Reports will always be needed. A dashboard has a sense of impermanence, and rightly so -- if the backend database gets corrupted, then your dashboard isn't going to show the same thing today that it showed yesterday, even for the exact same filter options.
Add to that the ability to do things like highlight lines/items as you go through and all the other tricks humans have built up over the past few thousand years for dealing with paper, many of which are only kind of functional in even the best e-readers never mind some random dashboard and yes, reports are definitely needed.
That said, there is definitely still an overabundance of reporting when not needed. Run a whole report to look up the current price of a single item? Yeah that happens and then is immediately discarded once the information is obtained. That type of "reporting" is definitely a complete waste of time and paper but that's more an issue of stupid people not using the tools available to them than the tools being wrong or bad.
Basically any time you have some piece of data that the accountant might need come end of year, a report is going to be necessary.
A good halfway point seems to be PDFs (or similar.) They're dissociated from the underlying database unlike a dashboard (that is, the data will never change -- or if it does, chances are the entire PDF is corrupt) while at the same time still remaining electronic and not wasting a bunch of paper. It doesn't help the highlighting aspect for reports that someone actually reviews, but for many end-of-day and similar reports that "must" exist but only get looked at when there's a problem, PDF works wonders.
That's a very US-centric view of the terms "left" and "right." Broadly speaking, the left tends to be more liberal (power to the people) while the right tends to be more conservative (power to those already in power.)
Of course how those views end up being delineated changes greatly from country to country and across time. In the current US, the government is the only significant entity that even claims to be "for the people" so its unsurprising that the left down there is in favor of larger government. The right tends to favor corporate/economic power because that's what rules the roost for the most part.
But in terms of the rest of the world, the left and right are not always defined the same way as they are in the US. Up here in Canada for example, the right (ie: Harper currently) just loooooves expanding government power. Oh he's all cool with deregulating industry and letting them trash our environment and economy, but at the same time he's attempting to tack on all sorts of new government powers with little responsibility or oversight, including legislation very similar to what TFA is talking about (he's on his third or fourth attempt at ramming that crap down our throats so far.) The left on the other hand tends to focus primarily on the unions. They generally beef up existing social programs of course as you would expect but most of their focus tends to be on expanding the power of unions (as an indirect "for the people") rather than the power of government.
And obviously I'm talking in huge generalities.. even Harper's managed to accidentally do some good here and there. Very few things are ever black and white when they affect millions of people who all have differing views on everything.
Its not an engineering problem. The engineering's been done. We know how to lock shit down very well if we try. The problem is we don't try.
Its really a social problem. Facebook is to your privacy what a post-it note is to your password. And people love them some Facebook (or Twitter or Snapchat or whatever the popular site is this year.)
Until a majority of users start either using privacy measures on a technical level or pushing for privacy protection on a political level, all of the engineering in the world does a big wad of fuck all because nobody's willing (or allowed) to actually use it.
Apple (and Google shortly after) recently decided to lock down their phones out of the box. This is the kind of political push we need -- they're willing to stand up to the government's requests for privacy invasion and at the same time, not significantly impacting day-to-day use of their devices by regular users who only barely know what they've heard on the news regarding the political side of the story and know nothing of the technical side.
Of course who knows how long it will be before some government somewhere decides that this isn't cool and forces Apple/Google to either turn off the default encryption or provide a back door (which is worse really.. hackers are smart and if there's a back door they'll find it eventually -- exposing everyone instead of just those who don't know/care enough to turn on the encryption manually.) China for example doesn't seem like the kind of country that would take "well we can't actually do that" as a valid answer more than once (if that.)
I think the tariff is like 2% or something, so way way less than $1 on a $9 sub. But you multiply that by the #subs that Netflix has and it starts adding up.
As for the CRTC.. there's definitely some cronies going on there, but the past couple of years there's been enough citizen upheaval (I can't post the openmedia.ca website enough! lol) that they actually spend time considering what they're doing now rather than blindly going with the big media companies. Not that they don't still fall on that side of the fence plenty, but its not a near-guarantee like it used to be.
Well if its 12kW and you run it for an hour, then it would be 12kWh no? And if you ran it for 24h (assuming constant output which of course isn't valid but regardless..) then you'd have 12kW/24h.
W is the right unit here if he's dissociating from the amount of time in use. Saying its 12kWh means nothing if you don't know whether that's for a single hour or summed over the sunny part of the day or what.
There's lots of places where the conflict arises in various forms -- not just one specific infinity.
To start with, GR requires a smooth surface which QM says shouldn't exist -- suggesting that gravity is either an entirely separate mechanism completely unrelated to the other three forces or (more likely,) one of the theories is wrong as it approaches the limit of a singularity.
There's an information paradox issue as well which I believe has been partially (but not completely) resolved via the inclusion of Hawking radiation and a few other tricks.
I'm sure there's more. Personally, I suspect that both theories are probably wrong at they approach that limit -- QM because we already know it has pissall to say below the Planck length and thus is almost certain to be wrong beyond that, never mind taking it all the way to zero, and GR because it seems a lot more likely that gravity is quantized in some form than it being an entirely unique mechanism in the universe.
