You don't have to be able to explain an effect to tell that it exists.
Your claim is untestable not because we don't have instruments to detect it, but because:
a) It's vague. What do you mean by "energy is moving"? That single statement is, basically, total nonsense. You have to actually show the existence of whatever it is you mean by "energy" before it can make any sense.
b) It doesn't affect the outside world. People can make themselves "feel" pretty much anything. Mind over body is pretty well-established, so the fact that you can make your fingers tingle is not a "supernatural" event. The sense of touch is all in the brain anyway, as feeling is simply nerve impulses conducted from your skin to your brain via the spinal column. I can feel like I'm flying when dreaming, and it feels completely realistic. But that doesn't mean I'm hovering in the air and defying the laws of gravity.
"Healing" on the other hand, can be demonstrated. However, it's a bit unethical to do so, as actual injury must take place first.
A friend of mine could detect radar. At one point he was working on a radar unit when it was activated and he survived. After that point he claimed to be sensitive to it. The funny thing was that when driving with him he was an awesome radar detector. It was uncanny how he would say there's a cop with a radar ahead on roads he'd never been on and he'd always be right. I'm still somewhat skeptical myself though.
Define "always be right". Is that actually true, or do you simply not remember when he was wrong?
Tossing out of negative or non-noteworthy results is one of the most common forms of selection bias. Basically, only the notable events (where he was right) get remembered, while the mundane stuff (where he was wrong) gets ignored or forgotten.
For example, this sort of bias is why many people are fooled by psychics. They only remember the hits, not the misses. And what can be a "hit" is very wide indeed.
Pedantic. I meant low power fields, other than the obvious ones like light and high powered radar and such, of course.
Wifi, for example, is well outside the threshold of human perception. As would be cell phone signals. An old TV set actually throws off more radiation than Wifi does.
Hell, I once had a refrigerator that would trigger an electrical circuit detector (the kind that you can hold near an outlet to see if it's live) from 5 feet away. The same detector needed to be within half an inch of an outlet to work.
EM signals are simply everywhere, if somebody were truly sensitive to this sort of thing, they'd probably simply be dead from overstimulation.
Being able to sense electromagnetic fields, using no devices or other assistance, in a double blind trial, would definitely be worthy of the $1,000,000 from JREF.
Errr... What? Swiping a card takes far less time than paying with cash. Seconds, really.
Also, credit cards don't have PINs. Most of the time these days, they don't even require you to sign a slip anymore. At my local gas station I've paid for up to $30 without having to sign a single thing. Takes 10 seconds, max.
Seeing somebody pay with cash followed by having the illiterate idiot behind the counter try to make change when she can't even count properly always makes everybody else in the line groan.
These are people we're talking about, not governments. You're only wishing harm on regular people.
Those regular people are ultimately in charge of their government and their destiny. So if this harms them, then good. That's the goal. To force them to change.
We are talking IE6 here, it is a decade old by now. Do you still use 10 year old PC's? Do you use 10 year old cars?
Firstly, many, many people use 10 year old cars. Not as many use 10 year old computers, I grant you, but cars can last for 30-40 years or more.
Secondly, IE6 is only a tad over 8 years old. It came out in the latter half of 2001.
Really, how can you standup and claim your earned your keep when you still haven't managed to retire IE6. Do you still have a punch card reader for that essential piece of accounting software? Still use floppies because you might need one? Have word perfect installed for an old word file?
I've worked for very large companies before. And yes, punch card readers are still used in some industries. And yes, floppies are still used. And yes, Word Perfect is still used.
Big corporations don't work the way you think they do. Most of them make money by, oddly enough, not paying for things. If that 10 year old computer running 10 year old software does the job, then they will let it sit there and keep doing its job until it *needs* to be upgraded.
You don't upgrade simply because there is an available upgrade. Upgrades cost money, and every dime you spend has to produce results in some fashion. Spending money in order to "not make any more money" is generally money that you should not have spent.
That said, upgrades do make sense, but only as part of larger strategies. You don't upgrade simply because you can. That way lies never-ending maintenance costs.
