I would say put it in a museum to inspire kids to study STEM. Then again, perhaps someone should make a roving Hubble exhibit. Make a life size, non-working replica of the Hubble telescope, select a couple dozen of the most spectacular photos and print them poster-sized. Then go from town to town showing off what Hubble did and promoting exploring space. I'm not sure how much it'd cost to create a look-alike of the exterior of the Hubble, but I'm guessing it would cost much less than the amount it'd cost to bring Hubble back to Earth safely.
Ah, but each person that borrows that book is a lost sale!
Not really, of course. You and I know this to be false. The publishing houses, however, see it that way. So even if libraries buy 1,000 copies of a book, the publishers see this as 10,000+ lost sales, not 1,000 gained sales.
Actually, you can already rent books from the library using Amazon's systems. My wife has rented books and read them on our Kindle. The downside is that there are limited titles, limited "copies" of each book (thus you go on a wait list until one is returned), and a limited time out per book (21 days, IIRC). The upside is that there is no cost (beyond the taxes you would pay anyway to support your local library) and you can take out as many books as you want (given availability).
The Amazon Prime's system has the benefit of having no due date and having unlimited "copies" of a book. So you can take out The Hunger Games (for example) and keep it until you've read the entire thing. The downside is you get one book out per month, can only take one book out at a time, and don't get credit if you miss a month. So if that Hunger Games book takes you 62 days to read, you've just lost out on one book rental and can never get it back. It's an interesting start, but they'll have to beef it up a bit more if they want to tempt me into paying $79 a year for Prime.
Actually, I have. I love going strawberry picking with my boys. (Apple picking too, but those aren't berries.) One of the best parts of the activity is when one of us spots an area with a lot of good berries and calls the others over.
Why couldn't berry pickers pick in groups (cover a lot more area that way) which would turn it into a social experience and cut down on "two for me, one for the group"?
As much as I'd like to see the headline "Anonymous Takes Down Zeta, Infamous Drug Cartel In Tatters", I really don't think Anonymous threatens Zeta. If Anonymous reveals names, Zeta will just start killing people associated (even remotely) with Anonymous until they stop. Zeta doesn't seem to have any moral issues with blood and gore. Besides, if Anonymous reveals names, what will it matter if Mexico's often corrupt politicians don't act on it?
Or, worse, your mutilated corpse is found along with those of your wife and children. Thus sending the message: "Oppose us and we'll not only go after you, but we'll go after the ones you care about." Many people might be willing to stand up to Zetas at the risk of their life, but when you factor in the lives of those they care about, it becomes harder to stand up to them.
In the end, I agree. Individual bloggers standing up to Zeta stand no chance. They need to be hit and hit hard by a military-level force. Unfortunately, if my understanding of the situation is correct, Zeta "owns" a lot of influential politicians which helps ensure the military won't be brought to bear against them.
Or they can get you to plea to a non-moving violation. I didn't properly stop at a stop sign once (did a rolling stop) and got a ticket. The judge told me to go speak with the prosecutor who immediately offered me a deal to lower it to a non-moving violation (parking on the pavement). My choices were then a) Try to fight the ticket, possibly losing and getting a fine plus points on my license, or b) accept the plea in which case I pay a smaller fine and have no points added. I picked b.
In hindsight, it's the perfect setup for the government. They don't need to do whatever administrative work is needed to do to add points to your license (contacting insurance companies and the like), they don't need to deal with people fighting the tickets, and they tend to collect the somewhat smaller payments right away.
Oh, and since that day, I come to full stops at all stop signs. Not getting a second ticket for that!
Next thing you know, they'll give soldiers Big Pink gum. It's the only gum with the breath freshening power of ham and it pinkens your teeth while you chew.
Actually, some of the heavier elements only came about from supernovae (and even the lighter elements were only scattered about thanks to supernovae). Therefore, we are star debris!
But... but... but... They only make $6.8 billion because of piracy and lost sales. If only the government would pass these handy-dandy, pre-written, pro-RIAA laws, they would stomp out those evils and make $6.8 gazillion! Think of the lobbying contributions they could make then!
I don't know about apathy. Look at the Occupy movement. People upset at how big companies aren't 1) playing by the rules or 2) paying government officials to get rules set in favor of their company. Now, Congress wants to pass legislation to give big companies more power? This should go over well with the Occupy swarms.
