Yep. I was in the reserves (Canadian) back when Ontario lowered the drinking age from 21 to 18. One week the bartender at the mess was offhandedly asking me "you're 21, right?" ("sure" -- he didn't say 21 what). The next week - just after they lowered the age - I'm doing clerical work in the office and the sergeant asks "you're 18 aren't you?" Me: "Uh, yes sergeant." "Great. Officers' Mess needs another bartender, you're it."
(At the time, maybe still, you could join the reserves at 16, hence the question. I joined at 17. And fortunately for the officers, I'd been tending bar at my father's parties for a couple of years.;-)
Yep. The stuff they put in gasoline to raise the octane rating, which is what they used to use tetraethyl lead (TEL) for, costs more than tetraethyl lead. Or at least it used to, not much call for TEL these days. (Although it's still used in some avgas formulations, I think.)
Of course if you want to use gas with a low octane rating (and destroy your engine through premature detonation), or use real octane (and pay even bigger bucks), that's your choice (if you can find either).
ECMA is the European Computer Manufacturers Association. The only industry they're interested in is building computers. Not much call for them to produce office software. Most of the members like the OEM discounts they get from Microsoft to preload Windows, so they tend to rubber-stamp, er, bless any "standard" that Microsoft proposes.
No software, including anything from Microsoft, implements that "standard". (You think Microsoft does? Dream on.)
ECMA - the European Computer Manufacturers Association - is pretty much a rubber-stamp body anyway. It is certainly not a standards body like the International Standards Organization.
Sorry, the recollections of an involved party long after the fact do not constitute "well documented". Show me the contemporaneous emails or memos, that's documentation.
I can't imagine why anyone would make up a story like the "N-Ten" story (although who writes it "N-Ten" rather than "N10"? Calling it Windows NIO (or Neo?) would make more sense), but what you quote does not constitute "well documented".
Yes, precisely. Laser was coined as an acronym (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, in turn derived from maser, microwave amplification etc.) but the "-er" ending makes it look like a noun derived from a verb (ie, just as a runner is one who runs, a laser is that which lases). So we "back-derived" the verb "to lase", which means what the stuff in a laser does when it starts emitting stimulated radiation.
English highest evolved language? More like the most practical lowest common denominator!
There's some truth to that. English has never been prissy or stuck up about adopting foreign words, unlike some other languages (*cough* francais *cough*). The language itself is a hybrid of germanic and latin and freely adopts words from indigenous languages everywhere on the planet that the English went (mostly nouns - pajamas (India), boomerang (Australia), kayak (North American Arctic) - although the latter two have been verbed). It also freely adopts made-up words with foreign-language roots (telephone) or from acronyms (laser - from which we back derive the verb "lase") or even code words (compare "tank" vs the German "panzerkampfwagen", the latter being roughly "armoured war wagon", the former being a code used in WW I for the newly developed vehicles, noting the resemblence of the armor plating to water tanks). It's gained widespread use (often in bastardized form) as a trade language.
Even if you speak a language fluently, you may not recognize the written form if it's in an unfamiliar alphabet (or worse, if it's not alphabetic at all but ideographic or hieroglyphic). Would you recognize English if it were written in cuneiform?
(Granted, though, spoken languages tend to mutate faster than written languages. Arguably that isn't true for Goa'uld who are born (hatched? whatever) with ancestral memory. Rebellious slave species might well keep the same spoken language but adopt a new alphabet (or syllabary, etc) as a kind of code.)
How about an explanation for why all the human cultures and aliens across three galaxies all speak English?
It's a little-known and little-understood side effect of radiation emitted by the Gate "flush". It's related technology to the Ancients' knowledge implantation device (the one that zapped O'Neill a couple of times).
(And yes, I just made that up. Obviously it's so we don't waste a half-hour each episode going through language-learning lessons.)
I know about the Fermi Paradox, and the Drake Equation, and so on.
The thing is, all of that is based on assumptions that we have no bloody clue about.
