I almost knew not to read the article on the basis of the statement "the logic he used". The article did not disappoint. The logic he used is irrelevant. The whole argument is pointless because he tried to argue it logically. There are plenty of ways to inflate or deflate this number, however, as above comments have pointed out. One should not try to come at the answer with logic. Just measure it. (Yes, measuring it is not necessarily easy, but difficult-to-obtain right answer is always better than an easily-argued wrong one.)
They're presumably going for definition 2:...the unauthorised use of biological resources by organisations such as corporations, universities and governments.
Neither story is particularly clear on what the piracy is, what Google is doing, and why it's bad. There's a lot of speculation about things in the future, perhaps. Most of it seems to be a knee-jerk, irrelevant reaction to Google adding a new type of data.
You're making dangerous assumptions by thinking that a judge is incompetent to rule otherwise. A lot has to be taken into account. If the law specifically says that mailing addresses are protected from access, why would something that is not a mailing address be protected? An e-mail address is substantially different. They seem similar in this case, both ways of sending you junk mail, but was that the intent of the law? After all, if you have someone's mailing address, you can find them physically. With their e-mail address, you cannot. In addition, a list of mailing addresses can be compiled without your consent (who lives where is a matter of city record), but a list of e-mail addresses might be opt-in.
Things like when the law is written have to be taken into account, and as far as I know, neither of us have that information. If the law protecting mailing addresses was written recently and it says "mailing addresses", who in their right mind would extend this to e-mail addresses? Clearly the lawmakers must have known about the existance of e-mail.
You would equally hear complaints if laws preventing access to some things that were normally be public record were extended beyond the materials explicitly mentioned in the law. Who is a judge to say that people should not be allowed to access public records, if the legislators did not say so? Isn't that "legislating from the bench"?
This is a matter for the legislators of that area. If they want e-mail addresses lists to be removed from public record, amend the law to state so.
That depends on your interpretation of the phrase "freedom of speech". Perhaps you're confusing freedom of the press with the freedom to express yourself in a written manner, and extending that to imply that freedom of speech is to be interpreted as spoken expression. I suppose in theory judges could rule in such a way if they changed the current interpretation of "freedom of speech", but it's not like it's an unwritten interpretation -- there are many case rulings clarifying it -- so they would have to go against precedent and popular opinion to rule so.
On the other hand, a law that protects mailing addresses is more likely rather more specific than the First Amendment. Often inclusion of specific cases implies exclusion of other things. If I make a law barring horses from roaming the streets, this is not to be interpreted as also barring cows. A law against livestock would bar both, but would it cover tigers, which are not livestock?
The laws that are the basis for this are evident in the article. It's an issue of public record. In the interests of the people, many government documents are public record. Mailing addresses are protected to prevent abuse, but e-mail addresses are not. More than likely, they should be, just like mailing addresses. However, it's not really the place of the courts to say, "Well, this *should* be protected, but it isn't, so we'll rule as if it is."
So the case they're faced with is that someone asked for a copy of a public record and the city tried to make it difficult with the intent of preventing the person from obtaining the list. They didn't tell him he had to hand-copy it because they didn't have it in electronic form. They did it with the intent of making it unreasonably difficult to acquire a copy of the list, which directly opposes the spirit of the law regarding public record.
The appropriate step is legislative. Extend to e-mail addresses the same protections as mailing addresses.
I personally think that it's a lot more flattering toward God to take the opinion that He set the laws of nature such as they are and everything complex developed out of that (as of course He knew it would, without Him having to step in afterwards) than to say He just made eyes and bees' wings and such by a particular design. But perhaps it takes a certain strange love of complex results out of simple systems to really appreciate that.:p
Eh, sort of. I'm not really qualified to comment at length on mechanisms of evolution and selection. Of course, having blue eyes is a bad example. That we have a selection of eye colors indicates that it doesn't provide a survivability edge.
The "undirected" part, I believe, is that mutations and genetic combination is more or less random rather than intentional (at least from our perspective) and that survivability is more or less random. Cleary for most things, individual situations are more significant to whether or not a particular organism lives. (Hit by a car? Probably not because of your genes.) However, some traits give a higher level of survivability on average.