Admins are to afraid of having to say to their boss "why yes sir, the system is running perfectly but I still need resources to make sure it keeps doing that in the future"
True, but that's mainly because this is a lie and we both know it.
Once you have the system working, it will work that way until the hardware fails. You don't need to continually upgrade it to make it continue to work.
You only need to continually upgrade a system that is continually doing new things. A developer's box needs upgrades. The corporate user's box who does research using the web needs upgrades. The servers? Generally they don't need anything more than security fixes. They get upgraded when they get replaced or when the upgrade can be worked into a larger project. Upgrading solely for the sake of upgrading makes no sense.
Kind of sad, since it shows that some people are too stupid to realize that proof is just ABV/2.
That was sort of the point of my original conversation.
Proof = ABV * 2, but only in the United States. In the United Kingdom, Proof = 7/4 * ABV. Meaning that pure ethanol is 175 degrees proof in the UK, but 200 proof in the US. A vodka that US people would call 80 proof would only be 70 proof in the UK.
Proof is basically an historical measurement only, and here in the US we don't even have the correct ratio to make it historically accurate. 7:4 is the correct ratio for the gunpowder explanation, not 2:1. So proof, as you use it, is totally meaningless.
Actually, he used a percentage measurement. Which is valid on both "sides of the pond", as well as anywhere else in the universe that has "math".
Most people measure alcohol in percentage ABV. Only old-timers use "proof".
And "degrees proof" is only really used in the UK, despite it making no sense. "Degrees" of what, exactly? In America, it's just "proof", if it's used at all. Usually it ain't, as places that require labeling of ABV require a percentage measurement. Nowhere requires a "proof" to be put on there, but it is generally allowed.
Law enforcement needs to be held to a higher standard
Higher standard than what though? There's nothing illegal, immoral, or in any way wrong about somebody pointing a FLIR camera at your house. What "standard" do you propose to apply to prevent a policeman from doing something that is in no way wrong for any private citizen to do?
What you are suggesting strikes me as absurd. You're basically saying that it would be in some way a violation for a cop to point an FLIR camera at a house, but not a violation for a citizen to do the exact same action while the cop looks over his shoulder.
Now, I do grant you that there is a difference between pointing a camera at a single building because of "information received" vs. flying over neighborhoods in helicopters with a FLIR camera searching for heat sources indiscriminately. The former is fine by me, the latter is not, mainly because the latter is not about enforcing the law, it's about using anti-drug-laws to produce income sources for the police department themselves.
That's the craziest interpretation of "in plain view" I think I've heard. Wiretapping equipment is cheap so it should it be available to the local police without a warrant because, in your estimation, we can "see" the electronic signals with equipment cheaply?
To take the argument to its absurdity, crowbars are cheap so the police should be able to bust into your house without a warrant?
Your arguments are absurd, the original argument wasn't.
A private citizen can legally stand on the street and point a thermal imaging device at your house. Furthermore, such devices are relatively easy to get and cheap.
Wiretapping is not legal for a private citizen to do. Breaking into your house with a crowbar is not legal for a private citizen to do.
The short of it is that if it's legal and relatively easy for any average joe to do, then why should the cops have to jump through hoops to do the same thing?
Thermal imaging is a bit trickier. Frankly, I have no problem with the cops doing it, as any Joe could do the same. However, I have a problem with the law that makes them want to do it in the first place (marijuana should be legal, IMO).
GROWER PROTIP: Ordinary glass blocks infrared. Line the external walls with sheets of glass and voila, FLIR cameras see nothing. You still need to vent the heat out somewhere though, so I recommend running cold water pipes out into the ground somewhere. This is only if you're serious, of course.
Or if BBC went to the future to bring back to our time a superior codec that uses a lower bit rate but produces superior image.
No, the same codec, with a different algorithm, can make the same difference. Encoding schemes today are all about the perceptual filtering.
