> There was slavery for thousands of years in Africa so why isn't it rich?
It WAS rich at the time -at least those who owned the slaves were. It's not rich NOW because every inch of it's wealth was stolen by Europe under the guise of bringing "God and civilization to the barbarians" through a system of mass exploitation and annexation you may have heard of before, it was called colonization.
Ever seen Apocalypse Now? Go read the original book: Heart of Darkness, and while you're at it pick up a copy of "Things fall appart" by Chinua Achebe and then speak of how poor Africa was BEFORE Europe showed up. Hint: it wasn't.
Colonization didn't end all that long ago - the last African country to gain independence was Eritrea and that was only in 1999. The vast majority were independent before the 80's of course -and left as rogue states without much governance at all, ripped apart by years of wars against illegitimate occupation forces (yeah I know that wasn't how the occupiers describe it - the people who chased them out must have been very happy with their "benefactors" to do so right ?) and left in the hands of warlords and dictators who happily continued the patterns of exploitation they learned from their colonial masters - bad cycle stars and is almost impossible to break.
These days indeed the country that makes by far the most money out of exploiting Africa's potential for wealth is the U.S.A. The 4th largest oil reserves in the world belong to Nigeria - yet it's also got the second most worthless currency in the world - all the oil fields are owned by British and American companies... who is surprised ? The largest mining company in Sub-Saharan-Africa is even CALLED Anglo-American corporation. Your own farmers get PAID to destroy crops rather than compete fairly with African farmers (where the climate would probably mean we could outfarm you a thousand times over... yet we starve while you burn crops)...
>Slavery never contributed much to Americas industrial success.
That is only true in the narrowest possible reading of the concept. Those industries relied on farming to supply food for their workers for example. If that food was mostly imported - workers would have had a much higher cost of living, meaning they HAD to be paid more (because dead workers aren't productive), which would have slowed down industry growth. Among the most profitable of slavery-run farms were the cotton farmers, cotton isn't sold to the public- it's sold as a source material for the textile industry. If the cotton farms were PAYING their workers, their costs would have been higher - the cotton more expensive and one of America's most successful early industries would have been a GREAT deal smaller.
Even so you made a strawman attack - the disrespect for copyright and patents were the GP's point and did indeed have a massive positive impact on America's wealth and you ignored that to focus only on the point about slavery (an example given and not even part of the GP's main point) - and what's worse your strawman attack was rather pathetic as your argument is easily debunked with just 5 seconds of logic.
>Martial arts training usually comes with lessons on how to prevent violence. All dojos i know employ a policy where students getting into brawls will get expelled.
So do most gun training. It doesn't stop anybody freaking out over gunclubs does it ?
The people who freak out over video games are not being rational - that's the whole point.
>, specifically illegal violent behavior (sports are violent but perfectly legal) is there a reason to have concern with regulating them because of it.
This is an interesting and much overlooked point. Those who decry video games generally are in praise of sports- even very violent sports like football, wrestling, boxing and martial arts. If seeing fake violence on a screen will make you a more violent person - surely actively trying to beat somebody unconscious must have a much bigger effect - and worse - come with the skills training to make you much more effective at it.
Seriously - anybody who thinks you can learn to shoot from a video game - where guns have no REAL recoil, where you don't go death without ear protection, where your targets don't REALLY get to move in a full 360 degree angle around you has either never played a video game, never shot a real gun, or both. But somebody who has boxed damn sure knows how to hit for maximum impact.
You can't even say that he social aspect of teamsports is what counteracts it because most modern video games are ALSO team based - and what's more - the most violent sports like wrestling and boxing are at their most crucial points, really a solo thing.
So basically - everybody who boxes in school should end up with an arrest record for violent crime - maybe one in a thousand exceptions... since that's not true - it's silly to even consider the idea that video games will have any measurable impact on behavior at all.
The real problem with all this so-called research is that they all forget the single most basic fact about people. Humans are individual and their responses to stimuli are individual as well. Anything beyond the very basic "touch a hot plate, yank hand away" is highly individual, shaped in a context of personality, genetics and past experience - and thus utterly and completely impossible to predict. The moment you have something that cannot be predicted and in fact on which you cannot even draw general rules - you have something on which science cannot, shouldn't and and will not give an answer - because there IS no answer to give. Ipso facto - no laws or policies should exist for such things as there is nothing substantial or verifiable to base them on. This is just as true of video games as of porn.
We've all heard that "exposure to sexual material at a young age can cause harm"... but until not very long ago humans lived in single room buildings. Kids slept next to their parents in the same beds where their siblings were made. Frankly - THAT seems to be what we are actually naturally designed for. I know a number of parents who make absolutely no effort to hide their porn from their kids, and in fact encourage them to watch along and many others who insist this MUST be harmful - I think neither side is right. What's right is that a parent should know how his PARTICULAR child will respond to a particular thing -and GUIDE the introduction of this stimuli (whatever it is) to ensure that the potential good effects are there, the potential bad effects averted and above all that those kids do no grow up to be adults utterly unprepared for a world that doesn't sanction all the stimuli they can reach.
There seem to be utterly NO place whatsoever for the government to be involved in that system at all.
Actually SRWare is a scam - it came up during those same discussions and we investigated it. It's actually WORSE than chromium itself in some ways. We suggested to the author that it would be better to submit patches to chromium than to fork it - and that forks should be kept as a last resort if the upstream developers do not want to play ball. Since the chromium team was happy to work with us - we had no reason to do so.
Suffice to say he was rather uncooperative. On further investigation Iron proved to be basically a moneymaking scheme offering no real advantage to the users. There's no problem of course with making money out of free software, but doing so under false pretenses and by actually making things a little worse for users (Iron users miss out on security patches from chromium) well - sure you CAN do that, but I'm not going to give you free advertising for it:P
That's why I use chromium instead. All the advantage - with code I can check myself. And many do.
I can tell you that I was involved with discussions on the FSF's free-distro collaboration group about chromium and we identified a number of potential privacy gotcha's - we submitted the list to the chromium developers and all of them were fixed.
They were really very cooperative with us about resolving our privacy concerns.
>Also, around the Silurian/Ordovian the CO2 levels were 6x to 10x what they are now, You do realize that your chosen time-frame saw 60% of the planet's mammalian life wiped out right ? Your example of worse CO2 than we're making is... an extinction event. Yep - that's reassuring.
