The terms are a bit confusing, but the term "visible" light has nothing to do with magnitude, it only refers to light with a particular wavelength, roughly 380 to 750 nm, which our retinas happen to be sensitive to. The term visible is not meant to differentiate visible light from invisible light, but rather to differentiate these waves from radio waves, infrared, ultraviolet, X rays, microwaves, and gamma rays. So yes, even if the light cannot be seen, if it is in that particular spectrum, it is visible light.
"61-year-old Li Shuqi is only raising one of the ten plagues of Egypt but from the fuss his neighbors are raising you'd think he was working on all ten."
I can't really say that I blame them -- if they are farmers those locusts could very easily destroy their entire livelihood, and I doubt that there would be much in the way of legal recourse for these guys. That would be like if you owned a datacenter and the upstairs neighbors decided to install a swimming pool. These people definitely have a right to be leery.
I think the only way they could really make this work would be to have a much larger sample group balanced out with a control group of equal size willing to swear off chocolate for the duration of the experiment. There will definitely be huge changes in each woman's health over the year, and I don't think that 40 is a large enough sample to clear out the statistical noise, especially without a control group. So pretty much, this whole thing is just an extraordinary waste of time.
Why would this person need to be in power? The whole concern around this is that computer hackers could incite a nuclear war. The threat here is precisely that the perps here would NOT need to be in power... it is much easier to keep an eye on a rogue state than it is to prevent one small group of hackers from infiltrating the defense computers.
Ok we don't need to make this personal (although I've got to admit that seeing the word 'dicklicker' did make me laugh), but yes, you are correct. We can figure out with a great deal of precision the relative position of the Earth, Sun, and Moon many centuries in advance, so this will indeed be the longest solar eclipse that the Earth will see this century.
You can never underestimate the craziness of some people. I could imagine a hardcore environmentalist wanting to do this, for instance, finding the short term damage to the biosphere less harmful than the longterm damage that continued human occupation would do. A fundamentalist Christian who wants to bring about the second coming of jeebus? Someone who is just really pissed off and anti-social (in the psychological sense, not someone who doesn't like going to parties). I can envision plenty of reasons that someone might want to do this. The same could be said of many of the atrocities in human history -- why would someone want to kill off an entire race of people (Hitler)? Why would someone think it's a good idea to kill tens of millions of their own (Mao, Stalin)? People commit suicide all the time, and people commit genocide all the time. Why is it so hard to imagine someone deciding to combine the two?
Are you really suggesting that alcohol does not cause people to do bad things? Really? Have you not seen the stats on drunk driving? Domestic abuse? Rape? Alcohol is an incredibly destructive drug that definitely leads people to, as you so eloquently put it "go off their fscking brain". Even if these drugs were more likely to cause damage (the vast majority aren't, alcohol is one of the worst we have by every metric), it would be irrelevant. The key point you need to ask is whether or not society is better with or without prohibition. Studies show that more people do drugs when they are against the law. Making them against the law puts the business in the hands of criminals, rather than pharmacists. Rehab is orders of magnitude cheaper than jail, especially when you consider recidivism rates (ie, jail only makes people worse for the most part, they come out and are unemployable and become real criminals). When drugs are illegal, addicts are much less likely to seek treatment due to the underground nature of their activities. Illegal drugs are by their very nature going to be more dangerous and addictive, there is no quality/dosage control. Addictive and harmful chemicals can be added into the brew at will by unscrupulous dealers (see all the homemade moonshine related blindness during the American prohibition of alcohol). Prohibition also drives up prices, making junkies more likely to steal. Where is the benefit in keeping it illegal? Making the drug use itself a crime only serves to make these people more dangerous to the rest of us. It is cheaper and more effective to help them with their problems, and to at least make an attempt to rehabilitate them so that they can become productive, tax paying members of society rather than life long criminals and leeches.
Wow. Just wow. Please do a little bit of research, and then we can talk. Please look into United States involvement in Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala, Haiti, Laos, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Cambodia, Bolivia, Honduras, and too many other places to list. Just do a little bit of research and then try to tell me that we are not actively holding back the third world and giving the world a reason to hate us. Please try to come up with a rational justification for these actions, and please try to make a valid argument that these illegal actions have not destabilized the world.
