This is the third universe and things are definitely going downhill. Why, back in the day you never had stars spew their guts all over space and call it a "supernova." If they did they had the courtesy to clean up after themselves.
And don't get me started on those noisy pulsars or horrid black holes! I can't think of anything that sucks as much as black holes!
In a totally free market without natural constraints demand drives production up which in turn drives prices down.
But I don't think this would be a totally free market. Powerful groups manipulate the system to protect themselves - look at copyright extension, the RIAA going after technologies that make it easy for bands to sell directly to the public, and the way the insurance industry screwed up critical reform. If they see a benefit in keeping this technology to themselves they'll find a way to make it difficult for others to use it.
As one example off the top of my head, let's say this treatment requires vitamins. No problem - vitamins now require a prescription and can only be produced by licensed pharmacetical companies. That sounds unrealistic until you remember that the drug companies nearly succeeded in pushing through laws that would have put crippling burdens on the OTC supplement business.
The problem isn't that life expectancy could be raised to 1000 years or more.
The problem is that it would only be available to relatively few people. People who could afford multimillion dollar fees (which might exist solely to keep out the riffraff) or people with key political connections.
Working slaves can forget about it. Banks can always repossess a multimillion dollar house, but what do you do here when somebody declares bankruptcy after treatment?
The bottom line is that assets and power will quickly become (even more) concentrated in the top 1% or so of the population. Imagine what the average working person could do with a second lifetime where they own their own home from the beginning -- but they would start with much more real world experience and street smarts. Now imagine the same thing with people will millions of dollars in assets and dozens of lifetimes of experience.
The result would not be unlike the Go'uld in Stargate. The "immortals" might even put on the cloak of divinity. A few hundred years ago monarchs claimed they ruled by divine right, but they died just like us. How hard would it be for people with a centuries-long lifetime to manipulate society so the emphemerals believe that the immortals are graced by god. How long would it take for the emphemerals to forget that these medical treatments even forget or that everyone naturally dies within a century or so.
Can you think of a better way to discover your employee's true skills? Almost everyone is hired to fill an immediate need, but that doesn't mean that they should stay in the same position indefinitely.
Any sane person would use this opportunity to 1) develop new skills (esp. if that positions them for a "better" job in the company) and 2) showcase their current skills.
This seems like a reasonable investment considering the average cost of hiring a new developer is something like $20k. For about the same investment you can 1) make your developers extremely happy and less likely to leave (never forget that $20k cost), 2) make them more productive as they develop new skills, and 3) screen them for internal placement in more specialized positions.
Imagine, for example, trying to build a compiler able to produce an efficient executable in exactly one pass. Nobody does this now, for obvious design reasons consequent to an underlying sequential processing assumption, but it shouldn't be impossible. "All" it would take is a complete re-appraisal of everything we know about optimization and related issues in a truly concurrent, shared-everything, multi-threading environment with enough threads.
Am I completely out of my depth? What does threading have to do with efficient one-pass optimizing compilers?
It's been a while since I studied this, but it escapes me why anyone would want to roll the clock back by decades to return to single-pass compilers.
Background: modern compilers, e.g., the Gnu suite, use multiple passes to cleanly separate functionality. In a nutshell the first pass compiles the source code into an arbitrary intermediate format. IIRC gcc covers C, C++, Fortran (g77), Ada (gnat), Java (gcj) and more. Bob could add support for BobTalk with relatively modest effort.
The next pass performs generic optimizations on the intermediate code - extracting loop invariants, unrolling loops, eliminating dead code, etc.
The final pass translates the intermediate code into processor-specific object code.
(Reality is much more complex with the C preprocessor, register coloring and keyhole optmization of the object code, etc.)
The key thing isn't sequential thinking, it's the way that adding support for a new language is handled entirely in the first pass. Adding support for a new processor is handled entirely in the final pass. Adding new optimizations for your master's thesis is handled entirely in the second pass.
Back in the dark ages you did have "single-pass" compilers... and they were an absolute bitch to maintain since each language and processor stood alone. (I used quotes since these compilers normally produced assembly code (.s) that was then compiled/assembled into the object code files. So even "single pass" compilers normally used multiple passes, but with a processor-specific intermediate language.)
It was a major innovation when AT&T released a C++ compiler that worked by compiling the C++ code into C code instead of assembler. It allowed the new language to be supported in a fraction of the time required before.
So tell me again why we would want to return to the days when we went directly from a high level language to object code....
