I don't think there are any fundamental laws of physics that follow your claim here. Please don't go around making up imaginary laws of physics based on bad models. Of course, it may all depend on what you mean by increasing vibration. As you say, it could increase amplitude, but it could also increase the duration of the vibration. There's also no reason to think a particular, although unusual arrangement could increase the frequency as well. In fact, the right mechanical arrangement could increase amplitude, duration and frequency. Your concern about where the energy comes from is a little silly. There's plenty of energy to be exploited from the motion of the car as it is jostled around. Just look at those watches that wind themselves. While the swing arm may not be a custom designed device, the existence of such devices shows that such a thing is not absolutely impossible.
I don't want to go back to having 10 rows of toolbars with cryptic icons scattered around the page.
I think that statement goes a long way towards explaining why you like the ribbon and, in fact, why MS developed the ribbon in the first place. Most of us who hate the ribbon nonsense were using the interface differently. It looks like we were in the minority, so MS decided we didn't matter and now we have the ribbon, which basically _is_ "10 rows of toolbars with cryptic icons", only now they're a little better organized.
Maybe the hardware was ok. The software on the PC end was an abomination as far as I'm concerned. Unusable style over substance and buggy is how I would describe it.
The opiods really do increase the pain relieving properties of the acetaminophen greatly.
I think the point was that the opiods handle pain relief so effectively that the acetaminophen in the mix effectively does nothing except provide a health hazard.
Commenting because I found your post hilarious. So, despite agreeing with the GP poster enough to upmod them, you later realized that they held political opinions that don't agree with yours, so you acted to remove the mod... and posted in the thread not only to remove the mod, but to bitterly announce your disapproval of their signature. It makes you sound just a teensy bit uptight. Especially since the sig doesn't seem to say anything except that they prefer one of the two main US political parties above the other, but hate both.
"Still" do that? You mean with a special travel license that you have to apply for, can be rejected for if you don't meet strict criteria, and that has only existed for around 2 of the last 50 years? The article you linked to talked about a trip by two wealthy, famous entertainers to Cuba. VIPs have always been able to get exceptions to just about everything, right up to and including going to prison for serious crimes. Regular people with the cash to spend can also arrange for those special licenses, but need to dot their "i"'s and cross their "t"'s by attending particular events and meeting with particular people, otherwise they can be imprisoned when they get back home. While a step in the right direction, that's not actual freedom of travel.
What does setting a precedent have to do with it? The point was that a lawyer could act as a shill for a corporation, creating a class action suit in which the lawyer pretends to be working for the plaintiffs but is actually working for the corporation to eliminate the affected parties grounds to sue.
I will make three points here: 1. Brute-force attacks are not the main vulnerability of passwords at this point, so debating entropy is a little pointless
Fair enough. The main vulnerability of passwords will always be people. Most people will use the same password or a slight variation on it for just about everything. Heck, even I do that for groups of non-vital accounts. For most people, a phishing site can offer something in exchange for signing up, record the credentials the user enters, then try to log in any number of places and, chances are, if the same person has an account there the same credentials will work. The only real reason to debate entropy is because, usually, when you suggest using combinations of words instead of obfuscated passwords, someone will point out that a passphrase with just a few elements doesn't have as much entropy as a password with more elements. Then someone else has to point out that, since there are so many more possibilities for the individual elements, the passphrase can work out favorably, especially if it's easier to remember. I'm playing that role.
2. Your calculation of 4 sextillion combinations of words is overly optimistic
Not really. There are a quarter of a million English words in the OED. Some of them are obsolete, but that doesn't matter, it only matters that they will be memorable in a passphrase. That's enough for the 4 sextillion (ok, I rounded up by 94 quintillion or so, but we can ignore such a trifling sum) and that's ignoring all the possible forms of all these words and a heck of a lot of nouns that probably drive it north of a million possibilities per element.
Naturally, the actual words people choose for themselves will typically be from a much more limited set. Of course, the same is true of traditional passwords. Things like childs name plus numerical representation of date of birth are a pretty common way to deal with password requirements. I should have been more clear that I think where multi-word passwords work best is when they're generated by the computer for the human to remember, in which case they're typically easier to remember than an equivalently character-based password.
3. And 4 sextillion doesn't even compare that favorably to current password schemes
It actually can, unless you insist on only ever having four words in the multi-word passphrase, but allow the traditional password to be arbitrarily long. You give an example below of a 12 digit password, but realistically most people have passwords shorter than that. 72^2.906286310633014 ~= 250000, so let's just round to 3 and say that you're always going to need three times as many characters as words to beat the multi-word passphrase provided that the number of possible characters/words stays where we speculated.
The poster I replied to was opining that we should stop letting users pick their own passwords. If we do this, then the multi-word passphrase will probably be easier to remember. My preferred solution is to continue to use weak-sauce solutions like user-selected passwords and/or biometrics but to combine them with some sort of secure cryptographic device that the end user carries.