"When you see one country succeeding, and, many others roiling in their own stupidity"
Invalid. A great deal of the problems in the rest of the world are due to them being systematically held back by the first world to achieve a political and economic goal. Using this as evidence of our superiority is not just incorrect, it's deplorable.
"If everyone was a jingoistic patriotic nationalist, their countries would be better, and the world would be better."
No. We would all be dead by now.
Re:How many soldiers die if 187 F-22s aren't enoug
on
F-22 Raptor Cancelled
·
· Score: 1
Spending more on the military does nothing long term to stabilize the world and bring about peace. Short term safety? Sure. Long term peace? Absolutely not. We are only perpetuating this cycle of violence. How will society survive when we have the technology to create weapons that make thermonuclear weapons look like cherry bombs? Or when any crackpot malcontent can put together a 20 megaton bomb in their garage using spare parts? How, other than a global understanding that fosters peace and communication, can we hope to survive?
Re:How many soldiers die if 187 F-22s aren't enoug
on
F-22 Raptor Cancelled
·
· Score: 1
This is a totally backward though process that is holding the world back immensely; WWII was absolutely not an inevitability -- it was made possibly by how badly we screwed Germany after WWI. It is this mindset that causes us to go to war and creates the bad people, and then you people have the gall to come back and use the mess you've created as justification for your worldview! I am not naive enough to think that we can just immediately disband the military and things will be fine right away, the world is a huge mess. What I am saying is that we need to get past all of this schoolyard bully pissing contest, bigger fences mentality and started working together as one race as we move into the future. War is not necessary. Nationalism is not necessary. Until people can realize this, I fear that there is no future for us here...
Well then clearly they have never been to a Patriots game...
Re:How many soldiers die if 187 F-22s aren't enoug
on
F-22 Raptor Cancelled
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
A good way to solve this would be to stop being the world police and pissing everyone off. If we were just cool with people we easily get by with 10% of the defense budget we have now. Besides, I am sure that if we spent less on military and more on social programs we can save more civilians than we would lose soldiers. This whole nationalist, jingoist, fascist thing that the neo-Cons call Patriotism makes me throw up a little.
Seriously -- we are going to need something new to keep us entertained. How many Rock Bank/Guitar Hero games have there been now? Do they really think that people are dumb enough to keep buying the same thing over and over? They need to innovate! Figure out a way to use a real guitar, for instance. Then people can actually learn to play an instrument! Make it easier for users to upload their own songs. I don't know what the answer is, all I know is that they keep dumping the same thing on people over and over again, and most are not going to be willing to keep shelling out $60 for a new collection of songs every 6 months. They are not even beating a dead horse anymore, they have completely annihilated the horse's carcass and are now beating a vaguely horse-shaped grease spot into the ground.
"Because we'd end up wasting money on health care or cleanup and disposal of your dead body otherwise."
Yes, because I'm sure all of that is much cheaper than sending out armed squads of men to pick people up, put them through the court system, and then keep them in jail. You do realize that it is far cheaper and more effective to treat people, right? To paraphrase Bill Hicks, drugs addicts are sick, you don't put sick people in jail. Besides, why should it be the government's business if you want to harm yourself? By your rationale the government would have to monitor your food intake, make sure you are exercising, and bust into your bedroom every time you are getting it on to make sure you are wearing a condom. Oh yeah, and alcohol, tobacco, skydiving, and motorcycles are all out. Why do we respect and insist on personal freedoms in all of these areas and then have such a mental disconnect when it comes to drugs? Why does it matter that some people hurt themselves while on drugs? Why not improve education and treatment? It is cheaper, more effective, and more humane.