There was massive carnage predicted when the national 55 mph speed limit was raised. The Roads Would Run Red With Blood.
As I recall, the death rate dropped significantly. It's climbing again, but that's due to the number of passenger and vehicle miles climbing. If we're honest with the numbers the death toll would skyrocket if we went back to double nickel limits.
Anyone who has driven across the midwest or intermountain west could tell you why. At 55 mph your attention wanders and you'll miss something important. At 75 mph you'll pay more attention to driving. You don't know boredom until you've driven I-70 across western Kansas, I-80 across the Great Basin or I-84 through central Oregon.
A secondary effect is that traffic now travels at about the same pace. There's some spread, but on a rural interstate (outside of mountains) I'ld guess 80+% of the traffic is within a 10 mph band. A lot of drivers ignored the posted speed limit in the double nickel days and the same 80% band would have been over 20 mph wide. That meant you had a lot more passing and a significantly larger difference in speed as cars passed.
Does that mean that the speed limit should be 75 mph through urban cores? Or 40 past elementary schools and parks? Of course not. But the argument "slower speeds mean lower deaths" is not borne out by the facts. Accidents, when they occur, tend to be more severe. But the accident rate is lower... and newer cars are so much safer that people often walk away unharmed from accidents much more severe than the ones that would have killed everyone a few decades ago.
BTW, a while back I read that the Colorado Dept. of Transportation does monitor actual speeds and will adjust speed limits accordingly, if possible. (US highways often have restrictions.) Their position was mentioned by the GP - the overwhelming majority of drivers will travel at an appropriate speed.
1. Compel Yahoo to provide all logs regarding user. These probably have IP address and time. (Hopefully the time is maintained with NTP. It's not hard to do and allows you to coordinate logs across multiple sites with extremely high accuracy.)
2) Determine who manages this/these IP addresses. For convenience call them "home" (e.g., comcast) and "work".
3) Compel owners of these IP addresses to provide all identifying information they have regarding the person(s) assigned this address.
Depending upon the technical setup you might not be able to identify the poster... or you might be able to really nail them. (Broadband IP address gives you residence, work IP address verifies employee address and uniquely identifies the individual.)
BTW, "John Doe" indictments and defendants are not uncommon. This is a classic example of why they exist - the indictment or suit provides a basis to obtain a search warrant to determine the identity of the defendant.
You should not have an impenetrable shield from criminal prosecution or civil compensation just because your actions are online. Think about phishers - I cannot think of any reason whatsoever why their identities should be protected. Another good example is slander - I can understand the need for rape victims (for instance) being able to have true anonyminity when reporting abuse to authorities, but that anonyminity ends when they publicly accuse somebody of committing a crime - a person has the right to defend themselves from false allegations.
On the other hand compelled disclosure of our true names on demand would be analogous to 7-11 demanding your driver's license before you could buy a soda. It's reasonable - even prudent - to maintain multiple pseudonyms across multiple sites.
In the middle there are illegal acts that can be performed by maintaining multiple pseudonyms. A classic example is "pump and dump" stock manipulation.
It's a very complex question and it's important to remember that there's a distinction between "pseudonymity" and "anonyminity".
Recalling my old civil liberties class, the First Amendment covers both your right to speak and your freedom from being compelled to speak by the government. E.g., you can't be compelled to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in the classroom, although many school districts would have you believe otherwise.
This case doesn't involve the government, but it covers similiar ground. It's one thing for me to say "Bob Smith says dogs should be served in restaurants." (And I don't mean as patrons.)
It's a different thing for me to represent myself as some Bob Smith and say the same thing.
It's yet another thing for me to represent myself as a specific Bob Smith and say the same thing.
The first case could be defamation. (It depends on whether Bob Smith actually said it, whether his community would consider it offensive, etc.) The second case is clearly protected free speech. The final case is putting words into another person's mouth.
I don't believe it's identity theft, but it certainly seems to be the type of bad act that should strip that person's anonymity. It's the type of act that could result in immediate termination in the workplace, professional sanctions, etc.
Stars don't become black holes until they burn up their fuel, collapsing (and perhaps exploding, perhaps even multiple times) in on themselves until they are much more dense than any visible stars.
You might want to check university pages, not just some guy's geocities page.
Stars collapse once the core has exhausted its available fuel. This is only a minute fraction of the star's total mass, but it's critical. When the core goes dark the rest of the star falls on it.