Having studied relativity in college, the problem was that faster-than-light speeds resulted in imaginary numbers (square root of negative one). So you'd have an imaginary length, imaginary speed (relative to an observer), etc. Just what that imaginary number represents (impossibility, traveling back in time, becoming anti-matter) is up for debate.
With every flu shot I've gotten, I've never had anything more than a sore arm (and sometimes not even that). You can get a low grade fever and mild aches as well, but these only last 1 - 2 days. (Much less than the week-long flu.) The poster I was replying to was saying that 5% of people who get the flu shot get the full blown flu from it. This is completely false. Some people might get the low fever and ache for a day and think that was the flu. Some people might be infected with the flu prior to the vaccine taking effect and coincidentally have the symptoms appear after the shot. However, it is impossible to get full blown flu from the flu shot.
Yeah, I saw the alert tweeted out and read their petition. They are claiming that there are rumors that a bill might be introduced that would make sites liable for the content people post on them. They then claim that this bill would outlaw Twitter and Facebook (along with all other websites that allow comments, of course). The bill that they themselves admitted hasn't been introduced yet and is only a rumor.
While I would definitely oppose such a bill, I'm not going to go chasing away rumors. Once an actual bill like this has been introduced, then I'll protest it (as will every ISP or company that allows comments on their website).
How do you balance individual choices which put large numbers of individuals (perhaps including themselves or perhaps not) at risk? Do you let the individual make those choices and shrug your shoulders at their victims? Aren't the victims being denied their own choice? (In this care of whether or not they want to be exposed to the virus. Remember, some individuals can't get the vaccine due to age or medical issues. These individuals are at the mercy of the choices others make.)
People do not have absolute rights. I can't start a blog slandering people and showing them in photoshopped pornographic photos and then claim it's my choice to do this. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. If someone chooses not to be vaccinated for whooping cough (or chooses not to have their kids vaccinated), they aren't just putting themselves/their kids in harm's way. If that was it, I'd agree with you. However, they are putting everyone they come into contact with, even in the most trivial fashion, into harms way. What right does an individual have to go Typhoid Mary on people?
you choose for your child regarding the vaccines and regarding the places he/she visits with you
The problem is, *any* place could be an exposure zone. Walking past an infected person on the sidewalk could cause an infection. Should all parents and their kids be quarantined until the child is old enough to have gotten all of his/her shots? After all, taking your kid out anywhere could expose them. The parent going out and bringing something in could bring in germs.
Saying that color x is the most reflected color of an object makes it color x is the most basic and accurate explanation of why a thing is one color and not another.
During my college orientation, among other activities, we were shown some kind of presentation where this woman claimed that pouring water into a red glass imbued it with some attributes associated with the color red. I knew it was bunk and raised my hand. When I was called on, I explained that the glass was red because it allowed all colors to pass through it except for the color red. This color was reflected back to our eyes. If it absorbed the red light, it wouldn't look red to us. So, given that the red light was reflected and all other colors absorbed (or allowed to pass through), shouldn't the water in the glass be "imbued" with the attributes of all colors except for red*?
She didn't like this question, much and I wasn't called on to ask any more questions.
* Of course, the "keep the story straight" quack answer could have been: "Well, absorbing the attributes of all colors except for red gives X effect. We'll shorthand this by saying it's 'imbued with the power of red.'" I wasn't going to do her job for her, though.
No vaccine today uses any live virus. Typically, they contain killed viruses or just fragments of the virus. It is impossible to get the flu (even a mild case) from the flu vaccine. However, the flu vaccine takes time to become effective. During this time, you could be infected with the flu. (Alternatively, you could be infected before your shot but only have symptoms come out after it.) This is due to the coincidence of your infection and shot's timings, not due to the vaccine giving you the flu. People detect patterns, though, and start thinking that the vaccine gave them the flu.
According to Wikipedia: "The latest generation of preventive HPV vaccines is based on hollow virus-like particles (VLPs) assembled from recombinant HPV coat proteins." This means that being injected with the HPV vaccine doesn't mean that HPV viruses are now coursing through your body. Instead, some proteins from an HPV virus are. These proteins, by themselves, can't do anything to you. Your immune system, however, picks up on them and "fights them off" as if they were really HPV. Once done, your immune system will remember the fake HPV fight. When you are then really infected with HPV, your immune system will be ready to fight it off. (This is a bit of a simplification, but accurate enough.) There is a 0% chance that the HPV vaccine will infect you with HPV and then cause cancer.
