Why would you actually want to flex a phone? Does it make it more durable or more comfortable to hold in some way? According to the article, it takes a bit of force to do, so I doubt it's the latter.
(This isn't a criticism so much as bewildered curiosity.)
A possible unintended consequence of this approach could be that future peda-wannabees could claim they believed they were talking to a virtual victim and not a real one, even if the potential victim is real.Basically, a game to see if they could pick out the virtual being. They would, of course, want to verify they are really talking to a virtual victim, thus the reason for a visit. Who could prove it wasn't just a game?
Not a good tack to take. If they were willing to voluntarily take the risk that they were speaking to a child, they'd qualify for "reckless" mens rea. Many sex crimes do not require "intentional" or "knowing" behavior; some, like possession, are even strict liability, with no mens rea requirement at all.
If you're curious, you can check your state laws on the matter. Anyone engaging in this sort of behavior may evade the "knowingly" requirements of statutes like 18 USC 1470 & 2422, but cannot evade 18 USC 2251(a) or 18 USC 2252 whose mens rea requirements do not attach to knowing the age (or existence) of the child.
You can find a pretty comprehensive list of federal statutes governing this issue here. Personally, I hope pedos use those kinds of arguments, because they can't use them without admitting to all the other relevant elements of those charges. Attempt is still a crime, even if a child isn't real.
416 horse power and it can only do 132 mph is nothing to brag about.
It's not a technical limitation. The Model S has a software governor that caps its top speed. Part of the "tuning" package Tesla plans to offer for German Model S customers is a raise on the cap to somewhere closer to the "gentlemen's agreement" of 155 MPH that most auto manufacturers limit their cars with.
Instead of being happy for him and his achievement, his sister will probably put boogers on his pillow. He's 10, he probably does that to her anyway.
And well she should! Stupid younger siblings, always getting the same privileges as the older sibling at a younger age because it "wouldn't be fair."
"Hey, Mom and Dad, can use the telescope to break a record for girls in science? "Sure thing, dear." "I wanna use it too!" "Okay, you can go after your sister." "But Mooooom, you wouldn't let me make any scientific discoveries until I was twelve!"
I detest that approach, particularly when it involves something as meaningless and pointless as brute force memorization.
To be fair, if they aren't up for that, then med school is not for them. Anatomy alone is nothing but brute force memorization (combined with building a Latin vocabulary). Diagnosis requires applying logic and pattern matching to a database of symptoms that require copious memorization; you can't be good at it without both sets of skills. Memory is important to being a doctor.
Honestly, if you can't hack organic, you probably can't hack med school. Not because organic is essential, but because the way it's taught is very similar. Just like you shouldn't go to law school if you can't do well in English lit. The skills overlap is huge.
It's not corrosion that concerns them but density, and nitrogen is only a fraction lighter than air. Too much money for too little benefit. (Honestly, much like nitrogen in tires of normal cars.)
In the Land of the Free and the Home of the brave, They needed to add a lot of cowardly countermeasures to make sure the were not caught and imprisoned, for what was in essence a joy ride.... But Risk taking should be rewarded, not punished, especially if you are willing to work with the system.
It was a ride at higher speeds than are considered safe and legal across a very far distance with no sleep for the driver. "Risk-taking" should not be praised when the risks taken are with other people's lives for nothing more than one person's selfish pleasure.
If there was a way to go, I am going to do this stunt, I am expected to be at these locations between these times, and make sure the police give us enough room and clear out traffic. Sure it may require a little extra money say an traditional $10k to pay for the expense of blocking off the roads for the time.
You know, other people might have a valid use for the road -- perhaps even ones more important than just a joyride. Why should one rich jerk be able to buy off the roads so that no one else can use them just so he can beat some record that no one else cares about?
When the house lights went up for intermission, I looked down on a sea of blue light emanating from little 3" LCDs all over the audience.
Wait, during the intermission? What's the problem with that? Better than doing it during the performance.
It struck me that I preferred the rosy, golden hue of audiences 35 years ago, who used those little plastic butane lighters to salute the performers, to the cold, blue indifference of intermission emailers.
