Among hunters, hunting is a lot more than pulling a trigger and killing something. It's more about the very primal action of pursuing an animal for food. (Most hunters I know do in fact eat what they kill). It takes a lot of skill, and years to learn: where and when the animals gather, how to sit quietly and patiently, how to observe. All of those are skills you once had to develop if you wanted to eat.
The ultimate kill with a rifle is only the very end of the process. It's kinder than the older methods, such as a bow and arrow, which often wound an animal without killing it, and you have to track it to put it out of its misery. A rifle can drop an animal immediately.
If you eat meat, you can hardly claim that having somebody else kill your dinner puts you on a higher moral plane, especially if you've seen the way animals are treated in our factory-farms. Hunting puts you directly in touch with what you're eating, guts and blood and all.
So it sounds silly at first blush, but the blind can be active participants in a hunt. They still have ears and even noses; they can still be outside; they still eat what they kill; they still have the camaraderie of a hunting party. If the technology lets them participate even more fully in the process, why not?
There are, by the way, an awful lot of hunters who hunt for other reasons. Some will use a lot of high-tech to make it practically shooting fish in a barrel; they seem to care more about the kill than the hunt. I know they exist, but that does not describe most hunters in my experience.
I myself do not hunt, but I limit my animal products when I can to ones I believed were raised and slaughtered humanely.
In the US, the analog channels are essentially state-sponsored; the networks are given the bandwidth for some trivial sum of money precisely because they're supposed to be using it for the public good.
ABC, NBC, etc. aren't broadcasting local news every night at 6 and 11 (and national news at 6:30) because they think it brings in more viewers than another Survivor knock-off. They do it because they're required to. They'd cheerfully dump their expensive news-gathering organizations if they could. In fact, they do a lot less news-gathering than they used to, pushing the limits as hard as they can.
The digital broadcasts will be the same. The government is giving them free real-estate in a different part of the spectrum so that they can take the free real estate they were giving them in a more valuable part of the spectrum. That will continue to allow them to offer "free" "valuable" services like the news to the 10% of the US still getting their broadcasts over the air.
It depends on what you mean by "free". "Under parole" is not really free, and they dramatically restrict your movements. Restricting your online access would be a kind of virtualization of that.
Sex offenders are generally tracked for a long time out of fear of recidivism, which has a very high rate among sex offenders. Prison as punishment does a lousy job of treating them, and their crimes are more driven by personal issues than murder or theft.
It's not necessarily useful to keep them in jail forever, not to mention expensive, but keeping tabs on a sex offender even though the jail sentence is over is a milder but useful form of punishment.
The last line of the article says that this appeared at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology. I don't know what kind of peer review goes into that, but it's not just science-by-press-release.
At the bottom, yes. This is trying to show that QM is involved more directly than the usual explanation.
The usual explanation for smell is the lock-and-key hypothesis: a specific receptor fits a molecule of a specific shape. It's similar to (and in fact related to) the immune response. QM is involved, but only in the way the molecules fold and interact, so the QM is all wrapped up by plain old chemistry.
This explanation invokes QM more directly, in a way that can't be explained by plain old chemistry. It comes down to an observation that different isotopes can smell different (to animals; we have crummy senses of smell). Since the usual chemical interactions aren't affected by different isotopes, and it's unlikely that nuclear forces are involved, that leaves QM.
You can use Flashblock to kill the flash itself. A lot of it, however, is done with Javascript. You can turn Javascript off and then whitelist it for those great many sites that depend on it (like Slashdot's new comments system.)
As a guy who works with one of those long-tail bands, I can tell you that it's a lot more fun to be in the short head. People click on the face on the front page about a zillion times more often than they type your name in a search.
If the only way to get your face there is to sell your soul to the RIAA, then I'll stick with the one-zillionth fraction. But there are times I'm not so sure.
Are they really competing with YouTube? Rather, why are they competing with Apple? Apple is already selling (some of) their shows, and they're apparently pulling in mad bank for it.
