The problem is of course it's not possible in that many decades to cut the population by 75% without resorting to forced birth control and mass murder - which won't happen because those in charge will be sacked with extreme prejudice.
Oh, there's always the possibility of a super-epidemic. That may be even more likely due to our war on diseases - the red queen is not to be denied, and whenever we up the ante, so does evolution.
You seem to forget that there's this engine for replacing trees that die with other trees, thus keeping the carbon bound up on a larger scale. In the old days, we called them "forests".
That's highly debatable. The US has no concept of privacy in public, very little consumer and employee protection giving freedom from corporate exploitation, no rights of way, no inalienable right to vote, and lots of other freedoms that Europeans take for granted.
and if you remove a 15% violent, lawless minority that commits 50% of all murders in the US, we have the same or better murder rate than Europe.
And if you remove the murderers from the statistic, there are almost no murders! Fancy that. Manipulating statistics is not a service.
Fallacy 1: The only harm that a person can experience is murder. This is clearly false.
Don't move the goal posts. The claim was "save your life or the life of a loved one". That implies death. If you mean that a gun can be used to save the life of someone who is not being murdered, I will grant you that there may be cases like someone shooting to catch the attention of someone who can help save a life, or jamming a rifle into a crack to tie a rope to, but I think those cases are few and far between, statistically insignificant, and better served by other things than guns.
Fallacy 2: Including criminals in "Americans threatened by gun toting police" is not only fallacy conflation, it is downright evil. It is extremely dishonest and irrational to lump criminals into the same category as innocent citizens (unless you are a criminal or planning on becoming one).
The fallacy here is thinking that there is such a binary division as "criminals" and "innocent citizens". (Or such a thing as "evil", for that matter. Evil is a religious definition, and fuck that and the god it rode in on.) "Criminal" means someone who has committed a crime and not served his or her sentence. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty. And everyone is innocent until the moment they aren't. That does not flip a binary switch making them a different type of person with a different brain wiring from what they had a second ago. The world is not black and white. It's all shades, constantly changing. That's why statistics are important, and binary thinking both stupid and dangerous.
Anyhow, I won't bother discussing with you anymore, because you appear to be a hateful bigot who lacks the ability to think beyond the most base thinking of "us and them" and dehumanizing anyone who isn't "us". But please remember that you will be a "them" to a lot of people.
Can you imagine if the crowd in Las Vegas had tried to fight back? People would have been shooting at anyone holding a gun, or towards the hotel and into other rooms and the lot in front of it. Pretty sure more people would have died, not fewer.
As it is, many of the injuries and deaths were from trampling, not gun fire. Most humans look out for #1, even when it harms the group as a whole. That should be taken as a given. Fire a single shot into a big enough crowd, and you can kill dozens of people. They'll do the job for you.
No, a single-shot gun could not have been used. Having to break open a rifle to remove the old and insert a new cartridge would still make a weapon useful for skilful hunting, sports, and as a deterrent. But it would do a lot to reduce mass shootings to mere shootings.
you train and prepare for the one or two times in your life where being armed can save your life or the life of a loved one. You are probably just too young and ignorant yet to have had one of those moments, but they happen to almost everyone.
That would mean that almost everyone who does not carry a gun will either get killed or have a loved one killed in front of them. That clearly is not the case.
Most Americans will never ever be threatened by a gun, except by police. Most who are shot are shot by legally purchased guns.
Two things are in common for every mass shooting. 1: A man. 2: A gun. Reducing that combination is prudent.
But what the hell is it good for? Why do i want a plasma ring?
This is/. Think of the goatse opportunities.
Anyhow, the key point here, I think, is the word stable. Applications tend to follow. Few inventions were made for a purpose; the purposes are added later. I'm sure one of your ancestors said "What the hell is it good for? Why do I want a wooden ring?" after the wheel was invented, before there were any rolling applications taking advantage of it.
But that is far from the only possible source of RF noise
Indeed. You're hitting crystal plates with a water jet. Oscillating crystals causing electromagnetic noise was pretty much how radio transmitters were born.
First of all I want to clarify that they mean static noise, not static charge. The first one is the "waterfally" sound you get from your regular AM/FM radio not tuned into a channel. The second one is what happen when you rub a balloon against a cat.
