There exists no law that children can't go to a private Christian school that doesn't teach evolution. In many states, the same government will pay for that in the form of vouchers.
That's a technically accurate way of stating that which completely distorts reality. Some (as in ~10) states have small local programs, generally at the county or city level (so they don't cover the whole state). I think at best you can say there are a dozen or so pilot programs around the nation.
The vast majority of Americans pay taxes to send their (or someone else's) kids to government-run schools and have no choice in the matter, other than to additionally pay to send their own kids to private schools. Go figure - most folks can't afford to pay double tuition for their kids.
As far as I am aware, there are only two ways elements transmute in nature:
1.a) Inside a normal star, fusing merrily from hydrogen on up to iron
2.b) Inside super-nova, still a matter of stellar fusion but this is how we get anything heavier than lead.
3. Radioactive decay, heavier elements decaying into stabler lighter elements, no star required.
There's also:
fission bombs, though this is arguably just the same as your #3 radioactive decay
fusion bombs, which are genuine fusion
fusion reactors (tokamaks, etc.)
I don't know if particle accelerators qualify.
Finally, there was also the Big Bang and perhaps someday the Big Crunch.
Except they haven't actually had the results validated... They've produced something that looks like neutron tracks, and had an expert go "yeah, that looks like neutron tracks", but that's a long way from "is confirmed to be neutron tracks". This announcement sounds dangerously like P&F's - in that they found signs in a specific test setup, but didn't vary the setup. That they seem to have found neutrons with one very specific detection method, but don't appear to have tried any other detection methods raises huge red flags.
Bravo. I myself was wondering what controls had been run. As I recall, P&F didn't run any, which would have saved them some grief.
I know one of the guys who helped debunk the thing way back when, and there's so much disgust for the original guys that it seems to be a foregone conclusion that cold fusion can never work. For example, in the current article, the tone seems to be that people really want to prove these guys wrong, which to me seems too much of an almost religious zeal. Worse, a lot of very prominent scientists have very vocally declared the thing impossible, and it will be a very hard thing for a lot of them to even consider the possibility that they were wrong.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Claiming you've discovered cold fusion is like saying you've disproved the Pythagorean Theorum.
Let's not forget the history here:
Scientists working outside their field (no, don't quote Kuhn here) claimed to discover something incredible.
They announced these claims via press conference, instead of via the normal scientific channels.
Their work could not be replicated by physicists (or electrochemists, for that matter).
They refused to help others replicate their work.
Their work violated a great deal of established theory and they themselves presented no coherent theory.
Very quickly, the scientific community dismissed them as a bunch of buffoons.
Small groups on the fringe continued to believe in cold fusion with a religious zeal (a belief rather than science).
Said small groups continued to have conferences, publish books, etc. but never facing the rigor of the normal scientific process.
Someone comes along now and says "hey, I've discovered cold fusion!" I'm not surprised he's greeted with derision. Cold fusion is nonsense. There is no rational reason to think it exists. There is no theory that explains it. If I told you I can snap my fingers and transmute water into gold, would you want to see my experimental results?
In this case, the proponent refers to "the cold fusion community". Ha! The only "community" is a bunch of fringe believers working outside the norms of science. Seriously, why would he call it a "cold fusion effect"? Unless he's seeking to be endorsed by that group...
Another question...why was this presented at the American Chemical Society? Perhaps because they can't get on the agenda of the American Physical Society? Gee, I wonder why not. This is a rerun of Pons/Fleischmann: "We are not physicists and have an experimental result that is anomalous and would overturn decades of established, fundamental physics. We have no coherent theory that fits any established model. Can we present a paper?"
If you took away the over-amped adjectives, that article would be about 30 words long. How can you take someone seriously who refers to people as "bald-headed Frankensteinian goon"? Then again, what do you really expect from Rolling Stone...
So the gov't calls a shareholder meeting, replaces the board, and the new board quashes the lawsuit. They own 80% of the equity in the company. The government can do whatever it wants with AIG because it owns them.