I prefer a world in which lighters have mostly disappeared along with one of the worst, self-destructive habits our society once sanctioned. While I admire the poetry of the image you paint, I prefer addiction to the internet over one to cigarettes and/or weed. At least the screens go dark when the lights do, instead of lingering like the stench of smoke.
(P.S. Who the heck does a lighter salute at the opera? It's not a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. You're supposed to be calling for an encore, not Free Bird.)
It's a meeting. You're supposedly discussing something which requires the attention and input of everyone there.
Keyword: "Supposedly."
I've been in many, many meetings in which my contribution to the meeting was less than 5 minutes out of an hour long slog that focused on 2-3 other developers doing work with next to no connection to my own. In bad meetings like that, I think it's acceptable to otherwise occupy yourself -- preferably with actual work, though.
Yet another superior technology undone by good enough.
Superior? Bah. Much like Betamax, plasma was good at one thing and that's visual quality, and it was a mostly negligible advantage in both cases. Betamax only had noticeably superior quality at Beta I speed, and plasma only really looked at its best in the dark.
It was each technology's other failings that killed them. In the case of Betamax, it was VHS's longer recording times and lower prices. In the case of plasma, it was power consumption, burn-in, and price. In both cases, the "superior" technology was actually inferior for the average use case and more expensive for little gain.
First and foremost the scientists that decided it needed to be created to begin with had to first decide that their ability to calculate the masses of objects, (that are too far away to reliably gauge any relevant data except through speculation or guess work), somehow had to be irrefutable. Tell me first, how the data that was collected is irrefutable. You can't. Except in a land of non-science there isn't a need to create something to prove something else unless that something else is irrefutable.
There are a few good ways to figure out the mass of a star. First and foremost, the relationship been mass, gravity, and rotation around a common point is very well understood. From this, we can get a good measure of the masses of binary stars as they rotate around their center of gravity. After getting this for a large number of binary stars, we start to see a strong correlation between the luminosity and the mass of primary ignition stars. This lets us figure out the masses of other stars too.
From that, we can approximate the mass of galaxies. The luminosity of a galaxy gives us one measure of how much a galaxy should weigh based on what we can see. However, the rotational speed of a galaxy hints that it should be significantly more massive -- especially because stars further from the center do not show a significant change in rotational speed as would be expected if luminous matter was all that was contributing to a galaxy's mass. That means that something is adding mass that we can't see. That is the dark matter.
Are these methods irrefutable? Depends on what you mean by that. Could they at some point be refuted? Sure. Science discovers new data all the time, and part of the purpose of this experiment was to look somewhere we hadn't before. Is there anything right now that refutes the evidence? Not that I've seen. You seem pretty convinced that there is, but all you can offer really is accusations of ignorance or bias with nothing to back them up except, "Do all the work to prove my ridiculous assertions wrong that I refuse to do to prove them right."
But there really isn't a justification for it's existence as a serious pursuit other than ego.
I would turn that around back on you. There is a lot of evidence in favor of dark matter: galactic rotation curves, the motion of galactic clusters, fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation, and far more esoteric phenomena. I personally don't like the idea of dark matter, and I like dark energy even less. But I'm not going to flail around like a fool denying the evidence before me and accusing researchers of cult-like behavior. It is you who come off as arrogant and ungrounded in reality. True honesty involves accepting the things we don't like as true.
Because he has actual point he argues, and they are good one. I'm not saying right or wrong, only that they are worth thinking about.
Could you explain his point then? As best as I can suss it out, he offers up a wide variety of definitions of art, fails to settle on any one, and then cherry picks ones for different games to say why these particular games don't match that particular definition.
The best I can make out of his meandering article on the subject is, "If can be won, then it isn't art, and if a game can't be won and only experienced, then it isn't a game at all -- just an emulation of real art." This argument is poppycock. It's a matter of setting the definitions to suit the argument.
But this eliminates the high speed chase. The perp might have 10 or 20 minutes before the cops round up some back up and home in on the signal.
Doubtful. 75% of people involved in high speed chases (surveyed by the FBI, linked in another post in this thread) say that they would have slowed down to a safe speed as soon as they got away. Once that happens, it's easy to keep pace out of sight from a distance and move in as soon as the car stops. A stopped car is far easier to catch than one still running.
