Both are full of poisons. If you're going to consume psychoactive compounds, at least find a way to do it safely.
The solution to that is even older than rolling cigarettes: Just bake them into cookies (or cakes, if you prefer that). THC has a surprisingly high boiling point of 157C (315F); the denaturing point is even a bit higher than that again, as evidenced by being able to smoke it. It is also acid-tolerant, so it does not decay in your stomach that much. Although of course you do have to realize that it gets absorbed a lot slower, which means you can accidentally consume a larger amount of the stuff than you would when inhaling it.
All things you can learn when you chat up a nice girl in Amsterdam.:)
This from an idjut country that can't even spell 'METRE' correctly.
I know you're fishing for karma with that opening, but may I remind you that the ORIGINAL spelling for the primary units is french:
Mètre, kilogramme, seconde and ampère.
I don't see a single anglo-saxon "idjut" on either side of the Atlantic use the accents or the double-m or the final "e".
For that point, neither so do the Germans: Meter, Kilogramm, Sekunde, Ampere. The Dutch also don't get it quite right: meter, kilogram, seconde, ampère. The Catalans are much weirder: metre, quilogram, segon, ampere And the Spanish finally top it all: metro, kilogramo, segundo, amperio.
One might even get the funny idea, that pretty much every country in the world tried to make the measurements sound "natural" to their citizens. Crazy, isn't it?
But as stated elsewhere, messages are not random, so the laboratory exercise does not represent the real world. When you send a spy in to determine the number of tanks crossing a certain bridge, you don't consider an order for lamb chops and left hand threded eels to be a proper decoding.
Yes, but you don't understand the fundamental problem of your argument. With an OTP, the sentence "0 tanks crossed" is just as likely as the following:
And so on and so forth. You can only run a reasonability analysis, if any of those above was less reasonable than the others. So not only would you need to know that there is a spy and that the spy counted tanks (instead of, say, planes or flowerpots), you would also need to know the exact number he counted and that the spy has not counted wrong. You'd also need to know how he phrased the answer.
In short: You'd need to already know the decoded message to say which decoded message is correct. The reason is very simple: In a One-Time-Pad, the key and message are completely interchangeable. Given only the encrypted text, it is just as hard to find the key as it is to find the original message. This is the ideal property all encryption methods strive for.
A horse-carriage is not the same as a modern automobile -- after all, it does not have a steering wheel or other amenities -- yet people always saw it as enough of a prior art to call it a car; short for horseless carriage.
A feather quill cut and dumped in ink is not exactly the same as a modern ink pen, but who would doubt that the feather is prior art?
Can you deny that the first telephones of Reis, Gray or Bell constitute a real, tangible prior art to modern mobile phones; even though they look and work completely different?
And do you know what all those things I have mentioned have in common: They admit to themselves as having prior art; they fully embrace it and the companies that make them do not intend to sue the crap out of each other for those things they have in common. Rather more, they try to innovate and focus on what makes them different.
So, what makes the Apple products different from their competitors that is also different to their own roots -- the prior art? What makes you buy one in preference to the others? Is it the fact that they have rounded edges? Certainly not. Is it the fact that they are black? Of course not. Is it the basic way you work with them (tapping, looking, reading)? I'd be hard pressed to say that that's the case.
No, you prefer one over the other because of its functional differences; exactly those things that actually set it apart from both its prior art and their competitors; especially in the minds of their customers.
So coming full circle again: The looks of the TNG PADDs and the way you hold them is inconsequential to the question if they constitute prior art, as long as their technical and functional aspects are so similar -- which is undeniably the case.
>> In contrast, most creationists/intelligent designers want to force a single point-of-view, to the exclusion of all the others
So, so wrong. A lot of creationists would be happy having a critique of evolution (like a look at the lack of intermediate species in the fossil record, among other things). But mentioning the suspicious parts of evolution is somehow labeled establishing religion.
Please open any copy of Darwin's "The Origin of Species", please. It is, after all, the book that brought the issue up to public scrutiny in a big deal. And -- contrary to some opinions -- just reading something does not mean that you automatically have to agree with it.
For brevity's sake, I'm just giving you a few of the chapter headings in it:
* Difficulties on the theory of descent with modifications * Absence or rarity of transitional varieties * Organs of small importance * On the imperfection of the geological record * How far the theory of natural selection may be extended
And these are just some of the headings. The text itself contains an even more thorough look at what the theory can explain; what it can't explain and what, if found to be an incorrect assumption, would immediately break its back. The entire thing is a defense of a theory against a torrent of very intelligently put criticisms and pointing out of difficulties.
And, as far as I can remember, we raised or got shown many of the same questions during our school education on this topic. They were discussed and at the end, almost everyone was convinced of it. Not because the teacher said so, but just because it stood the test of an onslaught of people trying to poke holes in it... and it still does!
I know virtually no other scientific idea that was, is and probably will be for our entire lifetime, put under so much scrutiny. And for some reason, no counter-argument has yet managed to break it down; the best they got to, was to show us parts where we did not understand the full implications of the theory yet. And then, by examining it closer, we discovered elements of it that were even more amazing than we thought possible.
Things like the existence of DNA; that horizontal gene transfer is possible between different individuals, groups or species; the role of retro-viruses; the quickness with which adaptation can act, given enough outside pressure; and so on.
