>>Yes: every ISP/TV provider out there counts Netflix against your bandwidth cap, but not the pay-per-view choices you get through their service.
>That is not ANYTHING like your metaphor.
It's seriously close, but let me rephrase his metaphor so you can get it through big helm of stupidit made out of the paper mache'd pages of Atlas Shrugged you seem to have on your head. How many private toll roads do you know about who do (or would be allowed to) set a lower speed limit for trucks belonging to their competitors, forcing their competitors to drive slower on the road than their own trucks, and the vehicles of other people and companies who are not directly competing with the road-owner ?
Setting a discriminatory speed limit on your competition is no different from outright blocking them, indeed, it's EXACTLY as bad.
People who argue for right-libertarian viewpoints almost never correlate with "people who studied economics" and only rarely with "people who studied at a university".
Indeed, they love to spout off about how economics courses at universities are utterly useless because they are so Keynesian biassed. Which is just a nice way of saying "when every economist in the world points out how batshit insane our ideas are we can accuse them of bias instead of having to argue that inconvenient empirical evidence of theirs".
The worst thing is that they claim to stand for personal freedom. Biggest load of bullshit ever concocted. One-dollar-one-vote is NOT freedom and that is what an unregulated market INEVITABLY becomes. Unregulated capitalism ALWAYS and INEVITABLY can ONLY devolve into outright fascism [syn: corporatism] (which is exactly what is happening in the USA right now).
Capitalist libertarians call the government a necessary evil - socialist libertarians believe it's not necessary at all, and the reason WHY the Randian's think they can't do away with it is exactly because it destroys rather than maximises individual liberty.
Their freedom only exists for those who are already privileged. People who work in sweatshops are NOT doing so by choice - no matter WHAT Ron Paul believes. They are NOT. "Work in hell, or starve outside" is NOT a choice, it's NOT freedom. That's just slavery with a sugarcoating.
Hell even their great intellectual founders would be appalled by what they are doing today. Adam Smith was the first American economist to PROPOSE a state pension fund. He also stated that the ONLY kind of market which is REMOTELY sustainable is one where labour is by far the most expensive product you can buy. Because "high wages are good for society as a whole, while high profit margins for business is bad for society as a whole."
Not to mention - if you read the actual John Locke books on his labour theory of value (which is the basis of both Rand-style capitalism AND communism I shit you not) - and especially his definition of property (which Murray Rothbard quotes at least 10 times in every paper he ever wrote) then you can see just how patently stupid their ideas on property rights are. Hint: there is NOTHING except the word "man" in there that prevents a beaver from legally owning a beaver-dam.
What you described sounded like sticking two pieces of place on a sheet of plastic (presumably thick enough that you can put a hole in the middle to hold the data media). You have to admit, that description did not inspire confidence. What you now clarified should cover most scenarios I agree.
Do you know what two layers of conductive material with an insulator between them is called ? A capacitor. Literally - you just described the definition of a capacitor as a suitable design for a Faraday cage.
Hint - a capacitor is most decidedly NOT a Faraday cage. Capacitors store electric charge, they don't prevent induction.
This is why a Faraday cage needs to be sealed on ALL sides, and metal on the sides must all be conductively connected, you can't make one out of two layers !
That said -you're right about not needing to ground it if it's thick enough.
This is true of CDR's and other write-able media but NOT of (most) mass-printed optical media (though cheaper mass-printers have moved to this model now to save on industrial equipment).
Mass-printed media is much less likely to be damaged because they don't even contain dye. They are effectively PHYSICAL storage. A layer in the disk contains little bumps and dips. Dips reflect the lazer back, bumps scatter it, thus giving you 1's on dips and 0's on bumps.
This is one reason why you may well find your CD's from the 1990's still play fine even with a lot of scratches while CD's you bought in the mid-2000's are unusable. Many of the latter are dye-printed, which is much cheaper - but a far less reliable thing, the slightest discolouration throws the reader off while bump/dip optical media it's the actual physical shape of the disk that holds the information which is much less vulnerable to wear and tear.
The only way to have a fair justice system is to take capitalism out of the courtroom. That means set fixed hourly rates for lawyers and limit them legally to one-per-customer.
Yes, even if you're a billionaire you get ONE lawyer and they all cost the same so the poor guy whose life you ruined and is now suing you can afford one just as good as the one you got.
Will this have downsides ? Well I'm not so sure. The old "what would motivate you to be a better X" argument doesn't hold up well here, if what motivates you to be a "better lawyer" is "making more money" then you're in the job for the wrong reason to begin with.
>I'm not worried about dying from my own suicide. I can control that. I'm worried about dying from somebody elses suicide.