Why is this lawsuit a big deal? Or rather, why does it still exist?
I don't know why anyone has their money in large banks anymore. Move it to a local credit union and let those large bank fuckers die out. "Too big to fail" my ass. They haven't been paying FDIC for the last 10 years since "it wasn't necessary".
I'm sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. All banks pay FDIC premiums. No one has lost any money (under the limit of $200K or whatever it is) in an FDIC-insured bank. Ever.
FYI, credit unions pay NCUA premiums, which is a similar program. There are pros and cons of a credit union and for some it's a good choice, but being scared that your bank is going to fail and you're going to lose your FDIC-insured deposits is not one of them.
1 degree of Fahrenheit is calibrated at the difference in temperature a human being can actually feel. You can sense a difference of 69 degrees to 70 degrees, for example.
The benefit of Fahrenheit is that there are 180 points between water freezing and boiling. With Celsius, you almost always see decimals because the sale is not very granular.
Heck, why not make freezing 0 and boiling 10? Of course, we'd need two decimal points of accuracy to represent anything, but the system would be simpler, right?;-)
Regardless of what any contract says, regardless of who actually owes what, screenplay writers are the major breadwinners yet get paid virtually nothing for their efforts. Nobody got rich writing scripts, but many many rich actors and movie moguls got rich from bloody good stories.
Your overall point is valid, however there are a few people who sell multimillion-dollar scripts. Every now and then you read about someone hitting it big. You're absolutely right, though, that even "hitting it big" in those cases probably means earning less than the main actors.
The reason movies suck, 95 times out of 100, is a bad script. Good writing with bad acting still often produces a good movie. The reverse is never true.
Talk about a solution in search of a problem. So let me understand this. We are going to go into 3rd world countries and install autonomous flying drones that zap bugs with on board lasers? Isn't there perhaps a cheaper solution?
Yes, there are two:
DDT (Google before getting your panties in a wad about junk science environmental scare claims - the World Health Organization thinks DDT is the way to go).
Realize that in the last 500 years we've spent trillions on the third world and you know, we can't afford to fix everything that's wrong in the world.
Have you been to your local dumpsite? Imagine if there were 1.5 billion Americans (and Canadians). How would North American consumption patterns and "environmental standards" really compare?
Quite well. See Penn & Teller's Bullshitepisode on recycling. The waste of all North America over the next 1,000 years would fit in a landfill 35 miles square. And none of us would ever have to look at it or worry about it.
Totalitarian systems that don't care about the health of their citizens are a different matter. You don't see any thriving democracies among the most polluted parts of the world.
For instance, if China treats space the way they treat many other things (ie little or no regard for its preservation, pardon the sweeping statement) then what recourse will other countries have?
It's particularly difficult to pardon the hypocrisy your sweeping statement if, as I suspect, you happen to be in North America.
I'll take the environmental standards and pollution levels in the USA over China's any day of the week.
The debris was small, just 1/3 of an inch long, and was flying at about 19,800 mph, NASA officials said. The space station orbits the Earth at about 17,500 mph.
That's nothing. I'm moving through space at 64,800mph and I'm just sitting here at my desk!
The biggest lesson learned in all of this is to not spend $32,000 developing an iPhone game.
Dapple took me about 6 months to make and had a budget of roughly $32,000 USD. That budget includes: paying my contractors, business expenses incurred during the 6 months of development, and paying myself a very small salary (akin to what I made as a junior front-end programmer when I first started in the industry).
That's nuts. What did he think - he's launching an entire business around an iPhone color-matching game??? What is this "paying myself a small salary" nonsense? What "business expenses"?
For this sort of thing, you do most of the dev work yourself or you partner with someone. You keep your day job and the only "business expenses" you should have are a domain somewhere.
His costs are insane for this kind of project. They should be a tenth of what he incurred. Even at that, he'd have to sell 1,000 units or so to break even. And saying "to break even" speaks volumes about his business naivete. It's not about breaking even. You could have taken that $32,000, put it in the bank at 5%, and made $800 in six months. Instead, you made less than that and now you don't have the $32,000 any more.. He's not comparing opportunity costs.