Of course this is all true, the example given in the article is simply a classic example of statistical math. Of course it is not a real world situation, the number of terrorists could never be known that precisely, the error bars would differ for false positives and false negatives, it fails to take into account differing margins of error throughout the population (geography, gender, ethnicity, age, etc.). This is the sort of thing where a realistic example would be so complex as to defeat the purpose, so for the intents of communicating a counter-intuitive idea to people, we create an unrealistic and absurd situation such as this -- the terrorists and error bars are meaningless it is the numbers we are after here and the example is lucid and effective.
You, FTL. You screen 3,000 people, one of whom is a terrorist right, right? The test is wrong 10% of the time, right? That means that 10% of the time, when you screen a non-terrorist, you will get a false positive. There is also only a 10% chance that you will get a false negative when screening the terrorist, but you then have to pick him out from a field of 300 individuals, 299 of whom are false positives. Is this simple enough for your little brain or shall I spell it out further?
...I still get sick and tired of all of these absurd "special reports" on the news about the "unseen dangers" in the world that are orders of magnitude less likely to cause you serious harm than being struck by lightning. Certainly, Apple should be held responsible, particularly for their gross mishandling of the situation (trying to sweep it under the rug), but can we grow up a little? It does not seem that there has been any serious damage or injury as a result of this. This culture of fear that the news has been cultivating is beyond nauseating and is destroying our society piece by piece. Because of all the news coverage into child abductions, for instance, we teach our children that strangers are dangerous and keep them close to our chests at all times, despite the fact that the odds of a child being abducted by a stranger are literally 1 in a million! The same thing has happened with the War on Terror (TM), one terrorist attack and all of a sudden its necessary to start stripping away human rights and make air travel more or less unusable. We feel that airport security is necessary, despite the fact that it logically makes no sense. We see all the exposes on the dangers of drug use, yet fail to recognize that in reality aspirin is more dangerous. We humans are terrible at assessing risk, which leads to crap like this happening. I could fill an encyclopedia with examples of this, but I think the point I am trying to make is fairly clear, that this is juvenile behavior.
Or you could get a 500 GB HDD for under $100 that will still be much faster than the memory stick -- and will cost you 5% of the price per GB, you would really have to be a fool to buy one of those things right now.
Slashdot Mirror
I won't.
The terms are a bit confusing, but the term "visible" light has nothing to do with magnitude, it only refers to light with a particular wavelength, roughly 380 to 750 nm, which our retinas happen to be sensitive to. The term visible is not meant to differentiate visible light from invisible light, but rather to differentiate these waves from radio waves, infrared, ultraviolet, X rays, microwaves, and gamma rays. So yes, even if the light cannot be seen, if it is in that particular spectrum, it is visible light.
Congratulations, Captain Splendid, you just won the Internets. I wish I had some mod points for that one.
I think it's more like Wesley Snipes calling Kenny G black...
"61-year-old Li Shuqi is only raising one of the ten plagues of Egypt but from the fuss his neighbors are raising you'd think he was working on all ten."
I can't really say that I blame them -- if they are farmers those locusts could very easily destroy their entire livelihood, and I doubt that there would be much in the way of legal recourse for these guys. That would be like if you owned a datacenter and the upstairs neighbors decided to install a swimming pool. These people definitely have a right to be leery.
I think the only way they could really make this work would be to have a much larger sample group balanced out with a control group of equal size willing to swear off chocolate for the duration of the experiment. There will definitely be huge changes in each woman's health over the year, and I don't think that 40 is a large enough sample to clear out the statistical noise, especially without a control group. So pretty much, this whole thing is just an extraordinary waste of time.
Why would this person need to be in power? The whole concern around this is that computer hackers could incite a nuclear war. The threat here is precisely that the perps here would NOT need to be in power... it is much easier to keep an eye on a rogue state than it is to prevent one small group of hackers from infiltrating the defense computers.
Seconded -- if your job can't kill you it's not really blue collar.
Ok we don't need to make this personal (although I've got to admit that seeing the word 'dicklicker' did make me laugh), but yes, you are correct. We can figure out with a great deal of precision the relative position of the Earth, Sun, and Moon many centuries in advance, so this will indeed be the longest solar eclipse that the Earth will see this century.
Yo dawg, I heard you like end-notes, so we put an end note in yo end note so you can reference yo sources while you reference yo sources!