Then you're an idiot. Firstly, everything we know about suicidal depression says you're wrong - you really can NOT control it. If you are suicidally depressed and don't get the right help in time, you will die and it's out of your control (humans aren't quite as autonomous as we like to imagine). Secondly - the risk of you dying from your own suicide is more than 20 times higher than you dying from "somebody else's suicide" and the risk of dying while driving is more than a hundred times higher than that. We all have to die, it's not something we can avoid, and despite what you like to tell yourself you really can't choose how you go. So all you can do is be sensibly risk-avoidant. Avoid the risks that are high, and forget about the rest. If you hit the one in a million jackpot of being targeted by a terrorist then chances are NO security measures would save you anyway. Terrorists will always find holes in ANY security system. The total and only government expenditure when it comes to terrorism that makes any sense at all is in investigation, information gathering and good old fashioned detective work. The only way to prevent a terrorist attack is to arrest the plotters before they execute it. You cannot protect the places they target, it's never been possible and it never will be. But you can try to catch them early.
The risk of you being killed by a terrorist is about half the risk of suicide - and that's for American's who are statistically the MOST likely to be attacked by terrorist in the world (if you don't consider US choppers in war zones firing on civilians terrorism at least).
So what do you propose government does to protect us from ourselves ? Mandatory anti-depressants from age 10 onwards for everybody maybe ? Considering the number 1 cited cause for teenage suicide is bullying, and boys are 4 times more likely than girls to commit suicide - perhaps we should just give the death penalty to anybody found bullying a boy ?
>I suppose if you postulate one person in an SUV then you've got something. Most of the world doesn't drive things the size of SUVs with only one person in them.
In what world do you live ? Take a look into some SUV's on a morning commute sometime, the VAST majority of all cars on the road have only one person in them, a tiny minority have two, the few SUV's that have more than one is a parent taking kids to school. Since those parents usually go to work after and work is on average further from homes than schools are - the majority of times those SUV's still have only one person in them.
The kind of people who have figured out that smaller cars are much more sensible in the city, have ALSO figured out that even small cars can carry 3 kids with ease, they STILL don't drive S.U.V's. The people who DO drive SUV's are also statistically the LEAST likely to ever carpool...
So you're just wrong. Even if we assume that the vehicles are loaded, the GP specifically said seat-for-seat mileage the planes win further ! This actually makes sense because planes don't have red-light stops and traffic jams, where a car's fuel efficiency absolutely plummets.
You can't compare a car's BEST fuel efficiency (e.g. open-road) with that of a plane in fairness, at best you could get an average (and then you need to consider that the VAST majority of cars spend the vast majority of their driving in the LEAST ideal conditions). Since planes NEVER face those conditions, they average better. The worst case scenarios for planes involve weather, and that is a MUCH rarer event.
So, average for average, whether you have one person per vehicle or fill them up seat-for-seat, I find it very EASY to believe that planes could be MORE efficient than SUV's.
>Solution: Automate the "Nope, this isn't copyright" process too. If you have a video taken down you can put it back up and the case is referred to a real person. The company/person who was in the wrong then has to pay $100 to the person who dealt with it.
And another $100 to the person falsely accused to reimburse his time having to reverse the invalid take-down. That would seriously slow down the degree to which companies are prepared to lay dubious and over-extensive copyright claims on platforms like youtube.
>I think the little known fact that a major insight in physics came from an initial "mistake" is such an interesting morsel.
Now that is not news, as far as I can tell, the vast majority of true breakthrough's happen when somebody makes a mistake and discovers that it leads somewhere interesting. Breakthroughs by definition imply that somebody thought outside the current confines of the box - this is very difficult (despite what motivational speakers would have you believe), quite often however when a skilled person makes a trivial error in the steps, they discover that the "error" is actually just a small step outside the box that leads to a perfectly valid conclusion and open up entirely new concepts to discover.
In mathematics this is particularly common - at least in part because of how mathematicians actually do research in their own field. When somebody does come up with a new concept of mathematics (read the history of transfinite numbers for a beautifully illustrative example) nobody really bothers with the fundamentals of making it fit in well with other basic maths. No point doing all that terrible drudge work if the idea doesn't lead somewhere interesting - so for a while everybody is just expanding the idea. It's like a house build wrong way round. There are no foundations, the first floor is just bare walls, the second floor has sparse furniture and carpetting while the third floor starts looking like a suite at the hilton. If the idea does lead somewhere interesting, if some nice possibilities arise, it eventually starts causing problems that the house lacks foundations however. Some of those new things you're exploring is problematic, you're getting contradictory proofs - and you can't figure out which one is wrong. This is when it gets INTERESTING to do the drudge work, go fill in the foundations and carpet the first floor, because in doing so you work out what is structurally WRONG up on top, and can tell the correct and the incorrect maths apart again.