It's possible that building extremely large objects (e.g. Dyson Spheres) or stellar-sized engineering projects runs into some sort of problem that counters the advantages of such a program. Perhaps the complexity makes it unfeasible even for civilizations thousands of years more advanced than we are. Perhaps they develop technology that we can't conceive of that renders those large projects unneeded.
For a close-to-home example, 1950's science fiction writers often imagined huge computers. These monstrosities would be the size of small cities. Why didn't we build those? Because we came up with technology that enabled us to pack more power into a smaller space. Why build a city-sized, old-style computer when something the size of an iPad has as much, if not more, computational power?
As for smaller alien projects, we're just now getting to the point where we can detect Earth-sized objects... and even that is half-inferred. (This star is wiggling like his and has its light dimmed like that. Running the numbers, there must be a planet the size of 3 Earths in this orbit.) Half of the planets we've found could have dozens of orbiting alien space stations zipping around them and we wouldn't be able to detect them at all.
Detecting alien life isn't as simple as pointing a telescope to a random spot and seeing a rocket going zipping through space.
If I have an unvaccinated (due to being too young for the vaccination) baby which comes down to whooping cough, how do I track down the unvaccinated individual who gave my baby the disease? In the normal course of a day, I could come into contact with the germs from thousands of people. Just one trip into a Target, Walmart, or similar store could do the trick. Whooping Cough Infectee coughs into hand and picks up laundry detergent. Thinks again and puts it back. I come along, pick up same detergent bottle and then hug my baby. Baby is now infected and I never even saw the Infectee.
You have rights, but your rights don't include the right to cause serious harm/death to a huge group of individuals just because you don't want to get a shot. If we took the "it's the individual's choice" approach, polio and smallpox would still be around killing and maiming people today.
At least Dr. Oz has a "doctor" in front of his name so I can see people mistakenly trusting him over Dr. Noname the immunologist. Bad reasoning still, yes, but at least somewhat understandable. But trusting Jenny McCarthy? She's never held any advanced medical degree to my knowledge. How could you trust her with medical advice? If I need advice on how to strip for a magazine, I'll consult Jenny. If I need advice on medical issues, I'll ask a doctor.
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I would say put it in a museum to inspire kids to study STEM. Then again, perhaps someone should make a roving Hubble exhibit. Make a life size, non-working replica of the Hubble telescope, select a couple dozen of the most spectacular photos and print them poster-sized. Then go from town to town showing off what Hubble did and promoting exploring space. I'm not sure how much it'd cost to create a look-alike of the exterior of the Hubble, but I'm guessing it would cost much less than the amount it'd cost to bring Hubble back to Earth safely.
Ah, but each person that borrows that book is a lost sale!
Not really, of course. You and I know this to be false. The publishing houses, however, see it that way. So even if libraries buy 1,000 copies of a book, the publishers see this as 10,000+ lost sales, not 1,000 gained sales.
Actually, you can already rent books from the library using Amazon's systems. My wife has rented books and read them on our Kindle. The downside is that there are limited titles, limited "copies" of each book (thus you go on a wait list until one is returned), and a limited time out per book (21 days, IIRC). The upside is that there is no cost (beyond the taxes you would pay anyway to support your local library) and you can take out as many books as you want (given availability).
The Amazon Prime's system has the benefit of having no due date and having unlimited "copies" of a book. So you can take out The Hunger Games (for example) and keep it until you've read the entire thing. The downside is you get one book out per month, can only take one book out at a time, and don't get credit if you miss a month. So if that Hunger Games book takes you 62 days to read, you've just lost out on one book rental and can never get it back. It's an interesting start, but they'll have to beef it up a bit more if they want to tempt me into paying $79 a year for Prime.
Actually, I have. I love going strawberry picking with my boys. (Apple picking too, but those aren't berries.) One of the best parts of the activity is when one of us spots an area with a lot of good berries and calls the others over.
Why couldn't berry pickers pick in groups (cover a lot more area that way) which would turn it into a social experience and cut down on "two for me, one for the group"?
As much as I'd like to see the headline "Anonymous Takes Down Zeta, Infamous Drug Cartel In Tatters", I really don't think Anonymous threatens Zeta. If Anonymous reveals names, Zeta will just start killing people associated (even remotely) with Anonymous until they stop. Zeta doesn't seem to have any moral issues with blood and gore. Besides, if Anonymous reveals names, what will it matter if Mexico's often corrupt politicians don't act on it?
