On the other hand, one of the problem is that bubbles look very much like booms on the way up. So sure, back out of anything growing rapidly and you're almost certain to avoid all bubbles. You're also going to miss out on a ton of profit when it's not a bubble. Not to mention everybody thinks they're smarter than everyone else and will back out when it starts losing money. That is why the stock market crashes, it's not a stable system. Suddenly you pass some sort of critical threshold of people leaving and the stock dropping, then it starts accelerating like crazy until some real economics like book value stops it.
I think Homer survives because the Simpsons are frozen in time - if you witnessed live actors he'd lose touch with the age group or just seem like a retard who hasn't changed in 20 years. Instead he's still the classic middle aged dad who can keep going for many more seasons, while Harry Potter has changed from a kid to teen to adult now in the closing movies. The only reason I can think of why Buffy rates so high is Sarah Michelle Gellar, the role itself is hardly that awe-inspiring.
Seriously, when is something going to be done about these guys? Their business model is built on "it costs more in legal fees for people to fight these accusations than to settle with us out of court so they'll just pay up" which, really, amounts to extortion.
So if you feel for good reason you have been wronged for $x, but a full trial would cost $y where $y >> $x, what would you do: a) Eat the loss because it'd be extortion to pursue it in court b) Offer to settle for what you think you might get in court c) Insist on a trial even though the only ones winning are the lawyers
Imagine the neighbor's kids kicked a ball through your living room window, pure accident and all civil liability. Only by the most absurd logic would you not demand that he pay because if he decides to fight in court then the cost of fighting the accusations costs more than replacing the window. You could of course sue and refuse to settle it out of court, but what sense would that make? And least sense of all would just paying it yourself and let the neighborhood kids know they can break as many windows as they like be.
Also I think the plaintiff would aim a court decision more between $150,000 or $1.5 million though from what we've seen with prior cases that go to court where the individual is found guilty.
Not so sure about the court decision, but they'll almost certainly sue for the maximum of $150,000/work. Obviously they are going for a min-max strategy here and they want a lawsuit to look as unappealing as possible.
Actually, from my experiments with a 600,000 SCO sauce any chili takes a second or two to start burning while strong spirits start instantly. So I figure you will taste the alcohol, and it might be the last thing you taste for a while...
Pointing to the scientific definition may help, but maybe it's better to point out why scientists use it that way. Everyone who takes a prism out in the sunlight can see that the light is split in different colors. That is the practical, the observation without any theory as to how and why. What they don't get from that is the background of why they're seeing those colors in that order, why different materials will bend light differently and so on. That is what scientists call theory, it is the explanation, the theoretical foundation, the underlying principles and not simply a hunch.
Unfortunately, scientists occasionally use the casual meaning of the word themselves, because in the scientific world there's no confusion. "Hmm, that doesn't look right." "Yeah well, I have a theory about that. It might be that..." is hardly that unheard of words. It's just that no one of them has a problem separating "pet theory" from the "generally acknowledged scientific truth" variety. Well at least as close as you get truth, principally gravity could stop working right now. And there's the philosophers who'll argue that potentially we couldn't know "truth" from the Matrix and so on. But if you accept living in a real universe with other people, evolution looks pretty damn solid.
An optical drive is barely noticeable on a 3 Gbps SATA connection. Unless the SSD is really saturating the interface on its own, that won't be a problem. And that's only if you do tons of other stuff, if you just burn something the SSD will be idle 95% of the time.
The real problem is that the moderates aren't out there attacking the zealots with equivalent force. IMHO, moderate Islam needs to start actively working to cut the cancer of fundamentalism out of their ranks, as it's the only way these people will finally be marginalized.
I'll tell you where the moderates are, they're shit scared of Taliban as well. Look up some of the news, for example here they killed 93 people in a terrorist attack on a mosque on Friday. A mosque. You don't have to be white or Christian to be a target, anybody who is not fundamentalist enough is a target. I'd rather try reasoning with a rabid dog than these brain-washed suicide bombers, because you know they'll only hold up the Qu'ran, say that you have fallen from Allah and blow the shit out of you.
The robots.txt file is ignored if the final target is not in the domain. Thanks for the header-reminder.