I would agree, though, that while it's quite reasonable to take this at face value and say that evolution is the result of a random process ats.nd a few simple rules (as many elegant results are), but there's plenty of leeway as to where these rules and processes come from and why they work.
There's plenty of room for God in science (though I must admit I don't ascribe to such beliefs), but the way ID supporters conflicts directly with scientific resul
Intelligent Design is not so much believing that God made the world. That's an essential part of many religions and something that religious scientists would not dispute. They tend to believe as you seem to, that God is more evident in the system than in the results. (The results -- such as people -- being a product of the system -- say, evolution. Of course, God, being omniscient, would have no trouble designing a system such that any desired result would occur.)
ID really refers specifically to evolution. In short: "Intelligent Design (or ID) is a highly controversial claim holding that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent designer, rather than an undirected process such as natural selection." It is not so much the presence of an intelligent designer that is the problem, but rather the denouncement of an undirected process. One of their frequent claims is that some systems are so complex that a seemingly random process such as evolution could not have produced them.
Delightfully complex systems arising out of simple rules should not be a surprise to scientists or mathematicians. Whether or not this property is a base property of nature or the work of God is up to you, there's not any way to differentiate.
Re:15 Reasons to boycott IMDb
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The movie is just an extension of the play, an art form that is old on the same time scale as music. As musical performance adapted to newer technologies in recording and presentation, so did acting adapt to the new medium of the film (and underwent still more changes as the medium became more advanced).
The stories are not necessarily the same as the script. A screenwriter writes a script. Sometimes they write a story. Other times, it's an adaptation of a previous story -- like a book or a play.
Not all films are commercial, either. There are a variety of independent films that are made for the sake of the art form and for the love of storytelling, much as local bands often perform for the sake of loving to perform music.
Re:What other pre-web services are out there?
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Nice example.
"The FTP archive on gatekeeper.research.compaq.com is an unsupported service of Compaq Corporate Research."
It's not too well-known and is rather specialized, as far as I know, so if you changed the question to "what major, popular Internet service has been around longer than IMDB and still exists?" it might not qualify.
Re:What other pre-web services are out there?
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I know it's not popular to read the article, but you apparently didn't even read the whole comment you're replying to.
Not protocols, services. That at least eliminates FTP, Gopher, IRC, Telnet, and SSH. Whether or not you want to consider hosting Finger, Whois, and NNTP to be a service is debateable. Things you can access using these protocols, however, might be services.
Re:What other pre-web services are out there?
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I don't think IMDB even comes close to being one of the oldest Internet services. While it predates the Web, perhaps, it's only by a month or so. ENQUIRE was developed in the 80s, and the first Web pages was written in late December, 1990. The answer here also greatly depends on what you mean by "an Internet service". In the very first days of the Internet, the Telnet protocol could be used to access a number of mainframes. At the time, UNIX access to a mainframe computer could certainly be considered a service.
Average people are chimps. At least the sure act like chimps.
It's often nice, thinking you live in a country where the touchy-feely value of everyone having an equal opinion theoretically takes precedence over more qualified people making the decisions. Of course, the people in power to make the decisions have historically not been the most qualified anyway, so I don't think it would work out otherwise.
Very out of character for me, wow. I like democracy. But on the average, people really don't understand a damned thing and don't try, but are more than happy to push their poorly-thought-out opinion in your face.
They use Blair's announcement that the Kyoto treaty is "dead" -- because cutbacks in greenhouse gases will need to be made through technological advancement, not cutbacks -- as a staging point to opine on how global warming is a false theory. Which would be fine by me if they had any evidence. But they don't. They do mention their opinion on a good source of electrical energy, nuclear power. Fine, but that has little to do with the article, and not all CO2 emissions are because of power generation.
The final point is that global warming is made up, without ever presenting any evidence to support it.
