Re: Where to now?
On Nov 19, 2012, at 1:55 PM, Klaus Stock wrote: And...we got the iPad, where you actually have to flip pages the old way. FYI -- you *can* turn pages the traditional way, but you can also tap the right edge of the page to turn it, so in effect, the whole right edge of the page is a next page button. (Likewise with the left edge for previous page.) We could have an angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin debate about whether it's better to use up CPU cycles doing the page-turn animation, but I personally find it a useful visual cue, your mileage may vary considerably. That is true of iBooks, at least. Don't know much about the Kindle's GUI. I'm not sure the iPad has enough CPU moxie to be able to run eye-tracking yet. It's theoretically possible, but it would involve some high-efficiency coding. Or server-sourcing, which I'd just as soon do without .. it's annoying enough that Siri does it. And without a *very* good implementation of it, it could be extremely irritating with pages turning unintentionally or not turning when expected. *Lot* of tuning involved in that problem, and everyone's eyes move differently and the way our eyes move changes subtly over time and when drinking, etc. So it's very much a non-trivial problem with regard to several variables .. ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Where to now?
On Nov 19, 2012, at 1:58 PM, Klaus Stock wrote: We need a black swan. Maybe we already have it. The wiki model is working for editing wikipedias (not only _the_ Wikipedia, but many other clones, parodies, porn sites or just silly stuff), It began with IMDB and if they hadn't been such stupid jerks IMDB would have turned itself into what Wikipedia became. Why can't we apply the wiki idea to _engineering_? Patents. Perhaps the patent equivalen of GPL? Because the answer to why can't we apply the wiki idea to publishing information? was copyrights and licenses until GPL became a viable solution .. ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Facebook censorship and internet porn
On Dec 26, 2010, at 5:03 PM, Julia wrote: On Dec 11, 2010, at 7:42 PM, Jon Louis Mann wrote: ...net nanny software block and report any search for any string containing the word breast ...that may prevent a woman from learning how to examine herself for cancer or her options if she is diagnosed... ...policy of removing pictures of breastfeeding. I know of a few images that disappeared even though they were privacy-restricted in such a way that the only possible audience was clothing-optional-aware and I doubt there were any complaints to speak of, so I may very well be wrong. The rules seem to be somewhat variable, and the only consistent cases seem to be ones with one or both nipples visible. one friend who pushed that about as close to the limit as they seem to tolerate -- the one of her in *only* a skirt and pasties is still up... Charlie thanks for the link, charlie all is explained: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/breastfeeding-facebook- photos/ i found this on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=39521488436 evidently there are a lot of riled up women about this. evidently, some few were using breastfeeding as a way around the facebook restriction on frontal nudity. i still think this is a tempest in a teapot. personally, i think free speech is being abused on the internet. i do not want my eight year old to accidentally access porn when clicking on some spam site, or by googling white house. i don't want to censor the internet, but perhaps there should be a separate internet isolating any porn related material? jon This would be an excellent idea if the porn industry could be persuaded to go along with it. As perverse and counterproductive as this sounds, said industry, as a whole, seems bent on the exact opposite, and in fact, in many cases the less scrupulous players in the industry go to great lengths to invade inboxes and hijack web searches specifically to avoid being confined to the target market that would be happy to go find them wherever they are. This was made abundantly clear by the somewhat paradoxical maneuvering surrounding the proposed .xxx TLD for porn domains. The idea of a porn-specific TLD made perfect sense, as it would have provided a place where interested adults could easily have gone looking for whatever they wanted, and would have made the process of blocking porn from underage computer users (or any others whom society feels the need to protect from porn) relatively trivial and straightforward. * * * * * * * * * * Really? When I was first aware of an attempt to create the top-level domain .xxx, the porn industry was on board at the time, it was a bunch of religious leaders that were so vocal that it was blocked it then. At least, this was what I heard from someone who was in close communication with folks members of the ICANN board Said individual expressed disbelief and couldn't figure out why the *hell* any religious folks would get involved in trying to *block* something like that. Julia The porn industry was originally in favor of it, I believe, until there was discussion of the fact that porn sites would not be statutorily required to be in the .xxx TLD (and in fact might start a land-rush to register both in and out of .xxx and possibly crowd out more cooperative actors in the market who were trying to register new sites/domains in .xxx) , and then discussion of the possibility of *creating* such a statutory requirement (which was the gist of my devil's-advocate followup) was what spooked the industry, as I understand it. The religious groups seemed to object on the grounds that creating a TLD would somehow legitimize and/or admit the existence of pornography itself, which (disturbingly) was also the position of the US Commerce Dept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.xxx (this also jibes somewhat with my own memory of all this) Somewhere along the line (again, both from the article and my own recollection), ICANN made a statement to the effect that they don't regulate content of sites they provide registrations for, so discussion became somewhat moot at that point. I think I'm going to back away from my earlier statement that it would be an excellent idea. In retrospect, it would be an excellent idea on paper and implemented entirely by cooperative actors (like the ones who could be trusted not to use open SMTP relays to send mass quantities of unsolicited commercial email). In the real world, with a significant minority of cynical and pragmatic, if not outright dishonest, actors, within a dysfunctionally skewed framework of social perceptions and rules, I'm thinking it's not a good idea at all, just because there's no way to get to a fair implementation of it from here. The problem is a lot deeper than domain registration. ___
Re: Facebook censorship and internet porn
On Dec 11, 2010, at 7:42 PM, Jon Louis Mann wrote: ...net nanny software block and report any search for any string containing the word breast ...that may prevent a woman from learning how to examine herself for cancer or her options if she is diagnosed... ...policy of removing pictures of breastfeeding. I know of a few images that disappeared even though they were privacy-restricted in such a way that the only possible audience was clothing-optional-aware and I doubt there were any complaints to speak of, so I may very well be wrong. The rules seem to be somewhat variable, and the only consistent cases seem to be ones with one or both nipples visible. one friend who pushed that about as close to the limit as they seem to tolerate -- the one of her in *only* a skirt and pasties is still up... Charlie thanks for the link, charlie all is explained: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/breastfeeding-facebook- photos/ i found this on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=39521488436 evidently there are a lot of riled up women about this. evidently, some few were using breastfeeding as a way around the facebook restriction on frontal nudity. i still think this is a tempest in a teapot. personally, i think free speech is being abused on the internet. i do not want my eight year old to accidentally access porn when clicking on some spam site, or by googling white house. i don't want to censor the internet, but perhaps there should be a separate internet isolating any porn related material? jon This would be an excellent idea if the porn industry could be persuaded to go along with it. As perverse and counterproductive as this sounds, said industry, as a whole, seems bent on the exact opposite, and in fact, in many cases the less scrupulous players in the industry go to great lengths to invade inboxes and hijack web searches specifically to avoid being confined to the target market that would be happy to go find them wherever they are. This was made abundantly clear by the somewhat paradoxical maneuvering surrounding the proposed .xxx TLD for porn domains. The idea of a porn-specific TLD made perfect sense, as it would have provided a place where interested adults could easily have gone looking for whatever they wanted, and would have made the process of blocking porn from underage computer users (or any others whom society feels the need to protect from porn) relatively trivial and straightforward. The problem, and this seems to be endemic to the industry as far as I can tell, is that the industry would very much rather do business the way it does now and take every possible tactical and/or strategic action available to make sure they're not only net-ubiquitous, but that they actually crowd out legitimate web search results for completely unrelated subjects, and appear in your inbox even if your junk mail filtering is strong enough that you end up filtering out your friends before you filter out the porn ads. Rather than target a perfectly willing and sex-positive demographic that would be happy to pay for their premium content, they would rather make the maximum possible nuisance of themselves trying to convert maybe one in a thousand or so of the largely sex-negative remainder of the population that doesn't want to see anything they have to offer. As well as make themselves maximally available to your kids. I've observed this in relation to just about everything there is to do with the industry, and seen it time and time again. And it's always completely puzzled me, because to me it's always seemed to be a bad business policy as well as ensuring they remain marginalized. But I don't run that industry. As for free speech, deciding what's abuse of it and what's legitimate use of it is a formitable philsophical problem indeed. Likewise, which restrictions on it are legitimate and which are overbroad and possibly draconian. There's room for considerable debate along that boundary. I believe that there is, in many cases, abuse of freedom of speech in the industry, given their aggresively confrontational marketing strategies, but I would not dare point out specific examples as unambigiuously abusive or not, because I doubt I could debate either side to the extent that someone else could not come up with an equally or even more compelling opposing view. And I repeat my assertion that our society (particularly that of the USA, and even more particularly that of some regions of the USA and/or specific segments of the population) is not exactly objective or even rational on this subject, and is influenced by social and cultural standards that I consider dysfunctional and destructive at the very least. Not the least of which is the perception that nudity == sex, or the related perception that sex == bad/dirty/evil. Or a whole list of others. So there are likely to be many strong
Re: Facebook censorship and internet porn
On Dec 11, 2010, at 8:56 PM, Bruce Bostwick wrote: This was made abundantly clear by the somewhat paradoxical maneuvering surrounding the proposed .xxx TLD for porn domains. The idea of a porn-specific TLD made perfect sense, as it would have provided a place where interested adults could easily have gone looking for whatever they wanted, and would have made the process of blocking porn from underage computer users (or any others whom society feels the need to protect from porn) relatively trivial and straightforward. And -- accepts karma hit for responding to own post, but bear with me -- the devil's advocate position on the .xxx TLD case: The any others whom society feels the need to protect from porn is a *huge* loophole, and given some aspects of the current political climate, it's not entirely unreasonable to imagine a possible future society where that one clause amounts to everyone that certain religious sects have under their power at any given time, or in the worst case, everyone, period. Putting all the porn domains in one easily-filtered place could in some circumstances be a prelude to relatively simple total censorship of the entire industry. So there are extremes at both end of the spectrum, and the resistance to implementation of an .xxx TLD, specifically, is probably reasonable too, from at least some perspectives .. especially if it comes with the stipulation that all porn, as legally defined, must only exist in domains within that TLD. And that simply because free speech only allowed in free speech zones is not truly free in any real sense, particularly if the free speech zones are then conveniently located where they can have no possible actual impact. There's a happy medium in there somewhere, and ultimately, it's futile to try to apply technical measures to problems that are more social than technical in nature. Law has never succeeded in addressing morality, or even ethics for that matter, and it's going to continue to fail. So I have no solution to the problem of bad actors making life miserable every way they can. As I said, it's a formidable philosophical problem .. Listen, when you get home tonight, you're gonna be confronted by the instinct to drink a lot. Trust that instinct. Manage the pain. Don't try to be a hero. -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Facebook breastfeeding ban
On Dec 10, 2010, at 6:11 PM, Jon Louis Mann wrote: I have never heard of a Facebook rule outlawing pictures of women breast feeding in public. I don't know of any publicly stated rule, but I do know photos of women topless tend to vanish fairly quickly, and I'm certain of it in the cases where the photos show visible nipples. I also know that any image can at any time be reported by anyone seeing it, and my suspicion is that it's less of an outright policy than it is a matter of how many people complain -- although i know of a few images that disappeared even though they were privacy-restricted in such a way that the only possible audience was clothing-optional-aware and I doubt there were any complaints to speak of, so I may very well be wrong. The rules seem to be somewhat variable, and the only consistent cases seem to be ones with one or both nipples visible. I know of one friend who has pushed that about as close to the limit as they seem to tolerate -- the one of her in *only* a skirt and pasties is still up, as far as I know. Again, for the audience in question, unlikely to be objectionable. Hard to say. It's like probing a black box in some ways .. ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Brin: (Ignoring Murphy's Law) kills
On Dec 7, 2010, at 5:31 AM, Alberto Monteiro wrote: Three days ago, a brazilian teenager was killed in hospital, because instead of saline solution, the nurse gave her vaseline. The reason was that the idiots that produced those products made _identical_ vessels for them, with the difference being a minuscule identification label. Murphy's Law is exactly the way to prevent those stupid errors. Text (in Portuguese): http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caso_Stephane Here an image of the two vessels: http://g1.globo.com/jornal-nacional/noticia/2010/12/mae-diz-que-auxiliar-de- enfermagem-colocou-frasco-de-vaselina-em-sp.html Alberto Monteiro Translation of the latter link (machine translation, but more or less intelligible): http://tinyurl.com/2vxjxxn Yes, those are pretty hard to tell apart. Doesn't mean it's not at least doubly important to read the labels, but yes, that was probably going to happen sooner or later ... :( The eyes are open, the mouth moves, but Mr Brain has long since departed, hasn't he, Percy? -- Edmund, Lord Blackadder ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Facebook is evil, why it must be eradicated [was: Wikileaks?]
On Dec 7, 2010, at 5:44 AM, Alberto Monteiro wrote: Why do people join Facebook, when it's owned by sociopaths and perverts? and then wrote: It's not the people that join that are sociopaths and perverts, it's the people that control the site that are sociopaths and perverts. Only a sociopath and pervert can think that breastfeeding is pornography. It's disrespectful to breastfeeding (and to pornography too, but wfc?) All the billions that g*vernments invest all the time to make mothers breastfeed, and those sociopaths and perverts create a Social Network that criminalizes it. They should be exiled to Antarctica. It seemed to me that the initial post could have been an excellent illustration of a trap question in the mold of Have you stopped beating your wife?, and left it alone, admiring the complex twists of it semantic seductiveness. But this seems to be a much better question to answer in the real world. The answer is that the culture at large has some very unhealthy and dysfunctional ideas about nudity and sex, and tends to perceive women's exposed breasts (regardless of the reasons why they're exposed) as a sexualized image. I don't know if this is more so, or less so, in Brazil than it is in the USA (I've heard widely conflicting reports), but with only limited exceptions in some more open-minded areas of the country, people are taught to consider exposed female breasts a moral threat of sorts (under the guise of protecting children) and some websites run by people who adhere to that belief system tend to discriminate in that way rather, er, indiscriminately. I don't like the paradigm, I strongly feel that the value system that underlies it is ultimately more destructive and unhealthy than anything else, but it's a very deep-rooted paradigm that would require far more than my own meager efforts to shift. And whether I happen to like it or not, Facebook is likely to continue this behavior for the foreseeable future. I wouldn't necessarily call the attitudes driving it sociopathic, but I suppose I could call some of them perverted, for a fairly loose definition of perversion. (A similar definition exists in a more extreme form in parts of the Arab world where women are forced to wrap themselves in clothing to the extent that they can barely even see, supposedly to avoid tempting nearby men into acts of lust. Both are a form of blaming the victim, and I think men who believe this about women need to work on impulse control more than they need to harass the womenfolk into covering themselves up, but that may just be me.) “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” -- Mahatma Gandhi ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Facebook is evil, why it must be eradicated [was: Wikileaks?]
