Say, I can't understand this without a car analogy. Are you telling us that the black hole is like a drug dealer's Hummer? Or is it like a supermodel's Ferrari? Or is it like a two year old Volvo?
In the UK, they only use a ratified international blacklist of 1,300 sites. In Australia there would be those sites, plus anywhere up to 10,000 sites of the Australian Governments choosing.
If you want to censor something, having a list of censored things only makes people more curious. It's much better (for the censors) to keep the censored list secret.
This reminds me of the anecdote of the old lady who went to compliment Samuel Johnson for not putting any "bad words" on his dictionary.
-- "Why, did you look up all of them"? was the answer.
If the word "cunt" "is" unacceptable to the conservative's "God", why does the word "punt" not receive a 75% unacceptability rating? Why do we not see it spelled "p---" in the daily press?
Humans have pretty much short-circuited traditional evolution due to our very heavy reliance on learned information.
And that's why it took much longer to evolve from Australopitecus to Homo Sapiens than it took to get from stone age to space age. Human technology evolves by intelligent design, not just by exchanging random genes.
When two organisms reproduce, their chromosomes get mixed at random, there's no selection for the best genes from each. When two technology products are merged, the best parts from each are selected.
This means that any figure, that some judge deems is drawn to represent a person under the age of 21, must be considered juvinile. Therefore, if this drawing is doing something that may be construed as 'adult' in nature, the drawing is now up to the judge's intrepretation as to the age and content of the drawing.
the real disgusting kid stuff)because if they are able to see it, they begin to imagine it, and if they imagine it, they want to go do it
That's why sites like this one should be illegal, because when people see it they begin to imagine it and they want to commit theft. Also, sites like this one give away information that may be used by criminals, so they should be illegal too.
I once read an anecdote, I don't know if this is true, that in the 1700s the British set couples of goats loose in desert islands. The rationale was that castaways who eventually arrived at those islands would have a source of meat and milk. However, when someone visited those islands years later, there wasn't any life at all in the islands, only goat skeletons everywhere. The goats reproduced as long as there was food, and after they had eaten every plant they all died.
One can imagine a similar scenario for humanity. Not that we would eat every plant on earth, but if civilization were destroyed by overpopulation, maybe some plague would kill the survivors. Look at AIDS in Africa to see how lethal is a disease that's left to evolve without control.
Everybody being wiped out is a low-probability scenario, I agree, but not completely impossible.
one thing I recently found out is, AT&T is requiring you give them your damned SSN to get one activated?!?! What the hell is this?
The SSN is a practical primary key for identifying people, that's all. The big problem in using the SSN is that some federal agencies assume that anyone who calls them with an SSN number and the corresponding name is in fact that person.
If the SSN weren't used in this way, I would have no objection in giving it to anyone who asked. After all, my car license is in plain view for anyone to see. No one ever assumes that a person mentioning a car license plate is the owner of that car.
how a man who was unable to create new memories (or at least had great difficulty in this area) would be able to take in what is going on around him and give informed consent to offer his brain for further study after his passing.
Given the severity of his case, he certainly had some sort of legal guardian who could give consent by proxy.
What truly worries me are the intermediate cases. Where is the exact point at which you can be assumed to have free will or not? Mental impairment is relative and depends on a multitude of factors, both internal, such as disease, and external, such as alcohol and drugs. That's why casinos in Vegas give you free drinks. Of course, drinking is optional, but we know so little about the workings of the brain.
I have always thought that free will is overestimated. Who knows to which extent other factors influence our decisions? When one thinks about "free will", it's usually in the form of a "soul", that is an indivisible entity, which analyzes the relevant facts and emits a decision. But we know that the threshold for making a decision depends on the ethanol content in the brain, that fact is even accepted by the law. In most legislatures it is illegal for someone to perform some tasks under the influence of alcohol.
So what about the many other physical and chemical signaling mechanisms in the brain? How can we know if our ability to make a decision has been impaired by an infection or trauma that affected our free will? The human brain is the most complex system in the known universe, the unitary soul is a philosophical assumption unsupported by facts, scientists should make an effort to get closer to the true nature of free will.
A joke in New Zealand goes like this: How many Australians does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: twenty one. One to hold the bulb and twenty to drink until the room starts spinning.
I'm not religious, so I don't buy the "god gave this to us" crap, nor do I think the events of 2500 years ago has much relevance on the land claims of today.... I think the US should just leave both sides to fend for themselves
It was the events of 70 years ago, not the events of 2500 years ago, that led to the creation of the modern state of Israel. And that happened because the US let Europeans fend for themselves from 1938 until the end of 1941.
