So, which part of "sometimes" didn't you understand?
Specifically, in outer space, outside of Earth's sheilding effects, lead sheilding is spacecraft is eschewed because it exposes the astronauts to more dangerous radiation then less. That's why, among other reasons, the Apollo landers were made of the thinnest foil possible.
Magnetic sheilding isn't the only kind of shielding, and trying to disprove a "sometimes" with two specific examples is just plain a logical fallacy. That's the error in your logic, not mine, because you impute claims to me I never made, and failed to look for where the "sometimes" holds true rather then where it holds false, which only proves you don't understand logic, not that I'm wrong.
Re:Gotta love the 21th Century
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Nano Body Building
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Exercise and good diets? Nah mate, just pop in one of those new pills and you're sorted.
Yes, but who cares? The reason we have to exercise and diet is that we are adapted for non-civilized times. On the evolutionary scale civilization is young, young, young.
Maintaining our current adaptations, and using technology to correctly and dynamically adjust our bodies to our current situations sounds optimal to me. (We want to maintain our current adaptations as a "just in case" mechanism; we probably shouldn't evolve our "natural" bodies to excessively depend on civilization.)
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a lower or higher activity level, any more then it's intrinsically wrong that you can't run 60 mph for an hour. If the health effects of inactivity are erased, that's just fine.
Don't confuse effect with cause. Exercise is necessary for specific reasons. If the reasons are removed, then exercise is no longer necessary.
Of course, this ignore something else: If you could give me a pill and give me a toned body right now, the odds are much greater that I'd engage in much more exercise then I do now, even if it weren't strictly necessary. The hump is what stops me; I've tried several times to start an exercise program, but I've got so far to go before it's really fun and not boring that I never make it over that hump. I mean, I feel all bad about it and stuff, but that doesn't help much.
(Suggestions on how to make it fun aren't necessary, although perhaps they'll help others; I've thought of several but they all involve not living in an apartment.)
Also, fundamentally, adequate diets will always be necessary; you will always have certain requirements and it'll be a long time before we have elemental transmutation built into our bodies;-) But if I could stick a more efficient processing plant in you that ran off of sugar and a few trace elements, recycling everything else, would you still be bitching about how bad my diet of pure sugar is? Diet is relative, and if we adjust our bodies to match our diet, so much the better for us!
You have been brainwashed into assuming that exercise and diet are some sort of Universal Constant, but they aren't. Study animal nutrition for real-life examples that exist today. You want to kill your cat? Try feeding it Vegan-style. I've talked to a vet who has seen this; it's quite sad.
No, the interaction with the solar wind and the atmosphere will prevent us from being hit with charged particles.
Solar electromagnetic radiation comes through no matter what and is not affected by the magnetic field. In fact, that's something of a similar situation: The Ozone layer, as I understand it, is formed by the very radiation it absorbs. That's why a hole in the Ozone layer forms over the pole that gets no sunlight; Ozone breaks down relatively quickly and without the production mechanism, eventually it all breaks down. It reforms again once it is hit by sunlight again. CFCs were theorized to accelerate the destruction rate of the ozone, which caused a net reduction in the amount there was, starting near the poles since they get less sunlight and already had a lower production pace.
In the reverse direction, note that shielding can sometimes cause a net increase in dangerous radiation, as high-energy cosmic rays that would just pass through a person impact the shielding and bombard the shielded thing (like a person) with a series of lower energy radiations, which may total a lower energy overall then the cosmic ray but have a much greater effect on the person.
Second-order effects very often swamp the first-order effects. This is one of those basic facts of mathematical thinking that is vital to understanding any sort of science, and is one of the reasons having politicians, and people who think they understand science but don't understand this kind of mathematical thinking, scare me so much. Statements like "Higher taxes mean more income", "more shielding means less radiation", and "a lower magnetic field means more radiation getting to the surface" may all sound like common sense, but they aren't; the former two are certainly not universally true (only true under certain circumstances, which if you don't understand the limits you will almost certainly be led astray), this article suggests that the same is true of the third.
It's only confusing if you insist on trying to understand everything solely in terms of their first-order effects; the universe is far, far from that simple.
That said, I have no idea if this simulation is correct or not; I merely observe that there's no reason to dismiss it because it contradicts the results of a simplistic analysis based soley on direct effects.
(Minor nit: The solar wind is simply charged particles streaming away from the sun; they are not necessarily being moved by "solar radiation", which is really too generic a term in this context to be useful.)
The possibility of acquiring a patent, and thereby a guaranteed source of revenue, is what spurs innovation.