Plus, if the thieves abandon the car and run away on foot? I guess that's good for the person whose car got stolen. All they have to repair is paint damage.
A hoodie.
Gosh, I guess hoodies are completely indistinguishable and/or impossible to find once the the suspect is caught! Too bad people don't leave any sort of other evidence like fingerprints, hairs, surveillance camera footage, etc.! Maybe if we had detectives on the police force, we might be able to do something about that.
I mean, really. You can easily build a strong enough case to convict if you look for it in the vast majority of cases. Criminals, especially people who commit theft, are rarely masterminds and leave trails all over the place.
Most Americans have a pretty high opinion of England, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Japan. Do those countries send foreign aid to the US, to curry good will among Americans?
Of course not, we're all rich and have much to offer each other in terms of economic activity. Poorer countries don't, and poverty is a breeding ground for extremism and blame-shifting to outsiders, especially foreigners. Just look at how the economic downturn over the past few decades has coarsened American politics in a way not seen since the Great Depression.
Of course not. Trying to buy goodwill is like paying a blackmailer. It doesn't work, won't work, can't work, and only the morally bankrupt think otherwise.
Did you know that America is pretty popular in Iran with the people, especially young people? This is in spite of our policies towards their government, and it's largely because they love our cultural exports: movies, music, fashion, computers, etc. Hollywood is America's greatest ambassador.
Unfortunately for us, China isn't nearly so myopic about foreign aid. They've seen the benefits we derived throughout the latter 20th century, and they are building relationship with Africa, because for them Africa represents both a source of raw materials and a future market for their manufactured goods. Trade with Africa has ballooned from roughly $1 billion a year in 1980 to $55 billion in 2006 to $166 billion in 2011. Most of the investment has been in banking, energy, and infrastructure -- all with the intent of creating a massive market in a part of the world the West has largely ignored. (Most of our aid to Africa is little more than an agricultural subsidy to our own farmers). They've given out massive loans with less restrictions than Western banks and with more loan forgiveness. As a result, we aren't Africa's largest trading partner anymore. China is, and as a result, regimes that don't support the values we've traditionally supported in the region are much stronger than they would have been had we been more involved.
It's not a matter of morality, though that provides a fig leaf for most aid programs. The reasons governments invest in foreign aid is always for their nation's selfish benefit.
At what point did it become ok in the scientific community to keep on with a theory that evidence contradicts?
Where has it been contradicted here? The failure to observe WIMPs by this experiment doesn't mean that they don't exist -- just that they don't have certain properties that would make them detectable by this instrument.
It's like the search for the Higgs boson. There were theories that allowed for the Higgs to exist at lower energy levels than it was eventually found at. We tested them with the LEP and with Tevatron, in the 1990s. As we ruled out those lower (and some higher) energy levels, we got closer and closer to the truth. The Higgs boson exists are a mass somewhere around 125 GeV/c^2.
All this experiment has done is narrow the parameters a bit so far. Did you make a similar cry in 2011, when Tevatron shut down that we shouldn't have been wasting money on the LHC because the Higgs was contradicted? If so, then shame on you then. If not, then shame on you now.
The day I realized that the previous three chapters I had read were not science, but rather theories that were based on other theories based on yet other theories that only existed because the first theory was shown to be wrong at some point, was a real downer.
How is that not science? Science is all about filling in the gaps and trying to find explanations for what we don't know -- including the things we didn't previously know we didn't know. It's not some divine revelation that you either get right the first time or you disregard it as heresy and falsehood. It's a global learning process.
Suspect gets ahead of the cops, pulls over an unsticks this from his car. Then sticks it to a passing bus.
Good luck with that. It uses "industrial-grade adhesive" (whatever that means) and not magnets. Also, you rarely have high-speed chases in areas where buses can be reached out and touched without being noticed.
Also, there's the 'chain of evidence' problem. The police lose contact with the vehicle/driver. Later, they might recover the vehicle. But who was driving?
If they don't catch up to the car later with the driver still inside, then that's going to just be good old fashioned detective work. Only 32% of chases involve a stolen car, so finding out who the owner is will give you a pretty strong lead on who was driving, especially if the dash cam was running during the chase to provide a good shot of what the driver looked like from behind.