Of course those are just my suspicions and based entirely on what my non-expert ass thinks is most likely.. but until we figure out how to make some actual observations, my suspicions are no worse than anyone else's!
As stated, they're very anti-gay so whenever they feel their world being torn asunder, they sprint as fast as they can such that an appropriate percentage of the males and females reach their new homes exactly as the break completes. They're very good at observing the state of their world.
related theories of electromagnetism
Electonians are hated cousins. They're all but identical except that the Magtonians believe that being left alone with only your gender would make you intrinsically gay, and the Electonians do not. This has raised a holy war that has lasted since the beginning of time and they now hate each other so much that they instinctively kick their cousins straight off the side of their world whenever they see each other!
Photians are constantly trying to arbitrate peace by running messages back and forth between the two groups of cousins, but they have yet to be successful. Some say that it'll be a hot day in the CMB before the Magtonians and Electonians ever get along.
I've only read TFS (my math ain't good enough to follow the actual paper) but it seems to me there's a bit of a logic problem here: - If the mass is still there, what's preventing further collapse? They say that it "bounces" and then settles in size somewhere outsize its event horizon but as far as I can tell, they don't bother explaining what keeps it at that size. Is it just a regular (but smaller) star at that point? Neutron star? Something else? Some form of degeneracy pressure is needed though if you want to have the same amount of mass but without further collapse.
- If the mass is not still there (which is what TFS actually seems to imply,) how do they explain the existing observations of black hole-like objects, which we primarily observe via their gravitational effects (aka: based on their masses?)
Generally speaking, no. I mean theoretically I suppose its possible, but it would require an enormous amount of energy input to overcome the gravity -- on the scale of something like a collision with another star. And after a collision like that it would be hard to say it "turned into" a regular star in any sort of direct sense.
This isn't the problem at hand though. The problem at hand is that the incumbent broadcasters are also required to dump a certain amount of money into a public pot which then is used to fund Canadian media and arts. Currently Netflix and Youtube and similar are exempt from this tariff and since our incumbents are all pissy about Netflix (in particular,) they're trying to push anything they can to force Netflix to either (significantly) raise their prices or leave Canada all together.
This is just one small battle in a massive war our incumbents have been waging against Netflix (of course they have to wrap it in generic language so that they don't seem biased -- or accidentally leave a door open for Hulu or someone if they succeed in bullying Netflix out of the way.) Honestly if Netflix loses this we'll see our subscriptions maybe go up to $10. I mean that would be annoying since they just recently raised it to $9 but its still around 10% cheaper than a cable subscription with a reasonable amount of channels -- and you still get to watch on demand -- so its hardly going to kill Netflix in this country.
The % material thing will likely come around sooner or later, but its going to require a hell of a lot more justification on the part of the CRTC and incumbents because the on-demand model effectively means that the users are voting on whether or not we give any craps about Canadian content, and thus that battle has a potential for a huge backfire if it turns out we actually prefer to watch Game of Thrones instead of Corner Gas given equal opportunity.
And while the incumbents own pretty much all licensing for Canadian content, the CRTC as it runs right now is actually quite likely to force them to provide Netflix a reasonable licensing agreement if they try to suggest that Netflix' library should have x% Canadian content in it (regardless of whether anyone actually watches it.)
Magazines are a terrible example. They're no different than broadcast television from a content perspective -- some small number of people put in articles which are read by a large number of people.
A single magazine is more comparable to a single channel on TV -- nobody's forcing you to watch (read) that channel (magazine), but if you decide to do so you're stuck watching (reading) whatever the content provider happened to shove in there.
Direct streaming's most comparable business model from the past would be something like movie rental. You go in, pick what you want, watch it and then its gone and you have to intentionally pick it again if you want to watch it again. The payment model may be different (hell a single movie rental by the time Blockbuster shut down up here was around the same as a month's Netflix subscription!) but in terms of user choice and content selection, its a significantly better comparison than any printed, television or radio medium.
I don't know which Canadians you're referring to but most of us our just as pissed off at this kind of crap as the rest of the world.
Canadians (as an aggregate at least -- everyone's entitled to their own specific opinion of course!) don't believe in full on communism any more than the US does. The difference is that we don't believe in full on capitalism either -- lust for money is just as terrible as lust for power when it comes to controlling the lives of your citizens.
And we fight back when things go too wrong. Openmedia.ca has prevented or helped balance several bad laws in the past few years and have also been extremely active on the international front, in particular with regards to the TPP fight (ourfairdeal.org.)
We're not anti-government like much of the US seems to be but we're certainly not falling over and bowing to Harper and his cronies either.
China springs to mind. I'd be very surprised if the US hadn't made at least some concessions to China over the years to ensure that Walmart stays stocked and iPhones remain cheap(ish).
1) Err, the opposite of that. He's assuming a right-wingnut attack and suggesting that evolution isn't the best defense because for all of the evidence, you can't claim full 100% proof. As in, I can't go over to your house and show you an evolution that you can see with your own eyes in the way that I could show you a rock and a feather falling at the same speed in a vacuum.
