Chuckle... why in the world did you lose the context of GP's comment? It appears you thought GP was starting a discussion of non-electronic means of computing. It seems rather straightforward that he was discussing electric current (lightning) zapping through air in a maze in order to solve a shortest-path problem.
What I believe the GP means is that using electricity as described earlier in the thread would be "poor" in a programmable sense because it would be rather difficult or tedious to recreate the physical maze ("using physics") to solve shortest path problems in a repeatable or generalized manner. In that light, it's clear you already understand this.
Complexity for a good number of types of problems is like a water balloon. You can squish the complexity in one way but it just pops up somewhere else. You can (sometimes) make an O(2) problem O(1) in time by parallelizing the problem with O(1) computers, that is rather than one computer doing V^2 steps have V computers do V steps simultaneously.
As GP described you could set up a network of strings and beads. Then the problem is solvable in O(c) time which is practically speaking instantaneous. Yippee. Now let's do it again for a similar but different problem. We can do it instantly too, right? Well... no. We have to get a lot more strings and beads. And guess what... Reconstructing the network is... O(2) in time (or O(1) in time with O(1) grad students) and O(2) in string.
It's easier to think about this with the string/bead example. But it is exactly the same with the maze and lightning example. If I gave you a new problem set, just how long would it take you to physically create this maze? Now how would this scale? If I gave you a problem set ten times as large, how much time (and material) to create that maze?
This approach may practically speaking be just GREAT for solving this rather specific sort of problem (shortest path through some sort of maze made from nonconducting material filled with air). As such it is indeed cool. But it says absolutely NOTHING about complexity of these sorts of problems in a generalized fashion.
Glad to see you're getting modded back up. I have no idea why you were marked Troll to start.
However, your comment regarding the Correlation vs. Causation thing is a bit strange. You've taken a rather simple principle and thrust it into the realm of philosophy.
This comment is just a reminder that the discovery of a correlation is not the end of research but more akin to the beginning. A correlation is interesting. It is a necessary but non-sufficient component to a dependency or causation.
If A->B and A->C...
We might find a correlation between B & C. This might get a tad confusing because sometimes D->C and we don't see the correlation between B & C. Enough research and we may figure out when and why we see the correlation.
Or we could see a correlation between A & B, but we don't know yet which is causing which or if even a dependency is truly there. A lot more research may be required to clarify this.
What people mean when they bring up this statement is that we really cannot yet make definitive statements if all we have discovered is just a correlation. But based on those correlations we may be able to come up with explanatory models and theories that may be able to demonstrate a causal relationship. These theories could then be judged against further data. (sigh... at least that's what they SHOULD mean when they bring this up... sometime I wonder...)
Your point that we never really know if all concluded Causation is just an illusion is a bit trite and easily overruled by Occam's Razor. Yes, it might be possible that in the deepest reality, X->A and X->B and in such a way that to us it always looks like A->B. But, to grossly oversimplify Occam's Razor... WHO CARES?!?
I completely agree. I'm not certain what the norm is with regards to Science education. But it doesn't seem to bode well to politicize the choice of what gets taught.
To me it would seem far more important to mandate a course or two throughout the K-12 curriculum on Critical Thinking.
I'm rather worried about too much spoon-feeding of children in education. I'm not talking about presenting the traditional opposing sides of a controversial issue (eg. Creationism vs. Evolution) and letting the children make up their minds. Indeed, I really don't have a problem teaching primarily or only the consensus viewpoint in the early years.
But as the kids get a bit older, they really should be adequately prepared to digest the immense volume of information available today. Critical Thinking might help equip them to withstand the constant onslaught from Madison Avenue and Hollywood. It would hopefully help them see through most political shenanigans. Toss in some good logic, dialectic and debate and these kids would be well able to discuss most controversial issues such as what to do about Climate Change.
There is a rather interesting passage in the book Starship Troopers that deals with this head-on. At the beginning of the book, the History (their History =~ our present) teacher was describing the horrors of the past, specifically describing how kids would run amok in a destructive manner such as people are relating here.
The children were simply shocked and rather incredulous. The teacher asked them what would happen if they did such things. The kids responded quickly and clearly: the offending child(ren) AND the parents would end up in the public stockades for a public beating. The teacher then went on to explain many of the reasons corporal punishment had fallen out of favor and how parental responsibility had all but evaporated.
Corporal punishment isn't likely the panacea you are hoping for. Some recent meta-studies have shown it's not necessarily as effective as you'd think and may end up enhancing violent tendencies. However, these studies were looking at parent-on-child punishment, not societal or state level punishment. And as inhumane as it does seem today, I imagine the shame of public punishment (simultaneously with your parents) would actually be very effective with teens.
In any case, there really does seem to be need to rope the parents in and determine how to punish both the parents and the kids or to figure out how to help both.
Though you are likely correct that a future with no hope is the source of a good number of problems with youth, both in the US and in the UK, it's a tad goofy to compare this with the Revolutionary War.
The folk in the colonies were NOT "revolting against society".
These are not the redcoats you're looking for.
The colonists were working through society. Many representative bodies throughout the colonies held "civilized" debates about the issue and issued a wide variety of declarations of independence. Sure the war got ugly. Sure it involved a bunch of youth (as wars always seem to do). But it is an incredible stretch to compare this with destructive, undisciplined, unmanaged kids in the UK.
You are inferring a dependency or an order in time that doesn't seem to be strictly in the text you quoted.
It's
a) Obtain a warrant b) request access to satellite imagery
The conjuction was "and"... not "and then" nor "in order to".
There will be times, of course, when due to urgency or an emergency that the authorities must get data as fast as possible. But I'm certain we'll create up a Fast Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in order to make it feasible to get warrants in some reasonable period of time after the fact...
Surely, no responsible administration would have any issue adhering to that... um...
So it's taken the light 12 odd billion years to arrive here, It always makes me wonder whether the galaxy is 12 billion years old, or 12 billion years away - and if it is the latter, does that in any way compare to the former?
We get a picture of a galaxy. We can tell from redshift of the characteristics of the light that we're getting to create that picture how far/old that light is. Since we're using the understanding that the speed of light is and has always been constant, how far away and how old are directly related. What people mean is that we're seeing a picture of a galaxy from a long, long time ago. Assuming it's still there, it'd be at least 12.8 billion years old.
Could you conceivably see the big bang with Hubble if the universe is only 13.5 billion years old? Does this mean they know roughly where the universe began and are looking in that direction? If they looked in the other direction, would they run out of things to see because nothing in the universe has traveled out that far yet?
