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User: Tenebrousedge

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  1. Every /. article about a lab trying this experiments has reported "thrust", and I thought we all agree that this thrust is "unexplainable".

    You can't claim to have shown thrust until you rule out other explanations. The experiments have not been able to rule out other explanations. Specifically, they have not been able to show that this was not measurement error. Few of the studies have even attempted to do so.

    How can something be outside of an errorbar when the errorbar is not determined?

    I think we agree that not attempting to quantify your measurement error is foolish. Perhaps someone can inform the "researchers" about this.

    As far as I see no creditable debunk, I consider science reports true, perhaps you should correct your attitude towards them?

    There have been no published studies, because none of the "researchers" can pass peer review, because they can't show that their results are not measurement error. All theories attempting to prove the non-impossibility of this device have been thoroughly debunked. Your "creditable debunk" is the normal laws of physics, which do not permit violation of the conservation of energy/momentum. With no empirical evidence, no theory, and a mountain of both theory and evidence pointing the other direction, you are not describing science.

    I can only assume that your desire for this to be true has prevented you from actually trying to evaluate whether it is true.

  2. You're usually less credulous than this. No labs have shown "unexplainable thrust", and no explanations have passed peer review. In point of fact, no explanations have been without serious physics errors. No experiment has shown thrust outside of their own error bars, and in most cases those error bars have not even been determined. There is no evidence for this phenomenon just as there is no evidence for over-unity energy devices, despite much sound and fury on the Internet.

    What you're saying is completely untrue. Please correct yourself.

  3. McCulloch's paper has been repeatedly torn to pieces on r/EmDrive and this current theory fares no better. No one has measured thrust beyond the error bars, none of the experimental results have passed peer review, and all theories trying to explain the supposed phenomenon have basic physical errors, and just happen to overturn one of the most fundamental and well-tested concepts in science.

    I don't know what combination of ignorance, credulity, and motivated reasoning is required to believe in this. I'd suggest you should reexamine your beliefs about this phenomenon, but at the least you should not be promoting a paper which has been so thoroughly discredited.

  4. Re:Thank you, government, for saving us from Uber on Uber Banned in Germany and France, and Faces Lawsuits in Multiple States (nbcnews.com) · · Score: 1

    Yes, cars. Not just taxis - so the price that is to be increased is that of car operation

    Interesting idea. Most cities with severe traffic problems solve them by declaring that, absent emergencies, you're not allowed to drive on certain days. I'm sure your idea would be a welcome source of income if it is feasible.

    Your first point addresses parking, not congestion. Your second point refers to sparsely populated areas, which do not typically have congestion issues, absent slow motorhomes or large animals in the road. I'm not entirely sure I'm following what you're suggesting with regards to "smooth[ing] the transition", but alleviating some of the issues associated with congestion is clearly not preferable to preventing congestion.

    From my standpoint, it seems impossible to accurately price the space available on city streets, therefore market-based systems will perform poorly. I'd like to be wrong about that. Panama City would probably also appreciate a solution; I believe they have chosen to build light rail instead of implementing a medallion system.

  5. Re:Thank you, government, for saving us from Uber on Uber Banned in Germany and France, and Faces Lawsuits in Multiple States (nbcnews.com) · · Score: 1

    Being inconvenient to your argument is certainly good grounds for declaring something to be off-topic. I apologize for not adapting my argument to a meaner intellect. I see as well as ignoring the question I asked you have ascribed to me an additional set of arguments — I appreciate your efforts and I will try to uphold these arguments to your standard.

    I understand now that unrestricted taxi ownership does not produce gridlock, and that any real-world examples to the contrary are liberal lies, or the product of liberal policies. I understand that transportation is not fungible and taxis are the only proper means of transportation in capitalist society, so therefore they cause no problems. The Invisible Hand protects us and would never allow private interests to consume the entirety of a public resource. At the moment I have no idea in what sense computer networks could represent a valid analogy to transportation networks, but I think you mean that it will spur Uber to either build more roads or start killing people. Oh. More people, then.