Also, I can't think of any 2-factor authentication that doesn't involve a central authority of some sort, which poses incredible scaling and logistics issues. Since the internet is international, you'd need an international authority. Good luck getting people to agree on one. Cell phones might be the closest thing we have to a consensus, but that obviously leaves out huge populations of the world where that can't be relied on.
I'm thinking of a multi-function crytographic device not tied to one particular scheme. It could theoretically be built into a cell-phone, but would need to have its own dedicated, isolated hardware. The biggest challenge with integrating it with a cellphone would be the problem of securely transmitting data in the c
It's not meant to be a function of the number of characters. If you have a four word phrase, each word can be any of at least a quarter of a million English words, which gives 4 sextillion possible combinations. That's not even counting all the possible nouns you could throw in there, not to mention a little random punctuation, etc.
For passwords, I think we should start having multi-factor authentication. It's the 21st century, it's high bleeding time anyone with cause to have lots of passwords had their own secure cryptography device to take with them everywhere loaded up with various kinds of cryptography with a library of write-once, read-never (but overwrite allowed when obsolete) hidden keys and volumes of one-time pad (the other copies of which are kept securely by various organizations they have to work with such as banks, employers, etc.). Then, for everything that requires a password, they enter one password on whatever they're logging in to and one password onto their personal encryption device, which is plugged into the computer/atm/security system/etc. they're accessing and authenticates with it.
The Discovery Institute has a few things to throw at evolution. One is based on information theory, and from a scientific philosophy standpoint it makes sense. It deals with the concept of systems being designed. For example to make an army tank vast amounts of design are required. You do not need to take God into account. You can stop at you have this colossal amount of information that makes a system. You do not have to consider who put it there if you do not want to, thus completely removing religion from intelligent design.
If their argument was compelling, I think they must have explained it a little better than you. Based on your last line, it seems like you're describing the scientific principle of putting your hands over your ears and saying "LALALALALALALA!!!!"
The part of the title "The Explosive Origin of Animal Life" is a hot topic. The problem is the Cambrian Explosion, from where the life you see today originated. The problem with it is it seemingly spontaneously erupted. There should be a clear fossil record of organisms progressing to the Cambrian Explosion organisms, but the fossil record doesn't seem to be lining up. Darwin himself said the theory breaks down until that is resolved
Darwin is not the be all and end all on the subject of evolution. Frankly, he probably only wrote that out of a sense of obligation to Adam Sedgwick, who was one of his mentors. The Cambrian explosion isn't particularly surprising. Before it, organisms that formed fossils well weren't very common, then some adaptations crept in that conferred some distinct advantages over existing organisms in many niches, especially on land. Then you have rapid diversification as those niches fill up, and then the new organisms _become_ the environment, creating even more niches, not to mention arms races (seriously, literally arms in some cases). There's no hole in the theory of evolution in the Cambrian Explosion.
I do not see a problem with an information theory based Intelligent Design being taught in schools, because it is sound science. And the perplexities of evolutionary theory, mainly the Cambrian Explosion problem should be taught too, because that is sound and very exciting science.
Sorry, without a better explanation here of what you mean by "information theory based Intelligent Design", it seems to me more like a plan to sabotage kids understanding of Information Theory as well as Biology. The Cambrian Explosion should certainly be taught about as well. Imaginary problems with the Cambrian explosion... Well, I suppose it could be a good critical thinking exercise. The teacher could explain the supposed "problem" and have a round table discussion for the kids to present solutions to the supposed problem.
There have been some religious sects in which beating children seems to have been a central organizing principle. Every sermon, the reverend would bring up a child and beat the sin out of them in front of the whole congregation.
1) The explosion was "small" but was apparently big enough to be heard pretty far away. This wasn't a test-tube "pop" experiment with hydrogen. On the other hand, no damage to people or property was reported. So "was it bigger than a firecracker?", "was it bigger than a cherry bomb?". And what prosecutions for other commercially available "explosive devices" have taken place in Florida in the past? You know those cases must be out there. Fireworks are sold legally in most parts of FL and all it takes is an adult stupid enough to provide the fireworks to an equally stupid kid.
Ever pop a balloon? Take a nice, high-quality balloon and fill it up until it just can't take any more air, then seal it up and squeeze it until it pops. It makes a loud enough "explosion" to be heard pretty far away as well. That doesn't make it particularly dangerous. It's important to understand that what's going on in this soda bottle "bomb" is just a relatively weak pressure vessel rupturing when the internal pressure gets too high. There isn't some high impulse, damaging shockwave that can cause much in the way of real damage. It might burst an eardrum if you're right up next to it, and there might be some plastic shrapnel that could damage eyes. The drano being sprayed around is the most dangerous part. Compared to actual explosives, which produce intense, high impulse shockwaves, the drano bomb is nothing.
