The other is that doctors regard going without sleep as a rite of passage. They did it when they were residents so those who come after them should too. It's a stupid macho thing
Damn straight. This exists in an even more pathetic form in the IT industry. I've seen people pull 48 hour shifts keeping equipment alive, and when someone points out the insanity of that...... it's laughed at. Seriously. I've even seen management laugh it off, "hey those guys sure are dedicated to their jobs eh!"
EA as a company survives entirely on this principle. If enough people are willing to kill themselves working, the rest are just treated as whiners, complainers, and otherwise lazy.
It's one of the few times I'd ever call anything us geeks do "macho", and it's pretty sick IMHO. Like all machismo.
I just think it's yet another example of stupidity feeding stupidity. Well, that and everyone loves to gripe about their computers these days (thanks Windows!).
Seriously, this "study" actually claims that a computer crashing is more stressful for people than bodily injury. Who the hell are they surveying, stunt men? I'd say seeing a BSOD is a ton less stressful than, say, a broken limb.
Then again, maybe their computers are crashing right in the middle of something more important to these people than their physical health. Like that winning solitaire hand.
Fog is in droplets, which are large compared with light, so the light can "see" its non-uniformity and get reflected.
Well, yeah, but so is a glass of water. It's extremely large compared to the wavelength of visible light, yet the light passes right through (after a bit of refraction).
You're actually on the right track, you just have things reversed. Think: why do microscopic water droplets (fog, clouds) reflect light while an entire glass, very dense and really one huge droplet, doesn't?
You're redefined pH, which is what these claimants did. Yay. Actually, you've missed the point:
In addition, a chemical reaction requires a very elevated or very low PH level in order to create this alkaline or acidic condition.
The elevated or low pH does NOT create an alkaline or acidic condition. pH is a MEASURE of acidity/alkalinity. They're trying to claim that there is no acidic/basic condition because they measure neutrality within the trees.
Um, yeah, duh. Read what they said in their FAQ. They're defining the pH scale and claiming they're measuring neutrality.
The metals do touch each other, it just so happens that one of the metals is in solution, part of the liquid.
This isn't what they claimed. However, going with this you do of course realize that the two metals used in this tree experiment touch each other by that definition. Trees contain water, the ground does also. Ions flow through water. Just like in a battery.
So far, two for two.
So far you've not managed to explain why this isn't a chemical battery. All you've done is restate the nonsensical statements in the FAQ.
Chemical reactions *can* take hours or days to manifest, if not for catalysts. Example, the decompisition of elements is a chemical reaction and could take up to years or even centuries for it to reach it's half-life, and that is, by definition, only when half of it has decomposed.
Ok, see, I don't mean to be cruel, but you have zero idea of what you're talking about. Elements don't "decompose", they decay. This decay has nothing to do with chemisty, chemical reactions, or catalysts. It's a nuclear process that involves no chemisty, because by definition, chemisty deals with the study of interations BETWEEN atoms, not within them. Oh, and the concept of "half-life" is pretty exclusive to radioactive decay as well, not chemisty (although there are analagous processes).
Ignoring that, I wasn't claiming ALL chemical reactions are quick. Some take years. Some can take centuries. However, the FAQ stated this:
A chemical reaction requires hours if not days to manifest. Voltage per our validation occurs instantaneously upon tree tapping.
Their claim is that because they detect voltage "instantaneously upon tree tapping", that this couldn't possibly be a chemical reaction because "A chemical reaction requires hours if not days to manifest". Sorry, but this makes no sense at all.
In short, pick up an elementary school textbook. This is all covered.
What's the humidity inside your room? It's not completely dry, right? So, why don't you see a white patchy cloud in your room?
Actually this is because humidity as we know it is a measure of water vapour, which is in fact colourless and damn near transparent. Clouds are visible because they're actually condensed droplets of liquid water, and they reflect and scatter light. It's possible to have a relative humidity within a cloud that's actually lower than 100% overall, but you can have the humidity in your room be 100% without seeing any of it. The cloud is less dense with water than your room, but is still visible.
Less to do with density, than with the visible properties of water in its various states.
The galaxy, though, is definitely a density issue, you were right on there:) We still see the individual stars (in fact the article states this) but no one's ever realized that they form a galaxy-like structure in their own right.
