It is NOW. The Moon is the proper name for our moon. Which is my point, language evolves. The moment we discovered the Sun was a star, it made sense to call the star a planet orbits its sun.
Also, "satellite" could refer to a non-natural entity, of course.
Once again, that's the case now. When Sputnik went up, people felt the need to qualify it as an "artificial satellite," and the term was used for the longest time. Eventually we dropped the "artificial" from it.
So capitalize Sun and Moon, and if that's not enough for you, use Sol and Luna.
There is only one Sun, it's a proper noun, and it's our star. Please, whomever submitted this story, please get your basic astronomy right.
That ship sailed long ago. It's like complaining that we talk about the moons of Jupiter instead of calling them Jupiter's satellites.
For the longest time, the satellite of a planet is a moon of that planet and stars a planet orbits is its sun. When we want to differentiate them, we call our moon by its latin name Luna and our sun by its latin name Sol.
Whoever doesn't realize by now that Google is a marketing agency who makes their money off selling their users' data, deserves to get screwed.
Google makes zero money off selling their users' data. Selling their users data would, in fact, hurt Google's business strategy.
Google makes money off having access to users' data nobody else does. They can tell an advertiser, "we know the people for whom your ad will be most relevant, and no other advertising company has that information." If they were to actually give a list of said users to their client, they'd no longer be able to charge for advertising to those users, because their clients would do it directly.
Alice and bob examine their photons, tell each other, but not victor. Victor decides to entangle or not entangle. Examine new correlation.
This will test "does a correlation between alice and bob indicate that victor will entangle?".
If it does, you have a reasonably strong test case for many worlds.
Let's say their states are correlated when they equal each other. Whenever Victor entangles them, if Alice has state 0, Bob has state 0. If Alice has state 1, then Bob has state 1. Whenever Victor doesn't entangle them, then Alice's state does not tell us anything about Bob's state, but they could still match, purely by chance.
In other words, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference between entanglement and random matches, thus preventing us from predicting Victor's behavior.
Red is the color of alarm, of fear. It is abrasive to the eyes and to our visual processing system and is often used to signify errors for these reasons.
I hate humans.
Mac OS X and Windows screens heavily utilize blue for this reason. It is psychologically soothing. It makes you feel like you're awash in the operating system as opposed to standing apart from it.
I understand your complaint. You and others, versed far more in orbital mechanics, assure the rest of us fools that, based on your admittedly superior knowledge and training, that what you propose is safe.
My knowledge of orbital mechanics is limited to what I learned by playing with the Orbiter simulator. It's pretty lackluster. The point is that when I see an article that is not in my area of expertise, I don't pretend that it is and start attacking the people in the field. They know more than I do, and anything I can come up with as a possible danger is either not a legitimate danger, or something they have considered to greater detail than it would be possible for me to without knowledge and experience in the field. When something in my area of expertise comes up (modeling and simulation of electronics), and I see a problem, then I will ask the people involved, "how are you dealing with this issue?" Even then, people usually come back to me with very reasonable and interesting answers because, they've actually been working on the problem.
However, human history in the technological age has proven, time and time again, that reassurances of safety and no ill effects from domain experts is fraught with danger. Let's just run down through the list of things proclaimed to be safe, that we the luddites were wrong...
I'm not saying that whenever a new technology article comes up that we should all believe there will be no ill effects and things will be 100% safe. I'm saying the risk is acceptable. For every single thing in your list, the benefits far outweighed the cost. I don't care if planes crashed, DDT and windmills killed birds, or that coal is unclean. We live in a better world because we have planes, we saved a lot of people from malaria because of DDT, fossil fuels have allowed us to have a thriving civilization, and windmills might be killing birds but are they preferable to coal?
I'm not asking you to believe there will be no problems. I'm asking you to stop chasing the zero-risk path. We're better off today because we've taken risks, because we've made sacrifices, because we've had groups of visionaries taking us where we weren't certain that we could go. Sometimes thinks didn't work out at all, but we still learned something from the disasters behind us to build bigger and better things. When you look at Fukushima, you see a disaster, when I look at it, I see a success story. When the thing got hit by a tsunami larger than what it was designed to handle, the people involved still mitigated what could have been a much larger disaster. There were essentially no long-term ill effects from the whole thing, it was most certainly not another Chernobyl. This is human beings at their best. It's not that bad things won't happen, it's that when they do, we can handle it.
So yes, its not anti-technology at all, its anti-let's take a big frigging risk and abolish any common sense that says pushing a dinosaur killer closer to earth might be a bad fricking idea by deluding ourselves into pretending we know all the variables involved, when we can't.
I understand that, lacking any knowledge of orbital mechanics, you would think, "asteroid near earth, if it gets close enough, our gravity can pull it in." I think it's reasonable for you to ask the question, "just how dangerous is this? Convince me that the risk is acceptable." It's not, however, reasonable for you to assume you can judge the risk better than the people who are in the field. I recommend you play a bit with Orbiter yourself. It won't make you an expert, but it should be enough to give you a feel for how things actually work, and you're going to realize hitting the Earth while trying to put something in orbit is a lot harder than you think it is.