2) Yes, absolutely boatloads of evidence. Evidence is not proof. My second point is that this is the failing of the entire article -- science ONLY deals with evidence. We do not have any actual proof. Science is not math. I chose the word proof deliberately because that's what the whackjobs want and they fail to understand that that's not how science works. That rock and feather certainly look like they fell at the same speed in the vacuum and people who don't know that better call it "proof" because they've seen it -- but if you measure close enough, pure randomness of everything from the exact drop timing being a few nanoseconds different to imperfect vacuums to whatever else mean that there will always be _very_ slight differences in the drop times. But again, these people only care about what they can see directly and use that limited information to form a black and white "proven" vs "complete hogwash". Heavily dosed with personal and/or religious bias of course because pure objectivity isn't something normally associated with crazies.
Climate change deniers are a bit out of place in that group. While its pretty obvious to any sane person that climate change will (and in fact is) happening, we aren't yet to the point where it HAS happened (at least not in a big enough way to be obvious to anyone who wants to ignore science in the first place.)
Also, strongly suspect (and this may just be my own personal conspiracy theory) that most of the biggest/loudest climate change deniers are in league with the large energy and similar companies who stand to lose a lot if climate change regulation comes into play. Of course the loud (but "sane", in the selfish-I-just-want-money way) ones spark the idea in the actual crazies and it builds from there.
On the other hand, there is no such monetary incentive for anyone giving any fucks whether the universe was blinked into existence by a supernatural being 6k years ago or a multidimensional brane fart 14b years ago. People who choose to deny the evidence in favor of some arbitrary (and officially denied, assuming these folk are Catholic-derived and not some other Christian branch) interpretation of a 2000 year old book have no reason for their views other than being legitimate nutters.
Same with the holocaust. Except some of those people are still alive so the deniers are pretty much telling the people that watched their friends and families being abused, tortured and killed that its all in their heads. But the last of them will only be around another couple of decades at most and then there will be nothing but a terrible tale in the history books that hopefully future generations will take to heart and not repeat. The only people with any real incentive to deny the holocaust are those who might be called out for war crimes during that period.
The first is not specifically wrong. Thermodynamics implies that the big bang's energy had to some from somewhere. The trouble is that we have no idea where it would come from, which is why no respectable description of the big bang will leave out the part about us only knowing/theorizing up to the first few nanoseconds.
Prior to that everything we know about the universe upends itself in ways that we can't even begin to describe with any consistency because all of our known (testable) laws of physics have fundamental lower limits (the Planck length in particular is a limit we don't know how to breach -- the math we've got breaks down and our experimental devices, even the LHC, are many many orders of magnitude above that still so there's no way we can peek in and see what comes out.)
Black holes face similar problems beyond the event horizon. We've come up with some very surprising theories about the "surface" of black holes such as the 2D "record" of 3D events being encoded in some fashion, but basically we've got nothing regarding their interior. Its quite possible that understanding black holes may help understand the big bang (or vice-versa.. or not) but until/unless we can come up with a way to probe those phenomena we're literally just guessing.
Its not like discovering QED or even probing gravitation where we can see the effects (or expect to see them at or near energy levels we can reasonably achieve at the moment) and are just looking for ways to describe them mathematically in higher and higher precision. We've literally got zilch to go from since our theories break down completely in those situations and any measurable effects they might exhibit are (so far) extremely well beyond our instruments' capabilities so we're not able to create new theories (other than like I said, just guessing. String theory for example might be beautiful and mathematically sound and could potentially answer some of these questions.. but until has a testable theory with a positive result that can't be equally well explained via the standard model, its really just math and not science.)
And sadly, that will be a terrible day for the planet. We're already stressing the damned thing well past any measure of sustainability.. stop the aging process and we'll replace "dying of old age" with "dying of thirst/starvation."
Or worse, some sort of cleansing program to maintain a sustainable population level. Nothing sinister about that concept.. And of course because "me starving" is a bit stronger motivator than "some guy I've never met in a country I've never been to being executed," a cleansing program (or alternatively a forced sterilization program) is almost certain to be implemented.
Not getting straight A's in advanced Reimannian topology and also able to run the quarter mile in less than 8 seconds by the time you're 14? We've got a nice camp over here for you.
No more arbitrary than 18 being legal age.. or 21 being the drinking age.. or whatever. There's plenty of kids who know who they want to get naked with and what political affiliation they're comfortable with and how much booze is too much by the time they're 16.. And there's plenty of people who really don't understand the responsibilities that come with such "adult" actions well into their 30s, 40s and beyond. One size definitely does not fit all when it comes to any developmental cycle.
So 75 was chosen not because its better than 70 or 74 or 76 for every single person in existence, but because you need to set a hard number for the sake of having a line to draw if you're planning to call it a cutoff. I'm not sure if that guy picked 75 based on some statistical reasoning or just pulled it out of his ass but that's not really the relevant point -- the relevant point is simply having a number so you can say "this is the line."