This is the theory.
It is shockingly short of evidence that it actually motivates anyone in the software industry, if you discount mere assertion like your post.
The software industry was thriving before patents were allowed, and there's no particular evidence they help any actual innovaters now, either, except again, mere assertion.
And you still don't answer the possibility that it both spurs and retards innovation... and given the lack of evidence that patents have helped anyone in the software domain (where by the time you have the patent it's old news anyhow), whereas the evidence of patents being used to quench innovation lies in nearly every lawsuit ever filed w.r.t. software patents (the majority of the large cases have been submarine patents, or patents for which the justification for the lawsuit boggles the mind), the bulk of the evidence would seem to be on the "quench" side.
(Like the one-click patent, when Amazon sued B&N: Did B&N still Amazon's code in the night? The systems are more likely night-and-day different, to the point that experience on one would only be marginally useful in understanding the other, yet since Amazon apparently patented an entire concept, B&N had to stop using their one-click implementation. Note, in passing, this is another failing of the patent system in the software domain: Patents are supposed to encourage alternate implementations of similar things, but that's not possible in patents. See here for expansion on that point.)
No, the only way for that to work is to provide some reasonably-priced mechanism for people to convert their DVD movies into a PSP-understandable format.
Which is just another in a long list of reasons that the movie companies are inhibiting innovation by being so grabby with their content. This time, they are inhibiting their own innovation.
There is no way without this that the movie-watching capabilities of the PSP will ever mature. There is no way Sony will ever produce anything like this. There are too many thousands of movies in the world for them to ever convert anything even remotely resembling a critical mass on their own.
This aspect of the device is a boondoggle and Nintendo is 100% right that it's a waste of time... good news for them!
Maybe some of the Sony lustre will finally wear off; it'll be nice to see some of the Sony fan boys wake up to reality.
Of course this could (improbable) happen here, but the point is that according to MWI it does happen somewhere.
It is nice to see a real physicist say this, as it is the conclusion I have come to recently.
Turn the MWI around; instead of expressing it as "For any quantum interaction, all possibilities occur", express it as "For any state of the universe that can be reached by any series of quantum interactions with a probability greater then zero, it occurs." In other words, all of those silly probabilities we compute routinely in physics class, like all the air jumping into one corner or the probability of a man-sized object tunneling through a wall spontaneously, they occur, because while they have a low, low probability, it is non-zero.
You can "select" any series of quantum interactions you want, and it happens in some universe. So, for instance, there are universes where 'magic' works, because every time a person casts a "spell", some wildly improbable thing always happens, seemingly as a "result". (Of course, the vast majority of the child universes revert to normal, but there is a thread of universes you can draw where it all works.)
The MWI is commonly expressed to laymen as "if a particle can zig or zag, it does both", and perhaps if it were that simple it might be OK, but quantum effects are fuzzy, and what MWI leaves you is a general mish-mash where there is no line between existance and non-existance. (Douglas Adams, as usual, was ahead of the curve, with his Whole Sort of General Mish Mash and I now wonder if this was his logic.) Since the primary argument for MWI seems to be a philosophical one anyhow, I find this thoroughly uncompelling. We need not consider our universe so unspecial that it doesn't even exist in any meaningful sense of the term (since "existance" is defined meaningfully as excluding something else that doesn't exist; in MWI, everything exists except for a surprisingly small set of probability 0 things).
As usual, this isn't a proof of anything physical. But I find the MWI as philosophy to be garbage.
I think the author is referring to this spam solution checklist. While funny, it is also true; I've never used that list and wanted to add anything to it, or wished there was an "other" checkbox. It's pretty complete, and to date, nothing passes the checklist...
...including, of course, the current email system on a number of counts, but there is something to the old "The Devil you know is better then the one you don't." when dealing with a system involving reputations. At least right now, the fact that just because an email is labelled as coming from "Santa Claus" doesn't mean that it did is preventing people from having their reputations damaged by spam sent out with their name. I was recently "Joe Jobbed" and I was not looking forward to having to explain that my domain wasn't really a spammer's domain... I didn't have to, not to a single person. At least the current mail system is a known quantity.
Not just the political parties, but the North and the South still see each other as "separate but equal".
I'd have to disagree with that and I would expect you're living in "the South" right now. There are some people in the South who still see the "North" and "South" as seperate (with varying degrees of equality), but nobody to speak of in the North feels that way, and the vast majority of the South doesn't either.
It's just that those people are loud and nobody wants to piss them off unnecessarily; no point and they are awfully, awfully loud.
