This will require some years of development, but it certainly shows promise.
The strength and stiffness of a fiber are not the performance we'll directly obtain from the materials. It's more like a potential number. Typical 'carbon fiber' products have on the order of 60%-75% fiber and 40%-30% plastic by volume, where epoxy is one of the most common plastics. The carbon fibers contribute strength and stiffness, but it would fracture easily with a rigid binder. The softer plastic binder acts to share and redistribute loading efficiently (after some fibers break) to keep the carbon fibers more or less all carrying load effectively.
They'll have to go experiment until they find which plastics work well with this. That took a long time for composites since if the plastic binds too strongly to the fibers, the resulting composite is very brittle and loses a lot of potential strength. Also, to optimize the bond strength, carbon/kevlar/glass/etc fibers are typically treated with a 'sizing' that help the fibers bind optimally to a targeted plastic or set of plastics. Hopefully this new material can leapfrog off of the progress and work of the composites industry. Humidity will also be a concern that requires some testing and may cause some compromise on binder selection.
Also, 'typical' fiber properties really depend on the application. A typical aerospace carbon fiber is Hexcel IM7, which shows considerable improvement over the properties they reported in the article, and others can be a fair bit better or worse. The IM7 6k tow fiber is reported to have: Ultimate Tensile Strength: 5.15 GPa Elastic Modulus: 276 GPa http://www.hexcel.com/resources/datasheets/carbon-fiber-data-sheets/im7.pdf
A few years ago the least expensive carbon fiber would sell for ~$15/lb raw material with the epoxy typically around $9/lb, and the IM7 fiber above is probably an order of magnitude more costly. I don't know what figures they used for their cost comparison, but they can't really have the whole cradle to grave process figured out at this stage anyway, so we'll see what happens when they get some material fabricated.
There's a lot of work ahead, but this seems promising!
Subscribing to young earth creationism doesn't necessarily mean the individual is unable to think critically in general. An alarming amount of cognitive dissonance would easily enable that belief to be written off by the believer as a simple exception in a world view that is otherwise near-identical to the world view shared by the rest of the first world.
Not all people bother to develop a coherent world view. It's not always important to them.
If we could have fought the war the same way as WWII - pure brute force, civilian casualties are acceptable, and the goal was to cripple the clearly organized semi-public military-industrial complex of the enemy nation - the US military would have caused the Afghan rivers to run red with blood and then left in less than a month. But you can't overcome an underground third world loose alliance the same way you can conquer a first world government.
Honestly, I pity the people in Afghanistan, especially after the cold proxy war and the civil war following the Russian withdrawal in the late 1980's. Thankfully, the Afghan nation is slowly recovering due to international aid. Strange as it sounds, I admire the humanitarian benefits this war has brought to Afghanistan. I don't mean it's worth the price - perhaps, perhaps not - I'm just reflectively trying to see the glass as partly full.
I'm a mormon church member, and I feel the same way. Science is there to answer questions about how things happen and to help us develop a framework for understanding the world around us. Religion answers fundamentally different questions about how to live, and it has historically relied heavily upon teaching philosophical principles through metaphor. The targeted historical cultures were frequently uneducated savages - not so enlightened as to be able to reason using abstract logic. The first books we have, including the creation account, were targeted towards teaching slave tribes the principles of basic humanity. One of the first steps was to simply stop worshiping their melted earrings (golden calf) and look forward to something better.
Sadly, rather than attempting to learn from these ancient accounts by considering the full context and understanding what lessons were being taught, some christians preach a lazy literal interpretation of the existing translations of the original accounts. Worse yet, rather than resolving (or at least quietly accepting) the conflicts, they then begin to anger and yell about how since that infantile view contrasts with the scientific method, science must be ignorant and wrong.
As a christian, I understand why many people despise this type of religious zeal. The blind faith and follow-the-leader mentality can be frighteningly similar to the cargo cults and the Jim Jones massacre. Please remember, at least a few of us christians know better!
