You have to be kidding. The very definition of hard sciences is in the rigour. Things like testable predictions, controlled experiments, quantifiability, etc., are the hallmarks of the hard sciences.
It's not that the soft sciences are without any rigour, but it isn't to the same degree because we can't do it to the same degree.
Also, in the last paragraph, there are two problems. First, the whole paragraph is an argument that hard vs. soft is a meaningful distinction that is more prone to the science being settled, which was exactly the GPs point that you were arguing against, so you paradoxically just started arguing against yourself.
Second, you say
the "soft sciences" are a hell of a lot _harder_
. It's hard to tell whether this is meant to be cute wordplay or you're really equivocating, but you should say "more difficult" instead of "harder". I would agree that it's more difficult to come to a consistent conclusion in the soft sciences. I would disagree that they are simply more difficult -- the fact that you can take more steps in physics and chemistry is an invitation to take those steps. All the sciences are beyond humanity's grasp so they are all basically equally difficult on their frontiers.
He didn't say they were inhabiting it at the time. He said they were inhabitants. That's not the same thing. Somebody from Poland who visits Bangladesh for a week is an inhabitant of Poland even while in Bangladesh.
Merriam-Webster: "one that occupies a particular place regularly, routinely, or for a period of time".
This always drives me crazy. Velocity is relative. Isn't there a high probability at any given time that you're moving at more than 10% of the speed of light relative to those atoms?
Or is it the case that basically everything in the local part of the universe is going at "relatively" the same speed with respect to the fixed stars?
What complicates this is an argument made that the original church continues in the non-original location and that the Vatican Pope now is the "new Pope".
Still. There aren't a lot of Popes running around, this Pope is by a wide margin the most famous, and the summary referred to him by name, uniquely identifying this Pope through history. I think that's good enough.
I don't think I would agree about the Brits and Americans I've met; it might depend on the language, though. At least with European accents and maybe some Indian accents, they're likely to have much more exposure. With some other countries, much much less exposure.
It is surprising sometimes how ESL speakers might be less forgiving of poor English, but that's partly got to be "I did it, why can't you?".
Cancel is just an example. German words are longer than English on average, and German isn't the only language. Even if they were the same length you'd expect about half to be cut off if you're doing tight bounds around English words.
This very, very quickly leads to "everybody should just speak English". It's not just about a single word or a small handful of them.
Possibly anything, but I don't think this assert is indicative of it doing anything else that might be exploitable. If anything, the overactive assert makes it less exploitable.
The one thing I can think of, is if this assert was in a function that shouldn't have been called at all, so this tips off black-hats into seeing that an exploitable codepath is being taken in a situation where it shouldn't have been taken in the first place.
But I'm guessing it's not doing anything with this string, just doing some kind of type-detection and then exploding, so there wouldn't be any indication of anything exploitable.
I do actually see the rise growing (err...growth rising) in that chart (eg. the 4s section is steeper than the 4 section), but I agree that I certainly don't see it accelerating.
The article says he was a man from Glendale. Also he goes by "Gary" which is a male name.
Karen is much more often a female name in the US but it's not unheard of as a male name. The male form comes from a different root. You know it can sometimes be a male name because it doesn't end with a vowel:).
So yeah. You're sexist for exactly the reason you accused everyone else of being sexist.
I think that's actually a wonderful idea. As much as I kind of think there should be no cap at all, this addresses all the major arguments for a cap that aren't totally plain racism quite handily.
You still might have to consider a scaling factor for hiring foreign workers into places with varying costs of living.
Putting a figure on how much is news. I honestly would not have expected the figure to be 88%, which does seem skewed compared to baseline at first glance. That's like the violent crime gap, which is often state to be more significant than the nonviolent crime gap.
Also I wouldn't be so sure without studying it that academic misconduct directly relates to aggressiveness.
You said violent and non-violent, but only gave a figure for violent and said "unless there are sneaky ways to murder people", which is about violent crime. That's equivocal.
