Only today can someone be sent to jail and put on a sex offender's registry for sexually abusing themselves. Clearly, she is a danger to children and shouldn't be allowed to live within 2000 ft of a school building or daycare for the rest of her life. And certainly, every time she applies for a job this should come up on her background check. Oh, and don't forget to force her to notify her neighbors that she's a sex offender.
I am so tired of the "let's make an example of them" mentality that is used to justify this crap.
This experiment didn't prove that iron fertilization is never going to work as a carbon storage strategy. It showed that, in this situation, the plan didn't work as they thought it would; that hardly means that the strategy itself is unsound. Perhaps the iron seeding needs to be done in areas with lower predator populations. Perhaps they can add something with the iron the drives the predators away. Perhaps... they need to do more research before they say what is and isn't possible.
Just because it didn't work this time doesn't mean the idea should be abandoned, as the researchers themselves seem to indicate. Besides, saying that a single experiment proves anything is at least as unscientific as using models and statistics to do research.
Exactly, there is a big difference between a movie explosion and a real, "I'm trying to kill someone", explosion. They've even shown the difference on the show. If the explosion is a fuel-air explosion meant to look pretty, the Mythbusters are experts at that. If the explosion is a military (or in this case terrorist) grade high explosive, then no, they don't know much more about it than you or I could find online in about ten minutes.
Given the fact that the size of the fines rule 11 sanctions are set by the judge (not predetermined) I'd say it's more like they leveled a howitzer on the RIAA and the RIAA blinked. Sure, the howitzer might not be loaded, but is it really worth the risk?
For what it's worth, here is what wikipedia has on Rule 11 Sanctions
Rule 11 requires all papers to be signed by the attorney (if party is represented). It also provides for sanctions against the attorney or client for harassment, frivolous arguments, or a lack of factual investigation. The purpose of sanctions is deterrent, not punitive. Courts have broad discretion about the exact nature of the sanction which can include consent to in personam jurisdiction, fines, dismissal of claims, or dismissal of the entire case. The current version of Rule 11 is much more lenient than its 1983 version. Supporters of tort reform in Congress regularly call for legislation to make Rule 11 stricter.
Basically, it's a federal rule meant to deter abuses of the justice system and the fines can be practically whatever the judge wants them to be. That's a pretty scary prospect if you are concerned that you might have pissed off the judge enough that he would impose the sanctions on you, since you don't know how much money you stand to lose.
Ok, I hereby give up my right to sue the school if my child is hurt by drugs in such a way that the event wouldn't have happened had students been strip based on unfounded accusations by other students.
In many ways steam is better than cracked versions. I don't need to visit a questionable site and download what may or may not be the game I want. Game saves are saved on their site, so no worries about my hard drive crashing. If I'm visiting someone else I can log into steam and download the game to their computer quickly and easily. I don't have to worry about bad/malicious key-gens. I don't have to leave the house to buy a physical copy. Games are (in theory at least) available instantly on release day. I don't need to worry about the being sued for downloaded illegally.
I only have one game on Steam, I prefer physical copies of my media. But Steam does have it's advantages depending on your usage patterns. For me (one gamer in the house, one computer that I play on, seldom take my gaming machine with my on travel) I like the security of having CDs of all my games handy. Someone who travels or wants to maintain their game collection on multiple systems might find steam more convenient.
Courts have interpreted that to mean that they must take whatever steps are within their power as soon as they (meaning any employee of the school) becomes aware of a potential threat.
If I were a parent of a student at this school, I would be infinitely more concerned about children getting strip searched (for any reason) by school personnel than I would be worried about drugs. Forcing a child to remove their clothes in front of an adult based solely on the accusation of another student is absolutely, undeniably unacceptable. If nothing else it sets up the idea in that child's mind that they must unconditionally follow improper orders from school employees. If the principal was that convinced there was a problem, they should have called the police and let them deal with it, not forced a strip search on an innocent student.
The bible might not say how human beings were created but it does give a very specific order for things. Specifically, it gives an order that makes no scientific sense (the earth then the sun). And actually, it does say that Adam was created from the dust of the Earth (which might be vague enough to get away with) and that Eve created from the earth and one of Adam's ribs, which does seam to contradict evolution a bit.
