didn't you guys trash a Mars probe because of some idiot using PSI when he should've been using Pascals?
I made it in reference to a BP advert which had a random woman-in-the-street saying "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we make a car that doesn't (polute)"
Notice how Chuck and his lawyers haven't made a peep about this until someone tried to cash in on an Internet phenomenon. Someone is trying to make a quick buck out of Chuck Norris' fame (i.e. his likeness) without his permission.
The article doesn't appear to mention at what distance they could detect us with a Hubble-like device, and so it doesn't really tell us anything seeing as we don't know how many sun-like stars are in that range.
The original KITT had at least some style. The new one is just the chaviest car I can imagine. I suppose its going to have one of those noisy exhaust pipes and a subwoofer?
Because Linux is for European communist queers who pirate music. Macs are all-american and manly (sort of).
Seriously though, its probably to do with letting Apple join in at the endless corporate trough that is the US military, in order to expand their domestic support. Geeks will be more likely to be in favour of an idiotic war if it generates tech jobs.
Also, the international, share-everything ethos associated with Linux is unlikely to be popular with the people who came up with ITAR.
Pretending to be omniscient is bad teaching. The only point of giving such a detention is to try and instil in the child an aversion to questioning authority figures. Where is the educational value in that? Idiotic teachers who can't properly handle a teenager with an opinion play right into the stereotype of schools as place of indoctrination and intellectual repression.
I hope for his sake the kid has some teachers who can actually justify themselves to a child without reverting to "I'm an adult, listen to me or else"
Exactly. I didn't want to be seen doing an overt plug, but OpenOffice is what I use to avoid placing my trust in either closed-source or an evil document overlord. The good news on this front, is that frankly Google Docs sucks balls as an office package, and the new MS Office interface has alienated a lot of long time users. Its a good time for the free alternative to shine.