That is, when you're encoding something, you have to pick the bits you want to keep and the bits that you can toss away (but which the viewer won't notice). However, this is not a defined thing, you can use any algorithm you choose. Thus, "quality" is not an objective and measurable thing, it's a subjective assessment based on the viewer.
So if you have an algorithm that is good at deciding what people probably won't notice, then you can get a better quality for the same bitrate. If it's extremely good, you can sometimes get a better quality at a lower bitrate. And so forth. But the codec, the method of encoding and decoding, remains the same.
Facebook has, up until now, had an expectation of privacy. Generally, posts on Facebook stay visible only to your friends.
Facebook did recently change this default setting, however it's only a matter of time before somebody sues hell out of FB for not maintaining their expectations of privacy.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just saying what's gonna happen.
New York came up with a workaround. Since Amazon lets people be "affiliates", they passed a law that says if you have an affiliate in the state, then that constitutes a physical presence, which means Amazon must collect sales taxes on all sales to New Yorkers.
Amazon responded by saying "fine, we won't have any affiliates in New York then" and cut them all off.
New York said "hey, no fair, you didn't cave like everybody else did, time for angry legal action!!".
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have to be able to explain an effect to tell that it exists.
Your claim is untestable not because we don't have instruments to detect it, but because:
a) It's vague. What do you mean by "energy is moving"? That single statement is, basically, total nonsense. You have to actually show the existence of whatever it is you mean by "energy" before it can make any sense.
b) It doesn't affect the outside world. People can make themselves "feel" pretty much anything. Mind over body is pretty well-established, so the fact that you can make your fingers tingle is not a "supernatural" event. The sense of touch is all in the brain anyway, as feeling is simply nerve impulses conducted from your skin to your brain via the spinal column. I can feel like I'm flying when dreaming, and it feels completely realistic. But that doesn't mean I'm hovering in the air and defying the laws of gravity.
"Healing" on the other hand, can be demonstrated. However, it's a bit unethical to do so, as actual injury must take place first.
There's always a market in selling cheap things to stupid people for too much money.
PROTIP: Chicken wire blocks WiFi signals particularly well. Cover an area with it and you have a really good Faraday cage for WiFi.
A friend of mine could detect radar. At one point he was working on a radar unit when it was activated and he survived. After that point he claimed to be sensitive to it. The funny thing was that when driving with him he was an awesome radar detector. It was uncanny how he would say there's a cop with a radar ahead on roads he'd never been on and he'd always be right. I'm still somewhat skeptical myself though.
Define "always be right". Is that actually true, or do you simply not remember when he was wrong?
Tossing out of negative or non-noteworthy results is one of the most common forms of selection bias. Basically, only the notable events (where he was right) get remembered, while the mundane stuff (where he was wrong) gets ignored or forgotten.
For example, this sort of bias is why many people are fooled by psychics. They only remember the hits, not the misses. And what can be a "hit" is very wide indeed.
True, however the 100 milliwatts coming out of your WiFi device isn't quite in the same league as an MRI machine.
Pedantic. I meant low power fields, other than the obvious ones like light and high powered radar and such, of course.
Wifi, for example, is well outside the threshold of human perception. As would be cell phone signals. An old TV set actually throws off more radiation than Wifi does.
Hell, I once had a refrigerator that would trigger an electrical circuit detector (the kind that you can hold near an outlet to see if it's live) from 5 feet away. The same detector needed to be within half an inch of an outlet to work.
EM signals are simply everywhere, if somebody were truly sensitive to this sort of thing, they'd probably simply be dead from overstimulation.
Being able to sense electromagnetic fields, using no devices or other assistance, in a double blind trial, would definitely be worthy of the $1,000,000 from JREF.
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html
Anybody who claims to be sensitive to this sort of thing and who has not won the million bucks is basically a flat-out liar.
Errr... What? Swiping a card takes far less time than paying with cash. Seconds, really.
Also, credit cards don't have PINs. Most of the time these days, they don't even require you to sign a slip anymore. At my local gas station I've paid for up to $30 without having to sign a single thing. Takes 10 seconds, max.