I found it surprisingly much more difficult to get nonviolent crime rates broken down by gender. Most talk about overall, or violent, but not both at once so I can't even synthesize because the data may come from different sources, so I'm having trouble verifying your comment. I did find larceny was about 2:1 male:female in the US, which is substantially less than the figure for academic misconduct quoted in the summary which is more like 8:1. Also found a self-reporting survey that gave men about 5:2 on having committed crime in the previous year, though self-reporting has its own biases. Fraud and forgery was about 4:1 in the UK.
I always knew about the gap in violent crime and assumed that much of the overall gap was consequent. If anything I wondered if the criminalization of female-coded sex work would inflate female nonviolent crime stats. It's also really difficult to pick apart whether there's any gender bias in finding criminals, of either gender, which could skew the stats in either direction.
[...] broken chemical bonds, etc.). If you aren't destroying something your not getting energy out.
I hope I'm not being too pedantic here, but this isn't right. Adding chemical bonds is more likely to release energy than breaking them, so creating something is how you get the energy out of it, not destroying something.
A chemical bond that would release energy when it broke is an unstable bond so it's less likely to be found than a structure who could release energy by adding a chemical bond but hasn't had those circumstances occur. These unstable bonds were probably been formed in an environment with an excess of energy compared to the current one that's releasing it.
That's like saying fire is mastered because we know how to light a match and drop it on the forest floor.
You know that mastering fusion, in this context -- the context of producing energy -- means being able to safely control a fusion reaction with nontrivial net usable energy output. Right now, fusors do the safe control and H-bombs do the net energy output, but we don't have something that does both at once.
What's wrong with slashdot is pedants like you who not only aren't getting it, but refusing to consider the possibility that there's something you aren't getting.
Testing whether the previous tests have captured flaws that could easily be found by bloggers IS a test of the practical effectiveness of the scientific method, using the scientific method. Even if in principle the platonic ideal of the scientific method hasn't been tested, the actual reality is being tested.
More abstractly, there's no problem testing the scientific method with the scientific method. If the test using the scientific method says that the scientific method fails very often, then you definitely have a problem. If it says that you don't, then you may or may not have a problem depending on whether there's a flaw in the scientific method that the scientific method cannot itself detect. Which is okay because the scientific method itself is often about testing a hypothesis and believing it on the basis of how many times people fail to disprove it. Any further than that is an epistemolgy discussion.
The traditional way to extract energy from gravity is to drop something from high altitude to low altitude. The problem with teleporting from low to high is it implies *adding* gravitational energy, and the question of where it comes from. In the case of the article, the resolution is simple: the source atoms aren't actually moving, it's just reconstructing the gestalt "thing" in place and it just takes whatever energy it takes (or gives!) to construct that thing at the destination from local materials.
I think what you may be getting at is weakening the gravitational field slightly such that on net the gravitational potential energy of the entire rest of the universe to the Earth, including the thing you teleported, remains constant. So if it was highly massive, g might go from 9.8 to 9.5. In other words, removing some of the Earth's mass (I'm assuming you don't want to lose any mass from the teleported object), because that's what the definition of gravitational mass is. Removing mass still means removing energy, but you could find a balance where you turn X amount of Earth mass into Y amount of energy, and the combination of the reduction in gravity from the loss of X mass leads to potential energy increasing by Y which is accounted for by the energy extracted from Earth's mass. Kind of a just-in-time nuclear/antimatter reaction.
Or a third option is that you are extracting gravitational mass while leaving inertial mass the same. There doesn't seem to be any good reason to believe that's possible and lots of good reasons to believe it isn't (kind of required for relativity to work as we understand it), but it could in principle be wrong in narrow cases.
Which is a cool enough thought experiment but anyway, none of those things are necessary here because the source atoms aren't moving to the destination, just the things that they comprise is being reconstructed at the destination.
If the threshold were 1, it would clearly be too time consuming.
If the threshold were 300 million, where you need near-unanimous support, it would not.
Finding the right balance, especially when the response rate is increasing, is nontrivial. You must also consider the petitions that aren't utter nonsense but are stupid or impractical for non-obvious reasons, and the fact that even for valid petitions you can only consider so many unless you want to burn another $200k per year taxpayer money for more help.