In fact, some of those people just enjoy being loud, and if push came to shove you'd find that a lot of the die-hard Confederates aren't. Up here in the North there isn't anything quite so easy to be loud about so our loud folk are much more divided into numerous other camps.
Hack the contest. Googlebomb "nigritude ultramarine" to http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/09/184021 7 . That's this article, stripped of all the other crap.
I'm planning on doing it, and I'm not a Google monster, but I'm not a Google slouch either; I have a pretty decent amount of Google juice for a one-man site.
Note that mostly likely, links from Slashdot to Slashdot won't count any, so no point in linking in comments here.
Vice Defense Minister Shingo Nishimura had to resign in 1999 after suggesting that Japan should go nuclear.
I think that was the grand-parent's point; unless the Japanese are Gods amoung Men, the serious prospect of having a city nuked is likely to provoke a strong desire towards being able to defend themselves by a significant proportion of the population. (Although MAD starts to seriously breakdown in the case of a lone madman effectively in control of the nuke; the USSR, for all of the rhetoric of both sides, could be counted on to act essentially rationally, within its frame of reference, which is why MAD worked in the Cold War.)
If it doesn't... well, I still don't follow Europe's simultaneous "intense fear of the US" and "complete lack of desire to spend any money on defense", so I guess I have a track record of underestimating the irrationality of large populations.
(To me, actions speak louder then words. A lot of people, hell, entire countries screech about how evil the US is and how we scare them. But it's all words; their spending on defense says they feel quite confident that the US isn't going to come obliterate them... and even after the so-called "imperialistic actions" of the US over the last few years, I still haven't of any defense build-ups as a result... yes, it's only one metric but it's one of the few objective ones we've got, and it says that people aren't really as afraid of the US as they say they are. And yes, I'm looking at percent GDP, not absolute spending. No one country could out-spend us absolutely but a combination of the bigger ones could... and they don't.)
Show me the bar maid that checks the status of the pitcher once per second (if I'm reading the FA correctly) and I'll agree this is an unnecessary innovation.
"In the life-or-death field of bar tending, seconds count." - sounds like a pitch for ER meets Cheers.
But they are not in Internet Explorer, without the user asking for them, and in the case of less knowlegable users, without their consent or quite likely even their understanding that it is their browser, and not the web site, adding the tags. (Not everyone posts to Slashdot.)
Re:Finally, more bandwidth for World's Scariest...
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Comcast Fires TechTV Staff
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Discovery
The Discovery channel has already been eliminated as a source of "high brow crap". At least, I can't stand to watch it as I usually feel my intelligence is being insulted, only unlike the pap on, say, CBS, the Discovery channel has the audacity to think it's teaching me something.
TLC, Discovery, and Animal Planet have already been mostly toasted. (Who the hell would have guessed that the Animal Planet could tune into the Most Extreme meme? Or, perhaps more accurately, tried to tune in.) That leaves only PBS, the History channel, and Biography (I think; I don't actually watch that last one so I could be wrong).
No, people are insisting that I panic now on only slightly more then hearsay and conjecture. People like you who lecture are on the wrong side of rationality, whether you like it or not. I make no apologies for refusing to be manipulated by the current "in" trend, to the exclusion of using my sense.
Mods, parent has it backwards. The PS2 has (well, had, I've heard better ones have come out since the launch) shitty programming interfaces and a wierd dual-co-processor design. The DreamCast just has a standard CPU/GPU/Audio chip design, looking like a modern computer (with a sound card that is more then a DSP interface to your speakers).
Or he may have been thinking of the Saturn. But that doesn't match the DC's description at all. Sega learned from the Saturn and the DC is pretty straight-forward; certainly much more straight-forward then the PS2 or the supposed PS3 design (which I will believe when I see, frankly).
We can be certain that if we continue on our current path, growing emissions of greenhouse gases, we will change the climate dramatically some time this century.
The thing is, we can also be certain that even if every last human keels over dead, taking all technology with them, that the climate will change significantly over the next century.
Already I've noticed a climate shift starting in my area (Michigan)... we're returning to the type of winters we had 30 or 40 years ago, which had a lot more snow and cold weather then the winters we saw in the 90's, which typically had one hell of a snow-storm... but only that one, with temperatures reaching into the 50s sometimes in mid-December.
Human influence? Natural processes? The only answer is yes. Worth panicking over? I'm inclined to wait until something actually bad happens before panicking. (Note that "panicking" isn't isomorphic to "doing something"; I'm in favor of pre-emptive environmentalism, where on general principles we try to reduce our impact to the environment as much as possible. I don't see panicking as a valid reason to do anything, though.)