>The total carbon in the rock cycle is several orders of magnitude higher than all the carbon in all known available fossil fuel. So trying to get all the carbon in all the fossil fuel into the air as CO2 as fast as possible is not fucking stupid then... I politely disagree with your assessment (for the specific conclusion - that WAS politely). You do realize that fossil fuel is just ONE of the many things we're putting up there. We're clearing the amazon of more than an acre of forest every day ! I'm not one of the idiots who think forests combat global warming - I am well aware that they are carbon neutral - but the vast majority of the carbon we're clearing there does NOT exist in paper-producing trees. That vast majority is simply getting burned to get it out of the way, and then turned into farmland. Fossil fuels are a big problem - but present DAY organic carbon is producing pollution too so that's only half the picture already. Furthermore - don't make the classic mistake of thinking carbon and oxygen are in a credit/debit situation. CO2 contains oxygen - two for every bit of carbon. When you increase CO2 you don't just change the PERCENTAGE of it in the atmosphere - you use UP oxygen - at twice the rate you use up carbon. Let me put it in simple terms: burn one ton of carbon - there is two tons of oxygen nobody ever gets to breath. That also aggravates the atmospheric changes since the drop in oxygen levels is double the increase in CO2.
>There is certainly no danger of some sort of catastrophic feedback loop - that's pure political fearmongering Climate shifts HAPPEN based on feedback loops. Ice-ages and warm ages BOTH do exactly that. They start small but rapidly escalate - more ice = more albedo = less heat = more ice for example. Some of the worst feedback loops in geological history happened because of life-forms influence on their environment. When plants started pumping oxygen in the air it quite rapidly reached it's currently level of about 21% - and wiped out every other life form around. New life had to evolve that could survive this toxic and corrosive gas - when it did, it even learned how to actually USE that oxygen to help power itself, providing more CO2 which in turn powered the plants oxygen production- so now the plants proliferated... The entire face of life on the planet changed in just a blink of an evolutionary eye because (initially) one species developed a new trick that changed all the rules.
>but long term we just don't matter on the scale of a planet. Well, it would be rather nice if we could postpone our extinction as far as possible. We're a fairly adaptable species and could survive a lot of what the universe might throw at us, not all for sure, but a lot... but if we make things worse if we are the instruments of our own destruction - as you rightfully say on the scale of a planet it won't matter. We'll be as gone as the animals that lived before the oxygenating plants evolved...
Or - we could perhaps NOT persist in throwing everything we've evolved to depend on into absolute disarray to preserve the (EXTREMELY short term) wealth of a tiny elite and give ourselves time to get BETTER at adapting... who knows, we may just stick around long enough that we START to matter on the scale of a planet. A rare few other species have pulled it off. There is no guarantee that we will.
>I really enjoy learning about this stuff - you might as well. Too bad you seem to limit your learning to the humility breeding part of science that tells us that 97% of all species ever to have existed are extinct, that life survives but we probably won't etc. and then come to the conclusion that we are too weak to be doing anything that alters the planets c
>OK, so electric trains generate electricity spontaneously? I thought they used electricity generated primarily from fossil fuels.
Or nuclear or solar or wind - they aren't using fossil fuels to power the vehicle- they are using electricity and we have many more options to create THAT.
>And methane powered cars aren't burning a fossil fuel?
No, most of them get refilled by the methane that gets produced as a waste byproduct from sewage treatment. There is fossil methane but it's not nearly common enough to be worth bothering to mine - especially since biological wastes produce massive quantities which we are mostly wasting right now. So it's self-produce-able (at least for now - if ALL cars used it, I don't know the extent to which we could - and presumably it wouldn't be free anymore), it's also much cleaner burning producing no CO2 or CO1 - in fact it burning methane produces mostly.. water.
>Both produce less waste than everyone driving their own gas car, but neither particularly improves CO2 production. Which, btw, is what we are talking about here.
Actually - both DO reduce CO2 production even now. The more we switch electricity supplies to cleaner sources the more we will enhance the reduction from trains - and methane is already much cleaner burning. It's not a pollution-free sollution but it's much, much cleaner - the pollution it DOES produce is far less harmful and it doesn't include any CO2 at all. I know several people who have done the conversions on their cars and the fuel saving (since currently methane is still available for free) pays for the conversion costs in under 3 months. The main reason it hasn't become mainstream is a (largely irrational) safety fear. A tank of methane is more volatile than a tank of gasoline and in an accident more likely to explode.
>And before you again claim to know it all, there are dozens of possibilities for the causes of asthma, but you pick the one that serves your needs ignoring the fact that urban air quality has been improving during the same years that asthma rates have been increasing.
Okay forget the word "asthma". You're not seriously suggesting that breathing dirty air is good for us are you ? Surely cleaner air will make us healthier ? That's just a simple fact. The specific diseases it will reduce and the specific benefits while interesting has nothing to do with the debate. There is also the fact that cleaner air automatically means more energy for your body - the more oxygen you get out of each breath the easier your body burns it's own fuel. More energetic people are at least potentially more productive.
>Note here, again, I'm not claiming to know the answers - just the questions.
And I'm giving them to you and you're arguing semantics instead of seeing the point.
>There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
That sounds like: we don't understand everything so we shouldn't plan or change anything ? I promise you that was not the intent of the quote. The intent was to teach us to be adaptable in our planning so that as our understanding improves our plans do the same.
>The figures I cited are worldwide averages, not just developed countries.
Let me get this straight - you STATE that the cause of the effect is improved development but do not see a discrepancy in the suggestion that you need to be DEVELOPED to have the effect ? So you explain the cause of an effect, but then don't think that the effect would not exist in the ABSENCE of that cause ? Do you also think 2+2=5 if the 2 has really good self esteem ?
>The fertility rate is going down because women are choosing to have less children.
Fertility rate != Birthrate.
>This is a consequence of economic development and a higher standard of living.
Yes - in DEVELOPED countries. We don't have an overpopulation problem in RICH countries. India and China and Africa has the big problem with excessive birth rates -and they have LOW levels of education and economic development and the areas within where these rates are the highest have some of the worst living standards in the world. What you say is true- hell I said the same thing in my response - but for ME it means we need to improve these things in those poor regions. You seem to think that because the birthrate is going down in the USA and Europe that means the rate of human population is going down - trust me the decline in those countries isn't even a noticeable reduction compared to the increase in poor countries. The over-all human population is still growing an unless the development rate of those nations increase at a MUCH higher rate than they currently do (or will happen without radical policy changes) it will keep doing so at an alarming rate.
>Even the UN now admits that worldwide population will most likely peak a 9 billion sometime before the end of this century and start declining due to this effect. [citation needed] - more specifically citation with CONTEXT needed. That sentence could fit nicely into: If we increase development then... Or even: Unless we stem the tide of HIV then...
>Congratulations! You have solved the cause of Asthma. I was wondering why doctors were spending millions trying to figure it out when they could just turn to any know-it-all and find out.
Right it's not a proven fact that when asthma sufferers move to less polluted areas the have far fewer attacks. It is not a fact that the diseases hardly even EXISTED prior to the industrial revolution and in those societies on earth without industrialization STILL has a near zero occurrence.
