Re:The LHC should be destroyed
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 4, Interesting
It's pretty obvious you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about
In the first place, our current understanding is that black holes DO dissipate, through Hawking Radiation. Tiny black holes fade away almost instantaneously.
In the second place, tiny black holes are formed all the time. When interstellar dust hits the atmosphere, the resulting energy discharge can form tiny black holes, and fairly often. Most of them dissipate harmlessly.
Wait, there's more! Some black holes DO form when they hit the atmosphere and survive. Know what happens to them? Well, first consider how small a chunk of mass dense enough to be considered a black hole has to be when it's composed of the equivalent of a few protons. We are talking sub-electron size here. These black holes sink to the center of the Earth, but are so small they don't interact with any atoms on the way down. They sit at the center of the Earth, absorbing a new particle every few thousand years.
Events with the power of the LHC happen all the time at the edges of the atmosphere, and if they really had a reasonable capacity to cause a catastrophic event, it would have happened naturally many times over already.
That said, the night before collisions start, I'm having an End of the Universe party.
Scientific progression is not always this ultra-formalized process you speak of; it usually (almost always, and certainly it is vetted after the initial discovery) is today, but especially in the past, our current standards of statistics and peer review did not exist. That doesn't mean that the earliest days of the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the work of Newton didn't constitute an advancement of science. Science is not some monolithic process you must live and die by...that's only our current setup of academia and what our scientific community is willing to accept as proper science (to better weed out the people who will just waste everyone's time).
The essence of science - and what I think they're getting at in the article - is that science consists a discarding of what assumptions you bring to the table and begin analysis based on what can be observed rather than what you thought was the case. It's following evidence, wherever it leads. Statistical analysis and peer review are simply tools, helping us make the discovery and analysis in science more efficient and trustworthy. They are not the process itself.
So we should pander to your habits and make cars and, by extension, roads, neighborhoods and entire cities artificially louder?
This is an unfortunate problem, but the solution cannot be to just force cars to make noise. Are we going to stick playing cards in the spokes? What if cars didn't make noise in the first place...this wouldn't be the problem. Surely there is another solution.
Somehow, this mission strikes me as one of the coolest things NASA's done in a while. It's a struggling unit of the organization, working with spare parts from scrapped projects, jury-rigging a satellite together that will tow the spent upper stage of a rocket to the moon and smash the chunk of metal otherwise slated to be space debris into the closest heavenly body to send an Earth-visible (with a decent telescope) plume from one of its poles. Finally, it will analyze the plume to figure out if there's ice there.
Jesus H. Rollerskating Christ, the mere fact that I don't believe in Christianity doesn't mean I can't love to use their paragons as god damned epithets.
The other part that makes it unconstitutional is that it is an unreasonable restriction of only one type of expression. ONLY video games are regulated in this way. Movies, books, music and other forms of media are left untouched, which makes it an unfair restriction of the free expression of video games by imposing requirements on solely that kind of expression in order for it to be available.
A state law would have a better chance of passing constitutional muster if it passed a labeling law for ALL media, including books, music, magazines, newspapers, movies, television shows and every other method by which we get information. But you can see how obviously complicated and ridiculous that would get.
A gold-backed dollar is every bit as illusory as a non-backed dollar. The only thing that makes ANY currency worth ANYTHING is that people are willing to accept it and be sure they will be able to spend it themselves. Gold is no more immune to this than paper dollars in the United States - unless the fact that gold is shiny and malleable makes it carry more intrinsic value. The only reason gold has any value is that we assign it value, which exactly why money has value.
People who think returning to a gold-backed dollar would be in any way useful lack some extraordinarily basic economic education. If we were sticking to gold-backed dollars right now, gold's value would plummet just as much as the dollar's.
What the developers and studios want is to reach their audience: gamers. PAX, as a gathering specifically of gamers, by games and for gamers, is certainly not the only venue for this, but it provides an unprecedented level of access to a core gaming demographic. Tycho and Gabe have long been known as powerhouses in the industry, and PAX is an extension of that power: bringing huge numbers of gamers into one location, gathering all of the gaming press that's worth its salt and, now, providing studios to engage that audience on the gamers' terms, not on the terms of publishers or the press or anyone else.
