The Big Bang theory predicts that the early universe was a very hot place and that as it expands, the gas within it cools. Thus the universe should be filled with radiation that is literally the remnant heat left over from the Big Bang, called the "cosmic microwave background radiation", or CMB.
The existence of the CMB radiation was first predicted by George Gamow in 1948, and by Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman in 1950. It was first observed inadvertently in 1965 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The radiation was acting as a source of excess noise in a radio receiver they were building. Coincidentally, researchers at nearby Princeton University, led by Robert Dicke and including Dave Wilkinson of the WMAP science team, were devising an experiment to find the CMB. When they heard about the Bell Labs result they immediately realized that the CMB had been found. The result was a pair of papers in the Physical Review: one by Penzias and Wilson detailing the observations, and one by Dicke, Peebles, Roll, and Wilkinson giving the cosmological interpretation. Penzias and Wilson shared the 1978 Nobel prize in physics for their discovery.
You are simply wrong. To imply that the universe we are in is some kind of "testable result" of intelligent design is misinformed at best, pathetic and dishonest at worst.
And you are wrong about theories. A theory absolutely must make testable predictions. A theory that does not make a testable prediction is unfalsifiable. By definitition a scientific theory must be falsifiable.
What you need to understand is not some concise definition of theory but a comprehensive definition of falsifiable. This snippet from Wikipedia's definition of falsifiability will start you on the right path:
Falsifiability, or defeasibility, is an important concept in the philosophy of science. It is the principle that a proposition or theory cannot be considered scientific if it does not admit the possibility of being shown false.
Thanks for playing. We do have some lovely parting gifts for you.
Every scientific theory makes testable predictions. For example, the theory of relativity predicts that gravitational fields bend light and that time slows down for someone moving relative to a stationary observer. Both of these outrageous predictions have been tested multiple times and have found to occur exactly as the theory predicts.
What testable predictions does intelligent design make?
Lemme see if I understand you. You're an engineer. And you can't understand why non-engineers have problems with their systems in the face of cleverly engineered attacks.
The poster talked about "bombers and the like... flown in from Far Away". Such bombers are vulnerable to surface to air missiles. The first phase of achieving air superiority is to identify and destroy SAM sites and other air defenses. Bombers aren't suitable for that mission. Cruise missiles are too expensive to be widely used for it. Ground attack aircraft from a nearby land base or a carrier are best suited for the job.
Can you cite in which 1980s NATO exercise simulated carriers were sunk by simulated diesel subs? I didn't think so. Whether in the 70s (when I served in the Navy), the 80s, the 90s or today, it would be all but impossible for a diesel sub to sink a carrier.
Carriers never work alone. They are always part of a task force that screens submarine, missile and aircraft threats.
The US maintains constant surveillance of every potentially hostile submarine in the world at all times. Nowadays submarines have certainly gotten quieter but back in the eighties the position of every Soviet diesel sub at sea would have been known to within a few hundred miles. In the event that hostilities broke out ASW aircraft would be dispatched from every carrier to find and continuously track ever enemy sub using magnetic anomaly detectors, dipping sonar and sonobuoys. Taking out the subs would have been like shooting fish in a barrel.
BTW, one of the first missions in any war is to achieve air superiority as quickly as possible, as the US did in both Iraq wars. Long range bombers are useless in achieving this objective.
No, it means that this particular test cannot provide meaningful results for you.
There's a cardiovascular fitness test that measures how much distance you can cover in 12 minutes. If you happen to have a broken ankle or an artificial leg, obviously that test can't provide meaningful results for you.
Wait--let me get this right. None of your friends and none of your clients will even pick up the phone unless they can see who's calling? Who are your freaking clients, the Sopranos?
You must have your own special little version of Slashdot. My original post was modded up to five, the maximum. None of your posts in this thread has received a single mod point.
But you do seem to be having fun making an ass of yourself so go right ahead.
"No company will ever admit that it's not in a solid growth period. Don't be silly, that would lower the stock price."