If its a stolen car (which I would assume most police chases are caused by)...
Nope, stolen cars are only about a third of ultimate reasons why people run: only 32% were driving a stolen car, 27% had a suspended driverâ(TM)s license, 27% just wanted to avoid arrest, and 21% were DUI. (Note that there is some overlap here, and that adds up to more than 100%).
I guess one could argue that its better that a car thief gets away and no one gets hurt rather than a car chase were innocent people might be injured or killed, but I don't see how this system would catch even close to the same amount of criminals as the police catch today...
There's an important need to balance public safety with law enforcement, as the article I linked above says. Roughly speaking, a person died every day from a high-speed chase in the time period studied (1994-1998), and 42% of those people were innocent bystanders.
Better yet, if you still hunger for justice, most criminals interviewed would have slowed down once they felt safe. Adrenaline and the fight or flight reflex are huge factors in choosing to run in the first place. This would give police a chance to set up to trap the criminal in a more leisurely way, since they know where the criminal is going, and it would be easy to get cars in the area ready to swoop in in case the car came to a stop.
But really, I think most car owners would be happier just to get the car back with a little paint damage than to see the criminal brought down at risk to someone's life. (And if they aren't, screw 'em.)
If they made the sentence for stealing a car, twenty years in prison, you would see almost ALL car theft stop within a few months, would you not?
Not really. Most criminals are not fully rational actors; after all, if crime were rational in spite of the costs, more people would do it. Impulse control, desperation, and an inflated sense of the ability to get away with it are major factors in the commission of crime that are completely unaffected by sentence length. Otherwise, who would kill someone in a death penalty state unless they thought their life was worth the other person being dead?
The evidence on deterrence is generally a wash. We don't have good info on what people would have crossed the line from ordinary citizen to criminal without the laws as they are. The best thing we can study is effects of prison length on recidivism rates (i.e. on people who have already demonstrated themselves to be willing to break the law in spite of the current sentences).
This meta-analysis suggests that longer prison sentences increase recidivism rates slightly. In contrast, this Italian study suggests that a threat of longer sentences upon return to prison *does* deter released inmates who have committed minor offenses but has no effect on more hardened criminals. Bringing economic rationality into the picture, a review of going rates for drug mules in markets with varying sentences shows that deterrence can be overriden by offering to pay more to compensate for the riskier service. Like I said, a wash.
It still fails to answer a fundamental question of why a country that can't even pay its own bills, and sinks deeper in debt every day should be spending ANY money on foreign aid.
We'll skip the question of whether or not we can pay our bills since it's really a question of whether or not we will pay our bills.
The reasons for foreign aid are many and varied. Investing in other countries builds good will, business relationships, and markets for US goods. Also, most foreign aid goes straight into purchasing products from us, making it more or less a roundabout way of subsidizing our own industries by artificially creating markets for them. There's also the general principle that foreign countries can't really do much for us if they have nothing to offer us, and they won't have anything to offer us if they stay unstable and poor. There's also the humanitarian angle, but in terms of realpolitik, that's the least of the reasons.
I described one software development methodology (scrum, if that matters) to a crowd of discontent gamers in the Steam forum. I then painstakingly crafted a reasoned explanation for why that process necessitates that this particular bug in an older game (Half-Life: Opposing Force, which had been recently ported to both Linux and Mac) simply won't be fixed anytime soon, because the Steam developers are almost certainly entirely wrapped up in the development of Half Life 3.
What does Scrum have to to with allocation of development resources between development and bug fixing? I do mostly bug fixes rather than new feature development at my company, and we use scrum methodology for our maintenance team. I'm not sure how this would be even related to HL3, much less why you would think that HL3 is drawing resources from other projects to the point that bug fixes must stop.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would you actually want to flex a phone? Does it make it more durable or more comfortable to hold in some way? According to the article, it takes a bit of force to do, so I doubt it's the latter.
(This isn't a criticism so much as bewildered curiosity.)
A possible unintended consequence of this approach could be that future peda-wannabees could claim they believed they were talking to a virtual victim and not a real one, even if the potential victim is real.Basically, a game to see if they could pick out the virtual being. They would, of course, want to verify they are really talking to a virtual victim, thus the reason for a visit. Who could prove it wasn't just a game?
