Why do I call it idiotic?
A) Because it handwaves away half the problem. Ok, so male peacocks evolved so to impress the females. But why did females evolve that trait then? Going strictly natural selection, if that tail were indeed a disadvantage, some females would be randomly born with a preferrence for smaller tails and mate with males with smaller tails, their children would have less of a disadvantage, repeat. So natural selection would guide things towards removing that handicap anyway.
It's not that simple. Traits that appeal to some, for lack of a better term, aesthetic sense of one sex can be selected for, even if they create some disadvantage for the other sex. There are several ways this can happen, including simple vestigial preferences that have yet to evolve out (we're always in the *middle* of the process). However, the most obvious way to summarize these is if that aesthetic sense has a larger evolutionary advantage than the disadvantage of the trait that appeals to it, it can survive purely on its own merits.
Obviously, if the trait is something that is even somewhat reliably paired with other indications of fitness (e.g. if a peacock needs to be especially robust or healthy to grow a big tail, or a frog's neck allows finding more mates by making louder sounds) then that can be inflated greatly as long as the trait itself isn't (proportionally) much of a hindrance.
But there are also potential advantages to evolving a preference for certain patterns in nature. E.g. as long as there's some advantage to peahens in finding patterns similar to the peacock's tail pleasing, and as long as that tail doesn't result in *too many* males dying, then it can be strong selected for purely based on that peahen preference.
However, on the other side of the equation, if it's a *sufficiently* sex-linked trait there can *easily* be an advantage for the *species* in many or even most males dying off due to predation. Less resources are required per reproductive opportunity, and the males that remain have stronger pressure to develop mitigating strengths that might not be sex-linked. This is especially true in herding and flocking animals where the reproductive opportunities are concentrated.
We should also be careful about having the hubris to assume we can realize all the possible advantages and disadvantages of a trait. It's easy to sit in an armchair and say a peacock's tail is a disadvantage, but without *extensive* study that's just a guess. In many cases where those kinds of studies have been done, the traits have turned out to have some unexpected advantage that overrode the obvious disadvantages (c.f. sickle cell anemia). If it's something subtle enough not to be "obvious" to us, there's probably an advantage to co-evolving some kind of "showy" adaptation of the trait that the opposite sex can select for.
Having read the paper, and having actually studied statistics enough to understand what makes a valid statistical argument, I assess the probability of your reasoning being correct is less than 1 in 10^9.
There are so *many* *obvious* logical inconsistencies, failures to examine the entire picture, and assumptions that are totally unfounded (not to mention so many reductio ad absurdum arguments demonstrating the infeasibility of even this general type of argument) that I might simply assess the probability of this argument's correctness as 0. However, I'm cognizant of my potential to err in this... but not by *that* much (yes, I'm aware of the irony of this statement).
Your laughably low hypothetical stipulation of 90% probability of this argument being wrong is just one of the less significant of those.
Take, for example, the lack of inclusion of any assessment (or reasonable approach to even come close to calculating such an assessment) of how much such an invalid argument would affect the outcome. If, hypothetically, there were a 1/10,000 of an argument being wrong, but only a 1/10,000 chance of that logical error affecting the validity of the conclusion, then at best you can increase the assumable risk to 1/100,000,000. That's still high, of course, but the principle invalidates your entire argument. And that's just one of at least a dozen invalidating flaws I found in the reasoning while only thinking about this for half an hour.
If we're going to worry about unlikely but plausible scenarios for planetary doom that we could do something about if we tried, let's examine the nearly undisputable fact that, statistically speaking, far more people die from asteroid impacts per year than shark attacks*.
The problem with the Randites is they simply don't want to play fair. They'll gussy up their arguments with all sorts of sophistry but the fact of the matter is they're greedy and don't want to pay their fair share.
As oversimplified generalizations go, this one's a doozy. Most (as in the majority, though perhaps not the most vocal) libertarians agree that there are some things that have to be provided by and paid for by society. They are as willing to pay their fair share as the next guy for those things.
