Pangloss

Rofl. Take deep breaths, because the atmosphere catches fire in 31 days!!!!

I'd be fine with that, and set aside the whole constitutional line in the sand. Constitutions seem to mean different things to different countries.

You're talking about moderation. But it has a down side, in that you have to wait for posts to be approved.

As should be. I just question this notion that eliminating the subsidy would cause all the land to immediately return to nature and public ownership (or at least faster than this deal will cause). Seems like a bit of a stretch to me.

I said guidelines; laws is a whole other subject. But there is a perfectly valid criticism (or at least concern) regarding countries that change their constitutions to allow presidents to seek further terms in office.

Given the power of the sugar lobby that's a pretty huge "if", so you're still not even coming close to cleaning my back yard. But even if we did somehow manage to eliminate the powerfully-backed sugar subsidy, you're basically talking about a $10 billion annual business receiving $2 billion in subsidies. Why wouldn't we just see a 20% increase in the cost of sugar? Do you have any supporting analysis from other sources to back up the notion that they would go out of business quickly if they lost those subsidies? Actually I was making a point, which is that according to all anaylsis I've read, any other solution than the one currently being pursued would have taken decades to accomplish due to court battles. Your point really was about ideologies -- as if you don't care whether the Earth is suffering so long as you can blame corporations for it. After all, you're dismissing a clear-cut solution solely because it is a compromise that includes any benefit to the landowners, however small, even though it immediately solves the problem and produces a far greater benefit is to the land and the people. If that's not the case, I'm glad to hear it, but you're going to have to do a little better than casual dismissals and unrealistic assumptions.

It's conveniently located right over there behind YT's experiment booth.

Empty flat-top buildings bug the heck outa me. Pure wasted space.

I issue a heartfelt apology for them! (Gee, 368 Google News hits on that phrase for just the past 30 days! 755 for "ripple effect". Your "controversial remarks" generated 2,417. "Emotional Journey" is not bad at 2,468. "Tipping Point" tips in at 4,634. "Sea change" seems to be the winner, though, with over 15,000! "Under the bus" draws over 17k, but of course that one's skewed by a single subject.)

Excellent! I call with "a ripple effect on the economy"!

... that you can RSS-subscribe to new posts at SFN? >:eek:

Conservatives may fight McCain on convention floor. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/06/AR2008070602322.html RNC makes first battleground-state ad buy, focusing on balanced energy plan. http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/07/06/rnc-unit-launches-first-big-ad-buy-in-battleground-states/

Sorry we haven't been more help for you -- I know these problems can be really frustrating. In answer to your question, the modem may or may not have a web interface, just like the router. I know that's the case with my equipment here at the house, but the modem's interface is basically bypassed and controlled by the router. It's possible the box is just on the fritz. Have you tried just challenging their tech support people to either return a solution or replace the box? Or do they think it's not a problem because you can access basic web services? I know you don't have a lot of options but you shouldn't put up with any nonsense if they try anything -- you're the customer.

Yah, apparently they changed their constitution to allow him a second term, and may do it again to allow him a third term. Kind of an odd way to do it, but we don't as yet have an over-arching set of guidelines for constitutional manipulation amongst free nations, so it's hard to really condemn that approach. This Reuters article has some interesting bits on the subject of Uribe's soaring popularity and the possibility of a third term: http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN06348039

When you say you hooked it up directly, do you mean through like a DSL modem? Those can have firewalls as well.

So you're having the problem with all computers? That would point to the router or the service provider.

And that works ok? So it's just the computer? Have you checked to see if your motherboard has a hardware firewall? Some of them do, controlled through BIOS or software.

So you're unable to connect with anything other than a Web browser? That definitely suggests port blocking taking place somewhere.

That has a built-in firewall, though it's supposed to ignore outgoing requests to connect. Have you look at its settings? You can bring it up by going to Start, Control Panel, Windows Firewall. You can turn it off, but it will nag you about it. But that would at least allow you to test your connections. You can also add exceptions there. If you're able to hit the Internet (which is obviously the case) but not connect specific programs, that definitely suggests a port blockage of some sort, so I would definitely check this.

