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Entry: "chemical compound"

Entry: "chemical compound"

Entry:"chemical compound"

What definition of "chemical compound" are you using exactly, that perchlorate ion would not be a chemical compound?

As for the question: calcium perchlorate.

Yeah that word implies pretty much means what it means.

Yes, so "if p, then q". And you helpfully doubled down on your "p":

Meanwhile, back in reality the OP did in fact CONFIDENTLY ASSERT that his "little classroom experiment" disproved AGW.

...therefore "q" (the NPD).

Allow me to put it another way: if your physician called you up and said, "your lab results came back and imply you have cancer" would you seriously believe this *wasn't* a diagnosis?

Ouch. It has to hurt.

Perhaps you were referring to yourself?

I said literally said "it's likely that...'

...you were saying? No such thing.

Yep , that's pretty much an inflated sense of your own worth with an expectation that you'll be given what others have earned, and it's pretty much staring everyone in the face.

Persisting in your diagnostic pronunciations, eh? For the record, I wanted to point out that you have engaged in yet another fallacy: the false dilemma.

The truth is far more likely that you, just like the OP, are merely incompetent rather than malicious. You incompetently diagnose people with "disorders" via an internet post, despite experts knowing this is untenable. The OP incompetently believes that the results of a elementary/obvious chemical reaction equation are a possible effect that hasn't already been considered by the experts.

That is to say, you both exhibit the Dunning-Kruger Effect—narcissism not required.

Can't you see the religious or supernatural - or whatever superstitious make-believe humans have invented to cover up their lack of understanding of our world -- implications when they're right in front of you?

Yes, some of them might have. But 1) that has nothing to do with etymology; 2) just because the word had some meanings in the past does not mean that it has the same set of meaning now; 3) you said "Gifted implies there is something special, almost magic" and now you're admitting yourself (be it god, nature, or the laws of the cosmos) that it could easily be a purely natural process - someone's brain ending up more capable than the brains of others - and indeed it is, thist is exactly what is happening, no fairies necessary, and no implications for anything supernatural. Get used to the fact that "gifted" is a common term in the field of psychology referring to precisely this. Or else start sending letter to publishing houses to stop using that word, it you honestly think its use to be misplaced.

From the Encyclopedia Brittanica:

As a form of torture, waterboarding became illegal under the law of war with the adoption of the third Geneva Convention of 1929, which required that prisoners of war be treated humanely, and the third and fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949, which explicitly prohibited the torture and cruel treatment of prisoners of war and civilians, respectively. On the basis of the 1929 convention the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE; 1946–48) convicted 25 Japanese leaders of responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity, specifically including torture by waterboarding (referred to by the IMTFE as the “water treatment”).

I can't read German. It should be obvious that I expect links in English as this is an English language site.

Look, you didn't know that these laws existed so you asked for evidence. I gave it to you. Google Translate can translate these laws just fine if you still don't believe me.

The USA also gives subsidies to churches, so it's hardly characteristic of Europe.

The US government transfers massive amounts of money to churches in violation of the first amendment? Really? Where?

"The whole lot (of European nations) was guilty of the most vile forms of colonialism." So was the USA. Your point?

Really? Where in the world is the US supposed to have practiced this "vile form of colonialism"?

Look, democracy was born in Europe.

No, it wasn't: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/157129/democracy/233828/Prehistoric-forms-of-democracy

But Europe did indeed invent fascism, colonialism, communism, socialism, industrial genocide, and Marxism.

You seem to forget that Germany had a democracy before World War II.

Indeed, it was. And when their economy was in the toilet, they blamed the Jews, the capitalists, and the Americans, and then democratically and knowingly elected an anti-Semitic war monger and democratically abolished their own democracy in hopes that he'd restore power, wealth, and glory to the Fatherland. And I think they'd do something like that again given similar circumstances, as would other European nations, because all of them feel superior and entitled and don't know much about history. You yourself are quite representative of those attitudes.

But where did he condone all the other methods of execution that Christians have used up through the centuries? It's not like being pelted with stones is any worse than being "drawn and quartered", for instance. Then again there is a growing consensus that a country practicing the death penalty - aka sanctioned murder - in any form in this day and age is barbaric.

