"That, or you figure out how to boil water with it"
The disclaimer I knew I should have put on this post:
Use it to boil water as in use it to generate superheated steam to turn a turbine to turn a generator to produce electricity. Kinda like what we've done with every heat source we've discovered in the past two centuries or so. Kinda like the steam turbines that are probably powering your computer right now.
It's been years since my "Chemistry for Engineers" course and I confused atomic number with atomic mass. So sue me already.
But that's besides the point. Even 90-some-odd elements is a heck of a lot more than you'd expect counting the possible mathematical combinations of 1-3 different subatomic particles. For example: Why isn't deuterium helium instead of hydrogen? After all, it's exactly one-half of a helium-4 atom.
Have you taken a look at the vacuum lately? At this point I'd be more comfortable calling it "ether" instead of "vacuum," because there seems to be more "something" than "nothing" out there.
Hell, transistors work on an unexplained phenomenon (Don't tell me how they work, tell me why). If we all had to fully understand something before putting it to some use, we'd still all be living in caves.
"Genereally, unexplained phenomena get researched by scientists for years *before* a company and patents are formed, ne?"
That, or you figure out how to boil water with it. Forget mouse traps, if you can build a better way to boil water, then you will have the world beating a path to your doorstep.
Just so long as it doesn't involve reaching into any more alphabets. I've had my fill with Greek and Cyrillic. My TI-92+ just doesn't have enough buttons.
"Saddly, If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is..."
Except we need a revolution in atomic science to make sense of things. How come we can get over 200 completely unique elements with nothing more than three different subatomic particles? And while you're at it, how come they can form molecules that have nothing in common with any of the parent elements?
Oh, and as for "a source of clean and nearly limitless energy," that's something people have been working on for decades. It could be anything ranging from fusion to figuring out how to harness useful amounts of zero-point energy.
"The MSN motto for support was "Get that customer off the phone!""
Hell, that's the motto on 99% of the call floors out there. Even when I worked for an outsource company for Dell (supposedly focused on customer satisfaction... apparently my satisfaction issues with their controllerless modem don't count...), there was much more pressure to "clear the que" than to solve problems. To the point where it's easier with most problems to tell the customer to do an FFR (FDISK, FORMAT, re-install, doo-dah doo-dah) simply because you can get them off the phone while they're formatting.
"Anything they do in theyre spare time in theyre lives is theyre business,"
RTFA. The main complaint of these ISPs is that these people (in their free time) say "I'm a tech support person for XYZ ISP and..." Their free time doesn't seem so free any more if they seem to be acting in their official capability as XYZ tech support. And if the information is harmful, does the poster get blamed or the employer they all but claim to represent?
"In the case of 12/7/41, there is evidence that the government knew that the attack on Pearl Harbor was coming, and did nothing to stop it because it would involve the USA in the war."
What would have been the point in doing nothing with the information? All that could have been done with it was to improve Pearl Harbor's defenses in preparation for the attack, thus involving the US in a war. The attack would have happened regardless. And even if it didn't, there was always the issue of the actual war declaration coming in from Tokyo to deal with (the one that was supposed to be delivered to Washington minutes before attack but got delayed on the Pacific telegraph lines).
Or are you talking about the war in Europe? Hitler himself solved that problem by also declaring war on the US.
Hell, the new radar facilities on Oahu would have made a big difference in what happened during the attack if the operators knew how to interpret the information, which brings me back to my main point...
At any rate, if you're going to troll with statements like that, make sure they stand up to Occam's Razor.
"Wouldn't naturally occuring radioactive elements cause problems with that a little? Or do they have the ability to sort out the different forms and identify only those that are not naturally occuring?"
It all depends on what you're looking for. If you're looking for "radioactive/radiological materials," then yes, you're going to find a lot, whether you have a weapons program or not.
On the other hand, if you find uranium-235 or plutonium in any measurable amount, that all but guarantees a nuclear weapons program. Plutonium has only recently been demonstrated to exist naturally and U-235 is a very rare isotope of a very rare element. In both cases, it's generally cheaper to make your own.
"My guess is that the detectors are set to "go off" even if the tiniest amount of radiation is found. That way, any attempt by terrorists to try to hide the radiation (thick lead, etc) will be thwarted."
If anything, all those false positives will make it easier to sneak in a nuclear or radiological device. When the alarms are going off every day you tend not to be as attentive as you would be otherwise, and the personnel involved won't exactly give a thorough search.
How did 12/7/41 and 9/11/01 happen? Too much information gathering, not enough information interpretation. And from the looks of this, we're setting ourselves up for more of the same.
