Judges have better things to do than uphold laws they don't understand.
Are you serious?!? They're judges!!!! Their whole job is to understand the damn laws and uphold them.
In this page is the federal judicial oath, I'm sure each state has something similar.
"I do solemnly swear or affirm, that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent on me, according to the best of my abilities and understanding, agreeably to the constitution, and laws of the United States. So help me God." [Emphasis mine.]
Yes, folks, the same government nannies will have your neighbors throwing mercury into the trash. Never mind that it will get into the ground and your water supplies, costs more, is inferior light and sends money to the Chinese communists.
There's coal in mercury, burning coal puts mercury in the air. Mercury comes down in rain fall, gets converted to highly toxic methyl mercury and is adsorbed by fish. There's so much mercury in fish that you can't eat them any more. Solution: use less power, burn less coal, get less mercury poisoning. While using mercury laden light-bulbs might not be a perfect answer, these light bulbs last so much longer and use so much less energy there would be a net decrease in mercury contamination. (Not to mention that the mercury in these bulbs is not going to be burned and put up in the air, except where there's an incinerator.)
Never mind that the same thinking banned DDT which meant millions of Africans have died from malaria or that liberated prisoners from the Nazi death camps were bathed in DDT to kill the bugs living on them or that "Silent Spring" has been shown to be a work of fiction.
The fact of the matter is that there would be no birds of prey without banning DDT. If you think that's not a big deal relative to human life, think on this: a number of disease carrying vermin are eaten by those same birds of prey. For example, prairie dog populations are being harmed by the bubonic plague. Should DDT be used in a limited capacity, probably it could be used in a helpful way yes. It wasn't being used that way though, it was being sprayed wholesale over large swathes of land.
Never mind that banning asbestos created more danger because removing asbestos is more dangerous than using it properly, automobile brakes are nowhere near as capable, costs increased and, oh, yeah, the WTC would have stood longer because it was designed to survive airplane hits provided the guts were protected by asbestos so it would have stood a few more hours.
Show me the proof where people's brakes are failing. Show me the increased accident rates that can be directly attributed to brake failure.
With enough retries, Microsoft usually gets it about right and succeeds in the end.
I don't know where this piece of "conventional wisdom" came from, but my impression is that microsoft doesn't get it right the first time and then keeps screwing up repeatedly. Sure, they may fix the original problems, but it seems like they introduce so many other problems in later versions that IMO there is no net improvement. But hey, I avoid microsoft products wherever possible, for this reason and the fact that they write software for the lowest common denominator so I might not be a good person to talk to.
Re:5 were purchased by my household
on
100 Million iPods
·
· Score: 1
Well if I may answer your astatistical anecdotal story with my own astatistical anecdotal story: I bought a 4G 20GB iPod about four years ago and I use it every day while I'm walking to work, about half an hour each way. So a fad to you is something that I use during for something like ~1/34th of my life, which is substantial. (I don't use it on weekends, so its not 1/24th.)
The scientific community generally regards Milankovitch cycles as being in large part responsible for non-industrial era warming. Yet, when it comes to industrial era warming, proponents of human-caused global climate change say that CO2 emissions are driving temperature. This is a logical departure from the previous theory because it readjusts causality.
I don't care if you were trained as a physicist, you should try to make some sense. The graphs you just showed are on a 400k year time line, whereas the warming we are seeing in the industrial era has occurred over the last 100 years. Nobody is saying that the Milankovich cycles don't contribute to climate, but there is no good explanation of the warming in the last one hundred years that is mainly attributed to any kind of astronomical activity. I think its very much a case of "when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" syndrome. That is, physicists say climate is changing based on sun activity, atmospheric scientists says climate is changing based on atmospheric causes. Who is right? Well it depends on perspective I guess, but if you just watch what happens in the next 100 years, I wouldn't buy any property on the coasts. One thing though, if the climate people are right and we don't do anything about it, and millions of people die or are displaced, wouldn't you feel a little dumb? This is called risk analysis. There is a very high probability that human emission of CO2 are contributing to warming, and that is something we can do something about, so shouldn't we do it? (as opposed to sun-spots, which we can do nothing about.)
I beg to differ. As an example of how things should go, I hold up Apple, who switched their OS relatively seamlessly when it became apparent there was a better chip to use. If these old archaic instructions are still in Vista, its proof that monopolistic practices really do hold back progress. If the marketplace were functioning as it should, such a hideous beast of a program like windows would have been replaced long ago.