Not a good tack to take. If they were willing to voluntarily take the risk that they were speaking to a child, they'd qualify for "reckless" mens rea. Many sex crimes do not require "intentional" or "knowing" behavior; some, like possession, are even strict liability, with no mens rea requirement at all.
If you're curious, you can check your state laws on the matter. Anyone engaging in this sort of behavior may evade the "knowingly" requirements of statutes like 18 USC 1470 & 2422, but cannot evade 18 USC 2251(a) or 18 USC 2252 whose mens rea requirements do not attach to knowing the age (or existence) of the child.
You can find a pretty comprehensive list of federal statutes governing this issue here. Personally, I hope pedos use those kinds of arguments, because they can't use them without admitting to all the other relevant elements of those charges. Attempt is still a crime, even if a child isn't real.
let he\she who is without sin cast the first stone.
I haven't spied on anyone. Can I throw rocks at these people?
(oh please oh please oh please oh please oh please...)
416 horse power and it can only do 132 mph is nothing to brag about.
It's not a technical limitation. The Model S has a software governor that caps its top speed. Part of the "tuning" package Tesla plans to offer for German Model S customers is a raise on the cap to somewhere closer to the "gentlemen's agreement" of 155 MPH that most auto manufacturers limit their cars with.
There's also a hidden menu setting to turn off the governor. See the video at just before the 1:00 mark. I haven't read anything about people trying it, though.
Instead of being happy for him and his achievement, his sister will probably put boogers on his pillow. He's 10, he probably does that to her anyway.
And well she should! Stupid younger siblings, always getting the same privileges as the older sibling at a younger age because it "wouldn't be fair."
"Hey, Mom and Dad, can use the telescope to break a record for girls in science?
"Sure thing, dear."
"I wanna use it too!"
"Okay, you can go after your sister."
"But Mooooom, you wouldn't let me make any scientific discoveries until I was twelve!"
(Not that I have a grudge or anything!)
I detest that approach, particularly when it involves something as meaningless and pointless as brute force memorization.
To be fair, if they aren't up for that, then med school is not for them. Anatomy alone is nothing but brute force memorization (combined with building a Latin vocabulary). Diagnosis requires applying logic and pattern matching to a database of symptoms that require copious memorization; you can't be good at it without both sets of skills. Memory is important to being a doctor.
Honestly, if you can't hack organic, you probably can't hack med school. Not because organic is essential, but because the way it's taught is very similar. Just like you shouldn't go to law school if you can't do well in English lit. The skills overlap is huge.
It's not corrosion that concerns them but density, and nitrogen is only a fraction lighter than air. Too much money for too little benefit. (Honestly, much like nitrogen in tires of normal cars.)
My First thought....A clown running around with helium filled disks... brain:WTF.
The drive heads all float, down here.
Oh the bright side, they make Alvin and the Chipmunks inaudible.
The downside? Mysterious uptick in neighborhood dog noise.
In the Land of the Free and the Home of the brave, They needed to add a lot of cowardly countermeasures to make sure the were not caught and imprisoned, for what was in essence a joy ride. ...
But Risk taking should be rewarded, not punished, especially if you are willing to work with the system.
It was a ride at higher speeds than are considered safe and legal across a very far distance with no sleep for the driver. "Risk-taking" should not be praised when the risks taken are with other people's lives for nothing more than one person's selfish pleasure.
If there was a way to go, I am going to do this stunt, I am expected to be at these locations between these times, and make sure the police give us enough room and clear out traffic. Sure it may require a little extra money say an traditional $10k to pay for the expense of blocking off the roads for the time.
You know, other people might have a valid use for the road -- perhaps even ones more important than just a joyride. Why should one rich jerk be able to buy off the roads so that no one else can use them just so he can beat some record that no one else cares about?
When the house lights went up for intermission, I looked down on a sea of blue light emanating from little 3" LCDs all over the audience.
Wait, during the intermission? What's the problem with that? Better than doing it during the performance.
It struck me that I preferred the rosy, golden hue of audiences 35 years ago, who used those little plastic butane lighters to salute the performers, to the cold, blue indifference of intermission emailers.