Wrong. Wilmot intended to create and detonate a bomb on school grounds, which she did. Whether the boy intentionally shot his brother with a BB or not, is debatable.
Not wrong. I didn't say that the boy intentionally shot his brother with a BB. I speculated that it's possible he might have, but that's irrelevant. He did intentionally shoot his brother in the head with a BB _gun_. Loaded with a BB or not, that's an intentional act that's far more irresponsible than popping a soda bottle.
The major difference, of course, is that intentionally detonating a bomb on school property, where we've had a painful history involving such violence and where others may be injured, is a crime.
First, using the term bomb for this is a stretch. Second the painful history of violence you're talking about is actually nearly 100% off school grounds, which is one of the reasons it's so sensationalized when it happens there. Using the fact that people are especially afraid of violent attacks on school to argue for extra harsh punishment for someone who had absolutely no intention for violence and harmed no one smells like either hysterics or some bizarre cargo cult/collective punishment logic, as if a harsh punishment handed out for something that has a small resemblance to a serious crime you're worried about will somehow transfer, through sympathetic magic, to the perpetrator of a real crime. Third, but probably most significant, pointing a lethal weapon at someone's head and pulling the trigger is also a crime. Reckless endangerment at the very least.
I think it's probably a surprise to most that someone could be killed with a BB gun.
It should not be a surprise to anyone who owns one. A BB gun is a lethal weapon. They are, in fact, designed to kill things. They're mainly intended for small game and for target practice, but they can penetrate quite deeply. Anyone given a lethal weapon as a toy should be given a safety lesson and be expected to follow some basic safety rules. The most important rule is that, unless you actually have some legitimate reason to shoot them, you never, ever, ever point the gun at another human being (or at an animal you don't intend to kill, for that matter). It doesn't matter if you think it's not loaded, or if you think there's some sort of safety mechanism engaged, or if you think that the person is somehow shielded. You do not point the weapon at anyone and you make that an ironclad habit.
One act was intentional, illegal, and on school property. One act was accidental, legal, and on private property.
Both acts were intentional and illegal (but also pretty much just kids being kids), but you are correct that one was on public property and one on private property. Frankly I don't see how that should make much of a difference.
In any case, with the facts as we know them, I don't think either case requires prosecution, and certainly not as an adult. The boy who killed his own brother, probably has guilt enough to punish him. As for the girl who popped a soda bottle on school grounds, expulsion is probably too far to go. Suspension or many detentions maybe. Most critically, what she should get is a lecture or two on safety procedures. Prosecution for this is just ridiculous and stinks of posturing.
One of these days, I'd like to see one of these kids tried as an adult sue for the right to vote. Obviously it would have to be one who was acquitted since felons end up disenfranchised in most of the US.
One incident was admittedly intentional, while the other was an obvious accident.
Both incidents were intentional. The immediate consequences were not. In the case of the BB guns, the boy deliberately pumped up the gun and held it to his brothers head and pulled the trigger. The story is that the boys were doing it to each others without BBs in the guns for fun, just to get the blast of air. A piece of debris in the gun, or even the blast of air by itself could be potentially dangerous at very close range. A BB gun is designed to kill things and, just like any gun, you do not ever point it at any living thing you don't intend to kill. This is very basic gun safety. As it turned out, there actually was a BB in the gun, and it went through the younger brothers skull. I don't know if the older brother loaded it to shoot at a target in between playing with blasts of air and forgot, or if there was just a BB jammed in there that suddenly came loose. For that matter, it could have been intentional: either a deliberate attempt to hurt the younger brother, or maybe he only pumped the gun up part way and thought the BB would bounce off and only sting a little and be funny. We can't really guess at what might have happened, however. Even if we give full benefit of the doubt at take the story at face value, it was tremendously irresponsible and everything was intentional except for there being a BB in the gun.
In the case of the soda bottle, the intent was to create an amusing small gas explosion, just like the blast of air from the BB gun. The difference being that, without a barrel to concentrate the force, it's almost impossible for the soda bottle explosion to kill anyone. It can be a little irresponsible to play around with, but it's nowhere near the level of pointing a gun directly at a child's head.
The girl responsible for making and detonating a bomb on school grounds, Kiera Wilmot, needs to be punished for her actions. Someone could have been injured.
The boy responsible for pointing a gun at his brothers head and pulling the trigger would seem to have some responsibility too. Someone was injured. Killed, in fact. You certainly could argue that the guilt and stigma associated with the act are enough in the boys case. Of course, you could also argue that a simple school punishment such as a month of detentions and maybe some lectures on safety would be enough in her case. Expulsion and criminal charges as an adult for a minor seem a little beyond the pale.