So no, I am afraid you overlook just how deeply this entire theory is constantly being evaluated and how hard it is getting poked at. Nowadays, people want to break it, just to see what amazing things we have not yet learned about it.
So, we need to keep religion completely out of education standard.
No, actually we don't. It depends on what the people want, since this is a democracy. If the people are a bunch of religious nuts, then the education standard needs to include religion (whichever flavor the majority wants) and omit evolution (of that's what a majority wants). This is the price of democracy: you have to share with all the other people you co-inhabit a region with.
Be careful where you're heading with that idea, as what you propose is exactly what ages of very intelligent political philosophers have correctly pointed out to be the most brutal and merciless part of democracy: The tyranny of the majority.
If you take a democracy to mean that you put everything to a vote and then blindly enforce what the majority demands, you quickly end up in a nightmarish hellhole.
After all, what if a populist puts up to vote that you must buy and memorize a particular book and you are told that 51% of the people agreed to that? What if it is then put up for the vote, that due to the way voting works, all parties should be merged, and 51% of the people agree? What if is then asked, what you should do with a certain 1% of the population, and 51% of the people agree to seize their property?
With just three, small votes, you're in a wonderful cross between Mao's China, Stalins Soviet Union and -- and this is up to you to choose -- Hitler's Germany, Mussolinis Italy, Franco's Spain, Europe during the Inquisition, the USA during the Indian Displacement, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, etc. pp.
After all, remember that no-one said that those 51% of the population were always the same 51%. As an old adage goes: When they came for the Communists, I didn't say a word. When they came for the Gypsies, I didn't say a word. When they came for the Jews, I didn't say a word. When they came to get me, there was no-one left to say a word to save me.
No, the power of democracy does not lie in the tyranny of the majority; it lies within the civil discourse between all; majorities, minorities, loud or silent. It lies within the concept that everyone must be included to agree on a best course of action. All safe-guards in a democratic society must be laid out to guarantee this fundamental concept. That it must be impossible for any part, to take away the voice of any other part.
And, not to put too fine point on it: Taking away the voice of reason, the process of rational and impassioned evaluation of how we think the world works -- even if that reason might arrive at a conclusion you deem erroneous -- in favour of the voice of dogma, is to deny one of those safeguard of democracy.
TL;DR: The difference is that those teaching evolution do not deny you your right to teach your kid your point-of-view; they only deny you the option of saying that your view is the only way to look at it. In contrast, most creationists/intelligent designers want to force a single point-of-view, to the exclusion of all the others; especially if they come from an impassioned look at the world as it is.
I understood that. What I was more getting at was your statement that the view of the stars should be pretty good -- as good as a near-vacuum.
But actually, during most Martian weather patterns, the view to the stars is pretty shoddy. After all, it's not the air molecules that are blocking your view to the starts on Earth (at night, at least); the three worst culprits are moisture (in the form of clouds/mist), solid airborne particles (dust, sand, ash, etc.) and the simple fact that the overall density of the atmosphere fluctuates from heat convection -- the latter leading to "twinkling" stars.
Now, Mars has virtually no airborne moisture and only high-altitude ice clouds, which is a boon. Unfortunately, this also means that it contains much more solid particles which stay afloat much longer; as they're not washed out of the atmosphere via fog, rain, snow or hail. The third is heat convection. While it helps that there's less air that moves around (which is why modern telescopes are built as high up as possible on Earth), Mars has a much stronger temperature tide. In other words: The difference in atmospheric density between hot and cold areas.
On Earth, this seldom amounts to more than a fraction of a percent compared to the overall density. Whereas on Mars, the density can quite easily vary by 10% even if it's just modestly heated up.
So, on the balance of things, yes, Mars has a better astronomical weather than Earth, but not by much. And in contrast to the moon, where you can see the stars even during the day, on Mars you only see a reddish haze.
Again, as a comparison: moving just 100 times slower than light is still pretty damn fast. Having 100 times less atmosphere than Earth is, for many purposes, still pretty damn dense.
The atmosphere is so thin it's basically vacuum, so the view of the stars should be pretty good. If we could engineer cottonwood trees that thrive in vacuum, high radiation, temperatures as low as -150 celcius, and no water, we'd be good there too. Of course then we'd have to engineer humans that didn't suffer bone decalcification due to the low gravity...
Snarky as your comment may have been meant, I think you need to check your numbers again what constitutes "so thin it's basically vacuum."
Mars has an average surface atmospheric pressure of 0.636 kPa. Earth has 101.325 kPa. So yes, while it is 160-times thinner, that's still pretty thick, especially if dust is kicked up. After all, remember that with 1/3rd gravity, much less air friction and no moisture, dust particles can stay afloat for quite some time.
And then, compare that to the moon, with a pressure of 10^-7 kPa (~1 nPa), Mars still has a 6.36 million times denser atmosphere. And compared to interplanetary space, that's still practically solid, as space has 400.000 times less pressure.
In other words: If Mars is a near-vacuum at nearly 10^17 times more molecules per cm than interplanetary space, then a snail that moves at only 3*10^10 cm/s.
Just like there does not seem a topic for which you can't find a quote from The Simpsons?