The bible also says (indirectly) that the Earth is only about 6000 years old, that it was completely covered in water at one point in human history, and that humans all spoke one language until they tried to build a tower to heaven and God struck it down and scrambled their brains: all of which seems to contradict geology, archaeology, and astronomy pretty thoroughly. Now, if you are saying that you believe in the Bible as a collection of stories meant to tell us how to to live our life, some based on truth and some based on made up stories, then maybe I can understand that (minus the condoning of slavery, prostitution, beating your wife, killing non-believers, killing the gays, and killing those who eat shellfish).
The problem is that due to the immense size of the subject, it is impossible to teach every student everything known about evolution. What that means is that someone can show you evidence that (due to your limited knowledge) seems to disprove evolution. With more knowledge, every argument against the core of evolution can be rebutted, but the knowledge takes work to find and understand.
Maybe instead of focusing on rebutting every argument made against evolution we should encourage students to find the 'aha!' moment that makes evolution click for them. For me, it was the subject of endogenous retroviruses. Basically, these are viruses that infiltrate the hosts DNA and actually get passed on to offspring. There are chunks of DNA that are present in the exact same spot in most primate DNA, but not those primates that are believed to have branched off earliest. Based on mutations to this DNA, it's even possible to order when each species split off from the common ancestor.
I see no competing explanation for this in the 'theory' of intelligent design, which is the only other theory presented by any number of people. I suppose they could say "that's just the way the primates were designed, with that bit of DNA shared" which of course is the whole problem with ID in the first place: anything you can't explain just means God did it.
Ok then, measure the amount of energy it takes to spin up the disk with an object stationary over it vs with an object moving upwards over it. If it requires more energy to spin up the disk with the moving object over it, and the increased energy is greater than or equal to the potential energy gained by nullified mass upwards, then I'll believe it.
It seems like a pretty straightforward experiment to do and it would go a long, long ways towards proving legitimacy. And yet, no one has done it yet (or at least no one has released any results for it yet). Come up with a theory that says where the energy is coming from, and I'll start to believe, until then it's crank science.
Contact the company that makes the software. I know for a fact it is possible to get demo versions of a lot of software if you are talking about buying it if it works out for you, especially if you are talking about buying a few dozen copies. If nothing else, they'll give you someone to talk to about what the product does and doesn't do, situations that it has and hasn't worked out in the past. At least, if it's an honest company they will, and dishonest companies (believe it or not) tend not to last as long as honest ones.
Well, you say that jokingly but depending on the types of software we are talking about it might be an option. I'm not really an OSS evangilist but I would still recommend it in this case because the company isn't willing or isn't able to purchase the software legally. For technical users, there shouldn't be any problem moving people over to Linux, OpenOffice (I'm not talking about the accounting guys or anything, just the people that it makes sense to move over), and svn. The problem is if the software being pirated is software without good free alternatives.
Unless I'm missing something the options are 1) put your ass on the line and install the software illegally, 2) look for free alternatives, or 3) quit. Personally I'm not loyal enough to my company for #1 and with the job market today I wouldn't want to do #3.
If I were a scientist I probably wouldn't spend a whole lot of time researching cold fusion either, after all it's just a bad experiment published by some crank researcher decades ago. But then I meet said crank researcher at a conference or on a research project, and he's not a crank at all. For the first time, I hear the other side of the story straight from the source and the other side of the story actually makes sense.
So I agree to assist on one of his experiments so that I can have the chance to run the experiment myself, with help from the original researcher who discovered the effect. I'm watching him so I'll know if he fudges the results or the equipment. Sure enough, the experiment is run and something is going on that looks suspiciously like cold fusion, so we publish a paper.
Later, I continue the research on my own and my experiments (without the supposedly crank researcher even present) produce very similar results, in fact I'm even able to verify that high energy neutrons are produced at much higher than background levels, so I publish another paper.
The point is, after people see the test setup run successfully once, they believe in it enough to risk their career to research it further. Now whether that is 'True Believer' syndrome (where every result looks positive) or just plain excitement over a major discovery is up to interpretation
Gravity Shielding => Perpetual Motion Machine => Violation of Conservation of Energy
If I can shield gravity, I can put half a wheel over my shield and the wheel will spin, even if the effect is only a couple percent. Hurray, for free energy! Now, if there was a power input requirement that was directly related to the amount of mass that was being lifted by the purportedly blocked gravity, it might work; but nothing that I've ever seen on the subject of rotating super-conducting disks has mentioned a required energy input.