According to an article in Discover magazine a few years ago, parts of the star will fall towards the center with a speed as high as a third of the speed of light! This causes enormous pressure, during the "big crunch" the density of the star may be 5-6 higher than the density of a neutron star. IIRC the massive neutrino flux is produced at this time. BTW this "core" is substantially far larger than the core mentioned earlier.
Matter can't be compressed this hard for long and the core "bounces" back. That is what flings the outer layers of the star into space. But force goes both ways - what throws stellar masses into space also increases the pressure on the remaining core. If the density gets too high a black hole is created and it quickly consumes the core, but the outer layers have already been ejected. Otherwise the core eventually bounces back entirely and you have a neutron star. A neutron star is a core of degenerate matter covered by a layer of normal matter.
You do not get cycles of explosions.
(I seem to recall hearing about flares on neutron stars after enough normal mass has fallen to trigger fusion, but those flares are fall smaller than supernovas.)
I've been debating how to reply since your position seems reasonable until you look at actual cases....
I live in a college town and every few years some genius takes four $10 bills and one $1 bill. He cuts one corner from each $10 bill and glues it to a corner of the $1. He then spends the "$10" bill in a busy, dark bar.
If you look at it in the light, the bill is obviously bogus. The corners don't match, the president is wrong, the back is entirely wrong.
But in a dark bar it's almost always accepted as a $10 by a busy bartender.
You might think the bartender deserves it, but the local DA disagrees. I think the feds also get involved even though the guy only "repurposed" real currency.
The same DA filed ADW charges against teens firing pellet guns from a car and worked with the police and bars to detain anyone providing a fake ID. You might think he's being unreasonable, but you would still be spending thousands of dollars to defend yourself, to say nothing of facing the possibility of serving real time.
The government doesn't give a rat's ass about anyone distributing bricks of flour. But somebody distributing bricks of heroin (or cocaine or whatever)... that's another matter. The fact that they attempted to rip off the agents by delivering flour instead of the drugs is irrelevant.
As for whether or not flour looks like cocaine, we're talking about bricks wrapped in plastic and/or foil, not dime bags on the street corner.
(P.S., I meant "intent to distribute" not "attempt to distribute" in the GP)
I doubt a disclaimer on the back would get you off the hook if the front "looked legit enough to pass." If you used it as a fake id, it's a fake id and you could find yourself in a shitload of trouble.
Consider four data points. First, would it be legal if you deposited a check with some nice hefty figure on the front, but a "not a valid check do not accept" notice on the back? Or do you think you'll get a hefty fine from your bank (at best)? People have tried this, it's not a theoretical question.
Second, remember the story a while back about somebody passing an obviously fake $200 bill? It didn't matter that the bill had a picture of Daffy Duck (or whatever), they passed it as US currency and the feds hit them with federal counterfeiting charges.
Third, every so often some teens get the bright idea of driving around and shooting people with bb or paint guns. Just a joke, right? Nope - they find themselves facing felony "assault with a deadly weapon" charges because their victims thought they were being shot by a real gun.
The extreme form of this are idiots who do holdups with fake guns. Ha ha ha - they still get a mandatory 5 or 10 year extension for possessing a firearm during the commission of a felony. I've even heard of a case where somebody got that extension for the "finger in your coat pocket" trick.
Finally there's the guys who sell flour to undercover narcs. It's legal to sell flour, right? Wrong - if they claim they're selling you cocaine then it's attempt to distribute. The fact that they knew it was flour is legally irrelevant.
TVs don't have the same optical requirements as monitors. That 36" legacy TV is still limited to 525 scan lines, a 19" monitor may be driven to 1500-2000 scan lines. Even with HDTV you're looking at significantly lower resolutions than a monitor.
On top of that a bit of "smearing" is actually desirable on TVs since it helps to mask artifacts. In contrast monitors must be crisp because they're usually used for relatively small print. Imagine using a monitor with only 6 lines of text.
Actually that is a concern. An occasional glass of (red?) wine is fine, but daily use or a leaded glass decanter for a prolonged period is a Bad Idea because the acid can leach the lead.
First, one might argue in some situations, cosmetic surgery is some sort of a sign of social dominance (has the money for surgery) or some such thing, and so it effects people on some psychological level beyond the simple physical appearance.
The problem with this argument is that we're seeing cheap plastic surgery in porn, not expensive (and essentially undetectable) plastic surgery.