Ironically, math is the one discipline your argument doesn't apply to.
Bluntly, if you're not thinking mathematically, you're not thinking, you're just feeling or assuming... or just fooling yourself.
It helps to understand that there is much more to math then just "arithmatic", and that there are entire mathematical disciplines devoted to the study of things like "uncertainty" (statistics), so you can't cop out on claims that math can't handle the real world.
Logic is critical thinking. Trying to teach critical thinking without logic is a waste of time. Trying to teach "problem solving" without algebra and basic logic is a waste of time.
One could successfully argue that one of the faults of the current system is the obsession with numbers and algebra, to the exclusion of statistics, logic, and other mathematically useful disciplines.
Of the things you mention we should be teaching directly, the only one that isn't mathematical is "memorization techniques"... and as I understand it, the only technique of value requires a hell of a lot of up-front investment that nobody is really willing to put the effort into.
The very fact that you might disagree with the definition of "math" used in this posting, or that you don't see the connection between "logic" and "problem solving" is itself a sign of the weakness of your education (which isn't necessarily your fault, though ultimately and sadly it is your responsibility), not the incorrectness of this post. Teaching math (and not just "numbers") is ultimately the only way to get what you are calling for.
Forget asking whether it is a crime. Ask, "If a child does something, does Justice demand that a parent be punished?"
Herein lies the problem. It is not Just to punish someone for something they can not avoid. You say,
I think the main reason people are afraid of this is that many don't spend enough time or energy to be reasonably sure their kids won't get them put in jail someday.
And I say, nobody can spend that much time.
I had loving parents, etc. I'm about as straigh-laced as they come... but in the end, that was my choice. There was many a thing that I did without my parent's knowlege. I could have easily made some serious crimes, like running drugs, one of them. I had the brains. I had the opportunity. And there's not a damn thing they could have done about it if I so chose.
You can make a case for negligence being actionable, because that is a direct action the parent takes. Negligence should be actionable independently of whether the kid ever does anything. But while a child is not a truly free actor yet, neither are they robotic automatons responding directly and solely to their parent's actions. You can not hold parents legally responsible for their children's most heinous crimes... all you can use it as is as just cause for investigating their parent's behavior, and since nobody can define "good parenting" very well anyhow...
In the end, one must be careful not to make the action of having children something that gives parents pause because of the significant possibility of totally random jail time based on the (in the final analysis) uncontrollable actions of their children.
Now, to any potential Slashbots smashing the reply button to angrily contradict me, make sure you understand what I'm saying. Parents are not devoid of responsibility, legal and moral. But neither is the child. It's equally wrong to wipe the responsibility away from either party. The correct answer requires analysis of both parties. No easy answers here!
though I have my doubts since its impossible to measure all effects of the sound everywhere
No, it's not. The simple expedient of actually measuring the effects works perfectly.
What we can't do is reverse engineer the sound, or generate such a sound from information about the environment. The cleverness of that technique is how it bypasses the need to do so, at the cost of being relatively limited.
It would depend on a static environment, though; GP mentions going around "people" but if they move, kiss the effect goodbye.
Not even remotely similar
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Directed Sound
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· Score: 1
That is not even remotely similar. RTFA.
This is "directional sound" with no parabolic shapes in sight, made through an entirely different mechanism.
It's tax issues and the issues involved in proving you can legally export stuff that's the real headache... especially w/ downloadable software. And.ca is a pretty stupid example, since the US/Canada border is about the most permissive one in the world.
Having looked at the issue a while back, the problem is that shipping into foreign countries involves a lot more paperwork, paperwork that differs from country to country and sometimes even more often than that, including variation based on the incoming products.
You have to have a lot of customers in the other country to make it worth while and a lot of smaller companies won't be able to justify it. You can easily need entire positions within a company to manage these issues, and if international orders can't pay for that position and still make a profit, they won't happen. (And if a company only has 20 people in it, an entire person dedicated to that issue is very expensive; even if you can pay their salary there is the opportunity cost of one entire person, which is significant.)
That, I think, is the real reason. They'd be happy to take your money, but by the time the relevant governments and shipping companies are done taking their slice, both in the form of taxes and paperwork, it just isn't worth it. (I was looking in terms of selling software internationally, and while I never did make the jump into business, I saw that I was only going to be selling into the US; anybody out of the country who wanted a copy would have to make, shall we say, alternate arrangements that I knew nothing about.)