Thanks, that makes your perspective a lot clearer to me, and understand each of your points now. I also think your experiences and conclusions match mine pretty closely.
FWIW, some random person on the internet agrees with you.
The Scandinavian cultures are able to pull it off because of their citizens and culture. The US and many other nations are not able to duplicate the model because of their citizens. The economic and social models can work extremely well, but they fall apart if enough of its citizens choose to abuse and exploit it for personal gain at societal expense.
One Finnish woman I knew told me she wanted to take a vacation to Spain for two months but didn't feel like waiting for the vacation, so she said she planned to quit her job and started collecting the very generous year-long Finnish unemployment package (~75% of her wage). She'd hang out at home for the duration of the year while she collected checks, then she would probably go back to working again. I didn't hear from her after her trip, but she did at least head out for Spain according to that plan. The economic model can be sustained because most of the population doesn't do what she did.
Rather than discussing social and other items statically, I would focus more on how well the culture's priorities match or fit those of the OP.
*The US prioritizes economic productivity, efficiency, and convenience at the expense of other virtues. *People in the US benefit from decent wages, low total taxes and cost of living --> very large new homes and nicer cars, good entertainment/music, and 24 hour stores are everywhere. *The US suffers low quality or high costs for education and is straddled with a need to maintain health insurance or bear that as a financial risk. *Usually public transport is weak because of the urban sprawl, but cars are so cheap and convenient that hardly anyone cares.
Compare that package to others that might meet your wants and needs.
The US can be lucrative if you're in IT. But it has unnecessarily long work hours, bad health care, and a persistent civil rights and racism problem... education... so why would you deal with it?
Not trying to argue, but at least for the OP's case I don't think all of your conclusions apply. Education is a weakness, but: *High work hours are easy to fix - don't work there; find a project with good funding and do 40/week. You can easily feel this out in an interview. *Health care is not an issue with health insurance (salaried IT worker). US physician skill level, medical equipment, drugs, and access/availability of care are top notch. US health care system is ridiculously expensive without insurance, but with insurance it will work well for the OP. *I saw significantly more racism/hate of specific foreign cultures/immigrants when living in areas of Finland (2 years, spoke the language) than most of the US; my parents had the same experience comparing their time in Germany to the US ( ~3 years, did not speak the language). *On education prior to college, I agree completely - the US public education system on the main is lousy right now unless you are very careful in selecting where you live so your children attend a specific 'good' school (or pay for a private school). Universities are generally good and can make up for lost time, but they're often expensive.
Usually my classes are taught by an instructor with a whiteboard.
I pay attention to and interact on the discussion, then periodically snap a photo of the whiteboard now and then with my cameraphone. With an 8MP or so typical smartphone, I can pretty much always crop the photo and read the board easily. The date and time are embedded in the image, so I can easily filter them by lecture (and cross check syllabus for topics) without doing any work. I usually review the image notes before an exam and that's about it. And I never have paper notes to file or dump at the end of the semester.
I find this enables me to pay more attention and interact more during the lecture, which is where I learn the best. Others learn well from transcribing the information; I don't and never have. YMMV.
I don't have one, but a large part of the fetish for tube amplifiers is the equalizer curve they naturally produce during amplification. Many find the inaccuracy to be a pleasing 'warm' EQ curve, so in that case doing it wrong feels better because of a desirable equalizer overlay.
Its odd, how in your gun toting utopia, the USA, which has regular gun massacres, I'm aware of very few - if *any* instances of one of the concealed carry heroes actually stopping a massacres by shooting the nutter.
Probably because they realise that when push comes to shove - they aren't John Wayne (who was a draft dodging coward anyway), but rather pants pissing blowhards hiding as best as they can.
I live in Salt Lake City, Utah, and I can name 2 cases in the last 10 years that were within one mile of my apartment.