Also, not every asteroid that doesn't burn up in the atmosphere is a dinosaur killer. There is pretty larg
I suspect I started using computers about as early as you did (first experience was in the late 70s, got my first computer in the early 80s, first IBM PC was in 86, first computer I bought myself was in 91, etc.) and I've always felt the same way about organization, but on both my Mac and with Google Drive I find that searching is just faster than navigating, even if I know exactly where my file is.
That's fair enough, and like I said, I don't have a problem with people who want to do that. In fact, since Google Drive is actually still allowing me to set the hierarchy, I think Google is handling it right. I just have this fear that one day operating systems will be like phone operating systems. They'll stop telling me where my stuff is, and no longer allow me to exert any control over it.
For one single file, I will even agree that searching is faster than navigating. However, typically when I navigate to the directory where I keep a file, I have several related files right there, that I will soon be working with as well. Now I don't need to also search for them, because the folder is open on the right spot.
Basically, I didn't mean to be critical of your workflow, I just wanted to point out that there are people like me who don't use the search features as the default method of getting to our data. Literally the only times I will ever search for a file is if it wasn't placed there by me. For example, when it was placed by the installer of an application.
There is a cost to doing that: Google Drive's search features won't work for you...and although you can organize things in hierarchical directories, the search features are the way I find the stuff I want 99% of the time.
I've been seeing both Windows and Mac moving in the direction of trying to abstract me from the location where files are saved in favor of searching for them. I've never understood that use model. I don't mind that other people would find their files that way, but I've never had to search for a file in my life. I just save them in logical places and they're always where I expect them to be. It's most certainly not what I want to do 99% of the time.
It must be a result of working with a computer back when indexing every single file in your box would have been an insane waste of storage space, the indexing process would have taken an insane amount of time during which my computer would have been unusable because I'd only have a single core, and the search through the index would still be slow enough that it'd be faster to navigate to the file. In those days, we wore an onion in our belts, because that was the style at the time...
Be nice if people could explain it without the "fuck off and die" part, though. Or the singing pig comment below mine. I have a general understanding of orbital mechanics being in the space biz and all, but I really don't expect it to be general knowledge even in the geekverse.
I completely agree with you, and think general politeness goes a long way in making a convincing argument (it doesn't matter how logical and factual your argument is if you've made the other person stop listening to you).
That said, I think I also understand the frustration that causes people to answer so angrily. We're seeing this anti-technology reaction lately, even among geek circles. Every time somebody tries anything remotely innovative, you see the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag pop up and a bunch of people posting about how this new innovative thing sounds great in theory, but in practice it's going to kill and maim people, and generally make puppies cry.
Basically, it's not that I expect people to have a general understanding of orbital mechanics here. It's that I expect people who do not have a general understanding of orbital mechanics to assume that those actually involved in the project know what they're doing. It's alright to ask, "is there a danger here, can someone with knowledge in this area explain to me the risks involved?" It's another thing entirely to say, "I hope these guys are being extremely careful, because I see a danger here even though I know absolutely nothing about the field. In addition, I assume the people who are involved in this project to be completely irresponsible people who care nothing about safety."
I've made this observation before. Back when I was in school, classmates around me who had serious problem learning the material generally fell into one of two categories:
They got frustrated with their inability to learn the material remained permanently stuck on the problem, and just decided they hated the course, the professor, or whatever. Typically that stemmed from lacking a good grasp on knowledge the rest of us had. Either a misunderstanding on what was just explained, or a fundamental lack of understanding on the material from a prerequisite course (or something that should have been a prerequisite course). What these guys needed was to have someone observe their thought process in trying to solve the problem, find out why they were stuck, and give them the knowledge they lack. Once they get that extra knowledge and start solving the problems more easily, that builds confidence, and they stop being afraid / hating the subject.
If they couldn't solve the problem, they'd instantly give up and ask someone how to do it. This stems from never being given a challenging problem, or just always being shown the procedure of how to solve one as soon as they explain that they don't immediately know how to do it. And of course, once they leave school, nobody needs them to solve problems that we already have a procedure for how to solve. Figuring out a solution to a problem we don't have the answer to is what we want to pay them to do.
In short, you're obviously a good teacher. You don't crush your students' confidence to the point where they refuse to try, but you also make sure to challenge them so that they don't get into the second mode of just asking for help immediately if they haven't seen the problem before.
As in like when I went to UF if you wanted to study CIS you had to take Calc 1-3 (ok...most of us were fine with that), Chem 1-2 (hum...), and Physics 1-2 (gahhh?), along with some other very non-CIS related but much more related Engineering classes.
Sounds great. I hope the curriculum also included 9-12 hours of liberal arts.
You're getting a degree, not a certification. What you're paying for is a well-rounded education with emphasis on a major of your choosing.
In effect if you wanted to learn to be a programmer, network engineer, or even a web designer you had to have the background of a EE.
Really? Because you didn't list a circuits, electronics, DSP, emag, or semiconductors course. What's the EE background you're talking about here? Physics and calculus isn't an EE background, it's background all disciplines need. It's information you need to lead a normal day to day life.