  6. Re:Thank you, government, for saving us from Uber on Uber Banned in Germany and France, and Faces Lawsuits in Multiple States (nbcnews.com) · · Score: 1

    Huh? It costs two (or more) human's their time â" the most precious resource we have in life... But you must've meant something else here â" just what, I do not know...

    "Wha?" is a pretty poor rebuttal. I've actually seen this happening, so I don't know what you think is so crazy about the idea. Panama has very lax requirements for a taxi license and no medallion system; Uber is replaced by word of mouth for the most part. Time is not the "most precious resource we have", it costs a couple dollars per hour for the driver. Market efficiency being what it is, prices are driven down near the cost to provide the service. You can't cut down the cost of gas, but driver wages will tend towards a bare subsistence and maintenance towards a minimum of roadworthiness. And again, market forces begin to correct for congestion when [a] the cost of gas exceeds the driver's profit, or [b] it's so bad people stop taking taxis. Neither of these are particularly efficient mechanisms, particularly the latter as many people may not have access to alternative means of transportation.

    Go to Panama City some time and take a taxi. They're dirt cheap, at least for locals. You'll be ludicrously overcharged as a tourist, but that's capitalism too, right? Taxis choke the streets during most afternoons, to the point where they won't even pick you up if you want to go across the city. The vehicles are not necessarily rickety rustbuckets, but generally they are far from new, and I don't think half of them have insurance or working air conditioning.

    It's easy to rail against taxi monopolies. You've done so repeatedly. I'm sure it's a good argument. I submit Panama City as an object lesson in giving people incentives to have cars in the streets. I see no value in spreading that problem. How do you imagine that Uber or Lyft will provide a disincentive towards gridlock? How does Panama not become the end game for these services?

  7. Re:Thank you, government, for saving us from Uber on Uber Banned in Germany and France, and Faces Lawsuits in Multiple States (nbcnews.com) · · Score: 1

    The point at which market forces begin to correct for congestion is well after the point of gridlock. It doesn't cost much for the taxi to sit in traffic, especially if they have a fare. There are relatively hard limits to how much we can afford to incentivize cars being on the road. Medallions have been one solution to this. Since I'm sure you have a good handle on the drawbacks of those, perhaps you can give me your thoughts on an alternative solution.

  8. from the political-science dept... on Stephen Hawking Calls Trump A 'Demagogue' Who Appeals 'To The Lowest Common Denominator' (go.com) · · Score: 1

    I'm pretty sure it's this political science department.
    Randy Newman - Political Science
    lyrics

    This classic song has never been timelier...

  9. RedHat managed to sway Debian and by extension Ubuntu didn't have the will nor even did SuSE.

    Horseshit. Stop acting like this is some big conspiracy. The pages of pro and con discussion are still on the Debian wiki. Systemd was selected because it was technically better than upstart, not an unholy maintenance nightmare like SysV, and had more features than OpenRC.

    Systemd and cgroups are fixing things that have been broken since the 70s. Usably broken, I grant you, and well-known, but still fundamentally flawed. We have some forty years worth of technical debt accumulated on top of these systems, and frankly I'm surprised that they haven't broken more things. We should not pretend that there are not logical reasons for the changes nor that they are not subject to public scrutiny and input. It definitely looks like a big problem though, if you ignore those factors.

  10. Energy Sources on Mars Is Coming Out Of An Ice Age (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    The extra warming has been compared to 400,000 Hiroshima-sized nuclear explosions per day, or 2.5 x 10^14 Joules per second, or 250 TW. This is a very large number, but total solar energy intercepted by the Earth is around seven hundred times greater. World power consumption in 2013 was 18 TW. Power consumption is a term in the energy balance equation; we are eventually going to have to rein in energy use purely because of climate considerations, but not soon.