The conductor will now commit hara-kiri after apologizing for shaming his family.
That would be seppuku, not harakiri. The two are closely related, but harakiri is just suicide by disembowelment, while seppuku is the ritualized form done to spare others shame.
If I move to your country can I get that education for free? Why not?
Depending on the country, most likely you can, yes. Just like you'll get health care, a roof over your head if you cannot afford one, and a minimum income. The problem is moving there. That is likely restricted, unless you're a refugee.
And you've just removing the possibility of voting for immobile people.
That does not follow. In some countries with universal socialized healthcare, if you can't come to the voting booth, the voting booth comes to you. Ambulatory voting stations is also how votes are cast in hospitals and high security prisons (in most countries, disenfranchisement is illegal). As long as there are at least two unrelated people somewhere, a voting enclosure can be erected, so the ballot can be cast in secrecy.
The only ones having a real problem are those who are abroad and without access to an embassy or consulate, or trekking alone through the wilderness. But presumably those are in that situation by choice, knowing that it would mean not being able to vote.
What's wrong with the way bookmarks have worked forever?
Many people appear to prefer to use tabs to provide the functionality that bookmarks were designed for. So we end up with situations like Firefox OOMing on a 32GB workstation, but it appears to be what the users want. Perhaps if the bookmark toolbar saved a screenshot of each site, and used that both for hover actions and as a preliminary muted background picture while the site loaded, some tab users might discover bookmarks? Although a cascading menu hierarchy might still put some off as too complex. That was apparently the rationale for getting rid of the cascading Windows start menu.
The Quantum is the smallest possible increment. Always remember that when someone tells you it's a quantum leap in performance.
True and false. The astonishing property of a quantum leap isn't the distance, but that it goes from one state to another without anything in-between. That's obviously not what happens with Firefox, though. There wasn't a single commit without any betas, even though it feels like it...
And that's a big problem in itself. It opens up for buying and coercing votes, as the person can be observed when voting. Other countries solve this by having voting booths for early voting at police stations, town halls, hospitals, military bases and embassies in foreign countries. That allows for verifying that the voter has privacy when picking and casting the ballot, and assists with counting given that the ballots are handled like any other ballots, with an actual sealed urn being sent for counting, and not individual letters.
When humans read the votes, and each ballot box needs a 2 out of 3 agreement by different counters before being approved, you avoid a lot of the problems with determining intent. Allowing party representatives to challenge votes is perhaps the worst hold-up in American politics. It seems almost self-evident that a requirement for a fair election is to ban interference by those who run in the election during the voting process itself. The only thing that should be allowed is observing, not interfering.
And many of the questions actually have wrong answers if you're deducing the answer, because the required answers are the same wrong things you'll find in a "n Lies My Teacher Told Me" type of book!
And often as in "There's more than one way to skin a cat".
A typical wrong test is: Insert the missing value: 1 2 4 [ ]
There are dozens of valid answers for this one, and the two most common ones, 7 and 8 are both equally valid. Similar for some of the common shape tests, where the test maker might be unfamiliar with concepts like both OR and XOR being valid operations. So a valid result might be scored as incorrect.
And yes, there are cultural differences too. A test description that says "blue" and elements of the test have both blue and green colors does not work well for someone from a culture that doesn't distinguish between blue and green.
Meanwhile, vast swathes of Kentucky and West Virginia are quite uninhabited and livable with no assistance!
It doesn't just have to be liveable for a tech town; it has to have a big city to provide people and amenities that the people want.
The Phoenix metro area has more than 4.5 million people, which is more than the entire state of KY, and more than twice the state of WV in tourist season. That's the incentive. The environment is just an inconvenience to be conquered through technical solutions.
The Microsoft campus wasn't built in Bellevue, Washington because of the nice weather. It was built there because it's right next door to Seattle.
Education generally doesn't change a person's intelligence: your point is weak. If a persons education constantly involved solving a spectrum of novel problems, then experience teaches a student so trained will perform better in the next round of problem solving
That does not follow. IQ tests are deliberately made and changed to combat the effect of rote learning, because that is not what they want to measure. Nor is it relevant to a person's intelligence - getting better at something does not mean getting more intelligent.