I have a question for you, why was education better when the relative salary of teachers was lower than it is today? The armies that fought the U.S. Civil War were the most literate armies in history (as evidenced by the many letters and journals that they wrote), yet at that time school teachers were generally paid a pittance.

So, when I first read the above, I figured you were just trolling. However, a quick google search turned up the following:

Civil War armies were the most literate in history to that time

Emphasis mine. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to ascertain the precise mistake made by the parent post.

Not in the case of solar, or solar-derived, energy sources (wind, tidal etc). These convert solar energy to electricity, which would've been almost completely radiated as heat anyway (excepting chemical storage, such as photosynthesis).

Fission, fusion, geothermal etc add to our waste heat. Fossil is technically solar-derived, but is releasing millions of years of accumulated solar energy all at once.

C) Bitcoin can collapse just like any other currency. I'm not sure what could lead you to think otherwise.

Uh, no. It can collapse even more dramatically than most other currencies. In fact, it will, simply because it works like a bad case of the gold standard.

Perhaps its collapses will so drill into people some basic knowledge of modern economics. If, in the process, bitcoin also brings ruin and suffering to libertarians and gangsters, then so much for the better.

English law descends from French law

No it doesn't. The first treatise on English law was the Tractatus of Glanvill in 1188 (law predating that is legally defined as "time immemorial"). England was subject to Norman Law since 1066, but Normandy was a Duchy of Viking invaders and settlers, and the Kind of France didn't conquer it and unify it into France until 1204. The common law of England is geographically distinct - the rest of Western Europe uses civil law.

those "slaves" are slaves for a seven-year term, after which they're free. Second they get paid, and there's even a minimum wage...

Only true for Jewish slaves, who were more like servants. The majority of slaves were non-Jewish, and could be worked without pay until death.

with raping female slaves, which is islamic in origin.

Judaic law gives slave masters the right to rape the wife of any of their slaves if the slave was sold into slavery by a court of law.

killing slaves and raping slaves and torture only ever was allowed under islamic law

Actually it was allowed in many places: "A major touchstone of the nature of a slave society was whether or not the owner had the right to kill his slave. In most Neolithic and Bronze Age societies slaves had no such right, for slaves from ancient Egypt and the Eurasian steppes were buried alive or killed to accompany their deceased owners into the next world. Among the Northwest Coast Tlingit, slave owners killed their slaves in potlatches to demonstrate their contempt for property and wealth; they also killed old or unwanted slaves and threw their bodies into the Pacific Ocean. An owner could kill his slave with impunity in Homeric Greece, ancient India, the Roman Republic, Islamic countries, Anglo-Saxon England, medieval Russia, and many parts of the American South before 1830." - Encyclopedia Britannica

The Holocaust was legalised under German law that gave Hitler's orders legal power. The establishment of slavery in the colonies, concentration camps, hunting Aborigines for sport, these all occurred under Western legal systems. Islamic law does not have a monopoly on abuse.

Well, maritime salvage laws probably apply... so, yeah. Free boat!

Actually, now that I've done some googling, I'll have to retract my statement. No free boat for you!

The popular belief that a salvor becomes the owner of the property, at least if it was abandoned by the owner or was derelict, is erroneous. The owner may always reclaim his property from the salvor on paying salvage money. The salvor, for his part, has a maritime lien on the salved property (in an amount determined by national statute or juridical custom) and need not return the property to the owner until his claim is satisfied or until security to meet an award is given. An owner who elects not to reclaim his property cannot be made liable for a salvage reward.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/519995/salvage

The objects salvaged always remain the property of the original owner, but the original owner is responsible for compensating the salvor (person doing the salvaging) for their time, effort, and the danger they went through to salvage the property. So if you find a 5 million dollar yacht that has slipped loose from its moorings and is adrift, you do not get to claim it. (Which is a good thing if it is your 5 million dollar yacht which your bone-head brother-in-law borrowed but then, like an idiot, forgot to drop anchor when he took the tender ashore to go to a party, get wasted, and find with some bubble-headed island girl half his age to spend the night with.) However, you can hold onto it until the owner pays you for the boat's retrieval.

Having said that, apparently the owner of the boat no longer wants it back, so the question of ownership is up in the air.

First, it's not "it's usage", but "its usage".
Second, when you so authoritatively output garbage like that you look authoritatively silly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic
http://www.britannica.com/bps/search?query=islamist
You're welcome.