From so-far-observed evidence, we're the only technological species in the universe. This would seem to indicate that either something is wrong with the assumptions Fermi makes, or we're very unobservant. I seriously doubt that Earth contains the only life in the universe, even the only intelligent life (loosely defining intelligence to cover the numerous non-human species that are tool-using and/or seem to have some kind of learned language).
It's possible, though, that developing post-.paleolithic technology is not an evolutionarily stable strategy. I hope not, but going by so-far-observed evidence, it has about a one in several tens of thousands chance of arising (lifespan of neolithic-and-later civilization to date divided by how long higher vertebrates have been around -- not that vertabrate anatomy is a prerequisite, some cephalopods are pretty smart).
Also, the original Drake Equation contains a number of simplifying assumptions that we now know (or are pretty sure) are bogus. Radiation from the galactic core defines a "habitable zone" around the galaxy, so we have to reduce the number of possible stars where life (as we more or less know it) can arise. Life (and habitable planets) needs certain abundances of metals (anything heavier than helium, in astrophysical terms) that will only be found in second or third generation stars (formed from supernovae remnants), which weeds out all stars more than about a third the age of the galaxy, and so on.
We could actually be the first technological species in this galaxy, or perhaps the first visited us over 65 or 200 million years ago and the evidence has been obliterated. (Dates picked for major impact events with significant geologic and ecologic consequences).
Of course all of the above has been raised before to answer Fermi's question ("given assumptions x, y and z, where are they?"). We just don't know which (if any) is the right answer.
Which scientific consensus is that? The only one I'm aware of is that yes, global warming is probably taking place. (And there are a few notable hold outs on that.)
There is no consensus as to whether that warming is due to a slight increase in the solar "constant", increased greenhouse effect, decreased albedo, or space aliens bombarding us with heat rays.
Hell, for all anyone really knows, the increased temperature is raising global CO2 levels rather than vice versa. There are at least three mechanisms for that, probably more.
The galaxy is only 100,000 light years wide, and has existed for billions of years. We've only been listening for 100 years, but where are they?
If we've really been listening for 100 years (we haven't -- unintentionally broadcasting that long maybe, but only listening for about 40) then the size of the galaxy is irrelevant, we've only "listened to" a sphere 200 light years in diameter, 0.2% the size of the galaxy (actually, 80 ly and 0.08% at best, in reality much less).
Start worrying if we haven't heard from them in another, say, 50,000 years.
The Space Race is the race to get self-sustaining human habitations (whether something akin to L5 colonies, terraformed planets or moons, or whatever) in space before civilization collapses down here (from either internal or external forces) to the point where we'll never be able to try it again.
Nobody has won it. Currently we're not even close, and we may even be losing ground.
Exactly. If H2O dominates the greenhouse effect, then changing CH4 and CO2 levels won't make a significant difference. This is especially true if the H2O is non-anthropogenic, since it means that any human tinkering with other greenhouse gases, one way or the other, is insignificant.
If we're really concerned about global warming then perhaps we should be putting up sunshades (either orbital or high-altitude high-albedo aerosols). Or covering (part of) the oceans with a layer of white plastic foam, which will substitute for the melted ice as far as albedo, and reduce evaporative surface.
Ignoring the salinity (because it really messes up the calculations), water at 0C is less dense than water at 4C, so after the ice has melted and the water warms a little more, then yes, the water level will drop.
As far as I know, we still talk about the Theory of Evolution.
No we don't. (Well, maybe you do.) We talk about the fact of evolution, and discuss various theories of how it works, such as Darwin's theory of speciation by natural selection, Lamark's (discredited) theory of inherited acquired characteristics, the punctuated equilibrium theory, and so on.
We also talk about theories of gravity, etc. Does anyone here doubt that gravity exists?
Your first sentence. I know lots of people with guns who don't kill people. I know of people without guns who do kill people.
Also your last sentence. Expecting that banning guns will protect people from gun violence is like expecting that declaring your city a "nuclear free zone" (and I've seen the signs at some cities' limits) will protect it in case of nuclear attack.
The only reason that banning guns could possibly make a difference in protecting people (as you put it, "Black leaders want to protect blacks from gun violence") is if they're a naturally violent society to start with. They may still get into fights but with only less-lethal weapons at hand, they don't kill each other as much. A non-violent society should have no problem with people carrying whatever weapons they want, because they'll only be used in defense against the rare individual who exhibits aberrant violent behaviour.