If the Nazis hadn't mass murdered Jews, Zionism would still exist, but I don't believe the UN would have created different nations for Israelis and Palestinians. Most probably the British Mandate of Palestine would become an independent country with multiple religions, like Lebanon is today.
My father once said to me that one cannot remain neutral between good and evil. And I believe that every time some group starts hating another to the point of murdering innocent people, that's evil.
I agree with your points, islands like Hawaii are ideal for electric cars. But I'd say there's another factor to be considered: which kind of use will those cars have? Taxis, for instance, aren't very good for electric cars, the time spent recharging is time lost for carrying paying customers. Ditto for delivery vans and all other service vehicles.
The ideal use for electric cars is for commuters, they travel a fixed distance every day, will be parked at the same places day and night, except for an hour or so every morning and evening. Considering your point that warm temperatures matter, the ideal situation for electric cars in the US would be for commuters in the southwest. From Texas to California there are millions of people who drive their cars in exactly the same route every working day, and the temperature never goes below freezing.
The best way to bootstrap the electric vehicle would be, IMHO, to grant some kind of subsidies for low-power two-seater cars in the US Southwest, including some economic incentive for charging at night and for companies to provide charging points at their employee parking lots.
You also have to account for any differences between the earth-star distance and the earth-cloud distance
One could start by assuming that the points which are being illuminated now and have the biggest angular separation from the star are at the same distance from earth as the star. Those points form a circle with a 436 light-year radius. The size of that circle as seen from earth will give you the distance to the star.
I'm assuming that there is enough dust everywhere in space to return a detectable reflection, but even if this isn't true an imperfect circle would still give us usable data. At the distance that star is, about 7500 light-years, this would probably more accurate than other methods.
Supernova 1987A has had its distance measured by a similar method, look in this picture how the reflections appear.
This could be used to determine distances very precisely. If we know when that light was emitted and we know the speed of light, then we can calculate with great precision the distance from the star to the reflecting dust cloud.
Well at least Cuba has good health care so their jailed journalist should be getting some good care.
Who told you that? The Cuban government. Suppose it isn't true, no one is allowed to say so.
IF the Cuban health care were as good as the Cuban government claims, then why the censorship? Any government would be pretty happy to let journalists report freely on it. Since the press is not free in Cuba, it only stands to reason that the situation there is much worse than the Cuban government is willing to admit.
If you can point me to a set of tools for the language you propose is squeezing fortran out that makes it as easy to work with vectors and matrices as Fortran, I would be thankful, but I haven't found it yet
SciPy makes it *much easier* to work with vectors and matrices in Python than Fortran. Besides vectors, it has a wide variety of scientific fucntions. F2Py lets you call your existing Fortran routines from a Python script. It even lets you access global common data from the Fortran program in a Python script. F2Py also lets you call routines compiled in C from Python. A similar program that lets you access C routines from Python is Swig
Using vectors and matrices in Fortran only seems easy to you because you are used to it, but once you get used to doing it in a modern language you'll realize what a mess Fortran is. Both Frotran and C suffer from the problem of handling variable-sized arrays, you have to allocate the arrays. In Fortran-77 and older versions you don't even have the option of dynamical memory allocation, you had to declare the dimension of the arrays at compile time.
With Python you have an almost perfect development environment for scientific computation. You get the fast development cycle of Python, with the quick execution time of Fortran or C. All that with a huge set of libraries and utilities for every conceivable need. Do you have data that you get from an external website, for instance? Python lets you automate the download. Need to get data from a database? Format the output into a PDF file? Create pretty graphics for a presentation? Save data to excel spreadsheets? Etc, etc? Python has libraries for all that.
I took a look at that page, and I became worried. Take the new string formatting, for instance. It's *much* easier to migrate existing software from C to Python using the old % format. The argument that % is a binary operator is stupid, that's what tuples are for.
Also, making the keys() method not return a list doesn't make sense. I often use mixed data sets, it's very convenient to be able to do somelist.append(x.keys()).
And so on, several of those changes will make it harder to do simple tasks without any advantage. Unfortunately, I can't say I'm enthusiastic about Py3k. Python was so good while it lasted....