Sure we know where the universe began - in your belly button. Seriously, the question doesn't quite make sense (or the answer doesn't make sense - take your pick). The analogy that might help is to think of the universe like a balloon - but only the rubber sheet. not the entire thing. Light, matter, everything is within and goes round that rubber sheet. The balloon is expanding. That's what's causing the redshift, more or less. If we reverse time and view the balloon as shrinking, everything collapses into the Big Bang. But there is no "place" where the universe started. It started everywhere.
However, I believe there is a theoretical limit beyond which we don't expect to be able to see anything. But it isn't because of the reasons you're positing. It's not because stuff isn't that far away. If I recall correctly, it has more to do with when we believe there was stuff to see.
And to see things that happened 12 billion years ago, would you need to look 12 billion years in the other direction from where they actually happened?
You would need to BE 12-billion light years in ANY direction from said event (and looking towards the event) AT 12-billion years past the event. Then the light from the event reaches you and you can see what happened 12 billion years ago. Say I fire 20 billion baseballs simultaneously in all directions at 60 miles an hour. Assuming no friction, interference, etc., if you are 60 miles away from where I was when I threw the balls at one hour after I threw them, you're gonna get smacked upside the head with a baseball and you'll get to experience my toss from an hour ago, 60 miles away.
Part of what makes this particular story rather interesting, is that not a lot of light is going to reach us from something that far away. If you think of my 20 billion baseballs, you can understand that at some distance you won't get hit because the balls get spread real thin rather quickly. The light from that galaxy is spread VERY thin. The fact we're seeing it at all is because of some nifty little tricks and a whole lot of luck. Basically we're taking advantage of an ENORMOUS magnifying glass to get a better look.
I do believe you're on to something. However, I have always understood that the reasons actors (and a whole lot of that industry) are into this is good ole' fashion networking. Not that much different from when and why Christianity went real big after emperor Constantine converted. Everyone wanted to curry favor with the emperor and people rushed on in, Jews, pagans, all sorts of people. But these people brought on in a good number of their own practices and the church changed quite a bit.
This doesn't seem to be the case with Scientology (which actually seems a ton more like ancient Gnosticism, at least in principle), though I imagine it could be. What they need is huge and rapid influx of converts (to the point of increasing the total membership 20-fold) and another prophet or two to bring on in the updated truth. If the new prophets would hold out the "truth" free of charge, it'd likely morph Scientology on into a religion rather than the incredible parasitical oddity it is.
Until then, people have to sort of suck it on up so they can get in good with people in power in the entertainment industry. And actors are well... good at faking it.
But how else could Scientology not seem like poorly written Science Fiction given its creator (and his motives)?!? I find it so absolutely bizarre that anybody getting seriously into this couldn't do the most BASIC research into what Hubbard was doing here.
Not to knock the possible independent invention of Spread Spectrum techniques by your friend...
Not to dismiss your remarks regarding that others may have also independently invented this sometime in the last 40 years (though I believe you're simply referring to civilian commercial use in the past few decades)...
But it would seem to take just a wee bit of effort of web research to demonstrate that various forms of this have been around a lot longer.
Goodness. Tesla patented a form of frequency hopping in 1900!!
Hedy Lamer is famous for being the woman who more or less invented and patented an early form of CDMA in 1940.
Granted, these things didn't have widespread civilian use and applications until the last few decades. But it seems strange to present your story the way you did. It would seem likely depending in his implementation that this chap couldn't have patented it in any case due to longstanding prior patents.
Furthermore, describing this as "zero bandwidth" really seems strange. I can certainly understand why engineers would have dismissed this. A more accurate description of spread spectrum would be "infinite bandwidth". That is why it's called SPREAD spectrum. It flattens out the wave in the frequency domain. Simply because the power in any given range drops to the noise floor isn't quite the same as it truly being zero bandwidth.
People aren't saying "ahhhh my life is safe, I don't taunt tigers". They're saying: "if you DO taunt tigers, bad things are likely to happen". There's a clear difference between the two.
I'd recommend an interesting book: Life of Pi by Yann Martel. It goes into a good amount of detail about zoo related issues and especially tigers. We're not safe from tigers at all. Yes, there IS a certain level of risk going to a zoo.
I take issue with your thought that these people constantly repeating the fact of the taunting are doing such out of some idea of a sense of security or a world under control. Indeed, I see the reverse. It appears to me that you may be arguing for a safe world where folk should be safe to taunt tigers.
As several others have mentioned, this isn't an issue of sentencing (or wishing) the young chap to death for stupidity. It's a horrific reminder WHY such stuff is stupid. It's not stupid behavior because it's boorish and disturbs our sense of peace. It's stupid behavior because it could quite easily to lead to a premature death. And to GP's post, this ought to show you that the proper response may not be so much to call security to get the man arrested as much as to hastily move away.
Yes the zoo (and related agencies) are clearly at fault for the wall height. Punitive damages against the zoo should be stark to shock the cobwebs out of the eyes and brains of zoos and agencies to address things like this properly.
But in order to be able to proceed through life in a prudent manner, it seems important to have a reasonable understanding of dangers. Many animals are incredibly dangerous for one reason or another. This is not something people should take lightly. Discussing this particular occurance devoid of the context (the taunting) would seem to be enormously unwise. It could lead to all sorts of erroneous conclusions.
Evolution isn't a "let's try every possibility and see what works and what doesn't" sort of thing. It seems rather likely that once things get going down one pathway of evolution that we don't back up to try other possibilities for optimal performance. Indeed, we need to remember that what steers evolution at any given point in time is the current environment (selective pressures) as much as anything. And this itself is constantly changing.
The choice/selection of the four "natural" (five if you count U) bases for RNA/DNA was made so incredibly long ago, it doesn't seem clear that the other possibilities are being or have been tried or selected in any sort of way. So your "um's" don't seem to be appropriate, at all. It's not clear that these base pairs ever "showed up" before at all once life got going using "natural" RNA/DNA.
These aren't new genes were discussing here as much as getting to play with a new library of functions. That is, they're not creating new words as much as expanding the alphabet. And it's not just life so much here that they're pursuing. There are other uses of DNA these days than creating new life. These other applications are discussed in the fine article.
Lastly, the only way to learn is to experiment. Science doesn't prove as much as it disproves. You can theorize all you want, but experiments are necessary to refute/refine these theories (by disproving/falsifying). This is why your request for proof of the unknown is bizarre. Carried to its final conclusion, your "do nothing because we know nothing" attitude would suffocate almost all progress and learning entirely.
So THAT's what's up with Stewie... He's just "going through a phase". Lois must have given him a slapdown for the future Stewie to be well-adjusted.
I found your assertions rather interesting. I would have modded you such just so increased exposure would have dredged up some informative responses.