You really are catastophically ignorant. There are hundred upon hundreds of companies in the US alone that have no need to sell themselves as growth companies--because not all investors are looking to invest in such companies! Many investors value stability, security and yield above capital gains. Such investors might invest in the stocks of utilities and insurance companies, which have long been harbors for conservative investors.
"Shareholders used to look forward to profits from the company in the form of dividends. It's a relatively recent idea that stock prices should be the primary goal of benefit to shareholders."
While it might be a good practice for a mature company in a mature industry to pay dividends, a company with good management and solid growth prospects has no business paying dividends. A growing company's need for capital almost always outstrips its cashflow. It's just plain dumb for a growing company to pay out dividends and then have to go out and borrow money or sell more equity to finance its growth.
Of course if it does have to borrow it will use its stock as collateral--which means the higher its stock price, the more money it can borrow. And if it sells more equity how much money it can get per share will be determined by--guess what?--its stock price. Either way, ensuring a healthy stock price is in long term interests of its shareholders.
Another reason why it's not necessarily a good idea to pay dividends is that the US, unlike most other Western democracies, taxes dividends twice. First, the company pays taxes on its profits. Then with what it has left over, it pays dividends to its shareholders--who have to include those dividends as part of their taxable income. This is wrong and counterproductive because although the corporation and its shareholders are separate entities, everything the corporation owns is, in fact, actually owned by its shareholders. If I pay you some money you can argue you that it should be taxed. But if I move money from one of my accounts (a corporation of which I am part owner or say my checking account) to another of my accounts (say my savings account) isn't doesn't make sense to tax it. But there it is.
This double taxation is one of the distorting factors that makes it much more logical for investors to seek returns from increased share prices rather than dividends.
Finally, to pay a dividend is for the company to, in effect, throw up its hands and say, "Here. We can't figure out how to put this money we made for you to work any better than you can so we're just going to give it to you. You figure out where to put it."
Karl's still holding on line two. Shall I put him through?
You're so confused about basic economics it's hard to know where to start. But I'll try.
"Companies that are owned by stock holders are only interested in profits"
As opposed to companies owned by whom? Most businesses, even small ones, are incorporated, which means they're owned by stockholders. Stockholder is just another word for "owner". Sole proprietorships and partnerships also have owners.
"That means companies with stock holders do stupid things like fire 30% of their staff to make a profit"
Sometimes, firing 30 percent of the staff is exactly what needs to be done. Somtimes the percentage should be higher. Sometimes making a profit does not require any firings. It's absurd to make a blanket statement that firing people to increase profits is stupid.
"The company has no long term investment in you"
Says who? Which company? A company might not have a long term investment in a particular employee. Or it might subsidize that employee's education like my company does, making me not only more valuable to them but more competitive in the jobs marketplace.
"Half the time they aren't even looking to be more profitable... they just want to increase stock prices."
And exactly how does a company increase its stock price without increasing profits? Both increased profits and increased stock prices represent increases in shareholder value, which is a company's primary fiduciary (i.e., legal and moral) responsibility to its shareholders.
"What you should be looking for is a small company"
I prefer working for small companies but working for big companies has distinct advantages. It's foolish to make a one-size-fits-all statement that small companies are always better.
"Or better yet, start your own company."
Great idea. But then you'd be one of those greedy shareholders.
"If you are working for a company (if a company pays you) you're obviously worth twice that. They can't make a profit on you if you aren't."
Karl Marx called and left a message for you re: the surplus value of wages. "Keep fighting the good fight comrade. Seventy five years of abject failure in the Soviet Union does nothing to disprove my theories."
Here's one reason you're feeling poorer: You're being gouged on property taxes. In my neighborhood the market price of condos has more than tripled in the past seven years. If tax rates remain the same that means taxes have tripled. But have school enrollments tripled? Have police salaries tripled? Have there been three times as many fires? No, no and no. Rising real estate prices have become a money grab for politicians. You need to get involved with your local politics and insist that property tax rates be adjusted downward so that what you pay reflects the true cost of delivering municipal services.