On Dec 7, 2010, at 4:25 PM, trent shipley wrote: On Dec 7, 2010 3:15 PM, Dan Minette danmine...@att.net wrote: Only a sociopath and pervert can think that breastfeeding is pornography. It's disrespectful to... Actually, it doesn't, Alberto. Facebook is free, last time I looked. I can choose to use it or not use it. If a network won't let me refer to physics, and takes all examples of QM off it, it's not criminalizing QM. Perhaps Facebook is making a business decision. Will disallowing pictures of breastfeeding on Facebook gain it more prudish members than allowing it would gain members interested in details of breastfeeding that can best be shown by pictures? Not allowing women to breastfeed in, say, Mall of the Americas is one thing. That severely curtails breastfeeding mom's ability to go there. But, there are other ways to communicate such info on the web, so not allowing someone to post it on one's Facebook account can be seen as a purely business decision. Dan M. A business decision that injures public health. Not directly. Indirectly, it reinforces prejudices against women and childrearing that require little if any persuasion to continue, and considerable effort to dispel. And playing to prejudices is irresponsible, at the very least. But very little of that is Facebook, which is simply doing its best to appeal to a paying audience and maximize its profit, and has done the math in terms of financial bottom-line impact of allowing vs. prohibiting such pictures and decided it can gain greater profits by doing the latter. They missed an opportunity to advance a more forward-thinking and tolerant attitude, is all, and as a corporate entity, did so purely on the basis of that profit/loss analysis. Facebook's customers and their cultural values are the driver behind that. If their target audience had different cultural values, they would play to those just as eagerly -- imagine an alternate-universe USA whose culture is clothing-optional and predominantly neo-Wiccan, in which an equally-profit-motivated Facebook system plays to those cultural values just as enthusiastically as Facebook does in this universe. They merely reflect the wider population's attitudes. And again, my opinion is that those attitudes themselves are the problem, in our universe .. The true paradox of democracy is that it is vulnerable to defeat from within -- Me ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: WikiLeaks
On Dec 2, 2010, at 7:51 AM, Jon Louis Mann wrote: Having consensual sex in Sweden without a condom is punishable by a term of imprisonment of a minimum of two years for rape. That strikes me as very strange indeed. is there more to that law than that? Does this apply only to extramarital sex, for example? ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: The powers of cats
On Nov 11, 2010, at 7:05 AM, Alberto Monteiro wrote: Is is beyond the intelligence level of cats to understand that it's possible to use the mouse and see interesting things in the screen? Given the things I've seen cats learn to do, and in some cases, figure out on their own, especially from imitating human behavior, it wouldn't surprise me. I think just moving the mouse cursor wouldn't be enough of a reward to set up the feedback loop, for a cat, but if there were some noticeable and visually interesting reaction to mouse movement or clicking the mouse button, yes, the cat would probably start exploring it and trying to figure it out, and at some point, might just start randomly experimenting with the mouse and/or keyboard. On a different note, do cats see computer screens the same way we do? I've seen both cats and dogs react to images on TV and computer screens as real objects. I've seen a cat try to pounce on a mouse cursor on a computer screen, and i know of one dog who reacts very strongly to images of unfamiliar dogs on a TV screen (which for various reasons would be less likely to look real to either a cat or dog than a computer screen, particularly older CRT types). So this, at least, I can vouch for. (There are also quite a few videos now of cats playing with iPad touchscreens, particuarly if there's a game running that responds in visually interesting ways to the touchscreen input, on YouTube. As well as one of a cat investigating how a toilet works by repeatedly flushing it and watching the water in the bowl..) I don't believe there's a power in the 'verse can stop Kaylee from bein' cheerful. Sometimes you just wanna duct-tape her mouth and dump her in the hold for a month. -- Capt. Mal Reynolds, Serenity ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: the Cold War
On Nov 11, 2010, at 7:41 AM, Pat Mathews wrote: Of course, Russia and China didn't like each other any better than we liked either one of them, or they, us. Still, Kipling's Great Game went on along all three borders for quite some time. Which took the US a long time to figure out, incidentally. It also took us a long time to figure out that North Vietnam wasn't ever going to be a Chinese proxy the way North Korea had been, because China had been VIetnam's mortal enemy and part-time occupying power for the last thousand years or so, and that the domino theory justification for the Vietnam War was based almost entirely on completely invalid assumptions about how things worked in that part of the world, colored in large part by the very recent experience of the Korean War. ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: the Cold War
On Nov 8, 2010, at 4:55 AM, Alberto Monteiro wrote: Jon Louis Mann wrote: ...and judging by GDP figures, the USA is still fighting the Cold War. There never was a Cold War beginning with the Korean War WW III was a global conflict against Communism in Latin America, The Carribbean, Africa, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, etc. In fact the US has been in a state of war under other names for most of our history. WW IV is called the war on terror, and is also global in scope. Jon Mann No, the conflicts above mentioned justify the War term, the Cold is necessary because there was no actual USA x CCCP direct conflict, with americans and soviets killing each other in great numbers. Alberto Monteiro Depends on your definition of great numbers. There was extensive Soviet involvement in the Vietnam War, including significant numbers of Soviet pilots flying MiG-21's out of North Vietnam. Sort of like USA flight crews operating VNAF aircraft in the early years of the war, before we dropped the pretense and started flying under USAF colors. Most of this wasn't much talked about until long after the fall of Saigon. (The US pilots, mostly Navy, had noticed a rather wide distribution of pilot skill levels among the MiG pilots they engaged -- most were relatively unskilled and were a threat mostly due to their large numbers, but a few were clearly highly skilled and very experienced in air combat maneuvers. There was a lot of speculation on this until it was revealed much later that these were in fact USA/USSR dogfights.) Heard from a flight instructor: The only dumb question is the one you DID NOT ask, resulting in my going out and having to identify your bits and pieces in the midst of torn and twisted metal. ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Down with the government
On Oct 19, 2010, at 8:53 AM, John Williams jwilliams4...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 6:35 AM, Julia ju...@zurg.net wrote: The old people don't equate to the old culture. There's a fairly large intersection of the two, but neither is a subset (proper or improper) of the other. I understand that, but as you say, there's a fairly large intersection of the two. I agree, which is why I posed my question. I don't think the fact that there is not a perfect correspondence of old culture with old people answers my question. It's not an absolute correlation. I fit many people's profile of old people. Maybe only by a few years, but I'm definitely at least partially stuck in that cubbyhole. But I'm pretty far out on the bleeding edge of new culture, at least in the sense of this current cultural conflict, and plan to stay there as long as possible. And I know people far more into the age range of what's culturally considered old people who are at least as many sigmas out from the mean in my direction as I am, if not more. Granted, my corner of the Venn diagram is a lonely one, but it's not completely uninhabited .. Almost nothing that trickles down is fit to consume. -- Davidson Loehr ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Down with the government
On Oct 18, 2010, at 7:50 PM, Kevin O'Brien wrote: In other words, we have a continuing culture ware against a backdrop of change that is rapidly making the old culture obsolete. Well put. I might add that the old culture is becoming at least vaguely aware of their increasing marginality, irrelevance, and obsolescence, and doesn't like it at all .. ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: StratoSolar
On Oct 11, 2010, at 5:29 PM, Alberto Monteiro wrote: Keith Henson wrote: Since the 1970s, US politicians have given lip service to National Energy Self-sufficiency. The US has failed to achieve anything, largely because nobody had a good idea of how to make it work at the same or lower cost than importing oil. This method might not work either. However, it passes first-order physics and economics analysis and seems to deserve serious further study. You (USA) might be closer to self-sufficienty than you (Keith) think. Deepen the crisis (and reduce energy expendidure) and get a little more of shale gas, and you get there. Alberto Monteiro, minion of evil oil companies I still want to see someone work out a production scale process for seafloor methane-syngas-syncrude. Or even convert from flaring off natgas in the oilfield to field-scale syncrude production. If we have a finite amount of methane available, the least we can do is stop wasting it in production. Once you get to syncrude, you have perfectly reasonable refinery feedstock. Obviously it's a stopgap solution, but it would buy time to get off of a petroleum-based energy economy before the worst aspects of post-peak- oil economy start to kick in. (I would *really* like to see petroleum production start to migrate more toward plastics feedstock, and plastics in turn migrate away from disposable packaging -- the dreaded PETE water bottle included -- and more toward durable materials engineering. There's time yet to consider that. But that's later on in the plan. Along with recovering a lot of what's already been tossed into landfills .. which can be mined, if it comes down to it.) 'How do I print, Mr. Kahn?’ ‘How do I save?’ It’s Control-S! It’s ALWAYS Control-S!!” — Kahn Souphanousinphone ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Brin: Claw
Are the costs of those last 206 years items adjusted for variations in the value of the dollar over that time? ($1M bought a lot more back when we were buying Louisiana than it did when we were paying for Apollo missions..) [Also, concurring with David that WWII doesn't seem to be in there. One estimate I saw was around $288B to $341B in 1945 USD. One estimate of current value of that would be about $2.09T in 1990 USD, probably more now. Probably ballpark numbers given the spread of the cost over 4 years of US involvement in WWII and fluctuations in dollar values over that time (not to mention some of the financial craziness that went on during the mobilization where procurement amounted to however much of X you can make for however much you bid on it and we need it YESTERDAY, there's a war on, dont'cha know, so a lot of the smaller manufacturing/procurement is hard to put a firm dollar value on).] On Aug 26, 2010, at 6:00 PM, KZK wrote: This Graph puts the 23Trillion in Perspective: http://www.flickr.com/photos/79361...@n00/4868316187/ Obama's Kleptocratic Banksters aren't really very different from Bush's. Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. -- H. L. Mencken ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Brin: The Digital Surveillance State: Vast, Secret, and Dangerous
On Aug 23, 2010, at 2:24 AM, KZK wrote: On Aug 21, 2010, at 21:51, David Brindb...@sbcglobal.net wrote: Whine, moan bitch complain without any sensible suggestions... yep, that's the Cato way. Above all, aim all suspicion-of-authority at some vague government and ignore all other forces. From: KZKevil.ke...@gmail.com To: brin-l@mccmedia.com Sent: Sat, August 21, 2010 6:42:35 PM Subject: Brin: The Digital Surveillance State: Vast, Secret, and Dangerous http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/08/09/glenn-greenwald/the-digital-surveillance-state-vast-secret-and-dangerous/ On 8/21/2010 10:14 PM, Chris Frandsen wrote: This is the same anti government pitch being pushed right now to hamstring this administration. So, we should just ignore it when Obama is worse, in this case on spying on Americans, than Bush was, just because he has a (D) after his name? We should just ignore it when Obama does the opposite of what he campaigned on, just because he has a (D) after his name? We should Shut our mouths over things that when Bush did them, were completely outrageous, just because he has a (D) after his name? So we should just turn of four brains and accept everything he does as good, and just and right, and beyond criticism, just because he has a (D) after his name? I have to admit, one reason I voted for Obama (and I did vote for him, both in the primaries and in the general election) was my belief that at the very least, he would partially if not completely dismantle the invasive security apparatus that Bush/Cheney were so eager to put into place the day after 9/11/01, and if nothing else, call for the repeal of at least portions of the USA PATRIOT Act and the illegal (by the actual FISA statute, if I remember correctly) warrantless wiretapping practices used by the domestic security/intel agencies and restore some accountability to government surveillance of citizens. The fact that he did nothing of the sort, and in fact took steps to further entrench that policy of surveillance and extrajudicial anti- terrorism measures that ultimately completely bypass due process, by itself makes me regret ever supporting him. It's a largely inexplicable discrepancy between the policy promises he campaigned on and the actual policies he put in place once in office. As far as I know, Cheney's shadow Situation Room, PEOC, and secure communications facilities are still in place at One Observatory Circle, as I've heard no mention anywhere of those being decommissioned or removed. Granted, Joe Biden doesn't seem to be the type of VP who would take advantage of having those facilities there, but that hinges on a gut-level read of the man that may be wildly if not totally inaccurate. We still only have simple good-faith assertions by the various three letter agencies involved that they will not use the largely unaccountable surveillance powers they have for reprisals against citizens' criticism of the apparatus itself or of Congress' or presidential administrations' use or misuse of it. So far I haven't seen any evidence of its misuse, but a great deal of such misuse could be going out without any news of it ever surfacing, the way it's structured from what's been disclosed. And given that we're talking about a system that can data-mine the entire US telecommunications infrastructure in real time, under software control, on fairly abstract semantic levels, the potential for virtually untraceable abuse is significant indeed. Which is what disappoints and concerns me about what *hasn't* happened to correct this during this administration. (And the irony is that the same neoconservatives who couldn't be enthusiastic enough about the expansion of government power after 9/11, while Bush II was in office, are suddenly completely against it now that Obama is in office. Seems they forgot the rule that you should never give a government powers you wouldn't want your worst nightmare of a government to have..) Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. -- H. L. Mencken ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: First Pluto is not a planet, and now . . . .
On Aug 3, 2010, at 10:33 AM, Nick Arnett wrote: On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 8:29 AM, William T Goodall w...@wtgab.demon.co.uk wrote: ... When presented with the statement “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals,” just 45 percent of respondents indicated “true.” Compare this figure with the affirmative percentages in Japan (78), Europe (70), China (69) and South Korea (64). Americans apparently are increasingly afraid of lightning. Hey, self=fulfilling prophecy and confirmation bias are sort of a national cultural tradition around here. :p (The people who answered false might rightly claim that 1. they've always believed in non-evolutionary creation, and 2. they've never been hit by lightning, so it must be working, right? ;) ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: First Pluto is not a planet, and now . . . .
On Aug 3, 2010, at 10:10 AM, Nick Arnett wrote: As long as we're on that subject, it dawned on me a while ago that the trouble I have with creationists is that they believe in a God who is too stupid to have created evolution. They also believe in a god who loves them so much that he'll destroy them if they don't believe totally in him and do everything he says without question. And who killed and then resurrected his son just to show them he meant business. That's always sounded like a rather unhealthy kind of relationship to me. You wanna tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing? -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Creationism [was: First Pluto is not a planet, and now . . . .]
On Aug 3, 2010, at 12:48 PM, Dave Land wrote: The idea that Christianity or Judaism believe that the devil is a separate but (thankfully, not quite) equal power to God is nonsense: it goes against the whole idea of monotheism. You can accept or not accept the monotheistic God of Judeo-Christianity as you see fit, but you can't accept it _and_ have this other power floating out there, too. He works for God or he doesn't exist. Dave It is fun, however, to point out to Satanists that they are, in fact, at least indirectly Christians. It makse their heads explode quite entertainingly. :D HAH, YES. HE ACTUALLY SAYS IN HIS LETTER, I BET YOU DON'T EXIST 'COS EVERYONE KNOWS ITS YORE PARENTS. OH YES, said Death, with what almost sounded like sarcasm, I'M SURE HIS PARENTS ARE JUST IMPATIENT TO BANG THEIR ELBOWS IN TWELVE FEET OF NARROW UNSWEPT CHIMNEY, I DON'T THINK. (: HAPPY HOGSWATCH :) ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Creationism [was: First Pluto is not a planet, and now . . . .]