"Imagine if everyone felt they had the right to take the law into their own hands and dispense justice as they saw fit our legal system would become unbalanced."
Here's the problem with your view: Signing him up for mailing lists is just as legal (if not moreso) than spam itself. All the information used is publicly available, all people did was make it more public. And, on top of that, he doesn't get advertisements in his mailbox delivered postage due.
They aren't taking the law into their own hands, they're working wholly within the law in pursuit of their own personal goals. And who isn't?
"Now if someone can build an "open" free web based schedule of the major networks that people can contribute to, then the PVR would be able to read this off the net and schedule recordings!"
Come now, you should know better than that! AOL/TW, Disney, Fox, Paramount, et al will sue your pants off the moment you divulge their "trade secrets!"
FBI demolitions teams will be going after C-band dishes any day now...
"I see more "former" Wal-Mart's than I do open ones."
Huh? Either you're confusing Wal-Mart with Kmart, or you live in China (and even then...). The only closed Wal-Marts I've seen are a few blocks away from newer, bigger Wal-Marts that were built to replace them.
"There is a problem compareaing straight numbers like that."
Then let's go to the World Gazetteer and look at some population numbers. How about we look at some Western countries and see how much of that country's population lives in the three most populous cities:
I don't think we need to go on to the smaller countries, I think you can see the pattern. Keep in mind that these are cities and don't include the surrounding metropolitain area (just urban areas, not suburbia). On to North America:
Canada: 16.76% Mexico: 12.00% USA: 5.13%
And you say the population distribution in the US is "similar" to that of Western Europe?
Let me go on to just the single most populated city in each country:
Hell, the US number for three cities is less than most of Europe's numbers for just one.
We don't have a history of building fortified cities around castles that Europe and Southeast Asia have. We don't have a harsh climate forcing us to stick together that Scandinavia, Russia and Canada have. Nor do we have the limited resources of Third World countries forcing us to stay in our cities. Unlike Australia and South America, we've conquered and populated our interiors. When all is said and done, our distribution more resembles India and China more than it does Europe, and we achieved such a homogeneous distribution in far less time (the other two literally had millenia).
"You will find that parts of the USA, such as the eastern seaboard, have popluation densities that are more comparable to Europe."
Note that you said "Eastern Seaboard" and not "New York" or "Philadelphia." Europe has population spikes like Paris, London, and Brussels. The US has the I-95 corridor, which stretches from Boston to DC (if not Richmond). The closest thing Western Europe has to that kind of dispersal of urban areas is the Rhine Valley, and that's not anywhere near the same scale.
I am about to spend way too much time on this, but this is an argument I've had before and I want to end it here and now.
"I suspect the difference is due to the use of "metropolitan area" versus city."
"Metropolitan area" is a very vague definition. The Canadian census folks talked about it being a city and the surrounding area that economically relies on the city blah blah blah... I'm sure the relatively arbitrary definition of these "metropolitan areas" is usefull for bureocratic statisticians, but I don't find it useful here. For example, your areaconnect.com link claims that all of New Jersey is a "metropolitan area," even though I know for a fact that there are farms in New Jersey.
"The largest population centre, Toronto, has a density of 603 p/sqkm. Compare this to the entire state of New Jersey: 437p/sqkm. That is a "high density" city compared to a state. New York state is better at 155p/sqkm. But this is still higher then the density of southern Ontario and Quebec."
But looking at the population density for an area the size of even the relatively small New Jersey is meaningless. The scale is too great; the people of New Jersey aren't spread out uniformly. And of course you'll find higher numbers when you consider there are about ten Americans for every Canadian. I think something a bit more meaningful is needed.
Information on New Jersey can conveniently be found here. According to the numbers on this page, about 14.1% of New Jersey's population live in its ten most populous cities. For the three most populous states, New York has 45.5%, California has 24.8% and Florida has 22.1%.
Unfortunately, Canada doesn't seem to have such an easy-to-follow presentation of information, so I needed to go digging. For Ontario, I went here and went digging through for the ten most populous cities (not "metroplitain areas" not "regional municipalities," honest to God cities). They are:
Toronto 2,481,494 Ottawa 774,072 Mississauga 612,925 Hamilton 490,268 London 336,539 Brampton 325,428 Windsor 208,402 Kitchener 190,399 Vaughan 182,022 Greater Sudbury 155,219
This means 50.5% of the people in Ontario live in Ontario's ten most populous cities. Not only is this ratio more than New York, it's also a numerical majority.