One was an off duty policeman in Trolley Square who took down a killer intent on a major massacre. Another was at the grocery store across the street from my apartment in the last year or so, where a civilian used a gun to restrain a nutjob (I don't think he fired a shot) who had stabbed a random man in the head with a knife, puncturing his skull. We don't know what his further intentions were; rumor was the guy wanted to go back to jail. I only know that happened because of family working in the hospital to help the poor victim. Now since no shot was fired, the gun acting as protection will probably get no significant fanfare in the news. That, and the fact that the locals don't need to hear how guns can help--after Trolley Square, there's little real local debate.
A lot of gun owners here are guys in the military or police that want to have a gun on their person when off duty. And if a soldier or policeman saves the day, sometimes it's actually less newsworthy since that's 'their job' anyway. My brother and two borthers in law, soldier/veterans and a policeman, all carry guns and know how to use them responsibly. Each of the three would view it as their moral duty to risk their own lives to put down a guy like Breivik. Two of them have already stopped an assault or murder with the aid or threat of using a firearm, but only in the line of duty.
Why not take this the other direction and have the government get it legal with the courts or whoever and then provide eBay a list of welfare payees or addresses they want to cross check? All the government needs to do is figure out what data they actually need before making the request and get it stamped--nothing hard there. Then privacy is protected, and the government gets only the data they intend to investigate.
I didn't understand this until I learned about my wife. Her ACT score was only ~+1 standard deviation above the norm--nothing special really--but she graduated cum laude in college and then top 15% in medical school (AOA). She has OCD, and it inhibits her on any question presented using the paradox of choice.
I think a lot of people have analogous problems--they may fully understand the concept being tested but remain unable to demonstrate that in their test score or other metric for whatever reason. I think language and terminology are common culprits.
This is inaccurate. Remember, like the label "Muslim," the label "Christian" is a blanket category encompassing a host of specific religions that are united by a common thread.
The reason for the necessity of a redemption is independent of the origins of humanity - if we choose to simply assume a conservation law for ethics exists, clearly some balancing force is needed to counter the simple fact that humans screw up and do some nasty things, then get away clean. For Christians, the assumption of that conservation law is termed faith, and further, the balancing force is attributed to the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. Further development of the framework defines a religion that falls under the "Christian" label.
I currently believe the Creation story is metaphorical and evolution is real. My views will further evolve in time as I continue to learn. Being related to a monkey isn't scary. I like my cat pretty well; maybe we're 10^7th cousins. The creation account in Genesis closely parallels the prevalent Babylonian creation accounts of the era, and that account contains metaphors useful for teaching ethical concepts to the ignorant, recently freed slaves who made up the original Jewish culture back when it happened. Is Santa an evil lie or a nice story? That's today, not 4000+ years ago.
Really brilliant people are used to being right when everyone else around them is wrong. They're hard to argue out of a wrong position, and when you get enough of them together that they can sort themselves into loony birds of a feather even reality can't make a dent in their opinions. And brilliance in one area doesn't translate into competence in every area. There are people I'd trust to design an aircraft I had to fly in or a sub I had to dive in, but that I wouldn't trust managing by checking account.
My coworker, an aero engineer, was mayor of his city for decades. One time I asked him how intelligent politicians typically are. He felt the norm was probably around a 100-ish IQ but the standard deviation was extremely high.
Unintellgent politicians can do extremely well with a good team supporting them. They can offer charisma, guts, know how to deal, and know when to listen and when to talk. The intellectual piece can be covered by their team, and they can serve as the public face and negotiator. And while the best ideas in the world won't overthrow a sufficiently stubborn opponent, charisma or a bribe might make short work of him.
Thinking from another angle, a clever political team can be extremely effective at getting results by rallying behind a convincing, argumentative, simpleton (puppet) lawyer who feels the team's ideas are worth arguing tooth and nail. He won't back down because he can't - he doesn't know where to go on his own, and that's part of the power in that political team structure.
Agreed. In the US and the first world, being poor has transitioned into the much more benign problem of limited socioeconomic mobility. It's a legitimate problem that we need to work to address, but poverty in first world nations is nothing like poverty in third world nations.