If it was herd immunity, you would still expect to see a significantly higher number of infected amongst the unvaccinated.
That's not necessarily true.
Say the vaccine is 96% effective and we're studying a population of 1000 kids. If they were all vaccinated, and they all come in contact with the virus, you'd expect roughly 40 of them to still get sick. If 30 of those do not get vaccinated, and all 1000 were exposed to the virus, you'd have a cap of 30 non-vaccinated kids getting sick, but still roughly 39 of the vaccinated kids will be sick, simply because there are more of them.
The total amount of people with the disease goes up significantly, but most of the people coming down with the disease are still people who were vaccinated. If you stop assuming all those people came in contact with the virus, the fact that there are now 30 kids who weren't vaccinated increases the chance of 39 kids for whom the vaccine didn't work to come in contact with the disease, so there's a larger proportion of vaccinated kids getting sick.
So... either their was something wrong with the vaccine, there was a mutation, or else this particular vaccine is less effective than most other vaccines. Unfortunately, most people will take this and generalize it to "vaccines don't work!!!"
There's also the possible effect of non-vaccinated kids lowering the herd immunity. Basically increasing the chances of those who got the vaccine which for some reason or another wasn't effective in immunizing them to come in contact with the virus.
Like you said, lots of variables, more study needed. We do need to verify the effectiveness of the vaccine (or even the effectiveness of a particular batch of the vaccine) is not being compromised.
Screw that. I don't see how a magic trick can be copyrightable. The performance of it is copyrightable, but Bakardy isn't selling a recorded version of Teller's show. He watched the show, figured out how Teller did the trick, and is telling other people how he does it for a price. The equivalent analogy is if I go see a movie where a character gets his hand chopped off, figure out based on my own experience how the special effects guy made the hand-chopping look so realistic, and sell the information of how to do that to people, who will then proceed to make other movies where characters get their hands chopped off using the same technique. That's perfectly valid. The movie scene is copyrightable, the method used to film the scene is not.
There's more to a magic show than the trick. Presentation is everything. If the trick is so well know you can no longer present it in an entertaining way, tough luck, create a new trick. So yeah, Teller lost my respect.
Cliche, but... Coders are a dime a dozen. The actual idea is what matters.
FTFY
If your way was correct, we'd have 100's of implementations of EVERY idea. We don't, but we do have 1000's of coders for every idea.
Actually, we do have hundreds of implementations for EVERY idea. Unfortunately, they're hundreds of BAD implementations, so the idea, even if good, doesn't take off. And although you can have thousands of coders available to work on your idea, because implementation is so hard, it's possible none of them will get it right.
I don't care how awesome and original you think your idea is, at least 100,000 other people already had it. Of those, 99,900 never bothered to try to take in any further, which is guaranteed failure. Whether the remaining 100 who actually have the drive to try will succeed or not depends on if they have the talent (or can hire someone who does have the talent) to not only implement it, but implement it well. Sometimes a good implementation is not even possible until other things are in play. For example, I'm sure people thought of smartphones in the early 90's, but unless you have the cheap LCD screens, fast and power efficient chips, batteries with high energy density, and a data network in place, that idea is going nowhere. Actually, it did go somewhere: The PDA. Which is the same idea, poorly implemented due to the lack of supporting technology.
"The cost to make the darn thing has nothing to do with it, though."
And I call bullshit on that. If they're going to use the excuse that they are charging less there because the people have less, they are either selling at a loss, or admitting to their severe greed.
Did you not read anything I typed? The cost to make the darn thing has nothing to do with it because you charge the most people will pay for it while keeping demand at the level of production that is most cost efficient to you. Why would you charge anything less than that?
How much money do you need to survive and go to work everyday? If you're making more money than you need to stay alive, are you guilty of "substantial greed"? Are you guilty of greed if you go work for somebody who offers you more money if you don't need that extra money. Prices for everything are set according to what people are willing to pay to maximize your profits. It better be far above what it costs to make it, or you wouldn't be in that business.
".in which you decide how much the product costs not based on how much the product costs to make, but on how much money the potential buyer has."
I prefer the term "Price Gouging" or "Economic Rape" for this "charge all you can get away with" approach...
Holy lack of understanding of economics, Batman!
The supply and demand curve to determine price is the most basic you can get. You price things by optimizing how many you sell and the demand at a particular price. For example, if I can produce 100 widgets a month for $0.50 each, I charge $1.00 each, and I'm selling out every time, then I need to increase my price until demand goes below my production capacity. Alternatively, if the demand is such that I can sell one item every 3 months for $1,000 a piece, I'm better off lowering production to make one widget every 3 months than I am selling 300 widgets for $1.00 each. The cost to make thing has nothing to do with the price I sell it for, except as an absolute minimum (and even that isn't set in stone when you consider things like, for example, selling support for an item I give away for free: one of the favorite GPL software models for making money).
Now, if you argue that they're artificially controlling the market by disallowing trade between countries, I'm with you there. I don't like the practice, and I think it's unfair. The cost to make the darn thing has nothing to do with it, though.
> A lot of us believe individual rights trump societal rights.
So what is your stance on drunk driving? Like not getting vaccinated, it's a situation where a person engages in risky behavior that might lead to death of innocents.