On Aug 3, 2010, at 4:00 PM, William T Goodall wrote: On 3 Aug 2010, at 19:35, Bruce Bostwick wrote: On Aug 3, 2010, at 12:48 PM, Dave Land wrote: The idea that Christianity or Judaism believe that the devil is a separate but (thankfully, not quite) equal power to God is nonsense: it goes against the whole idea of monotheism. You can accept or not accept the monotheistic God of Judeo-Christianity as you see fit, but you can't accept it _and_ have this other power floating out there, too. He works for God or he doesn't exist. Dave It is fun, however, to point out to Satanists that they are, in fact, at least indirectly Christians. It makse their heads explode quite entertainingly. :D I point out that Christians are actually Satanists. One big happy pantheon Maru In the sense that Christians, Satanists, Jews, and Muslims are all part of the same larger belief-system, at least. Sibling rivalry Maru ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Tea Party Racism
On Jul 26, 2010, at 11:58 AM, zwil...@zwilnik.com wrote: On July 25, 2010 at 7:57 PM Bruce Bostwick lihan161...@sbcglobal.net wrote: On Jul 25, 2010, at 1:06 PM, Doug Pensinger wrote: Is the Tea Party fundamentally racist? Or is it just coincidental that it formed as a black man was taking office? For years, Republicans were in office busting the budget and passing bills like Medicare D which was completely unfunded and will cost us something like $72 B a year. Where was the outrage then? Doug I wouldn't say it was fundamentally racist as a matter of actual policy, or at least not overtly stated policy. Most of the time, they carefully avoid using racist language or imagery in their public statements. Most of the time. Don't overlook what is called dog whistle political statements. This names comes from the well-known phenomenon that a highly- pitched whistle will be heard by dogs, but not by people. And in polictics there is a similar phenomenon whereby you can say something that cannot explicitly be criticized when you you say it, but the people who are supposed to hear it will understand what you really mean. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics I'm not overlooking it, hence my qualifying statement about overtly stated policy. Covert communication is an entirely different matter. There is almost certainly some degree of dog-whistle codespeak in what comes out of the Tea Party. It's clear that they're occasionally (or even often) using specific wording that's somewhat unusual for what they appear to be saying at face value, and in my experience that's a sign that the words they're using are intended to mean something very different than what most people understand them to mean. So I wouldn't rule that out, at all. (And I'd love to get my hands on a fairly complete codebook., and would love even more to see live real- time de-obfuscated transcripts of such statements.) You wanna tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing? -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Tea Party Racism
On Jul 26, 2010, at 11:58 AM, zwil...@zwilnik.com wrote: On July 25, 2010 at 7:57 PM Bruce Bostwick lihan161...@sbcglobal.net wrote: On Jul 25, 2010, at 1:06 PM, Doug Pensinger wrote: Is the Tea Party fundamentally racist? Or is it just coincidental that it formed as a black man was taking office? For years, Republicans were in office busting the budget and passing bills like Medicare D which was completely unfunded and will cost us something like $72 B a year. Where was the outrage then? Doug I wouldn't say it was fundamentally racist as a matter of actual policy, or at least not overtly stated policy. Most of the time, they carefully avoid using racist language or imagery in their public statements. Most of the time. Don't overlook what is called dog whistle political statements. This names comes from the well-known phenomenon that a highly- pitched whistle will be heard by dogs, but not by people. And in polictics there is a similar phenomenon whereby you can say something that cannot explicitly be criticized when you you say it, but the people who are supposed to hear it will understand what you really mean. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics One important thing to note related to covertly targeted communication is that the right wing in general is not in the habit of making broadcast public statements all that frequently to the general public, for various reasons, not the least of which is that they tend not to be well prepared for or tolerant of the inevitable criticism from more moderate or progressive-minded audiences. The far more common practice in the right-wing community is to communicate through viral chain emails, which can usually be counted on to travel only to sympthetic readers and whose targeting leverages interpersonal relationships as a filter to keep the communication from reaching people inclined to question the content. This bears some serious consideration. The Tea Party leadersip doesn't seem to be authoring a lot of the viral content, but the rank and file membership use that back channel almost exclusively, and given that the people in those channels tend to be a vector for both Tea Party and neopentecostal theocratic agitprop, among many other (and sometimes many much, much nastier) subjects, there's no small amount of cross-pollination and conflation. I have at least two ore three separate taps into that vector, thanks to certain oddities about my family relationships and my political leanings, and I can say confidently that about 90% or more of what the Tea Party rank and file are saying isn't making the news because it's targeted tightly enough that the media don't see it. And it's being mixed with a lot of theocratic and Christian- nationalist messages, and various flavors of racist and/or white supremacist content as well, and because it's largely viral, it's nearly impossible to trace to a given origin, or stop in any meaningful fashion. And I'm only getting a tiny fraction of the full stream of it, and I get a lot. So this is a complex question, because while the Tea Party does technically have a leadership of sorts, it's a weak one, and there's a lot of leaderless-cell activity underneath the surface that's not at all like the public face of the party. And I'm not sure whether that's a feature of the design, or an emergent property of its population and the methods they use to communicate. I'm leaning toward the latter, although the leadership certainly doesn't seem to be too serious about doing anything other than enabling it and diverting outside attention away from what's going on. The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed. -- Adolf Hitler ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Tea Party Racism
On Jul 25, 2010, at 1:06 PM, Doug Pensinger wrote: Is the Tea Party fundamentally racist? Or is it just coincidental that it formed as a black man was taking office? For years, Republicans were in office busting the budget and passing bills like Medicare D which was completely unfunded and will cost us something like $72 B a year. Where was the outrage then? Doug I wouldn't say it was fundamentally racist as a matter of actual policy, or at least not overtly stated policy. Most of the time, they carefully avoid using racist language or imagery in their public statements. Most of the time. But the party also seems to leave very carefully parsed loopholes in their public statements, in general, that one could figuratively drive a Mack truck through, in terms of allowing, and one might say even enabling, racist ideology and behavior among their rank and file membership, and it's an absolute certainty to me that the party has some very racist followers, *and* that the party seems to do little if anything to discourage those followers from overtly racist behavior. And the thing that makes this a really hard question is that if you were to ask any of those hardcore racist folks in the Tea Party whether the party stands for what they believe in, the majority would probably enthusiastically say yes. And might even specifically extend that to support for their racist beliefs and ideology. It depends on who you ask, and some of the answers you might get from the leadership would be rather interestingly uninformative if past behavior is any guide. The best I'd be able to say overall is that they are very good at claiming they aren't what they seem in practice to be. Sort of like the Nigerian scam emails that start off with This is not spam .. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. -- Thomas Jefferson ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: replacing fossil fuels
On Jul 6, 2010, at 10:41 AM, Nick Arnett wrote: We don't need to confer about this kind of thing. The only time we need to agree is on those very, very rare occasions when we see the need to shut someone out. I've found, on the lists/communities I mod, that if none of the mods approve a post given ample opportunity to do so, if it sits in the queue long enough, a quick poll of the other mods for is this post a problem? will usually arrive at some consensus as to whether to reject it or not. (Although the first person to ask is usually the one who ends up tasked with telling the offender what the problem was..) And yes, the spambots attack regularly. They do indeed. Although the most foolproof test of all seems to be having a human read the first few posts from a new member and only approve posters who seem to be posting mostly on topic and from a perspective of interest in the discussion. Even if someone were to try to write a bot script to fake enough seemingly on-topic replies to gain unmoderated access and not just try to blast out as much spam as it can before it's killed, that faking process itself would be .. *rather* non-trivial. :D Oh yeah? Well, I speak LOOOUD, and I carry a BEEEger stick -- and I use it too! **whop!** -- Yosemite Sam ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Any comments on this piece?
On Jun 17, 2010, at 3:01 PM, Alberto Monteiro wrote: Ronn! Blankenship wrote: Petrobras was :-) Did they make women's undergarments out of petroleum? You have a wrong idea about Brazil. Unfortunately, the paradise that movies like Blame it on Rio or Tourists depict is as far away from actual Brazil as Escape from NY or The Postman [*] is from the actual USA. Alberto Monteiro [*] at least something is on-topic... Hmm .. there was wordplay involved that may not have been obvious to non-native English speakers .. bras as abbreviation (plural) for brassiere vs. abbreviation for Brasil .. ;) ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Weekly Chat Reminder
On Jun 2, 2010, at 1:00 PM, William T Goodall wrote: -(_() Though sometimes marshmallows do get thrown. I once found too-burnt-to-be-eaten flaming marshmallows can be thrown at fairly high velocity from the skewer on which they were being roasted. They stick fairly irremovably to many things in that state. I don't get invited to many marshmallow roasts. (Or marshmallow fights, for that matter.) Compressed Air Marshmallow Gun Maru ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Apple Microsoft
On May 26, 2010, at 4:23 PM, William T Goodall wrote: Apple's (AAPL) market capitalisation exceeded Microsoft's (MSFT) today $225.98 billion to $225.32 billion. The end of the blue screen era Maru -- William T Goodall Mail : w...@wtgab.demon.co.uk Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk Blog : http://blog.williamgoodall.name/ I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. - Neal Stephenson I was a bit behind Neal, because I had to wait a while before I had an OS X capable machine at home (I'm something of a FrankenMac expert and some of my machines are, well, vintage is putting it kindly), but I embraced it as soon as I had a machine that could run it. (And my user environment is intact, and incrementally upgraded, from 10.1.5 on my original home Wallstreet G3. And the user environment on my work machine is also intact, and incrementally upgraded, beginning with the first public release of 10.0. I'd be running 10.6.3 on my current personal machine if it weren't for the completely unsupported install of MySQL 5 running alongside the mostly unsupported install of PHP 5 that I use for web development testing under the fully supported Apache 2 in 10.5.8.) I'm over the moon. This is my over-the-moon face. -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: ObBenford, sort of . . .
On May 16, 2010, at 7:49 AM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: (Sorry, since the list won't allow graphics all I can post is the link.) Non Sequitur Comic Strip, May 16, 2010 on GoComics.com - http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2010/05/16/ How do they maintain the vacuum in the well? ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: On Listmail
Stop burning it for fuel, and start using it for plastic feedstocks. And stop using 1000-year plastics for disposable packaging and start using them for stuff that will be around for 1000 years. On May 4, 2010, at 11:22 PM, Doug Pensinger wrote: Tax, conserve, find alternatives and leave the oil in the ground. Here and elsewhere. Heard from a flight instructor: The only dumb question is the one you DID NOT ask, resulting in my going out and having to identify your bits and pieces in the midst of torn and twisted metal. ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: On Listmail
On May 3, 2010, at 12:49 AM, Doug Pensinger wrote: Beyond that, you're right, we should stop using fossil fuels as quickly as is practicable. I favor large state and federal taxes on gas and oil to subsidize research and development on alternatives and the development of mass transit. Maybe in light of this debacle a few more people will see it my way. There was research on exactly that sort of strategy, a few decades ago. Then it went out of style and what research there was was starved of funding and allowed to die, and we went right back to the old habits. Wind/solar energy resources are still seen as hippie fringe science in the parts of the world where oil is still king, and oil production is still the vast majority of our energy investment. The problem is one of attitudes, and fickle and unstable ones at that. The large scale investment in alternative energy sources had support mainly because people had fresh memories of the 1973 oil embargo, and as soon as it looked like Saudi oil was back on the table, the support for developing alternative energy faded out and oil was back in business. As soon as people couldn't see anything scary right in front of their faces, they forgot the bigger picture. Proposing a fundamental change in how humans do anything is never easy, and always has to fight this tendency to go right back to old habits once immediate crises are over, especially given the conservative and refractory nature of upper level management in the oil industry. There are a lot of people who think the way you and I do (and we agree on a lot!), but entirely too few of them are in decision making capacities when it comes to this sort of thing .. A city built on rock 'n roll would be structurally unsound. -- Julie Maier ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: On Listmail
On May 3, 2010, at 12:10 PM, Dan Minette wrote: No one could have envisioned, after already drilling the well and measuring all the downhole pressures, that during well changeover, there'd be enough pressure to push that much drill pipe outand that the drill pipe wouldn't be held by the cement. Wait .. drill pipe, or casing? Looked like they were in the process of casing the well to get it ready for production, which would mean casing, in which case you're absolutely right about the magnitude of the forces involved and what they'd do to the cutoffs and blowout preventers at the underwater wellhead. Unless the casing wasn't set right, or the cement hadn't cured enough .. There is a fundamental difference between the mythical imagery we apply to reality and the reality itself. -- Me ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: On Listmail
On May 3, 2010, at 1:47 PM, Alberto Monteiro wrote: Wind/solar energy resources are still seen as hippie fringe science in the parts of the world where oil is still king, Not everywhere. P = k v^3 Maru Alberto Monteiro You are correct, sir. ;) Go ahead and do it, you can apologize later. -- RADM Grace Hopper, 1906-1992 The sunset is an illusion, but the beauty is real. -- Richard Bach ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: On Listmail
On Apr 28, 2010, at 11:26 PM, John Williams wrote: From my point of view, the current political situation in the US is a disaster and just too depressing to even think about. It is depressing, isn't it? What passes for discourse in this country these days brings images to my mind of tribes of screeching monkeys flinging feces at each other. Too many people are focusing all their effort on out-shouting anyone tho disagrees with them, and putting no effort at all into actually listening or trying to gain real understanding. Yes, I find that very depressing indeed. It doesn't help that many of the people now shouting the loudest are people who are, indirectly, actively arguing for their own ruin, because they don't even stop to think what the words they're shouting actually mean, because they proudly refuse to allow their minds to be corrupted by knowledge. Happily, I can't say this describes anyone here. Sadly, it describes a lot of people in a lot of other places. I have no words for how that makes me feel. Depressed just seems to be a pitiful understatement. Giving kickbacks to the wealthy isn't creating wealth, it's just giving kickbacks to the wealthy. -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: On Listmail
On Apr 28, 2010, at 11:07 PM, Doug Pensinger wrote: Facebook is the only social network I frequent and while I think it's great and has its place, it's a terrible forum for any kind of serious political debate. For one thing, many of the people you know intimately are probably there, and if they are people you wouldn't want to debate at the dinner table (because you don't want to promote discord) then you probably don't want to get into it with them on Facebook either. And really, that's not what Facebook is for anyway, its more of a hey look at these pictures of my kids or hey isn't this a funny video or (for some) hey I just trimmed my toenails kind of place. Facebook is a pretty terrible forum for almost anything serious. I've never seen a site that seems to discourage any kind of in depth discussion so effectively by design. The notes feature is the closest thing it has to an actual writing-based feature, and even that is hidden away from the main page out of sight and only quoted there in brief snippets. Not that that has stopped me from expressing my opinion there now and then. 8^) Nor has it stopped me. :D It's Throw Open Our Doors to People Who Want to Discuss Things That We Could Care Less About Day. -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: KJ6FOI
Congratulations! When are you going back in for your General and/or Extra? ;) -de N5VB, EM10gi (might at some indeterminate point in the future be up on 20 meter PSK31, but for now is stuck on 2m/440 FM repeaters, fortunately accessible via IRLP) On Feb 25, 2010, at 8:43 PM, Nick Arnett wrote: Permission to brag, er, share good news? Since we're all somewhat geeky here, I'm happy to report that the Federal Communications Commission, in its infinite wisdom, bestowed upon me the amateur radio callsign KJ6FOI (mnemonic: Freedom of Information) today, after I passed the Technician Class test last Saturday. On this one we'd like to think of ourselves collectively as 'da men', sir. -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: KJ6FOI
On Feb 25, 2010, at 9:47 PM, John Williams wrote: On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 7:37 PM, Nick Arnett nick.arn...@gmail.com wrote: However, some of the spectrum is still restricted to CW (code) only. Right, the masochist channels :-) Or, perhaps, the apocalypse practice channels. It's a bandwidth thing. :D There are digital modes (like PSK31) that are legal in the code bands due to their narrow bandwidth (assuming your radio's mike isn't live and modulating audio over your PSK signal), and you would not believe how many CW signals can fit comfortably into just a few hundred Hz of spectrum. Plus, you can get out on HF with a couple of 50 cent transistors, an Altoids tin, and maybe a 9 volt battery if you set up your antenna and feedline right. ;) ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: KJ6FOI
On Feb 25, 2010, at 9:47 PM, John Williams wrote: On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 7:37 PM, Nick Arnett nick.arn...@gmail.com wrote: However, some of the spectrum is still restricted to CW (code) only. Right, the masochist channels :-) Or, perhaps, the apocalypse practice channels. There's actually an interesting tangent here, by the way, on the subject of single sideband (SSB) reception and transmission. SSB effectively translates a slice of spectrum either up from or down to audio baseband more or less intact (inverted in the case of LSB), and it's amazing what your ears can learn to figure out just from what you hear in that slice of spectrum, especially with tuning up and down the dial. And the possibilities only multiply when you feed that audio from the radio into, say, the sound card of a computer, and vice versa. DigiPan is only one of a nearly infinite number of possible examples of that. All the DSP capability of your computer interfaced quite elegantly with that old Hallicrafters tube rig from the attic and maybe an audio interface with an audio-triggered transmit relay. I don't know about you, but I find that thought rather exciting. :D (And an interesting experiment: Feed the I and Q outputs of a quadrature detector to a pair of stereo headphones. Apparently the brain's auditory cortex is wired in a way that takes unique advantage of that format. And you're literally *listening to signals on the complex plane*. What's not cool about that?) ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: KJ6FOI
On Feb 26, 2010, at 1:29 PM, Nick Arnett wrote: On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 9:19 AM, Bruce Bostwick lihan161...@sbcglobal.net wrote: Congratulations! When are you going back in for your General and/or Extra? ;) The examiners tried to talk me into doing the General immediately, but I didn't. I'm not sure when or if I will... I'll be quite happy on VHF, I think, but we'll see. You only pay for the first one. :D That's how I came out of my last VE session an Extra instead of a General. Hadn't studied for the Extra, but they talked me into taking it anyway, because it was free since I had passed the previous one and there was nothing to lose, and i ended up bashing through it and getting most of the how many degrees will this LC network rotate the phase of this signal questions right, or at least enough to pass. Possibly luck. But I got to sign /AE after the test session. You'll be happy on VHF for a while, but there are a lot of adventures to be had on HF too, and you need at least a General to work 20 meters .. ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: KJ6FOI
On Feb 26, 2010, at 1:33 PM, Nick Arnett wrote: And the possibilities only multiply when you feed that audio from the radio into, say, the sound card of a computer, and vice versa. DigiPan is only one of a nearly infinite number of possible examples of that. All the DSP capability of your computer interfaced quite elegantly with that old Hallicrafters tube rig from the attic and maybe an audio interface with an audio-triggered transmit relay. I don't know about you, but I find that thought rather exciting. :D Wowza... just read a little about DigiPan. Amazing. Personal computers sure have transformed amateur radio from when I first got interested. They've totally transformed it, in many ways. And with DSP only improving with time, we've probably only scratched the surface of what can be done along those lines. http://gnuradio.org/redmine/wiki/gnuradio might give you some ideas. I think the first time I ever encountered it at all was in 1968, when my older sister was an exchange student in Columbia and we talked to her via HF at the University of Pittsburgh's radio club. I remember it sort of freaking out my younger sister, the one who died last month. She was only six or seven years old and found the whole thing scary. They patched the audio into a telephone handset and that helped her deal with it. And yes, there are still places cellphones won't work and phone patches still play a role. Not as big a role now as they used to (especially on VHF/UHF repeaters) but there are places they're still hard to replace. Especially in disaster recovery. (And an interesting experiment: Feed the I and Q outputs of a quadrature detector to a pair of stereo headphones. Apparently the brain's auditory cortex is wired in a way that takes unique advantage of that format. And you're literally *listening to signals on the complex plane*. What's not cool about that? It must be very cool, since don't quite understand what you're saying. ;-) I'm trying to remember which issue of QST I saw it in. The effect is basically stereo single sideband, and signals appear to come from various points around your auditory horizon, making them much easier to isolate than they are if you're listening to a straight detector output in both ears. Haven't heard much about it since then, but it was quite fascinating when I saw it. The term they used was panoramic reception, I think. Listen, when you get home tonight, you're gonna be confronted by the instinct to drink a lot. Trust that instinct. Manage the pain. Don't try to be a hero. -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Today's EE/Physics homework assignment . . .
