What do you mean, "all over again"? Each competitor only has to pay them once. It's not the same guy having to pay them over and over again.
How it works is that company A drives company B out of the market. Then, when company C moves in, C has to pay all the startup costs to enter. When A drives C out, the company D again has to pay all of its startup costs to enter. Once the investors find out that startups in the industry get killed off, they'll stop investing in startups and so company K finds that it can't finance the startup costs because nobody will lend them money.
Sure....and they can live as monks in the mean time, since they're not making any profit themselves. This also means they are effectively giving free value to the community through their artificially low prices.
That's exactly how it works. Planned properly, company A can allow startups to spend as much as they need to get started and then undercut the market to kill the startup's sales. Without sales the debt they incurred to start up buries them quickly, before company A's capital stock runs out. Then company A buys up the startup's investments or just buys them out, and gets bigger. They raise prices back to profit levels and continue until they have to kill off the next startup, which will be easier each time because they grow as they buy up or buy out the failing startups.
A business can't lower prices beyond the margin of profitability for very long, unless it has huge cash reserves in the bank. Every time it does, it blows through those cash reserves, so it can't do it forever.
Not only does the cash reserve get bigger each time the cycle repeats, starting up a business in the industry gets progressively more expensive so each subsequent startup fails faster. It doesn't take long to reach a point where the market is unapproachable for startups unless regulation moves in to limit the monopoly exercise of the incumbent company. Look at what happened to railroads or check out the history of AT&T if you need concrete examples of this in action. Heck, it's even happening again to the baby Bells. There used to be thirteen companies right after the breakup. Now there's four, and they're regional so they dont compete much with each other.
The problem is that your points aren't relevant to the problem I have with drones based in the U.S. being used for surveillance of U.S. territory. When the USA PATRIOT act was passed, people got up in arms. THe federal government assured the public that the powers granted by it would only be used against terrorists. It took less than two years before the FBI used said powers in a domestic case against a drug dealer who was a U.S. citizen with no ties to any terrorist organization.
I grow weary of being accused of wearing a tinfoil hat just because I don't trust the government not to lie to make their jobs easier at the expense of the citizenry. It's not like it takes a conspiracy theory to drum up proof that it happens at every level of government, because it's human nature.
With all the talk of corruption and rent seeking in government one should wonder who really is creating the tax load.
"I didn't vote for the guy" is a pretty standard dodge when it comes to responsibility for government. If you stay and continue to vote and otherwise participate in U.S. government then I count that to mean you consider it better than leaving for somewhere that fits your ideas better.
Just because I am unable to get my society and government to strive for sensible taxation, regulatory, and spending policies doesn't mean I chose to create the current tax load. Far from it. But I get carried along for the ride just the same.
Your inability to convince enough people to agree with your ideas about taxation, regulation and spending indicates that they are not popular enough to change the way things work now. "Everyone who doesn't see things my way is a sheep!" is also a pretty common dodge for unpopular ideas.
Similarly, how can one label the simple and parsimonious "pay for what you use" as inefficient when it's blindingly obvious that being forced to pay for things that are poorly used or even not used at all, is less efficient. For example, would we consider it more efficient to be forced to pay a blanket fee for soda (say $100 per month for all the soda you can drink)? Somehow I doubt it. The only thing efficient about this is the exercise of force.
Try it for something like a water treament plant or pesticide regulations, then. It's easy to find examples where pay-as-you-go works better when you work with edge cases, but for lots of infrastructure and regulatory stuff there's no efficiency in micropayments because there's so much stuff to handle. Do you really think it would be more efficient to pay separately for every little thing that needs to be handled by governance like paying your thirty-five cents for the officers who keep the battery factory from pouring waste into a nearby stream and the dollar you owe to run the local court and the half-penny for each traffic light on your commute? That doesn't even consider differentials like paying more for one traffic light than the next because fewer people drive under it. I can't see any rational argument that would keep that from being a bookkeeping nightmare for everyone involved, and the effort necessary to control it would cost far more than any tax fat that I can imagine.
It's the nature of the device in question. There are many reasons to have an airbase in the continental U.S., like training and defense in the case of attack. Drones, on the other hand, currently serve one and only one purpose, and that's aerial surveillance. Having drones based in the continental U.S. is only useful if the drones are being used over U.S. territory (failing border patrol) and having the U.S. military running surveillance essentially on civilian populations raises the hackles of many people. We've heard the whole "we'll only use it against the bad guys!" line too many times to believe it any more.