Because physics is so intrinsically mathematical (and has been ever since at least Newton), this impacts on it directly. Often new ideas in physics are based on mathematical concepts which don't yet have proper foundations. Sometimes it's the physicist who through a mistake discovers where the foundation is wrong or missing. This is a classic example - a human error (in following steps) turned out to actually be more correct than the steps were. That allowed us to see that we'd been using the wrong KIND of statistical probability for a significant part of quantum mechanics for a very long time and solved a number of unanswered questions.
Planck time is the smallest length of time it is physically possible to MEASURE, not the smallest that can EXIST.
Things don't cease to exist just because they cannot be seen or measured. Half a planck time does exist and does pass - it would just not be possible with any physical apparatus to measure it.
Some would argue that nothing can happen in LESS than a Planck time (for the same reason we cannot measure the time) but that doesn't mean the time doesn't exist, just that it's not ENOUGH time for anything involving energy or matter to happen in.
Time is not a substance after all, and Planck never proposed that time is particulate (though that proposal goes back at least as far as the ancient Greek philosopher Xinu and his four paradoxes) .
The debate isn't actually settled, right back in ancient Greece some philosophers argued time didn't exist and was an illusion, some modern physicists interpret quantum mechanics to come to the same conclusion: there is no such thing as time (while other quantum physicists have answered with a quantum probability form of time which WOULD exist)
If we stick to the reference within which Max Planck himself calculated Planck time, that's essentially relativity with a very small bit of quantum mechanics mixed in - in the theoryset, time exists as a dimension of space, and dimensions do not have "smallest bits" as far as we know (well string theory says they might but quantum-loop theory contradicts it and since neither has any real proof yet I'm hedging my bets) - so there is no smallest amount of time that CAN pass, only the smallest we can measure.
Disclaimer: IANAP just an armchair enthusiast, if I got some details wrong, please don't castrate me - but if you post a correction I would love to read it and learn something.
It's a core instinct in most mammals. What do you think a dog is doing when he humps a pillow, or a leg ? I live in Africa, and I see baboons quite often, it's actually a RARE occasion to watch a troop of baboons and not see at least one or two masturbating.
Okay, now that makes a lot more sense. I misread your post as implying that her rape charge itself was preposterous as she only LOOKED a bit male but was actually female.
>Women did not fight for equal treatment in a physical arena, they wanted to be treated (rightly so) as equals intellectually.
Most of them.
> That might be because (shock) they are smart enough to admit that there is a physical difference.
Not always. Gloria Steinhem is on record as demanding that the New York fire department change their entrance exam to be less focussed on strength so that they can get 50% woman members. When it was pointed out that a fireman needs to be strong enough to carry an unconscious victim out of a burning building on his/her shoulders - she replied "the weaker woman can just drag victims by their ankles".
You're right, it occurred to me later that I forgot the arts-related ones. Clearly Mister Nobel also believed that literature and poetry uplifted humanity.
The study of literature is a science (and involves lots of cross-study with other sciences like archaeology for example) but writing there-off is an art.
>You're rather optimistic that humanity will exist forever for your infinite numbers, but optimism does not substitute for reality. There is nothing about this universe that prevents humans from going extinct; in fact, entropy guarantees it. If the universe exists for a finite duration, there cannot be an infinite number of humans to generate your infinite demand. Quit misusing "infinite".
Actually, I'm not - I specifically addressed this in my post- we WILL go extinct, knowledge which we cannot sell now is the only thing that can prolong our time here - but it can't make it eternal. I also said we have no choice but to AIM for infinite survival, or we won't even be around as long as we CAN be.
>One cannot separate "profit" from "value" in an economic discussion. Profit is value minus cost. Profit isn't a dirty word. All it means is that the value exceeded the cost.
That wasn't the meaning of profit under discussion and certainly not what the GP meant by it. In this context "profit motive" for research literally meant: "The ability to sell products made from that research for more money than we spent on it." So that's a subset of the proper definition of profit. It does not consider the value of research in ANY terms EXCEPT monetary and even then only in a fairly short time-frame. Crichton's (and my) point was that science should not be done for the PURPOSE of making money, it can be USED for that purpose, but not by the people who DO the research. That's not the same as saying we shouldn't consider cost and value, I specifically said we CANNOT do ALL the research for ALL the knowledge that could be known - that is the only basis we can use to choose what research to do, but that choice must not be based on a desire to earn money. Indeed research production must be given away freely (just because you don't charge for something doesn't mean it's value doesn't exist - when habitat for humanity builds a house for a poor person, that house has the same value as one that was bought).