Apparently you did not realize that since 1900 the Encyclopaedia Britannica has been published by a US company and has switched its content, if not its name, to become a heavily American Encyclopaedia (at the risk of rubbing salt into the wound here is the Wikipedia link). I wonder who's feeling dumb now...

The staff at Encyclopædia Britannica... for failing to mention that it is an American company in its own article about itself . (They only mention that it has "editorial offices in Chicago and thousands of contributors worldwide.")

Wikipedia's Article on Britannica
60 paragraphs on Britannica's history, status, organization, awards, etc. 15 paragraphs on criticisms, bias, racism/sexism. Cites over 100 sources.

Britannica's Article on Wikipedia
2 paragraphs on Origin and Growth (one of which is devoted to suggesting that Wikipedia is running out of steam or somehow failing in its mission), 4 paragraphs on "Issues and controversies," including a suggestion that Wikipedia was a haven for child pornography. Everything about the article says, "parents, keep your children away from this new-fangled, dangerous, unreliable Wikipedia thing!" Cites no sources. What is really amusing is that Britannica's stated slogan (at the top of every page) is "facts matter." I guess attribution does not. Their home page features an image of a 1st-gen iPad with the caption "looking ahead." If Britannica considers 2010 to be the future, that explains a lot.

After reading the story title I immediately looked up Encyclopedia Britannica's article on Wikipedia. As expected, more than half of the article (714 out of 1378 words) was spent on the Issues and Controversies section.

$1,400 cool?

http://store.britannica.com/products/ecm001en0

This is not the death of the encyclopedia, just the ending of an inefficient costly format. Who goes to their site and ops for the $1,400 print version over the $30 disc version?

Only one Slashdot do you need to be told that "metric tons" don't exist - they are tonnes, and require no prefix.

Authorities who disagree with you include:
The Encyclopedia Britannica
The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology
and about 16.5 million other hits on Google.

For some reason, having the homonyms ton/tonne variously refer to a short ton (907.18474 kg), a tonne (1000 kg), or long ton (1,016.0469088 kg a.k.a. English ton) vexes some people. They prefer to specify a "metric ton" rather than so overemphasize "tonne" that they sound as if they have a speech impediment.

The unit of measure exists by virtue of its pervasive use. The fact that you prefer an alternate equivalent does nothing to change that fact.

Utilizing solar power for the plant-tending machinery sounds like a good idea, at first... then you realize that plants themselves are solar powered, and therefore every square meter you are devoting to powering the machinery is a reduction of the potential plant-matter production. A possible semi-alternative might be to make the roofs of all homes into solar arrays, thus providing shelter and power simultaneously - of course, the occupants of those dwellings may not want to give up the electricity this would generate.

LFTR-based energy solutions come immediately to mind as a cheap, plentiful, and safe solution to our power needs.

Thorium is fairly plentiful, is produced as a "waste" by-product of conventional mineral-extraction processes, and the US has a stockpile of it large enough to run the entire country (and then some) for nearly a decade. The process of extracting energy from it results in an incredibly small mass of waste, orders of magnitude less than our current plants produce.

To top it all off, it's impossible for a LFTR plant to "melt down", and the startup/shutdown process takes a matter of hours, rather than weeks or months. As a matter of fact, there was a research group who made a reactor in the 50s who simply turned it off for the weekend on Friday, then turned it on again on Monday - they just shut it down for two days, then brought it back up.

As another indication of safety, the US government funded a research group in the 1950s who very nearly put a thorium reactor in an airplane. They stopped not because of safety concerns, but because fission-powered aircraft were not as cheap and expendable as the newly-developed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) technology as a delivery system. Missiles don't require a crew to ride them into enemy airspace.

Speaking of the military aspects of cheap power, one interesting "benefit" of LFTR technology is that weapons-grade fissionable material is not a waste product of the process. This may have something to do with the huge number of fast-breeder nuclear reactors in the US; their main product (other than energy) is weapons-grade plutonium.

Yet another indicator of safety: This is a pdf from the Thorium Energy Alliance that has, on its front page, a picture of enough thorium to satisfy a person's lifetime energy needs being held in a bare hand. You see, thorium isn't nearly as "radioactive" as other nuclear materials - it's not fissile, it's merely fertile.