The authors of the Federalist Papers were half of a debate that goes all the way back to the beginning of the country. The other half included people like Thomas Jefferson.
The point is, the "Founding Fathers" thought differently from each other. Arguably, that's why the 2nd Amendment is so vague in the first place. (Mind you, "vague" in this place means "absolutely clear", except that there are two diametrically opposed sides who each feel that it absolutely and clearly supports their point of view.)
So I appreciate the illustrative quotations, but this is a difficult debate that goes way back. You're not going to find an absolute answer in looking at the Founding Fathers.
They seem to have no objection to "ordinary" bombings in places like Madrid and London, and they sure cause all kinds of disruption there when they do. Perhaps they see such places as out of the scope: New York is in the US and London is part of Europe, but the fact that they're both The West (nominally their enemy) doesn't count.
I think that they'd find bombing malls and bridges to be very effective, assuming I have any idea what they mean by "effective". For all the economic harm, the 9/11 attacks seem to have had very little positive effect for their cause and substantial negative ones.
It's difficult to fight an enemy when you don't really know what they want out of you.
I don't think he's claiming that America's actions caused the jihad. He's claiming that it has made it worse, or rather, that it may be making it worse by providing recruiting tools.
It's based around the (debatable) idea that 9/11 was a one-shot with no follow-through. I think that part of what made 9/11 so horrible was that everybody was expecting it to be part of a campaign, one which was easy enough since the country is full of soft targets. I don't know if it didn't materialize because of the toppling of the Taliban, or increased enforcement (including Guantanamo and wiretapping), or just because they didn't plan well.
At this point proving causation is just impossible. They have a lot of bones to pick with us, but the rhetoric is often obtuse and bragging. The real question is not what got us here, but where we go from here. Most people are agreed that simply dropping the Iraq war is not an option, including (I suspect) the grandparent poster. But "winning" in the usual sense may also not be an option, in which case you're kinda stuck between a rock and a very difficult policy decision.
It means that the feature you actually want, the one that's been available in the commercial equivalent for years, will be migrating from the developer's code base to the unstable version on sourceforge just as soon as he's finished with his divorce.
The administration in power just suffered an enormous loss of power, with these machines already in place. Many of those elections were close enough to tip with only a tiny, hard-to-detect cheat, and the Republicans needed only a single change in the Senate to keep power there.
Are you saying that they're waiting for something REALLY important to come along before they unleash the their cheats?
I do think we need better accountability in elections, because it's terrible that we can't be certain in the country that's supposed to be the leader in democracy. I want to know why NIST is overriding the opinions of its own experts. But to claim that they want the status quo only to win elections is belied by the fact that they're NOT winning elections.
Actually, I'm not so sure it's the largest matrix computation. Weather and nuclear bomb simulations are done with matrix algebra, and it wouldn't surprise me to discover that they do some months-long calculations with even larger matrices.
1. The Earth is in an unusual place in the universe, from which everything else is moving away, but not necessarily the center. Mathematically, it could happen, but only at a select number of spots in the universe, and physicists usually assume that there's nothing special about the Earth. Any observations we make here are about the same as we'd make anywhere else, and we're not special. Assume the Earth is special and the whole theory falls apart.
2. Galaxies could have changed course over history. That too could be, but simplicity suggests that the universe has followed roughly the same laws over time. (That's the temporal version of the assumption we made in #1, that our time is nothing special). Again, if something happened in the past that we can't observe today, the whole theory is upset.
Overall, it means that you're right: we take anecdotal evidence from one point in the universe and assume that it applies everywhere and at every time. I can't particularly justify that assumption except to point out that any other assumption (that earth is somehow special or that now is somehow special) is more complicated.
We justify it because we believe that the location is essentially random, and that we're not at a specially picked spot. We also accept it because from what we can observe, other parts of the universe do appear to operate the same way, so the evidence isn't completely anecdotal.
