The designers of these probes and landers are really outdoing themselves. Look at the two landers on Mars that are WELL past their guaranteed time. I wonder if they purposely make them work well beyond their guaranteed time just to 'show off' or something.
Everything has failsafes. For instance, suppose you're powering down the runway in a Boeing 777, just about fast enough to take off, and the nose of the plane starts to lift.
Suddenly, the right engine fails. There isn't enough runway left for the plane to safely slow down and stop. Oh god, you're going to die, right?
Nope, the plane is built to be able to take off even if an engine fails. So under normal circumstances, the plane actually has far more power than it needs, because it's designed to continue to function safely even when severely compromised. The designers aren't "showing off", they're building in intelligent failsafes.
It's the same deal with spaceships, only far moreso because it's been years since the probe has had a mechanic available to look at it. It has to work, even millions of miles away from home in incredibly hostile conditions and years since its last tune up.
So the designers build redundancy and failsafes into everything. The spacecraft should be able to handle the failure of a number of systems and be able to keep right on ticking, although of course it may suffer reduced capability as a result.
In the case of Huygens, it has more batteries than it needed to carry out its mission. Batteries can fail, or not perform as efficiently as they were expected to. So you slap an extra one in, just in case. Apparently the batteries all performed well, so the probe ended up surviving significantly longer than it was "supposed to".
Battery life. The probe, if I remember correctly, has five LiSO2 batteries that are its sole power source (along with some 1W radioactive heaters simply to maintain its temperature).
The trip to Titan took three weeks, and there was at least some electrical activity on the probe that whole time (I know it had a timer set to "wake it up" for the descent). Then the probe kicked into high gear for the descent, running all its systems off the batteries.
It was expected to go dead sooner than it did, but the lost data probably wouldn't have told us much -- after it had been sitting on the surface for a few minutes, it had probably already reported everything interesting.
The lost Huygens trasmissions:
Yep, still cold.
My batteries are getting kinda low.
Still cold. This rock is hurting my ass.
God damned this rock. It's poking right into my radiothermal heater.
Holy shit it's cold here.
Batteries about to give out. Hey, is anybody listening?
Heeeellllo, anybody there? Cassini? Can you hear me?
Great, I'm going to die with a fucking rock in my ass and nobody listening to me.
While off topic, I have often thought that when applying this rule to the pronunciation of letters one bases the rule on the spelling of the letter.
That is, F is a consonant, but if one were to spell the letter it as it sounds it would be something like eff which begins with a vowel. Hence, the more natural sounding "An FM transm....."
Yes, no, maybe?
Yep. If the pronunciation of a word begins with a vowel sound, it should be preceded by "an" rather than "a".
"An FM transmitter" is correct, as is "a unicorn" and "an umbrella".
In fact, I just Googled for it. First hit seems seems pretty helpful, and they even use "umbrella" and "unicorn" as examples;-).
Radiation has nothing to do with volcanic activity. The heat inside the planet is not caused by a nuclear reaction.
I suggest you go read up on Lord Kelvin and his attempts to prove that the Earth couldn't possibly be millions of years old. He argued, quite convincingly at the time, that when you accounted for all known incoming and outgoing heat, the earth couldn't be more than about 10,000 years old or it would have frozen solid. And it is true that the earth is slowly cooling off, as the Sun doesn't provide enough warmth to keep our temperature this high.
Lord Kelvin was almost right. If there were no variables other than those he knew of, the earth would indeed have frozen solid in 10,000 years or so. But he performed those calculations before the discovery of a process called 'radioactivity', by which the nuclear decay of various substances produces very substantial amounts of heat. And fortunately the Earth has an absolutely incredible amount of radioactive material, the slow decay of which keeps us nice and toasty.
So, A) vulcanism is very much related to radioactivity. The earth would have frozen solid by now otherwise, and there would be no volcanoes. And B) while you're correct that the heat isn't caused by a nuclear reaction (rather decay), nobody said it was. The parent was talking about exactly what I explained here.
It is a basic principle of our Constitution that the majority does *not* have the right to take rights away from the minority.
Nonsense. The majority does not have the right to take away certain well-defined and clearly spelled out rights, as listed in the Bill of Rights and elsewhere. Everything else is fair game.
For instance, you don't have the right to drive a car without a license, or masturbate in public, or to smoke marijuana. Every one of those rights, and thousands more, has been taken away by virtue of laws passed and enforced by the majority.
I'm not saying that that is necessarily a bad thing, but it is true.
I like the picture on a CRT much better than a plasma or LCD, as well. I watched "The Day After Tomorrow" last week on my buddies new plasma set. It's contrast is so poor with dark colors.
All the storm cloud scenes looked horrible, with the worst color banding I've seen since 8 bit color was in fashion, it looked like a greyscale version of that old 256 color "plasma" demo.
Then either A) you're friend's plasma is shit, B) it badly needs to be calibrated, or C) both.
The market is currently flooded with low-end, relatively affordable, but complete shit plasmas. Don't assume that plasma == shit just because low-end plasma == shit. It would be like assuming that "all speakers are crap because this $50 Aiwa set is".
I have two high-end HDTV plasmas. They comfortably kick the crap out of CRTs in overall performance.
Hate replying to myself, but I should clarify: when I said that the difficulty of writing a program doesn't vary much with language, I meant among similar-level languages. The difficulty of writing a word processor in, say, C++ vs. Java isn't as different as you would expect.
