How is making up false offenses and arresting people not kidnapping? Why are the cops not tried for kidnapping? (Yes, yes, I know, who should arrest them, who should file the charges, but it would be nice to live in a slightly fairer world.)
We can test for changing fundamental constant. IIRC, we have observed the decay of a shortlived (in the order of days) isotope in a distant supernova. We have confirmed that the half-life is the same as is observed now. Half-lifes are quite complex, being affected by most of the fundamental constants. Either the constants are nearly unchanged since these supernova exploded, or they have changed in a way to exactly cancel out the effects of each of them on the half-life. Furthermore, the Okla natural nuclear reactor has a distribution of daughter nuclei we would expect to find today. Again, either the fundamental constants are unchanged, or their change is fine-tuned to give the correct answer. Applying Occams razor, the fine-tuning explanation is out until we find evidence that supports it and not the unchanging natural constants hypothesis.
I think you've misunderstood how it works for Big Pharma; curing something does not generate them bucketloads of money.
This is simply false, which you would know if you knew the prices for cancer drugs. A drug that is effective against a cancer will make you bucketloads of money. People really don't like dying, and they will pay good money not to.
Helping someone with the symptoms for several years without curing them, however, does generate bucketloads of money. As such it's defnitely in Big Pharma's best interests to not find cure for something and instead find something that relieves the symptoms.
But what if that is not the dichotomy? What if $other_pharma_company already have a patent on a drug to help with the symptoms, and you have the options of not going into that field, making no money, or try and cure the disease, making you a bucketload of money while costing $other_pharma_company money? What if drugs to help with the symptoms are out of patent protection? What if the drug you developed and tested turned out to cure people, in stead of helping with symptoms? Do you just ditch those billions of dollars worth of research because you might make more money by starting over, spending additional billions?
The big question is will they cure it [cancer] first?
Cancer isn't one disease, it is a rather diverse family of diseases. Today, medicine is able to treat some of them to the level where they are cured for most of the patients. Some of them, it can give patients years of extra life. For some of them, there isn't much we can do a this point. The advance to this level have been slow, but relatively steady. This will continue. We are probably never going to cure cancer, in the sense that all cancers are survivable by 95% of the patients, but we are slowly going to get better and better, so that more and more cancers fall in that category, and for most of the rest, the average number of years the patients survive will rise.
I am not a Chinese government fan by any means but as a sovereign country they have an obligation to protect the interests of their citizens above the financial gains of the globalists.
Free trade is about doing the best for the citizens, although in an abstract and long-sighted way. Your wage might drop 10% with free trade, but if the average price of all you buy will drop with 20%, you are still better of. There are exceptions, mostly when developing countries need to build their own industries, but most of the time, free trade benefits everyone.
You don't get to make up the rules, the WTO have them written down (and China have signed them). If you are restriction imports or exports for any but a few acceptable reasons, you are in breach of the rules, and the WTO can allow other countries to enforce import tariffs on your goods. The question is then whether the other countries want to enforce such tariffs, or whether China is too big a trade partner.
The WTO can be upset about it but how about making the US export strategic assets they don't want to give away? Say Iran wants to buy a few nukes. NK wants some fighter planes etc.
I would guess nukes and fighter jets are not covered by WTO agreements.
Every country decides what is in their best interest and I don't think WTO can do anything to make China share things they want to keep to themselves.
Protectionism is bad for everyone in the long run*, so we have made the WTO disincentivise countries from doing that. The WTO can not force China to do anything, but they can allow other countries to enforce import taxes on goods from China. If the import taxes are high enough, I am sure China would comply. The question is: Will the western countries enforce import taxes, or are China to big a trade partner?
* It is only a good idea if at least one of the assumptions in Ricardo's theorem is not met. This is usually that the entry cost on markets are not zero, so a developing country can have an import tax while they build up their own industry. At what point they have build up sufficiently that they should remove the taxes is an open question. Furthermore, the downsides of the taxes are diffuse enough that people will not feel them directly, so there will be significant political gain in not removing them, even when it would be advantageous for the countries population.
Shouldn't that be the other way around? Even if you are a hypocritical sadist who oppose women's rights, there will always be someone who are convinced you are a saint?
It is a corrolary of Gödels incompleteness theorem that, if the virus detection is not allowed to change the OS, it is impossible to make a virus detection program that can find all viruses that change the OS. It is not just hard to make a secure computer, it is impossible. You might be able to make it arbitrarily hard to crack, but you can't make it impossible. There is no secure implementation.
