Just as the U.S. has "cancer treatment" centers and hospitals that promise a cure but deliver only painful months at outrageous cost, so there are similar bogus medical treatments available in Europe. My favorite is live cell therapy - injecting animal cells (usually sheep) into you - cures all your ills.
As long as the super-rich have money to spare there will be both American and European medical industries happy to take it from them in return for empty promises.
It is far, far worse today. The Watergate scandal was clearly limited to the executive branch of government and to a handful of men in the President's innermost circle. The danger to our democracy was clearly limited. There was no danger of a war.
Today we have tens of thousands of employees with secret and top secret security clearances (and I doubt the validity of their background checks also) who are monitoring, following, performing "sneak and peek" operations on U.S. citizens not in the pursuit of terrorist activities as the law specifies but instead for any activity whatsoever. The decision whether to monitor or not is made by an agent, not by a judge. Although approval is given by FISA "judges", they are a rubber-stamp mechanism: I know of no refusal of a request to monitor by a FISA judge. "Judicial" approval is given after the monitoring begins anyway.
The U.S.A. is now a Stasi state with monitoring capability that the Stasi could only dream of: voice-recognition technology combined with AI narrative-comprehension software plus real-time processing and archiving brings us the world of the novel 1984 in 2011. Privacy now exists only in your mind.
Can anyone show, is anyone concerned, that some of the capture information is misused? Since NSA captures all of Goldman Sachs e-mails, phone calls, faxes, cables, wires, and cellphones, then can anyone assure me that there is not someone in NSA taking financial advantage of what they monitor? Or passing that information to an outside party? The financial information monitored is worth trillions. The social information monitored can bring down candidates, be used to blackmail politicians, attorneys, and company and government officials.
We need to tear down the domestic intelligence operations just as badly as we need to bring deficits under control. In fact, the former is far more dangerous to a free nation than debt.
jafiwam says:
"... picking up a child he had just met, and kissing it on the lips..."
No. Here's the relevant portion from the PDF file:
..When she reached the
doorway, Bethany picked up J.K., and started inside. With her back
to Ardolf, Bethany heard him plant a wet kiss on W.F.
She wheeled
around, grabbed W.K. from Ardolfâ(TM)s arms and pulled her child inside
the house.
After shutting the front door, she ran upstairs and
cried, saying âoeweâ(TM)ve just moved next door to a pedophile.â...
So the mother did not claim to see the kiss. She said she heard a kiss. Was there a kiss? If so, was it on the lips? Who knows. The mother presumed there was a kiss on the lips. She also presumed the neighbor was a pedophile. There was no valid eyewitness.
I might remind you that it is not uncommon for someone to kiss a child (even Presidents do it).
And maybe the "kiss", if on the lips, was accidentally on the lips (not intended to hit the lips, but a typical affectionate kiss intended for the cheek) but the child turned, changing the orientation of the child, causing lips to meet. Maybe the child offered the kiss, which children will often do, and the neighbor was responding in a normal manner..
The fellow was not found guilty of "kissing a child" but of possessing child porn. Don't confuse the two. The mother went to the law with her accusation based on what she presumed to be true. Who knows what really happened.
As you can see you have no idea of what actually happened, little imagination, little idea of legal process and are much more a moron than I. For example, apparently you think I am a bad person to suggest that the "kissing" accusation was false, yet any lawyer indeed, any prosecutor, would question it immediately.
I've priced this out for our condominium association and found that painting the roof white costs several thousand dollars per (rather small) unit - not worthwhile for the association certainly. That would pay the gas and electric bill for more than a year in most cases.
And the reflectance drops 75% in 3 years, so you'll soon be doing it again.
someone of being a pedophile? It's possibly the worst possible thing you could do to someone these days short of killing their children in front of them.
He's obviously passive-aggressive and has serious problems but the mom was out of line to make the critical "pedophile" allegation to police based upon the single isolated incident. She inadvertently set in motion what Steven Pinker calls a "doomsday machine" mechanism in the brain of the accused, whereupon he tossed caution to the winds and became hell-bent upon destroying his neighbors.
This "amok" behavior is a common behavior found in all societies where a man feels he has lost status, has no power and seeks revenge for his mistreatment.
I think the mother got what she deserved and the convicted got worse than he deserved. But neither party is innocent here.
for this endeavor. I have little doubt that the problem they're solving is hard. But is this progress?
Anyone trying an evolutionary layered approach where the control code is evolved?