And yes, these numbers need to change over time as society changes. 500 years ago waiting until you were 18 to get to boning would have been considered insane and birth control even more so.. your chances of successful childbirth diminish as you age and given the high (relative to now at least) infant mortality rate, getting on with bearing kids ASAP was considered pretty important which is why when you see shows like Game of Thrones, none of the characters bat an eye when they marry Sansa off as soon as she gets her first period -- that would have been pretty much the rule of day back prior to modern pediatrics.
Similarly, if in the next 18 years some of this stem cell and genetic research ends up paying off and is able to keep us not just alive, but healthy and active until we're say 90, he'll probably update his number to match. His argument isn't that living a longer _healthy_ life is bad, he's trying to argue that drawing out an deteriorating life is more of a burden than a gift, to both yourself and to society. Basically if L(ife)=H(ealthy)+D(eteriorated), he wants to maximize the H/D ratio and since increasing H is hard, he's looking at decreasing D (which also has the benefit of fewer deteriorated years in total) while arguing that modern geriatric care has been too focused on getting a larger absolute value for L by increasing D rather than H.
I think he's saying that we shouldn't be using evolution as a talking point when we want to say "see science works!" because we have no proof that evolution indeed works as Darwin described. We have right boatloads of evidence to be sure, but no actual proof (evolution is perhaps a bit of a bad example as we can see bacteria and viruses evolving all the time -- but we still can't say with 100% certainty that we're correct in extrapolating that to all of nature.)
The real problem with the article is that _NOTHING_ is 100% reproducible. Even quantum electrodynamics -- aka our most well-tested theory ever and the most sciencey science we have by any definition of the word -- is written in terms of probability. You can't show the two-slit experiment by firing a single photon. Or even a dozen photons. You have to fire hundreds or thousands of them before the interference pattern emerges. Its only "science" (by this guy's definition) due to the fact that its a lot easier to shoot 100,000 photons in a reasonable time frame than it is to evolve dinosaurs on 100,000 planets.
"Science" is not a belief system to be sure, but you CAN believe that "science will answer everything given enough time." That's wholly unjustified. Its entirely possible that science can NEVER explain everything either due to the fundamental limits of nature (we'll never be able to see past ~14bn light years for example unless we find something that travels faster than light, which currently seems pretty unlikely) or due to the more simple limits of our measurement devices (we're maybe.. just maybe.. going to be able to detect gravity waves in the next few years. Detecting an individual graviton though may not ever be something we can do as building an LHC-like detector powerful enough to measure gravitons would likely take more energy than is available on the entire planet. Perhaps if we're some day able to harness the Sun's energy in a more direct manner -- heading towards Dyson sphere territory here -- then maybe we could build a big enough detector in theory. But that's an awful lot of extrapolation.)
Not really.. adjust it so that people who rate a lot of things (earning themselves an ebay-like reputation) would be weighted differently than the person who just came in and rated one item.
That would significantly cut down the paid shilling abilities as you couldn't just start up 1000 new accounts to post a single review each for your site, but not eliminate it. (You could do the same thing but also pick 10 random listings to post random reviews on in order to flesh out the numbers.)
Add a temporal aspect to it though -- ie: measure the average time between reviews and if its too low, drop the user's weighting) -- and it becomes harder to game the system yet again as the shills now have to maintain their shilling accounts over time in order to build up enough reputation for their reviews to matter.
Not that it couldn't still be gamed.. but it would require a much more substantial investment by the shills in order for their shilling to be of marketable value. But that also makes them semi-trackable -- set up a fake company listing, hire a known shiller to promote it and then ban any account that posts a glowing review. Because those accounts have to be curated over time, this would be a significant risk for the shilling firms and would at the very least require them to invest enough time/effort to try and determine if your fake listing is actually fake (and of course you could go the next step and create an actual fake company with a fake website and a fake email address/phone#/etc if you wanted.)
Being "unacceptable" doesn't prevent someone from doing it. It has to be enforced somehow. But as soon as you add enforcement to the system, its no longer a "free" market.
That works for basic access passwords since the only check is "is it right yes/no?" at one particular entry point (the login screen.) You can reset that password and they only have to "update" the one location (their password hash file.)
Encryption is a whole different beast as you're effectively password protecting every single byte on your device. Simply changing the access password won't change those bytes.
So unless they're storing your password in plaintext (or reversibly encrypted,) or they've built a master key into their algorithm then no, they can't recover your data even if they reset your password for you.
No major company with any sanity would store user passwords in a recoverable form -- way too much chance of a rogue employee or a hacker getting their hands on the file and open them up to massive lawsuits.
Similar issues if they store a "hard to get" copy of the password right on your phone -- it won't take very long before someone figures that out and how to access it and then you may as well turn off the password feature all together for all the security it would give you.
Master passwords are a little bit more likely.. not because they're any saner (for the same reasons) but its a little easier to control a single key stored in a vault somewhere than it is to control a (probably distributed) password file that needs to be accessed regularly. Of course having it in a vault is great for something like the CSS or the PS3 master keys (which were both cracked eventually of course) but less good when your level 1 or even level 2 tech support need to use it periodically..
Slashdot Mirror
Reports will always be needed. A dashboard has a sense of impermanence, and rightly so -- if the backend database gets corrupted, then your dashboard isn't going to show the same thing today that it showed yesterday, even for the exact same filter options.