Define "thrive", please. I agree that fortran will continue to exist for many years, but I wouldn't call it "thriving".
based on my personal experience, it's the preferred language of most computational scientists and engineers
You don't know many computational scientists and engineers, do you? Based on my own personal experience, it's the preferred language of a few engineers who are responsible for maintaining some old application written in fortran and want to keep the kids off their lawn. Fortran is still kept for many old libraries that are stable and well debugged, such as Lapack for instance, but there certainly aren't many new systems being developed in fortran.
But the bird certainly looks like a duck. Also, he goes to the pond and you notice that he swims like a duck. Then he opens his beak and quacks like a duck.
Slashdot Mirror
Say, I can't understand this without a car analogy. Are you telling us that the black hole is like a drug dealer's Hummer? Or is it like a supermodel's Ferrari? Or is it like a two year old Volvo?
If you want to censor something, having a list of censored things only makes people more curious. It's much better (for the censors) to keep the censored list secret.
This reminds me of the anecdote of the old lady who went to compliment Samuel Johnson for not putting any "bad words" on his dictionary.
-- "Why, did you look up all of them"? was the answer.
Or, as this site so admirably puts it,
The pussy isn't censored, it has black fur in the back of the head and is looking the other way
If that's the case, wouldn't it have been cheaper to hire a janitor, instead of a lawyer?
And that's why it took much longer to evolve from Australopitecus to Homo Sapiens than it took to get from stone age to space age. Human technology evolves by intelligent design, not just by exchanging random genes.
When two organisms reproduce, their chromosomes get mixed at random, there's no selection for the best genes from each. When two technology products are merged, the best parts from each are selected.
There are two mistakes here. First, Nietzsche said that before any of those men were born, so God cannot be any of them. Second, I'm very much alive.
You are quite right.
As a brief example, this is child porn:
But this is not (pubic hair implies adulthood):
That's why sites like this one should be illegal, because when people see it they begin to imagine it and they want to commit theft. Also, sites like this one give away information that may be used by criminals, so they should be illegal too.
I once read an anecdote, I don't know if this is true, that in the 1700s the British set couples of goats loose in desert islands. The rationale was that castaways who eventually arrived at those islands would have a source of meat and milk. However, when someone visited those islands years later, there wasn't any life at all in the islands, only goat skeletons everywhere. The goats reproduced as long as there was food, and after they had eaten every plant they all died.
One can imagine a similar scenario for humanity. Not that we would eat every plant on earth, but if civilization were destroyed by overpopulation, maybe some plague would kill the survivors. Look at AIDS in Africa to see how lethal is a disease that's left to evolve without control.
Everybody being wiped out is a low-probability scenario, I agree, but not completely impossible.
Look, *anything* at all will be looked at as porn by someone somewhere! Are we letting our society be restrained by what some weird people think?
The SSN is a practical primary key for identifying people, that's all. The big problem in using the SSN is that some federal agencies assume that anyone who calls them with an SSN number and the corresponding name is in fact that person.
If the SSN weren't used in this way, I would have no objection in giving it to anyone who asked. After all, my car license is in plain view for anyone to see. No one ever assumes that a person mentioning a car license plate is the owner of that car.
Given the severity of his case, he certainly had some sort of legal guardian who could give consent by proxy.
What truly worries me are the intermediate cases. Where is the exact point at which you can be assumed to have free will or not? Mental impairment is relative and depends on a multitude of factors, both internal, such as disease, and external, such as alcohol and drugs. That's why casinos in Vegas give you free drinks. Of course, drinking is optional, but we know so little about the workings of the brain.
I have always thought that free will is overestimated. Who knows to which extent other factors influence our decisions? When one thinks about "free will", it's usually in the form of a "soul", that is an indivisible entity, which analyzes the relevant facts and emits a decision. But we know that the threshold for making a decision depends on the ethanol content in the brain, that fact is even accepted by the law. In most legislatures it is illegal for someone to perform some tasks under the influence of alcohol.
So what about the many other physical and chemical signaling mechanisms in the brain? How can we know if our ability to make a decision has been impaired by an infection or trauma that affected our free will? The human brain is the most complex system in the known universe, the unitary soul is a philosophical assumption unsupported by facts, scientists should make an effort to get closer to the true nature of free will.
If the album's name is "Virgin Killer", I think Virgin should take a stand on this.
A joke in New Zealand goes like this: How many Australians does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: twenty one. One to hold the bulb and twenty to drink until the room starts spinning.
You don't invent jokes about people who love you.
It was the events of 70 years ago, not the events of 2500 years ago, that led to the creation of the modern state of Israel. And that happened because the US let Europeans fend for themselves from 1938 until the end of 1941.