Slashdot Mirror
So, which part of "sometimes" didn't you understand?
Specifically, in outer space, outside of Earth's sheilding effects, lead sheilding is spacecraft is eschewed because it exposes the astronauts to more dangerous radiation then less. That's why, among other reasons, the Apollo landers were made of the thinnest foil possible.
Magnetic sheilding isn't the only kind of shielding, and trying to disprove a "sometimes" with two specific examples is just plain a logical fallacy. That's the error in your logic, not mine, because you impute claims to me I never made, and failed to look for where the "sometimes" holds true rather then where it holds false, which only proves you don't understand logic, not that I'm wrong.
Exercise and good diets? Nah mate, just pop in one of those new pills and you're sorted.
;-) But if I could stick a more efficient processing plant in you that ran off of sugar and a few trace elements, recycling everything else, would you still be bitching about how bad my diet of pure sugar is? Diet is relative, and if we adjust our bodies to match our diet, so much the better for us!
Yes, but who cares? The reason we have to exercise and diet is that we are adapted for non-civilized times. On the evolutionary scale civilization is young, young, young.
Maintaining our current adaptations, and using technology to correctly and dynamically adjust our bodies to our current situations sounds optimal to me. (We want to maintain our current adaptations as a "just in case" mechanism; we probably shouldn't evolve our "natural" bodies to excessively depend on civilization.)
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a lower or higher activity level, any more then it's intrinsically wrong that you can't run 60 mph for an hour. If the health effects of inactivity are erased, that's just fine.
Don't confuse effect with cause. Exercise is necessary for specific reasons. If the reasons are removed, then exercise is no longer necessary.
Of course, this ignore something else: If you could give me a pill and give me a toned body right now, the odds are much greater that I'd engage in much more exercise then I do now, even if it weren't strictly necessary. The hump is what stops me; I've tried several times to start an exercise program, but I've got so far to go before it's really fun and not boring that I never make it over that hump. I mean, I feel all bad about it and stuff, but that doesn't help much.
(Suggestions on how to make it fun aren't necessary, although perhaps they'll help others; I've thought of several but they all involve not living in an apartment.)
Also, fundamentally, adequate diets will always be necessary; you will always have certain requirements and it'll be a long time before we have elemental transmutation built into our bodies
You have been brainwashed into assuming that exercise and diet are some sort of Universal Constant, but they aren't. Study animal nutrition for real-life examples that exist today. You want to kill your cat? Try feeding it Vegan-style. I've talked to a vet who has seen this; it's quite sad.
No, the interaction with the solar wind and the atmosphere will prevent us from being hit with charged particles.
Solar electromagnetic radiation comes through no matter what and is not affected by the magnetic field. In fact, that's something of a similar situation: The Ozone layer, as I understand it, is formed by the very radiation it absorbs. That's why a hole in the Ozone layer forms over the pole that gets no sunlight; Ozone breaks down relatively quickly and without the production mechanism, eventually it all breaks down. It reforms again once it is hit by sunlight again. CFCs were theorized to accelerate the destruction rate of the ozone, which caused a net reduction in the amount there was, starting near the poles since they get less sunlight and already had a lower production pace.
In the reverse direction, note that shielding can sometimes cause a net increase in dangerous radiation, as high-energy cosmic rays that would just pass through a person impact the shielding and bombard the shielded thing (like a person) with a series of lower energy radiations, which may total a lower energy overall then the cosmic ray but have a much greater effect on the person.
Second-order effects very often swamp the first-order effects. This is one of those basic facts of mathematical thinking that is vital to understanding any sort of science, and is one of the reasons having politicians, and people who think they understand science but don't understand this kind of mathematical thinking, scare me so much. Statements like "Higher taxes mean more income", "more shielding means less radiation", and "a lower magnetic field means more radiation getting to the surface" may all sound like common sense, but they aren't; the former two are certainly not universally true (only true under certain circumstances, which if you don't understand the limits you will almost certainly be led astray), this article suggests that the same is true of the third.
It's only confusing if you insist on trying to understand everything solely in terms of their first-order effects; the universe is far, far from that simple.
That said, I have no idea if this simulation is correct or not; I merely observe that there's no reason to dismiss it because it contradicts the results of a simplistic analysis based soley on direct effects.
(Minor nit: The solar wind is simply charged particles streaming away from the sun; they are not necessarily being moved by "solar radiation", which is really too generic a term in this context to be useful.)
