Is it possible that another force (I'm thinking magnetism) could kick-start or accelerate the process? It's late and I'm exhausted at the moment, but I can't shake the notion that there could be enough spinning iron or some other material in orbit that could, in some configuration, speed things up.
I would have thought density would be significant, not just total mass, since you can take that mass and spread it out so thinly that it isn't going to do anything significant (form a star, a black hole or whatever).
IANAA/P, but I believe gravity tends to solve that problem when left to its own devices.
Who do you think should be making the choice to potentially wipe out humanity or just accept being wiped out ourselves? You have minutes to decide before you no longer have a choice to make. Leave it to a career military guy? Or the elected President?
If at all possible, that choice should be automatic, not a choice. Strangely enough, as others have pointed out here, this is the best method for ensuring that this scenario never unfolds.
Please don't construe this post as in any way implying that America should not have used nuclear weapons, but...
I think you're a bit off on some of the facts. My understanding is that the Japanese leadership didn't even know the first bomb was a nuclear bomb, they just thought we had developed a new firebombing technique.
When it comes down to it, it's a pretty murky subject to discuss and historians will be arguing about it forever. The evidence I have seen seems pretty clear that there wasn't really any serious debate within the administration on WHETHER to use the bomb? Why would there be? They were already routinely destroying cities with fire bombing and intentionally targeting civilians. They didn't fully grasp the long-term effects of radiation and fall-out, and so it as just another weapon that should be used as soon as it was ready. IIRC, Truman himself said he didn't give it much thought.
...Slashdot is really starting to be dominated by a bunch of angry old nerds.
Says the guy who called me a "fag" for posting a mildly sarcastic reply.
Thanks for proving exactly why some people, including you, actually print from browsers. That print dialog for me, until the very latest update, wouldn't let me print "selection", which usually meant wasting toner and pages printing more of the directions than I actually needed.
Most of the stuff I print from my browser is actually in print-friendly formatting, but a good majority of the time I only want to print selected text.
...You should not be printing web pages; the website should provide you with a document to print if information is actually needed in dead-tree form. The web is formatted for display not print. I know theres times when its needed, so save the html and open it into a program made for printing like Word.
Can you please provide me a PDF of your comment? I would like to print it and show it to my friends so that they know to stop printing information from webpages.
So, the University of Phoenix, a for profit university, is the model he's using to determine that in the future, professors and researchers will not be doing so for profit. Something seems really, really wrong here.
What does the status of the university itself have to do with the professors they employ?
... pretty much everything? Whether you're rating a teaching college or a research university, I would argue that the professors are the single most important variable to grade.
For teaching colleges, you either want professors who have made significant contributions to their field or professors who have demonstrated they have a great grasp of the subject and have a proven ability to impart that understanding on their students.
Research universities... surely I don't need to spell this one out? Prestigious universities wear their nobel laureate count very proudly, and for good reason. All other things being equal, you'd be a fool not to choose the research university with the best faculty.
The status of a university is largely determined by the professors they employ and the impact of the work they do. On top of that, more prestigious universities are far more attractive to the best researchers as well as the best teachers--and they're also far more likely to be able to secure the funding that cutting edge research requires. It's a positive feedback loop that continues to widen the gap between upper and lower tier universities.
I agree entirely with you on the value universities provide, and I think you left out a lot of very important additional benefits.
One small problem, though, is that the GP appears to be talking about colleges. To my knowledge, the term "college" refers specifically to 2- and 4-year degree granting institutions. Your post deals almost entirely with graduate level work which can only be performed at full universities.
Because going to college is now seen as a requirement for a decent job, the average college student is in college to graduate college, not because they want to go on to conduct research or stay in academia. For them, your wonderful experience means absolutely nothing.
...I wish there were another word than "gay" to describe this, but I can't think of one...in the sense that it describes people who seem to be in a drugged-like euphoria with absolutely no realism or grounding to their thinking, like they've taken some horrible mind-altering drug...