Add to that the ability to do things like highlight lines/items as you go through and all the other tricks humans have built up over the past few thousand years for dealing with paper, many of which are only kind of functional in even the best e-readers never mind some random dashboard and yes, reports are definitely needed.
That said, there is definitely still an overabundance of reporting when not needed. Run a whole report to look up the current price of a single item? Yeah that happens and then is immediately discarded once the information is obtained. That type of "reporting" is definitely a complete waste of time and paper but that's more an issue of stupid people not using the tools available to them than the tools being wrong or bad.
Basically any time you have some piece of data that the accountant might need come end of year, a report is going to be necessary.
A good halfway point seems to be PDFs (or similar.) They're dissociated from the underlying database unlike a dashboard (that is, the data will never change -- or if it does, chances are the entire PDF is corrupt) while at the same time still remaining electronic and not wasting a bunch of paper. It doesn't help the highlighting aspect for reports that someone actually reviews, but for many end-of-day and similar reports that "must" exist but only get looked at when there's a problem, PDF works wonders.
That's a very US-centric view of the terms "left" and "right." Broadly speaking, the left tends to be more liberal (power to the people) while the right tends to be more conservative (power to those already in power.)
Of course how those views end up being delineated changes greatly from country to country and across time. In the current US, the government is the only significant entity that even claims to be "for the people" so its unsurprising that the left down there is in favor of larger government. The right tends to favor corporate/economic power because that's what rules the roost for the most part.
But in terms of the rest of the world, the left and right are not always defined the same way as they are in the US. Up here in Canada for example, the right (ie: Harper currently) just loooooves expanding government power. Oh he's all cool with deregulating industry and letting them trash our environment and economy, but at the same time he's attempting to tack on all sorts of new government powers with little responsibility or oversight, including legislation very similar to what TFA is talking about (he's on his third or fourth attempt at ramming that crap down our throats so far.) The left on the other hand tends to focus primarily on the unions. They generally beef up existing social programs of course as you would expect but most of their focus tends to be on expanding the power of unions (as an indirect "for the people") rather than the power of government.
And obviously I'm talking in huge generalities.. even Harper's managed to accidentally do some good here and there. Very few things are ever black and white when they affect millions of people who all have differing views on everything.
Its not an engineering problem. The engineering's been done. We know how to lock shit down very well if we try. The problem is we don't try.
Its really a social problem. Facebook is to your privacy what a post-it note is to your password. And people love them some Facebook (or Twitter or Snapchat or whatever the popular site is this year.)
Until a majority of users start either using privacy measures on a technical level or pushing for privacy protection on a political level, all of the engineering in the world does a big wad of fuck all because nobody's willing (or allowed) to actually use it.
Apple (and Google shortly after) recently decided to lock down their phones out of the box. This is the kind of political push we need -- they're willing to stand up to the government's requests for privacy invasion and at the same time, not significantly impacting day-to-day use of their devices by regular users who only barely know what they've heard on the news regarding the political side of the story and know nothing of the technical side.
Of course who knows how long it will be before some government somewhere decides that this isn't cool and forces Apple/Google to either turn off the default encryption or provide a back door (which is worse really.. hackers are smart and if there's a back door they'll find it eventually -- exposing everyone instead of just those who don't know/care enough to turn on the encryption manually.) China for example doesn't seem like the kind of country that would take "well we can't actually do that" as a valid answer more than once (if that.)
I think the tariff is like 2% or something, so way way less than $1 on a $9 sub. But you multiply that by the #subs that Netflix has and it starts adding up.
As for the CRTC.. there's definitely some cronies going on there, but the past couple of years there's been enough citizen upheaval (I can't post the openmedia.ca website enough! lol) that they actually spend time considering what they're doing now rather than blindly going with the big media companies. Not that they don't still fall on that side of the fence plenty, but its not a near-guarantee like it used to be.
Well if its 12kW and you run it for an hour, then it would be 12kWh no? And if you ran it for 24h (assuming constant output which of course isn't valid but regardless..) then you'd have 12kW/24h.
W is the right unit here if he's dissociating from the amount of time in use. Saying its 12kWh means nothing if you don't know whether that's for a single hour or summed over the sunny part of the day or what.
Imagine the joke potential when we all get to move to Uranus!
I means exactly what I think it means.
I said many Americans believe in pure capitalism, at least a much higher percentage of them than Canadians do up here.
I never claimed that you have pure capitalism.
There's lots of places where the conflict arises in various forms -- not just one specific infinity.
To start with, GR requires a smooth surface which QM says shouldn't exist -- suggesting that gravity is either an entirely separate mechanism completely unrelated to the other three forces or (more likely,) one of the theories is wrong as it approaches the limit of a singularity.
There's an information paradox issue as well which I believe has been partially (but not completely) resolved via the inclusion of Hawking radiation and a few other tricks.
I'm sure there's more. Personally, I suspect that both theories are probably wrong at they approach that limit -- QM because we already know it has pissall to say below the Planck length and thus is almost certain to be wrong beyond that, never mind taking it all the way to zero, and GR because it seems a lot more likely that gravity is quantized in some form than it being an entirely unique mechanism in the universe.