“Why are you so eager to come to America?” “Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.” - from Dinesh D'Souza, probably elsewhere
I didn't have it as hard, but was getting pretty frustrated seeing the same trends starting to happen in my own life. If I didn't beat it, I at least made some improvements. I did two things at once - changed jobs to get a fresh start and started working on an advanced degree (part time). I also was able to lean on student loans to float through an unexpected financial challenge.
I finish my MS at the end of this year, and I have to say the two changes really helped me. I was so busy I couldn't despair about life for a while, and the stimulation from learning in school helps offset for the (slightly improved but still) unfulfilling parts of work. Summer is relaxing. The newer job is only a little more fulfilling but does offer a lot more mobility and therefore will open doors for me--it's already started to do that in a significant way, and the doors are a direct result of the MS program. Now that I'm starting to see results and opportunities are opening up, I feel happier and fulfillment is starting to come again--it's not here yet, but I can see it again.
You may want to look into something like that yourself. Worst thing you get is you advance your career.
TOR will be quickly broken if it gains widespread usage. The FBI has already demonstrated the ability to trace its 'anonymous' users when it's serious about a crime (such as controlled substance distribution centers as linked in Anubis's post).
The methods they've developed so far will get a lot more development if TOR is perceived as a real threat to somebody with political power.
I was with Comcast and had a 15 mbps connection but typically 150-200 ms ping in our apartment building. They advertised the crap out of the download rate, but I felt like I was on a satellite sometimes with the ping.
We moved to a home in a new neighborhood that's only serviced by Qwest. I was initially disappointed by the drop to 7 mbps and really lousy upload speed, but I do take comfort in a very consistent = 60 ms ping.
For many practical purposes, cutting the ping from the really lousy 1/5th-1/7th of a second down to 1/15th made this an overall upgrade.
Wikipedia lists 29 active and licensed civilian reactors; the majority of them belong to universities. Most were built in the 60's, most are General Atomics TRIGA reactors, and the power outputs range from 1 W to 10 MW. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors
A few other civilian groups are licensed to have nuclear material, and of course other sectors and nations have lots of the stuff. It's really pretty common.
If there was a televised game, let's say, of watching college kids hit themselves in the head with hammers until they drop - would that be legal? Would bets be allowed? How about Russian Roulette? Minefield dodging? Setting yourself on fire? All those things would just kill you instantly. Football kills you ten years after your retire, when no one is looking.
The line is much harder to draw with vertical monopolies than with horizontal ones. Microsoft was more horizontal in nature than Apple, and IIRC they had on the order of 90% of the market in hand for a few years before getting slapped. Apple's system is more vertical, so distilling how they capture the market down to one useful and realistic number is a lot harder.
I don't know of a good modern model to look to as a precedent for when the (US) government steps in, but today I think Android is keeping Apple safe.
I hope we can learn from the observation and shrink our own compass and related technologies. Maybe in a century or so we'll be able to develop cellular implants, drop them on the brain, and see if and how effectively it can learn to interpret the signals.
On that note, I hope we someday figure out that an organism can directly sense something we didn't previously observe or predict. Today I doubt our capabilities and understanding are developed enough to figure that out, even if it is quite commonplace. Nature is a beautiful innovator, and we have a lot to learn from it.
It is impossible that the universe has always existed since it would mean that an infinite amount of time has already passed.
Why is it impossible? Personally, I suspect time is infinite, in the absence of proof.
Time shifting due to relativity is in a way analogous to me. It makes very little sense to me because my frame of reference offers no way to directly interpret, understand, or use the principle. The arguments seemed sound. We've now been able to develop a significant body of scientific evidence supporting it, so I trust it much more.
With infinite time, I simply suspect it. It would be nice if someone could come up with an experiment that would test that idea--especially one without a high chance of grenading the universe.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a new favorite material - it used to be unobtanium, but for discussions like this, handwavium is much more accurate!
This will require some years of development, but it certainly shows promise.