Obviously, machine code (or BrainFuck) is enough of a difference to have a real impact on difficulty, and I accept that a super-duper-high-level language could make the process substantially easier, if a suitable one existed (but it doesn't, and the research presented here isn't compelling enough to change my mind about that).
Why does all research like this seem to revolve around "toy" problems? They study non-programmers or, when they include real programmers, focus only on small tasks that can be completed in an hour or so.
Great, I accept that a new language can make toy problems easier.
However, I think the situation is very different when you have a real programmer working on a real program. Writing a real application, like a word processor or a web browser, is difficult no matter what language you do it in -- and I would argue that the difficulty doesn't vary much between languages. In fact, I would further argue that many of these research languages, while making toy problems easier, would actually make "real" programming substiantally harder, because the semantics of the language are not as formalized and thus more difficult to remember and deal with.
I'm certainly not opposed to advances in language theory and design -- our modern-day large applications would be essentially impossible to write if all we had to work with was machine language. But to be a major advance, a new language should focus on making real problems easier for real programmers, not making toy problems easier for non-programmers.
Unfortunately none of the footage from tournaments our school has attended is online, or I'd link a few video clips as examples.
I would like to point out that tournament fighting has absolutely nothing to do with real-world fighting.
In a tournament fight, a 97lb man punching a 194lb man in the stomach counts as a point. The 97lb man can easily with the bout with a few solid connections.
In a real-world fight, a 97lb man punching a 194lb man in the stomach will probably hurt his hand, inflict very little damage to his opponent, and be summarily pummeled.
I am in no way saying that a little guy can't kick a big guy's ass. But if the two are equally skilled, the little guy is probably going to take a severe beating, at least outside of the artificial rules of a tournament. Furthermore, all of the real-world fights between martial artists that I have seen tend to involve very little "art" after the first few seconds...
... Four years ago I remember reading in TechWeek that landlords were demanding security deposits in dot com share options, rather than cash.
I spent the past five years in the Bay Area. I work for one of the biggest internet companies in existence and 70% of my income is in stock options, so I'm well aware of both stock option and real estate insanity.
I have never, ever heard mention of the practice you describe. Certainly not when I was renting (and I checked out virtually every apartment complex in San Jose) nor from any of the hundreds of other San Jose/San Francisco residents that I talk to (and real estate complaints are a very common conversation topic there).
If this ever actually happened, it certainly wasn't a widespread, or even widely known, practice.
Marriage confers certain legal rights and privileges. For instance, your health care and insurance typically extend to your spouse, and you are given tax breaks.
If polygamy were legalized, I could just marry EVERYBODY IN THE COUNTRY, and give them all those legal benefits which are restricted to married people. I imagine my health care provider would be a bit horrified, as would the federal government upon realizing that every single taxpayer was now married.
There are very good reasons to limit us to being able to extend such benefits to only one other person (or at least a small, well-defined number).
Also, someone was talking about photons being able to cross paths without interference. However... Thomas Young's famous double-slit experiment seems to prove otherwise, but like I said I'm not an expert and so would welcome someone's more educated input.
To get interference, you must have two light beams in the same location. The double-slit experiment works because you have two light beams both striking the target at the same spot.
However, this is a completely different situation. Crossing two light beams at, say, a ninety degree angle, will of course result in interference at the intersection of the two beams. But there won't be any interference before or after the intersection, because only at the intersection are there two beams to interact with each other.
It's important to remember that interference doesn't modify the waves themselves. Two waves (light, sound, water, etc.) can happily cross each other, interfere at the intersection, and proceed merrily on their ways without being otherwise affected.
I read the link and I don't give it much credibility.
Next.
You don't find Snopes credible? They identified the source of the information -- an article in Journal of the American College of Nutrition describing a study by the Center for Human Nutrition in Omaha. They also provided a full bibliography should you care to go check their sources and make sure that they haven't been making things up.
I'm guessing that "I don't give it much credibility" just means "I didn't actually read the link and I'm trying to make it look like I did", but in case that was a serious objection, rest assured that Snopes is as reliable as they come.
2. How many of the people complain that this is too warm: a. are overweight, or b. smoke, or c. drink warm beverages and not the recommended 8 glasses of water a day, or d. have high blood pressure, or e. feel sleepy because they aren't getting the recommended 7-9 hours of sleep at night, or f. not interested in what they are doing enough to stay awake.
a: no b: no c: the 8 glasses of water a day thing is an urban legend d: no e: no f: no
And yet I'm comfortable at 70F and miserable at 78F. Furthermore, if you're cold, you can dress warmer. If I'm hot, my options are much more limited -- stripping naked at one's workplace tends to have negative repurcussions.
It's time to start pushing for vote reform. America has the dumbest voting system on the planet, one that only works when there are only two candidates. As soon as you have more than two, you have this crap.
I would vote for Nader if it weren't for the fact that it would essentially be throwing my vote away. I'm sure that there are a lot of people out there who feel the same way. Stop bitching about it and do something. Write your congresscritters and tell them about the joys of other voting systems, such as instant runoff and approval voting.
And more importantly, the third parties should present a unified front on this if they ever want to win an election. Libertarians, Greens, hell even Communists, the first and foremost issue for you should be the voting system. We need to abolish this two-party crap and allow our voices to really be heard.
Higher resolution is only useful if you can see it. At typical viewing distances, you need a pretty large screen to notice the difference between HD and ED. If you sit close to the 42" screen, HD may be worth it. At 12', ED may be good enough.