My stance is that you should be allowed to drink and drive on your own property, if you own a field or something. That's your individual right and the government doesn't have a legitimate case for infringing on it even if it might get you and people on your property killed (in which case they do have the right to make you face the consequences for your negligent actions). Rules for taking the car on public roads are not infringing on your individual rights because those roads are as much everyone else's as they are yours.
Your body, on the other hand, is your own. So nobody has the right to force you to take anything you don't want to.
"A vaccination is an individual decision " no it is not. It is a social decision. If you are able, but unwilling to get a vaccine, then you are risking society.
A lot of us believe individual rights trump societal rights. Justified laws are those that avoid other members from the society you live in from infringing on your individual rights, not the other way around.
That said, not vaccinating your kids is just plain stupid. The proper way of handling this is educating these people in an attempt to make them better decisions. And since it's in the benefit of our society that people get their kids vaccinated, public education campaigns are a valid use of tax money.
In summary: trying to convince people to do the right thing for the benefit of society is ok. Forcing them to do the right thing is not.
This comment is wrong. Imagine that the sender and receiver were sufficiently far apart, say a million light years. Quantum entanglement would allow them to have faster than light communication even if it was being "encrypted" and "decrypted" with a commodore 64.
No, it does not. Another poster already linked to the No-Communication theorem. Basically, the effects of quantum entanglement are transmitted faster-than-light, instantaneously, in fact. Information through this process cannot be transferred faster than light.
It boils down to this: if you're light-years apart from me, and we each have one particle that is entangled with the other, if I collapse the state of my particle, I know which state your particle has collapsed to simultaneously. However, I cannot force my particle to collapse to a particular state, so I can't force it to send you any information. I can't even send you the information that I have collapsed the state of my particle. Measuring its state collapses it, and you won't know if your particle has collapsed to a state or not unless you measure it.
just because you can whine really loud it doesn't mean you can dictate to a game developer how to make their games. anyone who thinks the difference in endings is the cut scene color wasn't paying attention to the story at all.
I don't have a problem with the endings not being different enough (although I do have a problem with the difference to the endings essentially boiling down to a last second decision. You should be locked down to an ending based on choices you've made throughout the series).
What I do have a problem with is the lack of a satisfactory ending. Hollywood has historically placed happy endings everywhere they don't belong. People understandably complained about this because when you stick a happy ending on, for example, The Count of Monte Cristo, you just removed the entire moral lesson intended in the novel. Unfortunately, the result of this backlash is that people now think that emotionally complex endings where not everything works out in the end is "artistic" and we should just plop that everywhere. That's the exact same thing Hollywood has been doing with the happy endings, except that you're wrapping everything up with a bow of a different, sadder color.
The ending of a story needs to fit a story. For Edmond Dantes, he needs to accomplish his revenge masterfully, destroy all of his enemies exactly as he planned, only to find his life empty when all is said and done. For Shepard (s)he needs to do what (s)he's always done: beat all the fucking odds and accomplish the mission. If you're playing a Shepard that has sacrificed much along the way via the renegade route, that means a lot of bodies pave the way to final awesomeness. If you've been playing the game by taking the time to save kittens from trees, that means absolutely everything works out, synthetics are saved, organics are saved, the cycle is ended, and the mass relays are intact to usher in a new era of collaboration in the galaxy. Why? Because that's what your audience has invested all this time to achieve. Mass Effect isn't some literary masterpiece, it's an escapist reality where you get to be a badass. It's an action story in a sci-fi world. You don't play the game because you want to know how it ends, you play for the journey, and it better end exactly where you were planning to take that journey.
That's how the other two games operated, and maybe you want to pretend that wrapping a story that had absolutely no depth to it in an ambiguous ending increases the artistic value of the thing, but the rest of us see it as a cop-out and a bait and switch ploy. Those of us who just wanted to shut our brains off for a few hours were forced to turn them back on, and once you turn your brain on to try to figure out what the hell just happened you start asking questions such as *WHY WAS THE NORMANDY INSIDE A MASS EFFECT FIELD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BATTLE FOR EARTH?* Not only is the ending NOT the artistic masterpiece EA is claiming it is, but it's poorly thought out and cliched.
The video without context looks pretty bad. I suggest you actually link to the descirption of the study. The relevant part: "THIS IS NOT A REPRESENTATION OF THE RADIOACTIVE PLUME CONCENTRATION. Since we do not know exactly how much contaminated water and at what concentration was released into the ocean, it is impossible to estimate the extent and dilution of the plume."
They're saying, "radioactive particles are predicted to have dispersed at these locations." They're NOT saying "dangerous concentrations of it are present at these locations." They're saying nothing at all about concentration. This NOAA study is.
no way they'd be allowed to publish anything that would endanger the profits of the fisheries
That's not how this works. When someone presents evidence to support their argument, you can't just dismiss it. They have won the argument and the discussion is over until you go and collect evidence of your own that either confirms of denies their findings.