If the US isn't careful, they're going to lose any ability to utilize this technology; Both China and India are working on thorium-based reactors currently, with China's expressed goal being to monopolize the IP rights - yet another reason to abolish the current Intellectual Property system?

More information on thorium and thorium-based technologies can be found here.

My favorite personal infringement was "use of XOR to draw a cursor"

To be fair the XOR cursor patent was filed in Jan 1978. Perhaps in 1977 when folks were working on this it was not quite so obvious as it is to us today. I'm just adding some context, I'm not saying it was necessarily patent worthy. I think we would need to know more about raster graphics used in TV, it may be more relevant than computer graphics.
"In the late 1970s and ’80s raster graphics, derived from television technology, became more common, though still limited to expensive graphics workstation computers."
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/491818/raster-graphics

http://www.britannica.com/bps/user-profile/4419/The-Editors-of-Encyclop%C3%A6dia-Britannica

It appears to be using similar principles and design to Tesla's turbine!

No, that's quite different. This thing has blades. It's a centrifugal pump for air.

Er, correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the British missions to Lexington and Concord in fact *specifically* to seize supplies in those towns, in particular military supplies?

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/338392/Battles-of-Lexington-and-Concord

So I don't know what stupid edits were done 'reinterpreting' what he said on wiki - Paul Revere was most definitely just announcing their method of advance - but the POINT that he was announcing the approach of the British "to take away privately-owned guns" is entirely reasonable.

The Encyclopedia Britannica lists the area of the Sahara as 8.6 million km^2 (I choose that because Wikipedia's is far larger... 9.4 million km^2). Let's assume that half of the Sahara dessert is inhabitable (which I believe is a gross overestimation). Even then, 2% of the remaining area is still 86,000 km^2, or roughly the size of South Carolina, Austria, or New Zealand. Just because it's an extremely small proportion of the Earth's surface doesn't mean it's not still fantastically huge.

If we want to look in man-made terms, we can just look at the urbanized areas of the United States. 86,000 km^2 is equivalent to the areas of New York-Newark, NY-NJ-CT; Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA; Chicago, IL-IN; Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD; Miami, FL; Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX; Boston, MA-NH-RI; Washington, DC-VA-MD; Detroit, MI; Houston, TX; Atlanta, GA; San Francisco-Oakland, CA; Phoenix-Mesa, AZ; Seattle, WA; San Diego, CA; Minneapolis-Saint Paul, MN; Saint Louis, MO-IL; Baltimore, MD; Tampa-Saint Petersburg, FL; Denver-Aurora, CO; Cleveland, OH; Pittsburgh, PA; Portland, OR-WA; San Jose, CA; Riverside-San Bernardino, CA; Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN; Virginia Beach, VA; Sacramento, CA; Kansas City, MO-KS; San Antonio, TX; Las Vegas, NV; Milwaukee, WI; Indianapolis, IN; Providence, RI-MA; Orlando, FL; and Columbus, OH combined . This is the equivalent of constructing the entirety of the US Interstate Highway System out of PV cells, except building the road 1 km wide and 10,000 km longer.

Wait, this is SlashDot. 2% of the uninhabitable Sahara is equivalent to about 440,000 Libraries of Congress (using 2.1 million ft^2 for the area of the building).

kind of feels like nature telling me I'm non-essential

No, two lesbians with a turkey baster and some David Crosby spoof does that. Really, can you imagine wanting your kid to look like Crosby. Have you seen that wizened up fucking gnome. But.... come to think of it... if he were a woman he'd look pretty close to Chastity.... wups... Chaz Bono.

P.S. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/264162/Hesss-law-of-heat-summation

Minorities? How did you come up with that?

Good lord, son, stop drinking the right-wing Kool-Aid that presents the Founding Fathers as divinely inspired men of impeccable virtue. Many of them claimed to own other human beings on the basis that those human beings were racial minorities. Among them were Charles Pinckney, who wrote "...I say, that, at the time I drew that constitution, I perfectly knew that there did not then exist such a thing in the Union as a black or colored citizen, nor could I then have conceived it possible such a thing could have ever existed in it;" and James Madison, who though that slaves couldn't be freed unless "they are permanently removed beyond the region occupied by, or allotted to a white population."

As for your ridiculous claim that the founders understood women to be included in the "all men" who are created equal, the fact that one state allowed women to vote in elections (though not if they were poor) does not alter the position of the founders of the federal government. John Adams was explictly against giviing the vote to women or to men who didn't own land.