I have to agree with a sister post, however, that your multiple claims of universality (99.9%; will not be possible; a kid *will* try to kill; etc.) should give anyone familiar with science great hesitation to accept your claims and conclusions. Just for fun, next time spice it up a bit with more realistic and hence confusing figures: 83.2%; 13.4% of first time 1-year old murderers are successful; etc.
I was able to find at least one recent text addressing this issue:
This seems to be basic nature vs. nurture sort of a thing. Oddly enough, however, your position seems to be that the nature aspect of it is simply ZERO. It is really not so simple. Indeed, the role of the frontal cortex seems to be evidence of the role of nature (evolutionary history, etc.) here which IS part of the innate aspect of morality.
I think you need to practice some (self-)education yourself.
Go back and investigate literacy rates in the New England colonies circa 1750. You'll very likely be surprised. Hint - it was very likely the highest anywhere in the world at that time.
Next, go and grab a handful of the essays and debates of the time. It shouldn't be difficult. People were debating the merits of rebellion in person and in print all over the place back then. Once you have a good number of these treatises, essays and debates, I want you to ponder whether the son of some (average) working class family today would even be able to read these at all, much less properly analyze, criticize or "think at that level". Again, I imagine you'll be rather surprised.
The Revolutionary War was NOT the result of a few thinkers manipulating the crowds, although I think you can make a strong case of that sort of thing happening here and there (cough.. cough... Boston Tea Party... cough.. cough..). Many people in many corners of the colonies were very ready for independence. Indeed, it was almost certainly inevitable.
As an example, go and research the origins of the Declaration of Independence. You'll find it's hard to do so since there were many, many such declarations being passed all over the colonies by various representative bodies.
I am enormously skeptical of the claims of the article.
However, I think if there is any merit to the idea at all, it really just boils down to one fundamental similarity between Religion and Engineering:
Both rely on Authority-Based Information.
Do forgive me for generalizing here, but at a rather high-level Engineers solve problems. They don't "do science". They use science and math to solve problems. But do they question that math and science? Almost certainly not at the undergraduate level. Depending on what you're doing, maybe not even at the Masters level. There simply is no need to question it. The entire focus is to USE it.
For religion this information comes from on high, or from some Authority or another. For Engineering, it comes from Scientists or Mathematicians.
Scientists themselves may have a much, much better understanding of the concepts of a Scientific Theory and how Mathematics is simply used to represent our models which approximate reality. But for most of what an engineer may do, it works just as well to consider it LAW.
Consider this for a bit. For many religions, you likely start attributing great respect to some source, be it a text or a guru. By starting with the assumption that this foundation is certain, you use this to build logical constructs or to counsel people or whatever. See the similarity?
It doesn't serve an engineer much to spend time considering the uncertainties in the theories used to do engineering work.
Now having said all of that, if you do think your friend truly is curious how technology works, chastise him for his staunch and willful ignorance of Evolution and how THAT works. It is really quite fascinating. But he has to be willing to switch modes from protecting his belief system into one of "figuring it out". And you can chastise him for that too. If he IS secure in his belief system, he won't have a problem doing this.
As long as a couple of other rights and principles are observed, the position you seem to be advocating is certainly simplistic and to some extent a bit silly.
There is a difference between jail and prison, despite the way these terms are used interchangeably. In general, prison is punishment for convicted criminals.
If you think about it a bit, it seems very difficult to create a system of justice whereby "presumed innocent" criminals can be permitted to roam free during the weeks or months of their trial. Crimes occur. Someone commits them. The chap you found may not actually be guilty. But if your policy is that you cannot apprehend someone until a court conviction, what guarantee do you have that the accused will stick around for the trial? The policy of arrest/jail/bail may have false positives. But a system of never putting someone into jail into convicted seems horribly naive. Either you don't let them know you're "proving them guilty" and just catch them when you've done so (which doesn't provide for a defense) or you let them know they're a suspect and politely request they don't bolt for Mexico and please don't kill anyone else while they're gathering evidence.
Having said that, we must have safeguards for Habeus Corpus and the right to a speedy trial for this to work. Otherwise, we devolve into a system whereby the police (or corrupt leaders) do indeed judge you guilty (or otherwise deserving of punishment/pain) and toss you into jail where you rot. Think "Les Miserables".
This is why the recent diminishments of Habeus Corpus and the fact that several people (US citizens apprehended in the US) have spent YEARS in Guantanamo Bay before any charges were filed are so incredibly troubling.
In principle, your view that we're "guilty until proven innocent" seems quite wrong. In practice, it also seems we're sliding somewhat in that direction.
It simply seems to me that the simplest and most appropriate thing for Ford to do here would have been to provide all the necessary permission for them to proceed with their artistic work, or license it with a smallish fee if necessary.
That would have seemed like a win-win sort of thing. Free marketing, retention of their rights, etc.
It does seem that with trademarks you are indeed obligated to protect them or you may lose them. But I don't quite see why Fordwould have had to be so foolish about it.
Your post is as good as any to attempt to address one huge misunderstanding here.
A good Scientific Theory is falsifiable and has predictive power. But the idea of "testing in any useful time" is just one of many ways a Scientific Theory can make falsifiable claims and specific predictions.
It really is not a weighty argument to hold against the Theory of Evolution to state that it takes too long to watch it happening. Does it bother you that the earth's plates move a tad too slow to watch to validate Plate Tectonics? Does it trouble you how Scientists really know any element has a half-life in the millions of years? Does it tickle your curiosity to wonder how to test any theory that the moon arose from something the size of mars bumping into a very young earth?
Seriously we don't have spare proto-Earths and mars size planets to spare. Well, unless you really do want to send Mars into Venus and watch what happens...
But seriously, there are likely an enormous number of similar examples.
The Theory of Evolution is very strong in its ability to make predictive claims. I don't even need to repeat the list of observed speciation events.
I'll just give you one for fun. The Theory of Evolution was bolstered by the find of Archaeopteryx, a sort of blend between bird and reptile. That's because we sort of expected eventually to find something like that. Based on our current understanding, we should be able to predict that we'll never find a griffon alive or in the fossil record (well.. a natural one anyways - heaven help us when the genetic engineers really get tinkering). Otherwise stated, if we did find a blend between a bird and a mammal something would be seriously wrong with the modern Theory of Evolution. And no, the platypus isn't such a thing (exercise left to reader). Find me a feathered, furry thing that lactates and then we can have some fun.
This entire Creationist-Evolutionist debate suffers immensely from an inability of folk to understand their opponents' views and positions.
Please do understand here that you have basically given what YOU feel are two significant arguments against teaching Intelligent Design in the schools. These are, unfortunately, not much better than straw man arguments.