Regarding #4, I find it hard to imagine what circumstances could have occurred where BB gun incident wasn't deliberate. The boys in the case were shooting blasts of air at each other from guns which they apparently thought weren't loaded with BBs. Turned out there was a BB in one of the guns and it was fired through the younger boys skull when his brother fired it directly into his head. So it was deliberate, but with no intent to cause harm. The intent was just to create an entertaining little gas explosion from the end of the barrel. With the bottle bomb, the intent was also just to create an entertaining little gas explosion. For some reason, the one that caused absolutely no damage or injury is being prosecuted.
Methane clathrate extraction seems to have its own potential perils. Imagine the public reaction, or maybe the massive coverup, that will take place the first time a cruise ship drops to the bottom of the ocean because an extraction accident turned a large swath of ocean into methane froth with only 75% of the normal buoyancy of water. Even without massive accidents, imagine how much methane will simply be dumped into the atmosphere.
I'm curious if anyone has developed the idea of a hydraulic ram into an electrical generator. You could use it to pump water to a higher head and then generate power from the flow back down. Or, possibly, could you use a similar design where the opening and closing of the waste valve is used to spin up a flywheel? I wonder if an approach like that could compare favorably to a water wheel?
You're correct that, even if solar panels took more energy to make than they recoup, they would still be worth it for certain use cases. You're not correct that they, in fact, do still take more energy to produce than they generate. That hasn't been true for at least 40 years.
Petroleum products have one of the highest energy densities that is very easy to extract
Technically speaking, plutonium-238 has one of the highest energy densities that's very easy to extract. Just toss it into a lightly shielded chamber in some sort of external combustion engine like a steam engine or a Stirling engine and you're done. There are plenty of reasons it isn't practical. Availability and the costs and difficulties involved in making it are just some of those reasons. In terms of energy density, however, a kilogram of plutonium-238 has a usable energy density of at least 4000 (came up with this based on power output over twelve years, after which only 10% of the plutonium would be used up) times that of an equivalent mass of gasoline. It also doesn't require oxygen. It does have the additional downside that you can never turn it off.
In a practical sense, without nuclear breakthroughs, you're right about hydrocarbon fuels as being practical and convenient for fields such as transportation. Filling a tank with a fluid fuel is convenient and fast compared to electrical charging (consider that the energy transfer rate from a gasoline pump to a car gas tank can easily hit ten megawatts). Not to mention that there are vehicles such as jet planes and rockets that don't really have any electrically powered alternative. Battery technology can't keep up, and it's hard to compete with the energy density of fuels that get to cheat by making use of atmospheric oxygen. After all, the 45 megajoules you get from 1 kg of gasoline isn't really coming from just that 1 kg of gasoline. The energy comes from 1 kg of gasoline + ~3.8 kg of oxygen. So, the real energy density of gasoline as a fuel is only about 21% of what it appears to be, but it gets to use easily accessible in situ oxygen here on Earth. That kind of advantage is hard for chemical batteries, which have to carry all of their chemicals with them, to compete with. This is why air-breathing batteries are being researched, although those would always still have the weight disadvantage. Batteries do have their place, but there are some big tradeoffs in switching to them at the present time and for the forseeable future.
To avoid using up oli reserves and to remain carbon neutral (and probably cleaner overall), artificially created hydrocarbons may be the way to go. If the carbon in the fuel is drawn down from the atmosphere in the first place, there's little downside to re-releasing it except, of course, local pollution. If the hydrocarbons used are well chosen, that may not be a problem either. Methane is very clean burning, for example. Not as clean burning as hydrogen, but hydrogen represents significant storage and usage problems. Methane has some portability issues due to the pressures required to contain it in practically sized tanks, but there's been interesting work in using tanks full of carbon with tiny pores in it to store methane with a fraction of the pressure. In any case, making hydrocarbons from atmospheric CO2 and water and energy seems to be quite possible, it's just a matter of finding the most efficient method, whether it's done through interesting applications of biology or through some entirely technological process. In the short term, of course, it will be hard to compete with oil right from the ground (unless you consider all the externalities, which we never do), but it will probably do quite well in the long term. That way, even if we never have Mr. Fusion, we should hopefully still always have a way to power our cars, jet planes and rockets.
They did have DRM back in the 80's. It wasn't called DRM back then, but there were all kinds of schemes, all of them as half-baked and consumer-unfriendly as modern DRM. There were analog protection schemes too. Macrovision had this wonderful anti-copying technique that made the brightness and contrast go in and out, in and out. It was great. Most of the people who got to experience it were watching perfectly legal copies, of course. Not to mention that the overvoltages it applied would actually destroy some equipment.