Oh, here we go again with this canard. The breakdown that always seems to escape those who claim that taxation is theft is that firstly, taxes exist because the taxed population chose to create the tax load, and second, paying for what you use and only what you use is an absurdly inefficient way to run a society. Sure, you think it's fair to pay for the roads you use. But pay with what? Did you pay for the infrastructure necessary to create and secure the money you're using to buy your groceries, or do you have to work out a barter or deal with a bunch of incompatible currencies? We did that back in colonial times, and tossed it aside in favor of a central treasury because it's nightmarishly inefficient. The Interstate Highway system came into being because the "pay for what you use" concept simply didn't get the job done. There are a thousand examples of how this works, and the simple fact that virtually every society on Earth uses taxation should clue you in that it's probably not nearly as bad an idea as you'd love to believe.
I can't walk into Wal-Mart, pick up whatever and walk out can I?
No, but you can get to the parking lot and you can enter the store without fear that it'll collapse on you and you can buy stuff with a reasonable assumption that you'll get what you're paying for and you can trust that they won't just beat you up and take the money you brought and so on and so on, all because society decided that individuals having to secure all of that personally makes for a crapsack world. If you think you can do better, there are places you can go such that you pay only for what you personally use, but they're far away from most other people and you'll find that you spend an inordinate amount of time and energy just surviving.
The current method of taxation steals from those who provide the most to society in order to pay for those who either produce nothing or produce less.
It is to laugh. Do you really think that those with the most income are necessarily the ones who contribute the most to society? If so, you're unrecoverably naive. If you think that money is the measure of value, then I'll thank you to tell me what Paris Hilton has done to earn the vast millions of dollars she has access to. If she hadn't been born into it, she'd be a waitress somewhere in middle America and we both know it. Society is full of people who create value in excess of their paycheck and people who drag in tons of money without contributing much at all, so the whole "steals from the rich" argument falls apart in that regard.
Theft is compulsory, so is taxation.
Taxation isn't compulsory. This isn't the Soviet Union. Taxes are just a requirement for being a U.S. citizen, so if you don't want to pay taxes to the U.S. government, then leave the country and renounce your citizenship, and nobody will stop you. However, if you want the benefit of being a U.S. citizen, then you have to pay taxes. As I said above, there are many places in the world where paying taxes isn't required, and you could avail yourself of any number of those places if you don't like taxation. Just don't sit here with your safe drinking water and your anti-fraud legislation and your right to ask for aid if random chance turns you into one of those "less productive" people and whine about having to pay for it. Walk the walk, and all that.
The failure in logic goes deeper than who owns the rights to the commercials. The failure is in trying to make skipping ads and copyright infringement synonymous. That's like saying that I violate the copyright of an author by skipping pages in a book I'm reading. I'm with them more on the idea that it changes the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem, but I'm not sure I agree that doing that would be a bad thing.
I've always been of the opinion that this is the purview of Internal Affairs. I advocate for allowing IA officers to do random checks of police on duty, up to an including a patdown. Finding any secondary weapon that isn't clearly identifiable by its serial markings should result in jail time for the officer so found, period. The idea that any officer would carry a throwdown weapon is so counter to what is right that I can't hold any officer at all in esteem for knowing about how widespread the practice is and not speaking up.
For example, about 13% of the population of Ohio lives in one of the three largest cities, and the rest of us don't.
But going to the national level, almost one third of the population of the United States lives within a hundred miles of New York City. I'd be willing to bet that Ohio is below the national average in terms of traffic accidents per capita, which tends to prove SteveFoerster's point.
This statement is nonsensical because it requires that science can only operate in an "objective" reality. Einstein himself said, "Everything's relative" (yeah, I know he didn't really say that, but the meme fit too well to ignore) and so science doesn't need an objective framework to work, just a framework that's objective to the science being done. To give an example, imagine a tiny world in a bottle that's attached to a centrifuge on the surface of Earth. In that bottle-world, all of science would tell its occupants that gravity is toward the bottom of the bottle, and their science would operate on that assumption right up until the little bottle-explorers found a way to kick the cork out and break contact with the bottle. Then, suddenly, gravity would change in a fundamental and (to them) incomprehensible way, and they'd have to adapt their view of science to include the new, larger frame of reference. That wouldn't mean that all their current science was wrong, just limited in its scope to their understanding of the world as they knew it. Meanwhile, the bottle-scientists could continue to make fun of the bottle-zealots who put all of the unknown stuff at Bottle-God's feet rather than accepting that they just didn't know enough to say.
If you're not taking a "new is evil"mentality, then you're purposefully going offtopic. The question that you helpfully answered wasn't the one asked, and nobody asked for your anecdote about how you did just fine without constant contact. The poster asked how to set up the technology so that they can Skype when they want to in a more baby-proof manner.