:-X
Sorry, couldn't resist
You can never underestimate the craziness of some people. I could imagine a hardcore environmentalist wanting to do this, for instance, finding the short term damage to the biosphere less harmful than the longterm damage that continued human occupation would do. A fundamentalist Christian who wants to bring about the second coming of jeebus? Someone who is just really pissed off and anti-social (in the psychological sense, not someone who doesn't like going to parties). I can envision plenty of reasons that someone might want to do this. The same could be said of many of the atrocities in human history -- why would someone want to kill off an entire race of people (Hitler)? Why would someone think it's a good idea to kill tens of millions of their own (Mao, Stalin)? People commit suicide all the time, and people commit genocide all the time. Why is it so hard to imagine someone deciding to combine the two?
Are you really suggesting that alcohol does not cause people to do bad things? Really? Have you not seen the stats on drunk driving? Domestic abuse? Rape? Alcohol is an incredibly destructive drug that definitely leads people to, as you so eloquently put it "go off their fscking brain". Even if these drugs were more likely to cause damage (the vast majority aren't, alcohol is one of the worst we have by every metric), it would be irrelevant. The key point you need to ask is whether or not society is better with or without prohibition. Studies show that more people do drugs when they are against the law. Making them against the law puts the business in the hands of criminals, rather than pharmacists. Rehab is orders of magnitude cheaper than jail, especially when you consider recidivism rates (ie, jail only makes people worse for the most part, they come out and are unemployable and become real criminals). When drugs are illegal, addicts are much less likely to seek treatment due to the underground nature of their activities. Illegal drugs are by their very nature going to be more dangerous and addictive, there is no quality/dosage control. Addictive and harmful chemicals can be added into the brew at will by unscrupulous dealers (see all the homemade moonshine related blindness during the American prohibition of alcohol). Prohibition also drives up prices, making junkies more likely to steal. Where is the benefit in keeping it illegal? Making the drug use itself a crime only serves to make these people more dangerous to the rest of us. It is cheaper and more effective to help them with their problems, and to at least make an attempt to rehabilitate them so that they can become productive, tax paying members of society rather than life long criminals and leeches.
Wow. Just wow. Please do a little bit of research, and then we can talk. Please look into United States involvement in Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala, Haiti, Laos, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Cambodia, Bolivia, Honduras, and too many other places to list. Just do a little bit of research and then try to tell me that we are not actively holding back the third world and giving the world a reason to hate us. Please try to come up with a rational justification for these actions, and please try to make a valid argument that these illegal actions have not destabilized the world.
"When you see one country succeeding, and, many others roiling in their own stupidity"
Invalid. A great deal of the problems in the rest of the world are due to them being systematically held back by the first world to achieve a political and economic goal. Using this as evidence of our superiority is not just incorrect, it's deplorable.
"If everyone was a jingoistic patriotic nationalist, their countries would be better, and the world would be better."
No. We would all be dead by now.
Spending more on the military does nothing long term to stabilize the world and bring about peace. Short term safety? Sure. Long term peace? Absolutely not. We are only perpetuating this cycle of violence. How will society survive when we have the technology to create weapons that make thermonuclear weapons look like cherry bombs? Or when any crackpot malcontent can put together a 20 megaton bomb in their garage using spare parts? How, other than a global understanding that fosters peace and communication, can we hope to survive?
This is a totally backward though process that is holding the world back immensely; WWII was absolutely not an inevitability -- it was made possibly by how badly we screwed Germany after WWI. It is this mindset that causes us to go to war and creates the bad people, and then you people have the gall to come back and use the mess you've created as justification for your worldview! I am not naive enough to think that we can just immediately disband the military and things will be fine right away, the world is a huge mess. What I am saying is that we need to get past all of this schoolyard bully pissing contest, bigger fences mentality and started working together as one race as we move into the future. War is not necessary. Nationalism is not necessary. Until people can realize this, I fear that there is no future for us here...
Well then clearly they have never been to a Patriots game...