Only if you have poor eyesight. I have a 42" HD plasma at over fifteen feet viewing distance in my bedroom, and I can still easily tell the difference between HD and SD images on it. I admit that it's not as dramatic as on my other TVs (which are both larger and closer), but it was still worth the extra money IMHO.
Some decent brands, in no particular order: JBL, Klipsh, Paradigm, Genesis, B&W, Theil, Onix, Energy. There are tons more that just aren't coming to me off the top of my head, but in any case you probably won't have heard of most of them (it's a sad but true fact that you can't get decent speakers at any mainstream place like Best Buy).
I have Onix Reference 3's myself. Damned fine speakers.
Nice of you to pick the craziest, most undefendable beliefs as an example. What do they call that, the strawman argument?
Not at all. A strawman argument is misrepresenting your opponent's argument in a weaker form, attacking the weakened form, and then claiming that you have defeated the argument.
I admit that few people nowadays really believe in the miracle of transubstantiation, but the other two (the Great Flood and that homosexuality is a sin) are very much active beliefs held by millions of Christians. You may not personally believe either one -- and kudos to you if that is so -- but claiming that it's a straw man is disingenous.
In fact, the homosexuality one in particular is one of the most important political issues on the table right now. I would say that the opposition to gay rights is largely religious in nature, and characterizing my statement as a straw man is very unfair.
Why don't you tell me why it's also just as crazy to forgive, and love one another, or that if we work hard and be good people that there may be a paradise waiting for us all? Those are pretty unrealistic also, are they delusions?
I take issue with the supernatural, illogical, and delusional beliefs specific to religions. The forgiveness and love you mention are not supernatural, illogical, or delusional, nor are they specific to religion. As an atheist, I no less believe in loving and forgiving my fellow man than you do. In fact, I would consider myself more forgiving than most of the Christians I have met. Your mileage may vary.
Why is it that you, the smart atheist, have so much trouble discerning metaphor from literal truths, or so much difficulty seeing that rituals and tradition give people comfort, but that it's not the fundamental part of what might make religion a good thing?
What makes you think I have trouble discerning metaphor? I know perfectly well that "This is my body" wasn't supposed to mean "This cracker is literally my flesh". That doesn't stop that from being the Catholic Church's official teaching, though, does it?
Likewise, I know perfectly well that Leviticus is just a bunch of 2000-year-old rules that nobody should seriously be expected to follow today. And let me tell you, that must be a real comfort to the families of gay men who have been murdered in the name of God.
You don't do these things, fine. I'm not against you, I'm against the entire establishment of religion, which has been responsible for more atrocities, murders, and genocides than any other force in history.
Seriously though, someone in early childhood really hurt you, didn't they. Shame, that.
I strongly oppose belief in the supernatural, so I must be damaged goods? Odd.
No, I actually had a nice, perfectly normal childhood. No abuse, no molestation, no horrible experiences with religious nuts. I am happily married, well-adjusted, and successful. I have no psychological problems. I don't oppose religion because I was hurt, but rather because it is a dangerous delusion that has shamed, hurt, or killed millions of people.
Incidentally, I am just as opposed to belief in alien abductions and unicorns. It's just that there aren't as many true believers of those delusions, so I don't get as much of an opportunity to debate about them.
The wiretap laws make it illegal for a human to listen in. Your spam filter argument is just a straw man. If it were illegal for a machine to "read" the email, it wouldn't even be possible for the email to be received in the first place!
Amazingly enough, alot of what you say can also be used against the big bang theory. Is it now also a religious delusion?
When did I say that I support the big bang theory? In any case, the big bang theory is not a religion for many reasons, but most notably because it is falsifiable. It makes certain predictions, and you can test those predictions to see whether or not they hold true. You can prove it wrong, and come up with a theory that better explains the observed facts.
None of those traits hold for religious beliefs, which are delusional in nature (not based on observations of the world and persist despite mounds of evidence against them).
No modern religion claims that god makes it rain. That religion was once used to explain things that could otherwise have been explained better only says something about how unwilling primitive people were to explore reasoning.
Wow. You have completely and utterly missed the point. I know that no modern religion claims God makes it rain. That is because we now understand the physical processes behind rain.
My point was that as soon as we fully understand the physical processes behind something, religion is no longer able to claim "God did it". It has happened over and over again throughout history. This particular discussion -- creation -- is just one more example of "God did it" that will, like all the others, fall apart as soon as science manages to figure out exactly what really happened.
But, if you insist on using that line of reasoning, isn't it only fair to subject science to the same thing? I mean, if Zeus is going to be responsible for lightning bolts (incorrect), then shouldn't we dig up all the early paleontological reconstructions and ridicule them? Oops, that dead guy thought that animals evolved simply because they decided mutate? And the other one thought that random mutations could possibly explain such rapid evolution?
Absolutely. If science proposes something incorrect, then hell yes we should discard it and move on as soon as we realize it's incorrect. It has happened over and over again, and I'm sure that a lot of our currently-cherished scientific beliefs will likewise be demolished once we have a better explanation.
See, that's the difference between science and religion. Scientists actively challenge our current understanding of the world, and are quick to propose (and test!) alternative explanations.
Religions, on the other hand, are so damned convinced that they know the whole story that they ignore the last two thousand years of human advancement.
Oh, btw. If you're definition of mental illness would include my previous post as a sympton, you're really wound too tight. Did Father Callahan molest you or something?