AOL is guilty of this. I don't know if they're still doing it but the last time I went to install the latest version of AIM for a new machine the only thing they offered was the AIM Triton beta (which they did not identify as such on the download page). WTF? If want to be a beta tester I'll ask to be a beta tester. Oldversion.com to the rescue!
I asked it before and I'll ask it again. At the peak of the dot bomb boom supposedly miles and miles of fiber optic cable was laid that wasn't worth lighting up because the demand wasn't there. Has all of that capacity since been put online?
And supposedly the cool thing about fiber is that you don't have to do anything to the fiber to increase its capacity, just keep developing gizmos that can turn the light on and off at ever higher rates.
So has all that dark fiber been put into use or was it an urban legend or what?
No, someone from outside could have the frame of reference required to make sense of disparate pieces of information. Back in the early 70s when I was a radioman in the Navy and the incremental cost of encryption was nonzero we nevertheless encrypted many innocuous-sounding messages. There was even a designation for such traffic: EFTO-FOUO "encrypt for transmission only-for official use only." Some messages were encrypted to respect privacy; we might get a message that some guy's brother died. But others contained information that in and of itself was not particularly interesting, e.g., maybe we should expect a shipment of parkas. It's just coats. Not classified. But what if a bunch of ships currently in warm regions got such messages? A potential adversary could surmise that there was going to be a large redeployment of those ships to colder climes.
Of course in the NSA case we're talking about historical documents, not current ones. But it's conceivable that declassifying items that in and of themselves seem to be pretty mundane might nevertheless, when taken in aggregate, reveal information that is prejudicial to the best interests of the United States.
I'm not defending this wholesale reclassification effort. It does seem foolish and ineffective. I just wanted to point out that assuming that a potential adversary couldn't possibly have a useful frame of reference isn't necessarily true.
Windows is shutting down, and grammar are On their last leg. So what am we to do? A letter of complaint go just so far, Proving the only one in step are you.
Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes. A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad Before they gets to where you doesnt knows The meaning what it must of meant to had.
The meteor have hit. Extinction spread, But evolution do not stop for that. A mutant languages rise from the dead And all them rules is suddenly old hat.
Too bad for we, us what has had so long The best seat from the only game in town. But there it am, and whom can say its wrong? Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.
Clive James in The Guardian -- Saturday April 30, 2005
Because anything the government can abuse the government will abuse. Because anything the government can screw up the government will screw up.
I don't even have an EZ-Pass (multi-state automatic road toll paying device for your car) because I try to keep my entanglements with the government to an absolute bare minimum.
Januuary 1984. Spent about $1,700 total for a Sanyo MBC-555 with 64K memory and twin 160K 5.25 inch floppies and a Juki 6100 daisy wheel printer. And it had a cool amber character-based monitor.
It was cheap because they didn't even attempt to make it a PC clone. It could run only the most vanilla of MS-DOS programs; forget about Flight Simulator and dBase.
Yeah, brilliant idea, those keyboards. N00bs were constantly reprogramming them by accidentally hitting the key combo that turned on macro recording mode. Sort of like giving people a massage table that doubled as a band saw when you shift your weight just right.
Color 35mm film (not to mention 70 mm) is generally considered to be equivalent to roughly 4,000 x 5,300 pixels, which is way more than even 1,920 x 1,080. More info.
This means that any TV show shot on film (vs. videotape) is a candidate for a New! High Definition Version! Can't wait to see teh Soup Nazi in HD.
According the The Tax Foundation the top two percent of taxpayers account for 16.77% of all adjusted gross income yet they pay 34.27% of all income taxes paid. The top five percent account for 31.18% of all adjusted gross income and they pay more than half of the total tax bill for all of us (54.36%).
Slashdot Mirror
But first get a settlement.