It's funny to see 300 people point out that this guy has re-invented the potato/lemon battery, and at the tail end of the story someone tries defending the process, by quoting the FAQ:
Q: Is the voltage potential between an electrode inserted in the tree and one grounded both having different electro-potential characteristics due to electro-chemical reactions e.g. Galvanic batteries?
A: In a Galvanic reaction there is metal to metal contact. Henceforth the word "galvanized". Validation and voltage measurement does not involve metal to metal contact.
See, um, I'm no physicist, but I do know that in a galvanic cell, the metals most definitely do NOT touch each other. There is no metal-to-metal contact. None. The metal electrodes only interact through an electrolytic medium which carries ions between the two of them.
Just for fun, let's look at the rest of this answer:
In addition, a chemical reaction requires a very elevated or very low PH level in order to create this alkaline or acidic condition.
No, chemical reactions can take place at literally any pH. Try again.
A chemical reaction requires hours if not days to manifest.
Try telling that to someone who works with high explosives. Or, if you don't believe me, go to your kitchen and add some vinegar to some baking soda. It won't take hours to react, but see for yourself if you're unsure.
Anyway, the fact that the size of the trees has no effect on the amount of power.. well, all I see is talk about voltage, but we'll leave the advanced (ie: grade 11) physics out of this for now. We can safely stick to elementary school science for this. Go make a potato battery using the smallest potato you can find, and copper and aluminum electrodes. Now go make one using the biggest potato you can find. Notice that the voltage you can get from that is exactly the same!
Dude, you've been hoodwinked. The FAQ is entirely, completely, 100% wrong on the most basic fact of how batteries, and for that matter, chemisty works.
Agreed. Unsolicited messages should be removed from all IM systems, period.
However, GAIM seems to ignore (or unable to set on the server) the setting for "ignore everyone but my buddy list" on ICQ. In both Windows and Linux, you can set this, but it resets within a short period of time.
Haven't seen any malware yet, but the typical "ASL??" messages are annoying.
Anyone have any ideas? Googling doesn't seem to indicate that anyone else has this problem.
Some people -do- do fine on five hours a day. I'm one of them, in the summer.
For most of the spring-to-fall period, when our days are well over 12 hours long (and slightly over 16 hours in early July), I need about half the sleep I do in the winter. 4-5 hours, tops, and I generally wake up. It's very hard to fall asleep before midnight or 1am, and when I do, I usually wake up around 5am. Sometimes I manage to sleep longer (6-7 hours), and I feel like complete crap for the whole day.
In the winter, our days dip to just under 8 hours long (living at 51 degrees North is fun!), and I need a lot more sleep. 8-9 hours, often 10. I've tried going with less, and always feel awful the next day. I can often sleep 12 hours in December and feel great the next day.
When I was younger the winter didn't affect me much. I used to experiment on myself for months at a time, and I found I was far more alert and at my "peak" with around 5-6 hours of sleep each night, year round. Getting any more didn't help, and in fact usually made me become drowsy later during the day (and yeah, I did this for a few months at a go just to see what would happen).
Everyone's different, and contrary to conventional wisdom there is no magic amount of sleep for everyone. There isn't even a magic amount for any given person, as it depends highly on what you're doing, stresses in your life, diet, exercise, and a million other factors.
I'm not paying $800 CDN (Shaw Cable) for an HDMI HDTV digital box, plus the higher subscription fee just to get 10 channels that carry roughly 30% HD content during prime time.
$800????? Dear god man (or woman), get satellite.
HD receivers cost under $200, and you can get them for a coupla dollars per month if you add on to your plan. Bell's got something like 25 HD channels now, and while the content isn't HD 24-7, if you're any sort of sports fan, there's plenty.
Any fellow Canucks will want to kill me for reminding them. Personally, I'm now going to work mostly to burn the memory of this commercial out of my brain from last night's game.
It'd be far more embarrasing if her answer was "What's the big deal?", or better yet "I have nothing to hide."
There's no way our privacy comish can know every last way that our privacy can be compromised. When they learn about it, if they recognize that it's a problem, and more still, ACT ON IT, they're doing their job.
As for the mostly males involved in crashes, it's the same statistical nonsense as mostly red cars are involved in crashes. It's simply because there are more males on the road to be driving dangerously.