Time for a dummy redirect inside your site first? Disallow that directory in robots.txt and robots should stop following before they get redirected to the final site.
At least here in Norway, which I must admit has experienced an extreme rise in wealth over the last decades due to oil, I would say that by far most people trying to appeal to my empathy in daily life don't deserve it. I'm very fond of our many social securities for the disabled, elderly, unemployed, our socialized health care and pay a pretty penny in taxes without grumbling too much - but the flip side of that is that I know that people are also quite well taken care of. What I get in my daily life is usually obnoxious rom (that's gypsies with a PR touch) beggars who are really organized bands placing them out, protecting their territory and faking their desperation. The same bands who are grossly overrepresented in our criminal statistics by the way, supporting them is supporting organized crime.
To continue on that, I have very little empathy with criminals and very much empathy with victims, when we create what is probably the world's most luxurious prison I feel like puking. Not because I'm in favor of stuffing them in a dark hole with a mud floor, but because I want that money put into police protection and getting more criminals off the streets. Quantity, not quality absolutely does matter in this respect. The punishments in this country is an insult to everyone who has been beaten, mugged, raped or murdered. The money spent is an insult to all those elderly who spent their best years rebuilding after WWII and need help on their elder days and instead we spend it on the people bent on tearing society down instead of building it up.
I'm very much in favor of programs that provide opportunity, like for example here in Norway there is a lot of public higher education and a government sponsored grant/loan institution which means that practically everyone that wants to can take an education. I come from a family that would no doubt have sponsored a college education and a college fund, so quite likely I'm losing money by this being a public system. But at the same time I feel very empathic to children that grow up in less fortunate families or perhaps more egoistic families who don't have that backing. I know it's not fully that black and white in the US either, but your background definitely has much more impact there than here.
What I notice is that in the US there's much stronger opposition to any form of government "empathy" so to speak, Obama would be a right-wing extremist in most European coutries. Everybody should fend for themselves, and if they can't they should beg for private charity. My impression is that both for people and corporations it's whatever position is most opportunistic at the moment though. Here on the other hand the government should provide most of the first and second level of Maslow's pyramid, physiological and safety needs. Maybe it's just because we're richer, but I don't think so because I see the difference in our neighboring countries too which aren't that rich - not richer than the US anyway. I'm not sure whether it's because we're more empathic and just accept this as natural, or more collectivist and figure that deciding it by popular vote is justification enough. Either way, it also lowers the need for personal empathy, I don't give two bucks to a beggar because I give that and much more each day through taxes.
The other big difference is in health care, the US seems very happy to meter our medical punishment for bad lifestyle. While we tax the hell out of alcohol, tobacco and all other sorts of unhealthy things here, we don't ever withhold medical help. Despite being very big on individuality and freedom of life, if you want a band aid either from charity or the government then most seem to think your life should be splayed wide open for inspection to determine if you're worthy. Here there's a different interaction between the health system and patient, trust me the doctors will give you straight talk about what you are doing to your body but we won't play t
Yeah... I wish these stories would come with an estimated hourly wage by any winnings minus any costs and fees divided by the number of hours you had to work for it. Some people are like "I saved $200, so I saved $200" and I say "And you spent a full work week getting it." and they're like "So?" Yeah you get that extra crispy feeling of revenge but my experience is in such a process you end up spending a lot of your own time that you're never going to get compensated for. I have been a consultant for quite a few years and is quite used to knowing what an hour's billing is worth to me personally pre- and post-taxes. If I have to fight you half an hour for pocket change, it's just not worth it, I'd just work and bill half an hour more. I don't have quite that flexibility anymore but I still know very well what an hour is worth.
Well, according to the WP page on clear air turbulence: "Clear air turbulence[1] weather, sometimes colloquially referred to as "air pockets", is the erratic movement of air masses in the absence of any visual cues, such as clouds. Clear-air turbulence is caused when bodies of air moving at widely different speeds meet; at high altitudes of around 7,000-12,000 metres (23,000-39,000 ft)". I guess at 41000 feet this means they pass above most turbulence. Having been aboard some jumbojets I must say they appear very stable under normal flight, you probably need more stabilizers than on the ground but even there it's windy and such.
Not everyone you meet has aids and does nothing to prevent its spread.
So yeah why not tackle porn?