The problem is that gravity stores energy. Any time you move an object up or down a gravity well you gain or lose energy, almost by definition. Gravity blocking would allow you to move an object up without putting any energy into the system and no matter what the man says, that is a violation of physics.
I was under the impression that announcing cold fusion was more likely to destroy your career than launch it to new heights. Besides, tenure comes with a much improved budget and more money means better equipment and more thorough experiments. It makes sense that results that were marginal before are shown to be incorrect when more time and effort is invested into them.
In my opinion, it comes down to the fact that something is happening during these experiments, we just don't know what. There have been anomalous neutrons detected many times by many different researchers using this basic setup, in this case they even appear to be high energy. If you wanted to fake the results of your research, why would you pick a topic that is guaranteed to be either laughed out of the room or scrutinized like no other topic would?
We're talking treating people who are almost certainly going to die anyway with a genetic approach that doesn't have even a theoretical way to spread to other people. The absolute worst thing that could go wrong is that the people being treated die from the treatment. The second worst thing that could happen is that we don't do the treatment and they die anyway; though maybe a bit later.
I'm seriously asking, what do you think could actually go wrong?
The government wants to tap our phones, we rally against it. On principle as much as anything; the odds are highly against it affecting us individually.
A company patent trolls and sues big name companies without warning, and we advocate patent reform. On principle as much as anything; the companies being sued are usually big enough to protect themselves and absorb losses even if they lose the case.
Why shouldn't we object to this kind of thing on principle too? When senators want to spend money directly on their electorate (essentially buying their votes) instead of for the good of the nation as a whole, why shouldn't we complain? When we give companies billions of dollars to fix their mistakes and they turn around and sue the IRS to recover 300 million on taxes, using our money to pay the court costs, why shouldn't we complain?
Maybe it isn't the major issue, maybe it isn't even a real issue at all (hell, if they were incorrectly taxed why shouldn't they get the money back?) but we fight on principle every day. If we don't stand up and be pissed off about this today, if we don't demand that companies receiving bailouts act for the good of the nation instead of the good of their pocket books, things will only get worse in the future. Yeah, it's.1% of the bailout money we're talking about, but I bet less than.1% of Americans had their phones illegally tapped and less than.1% of patents are held by trolls.
Isn't that, you know, kind of the overarching theme of the show? The dehumanizing of your enemies to the point where no atrocity is unacceptable because the enemy is not just different, but fundamentally inferior to you.
Maybe Olmos doesn't get it completely, but the writters of the show clearly set out to make the point from the beginning. Even the noblest characters in the show do horrible things and only very slowly realize that cylons are human in every way that matters.
Actually, this is kind of scary when you think about it. If the mice are actually addicted to the jolt to the pleasure center of the brain, wouldn't that imply that anything that produces a similar jolt could be addictive?
Personally, I always assumed there was a fundamental difference between "I'm addicted to cocaine" and "I'm addicted to World of Warcraft". If this research is confirmed that would mean the difference only one of degree, the cocaine just hits your pleasure center harder and faster. I suppose there is still a difference though, I've never heard of anyone having withdrawal symptoms when they can't play WoW.
To me, this is more of a drive-able airplane than it is a flying car. I know, maybe there isn't any difference but to me a flying car is something that flys which replaces my car. This is something that I can drive on regular roads that replaces my airplane.
It's a different market, a different use, and a very different price point. It might succeed, but personally I still wouldn't call it a successful flying car.
Mars is more like the earth than anywhere else in the solar system
Not to nit-pick, but I would argue that the upper atmosphere of Venus is more Earth-like than the surface of Mars. At a certain altitude, Venus has a similar pressure and temperature to Earth, with the majority of the atmosphere being made up of CO2. Supposedly, a human could survive there with only a respirator and something to protect against acid rain, the same can hardly be said for Mars.
Slashdot Mirror
Only today can someone be sent to jail and put on a sex offender's registry for sexually abusing themselves. Clearly, she is a danger to children and shouldn't be allowed to live within 2000 ft of a school building or daycare for the rest of her life. And certainly, every time she applies for a job this should come up on her background check. Oh, and don't forget to force her to notify her neighbors that she's a sex offender.