The second article is about how there is no consensus in the scientific community about global warming, which is true to an extent. Their evidence, though, is a list of people interviewed, of which 2 of 20 held the opposing viewpoint. At the same time, they complain of the low number of people interviewed that held the opposing view. Not surprising if it's not well-accepted in the scientific community, no? The arguments they cite by these two people -- which were apparently cut from the interviews, ruining the opposing views' point -- were not in the least scientific and were shoddy at best.
It's sad that an organization that's ostensibly covering bias in the media is themselves biased and resorts to the oh-so-popular system of reporting opinion as fact and trying to report fact without any evidence.
"Canadians illegally download 14 music CDs or other files from the Internet for every file they take from the web legally..."
Yes. A music CD is one file. Apparently perhaps most file trading is done on the web now? And with the hundreds of web requests that your typical Joe User makes sitting at the computer -- for each of those there's 14 illegal files? Canadians are thievy!
"...noting a rise in plagiarism in schools and universities."
One that conveniently doesn't have any statistics quoted.
Most of this terminology is hardly in the realm of true jargon.
The things you mention for mechanics are quite specific to the internal workings of an automobile. They're not important for you to know.
On the other hand, one should be expected to understand the general functioning of things like antilock brakes, cruise control, oil and fluid changing, tire rotation, and antifreeze. You know that the thing under the hood is an engine, even though you never touch it, and you probably know that there are some cylinders with spark plugs somewhere in there. The thing is powered with gasoline, which is not the same as kerosene. Unleaded and leaded gasoline are different from one another and different from diesel fuel. Gasoline tank capacity is measured in gallons, travel distance in miles, and fuel efficiency in miles per gallon. These are all things that you wouldn't necessarily know without learning them first, and people generally know them because they drive cars.
Most of the computer "jargon" presented is no harder to understand than these basics about automobiles. For God's sake, megabytes and gigabytes are just units of size. If you can understand pounds and ounces or ounces and gallons, you can understand them. The same goes for "firewall" or "jpeg". I mean, people don't say, "I don't know what the brakes do. Is it okay if they don't work?" No.
Nobody's asking them to *write* in JavaScript, but considering half the websites out there use it far to liberally and usually do it incorrectly, they're going to run into the term mentioned on their web browser.
Training, learning, and a little focus would go a long way with computer terminology.
Nearly every newspaper has a comics section, too. Does that mean they're incapable of serious articles?
Incidentally, "nearly every media outlet" is way off. Most television and radio media sources have no columns of any kind, much less ones on astrology, and the majority of magazines have no astrology sections (yes, many, just not most).
Scientific mathematics and reasoning not your strong suit, huh?
Other sources of carbon dioxide production have been around for ages. Equally, sources of carbon dioxide removal have been around for ages. Without industrial processes, you reach a steady state where the CO2 level in the atmosphere remains constant. (It is possible that if local conditions change rapidly, allowing an increase in animal or plant growth or causing a sudden drop in either of these, you can have a slowly varying CO2 level as the world adjusts.)
So, say only 5% of the world's CO2 production is from industrial sources. This means nothing without further information. How much increase can the world handle before dangerously increasing in temperature? How quickly and to what extent can CO2 uptake methods react to a higher atmospheric CO2 concentration? If the answer is that only a 2% increase from previously existing production rates is safe, then the 5% from industrial production is far too much. If the answer is that as much as a 20% increase is no problem, then we're worrying for nothing. These other sources of CO2 are not going to go away, so only industrial production can be changed. Equally, removal of CO2 from the environment is possible, but more difficult and more expensive than changing industrial production.
Math also helps with the 75% bit. Say you have a container with a liter of water in it. You add half a liter of water. A week later, 75% of the water has evaporated. Sure, you don't know for sure which water molecules it was that evaporated, but it's irrelevant. (Plus, with that many molecules, I assure you that 1/3 of them were from the water you added.) You can now say that 75% of the half-liter of water you added is still in the container. If you make it a habit to add a half-liter of water every week, you should be able to figure out that, sooner or later, your container is going to fill up and overflow. If your container overflowing just so happened to mean the death of much of Earth's life, you might be a bit concerned. The suggestion to only add only 3/8 L of water a week (how much evaporates) might sound pretty good to you.
