I like to think of the slashdot crowd as relatively well educated. When they have so much dissent over what theories and facts are you know the 'common man' is going to have no clue.
Fact: In a scientific sense, facts are just repeatably observable phenomena.
Gravity is a fact - things fall when dropped. Evolution is a fact - hereditary traits change from generation to generation
Scientific theory: An attempt to explain a set of observed phenomena by making testable predictions. Theories are always open for debate and improvement if their predictions turn out to be falsified. Scientific 'laws' are just another name for theories. There is no difference between the two.
Newtons laws (theories) of motion - predict the motion of objects Newtons law of universal gravitation - predict the forces exerted between objects by gravity - proven insufficient by GR General theory of relativity - one of the current leading theories to explain gravitation but as with all theories is very much under assessment The modern theory of biological evolution - this is a combination on several validated theories concerning how populations change over time. It includes items such as natural selection, mutation and sexual selection.
There have been thousands, possibly millions of documented miracles. If a miracle were broadcast from Time Square on New Year's Eve with irrefutable scientific proof that it could not possibly have occurred without a supernatural explanation, people would still refuse to believe in it. Now, you were saying something about "blind faith?"
There is no such thing as "irrefutable proof" in science, hence no such thing as 'blind faith'. Science is always about trying to break the current understanding of things. If there was a 'miracle' that occured in such a way that the observations made were irrefutable then science would most definately sit up and take notice. Scientists would attempt to understand the data, reproduce it, make predictions based on it because that is what science is all about. There is nothing 'blind' about it.
The cable is not in contact with any moving surface. It's anchored to the Earth in some way. It then extends out past geosynchronous orbit so that the center of mass is located at geosync distance. Climbers are expected to take a couple of weeks to make the full climb to the end of the tether at which point anything they release will actually be moving fast enough to escape Earths gravity.
But they are abundantly demonstrated. You just have to look at geologic fossil records from around the world to see evolution and speciation in action. Those geologic records are recorded history - sure, they weren't written by humans but I think I'd have to give mother nature the advantage over humans when it comes to recording things without bias.
There seems to be confusion here over what a 'theory' is. Just because it's a theory doesn't mean that it's correct. It means that it is the best answer that we have been able to come up with to explain something. The biggest key to any theory is that it must be dis-provable. This is where ID fails to fall into the realm of science whereas evolution does. You want to disprove evolution? Easy - go find the fossillized remains of a human in the Jurrasic. You want to disprove ID? Impossible, unless you can get the almighty to appear before me and tell me personally that he didn't do it or maybe some alien species that has been recording our past.
What I want to know is how a 2x4 is going to get out to the center of the pacific where they would build an elevator. Any elevater would be built close to the equator, most likely at sea. The bottom of the elevator would be tethered to a mobile platform that can be moved whenever there are major storms approaching. The information about this and how it would be accomplished can be found here
There are several reasons why this planet can't be detected gravitationally. 1) Although it is roughly the same distance from the Sun as Pluto the inclination is about 10 degrees off so they are actually not close at all. 2) Even if they were close, becuase the orbits are so slow at that distance (Pluto takes a few hundred years to orbit the sun) it would take a long time to notice pertubances in the orbit of Pluto. 3) Even though this planet is twice the size of Pluto, it is still really really small. Pluto is smaller then our moon so at the distances we are talking here the interactions are going to be so small as to be completely unnoticable with our current technology.
Although the new legislation will prevent circumventing digital locks, it still allows copying for personal use. Personally, I don't see this as a big deal. The digital lock thing I can completely understand - as long as they don't take away my rights to use what's mine everything seems to be good.
I'm not too sure why you mention the ISS - It orbits well within the Van Allen belts and so is protected from the majority of the suns radiation. On the moon, the radiation problem would be quite severe. In the short time that the Apollo astronauts spent outside of the Van Allen belt the absorbed significant quantities of radiation.
While I agree with you that snail spam is much more of a drain on phyiscal resourses, dealing with electronic spam consumes far far more time. In a given day, I probably recieve 50-80% spam. Not a big deal if you only get a couple emails a day, but I regularly recieve hundreds of emails on a daily basis. Thanks to spamassassin the actual time loss is reduced greatly, but even so, I'm losing valuble time each and every day. With snail mail, I pick it up every few days and sort out the crap on the walk back to my house. Effectively 0 time loss.