A more practical way of improving efficiency would be to move to reversible computing. However, we are far, far away from the Landauer limit in any practical computers, so this is not what is limiting efficiency.
Having the broad picture right just means you have a working model, though. It doesn't mean you've actually discovered how the universe works, just that you can make accurate predictions. Maybe later it turns out that what happens, happens for a totally different reason than what you thought.
Science is all about making predictions, and not about discovering how anything works (formally, anyhow). Or as a physics professor put it: "There are no particles, only clicks in my Geiger counter".
When it comes to orbital mechanics, the variability comes not in being inherently unsure of what will change, but from a known error based on number and quality of measurements. This is why the probability of collision numbers change over time - they are really confidence numbers, not probability of occurrence numbers.
In the frequentistic worldview, yes. In the Bayesian worldview, they really are probabilities.
One of the differences is that the frequentistic worldview is only able to handle probabilities for occurrences that can, at least in principle, be repeated many times. For one-off occurrences, whether they are dice rolls or meteor strikes, they either happen or they don't, so they have probability 1 or 0. The Bayesian worldview is perfectly capable of handling probabilities for one-off occurrences, as it is more focused on what you would expect, given the information at hand. Both are valid worldviews, and both contain valid definitions of "probability", but they do not mix, so if both are used in the same discussion, the discussion goes nowhere, as both parties wonder why the other just don't get it.
It depends on whether you view probability as frequentistic or Bayesian. Your worldview is frequentistic, but a lot of the way we talk about probabilities on makes sense in a Bayesian worldview. Sibling posts have given plenty of examples.
When people say that a copy pirated is not a lost sale, they are defining "lost sale" as "a sale that WOULD have been made, except for the pirating". You are using the definition: "a sale that SHOULD have been, except for the pirating".
I am just unable to understand the intellectual lethargy that I find on Slashdot when it comes to piracy. You may disagree with how someone feels about piracy, but if it is their content, it is their prerogative. [Emphasis mine]
I think that is the disagreement right there: The idea that your can own content is a form of censorship* which a portion of the/. readership does not find reasonable (at least under the current terms). You do not share that view. I hope that explains difference.
*Censorship can be defined as prohibiting certain expressions, which is exactly what IP does. Some IP owners might allow you to express yourself in that way if you pay them, some will not. It is censorship regardless.
Then- our months are supposed to be based on cycles of the moon (Approx every 28 days)- but because there were 13 and superstitious nitwits didn't like 13 we have 12 months with varying days.
The time between two new moons is approximately 29.5 days. 28 is only used because it is a multiple of 7 (the number of greco-roman planets), and it divides the lunation into nice periods between new, half, full and half.
Would you spend say 100 dollars on something that might be of some help to avoid you killing one of them? Even if the odds weren't all that high that you would kill them?
I might want to, but for making laws, we should look at cost per life. However, GGP overlooks everything but deaths, so his post is worse than useless.
Car seats. Not all that many children were killed by auto accidents. Yet we require them to be belted in. No one alive today who is older than 30 grew up using a car seat.
I'm 31 and grew up with a car seat. I grew up in Europe, which might explain the difference.
Conclusion: Our results suggest that feet are impenetrable to the alcohol component of vodka. We therefore conclude that the Danish urban myth of being able to get drunk by submerging feet in alcoholic beverages is just that; a myth. The implications of the study are many though.
With an estimated LD50 at 150-200 mg/kg bodyweight (from WP), you call people weighing more than 35 kg rotund? I had heard that body images were distorted by anorectic-looking models, but I hadn't believed it.
Caffeine is bitter and has an LD50 is around 200 mg/kg body weight in rats. For table salt, the LD50 for humans is around 1g/kg of body weight. Caffein is about 5 times more toxic then something normally considered utterly nontoxic(acutely, anyway), and it tastes really bad. You will not accidentally eat a lethal dose of caffeine. On the other hand, it is quite easy to take enough to make you utterly miserable for days, and unable to sleep it off.
Lasers still diverge. A normal laser pointer will have expanded to 500 km in width before it hits the moon. If I have not made some mistake in the calculations, a diffraction limited deutrium fluoride laser which is 1 m wide at its narrowest will diverge to 60 meters width at 36.000 km. It should still be possible to collect all of that, so powering by laser should no fall off at the square of the distance.
Slashdot Mirror
How is making up false offenses and arresting people not kidnapping? Why are the cops not tried for kidnapping? (Yes, yes, I know, who should arrest them, who should file the charges, but it would be nice to live in a slightly fairer world.)