This is to say nothing of the possibility that factory-created CO2 has higher levels of particular radioactive carbon or oxygen isotopes than CO2 produced by other processes.
Without providing statistics on how much of Earth's CO2 production is from wood and coal fires versus other sources (factories) introduced by the Industrial Revolution, your other comments are useless. That's like saying you're saving money if you spend $50 on a coupon that saves you 20% off of any purchase less than $100.
Nonphysical accelerating frames of reference have virtual forces and virtual potential gradients, not real ones.
And "my college physics course" is an undergraduate degree and graduate courses.
Inertial frames of refernce certainly are preferred; they are physical. Accelerating frames of reference may be convenient at times, but they're not real.
Real forces are derived from potential gradients, which are associated with changes in energy. Virtual forces like the Coriolis force or the centrifugal force are not. While it may seem pointless, the distinction is important. Sit in a college physics class about it and see how often people screw things up because they think about the influence of virtual forces.
A rotating frame of reference turns a real force (centripetal) into a simpler virtual force (centrifugal), but rotating frames of reference are also not physical.
The combined gravitational pull of the two bodies in orbit equals the centripetal acceleration of a third, smaller body in orbit, keeping it in orbit. Of the five (per two bodies), only two are stable.
Clearly they should be required to put a new warning label on the game:
"Caution: Altering this game may affect game play."
I know it doesn't seem to be altering the game, per se, and it's using built-in but inaccessable content, but really. If using some third-party hack to access game content needs to be rated, why not using some third-party hack to retexture everyone so they're naked? Should all games then get an "M" rating? If this were part of accessible game content, I could see the problem.
Yep. One of the primary U.S. moves that helped incite terrorist organizations was the long-term placement of troops in Saudi Arabia. We requested to place troops there to strike at Iraq, and we knew we weren't particularly welcome. We weren't supposed to stay long, but we always gave the Saudi leadership the option to ask us to leave. We didn't end the first Iraq war well, and so needed to station troops nearby (ie. in Saudia Arabia) for a while. They didn't ask us to leave. Unfortunately some individuals, particularly bin Laden (and much of Saudi royalty) didn't appreciate this turn of events.
It's often said that the religious "edict" is more a ploy to bring people to his side. In fact, folks on both sides of the conflict use simplified, black-and-white religious arguments to justify a lot of what they do, but that's not the cause of their actions.
The U.S. is hardly the "most obvious target". It's the most dangerous for a number of reasons. All non-Muslim states, of which there are a lot, are obvious targets. The U.S. is a target because it's foreign policies has made it enemies in the Muslim world, not because it especially qualifies as "not Muslim".
The construction of this organization and the motivation of its leaders is traced back to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
Just because they say it's a religious issue doesn't mean that's true.
Not true re: phones. You can listen in on wireless conversations, but you can't act on information you obtain or use other peoples' wireless equipment. At least, these are the laws that apply to ham radio ops, who are more than capable of listening in on things.
The hosts need to be more clear about not providing access to third parties and explicit about the danger of unsecured wireless access points. (This usually isn't made clear by, say, your average ISP.) I'd say the same goes for wireless access point makers making a point of telling you to enable WEP, but the only one I've ever set up was crystal clear on this.
By broadcasting its station ID, the wireless point is inviting nearby users. By not requiring authentication, it's implicitly giving authorization to any user. The resource available without authentication is Internet connectivity.
This is like putting up a sign, "Free Cookies", along with a table with cookies on it. Someone walks by -- the cookies aren't theirs, but clearly they're allowed to take one. Now, put a cover over the cookies and a note "Please do not take cookies", and the person has made it clear that you're not to take them. So don't.
I don't buy this "you're at fault for using an unsecured wireless access point". It's wireless. How's he know where it is? Granted, he clearly knew he was doing something wrong. But other places provide unsecured wireless access. Some places even do so, and are fine with you using it, without advertising the fact. How, then, do you differentiate between that and a home wireless access point that apparently is "illegal use of a computer system"?