Let us be grateful that we can leave the opinions and intentions of the Founders in the dustbin of history.

Social Security pulls money from Social Security's reserve.

The Social Security reserve is an accounting fiction. Money goes to or comes from general funds.

Luckily, Obama's not in charge of treaties.

Executive agreement.

The only answer possible to that is 'yes', and thus the EPA is required by the courts to regulate carbon dioxide.

The other answer is "no". I get the feeling you frequently forget that there are other answers than the one you want it to be. The EPA had to decide whether greenhouse gases were a public health menace. The rationalizations there are remarkably weak such as claiming that global warming contributes to an increase in allergens, disease vectors, and flooding. Water also does the same thing and could be regulated by the same justification.

And once again, Obama is responsible for poor decisions made by anyone which serves in his administration.

At this point, I just want to point out that you have numerous obvious flaws in your reasoning which indicate you don't understand the important issues we discuss here.

For example, I have no idea why you repeat ancient 1930s propaganda on Social Security like it is fact. We have almost 80 years of operation of Social Security and we can see that it doesn't operate like you claim. I can't help you, if you continue to misunderstand key parts of the US government.

I'll agree that he lied about how far left he was, and is actually basically at the same point as Clinton, if that's the claim you want to make.

This is one of the few things that amuse me about leftists. How they turn on each other so easily.

Um, yes, they did force that tax cut, by filibustering every bill that didn't contain it.

You'd think the Republicans were running the show back then the way they get talked about. It's a feeble excuse. The Democrats just needed to keep their senate bloc loyal and peel away a couple of Republican senators. They failed to do that.

Almost all the things you listed are countered by tax rebates and whatnot for businesses that provide health insurance.

Yes, this was a totally insane way to provide health care, I agree, and while Obama likes to blame the Republicans, I think we've all realized we got basically the bill he wanted.

What? Do I hear a bit of disenchantment with the Glorious Leader? Did he say something again which might not have been the whole unvarnished truth?

Yes, and those exact same tax cuts have worked very well over the past decade, haven't they?

True, tax cuts aren't enough in themselves. The US could have not collected taxes at all for the past ten years and still have the recent financial crash wipe out a lot of the gain. My view is that recessions are the missing piece of the puzzle. Having to rebuild the financial system every 20-40 years is not a good idea, but the current approach of bailing out businesses in every recession builds up a lot of parasitic incompetents (using the "private profit, public risk" business model) who can't fend for themselves.

You have to cull the herd every so often, even if it means significant job loss, in order to clear space for the better businesses. This is the biggest flaw with any variety of Keynesian economics, not to mention the Obama variety which wasn't based on investment in the first place.

Someone is wrong here. You say the Crusades were "because muslims thought the "wrong" ideas" and Wikipedia states that it was because of Muslim aggression into the Byzantine empire. Hmmm. I wonder who's wrong?

The problem with your well researched and reasonable points is that just any nitwit can post to that wikipedia article as can post to slashdot. There are a variety of more reliable sources. For starters, try: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/144695/Crusades

The key to solving this is appreciating that Wikipedia is not a machine where you put in good information and get out the encyclopedia you want to see, it's about actually dealing with human beings on a large-scale collaborative project which has differences of opinion.

In fact, Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia at all. Wikipedia is in fact a game, specifically its an MMORPG--[NSFW].

This isn't just the opinion of the internet diplomacy bridage of encyclopedia dramatica. It's also shared by the former editor of Encyclopedia Britannica. He also gave this opinion more explicitly in a documentary about the influence of the web, which I can't find at the moment.

So Wikipedia is essentially a game. For the players, the stakes are not exactly high. Ultimately nobody cares how much "WP:EXP" they ammass, or how high they rise on the "WP:SCALE".

But for the rest of the world, the stakes are currently enormous. The reality is that Wikipedia is becoming the world's foremost gateway to knowladge. The end result of these players, their petty squabbles, cliques, and infighting, are the pages which the majority of the world is being directed to when it seeks information and learning. Needless to say, this is a disaster.