Particular spots could make that anecdotal evidence wrong, but the odds are extremely low that out of the entire enormous universe, we'd happen to be in a very particular spot. You could believe that it happened anyway, or that a conscious designer put us in exactly that spot for a reason. Feel free to go with those assumptions and see if they lead you any place useful; that's what science is all about.
Why can't we just theorize that time is not finite - there's no beginning and no end...
Because if you look out at the universe, it seems that everything is moving away from each other. (I'm talking about inter-galactic scales here.) You can tell because everything is slightly redder than it should be, and the further away it is, the redder it is. The effect is not unlike the way an ambulance changes pitch when it gets closer and then goes away: as it recedes, the additional distance that the source moves between peaks spreads the peaks out. In light, further apart = redder.
If everything is moving away from everything else, then at some point in the past they must all have been in the same place. And when the matter gets that dense, time moves funny. It's a bit like the special relativity stuff: when things move, they gain mass, and get shorter. A heavy gravitational field is just like acceleration, so the formulas get really hairy. At some point they get so hairy that zeros are introduced, and some numbers go to infinity, and everything goes haywire.
Sorry if that's a bit long-winded, and I've still glossed over a lot of really crucial bits, but the shorter answer is: we observe stuff in the universe that implies that the universe had a beginning, at which the conditions were very different from what we see today. You can't explain it by saying that time is infinite, and so people try to figure out the right explanation.
The odds are that whatever they were using did some uploading as well as downloading.
The guy probably ought to take a guess about how much was uploaded and pay the full $750 apiece. I'm sure he can afford it. That way he can claim to be evenhanded. It's rubbish, of course, but it avoids letting other people claim favoritism when they're sued.
Don't even take it out of their allowances, so when the next parent comes up in court, he can claim that they expect parents to be responsible for what their kids upload.
This is why peaceful protests make me nervous. If "just trying to deny the intersections to protesters with sawhorses" nearly touched off a riot, then I'm not convinced that the demonstration was all that peaceful in the first place. People only show up to demonstrations when they're angry about something, and the odds of them achieving their goal immediately to appease them are essentially nonexistent.
Bush wasn't about to show up and say, "Gosh, you're all right, I'll cancel the invasion". Even if the demonstration convinced him, the crowd wouldn't hear about it, and meanwhile they're pointing out to each other that their voices aren't being heard. Any interaction with law enforcement, no matter how well-intentioned, provokes "Help, help, I'm being repressed. Did you see how he was repressing me?"
I've always wondered just how effective protests really are. Presumably the people you're protesting to have at least a rough idea of how many people are in favor of their idea and how many are opposed. A demonstration adds emphasis: not only are people opposed to/in favor of abortion/hunger/AIDS/war/trade, but they're willing to take time out of their busy schedules to show it.
There have been many demonstrations in the history of the world, and some have been followed by change (e.g. the civil rights era), but correlation is not causation. And most demonstrations that I'm aware of (I live in DC, so I see a lot of them) have far bigger effects on the local commuters than they do on the decision makers.
By all means, I support the right of the people to petition and seek redress, and to gather peaceably in large numbers. Law enforcement absolutely must be taught how to deal with those crowds delicately, keeping the peace without becoming the cause of disturbance. Demonstrations should absolutely continue to happen. But I wonder if it would be a valuable word of advice to the organizers of such things that their efforts might be better expended elsewhere.
I dunno, but people contribute to Wikipedia and various open-source projects all the time, for which they don't get paid. Sometimes people (like RedHat) even make money re-selling your work. Heck, right here at Slashdot, the guys selling ads are profiting from your opinion expressed above.
It's a sense of community, I think. People put forth relatively small amounts of effort and get back rich content from the sum. The whole may be no more than the sum of the parts, but the sum is a lot more valuable to you than your part.
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Among hunters, hunting is a lot more than pulling a trigger and killing something. It's more about the very primal action of pursuing an animal for food. (Most hunters I know do in fact eat what they kill). It takes a lot of skill, and years to learn: where and when the animals gather, how to sit quietly and patiently, how to observe. All of those are skills you once had to develop if you wanted to eat.