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I almost knew not to read the article on the basis of the statement "the logic he used". The article did not disappoint. The logic he used is irrelevant. The whole argument is pointless because he tried to argue it logically. There are plenty of ways to inflate or deflate this number, however, as above comments have pointed out. One should not try to come at the answer with logic. Just measure it. (Yes, measuring it is not necessarily easy, but difficult-to-obtain right answer is always better than an easily-argued wrong one.)
They're presumably going for definition 2: ...the unauthorised use of biological resources by organisations such as corporations, universities and governments.
Neither story is particularly clear on what the piracy is, what Google is doing, and why it's bad. There's a lot of speculation about things in the future, perhaps. Most of it seems to be a knee-jerk, irrelevant reaction to Google adding a new type of data.
You're making dangerous assumptions by thinking that a judge is incompetent to rule otherwise. A lot has to be taken into account. If the law specifically says that mailing addresses are protected from access, why would something that is not a mailing address be protected? An e-mail address is substantially different. They seem similar in this case, both ways of sending you junk mail, but was that the intent of the law? After all, if you have someone's mailing address, you can find them physically. With their e-mail address, you cannot. In addition, a list of mailing addresses can be compiled without your consent (who lives where is a matter of city record), but a list of e-mail addresses might be opt-in.
Things like when the law is written have to be taken into account, and as far as I know, neither of us have that information. If the law protecting mailing addresses was written recently and it says "mailing addresses", who in their right mind would extend this to e-mail addresses? Clearly the lawmakers must have known about the existance of e-mail.
You would equally hear complaints if laws preventing access to some things that were normally be public record were extended beyond the materials explicitly mentioned in the law. Who is a judge to say that people should not be allowed to access public records, if the legislators did not say so? Isn't that "legislating from the bench"?
This is a matter for the legislators of that area. If they want e-mail addresses lists to be removed from public record, amend the law to state so.
That depends on your interpretation of the phrase "freedom of speech". Perhaps you're confusing freedom of the press with the freedom to express yourself in a written manner, and extending that to imply that freedom of speech is to be interpreted as spoken expression. I suppose in theory judges could rule in such a way if they changed the current interpretation of "freedom of speech", but it's not like it's an unwritten interpretation -- there are many case rulings clarifying it -- so they would have to go against precedent and popular opinion to rule so.
On the other hand, a law that protects mailing addresses is more likely rather more specific than the First Amendment. Often inclusion of specific cases implies exclusion of other things. If I make a law barring horses from roaming the streets, this is not to be interpreted as also barring cows. A law against livestock would bar both, but would it cover tigers, which are not livestock?
The laws that are the basis for this are evident in the article. It's an issue of public record. In the interests of the people, many government documents are public record. Mailing addresses are protected to prevent abuse, but e-mail addresses are not. More than likely, they should be, just like mailing addresses. However, it's not really the place of the courts to say, "Well, this *should* be protected, but it isn't, so we'll rule as if it is."
So the case they're faced with is that someone asked for a copy of a public record and the city tried to make it difficult with the intent of preventing the person from obtaining the list. They didn't tell him he had to hand-copy it because they didn't have it in electronic form. They did it with the intent of making it unreasonably difficult to acquire a copy of the list, which directly opposes the spirit of the law regarding public record.
The appropriate step is legislative. Extend to e-mail addresses the same protections as mailing addresses.
Yes, more or less.
:p
I personally think that it's a lot more flattering toward God to take the opinion that He set the laws of nature such as they are and everything complex developed out of that (as of course He knew it would, without Him having to step in afterwards) than to say He just made eyes and bees' wings and such by a particular design. But perhaps it takes a certain strange love of complex results out of simple systems to really appreciate that.
Eh, sort of. I'm not really qualified to comment at length on mechanisms of evolution and selection. Of course, having blue eyes is a bad example. That we have a selection of eye colors indicates that it doesn't provide a survivability edge.
The "undirected" part, I believe, is that mutations and genetic combination is more or less random rather than intentional (at least from our perspective) and that survivability is more or less random. Cleary for most things, individual situations are more significant to whether or not a particular organism lives. (Hit by a car? Probably not because of your genes.) However, some traits give a higher level of survivability on average.