Some good introductory info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere Short answer, the strength is determined by how fast the planet is rotating compared with its size (ala size * speed = strength). Some planets and moons have them, others do not. The case of Mars is particularly interesting for its lack of one, and what that might mean regarding our own's future, since it apparently had one at some point in its distant past (its loss may be a factor in its loss of atmosphere, since the field is thought to reduce atmospheric loss due to movement through space).

I'm working on a homework assignment here, but I'm not actually looking for an answer to the problem, just a little help understanding which approach to take. My team is tasked with building a detailed sampling plan, but we're arguing about which approach to use. I was hoping I could get some insight as to why one method is better than the other for this situation. We've narrowed it down to either stratified or cluster sampling, but there is a debate within my team as to whether our data sets are homogeneous or heterogeneous. In our population we have thousands of students staying in various university dormitories, and we want to determine how long they remain resident there on average. The dormitories are collected into regions around campus. North campus dormitories, south campus dormitories, etc (6 regions). Now, I've been over our textbook quite a bit, and also, using the Wikipedia as a starting point, I've been through various articles on stratified sampling and cluster sampling. And as I mention above, the problem seems to break down to whether or not my sample is homogeneous. Looked at one way, cluster sampling seems correct, because we have a heterogeneous group (students in different degree programs), but homogeneous average stay lengths (everyone's in a bachelor's program which is typically four years long). But looked at another way, stratified sampling seems correct, because we have a completely homogeneous population -- there is insufficient homogeneity between the students, since they're all in four-year degree programs. I have a general feeling about this is that we should go with stratified sampling (specifically, diversified) because of all the shortcomings of cluster sampling that you read about everywhere. The biggest problem I've run into in researching these two methods is just understanding what exactly constitutes homogeneity in the data. Any insight or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

Well, just to give you a little insight on that, I can tell you that all reported posts get scanned by all the mods and admins, usually receiving some kind of attention within a few minutes. Just glancing at the first page of the Reported Posts subforum, which runs back about two weeks, I see that all 25 threads have multiple views, and 14 of the 25 have replies (meaning we talked about them, usually along the lines of "I did ____ to the post/poster", but sometimes in more depth). We could do that in a more open fashion, but I'm not sure there would be a lot to be gained from doing that, and it would certainly increase the noise-to-signal ratio for more casual-minded readers.

BTW, here's a cool tip: If you are a GMail user, you can actually subscribe to your own email account's RSS stream and slap it into the quick bar just below the address bar. Useful for checking your email without having to actually visit GMail.

I haven't had a problem with that in general, but it did lock up on me once while trying to execute some javascript on a pretty busy (script-heavy) site after I interrupted it a few times. I've had the same thing happen with that page in IE6, though, and I thought FF3 recovered from that situation a lot better -- it actually asked me if I wanted to try and resume the session, and when it did it perfectly recovered the other tabbed sessions it was running at the time, which was a neat trick. (It even retained the text that I had typed into the quick reply window in a thread here at SFN, but had not yet submitted. Isn't that slick?) Alas, I am constantly having to switch back to IE6 for compatibility purposes, mainly with my school's internally-built web portal. I'm tracking down some of the specific compatibility issues for the design team, which is 100% ASP.NET-based, so I can advise them on what I think will just be a few changes. Unfortunately I think the Outlook Web Access client is a lost cause. Perhaps that's deliberate on Microsoft's part -- every non-IE browser gets a stripped-down, simplified version of the client, which works ok but is very tedious to use. There are some plug-ins I can add to FF to handle that, though, and at some point I plan to install them, so I'm not complaining. In fact as an ASP developer I consider it my onus to dig into it a little deeper and communicate to my ASP students how to avoid those issues, so the occasional incompatibility is actually a bit of a plus.

Ok, I'm going to change your subject line, then, since you've changed your mind from telling us that this is a bad thing to making an academic point about suicide rates.