It's the catholic solution. No porn = no dirty thoughts = abstinence and monogamy = no AIDS problem. No points for finding flaws in that logic, even WoW or slashdot would be more effective.
But it's a long time since computers just draw something up on the screen. One little error in a video decoding will keep throwing off every frame until the next keyframe. One error in a shader computation can cause a huge difference in the output. What coordinates have an error tolerance after all is transformed and textured and tessellated and whatnot? An error in the Z-buffer will throw one object in front of another instead of behind it. The number of operations where you don't get massive screen corruption is not that high.
Just like science doesn't disprove I saw a spaghetti monster abducting cows and taking them to outer space this very afternoon in Lisbon. You cannot just come up with any wild delusional dream, and tell the scientist: "Well, now prove that this never happen." That's not the scientific method. You first have to give tangible proof your self about your theory that can be either based in previous accepted scientific theories or must be able to be reproduced for further analysis. If you don't, scientists not only normally don't have the tools to refute what you are saying, but mostly, they don't have to care about what you claim. It's just a wild dream, a lie, psychotropic drugs... whatever.
Or... the truth? I think we're getting close to the core of the issue, which is whether the only things that are true are the things that have passed a rigorous scientific review. Or can there be events that defy the understanding of the observer, is caused by powers outside his control and are none the less true? Does the fact that science says "insufficient evidence" make it false? Or will the scientific method simply always err conservatively? Imagine as a thought experiment that you get sent back to the death of Christ. Imagine you observe a true case of divine intervention as he is resurrected from the dead. No matter what you do, no matter if you video tape it and get to bring all the EKG, EEG and other machinery in the world, no matter how much data you collect, no matter how certain you are not being deceived I swear it would never get scientifically accepted. Every other possibility no matter how bizarre will be considered except the possibility that you observed something supernatural. Trying to find the supernatural with the scientific method is like trying to find the color blue with a microphone, true or false you'll find nothing.
1) Those that believe in religion in addition to science 2) Those that believe in religion instead of science
I mean, science does not prove or disprove whether there is a soul or if there's an afterlife or any of those things that means we're more than flesh and blood who doesn't have any other purpose than our own. These people may call themselves spiritual but they're not threatened by scientific discovery because the divine exists outside time and space and the realm of science.
Then there are the people who care very much about worldly "facts" or perhaps "axioms" are the word since they exist without proof only by Holy Scripture, like that the world is 6000 years old, all men come from Adam shaped of mud and Eve shaped from a rib, the earth is the center of the universe and so on. They are hostile to science because science is dangerous to their religion, every time evidence builds that these facts are wrong it threatens their religion as a whole. To them the Bible or Qur'an can't be wrong, where science and religion clash science must yield.
I think a very nice follow-up question to that study would be: "If something that is established religious doctrine in your belief was contradicted by observational evidence, what would you be more inclined to believe?" That is where I think scientists and many religious folks would go their separate ways.
it is a fallacy to continue to believe man can do more than a robot in near-earth space. Anything a human can do could have been by remote control.
No. Repairing complex instruments like the Hubble couldn't have been done by robot.
Isolated speaking, I have no doubt the Hubble missions were done cheaper and better by men. But we have also put a huge, huge cost in developing and sustaining the space shuttle program. If we didn't have the space shuttles, could we have developed those robotics? Launched another Hubble to take its place? The Shuttle has cost about 1.3 billion dollars on average for each launch, the build costs for Hubble was at the best source I could find about 2.5 billion dollars. None of which really give us the marginal costs of another shuttle launch or another Hubble, but going with what I got for every two service missions we could have sent up a new one. A billion is more than the whole total of the Mars rovers including all the mission extensions. Even if the shuttle can do some things humans can't, it's still a very expensive way to solve a problem.
I think it boils down to this: If we send humans to the Moon, they'll be remarkably like the humans Mark I we sent in 1969, while the most advanced robot we could have sent then was probably a digital watch. In 2050, if we still send humans for a round three they'll still be very similar to the 1969 humans, while if we send robots the next generation is likely to be much, much better than the last one. That means to a country running a space program, which hopefully have a little bit of foresight beyond this one mission, robots are still the way to go.