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I don't think there are any fundamental laws of physics that follow your claim here. Please don't go around making up imaginary laws of physics based on bad models. Of course, it may all depend on what you mean by increasing vibration. As you say, it could increase amplitude, but it could also increase the duration of the vibration. There's also no reason to think a particular, although unusual arrangement could increase the frequency as well. In fact, the right mechanical arrangement could increase amplitude, duration and frequency. Your concern about where the energy comes from is a little silly. There's plenty of energy to be exploited from the motion of the car as it is jostled around. Just look at those watches that wind themselves. While the swing arm may not be a custom designed device, the existence of such devices shows that such a thing is not absolutely impossible.
I don't want to go back to having 10 rows of toolbars with cryptic icons scattered around the page.
I think that statement goes a long way towards explaining why you like the ribbon and, in fact, why MS developed the ribbon in the first place. Most of us who hate the ribbon nonsense were using the interface differently. It looks like we were in the minority, so MS decided we didn't matter and now we have the ribbon, which basically _is_ "10 rows of toolbars with cryptic icons", only now they're a little better organized.
Maybe the hardware was ok. The software on the PC end was an abomination as far as I'm concerned. Unusable style over substance and buggy is how I would describe it.
The opiods really do increase the pain relieving properties of the acetaminophen greatly.
I think the point was that the opiods handle pain relief so effectively that the acetaminophen in the mix effectively does nothing except provide a health hazard.
Commenting because I found your post hilarious. So, despite agreeing with the GP poster enough to upmod them, you later realized that they held political opinions that don't agree with yours, so you acted to remove the mod... and posted in the thread not only to remove the mod, but to bitterly announce your disapproval of their signature. It makes you sound just a teensy bit uptight. Especially since the sig doesn't seem to say anything except that they prefer one of the two main US political parties above the other, but hate both.
"Still" do that? You mean with a special travel license that you have to apply for, can be rejected for if you don't meet strict criteria, and that has only existed for around 2 of the last 50 years? The article you linked to talked about a trip by two wealthy, famous entertainers to Cuba. VIPs have always been able to get exceptions to just about everything, right up to and including going to prison for serious crimes. Regular people with the cash to spend can also arrange for those special licenses, but need to dot their "i"'s and cross their "t"'s by attending particular events and meeting with particular people, otherwise they can be imprisoned when they get back home. While a step in the right direction, that's not actual freedom of travel.
"start restricting freedom of movement'? Take a trip to Cuba.
What does setting a precedent have to do with it? The point was that a lawyer could act as a shill for a corporation, creating a class action suit in which the lawyer pretends to be working for the plaintiffs but is actually working for the corporation to eliminate the affected parties grounds to sue.
I will make three points here:
1. Brute-force attacks are not the main vulnerability of passwords at this point, so debating entropy is a little pointless
Fair enough. The main vulnerability of passwords will always be people. Most people will use the same password or a slight variation on it for just about everything. Heck, even I do that for groups of non-vital accounts. For most people, a phishing site can offer something in exchange for signing up, record the credentials the user enters, then try to log in any number of places and, chances are, if the same person has an account there the same credentials will work. The only real reason to debate entropy is because, usually, when you suggest using combinations of words instead of obfuscated passwords, someone will point out that a passphrase with just a few elements doesn't have as much entropy as a password with more elements. Then someone else has to point out that, since there are so many more possibilities for the individual elements, the passphrase can work out favorably, especially if it's easier to remember. I'm playing that role.
2. Your calculation of 4 sextillion combinations of words is overly optimistic
Not really. There are a quarter of a million English words in the OED. Some of them are obsolete, but that doesn't matter, it only matters that they will be memorable in a passphrase. That's enough for the 4 sextillion (ok, I rounded up by 94 quintillion or so, but we can ignore such a trifling sum) and that's ignoring all the possible forms of all these words and a heck of a lot of nouns that probably drive it north of a million possibilities per element.
Naturally, the actual words people choose for themselves will typically be from a much more limited set. Of course, the same is true of traditional passwords. Things like childs name plus numerical representation of date of birth are a pretty common way to deal with password requirements. I should have been more clear that I think where multi-word passwords work best is when they're generated by the computer for the human to remember, in which case they're typically easier to remember than an equivalently character-based password.
3. And 4 sextillion doesn't even compare that favorably to current password schemes
It actually can, unless you insist on only ever having four words in the multi-word passphrase, but allow the traditional password to be arbitrarily long. You give an example below of a 12 digit password, but realistically most people have passwords shorter than that. 72^2.906286310633014 ~= 250000, so let's just round to 3 and say that you're always going to need three times as many characters as words to beat the multi-word passphrase provided that the number of possible characters/words stays where we speculated.
The poster I replied to was opining that we should stop letting users pick their own passwords. If we do this, then the multi-word passphrase will probably be easier to remember. My preferred solution is to continue to use weak-sauce solutions like user-selected passwords and/or biometrics but to combine them with some sort of secure cryptographic device that the end user carries.