All those Doctors are trying to find a cure DESPITE the dirty air because they can't do anything about that - but they can try to help the patient.
>I guess I'll just lump you in with the geniuses who know how the Earth's climate works.
Right so... let me get this straight - you bash ONE of my examples, and you do so ignorantly at that and ignore all the other much more easily provable and simply verifiable ones ? Strawman attack is a fallacy, don't do it.
>BTW, if transportation were cheaper with alternate fuels, we would be doing it already.
It is, and we are. The running cost of an electrical train per capita is far lower than a highway full of cars for the same number of people. We build electrical trains because they are cheaper to run than any fossil fuel engine - either the steam that predated it or the internal combustion engine. Electrical tram services are far cheaper to operate than bus services. This is all stuff you can easily check for yourself. Methane powered cars can be built out of existing car models today and run for MUCH cheaper (in fact currently due to low demand you can actually do so for free -any sewage treatment plant will let you collect as much as you need, they have no use for it) and methane burns a LOT cleaner than gasoline does. The only reason we we're not mass-producing alternative energy cars long ago was vested interests that artificially increases costs. As technology has continued to drive down efficiency (which would have happened FASTER if the market was bigger in the past) the real costs are making this harder, further the political climate is now creating a market space previously kept artificially shut and hybrids are becoming more and more popular, which WILL be opening the road to fully electric which most likely WILL be the de-facto personal transport technology of the future - the only debateable issue there is how long it will take. I'm prepared to bet on under a decade before 90% of new vehicles sold are electric with a few hold-outs in things like the 18-wheeler truck industry.
>By Frozen Bubble, do you mean Bubble Bobble, the original arcade game which was then ported to consoles and made the authors large wads of cash?
No I mean Frozen Bubble which is the same game, with the same quality - and was given away for free. It is ludicrous to suggest that a game like that cannot be done for free UNLESS it's a clone either - the site I linked you to have some very addictive and highly original free games.
>. In the middle ages, we had no power plants, race cars, LCD TVs, computers, trains, commercial jets, ocean liners, etc
We also had no acid rain, asthma, lung disease, pollution fog, giant oil cartels, oil-spills in the gulf... that's the bit I don't get. A change to renewable energy would improve the quality of life of every person on the planet. AGW or not - it's a win-win for the human race... why could you POSSIBLY care that it will make the oil-producers not be rich anymore ? The smart once are already preparing for the future - hell that's all that Dubai IS - one giant investment against the day the oil runs out / we stop buying it. We have to get over our oil dependence to survive because there isn't an infinite amount of it and we're using it up. In the process we get cleaner air, cleaner rivers, new industries, healthier and more productive workers - an escalation of benefit for every single one of us - and best of all, in the short term you actually have MORE cash in your pocket doing the right things than if you do the wrong things...
Why the hell not do it then ?!??!?!
You know I've asked this quesxtion on/. of people making posts like yours many, many times - not ONCE EVER has one of them had the balls to reply to me - do you ?
And still we ignore the other part: even if it's got nothing to do with the trillions of tons of carbon we dig up every year and burn and then pump into the air as CO2 who cares ?
So let's assume man has NO influence - what will we achieve by going for less or zero polluting energy sources ? Economic advances (not being dependent on a cut-throat sellers market... mmmm yummy), healthier lives with greatly reduced incidences of diseases like asthma (which in turn means a major boost to global productivity), less incidence of problems with real environmental and agricultural impacts like acid rain. Cheaper transportation meaning an increase in GDP and higher quality of life for everybody. Reduced medical costs. It not only all adds up but exponentially increases the quality of the civilization we live in as each positive impact causes OTHER positive impacts.
So yeah... giving the full benefit of the doubt to the deniers: humans have NO influence on climate, the results of the changes we would make in our misguided attempt to resolve that influence would make the world a MUCH better place for everybody to live in - the only people who will lose anything at all are the oil magnates... so I ask you... WHO THE FUCK CARES IF IT'S RIGHT OR NOT - we should be doing this EITHER WAY - it's a win win situation ! If it's wrong we live in a better world. If it's right we live in a better world... let's just stop arguing and do it.
>In another generation or two the earth's population will be naturally declining due to inexorably declining fertility levels.
Sorry, not true. That was press jumping on various pieces of unrelated research and making a wonderful scare story that no scientist ever actually believed. Human fertility is just fine - repeated checks by sperm banks all over the world in the decade since that was big news have still reported absolutely NO decline in sperm counts. On the contrary longer life expectancy have increased the amount of women who remain alive their entire fertile period - technically upping the average human fertility rate, combined with reduced child mortality rates and longer lifespans... we got a population set to keep exploding for quite some time unless there is a radical intervention.
The trouble is - there are only two practical ways such an intervention could occur: massive government interference in perhaps the most basic of human civil liberties - or massive increase in global education levels...
So which one do you prefer ? Because I vote for the "more schools and make them free because it's EXACTLY the poor people we need to work on here" approach over the "we will legally force you to get castrated after your first child" approach myself,even if it means I pay a little more tax.
>What causes the normal 100k year temperature cycles during the ice age we're in the middle of?
This is an ice-age according to you? WTF have you been smoking ? We haven't HAD an ice-age since our first ancestors reached North America and besides it's a stupid term. The proper term is glacial cycle -and we're smack in the middle of an inter-glacial cycle (that would be what happens in between ice ages when climate becomes moderate). In a real "ice age" we'd be seeing glaciers cover most of Europe and almost all of North America. And you don't even want to KNOW about superglacials - they are very rare- in the once per hundred-million-years range but when THOSE happen - the polar ice-caps actually MEET at the equator !
This my friend is a moderate interglacial cycle - a warm period in other words. It's true that it will not last for ever, historically it's ending will be with a mild glacial cycle ("mini-ice-age"). After that one of two things happen - either we return to a short interglacial cycle where it warms up again (but not nearly up to where we are) and then into a full-on glacial cycle, or it just flips straight into the full on glacial. It's not really possible to predict because either is about equally likely.
The thing is not only is this a warm period, we aren't expecting the next mild-glacial for quite some time and we're making this interglacial by far the worst it's ever been. Even if the (very small and non-consensus) theory that we should be expecting a glacial within the century IS true - well we've probably already prevented it - it will at best maybe manage to save us from our own folly (how undeserved and unlikely would that be ?)
Much more likely is that we'll keep boosting CO2 levels up and up and up, creating feedback loops that reduce albedo, warm the oceans and warm the sky - all building up to an ever increasing rapidity of temperature rises and reach a level of temperature unlike anything since the evolution of oxygenating plants.
Seriously dude... what part of "the hottest decade in recorded human history" did you NOT understand ?
happypenguin.org - a heckuva lot of those games are really, really good.