The strength and stiffness of a fiber are not the performance we'll directly obtain from the materials. It's more like a potential number. Typical 'carbon fiber' products have on the order of 60%-75% fiber and 40%-30% plastic by volume, where epoxy is one of the most common plastics. The carbon fibers contribute strength and stiffness, but it would fracture easily with a rigid binder. The softer plastic binder acts to share and redistribute loading efficiently (after some fibers break) to keep the carbon fibers more or less all carrying load effectively.
They'll have to go experiment until they find which plastics work well with this. That took a long time for composites since if the plastic binds too strongly to the fibers, the resulting composite is very brittle and loses a lot of potential strength. Also, to optimize the bond strength, carbon/kevlar/glass/etc fibers are typically treated with a 'sizing' that help the fibers bind optimally to a targeted plastic or set of plastics. Hopefully this new material can leapfrog off of the progress and work of the composites industry. Humidity will also be a concern that requires some testing and may cause some compromise on binder selection.
Also, 'typical' fiber properties really depend on the application. A typical aerospace carbon fiber is Hexcel IM7, which shows considerable improvement over the properties they reported in the article, and others can be a fair bit better or worse. The IM7 6k tow fiber is reported to have:
Ultimate Tensile Strength: 5.15 GPa
Elastic Modulus: 276 GPa
http://www.hexcel.com/resources/datasheets/carbon-fiber-data-sheets/im7.pdf
Sample properties of one finished product provide:
Ultimate Tensile Strength: 2.5 GPa
Elastic Modulus: 163 GPa
http://www.hexcel.com/Resources/DataSheets/Prepreg-Data-Sheets/8552_eu.pdf
A few years ago the least expensive carbon fiber would sell for ~$15/lb raw material with the epoxy typically around $9/lb, and the IM7 fiber above is probably an order of magnitude more costly. I don't know what figures they used for their cost comparison, but they can't really have the whole cradle to grave process figured out at this stage anyway, so we'll see what happens when they get some material fabricated.
There's a lot of work ahead, but this seems promising!
Subscribing to young earth creationism doesn't necessarily mean the individual is unable to think critically in general. An alarming amount of cognitive dissonance would easily enable that belief to be written off by the believer as a simple exception in a world view that is otherwise near-identical to the world view shared by the rest of the first world.
Not all people bother to develop a coherent world view. It's not always important to them.
If we could have fought the war the same way as WWII - pure brute force, civilian casualties are acceptable, and the goal was to cripple the clearly organized semi-public military-industrial complex of the enemy nation - the US military would have caused the Afghan rivers to run red with blood and then left in less than a month. But you can't overcome an underground third world loose alliance the same way you can conquer a first world government.
Honestly, I pity the people in Afghanistan, especially after the cold proxy war and the civil war following the Russian withdrawal in the late 1980's. Thankfully, the Afghan nation is slowly recovering due to international aid. Strange as it sounds, I admire the humanitarian benefits this war has brought to Afghanistan. I don't mean it's worth the price - perhaps, perhaps not - I'm just reflectively trying to see the glass as partly full.
I'm a mormon church member, and I feel the same way. Science is there to answer questions about how things happen and to help us develop a framework for understanding the world around us. Religion answers fundamentally different questions about how to live, and it has historically relied heavily upon teaching philosophical principles through metaphor. The targeted historical cultures were frequently uneducated savages - not so enlightened as to be able to reason using abstract logic. The first books we have, including the creation account, were targeted towards teaching slave tribes the principles of basic humanity. One of the first steps was to simply stop worshiping their melted earrings (golden calf) and look forward to something better.
Sadly, rather than attempting to learn from these ancient accounts by considering the full context and understanding what lessons were being taught, some christians preach a lazy literal interpretation of the existing translations of the original accounts. Worse yet, rather than resolving (or at least quietly accepting) the conflicts, they then begin to anger and yell about how since that infantile view contrasts with the scientific method, science must be ignorant and wrong.