Honestly, I would not invest much hard money in such a venture - perhaps if I was doing iPhone dev during the day, I'd work on something on the side at night, or if I had a friend/partner who wanted to team up.
Cheated who? The fact that a bunch of countries who had nukes already decided to get together and define rules for everyone else doesn't mean that the rules have any legal or moral standing, or that they will be followed.
You're partially right and I was partially wrong: only North Korea cheated. India and Pakistan never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. North Korea did and violated it...I would call that cheating at best.
BTW, it was not a case of nuclear states "getting together and defining rules for everyone else". The nations of the world (except for India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel) signed the NPT - it wasn't imposed by force.
Yes, because making a rocket go a few extra thousand miles is such a challenge compared to developing a nuclear bomb.
Making a rocket go a few extra thousand miles is pretty easy. Making it go a few extra thousand miles and still hit something you want to hit is quite hard.
As an example...North Korea has built a nuclear weapon (1940s technology) but not a reliable ICBM (late 50s/early 60s technology).
What is your point then? Nuclear weapons at the time were strictly a Soviet and American technology.
At the time, they were strictly an American technology. It was only later that treasonous Americans and Brits sold the secrets to the Communists.
That is far from the case these days and also worth noting that Japan was not wiped off the map and was already preparing to surrender.
Japan was preparing to defend its islands inch-by-inch. Without the atomic bombs, 1 million+ Americans would likely have died in block-by-block fighting in Japan.
There are theories that the detonations were just a way to show off to the world the power of the atomic bomb and for the Emperor of Japan to save face when he was ready to surrender.
Well, there are theories that NASA didn't land on the moon and that the world is really flat, but so what?
Going up against a nuclear power ensured destruction so many countries became nuclear powers.
...for some values of "many". There are 5 countries with nukes as allowed in the non-proliferation treaty (USA, Russia, UK, France, China), 3 that cheated (India, Pakistan, North Korea), and 1 unofficial (Israel). South Africa had nukes but got rid of them. 9 countries out of 191.
Slashdot Mirror
There exists no law that children can't go to a private Christian school that doesn't teach evolution. In many states, the same government will pay for that in the form of vouchers.
That's a technically accurate way of stating that which completely distorts reality. Some (as in ~10) states have small local programs, generally at the county or city level (so they don't cover the whole state). I think at best you can say there are a dozen or so pilot programs around the nation.
The vast majority of Americans pay taxes to send their (or someone else's) kids to government-run schools and have no choice in the matter, other than to additionally pay to send their own kids to private schools. Go figure - most folks can't afford to pay double tuition for their kids.
As far as I am aware, there are only two ways elements transmute in nature:
1.a) Inside a normal star, fusing merrily from hydrogen on up to iron 2.b) Inside super-nova, still a matter of stellar fusion but this is how we get anything heavier than lead. 3. Radioactive decay, heavier elements decaying into stabler lighter elements, no star required.
There's also:
I don't know if particle accelerators qualify.
Finally, there was also the Big Bang and perhaps someday the Big Crunch.
Except they haven't actually had the results validated... They've produced something that looks like neutron tracks, and had an expert go "yeah, that looks like neutron tracks", but that's a long way from "is confirmed to be neutron tracks". This announcement sounds dangerously like P&F's - in that they found signs in a specific test setup, but didn't vary the setup. That they seem to have found neutrons with one very specific detection method, but don't appear to have tried any other detection methods raises huge red flags.
Bravo. I myself was wondering what controls had been run. As I recall, P&F didn't run any, which would have saved them some grief.
I know one of the guys who helped debunk the thing way back when, and there's so much disgust for the original guys that it seems to be a foregone conclusion that cold fusion can never work. For example, in the current article, the tone seems to be that people really want to prove these guys wrong, which to me seems too much of an almost religious zeal. Worse, a lot of very prominent scientists have very vocally declared the thing impossible, and it will be a very hard thing for a lot of them to even consider the possibility that they were wrong.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Claiming you've discovered cold fusion is like saying you've disproved the Pythagorean Theorum.