Of course if you talking single-player only then it limits things a bit but we're seeing an ever increasing shift to low-entry-cost models even in commercial PC games - particularly in he MMO sphere. WoW has been free to download for years (though it's size makes buying the disk sets actually CHEAPER in my country than the bandwith costs of the download) - you just pay the subscription fee to use their servers. DnD-online has even done away with the subscription-fee and moved entirely to a microtransaction environment (which took an ailing game and gave it a brand new life).
A lot of FOSS games are terrible - most are getting better and better and some are truly excellent. Again it depends how you look at it. ID has been publishing their titles under the GPL for years, true they don't do so right away -first they sell them as closed stuff, so they can make money licensing the engines but they always freed them later - while still selling the artwork. Giving those engines away for free - kept the games alive, means their still making money on artwork for 15 year old games (though granted, not a lot) and that some groundbreaking game engines and ideas survived major changes in the hardware world - and these ARE top-of-the-range games.
In the end -say what you will - but Frozen Bubble remains one of the most popular games ever created, simplicity != bad quality.
> especially based on the apparent confusion even within the wordpress community.
Except there isn't any confusion in the wordpress community. Every wordpress developer and contributor and every theme designer uses the GPL and believes they are supposed to do so. There is only one person developing a wordpress theme who disagrees. When you are alone among thousands of developers in how you claim the license applies that is - by itself- a major warning sign. When you are directly at odds with the core developers of a product on top of which you build your main product, arguing and fighting with your core supplier in fact - that is just really stupid business. Getting sued by your own suppliers is likely to kill any business - even if you somehow managed to win it. The fact that these suppliers have a huge law office filled with law professors - not just normal lawyers - who will by quite happy to do the case pro bono means chances are you'll be begging to settle really fast, because you have to PAY a lawyer to keep arguing against the whole world and they don't.
You didn't get to go to school in South Africa under the apartheid system. School was little more than a political indoctrination system and conformity above all was the value they tried to impress upon us. Critical questions were punished...
So if it answers your questions: I was a straight A student in the subjects with good teachers, and failed subjects with bad ones - some of which I went on to be a top student of at University - and one of which forms a cornerstone of my career...
The first experience I had of this happened in my very first year of high school - we were doing a course on electricity and the teacher said what the textbook said: "100volts and higher are dangerous", I raised my hand and said: "Well depends on context surely - directly to the blood stream - 1 volt is more than enough to kill you". The teacher looked at me and said "Oh shut up, 1v can't harm anybody under any conditions". I politely said "My father is an electrical engineer- he designed the powergrids for half the cities in this country* - and he wrote his thesis on electrical safety designs with a study of it's interaction with the human body.**" I didn't get to finish my sentence - I received corporal punishment right there for "being disrespectful" (which was a phrase meaning: daring to disagree with authority" That was the school experience I had. By all means - I am completely over it, I has no impact on my life today. But I also have a social conscience - I know that the attitude in most schools is still exactly the same and I care about the kids going through the same - I care about the impact it has on society. I know too many people who had the intelligence to do groundbreaking things but never even made it to university because schools broke their spirit. I know how many kids will get HIV infections today because schools think telling them about the existence of condoms will encourage them to have sex (they already are, but now their not doing it safely - but those kinds of teachers would much rather pretend they don't).
*After 1994 most of the former "black" cities didn't have power - the government spent a lot of money on providing them with electricity, my dad's company had most of the design contracts for that and he was in charge of most of those design projects.
**If you care - the reason is that the nervous system uses electricity. Electrical pulses from the brain to the heart controls it's beat. A voltage from outside that's high enough to overcome the resistance of the blood and provide a current stronger than the current of the nervous system afterward will effectively "override" it. DC causes an instant flat-line, AC sends the hearth rhythm out of whack (neither 50 nor 60 Herz is anywhere near normal) - either way, instant heart-attack. Considering all the factors including the average resistance of human blood and the current of the human nervous system - 1volt is more than enough. The reason it usually doesn't kill people is because the human skin has a very high electrical resistance and most electrical shocks end up running over it rather than through our bodies (effectively conducted by hair and sweat)- at worst causing muscle spasms by messing with the nerve signals (through induction). Most electrical shock deaths actually happen because voltage over a high-resistance conductor produces a lot of heat - it burns through the skin, and only then - once it's running through the (low resistance) blood does it kill you.
I have no problem with the point you make - my problem is with those teachers who when the smarter kids can USEFULLY model it as a force to solve problems quicker (fully understanding what's REALLY happening - that inertia is an effect of momentum is an effect of mass- maybe even know the Einsteinian addition that allows some things to have momentum WITHOUT having mass like photons) get punished for taking what to THEM is just a clever shortcut.
Clever shortcuts are a fundamental trick to being better things- it's a problem if you ONLY know the shortcut and not the road that led to it - then it's just an error. The problem is that our schoolsystem makes no differentiation between the kids who just know what their grandparents taught them (although my dad was an engineer who taught me that centrifugal "force" in those cases isn't really a force, it's just a useful way to calculate the result of Newtons first law on something forced by a constraint to travel in a circular pattern) and the kids who think the simplified surface answer is the whole answer.
That's why it's those smart kids who later complain about it... we feel we could have gotten further along the path if we were allowed to use shortcuts to skip over those things. We already understood them, doing the sums a thousand times over when there's a quicker way to get the same result by pretending there's another force is CLEVER - not stupid.
Mind you most of school science is all still just the bare scratchings of the surface. Everybody who did it knows that prisms split light up and this causes rainbows... but how many of us really know the COOL part of that question ? How do thousands of drops combine into one big rainbow... and for that matter - why is it bow-shaped ? The real geometry of how rainbows form is gorgeously ellegant... the colours are, quite frankly, the boring bit.
You stated that we cannot model centrifugal force because it disappears if the component forces are removed (duh- remove either of them and there is no longer anything to add up to it).
I pointed out how you can have forces created by other forces that aren't even directly part of them (you need a force to move a conductor through a magnetic field) and since we have no problem modeling those and predicting exactly what will happen if the motive force is removed - this has nothing to do with the usefulness of sometimes modeling centripetal effects as if it was a motive force in it's own right - especially since, in some (admittedly more esoteric) cases, it is.
The suggestion that you cannot teach the esoteric cases to the smart kids because it would confuse the dumb ones I have heard about every subject a million times and having BEEN one of the bored and frustrated smart kids I have only one response: balderdash.
You know we all also learned the right-hand law for electromagnetic inference and that ALSO disapears if the objects stop moving... does that mean we can't model magnetic forces now ?
Slashdot Mirror
> There was slavery for thousands of years in Africa so why isn't it rich?
It WAS rich at the time -at least those who owned the slaves were. It's not rich NOW because every inch of it's wealth was stolen by Europe under the guise of bringing "God and civilization to the barbarians" through a system of mass exploitation and annexation you may have heard of before, it was called colonization.