Is it just a fetish? I first thought so, but the market itself is evolutionary (where 'fitness' is what sells for the best price) and porn has definitely gotten more extreme (imo) as it's gone mainstream. A few years ago you could make a strong argument that this reflected a difference between guys who view porn and those who don't, but not now that it's readily available on premium channels and many hotels.
Check your facts - this has been proven experimentally. A while back Scientific American (iirc) discussed an experiment involving some breed of bird (or fish?) that sexually selects on long tails (a common theme, it seems). The scientists took a bunch of short-tailed losers and glued on tail extensions. Suddenly they were getting all of the action and the former hot studs couldn't get any since they were now the "short tailed" dudes.
As for your bigger argument, "fitness" isn't a step function where you're either perfect or you're dead, it's a gradual slope. Evolution will definitely select for the guy who's only 80% on the "fitness" scale but 200% on the procreation scale. This gets worse as the 100% fitters drop out of the gene pool and there's more room for even less fit, but oh-so-sexy, breeders.
Why do peahens (and others) find long tails so attractive? Who knows. It's probably a legitimate indicator of fitness run amock - the same way a lot of human males think that if a C cup bust is nice, a DDDD cup must be much nicer. Other males are more attracted to general fitness and are thus more attracted to the athletic type than the busty type.
Male peacock tails are definitely counter-survival. IIRC several other bird and fish species have similarly extreme adaptations.
Humans - at least as shown in American porn - also have counter-survival preferences. I personally prefer a lithe/athletic appearance, but it seems most guys prefer women with at least 10 pounds of silicon up front.
There are resolution limits in classical optics, even before you include a turbulent atmosphere. These are limitations based on the appature of the optics and the wavelength of light. IIRC that gives you a minimal resolution of 6-12" for a Hubble-class telescope in a low polar orbit -- far too coarse to read your license plate, much less your watch.
Of course these aren't classical telescopes - if I were designing one I might focus a very narrow band onto a linear sensor and let the motion of the satellite provide the second axis. That would give you a 'stripe' but you couldn't maintain focus on a particular object of interest.
The other thing to remember is that too much detail can be as crippling as too little detail. Increase the resolution by an order of magnitude and you'll increase the amount of data you must search by two orders of magnitude. Either you toss more analysts on the problem or your turnaround time suffers. You'll still want high resolution when you're specifically looking at something, but if you're scanning the desert for tanks it may be sufficient to have relatively low resolution on multiple frequencies so you can distinguish tanks from decoys.
I've seen arguments made that this is trespass. The analogy is that you have no more right to install software on my system than you do to install a webcam in my bedroom. But that's somehow been twisted so that unauthorized access to a big company's computers is a crime, but the same thing on an individual's or small company's computers is their fault.
The dinosaurs weren't killed off by the mammals. It took millions (tens of millions?) of dinosaur-free years before mammals were more than rats.
The Roman empire split and the real power had moved to the east, based in Constantinople (Istanbul), long before Rome was sacked. The western empire had been basically abandoned. As I understand it even the "sacking" was nothing like what you think - for a long time it was basically one group coming in and displacing the top tier of society. Some people argue the Roman empire morphed into the Bryzantine Empire and didn't really fall until fairly recent times. (Recent when you're talking about 2500 years, that is.)
The Confederacy was a far stronger military power than you give it credit for. It fought off the Union for four years and came close to delivering crippling blows on several occasions.
And finally, Hitler didn't defeat the Soviets but he had Leningrad/St. Petersburg under siege for years and got close enough to Moscow that Stalin et al came close to doing an emergency evacuation.
It's been a long time since my college philosophy course, but your position is a fallacy. It does great harm to focus on a single problem, or even a single category.
For instance, does the suffering in Thailand justify ignoring the people in Florida still struggling to recover from those storms? Or the people in California and Arizona who have just been hit with record rainfall?
Does the suffering in Florida justify ignoring the homeless in my own town?
Should the suffering of the homeless justify ignoring the poor (financially), scared local women needing medical care? (Planned Parenthood performs abortions, but it's also the only medical resource for many women.)
The list goes on and on. Helping the local animal shelter or helping to stop the corporatization of American civil life might seem "less important" than helping these victims, but that doesn't mean they should be ignored entirely until there's nothing more pressing.
This is Denver. I live maybe 5 miles away from this guy but I'm sure we occasionally have markedly different weather. (E.g., merely overcast vs. several inches of snow on the ground and more falling.)
I once left a dark and gloomy Boulder (just NW of Denver) and met somebody in south Denver, about 40 miles away. The sky was mostly clear, just some clouds over the mountains. She was shocked when I commented on the weather.