Oh wow! We have a Senate in our bicameral legislature? I didn't even know about that... you're so much smarter than me. Can you read Ayn Rand to me and help me go to sleep?
Snarky reply that completely glosses over my point begets snarky reply.
What President Obama failed to appreciate is all the numb nuts out there that are voting specifically for the candidate that's going to cause the most damage to the federal government.
What the president failed to appreciate is the Constitution.
Never mind that the original tea party had precisely zip to do with taxation, and everything to do with ditching the competitors product so that they wouldn't have any competition.
Both factions were prominent: those who opposed taxation without representation, and merchants who resented the crown's favoritism of the East India tea company.
... except they didn't actually WANT representation. Representation, because of the relatively low population, would've meant an extremely small minority party (or two) without the ability to get anything done in Parliament. They wanted a rallying cry (and revolution), not actual representation.
Probably one of the many reasons Puerto Rico doesn't want to become a state. They'd still have insignificant representation, no real power to affect political outcomes, and they'd have higher costs associated with it.
"Owns a controlling stake" is synonymous with "owns" in the context of publicly traded companies, just as "buying 51% or more of the voting stock of the company" is synonymous with "buying the company".
While true... IIRC, part of this "deal" was that the government would not hold voting stock. Or at least not all of it, or waived voting rights, or some such similar crap.
Overall I agree entirely with you. Two little nitpicks:
Or how about noticing that "left" and "right" are pretty much media inventions. To make politics easy to explain using sports metaphors. Yay for our team!
Eh, "left" and "right" are pretty useful terms for discussing political science. It's just that the media misuses them and the average American is so clueless they can't accurately state their own views on politics, much less understand the views of others.
Also note that in the US the election system (primarily, but not entirely, the means used to count the votes) is so structured that only two parties have a reasonable chance to win an election. There have been only a few times when an incumbent party became so weak that it essentially abdicated it's position to an alternate third party. Even Teddy Rooseveldt wasn't able to overcome this bias. I *think* that Instant Runoff would be quite superior, and I'm quite convinced that Condorcet voting would be superior. And, yes, it's true that it can be proven that no fair voting system can exist, but this doesn't mean that some aren't better than others. And the majority rule system is about the worst. (Not as bad as minority rule, of course.)
Are you talking about elections for the executive only? Are you talking about a party "winning" by gaining a majority in one or both houses? On this issue, I most favor either proportional representation or a two-vote system like Germany's.
Here's what I'd do if I were king for a day:
Establish two-vote system similar to Germany's, guaranteeing all parties with 5% or more of the vote proportional seats
Increase restrictions on lobbying... this is vague because I really don't have a good specific list in mind at the moment.
Eliminate campaign finance. Entirely.
Mandate all broadcast platforms (broadcast TV, radio, etc.) dedicate a certain % of time in each time block to political messages.
Divise a system to fairly apportion aforementioned broadcast time to candidates and parties.
Move the election day to a weekend or make it a mandatory federal holiday for all non-vital personnel
Follow Australia's example and make voting mandatory... like jury duty. How about a $75 fine for failure to vote, waivable if you can demonstrate hardship?
... and I don't want to hear any "OMG, WE CAN'T FORCE BROADCAST NETWORKS TO DO SOMETHING, YOU NAZI" from any political parties that advocate state-mandated censorship of nudity on broadcast television.
I agree with absolute everything you wrote except:
Which, of course, has nothing to do with climate change at all, and as far as anyone can tell he's actually done the work he was given the grant to do.
I couldn't find the name of the actual paper in this story so I haven't read it, but "interaction of land, atmosphere, and vegetation" sounds a heck of a lot like something closely related to climate change and climate modeling. Even if it has nothing to do with the carbon cycle, it's a potentially vital piece of information directly related to the effects of climate change.
DMCA and patents may provide Apple a legal method of blocking this, but trademarks will not.