You know, the insurance industry isn't run by complete morons. They actually have thought of this amazing fact. For an equal number of males and females on the road, the males tend to cause more injuries and/or deaths. It's exacerbated by the fact that more males drive (in most countries), but you haven't stumbled upon some unknown secret.
Interestingly, females tend to be involved in more low-speed accidents. They cause slightly more property damage, but the men more than make up for it in injury claims. In no-fault jurisdictions, the differing rates for male and female drivers often disappears.
Of course, this pales in comparison to the accident rates of the 16-24 crowd. Younger drives are several times more likely to crash their car, and it's not just a "new driver" issue: people getting their licence for the first time at say 25 or 30 tend to be pretty safe drivers compared to their teenage counterparts.
15 degrees Celsius, just to keep the Europeans happy
I think you mispelled "the rest of the world beyond the USA". I use metric, and I can assure you Canadians are not European in any way, shape, or form.
When air heats up the density decreases, and changes the pressure at sea level. A plane will perform worse at lower altitudes. In affect you are taking off at a lower altitude.
I'm confused, though. When the density of the air decreases, it's like being at a HIGHER altitude. Did you mean that a plane will perform worse at higher altitudes? Would make sense, as all planes have a flight ceiling above which they don't perform.
Yeah, and that's only 5% IN ONE YEAR. Talk about a meaningless reassurance.
I don't know anyone who actually thinks the entire IT industry will be outsourced next week. I do, however, know a lot of people who think the majority of it might be LONG BEFORE THEY RETIRE.
Outsourcing doesn't worry me much, though. Personally, I just go where the local money is. Currently, it's Alberta ($60 oil is a wonderful thing). 10 years ago it was the Valley. 10 years from now, who knows? It'll be a fun time finding out, though:)
What hacks me off these days, is the sudden increase in perceived volume when an advert or similar break occurs during a television show... it's so blatant, yet they keep denying there's anything happening.
A number of years back, this was investigated. Might have been the competition bureau (here in Canada); it was some governmental consumer protection body of sorts.
The answer from the TV folks was that at no time did the commercials exceed the maximum volume of any particular show, so therefore they weren't breaking any laws/regulations. The news reports on this, of course, presented this as a dead issue: commercials are not in fact louder than the shows they're interrupting, see, they have numbers to prove it!
Of course, what they actually showed was that commercials are shown at the maximum volume allowed, for the ENTIRE DURATION OF THE COMMERCIAL. For instance (numbers entirely made up), if show A averages 80db but has a peak at 100db even once, so long as the commercials never exceeded 100db they were fine. So, they played the commercials at 99db the whole way through.
A complete farce, and it's only gotten worse over the years. Ford recently changed an ad campaign up here because it was so loud and obnoxious. Now when they play this commercial, the sound stops entirely for most of it, and you see a green "MUTING" on the screen. Obviously enough people complained. Anyone who's seen this commercial knows what I'm talking about, it involved a family sitting in their new Ford vehicle literally screaming for 30 seconds.
I am so sick of hearing the media called 'liberal'.
I'm not. I'd love it if all media was exceedingly liberal. Openness, freedom and respect are all very good things to have in a society.
What I *am* sick of is the use of the word 'liberal' as an insult. It makes no sense. It's just a cheap way to avoid saying 'people who do things that I disagree with, even though it doesn't hurt me, but BY GOD THEY SHOULD STOP IN THE NAME OF DECENCY' anyway.
Xbox 360 and PS3 are the very first consoles (that I know of) that are requiring the consumer to CHANGE their TV to get the most out of the console. No console has ever done this.
You're a moron. Every console that has come with Composite video output (everything since the original NES) could be classified as this. If you didn't (and some people still don't) have a TV with A/V input jacks, you were stuck seeing an RF-modulated signal, which is a much poorer quality signal than the console will provide.
We're in exactly the same position we've been in for 20 years now: some people have older TVs, and will have to settle for a lower quality picture (and sound, for that matter). Some people have newer TVs, and can experience a far better quality picture. This was true in 1985, and it's no different today.
Hell, we just went through a generation of consoles with fancy things like 5.1 sound outputs. No TV I've ever seen supports this by itself, you have to go and buy more A/V equipment to "get the most out of your console". No one complained then, because the games still played on a lower end setup, just without the fancy extras.