I am so tired of the "let's make an example of them" mentality that is used to justify this crap.
This experiment didn't prove that iron fertilization is never going to work as a carbon storage strategy. It showed that, in this situation, the plan didn't work as they thought it would; that hardly means that the strategy itself is unsound. Perhaps the iron seeding needs to be done in areas with lower predator populations. Perhaps they can add something with the iron the drives the predators away. Perhaps... they need to do more research before they say what is and isn't possible.
Just because it didn't work this time doesn't mean the idea should be abandoned, as the researchers themselves seem to indicate. Besides, saying that a single experiment proves anything is at least as unscientific as using models and statistics to do research.
Exactly, there is a big difference between a movie explosion and a real, "I'm trying to kill someone", explosion. They've even shown the difference on the show. If the explosion is a fuel-air explosion meant to look pretty, the Mythbusters are experts at that. If the explosion is a military (or in this case terrorist) grade high explosive, then no, they don't know much more about it than you or I could find online in about ten minutes.
No, this poses the question...
Begging the question would mean that it is a non-logical circular argument.
Given the fact that the size of the fines rule 11 sanctions are set by the judge (not predetermined) I'd say it's more like they leveled a howitzer on the RIAA and the RIAA blinked. Sure, the howitzer might not be loaded, but is it really worth the risk?
For what it's worth, here is what wikipedia has on Rule 11 Sanctions
Rule 11 requires all papers to be signed by the attorney (if party is represented). It also provides for sanctions against the attorney or client for harassment, frivolous arguments, or a lack of factual investigation. The purpose of sanctions is deterrent, not punitive. Courts have broad discretion about the exact nature of the sanction which can include consent to in personam jurisdiction, fines, dismissal of claims, or dismissal of the entire case. The current version of Rule 11 is much more lenient than its 1983 version. Supporters of tort reform in Congress regularly call for legislation to make Rule 11 stricter.
Basically, it's a federal rule meant to deter abuses of the justice system and the fines can be practically whatever the judge wants them to be. That's a pretty scary prospect if you are concerned that you might have pissed off the judge enough that he would impose the sanctions on you, since you don't know how much money you stand to lose.
Ok, I hereby give up my right to sue the school if my child is hurt by drugs in such a way that the event wouldn't have happened had students been strip based on unfounded accusations by other students.
Satisfied?
In many ways steam is better than cracked versions. I don't need to visit a questionable site and download what may or may not be the game I want. Game saves are saved on their site, so no worries about my hard drive crashing. If I'm visiting someone else I can log into steam and download the game to their computer quickly and easily. I don't have to worry about bad/malicious key-gens. I don't have to leave the house to buy a physical copy. Games are (in theory at least) available instantly on release day. I don't need to worry about the being sued for downloaded illegally.
I only have one game on Steam, I prefer physical copies of my media. But Steam does have it's advantages depending on your usage patterns. For me (one gamer in the house, one computer that I play on, seldom take my gaming machine with my on travel) I like the security of having CDs of all my games handy. Someone who travels or wants to maintain their game collection on multiple systems might find steam more convenient.
Courts have interpreted that to mean that they must take whatever steps are within their power as soon as they (meaning any employee of the school) becomes aware of a potential threat.
If I were a parent of a student at this school, I would be infinitely more concerned about children getting strip searched (for any reason) by school personnel than I would be worried about drugs. Forcing a child to remove their clothes in front of an adult based solely on the accusation of another student is absolutely, undeniably unacceptable. If nothing else it sets up the idea in that child's mind that they must unconditionally follow improper orders from school employees. If the principal was that convinced there was a problem, they should have called the police and let them deal with it, not forced a strip search on an innocent student.
The bible might not say how human beings were created but it does give a very specific order for things. Specifically, it gives an order that makes no scientific sense (the earth then the sun). And actually, it does say that Adam was created from the dust of the Earth (which might be vague enough to get away with) and that Eve created from the earth and one of Adam's ribs, which does seam to contradict evolution a bit.