Also, I can't think of any 2-factor authentication that doesn't involve a central authority of some sort, which poses incredible scaling and logistics issues. Since the internet is international, you'd need an international authority. Good luck getting people to agree on one. Cell phones might be the closest thing we have to a consensus, but that obviously leaves out huge populations of the world where that can't be relied on.
I'm thinking of a multi-function crytographic device not tied to one particular scheme. It could theoretically be built into a cell-phone, but would need to have its own dedicated, isolated hardware. The biggest challenge with integrating it with a cellphone would be the problem of securely transmitting data in the c
It's not meant to be a function of the number of characters. If you have a four word phrase, each word can be any of at least a quarter of a million English words, which gives 4 sextillion possible combinations. That's not even counting all the possible nouns you could throw in there, not to mention a little random punctuation, etc.
For passwords, I think we should start having multi-factor authentication. It's the 21st century, it's high bleeding time anyone with cause to have lots of passwords had their own secure cryptography device to take with them everywhere loaded up with various kinds of cryptography with a library of write-once, read-never (but overwrite allowed when obsolete) hidden keys and volumes of one-time pad (the other copies of which are kept securely by various organizations they have to work with such as banks, employers, etc.). Then, for everything that requires a password, they enter one password on whatever they're logging in to and one password onto their personal encryption device, which is plugged into the computer/atm/security system/etc. they're accessing and authenticates with it.
The Discovery Institute has a few things to throw at evolution. One is based on information theory, and from a scientific philosophy standpoint it makes sense. It deals with the concept of systems being designed. For example to make an army tank vast amounts of design are required. You do not need to take God into account. You can stop at you have this colossal amount of information that makes a system. You do not have to consider who put it there if you do not want to, thus completely removing religion from intelligent design.
If their argument was compelling, I think they must have explained it a little better than you. Based on your last line, it seems like you're describing the scientific principle of putting your hands over your ears and saying "LALALALALALALA!!!!"
The part of the title "The Explosive Origin of Animal Life" is a hot topic. The problem is the Cambrian Explosion, from where the life you see today originated. The problem with it is it seemingly spontaneously erupted. There should be a clear fossil record of organisms progressing to the Cambrian Explosion organisms, but the fossil record doesn't seem to be lining up. Darwin himself said the theory breaks down until that is resolved
Darwin is not the be all and end all on the subject of evolution. Frankly, he probably only wrote that out of a sense of obligation to Adam Sedgwick, who was one of his mentors. The Cambrian explosion isn't particularly surprising. Before it, organisms that formed fossils well weren't very common, then some adaptations crept in that conferred some distinct advantages over existing organisms in many niches, especially on land. Then you have rapid diversification as those niches fill up, and then the new organisms _become_ the environment, creating even more niches, not to mention arms races (seriously, literally arms in some cases). There's no hole in the theory of evolution in the Cambrian Explosion.
I do not see a problem with an information theory based Intelligent Design being taught in schools, because it is sound science. And the perplexities of evolutionary theory, mainly the Cambrian Explosion problem should be taught too, because that is sound and very exciting science.
Sorry, without a better explanation here of what you mean by "information theory based Intelligent Design", it seems to me more like a plan to sabotage kids understanding of Information Theory as well as Biology. The Cambrian Explosion should certainly be taught about as well. Imaginary problems with the Cambrian explosion... Well, I suppose it could be a good critical thinking exercise. The teacher could explain the supposed "problem" and have a round table discussion for the kids to present solutions to the supposed problem.
There have been some religious sects in which beating children seems to have been a central organizing principle. Every sermon, the reverend would bring up a child and beat the sin out of them in front of the whole congregation.
1) The explosion was "small" but was apparently big enough to be heard pretty far away. This wasn't a test-tube "pop" experiment with hydrogen. On the other hand, no damage to people or property was reported. So "was it bigger than a firecracker?", "was it bigger than a cherry bomb?". And what prosecutions for other commercially available "explosive devices" have taken place in Florida in the past? You know those cases must be out there. Fireworks are sold legally in most parts of FL and all it takes is an adult stupid enough to provide the fireworks to an equally stupid kid.
Ever pop a balloon? Take a nice, high-quality balloon and fill it up until it just can't take any more air, then seal it up and squeeze it until it pops. It makes a loud enough "explosion" to be heard pretty far away as well. That doesn't make it particularly dangerous. It's important to understand that what's going on in this soda bottle "bomb" is just a relatively weak pressure vessel rupturing when the internal pressure gets too high. There isn't some high impulse, damaging shockwave that can cause much in the way of real damage. It might burst an eardrum if you're right up next to it, and there might be some plastic shrapnel that could damage eyes. The drano being sprayed around is the most dangerous part. Compared to actual explosives, which produce intense, high impulse shockwaves, the drano bomb is nothing.