Behold the might of the law of large numbers and the infinite monkey theorem! Given enough input, you can find almost anything in everything and match almost everything to something else.
Just about anyone can be talked through landing an airplane (poorly) given lots of time and ideal conditions. Now try it in a storm.
That is why you have an autopilot in place. There is no reason not to assume that the instructions you would get is: See the center-left screen. Please press the button labeled "Autopilot", then select "Emergency landing approach protocol". Of course, this is only peripherally related to the topic at hand.
Battlefield medicine is a lot of manual dexterity and muscle memory. By the time some computer talks you through the first suture knot the patient is long dead. And ten or fifteen more behind him.
Who said you wouldn't get any training with the system before battle? Remember, I'm not talking about the entire idea from the article, only the subsection that deals with augmented reality extended by an expert system.
Basically, your argument boils down to this: Imagine that your grandparents have not seen a computer or dealt with one for most of their life. For them, it sure might be possible to get and see an E-Mail with the pictures you've just sent them, but they certainly can't be expected to browse the web to find the codecs they need to watch the OGG-Theora movie you've also attached. There might be exceptions, but they're bound to be rare.
But your siblings, who grew up at the same time as you; even if they never studied computers in detail, might correctly understand what you told them to do. And for you yourself, and millions around you, this action comes almost as second nature -- not because you might have professionally studied it, but because they were simply subjected to it.
Now imagine every single soldier being equipped with such a system. Being told to trust it. Having learnt to use it even under the duress of combat. To have it integrated into their daily drill. No, they would not need to study medicine; but just by being subjected to a system that puts that knowledge in their hand (so to speak), they can become far more capable than what the current pure first-aid-medic system can give.
As I said: It would not replace medical doctors, hospitals or med-evacs. Instead, it would improve the immediate situation at hand until proper help could arrive.
Just compare the injury-to-death rates of historical battles with modern battles. Even though the number of injured people can be much higher today, the plain fact that you're most likely not going to lie in the dirt for a few hours until the battle is over is saving scores of people.
That, plus "democratically" peforming specialist tasks doesn't seem like a terribly good idea. Who'd want to have their wounds tended by a political scientist? I wouldn't...
You forget that with a sufficiently advanced expert system that is guiding the actions of the person in question, many complex tasks boil down to an execution of relatively simple steps.
For example: Most people could not land an airplane on their own. But as the Mythbusters have shown, if an expert (or expert system) is guiding you through the steps, almost everyone can do it.
So, if I have the choice between sharing a single, specialized medic who could do brain surgery without help but can only tend to one patient at a time, or just giving the soldier next to me the ability to do something simple like ensuring that my heart keeps beating and my blood doesn't spill everywhere while they call the med-evac; I'll gladly take the second option. If there's a system in place that makes sure the soldier next to me doesn't accidentally administer a fatal dose of morphine, all the better!
As always: The solution does not need to be perfect, as long as it is better than what is currently in place.
That is not not something Ayn Rand was the first to state. It's even older than basic capitalism. For example, the ancient Greek and Romans knew that while slave labour was bad for the slave, it was essential for their society, and thus a net-gain for it.
But as you can quite clearly see, whether a net-gain for society is morally good or wrong depends on what kind of society you are talking about.
And then of course, the windowmaker-fallacy is also not very far away. Just because you break a window and give a window-maker a new job, that doesn't mean that it's a net-gain.
As good and as valuable as more automation is (after all, for most people the times of 60h+ working weeks are long over), there are some corner-cases where its over-all effect can be and is damaging.
I missed the part of the bible that specified that injecting a homosexual man with estrogen, causing his breasts to begin to develop, would cure him of homosexuality. Would you be so kind as point that out?
There are always three things to any written pronouncement: The letter, the spirit and the application. In law terms it means that the letter of the law (the text that is read by you) is not a complete picture of the spirit of the law (what those who wrote it intended), and that how it is applied (what those who read it do with it) is not a perfect representation of either of the the two former things.
In your example, the Old Testament merely states that homosexuality is a grave sin and should be punished in the life just as it is punished in the afterlife. The spirit of it was just good, old, plain homophobia. The application of it by those who follow that creed can range from tacit disapproval to burn-them-at-the-stake. Somewhere in the middle-ground is chemical castration as happened to Turing.
So, even though the OT did not proscribe that punishment directly, it is responsible for, or at least an expression of, the belief that homosexuals ought to be punished. So if you think the application is morally wrong, you can't escape the argument that the letter is also or even just as morally wrong.
Or in other terms: I missed the part of the 2nd Amendment to the US constitution where it says people may buy assault rifles, rocket launchers and autocannons. Would you be so kind as point that out? I missed the part in the manual of my car where it said you should not strap rocket boosters onto it. Would you be so kind as point that out?
Or, to put it in really simple, Hollywood-compatible terms: I missed the part of the Army Handbook where it says where to find the mess hall. But if it isn't explicitly described in there, how could you have ever found the mess hall?
That was my first thought too, but in a lot of cases (in Australia at least) reception on those back roads is pretty ordinary at best, and would likely drop to nothing when upside-down in a ditch, so i'm wondering about the usefulness of this idea... it would certainly have it's uses but if the primary use-case is the "upside down in a ditch on a back road" then i'm not so sure.