Also remember that he wrote a lot of that while he was in the trenches during WWI. Basically, writing about these fantastic stories became a way for him to escape the horrors of the war he was experiencing. When his sone Christopher was in North Africa during WWII, Tolkien sent the stuff he had written to him. Check out this link:
http://www.greatwar.nl/frames/default-tolkiene.htm l
My favorite quote (which also makes it into the preface for LOTR):
"One has personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead."
Hell yeah! Just look at the other wars the proud sons and daughters of the U.S. have won:
War on Drugs: Nobody uses those any more right? We're all clean and sober now, nevermind those pesky Californians and their "medicinal" marijuana. They're just tree-hugging hippies with glaucoma and don't count.
War on Poverty: We cured that long ago, the incredible wages we pay our hard-working CEOs have been trickling down into the economy for some time and no one is poor any more and we all have health care and social security.
War on Christmas: Won! Wal-Mart now uses the wholesome Merry Christmas instead of the godless heathen phrase "Happy Holidays". Santa Claus is no longer banned from spreading the gospel to children by teaching them the joys of rampant consumerism and owning a tickle-me-elmo.
War on Terror: We invaded Iraq, so no more terrorists, right? A reliable source told me that the insurgency there is in the last throes. However, this is only if the democrats don't ruin it by not supporting our troops by refusing to allow any more to die in the middle of the non-civil war.
When my powerbook showed up with a slot drive that wouldn't burn CDs, Apple sent a new one and a prepaid shipping slip to send back the old one. When the logic board fried a year later, I called apple support and then I took it over to an authorized dealer. Two days later, the logic board had been swapped and the laptop was as good as new.
Contrast this with my experience with Dell, one PC we ordered from them showed up with none of the software installed (including windows). The replacement drive they sent out showed up only partially formatted. After that, they sent out a service tech. The service tech had to come out twice in order to replace the drive and then install all the needed software. Total time, about a month. What a joke. That laptop from Apple is still running after five years, all that Dell crap we bought had bit the dust long before that. So yeah, Macs are by no means perfect, but its certainly not any worse than most of PCs, and my experience is that their service is just fine.
Me also. I lived in California and wrote Dianne Feinstein about the concerns I had about the state of copyright affairs in this country, and how I disagreed with whatever the latest dirty trick the RIAA and MPAA was pulling with copyright (I forget which one it was exactly). She wrote me back a one sentence letter than essentially said, "I believe the best way to protect innovation is to protect copyright and copyright holders." So... meh... writing her won't do any good. Voting her out of office might help (unless she gets a job as a lobbiest like Trent Lott). I would have voted against her in the next election, but I moved. She will win anyway, barring some scandal about sex.
What's really going on here is regulatory capture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture. The senate, who is supposed to be regulating the entertainment industry is actually working for them. This won't change unless the people doing this are removed from their jobs and more ethically responsible people are put in charge.
Like the wise man said: Societies are like fish, they rot from the head on down.
Of course the creationists will just deny these anyway, but then again, they would never argued about this for so long if they were rational to begin with.
Well if its taken this long for NASA to figure out a good routine for pathing then I suppose I shouldn't be so down on Obsidian for pathing being so terrible at it with your henchmen in NWN 2.
Is anybody else amazed at the apparent simplicity of a lot of the problems facing the rover? I don't say this to criticize the NASA guys and gals, I'm sure if I had designed a rover would never have done as well up on Mars as theirs, but it always surprises me how simple a lot of the problems they face seemingly are. Of course, a simple problem here is a big problem when you're trying to do it at 35-250 million miles away.
I know I will get modded down for this, but, IMHO, the NASA of today is little more than a slush fund for big money contractors and a few researchers who can't get funding any other way.
That isn't true. There's plenty of good work being done at NASA still. 1) There is the whole "water on mars" thing, this is something people were waving their arms and speaking in loud voices about with no evidence for years. Its beginning to look like NASA is proving it beyong a reasonable doubt. 2) Plain ol' R&D, I know someone at Goddard who just patented a new way to synthesize nanotubes that are soluble in water. 3) Atmospheric research. That acronym stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Up until that jackass got a bug up his butt to go to the moon, NASA was funding quite a bit of this. Now all their money is going to the moon and a new launch vehicle. Sad really. But the point is that while your point may have some truth to it, saying NASA is "little more than a slush fund" is an over-generalizing.