On Feb 22, 2010, at 9:10 AM, Dave Land wrote: On Feb 20, 2010, at 7:52 PM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: http://thereifixedit.com/2010/02/20/epic-kludge-photo-resistance-is-futile/ Beats the heck out of a trip to the hardware store, if you happen to have a bag of those things hanging around. How else are you gonna use up 50 identical resistors? Dave Can't quite tell if they're all identical, though, or what the exact value is. (The color codings look like they're using several ambiguous values of almost-brown, almost-red, or maybe orange.) -b, who once actually used to do that kind of thing for a day job ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Unsolvable and beyond compromise.
On Feb 22, 2010, at 4:27 PM, Trent Shipley wrote: http://alturl.com/s5id Republicans would have to be suicidal idiots to play ball with Obama and the Democrats on health care reform. They all involve increased interference by the Federal Government in the health care market, which is a cultural no-no in America. (Leaving people uninsured is also a no-no. Basically, health care reform runs afoul deeply held contradictory cultural values. It is not a problem for which there is a satisfactory political compromise.) Until the cultural values change. Which I believe is happening. The people who are against federal government interference in the health care market are *not* the people who are against leaving people uninsured and at the mercy of profit-based health care systems. The former are a dwindling, if increasingly vocal and still somewhat better connected, minority, and the latter are a disorganized but increasingly savvy majority, and sooner or later that balance will tip one way or the other .. and I see it ultimately tipping in favor of strengthening the safety net for people that a purely profit-driven health care system tends to let fall through the cracks. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but that's how I see it. This conflict has many other aspects, though, and runs far deeper than just the health care debate .. ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: ping
NAK On Feb 9, 2010, at 8:12 PM, Trent Shipley wrote: Ping! Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness. -- Bertrand Russell ___ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Is this thing on?
On Jan 26, 2010, at 11:17 AM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: At 05:53 PM Monday 1/25/2010, Julia wrote: I love wearing a Workman model Utilikilt and sticking a hammer in the tool loop, just so *I* can answer the question, How's the hammer hanging? (Of course, it doesn't happen often, and is more likely to be a rubber mallet, the sort that's useful for pounding tent stakes into the ground.) Julia Some places the ground is hard enough to make a rubber mallet useless for that purpose. Carrying a sledge hammer of sufficient size in a tool loop on an article of clothing more commonly worn in these parts, however, might lead to one being the subject of the tune made popular recently by commercials for _American Idol_ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMwhl4IrPNc ) . . . ronn! :) I've been known to use 60d bridge spikes, due to two things rather common in the places I've had to camp in Texas: 1) buried bits of limestone, and 2) caliche. Driving those usually doesn't require a sledgehammer, but it often requires a 2 lb crosspeen hammer. (It's rather interesting to both hear and feel one of those little rocks splitting under the spike when I drive it in. Under similar conditions, I have actually snapped the top off of vendor-supplied plastic stakes, and remember hearing a flying bit of one whizzing past my ear Hollywood-ricochet style once. That was shortly before i switched to bridge spikes, which don't break. Even if they are sometimes pure *#^$* to pull up.) Oh yeah? Well, I speak LOOOUD, and I carry a BEEEger stick -- and I use it too! **whop!** -- Yosemite Sam ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Getting ballpoint pen off laptop screen?
On Jan 7, 2010, at 10:53 PM, Michael Harney wrote: Julia wrote: What's the best thing to do for that? And, just as importantly, what should be avoided at all costs? Julia ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com Important: Do NOT use acetone. It erodes plastics and may severely damage the screen surface. Someone already suggested using a moist, lint-free cloth. There are cleaning gels and wipes for LCD screens that you can also try. Michael Harney The only safe solvent to use on anything computer-screen related is water, preferably distilled, although it won't dissolve most inks. Isopropyl alcohoi will cut through most inks, possibly not as well on ballpoint inks as on dry erase or permanent marker, but it may react chemically with some plastics, particularly transparent/translucent ones. I don't remember if the scratch filler compound I'm thinking about -- that would match the refractive index of the plastic and polish out after applying to hide the scratch -- is something that actually exists or something I wanted that didn't exist. (And I'm not sure how good an idea that would be on a matte finish diffuser surface anyway.) I seem to remember that some LCD's can be disassembled and the front diffuser sheet replaced, and if this is one of those, that might be feasible. It's labor intensive, as I recall .. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: SciFi and Fantasy(?) Wiki
On Dec 29, 2009, at 5:36 AM, Alberto Monteiro wrote: For example, why on Hell should a site or list dedicated to, say, Linux, include advertisings about Viagra? Because someone, somewhere, has decided that we all need to see ads for Viagra every hour of the day, no matter where we are, and no matter how relevant they are to what we're doing at the moment. I suspect that that person works for the ad agency that's promoting Viagra. (And apparently they're determined enough to get those ads in front of us that they don't mind people going to what would be heroic lengths to defeat even the strongest email spam filters to get them into our email inboxes, as well.) We're going to shape the future of jurisprudence, the laws that sustain our whole society. Or shove somebody in there to strike down those God-awful excuses for laws the Republicans are passing. -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Avatar
On Dec 23, 2009, at 2:56 PM, Max Battcher wrote: On 12/23/2009 13:11, Julia wrote: When I've seen the preview, I've had uncanny valley issues. I don't think I could sit through the whole thing without having a brain-ache. :( I don't think the previews do justice to the film because this really is one of those rare films that needs 3D to do it justice and is better the bigger the screen that you watch it on. I particularly think the uncanny valley issues with the film dissolve the more you let the film immerse you and large screens and 3D are key to that. This is something that James Cameron seems to have known all along, and part of why it has become the message to get out to encourage people to pay for that 3D or IMAX upgrade at their local popcorn stadium. I actually had few if any uncanny valley problems with it at all. I think one big factor was facial expressions -- this is the first movie about which I've been able to say that the CG characters had a full enough and rich enough range of expressions for the faces and nonverbal cues to hold their own with the dialogue, and in fact successfully replace it in ways that really surprised me. But there was an incredible attention to detail all around, and it required very little suspension of disbelief, and particularly visually, less than I'm used to from most movies. The previews really don't do it justice at all, and I agree with Max that it's a movie that does really need 3D to really get all of it. As for the themes I found most interesting .. well, those would be spoilers .. ;) ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Kid's telescope buying advice?
On Dec 10, 2009, at 3:59 AM, Charlie Bell wrote: On 10/12/2009, at 6:26 PM, Bryon Daly wrote: *Delurking* I could use some telescope purchasing advice, if anyone's interested in helping. My astonomy knowledge is quite limited. I'd say you'd be better off getting a decent 'scope for the family and getting the lad a good book on how to use it as a present. Go to a telescope shop. Don't get one from a toy store. I was rather taken with this one when it first hit the market, and have been wanting one ever since: http://scientificsonline.com/product.asp?pn=3005001bhcd2=1260492140 It's not a high-end machine with a computerized equatorial mount, but it's quite a decent scope even considering its funky late-70's body design. At least good enough for entertaining and engaging family astronomy. There was a thriving secondhand market in these old Astroscans before Edmund finally got wise and started making them again. Yes, my exposure to telescopes was with one of the cheap toy-store Newtonians. It was so unbelievably frustrating to use that I gave up on it after a few weeks. (Although the eyepieces came in handy when I was able to tape one onto an old microscope objective I had lying around and make a surprisingly nice 100x+ handheld microscope, which I might still have somewhere.) With the Barlow and maybe a set of Ha and CaK solar aperture filters, you could have quite a lot of fun with one of these... We're going to shape the future of jurisprudence, the laws that sustain our whole society. Or shove somebody in there to strike down those God-awful excuses for laws the Republicans are passing. -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Fake religion
On Dec 4, 2009, at 6:48 PM, Dave Land wrote: On Dec 4, 2009, at 8:52 AM, William T Goodall wrote: On 3 Dec 2009, at 21:11, Bruce Bostwick wrote: All religions are fake from the perspective of those seeing them from outside. No religion is fake from the perspective of its true believers. Not a very useful metric, all things considered. I see all 10,000 or so current religions as fake and a religionist sees 9,999 of them as fake :-) Almost in Agreement Maru This is one of the best statements you've ever made. You sound very much aligned with Leo Tolstoy, who, in his attempts to promote nonviolent resistance as the truest expression of the teachings of Christ (which he saw as a philosophy of life, not as the words of the Son of God, nor the ravings of a lunatic), had nothing, nothing at all good to say about churches. In fact, he goes as far as to say that their very existence as churches is in opposition to Christ. You might like to read his The Kingdom of God is Within You, in which he presents his arguments, which have reminded me of yours from time to time, quite brilliantly. Dave Tolstoy and I seem to agree rather fundamentally on the nature of those teachings. The portions of the gospels that seem to have been original writing (even if they *were* written as much as 200 years after whatever actually happened) very much seem to be about philosophy of life and a way of living, very much opposed to even the *idea* of an organized church. I think Christ would have been completely appalled at what was made of his teachings after the era of, say, Constantine and the First Council of Nicaea, and my guess is that the results would have made chasing the moneylenders out of the temple look mild by comparison. But I'm a religion of one, and those teachings are but one of my many resources .. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Fake religion
Sorry, the page you were looking for in the blog Infinite Complacency does not exist. On Dec 1, 2009, at 7:40 PM, William T Goodall wrote: http://infinitecomplacency.blogspot.com/2009/11/16-john-lindsteins-lawsuit.html The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. - H.L. MENCKEN ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Fake religion
On Dec 3, 2009, at 2:46 PM, Julia wrote: -Original Message- From: brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com [mailto:brin-l- boun...@mccmedia.com] On Behalf Of Bruce Bostwick Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 9:28 AM To: Killer Bs (David Brin et al) Discussion Subject: Re: Fake religion Sorry, the page you were looking for in the blog Infinite Complacency does not exist. On Dec 1, 2009, at 7:40 PM, William T Goodall wrote: http://infinitecomplacency.blogspot.com/2009/11/16-john-lindsteins- law suit.html The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. - H.L. MENCKEN ___ If you go back to his original post, the link doesn't break there. And, well, geez, Bruce, *you* should know what to do with a broken link! Julia I should indeed. :\ My apologies .. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Fake religion
All religions are fake from the perspective of those seeing them from outside. No religion is fake from the perspective of its true believers. Not a very useful metric, all things considered. (Alignment with the majority perspective isn't much more useful, either, unfortunately, as in the former case, the majority perspective is itself somewhat skewed by its participation, in turn, in the doctrine of the religion in question, if only indirectly. Come back to Scientology in a millennium or two, and it will have its own priestly hierarchy and its own diffusion into lay culture, almost certainly ..) On Dec 1, 2009, at 7:40 PM, William T Goodall wrote: Remind me which one of these is supposed to be the evil phoney religion? http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/12/irish_govt_report_on_catholic.php http://infinitecomplacency.blogspot.com/2009/11/16-john-lindsteins-lawsuit.html Evil is as Evil does Maru I don't believe there's a power in the 'verse can stop Kaylee from bein' cheerful. Sometimes you just wanna duct-tape her mouth and dump her in the hold for a month. -- Capt. Mal Reynolds, Serenity ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: List of The 50 Best Inventions of 2009
On Nov 19, 2009, at 6:44 AM, Andrew Crystall wrote: On 18 Nov 2009 at 20:40, Bruce Bostwick wrote: Considering the fact that the only two loss of vehicle and crew events NASA has ever had to deal with that actually involved going into or coming back from space (not counting Apollo 1 in that, as it Both were directly caused by problems on-launch... .. and would not have caused an LOV/C in either event if the geometry of the stack didn't put components like the SRB *next to*, and not *in tandem with*, other components like the ET, likewise with the ET and the wing leading edges. If an SRB burn-through happened in a tandem stack, the most that would happen would be a noticeable reduction in SRB thrust and possibly a skewed thrust vector, which would be easily escapable with an LES activation. And ice-saturated foam chunks popping off the ET can only fall downstream .. in a tandem stack, there aren't any fragile wing leading edges or TPS tiles in the way for them to hit. the RCC leading edge of the wing -- and since the spaceplane design in question does *not* include any abort options from liftoff to the !??? What spaceplane design do you think I'm talking about? I am not refering to any single design, and never have been. See below. I'd have to question why putting crew on top of a rocket is insane. Because both failures on launch are related to strapping huge rockets to the crew section, and then taking off vertically, maybe? See above. The stack geometry of the STS is one of the most insane things I've ever seen, and I'm quite frankly impressed that they've only had two LOV/C's and not many more, especially in the pre-51L days. (It says something that the current mission plans usually include a contingency STS-3xx rescue mission, which, before 39B was converted to Ares I support, was stacked at 39B ready to fuel up and launch whenever an STS-1xx was flying. Word is that if NASA has to fly an STS-3xx, the STS program will be terminated after that flight.) a lot of ways. About the only thing Ares I/Ares V can't do is... ...Is retrieve the decades lost while NASA messed arround with the shuttle and ISS? Oh, and let's not forget launch affordably, be reuseable, have a sensible turnarround time, use safer hybrid fuel systems... AndrewC And there, I'll partially agree with you. I'll concede that a spaceplane design that is better than the Orion/Ares I may exist. STS just isn't it. And you know what? If you come up with a propulsion system that's more efficient than binary-fuel combustion from onboard fuel and oxidizer, that will get a spaceplane from earth surface to LEO with only the consumables it carries onboard, and allows carrying a payload that doesn't run head on into diminishing returns the way the current systems do, I'd be at the head of the line cheering for it. And if you come up with such a thing, and can make it work, you can pretty much write your own paycheck, either contracting to NASA or running your own launch business. ;) (I've considered MIPCC-type turbojet propulsion and a flying-wing robot lifting stage for that first part of the trip out of the troposphere, and there's some real promise there in terms of the significantly greater Isp of air-breathing (or LOx-supplemented) turbojet thrust vs. rocket thrust, and possibly an aerospike engine in the orbiter to get from that jet-lift altitude to LEO. Once you're out of the atmosphere and not dealing with significant degrees of drag, really efficient technologies like VASIMR become an option, but that first 50,000 feet or so is a real hurdle.) A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -- attributed to Lazarus Long by Robert A. Heinlein ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: List of The 50 Best Inventions of 2009