Of course those are just my suspicions and based entirely on what my non-expert ass thinks is most likely.. but until we figure out how to make some actual observations, my suspicions are no worse than anyone else's!
breaking a magnet in half
As stated, they're very anti-gay so whenever they feel their world being torn asunder, they sprint as fast as they can such that an appropriate percentage of the males and females reach their new homes exactly as the break completes. They're very good at observing the state of their world.
related theories of electromagnetism
Electonians are hated cousins. They're all but identical except that the Magtonians believe that being left alone with only your gender would make you intrinsically gay, and the Electonians do not. This has raised a holy war that has lasted since the beginning of time and they now hate each other so much that they instinctively kick their cousins straight off the side of their world whenever they see each other!
Photians are constantly trying to arbitrate peace by running messages back and forth between the two groups of cousins, but they have yet to be successful. Some say that it'll be a hot day in the CMB before the Magtonians and Electonians ever get along.
I've only read TFS (my math ain't good enough to follow the actual paper) but it seems to me there's a bit of a logic problem here:
- If the mass is still there, what's preventing further collapse? They say that it "bounces" and then settles in size somewhere outsize its event horizon but as far as I can tell, they don't bother explaining what keeps it at that size. Is it just a regular (but smaller) star at that point? Neutron star? Something else? Some form of degeneracy pressure is needed though if you want to have the same amount of mass but without further collapse.
- If the mass is not still there (which is what TFS actually seems to imply,) how do they explain the existing observations of black hole-like objects, which we primarily observe via their gravitational effects (aka: based on their masses?)
Could neutron stars turn back into regular stars?
Generally speaking, no. I mean theoretically I suppose its possible, but it would require an enormous amount of energy input to overcome the gravity -- on the scale of something like a collision with another star. And after a collision like that it would be hard to say it "turned into" a regular star in any sort of direct sense.
This isn't the problem at hand though. The problem at hand is that the incumbent broadcasters are also required to dump a certain amount of money into a public pot which then is used to fund Canadian media and arts. Currently Netflix and Youtube and similar are exempt from this tariff and since our incumbents are all pissy about Netflix (in particular,) they're trying to push anything they can to force Netflix to either (significantly) raise their prices or leave Canada all together.
This is just one small battle in a massive war our incumbents have been waging against Netflix (of course they have to wrap it in generic language so that they don't seem biased -- or accidentally leave a door open for Hulu or someone if they succeed in bullying Netflix out of the way.) Honestly if Netflix loses this we'll see our subscriptions maybe go up to $10. I mean that would be annoying since they just recently raised it to $9 but its still around 10% cheaper than a cable subscription with a reasonable amount of channels -- and you still get to watch on demand -- so its hardly going to kill Netflix in this country.
The % material thing will likely come around sooner or later, but its going to require a hell of a lot more justification on the part of the CRTC and incumbents because the on-demand model effectively means that the users are voting on whether or not we give any craps about Canadian content, and thus that battle has a potential for a huge backfire if it turns out we actually prefer to watch Game of Thrones instead of Corner Gas given equal opportunity.
And while the incumbents own pretty much all licensing for Canadian content, the CRTC as it runs right now is actually quite likely to force them to provide Netflix a reasonable licensing agreement if they try to suggest that Netflix' library should have x% Canadian content in it (regardless of whether anyone actually watches it.)
Magazines are a terrible example. They're no different than broadcast television from a content perspective -- some small number of people put in articles which are read by a large number of people.
A single magazine is more comparable to a single channel on TV -- nobody's forcing you to watch (read) that channel (magazine), but if you decide to do so you're stuck watching (reading) whatever the content provider happened to shove in there.
Direct streaming's most comparable business model from the past would be something like movie rental. You go in, pick what you want, watch it and then its gone and you have to intentionally pick it again if you want to watch it again. The payment model may be different (hell a single movie rental by the time Blockbuster shut down up here was around the same as a month's Netflix subscription!) but in terms of user choice and content selection, its a significantly better comparison than any printed, television or radio medium.
I don't know which Canadians you're referring to but most of us our just as pissed off at this kind of crap as the rest of the world.
Canadians (as an aggregate at least -- everyone's entitled to their own specific opinion of course!) don't believe in full on communism any more than the US does. The difference is that we don't believe in full on capitalism either -- lust for money is just as terrible as lust for power when it comes to controlling the lives of your citizens.
And we fight back when things go too wrong. Openmedia.ca has prevented or helped balance several bad laws in the past few years and have also been extremely active on the international front, in particular with regards to the TPP fight (ourfairdeal.org.)
We're not anti-government like much of the US seems to be but we're certainly not falling over and bowing to Harper and his cronies either.
China springs to mind. I'd be very surprised if the US hadn't made at least some concessions to China over the years to ensure that Walmart stays stocked and iPhones remain cheap(ish).
1) Err, the opposite of that. He's assuming a right-wingnut attack and suggesting that evolution isn't the best defense because for all of the evidence, you can't claim full 100% proof. As in, I can't go over to your house and show you an evolution that you can see with your own eyes in the way that I could show you a rock and a feather falling at the same speed in a vacuum.