Yeah I agree, I'm on my third motorola flip-top and while each new version does get slimmer and smaller, it seems there's always compromises. E.g., on my newest one, its too easy for the quick buttons on the side to change the ringer type while the phone is in my pocket. Not to mention the fact that T-mobile puts their "download ringtones" links first in the sounds menu and there's no way to delete them... It annoys me because the phone has bluetooth so I just upload my own mp3s; I'm not buy any of their crap.
If anybody can fix the UI disaster, its Apple. Sure it won't be perfect, but my guess is that it will be an improvement (if you want to pay for it). This whole situation reminds me of the way Apple dealt with the music companies, and we all know the DRM is a mixed bag, but it sure beats the competition for most people.
Strangely enough, I'm a bit proponent of the "do one thing and do it well philosophy", but after seeing the keynote, I am impressed. A good UI makes the extra features useful, a bad one makes them annoying.
Why would anyone rush out and buy a new operating system?
/dons mac-snob hat
OS X usually runs better and faster than previous version. Although I'm suspicious that a lot of that is empathy on the parts of the fanboi's, "Its new and shiny so it *feels* faster!" You could make the argument that each revision of OS X is not a "new" operating system, but sometimes I still play OS 9 games on OS X using the emulator (Myth II rocks), but the fps there is compensated by the fact that the hardware is so much faster than the old stuff. I'm not sure I'd want to play one compiled for a PPC on an Intel processor, I've heard bad things wrt MS Office and Rosetta... but the problem is mostly moot because there are few games for OS X. I'd be interested to hear from people who play WoW though, is it slower on Intels?
they [Apple] have done everything in their power to tie iTunes and the iPod closely together
The problem I have with that statement is that I own an iPod and and I never use iTunes with it. I still run HFSplus on it with the original firmware/software, etc., I just use gtkpod and mp3gain. So while you might say they have done everything in their power to tie the two together, from my experience is that no, they haven't done that because I have very little trouble running my ipod with iTunes. My biggest difficulty wan't anything that Apple did, it was editing the linux kernel to remove that business about "You're using a journaled filesystem so I'm going to mount it read-only" thing.
If a report were issued that global warming was not manmade and a thinktank offered a similar reward, would you also call it a bribe?
Yes, as others have pointed out, the entire point is that AEI has a non-scientifically based conclusion in mind and they're paying people to pretend that the science supports that. Exxon-Mobil has a history of spreadinbg FUD regarding climate change, and this is just the latest attempt. We should consider ourselves fortunate that at least this time, we know about it. What's the difference? NSF, NASA or any other governmental agency are going to (nominally) fund research to examine particular aspects of the climate and publish their data in a widely available format. By and large, most of that work has agreed there is a problem with the climate. Exxon-Mobil is only going to fund people who say there isn't a change, NASA and NSF will fund research, Exxon-Mobil and AEI are funding a conclusion. This is not science, this is bribery.
P.S. I say nominally because the Bush administration has in the past and continues to appoint people who have no scientitic background to edit government scientists' reports.
The beta crashes if you try to use it.
http://www.macresearch.org/grants_gov_macviewer_in staller_for_intel_based_macs
They were promising to deliver alternate platforms since its inception and so far all we've gotten is lip service.
I am a researcher that falls under this, my labs are mac/linux wherever possible. I scrounged a surplus PC to run this software. It sure is annoying that my tax dollars went to pay for such a thing though. This is not the real travesty though... the real travesty is that the National Science Foundation already has a much better system than grants.gov for submitting grants called fastlane, its all webforms and no extra program necessary. If even automagically creates pdfs for you if you wish. Their web-site works with Safari and Firefox too. The rumor is that NSF will have to ditch its easy to use and well designed grant submission software for the POS that grants.gov is.
I don't think anyone's going to believe you that bad accounting practices don't come from corporations, the tax code contribute but the bad accounting comes straight from the business itself. The problem with deregulation is that you are forced to assume that a free market is actually free. The reality is that corporations are only mandated to create a profit for their CEO's and their shareholders and they will do so however they can. Thus it is in a corporation's interest to try to remove competition and ensure a steady stream of profit for the forseeable future, i.e., not make the market free. Why is it that libertarians ask for more of the same after they've been bent over a barrel?
