The Stradavari family had extraordinary skill, surpassing anybody else at the time.
This is not necessarily true. I am an expert in Wikipedia, and I can tell you that over history several other families of luthiers, including the Guarneri and Amati families, were considered to be the finest. However, at this particular period in history, the Stradivari family is seen as superior.
Thanks Phil. It would be interesting to see an analysis of the relative speed, it looks fairly difficult to do because it looks like the rock is coming in at an angle (although it's hard to tell without much of a frame of reference).
You're missing the point. The skydiver is not at rest either. It is not traveling at the absolute speed of 300km/h, it is traveling 300 km/h faster than the diver. Go ahead and count the number of seconds between when he pops his chute, and when the rock flies by, and tell me if that is enough time for the rock to accelerate to a speed of 300km/h relative to the diver while still being above him.
What you're suggesting is that the rock would have had to have been launched directly upward at a relatively high velocity, in order for it to have time to come to a stop, then start accelerating downward such that, when it passed the slower diver, it was moving substantially faster than he was. There is not enough time for that to happen.
It's cool that you're a skydiver, I admire that, but these people have been looking at this for 2 years. The guy in question owns his own wing suit and other gear. The guy in question does not think it came from him. I hope you can respect his experience and acknowledge that your own experience does not necessarily outweigh his. Your'e not the only person with skydiving experience in this situation.
I acknowledge that, yeah, it's possible for a rock to be launched out of a chute if it was packed with the chute. But that's not the situation that I see in the video.
While not the most newsworthy, the simplest explanation is the guy packed a rock in his parachute and god knows how he didn't notice when he packed but it wouldn't be the first rock to take make a skydive.
That's a long post, but it fails to address how the rock got to the speed of several hundred km per hour by the time it flew past him.
Another possible explanation is that the object fell from either the plane or another skydiver (as he was first out of the plane).
Like he explains, and the video clearly shows, when the rock flew past him both the plane and all of the other divers were below him. At the start of the video you can see the plane basically dive past all of the divers and descend below them. He points out where the other divers are, other than one person who enters his airspace about 4 seconds after the rock flies past. It wasn't on the plane, and it wasn't from another diver. They have had 2 years to think about those possibilities. I understand that being an amateur internet detective is fun, but at least watch the evidence.
So you think those racists were justified in their actions and were not immorally oppressing black folks?
No. I didn't say anything of the sort. I just guessed what the hypothetical outcome would be to the hypothetical situation you brought up. My guess was based on what actually happened to the racist parts of the US. They are in fact on the bottom of the list for poverty, education, and health, and their region is not known as an area where you go if you want to hire intelligent, highly skilled workers. Those people have left the area and gone to the areas where companies looking for those workers are based.
It's a dangerous road to go down and I know you'd agree if it was some powerful homophobic group putting pressure on a company for having a homosexual employee.
Do you notice how the situation we're actually dealing with is the exact opposite of the situation you're suggesting? What do you seriously think would happen if a homophobic group but pressure on a company to fire a homosexual employee? Here in 2014, in the age of instant communication, what do you think would actually happen? You've seen the stories about waiters or waitresses being stiffed on tips by people expression their disapproval of various lifestyle choices, and how the internet responds to that, correct?
This is the situation: something that should be obviously and objectively wrong (suppression of rights of tens of millions of people) is being condemned by a vocal group, and you are equating that to something that is not wrong being condemned by a vocal group. No one cares when loud idiots protest things that don't need to be protested. See the Westboro Baptist Church for proof. They had a picket yesterday, and another one today. You heard about those, right?
How about if a local business employee thought that blacks should be able to drink at the same water fountain but the local community didn't like that idea so got the person fired?
My guess would be that the ex employee would move somewhere else and the community in question would end up at the bottom of the list for things like poverty, education, and health.
Sure. But you lose your right to claim to be pro free speech after advocating a boycott as an attempt to silence someone exercising their free speech.
Isn't a boycott free speech?