But when you look at it any more than superficially, every dollar the government spends is taken at gunpoint (perhaps metaphorically) from someone. As a minarchist libertarian, I'm happy to admit there are any number of things I think are important enough that it's worth pointing a gun at my grandmother if she refuses to pay for them. A functioning justice system, for example (which would be rather unlike the one we have).
Just not *nearly* as many of them as either Democrats or Republicans seem willing to mug her for.
Slashdot is *commentary* on news, not news itself. There's no particular reason to expect that the summary will be any more objective than the 100 pages of mindless drivel, punctuated by the occasional cogent remark, that immediately follow it.
What's missing is your *time*, and it's the only completely non-renewable resource you possess. I don't know how to make wasting someone's time a crime, but don't pretend it has no value.
Speaking of which, when someone copies a disk, what's stolen isn't the contents, because they are still there, but the *rights* given to content owners. Kind of like if someone violated your right to free speech... but a created right rather than a natural one.
As much as I generally oppose the Fairness Doctrine on freedom of speech grounds, I have to admit that I sometimes wish this rule were in force. And certainly if you're going to enforce it on "traditional" media, it should be enforced on non-traditional media as well, both for fairness and to give more credibility to the non-traditional media and their status as journalists. I mean... what's the consequence? Bloggers have to enable comments and not moderate conflicting views out of existence?
For 90% of the content out there, the doctrine is already in effect.
I've had good luck with those services that you mail your disks to, where they polish them with professional machines to a fine sheen, and mail them back. The disks work well after this treatment. The various hand-help "disk doctor" devices are crap. Don't bother, you'll just make a bad situation worse, most of the time.
You can't repair scratches through the media, though... if you see light when you hold the disk up to a light, you're out of luck.
But for surface scratches, you can get them fixed for a couple bucks per disk (less in bulk). Google for "cd repair service" and you'll find a lot of them.
Don't leave out internal combustion engine thermal efficiency, which is typically 30%. So that ".31 gallons of gas" worth of electricity (at ~90% efficiency through electric motors) is roughly equivalent to 1 gallon of gas through an ICE.
On a reasonably efficient (hybrid?) electric vehicle, that could easily translate to around a 50 mile range.
So, yes, it's theoretically plausible to run a car on solar energy. Not easy, not cheap, probably not that total energy efficient in the long run when you count the cost of making/maintaining the panels (and replacing them after fender benders), the motors, batteries, etc., etc. But plausible.
The only question is whether the legal interpretation of the phrase "ex post facto law" matches the common sense one.
The reason that this is in the Constitution is that the founders saw great injustice being perpetrated by laws passed to make prior behavior *illegal*, not the other way around. Original intent is a pretty strong precedent in Constitutional law. There's a significant change the SCOTUS would interpret it that way as well. And I'm not entirely sure this would be wrong.
In this case, retroactive immunity allows an injustice to stand. But in other cases, it might easily be in the interests of justice to retroactively make something legal that (technically, mistakenly, or by court ruling) was previously deemed illegal.
By the doctrine of first sale you're allowed to sell it legally (i.e. you can't be (successfully) sued for copyright infringement). But then again the prof is allowed to give you an F legally for any reason he chooses. Whether it's a good *idea* or not is another question (in either case).
Oddly enough, people *have* made cars that run on water. They use sodium or cesium to split the hydrogen out of the water (they like oxygen even more than hydrogen does), run it through a fuel cell, and when it's expended they swap it out and send the "burnt" metal back to be recycled.
No, you don't get free energy... at all. It takes (significantly) more energy to break the oxygen back out of the metal and recycle it. But it's not too terribly an inefficient or crazy way to store energy for a car. The power density of the sodium/cesium is quite high. And the infrastructure for delivering water to the car is well developed:-).
Of course, the dangers of having that much sodium metal sitting around waiting to be exposed to water during an accident have to be considered. But it's not an insurmountable problem.