Did the weather just clear? Nope, it was still dark and gloomy when I returned 3 hours after I left. Davidson Mesa isn't that high, but it was enough to produce wildly different weather that day.
There would be no unaffected countries. Besides the humanitarian and economic issues, the impact would throw a lot of dust into the atmosphere and we could see 'nuclear winter' type effects.
Does anyone have comparable numbers for major volcanic eruptions? I'm specifically thinking about the eruptions near the year without a summer (1816).
Slashdot Mirror
Why bother using https at all? How many people do you think actually check for that little lock symbol in their browser.
What's to keep them from sticking in a Verisign graphic just to look safe? Think they're going to be stopped by copyright law?
This is the third universe and things are definitely going downhill. Why, back in the day you never had stars spew their guts all over space and call it a "supernova." If they did they had the courtesy to clean up after themselves.
And don't get me started on those noisy pulsars or horrid black holes! I can't think of anything that sucks as much as black holes!
In a totally free market without natural constraints demand drives production up which in turn drives prices down.
But I don't think this would be a totally free market. Powerful groups manipulate the system to protect themselves - look at copyright extension, the RIAA going after technologies that make it easy for bands to sell directly to the public, and the way the insurance industry screwed up critical reform. If they see a benefit in keeping this technology to themselves they'll find a way to make it difficult for others to use it.
As one example off the top of my head, let's say this treatment requires vitamins. No problem - vitamins now require a prescription and can only be produced by licensed pharmacetical companies. That sounds unrealistic until you remember that the drug companies nearly succeeded in pushing through laws that would have put crippling burdens on the OTC supplement business.
The problem isn't that life expectancy could be raised to 1000 years or more.
The problem is that it would only be available to relatively few people. People who could afford multimillion dollar fees (which might exist solely to keep out the riffraff) or people with key political connections.
Working slaves can forget about it. Banks can always repossess a multimillion dollar house, but what do you do here when somebody declares bankruptcy after treatment?
The bottom line is that assets and power will quickly become (even more) concentrated in the top 1% or so of the population. Imagine what the average working person could do with a second lifetime where they own their own home from the beginning -- but they would start with much more real world experience and street smarts. Now imagine the same thing with people will millions of dollars in assets and dozens of lifetimes of experience.
The result would not be unlike the Go'uld in Stargate. The "immortals" might even put on the cloak of divinity. A few hundred years ago monarchs claimed they ruled by divine right, but they died just like us. How hard would it be for people with a centuries-long lifetime to manipulate society so the emphemerals believe that the immortals are graced by god. How long would it take for the emphemerals to forget that these medical treatments even forget or that everyone naturally dies within a century or so.
Can you think of a better way to discover your employee's true skills? Almost everyone is hired to fill an immediate need, but that doesn't mean that they should stay in the same position indefinitely.
Any sane person would use this opportunity to 1) develop new skills (esp. if that positions them for a "better" job in the company) and 2) showcase their current skills.
This seems like a reasonable investment considering the average cost of hiring a new developer is something like $20k. For about the same investment you can 1) make your developers extremely happy and less likely to leave (never forget that $20k cost), 2) make them more productive as they develop new skills, and 3) screen them for internal placement in more specialized positions.
Background: modern compilers, e.g., the Gnu suite, use multiple passes to cleanly separate functionality. In a nutshell the first pass compiles the source code into an arbitrary intermediate format. IIRC gcc covers C, C++, Fortran (g77), Ada (gnat), Java (gcj) and more. Bob could add support for BobTalk with relatively modest effort.
The next pass performs generic optimizations on the intermediate code - extracting loop invariants, unrolling loops, eliminating dead code, etc.
The final pass translates the intermediate code into processor-specific object code.
(Reality is much more complex with the C preprocessor, register coloring and keyhole optmization of the object code, etc.)
The key thing isn't sequential thinking, it's the way that adding support for a new language is handled entirely in the first pass. Adding support for a new processor is handled entirely in the final pass. Adding new optimizations for your master's thesis is handled entirely in the second pass.
Back in the dark ages you did have "single-pass" compilers... and they were an absolute bitch to maintain since each language and processor stood alone. (I used quotes since these compilers normally produced assembly code (.s) that was then compiled/assembled into the object code files. So even "single pass" compilers normally used multiple passes, but with a processor-specific intermediate language.)