I didn't hear anyone attempting to silence Eich. They were disagreeing with what he did and saying they didn't want to work for him, not outright telling him that he should stop expressing his opinion. He is absolutely free to express his opinion, and likewise people are free to react to his opinion.
Just to be clear, if Sergey Brin and Larry Page donated a few billion dollars each to North Korea or Bashar Al-Assad, you would oppose any sort of backlash against them for doing so, correct?
Supplying the about 2600 permanent inhabitants with really fast broadband (100% fiber optics now) is just a side effect.
That's not how the telco official described it. He seemed to say that they were treating Svalbard as a small version of mainland Norway, where they could try new things and get quick feedback to make sure they're doing it right. He claimed that Svalbard was 10 years ahead of mainland Norway. He also suggested that they were seeing substantially lower maintenance costs with fiber, and were looking into removing all of the phone lines and coax and just using fiber. He seemed to imply that all of this was in preparation for rollout across mainland Norway.
I'm sure the military benefits from the improved connectivity, but there are several benefits of treating the archipelago as a microcosm of the mainland. It sounds like he's trying to line up his company to implement this across Norway as efficiently as possible, military or not.
I'm not talking about carrying weight, I'm talking about what a person actually believes. Obama could have said and done the things he did even while believing the opposite, because he thought that's what people wanted to see and hear. In fact, doing so would fit perfectly into what I know about Obama's personality. Someone doesn't donate their own money to a political campaign because he thinks it's what people want to see, they do it because they believe in that campaign.
Also, as history has demonstrated, anti-homosexual laws can't pass in California
Considering that Prop 8 passed, I don't agree with that claim. Prop 8 eliminated the rights of homosexual couples to marry. That sounds rather anti-homosexual to me.
The reason you don't understand this is because you been trained to conflate opposition to gay marriage with hate for homosexuality.
Please enlighten me on the reasons why a person who has no opinion of homosexuality would oppose rights for homosexuals, marriage in particular.
Prop 8. was about recognition of marriage by the state of California, it was not about whether or not same-sex marriage is legal or illegal.
If gay marriages are not recognized in California, then what's to stop them from passing a law banning homosexual activity? Is one of those things ok, and one of them not? Isn't it the same thinking?
There's no point in analyzing what politicians claim to believe or support. They say what they think people want to hear. Obama did not go out and donate to campaigns seeking to restrict gay rights. He didn't help the matter much with his public stance, but there's a huge difference between a politician saying something, and someone donating. Only in the second case can you can be sure of the person's opinion.
I'm sorry, who is asking for special rights and privileges that only they should have? And what are they asking for that will only apply to them and no one else? It sounds like you're describing religious people wanting special treatment because they are religious.
So you read from my statement that I don't think the federal government has any role in compelling an employer to provide much of anything to their employees other than wages & benefits that have been negotiated between the employer and employee? Wow, I didn't think I was being that transparent.
No, I read that you have major problems when the federal government "compels" a "private individual" to "violate their religious beliefs." That's not what the case is about, the case is about whether the government can require a corporation to provide insurance that covers contraception. See how I stated that without saying anything about violating religious beliefs, and how I accurately described it as a corporation and not a private individual? It's not like the government is forcing everyone to take contraception, is it? Not that having everyone on contraception would be a terrible thing.
You are attempting to split hairs. The penalty/tax is there to compel more and more businesses to provide coverage (and said medication), and over time will likely go up to compel more employers to pick the cheaper of the two options.
That is speculation. It's no more likely to go up then it is likely to go down.
Today, one also highlighted that if an employer can be compelled today to provide certain (what the employer deems to be) abortion inducing drugs, what stops the government from also compelling outright abortion coverage?
The fact that the FDA regulates the devices in question, and that they are not covered by abortion laws and regulations, indicates that those medications and devices are not considered to constitute abortion. It doesn't really matter what the employer thinks they do.
Again you try to split hairs... lemme guess, you are also one of the 'corporations are not people' type?
When a corporation can be murdered, or jailed for murder, then I'll agree that a corporation is a person.