Wrong. Wilmot intended to create and detonate a bomb on school grounds, which she did. Whether the boy intentionally shot his brother with a BB or not, is debatable.
Not wrong. I didn't say that the boy intentionally shot his brother with a BB. I speculated that it's possible he might have, but that's irrelevant. He did intentionally shoot his brother in the head with a BB _gun_. Loaded with a BB or not, that's an intentional act that's far more irresponsible than popping a soda bottle.
The major difference, of course, is that intentionally detonating a bomb on school property, where we've had a painful history involving such violence and where others may be injured, is a crime.
First, using the term bomb for this is a stretch. Second the painful history of violence you're talking about is actually nearly 100% off school grounds, which is one of the reasons it's so sensationalized when it happens there. Using the fact that people are especially afraid of violent attacks on school to argue for extra harsh punishment for someone who had absolutely no intention for violence and harmed no one smells like either hysterics or some bizarre cargo cult/collective punishment logic, as if a harsh punishment handed out for something that has a small resemblance to a serious crime you're worried about will somehow transfer, through sympathetic magic, to the perpetrator of a real crime. Third, but probably most significant, pointing a lethal weapon at someone's head and pulling the trigger is also a crime. Reckless endangerment at the very least.
I think it's probably a surprise to most that someone could be killed with a BB gun.
It should not be a surprise to anyone who owns one. A BB gun is a lethal weapon. They are, in fact, designed to kill things. They're mainly intended for small game and for target practice, but they can penetrate quite deeply. Anyone given a lethal weapon as a toy should be given a safety lesson and be expected to follow some basic safety rules. The most important rule is that, unless you actually have some legitimate reason to shoot them, you never, ever, ever point the gun at another human being (or at an animal you don't intend to kill, for that matter). It doesn't matter if you think it's not loaded, or if you think there's some sort of safety mechanism engaged, or if you think that the person is somehow shielded. You do not point the weapon at anyone and you make that an ironclad habit.
One act was intentional, illegal, and on school property. One act was accidental, legal, and on private property.
Both acts were intentional and illegal (but also pretty much just kids being kids), but you are correct that one was on public property and one on private property. Frankly I don't see how that should make much of a difference.
In any case, with the facts as we know them, I don't think either case requires prosecution, and certainly not as an adult. The boy who killed his own brother, probably has guilt enough to punish him. As for the girl who popped a soda bottle on school grounds, expulsion is probably too far to go. Suspension or many detentions maybe. Most critically, what she should get is a lecture or two on safety procedures. Prosecution for this is just ridiculous and stinks of posturing.
One of these days, I'd like to see one of these kids tried as an adult sue for the right to vote. Obviously it would have to be one who was acquitted since felons end up disenfranchised in most of the US.
One incident was admittedly intentional, while the other was an obvious accident.
Both incidents were intentional. The immediate consequences were not. In the case of the BB guns, the boy deliberately pumped up the gun and held it to his brothers head and pulled the trigger. The story is that the boys were doing it to each others without BBs in the guns for fun, just to get the blast of air. A piece of debris in the gun, or even the blast of air by itself could be potentially dangerous at very close range. A BB gun is designed to kill things and, just like any gun, you do not ever point it at any living thing you don't intend to kill. This is very basic gun safety. As it turned out, there actually was a BB in the gun, and it went through the younger brothers skull. I don't know if the older brother loaded it to shoot at a target in between playing with blasts of air and forgot, or if there was just a BB jammed in there that suddenly came loose. For that matter, it could have been intentional: either a deliberate attempt to hurt the younger brother, or maybe he only pumped the gun up part way and thought the BB would bounce off and only sting a little and be funny. We can't really guess at what might have happened, however. Even if we give full benefit of the doubt at take the story at face value, it was tremendously irresponsible and everything was intentional except for there being a BB in the gun.
In the case of the soda bottle, the intent was to create an amusing small gas explosion, just like the blast of air from the BB gun. The difference being that, without a barrel to concentrate the force, it's almost impossible for the soda bottle explosion to kill anyone. It can be a little irresponsible to play around with, but it's nowhere near the level of pointing a gun directly at a child's head.
The girl responsible for making and detonating a bomb on school grounds, Kiera Wilmot, needs to be punished for her actions. Someone could have been injured.
The boy responsible for pointing a gun at his brothers head and pulling the trigger would seem to have some responsibility too. Someone was injured. Killed, in fact. You certainly could argue that the guilt and stigma associated with the act are enough in the boys case. Of course, you could also argue that a simple school punishment such as a month of detentions and maybe some lectures on safety would be enough in her case. Expulsion and criminal charges as an adult for a minor seem a little beyond the pale.