Well, Europe (specifically the area governed by the EU) is not the same as Australia.
Here, you're very hard pressed to find places that do not qualify as someone's back road outside of a few mountain streets.
And well, if you drive off of a mountain street, the "golden" window where people can actually help you has usually already passed the moment your car lost contact with the street.
Careful what you wish for, it might lead to a lot more dead kids. Hint: Dead rape victims can't talk.
Any good forensic examiner would like to disagree with you.
True, you should probably visit a psychiatrist if you think you hear the dead speak, but that does not mean that they can't talk.
Three guesses why the Mafia and certain other organized criminals give you concrete shoes -- or even directly cut out the watery middle-man and simply embed you completely in concrete.
Remember: In the family, the Omertà and oath of silence extends even beyond death.
You might want to reread that quote from Adams. He did not express any of the erroneous formulas that you stipulate. Here's the full quote in all its glory:
It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, but that not every one is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite nuber of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so if every planet in the Universe has a populations of zero then the entire population of the Universe must also be zero, and any people you may actually meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
So what he's actually saying is this: X = # of worlds; Y = # of inhabited Worlds; X = infinite; Y = finite; infinite number >>> finite number (infinity has a higher magnitude than any finite number) It follows: X/Y = 0 - epsilon, where epsilon approaches 0 infinitely close. Thus: Average density of life per world so close to zero, that it functionally IS zero (remember, just like: 0.99999... = 1)
Summary: Any life one sees must be the product of a deranged mind. You could even go so far as calling it imaginary.
Actual summary: Expressing humorous quotes in terms of maths is exactly what it takes to take the humour out of them.
I would have given you a +1 funny, if I had not already posted here; AC or not.:)
The fact that such prime opportunities for jokes always escape my attention probably says a lot about me. Now, of course, whether it's saying something good or bad lies, as always, in the eye of the beholder.:D
So. A measure of both distance and time, depending on your context.
No. A parsec is "a distance corresponding to a parallax of one second". But here, "second" does not refer to the unit of time "second" but to an "arc-second", a specific angular value. If you have a circle, and you divide it into 360 parts, a single slice covers an angle of exactly one "degree" (do note that this in turn also does not refer to temperature). If you divide that slice into 60 parts, each slice covers an angle of 1 arc-minute. If you divide such a slice into another 60 parts, you get an angle that covers 1 arc-second.
As for what a parallax is, please read the link provided by the grandparent.
But even if you had used a unit of time to define the parsec -- like in the light-year -- what you actually define is a pure length. Do note that you can define a light-year as both "the distance light crosses in an absolute vacuum in one solar year" or "9.4605284 x 10^15 meters". See how the latter does not include any reference to time? You could even express the light-year as the distance you can drive an object of a certain mass and shape when you accelerate it with a certain energy through a perfectly uniform medium of a certain density (thus slowing down the object eventually to a standstill).
You can define a length with the help of a unit of time, but you don't need to. That is also why the 1 astronomical unit distance used in the parsec is also not a unit of time; as the fact that it derives from the rotation of the earth around the sun is unimportant as long as the ultimately defined value remains a pure time.
You do know that you can run an Emulator with arbitrary speed? It is not the instruction set or register layout or memory model that is restricting performance. It's the hardware itself that puts a limit on that.
Heck, even if you use real hardware, you could produce a >1GHz 6502 CPU, if you wanted to do it. It will be identical to the 6502 in everything but the clock speed and some minor hardware layout alterations to cope with these speeds (even small bends in the wires start to act as an antenna at these speeds).
And if you use a software emulator (which this Minecraft Mod is for all intents and purposes), you can run it as fast as your host platform allows. This is why you can run a Nintendo Emulator at >200x the real speed of the original hardware.
But that very same strength is gonna weigh MSFT down like a boat anchor because you can't run Windows x86 programs on ARM and at least for now neither Intel nor AMD is pushing x86 smartphones.
Ahem, your entire point disintegrates with a single Google search:
Intel is pushing HARD into the direction of getting x86 handsets, smartphones and tablets out into the open; that's pretty much one of the main reasons they bought Infineon Wireless for 1.4 Billion USD; the second biggest RF-chip producer in the world after Qualcomm. Intel wasn't in the smartphone/handset market and they wanted (and still want) to get into it.
And as soon as you have x86 on your smartphone, and Win8 on top of it, suddenly you can run ~95% of all Windows applications unmodified on your smartphone or tablet. That is a sales argument, if I've ever seen one.
You can live with not doing it, but taking a soft cloth greatly improves things. Using newspaper sheets is somewhat pointless for most displays. Taking sandpaper is pretty much the definition of a Pyrrhic victory. Taking a sandblaster, though, is quite generally considered the sign of a thoroughly confused mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Both are full of poisons. If you're going to consume psychoactive compounds, at least find a way to do it safely.
The solution to that is even older than rolling cigarettes: Just bake them into cookies (or cakes, if you prefer that). THC has a surprisingly high boiling point of 157C (315F); the denaturing point is even a bit higher than that again, as evidenced by being able to smoke it. It is also acid-tolerant, so it does not decay in your stomach that much.
Although of course you do have to realize that it gets absorbed a lot slower, which means you can accidentally consume a larger amount of the stuff than you would when inhaling it.