Oh, and while we're talking about STS .. why is it, exactly, that NASA has been dropping all of those ET's back into the atmosphere to burn up, after spending the $10k/pound to get them up there, and not saving them on-orbit as construction material? I know they've considered keeping them on-orbit, purging out the remaining propellant traces (which are hydrogen and oxygen, nothing toxic like hypergolics or anything like that), sealing and pressurizing them, and using them as space station components? I've never really seen the logic in carrying something that large into orbit, *getting* it into orbit (albeit with a fairly low perigee and a fairly rapid decay), and then just throwing it away .. you got it out of the gravity well, and could use it as structural material, and you just abandon it? Doesn't make sense, unless I'm really missing something important .. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: List of The 50 Best Inventions of 2009
On Nov 19, 2009, at 11:15 AM, Andrew Crystall wrote: On 19 Nov 2009 at 8:19, Bruce Bostwick wrote: Oh, and while we're talking about STS .. why is it, exactly, that NASA has been dropping all of those ET's back into the atmosphere to burn up, after spending the $10k/pound to get them up there, and not saving them on-orbit as construction material? One of my my *major* bugbears with the way the entire program's been run, actually. They've hauled up the ISS *inside* the shuttle. I have yet to hear any convincing explination either. For reference, the volume of the ET's LOX tank alone is very roughly 3500m^3. The current ISS habitable volume is 358m^3. Exactly. Why waste all that material if you *have it in orbit with you*? All they'd have to do is delay releasing the tank until after the OMS burns, and maybe compensate for the change in thrustline with some RCS torque if they can't gimbal the OMS engines. At most, they'd have to bolt an auxiliary propulsion module on it with enough delta-V to get it to a storage orbit. Trivial, given that the cost of getting it up to transfer orbit has already been paid. That being said, what I really wish someone would propose is sending a robot propulsion/navigation system out to a conveniently sized nickel/ iron asteroid, bring it home, and park it in an orbit high enough to keep it from decaying for the foreseeable future (and any orbit with a perigee higher than a few hundred miles qualifies for that), preferably one that doesn't spend too much time in the van Allen belts, and set up an automated smelter, foundry, and mill on/in it that can build structural components on-orbit, without ever having to lift them up from earth. And, if there's a surplus, make periodic drops to the surface. Did I mention that steel parts made in a vacuum are incredibly strong, mainly because they don't have any of the oxide inclusions and other contaminants that are unavoidable in the same parts made in an air atmosphere? ;) *That* would be a good application for VASIMR and other high- efficiency engine technologies .. The stack geometry of the STS is one of the most insane things I've ever seen, and I'm quite frankly impressed that they've only had two LOV/C's and not many more, especially in the pre-51L days. I'm not convinced that for carrying Humans, Ares is going to be much safer. Yes, I've heard the arguments. Still not entirely convinced, and it's still an extremely expensive launch vehicle - for the price, they'd be better just using proven Russian lifters. There's still the question of transporting hardware to the launch site, which if we were using Russian launch systems would involve either shipping all that hardware to Baikonur (and a greatly expanded fleet of Super Guppies and all the infrastructure to support them), or setting Canaveral up to launch Protons, which would involve shipping them here and building an entire new pad structure (and possibly major modifications to the VAB high bays) and fitting out MLP's to support them. And building a UDMH/N2O4 infrastructure at the new pad, to boot. Nasty stuff, those two. Worth taking the tour of the Titan II Museum in AZ to hear just how nasty. [And the Russian systems haven't always been all that safe. There's a blast scar at Baikonur, from an N-1 crash in the 60's that pretty much wrecked all the pad infrastructure they had at the time, that was clearly visible from orbit for at least 20 years. (That was from the one that shut down all but one of its first stages a couple of hundred feet up, and fell back onto the pad. The blast from it had enough of an overpressure to flatten all the surrounding buildings and buckle the tanks on the one remaining N-1 that hadn't been launched yet. Which is why the USSR never landed on the moon.) The Protons are a much more mature system, especially now, granted, but a lot of the legacy systems were USSR-built and .. well, let's just say they cut a few corners here and there.] And you know what? If you come up with a propulsion system that's more efficient than binary-fuel combustion from onboard fuel and oxidizer, Well - I'm sure you're aware that SpaceShipOne sucessfully used a N2O/HTPB Hybrid rocket engine. And I'm with Pournelle's contention that if you gave Rutan a billion, he'd have a working reuseable Spaceplane which could reach a reasonable orbit inside three years. (And honestly, he could of done so for at least a decade). Pournelle is probably just about right, there. It all comes down to a) developing enough thrust (and/or lift) to get out of the part of the atmosphere where you're having to expend most of your energy pushing air out of the way (one reason RP1/LOX worked so much better for first stages early on), and b) putting in enough deltaa-V, fast enough, to get to a high enough apogee to be able to burn one last time to bring the perigee
Re: List of The 50 Best Inventions of 2009
On Nov 19, 2009, at 1:16 PM, Alberto Monteiro wrote: Bruce Bostwick wrote: That being said, what I really wish someone would propose is sending a robot propulsion/navigation system out to a conveniently sized nickel/ iron asteroid, bring it home, and park it in an orbit high enough to keep it from decaying for the foreseeable future Great idea! All it would require was a propulsion system that does not waste fuel to change the asteroid's speed from about 50 km/s to 30 km/s in the perihelium of the transfer orbit, and it would be cheaper than launching stuff from Earth at the enormous 10 km/s speed (give or take a few km/s). Alberto Monteiro Not as tall an order as it might sound, using something like VASIMR which has an Isp of up to 5000 s. Once you get out of the atmosphere, a higher efficiency engine system can spread out the delta-V across a fairly large period of time, and with enough engines and enough energy (some of which, for part of the mission at least, can come from PV panels), I think it would be within reach to bring us a suitable size asteroid. And as far as how much could be mined from one, well .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining The asteroid 16 Psyche is believed to contain 1.7×1019 kg of nickel- iron, which could supply the 2004 world production requirement for several million years. A small portion of the extracted material would also contain precious metals. I think it might be worth a try. ;) ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: List of The 50 Best Inventions of 2009
On Nov 19, 2009, at 4:50 PM, Andrew Crystall wrote: That being said, what I really wish someone would propose is sending a robot propulsion/navigation system out to a conveniently sized nickel/ iron asteroid, bring it home, and park it in an orbit high enough to Question: Would you need to go the asteroid belt for this, or are there inner-system asteroids, or even NEA's in easy-to-capture orbits, which would be useable? There are definitely inner system and near-Earth asteroids. Not sure how many of them are nickel-iron in large enough quantities to invest in trying to catch one -- about 10% of asteroids are M-type, and I can't seem to find any info on whether that population distribution is the same for the near-Earth variety as it is for the main-belt variety. The NEA's are in fairly elliptical orbits with perihelia much lower than that of Earth (which would be great for PV-assisted VASIMR, which could lower the aphelion to the point where the asteroid was exposed to near Earth-level solar illumination and allow raising the perihelion as well), so it would take a long time and a lot of reaction mass to get into a transfer orbit that would put a capture within reach of a high efficiency engine. Unless a translunar slingshot would help. ;) About the only thing we'd have going in our favor is that most of them aren't too much out of the plane of the ecliptic, so at least there wouldn't be huge plane changes involved. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: List of The 50 Best Inventions of 2009
On Nov 18, 2009, at 7:12 PM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: At 05:42 PM Tuesday 11/17/2009, Andrew Crystall wrote: On 17 Nov 2009 at 12:48, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: starts here . . . The Best Invention of the Year: NASA's Ares Rockets The 50 Best Inventions of 2009 - TIME http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1934027_1934003_1933945,00.html http://tinyurl.com/yl4evjq (Includes the 5 Worst Inventions of the Year and a poll for voting on the ranking: Ares is not #1 in that poll.) The Ares I darn well should be. I mean, the Ares V is a good enough concept for bulk launch, never mind that the Saturn V was carrying arround 75% of the same payload in the late 60's, but sticking Astronaughts on top of a rocket at this stage? Insane. Spaceplanes, allready. AndrewC I'm guessing I wasn't clear and that you didn't go through the list at the site. The poll is for visitors to the site to rank the items in the 50 Best list. When I was there #1 was what they referred to as the Electric Eye, #2 was the 60W LED light bulb (no word on when they'll come out with one to replace 100W bulbs — here at least 60W aren't bright enough to light up the room well enough from the ceiling fixture (even though the ceiling is painted white) or to read by), and bringing up the tail at #50 was the cloned puppy. Dog Gone Maru . . . ronn! :) My main gripe about LED lighting is that, with the sole exception of IKEA, I think, everyone seems to love cool white LED's in lighting fixtures. I very much prefer warm white phosphor GaN LED's (or even yellow/orange GaAs LED's in some applications). I've just never been a big fan of that blue-white color balance, never liked it in fluorescent tubes and really don't like it in LED's. Of course, it seems like maybe the GaN types are mature enough now that people aren't as eager to show off the fact that they can get blue LED's. I've become very annoyed by that color, particularly the shorter-wavelength variety. Plus they have way too much power dissipation for some applications. :p HANK: A man came by from the Shiney Pines trailer park, and he said you still got a trailer there. LUANNE: No I don't, it tipped over. HANK: But it's still there. LUANNE: No, it tipped over! HANK: Luanne, let me try to explain. I have a beer can. I tip it over. Now, is it still there? LUANNE: I can't live in a beer can. I can live in a trailer, but I don't have a trailer because the trailer tipped over! ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Nomenclature (was) Chemicals R Us
On Nov 18, 2009, at 8:09 PM, Rceeberger wrote: On 11/18/2009 7:00:59 PM, Ronn! Blankenship (ronn_blankens...@bellsouth.net ) wrote: At 11:58 AM Wednesday 11/18/2009, Deborah Harrell wrote: I'll bet there's a difference of wording -- 'organic chemistry' here primarily refers to petrochemicals; 'biochemistry' refers to life-related chemicals. This is an incorrect terminology in my opinion, but I can't change what is taught in colleges... Debbi Words, Words - What Is Brain?! Maru :) I agree with you. Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Though usually with the omission of most metal carbonates, the chemistry of which is usually covered in the section on inorganic chemistry. That's how *I* teach it in colleges, anyway. ;) Just Don't Ask An Astrophysicist To Define Metals 'Cuz He'll Include Carbon As One Maru Well why not? Calcium is a metal too isnt it? xponent Common Sense Is Worth Little Without Knowledge Maru rob So is silicon .. well, sort of, anyway .. A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -- attributed to Lazarus Long by Robert A. Heinlein ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: List of The 50 Best Inventions of 2009
On Nov 17, 2009, at 5:42 PM, Andrew Crystall wrote: On 17 Nov 2009 at 12:48, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: starts here . . . The Best Invention of the Year: NASA's Ares Rockets The 50 Best Inventions of 2009 - TIME http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1934027_1934003_1933945,00.html http://tinyurl.com/yl4evjq (Includes the 5 Worst Inventions of the Year and a poll for voting on the ranking: Ares is not #1 in that poll.) The Ares I darn well should be. I mean, the Ares V is a good enough concept for bulk launch, never mind that the Saturn V was carrying arround 75% of the same payload in the late 60's, but sticking Astronaughts on top of a rocket at this stage? Insane. Spaceplanes, allready. AndrewC Considering the fact that the only two loss of vehicle and crew events NASA has ever had to deal with that actually involved going into or coming back from space (not counting Apollo 1 in that, as it was sitting on the ground when the fire occurred) involved a spaceplane design -- one due to an SRB hull joint failure that burned through the ET wall, the other due to a large (and undetected) hole in the RCC leading edge of the wing -- and since the spaceplane design in question does *not* include any abort options from liftoff to the beginning of the RTLS window, and NASA is crossing their fingers that nobody ever has to try an RTLS abort, I'd have to question why putting crew on top of a rocket is insane. I'd much rather ride an Orion/Ares I than I would an STS flight. The Orion/Ares I has a launch escape system at least as good as the one used for Apollo, and has the SRB in the only place I'd really want one -- well aft of the liquid fuel tanks and the crew cabin. It may not be the *best* design, granted, but it's better than STS in a lot of ways. About the only thing Ares I/Ares V can't do is retrieve satellites and bring them back to earth. And I can't quite recall STS ever using that capability, honestly. Go ahead and do it, you can apologize later. -- RADM Grace Hopper, 1906-1992 The sunset is an illusion, but the beauty is real. -- Richard Bach ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: For those still following the 'balloon boy' fracas
On Nov 12, 2009, at 8:54 PM, Deborah Harrell wrote: Richard Heene will plead guilty to attempting to influence a public servant, a felony, with a stipulated sentence to probation, according to the statement. He could face two to six years in the Department of Corrections and a fine of up to $500,000. Considering that my initial off-the-cuff estimate of how much the response cost the various emergency services involved was somewhere in the $250k-$500k range, the fine will probably just *barely* recover the cost of the resources they wasted, and if he pleads guilty, it won't be frittered away in court costs. Which is good enough for me. I wish I could say I felt sorry for him, but honestly, I don't. I'm also not holding out much hope of him learning much from this mistake. Such people rarely seem to have that ability. 'How do I print, Mr. Kahn?’ ‘How do I save?’ It’s Control-S! It’s ALWAYS Control-S!!” — Kahn Souphanousinphone ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Microsith's evil ways [was: For those still following the 'balloon boy' fracas]