My point was that religious beliefs are a delusion. It should be pretty scary to you that not even psychiatrists can find a meaningful distinction between religious delusions (a 'loving' God ruthlessly flooded the entire planet and murdered trillions of innocent animals, crackers turn to flesh in my mouth, you'll spend an eternity burning in hell for inserting your penis into another man) and the delusions of the truly insane (the CIA is controlling my mind via my radio).
The only distinction we've been able to make so far is that the religious delusions are held by large numbers of people. These beliefs are still every bit as irrational and insane as the delusions held by the mentally ill.
Well, it's obvious that the most fundamental questions about the universe remain unanswered to some people's satisfaction, mine included. The big bang may describe the first split second, but doesn't really explain anything other than there was nothing, and then all of the sudden there is something. And in the vaguest sense, it is somewhat hard to deny that it certainly seems like there may be a creator of some sort. So, in the most general sense, a religionist isn't all that crazy, imo.
Yes, it is crazy. There are two main reasons:
A) It doesn't answer the question. How did the universe get here? God created it. Well, how did God get here? Ummm... well... he's just always been here. So what was he doing for the infinity of time before he decided to create the universe? Ummm... well... hrm.
If the universe is so complex that it can't exist without a creator, then God is also so complex that he can't exist without a creator. If God could come into existence without help, then so could the universe.
B) We've seen this before, and every other case has been wrong. How do volcanoes work? God (Hephaestus) makes them erupt. What is the sun? It's God (Ra). How does lightning work? They're God (Zeus) throwing lightning bolts that Hephaestus forged. Why do we get sick? God (Heiséi) makes us sick. Why does it rain? God (Mama Cocha) makes it rain.
How was the universe made? God (Yahweh) made it.
So, we've managed to prove that every other thing God supposedly does has a rational explanation. The only thing you have left is the origins of life and the universe, which I admit we don't have a rock-solid explanation for.
So, which is more likely: that you're finally right for once and God did it (nevermind where God himself came from), or this will once again fall to the forces of reason?
Furthermore, if you still think you're not crazy for believing it, I'd like you to do the following. Come up with a definition for the word "delusion" that includes all mental-illness-type-delusions but doesn't include religious beliefs.
Amazingly enough, thousands of psychologists have tried to do just that, and there still isn't any such definition.
Why this distinction between beliefs based on "faith" and based on "reason"? Faith is not always blind. I have faith in my wife. Why? Because she has demonstrated to me in many ways that she is a faithful woman who loves me. Though we're not together during the business day, don't you think it is reasonable for me to trust her fidelity during the day, far less reasonable for me to suspect her of betraying me (at least in the absence of very serious evidence)?
The word "faith" has a number of different definitions; you are confusing the argument by using a different one than I am. You have evidence of your wife's faithfulness -- she has always been faithful to you in your presence, has professed her love to you on many occasions, and has done many other things to give you reason to believe in her faithfulness. There is no such evidence of the existence of God, so any belief in him must be a different sort of faith than what you describe.
I hope you can see that faith can be reasonable.
If it's reasonable (based on rational fact and evidence), it's not "faith" as generally defined in religious discussions.
Secondly, you wanted some evidence to be submitted about God. There are two kinds of evidence recognised by Christians: what can be seen in nature; and what has been specifically revealed by God in history.
I submit that there is nothing in nature which indicates the existence of God, nor has God at any point revealed his existence. I challenge you to submit evidence to the contrary.
Have you ever asked the questions that Science can't answer?
Of course. No one is claiming that science has all the answers.
Empiricism can observe the material world, and it can even propose laws which seem to describe the way the universe works. But it cannot say where these laws come from, or why they are so.
True. However, God doesn't make the situation any better.
Science:Question: Why does [system A] behave in [behavior B] fashion? Answer: We don't know.
Religion:Question: Why does [system A] behave in [behavior B] fashion? Answer: God wants it to work that way. Question: Why? Answer: We don't know.
All you've done is introduced one more unknowable thing and abstracted the answer one more step away.
Isn't it beautiful and elegant that such simple laws can describe such complexity? Isn't it still so unlikely, even given such laws, that they would produce you?
First, nobody has any idea how likely or unlikely it is -- we don't understand the processes that gave rise to life (and when we do, it will have been science, not religion, that answered the question). Second, even if it's fantastically unlikely, what does that have to do with anything? In a universe with fifty billion stars in each of a hundred trillion galaxies, the fact that something is "unlikely" still leaves room for it to happen trillions of times. And all we need is for it to have happened once -- and it obviously did, since here we are.
Have you ever investigated the historical man Jesus Christ, and assessed his claims and the claims of his followers? Reading the new testament of the bible is a good start: it's not very long, and you can't claim lack of evidence without having read it. It's also worth looking at historical analyses of it.
The historical man Jesus Christ is known from exactly four documents: the four Gospels. There are, to the best of my knowledge, no other known documents claiming first-hand knowledge of the man.
Tell me something: if I and three of my friends wrote stories claiming that we had seen a man perform great miracles, claim to be the son of Allah, and endorse Islam as the one true path, would you instantly trust me, discard all other religions, and follow Islam?
That is exactly what you done. Replace "Allah" with "God" and "Islam" with "Christianity" and you ha
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The designers of these probes and landers are really outdoing themselves. Look at the two landers on Mars that are WELL past their guaranteed time. I wonder if they purposely make them work well beyond their guaranteed time just to 'show off' or something.