The sensor is at the bottom to detect anything on the ground that would interfere with the door coming down. If you move the sensor to the top, it is now useless
Above there are a least a half-dozen posts saying the equivalent.
The obvious-to-me solution is to set angled mirrors at the bottom so that the light path (breaking which trips the sensor on most garage doors I'm familiar with) is still at the bottom, but parts edible by raccoons (wires, plastic sensor housings, etc) are not.
I'd patent that except that the fact that a half-dozen slashdot posters can't figure it out is no indication of non-obviousness.
(And yes, lining it all up is tricky, but there are gadgets for helping line up optical systems that go back to homebuilt gas lasers (mid 1960s) and amateur telescopes (hundreds of years?).
In this day and age any scientific dabbling seems to be viewed with suspicion. Sad.
Of course it is. Those with the power (gov't and big money) are terrified at the thought that some young Edison or Tesla wannabe might come up with the next disruptive technology. Mainly they're worried that the next Bill Gates might recognize and capitalize on it before they do, or that scientific inquiry just encourages asking too many questions.
Of course having the Consumer Product Safety Commission ban hobbyist scientific gear is a nice (and maybe even unconcious) cover. Think of the children.
(Please do. Think about the world they're growing up into. Sigh. It's the 21st century, want to know where your flying cars went? The guy that (in an alternate universe) would have invented them wasn't allowed to play with "dangerous" toys as a kid, and now writes computer games.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. I was in the reserves (Canadian) back when Ontario lowered the drinking age from 21 to 18. One week the bartender at the mess was offhandedly asking me "you're 21, right?" ("sure" -- he didn't say 21 what). The next week - just after they lowered the age - I'm doing clerical work in the office and the sergeant asks "you're 18 aren't you?" Me: "Uh, yes sergeant." "Great. Officers' Mess needs another bartender, you're it."
;-)
(At the time, maybe still, you could join the reserves at 16, hence the question. I joined at 17. And fortunately for the officers, I'd been tending bar at my father's parties for a couple of years.
Yep. The stuff they put in gasoline to raise the octane rating, which is what they used to use tetraethyl lead (TEL) for, costs more than tetraethyl lead. Or at least it used to, not much call for TEL these days. (Although it's still used in some avgas formulations, I think.)
Of course if you want to use gas with a low octane rating (and destroy your engine through premature detonation), or use real octane (and pay even bigger bucks), that's your choice (if you can find either).
ECMA is the European Computer Manufacturers Association. The only industry they're interested in is building computers. Not much call for them to produce office software. Most of the members like the OEM discounts they get from Microsoft to preload Windows, so they tend to rubber-stamp, er, bless any "standard" that Microsoft proposes.
Nobody else really pays much attention to them.
No software, including anything from Microsoft, implements that "standard". (You think Microsoft does? Dream on.)
ECMA - the European Computer Manufacturers Association - is pretty much a rubber-stamp body anyway. It is certainly not a standards body like the International Standards Organization.
use the now industry-standard Microsoft format,
What was the ISO-number of that standard again? Oh wait, it doesn't have one. Unlike some others.
Which format did you say was industry standard?
the origins of the name are well documented.
Sorry, the recollections of an involved party long after the fact do not constitute "well documented". Show me the contemporaneous emails or memos, that's documentation.
I can't imagine why anyone would make up a story like the "N-Ten" story (although who writes it "N-Ten" rather than "N10"? Calling it Windows NIO (or Neo?) would make more sense), but what you quote does not constitute "well documented".
That's what I figured it stood for. As in "nice try, but it's not quite there yet". Or maybe it just stood for "nearly there".
Yes, precisely. Laser was coined as an acronym (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, in turn derived from maser, microwave amplification etc.) but the "-er" ending makes it look like a noun derived from a verb (ie, just as a runner is one who runs, a laser is that which lases). So we "back-derived" the verb "to lase", which means what the stuff in a laser does when it starts emitting stimulated radiation.