To answer the actual question, I'd set up a little box on the wall with a plexiglas front, and put a regular monitor in it with a webcam mounted above. If you're even better about it, you could set up the box so you can drop your iPad into it during the session and then just lift it out when you're done. Baby marks on the front can be wiped off and the touch screen won't work through a quarter inch of plastic.
This is the part where you reread the article (or at least the summary) and notice that the plan is to put the asteroid into orbit around the Moon. Therefore, the odds of it plummeting into anything other than open lunar real estate is pretty much nil.
This doesn't make a lot of sense, because most of the things that software could do will only be minor tuning of specific systems, and anything that's likely to cause a catastrophic failure will usually stop the car before it starts. Even a blue screen will usually just cause the car to stall, which is unlikely to cause a pileup.
Without hardware modifications, changing the performance of the car to any real degree (other than making it unable to run at all) is unlikely.
No, the point is that bigger specimens of smaller dinosaurs had an advantage over the average, so there was environmental pressure driving larger animals to survive. Therefore, as the bigger dinosaurs bred more than their smaller siblings, the average size of their young went up, reinforcing their advantage until truly huge specimens became the norm.
Grab a thermometer and try it if you think it's not possible. I've done it myself (not a French press but a coffee machine and just plain cups from a pot too) and unless you're heating the grounds, your coffee mug and the parts of your French press before you use it, running boiling water (which usually averages around 190-200 degrees Fahrenheit, not 212 like you'd think) through the grounds/machine can lose fifty or more degrees easily. It may seem counterintuitive that so much heat can dissipate like that, but get a thermometer and you'll find out that just pouring boiling water from a pot to a mug can take it down to 160. One good way to illustrate this is to start with two standard size room temperature coffee mugs. Pour boiling water into one, and wait ten seconds. Dump that mug into the second, and wait another ten seconds. Then pour the second mug over your hand. While it's still very hot, it won't cause burns. It's a good way to demonstrate just how fast water sheds its heat into other materials, and it led us to the conclusion that if you want to serve coffee or tea that stays hot, fill the cups with hot water ahead of time, and then dump the hot water just before you pour in the coffee/tea.
Unless you are a significant public figure for your business (and even then I'm not so sure), what you believe and what you say should have fuck all to do with your employer.
This ignores the idea that many people get paid for image. When Hanes pays money to Michael Jordan, they're doing it for the right to associate his face with their name, so people who like him will be more inclined to buy their stuff. They're paying for his image, and if he then does something that makes his image run counter to their corporate image, they have the right to tell him (in exchange for the money they pay him) to tell him what he can and can't do, both "on" and "off" the clock. If Mr. Jordan doesn't like that, nobody put a gun to his head to sign an endorsement contract.
The same is true of John Derbyshire. National Review pays him money to present his opinions as part of their staff, and when he starts saying stuff they don't like, they have every right to tell him to stop or to stop paying him even if he's only presenting those non-aligned opinions in other places. There's no censorship going on here, because he wasn't incarcerated or fined or "disappeared", he was fired. He's still quite free to go get a job writing for a publication that lines up better with his stated opinions, but the money that NR paid him had strings attached, and he decided that writing his article was worth more than that paycheck.
Given your answer in (A), there's no solution that requires nothing more than the barometer, since the answer involving pressure differences and the drop count both require a method for scaling the building as well (a measuring device is unneeded for both (A) and (B) since there's no rule that says you can't find the building's height in barometer-lengths as opposed to any other unit of length). Sure, you could use the stairs to get to the roof, but then you could do the same thing with measuring the building by the length of the barometer as well. There's nothing in the measuring solution that requires that you measure the outside of the building, after all, so you could just do it (very carefully) as you climb the stairs.
Have they ever done something NOT wrong?
Seriously. Just give me ONE example. Just one.
Seriously, I really dislike Microsoft, but even I can do this with about ten seconds to think. My example is MS-DOS. I was using a lot of different OSes at that time because there was nothing approaching uniformity, and frankly there wasn't anything else that ran on that level of hardware that I liked better. Closer to current, Windows XP is still viable today and it's not that bad. I use Ubuntu personally, but I didn't delete my XP partition and it still gets used for some business apps that I need to run for work and for some games.
It is objectivly to say Microsoft is the most evil software company ever. By a large margin.
In a world that contains (or at least contained) SCO, this is a bad stance to take. Microsoft stinks badly, I'll certainly agree, but yours is a big statment to make and it's not objective in any way.