The company on it's own is little more than an empty legal entity or person... only through it's owners giving it direction does it have any meaning or substantive form be it selling potatoes or hobby supplies. When mandates come in against this legal person, it is the natural persons who are ultimately responsible for ensuring that things happen on behalf of the legal person.
I know that, I am simply aware of the rhetoric. This is an issue of companies supplying insurance to their employees. But the way people describe it, the evil federal government is compelling upon pain of very nasty things that private individuals must violate all of their most closely held and sacred religious beliefs. The discussion could do without the rhetoric. The question is whether an employer has to provide insurance that covers medication that, for whatever reason, the employer does not want to pay for. Religion has zero basis on the actual issue. It doesn't matter why they don't want to pay for it. Saying it's a religious belief does not automatically elevate it up to some mythical righteous level.
So you are ok with what amounts to religious discrimination against employers... quite clearly... but what about discrimination against employees?
Religion has a special place in my heart. In general, my opinion of an individual is inversely proportional to how religious they are (this doesn't apply to every religion, only the ones who have earned it). I wasn't born this way though, this feature of me has been very carefully molded and crafted by many groups and politicians over the last 3 or 4 decades. I see what happens in the name of religion, and I strongly oppose it. Religion, like sex, should happen behind closed doors and out of the sight and reach of the government. The inverse is true as well. Government should happen out of the sight and reach of religion.
works hard to live a 'live and let live' sort of life
I absolutely believe in the golden rule. Why do you think I have such a negative opinion about religion?
Are you asking me about tax law? I'm not the person to ask. I don't think "defacto relationship" is even a legal thing. Maybe you're thinking about a common law marriage.
Slashdot Mirror
The Stradavari family had extraordinary skill, surpassing anybody else at the time.
This is not necessarily true. I am an expert in Wikipedia, and I can tell you that over history several other families of luthiers, including the Guarneri and Amati families, were considered to be the finest. However, at this particular period in history, the Stradivari family is seen as superior.
A violin made in the 1700s is still worth a lot of money, it just doesn't sound any better.
Thanks Phil. It would be interesting to see an analysis of the relative speed, it looks fairly difficult to do because it looks like the rock is coming in at an angle (although it's hard to tell without much of a frame of reference).
Oops, you're not the GP. I didn't check the name, I don't know if you're a skydiver or not.
You're missing the point. The skydiver is not at rest either. It is not traveling at the absolute speed of 300km/h, it is traveling 300 km/h faster than the diver. Go ahead and count the number of seconds between when he pops his chute, and when the rock flies by, and tell me if that is enough time for the rock to accelerate to a speed of 300km/h relative to the diver while still being above him.
What you're suggesting is that the rock would have had to have been launched directly upward at a relatively high velocity, in order for it to have time to come to a stop, then start accelerating downward such that, when it passed the slower diver, it was moving substantially faster than he was. There is not enough time for that to happen.
It's cool that you're a skydiver, I admire that, but these people have been looking at this for 2 years. The guy in question owns his own wing suit and other gear. The guy in question does not think it came from him. I hope you can respect his experience and acknowledge that your own experience does not necessarily outweigh his. Your'e not the only person with skydiving experience in this situation.
I acknowledge that, yeah, it's possible for a rock to be launched out of a chute if it was packed with the chute. But that's not the situation that I see in the video.
While not the most newsworthy, the simplest explanation is the guy packed a rock in his parachute and god knows how he didn't notice when he packed but it wouldn't be the first rock to take make a skydive.
That's a long post, but it fails to address how the rock got to the speed of several hundred km per hour by the time it flew past him.
Probably its a piece of the aircraft he just jumped out of that fell off
The aircraft that was obviously below him when the rock flew by?
Another possible explanation is that the object fell from either the plane or another skydiver (as he was first out of the plane).
Like he explains, and the video clearly shows, when the rock flew past him both the plane and all of the other divers were below him. At the start of the video you can see the plane basically dive past all of the divers and descend below them. He points out where the other divers are, other than one person who enters his airspace about 4 seconds after the rock flies past. It wasn't on the plane, and it wasn't from another diver. They have had 2 years to think about those possibilities. I understand that being an amateur internet detective is fun, but at least watch the evidence.