You can already buy a "Case compatible with iPod Video" or any number of aftermarket accessories which prominently feature their compatibility with the iPod. As long as these products are marketed and labeled in such a way that it's quite obvious they're not Apple devices, they should be safe from a serious trademark dispute. If not, generic ink manufacturers would already be shutdown for listing "Compatible with... Canon MP750/780" on their labels.
That said, I doubt they could market this as an "Apple Peel" in the states... so if that's what you were referring to, I agree.
That's not entirely true, is it? I mean, this asteroid could have maneuvered itself/been maneuvered into orbit behind the Earth at a slightly higher speed, and it could be closing that gap at the rate of.... 20 million miles/88 years, which appears to work out to just over 25 miles per hour. In other words, it's going faster than the posted speed limit for our residential zone:(
Email is a distributed system that isn't controlled by any single company (or any combination of companies for that matter). As a consequence, email does not go down.
In short, the story that you are commenting in is the reason email is superior to facebook. You needn't look farther.
Except this is the same reason why, to hundreds of millions of people across the globe, a site like facebook is superior to email. It acts like a Global Address List which allows friends and family to easily find and contact each other without needing to know social security numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, or physical addresses. It also allows people to share their contact information with specific groups of people, so that friends or family can easily find one's phone number or email address.
I'm reversing the order of these quotes to address them in the order which I would like.
There are millions of engineers in this country that aren't going around blowing stuff up and killing people.
And there are actually quite a few honest politicians in the US... but greedy, power-hungry assholes are attracted to the field and tend to succeed at it. What's that have to do with anything? Nobody is saying "all engineers are terrorists", what they're saying is "many terrorists have engineering backgrounds". Don't you think it's possible that some of the factors that make someone likely to go into the suicide bombing business ALSO make one more likely to be an engineer in school?
And, more to the point, it's more likely that those terrorists got their engineering degrees as a result of their choice to be a terrorist, rather than the other way around.
Not. at. all. You think these guys joined Al Qaeda and were told, "Hey, we're going to send you to UCLA for your master's in EE, then when you graduate we're going to fly you to Yemen where you will learn how to build a bomb out of a schoolbus!" If some idealistic young kid wants to be a terrorist, he either runs away to Somalia or goes to flight school, he doesn't submit college applications hoping his engineering skills will pay off sometime in the far future.
Nobody who can add to the P != NP discussion intelligently is an ordinary netizens*.
Look, no one without an interest in math gave a hoot. In fact pretty much any advanced math problem is going to be self selected to be pretty much all people who can contribute.
Had it been about Vitamin D research, then having it open would have been a nightmare.
*And that is the stupidest word to come out of the internet, far far worse the blogosphere.
I didn't follow this as closely as I should have, but I do recall that the wiki for this proof was actually edited by many non-mathematicians. People corrected the English in the proof, fixed various grammatical mistakes, and clarified ideas to make them more precise or simple.
Speeding is travelling to quickly for the prevailing conditions. That speed may or may not be above the speed limit, whatever it is set to.
The speed limit is not "the safe speed". It is the legal limit of speed. Just because you are legally permitted to travel at up to 30mph on a street, doesn't mean it's safe to do so.
A minor nitpick, but.. "speeding" is exceeding the legal speed limit, which may or may not be the POSTED speed limit. Legal definitions do exist for this, and "speeding" usually means something. In some states, speeding is merely exceeding the posted speed limit. In many others, there are additional limitations on speed which define speeding differently.
In California, there are three ways you can be "speeding":
Violation of "basic speed law": going faster than the conditions safely allow
Violation of "prima facie" speed limits: going too fast around schools, rail road crossing, senior centers, and anything else specifically pre-defined by law
Exceeding the posted speed limit
Because "speeding" is legally defined, somebody (in CA) can not be "speeding" unless they are meeting the above criteria. In CA, you're legally speeding if you're going 65 mph on a highway at night in the rain and fog with 50 feet visibility unless you can demonstrate that this was safe.