We can test for changing fundamental constant. IIRC, we have observed the decay of a shortlived (in the order of days) isotope in a distant supernova. We have confirmed that the half-life is the same as is observed now. Half-lifes are quite complex, being affected by most of the fundamental constants. Either the constants are nearly unchanged since these supernova exploded, or they have changed in a way to exactly cancel out the effects of each of them on the half-life. Furthermore, the Okla natural nuclear reactor has a distribution of daughter nuclei we would expect to find today. Again, either the fundamental constants are unchanged, or their change is fine-tuned to give the correct answer. Applying Occams razor, the fine-tuning explanation is out until we find evidence that supports it and not the unchanging natural constants hypothesis.
I think you've misunderstood how it works for Big Pharma; curing something does not generate them bucketloads of money.
This is simply false, which you would know if you knew the prices for cancer drugs. A drug that is effective against a cancer will make you bucketloads of money. People really don't like dying, and they will pay good money not to.
Helping someone with the symptoms for several years without curing them, however, does generate bucketloads of money. As such it's defnitely in Big Pharma's best interests to not find cure for something and instead find something that relieves the symptoms.
But what if that is not the dichotomy? What if $other_pharma_company already have a patent on a drug to help with the symptoms, and you have the options of not going into that field, making no money, or try and cure the disease, making you a bucketload of money while costing $other_pharma_company money? What if drugs to help with the symptoms are out of patent protection? What if the drug you developed and tested turned out to cure people, in stead of helping with symptoms? Do you just ditch those billions of dollars worth of research because you might make more money by starting over, spending additional billions?
The big question is will they cure it [cancer] first?
Cancer isn't one disease, it is a rather diverse family of diseases. Today, medicine is able to treat some of them to the level where they are cured for most of the patients. Some of them, it can give patients years of extra life. For some of them, there isn't much we can do a this point. The advance to this level have been slow, but relatively steady. This will continue. We are probably never going to cure cancer, in the sense that all cancers are survivable by 95% of the patients, but we are slowly going to get better and better, so that more and more cancers fall in that category, and for most of the rest, the average number of years the patients survive will rise.
I am not a Chinese government fan by any means but as a sovereign country they have an obligation to protect the interests of their citizens above the financial gains of the globalists.
Free trade is about doing the best for the citizens, although in an abstract and long-sighted way. Your wage might drop 10% with free trade, but if the average price of all you buy will drop with 20%, you are still better of. There are exceptions, mostly when developing countries need to build their own industries, but most of the time, free trade benefits everyone.
You don't get to make up the rules, the WTO have them written down (and China have signed them). If you are restriction imports or exports for any but a few acceptable reasons, you are in breach of the rules, and the WTO can allow other countries to enforce import tariffs on your goods. The question is then whether the other countries want to enforce such tariffs, or whether China is too big a trade partner.
The WTO can be upset about it but how about making the US export strategic assets they don't want to give away? Say Iran wants to buy a few nukes. NK wants some fighter planes etc.
I would guess nukes and fighter jets are not covered by WTO agreements.
Every country decides what is in their best interest and I don't think WTO can do anything to make China share things they want to keep to themselves.
Protectionism is bad for everyone in the long run*, so we have made the WTO disincentivise countries from doing that. The WTO can not force China to do anything, but they can allow other countries to enforce import taxes on goods from China. If the import taxes are high enough, I am sure China would comply. The question is: Will the western countries enforce import taxes, or are China to big a trade partner?
* It is only a good idea if at least one of the assumptions in Ricardo's theorem is not met. This is usually that the entry cost on markets are not zero, so a developing country can have an import tax while they build up their own industry. At what point they have build up sufficiently that they should remove the taxes is an open question. Furthermore, the downsides of the taxes are diffuse enough that people will not feel them directly, so there will be significant political gain in not removing them, even when it would be advantageous for the countries population.
Shouldn't that be the other way around? Even if you are a hypocritical sadist who oppose women's rights, there will always be someone who are convinced you are a saint?
It is a corrolary of Gödels incompleteness theorem that, if the virus detection is not allowed to change the OS, it is impossible to make a virus detection program that can find all viruses that change the OS. It is not just hard to make a secure computer, it is impossible. You might be able to make it arbitrarily hard to crack, but you can't make it impossible. There is no secure implementation.
A more practical way of improving efficiency would be to move to reversible computing. However, we are far, far away from the Landauer limit in any practical computers, so this is not what is limiting efficiency.