Basically science should be done as charity to all mankind. Some poor people will sell their habitat-for-humanity houses, some people will make money out of research charitably given - that's fine. But the researchers shouldn't be trying to make money - indeed we should do all in our power to remove monetary concerns from them. This is WHY we invented ideas like 'tenure'. We give our best scientists a position from which they CANNOT be fired, not ever, so that there is no worry about perceptions of value or productivity, so that they can work with the freedom of being driven by curiosity rather than money. Due to the sheer SCALE of research costs in many fields, I'm not sure private charity can fund the public charity that the researchers are doing (or ought to be doing), hence I think tax funding makes sense here.
>But sometimes the knowledge is not worth the cost
Indeed, which is why we do need to select more worthwhile research -we cannot afford "buy" it ALL - especially when the cost is lives, I just argued that the metric for choosing worthwhile research should not be it's likelihood of producing short-term monetary gain. Ideally the government ought to fund research but have no say in who it is allocated to - that should be decided by the boards of universities, academics selecting which research within their staff is most deserving. Of course that's still not ideal - but nothing is, it's a hell of a lot better than letting shareholders decide it.
>And he pays a finite amount of money to gain that knowledge. You yourself pay nothing (rightfully). He also does not pay for all the pocket lint in the world; only for select samples. The knowledge of my pocket lint may very be lost to the world. No one cares, nor should they. It never had infinite value
You don't know that, for all you know mixed in there is a windblown spore that would cure cancer. A single molecule, never to be discovered because nobody checked there. Unfortunately, we can't afford to turn over every stone, so we have to choose the most likely ones. This is a reality, but I won't pretend it's not an unfortunate reality.
>Your analysis overlooks one thing that invalidates it: Knowledge transfer and maintenance has a cost.
By any reasonable metric, the lowest cost there is, and a cost that with better and better technology only gets closer to zero. It costs as near-nothing as makes no difference to put a research paper on the web for anybody to download (if measured in percentage of total cost / total papers available).
Terry Pratchett once wrote: If you really want to help people, build a library and don't put a lock on the door. He's right, the only thing that ultimately makes the world any better for anybody is access to knowledge without barriers, and since the poor are the ones who has the most NEED for improving their lives, money is the one barrier we cannot AFFORD to put on knowledge.
>Next, because maintaining knowledge costs time and resources (which is equivalent to money), knowledge can be lost when humanity stops paying the cost to keep it. Knowledge has been lost to history when people didn't write it down, when those who knew it died off, and new generations didn't (or couldn't) learn it.
And as a result, there are now classical cathedrals where the stained glass is down according to a method that's been lost, which means when they get damaged, it's impossible to repair them since nobody knows how to do it anymore. That's not a GOOD thing and we OUGHT to apply our technology to REDUCING that problem, not pretending it makes the exercise futile.
>This being an information age, a lot of knowledge has been gathered and archived; but can you guarantee that 100% of it will be saved 100 years from now? Any knowledge that is lost cannot have infinite value, as its supply has gone from "infinite" to "0".
That doesn't mean it's value isn't infinite, it just means that an infinite sized value has been lost. When a cargo ship sinks, the value of it's cargo doesn't disappear, it still had the value it had before sinking, but that value is lost, and the owners have to recover it's cost. Lost knowledge is no less valuable for being loss, it's just not USEFUL, we end up paying for the lost value in the things we cannot do anymore.
>You assumed human knowledge lasts forever, even though it does not. Actually, history suggests the majority of it survives a very long time. We still have access to the vast majority of the writings of the ancient Greeks and even the Mesophotamian's. There's probably no profit in decyphering original carvings of their legends - but there is certainly VALUE in doing so. In this hypothetical "profitable research only" there would BE no archaeology, or at least, archaeology would be limited to the tiny degree that digs up stuff you can p
>The day the government stops allocating tax money to research...is the day I send them dollars myself, I suppose. I don't see any reason why I can't do that, and it seems easier than revolting
Good point, if enough people agree at least. Too few and the reason you couldn't do it is because there won't be any researchers left to send the dollars to.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Yes: every ISP/TV provider out there counts Netflix against your bandwidth cap, but not the pay-per-view choices you get through their service.
>That is not ANYTHING like your metaphor.
It's seriously close, but let me rephrase his metaphor so you can get it through big helm of stupidit made out of the paper mache'd pages of Atlas Shrugged you seem to have on your head.