On Nov 13, 2009, at 7:28 AM, Alberto Monteiro wrote: Bruce Bostwick quoted: 'How do I print, Mr. Kahn?’ ‘How do I save?’ It’s Control-S! It’s ALWAYS Control-S!!” — Kahn Souphanousinphone Not if you are doomed with M$'s products in other languages. The idiots that ported Word, Excel, etc to Portuguese _translated_ the Control-things, so that I have no idea how to cut, copy, paste, save, etc. BTW, each M$ product uses a _different_ set of Control's. Alberto Monteiro Interesting that the canonical Z-X-C-V-B keyboard shortcuts weren't carried over into other localizations. I would have expected otherwise, given that at least the X-C-V-B arrangement has been well established since Macintosh System 1.x back in the 128k Classic days, and quite a few of the early generation Windows keyboard shortcuts followed the Mac ones, simply using Control rather than Command. (And the X-C-V shortcuts are more iconic than alphabetical, in Latin-script languages at least, and the arrangement was particularly ergonomic, I think, hence their use as something of a de facto standard in English- localized platforms.) It's kind of sad that MS didn't provide an option to use traditional key shortcuts instead of just trying (not very well, it seems) to localize them as well. But in my defense, it was just a quote. From a character who is known more for his temper (and, to some degree, his prejudices and impatience) than for his accuracy. Even if he is a systems analyst. :D Grotesque oppression isn't okay just because it's been institutionalized. -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Microsith's evil ways [was: For those still following the 'balloon boy' fracas]
On Nov 13, 2009, at 7:28 AM, Alberto Monteiro wrote: Bruce Bostwick quoted: 'How do I print, Mr. Kahn?’ ‘How do I save?’ It’s Control-S! It’s ALWAYS Control-S!!” — Kahn Souphanousinphone Not if you are doomed with M$'s products in other languages. The idiots that ported Word, Excel, etc to Portuguese _translated_ the Control-things, so that I have no idea how to cut, copy, paste, save, etc. BTW, each M$ product uses a _different_ set of Control's. Alberto Monteiro And it's worth noting that Ctrl-(any letter) is probably more intuitive than Alt-F4. ;) What is this shadow across the highway of Divine Command? It is a warning that institutions endure, that symbols endure when their meaning is lost, that there is no summa of all attainable knowledge. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: The thread about the thread Re: DeLong on health insurance reform
On Oct 25, 2009, at 8:06 PM, Deborah Harrell wrote: On Sun, 10/25/09, Doug Pensinger brig...@zo.com wrote: snippage Good to hear from you all that haven't posted much, maybe we can get a rip roaring discussion going. Anybody over hear read Banks' new one? Hey, guess who's posting from home for the first time? (I did have some serious help getting stuff hooked up, and I still hate this laptop's 'finger mouse.' -- hmm, hadn't thought of what that conjures up, but it's entirely apt...) Debbi Posting Like A Newbie Maru You mean one of these? http://xkcd.com/243/ The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. - H.L. MENCKEN ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Cloud Computing Smears (Was: Google Wave)
On Oct 18, 2009, at 12:25 AM, Max Battcher wrote: On 10/18/2009 0:38, John Williams wrote: On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 8:36 PM, Julia Thompsonf...@zurg.net wrote: Er. In that sort of a situation, I myself would set up a RAID for storing the data, *much* less chance for losing it. RAID does not protect from rm -rf / , which (some variant of) is my guess at what happened. Although now they are saying most of the data is recovered, so maybe it got munged in a reversible way. Any cloud service at this point is going to be tens, if not hundreds, of servers. (Major services easily run in the thousands of servers, and if you count virtual servers the biggest services are using millions of servers already.) At this point any outage that is going to affect a service as whole is generally going to be a lot subtler (and possibly a lot nastier, such an accidental viral infection due to an underlying bug/exploit in the service) than a rm -rf /. At least, assuming the system admins are doing their jobs correctly rm -rf / to a single server is extremely unlikely to cause massive outage or damage... (As a service gets large enough hard drives are expected to fail randomly, and surprisingly frequently, and services should be designed around that problem...) And, as with a RAID except on a much larger scale, there's built in redundancy and error correction, so the system tends to self-heal. About the only threat is viral mechanisms that propagate through the system. I'm just territorial about my data, is all. I tend to like knowing where it's stored and who has access to it, and have some control over its persistence in some cases. There are some applications for which I think cloud storage might serve my needs, and others for which I consider it unsuitable. Oh yeah? Well, I speak LOOOUD, and I carry a BEEEger stick -- and I use it too! **whop!** -- Yosemite Sam ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Google Wave
On Oct 15, 2009, at 3:03 PM, Max Battcher wrote: Jo Anne wrote: OK, Guys, what the heck is Google Wave? Is it like what Twits do with Tweets? I know what a beta test is, but a Google Wave? Speak slowly and directly into the microphone, please. It depends on who you ask and how much hype they've ingested, digested, and are prepared to spew back at you... Basically, Google Wave is an attempt at a convergence of... well, everything that is communication, actually. It tries to converge the immediacy of IM or Twitter with the long term storage and general richness of email or forum conversations or Word documents. It has the possibility of becoming One Inbox to Rule Them All, but that invokes a lot of assumptions that may not necessarily be true nor become true. So far, I remain a skeptic of the project: considering how hard it is to explain the system I wonder if it is too complex to easily gain mainstream acceptance/usage. You can watch the long video (and it is long) trying to explain the thing at the Wave website: http://wave.google.com I haven't chimed in on Wave or the more general subject of cloud computing yet, since I haven't used it yet (which, in some people's judgment, makes me ineligible to comment, although I consider that a questionable argument), but my misgivings about it are generally related to the same question of how valid the underlying assumptions are, as well as the overall reliability of the servers the storage lives on. (It seems to me that a lot of the hype around the cloud computing concept is really thin on details of infrastructure, storage reliability/redundancy and backup maintenance, privacy protection, and a whole range of other unanswered questions I've had about it. And for people who seem so eager to have me store my personal data on their servers, a lot of those unanswered questions are show stoppers for me.) The true paradox of democracy is that it is vulnerable to defeat from within -- Me ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Google Wave
On Oct 15, 2009, at 4:35 PM, Max Battcher wrote: Bruce Bostwick wrote: I haven't chimed in on Wave or the more general subject of cloud computing yet, since I haven't used it yet (which, in some people's judgment, makes me ineligible to comment, although I consider that a questionable argument), but my misgivings about it are generally related to the same question of how valid the underlying assumptions are, as well as the overall reliability of the servers the storage lives on. In terms of specific to Google Wave: for now early adopters should trust Google's storage policies (and considering the vast number of people with Gmail addresses, many do), with the addition of the Google way-early-beta caveat. In the mid to long term other servers should start to pick up Wave usage. The entire Java source to run your own Wave server is available for use and adaptation and servers talk to each other in similar ways to email servers (so Wave participant addresses right now are things like max.battc...@googlewave.com, which look like email addresses but aren't guaranteed to be one and the same). (More accurately, the server to server protocols are based on the more recent XMPP IM standards rather than decades-old email, but the general idea is the same...) (It seems to me that a lot of the hype around the cloud computing concept is really thin on details of infrastructure, storage reliability/redundancy and backup maintenance, privacy protection, and a whole range of other unanswered questions I've had about it. And for people who seem so eager to have me store my personal data on their servers, a lot of those unanswered questions are show stoppers for me.) Well cloud computing has come to embody a lot of concepts, generally, and can be anything from marketing droid speak to a beloved panacea from the computing gods... To be honest the term in common parlance doesn't seem to have a very well-defined meaning anymore. Generally, individual cloud computing providers should be able to provide you with all of the details that you need, and your questions are unanswered, you may not be asking the right people... All of the services that I use on a daily basis are very forthright with that sort of information and I would say that I have days where I am very paranoid. It's hard to argue anything at a general cloud computing level, and just like any other set of services you have to go into each relationship with some idea of your intent and the company/entity's trustworthiness. Perhaps if you named specific services or concerns your questions might be answered. Part of my concern with the concept in general is the fairly glaring admin/management deficiency described in this article: http://dailyqi.com/?p=10576 Even though Danger is owned by Microsoft, who is a proponent of cloud-based computing where data is stored and possibly reproduced across a number of services, only one server apparently was used. This isn’t the problem here, but it’s the apparent lack of any data backup by Danger is. The company’s statement on this should be very interesting. Granted, the mistake was fairly obvious, but it's hard to find out about things like that up front. (Although, as you say, any provider that's reluctant or outright unable to answer questions like what backup strategy do you use? isn't a good choice ..) I'm probably not a typical Texan in that I don't hunt. I fish, but I don't hunt. And it has nothing to do with how I think it might somehow be more holy to eat meat that's been bludgeoned to death by someone else, that's not it. It's really early in the morning, it's really cold outside, and...I don't wanna go. -- Ron White ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Wife's suggestion!
On Sep 22, 2009, at 1:36 AM, Doug Pensinger wrote: Yes but, calling the U.S. a Christian nation is a little beyond the merest mention. More than a little, although in this case, the usage didn't seem to be malicious. The origin of that phrase is a multilayered equivocation on the part of certain right-wing religious movements whose doctrine involves a fundamental rejection of even the concept of separation of church and state, and the equivocation is both in the glossed-over distinction in meaning between nation composed mostly of Christians (true) and nation whose government rests on, and is meant solely to promote and enforce, Christianity as a state religion (false, but an often intended misinterpretation), and the equally glossed-over distinction between the broadest and narrowest possible definitions of Christian. Ultimately, it's a code-phrase, one that means very different things to the in-group that uses it as a rallying point than it does to those outside that group, and the resulting confusion is by design, at least at the origin. And it's often repeated by people outside the group without a full understanding of the memes it belongs to and the agenda those memes serve. As I believe happened in this case. That said, I agree with the tenor of the message forwarded by Chris. As do I. Whatever the language used or the associations it might have, to me, the underlying message was clearly a call for civility, empathy, and compassion for others, whether we agree with them or not, and I am completely in agreement with that message. I've been disturbed enough by the hate speech from the right; Beck, Limbaugh et al, that I've considered taking some sort of action to express my displeasure. The worrisome thing to me about voices like Beck and Limbaugh is that they're symptoms, not root causes. There are far more hateful people in this country than the ones we hear on right-wing talk radio. (Radio is nothing compared to what circulates via viral chain-email back channels on the right wing.) Neither Beck nor Limbaugh would be on the radio at all if they didn't draw listeners by telling them what they want to hear. And it's their audiences that worry me, because the fact that guys like Beck or Limbaugh make money doing what they do is a clear sign that those beliefs are already out there. No, I'm disagreeing with you. That doesn't mean I'm not listening to you or understanding what you're saying. I'm doing all three at the same time. -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Wife's suggestion!
On Sep 22, 2009, at 3:20 AM, Charlie Bell wrote: I agree with Bruce that in general lessons ascribed to Jesus are about love and acceptance of the other. That's the widely perceived view of them, yes. Doesn't totally hold water if you actually read the New Testament, but yes - if people tried to act a bit nicer to each other we'd be better off. The New Testament comes from a variety of sources and at least a couple of major generations of editing and translation, though. See the research done by the Jesus Seminar, which did a lot of work on tracking down authenticity of the gospel texts virtually word by word, with interesting and somewhat revealing results. Among other things, there were some appallingly bad translators working for King James, and one in particular whose work was of such poor quality that they could actually trace which passages he worked on by characteristic errors. (Camel through the eye of a needle was one of his more spectacular goofs.) There was also a lot of content rejected from the canonical Bible around the time Christianity ceased to be an underground religion and became an official state religion, under Constantine, most notably at the First Council of Nicaea, and a lot of the content that *was* included tended to be more supportive of the idea of centralized church authority, based on surviving examples of books omitted from the canonical version. So, I find the New Testament less than authoritative as a whole in terms of how well it conveys the message. Others may disagree. There are entire dissertations' worth of theological discussion under this rock, though, and a lot of the subject is rather controversial, particularly within circles where belief in the literal truth of the entire Bible is an article of faith. But that's the tip of the iceberg .. Almost nothing that trickles down is fit to consume. -- Davidson Loehr ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Wife's suggestion!
On Sep 22, 2009, at 10:46 AM, Nick Arnett wrote: On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 1:20 AM, Charlie Bell char...@culturelist.org wrote: That's the widely perceived view of them, yes. Doesn't totally hold water if you actually read the New Testament, but yes - if people tried to act a bit nicer to each other we'd be better off. I know what you mean, I think, but I've stopped using the word nice to describe it. I know churches that are perfectly nice to gays, for example, but in doing so pretty much fail to accept them. Sort of a welcome to our church, we're glad to have you here and we're certain that you're going to hell. Except that the last sentence is implied, not spoken aloud. I guess another way to say what I'm saying is that hypocrisy and self-righteousness can be extremely nice, and I find the combination to be not only irritating, but destructive to community. There's a passive-aggressiveness present. I'd rather call on people to be real, rather than nice, I suppose. Nick I suppose it comes down to a distinction between a largely superficial pleasantness in discourse, which is what it seems like you're getting at there, and more substantive civility which involves some form of acceptance and a baseline level of respect, aside from philosophical disagreements .. Oh yeah? Well, I speak LOOOUD, and I carry a BEEEger stick -- and I use it too! **whop!** -- Yosemite Sam ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Wife's suggestion!