As a christian, I understand why many people despise this type of religious zeal. The blind faith and follow-the-leader mentality can be frighteningly similar to the cargo cults and the Jim Jones massacre. Please remember, at least a few of us christians know better!
Thanks, that makes your perspective a lot clearer to me, and understand each of your points now. I also think your experiences and conclusions match mine pretty closely.
FWIW, some random person on the internet agrees with you.
The Scandinavian cultures are able to pull it off because of their citizens and culture. The US and many other nations are not able to duplicate the model because of their citizens. The economic and social models can work extremely well, but they fall apart if enough of its citizens choose to abuse and exploit it for personal gain at societal expense.
One Finnish woman I knew told me she wanted to take a vacation to Spain for two months but didn't feel like waiting for the vacation, so she said she planned to quit her job and started collecting the very generous year-long Finnish unemployment package (~75% of her wage). She'd hang out at home for the duration of the year while she collected checks, then she would probably go back to working again. I didn't hear from her after her trip, but she did at least head out for Spain according to that plan. The economic model can be sustained because most of the population doesn't do what she did.
Rather than discussing social and other items statically, I would focus more on how well the culture's priorities match or fit those of the OP.
*The US prioritizes economic productivity, efficiency, and convenience at the expense of other virtues.
*People in the US benefit from decent wages, low total taxes and cost of living --> very large new homes and nicer cars, good entertainment/music, and 24 hour stores are everywhere.
*The US suffers low quality or high costs for education and is straddled with a need to maintain health insurance or bear that as a financial risk.
*Usually public transport is weak because of the urban sprawl, but cars are so cheap and convenient that hardly anyone cares.
Compare that package to others that might meet your wants and needs.
The US can be lucrative if you're in IT. But it has unnecessarily long work hours, bad health care, and a persistent civil rights and racism problem ... education ... so why would you deal with it?
Not trying to argue, but at least for the OP's case I don't think all of your conclusions apply. Education is a weakness, but:
*High work hours are easy to fix - don't work there; find a project with good funding and do 40/week. You can easily feel this out in an interview.
*Health care is not an issue with health insurance (salaried IT worker). US physician skill level, medical equipment, drugs, and access/availability of care are top notch. US health care system is ridiculously expensive without insurance, but with insurance it will work well for the OP.
*I saw significantly more racism/hate of specific foreign cultures/immigrants when living in areas of Finland (2 years, spoke the language) than most of the US; my parents had the same experience comparing their time in Germany to the US ( ~3 years, did not speak the language).
*On education prior to college, I agree completely - the US public education system on the main is lousy right now unless you are very careful in selecting where you live so your children attend a specific 'good' school (or pay for a private school). Universities are generally good and can make up for lost time, but they're often expensive.
Usually my classes are taught by an instructor with a whiteboard.
I pay attention to and interact on the discussion, then periodically snap a photo of the whiteboard now and then with my cameraphone. With an 8MP or so typical smartphone, I can pretty much always crop the photo and read the board easily. The date and time are embedded in the image, so I can easily filter them by lecture (and cross check syllabus for topics) without doing any work. I usually review the image notes before an exam and that's about it. And I never have paper notes to file or dump at the end of the semester.
I find this enables me to pay more attention and interact more during the lecture, which is where I learn the best. Others learn well from transcribing the information; I don't and never have. YMMV.
I don't have one, but a large part of the fetish for tube amplifiers is the equalizer curve they naturally produce during amplification. Many find the inaccuracy to be a pleasing 'warm' EQ curve, so in that case doing it wrong feels better because of a desirable equalizer overlay.
Its odd, how in your gun toting utopia, the USA, which has regular gun massacres, I'm aware of very few - if *any* instances of one of the concealed carry heroes actually stopping a massacres by shooting the nutter.
Probably because they realise that when push comes to shove - they aren't John Wayne (who was a draft dodging coward anyway), but rather pants pissing blowhards hiding as best as they can.
I live in Salt Lake City, Utah, and I can name 2 cases in the last 10 years that were within one mile of my apartment.