PAX's exhibitor list is phenomenal; it may not be the new E3, but it is stepping up nicely as the premier annual gathering of the video game industry, which means that it will pull bigger and bigger announcements as it goes. I expect to hear more actual news and surprises out of PAX than E3 this year.
The Ex Post Facto restriction only applies to making something "more" criminal. In other words, you can't go back and prosecute somebody for something they did in 2004 because it was made illegal through law in 2008, nor can you increase the jail terms for past crimes when new laws come into effect. You can, however, make something "less" criminal, such as repealing earlier laws and decriminalizing statutes. If Ex Post Facto was universal, once something was made law it could never, ever be undone.
One would think that an institution of higher education, particularly one dedicated to post-graduate studies, would be able to trust its students to know what was good for them.
If they spend too much lecture time on the intarblags, it will be reflected in their grades.
Well, I suppose they should use a 100-point scale, so you don't have to lump all those 71-79s together in the 7's when there could be much more delineation between them. Or 1,000 points. Obviously this breaks down at some point.
Five stars isn't necessarily bad, the correlation between positive and negative ratings is still very useful.
It is obvious that both will help. Your first big chunk of augmenting data will help a lot, as will your first few algorithm adjustments. As you go forward, however, you will get smaller and smaller returns for each new tweak to the algorithm and each new set of data.
It seems obvious after these results that the best course is BOTH.
Sometimes cooking a big meal takes me hours, and I ignore pretty much everything else. Or I'll chain together these activities, to the detriment of other important needs. Usually it's eating that loses out, but not always.
If "skipping basic needs" like eating, sleeping and other basic functions in favor of another activity means you're an addict, then I'm addicted to my job, my second job, reading books, watching movies, the internet, video games, cable TV, telephone conversations, cooking a good meal, writing, pooping, listening to music, naps and being lost in thought. Maybe I'm weird, but it's trivially easy for me to become absorbed in something and simply forget to eat or go to bed - for hours on end.
And it's not the internet I'm addicted to. It is that gods-cursed Stumble Button.
The 5th Amendment only protects you from SELF-incrimination. You still can be charged as an accessory or with obstruction of justice or other such charges if you know the perpetrator of a crime and fail to report it, particularly if the police are actively speaking to you on the matter; it's perjury if you actively lie.
That said, the RIAA is a bunch of douchebags, and I hope EMI pulls their funding. That should start a cascade of flagging support that ends in the destruction of that ridiculous cabal.
It's not even before Congress. It's been shoved out there for consideration, but isn't even close to actual law yet. It's in committee and totally bogged down. This has not taken effect yet.
That said, it needs to be put down like a squirrel with rabies.
Good call; my bad. "Not Guilty" is indeed a different status than "Innocent,", and the courts generally don't even go into innocence, but instead refrain from conviction. Some of it is a semantic difference as used popularly, but yes, in criminal courts the question is guilty or not guilty.
You have an incomplete understanding of science, and a faulty understanding of the Judicial System in the United States.
In the first case, science absolutely examines some things that only happen once. The Big Bang is one example I can think of off of the top of my head. It can't be reproduced. Does that stop anyone from working on the particulars? No.
In the second, the burden of proof for court cases is much different...it is typically "beyond a reasonable doubt." This means that if a normal, average person would have good reason to doubt that the person is guilty, then they are innocent. Law by no means follows the rigorous requirements of the formation of scientific inquiries and proving or disproving a hypothesis. Unfortunately, criminal law is as much marketing as it is actual investigation and presentation of evidence, because you're dealing with a jury of laypeople rather than a worldwide community of experts, as in science. Beyond that, the common law system predates the formulation of science as a discipline by centuries. The only real overlap is the terms used, which have different meanings in each case.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty obvious you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about
In the first place, our current understanding is that black holes DO dissipate, through Hawking Radiation. Tiny black holes fade away almost instantaneously.
In the second place, tiny black holes are formed all the time. When interstellar dust hits the atmosphere, the resulting energy discharge can form tiny black holes, and fairly often. Most of them dissipate harmlessly.