Oddly enough, you haven't stated the most significant reasons you'll see over and over and over again if you would dig ever so slightly into the writings of your opponents.
The reason Intelligent Design is bad science is not that it presupposes supernatural forces. People may argue that this is one reason it isn't science at all. But if someone says it's a bad Scientific Theory (or not a Scientific Theory at all), this is not why.
Furthermore, the rest of your arguments attempt to continue this ill advised view that Intelligent Design, as a theory, should be comparable to the Theory of Evolution.
The problem with Intelligent Design is that it is not a Scientific Theory for at least two significant reasons:
1) Lack of Falsifiability 2) Lack of Predictive Power
I'm not going to go deeper. There are vast amounts of resources available on the web to assist anyone seriously curious here. It isn't hard to see where and how the Theory of Evolution excels here and Intelligent Design simply fails outright.
But you must start by learning how Scientists view Science, including the Scientific Method and how Scientific Theories are used. Your points clearly indicate you do not adequately understand this.
Now, religion indeed should be taught in school, but in a proper forum, namely History, Sociology, Humanities, etc.. It should not be taught in a Science class and especially not as Science.
Next, as others have said here abiogenesis is not evolution.
Lastly, I do actually think that Intelligent Design should be taught in school. Be careful what you wish for. Intelligent Design should be taught when kids are old enough to dig into the Scientific Method, Scientific Theories, Null Hypotheses, Philosophy of Science and all that jazz. Intelligent Design serves as an excellent counter-example of a valid Scientific Theory and should be used as such (and you don't have to be rude to theists to do this).
That's not to say that recent graduates cannot immediately contribute significantly to their company.
My first few months out of college were rather somewhat unproductive since they felt it more important to take weeks of training on their various products and such. However, when I was able to be mentored with the usual work of the group it wasn't long before I noticed something...
"You mean whenever we start working on an issue we do these same series of steps on these same various servers in this particular order?"
I had that automated in short order.
Trouble is, people seem to forget the real lesson of college. What you learn in the university is nowhere near as important as learning how to learn. And sadly, if you don't capitalize on that lesson, it won't do you any good.
(I can never forget that one "oldie" who literally told me to read man pages for breakfast, from A to Z. He also told me it was my mission to become superuser. Ah the days...)
You can never and should never stop learning.
The very best piece of advice someone gave me while interviewing before I got out of college was that you must work extremely hard your first few years. You want to work harder than your peers and as soon as possible to become the most productive in your team.
I followed this advice and found it dovetailed just fine with continued learning. I just had to make certain not to fall into a treadmill routine. If I always made sure to allocate a fair chunk of time (10 to 20%) to trying to learn new things and trying to find faster ways of doing things, my productivity continued to grow. That's because the more productive I was, the more I could create free time to learn new things.
It's not terribly hard to come up with counter-examples to your hypothesis. Indeed, in democratic states where the majority feel speeding is not an issues, it is not handled the same way.
Case and point: Montana. There's a group of people who feel this isn't a significant issue (at least on the highways). Now, this may have a lot to do with the fact of the terrain of much of the state: flat and wide-open. But back when the US Federal speed limit was 55, each state (please do recall the US is a democratic republic) had the right to ignore this federal speed limit. But the cost of doing so was to lose a lot of federal funding for roads and such. So Montana had to comply... sort of. But what they did was call "speeding" a "misuse of energy" petty crime and the police (if one was ever bothered to deal with this) gave you a five dollar fine you paid on the spot.
These days, since the feds lightened up, Montana took the reins of this issue and declared no speed limit BUT the police can pull you over and give you a REAL traffic ticket (with customary fines) for driving "unsafe" at any speed.
Now... wouldn't the Autobahn be another similar example?
I do believe GP meant that whatever the impact kicks up will fall slower. I imagine that Mars' gravity will almost totally determine the trajectory of such ejecta. The effect of the Sun's gravity will be trivial by comparison.
Just like the parent, I wanted to see what came of the case referenced by GP.
Unfortunately, I don't think damncrackmonkey has presented an appropriate review or a valid interpretation of what came of this.
IANAL, and indeed I'd love for some lawyers to chime in.
But in essence, GP presented a writeup from 2002 regarding a court cases purportedly testing Miranda rights. This was based on oral arguments of a case before the Supremes then. Here's the deal. The 9th Circuit had found the police had violated this chap's 5th and 14th amendment rights. If you must simplify things into a boolean, it would seem our rights would have been strengthened had the SCOTUS confirmed the lower court's ruling.
Unfortunately, despite damncrackmonkey's supposed refutation, this was not what occurred:
Furthermore, if you read the concerns from the writeup GP linked and juxtapose these with the opinions (especially the primary opinion) of SCOTUS here, it doesn't seem clear the GP or this writeup was blatantly incorrect.
Basically, there is no clearly defined constitutional right to remain silent. Quoted from Justice Thomas' majority opinion:
that does not alter our conclusion that a violation of the constitutional right against self-incrimination occurs only if one has been compelled to be a witness against himself in a criminal case. (emphasis added)
Thomas explains further that the "right to remain silent" part of the Miranda warning is simply a measure to attempt to protect against violations of the Self-Incrimination clause and isn't in and of itself a constitutional right.
Their system isn't without issues. But it seems to have handled fraud rather well. Furthermore, it's a rather interesting that they have electronic voting, instead of computerized voting which is what the US seems to get stuck with.
I rather doubt the solar wind plays much role in "cleaning" up any dust here.
The mechanisms suggested here don't appear to be so much like a massive fan or a Cosmic Roomba but rather as a VERY LARGE agitator.
The research isn't necessarily suggesting the rings are ancient. It's saying our reasons for thinking the rings are young aren't as sound anymore. Basically, up until recently for a variety of reasons we thought the rings were young because our understanding led us to the belief that these rings ought to collapse rather soon (either into Saturn or its moons).
But now we're thinking there are forces which clump and forces which stir up. These work together more or less to recycle the material of the rings themselves. This leads researchers to believe the rings aren't necessarily going to collapse any time soon and indeed may be far older than we originally thought.
If "birth" of an apple is when it falls from a tree and you see one dropping (but you didn't see it fall and you have no idea where the branch is), you conclude it's "young". You know it's going to hit the ground soon and you know no matter where the branch is, it's not that far up and the apple only goes down. However, if all of a sudden you see a geyser blow and shoot that apple back up again.. and again... and again... you start to realize you really don't have any idea when it first fell off the tree.
Slashdot Mirror
Chuckle... why in the world did you lose the context of GP's comment? It appears you thought GP was starting a discussion of non-electronic means of computing. It seems rather straightforward that he was discussing electric current (lightning) zapping through air in a maze in order to solve a shortest-path problem.