So you think those racists were justified in their actions and were not immorally oppressing black folks?
No. I didn't say anything of the sort. I just guessed what the hypothetical outcome would be to the hypothetical situation you brought up. My guess was based on what actually happened to the racist parts of the US. They are in fact on the bottom of the list for poverty, education, and health, and their region is not known as an area where you go if you want to hire intelligent, highly skilled workers. Those people have left the area and gone to the areas where companies looking for those workers are based.
It's a dangerous road to go down and I know you'd agree if it was some powerful homophobic group putting pressure on a company for having a homosexual employee.
Do you notice how the situation we're actually dealing with is the exact opposite of the situation you're suggesting? What do you seriously think would happen if a homophobic group but pressure on a company to fire a homosexual employee? Here in 2014, in the age of instant communication, what do you think would actually happen? You've seen the stories about waiters or waitresses being stiffed on tips by people expression their disapproval of various lifestyle choices, and how the internet responds to that, correct?
This is the situation: something that should be obviously and objectively wrong (suppression of rights of tens of millions of people) is being condemned by a vocal group, and you are equating that to something that is not wrong being condemned by a vocal group. No one cares when loud idiots protest things that don't need to be protested. See the Westboro Baptist Church for proof. They had a picket yesterday, and another one today. You heard about those, right?
Boycotting them is fine. Using public media outlets demanding the business owner be fired as a punitive measure is not.
What's the difference? Boycotts are usually publicized.
How about if a local business employee thought that blacks should be able to drink at the same water fountain but the local community didn't like that idea so got the person fired?
My guess would be that the ex employee would move somewhere else and the community in question would end up at the bottom of the list for things like poverty, education, and health.
Sure. But you lose your right to claim to be pro free speech after advocating a boycott as an attempt to silence someone exercising their free speech.
Isn't a boycott free speech?
I didn't hear anyone attempting to silence Eich. They were disagreeing with what he did and saying they didn't want to work for him, not outright telling him that he should stop expressing his opinion. He is absolutely free to express his opinion, and likewise people are free to react to his opinion.
Just to be clear, if Sergey Brin and Larry Page donated a few billion dollars each to North Korea or Bashar Al-Assad, you would oppose any sort of backlash against them for doing so, correct?
An anonymous reader writes
We know it's you, Wil.
Supplying the about 2600 permanent inhabitants with really fast broadband (100% fiber optics now) is just a side effect.
That's not how the telco official described it. He seemed to say that they were treating Svalbard as a small version of mainland Norway, where they could try new things and get quick feedback to make sure they're doing it right. He claimed that Svalbard was 10 years ahead of mainland Norway. He also suggested that they were seeing substantially lower maintenance costs with fiber, and were looking into removing all of the phone lines and coax and just using fiber. He seemed to imply that all of this was in preparation for rollout across mainland Norway.
I'm sure the military benefits from the improved connectivity, but there are several benefits of treating the archipelago as a microcosm of the mainland. It sounds like he's trying to line up his company to implement this across Norway as efficiently as possible, military or not.
I'm not talking about carrying weight, I'm talking about what a person actually believes. Obama could have said and done the things he did even while believing the opposite, because he thought that's what people wanted to see and hear. In fact, doing so would fit perfectly into what I know about Obama's personality. Someone doesn't donate their own money to a political campaign because he thinks it's what people want to see, they do it because they believe in that campaign.
Also, as history has demonstrated, anti-homosexual laws can't pass in California
Considering that Prop 8 passed, I don't agree with that claim. Prop 8 eliminated the rights of homosexual couples to marry. That sounds rather anti-homosexual to me.
The reason you don't understand this is because you been trained to conflate opposition to gay marriage with hate for homosexuality.
Please enlighten me on the reasons why a person who has no opinion of homosexuality would oppose rights for homosexuals, marriage in particular.
Using Javascript does not enrich Brendan Eich in any way, and boycotting it would have zero effect on him. It would accomplish nothing.