Seriously, it looks like my Alzheimer-wracked mother trying to play soccer, except that, unlike her, it continues to pursue the ball. I hope the DoD's killer robots are more nimble than this: otherwise our Android Corps will be the laughingstock of the next big war.
his CODASYL network database engine in the backroom.
For high-throughput those mainframe databases still rule the world of business on IBM, FUJITSU, UNISYS and other platforms.
They can handle the throughput and maintain ACID compliance but they certainly are not relational. Perhaps Facebook should take a look. Indeed sometimes "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
We all know that most wiretaps have no court permission (or have FISA court permission, which is a rubber-stamp operation), so why not provide those numbers too?
Your point may be valid, but it shows an astounding lack of reading comprehension. I was giving an explanation for the current cycle of problems only, not making a general statement about the history of the United States. I even italicized "why". You should probably start a blog to vent your anger instead of derailing pre-existing conversations.
Whoa! Who's showing anger here, really? I read his post as indicating disgust more than anger.
FWIW I see no italicization of "why" in your post.
In any case, discussing a history of malfeasance is always more enlightening than discussing a single incident in isolation. I view his post as relevant to the discussion.
No respondent can read your mind and know the exact intentions of your post. If you wish to limit the discussion please explicitly state the scope of your argument.
no matter how small. If there is the possibility that information can be stored in some previously-unused niche then it is likely that biological organisms will exploit that niche.
While we have yet little evidence of low-level quantum-related neurological phenomena in living organisms, there is no doubt that every chemical reaction can be described in terms of quantum mechanics ultimately. And what are we but electro-chemical beings?
I hope Penrose is not correct. I hope, I hope, I madly hope! Because if he _is_ correct, the likelihood of a breakthrough in artificial human intelligence may have to be postponed indefinitely, yet I was hoping to see it within my lifetime.
You'll need to grab it by the testes and twist it into what you need it to be...
This "balls of clay" metaphor is troubling. "Feet of clay" is more consistent (although not applicable here).
Grabbing testes is something we avoid. The metaphor is hardly as appealing as "grab the gold ring", which has a cultural reference (the golden ring on a carousel) and an appealing outcome (gold in your hand). Who wants a handful of testes?
Another inconsistency is that, once you'ved "grab[bed} it by the testes" you are only holding the testes, not the entire object, so even in the case of clay balls there must be something attached that you wish to control.
Furthermore twisting clay only changes the shape of the clay manipulated, not the object to which the clay/testes is presumably attached.
Consider also that anything with testes will fight back and likely hurt you seriously - something a technology, a textbook, a keyboard won't do. Why must learning be a struggle?
tl;dr summary - this metaphor has all the appeal of a coffee table hitting a bare shin in a dark room.
Microsoft has attempted to hide the Internet behind a layer of proprietary abstractions. Whether you were developing an application for the Internet or for old-school client/server technologies was supposedly irrelevant. Given time, this spec slipped away, but it's idiosyncrasies remained.
Consequently when you write a.NET application for the Internet, not a single term in your vocabulary is the same as that of a Perl, Python or Ruby programmer. WWW standards are rarely, if at all, referenced.
Should you place a.NET programmer in front of a Perl web developer, they won't be able to communicate initially, if at all. Their initial (frustrating) dialog will consist of probing attempts to pin down each other's terminology and formulate a common "pidgin" vocabulary.
Astonishingly, this problem did not exist with Microsoft's older pre-.NET developers, who used the ASP framework and the lighter and simpler language VBScript to do web development. Those technologies were consistent with that of WWW standards(ASP was a CGI-like framework). Those developers quickly move to Perl, PHP, Python, and other languages and frameworks without a hitch. In contrast.NET programmers have to be taught everything from scratch, beginning with HTML.
..."the majority of students aren't being pushed (or pushing) themselves to excel."
That is not necessary. We don't need a lot of excellent students. We only a few excellent students: there isn't enough demand for a lot of them. And there are plenty of excellent American students who are interested in their field of study and do very well in it. They are certainly more than enough to satisfy America's requirements. So much so that most who get a Ph.D. end up disappointed and "underemployed".
"school in Japan (to use one example) is highly competitive..."
Great! And the Japanese who don't make the cut are very, very disillusioned with life. In Japan, like the U.S., there is an excess of individuals with excellent academic credentials, who compose an underclass of overeducated but poor Ph.D.s.
I'm over 60 years old and, with the right woman, hell, even with Five-Finger Mary, could easily crank up a 4-hour boner, no blue pill required.