What I believe the GP means is that using electricity as described earlier in the thread would be "poor" in a programmable sense because it would be rather difficult or tedious to recreate the physical maze ("using physics") to solve shortest path problems in a repeatable or generalized manner. In that light, it's clear you already understand this.
Complexity for a good number of types of problems is like a water balloon. You can squish the complexity in one way but it just pops up somewhere else. You can (sometimes) make an O(2) problem O(1) in time by parallelizing the problem with O(1) computers, that is rather than one computer doing V^2 steps have V computers do V steps simultaneously.
As GP described you could set up a network of strings and beads. Then the problem is solvable in O(c) time which is practically speaking instantaneous. Yippee. Now let's do it again for a similar but different problem. We can do it instantly too, right? Well... no. We have to get a lot more strings and beads. And guess what... Reconstructing the network is... O(2) in time (or O(1) in time with O(1) grad students) and O(2) in string.
It's easier to think about this with the string/bead example. But it is exactly the same with the maze and lightning example. If I gave you a new problem set, just how long would it take you to physically create this maze? Now how would this scale? If I gave you a problem set ten times as large, how much time (and material) to create that maze?
This approach may practically speaking be just GREAT for solving this rather specific sort of problem (shortest path through some sort of maze made from nonconducting material filled with air). As such it is indeed cool. But it says absolutely NOTHING about complexity of these sorts of problems in a generalized fashion.
Glad to see you're getting modded back up. I have no idea why you were marked Troll to start.
However, your comment regarding the Correlation vs. Causation thing is a bit strange. You've taken a rather simple principle and thrust it into the realm of philosophy.
This comment is just a reminder that the discovery of a correlation is not the end of research but more akin to the beginning. A correlation is interesting. It is a necessary but non-sufficient component to a dependency or causation.
If A->B and A->C...
We might find a correlation between B & C. This might get a tad confusing because sometimes D->C and we don't see the correlation between B & C. Enough research and we may figure out when and why we see the correlation.
Or we could see a correlation between A & B, but we don't know yet which is causing which or if even a dependency is truly there. A lot more research may be required to clarify this.
What people mean when they bring up this statement is that we really cannot yet make definitive statements if all we have discovered is just a correlation. But based on those correlations we may be able to come up with explanatory models and theories that may be able to demonstrate a causal relationship. These theories could then be judged against further data. (sigh... at least that's what they SHOULD mean when they bring this up... sometime I wonder...)
Your point that we never really know if all concluded Causation is just an illusion is a bit trite and easily overruled by Occam's Razor. Yes, it might be possible that in the deepest reality, X->A and X->B and in such a way that to us it always looks like A->B. But, to grossly oversimplify Occam's Razor... WHO CARES?!?
I completely agree. I'm not certain what the norm is with regards to Science education. But it doesn't seem to bode well to politicize the choice of what gets taught.
To me it would seem far more important to mandate a course or two throughout the K-12 curriculum on Critical Thinking.
I'm rather worried about too much spoon-feeding of children in education. I'm not talking about presenting the traditional opposing sides of a controversial issue (eg. Creationism vs. Evolution) and letting the children make up their minds. Indeed, I really don't have a problem teaching primarily or only the consensus viewpoint in the early years.
But as the kids get a bit older, they really should be adequately prepared to digest the immense volume of information available today. Critical Thinking might help equip them to withstand the constant onslaught from Madison Avenue and Hollywood. It would hopefully help them see through most political shenanigans. Toss in some good logic, dialectic and debate and these kids would be well able to discuss most controversial issues such as what to do about Climate Change.
There is a rather interesting passage in the book Starship Troopers that deals with this head-on. At the beginning of the book, the History (their History =~ our present) teacher was describing the horrors of the past, specifically describing how kids would run amok in a destructive manner such as people are relating here.
The children were simply shocked and rather incredulous. The teacher asked them what would happen if they did such things. The kids responded quickly and clearly: the offending child(ren) AND the parents would end up in the public stockades for a public beating. The teacher then went on to explain many of the reasons corporal punishment had fallen out of favor and how parental responsibility had all but evaporated.
Corporal punishment isn't likely the panacea you are hoping for. Some recent meta-studies have shown it's not necessarily as effective as you'd think and may end up enhancing violent tendencies. However, these studies were looking at parent-on-child punishment, not societal or state level punishment. And as inhumane as it does seem today, I imagine the shame of public punishment (simultaneously with your parents) would actually be very effective with teens.
In any case, there really does seem to be need to rope the parents in and determine how to punish both the parents and the kids or to figure out how to help both.
Though you are likely correct that a future with no hope is the source of a good number of problems with youth, both in the US and in the UK, it's a tad goofy to compare this with the Revolutionary War.
The folk in the colonies were NOT "revolting against society".
These are not the redcoats you're looking for.
The colonists were working through society. Many representative bodies throughout the colonies held "civilized" debates about the issue and issued a wide variety of declarations of independence. Sure the war got ugly. Sure it involved a bunch of youth (as wars always seem to do). But it is an incredible stretch to compare this with destructive, undisciplined, unmanaged kids in the UK.
Umm... just a quick note here...
You are inferring a dependency or an order in time that doesn't seem to be strictly in the text you quoted.
It's
a) Obtain a warrant
b) request access to satellite imagery
The conjuction was "and"... not "and then" nor "in order to".
There will be times, of course, when due to urgency or an emergency that the authorities must get data as fast as possible. But I'm certain we'll create up a Fast Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in order to make it feasible to get warrants in some reasonable period of time after the fact...
Surely, no responsible administration would have any issue adhering to that... um...
Yeah... we're doomed.
We get a picture of a galaxy. We can tell from redshift of the characteristics of the light that we're getting to create that picture how far/old that light is. Since we're using the understanding that the speed of light is and has always been constant, how far away and how old are directly related. What people mean is that we're seeing a picture of a galaxy from a long, long time ago. Assuming it's still there, it'd be at least 12.8 billion years old.
Could you conceivably see the big bang with Hubble if the universe is only 13.5 billion years old? Does this mean they know roughly where the universe began and are looking in that direction? If they looked in the other direction, would they run out of things to see because nothing in the universe has traveled out that far yet?Sure we know where the universe began - in your belly button. Seriously, the question doesn't quite make sense (or the answer doesn't make sense - take your pick). The analogy that might help is to think of the universe like a balloon - but only the rubber sheet. not the entire thing. Light, matter, everything is within and goes round that rubber sheet. The balloon is expanding. That's what's causing the redshift, more or less. If we reverse time and view the balloon as shrinking, everything collapses into the Big Bang. But there is no "place" where the universe started. It started everywhere.