I don't know how much time is actually spent on nonsense petitions (I saw a few), bad petitions, etc., and I don't know what a reasonable projection is, but there's no reason to be married to the number 25000. Maybe the right number is more. It might even be less, but I honestly though 25k was a bit low in the age of the Internet. A single tweet from a high-profile celebrity would be almost guaranteed to turn into a petition no matter what its merits.
You make them yourself, perhaps using regular playing cards or just your own stiff paper. The actual function of the cards (and even the art) is entirely online with no legal encumbrance, so you're paying for basically tournament-legal decks / decks that a random opponent will accept, time saved, and small-scale art.
I feel like the lone guy who really likes the Ewoks. The whole point is they look unassuming both physically and in terms of technology, and they still fight back (with a measure of success that can't just be attributed to the heroes). It's like Yoda, although Yoda at least had magic powers.
The Ewoks represented what is usually a tired trope for humans -- the physically and technologically weaker species that fights back through sheer iron will. Happens over and over in sci fi movies where humans are the weaker species and they just will themselves to beat the aliens. Not usually some other species using sheer will to beat the humans.
We have to carefully define terms. You're mixing wikipedia's definition of religion with your own definitions of atheism and agnosticism (which aren't uncommon but also aren't universal). I think snapping to the wikipedia definitions for all three terms is reasonable, and according to those definitions, on the pages for atheism and agnosticism, condensed and paraphrased:
Mere atheism is the lack of belief, not necessarily belief of lack. Strong atheism is belief of lack. Weak atheism is atheism that is not strong atheism; that is to say, weak atheism is lack of belief without belief of lack. Agnosticism is taking the position that whether theism or atheism is true is basically unknowable.
Agnosticism is therefore compatible with non-fundamentalist theism and with weak atheism both, and you could stretch the definition of religion around "strong atheism" or even around agnosticism, but I don't think you can stretch it around weak atheism, and therefore you cannot stretch it around atheism either. This said I do think that's a stretch of definition even to encompass agnosticism or strong atheism.
Practically speaking, any weak atheist will almost certainly disbelieve in every specific religion they've heard of in a "strong" manner -- eg. outright disbelief in Catholicism or Scientology or Hinduism or what-have-you -- but I don't think many reasonable people call disbelief in Hinduism a religion, even if you can technically shove not-belief in specific religions into the definition of "world views that relate humanity to spirituality".
Pretty much by induction, I'd say that strong atheism isn't a religion simply because it collects up disbeliefs in all possible specific theistic religions without advancing its own religious ideas beyond said rejections. Like the semi-famous quote which I'll paraphrase, "atheism is a religion in the same way that baldness is a hairstyle".
Also, you can go on all day dismissing Occam's razor, but even mentioning it is an outright admission that accepting non-existence of a higher power is not necessarily predicated on "faith alone", unless Occam's razor is dismissed as faith.
Meanwhile I'm tempted to call agnosticism pretty much self-evident to all thinking people except for the vast evidence to the contrary. I wouldn't generally call myself agnostic since I'm basically 99.999999999% sure of the strong atheist position but by technicality I'd admit that I am agnostic along with any person who is even halfway reasonable, whether theistic or non-theistic (even freakin' Richard Dawkins has admitted that much, and he's about as strong a strong atheist as you'll find in any public figure). You yourself casually professed an agnostic position by saying "because there is no explicit proof of it, nor can there be". But if you really wanted to call agnosticism a trivial religion, well, fine, semantic arguments bore me greatly. I imagine such agnosticism (under the definition in this post) would rival Christianity and Islam for membership numbers, though.
I agree that human nature is the root here, but Hitler was not a "secularist", and Nazi Germany was explicitly Christian (notwithstanding any "no true scotsman" arguments to the contrary).
"We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out." -Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 Oct. 1933
The metric time measurement is the second. It has an exact definition. The day and the year are non-metric units which are natural units. You'll note that metric places also use non-metric natural units like "car lengths" for the safe distance between cars driving with no hypocrisy. You could make at most one of them align neatly with an SI unit, but inherently can't do both. Light-years and astronomical units are like that as well.
Generally, despite arguments to the contrary, neither imperial nor metric tends to be particularly "natural", except perhaps for Celsius which has approximate boiling and freezing points.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to be kidding. The very definition of hard sciences is in the rigour. Things like testable predictions, controlled experiments, quantifiability, etc., are the hallmarks of the hard sciences.