Also, I think many people grossly exaggerate the "doing" part of science. We can design the mission down here, we can do the analysis down here, only very rarely does a scientist discover something to change his plans so on the fly that we couldn't tell the robot to go back and do it again tomorrow. If the robot lacks the tools, it's very likely a human would also lack the tools. The execution can be a fairly set of simple menial tasks like collect rocks, photograph every sample, put in processing chamber, wait for analysis - no great intelligence required. It's not like we're going to bring a huge lab of equipment we might use if and only if we found something interesting, humans or not.
By your logic I am a software pirate mastermind, all the computers in my house are using software I never paid for, I even play DVDs with software that I did not pay for.
Sadly, the latter makes you a criminal in the US (DMCA) and EU (EUCD, will have a different local name in each country) at least...
it's like stealing the movie, making a hundred copies, and then getting all your friends together to stand on every street corner and hand out free copies.
Most people upload about 1.0x, that means they downloaded 1,0x and then uploaded the same back and the one extra copy created by these events is the one they kept themselves. That each person in the swarm made 100 copies is obvious nonsense, the numbers don't add up. If there's 10000 people in a swarm, there's roughly 10000 copies and 1 copy/person. The rest is just legal baloney to make a person guilty not just of his copyright infringement, but of his peers' copyright infringement and his peers' peers' copyright infringement and so on without end.
Why DRM-free? I thought you just cared about it being a click away. "DRM-free" is code for "easy to pirate".
Probably because my setup is about 99.9% certain to fail their system requirements, for one. I'm sure there'll be other catches which means it won't "just work" where, when and how I want. Normal H.264 plays in my regular movie player both under Linux and Windows and if I should bother to get a Mac in the future, why should I settle for anything less? iTunes doesn't work worth shit under Linux but at least any AACs I buy there work just fine. I can back them up any way I want, drag them to an mp3 player or CD or whatnot. I see their pathetic attempts at "Managed Copy", I wouldn't trust anything with DRM beyond the rental price of it working right here and now.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, one of the problem is that bubbles look very much like booms on the way up. So sure, back out of anything growing rapidly and you're almost certain to avoid all bubbles. You're also going to miss out on a ton of profit when it's not a bubble. Not to mention everybody thinks they're smarter than everyone else and will back out when it starts losing money. That is why the stock market crashes, it's not a stable system. Suddenly you pass some sort of critical threshold of people leaving and the stock dropping, then it starts accelerating like crazy until some real economics like book value stops it.
I think Homer survives because the Simpsons are frozen in time - if you witnessed live actors he'd lose touch with the age group or just seem like a retard who hasn't changed in 20 years. Instead he's still the classic middle aged dad who can keep going for many more seasons, while Harry Potter has changed from a kid to teen to adult now in the closing movies. The only reason I can think of why Buffy rates so high is Sarah Michelle Gellar, the role itself is hardly that awe-inspiring.
Seriously, when is something going to be done about these guys? Their business model is built on "it costs more in legal fees for people to fight these accusations than to settle with us out of court so they'll just pay up" which, really, amounts to extortion.
So if you feel for good reason you have been wronged for $x, but a full trial would cost $y where $y >> $x, what would you do:
a) Eat the loss because it'd be extortion to pursue it in court
b) Offer to settle for what you think you might get in court
c) Insist on a trial even though the only ones winning are the lawyers
Imagine the neighbor's kids kicked a ball through your living room window, pure accident and all civil liability. Only by the most absurd logic would you not demand that he pay because if he decides to fight in court then the cost of fighting the accusations costs more than replacing the window. You could of course sue and refuse to settle it out of court, but what sense would that make? And least sense of all would just paying it yourself and let the neighborhood kids know they can break as many windows as they like be.
Also I think the plaintiff would aim a court decision more between $150,000 or $1.5 million though from what we've seen with prior cases that go to court where the individual is found guilty.
Not so sure about the court decision, but they'll almost certainly sue for the maximum of $150,000/work. Obviously they are going for a min-max strategy here and they want a lawsuit to look as unappealing as possible.
I count 0, 1, 10, 11...
I think a bragr won the nerd bragging contest...
Actually, from my experiments with a 600,000 SCO sauce any chili takes a second or two to start burning while strong spirits start instantly. So I figure you will taste the alcohol, and it might be the last thing you taste for a while...