How many private toll roads do you know about who do (or would be allowed to) set a lower speed limit for trucks belonging to their competitors, forcing their competitors to drive slower on the road than their own trucks, and the vehicles of other people and companies who are not directly competing with the road-owner ?
Setting a discriminatory speed limit on your competition is no different from outright blocking them, indeed, it's EXACTLY as bad.
People who argue for right-libertarian viewpoints almost never correlate with "people who studied economics" and only rarely with "people who studied at a university".
Indeed, they love to spout off about how economics courses at universities are utterly useless because they are so Keynesian biassed. Which is just a nice way of saying "when every economist in the world points out how batshit insane our ideas are we can accuse them of bias instead of having to argue that inconvenient empirical evidence of theirs".
The worst thing is that they claim to stand for personal freedom. Biggest load of bullshit ever concocted. One-dollar-one-vote is NOT freedom and that is what an unregulated market INEVITABLY becomes. Unregulated capitalism ALWAYS and INEVITABLY can ONLY devolve into outright fascism [syn: corporatism] (which is exactly what is happening in the USA right now).
Capitalist libertarians call the government a necessary evil - socialist libertarians believe it's not necessary at all, and the reason WHY the Randian's think they can't do away with it is exactly because it destroys rather than maximises individual liberty.
Their freedom only exists for those who are already privileged. People who work in sweatshops are NOT doing so by choice - no matter WHAT Ron Paul believes. They are NOT. "Work in hell, or starve outside" is NOT a choice, it's NOT freedom. That's just slavery with a sugarcoating.
Hell even their great intellectual founders would be appalled by what they are doing today. Adam Smith was the first American economist to PROPOSE a state pension fund. He also stated that the ONLY kind of market which is REMOTELY sustainable is one where labour is by far the most expensive product you can buy. Because "high wages are good for society as a whole, while high profit margins for business is bad for society as a whole."
Not to mention - if you read the actual John Locke books on his labour theory of value (which is the basis of both Rand-style capitalism AND communism I shit you not) - and especially his definition of property (which Murray Rothbard quotes at least 10 times in every paper he ever wrote) then you can see just how patently stupid their ideas on property rights are.
Hint: there is NOTHING except the word "man" in there that prevents a beaver from legally owning a beaver-dam.
What you described sounded like sticking two pieces of place on a sheet of plastic (presumably thick enough that you can put a hole in the middle to hold the data media). You have to admit, that description did not inspire confidence.
What you now clarified should cover most scenarios I agree.
Do you know what two layers of conductive material with an insulator between them is called ? A capacitor. Literally - you just described the definition of a capacitor as a suitable design for a Faraday cage.
Hint - a capacitor is most decidedly NOT a Faraday cage. Capacitors store electric charge, they don't prevent induction.
This is why a Faraday cage needs to be sealed on ALL sides, and metal on the sides must all be conductively connected, you can't make one out of two layers !
That said -you're right about not needing to ground it if it's thick enough.
This is true of CDR's and other write-able media but NOT of (most) mass-printed optical media (though cheaper mass-printers have moved to this model now to save on industrial equipment).
Mass-printed media is much less likely to be damaged because they don't even contain dye. They are effectively PHYSICAL storage. A layer in the disk contains little bumps and dips. Dips reflect the lazer back, bumps scatter it, thus giving you 1's on dips and 0's on bumps.
This is one reason why you may well find your CD's from the 1990's still play fine even with a lot of scratches while CD's you bought in the mid-2000's are unusable. Many of the latter are dye-printed, which is much cheaper - but a far less reliable thing, the slightest discolouration throws the reader off while bump/dip optical media it's the actual physical shape of the disk that holds the information which is much less vulnerable to wear and tear.
The only way to have a fair justice system is to take capitalism out of the courtroom.
That means set fixed hourly rates for lawyers and limit them legally to one-per-customer.
Yes, even if you're a billionaire you get ONE lawyer and they all cost the same so the poor guy whose life you ruined and is now suing you can afford one just as good as the one you got.
Will this have downsides ? Well I'm not so sure. The old "what would motivate you to be a better X" argument doesn't hold up well here, if what motivates you to be a "better lawyer" is "making more money" then you're in the job for the wrong reason to begin with.
>Yes, but an irrelevant country. The vatican has 800 people. Italy, 70 million.
800 people, and wealth (in money and property) estimated at over 50 billion U.S. dollars.
That makes them the richest per capita nation in the world on average.
>I'm not worried about dying from my own suicide. I can control that. I'm worried about dying from somebody elses suicide.
Then you're an idiot.
Firstly, everything we know about suicidal depression says you're wrong - you really can NOT control it. If you are suicidally depressed and don't get the right help in time, you will die and it's out of your control (humans aren't quite as autonomous as we like to imagine).