WTF is wrong with men these days? Viagra et al are an effin giant industry. I must watch bad ads on TV and get spammed just because you guys can't get it up. For God's sake, get yourselves a goddam' spider so I don't have to listen to yet another "E.D." ad in the middle of Star Trek.
"E.D"... - hah, makes me laugh! Bunch of pussies! And get offa my lawn!
Yes, but they are not necessary to do that. There are other ways of tracking state. But programmers are lazy and usually use the easiest way out (cookies)..
Slashdot Mirror
Just as the U.S. has "cancer treatment" centers and hospitals that promise a cure but deliver only painful months at outrageous cost, so there are similar bogus medical treatments available in Europe. My favorite is live cell therapy - injecting animal cells (usually sheep) into you - cures all your ills.
As long as the super-rich have money to spare there will be both American and European medical industries happy to take it from them in return for empty promises.
In most jurisdictions a signed faxed document is considered legal. That's why fax is so commonly used in contractual/legal agreements
to collect information on each and every contractor who deals with the FBI. They'll own the FBI within a year. What an utter clusterf***.
It is far, far worse today. The Watergate scandal was clearly limited to the executive branch of government and to a handful of men in the President's innermost circle. The danger to our democracy was clearly limited. There was no danger of a war.
Today we have tens of thousands of employees with secret and top secret security clearances (and I doubt the validity of their background checks also) who are monitoring, following, performing "sneak and peek" operations on U.S. citizens not in the pursuit of terrorist activities as the law specifies but instead for any activity whatsoever . The decision whether to monitor or not is made by an agent, not by a judge. Although approval is given by FISA "judges", they are a rubber-stamp mechanism: I know of no refusal of a request to monitor by a FISA judge. "Judicial" approval is given after the monitoring begins anyway.
The U.S.A. is now a Stasi state with monitoring capability that the Stasi could only dream of: voice-recognition technology combined with AI narrative-comprehension software plus real-time processing and archiving brings us the world of the novel 1984 in 2011. Privacy now exists only in your mind.
Can anyone show, is anyone concerned, that some of the capture information is misused? Since NSA captures all of Goldman Sachs e-mails, phone calls, faxes, cables, wires, and cellphones, then can anyone assure me that there is not someone in NSA taking financial advantage of what they monitor? Or passing that information to an outside party? The financial information monitored is worth trillions. The social information monitored can bring down candidates, be used to blackmail politicians, attorneys, and company and government officials.
We need to tear down the domestic intelligence operations just as badly as we need to bring deficits under control. In fact, the former is far more dangerous to a free nation than debt.
Now we can see dinner delivery coming at night.
No. Here's the relevant portion from the PDF file:
As you can see you have no idea of what actually happened, little imagination, little idea of legal process and are much more a moron than I. For example, apparently you think I am a bad person to suggest that the "kissing" accusation was false, yet any lawyer indeed, any prosecutor, would question it immediately.
I've priced this out for our condominium association and found that painting the roof white costs several thousand dollars per (rather small) unit - not worthwhile for the association certainly. That would pay the gas and electric bill for more than a year in most cases.
And the reflectance drops 75% in 3 years, so you'll soon be doing it again.
He's obviously passive-aggressive and has serious problems but the mom was out of line to make the critical "pedophile" allegation to police based upon the single isolated incident. She inadvertently set in motion what Steven Pinker calls a "doomsday machine" mechanism in the brain of the accused, whereupon he tossed caution to the winds and became hell-bent upon destroying his neighbors.
This "amok" behavior is a common behavior found in all societies where a man feels he has lost status, has no power and seeks revenge for his mistreatment.
I think the mother got what she deserved and the convicted got worse than he deserved. But neither party is innocent here.
for this endeavor. I have little doubt that the problem they're solving is hard. But is this progress?
Anyone trying an evolutionary layered approach where the control code is evolved?
Seriously, it looks like my Alzheimer-wracked mother trying to play soccer, except that, unlike her, it continues to pursue the ball. I hope the DoD's killer robots are more nimble than this: otherwise our Android Corps will be the laughingstock of the next big war.
his CODASYL network database engine in the backroom.
For high-throughput those mainframe databases still rule the world of business on IBM, FUJITSU, UNISYS and other platforms.
They can handle the throughput and maintain ACID compliance but they certainly are not relational. Perhaps Facebook should take a look. Indeed sometimes "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
That should do the trick, eh?
Oops, time to buy Oracle stock and short FaceBook, I guess!