Pointing to the scientific definition may help, but maybe it's better to point out why scientists use it that way. Everyone who takes a prism out in the sunlight can see that the light is split in different colors. That is the practical, the observation without any theory as to how and why. What they don't get from that is the background of why they're seeing those colors in that order, why different materials will bend light differently and so on. That is what scientists call theory, it is the explanation, the theoretical foundation, the underlying principles and not simply a hunch.
Unfortunately, scientists occasionally use the casual meaning of the word themselves, because in the scientific world there's no confusion. "Hmm, that doesn't look right." "Yeah well, I have a theory about that. It might be that..." is hardly that unheard of words. It's just that no one of them has a problem separating "pet theory" from the "generally acknowledged scientific truth" variety. Well at least as close as you get truth, principally gravity could stop working right now. And there's the philosophers who'll argue that potentially we couldn't know "truth" from the Matrix and so on. But if you accept living in a real universe with other people, evolution looks pretty damn solid.
*Please* patent it.
An optical drive is barely noticeable on a 3 Gbps SATA connection. Unless the SSD is really saturating the interface on its own, that won't be a problem. And that's only if you do tons of other stuff, if you just burn something the SSD will be idle 95% of the time.
What, is it now Darwin's fault the US court system will protect Darwin Award candidates? Or in a more classic form....
The real problem is that the moderates aren't out there attacking the zealots with equivalent force. IMHO, moderate Islam needs to start actively working to cut the cancer of fundamentalism out of their ranks, as it's the only way these people will finally be marginalized.
I'll tell you where the moderates are, they're shit scared of Taliban as well. Look up some of the news, for example here they killed 93 people in a terrorist attack on a mosque on Friday. A mosque. You don't have to be white or Christian to be a target, anybody who is not fundamentalist enough is a target. I'd rather try reasoning with a rabid dog than these brain-washed suicide bombers, because you know they'll only hold up the Qu'ran, say that you have fallen from Allah and blow the shit out of you.
The robots.txt file is ignored if the final target is not in the domain. Thanks for the header-reminder.
Time for a dummy redirect inside your site first? Disallow that directory in robots.txt and robots should stop following before they get redirected to the final site.
At least here in Norway, which I must admit has experienced an extreme rise in wealth over the last decades due to oil, I would say that by far most people trying to appeal to my empathy in daily life don't deserve it. I'm very fond of our many social securities for the disabled, elderly, unemployed, our socialized health care and pay a pretty penny in taxes without grumbling too much - but the flip side of that is that I know that people are also quite well taken care of. What I get in my daily life is usually obnoxious rom (that's gypsies with a PR touch) beggars who are really organized bands placing them out, protecting their territory and faking their desperation. The same bands who are grossly overrepresented in our criminal statistics by the way, supporting them is supporting organized crime.
To continue on that, I have very little empathy with criminals and very much empathy with victims, when we create what is probably the world's most luxurious prison I feel like puking. Not because I'm in favor of stuffing them in a dark hole with a mud floor, but because I want that money put into police protection and getting more criminals off the streets. Quantity, not quality absolutely does matter in this respect. The punishments in this country is an insult to everyone who has been beaten, mugged, raped or murdered. The money spent is an insult to all those elderly who spent their best years rebuilding after WWII and need help on their elder days and instead we spend it on the people bent on tearing society down instead of building it up.
I'm very much in favor of programs that provide opportunity, like for example here in Norway there is a lot of public higher education and a government sponsored grant/loan institution which means that practically everyone that wants to can take an education. I come from a family that would no doubt have sponsored a college education and a college fund, so quite likely I'm losing money by this being a public system. But at the same time I feel very empathic to children that grow up in less fortunate families or perhaps more egoistic families who don't have that backing. I know it's not fully that black and white in the US either, but your background definitely has much more impact there than here.