The problem comes when you try to actually address those fears. The general public doesn't really want our answers, scientifically sound or not.
The vast majority of people still seem to think airplanes fall out of the sky on a regular basis, and that a car is far safer to be in. They think that terrorism is an actual, credible threat to their lives. They think that stoned babysitters actually do put babies into the oven. They think that mysterious men are out there offering "free perfume samples" which are actually vials of ether.
Hell, most of them still believe in omnipotent being(s) and willfully ignore evidence to the contrary. People simply do not like to learn that what they believed for most (if not all) of their lives is in fact incorrect, and they will fight tooth and nail to avoid learning that.
That, and there's a very large motivation for many people to be able to say "Pfft! Scientists! What do they know, anyway!". The default assumption that scientists are in fact idiots, and have entirely ignored the most obvious of dangers, IS something to be scoffed at, I'm sorry.
the reason why it was defeated - in the words of the Judge - is not because of ID itself but because the people who represented the reasons for inserting ID into the curriculum did so inappropriately.
Yes, because there simply IS no appropriate way to try to get ID taught in Science class. You said it yourself:
the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom
That, my friend, is the end all and be all of the entire ID "debate". To get Religion taught intermixed with Science. No one has of yet put forth a way to teach ID as an actual scientific theory, because it isn't. It's religion couched in pseudo-scientific terms.
Nice use of the typical "Slashdot groupthink" line, though. It alone will probably get you modded up.
Slashdot Mirror
The other is that doctors regard going without sleep as a rite of passage. They did it when they were residents so those who come after them should too. It's a stupid macho thing
... it's laughed at. Seriously. I've even seen management laugh it off, "hey those guys sure are dedicated to their jobs eh!"
Damn straight. This exists in an even more pathetic form in the IT industry. I've seen people pull 48 hour shifts keeping equipment alive, and when someone points out the insanity of that...
EA as a company survives entirely on this principle. If enough people are willing to kill themselves working, the rest are just treated as whiners, complainers, and otherwise lazy.
It's one of the few times I'd ever call anything us geeks do "macho", and it's pretty sick IMHO. Like all machismo.
I just think it's yet another example of stupidity feeding stupidity. Well, that and everyone loves to gripe about their computers these days (thanks Windows!).
Seriously, this "study" actually claims that a computer crashing is more stressful for people than bodily injury. Who the hell are they surveying, stunt men? I'd say seeing a BSOD is a ton less stressful than, say, a broken limb.
Then again, maybe their computers are crashing right in the middle of something more important to these people than their physical health. Like that winning solitaire hand.
Fog is in droplets, which are large compared with light, so the light can "see" its non-uniformity and get reflected.
Well, yeah, but so is a glass of water. It's extremely large compared to the wavelength of visible light, yet the light passes right through (after a bit of refraction).
You're actually on the right track, you just have things reversed. Think: why do microscopic water droplets (fog, clouds) reflect light while an entire glass, very dense and really one huge droplet, doesn't?
Your points make no sense.
You're redefined pH, which is what these claimants did. Yay. Actually, you've missed the point:
In addition, a chemical reaction requires a very elevated or very low PH level in order to create this alkaline or acidic condition.
The elevated or low pH does NOT create an alkaline or acidic condition. pH is a MEASURE of acidity/alkalinity. They're trying to claim that there is no acidic/basic condition because they measure neutrality within the trees.
Um, yeah, duh. Read what they said in their FAQ. They're defining the pH scale and claiming they're measuring neutrality.
The metals do touch each other, it just so happens that one of the metals is in solution, part of the liquid.
This isn't what they claimed. However, going with this you do of course realize that the two metals used in this tree experiment touch each other by that definition. Trees contain water, the ground does also. Ions flow through water. Just like in a battery.
So far, two for two.
So far you've not managed to explain why this isn't a chemical battery. All you've done is restate the nonsensical statements in the FAQ.
Chemical reactions *can* take hours or days to manifest, if not for catalysts. Example, the decompisition of elements is a chemical reaction and could take up to years or even centuries for it to reach it's half-life, and that is, by definition, only when half of it has decomposed.