The dreadful fallout from so much politics and melodrama leaves pages that are essentially babbling and incoherant. I've ranted about this before, so I'm not going to repeat myself here, except to say that in my opinion, the Wikipedia pages on mathematics are actively damaging the future of mathematics, probably turning many budding mathematicians off the subject before they discover anything about it. Wikipedia shows mathematics in its worst possible light, because no mathematician is allowed near those pages. As an expert, I know this is true of mathematics, but I suspect it's the same for many other subjects.

Our discussion here are of no avail. Ultimately the only solution to the Wikipedia Question will be to remove it from the control of Jimbo et al and place it in the hands of an international, cross institutional, academic body. People who could actually run a depository of knowladge, instead of playing games with it.

Re: Your first item. The Swiss Guard still use them every day.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic-art/623972/122952/Swiss-Guards-outside-the-Vatican-palace-Vatican-City

Not real common anywhere else, I'll admit.

You are aware of things like JET? While it is still experimental for more practical usage, it still has been able to successfully preform fusion reactions. Also, the hydrogen bomb is powered by nuclear fusion.

Not to put to fine a point on it, but they do: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/236545/Gobi/47958/People-and-economy

Not many, granted, but there are still people there. And it's not like the Gobi has much going for it in terms of natural resources or scientific research.

Hell, even Antarctica has an (admittedly rolling) population of up to 5000, and that's pretty much the least habitable place on the Earth's surface.

Just in case you don't think wikipedia is trustworthy, it seems the entire paragraph in which had a lot of that information was copied directly from the Encyclopedia britannica. Double Jeopardy

Some cats are delighted to eat rats. (Example imagery.)

Either that or I'm missing something in the definition of a terrorist.

Yeah, you're missing this part:

the systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/588371/terrorism

The people you're referring to weren't using violence to create fear in the populace - they enjoyed widespread support amongst their countrymen, they rejected the rule of a government they considered illegitimate, they formed new provincial governments and then banded together in order to form a nation, they ejected the British officials, and, finally, they fought standing battles against British forces, first through partisan warfare and eventually through the use of a standing army. At no point did they blow up schools, hospitals, and police stations, or deliberately attack unarmed civilians, nor did they seek to terrorize the populace in order to gain power and unwilling support.

If you're unable to see the difference between an entire nation standing up and fighting for it's independence, and a bunch of power-hungry assholes wantonly killing civilians in order to gain control over others, then you really don't belong in this conversation.

http://corporate.britannica.com/press/releases/standard2.html
It started having problem already when Windows 2000 came out, to say nothing about XP, Vista and Windows 7.
Or use on Linux, for that matter.

The dead tree version doesn't have these compatibility problems.

Here, and a primacy cite ?here.

For more information, seek "Common Sense Revolution".

The figure of "a million" unemployed was bandied about in the popular press, though more likely, it was a million unemployed and their supporters.

I seriously doubt most Canadians even live near the lower portions of Alaska, as far as longitude goes. Of course, there aren't many Alaskans, hehe.

A lot of Canadians, if they live towards the southern part of their US-bordering province, could potentially be further south from the pole than north-eastern US states like Maine.

The fact is that Wikipedia has a super high resolution print quality and SVG image of the seal which could be used to manufacture fake credentials. This fact might explain why they are going after Wikipedia and not other places.

Maybe, but Britannica has a pretty high resolution version too...

http://www.britannica.com/bps/image/203351/115892/Seal-of-the-Federal-Bureau-of-Investigation

Initial letter from FBI and response by Wikimedia Foundation
  Wikipedia article in question, image in question.
  New York Times story (login). Britannica uses the logo

Captured by Pirates and Sold into Slavery Journals And Magazines The Web's Best Sites Additional Readings Four years later the ship on which Cervantes was returning to Spain was captured by Barbary pirates. He and his brother were carried as slaves to Algiers. Although his brother was able to earn his freedom relatively quickly, Miguel was held for several more years. He made several unsuccessful attempts to escape and partly as a result of those attempts became known

When you can provide a link asshole to prove me wrong, and not some cunt forum link like you did last time, I will respond. Otherwise, don't bother replying because your nothing but a pussy that doesn't have the balls to back up your comments with certified links.

Come on asshole. Back up your comments with a link. Prove me wrong. And you will note my last link was from a respected encyclopædia and the previous one from a history media page. If you can't match the credentials of those 2 sites, again. Don't bother.

Put up or shut up.