What I notice is that in the US there's much stronger opposition to any form of government "empathy" so to speak, Obama would be a right-wing extremist in most European coutries. Everybody should fend for themselves, and if they can't they should beg for private charity. My impression is that both for people and corporations it's whatever position is most opportunistic at the moment though. Here on the other hand the government should provide most of the first and second level of Maslow's pyramid, physiological and safety needs. Maybe it's just because we're richer, but I don't think so because I see the difference in our neighboring countries too which aren't that rich - not richer than the US anyway. I'm not sure whether it's because we're more empathic and just accept this as natural, or more collectivist and figure that deciding it by popular vote is justification enough. Either way, it also lowers the need for personal empathy, I don't give two bucks to a beggar because I give that and much more each day through taxes.
The other big difference is in health care, the US seems very happy to meter our medical punishment for bad lifestyle. While we tax the hell out of alcohol, tobacco and all other sorts of unhealthy things here, we don't ever withhold medical help. Despite being very big on individuality and freedom of life, if you want a band aid either from charity or the government then most seem to think your life should be splayed wide open for inspection to determine if you're worthy. Here there's a different interaction between the health system and patient, trust me the doctors will give you straight talk about what you are doing to your body but we won't play t
Yeah... I wish these stories would come with an estimated hourly wage by any winnings minus any costs and fees divided by the number of hours you had to work for it. Some people are like "I saved $200, so I saved $200" and I say "And you spent a full work week getting it." and they're like "So?" Yeah you get that extra crispy feeling of revenge but my experience is in such a process you end up spending a lot of your own time that you're never going to get compensated for. I have been a consultant for quite a few years and is quite used to knowing what an hour's billing is worth to me personally pre- and post-taxes. If I have to fight you half an hour for pocket change, it's just not worth it, I'd just work and bill half an hour more. I don't have quite that flexibility anymore but I still know very well what an hour is worth.
Well, according to the WP page on clear air turbulence: "Clear air turbulence[1] weather, sometimes colloquially referred to as "air pockets", is the erratic movement of air masses in the absence of any visual cues, such as clouds. Clear-air turbulence is caused when bodies of air moving at widely different speeds meet; at high altitudes of around 7,000-12,000 metres (23,000-39,000 ft)". I guess at 41000 feet this means they pass above most turbulence. Having been aboard some jumbojets I must say they appear very stable under normal flight, you probably need more stabilizers than on the ground but even there it's windy and such.
Not everyone you meet has aids and does nothing to prevent its spread.
So yeah why not tackle porn?
It's the catholic solution. No porn = no dirty thoughts = abstinence and monogamy = no AIDS problem. No points for finding flaws in that logic, even WoW or slashdot would be more effective.
Clearly written by an ancient slashdotter, so unaware of the real problems in life...
But it's a long time since computers just draw something up on the screen. One little error in a video decoding will keep throwing off every frame until the next keyframe. One error in a shader computation can cause a huge difference in the output. What coordinates have an error tolerance after all is transformed and textured and tessellated and whatnot? An error in the Z-buffer will throw one object in front of another instead of behind it. The number of operations where you don't get massive screen corruption is not that high.
Just like science doesn't disprove I saw a spaghetti monster abducting cows and taking them to outer space this very afternoon in Lisbon. You cannot just come up with any wild delusional dream, and tell the scientist: "Well, now prove that this never happen." That's not the scientific method. You first have to give tangible proof your self about your theory that can be either based in previous accepted scientific theories or must be able to be reproduced for further analysis. If you don't, scientists not only normally don't have the tools to refute what you are saying, but mostly, they don't have to care about what you claim. It's just a wild dream, a lie, psychotropic drugs ... whatever.
Or... the truth? I think we're getting close to the core of the issue, which is whether the only things that are true are the things that have passed a rigorous scientific review. Or can there be events that defy the understanding of the observer, is caused by powers outside his control and are none the less true? Does the fact that science says "insufficient evidence" make it false? Or will the scientific method simply always err conservatively? Imagine as a thought experiment that you get sent back to the death of Christ. Imagine you observe a true case of divine intervention as he is resurrected from the dead. No matter what you do, no matter if you video tape it and get to bring all the EKG, EEG and other machinery in the world, no matter how much data you collect, no matter how certain you are not being deceived I swear it would never get scientifically accepted. Every other possibility no matter how bizarre will be considered except the possibility that you observed something supernatural. Trying to find the supernatural with the scientific method is like trying to find the color blue with a microphone, true or false you'll find nothing.