It was a major innovation when AT&T released a C++ compiler that worked by compiling the C++ code into C code instead of assembler. It allowed the new language to be supported in a fraction of the time required before.
So tell me again why we would want to return to the days when we went directly from a high level language to object code....
There was massive carnage predicted when the national 55 mph speed limit was raised. The Roads Would Run Red With Blood.
As I recall, the death rate dropped significantly. It's climbing again, but that's due to the number of passenger and vehicle miles climbing. If we're honest with the numbers the death toll would skyrocket if we went back to double nickel limits.
Anyone who has driven across the midwest or intermountain west could tell you why. At 55 mph your attention wanders and you'll miss something important. At 75 mph you'll pay more attention to driving. You don't know boredom until you've driven I-70 across western Kansas, I-80 across the Great Basin or I-84 through central Oregon.
A secondary effect is that traffic now travels at about the same pace. There's some spread, but on a rural interstate (outside of mountains) I'ld guess 80+% of the traffic is within a 10 mph band. A lot of drivers ignored the posted speed limit in the double nickel days and the same 80% band would have been over 20 mph wide. That meant you had a lot more passing and a significantly larger difference in speed as cars passed.
Does that mean that the speed limit should be 75 mph through urban cores? Or 40 past elementary schools and parks? Of course not. But the argument "slower speeds mean lower deaths" is not borne out by the facts. Accidents, when they occur, tend to be more severe. But the accident rate is lower... and newer cars are so much safer that people often walk away unharmed from accidents much more severe than the ones that would have killed everyone a few decades ago.
BTW, a while back I read that the Colorado Dept. of Transportation does monitor actual speeds and will adjust speed limits accordingly, if possible. (US highways often have restrictions.) Their position was mentioned by the GP - the overwhelming majority of drivers will travel at an appropriate speed.
1. Compel Yahoo to provide all logs regarding user. These probably have IP address and time. (Hopefully the time is maintained with NTP. It's not hard to do and allows you to coordinate logs across multiple sites with extremely high accuracy.)
2) Determine who manages this/these IP addresses. For convenience call them "home" (e.g., comcast) and "work".
3) Compel owners of these IP addresses to provide all identifying information they have regarding the person(s) assigned this address.
Depending upon the technical setup you might not be able to identify the poster... or you might be able to really nail them. (Broadband IP address gives you residence, work IP address verifies employee address and uniquely identifies the individual.)
BTW, "John Doe" indictments and defendants are not uncommon. This is a classic example of why they exist - the indictment or suit provides a basis to obtain a search warrant to determine the identity of the defendant.
You should not have an impenetrable shield from criminal prosecution or civil compensation just because your actions are online. Think about phishers - I cannot think of any reason whatsoever why their identities should be protected. Another good example is slander - I can understand the need for rape victims (for instance) being able to have true anonyminity when reporting abuse to authorities, but that anonyminity ends when they publicly accuse somebody of committing a crime - a person has the right to defend themselves from false allegations.
On the other hand compelled disclosure of our true names on demand would be analogous to 7-11 demanding your driver's license before you could buy a soda. It's reasonable - even prudent - to maintain multiple pseudonyms across multiple sites.
In the middle there are illegal acts that can be performed by maintaining multiple pseudonyms. A classic example is "pump and dump" stock manipulation.
It's a very complex question and it's important to remember that there's a distinction between "pseudonymity" and "anonyminity".
This case doesn't involve the government, but it covers similiar ground. It's one thing for me to say "Bob Smith says dogs should be served in restaurants." (And I don't mean as patrons.)
It's a different thing for me to represent myself as some Bob Smith and say the same thing.
It's yet another thing for me to represent myself as a specific Bob Smith and say the same thing.
The first case could be defamation. (It depends on whether Bob Smith actually said it, whether his community would consider it offensive, etc.) The second case is clearly protected free speech. The final case is putting words into another person's mouth.
I don't believe it's identity theft, but it certainly seems to be the type of bad act that should strip that person's anonymity. It's the type of act that could result in immediate termination in the workplace, professional sanctions, etc.
You might want to check university pages, not just some guy's geocities page.
Stars collapse once the core has exhausted its available fuel. This is only a minute fraction of the star's total mass, but it's critical. When the core goes dark the rest of the star falls on it.
According to an article in Discover magazine a few years ago, parts of the star will fall towards the center with a speed as high as a third of the speed of light! This causes enormous pressure, during the "big crunch" the density of the star may be 5-6 higher than the density of a neutron star. IIRC the massive neutrino flux is produced at this time. BTW this "core" is substantially far larger than the core mentioned earlier.