I would agree, though, that while it's quite reasonable to take this at face value and say that evolution is the result of a random process ats.nd a few simple rules (as many elegant results are), but there's plenty of leeway as to where these rules and processes come from and why they work.
There's plenty of room for God in science (though I must admit I don't ascribe to such beliefs), but the way ID supporters conflicts directly with scientific resul
Intelligent Design is not so much believing that God made the world. That's an essential part of many religions and something that religious scientists would not dispute. They tend to believe as you seem to, that God is more evident in the system than in the results. (The results -- such as people -- being a product of the system -- say, evolution. Of course, God, being omniscient, would have no trouble designing a system such that any desired result would occur.)
ID really refers specifically to evolution. In short: "Intelligent Design (or ID) is a highly controversial claim holding that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent designer, rather than an undirected process such as natural selection." It is not so much the presence of an intelligent designer that is the problem, but rather the denouncement of an undirected process. One of their frequent claims is that some systems are so complex that a seemingly random process such as evolution could not have produced them.
Delightfully complex systems arising out of simple rules should not be a surprise to scientists or mathematicians. Whether or not this property is a base property of nature or the work of God is up to you, there's not any way to differentiate.
The movie is just an extension of the play, an art form that is old on the same time scale as music. As musical performance adapted to newer technologies in recording and presentation, so did acting adapt to the new medium of the film (and underwent still more changes as the medium became more advanced).
The stories are not necessarily the same as the script. A screenwriter writes a script. Sometimes they write a story. Other times, it's an adaptation of a previous story -- like a book or a play.
Not all films are commercial, either. There are a variety of independent films that are made for the sake of the art form and for the love of storytelling, much as local bands often perform for the sake of loving to perform music.
Nice example.
"The FTP archive on gatekeeper.research.compaq.com is an unsupported service of Compaq Corporate Research."
It's not too well-known and is rather specialized, as far as I know, so if you changed the question to "what major, popular Internet service has been around longer than IMDB and still exists?" it might not qualify.
I know it's not popular to read the article, but you apparently didn't even read the whole comment you're replying to.
Not protocols, services. That at least eliminates FTP, Gopher, IRC, Telnet, and SSH. Whether or not you want to consider hosting Finger, Whois, and NNTP to be a service is debateable. Things you can access using these protocols, however, might be services.
I don't think IMDB even comes close to being one of the oldest Internet services. While it predates the Web, perhaps, it's only by a month or so. ENQUIRE was developed in the 80s, and the first Web pages was written in late December, 1990. The answer here also greatly depends on what you mean by "an Internet service". In the very first days of the Internet, the Telnet protocol could be used to access a number of mainframes. At the time, UNIX access to a mainframe computer could certainly be considered a service.
Average people are chimps. At least the sure act like chimps.
It's often nice, thinking you live in a country where the touchy-feely value of everyone having an equal opinion theoretically takes precedence over more qualified people making the decisions. Of course, the people in power to make the decisions have historically not been the most qualified anyway, so I don't think it would work out otherwise.
Very out of character for me, wow. I like democracy. But on the average, people really don't understand a damned thing and don't try, but are more than happy to push their poorly-thought-out opinion in your face.
Just a couple of articles in and I see that AIM is horribly biased and presents opinion as fact.
http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/4081_0_2_0_C/
http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/A4005_0_2_0_C/
They use Blair's announcement that the Kyoto treaty is "dead" -- because cutbacks in greenhouse gases will need to be made through technological advancement, not cutbacks -- as a staging point to opine on how global warming is a false theory. Which would be fine by me if they had any evidence. But they don't. They do mention their opinion on a good source of electrical energy, nuclear power. Fine, but that has little to do with the article, and not all CO2 emissions are because of power generation.
The final point is that global warming is made up, without ever presenting any evidence to support it.