The Big Bang theory predicts that the early universe was a very hot place and that as it expands, the gas within it cools. Thus the universe should be filled with radiation that is literally the remnant heat left over from the Big Bang, called the "cosmic microwave background radiation", or CMB.
The existence of the CMB radiation was first predicted by George Gamow in 1948, and by Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman in 1950. It was first observed inadvertently in 1965 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The radiation was acting as a source of excess noise in a radio receiver they were building. Coincidentally, researchers at nearby Princeton University, led by Robert Dicke and including Dave Wilkinson of the WMAP science team, were devising an experiment to find the CMB. When they heard about the Bell Labs result they immediately realized that the CMB had been found. The result was a pair of papers in the Physical Review: one by Penzias and Wilson detailing the observations, and one by Dicke, Peebles, Roll, and Wilkinson giving the cosmological interpretation. Penzias and Wilson shared the 1978 Nobel prize in physics for their discovery.
The rest of the story is at NASA's Cosmolology 100 site.
For a fascinating and very readable book-length account read Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh.
You are simply wrong. To imply that the universe we are in is some kind of "testable result" of intelligent design is misinformed at best, pathetic and dishonest at worst.
And you are wrong about theories. A theory absolutely must make testable predictions. A theory that does not make a testable prediction is unfalsifiable. By definitition a scientific theory must be falsifiable.
What you need to understand is not some concise definition of theory but a comprehensive definition of falsifiable. This snippet from Wikipedia's definition of falsifiability will start you on the right path:
Falsifiability, or defeasibility, is an important concept in the philosophy of science. It is the principle that a proposition or theory cannot be considered scientific if it does not admit the possibility of being shown false.
Thanks for playing. We do have some lovely parting gifts for you.
Every scientific theory makes testable predictions. For example, the theory of relativity predicts that gravitational fields bend light and that time slows down for someone moving relative to a stationary observer. Both of these outrageous predictions have been tested multiple times and have found to occur exactly as the theory predicts.
What testable predictions does intelligent design make?
Lemme see if I understand you. You're an engineer. And you can't understand why non-engineers have problems with their systems in the face of cleverly engineered attacks.
Yep. You're an engineer.
The poster talked about "bombers and the like... flown in from Far Away". Such bombers are vulnerable to surface to air missiles. The first phase of achieving air superiority is to identify and destroy SAM sites and other air defenses. Bombers aren't suitable for that mission. Cruise missiles are too expensive to be widely used for it. Ground attack aircraft from a nearby land base or a carrier are best suited for the job.
Can you cite in which 1980s NATO exercise simulated carriers were sunk by simulated diesel subs? I didn't think so. Whether in the 70s (when I served in the Navy), the 80s, the 90s or today, it would be all but impossible for a diesel sub to sink a carrier.
Carriers never work alone. They are always part of a task force that screens submarine, missile and aircraft threats.
The US maintains constant surveillance of every potentially hostile submarine in the world at all times. Nowadays submarines have certainly gotten quieter but back in the eighties the position of every Soviet diesel sub at sea would have been known to within a few hundred miles. In the event that hostilities broke out ASW aircraft would be dispatched from every carrier to find and continuously track ever enemy sub using magnetic anomaly detectors, dipping sonar and sonobuoys. Taking out the subs would have been like shooting fish in a barrel.
BTW, one of the first missions in any war is to achieve air superiority as quickly as possible, as the US did in both Iraq wars. Long range bombers are useless in achieving this objective.
No, it means that this particular test cannot provide meaningful results for you.
There's a cardiovascular fitness test that measures how much distance you can cover in 12 minutes. If you happen to have a broken ankle or an artificial leg, obviously that test can't provide meaningful results for you.
All tests have limitations.
Wait--let me get this right. None of your friends and none of your clients will even pick up the phone unless they can see who's calling? Who are your freaking clients, the Sopranos?
You must have your own special little version of Slashdot. My original post was modded up to five, the maximum. None of your posts in this thread has received a single mod point.