Wait, there's more! Some black holes DO form when they hit the atmosphere and survive. Know what happens to them? Well, first consider how small a chunk of mass dense enough to be considered a black hole has to be when it's composed of the equivalent of a few protons. We are talking sub-electron size here. These black holes sink to the center of the Earth, but are so small they don't interact with any atoms on the way down. They sit at the center of the Earth, absorbing a new particle every few thousand years.
Events with the power of the LHC happen all the time at the edges of the atmosphere, and if they really had a reasonable capacity to cause a catastrophic event, it would have happened naturally many times over already.
That said, the night before collisions start, I'm having an End of the Universe party.
Scientific progression is not always this ultra-formalized process you speak of; it usually (almost always, and certainly it is vetted after the initial discovery) is today, but especially in the past, our current standards of statistics and peer review did not exist. That doesn't mean that the earliest days of the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the work of Newton didn't constitute an advancement of science. Science is not some monolithic process you must live and die by...that's only our current setup of academia and what our scientific community is willing to accept as proper science (to better weed out the people who will just waste everyone's time).
The essence of science - and what I think they're getting at in the article - is that science consists a discarding of what assumptions you bring to the table and begin analysis based on what can be observed rather than what you thought was the case. It's following evidence, wherever it leads. Statistical analysis and peer review are simply tools, helping us make the discovery and analysis in science more efficient and trustworthy. They are not the process itself.
So we should pander to your habits and make cars and, by extension, roads, neighborhoods and entire cities artificially louder?
This is an unfortunate problem, but the solution cannot be to just force cars to make noise. Are we going to stick playing cards in the spokes? What if cars didn't make noise in the first place...this wouldn't be the problem. Surely there is another solution.
Somehow, this mission strikes me as one of the coolest things NASA's done in a while. It's a struggling unit of the organization, working with spare parts from scrapped projects, jury-rigging a satellite together that will tow the spent upper stage of a rocket to the moon and smash the chunk of metal otherwise slated to be space debris into the closest heavenly body to send an Earth-visible (with a decent telescope) plume from one of its poles. Finally, it will analyze the plume to figure out if there's ice there.
Totally. Awesome
All aboard the FailPlane!
With Pic!
Jesus H. Rollerskating Christ, the mere fact that I don't believe in Christianity doesn't mean I can't love to use their paragons as god damned epithets.
Keep in mind that Apollo astronauts weren't selected because they were good scientists. They were chosen because they were good pilots.
The other part that makes it unconstitutional is that it is an unreasonable restriction of only one type of expression. ONLY video games are regulated in this way. Movies, books, music and other forms of media are left untouched, which makes it an unfair restriction of the free expression of video games by imposing requirements on solely that kind of expression in order for it to be available.
A state law would have a better chance of passing constitutional muster if it passed a labeling law for ALL media, including books, music, magazines, newspapers, movies, television shows and every other method by which we get information. But you can see how obviously complicated and ridiculous that would get.
A gold-backed dollar is every bit as illusory as a non-backed dollar. The only thing that makes ANY currency worth ANYTHING is that people are willing to accept it and be sure they will be able to spend it themselves. Gold is no more immune to this than paper dollars in the United States - unless the fact that gold is shiny and malleable makes it carry more intrinsic value. The only reason gold has any value is that we assign it value, which exactly why money has value.
People who think returning to a gold-backed dollar would be in any way useful lack some extraordinarily basic economic education. If we were sticking to gold-backed dollars right now, gold's value would plummet just as much as the dollar's.
Of course PAX is not E3, that's the entire point.
What the developers and studios want is to reach their audience: gamers. PAX, as a gathering specifically of gamers, by games and for gamers, is certainly not the only venue for this, but it provides an unprecedented level of access to a core gaming demographic. Tycho and Gabe have long been known as powerhouses in the industry, and PAX is an extension of that power: bringing huge numbers of gamers into one location, gathering all of the gaming press that's worth its salt and, now, providing studios to engage that audience on the gamers' terms, not on the terms of publishers or the press or anyone else.
PAX's exhibitor list is phenomenal; it may not be the new E3, but it is stepping up nicely as the premier annual gathering of the video game industry, which means that it will pull bigger and bigger announcements as it goes. I expect to hear more actual news and surprises out of PAX than E3 this year.