Once you are presented with evidence, the burden of proof is on you if you want to disagree with it. You can't just wave your hands, "I don't believe in the data they've presented" until and unless you can show data of your own that disagrees with theirs. Anything else is conspiracy theory paranoia bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, apparently "moon" has become generic, but not "sun".
What's your logical basis for allowing one and not the other?
Some people are using "sun" as a non-proper reference to other stars
By "some people," you mean the media, works of literature, and scientific papers.
but that is being corrected by other people
A futile attempt to keep language static instead of embracing new meanings. Like all other such attempts, you've already lost.
No, moon is a bit more generic than the Sun.
It is NOW. The Moon is the proper name for our moon. Which is my point, language evolves. The moment we discovered the Sun was a star, it made sense to call the star a planet orbits its sun.
Also, "satellite" could refer to a non-natural entity, of course.
Once again, that's the case now. When Sputnik went up, people felt the need to qualify it as an "artificial satellite," and the term was used for the longest time. Eventually we dropped the "artificial" from it.
So capitalize Sun and Moon, and if that's not enough for you, use Sol and Luna.
There is only one Sun, it's a proper noun, and it's our star.
Please, whomever submitted this story, please get your basic astronomy right.
That ship sailed long ago. It's like complaining that we talk about the moons of Jupiter instead of calling them Jupiter's satellites.
For the longest time, the satellite of a planet is a moon of that planet and stars a planet orbits is its sun. When we want to differentiate them, we call our moon by its latin name Luna and our sun by its latin name Sol.
OK, well, not all that shocked.
Whoever doesn't realize by now that Google is a marketing agency who makes their money off selling their users' data, deserves to get screwed.
Google makes zero money off selling their users' data. Selling their users data would, in fact, hurt Google's business strategy.
Google makes money off having access to users' data nobody else does. They can tell an advertiser, "we know the people for whom your ad will be most relevant, and no other advertising company has that information." If they were to actually give a list of said users to their client, they'd no longer be able to charge for advertising to those users, because their clients would do it directly.
Proposed followup experiment:
Alice and bob examine their photons, tell each other, but not victor. Victor decides to entangle or not entangle. Examine new correlation.
This will test "does a correlation between alice and bob indicate that victor will entangle?".
If it does, you have a reasonably strong test case for many worlds.
Let's say their states are correlated when they equal each other. Whenever Victor entangles them, if Alice has state 0, Bob has state 0. If Alice has state 1, then Bob has state 1. Whenever Victor doesn't entangle them, then Alice's state does not tell us anything about Bob's state, but they could still match, purely by chance.
In other words, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference between entanglement and random matches, thus preventing us from predicting Victor's behavior.
Red is the color of alarm, of fear. It is abrasive to the eyes and to our visual processing system and is often used to signify errors for these reasons.
I hate humans.
Mac OS X and Windows screens heavily utilize blue for this reason. It is psychologically soothing. It makes you feel like you're awash in the operating system as opposed to standing apart from it.
I really hate humans.
I understand your complaint. You and others, versed far more in orbital mechanics, assure the rest of us fools that, based on your admittedly superior knowledge and training, that what you propose is safe.
My knowledge of orbital mechanics is limited to what I learned by playing with the Orbiter simulator. It's pretty lackluster. The point is that when I see an article that is not in my area of expertise, I don't pretend that it is and start attacking the people in the field. They know more than I do, and anything I can come up with as a possible danger is either not a legitimate danger, or something they have considered to greater detail than it would be possible for me to without knowledge and experience in the field. When something in my area of expertise comes up (modeling and simulation of electronics), and I see a problem, then I will ask the people involved, "how are you dealing with this issue?" Even then, people usually come back to me with very reasonable and interesting answers because, they've actually been working on the problem.
However, human history in the technological age has proven, time and time again, that reassurances of safety and no ill effects from domain experts is fraught with danger. Let's just run down through the list of things proclaimed to be safe, that we the luddites were wrong...
I'm not saying that whenever a new technology article comes up that we should all believe there will be no ill effects and things will be 100% safe. I'm saying the risk is acceptable. For every single thing in your list, the benefits far outweighed the cost. I don't care if planes crashed, DDT and windmills killed birds, or that coal is unclean. We live in a better world because we have planes, we saved a lot of people from malaria because of DDT, fossil fuels have allowed us to have a thriving civilization, and windmills might be killing birds but are they preferable to coal?
I'm not asking you to believe there will be no problems. I'm asking you to stop chasing the zero-risk path. We're better off today because we've taken risks, because we've made sacrifices, because we've had groups of visionaries taking us where we weren't certain that we could go. Sometimes thinks didn't work out at all, but we still learned something from the disasters behind us to build bigger and better things. When you look at Fukushima, you see a disaster, when I look at it, I see a success story. When the thing got hit by a tsunami larger than what it was designed to handle, the people involved still mitigated what could have been a much larger disaster. There were essentially no long-term ill effects from the whole thing, it was most certainly not another Chernobyl. This is human beings at their best. It's not that bad things won't happen, it's that when they do, we can handle it.
So yes, its not anti-technology at all, its anti-let's take a big frigging risk and abolish any common sense that says pushing a dinosaur killer closer to earth might be a bad fricking idea by deluding ourselves into pretending we know all the variables involved, when we can't.