Seeing somebody pay with cash followed by having the illiterate idiot behind the counter try to make change when she can't even count properly always makes everybody else in the line groan.
Having a doctorate in a field doesn't mean you know anything about that field.
Having known many PhD's, I'd say it's quite the reverse, in fact.
Perhaps you should try creating something notable. I've created dozens of articles on Wikipedia. None of them has been deleted.
Most ATMs I see these days don't have deposit capabilities.
Also, the only time I use cash is when I'm bar hopping. Who uses cash these days? Even drive through fast food joints have card swipers on them now.
Yes, seriously. No government can exist without the support (or apathy) of its own people. At least, it cannot exist for very long.
These are people we're talking about, not governments. You're only wishing harm on regular people.
Those regular people are ultimately in charge of their government and their destiny. So if this harms them, then good. That's the goal. To force them to change.
Answer: Empty bottles are sturdier, but full bottles have more mass. Both can exert enough force to crack a human skull.
Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B8CY1-4TVY5PW-1&_user=10&_coverDate=04%2F30%2F2009&_rdoc=8&_fmt=high&_orig=browse&_srch=doc-info(%23toc%2340101%232009%23999839996%23941076%23FLA%23display%23Volume)&_cdi=40101&_sort=d&_docanchor=&_ct=16&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=63643bee356bcb486ed2d2213a3895e2
We are talking IE6 here, it is a decade old by now. Do you still use 10 year old PC's? Do you use 10 year old cars?
Firstly, many, many people use 10 year old cars. Not as many use 10 year old computers, I grant you, but cars can last for 30-40 years or more.
Secondly, IE6 is only a tad over 8 years old. It came out in the latter half of 2001.
Really, how can you standup and claim your earned your keep when you still haven't managed to retire IE6. Do you still have a punch card reader for that essential piece of accounting software? Still use floppies because you might need one? Have word perfect installed for an old word file?
I've worked for very large companies before. And yes, punch card readers are still used in some industries. And yes, floppies are still used. And yes, Word Perfect is still used.
Big corporations don't work the way you think they do. Most of them make money by, oddly enough, not paying for things. If that 10 year old computer running 10 year old software does the job, then they will let it sit there and keep doing its job until it *needs* to be upgraded.
You don't upgrade simply because there is an available upgrade. Upgrades cost money, and every dime you spend has to produce results in some fashion. Spending money in order to "not make any more money" is generally money that you should not have spent.
That said, upgrades do make sense, but only as part of larger strategies. You don't upgrade simply because you can. That way lies never-ending maintenance costs.
Admins are to afraid of having to say to their boss "why yes sir, the system is running perfectly but I still need resources to make sure it keeps doing that in the future"
True, but that's mainly because this is a lie and we both know it.
Once you have the system working, it will work that way until the hardware fails. You don't need to continually upgrade it to make it continue to work.
You only need to continually upgrade a system that is continually doing new things. A developer's box needs upgrades. The corporate user's box who does research using the web needs upgrades. The servers? Generally they don't need anything more than security fixes. They get upgraded when they get replaced or when the upgrade can be worked into a larger project. Upgrading solely for the sake of upgrading makes no sense.
It’s like having a supercomputer to control a toaster. It makes no sense at all.
Plain old toast is so retro. I prefer my toast printed with nice designs and patterns:
http://www.inseq.net/zuse.html :)
Kind of sad, since it shows that some people are too stupid to realize that proof is just ABV/2.
That was sort of the point of my original conversation.
Proof = ABV * 2, but only in the United States. In the United Kingdom, Proof = 7/4 * ABV. Meaning that pure ethanol is 175 degrees proof in the UK, but 200 proof in the US. A vodka that US people would call 80 proof would only be 70 proof in the UK.
Proof is basically an historical measurement only, and here in the US we don't even have the correct ratio to make it historically accurate. 7:4 is the correct ratio for the gunpowder explanation, not 2:1. So proof, as you use it, is totally meaningless.
Actually, he used a percentage measurement. Which is valid on both "sides of the pond", as well as anywhere else in the universe that has "math".