Ok, see, I don't mean to be cruel, but you have zero idea of what you're talking about. Elements don't "decompose", they decay. This decay has nothing to do with chemisty, chemical reactions, or catalysts. It's a nuclear process that involves no chemisty, because by definition, chemisty deals with the study of interations BETWEEN atoms, not within them. Oh, and the concept of "half-life" is pretty exclusive to radioactive decay as well, not chemisty (although there are analagous processes).
Ignoring that, I wasn't claiming ALL chemical reactions are quick. Some take years. Some can take centuries. However, the FAQ stated this:
A chemical reaction requires hours if not days to manifest. Voltage per our validation occurs instantaneously upon tree tapping.
Their claim is that because they detect voltage "instantaneously upon tree tapping", that this couldn't possibly be a chemical reaction because "A chemical reaction requires hours if not days to manifest". Sorry, but this makes no sense at all.
In short, pick up an elementary school textbook. This is all covered.
You can't really be this stupid.
You must be new here.
What's the humidity inside your room? It's not completely dry, right? So, why don't you see a white patchy cloud in your room?
:) We still see the individual stars (in fact the article states this) but no one's ever realized that they form a galaxy-like structure in their own right.
Actually this is because humidity as we know it is a measure of water vapour, which is in fact colourless and damn near transparent. Clouds are visible because they're actually condensed droplets of liquid water, and they reflect and scatter light. It's possible to have a relative humidity within a cloud that's actually lower than 100% overall, but you can have the humidity in your room be 100% without seeing any of it. The cloud is less dense with water than your room, but is still visible.
Less to do with density, than with the visible properties of water in its various states.
The galaxy, though, is definitely a density issue, you were right on there
It's funny to see 300 people point out that this guy has re-invented the potato/lemon battery, and at the tail end of the story someone tries defending the process, by quoting the FAQ:
.. well, all I see is talk about voltage, but we'll leave the advanced (ie: grade 11) physics out of this for now. We can safely stick to elementary school science for this. Go make a potato battery using the smallest potato you can find, and copper and aluminum electrodes. Now go make one using the biggest potato you can find. Notice that the voltage you can get from that is exactly the same!
Q: Is the voltage potential between an electrode inserted in the tree and one grounded both having different electro-potential characteristics due to electro-chemical reactions e.g. Galvanic batteries?
A: In a Galvanic reaction there is metal to metal contact. Henceforth the word "galvanized". Validation and voltage measurement does not involve metal to metal contact.
See, um, I'm no physicist, but I do know that in a galvanic cell, the metals most definitely do NOT touch each other. There is no metal-to-metal contact. None. The metal electrodes only interact through an electrolytic medium which carries ions between the two of them.
Just for fun, let's look at the rest of this answer:
In addition, a chemical reaction requires a very elevated or very low PH level in order to create this alkaline or acidic condition.
No, chemical reactions can take place at literally any pH. Try again.
A chemical reaction requires hours if not days to manifest.
Try telling that to someone who works with high explosives. Or, if you don't believe me, go to your kitchen and add some vinegar to some baking soda. It won't take hours to react, but see for yourself if you're unsure.
Anyway, the fact that the size of the trees has no effect on the amount of power
Dude, you've been hoodwinked. The FAQ is entirely, completely, 100% wrong on the most basic fact of how batteries, and for that matter, chemisty works.
Mods, you've been had as well.
Agreed. Unsolicited messages should be removed from all IM systems, period.
However, GAIM seems to ignore (or unable to set on the server) the setting for "ignore everyone but my buddy list" on ICQ. In both Windows and Linux, you can set this, but it resets within a short period of time.
Haven't seen any malware yet, but the typical "ASL??" messages are annoying.
Anyone have any ideas? Googling doesn't seem to indicate that anyone else has this problem.
Imagine if their patch accidentally disabled * * * TENS OF MILLIONS * * * of computers.
Imagine if them delaying a patch ended up with HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of disabled computers.
I, for one, am amazed this hasn't happened yet. Fortunately malware authors haven't gotten to the pure vandalism stage of their development.
before either Win2K or his wife were a twinkle in Bill Gates' eye.
:)
Considering how the phrase "twinkle in your eye" is usually used, talking about his wife in this fashion is kinda creepy
Some people -do- do fine on five hours a day. I'm one of them, in the summer.