On Sep 21, 2009, at 2:09 PM, Chris Frandsen relayed: Bottom line—We profess to be a Christian nation. It is appropriate to ask, “What would Jesus say and do?” I imagine he disagreed with the actions of those cheating tax collectors and adulterous women he befriended. Yet, we have no record of him calling them names, swearing at them, or making degrading comments. Amazingly, we even have evidence that Jesus loved his enemies. Some think this is a Christian nation, others think it's a secular nation whose majority religion happens to be Christianity, and there is much to debate in terms of what exactly constitutes a Christian. And some believe that Christianity implies morality and ethical behavior, and that its absence is necessarily immoral and unethical .. and some believe otherwise. Some even believe the opposite. That being said, there's a lot to be said for cultivating civility, whether the motivation to be civil is religious or otherwise. And as someone who is as far from church going Christian as it's possible to be and still live on this planet, I have to say that Jesus set a good example, and there's solid reasoning behind his teachings that is far above the petty little sects fighting over miniscule differences in apocryphal doctrine. ;) Can't we all just get along? ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Knowledge of Complex Systems and Ecch-onomics
On Sep 10, 2009, at 10:16 PM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: At 04:44 PM Thursday 9/10/2009, Chris Frandsen wrote: Here a title I have never heard before, Econophysicist! How long until we hear about Relativistic Inflation . . . ? :P Well, Hubble expansion certainly seems to apply .. :D -b ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Regulation and the financial crisis
On Sep 14, 2009, at 11:29 AM, John Williams wrote: On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 7:41 AM, Bruce Bostwick lihan161...@sbcglobal.net wrote: I think you're oversimplifying the arguments for regulation. I don't believe anyone involved in the process seriously believes regulation is a one-dimensional parameter, I think you give politicians far too much credit. I have no doubt that quite a few politicians do not put any more thought into regulation than more, and I have to make it look like I am doing something. In some cases, you may be right. In others, not s0 much. The measures that were most effective in the past year or so in terms of containing progressive collapse Which measures would that be, and how do you know they were beneficial in the way you claim? I believe an answer of sorts can be found in the portion of that quote you trimmed out. The rest of the answer is that the Federal Reserve stepped in and put the brakes on the ridiculously overleveraged derivative trading that was going on, injected some strategically placed capital into the firms that had the collateral and other fundamentals to support it, let the ones that were too unsupported to survive fail with those firewalls in place to contain the damage, and essentially turned the market entirely around or at least kept it from falling a lot farther than it did. It's worth noting, too, that those injections of capital were loans, the bulk of which are already in the process of being paid back. one which, when left completely alone, tends to evolve toward increasing instability and ultimately just the kind of collapse we saw a year ago. That is what the politicians constantly claim. The reality of the matter is that no one really knows whether there would have been a collapse. In fact, it may well be regulations and unintended consequences of regulations that made things worse than they might have been. I think it was fairly obvious at the time, then, and is even more so now, that there wasn't enough reserve capital in the system to avoid a progressive collapse of the entire system, there was an entire derivative market sector that was effectively completely unregulated because no one had thought to regulate that particular kind of trading, and there was a circular scheme of reinsurance backing up the trading on paper but no actual underwriting of any risk. Those sorts of shenanigans are more or less to be expected in the complete absence of any sort of regulation. Yes, if you wire all the safety valves on the boiler shut and stoke up the fire until the rivets are popping, something's going to blow somewhere. I think that's pretty clear even to a layman like me. And I believe we've had this argument before, and others more eloquent than I am have deconstructed your side of it in detail. The fact that regulations designed to enforce a certain degree of stability and the presence of certain fail-safes in the system that prevent progressive collapse when rogue players do play fast and loose is not a one-dimensional parameter at all, it's inherent in the nature of the regulations that are, in fact, necessary to protect the market system as a whole from the risky behavior of the people it's composed of. Just because regulations are designed to do something does not mean that people will behave as the designers expected. In fact, it is often the opposite. People devote a lot of energy trying to find flaws in the regulations so that they can do what they wanted to in the first place. And find flaws they do. I believe that's the only rational assumption around which to design any regulatory strategy. One of the assumptions is that the regulation must evolve with the market and take exactly that sort of gaming the system into account. At this point I have to ask exactly what your concept of regulation *is*, because it seems to be very different from mine. Never forget that you're dealing with a system made up of the collective behavior of millions of individual human beings, And the corollary: governments are made up of the collective behavior of many politicians and technocrats whose sole motivation is to gain more power and to hold on to more power. I don't think I ever assumed otherwise. But our government, unlike the leadership of publicly owned corporations, has a (mostly, sort of) working system of checks and balances to at least theoretically make it difficult to use elected offices to gather power for power's sake. It isn't perfect, but it tends to preserve at least something of a balance of power. The few legally required structural measures in corporate leadership intended to prevent that are far less effective. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Regulation and the financial crisis
I think you're oversimplifying the arguments for regulation. I don't believe anyone involved in the process seriously believes regulation is a one-dimensional parameter, and I think it's disingenuous to suggest that supporters of plans that involve regulation that is stricter overall are thinking that way. At the very best, that's a straw man argument. The measures that were most effective in the past year or so in terms of containing progressive collapse were measures that were very carefully strategically targeted at key elements of the overall system, and the regulations being proposed now are equally strategically targeted from what I can see. The fact that there's more regulation overall, in those proposals, isn't a decision to move the dial on one single parameter, it's more an artifact of the process being regulated, one which, when left completely alone, tends to evolve toward increasing instability and ultimately just the kind of collapse we saw a year ago. The market system is made up of people whose sole motivation is to make more money and make money faster, and whose altruistic motivations are far behind their motivations to get richer faster if they're there at all, and often what altruistic motivations they *do* have are overruled by the contractual obligations the corporations they work for have to pursue every possible means of making a profit. The fact that regulations designed to enforce a certain degree of stability and the presence of certain fail-safes in the system that prevent progressive collapse when rogue players do play fast and loose is not a one-dimensional parameter at all, it's inherent in the nature of the regulations that are, in fact, necessary to protect the market system as a whole from the risky behavior of the people it's composed of. Never forget that you're dealing with a system made up of the collective behavior of millions of individual human beings, because that understanding is fundamental to the understanding of how the system as a whole works and why it breaks down the way it does. It's very efficient at what it does, but the nature of what it does is itself chaotic, and that human element is the most chaotic part of it .. On Sep 9, 2009, at 10:39 AM, John Williams wrote: | The biggest myth is that regulation is a one-dimensional problem, in | which the choice is either “more” or “less.” From this myth, | the only reasonable inference following the financial crisis is that | we need to move the dial from “less” to “more.” There is a fundamental difference between the mythical imagery we apply to reality and the reality itself. -- Me ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: DeLong on health insurance reform
On Sep 8, 2009, at 4:19 PM, John Williams wrote: If you really want to discuss this again, please start a new thread and ask me again. *If*. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: DeLong on health insurance reform
On Sep 7, 2009, at 2:57, Ronn! Blankenship ronn_blankens...@bellsouth.net wrote: At 02:19 AM Monday 9/7/2009, Charlie Bell wrote: On 07/09/2009, at 8:36 AM, Nick Arnett wrote: On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 3:27 PM, Ronn! Blankenship ronn_blankens...@bellsouth.net wrote: Some people fear that government-run health care will feature all the cleanliness and maintenance standards of Walter Reed combined with the prompt service for which the DMV is famous and the compassion of the IRS, and want to know what guarantees there will be that it will be like the things government does well instead of the things that make the news as scandals or annoy and frustrate almost everyone who has to deal with them . . . Now, now, don't be bringing reasonable arguments into this discussion. That would ruin everything. In other words, I think you hit a real issue on the head. That question is answered for me partly by the fact that the federal government does run some things very efficiently and some of those things are health care. For example, the VA, though it is given inadequate resources, is incredibly efficient in what it delivers. What I fail to understand is how having a public *option* takes away anyone else's options to use private. There are public schools for the same reason. Run a government sponsored mutual healthcare fund, and fold the public hospitals into it. Make it a genuine option. Then see the private funds shape up, 'cause they would or they'd lose all their customers in short order. C. I think the fear is that employers who now offer insurance as part of the compensation package will realize that it would be cheaper for them to stop doing so and let their employers be covered by the public option so after a little while most of the people who now have other insurance will find themselves on the public option, so the private insurance companies go out of business, making the public option no longer an option for anyone unable to pay for all of their medical care out of their own pockets and then in the name of government cost-cutting the now only health-care provider starts cutting corners until the quality of service compares with the DMV and IRS, but there's no place else to go . . . . . . ronn! :) Is that any better than the current system of for-profit insurers sponsored by for-profit employers, both of whom profit most if neither pays for anything they can possibly avoid? ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Where's Waldo
And not bring it home and use it to decorate their front yard, or convert it into a barbeque grill .. On Sep 6, 2009, at 12:10 AM, Michael Harney wrote: The lab hopes boaters out for the busy Labor Day weekend might spot Waldo. The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed. -- Adolf Hitler ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: DeLong on health insurance reform
On Sep 6, 2009, at 4:21 PM, John Williams wrote: Taking away my money against my will and limiting my choices for what kind of health care I can purchase is taking away my freedom of choice. Freedom of choice is never absolute. And it is always limited by the need to balance that freedom with the identical freedom due to others. Your rights end where mine begin. And yes, I understand that it's against your will. You've made that point pretty consistently any time any sort of tax-based public service comes up for discussion. Ordinarily I shrug it off and chalk it up to fundamental disagreement. But, does the punishment for not making it into the wealthiest 25% of the population have to be a death penalty? If not, what exactly *do* you propose as an alternative to public-option health care for people who aren't fortunate enough to be able to afford health insurance that will actually cover treatments? Let them eat cake Maru ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: DeLong on health insurance reform
On Sep 6, 2009, at 5:12 PM, John Williams wrote: Really? Would you literally come to my house with a gun and force me to give you money, telling me that you know better who it should be spent on than I do? If your idea of how to spend it involves leaving people to the nonexistent mercy of a nonexistent public health care system so people in the top income brackets can afford an extra yacht this Christmas, maybe so. Grotesque oppression isn't okay just because it's been institutionalized. -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: DeLong on health insurance reform
On Sep 6, 2009, at 5:47 PM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: At 05:12 PM Sunday 9/6/2009, John Williams wrote: On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 2:50 PM, David Hobbyhob...@newpaltz.edu wrote: This is why I've quit talking with you about health insurance. When pressed, your bottom line seems to be taxation equals theft. What I have written is that taxation (taking someone's money) limits a person's freedom. That is obviously true. However, I have never written that I think there should be no taxes. In fact, I think that there are indeed some cases where the ends justify the means -- that I condone taking away individual freedoms for the greater good. But I think these cases are far fewer than others seem to think. Yes, I AM prepared to make you pay your share to keep people from dying Really? Would you literally come to my house with a gun and force me to give you money, telling me that you know better who it should be spent on than I do? I know a lot more deserving people to give my money to than wealthy elderly Americans who did not want to save up for their own health care. How about the people who are working but can't afford to take themselves or their kids to a doctor when they get the sniffles or a sore throat or an ear infection unless they have some sort of insurance that will pay most of the cost of the office visit and any prescriptions? . . . ronn! :) Or, for an even darker scenario, how about the people who can't quit or, God forbid, be fired from their job because if they do they'll lose the only insurance that will cover them -- because any other insurance will refuse to accept them because the condition the existing plan is paying for would be a pre-existing condition? Or how about the people who *are* fired from their job because the treatment they need will trigger a million-dollar-plus deductible that their employer doesn't want to pay, and then have to find somewhere else to work that has a health plan willing to consider accepting them? And remember, for people who work full time for a living, keeping a job when a critical care situation comes up can be extremely difficult, because employers tend to take a dim view of their employees taking weeks or months off to be treated or recover in the hospital. And not all health plans include long-term disability -- good luck with that Social Security disability application. And John .. wealthy elderly Americans who did not want to save up for their own health care? Really? Wouldn't wealthy indicate some ability to pay for critical care treatment, or at the very least, one of those gold-plated full-indemnity plans where treatments aren't denied by an actuarial accountant hundreds of miles away with no medical training just because the doctor wasn't playing the game the way they liked? Or has the definition of wealthy changed substantially the last time I checked? ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: DeLong on health insurance reform
On Sep 6, 2009, at 7:16 PM, John Williams wrote: On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 4:38 PM, Bruce Bostwicklihan161...@sbcglobal.net wrote: If not, what exactly *do* you propose as an alternative to public-option health care for people who aren't fortunate enough to be able to afford health insurance that will actually cover treatments? What exactly do you propose for everyone in the world who cannot afford basic health care such as childbirth assistance and infant care and vaccination? For everyone in the world, I'm not sure any proposal I could make would be relevant. Beyond proposals, though, there is a very strong argument to be made that it's inhumane to simply leave people to die if they can't find insurance coverage to pay for medical care that costs hundreds of times what they could afford on their own. And that market logic is a poor fit to this particular problem. Unfortunately, it's culturally acceptable, even popular, to ignore that argument completely .. What is this shadow across the highway of Divine Command? It is a warning that institutions endure, that symbols endure when their meaning is lost, that there is no summa of all attainable knowledge. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: DeLong on health insurance reform
On Sep 6, 2009, at 8:11 PM, John Williams wrote: On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 5:58 PM, Rceebergerrceeber...@comcast.net wrote: On 9/6/2009 7:47:52 PM, John Williams (jwilliams4...@gmail.com) wrote: On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 5:44 PM, Rceebergerrceeber...@comcast.net wrote: We do not tax everyone in the world, so they do not need to be considered as part of this discussion. We do not tax everyone in the US, so are you proposing not to provide health care to the about 50% of the US population that (net) does not pay taxes? Name them. You mean name the bottom 50% of all taxpayers? I don't have enough space to do that in this email, but check the tables here, for example: http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html In 2007, there was $1.115 trillion collected in federal income taxes. The top 50% of taxpayers paid $1.083 trillion, or 97.1% of taxes collected. The IRS tables I found don't break it down for the bottom 50%, but obviously there is a percentile under 50, probably above 40, where there are no federal income taxes paid. Of course there are other taxes. But there is certainly another percentile where net aid exceeds the other taxes paid. And there are millions of Americans below that percentile. Yes, federal income tax is, theoretically at least, a progressive-rate tax. I think everyone here knows that. There's a good reason for that. People working at or near minimum wage (which is below the poverty level, by most definitions, even with recent adjustments) are so close to the wire financially that they're spending most if not all of their money on daily necessities like food and housing. People working well above that income level spend a much smaller proportion of their income on daily survival needs and, while a larger percentage of tax rate is something of a strain, it's a considerably smaller strain than it would be on the people at or below the poverty level who currently don't pay taxes. Above the rapidly vanishing middle class. the theoretically higher- rate brackets can afford to hire tax attorneys and accountants whose specialty is finding ways to avoid tax liability, legally in most cases, so the actual revenue collected falls off fairly rapidly above that level. Then there are the literally thousands of custom tax-code exceptions so tightly written that they apply only to specific individual corporations or even individuals. So the lower income classes would almost certainly starve if taxed enough to gather any appreciable revenue, and the highest income classes mostly avoid tax liability by financial shell games of various sorts. Since the top 10% or so control such a disproportionate share of the country's overall privately held wealth that paying for a trip to the hospital out of pocket is a barely noticeable drop in the bucket, I assume you're really talking about the poorest half of the population. I have a hard time accepting that health care is a market resource that only the people who can afford to buy it are entitled to. There are some resources that fit that model, and there are some that don't. I prefer to believe that health care is a resource we all have an obligation to invest in. We can argue about details of implementation until the argument has devolved into questions of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but we keep coming back to that fundamental point of basic philosophy. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: DeLong on health insurance reform
On Sep 6, 2009, at 8:30 PM, John Williams wrote: Prove that you are actively supporting those people with every cent you can spare on par with what you suggest to Bruce. You obviously have a computer, therefore you are a hypocrite. I am not advocating taking other people's money, as Bruce did (indeed, he proposed to personally take MY money). I would live as a pauper before I advocated taking someone else's money and giving it to others. Strictly metaphorically, I assure you. As, I'm sure, were the other similar proposals in the same vein in this thread. (Type mismatch error: expected boolean value but found string 'cake'. Input not parsed.) ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Posted in a workcube
On Aug 30, 2009, at 9:16 PM, Doug Pensinger wrote: rob wrote: I will not brew Decaf. Decaf is the mind-killer. Decaf brings the little sleep that leads to total oblivion. I will embrace my caffeine. I will brew my beverages and let them... flow through me, and when they are gone, I will remain...alert wtf are you doing in a workcube on a Sunday evening??? Where are your priorities, man? Doug vacuum, mow the lawn, build a step, walk the dog, move furniture, cook dinner and empty the trash maru 1) Signature contained the verb build in the context of things to do .. win. ;) 2) I read the last as enjoy the trash, which made an odd Zen-like sort of sense. I've been known to enjoy the trash (or at least the ritual of taking out the trash) myself. Then I realized the oddity of the phrase was all in my mind .. This is an amazing honor. I want you to know that I spend so much time in the world that is spinning all the time, that to be in the no- spin zone actually gives me vertigo. -- Stephen Colbert during an interview on FOX News, The O'Reilly Factor ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: More Pluto Goofyness . . .
On Aug 26, 2009, at 8:24 AM, Alberto Monteiro wrote: Probably (my guess) Mars's moons are recent acquisitions, and won't last forever. Venus and Mercury may have had moonlets in the past too, that lasted a few million years and then either crashed or flew away. And it's entirely likely that Mars has had other moons in the past before Phobos and Deimos. I know of at least one equatorial oblique crater. IIRC, Phobos is falling and Deimos is leaving Mars. That's pretty consistent with my understanding. And why with 100+ moons, none of them has a sub-moon? My guess would be that there just aren't many stable solutions to a close-in three-body problem like that. Jupiter's gravitational effects dominate the orbital dynamics of a good part of the solar system, and many of its satellites are fairly close to its Roche limit to begin with, so my back-of-the-napkin guess would be that sub=moons would be extremely rare and tend not to be in very stable orbits. (As much as any orbit in this environment could truly be called stable, that is.) They would tend to become co-orbiting moons of the parent body before one would actually orbit the other. And co-orbiting bodies aren't entirely known even in solar orbit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3753_Cruithne http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J002E3 It is the mark of a higher culture to value the little unpretentious truths which have been discovered by means of rigorous method more highly than the errors handed down by metaphysical and artistic ages and men, which blind us and make us happy. -- Nietszche ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: More Pluto Goofyness . . .