I prefer a world in which lighters have mostly disappeared along with one of the worst, self-destructive habits our society once sanctioned. While I admire the poetry of the image you paint, I prefer addiction to the internet over one to cigarettes and/or weed. At least the screens go dark when the lights do, instead of lingering like the stench of smoke.
(P.S. Who the heck does a lighter salute at the opera? It's not a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. You're supposed to be calling for an encore, not Free Bird.)
It's a meeting. You're supposedly discussing something which requires the attention and input of everyone there.
Keyword: "Supposedly."
I've been in many, many meetings in which my contribution to the meeting was less than 5 minutes out of an hour long slog that focused on 2-3 other developers doing work with next to no connection to my own. In bad meetings like that, I think it's acceptable to otherwise occupy yourself -- preferably with actual work, though.
You don't replace a backlight. Like the plasma, when an LCD gets old, you replace it with a much improved model.
You apparently don't know how much a backlight costs. You'd replace an entire TV over a $60-90 part?
Sometimes I despair for humanity.
Yet another superior technology undone by good enough.
Superior? Bah. Much like Betamax, plasma was good at one thing and that's visual quality, and it was a mostly negligible advantage in both cases. Betamax only had noticeably superior quality at Beta I speed, and plasma only really looked at its best in the dark.
It was each technology's other failings that killed them. In the case of Betamax, it was VHS's longer recording times and lower prices. In the case of plasma, it was power consumption, burn-in, and price. In both cases, the "superior" technology was actually inferior for the average use case and more expensive for little gain.
How expensive do you think replacing a backlight is compared to replacing an entire plasma screen?
First and foremost the scientists that decided it needed to be created to begin with had to first decide that their ability to calculate the masses of objects, (that are too far away to reliably gauge any relevant data except through speculation or guess work), somehow had to be irrefutable. Tell me first, how the data that was collected is irrefutable. You can't. Except in a land of non-science there isn't a need to create something to prove something else unless that something else is irrefutable.
There are a few good ways to figure out the mass of a star. First and foremost, the relationship been mass, gravity, and rotation around a common point is very well understood. From this, we can get a good measure of the masses of binary stars as they rotate around their center of gravity. After getting this for a large number of binary stars, we start to see a strong correlation between the luminosity and the mass of primary ignition stars. This lets us figure out the masses of other stars too.
From that, we can approximate the mass of galaxies. The luminosity of a galaxy gives us one measure of how much a galaxy should weigh based on what we can see. However, the rotational speed of a galaxy hints that it should be significantly more massive -- especially because stars further from the center do not show a significant change in rotational speed as would be expected if luminous matter was all that was contributing to a galaxy's mass. That means that something is adding mass that we can't see. That is the dark matter.
Are these methods irrefutable? Depends on what you mean by that. Could they at some point be refuted? Sure. Science discovers new data all the time, and part of the purpose of this experiment was to look somewhere we hadn't before. Is there anything right now that refutes the evidence? Not that I've seen. You seem pretty convinced that there is, but all you can offer really is accusations of ignorance or bias with nothing to back them up except, "Do all the work to prove my ridiculous assertions wrong that I refuse to do to prove them right."
But there really isn't a justification for it's existence as a serious pursuit other than ego.
I would turn that around back on you. There is a lot of evidence in favor of dark matter: galactic rotation curves, the motion of galactic clusters, fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation, and far more esoteric phenomena. I personally don't like the idea of dark matter, and I like dark energy even less. But I'm not going to flail around like a fool denying the evidence before me and accusing researchers of cult-like behavior. It is you who come off as arrogant and ungrounded in reality. True honesty involves accepting the things we don't like as true.
Because he has actual point he argues, and they are good one.
I'm not saying right or wrong, only that they are worth thinking about.
Could you explain his point then? As best as I can suss it out, he offers up a wide variety of definitions of art, fails to settle on any one, and then cherry picks ones for different games to say why these particular games don't match that particular definition.
The best I can make out of his meandering article on the subject is, "If can be won, then it isn't art, and if a game can't be won and only experienced, then it isn't a game at all -- just an emulation of real art." This argument is poppycock. It's a matter of setting the definitions to suit the argument.