Matter can't be compressed this hard for long and the core "bounces" back. That is what flings the outer layers of the star into space. But force goes both ways - what throws stellar masses into space also increases the pressure on the remaining core. If the density gets too high a black hole is created and it quickly consumes the core, but the outer layers have already been ejected. Otherwise the core eventually bounces back entirely and you have a neutron star. A neutron star is a core of degenerate matter covered by a layer of normal matter.
You do not get cycles of explosions.
(I seem to recall hearing about flares on neutron stars after enough normal mass has fallen to trigger fusion, but those flares are fall smaller than supernovas.)
I've been debating how to reply since your position seems reasonable until you look at actual cases....
I live in a college town and every few years some genius takes four $10 bills and one $1 bill. He cuts one corner from each $10 bill and glues it to a corner of the $1. He then spends the "$10" bill in a busy, dark bar.
If you look at it in the light, the bill is obviously bogus. The corners don't match, the president is wrong, the back is entirely wrong.
But in a dark bar it's almost always accepted as a $10 by a busy bartender.
You might think the bartender deserves it, but the local DA disagrees. I think the feds also get involved even though the guy only "repurposed" real currency.
The same DA filed ADW charges against teens firing pellet guns from a car and worked with the police and bars to detain anyone providing a fake ID. You might think he's being unreasonable, but you would still be spending thousands of dollars to defend yourself, to say nothing of facing the possibility of serving real time.
The government doesn't give a rat's ass about anyone distributing bricks of flour. But somebody distributing bricks of heroin (or cocaine or whatever)... that's another matter. The fact that they attempted to rip off the agents by delivering flour instead of the drugs is irrelevant.
As for whether or not flour looks like cocaine, we're talking about bricks wrapped in plastic and/or foil, not dime bags on the street corner.
(P.S., I meant "intent to distribute" not "attempt to distribute" in the GP)
I doubt a disclaimer on the back would get you off the hook if the front "looked legit enough to pass." If you used it as a fake id, it's a fake id and you could find yourself in a shitload of trouble.
Consider four data points. First, would it be legal if you deposited a check with some nice hefty figure on the front, but a "not a valid check do not accept" notice on the back? Or do you think you'll get a hefty fine from your bank (at best)? People have tried this, it's not a theoretical question.
Second, remember the story a while back about somebody passing an obviously fake $200 bill? It didn't matter that the bill had a picture of Daffy Duck (or whatever), they passed it as US currency and the feds hit them with federal counterfeiting charges.
Third, every so often some teens get the bright idea of driving around and shooting people with bb or paint guns. Just a joke, right? Nope - they find themselves facing felony "assault with a deadly weapon" charges because their victims thought they were being shot by a real gun.
The extreme form of this are idiots who do holdups with fake guns. Ha ha ha - they still get a mandatory 5 or 10 year extension for possessing a firearm during the commission of a felony. I've even heard of a case where somebody got that extension for the "finger in your coat pocket" trick.
Finally there's the guys who sell flour to undercover narcs. It's legal to sell flour, right? Wrong - if they claim they're selling you cocaine then it's attempt to distribute. The fact that they knew it was flour is legally irrelevant.
TVs don't have the same optical requirements as monitors. That 36" legacy TV is still limited to 525 scan lines, a 19" monitor may be driven to 1500-2000 scan lines. Even with HDTV you're looking at significantly lower resolutions than a monitor.
On top of that a bit of "smearing" is actually desirable on TVs since it helps to mask artifacts. In contrast monitors must be crisp because they're usually used for relatively small print. Imagine using a monitor with only 6 lines of text.
Actually that is a concern. An occasional glass of (red?) wine is fine, but daily use or a leaded glass decanter for a prolonged period is a Bad Idea because the acid can leach the lead.
The problem with this argument is that we're seeing cheap plastic surgery in porn, not expensive (and essentially undetectable) plastic surgery.
Is it just a fetish? I first thought so, but the market itself is evolutionary (where 'fitness' is what sells for the best price) and porn has definitely gotten more extreme (imo) as it's gone mainstream. A few years ago you could make a strong argument that this reflected a difference between guys who view porn and those who don't, but not now that it's readily available on premium channels and many hotels.