To reverse it back on you, please enlighten me as to how "fight against Christian fundamentalism" equates to "fight against Christianity" unless you're positing that all Christians are fundamentalists.
And you just missed my point. I don't "wanna play games" alone, and I use my system every day to do real work and fun things. I don't care about laptops built in 1998. I have one (a PowerBook PDQ running Linux, by the way) but that's not what will make Linux grow. I want my computer to do everything I want it to do, including playing games, handling my work, controlling remote systems, handling telephony and so on. The rig I have right now does it all in Windows. It does everything except the games and some hardware in Linux. If those problems went away, I could run Linux exclusively and so could many of my friends, family, coworkers and neighbors. I don't want to have two computers for different things, and I don't want to have to switch operating systems to do all of the stuff that I want to do. The general public doesn't want that either. Say "go get an XBox or a Windows machine" to these people, and guess what they'll do? They'll go get a Windows system and they won't bother with Linux. How does that help? Your whole argument does nothing for Linux except alienate vast swathes of potential users so you can act smug about what you think everyone should do with a computer. Your attitude causes people like me more trouble than any problem Linux presents, because I can convince someone that I can fix a problem with Linux but your comments just make them think that Linux users are elitist jerks. If you can't manage to rein in the attitude, at least stay quiet so you don't get in the way of those of us who are actually doing productive work toward getting people to like Linux.
You said this statement at least three times that I saw, and it's pointless and dismissive. As my counter to why it's a suck argument, I present that it's surprisingly difficult to buy a computer with Linux installed and enough people balk at the idea that it's not gaining any real ground in the desktop market. Maybe it would be more productive to address the presented arguments with something better than cracks about XBoxes and statements that you're tired of hearing the argument that it won't play particular games. That argument is a valid reason not to switch to Linux, and it's not going to go away because of derision. I personally love Linux. I've got it running on both my desktop and netbook and I use it all the time. I fix computers for a living and I'm very knowledgeable about it. I still can't get World of Warcraft to run in WINE at anywhere near the framerate that it runs in Windows on the same machine (it's bad enough to be unusable in Linux and the XBox argument fails on that program) and so I'm still booting back to Windows to play it because it just doesn't work in Linux. Solving that sort of problem would go a lot farther toward getting Linux popular than alienating potential users by being an asshole.
The only route by which you can use your argument to label mine invalid is to demonstrate that all of the things you name are more of a detrimental force than diversity of thought is a benefit. You haven't done that in any meaningful way with your one-sentence dismissal, so your rebuttal fails to rebut. I point to the significant and sustained growth of the human population and our immense adaptation to our world to back up my side of the equation. What say you?
If Dobzhanskyâ(TM)s assertion is true, âoeHow is it, thenâ, Moroz asks, âoethat so few newly minted PhDs in the biological sciences have taken any formal graduate school courses in evolution or biodiversity?â
Wait, wait, I can answer this one! There's no money in it.
Good question. Maybe the creationist have taken over graduate level biological sciences!
Or maybe it was the accountants instead. Or perhaps it was the people like you who like to say things like "you evolution people" that make it troublesome to get funding. When all the money's in medical research, why would you expect a bunch of new PhDs to put their time and energy into biodiversity?
OK, let's go with your idea that "both" creationism and evolution should be taught. Which creation story do you teach? All of them? the top ten? Just yours? How do you address things like the "goal" of evolution? Abiotic genesis doesn't require this idea, but Intelligent Design does, so do you "teach the controversy" and point out that problem? In short, whose story takes precedence? You're going to have to choose, because there are thousands of creation stories and you can't filter out any of them if you want to argue that your particular one is scientific.
By the way, the whole concept if irreducible complexity got taken apart long ago, so your arguments about development of a heart and such aren't much use. Just to give you the ten second version, the use of a heart without lungs would be circulation. Just because complex bodies use circulation to move oxygen doesn't mean that it's a must. Take note that trees use circulation, but not to move oxygen, so they'd be able to use "a heart without lungs".
It's easier to believe in a Divine being than what we have today happening by chance.
The concept that evolution represents "by chance" simply proves that you don't know enough about evolution to comment. Learn that evolution doesn't happen by chance (that's mutation, and evolution describes the path laid out by the environmental choosing of the most beneficial mutations) and you'll be better able to argue the point.
Regrettably we are playing with evolution, or more specifically, natural selection to the detriment of our species.
I hear this sort of thing a lot, and it's simple crap. There's nothing regrettable about increasing survivability in the human population, because humans no longer adapt best based on physical attributes. Brain power is king at the human level of sentience, and keeping people like Stephen Hawking alive and functioning does more to advance our species than maintaining his gene pattern will degrade it. Humanity is long past the time when "survival of the fittest" applied to our physical bodies.