For most of the spring-to-fall period, when our days are well over 12 hours long (and slightly over 16 hours in early July), I need about half the sleep I do in the winter. 4-5 hours, tops, and I generally wake up. It's very hard to fall asleep before midnight or 1am, and when I do, I usually wake up around 5am. Sometimes I manage to sleep longer (6-7 hours), and I feel like complete crap for the whole day.
In the winter, our days dip to just under 8 hours long (living at 51 degrees North is fun!), and I need a lot more sleep. 8-9 hours, often 10. I've tried going with less, and always feel awful the next day. I can often sleep 12 hours in December and feel great the next day.
When I was younger the winter didn't affect me much. I used to experiment on myself for months at a time, and I found I was far more alert and at my "peak" with around 5-6 hours of sleep each night, year round. Getting any more didn't help, and in fact usually made me become drowsy later during the day (and yeah, I did this for a few months at a go just to see what would happen).
Everyone's different, and contrary to conventional wisdom there is no magic amount of sleep for everyone. There isn't even a magic amount for any given person, as it depends highly on what you're doing, stresses in your life, diet, exercise, and a million other factors.
I'm not paying $800 CDN (Shaw Cable) for an HDMI HDTV digital box, plus the higher subscription fee just to get 10 channels that carry roughly 30% HD content during prime time.
$800????? Dear god man (or woman), get satellite.
HD receivers cost under $200, and you can get them for a coupla dollars per month if you add on to your plan. Bell's got something like 25 HD channels now, and while the content isn't HD 24-7, if you're any sort of sports fan, there's plenty.
Be grateful you're not a Canadian hockey fan.
"THEY'RE DOWN HERE!!"
"WHAT??"
"THEY'RE DOWN HERE!!"
"DON'T YOU FREEZE ON ME!!"
"DIG!!"
"WE FOUND THEM!!!!!"
*cheers*
"Who put this music on?"
Any fellow Canucks will want to kill me for reminding them. Personally, I'm now going to work mostly to burn the memory of this commercial out of my brain from last night's game.
It'd be far more embarrasing if her answer was "What's the big deal?", or better yet "I have nothing to hide."
There's no way our privacy comish can know every last way that our privacy can be compromised. When they learn about it, if they recognize that it's a problem, and more still, ACT ON IT, they're doing their job.
This is what's commonly referred to as the "Tragedy of the Commons".
:)
And yes, it's why I become more and more cynical about human nature as I age
As for the mostly males involved in crashes, it's the same statistical nonsense as mostly red cars are involved in crashes. It's simply because there are more males on the road to be driving dangerously.
You know, the insurance industry isn't run by complete morons. They actually have thought of this amazing fact. For an equal number of males and females on the road, the males tend to cause more injuries and/or deaths. It's exacerbated by the fact that more males drive (in most countries), but you haven't stumbled upon some unknown secret.
Interestingly, females tend to be involved in more low-speed accidents. They cause slightly more property damage, but the men more than make up for it in injury claims. In no-fault jurisdictions, the differing rates for male and female drivers often disappears.
Of course, this pales in comparison to the accident rates of the 16-24 crowd. Younger drives are several times more likely to crash their car, and it's not just a "new driver" issue: people getting their licence for the first time at say 25 or 30 tend to be pretty safe drivers compared to their teenage counterparts.
15 degrees Celsius, just to keep the Europeans happy
I think you mispelled "the rest of the world beyond the USA". I use metric, and I can assure you Canadians are not European in any way, shape, or form.
When air heats up the density decreases, and changes the pressure at sea level. A plane will perform worse at lower altitudes. In affect you are taking off at a lower altitude.
I'm confused, though. When the density of the air decreases, it's like being at a HIGHER altitude. Did you mean that a plane will perform worse at higher altitudes? Would make sense, as all planes have a flight ceiling above which they don't perform.
the lockers all had external combination pad locks ... What they managed to do was to steal the master key for all the locks
Why would combination locks have a master key in the first place? Is this some weird European type of lock we never had back in the day?
Yeah, and that's only 5% IN ONE YEAR. Talk about a meaningless reassurance.
:)
I don't know anyone who actually thinks the entire IT industry will be outsourced next week. I do, however, know a lot of people who think the majority of it might be LONG BEFORE THEY RETIRE.