Let's not forget the history here:
Someone comes along now and says "hey, I've discovered cold fusion!" I'm not surprised he's greeted with derision. Cold fusion is nonsense. There is no rational reason to think it exists. There is no theory that explains it. If I told you I can snap my fingers and transmute water into gold, would you want to see my experimental results?
In this case, the proponent refers to "the cold fusion community". Ha! The only "community" is a bunch of fringe believers working outside the norms of science. Seriously, why would he call it a "cold fusion effect"? Unless he's seeking to be endorsed by that group...
Another question...why was this presented at the American Chemical Society? Perhaps because they can't get on the agenda of the American Physical Society? Gee, I wonder why not. This is a rerun of Pons/Fleischmann: "We are not physicists and have an experimental result that is anomalous and would overturn decades of established, fundamental physics. We have no coherent theory that fits any established model. Can we present a paper?"
I bet the guy who originally named that mountain feels silly right now.
"This looks like a good spot for our redoubt...
If you took away the over-amped adjectives, that article would be about 30 words long. How can you take someone seriously who refers to people as "bald-headed Frankensteinian goon"? Then again, what do you really expect from Rolling Stone...
So the gov't calls a shareholder meeting, replaces the board, and the new board quashes the lawsuit. They own 80% of the equity in the company. The government can do whatever it wants with AIG because it owns them.
Why is this lawsuit a big deal? Or rather, why does it still exist?
I don't know why anyone has their money in large banks anymore. Move it to a local credit union and let those large bank fuckers die out. "Too big to fail" my ass. They haven't been paying FDIC for the last 10 years since "it wasn't necessary".
I'm sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. All banks pay FDIC premiums. No one has lost any money (under the limit of $200K or whatever it is) in an FDIC-insured bank. Ever.
FYI, credit unions pay NCUA premiums, which is a similar program. There are pros and cons of a credit union and for some it's a good choice, but being scared that your bank is going to fail and you're going to lose your FDIC-insured deposits is not one of them.
1 degree of Fahrenheit is calibrated at the difference in temperature a human being can actually feel. You can sense a difference of 69 degrees to 70 degrees, for example.
The benefit of Fahrenheit is that there are 180 points between water freezing and boiling. With Celsius, you almost always see decimals because the sale is not very granular.
Heck, why not make freezing 0 and boiling 10? Of course, we'd need two decimal points of accuracy to represent anything, but the system would be simpler, right? ;-)
I don't recall seeing IBM ever swallow a company this big,
Lotus was nearly as big. IBM paid $3.5 billion in 1995.
Regardless of what any contract says, regardless of who actually owes what, screenplay writers are the major breadwinners yet get paid virtually nothing for their efforts. Nobody got rich writing scripts, but many many rich actors and movie moguls got rich from bloody good stories.
Your overall point is valid, however there are a few people who sell multimillion-dollar scripts. Every now and then you read about someone hitting it big. You're absolutely right, though, that even "hitting it big" in those cases probably means earning less than the main actors.
The reason movies suck, 95 times out of 100, is a bad script. Good writing with bad acting still often produces a good movie. The reverse is never true.
"Oh look, they arrested Harlan Ellison".
"Good!"
Just shrivel up and die, Harlan. We're all tired of you.
Fortunately, the editors here catch and correct...oh, that's right.
Talk about a solution in search of a problem. So let me understand this. We are going to go into 3rd world countries and install autonomous flying drones that zap bugs with on board lasers? Isn't there perhaps a cheaper solution?
Yes, there are two:
Dead?
Not dead, but struggling to convince folks it isn't about to file for bankruptcy.
Have you been to your local dumpsite? Imagine if there were 1.5 billion Americans (and Canadians). How would North American consumption patterns and "environmental standards" really compare?
Quite well. See Penn & Teller's Bullshit episode on recycling. The waste of all North America over the next 1,000 years would fit in a landfill 35 miles square. And none of us would ever have to look at it or worry about it.