Everything has failsafes. For instance, suppose you're powering down the runway in a Boeing 777, just about fast enough to take off, and the nose of the plane starts to lift.
Suddenly, the right engine fails. There isn't enough runway left for the plane to safely slow down and stop. Oh god, you're going to die, right?
Nope, the plane is built to be able to take off even if an engine fails. So under normal circumstances, the plane actually has far more power than it needs, because it's designed to continue to function safely even when severely compromised. The designers aren't "showing off", they're building in intelligent failsafes.
It's the same deal with spaceships, only far moreso because it's been years since the probe has had a mechanic available to look at it. It has to work, even millions of miles away from home in incredibly hostile conditions and years since its last tune up.
So the designers build redundancy and failsafes into everything. The spacecraft should be able to handle the failure of a number of systems and be able to keep right on ticking, although of course it may suffer reduced capability as a result.
In the case of Huygens, it has more batteries than it needed to carry out its mission. Batteries can fail, or not perform as efficiently as they were expected to. So you slap an extra one in, just in case. Apparently the batteries all performed well, so the probe ended up surviving significantly longer than it was "supposed to".
Battery life. The probe, if I remember correctly, has five LiSO2 batteries that are its sole power source (along with some 1W radioactive heaters simply to maintain its temperature).
The trip to Titan took three weeks, and there was at least some electrical activity on the probe that whole time (I know it had a timer set to "wake it up" for the descent). Then the probe kicked into high gear for the descent, running all its systems off the batteries.
It was expected to go dead sooner than it did, but the lost data probably wouldn't have told us much -- after it had been sitting on the surface for a few minutes, it had probably already reported everything interesting.
The lost Huygens trasmissions:
Yep, still cold.
My batteries are getting kinda low.
Still cold. This rock is hurting my ass.
God damned this rock. It's poking right into my radiothermal heater.
Holy shit it's cold here.
Batteries about to give out. Hey, is anybody listening?
Heeeellllo, anybody there? Cassini? Can you hear me?
Great, I'm going to die with a fucking rock in my ass and nobody listening to me.
While off topic, I have often thought that when applying this rule to the pronunciation of letters one bases the rule on the spelling of the letter.
;-).
That is, F is a consonant, but if one were to spell the letter it as it sounds it would be something like eff which begins with a vowel. Hence, the more natural sounding "An FM transm....."
Yes, no, maybe?
Yep. If the pronunciation of a word begins with a vowel sound, it should be preceded by "an" rather than "a".
"An FM transmitter" is correct, as is "a unicorn" and "an umbrella".
In fact, I just Googled for it. First hit seems seems pretty helpful, and they even use "umbrella" and "unicorn" as examples
Radiation has nothing to do with volcanic activity. The heat inside the planet is not caused by a nuclear reaction.
I suggest you go read up on Lord Kelvin and his attempts to prove that the Earth couldn't possibly be millions of years old. He argued, quite convincingly at the time, that when you accounted for all known incoming and outgoing heat, the earth couldn't be more than about 10,000 years old or it would have frozen solid. And it is true that the earth is slowly cooling off, as the Sun doesn't provide enough warmth to keep our temperature this high.
Lord Kelvin was almost right. If there were no variables other than those he knew of, the earth would indeed have frozen solid in 10,000 years or so. But he performed those calculations before the discovery of a process called 'radioactivity', by which the nuclear decay of various substances produces very substantial amounts of heat. And fortunately the Earth has an absolutely incredible amount of radioactive material, the slow decay of which keeps us nice and toasty.
So, A) vulcanism is very much related to radioactivity. The earth would have frozen solid by now otherwise, and there would be no volcanoes. And B) while you're correct that the heat isn't caused by a nuclear reaction (rather decay), nobody said it was. The parent was talking about exactly what I explained here.
It is a basic principle of our Constitution that the majority does *not* have the right to take rights away from the minority.
Nonsense. The majority does not have the right to take away certain well-defined and clearly spelled out rights, as listed in the Bill of Rights and elsewhere. Everything else is fair game.
For instance, you don't have the right to drive a car without a license, or masturbate in public, or to smoke marijuana. Every one of those rights, and thousands more, has been taken away by virtue of laws passed and enforced by the majority.
I'm not saying that that is necessarily a bad thing, but it is true.
Google for "wireless LCD monitor". Note that several manufacturers make such a beast. /is it that hard to use Google?
I like the picture on a CRT much better than a plasma or LCD, as well. I watched "The Day After Tomorrow" last week on my buddies new plasma set. It's contrast is so poor with dark colors.
All the storm cloud scenes looked horrible, with the worst color banding I've seen since 8 bit color was in fashion, it looked like a greyscale version of that old 256 color "plasma" demo.
Then either A) you're friend's plasma is shit, B) it badly needs to be calibrated, or C) both.
The market is currently flooded with low-end, relatively affordable, but complete shit plasmas. Don't assume that plasma == shit just because low-end plasma == shit. It would be like assuming that "all speakers are crap because this $50 Aiwa set is".
I have two high-end HDTV plasmas. They comfortably kick the crap out of CRTs in overall performance.
Witching doesn't always work.
Amazingly, it works at exactly the rate predicted by chance. Funny, that.
Hate replying to myself, but I should clarify: when I said that the difficulty of writing a program doesn't vary much with language, I meant among similar-level languages. The difficulty of writing a word processor in, say, C++ vs. Java isn't as different as you would expect.