The second article is about how there is no consensus in the scientific community about global warming, which is true to an extent. Their evidence, though, is a list of people interviewed, of which 2 of 20 held the opposing viewpoint. At the same time, they complain of the low number of people interviewed that held the opposing view. Not surprising if it's not well-accepted in the scientific community, no? The arguments they cite by these two people -- which were apparently cut from the interviews, ruining the opposing views' point -- were not in the least scientific and were shoddy at best.
It's sad that an organization that's ostensibly covering bias in the media is themselves biased and resorts to the oh-so-popular system of reporting opinion as fact and trying to report fact without any evidence.
"Canadians illegally download 14 music CDs or other files from the Internet for every file they take from the web legally..."
Yes. A music CD is one file. Apparently perhaps most file trading is done on the web now? And with the hundreds of web requests that your typical Joe User makes sitting at the computer -- for each of those there's 14 illegal files? Canadians are thievy!
"...noting a rise in plagiarism in schools and universities."
One that conveniently doesn't have any statistics quoted.
Most of this terminology is hardly in the realm of true jargon.
The things you mention for mechanics are quite specific to the internal workings of an automobile. They're not important for you to know.
On the other hand, one should be expected to understand the general functioning of things like antilock brakes, cruise control, oil and fluid changing, tire rotation, and antifreeze. You know that the thing under the hood is an engine, even though you never touch it, and you probably know that there are some cylinders with spark plugs somewhere in there. The thing is powered with gasoline, which is not the same as kerosene. Unleaded and leaded gasoline are different from one another and different from diesel fuel. Gasoline tank capacity is measured in gallons, travel distance in miles, and fuel efficiency in miles per gallon. These are all things that you wouldn't necessarily know without learning them first, and people generally know them because they drive cars.
Most of the computer "jargon" presented is no harder to understand than these basics about automobiles. For God's sake, megabytes and gigabytes are just units of size. If you can understand pounds and ounces or ounces and gallons, you can understand them. The same goes for "firewall" or "jpeg". I mean, people don't say, "I don't know what the brakes do. Is it okay if they don't work?" No.
Nobody's asking them to *write* in JavaScript, but considering half the websites out there use it far to liberally and usually do it incorrectly, they're going to run into the term mentioned on their web browser.
Training, learning, and a little focus would go a long way with computer terminology.
Nearly every newspaper has a comics section, too. Does that mean they're incapable of serious articles?
Incidentally, "nearly every media outlet" is way off. Most television and radio media sources have no columns of any kind, much less ones on astrology, and the majority of magazines have no astrology sections (yes, many, just not most).
Scientific mathematics and reasoning not your strong suit, huh?
Other sources of carbon dioxide production have been around for ages. Equally, sources of carbon dioxide removal have been around for ages. Without industrial processes, you reach a steady state where the CO2 level in the atmosphere remains constant. (It is possible that if local conditions change rapidly, allowing an increase in animal or plant growth or causing a sudden drop in either of these, you can have a slowly varying CO2 level as the world adjusts.)
So, say only 5% of the world's CO2 production is from industrial sources. This means nothing without further information. How much increase can the world handle before dangerously increasing in temperature? How quickly and to what extent can CO2 uptake methods react to a higher atmospheric CO2 concentration? If the answer is that only a 2% increase from previously existing production rates is safe, then the 5% from industrial production is far too much. If the answer is that as much as a 20% increase is no problem, then we're worrying for nothing. These other sources of CO2 are not going to go away, so only industrial production can be changed. Equally, removal of CO2 from the environment is possible, but more difficult and more expensive than changing industrial production.
Math also helps with the 75% bit. Say you have a container with a liter of water in it. You add half a liter of water. A week later, 75% of the water has evaporated. Sure, you don't know for sure which water molecules it was that evaporated, but it's irrelevant. (Plus, with that many molecules, I assure you that 1/3 of them were from the water you added.) You can now say that 75% of the half-liter of water you added is still in the container. If you make it a habit to add a half-liter of water every week, you should be able to figure out that, sooner or later, your container is going to fill up and overflow. If your container overflowing just so happened to mean the death of much of Earth's life, you might be a bit concerned. The suggestion to only add only 3/8 L of water a week (how much evaporates) might sound pretty good to you.