But this eliminates the high speed chase. The perp might have 10 or 20 minutes before the cops round up some back up and home in on the signal.
Doubtful. 75% of people involved in high speed chases (surveyed by the FBI, linked in another post in this thread) say that they would have slowed down to a safe speed as soon as they got away. Once that happens, it's easy to keep pace out of sight from a distance and move in as soon as the car stops. A stopped car is far easier to catch than one still running.
Plus, if the thieves abandon the car and run away on foot? I guess that's good for the person whose car got stolen. All they have to repair is paint damage.
A hoodie.
Gosh, I guess hoodies are completely indistinguishable and/or impossible to find once the the suspect is caught! Too bad people don't leave any sort of other evidence like fingerprints, hairs, surveillance camera footage, etc.! Maybe if we had detectives on the police force, we might be able to do something about that.
I mean, really. You can easily build a strong enough case to convict if you look for it in the vast majority of cases. Criminals, especially people who commit theft, are rarely masterminds and leave trails all over the place.
Most Americans have a pretty high opinion of England, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Japan. Do those countries send foreign aid to the US, to curry good will among Americans?
Of course not, we're all rich and have much to offer each other in terms of economic activity. Poorer countries don't, and poverty is a breeding ground for extremism and blame-shifting to outsiders, especially foreigners. Just look at how the economic downturn over the past few decades has coarsened American politics in a way not seen since the Great Depression.
Of course not. Trying to buy goodwill is like paying a blackmailer. It doesn't work, won't work, can't work, and only the morally bankrupt think otherwise.
Did you know that America is pretty popular in Iran with the people, especially young people? This is in spite of our policies towards their government, and it's largely because they love our cultural exports: movies, music, fashion, computers, etc. Hollywood is America's greatest ambassador.
Unfortunately for us, China isn't nearly so myopic about foreign aid. They've seen the benefits we derived throughout the latter 20th century, and they are building relationship with Africa, because for them Africa represents both a source of raw materials and a future market for their manufactured goods. Trade with Africa has ballooned from roughly $1 billion a year in 1980 to $55 billion in 2006 to $166 billion in 2011. Most of the investment has been in banking, energy, and infrastructure -- all with the intent of creating a massive market in a part of the world the West has largely ignored. (Most of our aid to Africa is little more than an agricultural subsidy to our own farmers). They've given out massive loans with less restrictions than Western banks and with more loan forgiveness. As a result, we aren't Africa's largest trading partner anymore. China is, and as a result, regimes that don't support the values we've traditionally supported in the region are much stronger than they would have been had we been more involved.
It's not a matter of morality, though that provides a fig leaf for most aid programs. The reasons governments invest in foreign aid is always for their nation's selfish benefit.
At what point did it become ok in the scientific community to keep on with a theory that evidence contradicts?
Where has it been contradicted here? The failure to observe WIMPs by this experiment doesn't mean that they don't exist -- just that they don't have certain properties that would make them detectable by this instrument.
It's like the search for the Higgs boson. There were theories that allowed for the Higgs to exist at lower energy levels than it was eventually found at. We tested them with the LEP and with Tevatron, in the 1990s. As we ruled out those lower (and some higher) energy levels, we got closer and closer to the truth. The Higgs boson exists are a mass somewhere around 125 GeV/c^2.
All this experiment has done is narrow the parameters a bit so far. Did you make a similar cry in 2011, when Tevatron shut down that we shouldn't have been wasting money on the LHC because the Higgs was contradicted? If so, then shame on you then. If not, then shame on you now.
The day I realized that the previous three chapters I had read were not science, but rather theories that were based on other theories based on yet other theories that only existed because the first theory was shown to be wrong at some point, was a real downer.
How is that not science? Science is all about filling in the gaps and trying to find explanations for what we don't know -- including the things we didn't previously know we didn't know. It's not some divine revelation that you either get right the first time or you disregard it as heresy and falsehood. It's a global learning process.
Suspect gets ahead of the cops, pulls over an unsticks this from his car. Then sticks it to a passing bus.
Good luck with that. It uses "industrial-grade adhesive" (whatever that means) and not magnets. Also, you rarely have high-speed chases in areas where buses can be reached out and touched without being noticed.