Ever seen Apocalypse Now? Go read the original book: Heart of Darkness, and while you're at it pick up a copy of "Things fall appart" by Chinua Achebe and then speak of how poor Africa was BEFORE Europe showed up. Hint: it wasn't.
Colonization didn't end all that long ago - the last African country to gain independence was Eritrea and that was only in 1999. The vast majority were independent before the 80's of course -and left as rogue states without much governance at all, ripped apart by years of wars against illegitimate occupation forces (yeah I know that wasn't how the occupiers describe it - the people who chased them out must have been very happy with their "benefactors" to do so right ?) and left in the hands of warlords and dictators who happily continued the patterns of exploitation they learned from their colonial masters - bad cycle stars and is almost impossible to break.
These days indeed the country that makes by far the most money out of exploiting Africa's potential for wealth is the U.S.A. The 4th largest oil reserves in the world belong to Nigeria - yet it's also got the second most worthless currency in the world - all the oil fields are owned by British and American companies... who is surprised ? The largest mining company in Sub-Saharan-Africa is even CALLED Anglo-American corporation.
Your own farmers get PAID to destroy crops rather than compete fairly with African farmers (where the climate would probably mean we could outfarm you a thousand times over... yet we starve while you burn crops)...
Sorry - you are just plain wrong.
>Slavery never contributed much to Americas industrial success.
That is only true in the narrowest possible reading of the concept. Those industries relied on farming to supply food for their workers for example. If that food was mostly imported - workers would have had a much higher cost of living, meaning they HAD to be paid more (because dead workers aren't productive), which would have slowed down industry growth. Among the most profitable of slavery-run farms were the cotton farmers, cotton isn't sold to the public- it's sold as a source material for the textile industry. If the cotton farms were PAYING their workers, their costs would have been higher - the cotton more expensive and one of America's most successful early industries would have been a GREAT deal smaller.
Even so you made a strawman attack - the disrespect for copyright and patents were the GP's point and did indeed have a massive positive impact on America's wealth and you ignored that to focus only on the point about slavery (an example given and not even part of the GP's main point) - and what's worse your strawman attack was rather pathetic as your argument is easily debunked with just 5 seconds of logic.
>Martial arts training usually comes with lessons on how to prevent violence. All dojos i know employ a policy where students getting into brawls will get expelled.
So do most gun training. It doesn't stop anybody freaking out over gunclubs does it ?
The people who freak out over video games are not being rational - that's the whole point.
>, specifically illegal violent behavior (sports are violent but perfectly legal) is there a reason to have concern with regulating them because of it.
This is an interesting and much overlooked point. Those who decry video games generally are in praise of sports- even very violent sports like football, wrestling, boxing and martial arts. If seeing fake violence on a screen will make you a more violent person - surely actively trying to beat somebody unconscious must have a much bigger effect - and worse - come with the skills training to make you much more effective at it.
Seriously - anybody who thinks you can learn to shoot from a video game - where guns have no REAL recoil, where you don't go death without ear protection, where your targets don't REALLY get to move in a full 360 degree angle around you has either never played a video game, never shot a real gun, or both.
But somebody who has boxed damn sure knows how to hit for maximum impact.
You can't even say that he social aspect of teamsports is what counteracts it because most modern video games are ALSO team based - and what's more - the most violent sports like wrestling and boxing are at their most crucial points, really a solo thing.
So basically - everybody who boxes in school should end up with an arrest record for violent crime - maybe one in a thousand exceptions... since that's not true - it's silly to even consider the idea that video games will have any measurable impact on behavior at all.
The real problem with all this so-called research is that they all forget the single most basic fact about people. Humans are individual and their responses to stimuli are individual as well. Anything beyond the very basic "touch a hot plate, yank hand away" is highly individual, shaped in a context of personality, genetics and past experience - and thus utterly and completely impossible to predict.
The moment you have something that cannot be predicted and in fact on which you cannot even draw general rules - you have something on which science cannot, shouldn't and and will not give an answer - because there IS no answer to give.
Ipso facto - no laws or policies should exist for such things as there is nothing substantial or verifiable to base them on. This is just as true of video games as of porn.
We've all heard that "exposure to sexual material at a young age can cause harm"... but until not very long ago humans lived in single room buildings. Kids slept next to their parents in the same beds where their siblings were made. Frankly - THAT seems to be what we are actually naturally designed for. I know a number of parents who make absolutely no effort to hide their porn from their kids, and in fact encourage them to watch along and many others who insist this MUST be harmful - I think neither side is right. What's right is that a parent should know how his PARTICULAR child will respond to a particular thing -and GUIDE the introduction of this stimuli (whatever it is) to ensure that the potential good effects are there, the potential bad effects averted and above all that those kids do no grow up to be adults utterly unprepared for a world that doesn't sanction all the stimuli they can reach.
There seem to be utterly NO place whatsoever for the government to be involved in that system at all.
Actually SRWare is a scam - it came up during those same discussions and we investigated it. It's actually WORSE than chromium itself in some ways.
We suggested to the author that it would be better to submit patches to chromium than to fork it - and that forks should be kept as a last resort if the upstream developers do not want to play ball. Since the chromium team was happy to work with us - we had no reason to do so.
Suffice to say he was rather uncooperative. On further investigation Iron proved to be basically a moneymaking scheme offering no real advantage to the users. There's no problem of course with making money out of free software, but doing so under false pretenses and by actually making things a little worse for users (Iron users miss out on security patches from chromium) well - sure you CAN do that, but I'm not going to give you free advertising for it :P
>I am wary of Google Chrome for the same reason..
That's why I use chromium instead. All the advantage - with code I can check myself. And many do.
I can tell you that I was involved with discussions on the FSF's free-distro collaboration group about chromium and we identified a number of potential privacy gotcha's - we submitted the list to the chromium developers and all of them were fixed.
They were really very cooperative with us about resolving our privacy concerns.
>Also, around the Silurian/Ordovian the CO2 levels were 6x to 10x what they are now,
You do realize that your chosen time-frame saw 60% of the planet's mammalian life wiped out right ? Your example of worse CO2 than we're making is... an extinction event. Yep - that's reassuring.
>The total carbon in the rock cycle is several orders of magnitude higher than all the carbon in all known available fossil fuel.
So trying to get all the carbon in all the fossil fuel into the air as CO2 as fast as possible is not fucking stupid then... I politely disagree with your assessment (for the specific conclusion - that WAS politely). You do realize that fossil fuel is just ONE of the many things we're putting up there. We're clearing the amazon of more than an acre of forest every day ! I'm not one of the idiots who think forests combat global warming - I am well aware that they are carbon neutral - but the vast majority of the carbon we're clearing there does NOT exist in paper-producing trees. That vast majority is simply getting burned to get it out of the way, and then turned into farmland. Fossil fuels are a big problem - but present DAY organic carbon is producing pollution too so that's only half the picture already.