    This is the kind of question that belies a complete lack of understanding about the scale of energy involved. I can't even qualify your comments on friction. However, to believe that there is any kind of hidden source of 100-125 TW located on the planet defies any kind of credulity.

  11. More cites. on Burning All Fossil Fuels Would Scorch Earth, Says Study (phys.org) · · Score: 1

    Don't forget Sawyer, 1972, although I don't think he used a GCM. His prediction was right on the money. Arrhenius was pretty accurate too, on the high side of current forcing estimates, but still within the likely band.

  12. Ruby Runtime on Ask Slashdot: Have You Migrated To Node.js? · · Score: 2

    There's actually not a lot in Ruby that you can't modify at runtime. You can't break variable assignment, and I don't think you can erase the concept of class inheritance, but most other components are up for grabs. It's perhaps not quite as flexible as Lisp or Smalltalk, but there's definitely no shortage of hanging rope. Metaprogramming Ruby was an enlightening look at how this can be put to practical use. Personally, I think that "monkey patching" is grounds for "developer punching", but there are a great many tools which improperly used make superlative footguns.

  13. I don't know, what's wrong with your theory. But I do see, that it is remarkably short on successful predictions to its name. So short, you can't name any. Or, maybe, you can name 1 or 2, but nothing a major scientific discipline â" with hundreds of well-funded disciples â" ought to have come up with in several decades of trying.

    Tens of thousands of papers over at least a century, and you're the first one to notice that they're all empty! Dang, we thought we had you with that one.

    Darling, try marketing a pancake-making machine, that makes no pancakes. I assure you, that demanding from other people to identify, just which part of the machine is responsible for there being no edible output, is not going to help your sales.

    Let's not make analogies about pancake machines. They're not made out of logic and easily observable facts. Right now you have an unassailable position where you are free to vary from discussion to discussion which facts you choose to believe in. Speculating as to what mental defect accommodates this is interesting, to a certain morbid perspective. Maybe I'm being over-generous in assuming that you have a consistent belief structure about the world. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, though.

    I'm not trying to sell you a position. You already have one. What do you gain by not describing it?

  14. So it might be inaccurate. What's wrong with the theory, though? Remember, if you can't identify what part of the theory is wrong, then you're spending an awful lot of time arguing against something you agree with.

    Does CO2 not absorb IR? Does it not accumulate in the atmosphere? Have you discovered another way for the planet to lose heat? How about massive undetected orbital changes?

    AGW is a scientific theory because we haven't been able to falsify it yet. We need only a single contradictory fact. We've been studying the issue intently for the last half century, and the central idea is more than a century old. There were a couple times when it was thought to be conclusively disproven, actually, but the competing theories were contradicted by other evidence. There are a number of possible facts which would disprove AGW. I'm not even going to ask you to substantiate your alternate theory, just suggest what else you think is going on. Why isn't Earth warming?

  15. Chrome Development on Google Chrome To Disallow Backspace As a 'Back' Button (independent.co.uk) · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well, no, that's not why that's there. The reason 'flags' exists is because chrome doesn't branch. Any features that are in development go right in the main branch, so there's no costly merging. It has basically nothing to do with UI concerns; it's a result of the dev process.

  16. Chromebook Keyboards on Google Chrome To Disallow Backspace As a 'Back' Button (independent.co.uk) · · Score: 2

    With Internet and browsers dominating existence, keyboards should be redesigned with common browser clickies built in and separate from editing keys.

    Apropos of the subject, Chromebooks do exactly that. Who needs those function keys anyway?

  17. Re:Just more copyright extension.. on YouTube Is Guilty Of Criminal Racketeering, Grammy Winner Says (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 2

    Hiding behind third parties does not remove your responsibilities. Much, perhaps most, youtube material is copyright violation.

    No third party has any obligation to enforce your copyrights. It is not the responsibility of service providers nor the public at large to defend your private interests.