Obviously, machine code (or BrainFuck) is enough of a difference to have a real impact on difficulty, and I accept that a super-duper-high-level language could make the process substantially easier, if a suitable one existed (but it doesn't, and the research presented here isn't compelling enough to change my mind about that).
Why does all research like this seem to revolve around "toy" problems? They study non-programmers or, when they include real programmers, focus only on small tasks that can be completed in an hour or so.
Great, I accept that a new language can make toy problems easier.
However, I think the situation is very different when you have a real programmer working on a real program. Writing a real application, like a word processor or a web browser, is difficult no matter what language you do it in -- and I would argue that the difficulty doesn't vary much between languages. In fact, I would further argue that many of these research languages, while making toy problems easier, would actually make "real" programming substiantally harder, because the semantics of the language are not as formalized and thus more difficult to remember and deal with.
I'm certainly not opposed to advances in language theory and design -- our modern-day large applications would be essentially impossible to write if all we had to work with was machine language. But to be a major advance, a new language should focus on making real problems easier for real programmers, not making toy problems easier for non-programmers.
Thank you for being the voice of reason.
Unfortunately none of the footage from tournaments our school has attended is online, or I'd link a few video clips as examples.
I would like to point out that tournament fighting has absolutely nothing to do with real-world fighting.
In a tournament fight, a 97lb man punching a 194lb man in the stomach counts as a point. The 97lb man can easily with the bout with a few solid connections.
In a real-world fight, a 97lb man punching a 194lb man in the stomach will probably hurt his hand, inflict very little damage to his opponent, and be summarily pummeled.
I am in no way saying that a little guy can't kick a big guy's ass. But if the two are equally skilled, the little guy is probably going to take a severe beating, at least outside of the artificial rules of a tournament. Furthermore, all of the real-world fights between martial artists that I have seen tend to involve very little "art" after the first few seconds...
... Four years ago I remember reading in TechWeek that landlords were demanding security deposits in dot com share options, rather than cash.
I spent the past five years in the Bay Area. I work for one of the biggest internet companies in existence and 70% of my income is in stock options, so I'm well aware of both stock option and real estate insanity.
I have never, ever heard mention of the practice you describe. Certainly not when I was renting (and I checked out virtually every apartment complex in San Jose) nor from any of the hundreds of other San Jose/San Francisco residents that I talk to (and real estate complaints are a very common conversation topic there).
If this ever actually happened, it certainly wasn't a widespread, or even widely known, practice.
Marriage confers certain legal rights and privileges. For instance, your health care and insurance typically extend to your spouse, and you are given tax breaks.
If polygamy were legalized, I could just marry EVERYBODY IN THE COUNTRY, and give them all those legal benefits which are restricted to married people. I imagine my health care provider would be a bit horrified, as would the federal government upon realizing that every single taxpayer was now married.
There are very good reasons to limit us to being able to extend such benefits to only one other person (or at least a small, well-defined number).
Also, someone was talking about photons being able to cross paths without interference. However... Thomas Young's famous double-slit experiment seems to prove otherwise, but like I said I'm not an expert and so would welcome someone's more educated input.
To get interference, you must have two light beams in the same location. The double-slit experiment works because you have two light beams both striking the target at the same spot.
However, this is a completely different situation. Crossing two light beams at, say, a ninety degree angle, will of course result in interference at the intersection of the two beams. But there won't be any interference before or after the intersection, because only at the intersection are there two beams to interact with each other.
It's important to remember that interference doesn't modify the waves themselves. Two waves (light, sound, water, etc.) can happily cross each other, interfere at the intersection, and proceed merrily on their ways without being otherwise affected.
Only if you believe that source.
I read the link and I don't give it much credibility.
Next.
You don't find Snopes credible? They identified the source of the information -- an article in Journal of the American College of Nutrition describing a study by the Center for Human Nutrition in Omaha. They also provided a full bibliography should you care to go check their sources and make sure that they haven't been making things up.
I'm guessing that "I don't give it much credibility" just means "I didn't actually read the link and I'm trying to make it look like I did", but in case that was a serious objection, rest assured that Snopes is as reliable as they come.
2. How many of the people complain that this is too warm:
a. are overweight, or
b. smoke, or
c. drink warm beverages and not the recommended 8 glasses of water a day, or
d. have high blood pressure, or
e. feel sleepy because they aren't getting the recommended 7-9 hours of sleep at night, or
f. not interested in what they are doing enough to stay awake.
a: no
b: no
c: the 8 glasses of water a day thing is an urban legend
d: no
e: no
f: no
And yet I'm comfortable at 70F and miserable at 78F. Furthermore, if you're cold, you can dress warmer. If I'm hot, my options are much more limited -- stripping naked at one's workplace tends to have negative repurcussions.
It's time to start pushing for vote reform. America has the dumbest voting system on the planet, one that only works when there are only two candidates. As soon as you have more than two, you have this crap.
I would vote for Nader if it weren't for the fact that it would essentially be throwing my vote away. I'm sure that there are a lot of people out there who feel the same way. Stop bitching about it and do something. Write your congresscritters and tell them about the joys of other voting systems, such as instant runoff and approval voting.
And more importantly, the third parties should present a unified front on this if they ever want to win an election. Libertarians, Greens, hell even Communists, the first and foremost issue for you should be the voting system. We need to abolish this two-party crap and allow our voices to really be heard.