Secondly - the risk of you dying from your own suicide is more than 20 times higher than you dying from "somebody else's suicide" and the risk of dying while driving is more than a hundred times higher than that.
We all have to die, it's not something we can avoid, and despite what you like to tell yourself you really can't choose how you go. So all you can do is be sensibly risk-avoidant. Avoid the risks that are high, and forget about the rest. If you hit the one in a million jackpot of being targeted by a terrorist then chances are NO security measures would save you anyway. Terrorists will always find holes in ANY security system. The total and only government expenditure when it comes to terrorism that makes any sense at all is in investigation, information gathering and good old fashioned detective work. The only way to prevent a terrorist attack is to arrest the plotters before they execute it. You cannot protect the places they target, it's never been possible and it never will be. But you can try to catch them early.
How does THAT have any bearing whatsoever on anything I said ?
The risk of you being killed by a terrorist is about half the risk of suicide - and that's for American's who are statistically the MOST likely to be attacked by terrorist in the world (if you don't consider US choppers in war zones firing on civilians terrorism at least).
So what do you propose government does to protect us from ourselves ? Mandatory anti-depressants from age 10 onwards for everybody maybe ?
Considering the number 1 cited cause for teenage suicide is bullying, and boys are 4 times more likely than girls to commit suicide - perhaps we should just give the death penalty to anybody found bullying a boy ?
I always thought the stone age was a time in history... now I realize it's a PLACE in the USA.
Never too old to learn something new...
>I suppose if you postulate one person in an SUV then you've got something. Most of the world doesn't drive things the size of SUVs with only one person in them.
In what world do you live ? Take a look into some SUV's on a morning commute sometime, the VAST majority of all cars on the road have only one person in them, a tiny minority have two, the few SUV's that have more than one is a parent taking kids to school.
Since those parents usually go to work after and work is on average further from homes than schools are - the majority of times those SUV's still have only one person in them.
The kind of people who have figured out that smaller cars are much more sensible in the city, have ALSO figured out that even small cars can carry 3 kids with ease, they STILL don't drive S.U.V's.
The people who DO drive SUV's are also statistically the LEAST likely to ever carpool...
So you're just wrong. Even if we assume that the vehicles are loaded, the GP specifically said seat-for-seat mileage the planes win further ! This actually makes sense because planes don't have red-light stops and traffic jams, where a car's fuel efficiency absolutely plummets.
You can't compare a car's BEST fuel efficiency (e.g. open-road) with that of a plane in fairness, at best you could get an average (and then you need to consider that the VAST majority of cars spend the vast majority of their driving in the LEAST ideal conditions). Since planes NEVER face those conditions, they average better. The worst case scenarios for planes involve weather, and that is a MUCH rarer event.
So, average for average, whether you have one person per vehicle or fill them up seat-for-seat, I find it very EASY to believe that planes could be MORE efficient than SUV's.
>Solution: Automate the "Nope, this isn't copyright" process too. If you have a video taken down you can put it back up and the case is referred to a real person. The company/person who was in the wrong then has to pay $100 to the person who dealt with it.
And another $100 to the person falsely accused to reimburse his time having to reverse the invalid take-down.
That would seriously slow down the degree to which companies are prepared to lay dubious and over-extensive copyright claims on platforms like youtube.
Oh it happens, though perhaps less rarely. Just ask George Cantor....
>I think the little known fact that a major insight in physics came from an initial "mistake" is such an interesting morsel.
Now that is not news, as far as I can tell, the vast majority of true breakthrough's happen when somebody makes a mistake and discovers that it leads somewhere interesting.
Breakthroughs by definition imply that somebody thought outside the current confines of the box - this is very difficult (despite what motivational speakers would have you believe), quite often however when a skilled person makes a trivial error in the steps, they discover that the "error" is actually just a small step outside the box that leads to a perfectly valid conclusion and open up entirely new concepts to discover.
In mathematics this is particularly common - at least in part because of how mathematicians actually do research in their own field. When somebody does come up with a new concept of mathematics (read the history of transfinite numbers for a beautifully illustrative example) nobody really bothers with the fundamentals of making it fit in well with other basic maths. No point doing all that terrible drudge work if the idea doesn't lead somewhere interesting - so for a while everybody is just expanding the idea. It's like a house build wrong way round. There are no foundations, the first floor is just bare walls, the second floor has sparse furniture and carpetting while the third floor starts looking like a suite at the hilton.