All things you can learn when you chat up a nice girl in Amsterdam. :)
This from an idjut country that can't even spell 'METRE' correctly.
I know you're fishing for karma with that opening, but may I remind you that the ORIGINAL spelling for the primary units is french:
Mètre, kilogramme, seconde and ampère.
I don't see a single anglo-saxon "idjut" on either side of the Atlantic use the accents or the double-m or the final "e".
For that point, neither so do the Germans: Meter, Kilogramm, Sekunde, Ampere.
The Dutch also don't get it quite right: meter, kilogram, seconde, ampère.
The Catalans are much weirder: metre, quilogram, segon, ampere
And the Spanish finally top it all: metro, kilogramo, segundo, amperio.
One might even get the funny idea, that pretty much every country in the world tried to make the measurements sound "natural" to their citizens. Crazy, isn't it?
But as stated elsewhere, messages are not random, so the laboratory exercise does not represent the real world.
When you send a spy in to determine the number of tanks crossing a certain bridge, you don't consider an order for lamb chops and left hand threded eels to be a proper decoding.
Yes, but you don't understand the fundamental problem of your argument. With an OTP, the sentence "0 tanks crossed" is just as likely as the following:
"2 tanks crossed"
"3 tanks crossed"
"4 tanks crossed"
[...]
"144 tanks cross"
"346 tanks cross"
And so on and so forth. You can only run a reasonability analysis, if any of those above was less reasonable than the others. So not only would you need to know that there is a spy and that the spy counted tanks (instead of, say, planes or flowerpots), you would also need to know the exact number he counted and that the spy has not counted wrong. You'd also need to know how he phrased the answer.
In short: You'd need to already know the decoded message to say which decoded message is correct. The reason is very simple: In a One-Time-Pad, the key and message are completely interchangeable. Given only the encrypted text, it is just as hard to find the key as it is to find the original message. This is the ideal property all encryption methods strive for.
Ahhh, then I stand somewhat corrected, as the horse carriage derives from an even older form of a horse-powered carriage. Thanks for that insight!
Of course, this only strengthens my point, ya know. ;-)
P.S.: Being a German myself, your username is amusingly uncomfortable. :D
A horse-carriage is not the same as a modern automobile -- after all, it does not have a steering wheel or other amenities -- yet people always saw it as enough of a prior art to call it a car; short for horseless carriage.
A feather quill cut and dumped in ink is not exactly the same as a modern ink pen, but who would doubt that the feather is prior art?
Can you deny that the first telephones of Reis, Gray or Bell constitute a real, tangible prior art to modern mobile phones; even though they look and work completely different?
And do you know what all those things I have mentioned have in common: They admit to themselves as having prior art; they fully embrace it and the companies that make them do not intend to sue the crap out of each other for those things they have in common. Rather more, they try to innovate and focus on what makes them different.
So, what makes the Apple products different from their competitors that is also different to their own roots -- the prior art? What makes you buy one in preference to the others? Is it the fact that they have rounded edges? Certainly not. Is it the fact that they are black? Of course not. Is it the basic way you work with them (tapping, looking, reading)? I'd be hard pressed to say that that's the case.
No, you prefer one over the other because of its functional differences; exactly those things that actually set it apart from both its prior art and their competitors; especially in the minds of their customers.
So coming full circle again: The looks of the TNG PADDs and the way you hold them is inconsequential to the question if they constitute prior art, as long as their technical and functional aspects are so similar -- which is undeniably the case.
>> In contrast, most creationists/intelligent designers want to force a single point-of-view, to the exclusion of all the others
So, so wrong. A lot of creationists would be happy having a critique of evolution (like a look at the lack of intermediate species in the fossil record, among other things). But mentioning the suspicious parts of evolution is somehow labeled establishing religion.
Please open any copy of Darwin's "The Origin of Species", please. It is, after all, the book that brought the issue up to public scrutiny in a big deal. And -- contrary to some opinions -- just reading something does not mean that you automatically have to agree with it.
For brevity's sake, I'm just giving you a few of the chapter headings in it:
* Difficulties on the theory of descent with modifications
* Absence or rarity of transitional varieties
* Organs of small importance
* On the imperfection of the geological record
* How far the theory of natural selection may be extended
And these are just some of the headings. The text itself contains an even more thorough look at what the theory can explain; what it can't explain and what, if found to be an incorrect assumption, would immediately break its back. The entire thing is a defense of a theory against a torrent of very intelligently put criticisms and pointing out of difficulties.
And, as far as I can remember, we raised or got shown many of the same questions during our school education on this topic. They were discussed and at the end, almost everyone was convinced of it. Not because the teacher said so, but just because it stood the test of an onslaught of people trying to poke holes in it ... and it still does!
I know virtually no other scientific idea that was, is and probably will be for our entire lifetime, put under so much scrutiny. And for some reason, no counter-argument has yet managed to break it down; the best they got to, was to show us parts where we did not understand the full implications of the theory yet. And then, by examining it closer, we discovered elements of it that were even more amazing than we thought possible.
Things like the existence of DNA; that horizontal gene transfer is possible between different individuals, groups or species; the role of retro-viruses; the quickness with which adaptation can act, given enough outside pressure; and so on.