I think there are two kinds of spiritual people:
1) Those that believe in religion in addition to science
2) Those that believe in religion instead of science
I mean, science does not prove or disprove whether there is a soul or if there's an afterlife or any of those things that means we're more than flesh and blood who doesn't have any other purpose than our own. These people may call themselves spiritual but they're not threatened by scientific discovery because the divine exists outside time and space and the realm of science.
Then there are the people who care very much about worldly "facts" or perhaps "axioms" are the word since they exist without proof only by Holy Scripture, like that the world is 6000 years old, all men come from Adam shaped of mud and Eve shaped from a rib, the earth is the center of the universe and so on. They are hostile to science because science is dangerous to their religion, every time evidence builds that these facts are wrong it threatens their religion as a whole. To them the Bible or Qur'an can't be wrong, where science and religion clash science must yield.
I think a very nice follow-up question to that study would be: "If something that is established religious doctrine in your belief was contradicted by observational evidence, what would you be more inclined to believe?" That is where I think scientists and many religious folks would go their separate ways.
it is a fallacy to continue to believe man can do more than a robot in near-earth space. Anything a human can do could have been by remote control.
No. Repairing complex instruments like the Hubble couldn't have been done by robot.
Isolated speaking, I have no doubt the Hubble missions were done cheaper and better by men. But we have also put a huge, huge cost in developing and sustaining the space shuttle program. If we didn't have the space shuttles, could we have developed those robotics? Launched another Hubble to take its place? The Shuttle has cost about 1.3 billion dollars on average for each launch, the build costs for Hubble was at the best source I could find about 2.5 billion dollars. None of which really give us the marginal costs of another shuttle launch or another Hubble, but going with what I got for every two service missions we could have sent up a new one. A billion is more than the whole total of the Mars rovers including all the mission extensions. Even if the shuttle can do some things humans can't, it's still a very expensive way to solve a problem.
I think it boils down to this: If we send humans to the Moon, they'll be remarkably like the humans Mark I we sent in 1969, while the most advanced robot we could have sent then was probably a digital watch. In 2050, if we still send humans for a round three they'll still be very similar to the 1969 humans, while if we send robots the next generation is likely to be much, much better than the last one. That means to a country running a space program, which hopefully have a little bit of foresight beyond this one mission, robots are still the way to go.
Also, I think many people grossly exaggerate the "doing" part of science. We can design the mission down here, we can do the analysis down here, only very rarely does a scientist discover something to change his plans so on the fly that we couldn't tell the robot to go back and do it again tomorrow. If the robot lacks the tools, it's very likely a human would also lack the tools. The execution can be a fairly set of simple menial tasks like collect rocks, photograph every sample, put in processing chamber, wait for analysis - no great intelligence required. It's not like we're going to bring a huge lab of equipment we might use if and only if we found something interesting, humans or not.
By your logic I am a software pirate mastermind, all the computers in my house are using software I never paid for, I even play DVDs with software that I did not pay for.
Sadly, the latter makes you a criminal in the US (DMCA) and EU (EUCD, will have a different local name in each country) at least...
it's like stealing the movie, making a hundred copies, and then getting all your friends together to stand on every street corner and hand out free copies.
Most people upload about 1.0x, that means they downloaded 1,0x and then uploaded the same back and the one extra copy created by these events is the one they kept themselves. That each person in the swarm made 100 copies is obvious nonsense, the numbers don't add up. If there's 10000 people in a swarm, there's roughly 10000 copies and 1 copy/person. The rest is just legal baloney to make a person guilty not just of his copyright infringement, but of his peers' copyright infringement and his peers' peers' copyright infringement and so on without end.
Why DRM-free? I thought you just cared about it being a click away. "DRM-free" is code for "easy to pirate".
Probably because my setup is about 99.9% certain to fail their system requirements, for one. I'm sure there'll be other catches which means it won't "just work" where, when and how I want. Normal H.264 plays in my regular movie player both under Linux and Windows and if I should bother to get a Mac in the future, why should I settle for anything less? iTunes doesn't work worth shit under Linux but at least any AACs I buy there work just fine. I can back them up any way I want, drag them to an mp3 player or CD or whatnot. I see their pathetic attempts at "Managed Copy", I wouldn't trust anything with DRM beyond the rental price of it working right here and now.