But you do seem to be having fun making an ass of yourself so go right ahead.
"No company will ever admit that it's not in a solid growth period. Don't be silly, that would lower the stock price."
You really are catastophically ignorant. There are hundred upon hundreds of companies in the US alone that have no need to sell themselves as growth companies--because not all investors are looking to invest in such companies! Many investors value stability, security and yield above capital gains. Such investors might invest in the stocks of utilities and insurance companies, which have long been harbors for conservative investors.
Are you done making an ass of yourself now, kid?
"Shareholders used to look forward to profits from the company in the form of dividends. It's a relatively recent idea that stock prices should be the primary goal of benefit to shareholders."
While it might be a good practice for a mature company in a mature industry to pay dividends, a company with good management and solid growth prospects has no business paying dividends. A growing company's need for capital almost always outstrips its cashflow. It's just plain dumb for a growing company to pay out dividends and then have to go out and borrow money or sell more equity to finance its growth.
Of course if it does have to borrow it will use its stock as collateral--which means the higher its stock price, the more money it can borrow. And if it sells more equity how much money it can get per share will be determined by--guess what?--its stock price. Either way, ensuring a healthy stock price is in long term interests of its shareholders.
Another reason why it's not necessarily a good idea to pay dividends is that the US, unlike most other Western democracies, taxes dividends twice. First, the company pays taxes on its profits. Then with what it has left over, it pays dividends to its shareholders--who have to include those dividends as part of their taxable income. This is wrong and counterproductive because although the corporation and its shareholders are separate entities, everything the corporation owns is, in fact, actually owned by its shareholders. If I pay you some money you can argue you that it should be taxed. But if I move money from one of my accounts (a corporation of which I am part owner or say my checking account) to another of my accounts (say my savings account) isn't doesn't make sense to tax it. But there it is.
This double taxation is one of the distorting factors that makes it much more logical for investors to seek returns from increased share prices rather than dividends.
Finally, to pay a dividend is for the company to, in effect, throw up its hands and say, "Here. We can't figure out how to put this money we made for you to work any better than you can so we're just going to give it to you. You figure out where to put it."
Karl's still holding on line two. Shall I put him through?
You're so confused about basic economics it's hard to know where to start. But I'll try.
"Companies that are owned by stock holders are only interested in profits"
As opposed to companies owned by whom? Most businesses, even small ones, are incorporated, which means they're owned by stockholders. Stockholder is just another word for "owner". Sole proprietorships and partnerships also have owners.
"That means companies with stock holders do stupid things like fire 30% of their staff to make a profit"
Sometimes, firing 30 percent of the staff is exactly what needs to be done. Somtimes the percentage should be higher. Sometimes making a profit does not require any firings. It's absurd to make a blanket statement that firing people to increase profits is stupid.
"The company has no long term investment in you"
Says who? Which company? A company might not have a long term investment in a particular employee. Or it might subsidize that employee's education like my company does, making me not only more valuable to them but more competitive in the jobs marketplace.
"Half the time they aren't even looking to be more profitable... they just want to increase stock prices."
And exactly how does a company increase its stock price without increasing profits? Both increased profits and increased stock prices represent increases in shareholder value, which is a company's primary fiduciary (i.e., legal and moral) responsibility to its shareholders.
"What you should be looking for is a small company"
I prefer working for small companies but working for big companies has distinct advantages. It's foolish to make a one-size-fits-all statement that small companies are always better.
"Or better yet, start your own company."
Great idea. But then you'd be one of those greedy shareholders.
"If you are working for a company (if a company pays you) you're obviously worth twice that. They can't make a profit on you if you aren't."
Karl Marx called and left a message for you re: the surplus value of wages. "Keep fighting the good fight comrade. Seventy five years of abject failure in the Soviet Union does nothing to disprove my theories."