This is to say nothing of the possibility that factory-created CO2 has higher levels of particular radioactive carbon or oxygen isotopes than CO2 produced by other processes.
Without providing statistics on how much of Earth's CO2 production is from wood and coal fires versus other sources (factories) introduced by the Industrial Revolution, your other comments are useless. That's like saying you're saving money if you spend $50 on a coupon that saves you 20% off of any purchase less than $100.
Nonphysical accelerating frames of reference have virtual forces and virtual potential gradients, not real ones.
And "my college physics course" is an undergraduate degree and graduate courses.
Inertial frames of refernce certainly are preferred; they are physical. Accelerating frames of reference may be convenient at times, but they're not real.
Real forces are derived from potential gradients, which are associated with changes in energy. Virtual forces like the Coriolis force or the centrifugal force are not. While it may seem pointless, the distinction is important. Sit in a college physics class about it and see how often people screw things up because they think about the influence of virtual forces.
A rotating frame of reference turns a real force (centripetal) into a simpler virtual force (centrifugal), but rotating frames of reference are also not physical.
...is not a force.
The combined gravitational pull of the two bodies in orbit equals the centripetal acceleration of a third, smaller body in orbit, keeping it in orbit. Of the five (per two bodies), only two are stable.
Clearly they should be required to put a new warning label on the game:
"Caution: Altering this game may affect game play."
I know it doesn't seem to be altering the game, per se, and it's using built-in but inaccessable content, but really. If using some third-party hack to access game content needs to be rated, why not using some third-party hack to retexture everyone so they're naked? Should all games then get an "M" rating? If this were part of accessible game content, I could see the problem.
Yep. One of the primary U.S. moves that helped incite terrorist organizations was the long-term placement of troops in Saudi Arabia. We requested to place troops there to strike at Iraq, and we knew we weren't particularly welcome. We weren't supposed to stay long, but we always gave the Saudi leadership the option to ask us to leave. We didn't end the first Iraq war well, and so needed to station troops nearby (ie. in Saudia Arabia) for a while. They didn't ask us to leave. Unfortunately some individuals, particularly bin Laden (and much of Saudi royalty) didn't appreciate this turn of events.
It's often said that the religious "edict" is more a ploy to bring people to his side. In fact, folks on both sides of the conflict use simplified, black-and-white religious arguments to justify a lot of what they do, but that's not the cause of their actions.
The U.S. is hardly the "most obvious target". It's the most dangerous for a number of reasons. All non-Muslim states, of which there are a lot, are obvious targets. The U.S. is a target because it's foreign policies has made it enemies in the Muslim world, not because it especially qualifies as "not Muslim".
The construction of this organization and the motivation of its leaders is traced back to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
Just because they say it's a religious issue doesn't mean that's true.
Not true re: phones. You can listen in on wireless conversations, but you can't act on information you obtain or use other peoples' wireless equipment. At least, these are the laws that apply to ham radio ops, who are more than capable of listening in on things.
The hosts need to be more clear about not providing access to third parties and explicit about the danger of unsecured wireless access points. (This usually isn't made clear by, say, your average ISP.) I'd say the same goes for wireless access point makers making a point of telling you to enable WEP, but the only one I've ever set up was crystal clear on this.
By broadcasting its station ID, the wireless point is inviting nearby users. By not requiring authentication, it's implicitly giving authorization to any user. The resource available without authentication is Internet connectivity.
This is like putting up a sign, "Free Cookies", along with a table with cookies on it. Someone walks by -- the cookies aren't theirs, but clearly they're allowed to take one. Now, put a cover over the cookies and a note "Please do not take cookies", and the person has made it clear that you're not to take them. So don't.
I don't buy this "you're at fault for using an unsecured wireless access point". It's wireless. How's he know where it is? Granted, he clearly knew he was doing something wrong. But other places provide unsecured wireless access. Some places even do so, and are fine with you using it, without advertising the fact. How, then, do you differentiate between that and a home wireless access point that apparently is "illegal use of a computer system"?