The ultimate kill with a rifle is only the very end of the process. It's kinder than the older methods, such as a bow and arrow, which often wound an animal without killing it, and you have to track it to put it out of its misery. A rifle can drop an animal immediately.
If you eat meat, you can hardly claim that having somebody else kill your dinner puts you on a higher moral plane, especially if you've seen the way animals are treated in our factory-farms. Hunting puts you directly in touch with what you're eating, guts and blood and all.
So it sounds silly at first blush, but the blind can be active participants in a hunt. They still have ears and even noses; they can still be outside; they still eat what they kill; they still have the camaraderie of a hunting party. If the technology lets them participate even more fully in the process, why not?
There are, by the way, an awful lot of hunters who hunt for other reasons. Some will use a lot of high-tech to make it practically shooting fish in a barrel; they seem to care more about the kill than the hunt. I know they exist, but that does not describe most hunters in my experience.
I myself do not hunt, but I limit my animal products when I can to ones I believed were raised and slaughtered humanely.
In the US, the analog channels are essentially state-sponsored; the networks are given the bandwidth for some trivial sum of money precisely because they're supposed to be using it for the public good.
ABC, NBC, etc. aren't broadcasting local news every night at 6 and 11 (and national news at 6:30) because they think it brings in more viewers than another Survivor knock-off. They do it because they're required to. They'd cheerfully dump their expensive news-gathering organizations if they could. In fact, they do a lot less news-gathering than they used to, pushing the limits as hard as they can.
The digital broadcasts will be the same. The government is giving them free real-estate in a different part of the spectrum so that they can take the free real estate they were giving them in a more valuable part of the spectrum. That will continue to allow them to offer "free" "valuable" services like the news to the 10% of the US still getting their broadcasts over the air.
It depends on what you mean by "free". "Under parole" is not really free, and they dramatically restrict your movements. Restricting your online access would be a kind of virtualization of that.
Sex offenders are generally tracked for a long time out of fear of recidivism, which has a very high rate among sex offenders. Prison as punishment does a lousy job of treating them, and their crimes are more driven by personal issues than murder or theft.
It's not necessarily useful to keep them in jail forever, not to mention expensive, but keeping tabs on a sex offender even though the jail sentence is over is a milder but useful form of punishment.
The last line of the article says that this appeared at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology. I don't know what kind of peer review goes into that, but it's not just science-by-press-release.
At the bottom, yes. This is trying to show that QM is involved more directly than the usual explanation.
The usual explanation for smell is the lock-and-key hypothesis: a specific receptor fits a molecule of a specific shape. It's similar to (and in fact related to) the immune response. QM is involved, but only in the way the molecules fold and interact, so the QM is all wrapped up by plain old chemistry.
This explanation invokes QM more directly, in a way that can't be explained by plain old chemistry. It comes down to an observation that different isotopes can smell different (to animals; we have crummy senses of smell). Since the usual chemical interactions aren't affected by different isotopes, and it's unlikely that nuclear forces are involved, that leaves QM.
You can use Flashblock to kill the flash itself. A lot of it, however, is done with Javascript. You can turn Javascript off and then whitelist it for those great many sites that depend on it (like Slashdot's new comments system.)
As a guy who works with one of those long-tail bands, I can tell you that it's a lot more fun to be in the short head. People click on the face on the front page about a zillion times more often than they type your name in a search.
If the only way to get your face there is to sell your soul to the RIAA, then I'll stick with the one-zillionth fraction. But there are times I'm not so sure.
That's precisely what I'm suggesting, and I'm willing to back it up with research by scholars.
Are they really competing with YouTube? Rather, why are they competing with Apple? Apple is already selling (some of) their shows, and they're apparently pulling in mad bank for it.
The authors of the Federalist Papers were half of a debate that goes all the way back to the beginning of the country. The other half included people like Thomas Jefferson.