Regarding #4, I find it hard to imagine what circumstances could have occurred where BB gun incident wasn't deliberate. The boys in the case were shooting blasts of air at each other from guns which they apparently thought weren't loaded with BBs. Turned out there was a BB in one of the guns and it was fired through the younger boys skull when his brother fired it directly into his head. So it was deliberate, but with no intent to cause harm. The intent was just to create an entertaining little gas explosion from the end of the barrel. With the bottle bomb, the intent was also just to create an entertaining little gas explosion. For some reason, the one that caused absolutely no damage or injury is being prosecuted.
Manslaughter isn't a felony?
With this sort of correct play, some video poker machines pay back over 100% in the long run.
Turns out, according to the article, if you find the correct way to play the machine to turn a profit, you get prosecuted.
Methane clathrate extraction seems to have its own potential perils. Imagine the public reaction, or maybe the massive coverup, that will take place the first time a cruise ship drops to the bottom of the ocean because an extraction accident turned a large swath of ocean into methane froth with only 75% of the normal buoyancy of water. Even without massive accidents, imagine how much methane will simply be dumped into the atmosphere.
I'm curious if anyone has developed the idea of a hydraulic ram into an electrical generator. You could use it to pump water to a higher head and then generate power from the flow back down. Or, possibly, could you use a similar design where the opening and closing of the waste valve is used to spin up a flywheel? I wonder if an approach like that could compare favorably to a water wheel?
You're correct that, even if solar panels took more energy to make than they recoup, they would still be worth it for certain use cases. You're not correct that they, in fact, do still take more energy to produce than they generate. That hasn't been true for at least 40 years.
Petroleum products have one of the highest energy densities that is very easy to extract
Technically speaking, plutonium-238 has one of the highest energy densities that's very easy to extract. Just toss it into a lightly shielded chamber in some sort of external combustion engine like a steam engine or a Stirling engine and you're done. There are plenty of reasons it isn't practical. Availability and the costs and difficulties involved in making it are just some of those reasons. In terms of energy density, however, a kilogram of plutonium-238 has a usable energy density of at least 4000 (came up with this based on power output over twelve years, after which only 10% of the plutonium would be used up) times that of an equivalent mass of gasoline. It also doesn't require oxygen. It does have the additional downside that you can never turn it off.
In a practical sense, without nuclear breakthroughs, you're right about hydrocarbon fuels as being practical and convenient for fields such as transportation. Filling a tank with a fluid fuel is convenient and fast compared to electrical charging (consider that the energy transfer rate from a gasoline pump to a car gas tank can easily hit ten megawatts). Not to mention that there are vehicles such as jet planes and rockets that don't really have any electrically powered alternative. Battery technology can't keep up, and it's hard to compete with the energy density of fuels that get to cheat by making use of atmospheric oxygen. After all, the 45 megajoules you get from 1 kg of gasoline isn't really coming from just that 1 kg of gasoline. The energy comes from 1 kg of gasoline + ~3.8 kg of oxygen. So, the real energy density of gasoline as a fuel is only about 21% of what it appears to be, but it gets to use easily accessible in situ oxygen here on Earth. That kind of advantage is hard for chemical batteries, which have to carry all of their chemicals with them, to compete with. This is why air-breathing batteries are being researched, although those would always still have the weight disadvantage. Batteries do have their place, but there are some big tradeoffs in switching to them at the present time and for the forseeable future.
To avoid using up oli reserves and to remain carbon neutral (and probably cleaner overall), artificially created hydrocarbons may be the way to go. If the carbon in the fuel is drawn down from the atmosphere in the first place, there's little downside to re-releasing it except, of course, local pollution. If the hydrocarbons used are well chosen, that may not be a problem either. Methane is very clean burning, for example. Not as clean burning as hydrogen, but hydrogen represents significant storage and usage problems. Methane has some portability issues due to the pressures required to contain it in practically sized tanks, but there's been interesting work in using tanks full of carbon with tiny pores in it to store methane with a fraction of the pressure. In any case, making hydrocarbons from atmospheric CO2 and water and energy seems to be quite possible, it's just a matter of finding the most efficient method, whether it's done through interesting applications of biology or through some entirely technological process. In the short term, of course, it will be hard to compete with oil right from the ground (unless you consider all the externalities, which we never do), but it will probably do quite well in the long term. That way, even if we never have Mr. Fusion, we should hopefully still always have a way to power our cars, jet planes and rockets.
They did have DRM back in the 80's. It wasn't called DRM back then, but there were all kinds of schemes, all of them as half-baked and consumer-unfriendly as modern DRM. There were analog protection schemes too. Macrovision had this wonderful anti-copying technique that made the brightness and contrast go in and out, in and out. It was great. Most of the people who got to experience it were watching perfectly legal copies, of course. Not to mention that the overvoltages it applied would actually destroy some equipment.
The comment I replied to said:
Piracy (the hijacking of boats on the high seas)
So it was giving its own definition for piracy which letters of marque negate.