If anything, while there is a correlation between higher education and IQ test scores, individual scores do not increase during education. (The scores actually decrease slightly, like for other groups that have a higher score than average, due to mortality rates and the baseline shifts),
Mighty small straw you have there. Planning to murder your neighbor for shits and giggles is bad thinking.
Planning to murder your neighbour is not bad thinking - it's the "for" part that makes it bad thinking, putting the cart before the horse.
Not following through is good thinking winning out.
Not necessarily, no. The not following through is likely related to jumping to a conclusion from a premise that either murder or being caught is bad. Without justifying either premise, it's bad thinking.
Given infinite time, every person should ponder things unlikely to become action, including how to murder one's neighbour, or how to make white asparagus ice cream. That's not bad thinking. Being able to explain why it shouldn't be done, without inserting any unfounded premises is good thinking. Jumping to conclusions is bad thinking.
Speculating on possible reasons why the universe exists or is the way it is is not bad thinking. Saying "ergo, it must be god or aliens" is bad thinking. Saying "there is no god/aliens, so the question is bullshit" is bad thinking. Saying "gods/aliens are irrelevant to the question; we need to answer how before we answer why" is good thinking.
What happens if a 6 year old goes to an accelerated education program, and learns about siphons and capillary actions, and which edge of a shingle to seal ? Wouldn't she be able to answer the questions for the 16 year old ?
Your question breaks down at the "and". 1: If she learns about siphons and capillary actions to the same level as a 16 year old, she should be able to deduce the same answers as the 16 year old. The 16-year old test question would be appropriate for her too, but not for her contemporaries that lack this knowledge. Thus it won't be asked, unless it's a personalized test. 2: If she learns about which edge of a shingle to seal, she should not be asked the question, and it should not be counted. It would be as invalid whether answered by a knowledgable 6 year old or by a 50 year old roof layer.
It's the ability to deduce an answer that the tests aim for, not knowledge. In order to test the ability to deduce, questions should be about things the question taker does not know, but have enough underlying knowledge to be able to think their way to an answer.
And what if the 16 year old grew in a country where they don't use shingles for roofing, but clay tiles ? Would they know which edge to seal ?
I'm glad you asked. That does not affect their ability to deduce the answer. A test taker not knowing anything about wood in general would affect the validity of the question, but basic knowledge of wood combined with unfamiliarity with its use as shingles would be a plus for the validity of the answer - then you can assume that you're testing their ability to figure out the answer. So a question about wood shingles might lead to more accurate test results in Arizona or New York City. A Vermont teen could instead be asked questions they are unlikely to have the knowledge to directly answer, like if a potted plant balancing on the sill on the only open window in a house is more likely to fall inwards or outwards - something a big city dweller might be more likely to know from experience.
In short, an IQ test should test "given understanding of A, but not B, does the test taker have the ability to deduce B?" Not knowing A or already knowing B both invalidate the result, and the challenge is to devise the tests in a way that minimizes the risk of either.
A few tests have early questions that simply intend to establish what the test taker knows or doesn't know, so answers to later questions can be filtered out based on this. Whether it's "what is 2 to the 3rd power" or "what is the shape of cells in a bee hive" or "pick the elliptic shape from the above pictures", these questions establish knowledge, which allows for excluding answers to the real IQ test questions later, when the participant doesn't know A or does know B. Someone not familiar with the test might think that these early questions actually affect the score directly, and may incorrectly conclude that the test is biased, while the exact opposite is the case.
Physical laws are rules. They are valid everywhere, for everything
That depends on your definition of everywhere. And even more on your definition of "are" (more commonly phrased as what the definition of "is" is). Is there a concept of space, even below the Planck length or outside the universe? What is a wave and what is a particle, and is there a law governing the duality that leads to different physical laws for the two?
, and non-discriminatory
That too is in question. The Copenhagen school of thought on quantum mechanics tend to disagree - observation causes discrimination.
Slashdot Mirror
The single best thing you can do to help prevent climate change (that doesn't involve murder / suicide) is to not have children.
Except as sashimi. That's energy neutral.
The problem is of course it's not possible in that many decades to cut the population by 75% without resorting to forced birth control and mass murder - which won't happen because those in charge will be sacked with extreme prejudice.