It's not that the soft sciences are without any rigour, but it isn't to the same degree because we can't do it to the same degree.
Also, in the last paragraph, there are two problems. First, the whole paragraph is an argument that hard vs. soft is a meaningful distinction that is more prone to the science being settled, which was exactly the GPs point that you were arguing against, so you paradoxically just started arguing against yourself.
Second, you say
the "soft sciences" are a hell of a lot _harder_
. It's hard to tell whether this is meant to be cute wordplay or you're really equivocating, but you should say "more difficult" instead of "harder". I would agree that it's more difficult to come to a consistent conclusion in the soft sciences. I would disagree that they are simply more difficult -- the fact that you can take more steps in physics and chemistry is an invitation to take those steps. All the sciences are beyond humanity's grasp so they are all basically equally difficult on their frontiers.
He didn't say they were inhabiting it at the time. He said they were inhabitants. That's not the same thing. Somebody from Poland who visits Bangladesh for a week is an inhabitant of Poland even while in Bangladesh.
Merriam-Webster: "one that occupies a particular place regularly, routinely, or for a period of time".
This always drives me crazy. Velocity is relative. Isn't there a high probability at any given time that you're moving at more than 10% of the speed of light relative to those atoms?
Or is it the case that basically everything in the local part of the universe is going at "relatively" the same speed with respect to the fixed stars?
What complicates this is an argument made that the original church continues in the non-original location and that the Vatican Pope now is the "new Pope".
Still. There aren't a lot of Popes running around, this Pope is by a wide margin the most famous, and the summary referred to him by name, uniquely identifying this Pope through history. I think that's good enough.
I don't think I would agree about the Brits and Americans I've met; it might depend on the language, though. At least with European accents and maybe some Indian accents, they're likely to have much more exposure. With some other countries, much much less exposure.
It is surprising sometimes how ESL speakers might be less forgiving of poor English, but that's partly got to be "I did it, why can't you?".
Cancel is just an example. German words are longer than English on average, and German isn't the only language. Even if they were the same length you'd expect about half to be cut off if you're doing tight bounds around English words.
This very, very quickly leads to "everybody should just speak English". It's not just about a single word or a small handful of them.
Possibly anything, but I don't think this assert is indicative of it doing anything else that might be exploitable. If anything, the overactive assert makes it less exploitable.
The one thing I can think of, is if this assert was in a function that shouldn't have been called at all, so this tips off black-hats into seeing that an exploitable codepath is being taken in a situation where it shouldn't have been taken in the first place.
But I'm guessing it's not doing anything with this string, just doing some kind of type-detection and then exploding, so there wouldn't be any indication of anything exploitable.
I do actually see the rise growing (err...growth rising) in that chart (eg. the 4s section is steeper than the 4 section), but I agree that I certainly don't see it accelerating.
The article says he was a man from Glendale. Also he goes by "Gary" which is a male name.
Karen is much more often a female name in the US but it's not unheard of as a male name. The male form comes from a different root. You know it can sometimes be a male name because it doesn't end with a vowel :).
So yeah. You're sexist for exactly the reason you accused everyone else of being sexist.
I think that's actually a wonderful idea. As much as I kind of think there should be no cap at all, this addresses all the major arguments for a cap that aren't totally plain racism quite handily.
You still might have to consider a scaling factor for hiring foreign workers into places with varying costs of living.
...no, it almost never does, except in accounting.
Putting a figure on how much is news. I honestly would not have expected the figure to be 88%, which does seem skewed compared to baseline at first glance. That's like the violent crime gap, which is often state to be more significant than the nonviolent crime gap.
Also I wouldn't be so sure without studying it that academic misconduct directly relates to aggressiveness.
You said violent and non-violent, but only gave a figure for violent and said "unless there are sneaky ways to murder people", which is about violent crime. That's equivocal.
I found it surprisingly much more difficult to get nonviolent crime rates broken down by gender. Most talk about overall, or violent, but not both at once so I can't even synthesize because the data may come from different sources, so I'm having trouble verifying your comment. I did find larceny was about 2:1 male:female in the US, which is substantially less than the figure for academic misconduct quoted in the summary which is more like 8:1. Also found a self-reporting survey that gave men about 5:2 on having committed crime in the previous year, though self-reporting has its own biases. Fraud and forgery was about 4:1 in the UK.