If the idea does lead somewhere interesting, if some nice possibilities arise, it eventually starts causing problems that the house lacks foundations however. Some of those new things you're exploring is problematic, you're getting contradictory proofs - and you can't figure out which one is wrong. This is when it gets INTERESTING to do the drudge work, go fill in the foundations and carpet the first floor, because in doing so you work out what is structurally WRONG up on top, and can tell the correct and the incorrect maths apart again.
Because physics is so intrinsically mathematical (and has been ever since at least Newton), this impacts on it directly. Often new ideas in physics are based on mathematical concepts which don't yet have proper foundations. Sometimes it's the physicist who through a mistake discovers where the foundation is wrong or missing.
This is a classic example - a human error (in following steps) turned out to actually be more correct than the steps were. That allowed us to see that we'd been using the wrong KIND of statistical probability for a significant part of quantum mechanics for a very long time and solved a number of unanswered questions.
Planck time is the smallest length of time it is physically possible to MEASURE, not the smallest that can EXIST.
Things don't cease to exist just because they cannot be seen or measured. Half a planck time does exist and does pass - it would just not be possible with any physical apparatus to measure it.
Some would argue that nothing can happen in LESS than a Planck time (for the same reason we cannot measure the time) but that doesn't mean the time doesn't exist, just that it's not ENOUGH time for anything involving energy or matter to happen in.
Time is not a substance after all, and Planck never proposed that time is particulate (though that proposal goes back at least as far as the ancient Greek philosopher Xinu and his four paradoxes) .
The debate isn't actually settled, right back in ancient Greece some philosophers argued time didn't exist and was an illusion, some modern physicists interpret quantum mechanics to come to the same conclusion: there is no such thing as time (while other quantum physicists have answered with a quantum probability form of time which WOULD exist)
If we stick to the reference within which Max Planck himself calculated Planck time, that's essentially relativity with a very small bit of quantum mechanics mixed in - in the theoryset, time exists as a dimension of space, and dimensions do not have "smallest bits" as far as we know (well string theory says they might but quantum-loop theory contradicts it and since neither has any real proof yet I'm hedging my bets) - so there is no smallest amount of time that CAN pass, only the smallest we can measure.
Disclaimer: IANAP just an armchair enthusiast, if I got some details wrong, please don't castrate me - but if you post a correction I would love to read it and learn something.
> it's really a core instinct in us humans.
It's a core instinct in most mammals. What do you think a dog is doing when he humps a pillow, or a leg ? I live in Africa, and I see baboons quite often, it's actually a RARE occasion to watch a troop of baboons and not see at least one or two masturbating.
>People would shut drug addicts on sight, a store owner would shut a thieve, etc
Only the ones who watched too much scatporn...
Did you mean "shoot" ?
Okay, now that makes a lot more sense. I misread your post as implying that her rape charge itself was preposterous as she only LOOKED a bit male but was actually female.
Considering that women can and do rape both men and other women... I fail to see the relevance ?
>Women did not fight for equal treatment in a physical arena, they wanted to be treated (rightly so) as equals intellectually.
Most of them.
> That might be because (shock) they are smart enough to admit that there is a physical difference.
Not always. Gloria Steinhem is on record as demanding that the New York fire department change their entrance exam to be less focussed on strength so that they can get 50% woman members. When it was pointed out that a fireman needs to be strong enough to carry an unconscious victim out of a burning building on his/her shoulders - she replied "the weaker woman can just drag victims by their ankles".
You can't make this shit up...
>Literature is a science?
You're right, it occurred to me later that I forgot the arts-related ones. Clearly Mister Nobel also believed that literature and poetry uplifted humanity.
The study of literature is a science (and involves lots of cross-study with other sciences like archaeology for example) but writing there-off is an art.
>You're rather optimistic that humanity will exist forever for your infinite numbers, but optimism does not substitute for reality. There is nothing about this universe that prevents humans from going extinct; in fact, entropy guarantees it. If the universe exists for a finite duration, there cannot be an infinite number of humans to generate your infinite demand. Quit misusing "infinite".
Actually, I'm not - I specifically addressed this in my post- we WILL go extinct, knowledge which we cannot sell now is the only thing that can prolong our time here - but it can't make it eternal. I also said we have no choice but to AIM for infinite survival, or we won't even be around as long as we CAN be.
>One cannot separate "profit" from "value" in an economic discussion. Profit is value minus cost. Profit isn't a dirty word. All it means is that the value exceeded the cost.
That wasn't the meaning of profit under discussion and certainly not what the GP meant by it. In this context "profit motive" for research literally meant: "The ability to sell products made from that research for more money than we spent on it."