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~epsas/dynamics/vortex/structure.pdf
http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0404004
http://www.peter-thomson.co.uk/tornado/A_self_organised_structure_for_the_tornado.html
http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/21580.pdf
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic-art/594363/19397/Tornadic-thunderstorm-The-rotating-updraft-that-produces-the-tornado-extends
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/publications/edwards/hcr3may.htm

Thanks! I never thought of googling it!

Now why didn't Galileo just read the documentation Aristotle had written on gravitation? He could have avoided some nasty arguments with the pope! Or why didn't Einstein read what Lorenz had written on relativity? Or why did Schockley, Bardeen, and Brattain invent the transistor? Vacuum tubes were extremely well documented in 1947. I could go on all night.

Sigh. I guess 640 kbytes will always be enough for somebody...

Is google down in your area:

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~epsas/dynamics/vortex/structure.pdf
http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0404004
http://www.peter-thomson.co.uk/tornado/A_self_organised_structure_for_the_tornado.html
http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/21580.pdf
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic-art/594363/19397/Tornadic-thunderstorm-The-rotating-updraft-that-produces-the-tornado-extends
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/publications/edwards/hcr3may.htm

It's to write an article whose accuracy is impeccably true by discussing the opponents and proponents in the controversy in a factual way.

Unfortunately, this principle breaks down outside of the scientific community when it comes to topics in one of two areas:

a) emotionally, especially religious, matters, because people who seriously believe that their eternal happiness or damnation depends on it regularily pull out all the stops when it comes to convincing others. The seemingly simple act of just identifying the facts is suddenly very difficult and faces opposition. And since WP doesn't allow original research, and religious nutjobs have no shortage of links, books, articles and other "sources" to point to, it quickly becomes a matter of who can spend more time on getting the article about Noah's place of birth right - a hundred people on the Internet with a vague interest in history, or a dozen fanatics who would kill for it if only they could?

b) fringe topics that require rare special knowledge. No, WP policy is again no help, because in many controversial areas of, say, science on the edge of current knowledge, even presenting a balanced summary of current theories requires expert knowledge. How many people could have written an article about string theory in the 1980s? How many of them were even mostly unbiased, as in not having their own pet theory to push?

WP is not a democracy, as it yells so often, but it does take a lot of the bad parts of democracy. You can't vote on the colour of the sky, and you can't set the value of Pi in a talk page discussion.

Articles like these are exactly where the Britannica, for example, shines in comparison to WP. As a simple test, compare the very straight and clear "Creationism" on Britannica Online with the jumbled mess full of politically motivated deals on choice of words that you find on Wikipedia and that quite frankly is more confusing than enlightening.

but I've never heard of someone saying "Well, I couldn't get weed so I bough some meth!"

http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/24267983/Substitution-of-Marijuana-For-Alcohol-The-Role-of-Perceived-Access-and-Harm

Well, it concerns alcohol and weed for students, not meth.

Still, Meth remains a locally producable drug, popular in areas that lack regular access to other drugs. MJ isn't normally unavailable, so it's probably not a substitution. Going by effects, it's more likely to substitute for cocaine and such.

see http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/449651/pencil

I have never seen the word "majority" used the way you used it. Never.

I guess Britannica is wrong too.

Oh, and Encyclopedia.com.

You'd better get cracking, obviously you need to correct them as well.

I should point out that your use of "majority" in this way left you without a term that means "> 50%". As a result, you commandeered the term "super-majority" for this purpose.

I'll give you this one. It was meant to be evocative, but clearly if you don't have a basic understanding of what the word "minority" in this context means, it may be confusing. It was clear to me, it was clear to several people I showed the post to, but obviously it was unclear to you.

In short, I believe your usage is probably wrong, and definitely confusing.

Believe what you like. All you've shown me so far is an unwillingness to learn a new use for a term, and a stubborn insistence that "if you don't know about it, it probably isn't right".

How about the chart from Encyclopedia Britannica (cited by wikipedia) which shows that most european countries began recovery in 1932/33?

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/243118/Great-Depression

It may be smooth enough going 2-3km/h, but will it be smooth/stable enough to hit 50-60km/h* down some steep slopes? I highly doubt it, most humans aren't stable enough when moving that fast because of reaction delay's and such - unless robotics and gyroscopes make huge leaps forward very quickly I can't see this happening.

*Downhill Speeds