I understand that, lacking any knowledge of orbital mechanics, you would think, "asteroid near earth, if it gets close enough, our gravity can pull it in." I think it's reasonable for you to ask the question, "just how dangerous is this? Convince me that the risk is acceptable." It's not, however, reasonable for you to assume you can judge the risk better than the people who are in the field. I recommend you play a bit with Orbiter yourself. It won't make you an expert, but it should be enough to give you a feel for how things actually work, and you're going to realize hitting the Earth while trying to put something in orbit is a lot harder than you think it is.
Also, not every asteroid that doesn't burn up in the atmosphere is a dinosaur killer. There is pretty larg
I suspect I started using computers about as early as you did (first experience was in the late 70s, got my first computer in the early 80s, first IBM PC was in 86, first computer I bought myself was in 91, etc.) and I've always felt the same way about organization, but on both my Mac and with Google Drive I find that searching is just faster than navigating, even if I know exactly where my file is.
That's fair enough, and like I said, I don't have a problem with people who want to do that. In fact, since Google Drive is actually still allowing me to set the hierarchy, I think Google is handling it right. I just have this fear that one day operating systems will be like phone operating systems. They'll stop telling me where my stuff is, and no longer allow me to exert any control over it.
For one single file, I will even agree that searching is faster than navigating. However, typically when I navigate to the directory where I keep a file, I have several related files right there, that I will soon be working with as well. Now I don't need to also search for them, because the folder is open on the right spot.
Basically, I didn't mean to be critical of your workflow, I just wanted to point out that there are people like me who don't use the search features as the default method of getting to our data. Literally the only times I will ever search for a file is if it wasn't placed there by me. For example, when it was placed by the installer of an application.
There is a cost to doing that: Google Drive's search features won't work for you...and although you can organize things in hierarchical directories, the search features are the way I find the stuff I want 99% of the time.
I've been seeing both Windows and Mac moving in the direction of trying to abstract me from the location where files are saved in favor of searching for them. I've never understood that use model. I don't mind that other people would find their files that way, but I've never had to search for a file in my life. I just save them in logical places and they're always where I expect them to be. It's most certainly not what I want to do 99% of the time.
It must be a result of working with a computer back when indexing every single file in your box would have been an insane waste of storage space, the indexing process would have taken an insane amount of time during which my computer would have been unusable because I'd only have a single core, and the search through the index would still be slow enough that it'd be faster to navigate to the file. In those days, we wore an onion in our belts, because that was the style at the time...
Be nice if people could explain it without the "fuck off and die" part, though. Or the singing pig comment below mine. I have a general understanding of orbital mechanics being in the space biz and all, but I really don't expect it to be general knowledge even in the geekverse.
I completely agree with you, and think general politeness goes a long way in making a convincing argument (it doesn't matter how logical and factual your argument is if you've made the other person stop listening to you).
That said, I think I also understand the frustration that causes people to answer so angrily. We're seeing this anti-technology reaction lately, even among geek circles. Every time somebody tries anything remotely innovative, you see the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag pop up and a bunch of people posting about how this new innovative thing sounds great in theory, but in practice it's going to kill and maim people, and generally make puppies cry.
Basically, it's not that I expect people to have a general understanding of orbital mechanics here. It's that I expect people who do not have a general understanding of orbital mechanics to assume that those actually involved in the project know what they're doing. It's alright to ask, "is there a danger here, can someone with knowledge in this area explain to me the risks involved?" It's another thing entirely to say, "I hope these guys are being extremely careful, because I see a danger here even though I know absolutely nothing about the field. In addition, I assume the people who are involved in this project to be completely irresponsible people who care nothing about safety."
I've made this observation before. Back when I was in school, classmates around me who had serious problem learning the material generally fell into one of two categories:
In short, you're obviously a good teacher. You don't crush your students' confidence to the point where they refuse to try, but you also make sure to challenge them so that they don't get into the second mode of just asking for help immediately if they haven't seen the problem before.
As in like when I went to UF if you wanted to study CIS you had to take Calc 1-3 (ok...most of us were fine with that), Chem 1-2 (hum...), and Physics 1-2 (gahhh?), along with some other very non-CIS related but much more related Engineering classes.
Sounds great. I hope the curriculum also included 9-12 hours of liberal arts.
You're getting a degree, not a certification. What you're paying for is a well-rounded education with emphasis on a major of your choosing.
In effect if you wanted to learn to be a programmer, network engineer, or even a web designer you had to have the background of a EE.
Really? Because you didn't list a circuits, electronics, DSP, emag, or semiconductors course. What's the EE background you're talking about here? Physics and calculus isn't an EE background, it's background all disciplines need. It's information you need to lead a normal day to day life.
If it was herd immunity, you would still expect to see a significantly higher number of infected amongst the unvaccinated.
That's not necessarily true.
Say the vaccine is 96% effective and we're studying a population of 1000 kids. If they were all vaccinated, and they all come in contact with the virus, you'd expect roughly 40 of them to still get sick. If 30 of those do not get vaccinated, and all 1000 were exposed to the virus, you'd have a cap of 30 non-vaccinated kids getting sick, but still roughly 39 of the vaccinated kids will be sick, simply because there are more of them.