Oh, there's always the possibility of a super-epidemic. That may be even more likely due to our war on diseases - the red queen is not to be denied, and whenever we up the ante, so does evolution.
You seem to forget that there's this engine for replacing trees that die with other trees, thus keeping the carbon bound up on a larger scale. In the old days, we called them "forests".
The US has far more freedom than Europe,
That's highly debatable. The US has no concept of privacy in public, very little consumer and employee protection giving freedom from corporate exploitation, no rights of way, no inalienable right to vote, and lots of other freedoms that Europeans take for granted.
and if you remove a 15% violent, lawless minority that commits 50% of all murders in the US, we have the same or better murder rate than Europe.
And if you remove the murderers from the statistic, there are almost no murders! Fancy that. Manipulating statistics is not a service.
Fallacy 1: The only harm that a person can experience is murder. This is clearly false.
Don't move the goal posts. The claim was "save your life or the life of a loved one". That implies death. If you mean that a gun can be used to save the life of someone who is not being murdered, I will grant you that there may be cases like someone shooting to catch the attention of someone who can help save a life, or jamming a rifle into a crack to tie a rope to, but I think those cases are few and far between, statistically insignificant, and better served by other things than guns.
Fallacy 2: Including criminals in "Americans threatened by gun toting police" is not only fallacy conflation, it is downright evil. It is extremely dishonest and irrational to lump criminals into the same category as innocent citizens (unless you are a criminal or planning on becoming one).
The fallacy here is thinking that there is such a binary division as "criminals" and "innocent citizens". (Or such a thing as "evil", for that matter. Evil is a religious definition, and fuck that and the god it rode in on.) "Criminal" means someone who has committed a crime and not served his or her sentence. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty. And everyone is innocent until the moment they aren't. That does not flip a binary switch making them a different type of person with a different brain wiring from what they had a second ago.
The world is not black and white. It's all shades, constantly changing. That's why statistics are important, and binary thinking both stupid and dangerous.
Anyhow, I won't bother discussing with you anymore, because you appear to be a hateful bigot who lacks the ability to think beyond the most base thinking of "us and them" and dehumanizing anyone who isn't "us". But please remember that you will be a "them" to a lot of people.
Can you imagine if the crowd in Las Vegas had tried to fight back? People would have been shooting at anyone holding a gun, or towards the hotel and into other rooms and the lot in front of it. Pretty sure more people would have died, not fewer.
As it is, many of the injuries and deaths were from trampling, not gun fire.
Most humans look out for #1, even when it harms the group as a whole. That should be taken as a given.
Fire a single shot into a big enough crowd, and you can kill dozens of people. They'll do the job for you.
ANY gun could have been used in that tragedy
No, a single-shot gun could not have been used.
Having to break open a rifle to remove the old and insert a new cartridge would still make a weapon useful for skilful hunting, sports, and as a deterrent. But it would do a lot to reduce mass shootings to mere shootings.
you train and prepare for the one or two times in your life where being armed can save your life or the life of a loved one. You are probably just too young and ignorant yet to have had one of those moments, but they happen to almost everyone.
That would mean that almost everyone who does not carry a gun will either get killed or have a loved one killed in front of them. That clearly is not the case.
Most Americans will never ever be threatened by a gun, except by police. Most who are shot are shot by legally purchased guns.
Two things are in common for every mass shooting.
1: A man.
2: A gun.
Reducing that combination is prudent.
But what the hell is it good for? Why do i want a plasma ring?
This is /.
Think of the goatse opportunities.
Anyhow, the key point here, I think, is the word stable. Applications tend to follow. Few inventions were made for a purpose; the purposes are added later. I'm sure one of your ancestors said "What the hell is it good for? Why do I want a wooden ring?" after the wheel was invented, before there were any rolling applications taking advantage of it.
But that is far from the only possible source of RF noise
Indeed.
You're hitting crystal plates with a water jet. Oscillating crystals causing electromagnetic noise was pretty much how radio transmitters were born.
A neat magic trick for parties!
For very small parties, given that these rings are no more than microns across.
First of all I want to clarify that they mean static noise, not static charge. The first one is the "waterfally" sound you get from your regular AM/FM radio not tuned into a channel. The second one is what happen when you rub a balloon against a cat.
A hiss, a bang, a squeal, a slash, a scream?