Most people measure alcohol in percentage ABV. Only old-timers use "proof".
And "degrees proof" is only really used in the UK, despite it making no sense. "Degrees" of what, exactly? In America, it's just "proof", if it's used at all. Usually it ain't, as places that require labeling of ABV require a percentage measurement. Nowhere requires a "proof" to be put on there, but it is generally allowed.
Even then they'd be fine as long as they don't also plant beans all over the island.
Law enforcement needs to be held to a higher standard
Higher standard than what though? There's nothing illegal, immoral, or in any way wrong about somebody pointing a FLIR camera at your house. What "standard" do you propose to apply to prevent a policeman from doing something that is in no way wrong for any private citizen to do?
What you are suggesting strikes me as absurd. You're basically saying that it would be in some way a violation for a cop to point an FLIR camera at a house, but not a violation for a citizen to do the exact same action while the cop looks over his shoulder.
Now, I do grant you that there is a difference between pointing a camera at a single building because of "information received" vs. flying over neighborhoods in helicopters with a FLIR camera searching for heat sources indiscriminately. The former is fine by me, the latter is not, mainly because the latter is not about enforcing the law, it's about using anti-drug-laws to produce income sources for the police department themselves.
That's the craziest interpretation of "in plain view" I think I've heard. Wiretapping equipment is cheap so it should it be available to the local police without a warrant because, in your estimation, we can "see" the electronic signals with equipment cheaply?
To take the argument to its absurdity, crowbars are cheap so the police should be able to bust into your house without a warrant?
Your arguments are absurd, the original argument wasn't.
A private citizen can legally stand on the street and point a thermal imaging device at your house. Furthermore, such devices are relatively easy to get and cheap.
Wiretapping is not legal for a private citizen to do.
Breaking into your house with a crowbar is not legal for a private citizen to do.
The short of it is that if it's legal and relatively easy for any average joe to do, then why should the cops have to jump through hoops to do the same thing?
Thermal imaging is a bit trickier. Frankly, I have no problem with the cops doing it, as any Joe could do the same. However, I have a problem with the law that makes them want to do it in the first place (marijuana should be legal, IMO).
GROWER PROTIP: Ordinary glass blocks infrared. Line the external walls with sheets of glass and voila, FLIR cameras see nothing. You still need to vent the heat out somewhere though, so I recommend running cold water pipes out into the ground somewhere. This is only if you're serious, of course.
Or if BBC went to the future to bring back to our time a superior codec that uses a lower bit rate but produces superior image.
No, the same codec, with a different algorithm, can make the same difference. Encoding schemes today are all about the perceptual filtering.
That is, when you're encoding something, you have to pick the bits you want to keep and the bits that you can toss away (but which the viewer won't notice). However, this is not a defined thing, you can use any algorithm you choose. Thus, "quality" is not an objective and measurable thing, it's a subjective assessment based on the viewer.
So if you have an algorithm that is good at deciding what people probably won't notice, then you can get a better quality for the same bitrate. If it's extremely good, you can sometimes get a better quality at a lower bitrate. And so forth. But the codec, the method of encoding and decoding, remains the same.
Facebook has, up until now, had an expectation of privacy. Generally, posts on Facebook stay visible only to your friends.
Facebook did recently change this default setting, however it's only a matter of time before somebody sues hell out of FB for not maintaining their expectations of privacy.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just saying what's gonna happen.
Okay, so a three dimensional pizza would be a calzone, but what would a four-dimensional pizza look like?
More importantly, on a four-dimensional pizza, can you fill the crust with cheese?
Yeah, I never will understand these youngsters...
New York came up with a workaround. Since Amazon lets people be "affiliates", they passed a law that says if you have an affiliate in the state, then that constitutes a physical presence, which means Amazon must collect sales taxes on all sales to New Yorkers.
Amazon responded by saying "fine, we won't have any affiliates in New York then" and cut them all off.
New York said "hey, no fair, you didn't cave like everybody else did, time for angry legal action!!".
That's the basic gist of it.