One was an off duty policeman in Trolley Square who took down a killer intent on a major massacre. Another was at the grocery store across the street from my apartment in the last year or so, where a civilian used a gun to restrain a nutjob (I don't think he fired a shot) who had stabbed a random man in the head with a knife, puncturing his skull. We don't know what his further intentions were; rumor was the guy wanted to go back to jail. I only know that happened because of family working in the hospital to help the poor victim. Now since no shot was fired, the gun acting as protection will probably get no significant fanfare in the news. That, and the fact that the locals don't need to hear how guns can help--after Trolley Square, there's little real local debate.
A lot of gun owners here are guys in the military or police that want to have a gun on their person when off duty. And if a soldier or policeman saves the day, sometimes it's actually less newsworthy since that's 'their job' anyway. My brother and two borthers in law, soldier/veterans and a policeman, all carry guns and know how to use them responsibly. Each of the three would view it as their moral duty to risk their own lives to put down a guy like Breivik. Two of them have already stopped an assault or murder with the aid or threat of using a firearm, but only in the line of duty.
And I don't own a gun or care to.
Why not take this the other direction and have the government get it legal with the courts or whoever and then provide eBay a list of welfare payees or addresses they want to cross check? All the government needs to do is figure out what data they actually need before making the request and get it stamped--nothing hard there. Then privacy is protected, and the government gets only the data they intend to investigate.
I didn't understand this until I learned about my wife. Her ACT score was only ~+1 standard deviation above the norm--nothing special really--but she graduated cum laude in college and then top 15% in medical school (AOA). She has OCD, and it inhibits her on any question presented using the paradox of choice.
I think a lot of people have analogous problems--they may fully understand the concept being tested but remain unable to demonstrate that in their test score or other metric for whatever reason. I think language and terminology are common culprits.
This is inaccurate. Remember, like the label "Muslim," the label "Christian" is a blanket category encompassing a host of specific religions that are united by a common thread.
The reason for the necessity of a redemption is independent of the origins of humanity - if we choose to simply assume a conservation law for ethics exists, clearly some balancing force is needed to counter the simple fact that humans screw up and do some nasty things, then get away clean. For Christians, the assumption of that conservation law is termed faith, and further, the balancing force is attributed to the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. Further development of the framework defines a religion that falls under the "Christian" label.
I currently believe the Creation story is metaphorical and evolution is real. My views will further evolve in time as I continue to learn. Being related to a monkey isn't scary. I like my cat pretty well; maybe we're 10^7th cousins. The creation account in Genesis closely parallels the prevalent Babylonian creation accounts of the era, and that account contains metaphors useful for teaching ethical concepts to the ignorant, recently freed slaves who made up the original Jewish culture back when it happened. Is Santa an evil lie or a nice story? That's today, not 4000+ years ago.
Really brilliant people are used to being right when everyone else around them is wrong. They're hard to argue out of a wrong position, and when you get enough of them together that they can sort themselves into loony birds of a feather even reality can't make a dent in their opinions. And brilliance in one area doesn't translate into competence in every area. There are people I'd trust to design an aircraft I had to fly in or a sub I had to dive in, but that I wouldn't trust managing by checking account.
My coworker, an aero engineer, was mayor of his city for decades. One time I asked him how intelligent politicians typically are. He felt the norm was probably around a 100-ish IQ but the standard deviation was extremely high.
Unintellgent politicians can do extremely well with a good team supporting them. They can offer charisma, guts, know how to deal, and know when to listen and when to talk. The intellectual piece can be covered by their team, and they can serve as the public face and negotiator. And while the best ideas in the world won't overthrow a sufficiently stubborn opponent, charisma or a bribe might make short work of him.
Thinking from another angle, a clever political team can be extremely effective at getting results by rallying behind a convincing, argumentative, simpleton (puppet) lawyer who feels the team's ideas are worth arguing tooth and nail. He won't back down because he can't - he doesn't know where to go on his own, and that's part of the power in that political team structure.