2) Yes, absolutely boatloads of evidence. Evidence is not proof. My second point is that this is the failing of the entire article -- science ONLY deals with evidence. We do not have any actual proof. Science is not math. I chose the word proof deliberately because that's what the whackjobs want and they fail to understand that that's not how science works. That rock and feather certainly look like they fell at the same speed in the vacuum and people who don't know that better call it "proof" because they've seen it -- but if you measure close enough, pure randomness of everything from the exact drop timing being a few nanoseconds different to imperfect vacuums to whatever else mean that there will always be _very_ slight differences in the drop times. But again, these people only care about what they can see directly and use that limited information to form a black and white "proven" vs "complete hogwash". Heavily dosed with personal and/or religious bias of course because pure objectivity isn't something normally associated with crazies.
Climate change deniers are a bit out of place in that group. While its pretty obvious to any sane person that climate change will (and in fact is) happening, we aren't yet to the point where it HAS happened (at least not in a big enough way to be obvious to anyone who wants to ignore science in the first place.)
Also, strongly suspect (and this may just be my own personal conspiracy theory) that most of the biggest/loudest climate change deniers are in league with the large energy and similar companies who stand to lose a lot if climate change regulation comes into play. Of course the loud (but "sane", in the selfish-I-just-want-money way) ones spark the idea in the actual crazies and it builds from there.
On the other hand, there is no such monetary incentive for anyone giving any fucks whether the universe was blinked into existence by a supernatural being 6k years ago or a multidimensional brane fart 14b years ago. People who choose to deny the evidence in favor of some arbitrary (and officially denied, assuming these folk are Catholic-derived and not some other Christian branch) interpretation of a 2000 year old book have no reason for their views other than being legitimate nutters.
Same with the holocaust. Except some of those people are still alive so the deniers are pretty much telling the people that watched their friends and families being abused, tortured and killed that its all in their heads. But the last of them will only be around another couple of decades at most and then there will be nothing but a terrible tale in the history books that hopefully future generations will take to heart and not repeat. The only people with any real incentive to deny the holocaust are those who might be called out for war crimes during that period.
The first is not specifically wrong. Thermodynamics implies that the big bang's energy had to some from somewhere. The trouble is that we have no idea where it would come from, which is why no respectable description of the big bang will leave out the part about us only knowing/theorizing up to the first few nanoseconds.
Prior to that everything we know about the universe upends itself in ways that we can't even begin to describe with any consistency because all of our known (testable) laws of physics have fundamental lower limits (the Planck length in particular is a limit we don't know how to breach -- the math we've got breaks down and our experimental devices, even the LHC, are many many orders of magnitude above that still so there's no way we can peek in and see what comes out.)
Black holes face similar problems beyond the event horizon. We've come up with some very surprising theories about the "surface" of black holes such as the 2D "record" of 3D events being encoded in some fashion, but basically we've got nothing regarding their interior. Its quite possible that understanding black holes may help understand the big bang (or vice-versa.. or not) but until/unless we can come up with a way to probe those phenomena we're literally just guessing.
Its not like discovering QED or even probing gravitation where we can see the effects (or expect to see them at or near energy levels we can reasonably achieve at the moment) and are just looking for ways to describe them mathematically in higher and higher precision. We've literally got zilch to go from since our theories break down completely in those situations and any measurable effects they might exhibit are (so far) extremely well beyond our instruments' capabilities so we're not able to create new theories (other than like I said, just guessing. String theory for example might be beautiful and mathematically sound and could potentially answer some of these questions.. but until has a testable theory with a positive result that can't be equally well explained via the standard model, its really just math and not science.)
And sadly, that will be a terrible day for the planet. We're already stressing the damned thing well past any measure of sustainability.. stop the aging process and we'll replace "dying of old age" with "dying of thirst/starvation."
Or worse, some sort of cleansing program to maintain a sustainable population level. Nothing sinister about that concept.. And of course because "me starving" is a bit stronger motivator than "some guy I've never met in a country I've never been to being executed," a cleansing program (or alternatively a forced sterilization program) is almost certain to be implemented.
Not getting straight A's in advanced Reimannian topology and also able to run the quarter mile in less than 8 seconds by the time you're 14? We've got a nice camp over here for you.
No more arbitrary than 18 being legal age.. or 21 being the drinking age.. or whatever. There's plenty of kids who know who they want to get naked with and what political affiliation they're comfortable with and how much booze is too much by the time they're 16.. And there's plenty of people who really don't understand the responsibilities that come with such "adult" actions well into their 30s, 40s and beyond. One size definitely does not fit all when it comes to any developmental cycle.
So 75 was chosen not because its better than 70 or 74 or 76 for every single person in existence, but because you need to set a hard number for the sake of having a line to draw if you're planning to call it a cutoff. I'm not sure if that guy picked 75 based on some statistical reasoning or just pulled it out of his ass but that's not really the relevant point -- the relevant point is simply having a number so you can say "this is the line."