I always knew about the gap in violent crime and assumed that much of the overall gap was consequent. If anything I wondered if the criminalization of female-coded sex work would inflate female nonviolent crime stats. It's also really difficult to pick apart whether there's any gender bias in finding criminals, of either gender, which could skew the stats in either direction.
[...] broken chemical bonds, etc.). If you aren't destroying something your not getting energy out.
I hope I'm not being too pedantic here, but this isn't right. Adding chemical bonds is more likely to release energy than breaking them, so creating something is how you get the energy out of it, not destroying something.
A chemical bond that would release energy when it broke is an unstable bond so it's less likely to be found than a structure who could release energy by adding a chemical bond but hasn't had those circumstances occur. These unstable bonds were probably been formed in an environment with an excess of energy compared to the current one that's releasing it.
That's like saying fire is mastered because we know how to light a match and drop it on the forest floor.
You know that mastering fusion, in this context -- the context of producing energy -- means being able to safely control a fusion reaction with nontrivial net usable energy output. Right now, fusors do the safe control and H-bombs do the net energy output, but we don't have something that does both at once.
What's wrong with slashdot is pedants like you who not only aren't getting it, but refusing to consider the possibility that there's something you aren't getting.
Testing whether the previous tests have captured flaws that could easily be found by bloggers IS a test of the practical effectiveness of the scientific method, using the scientific method. Even if in principle the platonic ideal of the scientific method hasn't been tested, the actual reality is being tested.
More abstractly, there's no problem testing the scientific method with the scientific method. If the test using the scientific method says that the scientific method fails very often, then you definitely have a problem. If it says that you don't, then you may or may not have a problem depending on whether there's a flaw in the scientific method that the scientific method cannot itself detect. Which is okay because the scientific method itself is often about testing a hypothesis and believing it on the basis of how many times people fail to disprove it. Any further than that is an epistemolgy discussion.
The traditional way to extract energy from gravity is to drop something from high altitude to low altitude. The problem with teleporting from low to high is it implies *adding* gravitational energy, and the question of where it comes from. In the case of the article, the resolution is simple: the source atoms aren't actually moving, it's just reconstructing the gestalt "thing" in place and it just takes whatever energy it takes (or gives!) to construct that thing at the destination from local materials.
I think what you may be getting at is weakening the gravitational field slightly such that on net the gravitational potential energy of the entire rest of the universe to the Earth, including the thing you teleported, remains constant. So if it was highly massive, g might go from 9.8 to 9.5. In other words, removing some of the Earth's mass (I'm assuming you don't want to lose any mass from the teleported object), because that's what the definition of gravitational mass is. Removing mass still means removing energy, but you could find a balance where you turn X amount of Earth mass into Y amount of energy, and the combination of the reduction in gravity from the loss of X mass leads to potential energy increasing by Y which is accounted for by the energy extracted from Earth's mass. Kind of a just-in-time nuclear/antimatter reaction.
Or a third option is that you are extracting gravitational mass while leaving inertial mass the same. There doesn't seem to be any good reason to believe that's possible and lots of good reasons to believe it isn't (kind of required for relativity to work as we understand it), but it could in principle be wrong in narrow cases.
Which is a cool enough thought experiment but anyway, none of those things are necessary here because the source atoms aren't moving to the destination, just the things that they comprise is being reconstructed at the destination.
Not when he's giving a countdown.
If the threshold were 1, it would clearly be too time consuming.
If the threshold were 300 million, where you need near-unanimous support, it would not.
Finding the right balance, especially when the response rate is increasing, is nontrivial. You must also consider the petitions that aren't utter nonsense but are stupid or impractical for non-obvious reasons, and the fact that even for valid petitions you can only consider so many unless you want to burn another $200k per year taxpayer money for more help.
I don't know how much time is actually spent on nonsense petitions (I saw a few), bad petitions, etc., and I don't know what a reasonable projection is, but there's no reason to be married to the number 25000. Maybe the right number is more. It might even be less, but I honestly though 25k was a bit low in the age of the Internet. A single tweet from a high-profile celebrity would be almost guaranteed to turn into a petition no matter what its merits.