The idea that the superconductor won't be adding to the thermal load is all well and good, but it doesn't cope with the problem of heat that comes in from solar radiation or heat generated by other parts of the ship like engines. Furthermore, it becomes a self-reinforcing problem, because being unable to dissipate heat makes the superconductor stop superconducting, which only adds to the problem.
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What do you mean, "all over again"? Each competitor only has to pay them once. It's not the same guy having to pay them over and over again.
How it works is that company A drives company B out of the market. Then, when company C moves in, C has to pay all the startup costs to enter. When A drives C out, the company D again has to pay all of its startup costs to enter. Once the investors find out that startups in the industry get killed off, they'll stop investing in startups and so company K finds that it can't finance the startup costs because nobody will lend them money.
Sure....and they can live as monks in the mean time, since they're not making any profit themselves. This also means they are effectively giving free value to the community through their artificially low prices.
That's exactly how it works. Planned properly, company A can allow startups to spend as much as they need to get started and then undercut the market to kill the startup's sales. Without sales the debt they incurred to start up buries them quickly, before company A's capital stock runs out. Then company A buys up the startup's investments or just buys them out, and gets bigger. They raise prices back to profit levels and continue until they have to kill off the next startup, which will be easier each time because they grow as they buy up or buy out the failing startups.
A business can't lower prices beyond the margin of profitability for very long, unless it has huge cash reserves in the bank. Every time it does, it blows through those cash reserves, so it can't do it forever.
Not only does the cash reserve get bigger each time the cycle repeats, starting up a business in the industry gets progressively more expensive so each subsequent startup fails faster. It doesn't take long to reach a point where the market is unapproachable for startups unless regulation moves in to limit the monopoly exercise of the incumbent company. Look at what happened to railroads or check out the history of AT&T if you need concrete examples of this in action. Heck, it's even happening again to the baby Bells. There used to be thirteen companies right after the breakup. Now there's four, and they're regional so they dont compete much with each other.
Virg
The problem is that your points aren't relevant to the problem I have with drones based in the U.S. being used for surveillance of U.S. territory. When the USA PATRIOT act was passed, people got up in arms. THe federal government assured the public that the powers granted by it would only be used against terrorists. It took less than two years before the FBI used said powers in a domestic case against a drug dealer who was a U.S. citizen with no ties to any terrorist organization.
I grow weary of being accused of wearing a tinfoil hat just because I don't trust the government not to lie to make their jobs easier at the expense of the citizenry. It's not like it takes a conspiracy theory to drum up proof that it happens at every level of government, because it's human nature.
Virg
With all the talk of corruption and rent seeking in government one should wonder who really is creating the tax load.
"I didn't vote for the guy" is a pretty standard dodge when it comes to responsibility for government. If you stay and continue to vote and otherwise participate in U.S. government then I count that to mean you consider it better than leaving for somewhere that fits your ideas better.
Just because I am unable to get my society and government to strive for sensible taxation, regulatory, and spending policies doesn't mean I chose to create the current tax load. Far from it. But I get carried along for the ride just the same.
Your inability to convince enough people to agree with your ideas about taxation, regulation and spending indicates that they are not popular enough to change the way things work now. "Everyone who doesn't see things my way is a sheep!" is also a pretty common dodge for unpopular ideas.
Similarly, how can one label the simple and parsimonious "pay for what you use" as inefficient when it's blindingly obvious that being forced to pay for things that are poorly used or even not used at all, is less efficient. For example, would we consider it more efficient to be forced to pay a blanket fee for soda (say $100 per month for all the soda you can drink)? Somehow I doubt it. The only thing efficient about this is the exercise of force.
Try it for something like a water treament plant or pesticide regulations, then. It's easy to find examples where pay-as-you-go works better when you work with edge cases, but for lots of infrastructure and regulatory stuff there's no efficiency in micropayments because there's so much stuff to handle. Do you really think it would be more efficient to pay separately for every little thing that needs to be handled by governance like paying your thirty-five cents for the officers who keep the battery factory from pouring waste into a nearby stream and the dollar you owe to run the local court and the half-penny for each traffic light on your commute? That doesn't even consider differentials like paying more for one traffic light than the next because fewer people drive under it. I can't see any rational argument that would keep that from being a bookkeeping nightmare for everyone involved, and the effort necessary to control it would cost far more than any tax fat that I can imagine.