Outsourcing doesn't worry me much, though. Personally, I just go where the local money is. Currently, it's Alberta ($60 oil is a wonderful thing). 10 years ago it was the Valley. 10 years from now, who knows? It'll be a fun time finding out, though
What hacks me off these days, is the sudden increase in perceived volume when an advert or similar break occurs during a television show... it's so blatant, yet they keep denying there's anything happening.
A number of years back, this was investigated. Might have been the competition bureau (here in Canada); it was some governmental consumer protection body of sorts.
The answer from the TV folks was that at no time did the commercials exceed the maximum volume of any particular show, so therefore they weren't breaking any laws/regulations. The news reports on this, of course, presented this as a dead issue: commercials are not in fact louder than the shows they're interrupting, see, they have numbers to prove it!
Of course, what they actually showed was that commercials are shown at the maximum volume allowed, for the ENTIRE DURATION OF THE COMMERCIAL. For instance (numbers entirely made up), if show A averages 80db but has a peak at 100db even once, so long as the commercials never exceeded 100db they were fine. So, they played the commercials at 99db the whole way through.
A complete farce, and it's only gotten worse over the years. Ford recently changed an ad campaign up here because it was so loud and obnoxious. Now when they play this commercial, the sound stops entirely for most of it, and you see a green "MUTING" on the screen. Obviously enough people complained. Anyone who's seen this commercial knows what I'm talking about, it involved a family sitting in their new Ford vehicle literally screaming for 30 seconds.
I am so sick of hearing the media called 'liberal'.
I'm not. I'd love it if all media was exceedingly liberal. Openness, freedom and respect are all very good things to have in a society.
What I *am* sick of is the use of the word 'liberal' as an insult. It makes no sense. It's just a cheap way to avoid saying 'people who do things that I disagree with, even though it doesn't hurt me, but BY GOD THEY SHOULD STOP IN THE NAME OF DECENCY' anyway.
Xbox 360 and PS3 are the very first consoles (that I know of) that are requiring the consumer to CHANGE their TV to get the most out of the console. No console has ever done this.
You're a moron. Every console that has come with Composite video output (everything since the original NES) could be classified as this. If you didn't (and some people still don't) have a TV with A/V input jacks, you were stuck seeing an RF-modulated signal, which is a much poorer quality signal than the console will provide.
We're in exactly the same position we've been in for 20 years now: some people have older TVs, and will have to settle for a lower quality picture (and sound, for that matter). Some people have newer TVs, and can experience a far better quality picture. This was true in 1985, and it's no different today.
Hell, we just went through a generation of consoles with fancy things like 5.1 sound outputs. No TV I've ever seen supports this by itself, you have to go and buy more A/V equipment to "get the most out of your console". No one complained then, because the games still played on a lower end setup, just without the fancy extras.
Just like HD compatible consoles.
The problem comes when you try to actually address those fears. The general public doesn't really want our answers, scientifically sound or not.
The vast majority of people still seem to think airplanes fall out of the sky on a regular basis, and that a car is far safer to be in. They think that terrorism is an actual, credible threat to their lives. They think that stoned babysitters actually do put babies into the oven. They think that mysterious men are out there offering "free perfume samples" which are actually vials of ether.
Hell, most of them still believe in omnipotent being(s) and willfully ignore evidence to the contrary. People simply do not like to learn that what they believed for most (if not all) of their lives is in fact incorrect, and they will fight tooth and nail to avoid learning that.
That, and there's a very large motivation for many people to be able to say "Pfft! Scientists! What do they know, anyway!". The default assumption that scientists are in fact idiots, and have entirely ignored the most obvious of dangers, IS something to be scoffed at, I'm sorry.
Yeah, but soon the government will design a bigger 2x4, with a bigger nail in it.
Eventually, they will have a big enough board, with a big enough nail, that it will destroy them all!
the reason why it was defeated - in the words of the Judge - is not because of ID itself but because the people who represented the reasons for inserting ID into the curriculum did so inappropriately.
Yes, because there simply IS no appropriate way to try to get ID taught in Science class. You said it yourself:
the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom
That, my friend, is the end all and be all of the entire ID "debate". To get Religion taught intermixed with Science. No one has of yet put forth a way to teach ID as an actual scientific theory, because it isn't. It's religion couched in pseudo-scientific terms.
Nice use of the typical "Slashdot groupthink" line, though. It alone will probably get you modded up.