The bible also says (indirectly) that the Earth is only about 6000 years old, that it was completely covered in water at one point in human history, and that humans all spoke one language until they tried to build a tower to heaven and God struck it down and scrambled their brains: all of which seems to contradict geology, archaeology, and astronomy pretty thoroughly. Now, if you are saying that you believe in the Bible as a collection of stories meant to tell us how to to live our life, some based on truth and some based on made up stories, then maybe I can understand that (minus the condoning of slavery, prostitution, beating your wife, killing non-believers, killing the gays, and killing those who eat shellfish).
The problem is that due to the immense size of the subject, it is impossible to teach every student everything known about evolution. What that means is that someone can show you evidence that (due to your limited knowledge) seems to disprove evolution. With more knowledge, every argument against the core of evolution can be rebutted, but the knowledge takes work to find and understand.
Maybe instead of focusing on rebutting every argument made against evolution we should encourage students to find the 'aha!' moment that makes evolution click for them. For me, it was the subject of endogenous retroviruses. Basically, these are viruses that infiltrate the hosts DNA and actually get passed on to offspring. There are chunks of DNA that are present in the exact same spot in most primate DNA, but not those primates that are believed to have branched off earliest. Based on mutations to this DNA, it's even possible to order when each species split off from the common ancestor.
I see no competing explanation for this in the 'theory' of intelligent design, which is the only other theory presented by any number of people. I suppose they could say "that's just the way the primates were designed, with that bit of DNA shared" which of course is the whole problem with ID in the first place: anything you can't explain just means God did it.
Ok then, measure the amount of energy it takes to spin up the disk with an object stationary over it vs with an object moving upwards over it. If it requires more energy to spin up the disk with the moving object over it, and the increased energy is greater than or equal to the potential energy gained by nullified mass upwards, then I'll believe it.
It seems like a pretty straightforward experiment to do and it would go a long, long ways towards proving legitimacy. And yet, no one has done it yet (or at least no one has released any results for it yet). Come up with a theory that says where the energy is coming from, and I'll start to believe, until then it's crank science.
Contact the company that makes the software. I know for a fact it is possible to get demo versions of a lot of software if you are talking about buying it if it works out for you, especially if you are talking about buying a few dozen copies. If nothing else, they'll give you someone to talk to about what the product does and doesn't do, situations that it has and hasn't worked out in the past. At least, if it's an honest company they will, and dishonest companies (believe it or not) tend not to last as long as honest ones.
Well, you say that jokingly but depending on the types of software we are talking about it might be an option. I'm not really an OSS evangilist but I would still recommend it in this case because the company isn't willing or isn't able to purchase the software legally. For technical users, there shouldn't be any problem moving people over to Linux, OpenOffice (I'm not talking about the accounting guys or anything, just the people that it makes sense to move over), and svn. The problem is if the software being pirated is software without good free alternatives.
Unless I'm missing something the options are 1) put your ass on the line and install the software illegally, 2) look for free alternatives, or 3) quit. Personally I'm not loyal enough to my company for #1 and with the job market today I wouldn't want to do #3.
Is that really unexpected?
If I were a scientist I probably wouldn't spend a whole lot of time researching cold fusion either, after all it's just a bad experiment published by some crank researcher decades ago. But then I meet said crank researcher at a conference or on a research project, and he's not a crank at all. For the first time, I hear the other side of the story straight from the source and the other side of the story actually makes sense.
So I agree to assist on one of his experiments so that I can have the chance to run the experiment myself, with help from the original researcher who discovered the effect. I'm watching him so I'll know if he fudges the results or the equipment. Sure enough, the experiment is run and something is going on that looks suspiciously like cold fusion, so we publish a paper.
Later, I continue the research on my own and my experiments (without the supposedly crank researcher even present) produce very similar results, in fact I'm even able to verify that high energy neutrons are produced at much higher than background levels, so I publish another paper.
The point is, after people see the test setup run successfully once, they believe in it enough to risk their career to research it further. Now whether that is 'True Believer' syndrome (where every result looks positive) or just plain excitement over a major discovery is up to interpretation
Gravity Shielding => Perpetual Motion Machine => Violation of Conservation of Energy
If I can shield gravity, I can put half a wheel over my shield and the wheel will spin, even if the effect is only a couple percent. Hurray, for free energy! Now, if there was a power input requirement that was directly related to the amount of mass that was being lifted by the purportedly blocked gravity, it might work; but nothing that I've ever seen on the subject of rotating super-conducting disks has mentioned a required energy input.