Virg
It's the nature of the device in question. There are many reasons to have an airbase in the continental U.S., like training and defense in the case of attack. Drones, on the other hand, currently serve one and only one purpose, and that's aerial surveillance. Having drones based in the continental U.S. is only useful if the drones are being used over U.S. territory (failing border patrol) and having the U.S. military running surveillance essentially on civilian populations raises the hackles of many people. We've heard the whole "we'll only use it against the bad guys!" line too many times to believe it any more.
Virg
I can't walk into Wal-Mart, pick up whatever and walk out can I?
No, but you can get to the parking lot and you can enter the store without fear that it'll collapse on you and you can buy stuff with a reasonable assumption that you'll get what you're paying for and you can trust that they won't just beat you up and take the money you brought and so on and so on, all because society decided that individuals having to secure all of that personally makes for a crapsack world. If you think you can do better, there are places you can go such that you pay only for what you personally use, but they're far away from most other people and you'll find that you spend an inordinate amount of time and energy just surviving.
The current method of taxation steals from those who provide the most to society in order to pay for those who either produce nothing or produce less.
It is to laugh. Do you really think that those with the most income are necessarily the ones who contribute the most to society? If so, you're unrecoverably naive. If you think that money is the measure of value, then I'll thank you to tell me what Paris Hilton has done to earn the vast millions of dollars she has access to. If she hadn't been born into it, she'd be a waitress somewhere in middle America and we both know it. Society is full of people who create value in excess of their paycheck and people who drag in tons of money without contributing much at all, so the whole "steals from the rich" argument falls apart in that regard.
Theft is compulsory, so is taxation.
Taxation isn't compulsory. This isn't the Soviet Union. Taxes are just a requirement for being a U.S. citizen, so if you don't want to pay taxes to the U.S. government, then leave the country and renounce your citizenship, and nobody will stop you. However, if you want the benefit of being a U.S. citizen, then you have to pay taxes. As I said above, there are many places in the world where paying taxes isn't required, and you could avail yourself of any number of those places if you don't like taxation. Just don't sit here with your safe drinking water and your anti-fraud legislation and your right to ask for aid if random chance turns you into one of those "less productive" people and whine about having to pay for it. Walk the walk, and all that.
Virg
The failure in logic goes deeper than who owns the rights to the commercials. The failure is in trying to make skipping ads and copyright infringement synonymous. That's like saying that I violate the copyright of an author by skipping pages in a book I'm reading. I'm with them more on the idea that it changes the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem, but I'm not sure I agree that doing that would be a bad thing.
Virg
I've always been of the opinion that this is the purview of Internal Affairs. I advocate for allowing IA officers to do random checks of police on duty, up to an including a patdown. Finding any secondary weapon that isn't clearly identifiable by its serial markings should result in jail time for the officer so found, period. The idea that any officer would carry a throwdown weapon is so counter to what is right that I can't hold any officer at all in esteem for knowing about how widespread the practice is and not speaking up.
Virg
For example, about 13% of the population of Ohio lives in one of the three largest cities, and the rest of us don't.
But going to the national level, almost one third of the population of the United States lives within a hundred miles of New York City. I'd be willing to bet that Ohio is below the national average in terms of traffic accidents per capita, which tends to prove SteveFoerster's point.
Virg
This statement is nonsensical because it requires that science can only operate in an "objective" reality. Einstein himself said, "Everything's relative" (yeah, I know he didn't really say that, but the meme fit too well to ignore) and so science doesn't need an objective framework to work, just a framework that's objective to the science being done. To give an example, imagine a tiny world in a bottle that's attached to a centrifuge on the surface of Earth. In that bottle-world, all of science would tell its occupants that gravity is toward the bottom of the bottle, and their science would operate on that assumption right up until the little bottle-explorers found a way to kick the cork out and break contact with the bottle. Then, suddenly, gravity would change in a fundamental and (to them) incomprehensible way, and they'd have to adapt their view of science to include the new, larger frame of reference. That wouldn't mean that all their current science was wrong, just limited in its scope to their understanding of the world as they knew it. Meanwhile, the bottle-scientists could continue to make fun of the bottle-zealots who put all of the unknown stuff at Bottle-God's feet rather than accepting that they just didn't know enough to say.
Virg
If you're not taking a "new is evil"mentality, then you're purposefully going offtopic. The question that you helpfully answered wasn't the one asked, and nobody asked for your anecdote about how you did just fine without constant contact. The poster asked how to set up the technology so that they can Skype when they want to in a more baby-proof manner.