Montreal 1,039,534 Laval 343,005 Quebec 169,076 Longueuil 128,016 Gatineau 102,898 Montreal-Nord 83,600 Saint-Laurent 77,391 Sherbrooke 75,916 Saint-Hubert 75,912 LaSalle 73,983
So Quebec has 29.9%. Nowhere near as bad as Ontario, but still more than California and Florida by a comfortable margin.
More numbers to chew on include:
Rhode Island: 48.3% Connecticut: 27.4% Massachusetts: 23.8% PEI: 34.7% live in either Charlottetown or Summerside
And what if we look at just the three most populous cities?
New York: 41.8% California: 16.9% Florida: 14.7%
Ontario: 33.9% Quebec: 21.4%
(rant mode ON) I've said it before and I'll say it again: Canadians are a heck of a lot more concentrated than Americans! You have fewer meters of phone lines to upgrade per capita! You have fewer kilometers of road to burn gas on per capita! You have less area cell towers need to cover! So don't give me all this crap about how good everything is in Canada compared to the US because it's amazing what you can accomplish when y'all freakin' live next door to one another!
Ontario has slightly fewer people than New York, is about 4 to 5 times larger, and yet the average Ontarian can't throw a rock without hitting another one! Come on people! You live in the second largest country in the world! Don't you want a freakin' back yard?!?! New York's numbers are skewed by having one of the most populous cities in the world, what's Ontario's excuse?
No wonder so many of the links I found when looking up this info talked about Canadian city-states... (rant mode OFF)
Slashdot Mirror
Part of your problem is that you think you /. handle is your real name.
"That, or you figure out how to boil water with it"
The disclaimer I knew I should have put on this post:
Use it to boil water as in use it to generate superheated steam to turn a turbine to turn a generator to produce electricity. Kinda like what we've done with every heat source we've discovered in the past two centuries or so. Kinda like the steam turbines that are probably powering your computer right now.
"btw who says the ether exists?"
It's been years since my "Chemistry for Engineers" course and I confused atomic number with atomic mass. So sue me already.
But that's besides the point. Even 90-some-odd elements is a heck of a lot more than you'd expect counting the possible mathematical combinations of 1-3 different subatomic particles. For example: Why isn't deuterium helium instead of hydrogen? After all, it's exactly one-half of a helium-4 atom.
"btw who says the ether exists?"
Have you taken a look at the vacuum lately? At this point I'd be more comfortable calling it "ether" instead of "vacuum," because there seems to be more "something" than "nothing" out there.
"So far we have an unexplained phenomenon."
Hell, transistors work on an unexplained phenomenon (Don't tell me how they work, tell me why). If we all had to fully understand something before putting it to some use, we'd still all be living in caves.
"Genereally, unexplained phenomena get researched by scientists for years *before* a company and patents are formed, ne?"
That, or you figure out how to boil water with it. Forget mouse traps, if you can build a better way to boil water, then you will have the world beating a path to your doorstep.
"As long as it sounds plausible then it gets published. Stringing enough buzz words together usually does the trick."
If only that problem were limited to science mags.
Excuse me while I go utilize a paradigm shift while thinking outside the box. That will surely decrease my TCO.
"Better recalculate those schrodinger equations."
Just so long as it doesn't involve reaching into any more alphabets. I've had my fill with Greek and Cyrillic. My TI-92+ just doesn't have enough buttons.
"Saddly, If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is..."
Except we need a revolution in atomic science to make sense of things. How come we can get over 200 completely unique elements with nothing more than three different subatomic particles? And while you're at it, how come they can form molecules that have nothing in common with any of the parent elements?
Oh, and as for "a source of clean and nearly limitless energy," that's something people have been working on for decades. It could be anything ranging from fusion to figuring out how to harness useful amounts of zero-point energy.
"He's raised 30 million dollars."
Where will I put my 5.25" floppy drive?
"The MSN motto for support was "Get that customer off the phone!""
Hell, that's the motto on 99% of the call floors out there. Even when I worked for an outsource company for Dell (supposedly focused on customer satisfaction... apparently my satisfaction issues with their controllerless modem don't count...), there was much more pressure to "clear the que" than to solve problems. To the point where it's easier with most problems to tell the customer to do an FFR (FDISK, FORMAT, re-install, doo-dah doo-dah) simply because you can get them off the phone while they're formatting.
"Anything they do in theyre spare time in theyre lives is theyre business,"
RTFA. The main complaint of these ISPs is that these people (in their free time) say "I'm a tech support person for XYZ ISP and..." Their free time doesn't seem so free any more if they seem to be acting in their official capability as XYZ tech support. And if the information is harmful, does the poster get blamed or the employer they all but claim to represent?