You make them yourself, perhaps using regular playing cards or just your own stiff paper. The actual function of the cards (and even the art) is entirely online with no legal encumbrance, so you're paying for basically tournament-legal decks / decks that a random opponent will accept, time saved, and small-scale art.
I feel like the lone guy who really likes the Ewoks. The whole point is they look unassuming both physically and in terms of technology, and they still fight back (with a measure of success that can't just be attributed to the heroes). It's like Yoda, although Yoda at least had magic powers.
The Ewoks represented what is usually a tired trope for humans -- the physically and technologically weaker species that fights back through sheer iron will. Happens over and over in sci fi movies where humans are the weaker species and they just will themselves to beat the aliens. Not usually some other species using sheer will to beat the humans.
No, it says that it isn't announced yet, but they expect it for PC nonetheless.
We have to carefully define terms. You're mixing wikipedia's definition of religion with your own definitions of atheism and agnosticism (which aren't uncommon but also aren't universal). I think snapping to the wikipedia definitions for all three terms is reasonable, and according to those definitions, on the pages for atheism and agnosticism, condensed and paraphrased:
Mere atheism is the lack of belief, not necessarily belief of lack.
Strong atheism is belief of lack.
Weak atheism is atheism that is not strong atheism; that is to say, weak atheism is lack of belief without belief of lack.
Agnosticism is taking the position that whether theism or atheism is true is basically unknowable.
Agnosticism is therefore compatible with non-fundamentalist theism and with weak atheism both, and you could stretch the definition of religion around "strong atheism" or even around agnosticism, but I don't think you can stretch it around weak atheism, and therefore you cannot stretch it around atheism either. This said I do think that's a stretch of definition even to encompass agnosticism or strong atheism.
Practically speaking, any weak atheist will almost certainly disbelieve in every specific religion they've heard of in a "strong" manner -- eg. outright disbelief in Catholicism or Scientology or Hinduism or what-have-you -- but I don't think many reasonable people call disbelief in Hinduism a religion, even if you can technically shove not-belief in specific religions into the definition of "world views that relate humanity to spirituality".
Pretty much by induction, I'd say that strong atheism isn't a religion simply because it collects up disbeliefs in all possible specific theistic religions without advancing its own religious ideas beyond said rejections. Like the semi-famous quote which I'll paraphrase, "atheism is a religion in the same way that baldness is a hairstyle".
Also, you can go on all day dismissing Occam's razor, but even mentioning it is an outright admission that accepting non-existence of a higher power is not necessarily predicated on "faith alone", unless Occam's razor is dismissed as faith.
Meanwhile I'm tempted to call agnosticism pretty much self-evident to all thinking people except for the vast evidence to the contrary. I wouldn't generally call myself agnostic since I'm basically 99.999999999% sure of the strong atheist position but by technicality I'd admit that I am agnostic along with any person who is even halfway reasonable, whether theistic or non-theistic (even freakin' Richard Dawkins has admitted that much, and he's about as strong a strong atheist as you'll find in any public figure). You yourself casually professed an agnostic position by saying "because there is no explicit proof of it, nor can there be". But if you really wanted to call agnosticism a trivial religion, well, fine, semantic arguments bore me greatly. I imagine such agnosticism (under the definition in this post) would rival Christianity and Islam for membership numbers, though.
I agree that human nature is the root here, but Hitler was not a "secularist", and Nazi Germany was explicitly Christian (notwithstanding any "no true scotsman" arguments to the contrary).
"We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out." -Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 Oct. 1933
The metric time measurement is the second. It has an exact definition. The day and the year are non-metric units which are natural units. You'll note that metric places also use non-metric natural units like "car lengths" for the safe distance between cars driving with no hypocrisy. You could make at most one of them align neatly with an SI unit, but inherently can't do both. Light-years and astronomical units are like that as well.
Generally, despite arguments to the contrary, neither imperial nor metric tends to be particularly "natural", except perhaps for Celsius which has approximate boiling and freezing points.
But anyway, this is an all-or-nothing fallacy.