To answer the actual question, I'd set up a little box on the wall with a plexiglas front, and put a regular monitor in it with a webcam mounted above. If you're even better about it, you could set up the box so you can drop your iPad into it during the session and then just lift it out when you're done. Baby marks on the front can be wiped off and the touch screen won't work through a quarter inch of plastic.
Virg
This is the part where you reread the article (or at least the summary) and notice that the plan is to put the asteroid into orbit around the Moon. Therefore, the odds of it plummeting into anything other than open lunar real estate is pretty much nil.
Virg
This doesn't make a lot of sense, because most of the things that software could do will only be minor tuning of specific systems, and anything that's likely to cause a catastrophic failure will usually stop the car before it starts. Even a blue screen will usually just cause the car to stall, which is unlikely to cause a pileup.
Without hardware modifications, changing the performance of the car to any real degree (other than making it unable to run at all) is unlikely.
Virg
No, the point is that bigger specimens of smaller dinosaurs had an advantage over the average, so there was environmental pressure driving larger animals to survive. Therefore, as the bigger dinosaurs bred more than their smaller siblings, the average size of their young went up, reinforcing their advantage until truly huge specimens became the norm.
Virg
Grab a thermometer and try it if you think it's not possible. I've done it myself (not a French press but a coffee machine and just plain cups from a pot too) and unless you're heating the grounds, your coffee mug and the parts of your French press before you use it, running boiling water (which usually averages around 190-200 degrees Fahrenheit, not 212 like you'd think) through the grounds/machine can lose fifty or more degrees easily. It may seem counterintuitive that so much heat can dissipate like that, but get a thermometer and you'll find out that just pouring boiling water from a pot to a mug can take it down to 160. One good way to illustrate this is to start with two standard size room temperature coffee mugs. Pour boiling water into one, and wait ten seconds. Dump that mug into the second, and wait another ten seconds. Then pour the second mug over your hand. While it's still very hot, it won't cause burns. It's a good way to demonstrate just how fast water sheds its heat into other materials, and it led us to the conclusion that if you want to serve coffee or tea that stays hot, fill the cups with hot water ahead of time, and then dump the hot water just before you pour in the coffee/tea.
Virg
Unless you are a significant public figure for your business (and even then I'm not so sure), what you believe and what you say should have fuck all to do with your employer.
This ignores the idea that many people get paid for image. When Hanes pays money to Michael Jordan, they're doing it for the right to associate his face with their name, so people who like him will be more inclined to buy their stuff. They're paying for his image, and if he then does something that makes his image run counter to their corporate image, they have the right to tell him (in exchange for the money they pay him) to tell him what he can and can't do, both "on" and "off" the clock. If Mr. Jordan doesn't like that, nobody put a gun to his head to sign an endorsement contract.
The same is true of John Derbyshire. National Review pays him money to present his opinions as part of their staff, and when he starts saying stuff they don't like, they have every right to tell him to stop or to stop paying him even if he's only presenting those non-aligned opinions in other places. There's no censorship going on here, because he wasn't incarcerated or fined or "disappeared", he was fired. He's still quite free to go get a job writing for a publication that lines up better with his stated opinions, but the money that NR paid him had strings attached, and he decided that writing his article was worth more than that paycheck.
Virg
Given your answer in (A), there's no solution that requires nothing more than the barometer, since the answer involving pressure differences and the drop count both require a method for scaling the building as well (a measuring device is unneeded for both (A) and (B) since there's no rule that says you can't find the building's height in barometer-lengths as opposed to any other unit of length). Sure, you could use the stairs to get to the roof, but then you could do the same thing with measuring the building by the length of the barometer as well. There's nothing in the measuring solution that requires that you measure the outside of the building, after all, so you could just do it (very carefully) as you climb the stairs.
Virg
Have they ever done something NOT wrong? Seriously. Just give me ONE example. Just one.
Seriously, I really dislike Microsoft, but even I can do this with about ten seconds to think. My example is MS-DOS. I was using a lot of different OSes at that time because there was nothing approaching uniformity, and frankly there wasn't anything else that ran on that level of hardware that I liked better. Closer to current, Windows XP is still viable today and it's not that bad. I use Ubuntu personally, but I didn't delete my XP partition and it still gets used for some business apps that I need to run for work and for some games.
It is objectivly to say Microsoft is the most evil software company ever. By a large margin.
In a world that contains (or at least contained) SCO, this is a bad stance to take. Microsoft stinks badly, I'll certainly agree, but yours is a big statment to make and it's not objective in any way.
Virg
To reverse it back on you, please enlighten me as to how "fight against Christian fundamentalism" equates to "fight against Christianity" unless you're positing that all Christians are fundamentalists.