The possibility of acquiring a patent, and thereby a guaranteed source of revenue, is what spurs innovation.
This is the theory.
It is shockingly short of evidence that it actually motivates anyone in the software industry, if you discount mere assertion like your post.
The software industry was thriving before patents were allowed, and there's no particular evidence they help any actual innovaters now, either, except again, mere assertion.
And you still don't answer the possibility that it both spurs and retards innovation... and given the lack of evidence that patents have helped anyone in the software domain (where by the time you have the patent it's old news anyhow), whereas the evidence of patents being used to quench innovation lies in nearly every lawsuit ever filed w.r.t. software patents (the majority of the large cases have been submarine patents, or patents for which the justification for the lawsuit boggles the mind), the bulk of the evidence would seem to be on the "quench" side.
(Like the one-click patent, when Amazon sued B&N: Did B&N still Amazon's code in the night? The systems are more likely night-and-day different, to the point that experience on one would only be marginally useful in understanding the other, yet since Amazon apparently patented an entire concept, B&N had to stop using their one-click implementation. Note, in passing, this is another failing of the patent system in the software domain: Patents are supposed to encourage alternate implementations of similar things, but that's not possible in patents. See here for expansion on that point.)
No, the only way for that to work is to provide some reasonably-priced mechanism for people to convert their DVD movies into a PSP-understandable format.
Which is just another in a long list of reasons that the movie companies are inhibiting innovation by being so grabby with their content. This time, they are inhibiting their own innovation.
There is no way without this that the movie-watching capabilities of the PSP will ever mature. There is no way Sony will ever produce anything like this. There are too many thousands of movies in the world for them to ever convert anything even remotely resembling a critical mass on their own.
This aspect of the device is a boondoggle and Nintendo is 100% right that it's a waste of time... good news for them!
Maybe some of the Sony lustre will finally wear off; it'll be nice to see some of the Sony fan boys wake up to reality.
Of course this could (improbable) happen here, but the point is that according to MWI it does happen somewhere.
It is nice to see a real physicist say this, as it is the conclusion I have come to recently.
Turn the MWI around; instead of expressing it as "For any quantum interaction, all possibilities occur", express it as "For any state of the universe that can be reached by any series of quantum interactions with a probability greater then zero, it occurs." In other words, all of those silly probabilities we compute routinely in physics class, like all the air jumping into one corner or the probability of a man-sized object tunneling through a wall spontaneously, they occur, because while they have a low, low probability, it is non-zero.
You can "select" any series of quantum interactions you want, and it happens in some universe. So, for instance, there are universes where 'magic' works, because every time a person casts a "spell", some wildly improbable thing always happens, seemingly as a "result". (Of course, the vast majority of the child universes revert to normal, but there is a thread of universes you can draw where it all works.)
The MWI is commonly expressed to laymen as "if a particle can zig or zag, it does both", and perhaps if it were that simple it might be OK, but quantum effects are fuzzy, and what MWI leaves you is a general mish-mash where there is no line between existance and non-existance. (Douglas Adams, as usual, was ahead of the curve, with his Whole Sort of General Mish Mash and I now wonder if this was his logic.) Since the primary argument for MWI seems to be a philosophical one anyhow, I find this thoroughly uncompelling. We need not consider our universe so unspecial that it doesn't even exist in any meaningful sense of the term (since "existance" is defined meaningfully as excluding something else that doesn't exist; in MWI, everything exists except for a surprisingly small set of probability 0 things).
As usual, this isn't a proof of anything physical. But I find the MWI as philosophy to be garbage.
...including, of course, the current email system on a number of counts, but there is something to the old "The Devil you know is better then the one you don't." when dealing with a system involving reputations. At least right now, the fact that just because an email is labelled as coming from "Santa Claus" doesn't mean that it did is preventing people from having their reputations damaged by spam sent out with their name. I was recently "Joe Jobbed" and I was not looking forward to having to explain that my domain wasn't really a spammer's domain... I didn't have to, not to a single person. At least the current mail system is a known quantity.
Not just the political parties, but the North and the South still see each other as "separate but equal".
I'd have to disagree with that and I would expect you're living in "the South" right now. There are some people in the South who still see the "North" and "South" as seperate (with varying degrees of equality), but nobody to speak of in the North feels that way, and the vast majority of the South doesn't either.
It's just that those people are loud and nobody wants to piss them off unnecessarily; no point and they are awfully, awfully loud.
In fact, some of those people just enjoy being loud, and if push came to shove you'd find that a lot of the die-hard Confederates aren't. Up here in the North there isn't anything quite so easy to be loud about so our loud folk are much more divided into numerous other camps.