Nevada also has the basic speed rule so "the safe speed" is also "the legal limit" as long as the safe speed is equal to or below the posted limit.
the researchers found that women who sit more than 6 hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours; for men, long-sitters were 17 percent more likely to die
You know... I'm pretty sure everyone is 100% likely to die...
Speak for yourself. My life insurance agent promised me that I will never see a penny of that money.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, fusion bombs would be far more noticeable.
Is it possible that another force (I'm thinking magnetism) could kick-start or accelerate the process? It's late and I'm exhausted at the moment, but I can't shake the notion that there could be enough spinning iron or some other material in orbit that could, in some configuration, speed things up.
I would have thought density would be significant, not just total mass, since you can take that mass and spread it out so thinly that it isn't going to do anything significant (form a star, a black hole or whatever).
IANAA/P, but I believe gravity tends to solve that problem when left to its own devices.
Who do you think should be making the choice to potentially wipe out humanity or just accept being wiped out ourselves? You have minutes to decide before you no longer have a choice to make. Leave it to a career military guy? Or the elected President?
If at all possible, that choice should be automatic, not a choice. Strangely enough, as others have pointed out here, this is the best method for ensuring that this scenario never unfolds.
Please don't construe this post as in any way implying that America should not have used nuclear weapons, but...
I think you're a bit off on some of the facts. My understanding is that the Japanese leadership didn't even know the first bomb was a nuclear bomb, they just thought we had developed a new firebombing technique.
When it comes down to it, it's a pretty murky subject to discuss and historians will be arguing about it forever. The evidence I have seen seems pretty clear that there wasn't really any serious debate within the administration on WHETHER to use the bomb? Why would there be? They were already routinely destroying cities with fire bombing and intentionally targeting civilians. They didn't fully grasp the long-term effects of radiation and fall-out, and so it as just another weapon that should be used as soon as it was ready. IIRC, Truman himself said he didn't give it much thought.
...Slashdot is really starting to be dominated by a bunch of angry old nerds.
Says the guy who called me a "fag" for posting a mildly sarcastic reply.
Thanks for proving exactly why some people, including you, actually print from browsers. That print dialog for me, until the very latest update, wouldn't let me print "selection", which usually meant wasting toner and pages printing more of the directions than I actually needed.
Most of the stuff I print from my browser is actually in print-friendly formatting, but a good majority of the time I only want to print selected text.
...You should not be printing web pages; the website should provide you with a document to print if information is actually needed in dead-tree form. The web is formatted for display not print. I know theres times when its needed, so save the html and open it into a program made for printing like Word.
Can you please provide me a PDF of your comment? I would like to print it and show it to my friends so that they know to stop printing information from webpages.
So, the University of Phoenix, a for profit university, is the model he's using to determine that in the future, professors and researchers will not be doing so for profit. Something seems really, really wrong here.
What does the status of the university itself have to do with the professors they employ?
... pretty much everything? Whether you're rating a teaching college or a research university, I would argue that the professors are the single most important variable to grade.
For teaching colleges, you either want professors who have made significant contributions to their field or professors who have demonstrated they have a great grasp of the subject and have a proven ability to impart that understanding on their students.
Research universities... surely I don't need to spell this one out? Prestigious universities wear their nobel laureate count very proudly, and for good reason. All other things being equal, you'd be a fool not to choose the research university with the best faculty.
The status of a university is largely determined by the professors they employ and the impact of the work they do. On top of that, more prestigious universities are far more attractive to the best researchers as well as the best teachers--and they're also far more likely to be able to secure the funding that cutting edge research requires. It's a positive feedback loop that continues to widen the gap between upper and lower tier universities.
I agree entirely with you on the value universities provide, and I think you left out a lot of very important additional benefits.
One small problem, though, is that the GP appears to be talking about colleges. To my knowledge, the term "college" refers specifically to 2- and 4-year degree granting institutions. Your post deals almost entirely with graduate level work which can only be performed at full universities.