Virg
And you just missed my point. I don't "wanna play games" alone, and I use my system every day to do real work and fun things. I don't care about laptops built in 1998. I have one (a PowerBook PDQ running Linux, by the way) but that's not what will make Linux grow. I want my computer to do everything I want it to do, including playing games, handling my work, controlling remote systems, handling telephony and so on. The rig I have right now does it all in Windows. It does everything except the games and some hardware in Linux. If those problems went away, I could run Linux exclusively and so could many of my friends, family, coworkers and neighbors. I don't want to have two computers for different things, and I don't want to have to switch operating systems to do all of the stuff that I want to do. The general public doesn't want that either. Say "go get an XBox or a Windows machine" to these people, and guess what they'll do? They'll go get a Windows system and they won't bother with Linux. How does that help? Your whole argument does nothing for Linux except alienate vast swathes of potential users so you can act smug about what you think everyone should do with a computer. Your attitude causes people like me more trouble than any problem Linux presents, because I can convince someone that I can fix a problem with Linux but your comments just make them think that Linux users are elitist jerks. If you can't manage to rein in the attitude, at least stay quiet so you don't get in the way of those of us who are actually doing productive work toward getting people to like Linux.
Virg
You said this statement at least three times that I saw, and it's pointless and dismissive. As my counter to why it's a suck argument, I present that it's surprisingly difficult to buy a computer with Linux installed and enough people balk at the idea that it's not gaining any real ground in the desktop market. Maybe it would be more productive to address the presented arguments with something better than cracks about XBoxes and statements that you're tired of hearing the argument that it won't play particular games. That argument is a valid reason not to switch to Linux, and it's not going to go away because of derision. I personally love Linux. I've got it running on both my desktop and netbook and I use it all the time. I fix computers for a living and I'm very knowledgeable about it. I still can't get World of Warcraft to run in WINE at anywhere near the framerate that it runs in Windows on the same machine (it's bad enough to be unusable in Linux and the XBox argument fails on that program) and so I'm still booting back to Windows to play it because it just doesn't work in Linux. Solving that sort of problem would go a lot farther toward getting Linux popular than alienating potential users by being an asshole.
Virg
The only route by which you can use your argument to label mine invalid is to demonstrate that all of the things you name are more of a detrimental force than diversity of thought is a benefit. You haven't done that in any meaningful way with your one-sentence dismissal, so your rebuttal fails to rebut. I point to the significant and sustained growth of the human population and our immense adaptation to our world to back up my side of the equation. What say you?
Virg
If Dobzhanskyâ(TM)s assertion is true, âoeHow is it, thenâ, Moroz asks, âoethat so few newly minted PhDs in the biological sciences have taken any formal graduate school courses in evolution or biodiversity?â
Wait, wait, I can answer this one! There's no money in it.
Good question. Maybe the creationist have taken over graduate level biological sciences!
Or maybe it was the accountants instead. Or perhaps it was the people like you who like to say things like "you evolution people" that make it troublesome to get funding. When all the money's in medical research, why would you expect a bunch of new PhDs to put their time and energy into biodiversity?
Virg
By the way, the whole concept if irreducible complexity got taken apart long ago, so your arguments about development of a heart and such aren't much use. Just to give you the ten second version, the use of a heart without lungs would be circulation. Just because complex bodies use circulation to move oxygen doesn't mean that it's a must. Take note that trees use circulation, but not to move oxygen, so they'd be able to use "a heart without lungs".
It's easier to believe in a Divine being than what we have today happening by chance.
The concept that evolution represents "by chance" simply proves that you don't know enough about evolution to comment. Learn that evolution doesn't happen by chance (that's mutation, and evolution describes the path laid out by the environmental choosing of the most beneficial mutations) and you'll be better able to argue the point.
Virg
Regrettably we are playing with evolution, or more specifically, natural selection to the detriment of our species.
I hear this sort of thing a lot, and it's simple crap. There's nothing regrettable about increasing survivability in the human population, because humans no longer adapt best based on physical attributes. Brain power is king at the human level of sentience, and keeping people like Stephen Hawking alive and functioning does more to advance our species than maintaining his gene pattern will degrade it. Humanity is long past the time when "survival of the fittest" applied to our physical bodies.
Virg
The idea that the superconductor won't be adding to the thermal load is all well and good, but it doesn't cope with the problem of heat that comes in from solar radiation or heat generated by other parts of the ship like engines. Furthermore, it becomes a self-reinforcing problem, because being unable to dissipate heat makes the superconductor stop superconducting, which only adds to the problem.
Virg