"In the case of 12/7/41, there is evidence that the government knew that the attack on Pearl Harbor was coming, and did nothing to stop it because it would involve the USA in the war."
What would have been the point in doing nothing with the information? All that could have been done with it was to improve Pearl Harbor's defenses in preparation for the attack, thus involving the US in a war. The attack would have happened regardless. And even if it didn't, there was always the issue of the actual war declaration coming in from Tokyo to deal with (the one that was supposed to be delivered to Washington minutes before attack but got delayed on the Pacific telegraph lines).
Or are you talking about the war in Europe? Hitler himself solved that problem by also declaring war on the US.
Hell, the new radar facilities on Oahu would have made a big difference in what happened during the attack if the operators knew how to interpret the information, which brings me back to my main point...
At any rate, if you're going to troll with statements like that, make sure they stand up to Occam's Razor.
"Wouldn't naturally occuring radioactive elements cause problems with that a little? Or do they have the ability to sort out the different forms and identify only those that are not naturally occuring?"
It all depends on what you're looking for. If you're looking for "radioactive/radiological materials," then yes, you're going to find a lot, whether you have a weapons program or not.
On the other hand, if you find uranium-235 or plutonium in any measurable amount, that all but guarantees a nuclear weapons program. Plutonium has only recently been demonstrated to exist naturally and U-235 is a very rare isotope of a very rare element. In both cases, it's generally cheaper to make your own.
USA bad! US sanctions kill babies! GWB makes Sadam look like a saint! Yankee go home! Yay euro!
(Because, with a subject line like that on Slashdot, you kinda have to...)
Now, see, if this were really a police state, you wouldn't be able to post that as an AC.
"My guess is that the detectors are set to "go off" even if the tiniest amount of radiation is found. That way, any attempt by terrorists to try to hide the radiation (thick lead, etc) will be thwarted."
If anything, all those false positives will make it easier to sneak in a nuclear or radiological device. When the alarms are going off every day you tend not to be as attentive as you would be otherwise, and the personnel involved won't exactly give a thorough search.
How did 12/7/41 and 9/11/01 happen? Too much information gathering, not enough information interpretation. And from the looks of this, we're setting ourselves up for more of the same.
"Imagine if everyone felt they had the right to take the law into their own hands and dispense justice as they saw fit our legal system would become unbalanced."
Here's the problem with your view: Signing him up for mailing lists is just as legal (if not moreso) than spam itself. All the information used is publicly available, all people did was make it more public. And, on top of that, he doesn't get advertisements in his mailbox delivered postage due.
They aren't taking the law into their own hands, they're working wholly within the law in pursuit of their own personal goals. And who isn't?
"IANAL, but its seems to me that it's perfectly legal - they will just migrate!"
This means that, since it facilitates the theft of intellectual property, cheese is now illegal under the DMCA.
"Cars are compatible, no matter if you drive a BMW or a GM car, you can use the same roads.",/I>
No matter if you use a Mac or a Wintel, you can use the same internet. And after all, what does the average person use their computer for, anyway?
"Now if someone can build an "open" free web based schedule of the major networks that people can contribute to, then the PVR would be able to read this off the net and schedule recordings!"
Come now, you should know better than that! AOL/TW, Disney, Fox, Paramount, et al will sue your pants off the moment you divulge their "trade secrets!"
FBI demolitions teams will be going after C-band dishes any day now...
"I see more "former" Wal-Mart's than I do open ones."
Huh? Either you're confusing Wal-Mart with Kmart, or you live in China (and even then...). The only closed Wal-Marts I've seen are a few blocks away from newer, bigger Wal-Marts that were built to replace them.
"There is a problem compareaing straight numbers like that."
Then let's go to the World Gazetteer and look at some population numbers. How about we look at some Western countries and see how much of that country's population lives in the three most populous cities:
France: 5.71%
Germany: 7.49%
Italy: 8.23%
Spain: 12.88%
UK: 15.04%
I don't think we need to go on to the smaller countries, I think you can see the pattern. Keep in mind that these are cities and don't include the surrounding metropolitain area (just urban areas, not suburbia). On to North America:
Canada: 16.76%
Mexico: 12.00%
USA: 5.13%
And you say the population distribution in the US is "similar" to that of Western Europe?
Let me go on to just the single most populated city in each country:
France: 3.57%
Germany: 4.01%
Italy: 4.37%
Spain: 7.41%
UK: 12.37%
Canada: 8.16%
Mexico: 8.67%
USA: 2.79%
Hell, the US number for three cities is less than most of Europe's numbers for just one.