On Aug 26, 2009, at 12:10 PM, David Hobby wrote: And why with 100+ moons, none of them has a sub-moon? My guess would be that there just aren't many stable solutions to a close-in three-body problem like that. Jupiter's gravitational effects dominate the orbital dynamics of a good part of the solar system, and many of its satellites are fairly close to its Roche limit to begin with, so my back-of-the-napkin guess would be that sub=moons would be extremely rare and tend not to be in very stable orbits. Bruce-- I think there certainly are stable solutions for some planet/moon systems without submoons. The orbit of the submoon would have to be definitely inside the Hill sphere of the moon. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere I stand corrected. :) To me, the problem is more that it's very unlikely that objects will get captured by the moon. Given how narrow the limits would be for all the parameters to line up to a successful capture, you're almost certainly right about that. Correct morality can only be derived from what man is—not from what do-gooders and well-meaning Aunt Nellies would like him to be. -- Robert A. Heinlein ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: More Pluto Goofyness . . .
On Aug 25, 2009, at 6:03 PM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: What's a planet? Debate over Pluto rages on - CNN.com http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/08/24/pluto.dwarf.planet/index.html http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/unisex/sciencemath/8964/ ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: List administrators: list broken!
On Aug 21, 2009, at 11:53 AM, Lance A. Brown wrote: Heh. I thought the list had just taken a deep breath. Instead it appears something has gone awry. I, too, am not receiving everything that is listed in the archive. --[Lance] .. there's an archive? :\ The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. - H.L. MENCKEN ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Passive-Agressive posting (was Re: The Role of Government in a Libertarian Free Market)
Yeah, Eliza and Parry could be quite entertaining if they talked to each other. Eliza and Racter could be too, but Eliza didn't get to say much in those conversations .. On Aug 18, 2009, at 4:08 PM, Patrick Sweeney wrote: It's kind of like playing with that old Eliza computer program. Anyone remember that? (Type mismatch error: expected boolean value but found string 'cake'. Input not parsed.) ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: A Real Free Market in Health Care
On Aug 12, 2009, at 8:30 PM, dsummersmi...@comcast.net wrote: Compassion, folks. IAAMOAC. And remember .. http://xkcd.com/386/ .. because it's always, *always*, true. :D When you mention that we want five debates, say what they are: one on the economy, one on foreign policy, with another on global threats and national security, one on the environment, and one on strengthening family life, which would include health care, education, and retirement. I also think there should be one on parts of speech and sentence structure. And one on fractions. -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: The Role of Government in a Libertarian Free Market
On Aug 12, 2009, at 10:02 PM, Dan M wrote: No, that is the fault of the laws as written. The problem with the court system is that they do not understand enough to enforce the laws as written. There is also the problem of laws written by people who often fail to anticipate the unintended consequences of the laws they write, compounded by the fact that people still don't approach legislation the way they do software design and testing. I still think version control, requirements management, and user acceptance testing have very definite roles to play in the development of legislation, and I'd still like to see alpha and beta level testing with bug tracking, or a very close analogue, employed in the rollout of new legislation. But I'm kind of a voice in the wilderness on that one .. Heard from a flight instructor: The only dumb question is the one you DID NOT ask, resulting in my going out and having to identify your bits and pieces in the midst of torn and twisted metal. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Politicians sell out again
On Aug 11, 2009, at 6:28 PM, Max Battcher wrote: On 8/11/2009 18:53, Trent Shipley wrote: More fundamental is his objection to the U.S. Government. In effect, he is saying that the U.S. system of government is inherently illegitimate, largely because it is run by politicians. By John William's standards ALL representative democracy is illegitimate precisely because a representative democracy REQUIRES professional politicians. Crazy tangent: I've always wondered if it might be worth the effort to introduce a third house, a tricameral legislature of sorts, where the members are brought in through a random civic duty lottery (akin to jury duty selection in most states, perhaps). Call it the House of Peers or House of the Public, for instance. I think such a crazy idea would only work in the modern communications era. You can't expect a person to serve even a 1-year term if they have to pack their bags for Washington and may not be able to expect to have their existing job when they return (much less can't afford the salary differential during the term). However, with the Moderne Internet, I think that average folks might be persuaded to do a little bit of work for their country online every so often for even a tiny amount of compensation. You could even contemplate things like micro-terms of only a few weeks duration with the right technological leverage. With micro-terms and lots of paid eyeballs you might even get awfully close to a sort of representative wiki democracy. Even if this House was of lesser standing than the existing legislature it would be useful just to have a public oversight committee directly drawn from the public and in the same turf as existing legislatures. Anyway, it's just a crazy thought experiment (that I created for use in a short story I never wrote) and I doubt that it would be easy to amend the Constitution to try it, but it might be something to play with at local or state levels and see if it survives/replicates... -- --Max Battcher-- http://worldmaker.net I've been thinking very much the same thought. As long as the selection process itself isn't compromised (Congratulations to our Glorious-Leader-For-Life on yet another unprecedented term in office. Only by Divine Providence could such an extraordary event happen with our random selection process!), the worst case for random selection is better than the worst case for selection by popular vote, because it's very difficult to game a random selection system without compromising the selection system itself. And, considering the arsenal of media manipulation that's deployed around every election to game the popular vote system by what are in effect social engineering hacks, random selection *does* have a certain appeal .. When you mention that we want five debates, say what they are: one on the economy, one on foreign policy, with another on global threats and national security, one on the environment, and one on strengthening family life, which would include health care, education, and retirement. I also think there should be one on parts of speech and sentence structure. And one on fractions. -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: On 'Incomprehesibility'
On Aug 2, 2009, at 11:24 PM, David Hobby wrote: William T Goodall wrote: On 1 Aug 2009, at 22:14, David Hobby wrote: William T Goodall wrote: ... NTSC vs. PAL: Not a fair criticism. That mess was created a LONG time ago, and was also a problem with VHS tapes. (A bigger problem, since the players were analog.) Even with HD the frame rate (50Hz/60hz) is still different between NTSC and PAL. (NTSC and PAL have nothing to do with HD being analog formats but the 50/60 Hz is the same so the labels have stuck). My home theatre DVD upscaling DVD player autoconverts these depending whether I have the output set to NTSC or PAL. Since my TV can sync at either 50Hz or 60Hz HD I have to change this setting to watch PAL/NTSC DVDs in native format and avoid conversion which is a lossy process. The others you list: It's still possible to just go with the defaults there. If the default is stereo I lose the benefit of my 800W 5.1 speaker system :) And if there is a Dolby and a DTS soundtrack I have to manually select the (better) DTS soundtrack. ... William-- The above seem to be minor tweaks to get the best output? The original complaint was about DVD vs VHS, so we might have wandered from the topic... ---David More than usual, you mean? Thread creep is an emergent properly of e- list discourse. ;) I don't plan on any shooting taking place during this job. Well, what you plan and what takes place ain't ever exactly been similar... -- Serenity ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Brin: On Incomprehensibility'
On Aug 1, 2009, at 10:15 PM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: At 07:31 PM Saturday 8/1/2009, David Brin wrote: Today's DVD's 1- are not universal if you record on minus or plus mode and many units throw fits, even then Another problem, at least with the unit I have, is that if I want to record a program (frex) from 8 to 9 on channel m followed by one from 9 to 10 on channel n onto VHS, it works fine and I get both programs in full (assuming my clock is sufficiently in sync with the clock the station is using). If I try to do the same thing to record to DVD±RW, when it finishes recording the first program instead of changing channels and recording the second program it spends anywhere from about 30 seconds to 2 minutes displaying Writing to disc . . . and a status bar and so I miss the beginning of the second program. (Or the end of the first if I try to compensate for that feature by setting the first recording to end at 8:58 or 8:59 . . .) Is that the case with all DVD±R/RW machines, or just the [relatively] cheap one I got in order to have something in place before the end of analog broadcasts? Depends on the make/model. This sounds sort of like what a Sony would do .. There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey. -- John Ruskin ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Brin: On Incomprehensibility'
On Aug 2, 2009, at 7:17 PM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: And the mandated DTV changeover was just another excuse to get money out of people who were satisfied with things the way they were, even those who have little or naught to spare. . . . ronn! :) On that, I'll agree with you. Did we really need to get rid of broadcast NTSC-M signals and orphan a technology that was specifically designed to be backward-compatible with the first generation of broadcast TV? And did we really need to replace them with 8VSB, which I have to say does much more poorly in fringe areas than NTSC-M did? I agree, I'm not convinced the move to DTV was a good thing. That was like a bad romantic comedy in fifteen seconds. -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: WeChooseTheMoon
On Jul 16, 2009, at 3:34 PM, John Garcia wrote: Alan Shepard launched in May 1961. The last lunar mission, Apollo 17 launched in Dec 1972. Eleven years to go from one sub-orbital flight to spending 3 days on the moon. That is an incredible accomplishment, the likes of which we may never see again. Let's not forget landing on the moon and then driving to the equivalent of the next town and back in the LRV. No small feat there, considering they had to drive a vehicle that could be folded up and stowed on the side of the LM descent stage. ;) But my best memories are still of the House Rock trip on 16. I can still hear Charlie Duke saying, Look at the size of that rock! I watched Shepard's launch (on TV of course) and Apollo 17's midnight launch (again on TV), and I probably won't live long enough to see the next lunar launch and that pisses me off. I remember going outside as a kid sometime around 1970 and seeing the gibbous moon (about the solar angle NASA seemed to like best for lunar landings), and thinking that it was entirely possible there was someone up there at that moment. It might have been around the time of 14, I can't remember. But the idea really hit me pretty profoundly at the time, that I was alive when our species accomplished the feat of landing on the moon, and it made me very sad even at that age when I found out 17 was the last mission, and that most of the funding had been cut after the landing. Bad way to come back to earth after such heady times. It seems like a cruel joke nowadays, that 1950's-1960's technology landed human beings on the moon and all the more modern technology we had later on fell so far short of that mark. I'm with Pournelle on that .. never thought I'd live to see the last ones. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Whatcha reading? (was Re: In despair for the state of SF)
On Jul 14, 2009, at 10:37 AM, Nick Arnett wrote: Anathem struck me as somewhat desperate in its invention of language, but it all made sense in the end. I'm not sure the book deserved to be so long, but on the other hand, I was never particularly tempted to give up on it. Stephenson knows how to keep the suspense up. The thing I enjoyed most about Anathem was the way the world of the story itself shifted as the story progressed, and the way it kept surprising me even in spite of the numerous clues dropped along the way. The best kind of surprise, for me, is a kind of paraprosdokian, where the story is leading toward what looks like a familiar path but takes an intriguing left turn right when you least expect it to and the unexpected direction is the one that makes the most sense after you recover from the surprise. And Anathem is definitely full of those. :) The language seemed to be Stephenson's solution to the problem of how to tell a story in an alien universe where the language naturally wouldn't be intelligible to us at all otherwise, and I thought it was about as good a solution to that problem as any, and a little more honest than most in that it captured at least a little of the difference in thought processes that stem from different language without going so far into the language as to distract from the story. It's a fundamentally non-trivial (and quite difficult) problem that I thought he solved at least well enough to not bother me. (I'm something of an anomaly that way, though, as my brain tends to build its own dictionary somewhat dynamically and I'm used to following unusual linguistic usage.) If I say much more than that I'll spoil the story for those who haven't read it .. Almost nothing that trickles down is fit to consume. -- Davidson Loehr ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Google Operating System
On Jul 9, 2009, at 9:11 AM, Mauro Diotallevi wrote: http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/lets-all-take-deep-breath-and-get-some.html It's brilliant start to finish, but I especially liked: Trying to make an OS out of Chrome is like saying you're going to turn a Pontiac Aztek into a stretch limousine. I suppose it could be done, but why? Because if competition is good, more competition is better? I use MacOS, three different flavors of Linux, and a couple of different versions of Windows, depending on whether I'm at work (and if so, at which computer), or at home, or out and about with my wife's laptop, and depending on exactly what I'm doing at the time (I have some old games that only run error-free on Windows ME, if you can believe it). I like what Google did to e-mail with GMail, and expect that they might have some new bright ideas to bring to the table in terms of operating systems. Since it's pretty clear that Chrome OS is going to be built on a Linux distro of some form or another (not sure which one, or whether they plan to fork an existing distro into their own development track like Darwin was forked from FreeBSD), Google's part of the job is mainly going to be the GUI. If they make it better than Gnome or KDE or X11, they'll probably at least be able to get a foothold in the market. But Google does GUI's well. I'm kind of curious to see what they do with this. :) (As far as why .. well, it's possible that Google has taken notice that Microsoft has been promoting Bing pretty heavily, and this is a shot across their bow. If Chrome OS succeeds, and evolves into something that can displace Windows as a full-functioning OS, there's a possibility that Microsoft has bitten off more than it can chew in picking this particular fight. If Google is successful enough with this, it may finally push MS into a position where it has little choice but to migrate to a Unix-based core and GUI model like *everyone* else in the market. At a time not of their choosing, unlike Apple's beautifully timed migration from OS 9 to OS X.) When you mention that we want five debates, say what they are: one on the economy, one on foreign policy, with another on global threats and national security, one on the environment, and one on strengthening family life, which would include health care, education, and retirement. I also think there should be one on parts of speech and sentence structure. And one on fractions. -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Google Operating System
On Jul 9, 2009, at 10:50 AM, Dave Land wrote: I am not like our friend Mario with his 57 Varieties approach to operating systems. I use Mac OS X almost exclusively because operating system fit and finish matter to me. (This is not a statement of superiority to Mario, merely noting a difference. I am left-handed, too, but I don't hold that over him, either. I become competent in pretty much any OS you toss me into in a short time, but given a preference, I'll drive a Honda with a manual transmission and use Mac OS X.) Well, I'll admit it -- I'm biased. I grew up with Macs from the original 128K Classic on up, had way too much fun with ResEdit from the moment it was first released until OS 9 became obsolete, have been using OS X since Public Beta rolled out, and am currently working on wrapping my head around Cocoa, so that's where most of my experience lies. I've had to use NT and XP for work, found both somewhat counterintuitive to use and more than a little unstable even with very little if any third party software installed and every possible protection against viruses, and generally only use Windows nowadays when I absolutely have to (see below). So I'll take Mac OS any day, because my experience with it is that it works, its interface makes perfect sense to me, and it's stable enough to run for *months* without even a logout/login. The longest I've seen a Windows machine stay up without needing a reboot is maybe a few days. I use Windows pretty much only when I have to (which is still all too often) in order to test our web sites on IE6/7/8. I consider Linux an interesting side-show, but I'm damned happy it's there, because I /can/ have an alternative to Windows on X86 hardware. I'm interested in Linux mainly for its server capabilities. LAMP is still the de facto standard web server platform, and while i can run MySQL as a root process in Darwin on my dev machine, alongside PHP 5, I'm pushing the boundaries a bit with that and it works better, and more reliably, on an actual server build of something like Debian (and would allow me to add Python and PostGreSQL to the LAMP stack). When it comes to servers and configurable routers and other stuff that's not directly end-user-facing, Linux is about the best game in town. At the risk of being flamed, I might also point out that NASA has long since forbidden any primary functionality on ISS from running on Windows platforms because of stability concerns -- if it's onboard and actually has to do with life support, maneuvering, or station operations, it's running on Linux. They only allow Windows for non- mission personal use and, in some cases, non-mission-critical experiment support. That says a lot, to me. And you've got to ask yourself, if no one on the internet wants a piece of this, just how far from the pack have you strayed? -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