English highest evolved language? More like the most practical lowest common denominator!
There's some truth to that. English has never been prissy or stuck up about adopting foreign words, unlike some other languages (*cough* francais *cough*). The language itself is a hybrid of germanic and latin and freely adopts words from indigenous languages everywhere on the planet that the English went (mostly nouns - pajamas (India), boomerang (Australia), kayak (North American Arctic) - although the latter two have been verbed). It also freely adopts made-up words with foreign-language roots (telephone) or from acronyms (laser - from which we back derive the verb "lase") or even code words (compare "tank" vs the German "panzerkampfwagen", the latter being roughly "armoured war wagon", the former being a code used in WW I for the newly developed vehicles, noting the resemblence of the armor plating to water tanks). It's gained widespread use (often in bastardized form) as a trade language.
Even if you speak a language fluently, you may not recognize the written form if it's in an unfamiliar alphabet (or worse, if it's not alphabetic at all but ideographic or hieroglyphic). Would you recognize English if it were written in cuneiform?
(Granted, though, spoken languages tend to mutate faster than written languages. Arguably that isn't true for Goa'uld who are born (hatched? whatever) with ancestral memory. Rebellious slave species might well keep the same spoken language but adopt a new alphabet (or syllabary, etc) as a kind of code.)
How about an explanation for why all the human cultures and aliens across three galaxies all speak English?
It's a little-known and little-understood side effect of radiation emitted by the Gate "flush". It's related technology to the Ancients' knowledge implantation device (the one that zapped O'Neill a couple of times).
(And yes, I just made that up. Obviously it's so we don't waste a half-hour each episode going through language-learning lessons.)
I know about the Fermi Paradox, and the Drake Equation, and so on.
The thing is, all of that is based on assumptions that we have no bloody clue about.
From so-far-observed evidence, we're the only technological species in the universe. This would seem to indicate that either something is wrong with the assumptions Fermi makes, or we're very unobservant. I seriously doubt that Earth contains the only life in the universe, even the only intelligent life (loosely defining intelligence to cover the numerous non-human species that are tool-using and/or seem to have some kind of learned language).
It's possible, though, that developing post-.paleolithic technology is not an evolutionarily stable strategy. I hope not, but going by so-far-observed evidence, it has about a one in several tens of thousands chance of arising (lifespan of neolithic-and-later civilization to date divided by how long higher vertebrates have been around -- not that vertabrate anatomy is a prerequisite, some cephalopods are pretty smart).
Also, the original Drake Equation contains a number of simplifying assumptions that we now know (or are pretty sure) are bogus. Radiation from the galactic core defines a "habitable zone" around the galaxy, so we have to reduce the number of possible stars where life (as we more or less know it) can arise. Life (and habitable planets) needs certain abundances of metals (anything heavier than helium, in astrophysical terms) that will only be found in second or third generation stars (formed from supernovae remnants), which weeds out all stars more than about a third the age of the galaxy, and so on.
We could actually be the first technological species in this galaxy, or perhaps the first visited us over 65 or 200 million years ago and the evidence has been obliterated. (Dates picked for major impact events with significant geologic and ecologic consequences).
Of course all of the above has been raised before to answer Fermi's question ("given assumptions x, y and z, where are they?"). We just don't know which (if any) is the right answer.
Which scientific consensus is that? The only one I'm aware of is that yes, global warming is probably taking place. (And there are a few notable hold outs on that.)
There is no consensus as to whether that warming is due to a slight increase in the solar "constant", increased greenhouse effect, decreased albedo, or space aliens bombarding us with heat rays.
Hell, for all anyone really knows, the increased temperature is raising global CO2 levels rather than vice versa. There are at least three mechanisms for that, probably more.
The galaxy is only 100,000 light years wide, and has existed for billions of years. We've only been listening for 100 years, but where are they?
If we've really been listening for 100 years (we haven't -- unintentionally broadcasting that long maybe, but only listening for about 40) then the size of the galaxy is irrelevant, we've only "listened to" a sphere 200 light years in diameter, 0.2% the size of the galaxy (actually, 80 ly and 0.08% at best, in reality much less).