So that's a subset of the proper definition of profit. It does not consider the value of research in ANY terms EXCEPT monetary and even then only in a fairly short time-frame. Crichton's (and my) point was that science should not be done for the PURPOSE of making money, it can be USED for that purpose, but not by the people who DO the research.
That's not the same as saying we shouldn't consider cost and value, I specifically said we CANNOT do ALL the research for ALL the knowledge that could be known - that is the only basis we can use to choose what research to do, but that choice must not be based on a desire to earn money.
Indeed research production must be given away freely (just because you don't charge for something doesn't mean it's value doesn't exist - when habitat for humanity builds a house for a poor person, that house has the same value as one that was bought).
Basically science should be done as charity to all mankind. Some poor people will sell their habitat-for-humanity houses, some people will make money out of research charitably given - that's fine. But the researchers shouldn't be trying to make money - indeed we should do all in our power to remove monetary concerns from them. This is WHY we invented ideas like 'tenure'. We give our best scientists a position from which they CANNOT be fired, not ever, so that there is no worry about perceptions of value or productivity, so that they can work with the freedom of being driven by curiosity rather than money.
Due to the sheer SCALE of research costs in many fields, I'm not sure private charity can fund the public charity that the researchers are doing (or ought to be doing), hence I think tax funding makes sense here.
>But sometimes the knowledge is not worth the cost
Indeed, which is why we do need to select more worthwhile research -we cannot afford "buy" it ALL - especially when the cost is lives, I just argued that the metric for choosing worthwhile research should not be it's likelihood of producing short-term monetary gain.
Ideally the government ought to fund research but have no say in who it is allocated to - that should be decided by the boards of universities, academics selecting which research within their staff is most deserving. Of course that's still not ideal - but nothing is, it's a hell of a lot better than letting shareholders decide it.
>And he pays a finite amount of money to gain that knowledge. You yourself pay nothing (rightfully). He also does not pay for all the pocket lint in the world; only for select samples. The knowledge of my pocket lint may very be lost to the world. No one cares, nor should they. It never had infinite value
You don't know that, for all you know mixed in there is a windblown spore that would cure cancer. A single molecule, never to be discovered because nobody checked there. Unfortunately, we can't afford to turn over every stone, so we have to choose the most likely ones. This is a reality, but I won't pretend it's not an unfortunate reality.
>Your analysis overlooks one thing that invalidates it: Knowledge transfer and maintenance has a cost.
By any reasonable metric, the lowest cost there is, and a cost that with better and better technology only gets closer to zero. It costs as near-nothing as makes no difference to put a research paper on the web for anybody to download (if measured in percentage of total cost / total papers available).
Terry Pratchett once wrote: If you really want to help people, build a library and don't put a lock on the door.
He's right, the only thing that ultimately makes the world any better for anybody is access to knowledge without barriers, and since the poor are the ones who has the most NEED for improving their lives, money is the one barrier we cannot AFFORD to put on knowledge.
>Next, because maintaining knowledge costs time and resources (which is equivalent to money), knowledge can be lost when humanity stops paying the cost to keep it. Knowledge has been lost to history when people didn't write it down, when those who knew it died off, and new generations didn't (or couldn't) learn it.
And as a result, there are now classical cathedrals where the stained glass is down according to a method that's been lost, which means when they get damaged, it's impossible to repair them since nobody knows how to do it anymore.
That's not a GOOD thing and we OUGHT to apply our technology to REDUCING that problem, not pretending it makes the exercise futile.
>This being an information age, a lot of knowledge has been gathered and archived; but can you guarantee that 100% of it will be saved 100 years from now? Any knowledge that is lost cannot have infinite value, as its supply has gone from "infinite" to "0".
That doesn't mean it's value isn't infinite, it just means that an infinite sized value has been lost. When a cargo ship sinks, the value of it's cargo doesn't disappear, it still had the value it had before sinking, but that value is lost, and the owners have to recover it's cost. Lost knowledge is no less valuable for being loss, it's just not USEFUL, we end up paying for the lost value in the things we cannot do anymore.
>You assumed human knowledge lasts forever, even though it does not.
Actually, history suggests the majority of it survives a very long time. We still have access to the vast majority of the writings of the ancient Greeks and even the Mesophotamian's. There's probably no profit in decyphering original carvings of their legends - but there is certainly VALUE in doing so.
In this hypothetical "profitable research only" there would BE no archaeology, or at least, archaeology would be limited to the tiny degree that digs up stuff you can p
>The day the government stops allocating tax money to research...is the day I send them dollars myself, I suppose. I don't see any reason why I can't do that, and it seems easier than revolting
Good point, if enough people agree at least. Too few and the reason you couldn't do it is because there won't be any researchers left to send the dollars to.