There's also the Canadian Arrow that starts test flights next month. As a Canadian myself, I'm very happy that both Canadian teams are poised to actually make attempts by the end of the year. O Canada!
DVD boxed sets of the series are already available. Currently seasons 1-4 are out and they are putting out a new one every ~8 months. As DVD collections go, they aren't bad, with several deleted scenes and commentary by Chris Carter. I'd give them a 8/10.
In the case of a known platform, with a known problem times can definately be estimated. My belief (based somewhat in reality) is that more often then not the times are blown due to one of two reasons.
Research that the developers must perform in order to get up to speed with the chosen solution, and
Improper understanding of what is required and how long it will take to implement.
These are related in that both could be solved by the developer/engineer knowing exactly what is required, having a strong voice in the actual budget, and actually being able to break the problem down into easily estimated chunks. More oftent then not it's client service and marketing people making the budget estimate who don't have any clue other then, "Well, this other project cost $x but this one doesn't seem as complex so it will probably cost $y". I think the industry has a huge shortage of knowledgable tech-savvy client service people who are not afraid to talk with the developers before giving an estimate. Oh well, that's my rant for the day.
If you do a quick google check for DVD jukebox you should find a whole raft of solutions for multi-terabyte backup solutions. Your probably looking in the $20000 range for 8TB and that's just for the jukebox(es). The media price would be on top of that. All in all though, I think a jukebox is the way for you to go... backing up that amount of data to tape would take absolutely forever and a hard disk solution is rather space consumptive.
I'm a little shocked that so many people found the ending in this surprising. With about 45 minutes to go both me, my date and the friend I went with knew without a doubt who the killer was. The give away was totally and completely obvious in all of our opinions. All one needs is an understanding of how things work in these movies and you'll pick up on it too. I wish I could explain what it was but I don't want to spoil it for any of you that haven't seen it yet. If you want to know feel free to e-mail me.
Slashdot Mirror
I like to think of the slashdot crowd as relatively well educated. When they have so much dissent over what theories and facts are you know the 'common man' is going to have no clue.
Fact: In a scientific sense, facts are just repeatably observable phenomena.
Gravity is a fact - things fall when dropped.
Evolution is a fact - hereditary traits change from generation to generation
Scientific theory: An attempt to explain a set of observed phenomena by making testable predictions. Theories are always open for debate and improvement if their predictions turn out to be falsified. Scientific 'laws' are just another name for theories. There is no difference between the two.
Newtons laws (theories) of motion - predict the motion of objects
Newtons law of universal gravitation - predict the forces exerted between objects by gravity - proven insufficient by GR
General theory of relativity - one of the current leading theories to explain gravitation but as with all theories is very much under assessment
The modern theory of biological evolution - this is a combination on several validated theories concerning how populations change over time. It includes items such as natural selection, mutation and sexual selection.
There have been thousands, possibly millions of documented miracles. If a miracle were broadcast from Time Square on New Year's Eve with irrefutable scientific proof that it could not possibly have occurred without a supernatural explanation, people would still refuse to believe in it. Now, you were saying something about "blind faith?"
There is no such thing as "irrefutable proof" in science, hence no such thing as 'blind faith'. Science is always about trying to break the current understanding of things. If there was a 'miracle' that occured in such a way that the observations made were irrefutable then science would most definately sit up and take notice. Scientists would attempt to understand the data, reproduce it, make predictions based on it because that is what science is all about. There is nothing 'blind' about it.
The cable is not in contact with any moving surface. It's anchored to the Earth in some way. It then extends out past geosynchronous orbit so that the center of mass is located at geosync distance. Climbers are expected to take a couple of weeks to make the full climb to the end of the tether at which point anything they release will actually be moving fast enough to escape Earths gravity.
There is a ton of good info about space elevators out there - check out http://www.elevator2010.org/site/primer.html for a decent primer.
But they are abundantly demonstrated. You just have to look at geologic fossil records from around the world to see evolution and speciation in action. Those geologic records are recorded history - sure, they weren't written by humans but I think I'd have to give mother nature the advantage over humans when it comes to recording things without bias.