Start worrying if we haven't heard from them in another, say, 50,000 years.
No, you're thinking of the Moon Race.
The Space Race is the race to get self-sustaining human habitations (whether something akin to L5 colonies, terraformed planets or moons, or whatever) in space before civilization collapses down here (from either internal or external forces) to the point where we'll never be able to try it again.
Nobody has won it. Currently we're not even close, and we may even be losing ground.
but H2O is not anthropogenic.
Exactly. If H2O dominates the greenhouse effect, then changing CH4 and CO2 levels won't make a significant difference. This is especially true if the H2O is non-anthropogenic, since it means that any human tinkering with other greenhouse gases, one way or the other, is insignificant.
If we're really concerned about global warming then perhaps we should be putting up sunshades (either orbital or high-altitude high-albedo aerosols). Or covering (part of) the oceans with a layer of white plastic foam, which will substitute for the melted ice as far as albedo, and reduce evaporative surface.
And H2O, which is also a greenhouse gas, eclipses both methane and CO2 put together.
Depends on the ultimate temperature of the water.
Ignoring the salinity (because it really messes up the calculations), water at 0C is less dense than water at 4C, so after the ice has melted and the water warms a little more, then yes, the water level will drop.
As far as I know, we still talk about the Theory of Evolution.
No we don't. (Well, maybe you do.) We talk about the fact of evolution, and discuss various theories of how it works, such as Darwin's theory of speciation by natural selection, Lamark's (discredited) theory of inherited acquired characteristics, the punctuated equilibrium theory, and so on.
We also talk about theories of gravity, etc. Does anyone here doubt that gravity exists?
What doesn't make sense here?
Your first sentence. I know lots of people with guns who don't kill people. I know of people without guns who do kill people.
Also your last sentence. Expecting that banning guns will protect people from gun violence is like expecting that declaring your city a "nuclear free zone" (and I've seen the signs at some cities' limits) will protect it in case of nuclear attack.
The only reason that banning guns could possibly make a difference in protecting people (as you put it, "Black leaders want to protect blacks from gun violence") is if they're a naturally violent society to start with. They may still get into fights but with only less-lethal weapons at hand, they don't kill each other as much. A non-violent society should have no problem with people carrying whatever weapons they want, because they'll only be used in defense against the rare individual who exhibits aberrant violent behaviour.
I'm sure they once called these "booby traps". What's the obsession with acronyms?
;-)
In these days of mixed-gender units, the term "booby traps" is no longer politically correct. Or maybe it's just confusing.
The sensor is at the bottom to detect anything on the ground that would interfere with the door coming down. If you move the sensor to the top, it is now useless
Above there are a least a half-dozen posts saying the equivalent.
The obvious-to-me solution is to set angled mirrors at the bottom so that the light path (breaking which trips the sensor on most garage doors I'm familiar with) is still at the bottom, but parts edible by raccoons (wires, plastic sensor housings, etc) are not.
I'd patent that except that the fact that a half-dozen slashdot posters can't figure it out is no indication of non-obviousness.
(And yes, lining it all up is tricky, but there are gadgets for helping line up optical systems that go back to homebuilt gas lasers (mid 1960s) and amateur telescopes (hundreds of years?).
There was a Star Wars III? When did that happen?
Of course. Think how they'd be screaming about radwaste with a half-life like that.
;-)
And another thought -- those uranium-containing granite countertops! OMG, they prepare food on those?!
In this day and age any scientific dabbling seems to be viewed with suspicion. Sad.
Of course it is. Those with the power (gov't and big money) are terrified at the thought that some young Edison or Tesla wannabe might come up with the next disruptive technology. Mainly they're worried that the next Bill Gates might recognize and capitalize on it before they do, or that scientific inquiry just encourages asking too many questions.
Of course having the Consumer Product Safety Commission ban hobbyist scientific gear is a nice (and maybe even unconcious) cover. Think of the children.
(Please do. Think about the world they're growing up into. Sigh. It's the 21st century, want to know where your flying cars went? The guy that (in an alternate universe) would have invented them wasn't allowed to play with "dangerous" toys as a kid, and now writes computer games.)