Totalitarian systems that don't care about the health of their citizens are a different matter. You don't see any thriving democracies among the most polluted parts of the world.
It's particularly difficult to pardon the hypocrisy your sweeping statement if, as I suspect, you happen to be in North America.
I'll take the environmental standards and pollution levels in the USA over China's any day of the week.
The debris was small, just 1/3 of an inch long, and was flying at about 19,800 mph, NASA officials said. The space station orbits the Earth at about 17,500 mph.
That's nothing. I'm moving through space at 64,800mph and I'm just sitting here at my desk!
The biggest lesson learned in all of this is to not spend $32,000 developing an iPhone game.
Dapple took me about 6 months to make and had a budget of roughly $32,000 USD. That budget includes: paying my contractors, business expenses incurred during the 6 months of development, and paying myself a very small salary (akin to what I made as a junior front-end programmer when I first started in the industry).
That's nuts. What did he think - he's launching an entire business around an iPhone color-matching game??? What is this "paying myself a small salary" nonsense? What "business expenses"?
For this sort of thing, you do most of the dev work yourself or you partner with someone. You keep your day job and the only "business expenses" you should have are a domain somewhere.
His costs are insane for this kind of project. They should be a tenth of what he incurred. Even at that, he'd have to sell 1,000 units or so to break even. And saying "to break even" speaks volumes about his business naivete. It's not about breaking even. You could have taken that $32,000, put it in the bank at 5%, and made $800 in six months. Instead, you made less than that and now you don't have the $32,000 any more.. He's not comparing opportunity costs.
Honestly, I would not invest much hard money in such a venture - perhaps if I was doing iPhone dev during the day, I'd work on something on the side at night, or if I had a friend/partner who wanted to team up.
FreeGeek.
At the time, they were strictly an American technology. It was only later that treasonous Americans and Brits sold the secrets to the Communists.
I've seen this argument time and again.
Well, you will likely see the argument time and again that only the Americans had the nuclear bomb in 1945 because it's true.
3 that cheated (India, Pakistan, North Korea)
Cheated who? The fact that a bunch of countries who had nukes already decided to get together and define rules for everyone else doesn't mean that the rules have any legal or moral standing, or that they will be followed.
You're partially right and I was partially wrong: only North Korea cheated. India and Pakistan never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. North Korea did and violated it...I would call that cheating at best.
BTW, it was not a case of nuclear states "getting together and defining rules for everyone else". The nations of the world (except for India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel) signed the NPT - it wasn't imposed by force.
Yes, because making a rocket go a few extra thousand miles is such a challenge compared to developing a nuclear bomb.
Making a rocket go a few extra thousand miles is pretty easy. Making it go a few extra thousand miles and still hit something you want to hit is quite hard.
As an example...North Korea has built a nuclear weapon (1940s technology) but not a reliable ICBM (late 50s/early 60s technology).
What is your point then? Nuclear weapons at the time were strictly a Soviet and American technology.
At the time, they were strictly an American technology. It was only later that treasonous Americans and Brits sold the secrets to the Communists.
That is far from the case these days and also worth noting that Japan was not wiped off the map and was already preparing to surrender.
Japan was preparing to defend its islands inch-by-inch. Without the atomic bombs, 1 million+ Americans would likely have died in block-by-block fighting in Japan.
There are theories that the detonations were just a way to show off to the world the power of the atomic bomb and for the Emperor of Japan to save face when he was ready to surrender.
Well, there are theories that NASA didn't land on the moon and that the world is really flat, but so what?
Going up against a nuclear power ensured destruction so many countries became nuclear powers.
...for some values of "many". There are 5 countries with nukes as allowed in the non-proliferation treaty (USA, Russia, UK, France, China), 3 that cheated (India, Pakistan, North Korea), and 1 unofficial (Israel). South Africa had nukes but got rid of them. 9 countries out of 191.
2. Moore's Law worked its magic on Internet bandwidth.
Moore's Law says nothing about internet bandwidth.