Or, worse, your mutilated corpse is found along with those of your wife and children. Thus sending the message: "Oppose us and we'll not only go after you, but we'll go after the ones you care about." Many people might be willing to stand up to Zetas at the risk of their life, but when you factor in the lives of those they care about, it becomes harder to stand up to them.
In the end, I agree. Individual bloggers standing up to Zeta stand no chance. They need to be hit and hit hard by a military-level force. Unfortunately, if my understanding of the situation is correct, Zeta "owns" a lot of influential politicians which helps ensure the military won't be brought to bear against them.
Or they can get you to plea to a non-moving violation. I didn't properly stop at a stop sign once (did a rolling stop) and got a ticket. The judge told me to go speak with the prosecutor who immediately offered me a deal to lower it to a non-moving violation (parking on the pavement). My choices were then a) Try to fight the ticket, possibly losing and getting a fine plus points on my license, or b) accept the plea in which case I pay a smaller fine and have no points added. I picked b.
In hindsight, it's the perfect setup for the government. They don't need to do whatever administrative work is needed to do to add points to your license (contacting insurance companies and the like), they don't need to deal with people fighting the tickets, and they tend to collect the somewhat smaller payments right away.
Oh, and since that day, I come to full stops at all stop signs. Not getting a second ticket for that!
Either that or he meant that it doesn't make him get shot by a ray gun from Star Trek.
"Set phasers to Road Rage."
Next thing you know, they'll give soldiers Big Pink gum. It's the only gum with the breath freshening power of ham and it pinkens your teeth while you chew.
Actually, some of the heavier elements only came about from supernovae (and even the lighter elements were only scattered about thanks to supernovae). Therefore, we are star debris!
But... but... but... They only make $6.8 billion because of piracy and lost sales. If only the government would pass these handy-dandy, pre-written, pro-RIAA laws, they would stomp out those evils and make $6.8 gazillion! Think of the lobbying contributions they could make then!
I don't know about apathy. Look at the Occupy movement. People upset at how big companies aren't 1) playing by the rules or 2) paying government officials to get rules set in favor of their company. Now, Congress wants to pass legislation to give big companies more power? This should go over well with the Occupy swarms.
Unfortunately, it has now become "The government is granted limited powers by the corporations considered to be people."
Corporations are people. All people are equal. Some (corporation "people") are just more equal than others (individuals).
Having studied relativity in college, the problem was that faster-than-light speeds resulted in imaginary numbers (square root of negative one). So you'd have an imaginary length, imaginary speed (relative to an observer), etc. Just what that imaginary number represents (impossibility, traveling back in time, becoming anti-matter) is up for debate.
With every flu shot I've gotten, I've never had anything more than a sore arm (and sometimes not even that). You can get a low grade fever and mild aches as well, but these only last 1 - 2 days. (Much less than the week-long flu.) The poster I was replying to was saying that 5% of people who get the flu shot get the full blown flu from it. This is completely false. Some people might get the low fever and ache for a day and think that was the flu. Some people might be infected with the flu prior to the vaccine taking effect and coincidentally have the symptoms appear after the shot. However, it is impossible to get full blown flu from the flu shot.
Yeah, I saw the alert tweeted out and read their petition. They are claiming that there are rumors that a bill might be introduced that would make sites liable for the content people post on them. They then claim that this bill would outlaw Twitter and Facebook (along with all other websites that allow comments, of course). The bill that they themselves admitted hasn't been introduced yet and is only a rumor.
While I would definitely oppose such a bill, I'm not going to go chasing away rumors. Once an actual bill like this has been introduced, then I'll protest it (as will every ISP or company that allows comments on their website).
How do you balance individual choices which put large numbers of individuals (perhaps including themselves or perhaps not) at risk? Do you let the individual make those choices and shrug your shoulders at their victims? Aren't the victims being denied their own choice? (In this care of whether or not they want to be exposed to the virus. Remember, some individuals can't get the vaccine due to age or medical issues. These individuals are at the mercy of the choices others make.)
People do not have absolute rights. I can't start a blog slandering people and showing them in photoshopped pornographic photos and then claim it's my choice to do this. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. If someone chooses not to be vaccinated for whooping cough (or chooses not to have their kids vaccinated), they aren't just putting themselves/their kids in harm's way. If that was it, I'd agree with you. However, they are putting everyone they come into contact with, even in the most trivial fashion, into harms way. What right does an individual have to go Typhoid Mary on people?