However, I believe there is a theoretical limit beyond which we don't expect to be able to see anything. But it isn't because of the reasons you're positing. It's not because stuff isn't that far away. If I recall correctly, it has more to do with when we believe there was stuff to see.
And to see things that happened 12 billion years ago, would you need to look 12 billion years in the other direction from where they actually happened?You would need to BE 12-billion light years in ANY direction from said event (and looking towards the event) AT 12-billion years past the event. Then the light from the event reaches you and you can see what happened 12 billion years ago. Say I fire 20 billion baseballs simultaneously in all directions at 60 miles an hour. Assuming no friction, interference, etc., if you are 60 miles away from where I was when I threw the balls at one hour after I threw them, you're gonna get smacked upside the head with a baseball and you'll get to experience my toss from an hour ago, 60 miles away.
Part of what makes this particular story rather interesting, is that not a lot of light is going to reach us from something that far away. If you think of my 20 billion baseballs, you can understand that at some distance you won't get hit because the balls get spread real thin rather quickly. The light from that galaxy is spread VERY thin. The fact we're seeing it at all is because of some nifty little tricks and a whole lot of luck. Basically we're taking advantage of an ENORMOUS magnifying glass to get a better look.
I do believe you're on to something. However, I have always understood that the reasons actors (and a whole lot of that industry) are into this is good ole' fashion networking. Not that much different from when and why Christianity went real big after emperor Constantine converted. Everyone wanted to curry favor with the emperor and people rushed on in, Jews, pagans, all sorts of people. But these people brought on in a good number of their own practices and the church changed quite a bit.
This doesn't seem to be the case with Scientology (which actually seems a ton more like ancient Gnosticism, at least in principle), though I imagine it could be. What they need is huge and rapid influx of converts (to the point of increasing the total membership 20-fold) and another prophet or two to bring on in the updated truth. If the new prophets would hold out the "truth" free of charge, it'd likely morph Scientology on into a religion rather than the incredible parasitical oddity it is.
Until then, people have to sort of suck it on up so they can get in good with people in power in the entertainment industry. And actors are well... good at faking it.
But how else could Scientology not seem like poorly written Science Fiction given its creator (and his motives)?!? I find it so absolutely bizarre that anybody getting seriously into this couldn't do the most BASIC research into what Hubbard was doing here.
Not to knock the possible independent invention of Spread Spectrum techniques by your friend...
Not to dismiss your remarks regarding that others may have also independently invented this sometime in the last 40 years (though I believe you're simply referring to civilian commercial use in the past few decades)...
But it would seem to take just a wee bit of effort of web research to demonstrate that various forms of this have been around a lot longer.
Goodness. Tesla patented a form of frequency hopping in 1900!!
Hedy Lamer is famous for being the woman who more or less invented and patented an early form of CDMA in 1940.
Granted, these things didn't have widespread civilian use and applications until the last few decades. But it seems strange to present your story the way you did. It would seem likely depending in his implementation that this chap couldn't have patented it in any case due to longstanding prior patents.
Furthermore, describing this as "zero bandwidth" really seems strange. I can certainly understand why engineers would have dismissed this. A more accurate description of spread spectrum would be "infinite bandwidth". That is why it's called SPREAD spectrum. It flattens out the wave in the frequency domain. Simply because the power in any given range drops to the noise floor isn't quite the same as it truly being zero bandwidth.
You're logic needs a bit of help.
Here A --> B. Tiger Taunting --> Mauling by Tiger
Not A does not necessarily mean Not B.
People aren't saying "ahhhh my life is safe, I don't taunt tigers". They're saying: "if you DO taunt tigers, bad things are likely to happen". There's a clear difference between the two.
I'd recommend an interesting book: Life of Pi by Yann Martel. It goes into a good amount of detail about zoo related issues and especially tigers. We're not safe from tigers at all. Yes, there IS a certain level of risk going to a zoo.
I take issue with your thought that these people constantly repeating the fact of the taunting are doing such out of some idea of a sense of security or a world under control. Indeed, I see the reverse. It appears to me that you may be arguing for a safe world where folk should be safe to taunt tigers.
As several others have mentioned, this isn't an issue of sentencing (or wishing) the young chap to death for stupidity. It's a horrific reminder WHY such stuff is stupid. It's not stupid behavior because it's boorish and disturbs our sense of peace. It's stupid behavior because it could quite easily to lead to a premature death. And to GP's post, this ought to show you that the proper response may not be so much to call security to get the man arrested as much as to hastily move away.
Yes the zoo (and related agencies) are clearly at fault for the wall height. Punitive damages against the zoo should be stark to shock the cobwebs out of the eyes and brains of zoos and agencies to address things like this properly.
But in order to be able to proceed through life in a prudent manner, it seems important to have a reasonable understanding of dangers. Many animals are incredibly dangerous for one reason or another. This is not something people should take lightly. Discussing this particular occurance devoid of the context (the taunting) would seem to be enormously unwise. It could lead to all sorts of erroneous conclusions.
Evolution isn't a "let's try every possibility and see what works and what doesn't" sort of thing. It seems rather likely that once things get going down one pathway of evolution that we don't back up to try other possibilities for optimal performance. Indeed, we need to remember that what steers evolution at any given point in time is the current environment (selective pressures) as much as anything. And this itself is constantly changing.
The choice/selection of the four "natural" (five if you count U) bases for RNA/DNA was made so incredibly long ago, it doesn't seem clear that the other possibilities are being or have been tried or selected in any sort of way. So your "um's" don't seem to be appropriate, at all. It's not clear that these base pairs ever "showed up" before at all once life got going using "natural" RNA/DNA.
These aren't new genes were discussing here as much as getting to play with a new library of functions. That is, they're not creating new words as much as expanding the alphabet. And it's not just life so much here that they're pursuing. There are other uses of DNA these days than creating new life. These other applications are discussed in the fine article.
Lastly, the only way to learn is to experiment. Science doesn't prove as much as it disproves. You can theorize all you want, but experiments are necessary to refute/refine these theories (by disproving/falsifying). This is why your request for proof of the unknown is bizarre. Carried to its final conclusion, your "do nothing because we know nothing" attitude would suffocate almost all progress and learning entirely.
So THAT's what's up with Stewie... He's just "going through a phase". Lois must have given him a slapdown for the future Stewie to be well-adjusted.
I found your assertions rather interesting. I would have modded you such just so increased exposure would have dredged up some informative responses.
I have to agree with a sister post, however, that your multiple claims of universality (99.9%; will not be possible; a kid *will* try to kill; etc.) should give anyone familiar with science great hesitation to accept your claims and conclusions. Just for fun, next time spice it up a bit with more realistic and hence confusing figures: 83.2%; 13.4% of first time 1-year old murderers are successful; etc.