Opteron is "cheapo hardware"?!
By the time this thing is optimized, it will be.
That's not intended as sarcasm, either, just a simple observation.
Hack the contest. Googlebomb "nigritude ultramarine" to http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/09/184021 7 . That's this article, stripped of all the other crap.
I'm planning on doing it, and I'm not a Google monster, but I'm not a Google slouch either; I have a pretty decent amount of Google juice for a one-man site.
Note that mostly likely, links from Slashdot to Slashdot won't count any, so no point in linking in comments here.
Vice Defense Minister Shingo Nishimura had to resign in 1999 after suggesting that Japan should go nuclear.
I think that was the grand-parent's point; unless the Japanese are Gods amoung Men, the serious prospect of having a city nuked is likely to provoke a strong desire towards being able to defend themselves by a significant proportion of the population. (Although MAD starts to seriously breakdown in the case of a lone madman effectively in control of the nuke; the USSR, for all of the rhetoric of both sides, could be counted on to act essentially rationally, within its frame of reference, which is why MAD worked in the Cold War.)
If it doesn't... well, I still don't follow Europe's simultaneous "intense fear of the US" and "complete lack of desire to spend any money on defense", so I guess I have a track record of underestimating the irrationality of large populations.
(To me, actions speak louder then words. A lot of people, hell, entire countries screech about how evil the US is and how we scare them. But it's all words; their spending on defense says they feel quite confident that the US isn't going to come obliterate them... and even after the so-called "imperialistic actions" of the US over the last few years, I still haven't of any defense build-ups as a result... yes, it's only one metric but it's one of the few objective ones we've got, and it says that people aren't really as afraid of the US as they say they are. And yes, I'm looking at percent GDP, not absolute spending. No one country could out-spend us absolutely but a combination of the bigger ones could... and they don't.)
Show me the bar maid that checks the status of the pitcher once per second (if I'm reading the FA correctly) and I'll agree this is an unnecessary innovation.
"In the life-or-death field of bar tending, seconds count." - sounds like a pitch for ER meets Cheers.
But they are not in Internet Explorer, without the user asking for them, and in the case of less knowlegable users, without their consent or quite likely even their understanding that it is their browser, and not the web site, adding the tags. (Not everyone posts to Slashdot.)
The definative Smart Tags article.
This is not what I would call regularly.
Discovery
The Discovery channel has already been eliminated as a source of "high brow crap". At least, I can't stand to watch it as I usually feel my intelligence is being insulted, only unlike the pap on, say, CBS, the Discovery channel has the audacity to think it's teaching me something.
TLC, Discovery, and Animal Planet have already been mostly toasted. (Who the hell would have guessed that the Animal Planet could tune into the Most Extreme meme? Or, perhaps more accurately, tried to tune in.) That leaves only PBS, the History channel, and Biography (I think; I don't actually watch that last one so I could be wrong).
No, people are insisting that I panic now on only slightly more then hearsay and conjecture. People like you who lecture are on the wrong side of rationality, whether you like it or not. I make no apologies for refusing to be manipulated by the current "in" trend, to the exclusion of using my sense.
TO PANIC.
Don't cut off my quotes and distort the meaning and then try to lecture me.
Mods, parent has it backwards. The PS2 has (well, had, I've heard better ones have come out since the launch) shitty programming interfaces and a wierd dual-co-processor design. The DreamCast just has a standard CPU/GPU/Audio chip design, looking like a modern computer (with a sound card that is more then a DSP interface to your speakers).
Or he may have been thinking of the Saturn. But that doesn't match the DC's description at all. Sega learned from the Saturn and the DC is pretty straight-forward; certainly much more straight-forward then the PS2 or the supposed PS3 design (which I will believe when I see, frankly).
We can be certain that if we continue on our current path, growing emissions of greenhouse gases, we will change the climate dramatically some time this century.
The thing is, we can also be certain that even if every last human keels over dead, taking all technology with them, that the climate will change significantly over the next century.
Already I've noticed a climate shift starting in my area (Michigan)... we're returning to the type of winters we had 30 or 40 years ago, which had a lot more snow and cold weather then the winters we saw in the 90's, which typically had one hell of a snow-storm... but only that one, with temperatures reaching into the 50s sometimes in mid-December.