The total amount of people with the disease goes up significantly, but most of the people coming down with the disease are still people who were vaccinated. If you stop assuming all those people came in contact with the virus, the fact that there are now 30 kids who weren't vaccinated increases the chance of 39 kids for whom the vaccine didn't work to come in contact with the disease, so there's a larger proportion of vaccinated kids getting sick.
So... either their was something wrong with the vaccine, there was a mutation, or else this particular vaccine is less effective than most other vaccines. Unfortunately, most people will take this and generalize it to "vaccines don't work!!!"
There's also the possible effect of non-vaccinated kids lowering the herd immunity. Basically increasing the chances of those who got the vaccine which for some reason or another wasn't effective in immunizing them to come in contact with the virus.
Like you said, lots of variables, more study needed. We do need to verify the effectiveness of the vaccine (or even the effectiveness of a particular batch of the vaccine) is not being compromised.
a legitimate application of copyright law
Screw that. I don't see how a magic trick can be copyrightable. The performance of it is copyrightable, but Bakardy isn't selling a recorded version of Teller's show. He watched the show, figured out how Teller did the trick, and is telling other people how he does it for a price. The equivalent analogy is if I go see a movie where a character gets his hand chopped off, figure out based on my own experience how the special effects guy made the hand-chopping look so realistic, and sell the information of how to do that to people, who will then proceed to make other movies where characters get their hands chopped off using the same technique. That's perfectly valid. The movie scene is copyrightable, the method used to film the scene is not.
There's more to a magic show than the trick. Presentation is everything. If the trick is so well know you can no longer present it in an entertaining way, tough luck, create a new trick. So yeah, Teller lost my respect.
Cliche, but... Coders are a dime a dozen. The actual idea is what matters.
FTFY
If your way was correct, we'd have 100's of implementations of EVERY idea.
We don't, but we do have 1000's of coders for every idea.
Actually, we do have hundreds of implementations for EVERY idea. Unfortunately, they're hundreds of BAD implementations, so the idea, even if good, doesn't take off. And although you can have thousands of coders available to work on your idea, because implementation is so hard, it's possible none of them will get it right.
I don't care how awesome and original you think your idea is, at least 100,000 other people already had it. Of those, 99,900 never bothered to try to take in any further, which is guaranteed failure. Whether the remaining 100 who actually have the drive to try will succeed or not depends on if they have the talent (or can hire someone who does have the talent) to not only implement it, but implement it well. Sometimes a good implementation is not even possible until other things are in play. For example, I'm sure people thought of smartphones in the early 90's, but unless you have the cheap LCD screens, fast and power efficient chips, batteries with high energy density, and a data network in place, that idea is going nowhere. Actually, it did go somewhere: The PDA. Which is the same idea, poorly implemented due to the lack of supporting technology.
"The cost to make the darn thing has nothing to do with it, though."
And I call bullshit on that. If they're going to use the excuse that they are charging less there because the people have less, they are either selling at a loss, or admitting to their severe greed.
Did you not read anything I typed? The cost to make the darn thing has nothing to do with it because you charge the most people will pay for it while keeping demand at the level of production that is most cost efficient to you. Why would you charge anything less than that?
How much money do you need to survive and go to work everyday? If you're making more money than you need to stay alive, are you guilty of "substantial greed"? Are you guilty of greed if you go work for somebody who offers you more money if you don't need that extra money. Prices for everything are set according to what people are willing to pay to maximize your profits. It better be far above what it costs to make it, or you wouldn't be in that business.
".in which you decide how much the product costs not based on how much the product costs to make, but on how much money the potential buyer has."
I prefer the term "Price Gouging" or "Economic Rape" for this "charge all you can get away with" approach...
Holy lack of understanding of economics, Batman!
The supply and demand curve to determine price is the most basic you can get. You price things by optimizing how many you sell and the demand at a particular price. For example, if I can produce 100 widgets a month for $0.50 each, I charge $1.00 each, and I'm selling out every time, then I need to increase my price until demand goes below my production capacity. Alternatively, if the demand is such that I can sell one item every 3 months for $1,000 a piece, I'm better off lowering production to make one widget every 3 months than I am selling 300 widgets for $1.00 each. The cost to make thing has nothing to do with the price I sell it for, except as an absolute minimum (and even that isn't set in stone when you consider things like, for example, selling support for an item I give away for free: one of the favorite GPL software models for making money).
Now, if you argue that they're artificially controlling the market by disallowing trade between countries, I'm with you there. I don't like the practice, and I think it's unfair. The cost to make the darn thing has nothing to do with it, though.
> A lot of us believe individual rights trump societal rights.
So what is your stance on drunk driving? Like not getting vaccinated, it's a situation where a person engages in risky behavior that might lead to death of innocents.
My stance is that you should be allowed to drink and drive on your own property, if you own a field or something. That's your individual right and the government doesn't have a legitimate case for infringing on it even if it might get you and people on your property killed (in which case they do have the right to make you face the consequences for your negligent actions). Rules for taking the car on public roads are not infringing on your individual rights because those roads are as much everyone else's as they are yours.