Of course, it could easily just be a hoax (and, in fact, the marketing hype *certainly* is fraudulent). But there's nothing impossible here.
That one's *easy*. Negotiate a contract with the receiver where they promise, in return for receiving the media, that they will destroy them when no longer being used.
That was easy. Where's my prize?
Oh, you mean to send something to someone *unsolicited* and just by the fact of receiving it make them liable for damages for something?
The difference is that it's free to send the calls, not that it can be pre-recorded. Another difference is that it can be done tracelessly through bot networks.
It's already illegal in most jurisdictions (in the US) to telemarket with pre-recorded messages. This has teeth with a regular phone call because the phone company is pretty careful about being able to bill people that use its network, and if you can bill them, you can track them down.
And... regular (illegal) pre-recorded telephone spam still costs money to send on a per-unit basis, so the incentive is way overbalanced by the risk.
Yes, but the only consequence of this "Defcon 6" that you mention is that Vista will disable playing of DRM protected content.
Err... which is the point.
It's completely trivial to remove the DRM from Vista. Heck, just delete the stupid modules or wrap the DLLs in dummy shims. You're admin, you can do anything you want.
Of course, at that point you can't access DRM-protected content, but err... that's kind of the point.
Microsoft even makes it easy to disable the DRM-protected data path in Vista. Just install a non-signed driver.
Here are some statements that have roughly similar truth values:
It done blowed up 140 years ago.
It 'sploded 28140 years ago.
From the perspective of the Earth, the supernova occurred 140 years ago.
The light of this supernova first reached the Earth 140 years ago.
No, really, remember your quantum mechanics... on the Earth it really did only happen 140 years ago. Before we observed this event, the star was in a superposition of exploded and non-exploded states.
There's no reference frame in which it's possible to say when it happened, but from our psuedo-reference frame either 140 years or 28140 years are plausible answers.
Simultaneity to within 28000 years is a meaningless concept for objects 28000 light years apart. The best we can say is that the supernova occurred roughly between 140 and 28140 years ago.
We are now seeing the image of a 140 year-old supernova, the youngest such image we've seen.
I could go on, but even I have limits in pedantry.
People have skirted around this, but I find it interesting to note that the crimes which the UK appears to *actually* be these CCTV cameras against are, in fact, bigger problems for the citizenry than the terrorists and pedophiles which were used to sell it.
We need a new word for something that's ironic because it is designed to seem ironic but really isn't.
The meta-irony here comes through in the point that terrorists aren't really a danger to normal people (statistically speaking), and in fact are probably less of a hazard than slipping on dog poop on the sidewalk. But you can get CCTVs pushed through based on the former and not the latter because almost all people have extraordinarily poor risk assessment skills.
The subject may sound like a pedantic nit-pick, but I think it gets right to the heart of this question.
When a mathematician writes down an subtly, but entirely, erroneous piece of mathematical reasoning, this question gets much easier. Clearly in that case it's "invented", because it can't be preexisting or "real" in any way that makes any kind of sense.
The question is: why would this process be fundamentally different from writing down a valid piece of mathematical reasoning? One could argue that that validity makes it a "discovery", but the process is exactly the same, and in fact it's often the case that something that appeared valid before appears invalid later or vice versa.
Does the math switch from "invented" to "discovered" and back to "invented" in that case? Does every bit of discovered/invented math exist in some kind of superposition of those two states?
Does the concept of "valid" even exist outside of human perception and understanding? Can we know whether there's a real difference between these? Metaphysical, yes, but I think the only valid answer is that what we *perceive* as reality is created by perception as much as it is by anything objective.
I vote for invented.
Besides, that will piss off the people arguing against software patents, which this whole discussion is a very thinly veiled reference to anyway.
What seems to happen in reality, as opposed to theory, is that people clear-cut and burn forests in order to grow more food to make the ethanol (or feed people, equivalently).