Because going to college is now seen as a requirement for a decent job, the average college student is in college to graduate college, not because they want to go on to conduct research or stay in academia. For them, your wonderful experience means absolutely nothing.
...I wish there were another word than "gay" to describe this, but I can't think of one...in the sense that it describes people who seem to be in a drugged-like euphoria with absolutely no realism or grounding to their thinking, like they've taken some horrible mind-altering drug...
Around here we call them the Tea Party.
Sorry for the troll, but that had to be done.
Oh wow! We have a Senate in our bicameral legislature? I didn't even know about that... you're so much smarter than me. Can you read Ayn Rand to me and help me go to sleep?
Snarky reply that completely glosses over my point begets snarky reply.
What the president failed to appreciate is the Constitution.
Both factions were prominent: those who opposed taxation without representation, and merchants who resented the crown's favoritism of the East India tea company.
... except they didn't actually WANT representation. Representation, because of the relatively low population, would've meant an extremely small minority party (or two) without the ability to get anything done in Parliament. They wanted a rallying cry (and revolution), not actual representation.
Probably one of the many reasons Puerto Rico doesn't want to become a state. They'd still have insignificant representation, no real power to affect political outcomes, and they'd have higher costs associated with it.
"Owns a controlling stake" is synonymous with "owns" in the context of publicly traded companies, just as "buying 51% or more of the voting stock of the company" is synonymous with "buying the company".
While true... IIRC, part of this "deal" was that the government would not hold voting stock. Or at least not all of it, or waived voting rights, or some such similar crap.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Overall I agree entirely with you. Two little nitpicks:
Or how about noticing that "left" and "right" are pretty much media inventions. To make politics easy to explain using sports metaphors. Yay for our team!
Eh, "left" and "right" are pretty useful terms for discussing political science. It's just that the media misuses them and the average American is so clueless they can't accurately state their own views on politics, much less understand the views of others.
Also note that in the US the election system (primarily, but not entirely, the means used to count the votes) is so structured that only two parties have a reasonable chance to win an election. There have been only a few times when an incumbent party became so weak that it essentially abdicated it's position to an alternate third party. Even Teddy Rooseveldt wasn't able to overcome this bias. I *think* that Instant Runoff would be quite superior, and I'm quite convinced that Condorcet voting would be superior. And, yes, it's true that it can be proven that no fair voting system can exist, but this doesn't mean that some aren't better than others. And the majority rule system is about the worst. (Not as bad as minority rule, of course.)
Are you talking about elections for the executive only? Are you talking about a party "winning" by gaining a majority in one or both houses? On this issue, I most favor either proportional representation or a two-vote system like Germany's.
Here's what I'd do if I were king for a day:
I agree with absolute everything you wrote except:
Which, of course, has nothing to do with climate change at all, and as far as anyone can tell he's actually done the work he was given the grant to do.
I couldn't find the name of the actual paper in this story so I haven't read it, but "interaction of land, atmosphere, and vegetation" sounds a heck of a lot like something closely related to climate change and climate modeling. Even if it has nothing to do with the carbon cycle, it's a potentially vital piece of information directly related to the effects of climate change.
DMCA and patents may provide Apple a legal method of blocking this, but trademarks will not.
You can already buy a "Case compatible with iPod Video" or any number of aftermarket accessories which prominently feature their compatibility with the iPod. As long as these products are marketed and labeled in such a way that it's quite obvious they're not Apple devices, they should be safe from a serious trademark dispute. If not, generic ink manufacturers would already be shutdown for listing "Compatible with... Canon MP750/780" on their labels.
That said, I doubt they could market this as an "Apple Peel" in the states... so if that's what you were referring to, I agree.
That's not entirely true, is it? I mean, this asteroid could have maneuvered itself/been maneuvered into orbit behind the Earth at a slightly higher speed, and it could be closing that gap at the rate of.... 20 million miles/88 years, which appears to work out to just over 25 miles per hour. In other words, it's going faster than the posted speed limit for our residential zone :(
Email is a distributed system that isn't controlled by any single company (or any combination of companies for that matter). As a consequence, email does not go down.