A good way to solve this would be to stop being the world police and pissing everyone off. If we were just cool with people we easily get by with 10% of the defense budget we have now. Besides, I am sure that if we spent less on military and more on social programs we can save more civilians than we would lose soldiers. This whole nationalist, jingoist, fascist thing that the neo-Cons call Patriotism makes me throw up a little.
No you don't.
Seriously -- we are going to need something new to keep us entertained. How many Rock Bank/Guitar Hero games have there been now? Do they really think that people are dumb enough to keep buying the same thing over and over? They need to innovate! Figure out a way to use a real guitar, for instance. Then people can actually learn to play an instrument! Make it easier for users to upload their own songs. I don't know what the answer is, all I know is that they keep dumping the same thing on people over and over again, and most are not going to be willing to keep shelling out $60 for a new collection of songs every 6 months. They are not even beating a dead horse anymore, they have completely annihilated the horse's carcass and are now beating a vaguely horse-shaped grease spot into the ground.
"Because we'd end up wasting money on health care or cleanup and disposal of your dead body otherwise."
Yes, because I'm sure all of that is much cheaper than sending out armed squads of men to pick people up, put them through the court system, and then keep them in jail. You do realize that it is far cheaper and more effective to treat people, right? To paraphrase Bill Hicks, drugs addicts are sick, you don't put sick people in jail. Besides, why should it be the government's business if you want to harm yourself? By your rationale the government would have to monitor your food intake, make sure you are exercising, and bust into your bedroom every time you are getting it on to make sure you are wearing a condom. Oh yeah, and alcohol, tobacco, skydiving, and motorcycles are all out. Why do we respect and insist on personal freedoms in all of these areas and then have such a mental disconnect when it comes to drugs? Why does it matter that some people hurt themselves while on drugs? Why not improve education and treatment? It is cheaper, more effective, and more humane.
Of course this is all true, the example given in the article is simply a classic example of statistical math. Of course it is not a real world situation, the number of terrorists could never be known that precisely, the error bars would differ for false positives and false negatives, it fails to take into account differing margins of error throughout the population (geography, gender, ethnicity, age, etc.). This is the sort of thing where a realistic example would be so complex as to defeat the purpose, so for the intents of communicating a counter-intuitive idea to people, we create an unrealistic and absurd situation such as this -- the terrorists and error bars are meaningless it is the numbers we are after here and the example is lucid and effective.
You, FTL. You screen 3,000 people, one of whom is a terrorist right, right? The test is wrong 10% of the time, right? That means that 10% of the time, when you screen a non-terrorist, you will get a false positive. There is also only a 10% chance that you will get a false negative when screening the terrorist, but you then have to pick him out from a field of 300 individuals, 299 of whom are false positives. Is this simple enough for your little brain or shall I spell it out further?
...I still get sick and tired of all of these absurd "special reports" on the news about the "unseen dangers" in the world that are orders of magnitude less likely to cause you serious harm than being struck by lightning. Certainly, Apple should be held responsible, particularly for their gross mishandling of the situation (trying to sweep it under the rug), but can we grow up a little? It does not seem that there has been any serious damage or injury as a result of this. This culture of fear that the news has been cultivating is beyond nauseating and is destroying our society piece by piece. Because of all the news coverage into child abductions, for instance, we teach our children that strangers are dangerous and keep them close to our chests at all times, despite the fact that the odds of a child being abducted by a stranger are literally 1 in a million! The same thing has happened with the War on Terror (TM), one terrorist attack and all of a sudden its necessary to start stripping away human rights and make air travel more or less unusable. We feel that airport security is necessary, despite the fact that it logically makes no sense. We see all the exposes on the dangers of drug use, yet fail to recognize that in reality aspirin is more dangerous. We humans are terrible at assessing risk, which leads to crap like this happening. I could fill an encyclopedia with examples of this, but I think the point I am trying to make is fairly clear, that this is juvenile behavior.
Or you could get a 500 GB HDD for under $100 that will still be much faster than the memory stick -- and will cost you 5% of the price per GB, you would really have to be a fool to buy one of those things right now.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136314