This releases so much CO2 that, by some studies' measures, it would take >500 years for biofuels to become carbon neutral.
If you read eBay's policy about this program, all the victims of this Scientology scam have to do is file a Counter Notice with eBay, and their item will be back up in 10 days unless the CoS actually files suit in court to prevent it (which they could do anyway).
Yes, it's an inconvenience... one of many brought to you by the DMCA. It's no different from any other takedown notice procedure, except perhaps in that it automates (? not specified) a process that would have happened anyway, almost as quickly, at great expense to eBay.
That misses the point, which is that the shorter wavelength and shorter distance exactly cancel, which should result in the peak of the wave mixing with the other laser at the same phase as before (canceling it). According to the argument presented here, anyway.
However, the mixing is not at a point. The two beams are recombined in the splitter, which means that they are traveling parallel again, and not in the same direction as either of the arms. So the shorter wavelength of the modified light will now interfere with the same wavelength of the other beam. Normally, the 2 are set up to be 180 degrees out of phase, exactly, so that no light comes out the other end (where there's a photodetector). Now that the beams have different wavelengths, that's no longer possible... some light will always reach the detector. (note that all this is proportional and will depend on the direction of the incident wave... if it hits both arms identically I imagine you wouldn't see it).
Unless I'm remembering incorrectly... it's been what, 15 years since they started this thing?, and I really only read up on it back then.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that simple. Traits that appeal to some, for lack of a better term, aesthetic sense of one sex can be selected for, even if they create some disadvantage for the other sex. There are several ways this can happen, including simple vestigial preferences that have yet to evolve out (we're always in the *middle* of the process). However, the most obvious way to summarize these is if that aesthetic sense has a larger evolutionary advantage than the disadvantage of the trait that appeals to it, it can survive purely on its own merits.
Obviously, if the trait is something that is even somewhat reliably paired with other indications of fitness (e.g. if a peacock needs to be especially robust or healthy to grow a big tail, or a frog's neck allows finding more mates by making louder sounds) then that can be inflated greatly as long as the trait itself isn't (proportionally) much of a hindrance.
But there are also potential advantages to evolving a preference for certain patterns in nature. E.g. as long as there's some advantage to peahens in finding patterns similar to the peacock's tail pleasing, and as long as that tail doesn't result in *too many* males dying, then it can be strong selected for purely based on that peahen preference.
However, on the other side of the equation, if it's a *sufficiently* sex-linked trait there can *easily* be an advantage for the *species* in many or even most males dying off due to predation. Less resources are required per reproductive opportunity, and the males that remain have stronger pressure to develop mitigating strengths that might not be sex-linked. This is especially true in herding and flocking animals where the reproductive opportunities are concentrated.
We should also be careful about having the hubris to assume we can realize all the possible advantages and disadvantages of a trait. It's easy to sit in an armchair and say a peacock's tail is a disadvantage, but without *extensive* study that's just a guess. In many cases where those kinds of studies have been done, the traits have turned out to have some unexpected advantage that overrode the obvious disadvantages (c.f. sickle cell anemia). If it's something subtle enough not to be "obvious" to us, there's probably an advantage to co-evolving some kind of "showy" adaptation of the trait that the opposite sex can select for.
Having read the paper, and having actually studied statistics enough to understand what makes a valid statistical argument, I assess the probability of your reasoning being correct is less than 1 in 10^9.
There are so *many* *obvious* logical inconsistencies, failures to examine the entire picture, and assumptions that are totally unfounded (not to mention so many reductio ad absurdum arguments demonstrating the infeasibility of even this general type of argument) that I might simply assess the probability of this argument's correctness as 0. However, I'm cognizant of my potential to err in this... but not by *that* much (yes, I'm aware of the irony of this statement).
Your laughably low hypothetical stipulation of 90% probability of this argument being wrong is just one of the less significant of those.