And yes, these numbers need to change over time as society changes. 500 years ago waiting until you were 18 to get to boning would have been considered insane and birth control even more so.. your chances of successful childbirth diminish as you age and given the high (relative to now at least) infant mortality rate, getting on with bearing kids ASAP was considered pretty important which is why when you see shows like Game of Thrones, none of the characters bat an eye when they marry Sansa off as soon as she gets her first period -- that would have been pretty much the rule of day back prior to modern pediatrics.
Similarly, if in the next 18 years some of this stem cell and genetic research ends up paying off and is able to keep us not just alive, but healthy and active until we're say 90, he'll probably update his number to match. His argument isn't that living a longer _healthy_ life is bad, he's trying to argue that drawing out an deteriorating life is more of a burden than a gift, to both yourself and to society. Basically if L(ife)=H(ealthy)+D(eteriorated), he wants to maximize the H/D ratio and since increasing H is hard, he's looking at decreasing D (which also has the benefit of fewer deteriorated years in total) while arguing that modern geriatric care has been too focused on getting a larger absolute value for L by increasing D rather than H.
I think he's saying that we shouldn't be using evolution as a talking point when we want to say "see science works!" because we have no proof that evolution indeed works as Darwin described. We have right boatloads of evidence to be sure, but no actual proof (evolution is perhaps a bit of a bad example as we can see bacteria and viruses evolving all the time -- but we still can't say with 100% certainty that we're correct in extrapolating that to all of nature.)
The real problem with the article is that _NOTHING_ is 100% reproducible. Even quantum electrodynamics -- aka our most well-tested theory ever and the most sciencey science we have by any definition of the word -- is written in terms of probability. You can't show the two-slit experiment by firing a single photon. Or even a dozen photons. You have to fire hundreds or thousands of them before the interference pattern emerges. Its only "science" (by this guy's definition) due to the fact that its a lot easier to shoot 100,000 photons in a reasonable time frame than it is to evolve dinosaurs on 100,000 planets.
"Science" is not a belief system to be sure, but you CAN believe that "science will answer everything given enough time." That's wholly unjustified. Its entirely possible that science can NEVER explain everything either due to the fundamental limits of nature (we'll never be able to see past ~14bn light years for example unless we find something that travels faster than light, which currently seems pretty unlikely) or due to the more simple limits of our measurement devices (we're maybe.. just maybe.. going to be able to detect gravity waves in the next few years. Detecting an individual graviton though may not ever be something we can do as building an LHC-like detector powerful enough to measure gravitons would likely take more energy than is available on the entire planet. Perhaps if we're some day able to harness the Sun's energy in a more direct manner -- heading towards Dyson sphere territory here -- then maybe we could build a big enough detector in theory. But that's an awful lot of extrapolation.)
Not really.. adjust it so that people who rate a lot of things (earning themselves an ebay-like reputation) would be weighted differently than the person who just came in and rated one item.
That would significantly cut down the paid shilling abilities as you couldn't just start up 1000 new accounts to post a single review each for your site, but not eliminate it. (You could do the same thing but also pick 10 random listings to post random reviews on in order to flesh out the numbers.)
Add a temporal aspect to it though -- ie: measure the average time between reviews and if its too low, drop the user's weighting) -- and it becomes harder to game the system yet again as the shills now have to maintain their shilling accounts over time in order to build up enough reputation for their reviews to matter.
Not that it couldn't still be gamed.. but it would require a much more substantial investment by the shills in order for their shilling to be of marketable value. But that also makes them semi-trackable -- set up a fake company listing, hire a known shiller to promote it and then ban any account that posts a glowing review. Because those accounts have to be curated over time, this would be a significant risk for the shilling firms and would at the very least require them to invest enough time/effort to try and determine if your fake listing is actually fake (and of course you could go the next step and create an actual fake company with a fake website and a fake email address/phone#/etc if you wanted.)
Being "unacceptable" doesn't prevent someone from doing it. It has to be enforced somehow. But as soon as you add enforcement to the system, its no longer a "free" market.
That works for basic access passwords since the only check is "is it right yes/no?" at one particular entry point (the login screen.) You can reset that password and they only have to "update" the one location (their password hash file.)
Encryption is a whole different beast as you're effectively password protecting every single byte on your device. Simply changing the access password won't change those bytes.
So unless they're storing your password in plaintext (or reversibly encrypted,) or they've built a master key into their algorithm then no, they can't recover your data even if they reset your password for you.
No major company with any sanity would store user passwords in a recoverable form -- way too much chance of a rogue employee or a hacker getting their hands on the file and open them up to massive lawsuits.
Similar issues if they store a "hard to get" copy of the password right on your phone -- it won't take very long before someone figures that out and how to access it and then you may as well turn off the password feature all together for all the security it would give you.
Master passwords are a little bit more likely.. not because they're any saner (for the same reasons) but its a little easier to control a single key stored in a vault somewhere than it is to control a (probably distributed) password file that needs to be accessed regularly. Of course having it in a vault is great for something like the CSS or the PS3 master keys (which were both cracked eventually of course) but less good when your level 1 or even level 2 tech support need to use it periodically..