So no, I am afraid you overlook just how deeply this entire theory is constantly being evaluated and how hard it is getting poked at. Nowadays, people want to break it, just to see what amazing things we have not yet learned about it.
So, we need to keep religion completely out of education standard.
No, actually we don't. It depends on what the people want, since this is a democracy. If the people are a bunch of religious nuts, then the education standard needs to include religion (whichever flavor the majority wants) and omit evolution (of that's what a majority wants). This is the price of democracy: you have to share with all the other people you co-inhabit a region with.
Be careful where you're heading with that idea, as what you propose is exactly what ages of very intelligent political philosophers have correctly pointed out to be the most brutal and merciless part of democracy: The tyranny of the majority.
If you take a democracy to mean that you put everything to a vote and then blindly enforce what the majority demands, you quickly end up in a nightmarish hellhole.
After all, what if a populist puts up to vote that you must buy and memorize a particular book and you are told that 51% of the people agreed to that?
What if it is then put up for the vote, that due to the way voting works, all parties should be merged, and 51% of the people agree?
What if is then asked, what you should do with a certain 1% of the population, and 51% of the people agree to seize their property?
With just three, small votes, you're in a wonderful cross between Mao's China, Stalins Soviet Union and -- and this is up to you to choose -- Hitler's Germany, Mussolinis Italy, Franco's Spain, Europe during the Inquisition, the USA during the Indian Displacement, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, etc. pp.
After all, remember that no-one said that those 51% of the population were always the same 51%. As an old adage goes: When they came for the Communists, I didn't say a word. When they came for the Gypsies, I didn't say a word. When they came for the Jews, I didn't say a word. When they came to get me, there was no-one left to say a word to save me.
No, the power of democracy does not lie in the tyranny of the majority; it lies within the civil discourse between all; majorities, minorities, loud or silent. It lies within the concept that everyone must be included to agree on a best course of action. All safe-guards in a democratic society must be laid out to guarantee this fundamental concept. That it must be impossible for any part, to take away the voice of any other part.
And, not to put too fine point on it: Taking away the voice of reason, the process of rational and impassioned evaluation of how we think the world works -- even if that reason might arrive at a conclusion you deem erroneous -- in favour of the voice of dogma, is to deny one of those safeguard of democracy.
TL;DR:
The difference is that those teaching evolution do not deny you your right to teach your kid your point-of-view; they only deny you the option of saying that your view is the only way to look at it. In contrast, most creationists/intelligent designers want to force a single point-of-view, to the exclusion of all the others; especially if they come from an impassioned look at the world as it is.
I understood that. What I was more getting at was your statement that the view of the stars should be pretty good -- as good as a near-vacuum.
But actually, during most Martian weather patterns, the view to the stars is pretty shoddy. After all, it's not the air molecules that are blocking your view to the starts on Earth (at night, at least); the three worst culprits are moisture (in the form of clouds/mist), solid airborne particles (dust, sand, ash, etc.) and the simple fact that the overall density of the atmosphere fluctuates from heat convection -- the latter leading to "twinkling" stars.
Now, Mars has virtually no airborne moisture and only high-altitude ice clouds, which is a boon. Unfortunately, this also means that it contains much more solid particles which stay afloat much longer; as they're not washed out of the atmosphere via fog, rain, snow or hail. The third is heat convection. While it helps that there's less air that moves around (which is why modern telescopes are built as high up as possible on Earth), Mars has a much stronger temperature tide. In other words: The difference in atmospheric density between hot and cold areas.
On Earth, this seldom amounts to more than a fraction of a percent compared to the overall density.
Whereas on Mars, the density can quite easily vary by 10% even if it's just modestly heated up.
So, on the balance of things, yes, Mars has a better astronomical weather than Earth, but not by much. And in contrast to the moon, where you can see the stars even during the day, on Mars you only see a reddish haze.
Again, as a comparison: moving just 100 times slower than light is still pretty damn fast. Having 100 times less atmosphere than Earth is, for many purposes, still pretty damn dense.
The atmosphere is so thin it's basically vacuum, so the view of the stars should be pretty good. If we could engineer cottonwood trees that thrive in vacuum, high radiation, temperatures as low as -150 celcius, and no water, we'd be good there too. Of course then we'd have to engineer humans that didn't suffer bone decalcification due to the low gravity...
Snarky as your comment may have been meant, I think you need to check your numbers again what constitutes "so thin it's basically vacuum."
Mars has an average surface atmospheric pressure of 0.636 kPa. Earth has 101.325 kPa. So yes, while it is 160-times thinner, that's still pretty thick, especially if dust is kicked up. After all, remember that with 1/3rd gravity, much less air friction and no moisture, dust particles can stay afloat for quite some time.
And then, compare that to the moon, with a pressure of 10^-7 kPa (~1 nPa), Mars still has a 6.36 million times denser atmosphere. And compared to interplanetary space, that's still practically solid, as space has 400.000 times less pressure.
In other words: If Mars is a near-vacuum at nearly 10^17 times more molecules per cm than interplanetary space, then a snail that moves at only 3*10^10 cm/s.
Just like there does not seem a topic for which you can't find a quote from The Simpsons?