Take, for example, the lack of inclusion of any assessment (or reasonable approach to even come close to calculating such an assessment) of how much such an invalid argument would affect the outcome. If, hypothetically, there were a 1/10,000 of an argument being wrong, but only a 1/10,000 chance of that logical error affecting the validity of the conclusion, then at best you can increase the assumable risk to 1/100,000,000. That's still high, of course, but the principle invalidates your entire argument. And that's just one of at least a dozen invalidating flaws I found in the reasoning while only thinking about this for half an hour.
If we're going to worry about unlikely but plausible scenarios for planetary doom that we could do something about if we tried, let's examine the nearly undisputable fact that, statistically speaking, far more people die from asteroid impacts per year than shark attacks*.
*(amortized over 1,000,000,000 years).
As oversimplified generalizations go, this one's a doozy. Most (as in the majority, though perhaps not the most vocal) libertarians agree that there are some things that have to be provided by and paid for by society. They are as willing to pay their fair share as the next guy for those things.
But when you look at it any more than superficially, every dollar the government spends is taken at gunpoint (perhaps metaphorically) from someone. As a minarchist libertarian, I'm happy to admit there are any number of things I think are important enough that it's worth pointing a gun at my grandmother if she refuses to pay for them. A functioning justice system, for example (which would be rather unlike the one we have).
Just not *nearly* as many of them as either Democrats or Republicans seem willing to mug her for.
Slashdot is *commentary* on news, not news itself. There's no particular reason to expect that the summary will be any more objective than the 100 pages of mindless drivel, punctuated by the occasional cogent remark, that immediately follow it.
Speaking of which, when someone copies a disk, what's stolen isn't the contents, because they are still there, but the *rights* given to content owners. Kind of like if someone violated your right to free speech... but a created right rather than a natural one.
For 90% of the content out there, the doctrine is already in effect.
You can't repair scratches through the media, though... if you see light when you hold the disk up to a light, you're out of luck.
But for surface scratches, you can get them fixed for a couple bucks per disk (less in bulk). Google for "cd repair service" and you'll find a lot of them.
Don't leave out internal combustion engine thermal efficiency, which is typically 30%. So that ".31 gallons of gas" worth of electricity (at ~90% efficiency through electric motors) is roughly equivalent to 1 gallon of gas through an ICE. On a reasonably efficient (hybrid?) electric vehicle, that could easily translate to around a 50 mile range. So, yes, it's theoretically plausible to run a car on solar energy. Not easy, not cheap, probably not that total energy efficient in the long run when you count the cost of making/maintaining the panels (and replacing them after fender benders), the motors, batteries, etc., etc. But plausible.
The reason that this is in the Constitution is that the founders saw great injustice being perpetrated by laws passed to make prior behavior *illegal*, not the other way around. Original intent is a pretty strong precedent in Constitutional law. There's a significant change the SCOTUS would interpret it that way as well. And I'm not entirely sure this would be wrong.
In this case, retroactive immunity allows an injustice to stand. But in other cases, it might easily be in the interests of justice to retroactively make something legal that (technically, mistakenly, or by court ruling) was previously deemed illegal.
By the doctrine of first sale you're allowed to sell it legally (i.e. you can't be (successfully) sued for copyright infringement). But then again the prof is allowed to give you an F legally for any reason he chooses. Whether it's a good *idea* or not is another question (in either case).
No, you don't get free energy... at all. It takes (significantly) more energy to break the oxygen back out of the metal and recycle it. But it's not too terribly an inefficient or crazy way to store energy for a car. The power density of the sodium/cesium is quite high. And the infrastructure for delivering water to the car is well developed :-).
Of course, the dangers of having that much sodium metal sitting around waiting to be exposed to water during an accident have to be considered. But it's not an insurmountable problem.
Of course, it could easily just be a hoax (and, in fact, the marketing hype *certainly* is fraudulent). But there's nothing impossible here.
That was easy. Where's my prize?
Oh, you mean to send something to someone *unsolicited* and just by the fact of receiving it make them liable for damages for something?
Oh, no thanks.