  18. Safe Harbor and ContentID on YouTube Is Guilty Of Criminal Racketeering, Grammy Winner Says (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    The crux is that they only allow it's use to musicians who have agreed to license their content to them...

    I don't know how you got the idea that there was some form of licensing going on. YouTube is not reproducing the works covered by ContentID, so they don't require a license for the works.

    ...as they don't publish any rules.

    You mean these rules?

    Google scans every video uploaded to YouTube against its ContentID system. That's a few hundred hours of video per minute. This is also not the only way to enforce ownership rights on YouTube. Google is under no legal obligation to provide their ContentID service. It is the copyright owner's job to enforce their rights. Google cannot do that for them without an explicit agreement, and they have no obligation to make any such agreement with anyone. It is not part of the "Safe Harbor" exclusions, and it would not remotely make sense if that were so, since the point of those exclusions was to prevent service providers from having to police their networks.

    that "Safe Harbor" law requires technical measures to be made available to everybody.

    No, it requires that the service provider "accommodates and does not interfere with standard technical measures". They are not obligated to provide any such methods.

    No matter how much content owners would like for the onus for copyright policing to be on service providers, it is not the case and will never be the case.

  19. Construction Industrial Complex on CIA Watchdog 'Mistakenly' Destroyed Its Only Copy Of A Senate Torture Report (yahoo.com) · · Score: 1

    Incidentally, Panama actually has this phenomenon. The construction companies have been giving kickbacks to the government officials, and the officials have been coming up with more money and ever more inventive ways to keep the debt off the books. A lot of money seems to be going into useless skyscrapers, but they're also building roads and hospitals.

    If you're going to have corrupt industries, it's probably better that they are constructive rather than destructive.

  20. Re:Immigration on France's After Work Email Ban Is 1 Step Closer To Reality (huffingtonpost.ca) · · Score: 1

    That's as may be, but your "solution" was ludicrous, and you drastically undervalue immigrants.

  21. I'm okay with this. Being part of a society is a compact of violence, so the only proper way of rejecting that compact is with violence. As far as vaccinations go, that horse done left the barn a while ago, but feel free to die for it.

  22. Well played :)

  23. Immigration on France's After Work Email Ban Is 1 Step Closer To Reality (huffingtonpost.ca) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So if Einstein wants to immigrate to the US, and we don't have full employment, you're going to kick his ass to the curb?

    Personally, I think the free flow of labor is a good thing. I wouldn't mind going to work in e.g. Germany, Costa Rica, or Japan. Moving to another country is not for the faint of heart even if you don't have visa issues. I could develop this theme more, but I think that even you can come up with as many circumstances where immigration is good.

  24. Purpose of Fiat Currency on Wendy's Plans To Automate 6,000 Restaurants With Self-Service Ordering Kiosks (investors.com) · · Score: 1

    The purpose of fiat currency is to be able to expand the money supply during war-time without either getting more of a commodity or debasing it. Everything else is a post facto rationalization.

    At least, that's the case if we must say that there is only one purpose of money. There are several, as you no doubt know. Suggesting that this one is in any sense a primary function is simply wrong; money would be useful and necessary even if there were no connection to labor at all. All but the looniest post-scarcity economic theories include some form of money.

  25. If I'm not impaired, there is no justification for arresting me. Your argument would make sense if there were no safe level of consumption. Not being able to determine a safe level of consumption via a blood test is not equivalent to not being able to determine impairment. There are lots of drugs which can impair driving for which there is no blood test. Frankly there aren't a lot of good legal or moral arguments for zero tolerance here. It would be a special exception to the rules about impaired driving, and it's not like the potential for harm by pothead drivers is great enough to offset the harm resulting from arresting unimpaired drivers. And I'm not going to argue strongly that it applies in this case, but there is some level of potential to harm others which is inherent to living in a free society. You have a very high bar to meet before broaching the subject of 'zero tolerance', considering we don't necessarily apply that rule even in the use of deadly force. I'm not so sure you've really though this through...