There seems to be confusion here over what a 'theory' is. Just because it's a theory doesn't mean that it's correct. It means that it is the best answer that we have been able to come up with to explain something. The biggest key to any theory is that it must be dis-provable. This is where ID fails to fall into the realm of science whereas evolution does. You want to disprove evolution? Easy - go find the fossillized remains of a human in the Jurrasic. You want to disprove ID? Impossible, unless you can get the almighty to appear before me and tell me personally that he didn't do it or maybe some alien species that has been recording our past.
What I want to know is how a 2x4 is going to get out to the center of the pacific where they would build an elevator. Any elevater would be built close to the equator, most likely at sea. The bottom of the elevator would be tethered to a mobile platform that can be moved whenever there are major storms approaching. The information about this and how it would be accomplished can be found here
With the Armed and Dangerous expansion there are a couple of upgrades that let you do limited run-time branching.
My vote goes with Robo-Rally too. A great game. Total mayhem.
There are several reasons why this planet can't be detected gravitationally.
1) Although it is roughly the same distance from the Sun as Pluto the inclination is about 10 degrees off so they are actually not close at all.
2) Even if they were close, becuase the orbits are so slow at that distance (Pluto takes a few hundred years to orbit the sun) it would take a long time to notice pertubances in the orbit of Pluto.
3) Even though this planet is twice the size of Pluto, it is still really really small. Pluto is smaller then our moon so at the distances we are talking here the interactions are going to be so small as to be completely unnoticable with our current technology.
Although the new legislation will prevent circumventing digital locks, it still allows copying for personal use. Personally, I don't see this as a big deal. The digital lock thing I can completely understand - as long as they don't take away my rights to use what's mine everything seems to be good.
I'm not too sure why you mention the ISS - It orbits well within the Van Allen belts and so is protected from the majority of the suns radiation. On the moon, the radiation problem would be quite severe. In the short time that the Apollo astronauts spent outside of the Van Allen belt the absorbed significant quantities of radiation.
While I agree with you that snail spam is much more of a drain on phyiscal resourses, dealing with electronic spam consumes far far more time. In a given day, I probably recieve 50-80% spam. Not a big deal if you only get a couple emails a day, but I regularly recieve hundreds of emails on a daily basis. Thanks to spamassassin the actual time loss is reduced greatly, but even so, I'm losing valuble time each and every day. With snail mail, I pick it up every few days and sort out the crap on the walk back to my house. Effectively 0 time loss.
There's also the Canadian Arrow that starts test flights next month. As a Canadian myself, I'm very happy that both Canadian teams are poised to actually make attempts by the end of the year. O Canada!
DVD boxed sets of the series are already available. Currently seasons 1-4 are out and they are putting out a new one every ~8 months. As DVD collections go, they aren't bad, with several deleted scenes and commentary by Chris Carter. I'd give them a 8/10.
- Research that the developers must perform in order to get up to speed with the chosen solution, and
- Improper understanding of what is required and how long it will take to implement.
These are related in that both could be solved by the developer/engineer knowing exactly what is required, having a strong voice in the actual budget, and actually being able to break the problem down into easily estimated chunks. More oftent then not it's client service and marketing people making the budget estimate who don't have any clue other then, "Well, this other project cost $x but this one doesn't seem as complex so it will probably cost $y". I think the industry has a huge shortage of knowledgable tech-savvy client service people who are not afraid to talk with the developers before giving an estimate.Oh well, that's my rant for the day.
If you do a quick google check for DVD jukebox you should find a whole raft of solutions for multi-terabyte backup solutions. Your probably looking in the $20000 range for 8TB and that's just for the jukebox(es). The media price would be on top of that. All in all though, I think a jukebox is the way for you to go... backing up that amount of data to tape would take absolutely forever and a hard disk solution is rather space consumptive.
I'm a little shocked that so many people found the ending in this surprising. With about 45 minutes to go both me, my date and the friend I went with knew without a doubt who the killer was. The give away was totally and completely obvious in all of our opinions. All one needs is an understanding of how things work in these movies and you'll pick up on it too. I wish I could explain what it was but I don't want to spoil it for any of you that haven't seen it yet. If you want to know feel free to e-mail me.
Cheers.