Here's one reason you're feeling poorer: You're being gouged on property taxes. In my neighborhood the market price of condos has more than tripled in the past seven years. If tax rates remain the same that means taxes have tripled. But have school enrollments tripled? Have police salaries tripled? Have there been three times as many fires? No, no and no. Rising real estate prices have become a money grab for politicians. You need to get involved with your local politics and insist that property tax rates be adjusted downward so that what you pay reflects the true cost of delivering municipal services.
AOL is guilty of this. I don't know if they're still doing it but the last time I went to install the latest version of AIM for a new machine the only thing they offered was the AIM Triton beta (which they did not identify as such on the download page). WTF? If want to be a beta tester I'll ask to be a beta tester. Oldversion.com to the rescue!
Class Action Suit.
I have an analog quantum clock that I have turned off and sure enough, twice a day it tells the correct time exactly right to the second.
I asked it before and I'll ask it again. At the peak of the dot bomb boom supposedly miles and miles of fiber optic cable was laid that wasn't worth lighting up because the demand wasn't there. Has all of that capacity since been put online?
And supposedly the cool thing about fiber is that you don't have to do anything to the fiber to increase its capacity, just keep developing gizmos that can turn the light on and off at ever higher rates.
So has all that dark fiber been put into use or was it an urban legend or what?
No, someone from outside could have the frame of reference required to make sense of disparate pieces of information. Back in the early 70s when I was a radioman in the Navy and the incremental cost of encryption was nonzero we nevertheless encrypted many innocuous-sounding messages. There was even a designation for such traffic: EFTO-FOUO "encrypt for transmission only-for official use only." Some messages were encrypted to respect privacy; we might get a message that some guy's brother died. But others contained information that in and of itself was not particularly interesting, e.g., maybe we should expect a shipment of parkas. It's just coats. Not classified. But what if a bunch of ships currently in warm regions got such messages? A potential adversary could surmise that there was going to be a large redeployment of those ships to colder climes.
Of course in the NSA case we're talking about historical documents, not current ones. But it's conceivable that declassifying items that in and of themselves seem to be pretty mundane might nevertheless, when taken in aggregate, reveal information that is prejudicial to the best interests of the United States.
I'm not defending this wholesale reclassification effort. It does seem foolish and ineffective. I just wanted to point out that assuming that a potential adversary couldn't possibly have a useful frame of reference isn't necessarily true.
Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.
Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must of meant to had.
The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.
Too bad for we, us what has had so long
The best seat from the only game in town.
But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?
Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.
Clive James in The Guardian -- Saturday April 30, 2005
Because anything the government can abuse the government will abuse.
Because anything the government can screw up the government will screw up.
I don't even have an EZ-Pass (multi-state automatic road toll paying device for your car) because I try to keep my entanglements with the government to an absolute bare minimum.
Januuary 1984. Spent about $1,700 total for a Sanyo MBC-555 with 64K memory and twin 160K 5.25 inch floppies and a Juki 6100 daisy wheel printer. And it had a cool amber character-based monitor.
It was cheap because they didn't even attempt to make it a PC clone. It could run only the most vanilla of MS-DOS programs; forget about Flight Simulator and dBase.
We've come a long way in 22 years.
Yeah, brilliant idea, those keyboards. N00bs were constantly reprogramming them by accidentally hitting the key combo that turned on macro recording mode. Sort of like giving people a massage table that doubled as a band saw when you shift your weight just right.
Color 35mm film (not to mention 70 mm) is generally considered to be equivalent to roughly 4,000 x 5,300 pixels, which is way more than even 1,920 x 1,080. More info.
This means that any TV show shot on film (vs. videotape) is a candidate for a New! High Definition Version! Can't wait to see teh Soup Nazi in HD.
The upper two percent do not have to pay taxes?
According the The Tax Foundation the top two percent of taxpayers account for 16.77% of all adjusted gross income yet they pay 34.27% of all income taxes paid. The top five percent account for 31.18% of all adjusted gross income and they pay more than half of the total tax bill for all of us (54.36%).
STFU please.