I can't believe nobody's made a Uranus joke yet. Urine. Uranus.
The Ex Post Facto restriction only applies to making something "more" criminal. In other words, you can't go back and prosecute somebody for something they did in 2004 because it was made illegal through law in 2008, nor can you increase the jail terms for past crimes when new laws come into effect. You can, however, make something "less" criminal, such as repealing earlier laws and decriminalizing statutes. If Ex Post Facto was universal, once something was made law it could never, ever be undone.
One would think that an institution of higher education, particularly one dedicated to post-graduate studies, would be able to trust its students to know what was good for them.
If they spend too much lecture time on the intarblags, it will be reflected in their grades.
Well, I suppose they should use a 100-point scale, so you don't have to lump all those 71-79s together in the 7's when there could be much more delineation between them. Or 1,000 points. Obviously this breaks down at some point. Five stars isn't necessarily bad, the correlation between positive and negative ratings is still very useful.
It is obvious that both will help. Your first big chunk of augmenting data will help a lot, as will your first few algorithm adjustments. As you go forward, however, you will get smaller and smaller returns for each new tweak to the algorithm and each new set of data. It seems obvious after these results that the best course is BOTH.
Sometimes cooking a big meal takes me hours, and I ignore pretty much everything else. Or I'll chain together these activities, to the detriment of other important needs. Usually it's eating that loses out, but not always.
If "skipping basic needs" like eating, sleeping and other basic functions in favor of another activity means you're an addict, then I'm addicted to my job, my second job, reading books, watching movies, the internet, video games, cable TV, telephone conversations, cooking a good meal, writing, pooping, listening to music, naps and being lost in thought. Maybe I'm weird, but it's trivially easy for me to become absorbed in something and simply forget to eat or go to bed - for hours on end.
And it's not the internet I'm addicted to. It is that gods-cursed Stumble Button.
Don't you *always* fail your last saving throw?
The 5th Amendment only protects you from SELF-incrimination. You still can be charged as an accessory or with obstruction of justice or other such charges if you know the perpetrator of a crime and fail to report it, particularly if the police are actively speaking to you on the matter; it's perjury if you actively lie.
That said, the RIAA is a bunch of douchebags, and I hope EMI pulls their funding. That should start a cascade of flagging support that ends in the destruction of that ridiculous cabal.
But my first guess was a patent troll that Nokia just bought out to put moronic patent litigation to bed.
Say you are a legitimate museum/educational institution capable of purchasing this skull.
Do you:
a) Purchase the mastodon skull to preserve an excellent fossil and put it on display for educational value, including its true age?
b) Allow this absurdity and insult to rational intelligence that is a Creation Museum die?
SYSTEM ERROR: Comprehension buffer overflow. Statistical probability approaches infinity to one against. Reset all variables within logical limits.
*REBOOT*
This bill HAS NOT BEEN PASSED.
It's not even before Congress. It's been shoved out there for consideration, but isn't even close to actual law yet. It's in committee and totally bogged down. This has not taken effect yet.
That said, it needs to be put down like a squirrel with rabies.
Good call; my bad. "Not Guilty" is indeed a different status than "Innocent,", and the courts generally don't even go into innocence, but instead refrain from conviction. Some of it is a semantic difference as used popularly, but yes, in criminal courts the question is guilty or not guilty.
You have an incomplete understanding of science, and a faulty understanding of the Judicial System in the United States. In the first case, science absolutely examines some things that only happen once. The Big Bang is one example I can think of off of the top of my head. It can't be reproduced. Does that stop anyone from working on the particulars? No. In the second, the burden of proof for court cases is much different...it is typically "beyond a reasonable doubt." This means that if a normal, average person would have good reason to doubt that the person is guilty, then they are innocent. Law by no means follows the rigorous requirements of the formation of scientific inquiries and proving or disproving a hypothesis. Unfortunately, criminal law is as much marketing as it is actual investigation and presentation of evidence, because you're dealing with a jury of laypeople rather than a worldwide community of experts, as in science. Beyond that, the common law system predates the formulation of science as a discipline by centuries. The only real overlap is the terms used, which have different meanings in each case.