Hah! Yeah that's what I thought of too. I find it amusing is that the "came back to nwn after nwn2" thread over at bioware is five pages long. This on a game that was released in June, 2002. And they still have one more patch coming for it, which will hopefully have rideable horses.
(registration required for that link, here's the google cache).
Yeah I was just thinking, gosh that hint could be really helpful when hashing through a gigabyte sized file, which I have to deal with all the time. I don't know why slashdot is so down on these hints, they all seem like good practices to me. *shock* I even learned something (except I knew enough to not pipe cats already).
I agree. There is a workaround though. I use the Finder in column view, and then instead of using the sidebar I use the old (10.1) style shortcuts on the Toolbar. Here's the hint I submitted from this place.
Okay, let me preface this by saying this is a shameless two-bit hack. I finally got around to buying 10.3 yesterday, and the lack of a horizontal scroll bar in the Finder windows has consumed several hours of my time trying to fix/break this bug/feature. The "feature" goes like this: if I click on the Home folder, which is a special folder (like Applications, Documents, etc.), the Finder roots me at that place and pulls the horizontal scroll bar from the bottom of the window. (Someone here already pointed out that a work around is typing "command-up arrow" a few times).
My solution is a bit different, I discovered that clicking on non-special folders doesn't cause this rooting "feature" to activate. So what I did was make aliases of all the special folders that I was interested in, and put them in a directory out of the way someplace (e.g., in folder in my Library). Now after a little icon management to get the aliases looking like the original directories (see other tips on this site), I put the aliases in the Toolbar and Voila!, the horizontal scroll bar has returned in all its hierarchial glory.
One thing though, I haven't figured out a way to get this to work with the Sidebar. When I try the system decides that I really mean the special folder itself and not the alias. This isn't a problem for me because I'm not using the Sidebar at the moment."
Slashdot Mirror
Well if I may answer your astatistical anecdotal story with my own astatistical anecdotal story: I bought a 4G 20GB iPod about four years ago and I use it every day while I'm walking to work, about half an hour each way. So a fad to you is something that I use during for something like ~1/34th of my life, which is substantial. (I don't use it on weekends, so its not 1/24th.)
I beg to differ. As an example of how things should go, I hold up Apple, who switched their OS relatively seamlessly when it became apparent there was a better chip to use. If these old archaic instructions are still in Vista, its proof that monopolistic practices really do hold back progress. If the marketplace were functioning as it should, such a hideous beast of a program like windows would have been replaced long ago.
Hell yeah! Just look at the other wars the proud sons and daughters of the U.S. have won:
War on Drugs: Nobody uses those any more right? We're all clean and sober now, nevermind those pesky Californians and their "medicinal" marijuana. They're just tree-hugging hippies with glaucoma and don't count.
War on Poverty: We cured that long ago, the incredible wages we pay our hard-working CEOs have been trickling down into the economy for some time and no one is poor any more and we all have health care and social security.
War on Christmas: Won! Wal-Mart now uses the wholesome Merry Christmas instead of the godless heathen phrase "Happy Holidays". Santa Claus is no longer banned from spreading the gospel to children by teaching them the joys of rampant consumerism and owning a tickle-me-elmo.
War on Terror: We invaded Iraq, so no more terrorists, right? A reliable source told me that the insurgency there is in the last throes. However, this is only if the democrats don't ruin it by not supporting our troops by refusing to allow any more to die in the middle of the non-civil war.
When my powerbook showed up with a slot drive that wouldn't burn CDs, Apple sent a new one and a prepaid shipping slip to send back the old one. When the logic board fried a year later, I called apple support and then I took it over to an authorized dealer. Two days later, the logic board had been swapped and the laptop was as good as new.
Contrast this with my experience with Dell, one PC we ordered from them showed up with none of the software installed (including windows). The replacement drive they sent out showed up only partially formatted. After that, they sent out a service tech. The service tech had to come out twice in order to replace the drive and then install all the needed software. Total time, about a month. What a joke. That laptop from Apple is still running after five years, all that Dell crap we bought had bit the dust long before that. So yeah, Macs are by no means perfect, but its certainly not any worse than most of PCs, and my experience is that their service is just fine.
What's really going on here is regulatory capture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture. The senate, who is supposed to be regulating the entertainment industry is actually working for them. This won't change unless the people doing this are removed from their jobs and more ethically responsible people are put in charge. Like the wise man said: Societies are like fish, they rot from the head on down.