Behold the might of the law of large numbers and the infinite monkey theorem! Given enough input, you can find almost anything in everything and match almost everything to something else.
Just about anyone can be talked through landing an airplane (poorly) given lots of time and ideal conditions. Now try it in a storm.
That is why you have an autopilot in place. There is no reason not to assume that the instructions you would get is: See the center-left screen. Please press the button labeled "Autopilot", then select "Emergency landing approach protocol". Of course, this is only peripherally related to the topic at hand.
Battlefield medicine is a lot of manual dexterity and muscle memory. By the time some computer talks you through the first suture knot the patient is long dead. And ten or fifteen more behind him.
Who said you wouldn't get any training with the system before battle? Remember, I'm not talking about the entire idea from the article, only the subsection that deals with augmented reality extended by an expert system.
Basically, your argument boils down to this: Imagine that your grandparents have not seen a computer or dealt with one for most of their life. For them, it sure might be possible to get and see an E-Mail with the pictures you've just sent them, but they certainly can't be expected to browse the web to find the codecs they need to watch the OGG-Theora movie you've also attached. There might be exceptions, but they're bound to be rare.
But your siblings, who grew up at the same time as you; even if they never studied computers in detail, might correctly understand what you told them to do. And for you yourself, and millions around you, this action comes almost as second nature -- not because you might have professionally studied it, but because they were simply subjected to it.
Now imagine every single soldier being equipped with such a system. Being told to trust it. Having learnt to use it even under the duress of combat. To have it integrated into their daily drill. No, they would not need to study medicine; but just by being subjected to a system that puts that knowledge in their hand (so to speak), they can become far more capable than what the current pure first-aid-medic system can give.
As I said: It would not replace medical doctors, hospitals or med-evacs. Instead, it would improve the immediate situation at hand until proper help could arrive.
Just compare the injury-to-death rates of historical battles with modern battles. Even though the number of injured people can be much higher today, the plain fact that you're most likely not going to lie in the dirt for a few hours until the battle is over is saving scores of people.
That, plus "democratically" peforming specialist tasks doesn't seem like a terribly good idea. Who'd want to have their wounds tended by a political scientist? I wouldn't...
You forget that with a sufficiently advanced expert system that is guiding the actions of the person in question, many complex tasks boil down to an execution of relatively simple steps.
For example: Most people could not land an airplane on their own. But as the Mythbusters have shown, if an expert (or expert system) is guiding you through the steps, almost everyone can do it.
So, if I have the choice between sharing a single, specialized medic who could do brain surgery without help but can only tend to one patient at a time, or just giving the soldier next to me the ability to do something simple like ensuring that my heart keeps beating and my blood doesn't spill everywhere while they call the med-evac; I'll gladly take the second option. If there's a system in place that makes sure the soldier next to me doesn't accidentally administer a fatal dose of morphine, all the better!
As always: The solution does not need to be perfect, as long as it is better than what is currently in place.
That is not not something Ayn Rand was the first to state. It's even older than basic capitalism. For example, the ancient Greek and Romans knew that while slave labour was bad for the slave, it was essential for their society, and thus a net-gain for it.
But as you can quite clearly see, whether a net-gain for society is morally good or wrong depends on what kind of society you are talking about.
And then of course, the windowmaker-fallacy is also not very far away. Just because you break a window and give a window-maker a new job, that doesn't mean that it's a net-gain.
As good and as valuable as more automation is (after all, for most people the times of 60h+ working weeks are long over), there are some corner-cases where its over-all effect can be and is damaging.
I missed the part of the bible that specified that injecting a homosexual man with estrogen, causing his breasts to begin to develop, would cure him of homosexuality. Would you be so kind as point that out?
There are always three things to any written pronouncement: The letter, the spirit and the application. In law terms it means that the letter of the law (the text that is read by you) is not a complete picture of the spirit of the law (what those who wrote it intended), and that how it is applied (what those who read it do with it) is not a perfect representation of either of the the two former things.
In your example, the Old Testament merely states that homosexuality is a grave sin and should be punished in the life just as it is punished in the afterlife. The spirit of it was just good, old, plain homophobia. The application of it by those who follow that creed can range from tacit disapproval to burn-them-at-the-stake. Somewhere in the middle-ground is chemical castration as happened to Turing.
So, even though the OT did not proscribe that punishment directly, it is responsible for, or at least an expression of, the belief that homosexuals ought to be punished. So if you think the application is morally wrong, you can't escape the argument that the letter is also or even just as morally wrong.
Or in other terms:
I missed the part of the 2nd Amendment to the US constitution where it says people may buy assault rifles, rocket launchers and autocannons. Would you be so kind as point that out?
I missed the part in the manual of my car where it said you should not strap rocket boosters onto it. Would you be so kind as point that out?
Or, to put it in really simple, Hollywood-compatible terms:
I missed the part of the Army Handbook where it says where to find the mess hall. But if it isn't explicitly described in there, how could you have ever found the mess hall?
That was my first thought too, but in a lot of cases (in Australia at least) reception on those back roads is pretty ordinary at best, and would likely drop to nothing when upside-down in a ditch, so i'm wondering about the usefulness of this idea... it would certainly have it's uses but if the primary use-case is the "upside down in a ditch on a back road" then i'm not so sure.