Check your facts - this has been proven experimentally. A while back Scientific American (iirc) discussed an experiment involving some breed of bird (or fish?) that sexually selects on long tails (a common theme, it seems). The scientists took a bunch of short-tailed losers and glued on tail extensions. Suddenly they were getting all of the action and the former hot studs couldn't get any since they were now the "short tailed" dudes.
As for your bigger argument, "fitness" isn't a step function where you're either perfect or you're dead, it's a gradual slope. Evolution will definitely select for the guy who's only 80% on the "fitness" scale but 200% on the procreation scale. This gets worse as the 100% fitters drop out of the gene pool and there's more room for even less fit, but oh-so-sexy, breeders.
Why do peahens (and others) find long tails so attractive? Who knows. It's probably a legitimate indicator of fitness run amock - the same way a lot of human males think that if a C cup bust is nice, a DDDD cup must be much nicer. Other males are more attracted to general fitness and are thus more attracted to the athletic type than the busty type.
Male peacock tails are definitely counter-survival. IIRC several other bird and fish species have similarly extreme adaptations.
Humans - at least as shown in American porn - also have counter-survival preferences. I personally prefer a lithe/athletic appearance, but it seems most guys prefer women with at least 10 pounds of silicon up front.
There are resolution limits in classical optics, even before you include a turbulent atmosphere. These are limitations based on the appature of the optics and the wavelength of light. IIRC that gives you a minimal resolution of 6-12" for a Hubble-class telescope in a low polar orbit -- far too coarse to read your license plate, much less your watch.
Of course these aren't classical telescopes - if I were designing one I might focus a very narrow band onto a linear sensor and let the motion of the satellite provide the second axis. That would give you a 'stripe' but you couldn't maintain focus on a particular object of interest.
The other thing to remember is that too much detail can be as crippling as too little detail. Increase the resolution by an order of magnitude and you'll increase the amount of data you must search by two orders of magnitude. Either you toss more analysts on the problem or your turnaround time suffers. You'll still want high resolution when you're specifically looking at something, but if you're scanning the desert for tanks it may be sufficient to have relatively low resolution on multiple frequencies so you can distinguish tanks from decoys.
I've seen arguments made that this is trespass. The analogy is that you have no more right to install software on my system than you do to install a webcam in my bedroom. But that's somehow been twisted so that unauthorized access to a big company's computers is a crime, but the same thing on an individual's or small company's computers is their fault.
The dinosaurs weren't killed off by the mammals. It took millions (tens of millions?) of dinosaur-free years before mammals were more than rats.
The Roman empire split and the real power had moved to the east, based in Constantinople (Istanbul), long before Rome was sacked. The western empire had been basically abandoned. As I understand it even the "sacking" was nothing like what you think - for a long time it was basically one group coming in and displacing the top tier of society. Some people argue the Roman empire morphed into the Bryzantine Empire and didn't really fall until fairly recent times. (Recent when you're talking about 2500 years, that is.)
The Confederacy was a far stronger military power than you give it credit for. It fought off the Union for four years and came close to delivering crippling blows on several occasions.
And finally, Hitler didn't defeat the Soviets but he had Leningrad/St. Petersburg under siege for years and got close enough to Moscow that Stalin et al came close to doing an emergency evacuation.
It's been a long time since my college philosophy course, but your position is a fallacy. It does great harm to focus on a single problem, or even a single category.
For instance, does the suffering in Thailand justify ignoring the people in Florida still struggling to recover from those storms? Or the people in California and Arizona who have just been hit with record rainfall?
Does the suffering in Florida justify ignoring the homeless in my own town?
Should the suffering of the homeless justify ignoring the poor (financially), scared local women needing medical care? (Planned Parenthood performs abortions, but it's also the only medical resource for many women.)
The list goes on and on. Helping the local animal shelter or helping to stop the corporatization of American civil life might seem "less important" than helping these victims, but that doesn't mean they should be ignored entirely until there's nothing more pressing.
This is Denver. I live maybe 5 miles away from this guy but I'm sure we occasionally have markedly different weather. (E.g., merely overcast vs. several inches of snow on the ground and more falling.)
I once left a dark and gloomy Boulder (just NW of Denver) and met somebody in south Denver, about 40 miles away. The sky was mostly clear, just some clouds over the mountains. She was shocked when I commented on the weather.
Did the weather just clear? Nope, it was still dark and gloomy when I returned 3 hours after I left. Davidson Mesa isn't that high, but it was enough to produce wildly different weather that day.
Does anyone have comparable numbers for major volcanic eruptions? I'm specifically thinking about the eruptions near the year without a summer (1816).