The problem is that gravity stores energy. Any time you move an object up or down a gravity well you gain or lose energy, almost by definition. Gravity blocking would allow you to move an object up without putting any energy into the system and no matter what the man says, that is a violation of physics.
Damn text based communication! I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not! How am I supposed to know whether to laugh or get angry?!
I was under the impression that announcing cold fusion was more likely to destroy your career than launch it to new heights. Besides, tenure comes with a much improved budget and more money means better equipment and more thorough experiments. It makes sense that results that were marginal before are shown to be incorrect when more time and effort is invested into them.
In my opinion, it comes down to the fact that something is happening during these experiments, we just don't know what. There have been anomalous neutrons detected many times by many different researchers using this basic setup, in this case they even appear to be high energy. If you wanted to fake the results of your research, why would you pick a topic that is guaranteed to be either laughed out of the room or scrutinized like no other topic would?
Ok, seriously. What could possibly go wrong?
We're talking treating people who are almost certainly going to die anyway with a genetic approach that doesn't have even a theoretical way to spread to other people. The absolute worst thing that could go wrong is that the people being treated die from the treatment. The second worst thing that could happen is that we don't do the treatment and they die anyway; though maybe a bit later.
I'm seriously asking, what do you think could actually go wrong?
From the article you linked...
"These people need their trips to Baja, their spa treatments, their hand jobs," says an official involved in the AIG bailout,...
Wait... what was that? That must be a misquote or something...
..., a serious look on his face, apparently not even half-kidding. "They don't function well without them."
I guess not.
The government wants to tap our phones, we rally against it. On principle as much as anything; the odds are highly against it affecting us individually.
A company patent trolls and sues big name companies without warning, and we advocate patent reform. On principle as much as anything; the companies being sued are usually big enough to protect themselves and absorb losses even if they lose the case.
Why shouldn't we object to this kind of thing on principle too? When senators want to spend money directly on their electorate (essentially buying their votes) instead of for the good of the nation as a whole, why shouldn't we complain? When we give companies billions of dollars to fix their mistakes and they turn around and sue the IRS to recover 300 million on taxes, using our money to pay the court costs, why shouldn't we complain?
Maybe it isn't the major issue, maybe it isn't even a real issue at all (hell, if they were incorrectly taxed why shouldn't they get the money back?) but we fight on principle every day. If we don't stand up and be pissed off about this today, if we don't demand that companies receiving bailouts act for the good of the nation instead of the good of their pocket books, things will only get worse in the future. Yeah, it's .1% of the bailout money we're talking about, but I bet less than .1% of Americans had their phones illegally tapped and less than .1% of patents are held by trolls.
Isn't that, you know, kind of the overarching theme of the show? The dehumanizing of your enemies to the point where no atrocity is unacceptable because the enemy is not just different, but fundamentally inferior to you.
Maybe Olmos doesn't get it completely, but the writters of the show clearly set out to make the point from the beginning. Even the noblest characters in the show do horrible things and only very slowly realize that cylons are human in every way that matters.
Actually, this is kind of scary when you think about it. If the mice are actually addicted to the jolt to the pleasure center of the brain, wouldn't that imply that anything that produces a similar jolt could be addictive?
Personally, I always assumed there was a fundamental difference between "I'm addicted to cocaine" and "I'm addicted to World of Warcraft". If this research is confirmed that would mean the difference only one of degree, the cocaine just hits your pleasure center harder and faster. I suppose there is still a difference though, I've never heard of anyone having withdrawal symptoms when they can't play WoW.
To me, this is more of a drive-able airplane than it is a flying car. I know, maybe there isn't any difference but to me a flying car is something that flys which replaces my car. This is something that I can drive on regular roads that replaces my airplane.
It's a different market, a different use, and a very different price point. It might succeed, but personally I still wouldn't call it a successful flying car.
Mars is more like the earth than anywhere else in the solar system
Not to nit-pick, but I would argue that the upper atmosphere of Venus is more Earth-like than the surface of Mars. At a certain altitude, Venus has a similar pressure and temperature to Earth, with the majority of the atmosphere being made up of CO2. Supposedly, a human could survive there with only a respirator and something to protect against acid rain, the same can hardly be said for Mars.