I was able to find at least one recent text addressing this issue:
Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals about Morality
This seems to be basic nature vs. nurture sort of a thing. Oddly enough, however, your position seems to be that the nature aspect of it is simply ZERO. It is really not so simple. Indeed, the role of the frontal cortex seems to be evidence of the role of nature (evolutionary history, etc.) here which IS part of the innate aspect of morality.
Umm...
I think you need to practice some (self-)education yourself.
Go back and investigate literacy rates in the New England colonies circa 1750. You'll very likely be surprised. Hint - it was very likely the highest anywhere in the world at that time.
Next, go and grab a handful of the essays and debates of the time. It shouldn't be difficult. People were debating the merits of rebellion in person and in print all over the place back then. Once you have a good number of these treatises, essays and debates, I want you to ponder whether the son of some (average) working class family today would even be able to read these at all, much less properly analyze, criticize or "think at that level". Again, I imagine you'll be rather surprised.
The Revolutionary War was NOT the result of a few thinkers manipulating the crowds, although I think you can make a strong case of that sort of thing happening here and there (cough.. cough... Boston Tea Party... cough.. cough..). Many people in many corners of the colonies were very ready for independence. Indeed, it was almost certainly inevitable.
As an example, go and research the origins of the Declaration of Independence. You'll find it's hard to do so since there were many, many such declarations being passed all over the colonies by various representative bodies.
I am enormously skeptical of the claims of the article.
However, I think if there is any merit to the idea at all, it really just boils down to one fundamental similarity between Religion and Engineering:
Both rely on Authority-Based Information.
Do forgive me for generalizing here, but at a rather high-level Engineers solve problems. They don't "do science". They use science and math to solve problems. But do they question that math and science? Almost certainly not at the undergraduate level. Depending on what you're doing, maybe not even at the Masters level. There simply is no need to question it. The entire focus is to USE it.
For religion this information comes from on high, or from some Authority or another. For Engineering, it comes from Scientists or Mathematicians.
Scientists themselves may have a much, much better understanding of the concepts of a Scientific Theory and how Mathematics is simply used to represent our models which approximate reality. But for most of what an engineer may do, it works just as well to consider it LAW.
Consider this for a bit. For many religions, you likely start attributing great respect to some source, be it a text or a guru. By starting with the assumption that this foundation is certain, you use this to build logical constructs or to counsel people or whatever. See the similarity?
It doesn't serve an engineer much to spend time considering the uncertainties in the theories used to do engineering work.
Now having said all of that, if you do think your friend truly is curious how technology works, chastise him for his staunch and willful ignorance of Evolution and how THAT works. It is really quite fascinating. But he has to be willing to switch modes from protecting his belief system into one of "figuring it out". And you can chastise him for that too. If he IS secure in his belief system, he won't have a problem doing this.
As long as a couple of other rights and principles are observed, the position you seem to be advocating is certainly simplistic and to some extent a bit silly.
There is a difference between jail and prison, despite the way these terms are used interchangeably. In general, prison is punishment for convicted criminals.
If you think about it a bit, it seems very difficult to create a system of justice whereby "presumed innocent" criminals can be permitted to roam free during the weeks or months of their trial. Crimes occur. Someone commits them. The chap you found may not actually be guilty. But if your policy is that you cannot apprehend someone until a court conviction, what guarantee do you have that the accused will stick around for the trial? The policy of arrest/jail/bail may have false positives. But a system of never putting someone into jail into convicted seems horribly naive. Either you don't let them know you're "proving them guilty" and just catch them when you've done so (which doesn't provide for a defense) or you let them know they're a suspect and politely request they don't bolt for Mexico and please don't kill anyone else while they're gathering evidence.
Having said that, we must have safeguards for Habeus Corpus and the right to a speedy trial for this to work. Otherwise, we devolve into a system whereby the police (or corrupt leaders) do indeed judge you guilty (or otherwise deserving of punishment/pain) and toss you into jail where you rot. Think "Les Miserables".
This is why the recent diminishments of Habeus Corpus and the fact that several people (US citizens apprehended in the US) have spent YEARS in Guantanamo Bay before any charges were filed are so incredibly troubling.
In principle, your view that we're "guilty until proven innocent" seems quite wrong. In practice, it also seems we're sliding somewhat in that direction.
It simply seems to me that the simplest and most appropriate thing for Ford to do here would have been to provide all the necessary permission for them to proceed with their artistic work, or license it with a smallish fee if necessary.
That would have seemed like a win-win sort of thing. Free marketing, retention of their rights, etc.
It does seem that with trademarks you are indeed obligated to protect them or you may lose them. But I don't quite see why Fordwould have had to be so foolish about it.
OK...
Your post is as good as any to attempt to address one huge misunderstanding here.
A good Scientific Theory is falsifiable and has predictive power. But the idea of "testing in any useful time" is just one of many ways a Scientific Theory can make falsifiable claims and specific predictions.
It really is not a weighty argument to hold against the Theory of Evolution to state that it takes too long to watch it happening. Does it bother you that the earth's plates move a tad too slow to watch to validate Plate Tectonics? Does it trouble you how Scientists really know any element has a half-life in the millions of years? Does it tickle your curiosity to wonder how to test any theory that the moon arose from something the size of mars bumping into a very young earth?
Seriously we don't have spare proto-Earths and mars size planets to spare. Well, unless you really do want to send Mars into Venus and watch what happens...
But seriously, there are likely an enormous number of similar examples.
The Theory of Evolution is very strong in its ability to make predictive claims. I don't even need to repeat the list of observed speciation events.
I'll just give you one for fun. The Theory of Evolution was bolstered by the find of Archaeopteryx, a sort of blend between bird and reptile. That's because we sort of expected eventually to find something like that. Based on our current understanding, we should be able to predict that we'll never find a griffon alive or in the fossil record (well.. a natural one anyways - heaven help us when the genetic engineers really get tinkering). Otherwise stated, if we did find a blend between a bird and a mammal something would be seriously wrong with the modern Theory of Evolution. And no, the platypus isn't such a thing (exercise left to reader). Find me a feathered, furry thing that lactates and then we can have some fun.
This entire Creationist-Evolutionist debate suffers immensely from an inability of folk to understand their opponents' views and positions.
Please do understand here that you have basically given what YOU feel are two significant arguments against teaching Intelligent Design in the schools. These are, unfortunately, not much better than straw man arguments.
Oddly enough, you haven't stated the most significant reasons you'll see over and over and over again if you would dig ever so slightly into the writings of your opponents.