Higher resolution is only useful if you can see it. At typical viewing distances, you need a pretty large screen to notice the difference between HD and ED. If you sit close to the 42" screen, HD may be worth it. At 12', ED may be good enough.
Only if you have poor eyesight. I have a 42" HD plasma at over fifteen feet viewing distance in my bedroom, and I can still easily tell the difference between HD and SD images on it. I admit that it's not as dramatic as on my other TVs (which are both larger and closer), but it was still worth the extra money IMHO.
Some decent brands, in no particular order: JBL, Klipsh, Paradigm, Genesis, B&W, Theil, Onix, Energy. There are tons more that just aren't coming to me off the top of my head, but in any case you probably won't have heard of most of them (it's a sad but true fact that you can't get decent speakers at any mainstream place like Best Buy).
I have Onix Reference 3's myself. Damned fine speakers.
Nice of you to pick the craziest, most undefendable beliefs as an example. What do they call that, the strawman argument?
Not at all. A strawman argument is misrepresenting your opponent's argument in a weaker form, attacking the weakened form, and then claiming that you have defeated the argument.
I admit that few people nowadays really believe in the miracle of transubstantiation, but the other two (the Great Flood and that homosexuality is a sin) are very much active beliefs held by millions of Christians. You may not personally believe either one -- and kudos to you if that is so -- but claiming that it's a straw man is disingenous.
In fact, the homosexuality one in particular is one of the most important political issues on the table right now. I would say that the opposition to gay rights is largely religious in nature, and characterizing my statement as a straw man is very unfair.
Why don't you tell me why it's also just as crazy to forgive, and love one another, or that if we work hard and be good people that there may be a paradise waiting for us all? Those are pretty unrealistic also, are they delusions?
I take issue with the supernatural, illogical, and delusional beliefs specific to religions. The forgiveness and love you mention are not supernatural, illogical, or delusional, nor are they specific to religion. As an atheist, I no less believe in loving and forgiving my fellow man than you do. In fact, I would consider myself more forgiving than most of the Christians I have met. Your mileage may vary.
Why is it that you, the smart atheist, have so much trouble discerning metaphor from literal truths, or so much difficulty seeing that rituals and tradition give people comfort, but that it's not the fundamental part of what might make religion a good thing?
What makes you think I have trouble discerning metaphor? I know perfectly well that "This is my body" wasn't supposed to mean "This cracker is literally my flesh". That doesn't stop that from being the Catholic Church's official teaching, though, does it?
Likewise, I know perfectly well that Leviticus is just a bunch of 2000-year-old rules that nobody should seriously be expected to follow today. And let me tell you, that must be a real comfort to the families of gay men who have been murdered in the name of God.
You don't do these things, fine. I'm not against you, I'm against the entire establishment of religion, which has been responsible for more atrocities, murders, and genocides than any other force in history.
Seriously though, someone in early childhood really hurt you, didn't they. Shame, that.
I strongly oppose belief in the supernatural, so I must be damaged goods? Odd.
No, I actually had a nice, perfectly normal childhood. No abuse, no molestation, no horrible experiences with religious nuts. I am happily married, well-adjusted, and successful. I have no psychological problems. I don't oppose religion because I was hurt, but rather because it is a dangerous delusion that has shamed, hurt, or killed millions of people.
Incidentally, I am just as opposed to belief in alien abductions and unicorns. It's just that there aren't as many true believers of those delusions, so I don't get as much of an opportunity to debate about them.
The wiretap laws make it illegal for a human to listen in. Your spam filter argument is just a straw man. If it were illegal for a machine to "read" the email, it wouldn't even be possible for the email to be received in the first place!
Amazingly enough, alot of what you say can also be used against the big bang theory. Is it now also a religious delusion?
When did I say that I support the big bang theory? In any case, the big bang theory is not a religion for many reasons, but most notably because it is falsifiable. It makes certain predictions, and you can test those predictions to see whether or not they hold true. You can prove it wrong, and come up with a theory that better explains the observed facts.
None of those traits hold for religious beliefs, which are delusional in nature (not based on observations of the world and persist despite mounds of evidence against them).
No modern religion claims that god makes it rain. That religion was once used to explain things that could otherwise have been explained better only says something about how unwilling primitive people were to explore reasoning.
Wow. You have completely and utterly missed the point. I know that no modern religion claims God makes it rain. That is because we now understand the physical processes behind rain.
My point was that as soon as we fully understand the physical processes behind something, religion is no longer able to claim "God did it". It has happened over and over again throughout history. This particular discussion -- creation -- is just one more example of "God did it" that will, like all the others, fall apart as soon as science manages to figure out exactly what really happened.
But, if you insist on using that line of reasoning, isn't it only fair to subject science to the same thing? I mean, if Zeus is going to be responsible for lightning bolts (incorrect), then shouldn't we dig up all the early paleontological reconstructions and ridicule them? Oops, that dead guy thought that animals evolved simply because they decided mutate? And the other one thought that random mutations could possibly explain such rapid evolution?
Absolutely. If science proposes something incorrect, then hell yes we should discard it and move on as soon as we realize it's incorrect. It has happened over and over again, and I'm sure that a lot of our currently-cherished scientific beliefs will likewise be demolished once we have a better explanation.
See, that's the difference between science and religion. Scientists actively challenge our current understanding of the world, and are quick to propose (and test!) alternative explanations.