In short, the story that you are commenting in is the reason email is superior to facebook. You needn't look farther.
Except this is the same reason why, to hundreds of millions of people across the globe, a site like facebook is superior to email. It acts like a Global Address List which allows friends and family to easily find and contact each other without needing to know social security numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, or physical addresses. It also allows people to share their contact information with specific groups of people, so that friends or family can easily find one's phone number or email address.
There wasn't really a boy who cried "Wolf" either. But it's a useful parable to describe a situation.
Never use the same lie more than two times?
... unless you want a position at Fox News.
I'm reversing the order of these quotes to address them in the order which I would like.
There are millions of engineers in this country that aren't going around blowing stuff up and killing people.
And there are actually quite a few honest politicians in the US... but greedy, power-hungry assholes are attracted to the field and tend to succeed at it. What's that have to do with anything? Nobody is saying "all engineers are terrorists", what they're saying is "many terrorists have engineering backgrounds". Don't you think it's possible that some of the factors that make someone likely to go into the suicide bombing business ALSO make one more likely to be an engineer in school?
And, more to the point, it's more likely that those terrorists got their engineering degrees as a result of their choice to be a terrorist, rather than the other way around.
Not. at. all. You think these guys joined Al Qaeda and were told, "Hey, we're going to send you to UCLA for your master's in EE, then when you graduate we're going to fly you to Yemen where you will learn how to build a bomb out of a schoolbus!" If some idealistic young kid wants to be a terrorist, he either runs away to Somalia or goes to flight school, he doesn't submit college applications hoping his engineering skills will pay off sometime in the far future.
Nobody who can add to the P != NP discussion intelligently is an ordinary netizens*.
Look, no one without an interest in math gave a hoot. In fact pretty much any advanced math problem is going to be self selected to be pretty much all people who can contribute.
Had it been about Vitamin D research, then having it open would have been a nightmare.
*And that is the stupidest word to come out of the internet, far far worse the blogosphere.
I didn't follow this as closely as I should have, but I do recall that the wiki for this proof was actually edited by many non-mathematicians. People corrected the English in the proof, fixed various grammatical mistakes, and clarified ideas to make them more precise or simple.
Maybe North Korea will make a game that lets you bomb NewsCorp and Fox.
Do you play the game or not? Some people would be *so* conflicted ...
I'd pirate it or disable the ads to ensure they made no direct revenue off of it... then I'd get totally addicted to it.
Speeding is travelling to quickly for the prevailing conditions. That speed may or may not be above the speed limit, whatever it is set to.
The speed limit is not "the safe speed". It is the legal limit of speed. Just because you are legally permitted to travel at up to 30mph on a street, doesn't mean it's safe to do so.
A minor nitpick, but.. "speeding" is exceeding the legal speed limit, which may or may not be the POSTED speed limit. Legal definitions do exist for this, and "speeding" usually means something. In some states, speeding is merely exceeding the posted speed limit. In many others, there are additional limitations on speed which define speeding differently.
In California, there are three ways you can be "speeding":
Because "speeding" is legally defined, somebody (in CA) can not be "speeding" unless they are meeting the above criteria. In CA, you're legally speeding if you're going 65 mph on a highway at night in the rain and fog with 50 feet visibility unless you can demonstrate that this was safe.
Nevada also has the basic speed rule so "the safe speed" is also "the legal limit" as long as the safe speed is equal to or below the posted limit.
Hosts files don't support wildcards...
A better solution is to just get a good hosts file :)
I highly recommend MVPS HOSTS. It blocks pretty much all of the nasties and it's updated regularly.
the researchers found that women who sit more than 6 hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours; for men, long-sitters were 17 percent more likely to die
You know... I'm pretty sure everyone is 100% likely to die...
Speak for yourself. My life insurance agent promised me that I will never see a penny of that money.