Oh, the gubmint won't release the numbers?
and other signed languages might have something to say about this. ASL should fall under prior art.
Signed languages in the West go back 300 years at the least IIRC.
Whoa! Who's showing anger here, really? I read his post as indicating disgust more than anger.
FWIW I see no italicization of "why" in your post.
In any case, discussing a history of malfeasance is always more enlightening than discussing a single incident in isolation. I view his post as relevant to the discussion.
No respondent can read your mind and know the exact intentions of your post. If you wish to limit the discussion please explicitly state the scope of your argument.
no matter how small. If there is the possibility that information can be stored in some previously-unused niche then it is likely that biological organisms will exploit that niche.
While we have yet little evidence of low-level quantum-related neurological phenomena in living organisms, there is no doubt that every chemical reaction can be described in terms of quantum mechanics ultimately. And what are we but electro-chemical beings?
I hope Penrose is not correct. I hope, I hope, I madly hope! Because if he _is_ correct, the likelihood of a breakthrough in artificial human intelligence may have to be postponed indefinitely, yet I was hoping to see it within my lifetime.
This may come as a shock to many but cookies are not necessary.
This "balls of clay" metaphor is troubling. "Feet of clay" is more consistent (although not applicable here).
Grabbing testes is something we avoid. The metaphor is hardly as appealing as "grab the gold ring", which has a cultural reference (the golden ring on a carousel) and an appealing outcome (gold in your hand). Who wants a handful of testes?
Another inconsistency is that, once you'ved "grab[bed} it by the testes" you are only holding the testes, not the entire object, so even in the case of clay balls there must be something attached that you wish to control.
Furthermore twisting clay only changes the shape of the clay manipulated, not the object to which the clay/testes is presumably attached.
Consider also that anything with testes will fight back and likely hurt you seriously - something a technology, a textbook, a keyboard won't do. Why must learning be a struggle?
tl;dr summary - this metaphor has all the appeal of a coffee table hitting a bare shin in a dark room.
The OS of choice for 9 out of 10 terrorists.
Now Pastabagel was very bored
He was tryin to create a next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done
We'll put some bleachers out in the sun
I'll bring belief, littlewink'll bring his nuclear gun
And we'll have it out on Highway 61.
after peace is declared.
I hear the dates from Afghanistan are exquisite.
Microsoft has attempted to hide the Internet behind a layer of proprietary abstractions. Whether you were developing an application for the Internet or for old-school client/server technologies was supposedly irrelevant. Given time, this spec slipped away, but it's idiosyncrasies remained.
Consequently when you write a .NET application for the Internet, not a single term in your vocabulary is the same as that of a Perl, Python or Ruby programmer. WWW standards are rarely, if at all, referenced.
Should you place a .NET programmer in front of a Perl web developer, they won't be able to communicate initially, if at all. Their initial (frustrating) dialog will consist of probing attempts to pin down each other's terminology and formulate a common "pidgin" vocabulary.
Astonishingly, this problem did not exist with Microsoft's older pre-.NET developers, who used the ASP framework and the lighter and simpler language VBScript to do web development. Those technologies were consistent with that of WWW standards(ASP was a CGI-like framework). Those developers quickly move to Perl, PHP, Python, and other languages and frameworks without a hitch. In contrast .NET programmers have to be taught everything from scratch, beginning with HTML.
That is not necessary. We don't need a lot of excellent students. We only a few excellent students: there isn't enough demand for a lot of them. And there are plenty of excellent American students who are interested in their field of study and do very well in it. They are certainly more than enough to satisfy America's requirements. So much so that most who get a Ph.D. end up disappointed and "underemployed".
Great! And the Japanese who don't make the cut are very, very disillusioned with life. In Japan, like the U.S., there is an excess of individuals with excellent academic credentials, who compose an underclass of overeducated but poor Ph.D.s.
Now that's biodegradable!
I want my clay Pepsi!
I'm over 60 years old and, with the right woman, hell, even with Five-Finger Mary, could easily crank up a 4-hour boner, no blue pill required.
WTF is wrong with men these days? Viagra et al are an effin giant industry. I must watch bad ads on TV and get spammed just because you guys can't get it up. For God's sake, get yourselves a goddam' spider so I don't have to listen to yet another "E.D." ad in the middle of Star Trek.
"E.D"... - hah, makes me laugh! Bunch of pussies! And get offa my lawn!
Yes, but they are not necessary to do that. There are other ways of tracking state. But programmers are lazy and usually use the easiest way out (cookies)..
I see lots of code rewriting in our future.