Human influence? Natural processes? The only answer is yes. Worth panicking over? I'm inclined to wait until something actually bad happens before panicking. (Note that "panicking" isn't isomorphic to "doing something"; I'm in favor of pre-emptive environmentalism, where on general principles we try to reduce our impact to the environment as much as possible. I don't see panicking as a valid reason to do anything, though.)
Ironically, math is the one discipline your argument doesn't apply to.
Bluntly, if you're not thinking mathematically, you're not thinking, you're just feeling or assuming... or just fooling yourself.
It helps to understand that there is much more to math then just "arithmatic", and that there are entire mathematical disciplines devoted to the study of things like "uncertainty" (statistics), so you can't cop out on claims that math can't handle the real world.
Logic is critical thinking. Trying to teach critical thinking without logic is a waste of time. Trying to teach "problem solving" without algebra and basic logic is a waste of time.
One could successfully argue that one of the faults of the current system is the obsession with numbers and algebra, to the exclusion of statistics, logic, and other mathematically useful disciplines.
Of the things you mention we should be teaching directly, the only one that isn't mathematical is "memorization techniques"... and as I understand it, the only technique of value requires a hell of a lot of up-front investment that nobody is really willing to put the effort into.
The very fact that you might disagree with the definition of "math" used in this posting, or that you don't see the connection between "logic" and "problem solving" is itself a sign of the weakness of your education (which isn't necessarily your fault, though ultimately and sadly it is your responsibility), not the incorrectness of this post. Teaching math (and not just "numbers") is ultimately the only way to get what you are calling for.
Forget asking whether it is a crime. Ask, "If a child does something, does Justice demand that a parent be punished?"
Herein lies the problem. It is not Just to punish someone for something they can not avoid. You say,
I think the main reason people are afraid of this is that many don't spend enough time or energy to be reasonably sure their kids won't get them put in jail someday.
And I say, nobody can spend that much time.
I had loving parents, etc. I'm about as straigh-laced as they come... but in the end, that was my choice. There was many a thing that I did without my parent's knowlege. I could have easily made some serious crimes, like running drugs, one of them. I had the brains. I had the opportunity. And there's not a damn thing they could have done about it if I so chose.
You can make a case for negligence being actionable, because that is a direct action the parent takes. Negligence should be actionable independently of whether the kid ever does anything. But while a child is not a truly free actor yet, neither are they robotic automatons responding directly and solely to their parent's actions. You can not hold parents legally responsible for their children's most heinous crimes... all you can use it as is as just cause for investigating their parent's behavior, and since nobody can define "good parenting" very well anyhow...
In the end, one must be careful not to make the action of having children something that gives parents pause because of the significant possibility of totally random jail time based on the (in the final analysis) uncontrollable actions of their children.
Now, to any potential Slashbots smashing the reply button to angrily contradict me, make sure you understand what I'm saying. Parents are not devoid of responsibility, legal and moral. But neither is the child. It's equally wrong to wipe the responsibility away from either party. The correct answer requires analysis of both parties. No easy answers here!
though I have my doubts since its impossible to measure all effects of the sound everywhere
No, it's not. The simple expedient of actually measuring the effects works perfectly.
What we can't do is reverse engineer the sound, or generate such a sound from information about the environment. The cleverness of that technique is how it bypasses the need to do so, at the cost of being relatively limited.
It would depend on a static environment, though; GP mentions going around "people" but if they move, kiss the effect goodbye.
That is not even remotely similar. RTFA.
This is "directional sound" with no parabolic shapes in sight, made through an entirely different mechanism.
It's tax issues and the issues involved in proving you can legally export stuff that's the real headache... especially w/ downloadable software. And .ca is a pretty stupid example, since the US/Canada border is about the most permissive one in the world.
Having looked at the issue a while back, the problem is that shipping into foreign countries involves a lot more paperwork, paperwork that differs from country to country and sometimes even more often than that, including variation based on the incoming products.
You have to have a lot of customers in the other country to make it worth while and a lot of smaller companies won't be able to justify it. You can easily need entire positions within a company to manage these issues, and if international orders can't pay for that position and still make a profit, they won't happen. (And if a company only has 20 people in it, an entire person dedicated to that issue is very expensive; even if you can pay their salary there is the opportunity cost of one entire person, which is significant.)
That, I think, is the real reason. They'd be happy to take your money, but by the time the relevant governments and shipping companies are done taking their slice, both in the form of taxes and paperwork, it just isn't worth it. (I was looking in terms of selling software internationally, and while I never did make the jump into business, I saw that I was only going to be selling into the US; anybody out of the country who wanted a copy would have to make, shall we say, alternate arrangements that I knew nothing about.)