Also, there's the 'chain of evidence' problem. The police lose contact with the vehicle/driver. Later, they might recover the vehicle. But who was driving?
If they don't catch up to the car later with the driver still inside, then that's going to just be good old fashioned detective work. Only 32% of chases involve a stolen car, so finding out who the owner is will give you a pretty strong lead on who was driving, especially if the dash cam was running during the chase to provide a good shot of what the driver looked like from behind.
If its a stolen car (which I would assume most police chases are caused by)...
Nope, stolen cars are only about a third of ultimate reasons why people run: only 32% were driving a stolen car, 27% had a suspended driverâ(TM)s license, 27% just wanted to avoid arrest, and 21% were DUI. (Note that there is some overlap here, and that adds up to more than 100%).
I guess one could argue that its better that a car thief gets away and no one gets hurt rather than a car chase were innocent people might be injured or killed, but I don't see how this system would catch even close to the same amount of criminals as the police catch today...
There's an important need to balance public safety with law enforcement, as the article I linked above says. Roughly speaking, a person died every day from a high-speed chase in the time period studied (1994-1998), and 42% of those people were innocent bystanders.
Better yet, if you still hunger for justice, most criminals interviewed would have slowed down once they felt safe. Adrenaline and the fight or flight reflex are huge factors in choosing to run in the first place. This would give police a chance to set up to trap the criminal in a more leisurely way, since they know where the criminal is going, and it would be easy to get cars in the area ready to swoop in in case the car came to a stop.
But really, I think most car owners would be happier just to get the car back with a little paint damage than to see the criminal brought down at risk to someone's life. (And if they aren't, screw 'em.)
If they made the sentence for stealing a car, twenty years in prison, you would see almost ALL car theft stop within a few months, would you not?
Not really. Most criminals are not fully rational actors; after all, if crime were rational in spite of the costs, more people would do it. Impulse control, desperation, and an inflated sense of the ability to get away with it are major factors in the commission of crime that are completely unaffected by sentence length. Otherwise, who would kill someone in a death penalty state unless they thought their life was worth the other person being dead?
The evidence on deterrence is generally a wash. We don't have good info on what people would have crossed the line from ordinary citizen to criminal without the laws as they are. The best thing we can study is effects of prison length on recidivism rates (i.e. on people who have already demonstrated themselves to be willing to break the law in spite of the current sentences).
This meta-analysis suggests that longer prison sentences increase recidivism rates slightly. In contrast, this Italian study suggests that a threat of longer sentences upon return to prison *does* deter released inmates who have committed minor offenses but has no effect on more hardened criminals. Bringing economic rationality into the picture, a review of going rates for drug mules in markets with varying sentences shows that deterrence can be overriden by offering to pay more to compensate for the riskier service. Like I said, a wash.
It still fails to answer a fundamental question of why a country that can't even pay its own bills, and sinks deeper in debt every day should be spending ANY money on foreign aid.
We'll skip the question of whether or not we can pay our bills since it's really a question of whether or not we will pay our bills.
The reasons for foreign aid are many and varied. Investing in other countries builds good will, business relationships, and markets for US goods. Also, most foreign aid goes straight into purchasing products from us, making it more or less a roundabout way of subsidizing our own industries by artificially creating markets for them. There's also the general principle that foreign countries can't really do much for us if they have nothing to offer us, and they won't have anything to offer us if they stay unstable and poor. There's also the humanitarian angle, but in terms of realpolitik, that's the least of the reasons.
I described one software development methodology (scrum, if that matters) to a crowd of discontent gamers in the Steam forum. I then painstakingly crafted a reasoned explanation for why that process necessitates that this particular bug in an older game (Half-Life: Opposing Force, which had been recently ported to both Linux and Mac) simply won't be fixed anytime soon, because the Steam developers are almost certainly entirely wrapped up in the development of Half Life 3.
What does Scrum have to to with allocation of development resources between development and bug fixing? I do mostly bug fixes rather than new feature development at my company, and we use scrum methodology for our maintenance team. I'm not sure how this would be even related to HL3, much less why you would think that HL3 is drawing resources from other projects to the point that bug fixes must stop.