Furthermore - don't make the classic mistake of thinking carbon and oxygen are in a credit/debit situation. CO2 contains oxygen - two for every bit of carbon. When you increase CO2 you don't just change the PERCENTAGE of it in the atmosphere - you use UP oxygen - at twice the rate you use up carbon.
Let me put it in simple terms: burn one ton of carbon - there is two tons of oxygen nobody ever gets to breath.
That also aggravates the atmospheric changes since the drop in oxygen levels is double the increase in CO2.
>There is certainly no danger of some sort of catastrophic feedback loop - that's pure political fearmongering
Climate shifts HAPPEN based on feedback loops. Ice-ages and warm ages BOTH do exactly that. They start small but rapidly escalate - more ice = more albedo = less heat = more ice for example.
Some of the worst feedback loops in geological history happened because of life-forms influence on their environment. When plants started pumping oxygen in the air it quite rapidly reached it's currently level of about 21% - and wiped out every other life form around. New life had to evolve that could survive this toxic and corrosive gas - when it did, it even learned how to actually USE that oxygen to help power itself, providing more CO2 which in turn powered the plants oxygen production- so now the plants proliferated...
The entire face of life on the planet changed in just a blink of an evolutionary eye because (initially) one species developed a new trick that changed all the rules.
>but long term we just don't matter on the scale of a planet.
Well, it would be rather nice if we could postpone our extinction as far as possible. We're a fairly adaptable species and could survive a lot of what the universe might throw at us, not all for sure, but a lot... but if we make things worse if we are the instruments of our own destruction - as you rightfully say on the scale of a planet it won't matter.
We'll be as gone as the animals that lived before the oxygenating plants evolved...
Or - we could perhaps NOT persist in throwing everything we've evolved to depend on into absolute disarray to preserve the (EXTREMELY short term) wealth of a tiny elite and give ourselves time to get BETTER at adapting... who knows, we may just stick around long enough that we START to matter on the scale of a planet. A rare few other species have pulled it off. There is no guarantee that we will.
>I really enjoy learning about this stuff - you might as well.
Too bad you seem to limit your learning to the humility breeding part of science that tells us that 97% of all species ever to have existed are extinct, that life survives but we probably won't etc. and then come to the conclusion that we are too weak to be doing anything that alters the planets c
>There is enough produced to make your friends feel good about themselves, but, alas, it isn't a solution.
I never said it was. I said - that it was an example of an alternative fuel being cheaper than the conventional fuels.
Ultimately I was promoting electrical cars as the actual SOLUTION.
>OK, so electric trains generate electricity spontaneously? I thought they used electricity generated primarily from fossil fuels.
Or nuclear or solar or wind - they aren't using fossil fuels to power the vehicle- they are using electricity and we have many more options to create THAT.
>And methane powered cars aren't burning a fossil fuel?
No, most of them get refilled by the methane that gets produced as a waste byproduct from sewage treatment. There is fossil methane but it's not nearly common enough to be worth bothering to mine - especially since biological wastes produce massive quantities which we are mostly wasting right now.
So it's self-produce-able (at least for now - if ALL cars used it, I don't know the extent to which we could - and presumably it wouldn't be free anymore), it's also much cleaner burning producing no CO2 or CO1 - in fact it burning methane produces mostly.. water.
>Both produce less waste than everyone driving their own gas car, but neither particularly improves CO2 production. Which, btw, is what we are talking about here.
Actually - both DO reduce CO2 production even now. The more we switch electricity supplies to cleaner sources the more we will enhance the reduction from trains - and methane is already much cleaner burning. It's not a pollution-free sollution but it's much, much cleaner - the pollution it DOES produce is far less harmful and it doesn't include any CO2 at all.
I know several people who have done the conversions on their cars and the fuel saving (since currently methane is still available for free) pays for the conversion costs in under 3 months.
The main reason it hasn't become mainstream is a (largely irrational) safety fear. A tank of methane is more volatile than a tank of gasoline and in an accident more likely to explode.
>And before you again claim to know it all, there are dozens of possibilities for the causes of asthma, but you pick the one that serves your needs ignoring the fact that urban air quality has been improving during the same years that asthma rates have been increasing.
Okay forget the word "asthma". You're not seriously suggesting that breathing dirty air is good for us are you ? Surely cleaner air will make us healthier ? That's just a simple fact. The specific diseases it will reduce and the specific benefits while interesting has nothing to do with the debate.
There is also the fact that cleaner air automatically means more energy for your body - the more oxygen you get out of each breath the easier your body burns it's own fuel. More energetic people are at least potentially more productive.
>Note here, again, I'm not claiming to know the answers - just the questions.
And I'm giving them to you and you're arguing semantics instead of seeing the point.
>There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
That sounds like: we don't understand everything so we shouldn't plan or change anything ?
I promise you that was not the intent of the quote. The intent was to teach us to be adaptable in our planning so that as our understanding improves our plans do the same.
>The figures I cited are worldwide averages, not just developed countries.
Let me get this straight - you STATE that the cause of the effect is improved development but do not see a discrepancy in the suggestion that you need to be DEVELOPED to have the effect ? So you explain the cause of an effect, but then don't think that the effect would not exist in the ABSENCE of that cause ?
Do you also think 2+2=5 if the 2 has really good self esteem ?
>The fertility rate is going down because women are choosing to have less children.
Fertility rate != Birthrate.
>This is a consequence of economic development and a higher standard of living.
Yes - in DEVELOPED countries. We don't have an overpopulation problem in RICH countries. India and China and Africa has the big problem with excessive birth rates -and they have LOW levels of education and economic development and the areas within where these rates are the highest have some of the worst living standards in the world. What you say is true- hell I said the same thing in my response - but for ME it means we need to improve these things in those poor regions.
You seem to think that because the birthrate is going down in the USA and Europe that means the rate of human population is going down - trust me the decline in those countries isn't even a noticeable reduction compared to the increase in poor countries. The over-all human population is still growing an unless the development rate of those nations increase at a MUCH higher rate than they currently do (or will happen without radical policy changes) it will keep doing so at an alarming rate.
>Even the UN now admits that worldwide population will most likely peak a 9 billion sometime before the end of this century and start declining due to this effect. ...
[citation needed] - more specifically citation with CONTEXT needed.
That sentence could fit nicely into:
If we increase development then...
Or even:
Unless we stem the tide of HIV then
By itself - it's meaningless.
>Congratulations! You have solved the cause of Asthma. I was wondering why doctors were spending millions trying to figure it out when they could just turn to any know-it-all and find out.