Religions, on the other hand, are so damned convinced that they know the whole story that they ignore the last two thousand years of human advancement.
Oh, btw. If you're definition of mental illness would include my previous post as a sympton, you're really wound too tight. Did Father Callahan molest you or something?
My point was that religious beliefs are a delusion. It should be pretty scary to you that not even psychiatrists can find a meaningful distinction between religious delusions (a 'loving' God ruthlessly flooded the entire planet and murdered trillions of innocent animals, crackers turn to flesh in my mouth, you'll spend an eternity burning in hell for inserting your penis into another man) and the delusions of the truly insane (the CIA is controlling my mind via my radio).
The only distinction we've been able to make so far is that the religious delusions are held by large numbers of people. These beliefs are still every bit as irrational and insane as the delusions held by the mentally ill.
Well, it's obvious that the most fundamental questions about the universe remain unanswered to some people's satisfaction, mine included. The big bang may describe the first split second, but doesn't really explain anything other than there was nothing, and then all of the sudden there is something. And in the vaguest sense, it is somewhat hard to deny that it certainly seems like there may be a creator of some sort. So, in the most general sense, a religionist isn't all that crazy, imo.
Yes, it is crazy. There are two main reasons:
A) It doesn't answer the question. How did the universe get here? God created it. Well, how did God get here? Ummm... well... he's just always been here. So what was he doing for the infinity of time before he decided to create the universe? Ummm... well... hrm.
If the universe is so complex that it can't exist without a creator, then God is also so complex that he can't exist without a creator. If God could come into existence without help, then so could the universe.
B) We've seen this before, and every other case has been wrong. How do volcanoes work? God (Hephaestus) makes them erupt. What is the sun? It's God (Ra). How does lightning work? They're God (Zeus) throwing lightning bolts that Hephaestus forged. Why do we get sick? God (Heiséi) makes us sick. Why does it rain? God (Mama Cocha) makes it rain.
How was the universe made? God (Yahweh) made it.
So, we've managed to prove that every other thing God supposedly does has a rational explanation. The only thing you have left is the origins of life and the universe, which I admit we don't have a rock-solid explanation for.
So, which is more likely: that you're finally right for once and God did it (nevermind where God himself came from), or this will once again fall to the forces of reason?
Furthermore, if you still think you're not crazy for believing it, I'd like you to do the following. Come up with a definition for the word "delusion" that includes all mental-illness-type-delusions but doesn't include religious beliefs.
Amazingly enough, thousands of psychologists have tried to do just that, and there still isn't any such definition.
Why this distinction between beliefs based on "faith" and based on "reason"? Faith is not always blind. I have faith in my wife. Why? Because she has demonstrated to me in many ways that she is a faithful woman who loves me. Though we're not together during the business day, don't you think it is reasonable for me to trust her fidelity during the day, far less reasonable for me to suspect her of betraying me (at least in the absence of very serious evidence)?
The word "faith" has a number of different definitions; you are confusing the argument by using a different one than I am. You have evidence of your wife's faithfulness -- she has always been faithful to you in your presence, has professed her love to you on many occasions, and has done many other things to give you reason to believe in her faithfulness. There is no such evidence of the existence of God, so any belief in him must be a different sort of faith than what you describe.
I hope you can see that faith can be reasonable.
If it's reasonable (based on rational fact and evidence), it's not "faith" as generally defined in religious discussions.
Secondly, you wanted some evidence to be submitted about God. There are two kinds of evidence recognised by Christians: what can be seen in nature; and what has been specifically revealed by God in history.
I submit that there is nothing in nature which indicates the existence of God, nor has God at any point revealed his existence. I challenge you to submit evidence to the contrary.
Have you ever asked the questions that Science can't answer?
Of course. No one is claiming that science has all the answers.
Empiricism can observe the material world, and it can even propose laws which seem to describe the way the universe works. But it cannot say where these laws come from, or why they are so.
True. However, God doesn't make the situation any better.
Science: Question: Why does [system A] behave in [behavior B] fashion? Answer: We don't know.
Religion: Question: Why does [system A] behave in [behavior B] fashion? Answer: God wants it to work that way. Question: Why? Answer: We don't know.
All you've done is introduced one more unknowable thing and abstracted the answer one more step away.
Isn't it beautiful and elegant that such simple laws can describe such complexity? Isn't it still so unlikely, even given such laws, that they would produce you?
First, nobody has any idea how likely or unlikely it is -- we don't understand the processes that gave rise to life (and when we do, it will have been science, not religion, that answered the question). Second, even if it's fantastically unlikely, what does that have to do with anything? In a universe with fifty billion stars in each of a hundred trillion galaxies, the fact that something is "unlikely" still leaves room for it to happen trillions of times. And all we need is for it to have happened once -- and it obviously did, since here we are.
Have you ever investigated the historical man Jesus Christ, and assessed his claims and the claims of his followers? Reading the new testament of the bible is a good start: it's not very long, and you can't claim lack of evidence without having read it. It's also worth looking at historical analyses of it.
The historical man Jesus Christ is known from exactly four documents: the four Gospels. There are, to the best of my knowledge, no other known documents claiming first-hand knowledge of the man.
Tell me something: if I and three of my friends wrote stories claiming that we had seen a man perform great miracles, claim to be the son of Allah, and endorse Islam as the one true path, would you instantly trust me, discard all other religions, and follow Islam?
That is exactly what you done. Replace "Allah" with "God" and "Islam" with "Christianity" and you ha