It's already illegal in most jurisdictions (in the US) to telemarket with pre-recorded messages. This has teeth with a regular phone call because the phone company is pretty careful about being able to bill people that use its network, and if you can bill them, you can track them down.
And... regular (illegal) pre-recorded telephone spam still costs money to send on a per-unit basis, so the incentive is way overbalanced by the risk.
Yes, but the only consequence of this "Defcon 6" that you mention is that Vista will disable playing of DRM protected content. Err... which is the point.
Of course, at that point you can't access DRM-protected content, but err... that's kind of the point.
Microsoft even makes it easy to disable the DRM-protected data path in Vista. Just install a non-signed driver.
It done blowed up 140 years ago.
It 'sploded 28140 years ago.
From the perspective of the Earth, the supernova occurred 140 years ago.
The light of this supernova first reached the Earth 140 years ago.
No, really, remember your quantum mechanics... on the Earth it really did only happen 140 years ago. Before we observed this event, the star was in a superposition of exploded and non-exploded states.
There's no reference frame in which it's possible to say when it happened, but from our psuedo-reference frame either 140 years or 28140 years are plausible answers.
Simultaneity to within 28000 years is a meaningless concept for objects 28000 light years apart. The best we can say is that the supernova occurred roughly between 140 and 28140 years ago.
We are now seeing the image of a 140 year-old supernova, the youngest such image we've seen.
I could go on, but even I have limits in pedantry.
We need a new word for something that's ironic because it is designed to seem ironic but really isn't.
The meta-irony here comes through in the point that terrorists aren't really a danger to normal people (statistically speaking), and in fact are probably less of a hazard than slipping on dog poop on the sidewalk. But you can get CCTVs pushed through based on the former and not the latter because almost all people have extraordinarily poor risk assessment skills.
Errrr...
I know you're trying to be funny, but yes, that's his point *exactly*. Got it in one.
When a mathematician writes down an subtly, but entirely, erroneous piece of mathematical reasoning, this question gets much easier. Clearly in that case it's "invented", because it can't be preexisting or "real" in any way that makes any kind of sense.
The question is: why would this process be fundamentally different from writing down a valid piece of mathematical reasoning? One could argue that that validity makes it a "discovery", but the process is exactly the same, and in fact it's often the case that something that appeared valid before appears invalid later or vice versa.
Does the math switch from "invented" to "discovered" and back to "invented" in that case? Does every bit of discovered/invented math exist in some kind of superposition of those two states?
Does the concept of "valid" even exist outside of human perception and understanding? Can we know whether there's a real difference between these? Metaphysical, yes, but I think the only valid answer is that what we *perceive* as reality is created by perception as much as it is by anything objective.
I vote for invented.
Besides, that will piss off the people arguing against software patents, which this whole discussion is a very thinly veiled reference to anyway.
This releases so much CO2 that, by some studies' measures, it would take >500 years for biofuels to become carbon neutral.
Yes, it's an inconvenience... one of many brought to you by the DMCA. It's no different from any other takedown notice procedure, except perhaps in that it automates (? not specified) a process that would have happened anyway, almost as quickly, at great expense to eBay.
Just when I thought it wasn't possible for Disney to get any more corporate, this happens.
However, the mixing is not at a point. The two beams are recombined in the splitter, which means that they are traveling parallel again, and not in the same direction as either of the arms. So the shorter wavelength of the modified light will now interfere with the same wavelength of the other beam. Normally, the 2 are set up to be 180 degrees out of phase, exactly, so that no light comes out the other end (where there's a photodetector). Now that the beams have different wavelengths, that's no longer possible... some light will always reach the detector. (note that all this is proportional and will depend on the direction of the incident wave... if it hits both arms identically I imagine you wouldn't see it).
Unless I'm remembering incorrectly... it's been what, 15 years since they started this thing?, and I really only read up on it back then.
But I'm not seeing that happening, so methinks people want to have their cake and eat it too.