The point is, the "Founding Fathers" thought differently from each other. Arguably, that's why the 2nd Amendment is so vague in the first place. (Mind you, "vague" in this place means "absolutely clear", except that there are two diametrically opposed sides who each feel that it absolutely and clearly supports their point of view.)
So I appreciate the illustrative quotations, but this is a difficult debate that goes way back. You're not going to find an absolute answer in looking at the Founding Fathers.
They seem to have no objection to "ordinary" bombings in places like Madrid and London, and they sure cause all kinds of disruption there when they do. Perhaps they see such places as out of the scope: New York is in the US and London is part of Europe, but the fact that they're both The West (nominally their enemy) doesn't count.
I think that they'd find bombing malls and bridges to be very effective, assuming I have any idea what they mean by "effective". For all the economic harm, the 9/11 attacks seem to have had very little positive effect for their cause and substantial negative ones.
It's difficult to fight an enemy when you don't really know what they want out of you.
I don't think he's claiming that America's actions caused the jihad. He's claiming that it has made it worse, or rather, that it may be making it worse by providing recruiting tools.
It's based around the (debatable) idea that 9/11 was a one-shot with no follow-through. I think that part of what made 9/11 so horrible was that everybody was expecting it to be part of a campaign, one which was easy enough since the country is full of soft targets. I don't know if it didn't materialize because of the toppling of the Taliban, or increased enforcement (including Guantanamo and wiretapping), or just because they didn't plan well.
At this point proving causation is just impossible. They have a lot of bones to pick with us, but the rhetoric is often obtuse and bragging. The real question is not what got us here, but where we go from here. Most people are agreed that simply dropping the Iraq war is not an option, including (I suspect) the grandparent poster. But "winning" in the usual sense may also not be an option, in which case you're kinda stuck between a rock and a very difficult policy decision.
It means that the feature you actually want, the one that's been available in the commercial equivalent for years, will be migrating from the developer's code base to the unstable version on sourceforge just as soon as he's finished with his divorce.
Could be. That's giving them credit for longer-term thinking than I'm used to, what with the whole cake-walk war thing.
The administration in power just suffered an enormous loss of power, with these machines already in place. Many of those elections were close enough to tip with only a tiny, hard-to-detect cheat, and the Republicans needed only a single change in the Senate to keep power there.
Are you saying that they're waiting for something REALLY important to come along before they unleash the their cheats?
I do think we need better accountability in elections, because it's terrible that we can't be certain in the country that's supposed to be the leader in democracy. I want to know why NIST is overriding the opinions of its own experts. But to claim that they want the status quo only to win elections is belied by the fact that they're NOT winning elections.
Actually, I'm not so sure it's the largest matrix computation. Weather and nuclear bomb simulations are done with matrix algebra, and it wouldn't surprise me to discover that they do some months-long calculations with even larger matrices.
I do mean that, though MeV is a common shorthand for MeV/c^2, and it's what they used in the original article.
Well, there are a couple of other options:
1. The Earth is in an unusual place in the universe, from which everything else is moving away, but not necessarily the center. Mathematically, it could happen, but only at a select number of spots in the universe, and physicists usually assume that there's nothing special about the Earth. Any observations we make here are about the same as we'd make anywhere else, and we're not special. Assume the Earth is special and the whole theory falls apart.
2. Galaxies could have changed course over history. That too could be, but simplicity suggests that the universe has followed roughly the same laws over time. (That's the temporal version of the assumption we made in #1, that our time is nothing special). Again, if something happened in the past that we can't observe today, the whole theory is upset.
Overall, it means that you're right: we take anecdotal evidence from one point in the universe and assume that it applies everywhere and at every time. I can't particularly justify that assumption except to point out that any other assumption (that earth is somehow special or that now is somehow special) is more complicated.
We justify it because we believe that the location is essentially random, and that we're not at a specially picked spot. We also accept it because from what we can observe, other parts of the universe do appear to operate the same way, so the evidence isn't completely anecdotal.