Its gratifying every time one of these "missing links" is found. My favorite is probably the lobe-finned fishes:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/0Of course the creationists will just deny these anyway, but then again, they would never argued about this for so long if they were rational to begin with.
Well if its taken this long for NASA to figure out a good routine for pathing then I suppose I shouldn't be so down on Obsidian for pathing being so terrible at it with your henchmen in NWN 2.
Is anybody else amazed at the apparent simplicity of a lot of the problems facing the rover? I don't say this to criticize the NASA guys and gals, I'm sure if I had designed a rover would never have done as well up on Mars as theirs, but it always surprises me how simple a lot of the problems they face seemingly are. Of course, a simple problem here is a big problem when you're trying to do it at 35-250 million miles away.
Yeah I agree, I'm on my third motorola flip-top and while each new version does get slimmer and smaller, it seems there's always compromises. E.g., on my newest one, its too easy for the quick buttons on the side to change the ringer type while the phone is in my pocket. Not to mention the fact that T-mobile puts their "download ringtones" links first in the sounds menu and there's no way to delete them... It annoys me because the phone has bluetooth so I just upload my own mp3s; I'm not buy any of their crap.
If anybody can fix the UI disaster, its Apple. Sure it won't be perfect, but my guess is that it will be an improvement (if you want to pay for it). This whole situation reminds me of the way Apple dealt with the music companies, and we all know the DRM is a mixed bag, but it sure beats the competition for most people.
Strangely enough, I'm a bit proponent of the "do one thing and do it well philosophy", but after seeing the keynote, I am impressed. A good UI makes the extra features useful, a bad one makes them annoying.
OS X usually runs better and faster than previous version. Although I'm suspicious that a lot of that is empathy on the parts of the fanboi's, "Its new and shiny so it *feels* faster!" You could make the argument that each revision of OS X is not a "new" operating system, but sometimes I still play OS 9 games on OS X using the emulator (Myth II rocks), but the fps there is compensated by the fact that the hardware is so much faster than the old stuff. I'm not sure I'd want to play one compiled for a PPC on an Intel processor, I've heard bad things wrt MS Office and Rosetta ... but the problem is mostly moot because there are few games for OS X. I'd be interested to hear from people who play WoW though, is it slower on Intels?
Oops, I meant very little trouble running my ipod without iTunes. Sorry... hit submit without proof-reading fully.
Sorry I dorked up the link. http://www.macresearch.org/grants_gov_macviewer_in staller_for_intel_based_macs
The beta crashes if you try to use it. http://www.macresearch.org/grants_gov_macviewer_in staller_for_intel_based_macs
They were promising to deliver alternate platforms since its inception and so far all we've gotten is lip service.
I am a researcher that falls under this, my labs are mac/linux wherever possible. I scrounged a surplus PC to run this software. It sure is annoying that my tax dollars went to pay for such a thing though. This is not the real travesty though... the real travesty is that the National Science Foundation already has a much better system than grants.gov for submitting grants called fastlane, its all webforms and no extra program necessary. If even automagically creates pdfs for you if you wish. Their web-site works with Safari and Firefox too. The rumor is that NSF will have to ditch its easy to use and well designed grant submission software for the POS that grants.gov is.
I don't think anyone's going to believe you that bad accounting practices don't come from corporations, the tax code contribute but the bad accounting comes straight from the business itself. The problem with deregulation is that you are forced to assume that a free market is actually free. The reality is that corporations are only mandated to create a profit for their CEO's and their shareholders and they will do so however they can. Thus it is in a corporation's interest to try to remove competition and ensure a steady stream of profit for the forseeable future, i.e., not make the market free. Why is it that libertarians ask for more of the same after they've been bent over a barrel?
Hah! Yeah that's what I thought of too. I find it amusing is that the "came back to nwn after nwn2" thread over at bioware is five pages long. This on a game that was released in June, 2002. And they still have one more patch coming for it, which will hopefully have rideable horses. (registration required for that link, here's the google cache).
Yeah I was just thinking, gosh that hint could be really helpful when hashing through a gigabyte sized file, which I have to deal with all the time. I don't know why slashdot is so down on these hints, they all seem like good practices to me. *shock* I even learned something (except I knew enough to not pipe cats already).