We don't have a history of building fortified cities around castles that Europe and Southeast Asia have. We don't have a harsh climate forcing us to stick together that Scandinavia, Russia and Canada have. Nor do we have the limited resources of Third World countries forcing us to stay in our cities. Unlike Australia and South America, we've conquered and populated our interiors. When all is said and done, our distribution more resembles India and China more than it does Europe, and we achieved such a homogeneous distribution in far less time (the other two literally had millenia).
"You will find that parts of the USA, such as the eastern seaboard, have popluation densities that are more comparable to Europe."
Note that you said "Eastern Seaboard" and not "New York" or "Philadelphia." Europe has population spikes like Paris, London, and Brussels. The US has the I-95 corridor, which stretches from Boston to DC (if not Richmond). The closest thing Western Europe has to that kind of dispersal of urban areas is the Rhine Valley, and that's not anywhere near the same scale.
I am about to spend way too much time on this, but this is an argument I've had before and I want to end it here and now.
"I suspect the difference is due to the use of "metropolitan area" versus city."
"Metropolitan area" is a very vague definition. The Canadian census folks talked about it being a city and the surrounding area that economically relies on the city blah blah blah... I'm sure the relatively arbitrary definition of these "metropolitan areas" is usefull for bureocratic statisticians, but I don't find it useful here. For example, your areaconnect.com link claims that all of New Jersey is a "metropolitan area," even though I know for a fact that there are farms in New Jersey.
"The largest population centre, Toronto, has a density of 603 p/sqkm. Compare this to the entire state of New Jersey: 437p/sqkm. That is a "high density" city compared to a state. New York state is better at 155p/sqkm. But this is still higher then the density of southern Ontario and Quebec."
But looking at the population density for an area the size of even the relatively small New Jersey is meaningless. The scale is too great; the people of New Jersey aren't spread out uniformly. And of course you'll find higher numbers when you consider there are about ten Americans for every Canadian. I think something a bit more meaningful is needed.
Information on New Jersey can conveniently be found here. According to the numbers on this page, about 14.1% of New Jersey's population live in its ten most populous cities. For the three most populous states, New York has 45.5%, California has 24.8% and Florida has 22.1%.
Unfortunately, Canada doesn't seem to have such an easy-to-follow presentation of information, so I needed to go digging. For Ontario, I went here and went digging through for the ten most populous cities (not "metroplitain areas" not "regional municipalities," honest to God cities). They are:
Toronto 2,481,494
Ottawa 774,072
Mississauga 612,925
Hamilton 490,268
London 336,539
Brampton 325,428
Windsor 208,402
Kitchener 190,399
Vaughan 182,022
Greater Sudbury 155,219
This means 50.5% of the people in Ontario live in Ontario's ten most populous cities. Not only is this ratio more than New York, it's also a numerical majority.
Moving on to Quebec, we have:
Montreal 1,039,534
Laval 343,005
Quebec 169,076
Longueuil 128,016
Gatineau 102,898
Montreal-Nord 83,600
Saint-Laurent 77,391
Sherbrooke 75,916
Saint-Hubert 75,912
LaSalle 73,983
So Quebec has 29.9%. Nowhere near as bad as Ontario, but still more than California and Florida by a comfortable margin.
More numbers to chew on include:
Rhode Island: 48.3%
Connecticut: 27.4%
Massachusetts: 23.8%
PEI: 34.7% live in either Charlottetown or Summerside
And what if we look at just the three most populous cities?
New York: 41.8%
California: 16.9%
Florida: 14.7%
Ontario: 33.9%
Quebec: 21.4%
(rant mode ON)
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Canadians are a heck of a lot more concentrated than Americans! You have fewer meters of phone lines to upgrade per capita! You have fewer kilometers of road to burn gas on per capita! You have less area cell towers need to cover! So don't give me all this crap about how good everything is in Canada compared to the US because it's amazing what you can accomplish when y'all freakin' live next door to one another!
Ontario has slightly fewer people than New York, is about 4 to 5 times larger, and yet the average Ontarian can't throw a rock without hitting another one! Come on people! You live in the second largest country in the world! Don't you want a freakin' back yard?!?! New York's numbers are skewed by having one of the most populous cities in the world, what's Ontario's excuse?
No wonder so many of the links I found when looking up this info talked about Canadian city-states...
(rant mode OFF)
"these things obviously don't go hand in hand, or the trial would have already been over."
Kinda hard to give somebody a speedy trial when the State Department is busily denying their visa...