The problem is, *any* place could be an exposure zone. Walking past an infected person on the sidewalk could cause an infection. Should all parents and their kids be quarantined until the child is old enough to have gotten all of his/her shots? After all, taking your kid out anywhere could expose them. The parent going out and bringing something in could bring in germs.
During my college orientation, among other activities, we were shown some kind of presentation where this woman claimed that pouring water into a red glass imbued it with some attributes associated with the color red. I knew it was bunk and raised my hand. When I was called on, I explained that the glass was red because it allowed all colors to pass through it except for the color red. This color was reflected back to our eyes. If it absorbed the red light, it wouldn't look red to us. So, given that the red light was reflected and all other colors absorbed (or allowed to pass through), shouldn't the water in the glass be "imbued" with the attributes of all colors except for red*?
She didn't like this question, much and I wasn't called on to ask any more questions.
* Of course, the "keep the story straight" quack answer could have been: "Well, absorbing the attributes of all colors except for red gives X effect. We'll shorthand this by saying it's 'imbued with the power of red.'" I wasn't going to do her job for her, though.
It's a side effect from their cloaking field malfunctioning. Obviously, the meteorologist is an alien plant trying to cover up the truth.
No vaccine today uses any live virus. Typically, they contain killed viruses or just fragments of the virus. It is impossible to get the flu (even a mild case) from the flu vaccine. However, the flu vaccine takes time to become effective. During this time, you could be infected with the flu. (Alternatively, you could be infected before your shot but only have symptoms come out after it.) This is due to the coincidence of your infection and shot's timings, not due to the vaccine giving you the flu. People detect patterns, though, and start thinking that the vaccine gave them the flu.
According to Wikipedia: "The latest generation of preventive HPV vaccines is based on hollow virus-like particles (VLPs) assembled from recombinant HPV coat proteins." This means that being injected with the HPV vaccine doesn't mean that HPV viruses are now coursing through your body. Instead, some proteins from an HPV virus are. These proteins, by themselves, can't do anything to you. Your immune system, however, picks up on them and "fights them off" as if they were really HPV. Once done, your immune system will remember the fake HPV fight. When you are then really infected with HPV, your immune system will be ready to fight it off. (This is a bit of a simplification, but accurate enough.) There is a 0% chance that the HPV vaccine will infect you with HPV and then cause cancer.
It's possible that building extremely large objects (e.g. Dyson Spheres) or stellar-sized engineering projects runs into some sort of problem that counters the advantages of such a program. Perhaps the complexity makes it unfeasible even for civilizations thousands of years more advanced than we are. Perhaps they develop technology that we can't conceive of that renders those large projects unneeded.
For a close-to-home example, 1950's science fiction writers often imagined huge computers. These monstrosities would be the size of small cities. Why didn't we build those? Because we came up with technology that enabled us to pack more power into a smaller space. Why build a city-sized, old-style computer when something the size of an iPad has as much, if not more, computational power?
As for smaller alien projects, we're just now getting to the point where we can detect Earth-sized objects... and even that is half-inferred. (This star is wiggling like his and has its light dimmed like that. Running the numbers, there must be a planet the size of 3 Earths in this orbit.) Half of the planets we've found could have dozens of orbiting alien space stations zipping around them and we wouldn't be able to detect them at all.
Detecting alien life isn't as simple as pointing a telescope to a random spot and seeing a rocket going zipping through space.
If I have an unvaccinated (due to being too young for the vaccination) baby which comes down to whooping cough, how do I track down the unvaccinated individual who gave my baby the disease? In the normal course of a day, I could come into contact with the germs from thousands of people. Just one trip into a Target, Walmart, or similar store could do the trick. Whooping Cough Infectee coughs into hand and picks up laundry detergent. Thinks again and puts it back. I come along, pick up same detergent bottle and then hug my baby. Baby is now infected and I never even saw the Infectee.
You have rights, but your rights don't include the right to cause serious harm/death to a huge group of individuals just because you don't want to get a shot. If we took the "it's the individual's choice" approach, polio and smallpox would still be around killing and maiming people today.
At least Dr. Oz has a "doctor" in front of his name so I can see people mistakenly trusting him over Dr. Noname the immunologist. Bad reasoning still, yes, but at least somewhat understandable. But trusting Jenny McCarthy? She's never held any advanced medical degree to my knowledge. How could you trust her with medical advice? If I need advice on how to strip for a magazine, I'll consult Jenny. If I need advice on medical issues, I'll ask a doctor.