Agreed. In the US and the first world, being poor has transitioned into the much more benign problem of limited socioeconomic mobility. It's a legitimate problem that we need to work to address, but poverty in first world nations is nothing like poverty in third world nations.
“Why are you so eager to come to America?”
“Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”
- from Dinesh D'Souza, probably elsewhere
I didn't have it as hard, but was getting pretty frustrated seeing the same trends starting to happen in my own life. If I didn't beat it, I at least made some improvements. I did two things at once - changed jobs to get a fresh start and started working on an advanced degree (part time). I also was able to lean on student loans to float through an unexpected financial challenge.
I finish my MS at the end of this year, and I have to say the two changes really helped me. I was so busy I couldn't despair about life for a while, and the stimulation from learning in school helps offset for the (slightly improved but still) unfulfilling parts of work. Summer is relaxing. The newer job is only a little more fulfilling but does offer a lot more mobility and therefore will open doors for me--it's already started to do that in a significant way, and the doors are a direct result of the MS program. Now that I'm starting to see results and opportunities are opening up, I feel happier and fulfillment is starting to come again--it's not here yet, but I can see it again.
You may want to look into something like that yourself. Worst thing you get is you advance your career.
TOR will be quickly broken if it gains widespread usage. The FBI has already demonstrated the ability to trace its 'anonymous' users when it's serious about a crime (such as controlled substance distribution centers as linked in Anubis's post).
The methods they've developed so far will get a lot more development if TOR is perceived as a real threat to somebody with political power.
I was with Comcast and had a 15 mbps connection but typically 150-200 ms ping in our apartment building. They advertised the crap out of the download rate, but I felt like I was on a satellite sometimes with the ping.
We moved to a home in a new neighborhood that's only serviced by Qwest. I was initially disappointed by the drop to 7 mbps and really lousy upload speed, but I do take comfort in a very consistent = 60 ms ping.
For many practical purposes, cutting the ping from the really lousy 1/5th-1/7th of a second down to 1/15th made this an overall upgrade.
Wikipedia lists 29 active and licensed civilian reactors; the majority of them belong to universities. Most were built in the 60's, most are General Atomics TRIGA reactors, and the power outputs range from 1 W to 10 MW. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors
A few other civilian groups are licensed to have nuclear material, and of course other sectors and nations have lots of the stuff. It's really pretty common.
If there was a televised game, let's say, of watching college kids hit themselves in the head with hammers until they drop - would that be legal? Would bets be allowed? How about Russian Roulette? Minefield dodging? Setting yourself on fire? All those things would just kill you instantly. Football kills you ten years after your retire, when no one is looking.
jackass?
The line is much harder to draw with vertical monopolies than with horizontal ones. Microsoft was more horizontal in nature than Apple, and IIRC they had on the order of 90% of the market in hand for a few years before getting slapped. Apple's system is more vertical, so distilling how they capture the market down to one useful and realistic number is a lot harder.
I don't know of a good modern model to look to as a precedent for when the (US) government steps in, but today I think Android is keeping Apple safe.
I hope we can learn from the observation and shrink our own compass and related technologies. Maybe in a century or so we'll be able to develop cellular implants, drop them on the brain, and see if and how effectively it can learn to interpret the signals.
On that note, I hope we someday figure out that an organism can directly sense something we didn't previously observe or predict. Today I doubt our capabilities and understanding are developed enough to figure that out, even if it is quite commonplace. Nature is a beautiful innovator, and we have a lot to learn from it.
It is impossible that the universe has always existed since it would mean that an infinite amount of time has already passed.
Why is it impossible? Personally, I suspect time is infinite, in the absence of proof.
Time shifting due to relativity is in a way analogous to me. It makes very little sense to me because my frame of reference offers no way to directly interpret, understand, or use the principle. The arguments seemed sound. We've now been able to develop a significant body of scientific evidence supporting it, so I trust it much more.
With infinite time, I simply suspect it. It would be nice if someone could come up with an experiment that would test that idea--especially one without a high chance of grenading the universe.