The conductor will now commit hara-kiri after apologizing for shaming his family.
That would be seppuku, not harakiri. The two are closely related, but harakiri is just suicide by disembowelment, while seppuku is the ritualized form done to spare others shame.
If I move to your country can I get that education for free? Why not?
Depending on the country, most likely you can, yes.
Just like you'll get health care, a roof over your head if you cannot afford one, and a minimum income.
The problem is moving there. That is likely restricted, unless you're a refugee.
Here's the funny part - these gents all came in legally under the immigration laws of their respective times, which is actually perfectly cool.
Here's the funny part - these foreign university students also come in legally.
And you've just removing the possibility of voting for immobile people.
That does not follow. In some countries with universal socialized healthcare, if you can't come to the voting booth, the voting booth comes to you. Ambulatory voting stations is also how votes are cast in hospitals and high security prisons (in most countries, disenfranchisement is illegal).
As long as there are at least two unrelated people somewhere, a voting enclosure can be erected, so the ballot can be cast in secrecy.
The only ones having a real problem are those who are abroad and without access to an embassy or consulate, or trekking alone through the wilderness. But presumably those are in that situation by choice, knowing that it would mean not being able to vote.
What's wrong with the way bookmarks have worked forever?
Many people appear to prefer to use tabs to provide the functionality that bookmarks were designed for. So we end up with situations like Firefox OOMing on a 32GB workstation, but it appears to be what the users want.
Perhaps if the bookmark toolbar saved a screenshot of each site, and used that both for hover actions and as a preliminary muted background picture while the site loaded, some tab users might discover bookmarks?
Although a cascading menu hierarchy might still put some off as too complex. That was apparently the rationale for getting rid of the cascading Windows start menu.
The Quantum is the smallest possible increment. Always remember that when someone tells you it's a quantum leap in performance.
True and false. The astonishing property of a quantum leap isn't the distance, but that it goes from one state to another without anything in-between.
That's obviously not what happens with Firefox, though. There wasn't a single commit without any betas, even though it feels like it...
It's particularly important for voting by mail.
And that's a big problem in itself. It opens up for buying and coercing votes, as the person can be observed when voting.
Other countries solve this by having voting booths for early voting at police stations, town halls, hospitals, military bases and embassies in foreign countries. That allows for verifying that the voter has privacy when picking and casting the ballot, and assists with counting given that the ballots are handled like any other ballots, with an actual sealed urn being sent for counting, and not individual letters.
When humans read the votes, and each ballot box needs a 2 out of 3 agreement by different counters before being approved, you avoid a lot of the problems with determining intent.
Allowing party representatives to challenge votes is perhaps the worst hold-up in American politics. It seems almost self-evident that a requirement for a fair election is to ban interference by those who run in the election during the voting process itself. The only thing that should be allowed is observing, not interfering.
And many of the questions actually have wrong answers if you're deducing the answer, because the required answers are the same wrong things you'll find in a "n Lies My Teacher Told Me" type of book!
And often as in "There's more than one way to skin a cat".
A typical wrong test is:
Insert the missing value:
1 2 4 [ ]
There are dozens of valid answers for this one, and the two most common ones, 7 and 8 are both equally valid.
Similar for some of the common shape tests, where the test maker might be unfamiliar with concepts like both OR and XOR being valid operations. So a valid result might be scored as incorrect.
And yes, there are cultural differences too. A test description that says "blue" and elements of the test have both blue and green colors does not work well for someone from a culture that doesn't distinguish between blue and green.
Meanwhile, vast swathes of Kentucky and West Virginia are quite uninhabited and livable with no assistance!
It doesn't just have to be liveable for a tech town; it has to have a big city to provide people and amenities that the people want.
The Phoenix metro area has more than 4.5 million people, which is more than the entire state of KY, and more than twice the state of WV in tourist season. That's the incentive. The environment is just an inconvenience to be conquered through technical solutions.
The Microsoft campus wasn't built in Bellevue, Washington because of the nice weather. It was built there because it's right next door to Seattle.
Education generally doesn't change a person's intelligence: your point is weak. If a persons education constantly involved solving a spectrum of novel problems, then experience teaches a student so trained will perform better in the next round of problem solving
That does not follow. IQ tests are deliberately made and changed to combat the effect of rote learning, because that is not what they want to measure.