If the Nazis hadn't mass murdered Jews, Zionism would still exist, but I don't believe the UN would have created different nations for Israelis and Palestinians. Most probably the British Mandate of Palestine would become an independent country with multiple religions, like Lebanon is today.
My father once said to me that one cannot remain neutral between good and evil. And I believe that every time some group starts hating another to the point of murdering innocent people, that's evil.
These guys are 50 years too late. It has been tried before.
I agree with your points, islands like Hawaii are ideal for electric cars. But I'd say there's another factor to be considered: which kind of use will those cars have? Taxis, for instance, aren't very good for electric cars, the time spent recharging is time lost for carrying paying customers. Ditto for delivery vans and all other service vehicles.
The ideal use for electric cars is for commuters, they travel a fixed distance every day, will be parked at the same places day and night, except for an hour or so every morning and evening. Considering your point that warm temperatures matter, the ideal situation for electric cars in the US would be for commuters in the southwest. From Texas to California there are millions of people who drive their cars in exactly the same route every working day, and the temperature never goes below freezing.
The best way to bootstrap the electric vehicle would be, IMHO, to grant some kind of subsidies for low-power two-seater cars in the US Southwest, including some economic incentive for charging at night and for companies to provide charging points at their employee parking lots.
One could start by assuming that the points which are being illuminated now and have the biggest angular separation from the star are at the same distance from earth as the star. Those points form a circle with a 436 light-year radius. The size of that circle as seen from earth will give you the distance to the star.
I'm assuming that there is enough dust everywhere in space to return a detectable reflection, but even if this isn't true an imperfect circle would still give us usable data. At the distance that star is, about 7500 light-years, this would probably more accurate than other methods.
Supernova 1987A has had its distance measured by a similar method, look in this picture how the reflections appear.
This could be used to determine distances very precisely. If we know when that light was emitted and we know the speed of light, then we can calculate with great precision the distance from the star to the reflecting dust cloud.
Who told you that? The Cuban government. Suppose it isn't true, no one is allowed to say so.
IF the Cuban health care were as good as the Cuban government claims, then why the censorship? Any government would be pretty happy to let journalists report freely on it. Since the press is not free in Cuba, it only stands to reason that the situation there is much worse than the Cuban government is willing to admit.
What is quicker to write and easier to see at a glance:
'%.3f' % pi
or
'{0:.3f}'.format(pi)
I'm seriously thinking of creating an http://ihatepy3k.org/ site.... :(
SciPy makes it *much easier* to work with vectors and matrices in Python than Fortran. Besides vectors, it has a wide variety of scientific fucntions. F2Py lets you call your existing Fortran routines from a Python script. It even lets you access global common data from the Fortran program in a Python script. F2Py also lets you call routines compiled in C from Python. A similar program that lets you access C routines from Python is Swig
Using vectors and matrices in Fortran only seems easy to you because you are used to it, but once you get used to doing it in a modern language you'll realize what a mess Fortran is. Both Frotran and C suffer from the problem of handling variable-sized arrays, you have to allocate the arrays. In Fortran-77 and older versions you don't even have the option of dynamical memory allocation, you had to declare the dimension of the arrays at compile time.
With Python you have an almost perfect development environment for scientific computation. You get the fast development cycle of Python, with the quick execution time of Fortran or C. All that with a huge set of libraries and utilities for every conceivable need. Do you have data that you get from an external website, for instance? Python lets you automate the download. Need to get data from a database? Format the output into a PDF file? Create pretty graphics for a presentation? Save data to excel spreadsheets? Etc, etc? Python has libraries for all that.
I took a look at that page, and I became worried. Take the new string formatting, for instance. It's *much* easier to migrate existing software from C to Python using the old % format. The argument that % is a binary operator is stupid, that's what tuples are for.
Also, making the keys() method not return a list doesn't make sense. I often use mixed data sets, it's very convenient to be able to do somelist.append(x.keys()).
And so on, several of those changes will make it harder to do simple tasks without any advantage. Unfortunately, I can't say I'm enthusiastic about Py3k. Python was so good while it lasted....
Define "thrive", please. I agree that fortran will continue to exist for many years, but I wouldn't call it "thriving".
You don't know many computational scientists and engineers, do you? Based on my own personal experience, it's the preferred language of a few engineers who are responsible for maintaining some old application written in fortran and want to keep the kids off their lawn. Fortran is still kept for many old libraries that are stable and well debugged, such as Lapack for instance, but there certainly aren't many new systems being developed in fortran.
Does this bird weigh as much as a duck?