Right it's not a proven fact that when asthma sufferers move to less polluted areas the have far fewer attacks. It is not a fact that the diseases hardly even EXISTED prior to the industrial revolution and in those societies on earth without industrialization STILL has a near zero occurrence.
All those Doctors are trying to find a cure DESPITE the dirty air because they can't do anything about that - but they can try to help the patient.
>I guess I'll just lump you in with the geniuses who know how the Earth's climate works.
Right so... let me get this straight - you bash ONE of my examples, and you do so ignorantly at that and ignore all the other much more easily provable and simply verifiable ones ? Strawman attack is a fallacy, don't do it.
>BTW, if transportation were cheaper with alternate fuels, we would be doing it already.
It is, and we are. The running cost of an electrical train per capita is far lower than a highway full of cars for the same number of people. We build electrical trains because they are cheaper to run than any fossil fuel engine - either the steam that predated it or the internal combustion engine. Electrical tram services are far cheaper to operate than bus services. This is all stuff you can easily check for yourself.
Methane powered cars can be built out of existing car models today and run for MUCH cheaper (in fact currently due to low demand you can actually do so for free -any sewage treatment plant will let you collect as much as you need, they have no use for it) and methane burns a LOT cleaner than gasoline does.
The only reason we we're not mass-producing alternative energy cars long ago was vested interests that artificially increases costs. As technology has continued to drive down efficiency (which would have happened FASTER if the market was bigger in the past) the real costs are making this harder, further the political climate is now creating a market space previously kept artificially shut and hybrids are becoming more and more popular, which WILL be opening the road to fully electric which most likely WILL be the de-facto personal transport technology of the future - the only debateable issue there is how long it will take. I'm prepared to bet on under a decade before 90% of new vehicles sold are electric with a few hold-outs in things like the 18-wheeler truck industry.
>By Frozen Bubble, do you mean Bubble Bobble, the original arcade game which was then ported to consoles and made the authors large wads of cash?
No I mean Frozen Bubble which is the same game, with the same quality - and was given away for free. It is ludicrous to suggest that a game like that cannot be done for free UNLESS it's a clone either - the site I linked you to have some very addictive and highly original free games.
>. In the middle ages, we had no power plants, race cars, LCD TVs, computers, trains, commercial jets, ocean liners, etc
We also had no acid rain, asthma, lung disease, pollution fog, giant oil cartels, oil-spills in the gulf... that's the bit I don't get. A change to renewable energy would improve the quality of life of every person on the planet. AGW or not - it's a win-win for the human race... why could you POSSIBLY care that it will make the oil-producers not be rich anymore ?
The smart once are already preparing for the future - hell that's all that Dubai IS - one giant investment against the day the oil runs out / we stop buying it.
We have to get over our oil dependence to survive because there isn't an infinite amount of it and we're using it up. In the process we get cleaner air, cleaner rivers, new industries, healthier and more productive workers - an escalation of benefit for every single one of us - and best of all, in the short term you actually have MORE cash in your pocket doing the right things than if you do the wrong things...
Why the hell not do it then ?!??!?!
You know I've asked this quesxtion on /. of people making posts like yours many, many times - not ONCE EVER has one of them had the balls to reply to me - do you ?
And still we ignore the other part: even if it's got nothing to do with the trillions of tons of carbon we dig up every year and burn and then pump into the air as CO2 who cares ?
So let's assume man has NO influence - what will we achieve by going for less or zero polluting energy sources ? Economic advances (not being dependent on a cut-throat sellers market... mmmm yummy), healthier lives with greatly reduced incidences of diseases like asthma (which in turn means a major boost to global productivity), less incidence of problems with real environmental and agricultural impacts like acid rain. Cheaper transportation meaning an increase in GDP and higher quality of life for everybody. Reduced medical costs. It not only all adds up but exponentially increases the quality of the civilization we live in as each positive impact causes OTHER positive impacts.
So yeah... giving the full benefit of the doubt to the deniers: humans have NO influence on climate, the results of the changes we would make in our misguided attempt to resolve that influence would make the world a MUCH better place for everybody to live in - the only people who will lose anything at all are the oil magnates... so I ask you... WHO THE FUCK CARES IF IT'S RIGHT OR NOT - we should be doing this EITHER WAY - it's a win win situation ! If it's wrong we live in a better world. If it's right we live in a better world ... let's just stop arguing and do it.
>In another generation or two the earth's population will be naturally declining due to inexorably declining fertility levels.
Sorry, not true. That was press jumping on various pieces of unrelated research and making a wonderful scare story that no scientist ever actually believed. Human fertility is just fine - repeated checks by sperm banks all over the world in the decade since that was big news have still reported absolutely NO decline in sperm counts.
On the contrary longer life expectancy have increased the amount of women who remain alive their entire fertile period - technically upping the average human fertility rate, combined with reduced child mortality rates and longer lifespans... we got a population set to keep exploding for quite some time unless there is a radical intervention.
The trouble is - there are only two practical ways such an intervention could occur: massive government interference in perhaps the most basic of human civil liberties - or massive increase in global education levels...
So which one do you prefer ? Because I vote for the "more schools and make them free because it's EXACTLY the poor people we need to work on here" approach over the "we will legally force you to get castrated after your first child" approach myself ,even if it means I pay a little more tax.
>What causes the normal 100k year temperature cycles during the ice age we're in the middle of?
This is an ice-age according to you? WTF have you been smoking ? We haven't HAD an ice-age since our first ancestors reached North America and besides it's a stupid term. The proper term is glacial cycle -and we're smack in the middle of an inter-glacial cycle (that would be what happens in between ice ages when climate becomes moderate).
In a real "ice age" we'd be seeing glaciers cover most of Europe and almost all of North America. And you don't even want to KNOW about superglacials - they are very rare- in the once per hundred-million-years range but when THOSE happen - the polar ice-caps actually MEET at the equator !
This my friend is a moderate interglacial cycle - a warm period in other words. It's true that it will not last for ever, historically it's ending will be with a mild glacial cycle ("mini-ice-age"). After that one of two things happen - either we return to a short interglacial cycle where it warms up again (but not nearly up to where we are) and then into a full-on glacial cycle, or it just flips straight into the full on glacial. It's not really possible to predict because either is about equally likely.
The thing is not only is this a warm period, we aren't expecting the next mild-glacial for quite some time and we're making this interglacial by far the worst it's ever been. Even if the (very small and non-consensus) theory that we should be expecting a glacial within the century IS true - well we've probably already prevented it - it will at best maybe manage to save us from our own folly (how undeserved and unlikely would that be ?)
Much more likely is that we'll keep boosting CO2 levels up and up and up, creating feedback loops that reduce albedo, warm the oceans and warm the sky - all building up to an ever increasing rapidity of temperature rises and reach a level of temperature unlike anything since the evolution of oxygenating plants.