Particular spots could make that anecdotal evidence wrong, but the odds are extremely low that out of the entire enormous universe, we'd happen to be in a very particular spot. You could believe that it happened anyway, or that a conscious designer put us in exactly that spot for a reason. Feel free to go with those assumptions and see if they lead you any place useful; that's what science is all about.
A neutron has a mass of 940 MeV. This sucker is around 6-20 MeV. Compared to that, the neutron isn't tiny; it's gi-freaking-normous.
I assume that's 10^-13 seconds. Ten seconds to thirteen seconds would be a very long time as these things go.
Why can't we just theorize that time is not finite - there's no beginning and no end...
Because if you look out at the universe, it seems that everything is moving away from each other. (I'm talking about inter-galactic scales here.) You can tell because everything is slightly redder than it should be, and the further away it is, the redder it is. The effect is not unlike the way an ambulance changes pitch when it gets closer and then goes away: as it recedes, the additional distance that the source moves between peaks spreads the peaks out. In light, further apart = redder.
If everything is moving away from everything else, then at some point in the past they must all have been in the same place. And when the matter gets that dense, time moves funny. It's a bit like the special relativity stuff: when things move, they gain mass, and get shorter. A heavy gravitational field is just like acceleration, so the formulas get really hairy. At some point they get so hairy that zeros are introduced, and some numbers go to infinity, and everything goes haywire.
Sorry if that's a bit long-winded, and I've still glossed over a lot of really crucial bits, but the shorter answer is: we observe stuff in the universe that implies that the universe had a beginning, at which the conditions were very different from what we see today. You can't explain it by saying that time is infinite, and so people try to figure out the right explanation.
The odds are that whatever they were using did some uploading as well as downloading.
The guy probably ought to take a guess about how much was uploaded and pay the full $750 apiece. I'm sure he can afford it. That way he can claim to be evenhanded. It's rubbish, of course, but it avoids letting other people claim favoritism when they're sued.
Don't even take it out of their allowances, so when the next parent comes up in court, he can claim that they expect parents to be responsible for what their kids upload.
This is why peaceful protests make me nervous. If "just trying to deny the intersections to protesters with sawhorses" nearly touched off a riot, then I'm not convinced that the demonstration was all that peaceful in the first place. People only show up to demonstrations when they're angry about something, and the odds of them achieving their goal immediately to appease them are essentially nonexistent.
Bush wasn't about to show up and say, "Gosh, you're all right, I'll cancel the invasion". Even if the demonstration convinced him, the crowd wouldn't hear about it, and meanwhile they're pointing out to each other that their voices aren't being heard. Any interaction with law enforcement, no matter how well-intentioned, provokes "Help, help, I'm being repressed. Did you see how he was repressing me?"
I've always wondered just how effective protests really are. Presumably the people you're protesting to have at least a rough idea of how many people are in favor of their idea and how many are opposed. A demonstration adds emphasis: not only are people opposed to/in favor of abortion/hunger/AIDS/war/trade, but they're willing to take time out of their busy schedules to show it.
There have been many demonstrations in the history of the world, and some have been followed by change (e.g. the civil rights era), but correlation is not causation. And most demonstrations that I'm aware of (I live in DC, so I see a lot of them) have far bigger effects on the local commuters than they do on the decision makers.
By all means, I support the right of the people to petition and seek redress, and to gather peaceably in large numbers. Law enforcement absolutely must be taught how to deal with those crowds delicately, keeping the peace without becoming the cause of disturbance. Demonstrations should absolutely continue to happen. But I wonder if it would be a valuable word of advice to the organizers of such things that their efforts might be better expended elsewhere.
My point is that by posting to Slashdot, you just did.
I dunno, but people contribute to Wikipedia and various open-source projects all the time, for which they don't get paid. Sometimes people (like RedHat) even make money re-selling your work. Heck, right here at Slashdot, the guys selling ads are profiting from your opinion expressed above.
It's a sense of community, I think. People put forth relatively small amounts of effort and get back rich content from the sum. The whole may be no more than the sum of the parts, but the sum is a lot more valuable to you than your part.