Well, Europe (specifically the area governed by the EU) is not the same as Australia.
Here, you're very hard pressed to find places that do not qualify as someone's back road outside of a few mountain streets.
And well, if you drive off of a mountain street, the "golden" window where people can actually help you has usually already passed the moment your car lost contact with the street.
Careful what you wish for, it might lead to a lot more dead kids. Hint: Dead rape victims can't talk.
Any good forensic examiner would like to disagree with you.
True, you should probably visit a psychiatrist if you think you hear the dead speak, but that does not mean that they can't talk.
Three guesses why the Mafia and certain other organized criminals give you concrete shoes -- or even directly cut out the watery middle-man and simply embed you completely in concrete.
Remember: In the family, the Omertà and oath of silence extends even beyond death.
Errata (just like in any good book about maths): X/Y = 0 + epsilon
You might want to reread that quote from Adams. He did not express any of the erroneous formulas that you stipulate. Here's the full quote in all its glory:
It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, but that not every one is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite nuber of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so if every planet in the Universe has a populations of zero then the entire population of the Universe must also be zero, and any people you may actually meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
So what he's actually saying is this:
X = # of worlds;
Y = # of inhabited Worlds;
X = infinite;
Y = finite;
infinite number >>> finite number (infinity has a higher magnitude than any finite number)
It follows: X/Y = 0 - epsilon, where epsilon approaches 0 infinitely close.
Thus: Average density of life per world so close to zero, that it functionally IS zero (remember, just like: 0.99999... = 1)
Summary: Any life one sees must be the product of a deranged mind. You could even go so far as calling it imaginary.
Actual summary: Expressing humorous quotes in terms of maths is exactly what it takes to take the humour out of them.
I would have given you a +1 funny, if I had not already posted here; AC or not. :)
The fact that such prime opportunities for jokes always escape my attention probably says a lot about me. Now, of course, whether it's saying something good or bad lies, as always, in the eye of the beholder. :D
[...] the ultimately defined value remains a pure time.
Please mentally replace that part with "the ultimately defined value remains a pure unit of distance."
So. A measure of both distance and time, depending on your context.
No. A parsec is "a distance corresponding to a parallax of one second". But here, "second" does not refer to the unit of time "second" but to an "arc-second", a specific angular value. If you have a circle, and you divide it into 360 parts, a single slice covers an angle of exactly one "degree" (do note that this in turn also does not refer to temperature). If you divide that slice into 60 parts, each slice covers an angle of 1 arc-minute. If you divide such a slice into another 60 parts, you get an angle that covers 1 arc-second.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcsecond#Symbols_and_abbreviations
As for what a parallax is, please read the link provided by the grandparent.
But even if you had used a unit of time to define the parsec -- like in the light-year -- what you actually define is a pure length. Do note that you can define a light-year as both "the distance light crosses in an absolute vacuum in one solar year" or "9.4605284 x 10^15 meters". See how the latter does not include any reference to time? You could even express the light-year as the distance you can drive an object of a certain mass and shape when you accelerate it with a certain energy through a perfectly uniform medium of a certain density (thus slowing down the object eventually to a standstill).
You can define a length with the help of a unit of time, but you don't need to. That is also why the 1 astronomical unit distance used in the parsec is also not a unit of time; as the fact that it derives from the rotation of the earth around the sun is unimportant as long as the ultimately defined value remains a pure time.
I doubt the 6502 has the horsepower for it...
You do know that you can run an Emulator with arbitrary speed? It is not the instruction set or register layout or memory model that is restricting performance. It's the hardware itself that puts a limit on that.
Heck, even if you use real hardware, you could produce a >1GHz 6502 CPU, if you wanted to do it. It will be identical to the 6502 in everything but the clock speed and some minor hardware layout alterations to cope with these speeds (even small bends in the wires start to act as an antenna at these speeds).
And if you use a software emulator (which this Minecraft Mod is for all intents and purposes), you can run it as fast as your host platform allows. This is why you can run a Nintendo Emulator at >200x the real speed of the original hardware.
Correct link for non-german speakers:
https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+medfield
Copy+Paste gives you great power, but with great power... :)
But that very same strength is gonna weigh MSFT down like a boat anchor because you can't run Windows x86 programs on ARM and at least for now neither Intel nor AMD is pushing x86 smartphones.
Ahem, your entire point disintegrates with a single Google search:
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=intel+medfield
Intel is pushing HARD into the direction of getting x86 handsets, smartphones and tablets out into the open; that's pretty much one of the main reasons they bought Infineon Wireless for 1.4 Billion USD; the second biggest RF-chip producer in the world after Qualcomm. Intel wasn't in the smartphone/handset market and they wanted (and still want) to get into it.
And as soon as you have x86 on your smartphone, and Win8 on top of it, suddenly you can run ~95% of all Windows applications unmodified on your smartphone or tablet. That is a sales argument, if I've ever seen one.
So its like defragging your hard drive?
I'd compare it more to cleaning your display.
You can live with not doing it, but taking a soft cloth greatly improves things. Using newspaper sheets is somewhat pointless for most displays. Taking sandpaper is pretty much the definition of a Pyrrhic victory. Taking a sandblaster, though, is quite generally considered the sign of a thoroughly confused mind.