Having the broad picture right just means you have a working model, though. It doesn't mean you've actually discovered how the universe works, just that you can make accurate predictions. Maybe later it turns out that what happens, happens for a totally different reason than what you thought.
Science is all about making predictions, and not about discovering how anything works (formally, anyhow). Or as a physics professor put it: "There are no particles, only clicks in my Geiger counter".
When it comes to orbital mechanics, the variability comes not in being inherently unsure of what will change, but from a known error based on number and quality of measurements. This is why the probability of collision numbers change over time - they are really confidence numbers, not probability of occurrence numbers.
In the frequentistic worldview, yes. In the Bayesian worldview, they really are probabilities. One of the differences is that the frequentistic worldview is only able to handle probabilities for occurrences that can, at least in principle, be repeated many times. For one-off occurrences, whether they are dice rolls or meteor strikes, they either happen or they don't, so they have probability 1 or 0. The Bayesian worldview is perfectly capable of handling probabilities for one-off occurrences, as it is more focused on what you would expect, given the information at hand. Both are valid worldviews, and both contain valid definitions of "probability", but they do not mix, so if both are used in the same discussion, the discussion goes nowhere, as both parties wonder why the other just don't get it.
It depends on whether you view probability as frequentistic or Bayesian. Your worldview is frequentistic, but a lot of the way we talk about probabilities on makes sense in a Bayesian worldview. Sibling posts have given plenty of examples.
When people say that a copy pirated is not a lost sale, they are defining "lost sale" as "a sale that WOULD have been made, except for the pirating". You are using the definition: "a sale that SHOULD have been, except for the pirating".
I am just unable to understand the intellectual lethargy that I find on Slashdot when it comes to piracy. You may disagree with how someone feels about piracy, but if it is their content, it is their prerogative. [Emphasis mine]
I think that is the disagreement right there: The idea that your can own content is a form of censorship* which a portion of the /. readership does not find reasonable (at least under the current terms). You do not share that view. I hope that explains difference.
*Censorship can be defined as prohibiting certain expressions, which is exactly what IP does. Some IP owners might allow you to express yourself in that way if you pay them, some will not. It is censorship regardless.
Either your usage of "very recently" is rather different from normal useage, or your are spouting bullshit.
Then- our months are supposed to be based on cycles of the moon (Approx every 28 days)- but because there were 13 and superstitious nitwits didn't like 13 we have 12 months with varying days.
The time between two new moons is approximately 29.5 days. 28 is only used because it is a multiple of 7 (the number of greco-roman planets), and it divides the lunation into nice periods between new, half, full and half.
IIRC, one of the reasons for disallowing children in the front seats is that seatbelts adjusted for adults can be dangerous to children.
Let's say you have young children.
Would you spend say 100 dollars on something that might be of some help to avoid you killing one of them? Even if the odds weren't all that high that you would kill them?
I might want to, but for making laws, we should look at cost per life. However, GGP overlooks everything but deaths, so his post is worse than useless.
Car seats. Not all that many children were killed by auto accidents. Yet we require them to be belted in. No one alive today who is older than 30 grew up using a car seat.
I'm 31 and grew up with a car seat. I grew up in Europe, which might explain the difference.
If by "tasteless" you mean intensely bitter. Of course, for quite a few things, it would be tasteless for them to be bitter.
Conclusion: Our results suggest that feet are impenetrable to the alcohol component of vodka. We therefore conclude that the Danish urban myth of being able to get drunk by submerging feet in alcoholic beverages is just that; a myth. The implications of the study are many though.
With an estimated LD50 at 150-200 mg/kg bodyweight (from WP), you call people weighing more than 35 kg rotund? I had heard that body images were distorted by anorectic-looking models, but I hadn't believed it.
Caffeine is bitter and has an LD50 is around 200 mg/kg body weight in rats. For table salt, the LD50 for humans is around 1g/kg of body weight. Caffein is about 5 times more toxic then something normally considered utterly nontoxic(acutely, anyway), and it tastes really bad. You will not accidentally eat a lethal dose of caffeine. On the other hand, it is quite easy to take enough to make you utterly miserable for days, and unable to sleep it off.
Lasers still diverge. A normal laser pointer will have expanded to 500 km in width before it hits the moon. If I have not made some mistake in the calculations, a diffraction limited deutrium fluoride laser which is 1 m wide at its narrowest will diverge to 60 meters width at 36.000 km. It should still be possible to collect all of that, so powering by laser should no fall off at the square of the distance.
So now you escalated it to the point where the police will not only put your dog down, but will also lock you up for assault. Nice work.