Prop 8. was about recognition of marriage by the state of California, it was not about whether or not same-sex marriage is legal or illegal.
If gay marriages are not recognized in California, then what's to stop them from passing a law banning homosexual activity? Is one of those things ok, and one of them not? Isn't it the same thinking?
There's no point in analyzing what politicians claim to believe or support. They say what they think people want to hear. Obama did not go out and donate to campaigns seeking to restrict gay rights. He didn't help the matter much with his public stance, but there's a huge difference between a politician saying something, and someone donating. Only in the second case can you can be sure of the person's opinion.
homophobia
noun
noun: homophobia
1.
an extreme and irrational aversion to homosexuality and homosexual people.
than the more common “someone who dislikes gay people”
Describe how disliking an entire group of people that you don't know is rational.
And what rights are homosexuals asking for that will only apply to them? The way I hear it, they want the same rights that other people have now.
I'm sorry, who is asking for special rights and privileges that only they should have? And what are they asking for that will only apply to them and no one else? It sounds like you're describing religious people wanting special treatment because they are religious.
So you read from my statement that I don't think the federal government has any role in compelling an employer to provide much of anything to their employees other than wages & benefits that have been negotiated between the employer and employee? Wow, I didn't think I was being that transparent.
No, I read that you have major problems when the federal government "compels" a "private individual" to "violate their religious beliefs." That's not what the case is about, the case is about whether the government can require a corporation to provide insurance that covers contraception. See how I stated that without saying anything about violating religious beliefs, and how I accurately described it as a corporation and not a private individual? It's not like the government is forcing everyone to take contraception, is it? Not that having everyone on contraception would be a terrible thing.
You are attempting to split hairs. The penalty/tax is there to compel more and more businesses to provide coverage (and said medication), and over time will likely go up to compel more employers to pick the cheaper of the two options.
That is speculation. It's no more likely to go up then it is likely to go down.
Today, one also highlighted that if an employer can be compelled today to provide certain (what the employer deems to be) abortion inducing drugs, what stops the government from also compelling outright abortion coverage?
The fact that the FDA regulates the devices in question, and that they are not covered by abortion laws and regulations, indicates that those medications and devices are not considered to constitute abortion. It doesn't really matter what the employer thinks they do.
Again you try to split hairs... lemme guess, you are also one of the 'corporations are not people' type?
When a corporation can be murdered, or jailed for murder, then I'll agree that a corporation is a person.
The company on it's own is little more than an empty legal entity or person... only through it's owners giving it direction does it have any meaning or substantive form be it selling potatoes or hobby supplies. When mandates come in against this legal person, it is the natural persons who are ultimately responsible for ensuring that things happen on behalf of the legal person.
I know that, I am simply aware of the rhetoric. This is an issue of companies supplying insurance to their employees. But the way people describe it, the evil federal government is compelling upon pain of very nasty things that private individuals must violate all of their most closely held and sacred religious beliefs. The discussion could do without the rhetoric. The question is whether an employer has to provide insurance that covers medication that, for whatever reason, the employer does not want to pay for. Religion has zero basis on the actual issue. It doesn't matter why they don't want to pay for it. Saying it's a religious belief does not automatically elevate it up to some mythical righteous level.
So you are ok with what amounts to religious discrimination against employers... quite clearly... but what about discrimination against employees?
Religion has a special place in my heart. In general, my opinion of an individual is inversely proportional to how religious they are (this doesn't apply to every religion, only the ones who have earned it). I wasn't born this way though, this feature of me has been very carefully molded and crafted by many groups and politicians over the last 3 or 4 decades. I see what happens in the name of religion, and I strongly oppose it. Religion, like sex, should happen behind closed doors and out of the sight and reach of the government. The inverse is true as well. Government should happen out of the sight and reach of religion.
works hard to live a 'live and let live' sort of life
I absolutely believe in the golden rule. Why do you think I have such a negative opinion about religion?
Are you asking me about tax law? I'm not the person to ask. I don't think "defacto relationship" is even a legal thing. Maybe you're thinking about a common law marriage.