Seriously dude... what part of "the hottest decade in recorded human history" did you NOT understand ?
happypenguin.org - a heckuva lot of those games are really, really good.
Of course if you talking single-player only then it limits things a bit but we're seeing an ever increasing shift to low-entry-cost models even in commercial PC games - particularly in he MMO sphere. WoW has been free to download for years (though it's size makes buying the disk sets actually CHEAPER in my country than the bandwith costs of the download) - you just pay the subscription fee to use their servers.
DnD-online has even done away with the subscription-fee and moved entirely to a microtransaction environment (which took an ailing game and gave it a brand new life).
A lot of FOSS games are terrible - most are getting better and better and some are truly excellent. Again it depends how you look at it. ID has been publishing their titles under the GPL for years, true they don't do so right away -first they sell them as closed stuff, so they can make money licensing the engines but they always freed them later - while still selling the artwork.
Giving those engines away for free - kept the games alive, means their still making money on artwork for 15 year old games (though granted, not a lot) and that some groundbreaking game engines and ideas survived major changes in the hardware world - and these ARE top-of-the-range games.
In the end -say what you will - but Frozen Bubble remains one of the most popular games ever created, simplicity != bad quality.
> especially based on the apparent confusion even within the wordpress community.
Except there isn't any confusion in the wordpress community. Every wordpress developer and contributor and every theme designer uses the GPL and believes they are supposed to do so. There is only one person developing a wordpress theme who disagrees. When you are alone among thousands of developers in how you claim the license applies that is - by itself- a major warning sign. When you are directly at odds with the core developers of a product on top of which you build your main product, arguing and fighting with your core supplier in fact - that is just really stupid business.
Getting sued by your own suppliers is likely to kill any business - even if you somehow managed to win it. The fact that these suppliers have a huge law office filled with law professors - not just normal lawyers - who will by quite happy to do the case pro bono means chances are you'll be begging to settle really fast, because you have to PAY a lawyer to keep arguing against the whole world and they don't.
You didn't get to go to school in South Africa under the apartheid system. School was little more than a political indoctrination system and conformity above all was the value they tried to impress upon us. Critical questions were punished...
So if it answers your questions: I was a straight A student in the subjects with good teachers, and failed subjects with bad ones - some of which I went on to be a top student of at University - and one of which forms a cornerstone of my career...
The first experience I had of this happened in my very first year of high school - we were doing a course on electricity and the teacher said what the textbook said: "100volts and higher are dangerous", I raised my hand and said: "Well depends on context surely - directly to the blood stream - 1 volt is more than enough to kill you".
The teacher looked at me and said "Oh shut up, 1v can't harm anybody under any conditions". I politely said "My father is an electrical engineer- he designed the powergrids for half the cities in this country* - and he wrote his thesis on electrical safety designs with a study of it's interaction with the human body.**"
I didn't get to finish my sentence - I received corporal punishment right there for "being disrespectful" (which was a phrase meaning: daring to disagree with authority"
That was the school experience I had. By all means - I am completely over it, I has no impact on my life today. But I also have a social conscience - I know that the attitude in most schools is still exactly the same and I care about the kids going through the same - I care about the impact it has on society. I know too many people who had the intelligence to do groundbreaking things but never even made it to university because schools broke their spirit. I know how many kids will get HIV infections today because schools think telling them about the existence of condoms will encourage them to have sex (they already are, but now their not doing it safely - but those kinds of teachers would much rather pretend they don't).
*After 1994 most of the former "black" cities didn't have power - the government spent a lot of money on providing them with electricity, my dad's company had most of the design contracts for that and he was in charge of most of those design projects.
**If you care - the reason is that the nervous system uses electricity. Electrical pulses from the brain to the heart controls it's beat. A voltage from outside that's high enough to overcome the resistance of the blood and provide a current stronger than the current of the nervous system afterward will effectively "override" it. DC causes an instant flat-line, AC sends the hearth rhythm out of whack (neither 50 nor 60 Herz is anywhere near normal) - either way, instant heart-attack. Considering all the factors including the average resistance of human blood and the current of the human nervous system - 1volt is more than enough. The reason it usually doesn't kill people is because the human skin has a very high electrical resistance and most electrical shocks end up running over it rather than through our bodies (effectively conducted by hair and sweat)- at worst causing muscle spasms by messing with the nerve signals (through induction). Most electrical shock deaths actually happen because voltage over a high-resistance conductor produces a lot of heat - it burns through the skin, and only then - once it's running through the (low resistance) blood does it kill you.
I have no problem with the point you make - my problem is with those teachers who when the smarter kids can USEFULLY model it as a force to solve problems quicker (fully understanding what's REALLY happening - that inertia is an effect of momentum is an effect of mass- maybe even know the Einsteinian addition that allows some things to have momentum WITHOUT having mass like photons) get punished for taking what to THEM is just a clever shortcut.
Clever shortcuts are a fundamental trick to being better things- it's a problem if you ONLY know the shortcut and not the road that led to it - then it's just an error. The problem is that our schoolsystem makes no differentiation between the kids who just know what their grandparents taught them (although my dad was an engineer who taught me that centrifugal "force" in those cases isn't really a force, it's just a useful way to calculate the result of Newtons first law on something forced by a constraint to travel in a circular pattern) and the kids who think the simplified surface answer is the whole answer.
That's why it's those smart kids who later complain about it... we feel we could have gotten further along the path if we were allowed to use shortcuts to skip over those things. We already understood them, doing the sums a thousand times over when there's a quicker way to get the same result by pretending there's another force is CLEVER - not stupid.
Mind you most of school science is all still just the bare scratchings of the surface. Everybody who did it knows that prisms split light up and this causes rainbows... but how many of us really know the COOL part of that question ? ... and for that matter - why is it bow-shaped ? The real geometry of how rainbows form is gorgeously ellegant... the colours are, quite frankly, the boring bit.
How do thousands of drops combine into one big rainbow
You stated that we cannot model centrifugal force because it disappears if the component forces are removed (duh- remove either of them and there is no longer anything to add up to it).
I pointed out how you can have forces created by other forces that aren't even directly part of them (you need a force to move a conductor through a magnetic field) and since we have no problem modeling those and predicting exactly what will happen if the motive force is removed - this has nothing to do with the usefulness of sometimes modeling centripetal effects as if it was a motive force in it's own right - especially since, in some (admittedly more esoteric) cases, it is.
The suggestion that you cannot teach the esoteric cases to the smart kids because it would confuse the dumb ones I have heard about every subject a million times and having BEEN one of the bored and frustrated smart kids I have only one response: balderdash.
You know we all also learned the right-hand law for electromagnetic inference and that ALSO disapears if the objects stop moving ... does that mean we can't model magnetic forces now ?
This !
The worst AV in history on the most insecure OS in history on machines that have access to my bank account ?