Nor is it relevant to a person's intelligence - getting better at something does not mean getting more intelligent.
If anything, while there is a correlation between higher education and IQ test scores, individual scores do not increase during education. (The scores actually decrease slightly, like for other groups that have a higher score than average, due to mortality rates and the baseline shifts),
Mighty small straw you have there. Planning to murder your neighbor for shits and giggles is bad thinking.
Planning to murder your neighbour is not bad thinking - it's the "for" part that makes it bad thinking, putting the cart before the horse.
Not following through is good thinking winning out.
Not necessarily, no. The not following through is likely related to jumping to a conclusion from a premise that either murder or being caught is bad. Without justifying either premise, it's bad thinking.
Given infinite time, every person should ponder things unlikely to become action, including how to murder one's neighbour, or how to make white asparagus ice cream. That's not bad thinking. Being able to explain why it shouldn't be done, without inserting any unfounded premises is good thinking. Jumping to conclusions is bad thinking.
Speculating on possible reasons why the universe exists or is the way it is is not bad thinking.
Saying "ergo, it must be god or aliens" is bad thinking.
Saying "there is no god/aliens, so the question is bullshit" is bad thinking.
Saying "gods/aliens are irrelevant to the question; we need to answer how before we answer why" is good thinking.
What happens if a 6 year old goes to an accelerated education program, and learns about siphons and capillary actions, and which edge of a shingle to seal ? Wouldn't she be able to answer the questions for the 16 year old ?
Your question breaks down at the "and".
1: If she learns about siphons and capillary actions to the same level as a 16 year old, she should be able to deduce the same answers as the 16 year old. The 16-year old test question would be appropriate for her too, but not for her contemporaries that lack this knowledge. Thus it won't be asked, unless it's a personalized test.
2: If she learns about which edge of a shingle to seal, she should not be asked the question, and it should not be counted. It would be as invalid whether answered by a knowledgable 6 year old or by a 50 year old roof layer.
It's the ability to deduce an answer that the tests aim for, not knowledge. In order to test the ability to deduce, questions should be about things the question taker does not know, but have enough underlying knowledge to be able to think their way to an answer.
And what if the 16 year old grew in a country where they don't use shingles for roofing, but clay tiles ? Would they know which edge to seal ?
I'm glad you asked. That does not affect their ability to deduce the answer.
A test taker not knowing anything about wood in general would affect the validity of the question, but basic knowledge of wood combined with unfamiliarity with its use as shingles would be a plus for the validity of the answer - then you can assume that you're testing their ability to figure out the answer.
So a question about wood shingles might lead to more accurate test results in Arizona or New York City.
A Vermont teen could instead be asked questions they are unlikely to have the knowledge to directly answer, like if a potted plant balancing on the sill on the only open window in a house is more likely to fall inwards or outwards - something a big city dweller might be more likely to know from experience.
In short, an IQ test should test "given understanding of A, but not B, does the test taker have the ability to deduce B?"
Not knowing A or already knowing B both invalidate the result, and the challenge is to devise the tests in a way that minimizes the risk of either.
A few tests have early questions that simply intend to establish what the test taker knows or doesn't know, so answers to later questions can be filtered out based on this. Whether it's "what is 2 to the 3rd power" or "what is the shape of cells in a bee hive" or "pick the elliptic shape from the above pictures", these questions establish knowledge, which allows for excluding answers to the real IQ test questions later, when the participant doesn't know A or does know B.
Someone not familiar with the test might think that these early questions actually affect the score directly, and may incorrectly conclude that the test is biased, while the exact opposite is the case.
Physical laws are rules. They are valid everywhere, for everything
That depends on your definition of everywhere.
And even more on your definition of "are" (more commonly phrased as what the definition of "is" is).
Is there a concept of space, even below the Planck length or outside the universe?
What is a wave and what is a particle, and is there a law governing the duality that leads to different physical laws for the two?
, and non-discriminatory
That too is in question. The Copenhagen school of thought on quantum mechanics tend to disagree - observation causes discrimination.
And what if the physicis of the physics-alien of our physics-alien was an alien intelligence also?
The alien intelligences will converge to being turtles, all the way down.