The reason Intelligent Design is bad science is not that it presupposes supernatural forces. People may argue that this is one reason it isn't science at all. But if someone says it's a bad Scientific Theory (or not a Scientific Theory at all), this is not why.
Furthermore, the rest of your arguments attempt to continue this ill advised view that Intelligent Design, as a theory, should be comparable to the Theory of Evolution.
The problem with Intelligent Design is that it is not a Scientific Theory for at least two significant reasons:
1) Lack of Falsifiability
2) Lack of Predictive Power
I'm not going to go deeper. There are vast amounts of resources available on the web to assist anyone seriously curious here. It isn't hard to see where and how the Theory of Evolution excels here and Intelligent Design simply fails outright.
But you must start by learning how Scientists view Science, including the Scientific Method and how Scientific Theories are used. Your points clearly indicate you do not adequately understand this.
Now, religion indeed should be taught in school, but in a proper forum, namely History, Sociology, Humanities, etc.. It should not be taught in a Science class and especially not as Science.
Next, as others have said here abiogenesis is not evolution.
Lastly, I do actually think that Intelligent Design should be taught in school. Be careful what you wish for. Intelligent Design should be taught when kids are old enough to dig into the Scientific Method, Scientific Theories, Null Hypotheses, Philosophy of Science and all that jazz. Intelligent Design serves as an excellent counter-example of a valid Scientific Theory and should be used as such (and you don't have to be rude to theists to do this).
That's not to say that recent graduates cannot immediately contribute significantly to their company.
My first few months out of college were rather somewhat unproductive since they felt it more important to take weeks of training on their various products and such. However, when I was able to be mentored with the usual work of the group it wasn't long before I noticed something...
"You mean whenever we start working on an issue we do these same series of steps on these same various servers in this particular order?"
I had that automated in short order.
Trouble is, people seem to forget the real lesson of college. What you learn in the university is nowhere near as important as learning how to learn. And sadly, if you don't capitalize on that lesson, it won't do you any good.
(I can never forget that one "oldie" who literally told me to read man pages for breakfast, from A to Z. He also told me it was my mission to become superuser. Ah the days...)
You can never and should never stop learning.
The very best piece of advice someone gave me while interviewing before I got out of college was that you must work extremely hard your first few years. You want to work harder than your peers and as soon as possible to become the most productive in your team.
I followed this advice and found it dovetailed just fine with continued learning. I just had to make certain not to fall into a treadmill routine. If I always made sure to allocate a fair chunk of time (10 to 20%) to trying to learn new things and trying to find faster ways of doing things, my productivity continued to grow. That's because the more productive I was, the more I could create free time to learn new things.
It's not terribly hard to come up with counter-examples to your hypothesis. Indeed, in democratic states where the majority feel speeding is not an issues, it is not handled the same way.
Case and point: Montana. There's a group of people who feel this isn't a significant issue (at least on the highways). Now, this may have a lot to do with the fact of the terrain of much of the state: flat and wide-open. But back when the US Federal speed limit was 55, each state (please do recall the US is a democratic republic) had the right to ignore this federal speed limit. But the cost of doing so was to lose a lot of federal funding for roads and such. So Montana had to comply... sort of. But what they did was call "speeding" a "misuse of energy" petty crime and the police (if one was ever bothered to deal with this) gave you a five dollar fine you paid on the spot.
These days, since the feds lightened up, Montana took the reins of this issue and declared no speed limit BUT the police can pull you over and give you a REAL traffic ticket (with customary fines) for driving "unsafe" at any speed.
Now... wouldn't the Autobahn be another similar example?
I do believe GP meant that whatever the impact kicks up will fall slower. I imagine that Mars' gravity will almost totally determine the trajectory of such ejecta. The effect of the Sun's gravity will be trivial by comparison.
Oh how I wish I could mod the parent up for the sig:
In Soviet Russia, the government controls the commerce.
Incredibly appropriate for this thread.
(Of course, the content of parent's post seems awry.)
Hmm...
Just like the parent, I wanted to see what came of the case referenced by GP.
Unfortunately, I don't think damncrackmonkey has presented an appropriate review or a valid interpretation of what came of this.
IANAL, and indeed I'd love for some lawyers to chime in.
But in essence, GP presented a writeup from 2002 regarding a court cases purportedly testing Miranda rights. This was based on oral arguments of a case before the Supremes then. Here's the deal. The 9th Circuit had found the police had violated this chap's 5th and 14th amendment rights. If you must simplify things into a boolean, it would seem our rights would have been strengthened had the SCOTUS confirmed the lower court's ruling.
Unfortunately, despite damncrackmonkey's supposed refutation, this was not what occurred:
SCOTUS OpinionsThe SCOTUS reversed the lower court's rulings.
Furthermore, if you read the concerns from the writeup GP linked and juxtapose these with the opinions (especially the primary opinion) of SCOTUS here, it doesn't seem clear the GP or this writeup was blatantly incorrect.
Basically, there is no clearly defined constitutional right to remain silent. Quoted from Justice Thomas' majority opinion:
Thomas explains further that the "right to remain silent" part of the Miranda warning is simply a measure to attempt to protect against violations of the Self-Incrimination clause and isn't in and of itself a constitutional right.
Again... hmm...
Could you please cite a current reference for your statement.
It seems either out-of-date or simply false. I don't believe they've used hand-counting for a while now.
Indeed, India seems to have got a better handle of this than we do in many ways:
Indian voting machines
Their system isn't without issues. But it seems to have handled fraud rather well. Furthermore, it's a rather interesting that they have electronic voting, instead of computerized voting which is what the US seems to get stuck with.
I rather doubt the solar wind plays much role in "cleaning" up any dust here.
The mechanisms suggested here don't appear to be so much like a massive fan or a Cosmic Roomba but rather as a VERY LARGE agitator.
The research isn't necessarily suggesting the rings are ancient. It's saying our reasons for thinking the rings are young aren't as sound anymore. Basically, up until recently for a variety of reasons we thought the rings were young because our understanding led us to the belief that these rings ought to collapse rather soon (either into Saturn or its moons).
But now we're thinking there are forces which clump and forces which stir up. These work together more or less to recycle the material of the rings themselves. This leads researchers to believe the rings aren't necessarily going to collapse any time soon and indeed may be far older than we originally thought.
If "birth" of an apple is when it falls from a tree and you see one dropping (but you didn't see it fall and you have no idea where the branch is), you conclude it's "young". You know it's going to hit the ground soon and you know no matter where the branch is, it's not that far up and the apple only goes down. However, if all of a sudden you see a geyser blow and shoot that apple back up again.. and again... and again... you start to realize you really don't have any idea when it first fell off the tree.