Your body, on the other hand, is your own. So nobody has the right to force you to take anything you don't want to.
"A vaccination is an individual decision "
no it is not. It is a social decision. If you are able, but unwilling to get a vaccine, then you are risking society.
A lot of us believe individual rights trump societal rights. Justified laws are those that avoid other members from the society you live in from infringing on your individual rights, not the other way around.
That said, not vaccinating your kids is just plain stupid. The proper way of handling this is educating these people in an attempt to make them better decisions. And since it's in the benefit of our society that people get their kids vaccinated, public education campaigns are a valid use of tax money.
In summary: trying to convince people to do the right thing for the benefit of society is ok. Forcing them to do the right thing is not.
but 14% had been vaccinated, so risking autism, whether real or not, is no guarantee to not get whooping cough.
If everyone else had been vaccinated as well, those 14% may not have caught the disease: Herd immunity
This comment is wrong. Imagine that the sender and receiver were sufficiently far apart, say a million light years. Quantum entanglement would allow them to have faster than light communication even if it was being "encrypted" and "decrypted" with a commodore 64.
No, it does not. Another poster already linked to the No-Communication theorem. Basically, the effects of quantum entanglement are transmitted faster-than-light, instantaneously, in fact. Information through this process cannot be transferred faster than light.
It boils down to this: if you're light-years apart from me, and we each have one particle that is entangled with the other, if I collapse the state of my particle, I know which state your particle has collapsed to simultaneously. However, I cannot force my particle to collapse to a particular state, so I can't force it to send you any information. I can't even send you the information that I have collapsed the state of my particle. Measuring its state collapses it, and you won't know if your particle has collapsed to a state or not unless you measure it.
just because you can whine really loud it doesn't mean you can dictate to a game developer how to make their games. anyone who thinks the difference in endings is the cut scene color wasn't paying attention to the story at all.
I don't have a problem with the endings not being different enough (although I do have a problem with the difference to the endings essentially boiling down to a last second decision. You should be locked down to an ending based on choices you've made throughout the series).
What I do have a problem with is the lack of a satisfactory ending. Hollywood has historically placed happy endings everywhere they don't belong. People understandably complained about this because when you stick a happy ending on, for example, The Count of Monte Cristo, you just removed the entire moral lesson intended in the novel. Unfortunately, the result of this backlash is that people now think that emotionally complex endings where not everything works out in the end is "artistic" and we should just plop that everywhere. That's the exact same thing Hollywood has been doing with the happy endings, except that you're wrapping everything up with a bow of a different, sadder color.
The ending of a story needs to fit a story. For Edmond Dantes, he needs to accomplish his revenge masterfully, destroy all of his enemies exactly as he planned, only to find his life empty when all is said and done. For Shepard (s)he needs to do what (s)he's always done: beat all the fucking odds and accomplish the mission. If you're playing a Shepard that has sacrificed much along the way via the renegade route, that means a lot of bodies pave the way to final awesomeness. If you've been playing the game by taking the time to save kittens from trees, that means absolutely everything works out, synthetics are saved, organics are saved, the cycle is ended, and the mass relays are intact to usher in a new era of collaboration in the galaxy. Why? Because that's what your audience has invested all this time to achieve. Mass Effect isn't some literary masterpiece, it's an escapist reality where you get to be a badass. It's an action story in a sci-fi world. You don't play the game because you want to know how it ends, you play for the journey, and it better end exactly where you were planning to take that journey.
That's how the other two games operated, and maybe you want to pretend that wrapping a story that had absolutely no depth to it in an ambiguous ending increases the artistic value of the thing, but the rest of us see it as a cop-out and a bait and switch ploy. Those of us who just wanted to shut our brains off for a few hours were forced to turn them back on, and once you turn your brain on to try to figure out what the hell just happened you start asking questions such as *WHY WAS THE NORMANDY INSIDE A MASS EFFECT FIELD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BATTLE FOR EARTH?* Not only is the ending NOT the artistic masterpiece EA is claiming it is, but it's poorly thought out and cliched.
meh
It's fine
The video without context looks pretty bad. I suggest you actually link to the descirption of the study. The relevant part: "THIS IS NOT A REPRESENTATION OF THE RADIOACTIVE PLUME CONCENTRATION. Since we do not know exactly how much contaminated water and at what concentration was released into the ocean, it is impossible to estimate the extent and dilution of the plume."
They're saying, "radioactive particles are predicted to have dispersed at these locations." They're NOT saying "dangerous concentrations of it are present at these locations." They're saying nothing at all about concentration. This NOAA study is.
doctored evidence
no way they'd be allowed to publish anything that would endanger the profits of the fisheries
That's not how this works. When someone presents evidence to support their argument, you can't just dismiss it. They have won the argument and the discussion is over until you go and collect evidence of your own that either confirms of denies their findings.
Once you are presented with evidence, the burden of proof is on you if you want to disagree with it. You can't just wave your hands, "I don't believe in the data they've presented" until and unless you can show data of your own that disagrees with theirs. Anything else is conspiracy theory paranoia bullshit.